Lit_ A Memoir Part 30

By the time the book hit, Mother fit the Leechfield landscape. Neighbors who once kept their kids from playing in our yard now swap stories about her tantrums like baseball cards. There was the time she upended the oranges in the supermarket display, the fit she threw about parmesan cheese. She flipped off a motorcycle cop. A Baptist deacon who dared to scold her for wearing shorts in the yard heard that he could see evil in the crotch of a tree. Now church ladies holler hey hey in the afternoon. Mornings, old men jostle to buy Mother coffee at the grocery store. in the afternoon. Mornings, old men jostle to buy Mother coffee at the grocery store.

Almost as worrisome is Lecia's grim focus on a brisket Mother promised to fix. Whenever we drive home, Mother tempts Lecia with some childhood dish-chicken and dumplings, fudge, red beans and rice-but never, not once, follows through.

Lecia's ongoing capacity to hope for these dishes just stumps me. On the road before her, there's a shimmering mirage of meat shredded in lush gravy with a side of b.u.t.tery potato hunks. Does she bounce up and down a little in antic.i.p.ation like a kid on a carousel? I believe she does, though the next instant, her face clouds. It won't be there, will it? she says, shooting me a look.

There's a newspaper cartoon of a bucket-headed boy repeatedly talked into running at the football held by a wicked pigtailed girl who yanks it away so the boy falls on his a.s.s every time.

How many times, Lecia says, am I going to run at that football?

Many, it turns out. With scads of costly professional help, I gave up pining for maternal behavior long ago. But Lecia had once hired Mother to pick up her son Case at kindergarten until-a few weeks in-Mother forgot the boy in the parking lot. Given fat sums to answer Lecia's insurance office phones, Mother tended to snipe into the receiver What? What? The way Stalin trusted Hitler not to invade Russia, Lecia trusts Mother. In a way, I admire the simple persistence of both parties-Lecia's overfunctioning, Mother's under. The way Stalin trusted Hitler not to invade Russia, Lecia trusts Mother. In a way, I admire the simple persistence of both parties-Lecia's overfunctioning, Mother's under.

On any given holiday, Mother sits on her spreading white a.s.s on either porch glider or couch. Which idleness-in some perverse way-I also envy. It takes fort.i.tude to station yourself immobile before the cla.s.sic-movie channel for days at a pop while hordes of individuals bake and whip, saute and sear; serve and clear; and eventually scrub cheese crusts off ca.s.seroles and pan drippings from a blackened oven.

For weeks I've hounded Mother daily about brisket, and she's sworn to ante up. But yesterday her corns hurt, and as late as dawn this morning, the meat hadn't been bought. She was having palpitations, but I swore if the stove was cold when we walked in, I'd head back to the airport.

It could kill me to go to the store with my heart fluttering this way, she said.

If you drop dead making this brisket, I said, you'll go straight up to live with Baby Jesus.

I'm thinking of going back to being a Buddhist, she said.

Then you'll escape the wheel of rebirth, I said.

Minutes after we pull in, my sister's face floats cherublike above an electric skillet holding a mess of peppery brisket. She uses her hand to wave toward her nose the white ribbons of steam swiveling up. Mother breathes frost on her big square gla.s.ses, then wipes them. She looks stunned we're making such a big deal.

Oh, she says with a distracted look, I forgot to get the blow-up mattress. (Lecia and I sent her-separately, it turns out-cash to buy an extra mattress.) My sister's deaf to this. She's forking up saucy meat with a beatific expression. Such a token might not exactly undo past hurts, but they might reshape our mouths to savor what's now being served up.

That night, at opposite ends of the bulbous sofa, Lecia and I have lain our respective heads like characters in a storybook rowboat under tinfoil stars, with a faded blue quilt covering our middles. In the saggy double bed we used to share, our boys have sacked out-Dev blond like her, Case dark like me.

At the schoolyard basketball court today, we'd watched Dev drag in Case's wake as I had Lecia's. Just thirteen, Case can just barely palm the ball for a second or two, his hand like a giant spider holding it aloft as Dev gapes. Ready? Case said, and he bounce-pa.s.sed it to the smaller boy.

Dev two-stepped through a layup, the orange ball slipping through the white net, which prompted Case to shout out swish swish. Leaping for the rebound, Case stepped back and started to lecture, detailing proper form for a shot with the rigor of a ballet master. Bend your knees. Hold it here. Finish with the tips of your fingers right over the front rim.

That night on Mother's sofa, Lecia asks, Who does Case remind you of?

In terms of the need to expound? You and Daddy, I say.

Frightening, she says.

About then Mother stumps in, hair every which way, a piece of cheese disappearing into her maw. She says, What're y'all talking about so late?

Our deep and abiding love for you, Lecia says.

Mother slumps down on the facing chair, staring at the gra.s.sy s.h.a.g carpet. When she lifts her head, there are tears in her eyes. I wish your daddy was here for this, she says, us all together this way.

Look at both those boys, Lecia says, Pete Karr times two.

He's the only person who ever really loved me.

What are we? I say.

Mother shrugs. The only man, I mean. I miss him like crazy.

He did adore you, I say.

He felt sorry for me, she says, but he stood by, thick or thin.

She runs a hand over her spiky hair, asking, Does this haircut look like feathers?

In the library the next day, Mother's bridge club marches in-a troop of ladies bearing into the small room trays of baked goods big as coffee tables.

The day unfolds like that old TV show This Is Your Life This Is Your Life, where producers conspire to drag before you the past's every character. In aging form, they parade. There's the doctor who examined me the night Mother went to the hospital; my first-grade teacher; the princ.i.p.al who told me I'd be no more than a common prost.i.tute. John Cleary, the first boy I ever kissed, is there with his daughters. My friend Clarice from grade school, Meredith from high school (in lawyer's garb and big as a linebacker), Doonie with his whole tribe. There's the judge Mother charmed into freeing me from jail-nearly a hundred, he is, his liver-spotted hand still clutching Mother's, and he still gazes at her like she's a jam-stuffed biscuit. The druggist, the guy who ran the lumberyard, girls who snubbed me at the skating rink, girls who didn't.

I feel every school photo I ever took pa.s.s over my face to melt into the forty-year-old I am now. Seen by so many pairs of old eyes, I become my every self.

Then above the crowd, a disembodied head comes gliding as if carried on a pole. From the corner of my eye, I catch the silhouette, and my head whips to track it. The profile vanishes behind a pillar. The room around me clicks off as the face eases back into view-black-haired with snow at the temples. I stand so fast, the chair I'm in tips over. The crowd parts, and the eras collapse into each other. All the notches on the time line are stripped off like thorns. It's Daddy approaching me like a smiling phantom.

Though it's not Daddy, of course, but my cousin Thomas, unseen since our grandpa's funeral in sixth grade, wearing the exact face Daddy had at fifty, and Lecia must think so, too, since she's rushed to his side, hand over her mouth.

Maybe that day's bounty b.u.mped my sales up, plus Lecia's inflicting copies on virtually everybody she knew-clients, friends, cleaning people. Out of the trunk of her car, she hawks them like a hot dog vendor (I swear), and being as she could sell snow to an Eskimo, she reorders often. In any bookstore, she remerchandises so that my book's in front.

So the book was a sleeper hit, which floored me. Before it came out, I'd actually warned the publisher not to print so many, since the thought of them growing cobwebs in warehouses flooded me with dread. Having spent my fifteen-year career reading to a few loyal pals, I was shocked to find that now bookstore crowds wrapped around the block as I signed till my hand cramped. Mail flooded in. Magazines would pay me astonishing sums to write a few thousand words. Lecia and Mother were wild with glee, my sister joking that I'd never have to call collect again.

But in another way, nothing much changed. A single mom can't hit the road and stay gone. Mostly I lived like before. I taught. I stood around a Little League field with a clipboard and a whistle around my neck. Maybe once a week, some mom might say she'd seen me in People People magazine. Then once or twice a month I'd make a surreal overnight trip where I felt-as writer Ian McEwan once said-like an employee of my former self. magazine. Then once or twice a month I'd make a surreal overnight trip where I felt-as writer Ian McEwan once said-like an employee of my former self.

The big win? Money. My bills were paid. I could hire a student to help with Dev, grocery shop, fold laundry. Other than that and some journalism jobs-and the monthly photo session or far flung reading or lecture-I was a single mom in a small town.

Which is how I wind up in a sweltering theme park come August-by selling books. Before I went on the road, I promised Dev if we made it on one big best-seller list, I'd take him to Disney World. For a week: my idea of an electric chair with no off switch.

Still, being there turned out to be a thrill, but for one hair-raising ride called the Tower of Terror, where they dropped us in an elevator a dozen floors. In the group photo, everyone's hands are up in the air as they grin. I'm hunkered down as if for a bomb blast. (I have too many frames per second for Tower of Terror.) After five days of more palatable rides, Dev and I abandon the blistering park, so I can rent a speedboat we can't afford. With his new blue captain's hat on, he steers us bouncing over the waves.

At night, while he soaks in the bathtub, I talk to Walt for way longer than I promised his kids I would. He's suffering some asbestos-related disease caught in a car factory as a teenager. Now it's devouring the lungs in his barrel chest, and every breath costs him.

In St. Paul the year before, I'd visited him. His daughter Pam had moved home, and he'd needed an oxygen bottle.

From Florida that night, I ask what can they do.

Not much, he says, panting. Morphine. It's progressive.

You're telling me you're gonna die?

That's right.

You can't die, I say. That's just unacceptable to me.

Well, I'm not a big fan of the idea, either. He wheezes for a minute before saying, I can't talk. Tell me your adventures.

So I tell him about the long drop in the tower; and the wonton soup at Epcot; and Tinker Bell sliding down on her cable through fireworks; and a baby bird we found under a park bench, fallen from a nest, how it looked like a purplish dragon, how we sat with it till a guy with a broom swept it into his dustpan.

Great job, he gasps. You've done.

The line between us is crackling, and I know I'm keeping him on the line for myself. His breath comes in like a tide and goes out farther every time.

Tell me some n.o.ble deaths, he says.

I remind him that when Socrates had drunk the hemlock-in the Phaedo Phaedo we read together-the cold was creeping up his legs, how his students bent over him, saying, we read together-the cold was creeping up his legs, how his students bent over him, saying, Don't you have anything more to tell us Don't you have anything more to tell us.... And in the Chekhov biography I just finished, he was coughing into his napkin bright red arterial blood, and once the doctor announced it was hopeless, champagne was called for.

Dev comes out wrapped in an oversize bathrobe, and he's got that crease in his forehead that comes when he sees me cry. He knows Walt's fading, and his hand settles on my shoulder.

Remember back when I was in school, I finally say into the putty-colored receiver, how you bought all those lunches and theater tickets for me, when I asked how I'd ever pay you back? Remember what you said?

He's too breathless to respond.

You said, It's not that linear. You're gonna go on to help somebody else It's not that linear. You're gonna go on to help somebody else. Well, I got a chance to help my a.s.sistant out of a pinch. And she asked how she'd pay me back, and I told her the story. I'd never have done that without you.

He's struggling to say something, barely audible his voice is, a plume of air, the smoke trail a voice leaves behind. He says, Tell her to thank me.

43.

The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Late have I loved you, O Beauty, so ancient and so new, late have I loved you. For behold you were within me, and I outside; and I sought you outside and in my unloveliness fell upon those lovely things which you have made. You were with me, and I was not with you. I was kept from you by those things, yet had they not been in you, they would not have been at all. You called and cried to me to break open my deafness and you sent forth your beams and you shone upon me and chased away my blindness. You breathed fragrance upon me, and I drew in my breath and now do pant for you...-St. Augustine, City of G.o.d City of G.o.d After ten months praying in a cave in Manresa, St. Ignatius received a vision that permitted him to see G.o.d in all things to see G.o.d in all things-the stated goal of his Spiritual Exercises, which are part of each Jesuit's novitiate.

This doesn't innately appeal to me. Despite my conversion, I don't much care to see G.o.d in all things. I prefer to find G.o.d in circ.u.mstances I think up in advance, at home in my spare time-circ.u.mstances G.o.d will fulfill for me like a gumball machine when I put the penny of my prayer into it.

It's not virtue that leads me to the Exercises but pain. Only a flamethrower on my a.s.s ever drives me to knock-knock-knock on heaven's door. Pain, in my case, is the sole stimulus for righteous action.

After six years in Syracuse-Dev's eleven-I lost a love; or more accurately, I drove one away with a stick. It seems unfair to drag him in kicking and screaming for the purposes of this narrative, so here's the short version. On tour in London, I'd taken up with a tall Cambridge-educated Brit met through work. (Let's say his job was in TV.) Our months-long transatlantic affair had a glittery aspect. He owned more tuxedos than a maitre d', and I jetted over for his black-tie soirees. He spent a summer month in green Syracuse with Dev and me. But the distance was a misery. He ran a company in London, and I could never move Dev from his dad. Still, the Brit and I wound up engaged-as in to be married. He'd leave London for Syracuse and consulting.

For a few months I deluded myself that my old dream of family was a.s.sembling. I splurged on fancy barrister bookcases for his five thousand, first-edition books, which arrived in duct-taped bubble wrap. I cooked steamship roasts.

But Syracuse was drearier than London, with exactly zero tuxedo-specific events beyond the occasional prom. Plus an underemployed thirty-something bachelor with time on his hands wasn't exactly a couture fit for a fortysomething workaholic with a six-foot son who giggled while chucking a basketball at said bachelor's crotch. (You make him stop, I said, staring into my computer.) The burden of the move quite literally broke the Brit's back-a slipped disk flattened him. After months of hauling his dinner to him on a tray, I wanted to bubble-wrap him and stick stamps on his forehead. (So much for in sickness and in health in sickness and in health.) We scheduled back surgery in London, Dev and I letting a summer place while he healed. But by then I was already wondering if we could get the deposit back on the reception hall, envisioning the dress I'd bought boxed up with mothb.a.l.l.s. (If I'd been thinking like an adult instead of a gradeschooler with a Cinderella costume, I'd never have permitted anybody to give up a fancy job and house in Notting Hill.) I broke things off, but his departure tore open an old wound.

Once he's gone, I begin to sense-as I shove my cart through the supermarket amid the Republican families on Sunday-a giant S on my chest for Spinster. Dev's preoccupied with friends and rap records. Despite Patti and friends, the old lack of close family makes me fumingly mad at G.o.d, who, it may seem nutty to say, is real to me after years of prayer, not like the Easter Bunny or anything. All pain still makes me mad at G.o.d.

Running into Big John, who steers me into overhauling how I pray, strikes me as grace. We make best pals playing racquetball at my health club-a joke, given he's six-five and a former Olympic contender for the water polo team. With our handicapping, I only have to score a single point to win.

As a young man, John had been torn between a career as an athlete and the Jesuit seminary, but he'd drunk his way out of both businesses. On getting sober, he'd started a swim club to pursue his dream of coaching Olympic-caliber compet.i.tors. A lumbering guy with curly brown hair and eyes the color of pool chlorine, he pursues that Olympic vision waking and sleeping.

When we meet, he's sober longer than I am, and-due to his own heartbreak-he's reconsidering whether he's called to be a Jesuit. To discern the answer, he undertakes a lay version of the Exercises, emerging nine months later like a creature dipped in fine metal, heartbreak cured. Right after, his coaching career takes off like gangbusters. His swimmers start taking national prizes, and four are pulling down Olympic-level times. One gold-medals in Sydney. In short, following Ignatius jacked up both his mood and his productivity, and-compet.i.tive b.i.t.c.h that I am-this spiked my interest.

Still, I waffle when a nun outlines the time commitment-cla.s.ses, spiritual direction, hours of prayer, journals. Also, while I wasn't-for longer than I care to admit-boinking anybody, I didn't want to scare off any future prospects. Imagine saying to your date that you can't give up any nay-nay till your Franciscan spiritual advisor gives the thumbs up.

Then coming back from New York on the train one day, I slip into a familiar gap. It's right before Christmas in a packed coach car, the overhead shelves crammed with suitcases and spilling bags and packages. I settle into a window seat with the backrest tilted far back. It's the only place left. Behind me, a young woman-maybe nineteen-asks me to move my seat up. After fiddling with it for a second, I tell her it's stuck in a deep recline. Then I lie back while pa.s.sengers clot the aisles and jam in their overhead bags. She leans forward and says, very close to my ear, I bet if I yanked your hair, you could move that seat I bet if I yanked your hair, you could move that seat.

And from my sagging state of half-sleep, I snap awake and shoot back, You picked the wrong b.i.t.c.h to f.u.c.k with on this train.

Around us, the entire car stops. People hold gestures midair. She starts to kick the back of my seat-hard and rhythmically, which I don't respond to at first. If I were thinking like anything but an animal, I would've apologized to her by now. But I sit there fuming instead, telling myself stuff like, She's just doing this because I'm a woman of a certain age She's just doing this because I'm a woman of a certain age. I'm determined not to respond to the kicks that keep coming, but eventually, she says with force, You better not get off in Albany, b.i.t.c.h, 'cause I'll slap your face.

With blood pounding in my temples and all the venom that a woman disappointed in love can bring to an instant, I press my face into the slot between the seat and the window and hiss, If you touch me, I'll cut your f.u.c.king hand off.

I don't even know where this sentence comes from. Not to mention that-in terms of cutting off a hand-I lack even a pair of cuticle scissors. All human activity within sound of me ceases. The entire car is throbbing with hatred for us both. The girl withdraws like a slug doused with salt, and the train lurches west.

About twenty minutes out of the station, while I sit infused with acid at the outburst, I try to write the girl a note, but I wind up crouching by her seat to apologize. She shrugs coolly.

Once home, I call my sobriety coach, Patti, who says, What d'you expect, Mare? Run around without a meeting, and eventually, you'll start acting like a drunk again.

I wasn't that bad back then.

Silence from Patti, who knows better.

Okay, sometimes I was.

She suggests I doctor bathwater with lavender salts, set votive candles all over, kill the lights, then step into my own baptismal fount. Maybe there I can rethink events on the train. Follow that, she says, with a list of how your life has changed since you quit drinking.

Lying back in the fragrant water, I let a washcloth obliterate my features, rewinding to the days and hours before I got on the train.

It's the old story. Underslept and underfed, I'd been running with my shoulder bag thumping against my b.u.t.t, doing quarterback dodges and rolls on crowded holiday streets, while behind me, pedestrians dove for cover. I was behind in every conceivable way. So the old attack dog started howling through my head as I'd loped. Take the subway, the sane voice had said. Take the subway, you can buy a sandwich. Then counterattack claimed I needed cardio for the blubber on my a.s.s. A sandwich isn't the solution. You need to refinance. You need five hundred dollars this week or Dev's Christmas is Tiny Tim's.

You might as well call it the voice of the Adversary, for once I tune in to it, I've lost my real self-the G.o.d-made one, akin to others. The Adversary's voice can suck me into the maelstrom of my tornado-force will, which'll chew up anybody in its path, me included.

The washcloth steams my features soft, and once the water's cold, I oil myself up like a bodybuilder, slip on sweats, then towel-wrap my hair like a Turkish pasha.

Heating up meatb.a.l.l.s for Dev and his pals loudly playing air hockey in the bas.e.m.e.nt, I do Patti's list of what's changed in ten years. The boys clattering downstairs are a nightly antidote to the shipwrecked household I grew up in, and we no longer have to roll coins from the sofa cushions in order to afford meatb.a.l.l.s. Last month at Mother's surprise birthday, I floated in the pool alongside her and Lecia while brother-in-law Tom worked the grill and Dev and his cousin did cannonb.a.l.l.s.

The night after the train debacle, I drive under a sky black as graphite to meet my new spiritual director for the Exercises-a bulky Franciscan nun named Sister Margaret, patiently going blind behind fish-tank gla.s.ses that magnify her eyes like goggles.

Asked my concept of G.o.d, I mouth all the fashionable stuff-all-loving, all-powerful, etc. But as we talk, it bobs up that in periods of uncertainty or pain-forlorn childhood, this failed relationship-I often feel intentionally punished or abandoned.

How's that possible, I say, if I have no childhood experience of a punishing G.o.d?

Margaret says, We often strap on to G.o.d the mask of whoever hurt us as children. If you've been neglected, G.o.d seems cold; if you've been bullied, He's a tyrant. If you're filled with self-hatred, then G.o.d is a monster making inventor. How do you feel sitting here with me now?

I don't know, like some s.l.u.tty Catholic schoolgirl.

She laughs at this and says, I see you-she peers through those lenses-what I can see of you, as my sister, G.o.d's beloved child. The hairs on your head are numbered, and we've been brought together, you and me, to shine on each other a while.

So you don't judge me? I want to know.

For what? she said. I don't even know you.

Well, I say, I'm not married, and I aspire to be s.e.xually active again some day.

She says, I'm not naive. But Jesus might ask: Should you be vulnerable to a man without some spiritual commitment? Is that G.o.d's dream for you?