Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace (12 page)

S
o there I was, on a plane returning home from St. Louis. Or rather, there I was in a plane at a gate at the St. Louis airport with, I think, the not unreasonable expectation that we would be in the air soon, as our flight had already been delayed two hours. I was anxious to get home, as I had not seen Sam in several days, but all things considered, I thought I was coping quite well, especially because I am a skeptical and terrified flier. In between devouring Hershey’s chocolate and thirteen dollars’ worth of trashy magazines, I had spent the two hours of the delay trying to be helpful to the other stranded passengers: I distributed all my magazines and most of my chocolates;
I got an old man some water; I flirted with the babies; I mingled, I schmoozed. I had recently seen what may have been a miracle at my church and had been feeling ever since that I was supposed to walk through life with a deeper faith, a deeper assurance that if I took care of God’s children for God, He or She would take care of me. So I took care of people, and hoped that once we were on board, everything would go smoothly.

My idea of everything going smoothly on an airplane is (a) that I not die in a slow-motion fiery crash or get stabbed to death by terrorists and (b) that none of the other passengers try to talk to me. All conversation should end at the moment the wheels leave the ground.

Finally we were allowed to board. I was in row 38, between a woman slightly older than I, with limited language skills, and a man my own age who was reading a book about the Apocalypse by a famous right-wing Christian novelist. A newspaper had asked me to review this book when it first came out, because its author and I are both Christians—although as I pointed out in my review, he’s one of those right-wing Christians who thinks that Jesus is coming back next Tuesday right after lunch, and
I am one of those left-wing Christians who thinks that perhaps this author is just spiritualizing his own hysteria.

“How is it?” I asked, pointing jovially to the book, partly to be friendly, partly to gauge where the man stood politically.

“This is one of the best books I’ve ever read,” he replied. “You should read it.” I nodded. I remembered saying in the review that the book was hard-core right-wing paranoid anti-Semitic homophobic misogynistic propaganda—not to put too fine a point on it. The man smiled and went back to reading.

I couldn’t begin to guess what country the woman was from, although I think it’s possible that she had one Latvian parent and one Korean. She sounded a little like Latka Gravas, the Andy Kaufman character on
Taxi
, except after things began to fall apart, when she sounded just like the Martians in
Mars Attacks!
“Ack ack ack!” she’d cry. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

As we sat there on the runway, the man with the book about the Apocalypse commented on the small gold cross I wear.

“Are you born again?” he asked, as the plane left the gate. He was rather prim and tense, maybe
a little like David Eisenhower with a spastic colon. I did not know how to answer for a moment.

“Yes,” I said. “I am.”

My friends like to tell one another that I am not really a born-again Christian. They think of me more along the lines of that old Jonathan Miller routine: “I’m not really a Jew—I’m Jew-ish.” They think I am Christian-ish. But I’m not. I’m just a bad Christian. A bad born-again Christian. And certainly, like the apostle Peter, I am capable of denying it, of presenting myself as a sort of leftist liberation theology enthusiast and maybe sort of a vaguely Jesusy bon vivant. But it’s not true. And I believe that when you get on a plane, if you start lying you are totally doomed.

So I told the truth: that I am a believer, a convert. I’m probably about three months away from slapping an aluminum Jesus-fish on the back of my car, although I first want to see if the application or Stickum in any way interferes with my lease agreement. And believe me, all this boggles even my mind. But it’s true. I could go to a gathering of foot-wash Baptists and, except for my dreadlocks, fit right in. I would wash their feet; I would let them wash mine.

But as the plane taxied out farther, the man on
my right began telling me how he and his wife were home-schooling their children, and he described with enormous acrimony the radical, free-for-all, feminist, touchy-feely philosophy of his county’s school system, and I knew instantly that this description was an act of aggression against me—that he was telepathically on to me, could see that I was the enemy, that I would be on the same curling team in heaven as Tom Hayden and Vanessa Redgrave. And then the plane braked to a stop.

We all looked around for a moment, before the captain came on the PA system and announced calmly that two passengers wanted to get off the plane, right then and there. We were headed back to the gate. “What?” we all cried. The good news was that this was going to take only a minute or so, since in the past two hours we had traveled only about five hundred feet. The bad news was that FAA regulations required that security go over all the stowed luggage to make sure these two people had not accidentally left behind their pipe bombs.

The Latvian woman stared at me quizzically. I explained very slowly and very loudly what was going on. She gaped at me for a long moment. “Ack,” she whispered.

Eventually the three of us in row 38 began to read. The other two seemed resigned, but I felt frantic, like I might develop a blinky facial tic at any moment. Time passed underwater.

An hour later the plane finally took off.

We, the citizens of row 38, all ordered sodas. The Latvian woman put on a Walkman and listened with her eyes closed; the Christian man read his book about the Apocalypse; I read
The New Yorker
. Then the seat-belt sign came on, and the pilot’s voice was back over the PA. “I’m afraid we are about to hit some heavy turbulence,” he said. “Please return to your seats.”

The next minute the plane was bouncing around so hard that we had to hold on to our drinks. “Ack ack ack!” said the Latvian, grabbing for her Sprite.

“Everyone take your seat,” the pilot barked over the PA system. “We are in for some rough going.” My heart thumped around my chest like a tennis shoe in the dryer.

The plane rose and fell and shook, and the pilot came back on and said sternly, like an angry dad, “Flight attendants, sit down now!” The plane hit huge waves and currents on the choppy sea of sky, and we bounced and moaned and gasped.
“Whhhoooooaaaa!” everybody said as one, as though we were on a roller-coaster ride. We’re going down, I thought. I know that a basic tenet of the Christian faith is that death is really just a major change of address, but I had to close my eyes to squinch back tears of terror and loss. Oh my God, I thought, oh my God: I’ll never see Sam again. This will kill me a second time. The plane bucked and shook without stopping, and the Christian man read calmly, stoically, rather pleased with his composure, it seemed to my tiny, hysterical self. The Latvian closed her eyes and turned up her Walkman. I could hear it softly. And I, praying for a miracle, thought about the miracle I had seen in church one Sunday.

One of our newer members, a man named Ken, is dying of AIDS, disintegrating before our very eyes. He came in a year ago with a Jewish woman who is with us every week, although she does not believe in Jesus. Shortly after Ken started coming, his partner, Brandon, died of AIDS. A few weeks later Ken told us that right after Brandon died, Jesus had slid into the hole in his heart left by Brandon’s loss, and had been there ever since. Ken has a totally lopsided face, ravaged and emaciated, but when he smiles, he is radiant. He looks like
God’s crazy nephew Phil. He says that he would gladly pay any price for what he has now, which is Jesus, and us.

There’s a woman in the choir named Ranola, who is large and beautiful and jovial and black and as devout as can be, who has been a little standoffish toward Ken. She has always looked at him with confusion, when she looks at him at all. Or she looks at him sideways, as if she wouldn’t have to quite see him if she didn’t look at him head-on. She was raised in the South by Baptists who taught her that his way of life—that he—was an abomination. It is hard for her to break through this. I think she and a few other women at church are, on the most visceral level, a little afraid of catching the disease. But Ken has come to church most Sundays for the past year and won over almost everyone. He missed a couple of Sundays when he got too weak, and then a month ago he was back, weighing almost no pounds, his face even more lopsided, as if he’d had a stroke. Still, during the Prayers of the People, he talked joyously of his life and his decline, of grace and redemption, of how safe and happy he feels these days.

So on this one particular Sunday, for the first hymn, the so-called Morning Hymn, we sang
“Jacob’s Ladder,” which says, “Every rung goes higher, higher,” while, ironically, Ken couldn’t even stand up. But he sang away sitting down, with the hymnal in his lap. And when it came time for the second hymn, the Fellowship Hymn, we were to sing “His Eye Is on the Sparrow.” The pianist was playing and the whole congregation had risen—only Ken remained seated, holding the hymnal in his lap—and we began to sing, “Why should I feel discouraged? Why should the shadows come?” Ranola watched Ken rather skeptically for a moment, and then her face started to melt and contort like his, and she went to his side and bent down to lift him—lifted this white rag doll, this scarecrow. She held him next to her, draped over and against her like a child while they sang. And it pierced me.

I can’t imagine anything but music that could have brought this about. Maybe it’s because music is about as physical as it gets: your essential rhythm is your heartbeat; your essential sound, your breath. We’re walking temples of noise, and when you add tender hearts to this mix, it somehow lets us meet in places we couldn’t get to any other way.

Meanwhile, little by little, the plane steadied,
and the pilot announced that everything was okay. I was so excited that we were not going to crash and that I might actually get to see Sam again that I started feeling mingly; I wanted the Christian man to be my new best friend. But just as I opened my mouth, the pilot came back once more to ask if there was a doctor on board.

A woman behind us, who turned out to be a nurse, got up and went back to investigate. The Christian man prayed; I tried to rubberneck, but I couldn’t see a thing. I went back to thinking about Ken and my church and how on that Sunday, Ranola and Ken, of whom she was so afraid, were trying to sing. He looked like a child who was singing simply because small children sing all the time—they haven’t made the separation between speech and music. Then both Ken and Ranola began to cry. Tears were pouring down their faces, and their noses were running like rivers, but as she held him up, she lay her black weeping face against his feverish white one, put her face right up against his and let all those spooky fluids mingle with hers.

When the nurse sitting behind us returned, she offered the news that a woman in the back was
having a heart attack. A heart attack! But there were doctors on hand, and the nurse thought the woman was going to be okay.

“Good Lord,” said the Christian man. We looked at each other and sighed, and shook our heads, and continued to look at each other.

“God,” I said. “I just hope the snakes don’t get out of the cargo hold next.” The prim apocalyptic man smiled. Then he laughed out loud. The Latvian woman started laughing, although she still had her Walkman on, and while I hate to look like I’m enjoying my own jokes too much, I started laughing, too. The three of us sat there in hysterics, and when we were done, the man reached over and patted the back of my hand, smiling gently. The Latvian woman leaned in close to me, into my Soviet airspace, and beamed. I leaned forward so that our foreheads touched for just a second. I thought, I do not know if what happened at church was an honest-to-God little miracle, and I don’t know if there has been another one here, the smallest possible sort, the size of a tiny bird, but I feel like I am sitting with my cousins on a plane seven miles up, a plane that is going to make it home—and this made me so happy that I thought: This is plenty of miracle for me to rest in now.

W
e turn toward love like sunflowers, and then the human parts kick in. This seems to me the only real problem, the human parts—the body, for instance, and the mind. Also, the knowledge that every person you’ve ever loved will die, many badly, and too young, doesn’t really help things. My friend Marianne once said that Jesus has everything we have, but He doesn’t have all the other stuff, too. And the other stuff leaves you shaking your sunflower head, your whole life through.

I got a message to call my aunt Gertrud last week. She is not my blood aunt, but was adopted when I was two. She and her husband, Rex, were my parents’ best friends my entire life, our two
families eventually part of one whole. She became Sam’s grandmother one month after conception; neither of her children decided to have kids.

I remind her whenever she nags me about something that I ruined my figure to give her a grandson.

She and I stick together.

Her skin is still beautiful, soft brown and rosy. It is like very old deerskin gloves. When she was younger, she had silky chestnut hair, very European, but she let it go gray and then radiant moon-white. She was long-legged and looked great in shorts and well-worn hiking boots. Our families went hiking together many weekends, on Mount Tamalpais, at Palomarin, on the Bear Valley Trail in Point Reyes. She was not patient with children who lagged behind on the path; she brought us sandwiches on black bread, and perforated raisin bars to eat by streams and rivers. My father, taking pity on us, brought Cokes and grape sodas and chubs of salami. She was an expert seamstress with great style and taste; she was also sort of cheap—she would say frugal—and bought impeccable accessories at Monkey Wards and Cost Plus.

She sewed some things for me over the years,
especially as I neared adolescence, so skinny that nothing from the stores could do justice to my peculiar beauty. She made me two tennis dresses when I was twelve, sky-blue grosgrain trim on one, embroidered cloth daisies on the other. My eighth-grade graduation dress of periwinkle blue; a hippie shift when I was fourteen, from a Cost Plus Indian bedspread; a much bigger one when I suddenly filled out and then some.

My mother and Gertrud raised their kids together, played tennis at the club, fought for left-wing causes, and shared a love of cooking and reading, and both subscribed to
The Nation
and
The New Yorker
for as long as I can remember. Our families were at each other’s houses all the time. My father and Rex sailed on Rex’s boats many weekends, sometimes up the Delta for the whole weekend. Gertrud was a server, manic and industrious, my mother a mad little English archduchess who had people wait on her. While Gertrud saved, my mother charged; while Gertrud’s marriage lasted, my mother’s ended when she was forty-eight. She charged a fantastic new life for herself in Hawaii, where she started a law firm. When she moved back fifteen years later, she was broke, ill
with diabetes, and then early Alzheimer’s. Gertrud hovered over her, clucked, mended, tried as ever to fix her.

After surviving breast cancer twice, Gertrud was the one who got dealt the cards to be the survivor, the one who got to see how things came out; one pays an exorbitant price for that honor. A few years ago, my mother died, devastatingly. A few years before that, Gertrud’s husband died of cancer, and twenty-five years ago, my father. These were the people with whom she had planned to grow old. She endured.

Our families are still close, and I am particularly devoted to Gertrud. This does not preclude my shaking a fist at her in public or at meals when she says aggressively stubborn things. “That’s enough out of you, old woman,” I thunder, and she shakes utensils in my direction, like a crab.

Until two years ago, Gertrud was still hiking in the mountains, with me, with her friends, and when you watched her, you could see how much ground she had lost. Even as she had to steady herself with a walking stick while she pointed out alpine wildflowers—grousing that you should know their names by now—you thought, Please let me look like this at eighty. Then when you saw
her in the convalescent home after botched surgery to replace her hip—frail, pale, defeated—you thought, Please don’t let me live this long. Please, Jesus, shoot me. But then she resurrected one more time, came home, set her life in order again. She still lives alone, and drives; she keeps up her garden, with help, and makes people in our blended family cheesecake for birthdays.

She looks iconic now, apple-doll-ish, small as a child, terribly thin, still stylish and beautiful, though. Stubborn as ever; impossible.

When her daughter called from Oregon last week, and left me a message saying that Gertrud was depressed about selling her house, and would I please give her a call, I got on the phone immediately.

I hadn’t even known she was definitely selling the house. The last I’d heard, she was selling just a parcel of land below the house her husband built. This was where she had always wanted to die, in this falling-down house where, from her deck, you can see a broad swath of San Francisco Bay, Angel Island, Alcatraz, the entire span of the Golden Gate Bridge, the lights of San Francisco, the sailboats, the ferries. We used to be able to see the railroad yard from here, the trains, and walk a hundred
yards to the trestle that took you above the yard to Main Street, until it was all torn down.

For the last few years, she had spoken about how one day she might need to leave, for some sort of assisted-living apartment, but this was the first I’d heard of her actually doing so. We’d all been supportive of her keeping the house forever, but secretly hoped that she’d have a nice cerebral accident before she
had
to move, a nice sudden Hallmark death while dozing.

I called Gertrud and asked her what was happening. She was distraught. She was going up to San Rafael at five, to sign the papers selling both her house and the parcel of land. The man handling the transaction was one of Rex’s old sailing buddies, and the prospective buyer was the grown son of childhood friends from Germany. “I can’t talk to you or anyone now,” she said.

“At least let me drive you tonight,” I begged.

“No. I need to do this myself. Just pray for me.” Now, this scared me badly, as she is a confirmed atheist. Her deep spirituality is absolutely antireligious, entirely rooted in nature and in taking care of people. She has made her daily rounds all the years I’ve known her, taking food and comfort
to sick friends. She was the local head of UNICEF forever.

Still, I have seen an amorphous interest on her face in the holiday prayers one of us always offers, when we lift up her husband, my father, my mother. I know she feels the three of them, then, in a way different from memory: more like when we light the paper that amaretti cookies come wrapped in, stamped with pale pink and blue and green, and make a wish as they flutter on fire up into the air, wisps of sparks and then ashes.

I told her I had to leave for an appointment in Berkeley but would call her from the car on my way back, to see if she’d changed her mind.

She can be so annoying and inconvenient, like most old people. Just that they’ve lived so long frustrates your hope of easy endings. They’re going to die anyway—why are they clinging so hard to the life they had? I know the answer: It gives them happiness. All any of us has is this bit of time together now. But the old, who can see so much and so little, hook into life with a lot of opinion and complaint, and this can be wearing. The only reason I do not feel like attacking her more often is that she isn’t my real mother. But I’ve come close.
Every year when she goes with Sam and me to a writing conference in the mountains, there are times when I have to leave the living room of our condo to compose myself. We’ll spend hours together happily, reading, making food for Sam and his friends, cleaning up after that; and I’ll listen to her endless comments, opinions, grievances, and questions, and it doesn’t bother me at all. I’ll be an annoying old lady someday, too, with opinions on everything, if I live. Age itself is annoying, and weird. Everything gets solidified and liquefied at the same time. I honor her by simply noting the need for constant engagement. But then she’ll criticize something, and in her honeyed, controlling voice I’ll hear the burr of friendly fascism. It so pushes my buttons—speed dial. I’ll hear coercion in her supposedly innocent suggestions, the hideous drive of the Viennese waltz—“You vill valtz!”—and the glittering pleasure of “I told you so.” And let’s not even get into the garbage eating.

Well, okay: but just briefly. Do all Europeans who survived World War II eat garbage? Not simply cutting off half-inches of mold on cheese to save the rest of it: I do that. I mean the insistence that the bit of toasted bagel that Sam left on his plate yesterday makes a perfectly nice breakfast
today—for her. She’s not trying to make me eat it, and still it enrages me.

“Gertrud!” I say. “That is garbage!”

Or I’ll come upon her gnawing on an absolutely white cantaloupe rind that she’s found on Sam’s plate. Or she’ll wrap up overcooked ravioli from yesterday that she wants to take with her when we leave tomorrow, to eat for dinner when I drop her off. It’s table scrapings.

But mostly, we find enormous solace in each other. We read the papers together, angrily, muttering. She reads Noam Chomsky for pleasure. She brings me great chocolate.

We hike almost every day when we are in the mountains. On our last night together, two years ago, we went stargazing at High Camp, in Squaw Valley. Already at 7,500 feet, we took the gondola up to the meadow, where fifty others had gathered to watch a Perseid meteor shower. There were two astronomers to guide us, with powerful telescopes.

Gertrud was by far the oldest person there, by a good ten years or so. She was wearing a hat, warm clothes, and hiking boots, and she had her walking stick, ready for action. You could tilt your head back and see a shooting star every few minutes. Gertrud held on to my arm, leaned back unsteadily.

The astronomers started with easy stars, constellations and planets, Cassiopeia and Venus, almost below the horizon; they showed us star clusters, and told us how many millions of galaxies there are, infinitely bigger than our old Milky Way, trillions and gazillions of light-years distant, and all the while there are shooting stars and showers overhead. Gertrud leaned on me, held tight to my arm, and whispered in my ear, “We don’t need so much information! Right there is the best thing of all, our dear old friend the Big Dipper.”

We had hiked on this exact spot of land the day before, on our yearly wildflower walk, and the sky then was as bright as the field of weedy yellow flowers had been.

Gertrud won’t wait in line. Maybe it is a European thing, like the garbage eating. Maybe she has waited in enough lines to last a lifetime. But I took my turn when she said she was steady enough to stand alone. When I reported that you could see twin stars and stellar graveyards through the telescope, she said rather huffily, “I’ll just wait right where I am, and see what I can see.”

The stars were as close as berries on a bush.

After a while, though, Gertrud began to shiver. The night was not that cold, but she is so thin. She
teetered as she held on to me, and I stood like a handrail while she got her balance. She held on so tight that it hurt: I could see that her knuckles were white, by the lights of the stars and the gondola. I rubbed her shoulders briskly, as you would warm a child just out of the ocean, and we headed back down the mountain.

I was reminded of that evening when I called her from Berkeley at three-thirty the day she was going to sell her house and asked her if she’d like me to pick her up. “Yes, please,” she said. When I got to her house an hour later, she was waiting outside, ready for action again: this time, instead of hiking boots, she was wearing a dark blue knit cardigan with gold buttons, and a scarf tucked in around her neck; very nautical, still the admiral of her ship. She was teary but composed. All I knew to do was to be willing to feel really shitty with her.

“When did you decide to sell the house?” I asked when we started out.

She said with genuine confusion that she didn’t know how it had come to be—she had meant to sell only the parcel. A number of friends had convinced her that it made sense to sell both properties now and rent the house back for a year. This would give her time to find a smaller place, with a garden
and a view, and people around to help her in case she fell.

“Couldn’t you hire someone to help around the house and drive?”

She said she had changed her mind too many times, had put everybody through too much already: the realtor, the buyer, and her children.

Everything in me wanted to save her—to offer her the extra room in our house, or promise to drop in on her every day. But instead I did an incredible thing, something I have not done nearly enough in my life: I did nothing. Or at any rate, I did not talk. Miserable, and desperate to flee or to fix her, I listened instead.

Fear and frustration poured out of her as we drove past my entire childhood, past the hillsides that used to be bare of everything, where we slid down the long grass on cardboard boxes, past the little white church on the hill, past the supermarket built on the swamps where we used to raft, past the stores on the Boardwalk, where the Christmas star shines every year.

Then, without particularly meaning to, just before we got on the clotted freeway, I pulled off the road and parked the car in a bus zone.

“Wait a minute, Gertrud. Let me ask you
something: What do you want to do? What does your heart say?”

She answered after a long moment. “I don’t want to sell my house.”

“Are you sure?” This was shocking news, and the timing just terrible.

“Yes. But now I have to. I’ve changed my mind so often.”

Neither of us spoke for a minute. “But that’s the worst reason to do something,” I finally said. She looked at me. “You have the right to change your mind again.”

“Really, Annie?”

“Yep.”

Gertrud glanced around with confusion, disbelief, misery. She dried her tears, reapplied lipstick, and picked at invisible lint on her blue knit sweater.