Some Assembly Required (21 page)

My friend Mary is staying here with me for five days. We met thirty-five years ago in Bolinas, were instantly inseparable, and spent years drinking and taking acid together, and now she can have a glass of wine every so often, without needing to finish the bottle. I don’t have this in me. I stopped almost twenty-four years ago. We lost touch for years, but now we are just as close as we ever were. She is Catholic, a big blonde with four grandchildren and a nephew who is getting a bone marrow transplant next week, for his leukemia. Today I took her and Jax into San Francisco for the Good Friday service at Mission Dolores, one of the early Spanish missions founded by Junípero Serra.

The service was in both Spanish and English, spoken by a handsome Hispanic priest. There were very few white people in the crowd of several hundred. Jax was sound asleep in my arms most of the time, and he seemed unusually small in that huge, glorious stained-glass space. His lips were pooched out, his cheeks were rosy and red, and he snorfled in his
sleep. When he finally woke up and got his bearings, such as they were, he made that beautiful gesture of tucking his head under his wings with shyness. I feel like doing that all the time, ducking down and hiding my face, except that mature, together, confident adults don’t do that.

He was awake for the last three Stations of the Cross. I love the ritual. It is like a nature hike: Here is a redwood, it loses its needles.… Here is a redwing blackbird. Also, it is all of life—you walk, you fall, you get up, you go on, you fall, you get up, you go on, you die, you resurrect. Mary was teary about her nephew, and I whispered to her the great line that we are Easter people living in a Good Friday world. The depth and the song of the Spanish language reminded me of the Fijian church: the supplication, and pain, and people having someplace to be together.

Jax flirted with an old Hispanic man in the aisle next to me, who put his leathery fingers near his ears and waggled them, then flew a plane or a bee all over his own airspace, up and down, up and down. This made Jax laugh, drop his eyes like a coquette, and dip his face back down under my wing.

I believe I am in Boston. The first question every interviewer in every medium has asked is: “How do you like being a grandmother?” I wrote a piece in February for the
Los Angeles Times
in which I mentioned that my son had had a son.
I respond that it is a blessing, and do not go into anything interesting, like the complexity of it all, and the struggles; I say only that Jax is the third great love of my life, along with Sam and Jesus.

News of Jax is a showstopper. People think Sam must be sixteen by now.

The second or third question is about why I used the word “bird” in a title for the second time; this is just not right. What is it about me and birds?

It is a good question, although asked with some suspicion, as if I were capitalizing on the earlier book. There are birds throughout every book I’ve written. My father was an avid bird-watcher. He did not believe in God or read the Bible, but he believed in birds and read all of Audubon. I grew up believing that birds were of supreme value and beauty. That if you studied and observed them, you could learn a great deal about life.

I said in another book that if birdsong were the only proof of a bigger, invisible reality, that would be enough for me.

What’s so great about birds, besides their beauty, is that they are very different from us—we are so earthbound and they are so free—and yet so similar, especially to our children in their vulnerability. The small ones you might crush, and the big ones soar like little gods, pelicans skimming the surf, eagles and hawks as high in the sky as stars. Big ones might peck your eyes out or dive-bomb you. They’re such alien creatures, so pretty, yet they spring from dinosaurs. And you
can never look a bird in the eyes—their eyes are on either side of their heads, and they are so quizzical. They have to be—they are prey, and yet so hungry, like teenagers; like us.

Last night, in a huge church outside Decatur, Georgia, where I was having a reading, some people asked me if I could go out with them for coffee and birthday cake. Temporarily unable to remember what city I was in, I said, “I just want to go back to—wherever it is that I am.” Then I realized that this was possibly the most brilliant thing I have ever said. All I have to do for a shot at salvation is go back to where I am, and that means wherever my feet are, not my poor old pinball head.

Today is my father’s eighty-sixth birthday. He has been dead thirty years.

Today is my fifty-sixth birthday. I am in my hotel room after my reading tonight, flying home at dawn. My publisher sent me balloons and an entire chocolate cake. The cake was like having a big rattlesnake on the dresser. Finally I called room service and ordered three scoops of sorbet. When the woman from room service arrived, I asked if I could give her this fancy chocolate cake that said “Annie” on it, for her family.
She was glad to take it away, after I removed the candles and made sure to pocket the matchbook. The single most radical thing I know, which took me only forty-plus years to learn, is that I get to take care of myself. Of course, Amy and Sam get to take care of themselves, too; so this is not great. But I am not a victim of this: I do get to take care of me, and so I put three candles onto my balls of sorbet, and lit them, like prayer candles in a cathedral: lemon, mango, raspberry.

I did housework today on my only day home from the book tour, and it was lovely, monk’s work: I swept, folded laundry, repacked for Seattle, walked the dogs, paid bills, and this has all made me calm and happy. It took nearly ten minutes to clean up Jax’s drool-crust from the glass table in the living room. The drool-crust is like evidence that space aliens would leave behind on furniture after they abducted the earthlings in the house. And when I got it perfectly drool-crust clean, Amy, Jax, and Sam burst through the front door, followed not long after by Stevo, Annette, and Clara, with a carrot cake and balloons.

Jax is nine months old today, and I am sick from the book tour, mentally stuffed and with a bad cough, sore throat, no
energy. But Amy needed to drop Jax off in the late afternoon so she could do errands and take some time for herself.

I took Jax to the park across the street on my shoulders, like a little big boy. My first memories are of my dad holding on to my ankles as we walked up to old St. Hillary’s to look for sticky monkey flowers, which grow in these parts. Jax and I went on an owl prowl, staring up from beneath the branches of a redwood and a sycamore, with me calling up, “Whoooo, whoooo,” to summon them. We have never once seen an owl, but always see other kinds of birds. I am teaching him to hug trees, which Sam does not quite approve of, being more conservative than I am in this regard.

When we were back home, I gave him a bottle of warm formula, and he fell asleep burrowed against my chest. I felt quiet, peaceful joy: my pastor Veronica says that peace is joy at rest, and joy is peace on its feet. Amy is a good mother, Sam is blowing me away with his arduous studies and sturdy fathering, Jax is the mellowest baby I’ve ever known. Riding on someone’s shoulders, stopping to touch redwood bark—those were such crystallizing moments in my childhood and in Sam’s, and now they are in Jax’s, and will come and come. His sweetness and growing powers of observation make everything worth it, even the three weeks when Amy took him to Chicago, and the difficulty of constantly having to release Sam and Amy to their own destiny, to the immediacy of their groping, lurching, unfinished lives. But we somehow
keep coming through. I listened to Jax snore. He’s so snuggly, so small and whole. He’s like the final inside nesting doll, the one you can’t take apart.

When Amy returned, she announced that she and Jax were going back to Chicago in a couple of weeks. The elevator dropped inside me. “Oh, just for ten days,” she said.

God has apparently had it with subtlety and nuance, because now I have laryngitis. So the day after Amy told me about her next trip to Chicago, I lost my voice.

As I was stewing this afternoon about her trip and my infirmity, Sam came by to get some money for art supplies. I couldn’t even inflict my goodness on him, because I had neither voice nor energy. He seemed to be doing well. He stretched out on the couch and put on a baseball game. After a while he got up to go to the kitchen, and when he passed me, long-legged and fatherly—proud and humbled at the same time—I asked hoarsely, “Are you okay with Amy and Jax leaving again?”

He shrugged and said, “And my choices would be?” He turned up his palms. Then he reached down to pat me on the top of my head. Next thing I know, he will be pretending to pull off the tip of my nose and displaying the end of his thumb from behind his fingers. I had to laugh, although it
hurt my throat. When I get wobbly from umbrage, it can be quantum: everyone in the family universe gets wobbly. I make a bad matriarch, what with my bad nerves and tiny opinions.

When he came back, he listened to the baseball game while I lay on the smaller couch and read. Then he turned off the TV, and made some sketches in his notebook for quite a while.

Silence is an extension of music. It is the spaciousness that is deep within, that expresses and is complete each moment as it lolls about, or spirals out and back in like a fiddlehead fern, and I got to be with my son in this silence, except for the scritch-scratch of his pencil on the paper.

Sometimes I look at this handsome young man lost in study, his long limbs and huge brown eyes, and I forget he has a baby at home.

The silence has been good for me today—not talking has subdued the rackety noise of fear in my head. I filled the silence with things that nourish me, instead of stuff that tears me down. I took naps with the animals, picked flowers from the garden—lilies and daisies—had tea and vanilla ice cream. I rested all day on the couch with a book, then made a quiet old-lady dinner of lentil soup and more ice cream. I felt much better afterward, like my regular old self again, which is to say good, with an underlying thrum of dread.

Tom called from the airport, waiting for a flight to Australia. He was in a bad mood, although he will never admit this. We both have close friends in dire health, and friends with kids who are profoundly sick.

We talked for a while about how our various friends were doing, and then I asked if I could pose a theological question, and he sighed deeply, although I know he loves that I question so much. I asked him: If—as he had once explained—God is the Lover, Jesus the Beloved, and the Holy Spirit the animating love between them, then where does Mary fit in?

“Mary is also loved. But she is not the Source. The Trinity is. The Trinity is the dance, and Mary invites us all to the dance floor, and she opens the door. She welcomes everyone to come in to the dance.”

“Like the opposite of a bouncer.”

“That’s right. She is loved, she is Love. But she’s not foundational. Now, we don’t like to mention this to you and your little feminist friends, because it sounds a tiny bit harsh, and all of you take it the wrong way, boo-hoo, boo-hoo. But you have to have a penis to be the Source.”

Laughter lifts the phonograph needle out of the scratches on my heart’s album. When I was a child, I knew that something
scary or weird could happen at any time, because it did. Without laughter, I skip straight to this old scratch. It’s deep, and you’d better be prepared for things to go bad.

Some of the same old-lady baby-snatchers who fought over Sam twenty years ago came after Jax today at church. “Give me that baby.” “It’s my turn.” I perfectly remember two of our saints, Zerline and Mary Williams, hissing at each other, underneath the sermon: “You’re
hoggin’
that baby.”

The first Scripture reading today was Luke 15, the Prodigal Son. Of course. It’s the only real story—coming back to God, who welcomes us with heartbroken joy, no matter what, every time. I do not get this.

The plainness of the church is restful. I relaxed, as I always do here, because everyone was down-to-earth, joining in the most ordinary of human things to do, singing together, handing one another Kleenex, grabbing for the babies. Spirit gets on you at this joint like a light drizzle, making you look up and take notice.

When Jax fussed, I walked and jostled him in the back of the church, which is thirty feet from the front. During a lull, I stopped to tell the older, gorgeous Iraqi wife of a retired African-American minister how beautiful she looked in the rich purples and maroons she was wearing, and she said, “You look beautiful in that grandson.”

Jax spent the morning in my living room, shouting as he bounced up and down in his bouncy saucer, an easy ten minutes at a stretch with his strong thigh muscles, playing all the different gears and whistles. He was like a one-man band, Dick Van Dyke in
Mary Poppins
.

I look at him and think, Who is the big kid coiled up in there, the teenager who is going to scare Amy and Sam to death? I think of Sam’s friends who still live in town, the kids at my church who’ve gotten lost and even died, a relative’s fourteen-year-old daughter who is in an institution for eating disorders. They’re like those firework snakes of dark ash that uncoil when you light the tablets. These lost, hurting children uncoiled from the babies they were: joyous, adored. Now they’ve broken their parents’ hearts.

As a baby, Sam was not as loud as Jax is; he was a little shy, always watchful, searching for clues about people and the world. I was an anxious and confused mother, struggling to make ends meet, and with a best friend who was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer when Sam was seven months old. Also, there was no father around. Maybe as a result Sam was more deliberate, more cautious in his exploration of the world, whereas Jax is utterly mellow and spontaneous. He moves from his own center, while Sam was more dependent on me: how I was doing, how I was coping. I had done this
semi-insane thing, having a child at an extra-stressful age in life, with no money—which Sam and Amy have done, too—and for financial reasons I was stuck living in a dark and peculiar house with no light. Amy and Sam are too, but they can come here whenever they want, where there are six skylights, and lots of room. And their parents pay all the bills.