Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace Read online

  Sam listened very politely to my little talk. Then, when he thought I wasn’t looking, he turned on the TV. I made him turn it off. I explained that in honor of Ash Wednesday we were not watching cartoons that morning. I told him he could draw if he wanted, or play with Legos. I got myself a cup of coffee and started looking at a book of photographs. One in particular caught my eye immediately. It was of a large Mennonite family, shot in black-and-white: a husband and wife and their fifteen children gathered around a highly polished oval table, their faces clearly, eerily reflected in the burnished wood. They looked surreal and serious; you saw in those long, grave faces echoes of the Last Supper. I wanted to show the photograph to Sam. But abruptly, hideously, Alvin and the Chipmunks were singing “Achy Breaky Heart” in their nasal demon-field way—on the TV that Sam had turned on again.

  And I just lost my mind. I thought I might begin smashing things. Including Sam. I shouted at the top of my lungs, and I used the word “fucking,” as in “goddamn fucking TV that we’re getting rid of,” and I grabbed him by his pipe-cleaner arm and jerked him in the direction of his room, where he spent the next ten minutes crying bitter tears.

  It’s so awful, attacking your child. It is the worst thing I know, to shout loudly at this fifty-pound being with his huge trusting brown eyes. It’s like bitch-slapping E.T.

  I did what all good parents do: calmed down enough to go apologize and beg for his forgiveness, while simultaneously expressing a deep concern about his disappointing character. He said I was the meanest person on earth next to Darth Vader. We talked, and then he went back to his drawing. I chastised myself silently while washing breakfast dishes, but then it was time for school and I couldn’t find him anywhere. I looked everywhere in the house, in closets, under beds, and finally I heard him shouting from the branches of our tree.

  I coaxed him down, dropped him off at school, and felt terrible all day. Everywhere I went I’d see businessmen and businesswomen marching purposefully by with holy ashes on their foreheads. I couldn’t go to church until that night to get my own little ash tilak, the reminder that I was forgiven. I thought about taking Sam out of school so that I could apologize some more. But I knew just enough to keep my mitts off him. Now, at seven years old, he is separating from me like mad and has made it clear that I need to give him a little bit more room. I’m not even allowed to tell him I love him these days. He is quite firm on this. “You tell me you love me all the time,” he explained recently, “and I don’t want you to anymore.”

  “At all?” I said.

  “I just want you to tell me that you like me.”

  I said I would really try. That night, when I was tucking him in, I said, “Good night, honey. I really like you a lot.”

  There was silence in the dark. Then he said, “I like you, too, Mom.”

  So I didn’t take him out of school. I went for several walks, and I thought about ashes. I was sad that I am an awful person, that I am the world’s meanest mother. I got sadder. And I got to thinking about the ashes of the dead.

  Twice I have held the ashes of people I adored—my dad’s, my friend Pammy’s. Nearly twenty years ago I poured my father’s into the water near Angel Island, late at night, but I was twenty-five years old and very drunk at the time and so my grief was anesthetized. When I opened the box of his ashes, I thought they would be nice and soft and, well, ashy, like the ones with which we anoint our foreheads on Ash Wednesday. But human ashes are the grittiest of elements, like not very good landscaping pebbles. As if they’re made of bones or something.

  I tossed a handful of Pammy’s into the water way out past the Golden Gate Bridge during the day, with her husband and family, when I had been sober several years. And this time I was able to see, because it was daytime and I was sober, the deeply contradictory nature of ashes—that they are both so heavy and so light. They’re impossible to let go of entirely. They stick to things, to your fingers, your sweater. I licked my friend’s ashes off my hand, to taste them, to taste her, to taste what was left after all that was clean and alive had been consumed, burned away. They tasted metallic, and they blew every which way. We tried to strew them off the side of the boat romantically, with seals barking from the rocks onshore, under a true-blue sky, but they would not cooperate. They rarely will. It’s frustrating if you are hoping to have a happy ending, or at least a little closure, a movie moment when you toss them into the air and they flutter and disperse. They don’t. They cling, they haunt. They get in your hair, in your eyes, in your clothes.

  By the time I reached into the box of Pammy’s ashes, I had had Sam, so I was able to tolerate a bit more mystery and lack of order. That’s one of the gifts kids give you, because after you have a child, things come out much less orderly and rational than they did before. It’s so utterly bizarre to stare into the face of one of these perfect beings and understand that you (or someone a lot like you) grew them after a sweaty little bout of sex. And then, weighing in at the approximate poundage of a medium honeydew melon, they proceed to wedge open your heart. (Also, they help you see that you are as mad as a hatter, capable of violence just because Alvin and the Chipmunks are singing when you are trying to have a nice spiritual moment thinking about ashes.) By the time I held Pammy’s ashes in my hand, I almost liked that they grounded me in all the sadness and mysteriousness; I could find comfort in that. There’s a kind of sweetness and attention that you can finally pay to the tiniest grains of life after you’ve run your hands through the ashes of someone you loved. Pammy’s ashes clung to us. And so I licked them off my fingers. She was the most robust and luscious person I have ever known.

  Sam went home after school with a friend, so I saw him for only a few minutes later, before he went off to dinner with his Big Brother Brian, as he does every Wednesday. I went to my church. The best part of the service was that we sang old hymns a cappella. There were only seven besides me, mostly women, some black, some white, mostly well over fifty, scarves in their hair, lipstick, faces like pansies and cats. One of the older women was in a bad mood. I found this very scary, as if I were a flight attendant with one distressed passenger who wouldn’t let me help. I tried to noodge her into a better mood with flattery and a barrage of questions about her job, garden, and dog, but she was having none of it.

  This was discouraging at first, until I remembered another woman at our church, very old, from the South, black, who dressed in ersatz Coco Chanel outfits, polyester sweater sets, Dacron pillbox hats. They must have come from Mervyn’s and Montgomery Ward, because she didn’t have any money. She was always cheerful—until she turned eighty and started going blind. She had a great deal of religious faith, and everyone assumed that she would adjust and find meaning in her loss—meaning and then acceptance and then joy—and we all wanted this because, let’s face it, it’s so inspiring and such a relief when people find a way to bear the unbearable, when you can organize things so that a small miracle appears to have taken place and that love has once again turned out to be bigger than fear and death and blindness. But this woman would have none of it. She went into a deep depression and eventually left the church. The elders took communion to her in the afternoon on the first Sunday of the month—homemade bread and grape juice for the sacrament, and some bread to toast later—but she wouldn’t be part of our community anymore. It must have been too annoying to have everyone trying to manipulate her into being a better sport than she was capable of being. I always thought that was heroic of her: it speaks of such integrity to refuse to pretend that you’re doing well just to help other people deal with the fact that sometimes we face an impossible loss.

  Still, on Ash Wednesday I sang, of faith and love, of repentance. We ripped cloth rags in half to symbolize our repentance, our willingness to tear up the old pattern and await the new; we dipped our own fingers in ash and daubed it on our foreheads. I prayed for the stamina to bear mystery and stillness. I prayed for Sam to be able to trust me and for me
to be able to trust me again, too.

  When I got home, Sam was already asleep. Brian had put him to bed. I wanted to wake him up and tell him that it was okay that he wouldn’t be who I tried to get him to be, that it was okay that he didn’t cooperate with me all the time—that ashes don’t, old people don’t, so why should little boys? But I let him alone. He was in my bed when I woke up the next morning, over to the left, flat and still as a shaft of light. I watched him sleep. His mouth was open. Just the last few weeks, he had grown two huge front teeth, big and white as Chiclets. He was snoring loudly for such a small boy.

  I thought again about that photo of the Mennonites. In the faces of those fifteen children, reflected on their dining room table, you could see the fragile ferocity of their bond: it looked like a big wind could come and blow away this field of people on the shiny polished table. And the light shining around them where they stood was so evanescent you felt that if the reflections were to go, the children would be gone, too.

  More than anything else on earth, I do not want Sam ever to blow away, but you know what? He will. His ashes will stick to the fingers of someone who loves him. Maybe his ashes will blow that person into a place where things do not come out right, where things cannot be boxed up or spackled back together, but where somehow that person can see, with whatever joy can be mustered, the four or five new leaves on the formerly barren tree.

  “Mom?” he called out suddenly in his sleep.

  “Yes,” I whispered, “here I am,” and he slung his arm toward the sound of my voice, out across my shoulders.

  This Dog’s Life

  Having a good dog is the closest some of us are ever going to come to knowing the direct love of a mother or God, so it’s no wonder it knocked the stuffing out of me and Sam when Sadie died. I promised Sam we’d get another puppy someday, but secretly decided not to ever get another dog. I didn’t want to hurt that much again, if I could possibly avoid it. And I didn’t want my child’s heart and life to break like that again. But you don’t always get what you want; you get what you get. This is a real problem for me. You want to protect your child from pain, and what you get instead is life, and grace. And while theologians insist that grace is freely given, the truth is that sometimes you pay through the nose. And you can’t pay your child’s way.

  We should never have gotten a dog to begin with—they all die. I know this sounds sort of negative and bitter, but it happens to be true. It’s so subversive when artists make art that will pass away in the fullness of time, or later that same day; but it’s not as ennobling when your heart is broken by the death of a pet.

  When Sam was two and George Herbert Walker Bush was president, I noticed I was depressed and afraid a lot of the time. I decided that I needed to move, marry an armed man, or find a violent but well-behaved dog. I was determined, as I am now, to stay and fight, and the men I tended to love were not remotely well enough to carry guns, so I was stuck with the dog idea.

  For a while I called people who were advertising dogs in the local paper. People said they had perfect dogs, but perfect for whom? Quentin Tarantino? One dog we auditioned belonged to a woman who said her dog adored children, but it actually lunged at Sam, snarling. Other dogs snapped at us. One ran to hide, peeing as she ran. So I took the initiative and ran an ad for a mellow, low-energy guard dog, and the next day we got a call from a woman who said she had just the dog.

  As it turned out, she did have a great dog, a gorgeous two-year-old named Sadie, half black Lab, and half golden retriever. She looked like a black Irish setter. I always told people she was like Jesus in a black fur coat or Audrey Hepburn in Blackglama, elegant and loving and silly; such a lady.

  She was very shy at first. Our vet said she must have been abused as a puppy, because she was very worried about not pleasing us. He taught us how to get on the floor with her and plow into her slowly, so that she would see that we meant her no harm—that we were in fact playing with her. She tried to look nonchalant, but you could see she was alarmed. She was eager to please, though, and she learned to play, politely.

  She lived with us for more than a decade, saw us through great joy and great loss. She consoled us through friends’ illnesses, the death of Sam’s grandparents. She and I walked Sam to school every day. She was mother, dad, psych nurse. She helped me survive my boyfriends and the tinny, hollow loneliness in between. She helped Sam survive his first mean girlfriend. She’d let my mother stroke her head forever. She taught comfort.

  When Sam was about to turn thirteen, she developed lymphoma. She had lymph nodes in her neck the size of golf balls. Our vet said she would live a month if we didn’t treat her. Part of me wanted to let her die, so we could get it over with, have the pain behind us. But Sam and I talked it over and decided to get her half a dose of chemo; we wanted her to have one more great spring. She was better two days later. She must have had a great capacity for healing: she went in and out of remission for two years, eight seasons. Toward the end, when she got sick again and probably wasn’t going to get well, our vet said he would walk us through her death. He said that even when beings are extremely sick, ninety-five percent of them is still healthy and well—it’s just that the five percent feels so shitty—and that we should focus on the parts that were well, that brought Sadie pleasure, like walks, smelling things, and us.

  Our vet does not like to put animals to sleep unless they are suffering, and Sadie did not seem to be in pain. He said that one day she would go under the bed and not come out, and when she did, he would give us sedatives to help her stay calm. One day, she crawled under the bed, just as he said she would.

  It was such a cool, dark cave under my bed, with a big, soft moss-green carpet. Her breathing was labored. She looked apologetic.

  I called the vet and asked if I should bring her in. He said she’d feel safer dying at home, with me, but I had to go in to pick up the narcotics. He gave me three syringes full. I took them under the bed with me, along with the telephone, with the ringer off, and I lay beside her and assured her that she was a good dog even though she could no longer take care of us. I prayed for her to die quickly and without pain, for her sake, but mostly because I wanted her to die before Sam got home from school. I didn’t want him to see her dead body. She hung on. I gave her morphine, prayed, talked to her softly, and called the vet. He had me put the phone beside her head and listened for a moment.

  “She’s really not in distress,” he assured me. “This is hard work, like labor. And she has you, Jesus, and narcotics. We should all be so lucky.”

  I stayed beside her on the carpet under the bed, and then she raised her head to look around like a black horse, and she sighed, and then laid her head down and died.

  I couldn’t believe it, that she was gone, even though she’d been sick for so long. But you could feel that something huge, a tide, had washed in, and washed out again.

  I cried and cried, and called my brother and sister-in-law. Jamie said Stevo wasn’t home, but she would leave him a note and come right over. I prayed again, for my brother to get there before Sam came home from school, so he could take Sadie’s body away, to spare Sam, to spare me from Sam’s loss.

  I kept looking at the clock. School would be out in half an hour.

  Jamie and their dog, Sasha, arrived seventeen minutes after Sadie died. I had pulled the carpet out from under the bed. Sadie looked as beautiful as ever. Jamie and I sat on the floor nearby. Sasha is a small white dog with tea-colored stains, perky ears and tender eyes, and a bright dancing quality—we call her the Czechoslovakian circus terrier—and we couldn’t resist her charm. She licked us and ran up to Sadie, licking her, too, on her face. Then she ran back to us, as if saying, “I am life, and I am here! And my ears are up at this hilarious angle!”

  Stevo finally arrived, only a few minutes before Sam would get home from school. I wanted Stevo to hurry and get Sadie into the car, but it was too horrible to think of S
am catching him sneaking Sadie out, like a burglar stealing our TV. I breathed miserably, and I prayed to be up to the task. Stevo sat beside Jamie. Then Sam arrived and found us. He cried out sharply and sat on my bed alone, above Sadie. His eyes were red, but after a while Sasha made him laugh. She kept running over to Sadie, the dead, exquisitely boneless mountain of majestic glossy black dog in repose on the rug. She leapt on the bed to kiss Sam, before tending to the rest of us, like a doctor making her rounds.

  Then things got wild: My friend Neshama arrived. I had called her with the news. She sat down beside me. A friend of Sam’s stopped by, and his father came in, too, and slipped behind Sam on the bed like a shadow. Then the doorbell rang, and it was another friend of Sam’s, just stopping by, out of the blue, if you believe in out of the blue, which I don’t, and then a kid who lives up the hill came by to borrow Sam’s bike. He stayed, too. It was like the stateroom scene in A Night at the Opera. There were five adults, four kids, one white Czechoslovakian circus terrier, and one large dead black dog.

  But one of the Immutable Laws of Being Human is that whoever shows up is the right person, or the right people, and boy, were those the right people. Sadie looked like an island of dog, and we looked like flotsam that had formed a ring around her. Life, death, dogs—something in us was trying to hold something together that doesn’t hold together, but then does, miraculously, for the time being.