Some Assembly Required (26 page)

Tom was explaining the Nicene Creed to the chemist: God the Father is the creator of everything, physical and invisible; the Son becomes incarnate, suffers, dies, and is risen; and the Holy Spirit “proceeds” from the Father. Everything was fine, until Charlemagne came along and wanted to emphasize one radical word:
filioque
, which means “and from the son,” i.e., the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, instead of just from the Father.

And then the shit hit the fan.

The Greek Orthodox Church maintained that this was change, therefore heretical. The Latin Church thought of it as clarification. Everyone became fanatical, and if you disagreed with other people’s understanding, then they got to kill you. This is all very modern, very Sarah Palin.

The chemist asked Tom where he stood, and Tom quoted the great Cardinal Newman, who described the truth of the risen Christ as a huge shining diamond above everything else. But every so often, Tom said, because life is change, the light changes and we see things differently. And to paraphrase Pope John Paul II, you say potato, I say potahto, and not everyone has to see things exactly the same way. Tom said that either you learn to live with paradox and ambiguities, or you’ll be six years old for the rest of your life. Tom and the chemist shook hands warmly, and we limped off with Ann to the open-air market, where the raspberries were the size of aggies.

I wondered if raspberries were still Jax’s favorite food, along with grapes and peas. I wrote texts and e-mails to Sam and Amy, but didn’t hear back. I imagined the worst: jails, foster care, both dogs dead.

I thought about Jax in every port and every town, like a bad song. He’s my little soldier boy. The word
pining
came to mind. I wondered what new things he has learned to do. I
was medium pissed that Sam and Amy had dropped off the radar, and I decided that I would not get them the great presents I had intended to. This is how we Christians do things.

Today we were in Saint Petersburg for eighteen hours, and it was pretty great—the Hermitage, several of the world’s great cathedrals, the Summer Palace, which is what Liberace would have overseen if he’d been a dictator, and a night of ballet—
Giselle
. But even better than all those gold onion-shaped domes, grand parks, and the harbor was the cab ride Ann and I took from the ballet to the ship.

We agreed on a price of twenty dollars American, for what would turn out to be a ten-minute ride, which was fine. The cabbie knew only ten words of English, including “twenty dollars American” and “I loves Obama.” His name was Akman, and he was Armenian, swarthy and fat, with thick stubble, and he chain-smoked Luckys. He was like someone sent over by central casting to play the fat, swarthy Armenian with stubble. Every few minutes, Ann, Akman, or I shouted out, “I love Obama!” and we’d all clap enthusiastically, like Jax. Until we arrived at the docks. Then he tried to rip us off—twenty dollars
each
, he now said. Bad feelings erupted, and we gave him one twenty-dollar bill and started to storm off, feeling like embittered capitalist pigs. Then we heard the window roll down, and held our breaths—was he going to shoot us? Instead, Akman shouted, “I loves Obama!” and we shouted that we did, too, and all three of us clapped and I raised my fists in the power salute. “Thank you, my
friends!” he shouted, holding his hands over his heart, pure love on his face, like Jesus in His distressing guise as a fat, swarthy cabbie with five-o’clock shadow.

It’s wonderful to travel again when the rest of the world does not feel that war criminals are in charge of your country.

Ann and I left the ship and walked all day. Riga, the capital of Latvia, is the loveliest city of gardens, towers, bridges, and random daisies everywhere. Tom was too tired and cranky to leave the ship, so he wasn’t along as our guide. Consequently, all we had to go on as we made our way around town were ten postcards I bought from a peddler—we were like gentle space aliens who’d landed in Latvia on a peaceful mission. We stopped people, showed them a postcard of a church or a cathedral, of the great public garden along the canal, of monuments of the Viking trade routes, of the statue of freedom, and they pointed us in the right direction. We walked along the lively ancient streets to the river, where we stopped to watch a cross-eyed calico cat chase white butter flies. He had a bright red nose, like a clown, and he was a great hunter. We watched for quite a long time in the shade of some trees, out of the heat. He didn’t actually catch any butterflies, possibly because he was so cross-eyed. But just as we were about to leave, with a sudden furry
grand jeté
, he brought down a purple-blue lilylike blossom, an agapanthus,
and wrestled it to the ground. Ann and I cheered, like it was an Olympic event.

Maybe it was the heat and the exhaustion, but at that moment I had a revelation: One of our best family friends grew agapanthus in a corner of the unfenced garden in front of her house, and she got so tired of boys’ taking shortcuts through her garden and tromping on her flowers that she had a housepainter make a sign that she stuck into the ground. It read: “Beware the Agapanthus.”

I realized, in that moment, that almost all the things I had feared and dreaded my whole life had been like those agapanthus, not threatening at all, except in the imagination of a confused young girl whose parents had a bad marriage.

We went back to the ship by way of the Latvian freedom monument that separates the old town from the newer city, a tall, slender copper woman atop a high column, holding three gilded stars.

In Poland, I did not decide to visit Stutthof, the concentration camp, until the very last moment. It felt like there was something obscene about taking a tour bus to see a Nazi camp, the first built outside Germany and the last to be liberated. But Tom had been to Auschwitz, and he thought it might be important for me to go and observe, to get at a cellular level the fact that despite our great love and art, we are
a violent species. Cain is still killing Abel, and that was meaningful for people like me, who can write to bear witness, remind others of this in the hopes of preventing such madness in the future.

Another woman from our sober group, Keenan, went with me—Tom was going to the Solidarity shrines on his own—and she and I stuck close together, huddling on the tour bus like schoolgirls. She is a Presbyterian minister, a compassionate soul; we did not talk much, only to admit that being on a tour bus with a friend, ludicrous as it might seem, was the only way either of us would have ever seen a concentration camp.

I loved our guide, a smart, no-nonsense, but gentle Polish woman, who took us first to the Solidarity shrines. Then, after an hour’s ride out to the beautiful countryside, there was a long drive through woods. Keenan and I were both anxious the whole time, knowing that right around the corner would be the gates of the camp. You can’t gear up for its sudden, stark appearance.

The blackness and bleakness and unreality of Stutthof hit you like the heat. We stepped through the gates into the ultimate harshness, hearts sinking. A storage cabin held tens of thousands of pairs of shoes, every single pair of shoes a fully formed human life, and over a sign, baby shoes hung by their laces. I stopped to take it in, and fell in with a tall older Swede named David who had also dropped back from the rest of the group. He teared up at the display of baby shoes,
but by that point I actually felt next to nothing. We entered an oppressive scrunched warren of living quarters, barracks, and walked in a daze through the horror of the “hospital” rooms. I felt terrible studying the enlarged photographs of the victims on the walls and at the wrenching reality of how many children had been murdered, but I plodded along like a robot, staying close to Keenan and David. I wanted the tour to be over, wanted to be back on the bus and able to say sadly for now and all time that I had seen one of the camps.

A quiet expanse of dark yard lay in the middle of the camp—on one side were the barracks and hospital, on the other was the museum display, mostly photos and news paper clippings. On the walls, monstrous memorabilia in cases. David’s face was in deep grief; Keenan seemed to be in overwhelmed, puzzled wretchedness. We were shown to the crematorium, to the left of the museum, where the smell of ashes remains. The two small ovens were almost hideously lovely, like appliances you might buy at IKEA, miserably human. I couldn’t leave that room. I do not know what was going on inside me, but I kept sneaking back while everyone else went on to the next exhibit. The nearby gas chamber was rather small and innocuous, until you looked up and saw the hole in the ceiling for the can of Zyklon B. Upon seeing this hole, there is not one helpful thought you can think.

Our group had moved on to a beautiful meadow behind the crematorium, where one set of gallows remained. I caught up to David in the shade of a grove of silver trees. Keenan
was bending down low to look at wildflowers. I couldn’t remember what kind of trees they were, although we have them where I live. David did not know the word in English, but he drew the picture of the leaf on my sheath of notes, and he wrote the word for them in Swedish,
björk
. He told me how, in the fall, the leaf drops off, and the new bud is already in place, fully formed but tiny, waiting to be born again in spring.

David, Keenan, and I trundled back to the bus like refugees.

When we got back on board, Keenan shared a bright, juicy mandarin orange with me.

The shoes, the ovens, the gas chamber, the faces in the photographs, the meadow with the leafless trees, Christ crucified and waiting to be reborn again; I could not make sense of anything, except that by the time we got back to Gdansk, I remembered the name of the tree in English: silver birch.

It was our last full day on board, and we had docked in Visby, Sweden, in the pouring rain. Early tomorrow we would cruise into Stockholm, and later I would fly home. Tom and I found each other in a secret corner of the dining room and had breakfast together. I had my usual girly healthy balanced breakfast, and Tom had eggs, potatoes, and three different kinds of fatty carcinogenic pork products.
After our usual catch-up and gossip, I looked up and asked, “Can I tell you everyone I hate?” He nodded, and put down his fork, as if this were confession.

I told him about a couple of exes who still vex me, and one with whom I had hoped to get back together, and how much I still hated what my parents’ terrible marriage had saddled my brothers and me with; and about two women who were formerly in our family, who behaved beyond heinously in their divorces from beloved family members; and about everything Sam and Amy had done wrong over the year, beginning prenatally, up to and including not staying in touch with me now, and how awful they could be to each other, in front of Jax, and what an entitled white male Sam could be sometimes with both me and Amy, and how impossible and bullheaded she could be; a few random writers who have been mean to me, and of course, entire presidential administrations.

I heaved a sigh and stared down into my lap, done, for the time being.

“Let me get us more coffee and some pastry,” he said. “We need communion.”

When he got back, I told him about how I had pinched Sam really hard on the arm once. Tom handed me half a glazed doughnut. “I hate that I’m so crazy, and shut down, all at once. I hate that I love Sam so much, the same way I love Jesus. Maybe it would have been healthier if I’d had more kids.”

“Well, yeah, you love him,” Tom said. “He’s the son.”
I’d never thought of that. He continued, “Even Joseph and Mary must have been beside themselves half the time, with this strange, strange kid of theirs.”

“Do you think God, the Father, was terrified for Jesus?”

“Well, at least concerned.”

“And what do you do in the face of this powerlessness? As a parent?”

“You get to be obsessed and angry,” Tom said. “And they get to be the age they are, and act like teenagers if they want to. There is a zero-percent chance you will change them. So we breathe in, and out, talk to friends, as needed. We show up, wear clean underwear, say hello to strangers. We plant bulbs, and pick up litter, knowing there will be more in twenty minutes. We pray that we might cooperate with
any
flicker of light we can find in the world.”

Later, Ann and I disembarked, but it was raining too hard for a walk, and I ended up in bed; at first I felt lonely, tired, peeved with Sam and Amy, maybe a little more lost than usual, but soon I got lost in a good way, with a book, which is also to get found, and my staunchest lifelong light.

Yesterday our ship arrived in Stockholm harbor at dawn. Tom and our friends were going to spend a couple more days in the city, but I headed directly to the airport, and was back in San Francisco in the evening. Jax and Amy and Sam were
here to welcome me home. I am hosting Jax’s birthday party tomorrow. Everyone who is anyone will be here. Jax was shy with me for approximately four seconds: maybe Bonnie is right, that our love for each other is indelible, and not based on proximity—she has promised me this. He threw himself into my arms, tucked his head under my neck, like a dove. He is very grown-up, scooching around his fiefdom to take possession of anything within reach, and trying to fend off the kissing dogs, who want to clean him every five minutes, like geishas. He’s such a mellow, peaceful guy, busy bashing my things against the floor or coffee table. He reaches for one of us from time to time, and lets us hold him until he wiggles and wants to get back down so he can pick up things and fling them about. Sam and Amy seem to be in semi-okay shape, friendly enough, and civil, so blown away in love with my guy, Smash Crasher, who blithely goes on about his work.

The three of them put me to bed at eight. Sam actually tucked me in. Jax was instructed to give me several jellyfish kisses, which he did, and they tiptoed out.

I woke up at five this morning in a fog of headache and Komodo dragon breath: both dogs standing over me on the bed, watching for the first signs of life, their heads maybe a foot away from mine. When my eyes flickered, trying to
focus, they peered at me wildly, like maybe the house was on fire. Or I should get up so the dogs and I could start pulling things together for Jax’s one-year birthday. Or else they were hungry, which I was, too.