Plan B (10 page)

 

I
f I could write only one more story in my whole life, it would be this:

Sam's wrestling practice was canceled one recent afternoon, and he was driving me crazy with his pent-up energy. I was puttering around the house, which is my main spiritual practice, and he kept ambushing me with demands for food or attention, and demonstrations of wrestling menace—grabbing at me as if to put me in a hammer hold, or coming at me as if to pile-drive me into the kitchen floor like Hulk Hogan: “I'm not going to hurt you,” he reassured me, like a serial killer, flinging his leg around the backs of my knees so that I was afraid they
would buckle. I'm fifty, but already I'm turning into an old dog, with poor vision, dysplasia, achy knees, a weak back, and flatulence, while he's raw robust animal health. Something in him wants to flip me, Samoan-drop me into the carpet. I put up puny Rose Kennedy dukes and asked him if he wanted to go for a hike on the mountain. He said yes.

He's two inches taller than I am. The other day he gave me a good-night hug and noticed that he was looking down into my eyes.

“Wow,” he said, stepping back. “When did this happen? You're like a little gnome to me now.”

I am shrinking and he is shooting up, but we share that on the inside we both feel no different from children and we both get a lot of exercise. I am positive of only a few things in life, and one is that if you want to have a decent middle and old age, you have to get exercise almost every day. All the older people who are thriving have stayed physically active—there are exceptions, and everyone knows someone who smoked two packs a day and had a few social beers with breakfast every morning who lived to be eighty-five, but you have to assume that this won't be you. You have to assume that without exercise, you'll
be the dead one, or if you're lucky, the one in diapers, with a cannula up your nose.

We headed out to Deer Park, which is the northern face of Mount Tamalpais, about half a mile from our house. I hiked on the southern side of the mountain with my father my whole life until he died. As young children, my brothers and I straggled along behind him, but when I got older, he and I would stride up steep hills together, sometimes in silence, other times talking, about books, politics, culture, family. I'd mention books or poems that I knew would please him—Kazantzakis, “Prufrock”—and sometimes before a hike I would read criticism or introductions to works so I could keep up in conversation. I lived for his admiration. I didn't want to instill this need to impress in Sam, and luckily, “impress” might be a bit strong to describe how Sam acts around me. He loves me, most of the time, and thinks I'm hilarious, but he doesn't perform the way I did: he doesn't study for our conversations, he doesn't chat up my friends, he doesn't read books so that we can discuss them. In fact, he reads very few books. He reads what he wants, namely magazines in areas I have no opinions or particular interest in: motherboards for his computer, bike frames. I'd always
imagined Sam and me strolling along together, talking like my dad and I used to talk, about intellectual things. But I get something better. I get this:

“Darling, did you finish
Romeo and Juliet
?” I asked this at the trailhead, hoping to kick off a bookish discussion. “And did you like it?”

“Yep. I loved it.”

“Tell me what you loved.”

“Great writing. Clever story.” That was it.

We set out on the fire road that leads to a steep trail, with Lily racing ahead.

“Did you ever notice how much Lily looks like Benicio Del Toro?” Sam asked. It's true.

He and Lily dropped behind me, and I walked along lost in my thoughts and the beauty of the woods. After a while, I reached the high trail that meanders through bay and laurel groves. You get various climates here on the mountain: first, in the English dappled shade, it's cool and it smells like spring and mulch; a few minutes later, you come out from under the trees and you're in Sicily, in bright blue heat.

Hearing a commotion, I turned to find Sam. He was bashing the ground with a branch, whacking at the low-hanging branches as if they were piñatas. Rather than give
a short talk on honoring the ecosystem that he and his classmates have studied extensively, I continued walking. I rest in silence and music and long strides, while Sam rests in noise and motion.

After a moment he stopped his whacking, and the silence was broken only by birdsong, our footsteps, and invisible animals moving around in the fallen leaves and twigs. Then Sam started whistling. His grandfather taught him to whistle when he was four—his adopted grandfather, Rex, my father's best friend of thirty years. My father died ten years before Sam was born, and I was still struggling with an achy emptiness, a feeling that my life had been diminished by half at his death. How would my books and Sam even matter if my father wasn't around to be proud? Now he's been dead for as long as I knew him alive, and sometimes when I've done something fabulous, I feel like a gymnast who has performed a flawless routine in an empty auditorium.

Sam looks a lot like my father did as a boy. Sam also looks like his own father. The first time Sam and I took a walk with Sam's father, John led the way through the woods behind his father's house. Sam walked shyly, ten feet or more behind his dad, and I took up the rear, feeling terror and grief that I was having to share my son. But
it cheered me to hear him whistling away. It wasn't that he didn't feel shy and nervous; it was just that Rex had taught him how to whistle.

Rex was one of three men who helped raise Sam during his first five years, the others being my brother Stevo, who taught Sam how to wrassle and goof off, and his unofficial big brother, Brian, who was bathing and diapering him when he was two weeks old, and taking him on adventures ever since—canoeing, train rides, farmers' markets. Rex's specialties were camping and workshop. They spent hours in Rex's workroom when Sam was young, hammering, nailing, talking, silent. Rex discovered that Sam connects with his own spirit most when he is working with his hands. He would study a nail, or a washer, as if he were holding a butterfly.

Sam dropped back from me on the trail, then caught up, an edgy psycho-scamper. He stabbed the air with his sword, so joyous, so masculine. He's always picked up anything that can be used to smash other things, or to make bombs, or to destroy piles of leaves or sand or stones. He's a closed current of energy, like those flashlights you squeeze to make the wires connect inside, and then they pour forth their light. He walked with me for a few minutes in silence. He's transparent at these times,
like a baby, without any of the barriers or labyrinths people set up later, out of fear.

Before Sam was born, people told me how utterly transparent with beauty babies could be. I have a photograph on the wall in my study of a baby in Sudan, breast-feeding, and she looks like chocolate, wrapped in a blue and lavender napkin, pressed into what little we can see of her mother's brown-black breast. This is a universal baby, a safe baby. I had thought Sam would be more like this, more of the time. I saw the same flatness in his nose when he nursed, like the Sudanese baby trying to get as close as possible to what nourished her, and the same deliciousness of baby arms. But the clutch of her fingers should have tipped me off—that grasping and clutching might come with the territory, grasping and clutching at you, and then pushing you away—and the openness of the baby's ear—babies are listening, can hear, and will one day use what they hear against you.

Smash, bash, whack. Sam swung at branches above him as if delivering forehand volleys. Sometimes I worry that he takes such joy in wrecking things. When he was two, being awful and destructive on every level of his pitiful, loathsome, poopy existence, I told my friend Pammy, calmly, “He's a bad person. He's already ruined.”

Pammy said something that I have clung to like the last heel of bread: “Sam has a deep core of sweetness within him.” She was right. He's deeply compassionate, and fair, but he also loves knives, and air-soft guns, and paintball guns, and Ninja blades, and violence. Maybe it was inconsistent for us to watch
Touched by an Angel
together, right before we watched
South Park
. Maybe it confused him that we went to church on Sundays and then watched
The Sopranos
.

He has always said the funniest things. Until he was five, he couldn't say
l
's properly. He pronounced them
y
. Yeaf, yunch, yove, the Yord, and Sam Yamott. One day he came home from school and said slowly that he had llloved his lllunch. His teacher had finally taught him
l
's. He ran to the house next door to show off for the teenagers he adored. It was a bittersweet moment: Your kid can't get a job on CNN if he can't say his
l
's, but now he's growing up; he'll be dating soon, and mouthing off and sneering when he's furious. And that has come true, though now he's the teenager all the little kids love.

He still says things that I scribble down on index cards. Just this morning as I drove him to school, we were talking about politics, and he said, “Mom, you know—you have a very rich vocabulary.” He can make words all
his own. “Random” is the latest favorite. I'll say something I've been meaning to tell him all day, and he'll look at me askance and say, “Wow, that's a little random.” Driving along with him and his friend Nick the other day, I told Nick, “You know, I'll always be one of the adults who is on your side, if you need me.” He replied, “Oh, thanks, Annie,” and there was silence in the car until Sam said, “God,
that
was random.”

Now Sam pushed the tip of his branch into the pebbly ground like a divining rod, splitting the road in two, making a great noise unto the Yord. He exerts tremendous energy, and it builds up and he sends it forth with his tools, his swords. It's art, it's an installation, it's the American way: “We're big and strong and male, and this thing is about to get seriously small, and be in shreds, because I am about to heavily fuck with it.” He finds where something has a weak spot, picks up a branch, and jabs it, like a physical yell.

He can say terrible, mean things to me, and then, a few hours later, be so kind and contrite that it brings tears to my eyes. He was always this way, accepting and fair, capable of casual meanness and extraordinary empathy. When he was seven and we started looking for his father, I asked him what he would do if it turned out that his father was
strange, or standoffish, and Sam said genuinely, “Oh,
I
wouldn't care. I wouldn't care if he was a crook. I wouldn't care if he had a gun.
I
wouldn't care if he cut down trees and didn't re
plant
.” You can see that we live in an ecologically correct area.

I pulled over by the side of the road to write this down, pretending I was making a shopping list. I always write down his exact words. He is an exact person, as we all are, even though I sense that there is only one of us, that we are mosaic chips of that One. Sam is very stylish, oddly enough, as I'm not stylish at all. His hair always looks good. And I was always a great student, whereas he isn't, in the classic sense, of a student who studies hard, likes to read, and hands in homework. He's a great student in the reform sense: he's fascinated by life, he's funny, and he participates eagerly in discussions. I've never yelled at anyone in my whole life except for him, and he yells at me, too. We fight about homework and his mouthiness and the laundry. I no longer wash his dirty clothes for him, because he will not put them away, so he does his own, and keeps the clean clothes unfolded in a basket, with an empty basket beside it so he can transfer clothes rapidly from one basket to another while looking for something to wear—like a fabric Slinky. There's a
third basket, for dirty clothes, which is usually empty, as the dirty clothes are strewn all over his bedroom floor.

Sam began chucking rocks into the creek, and Lily barked at them loyally, as if shaking her fist—“and
stay
away!” I listened to the splashes of the rocks he was pitching, aiming at other rocks, or at unseen enemies, creation and destruction in the same breath. I heard the knock of one stone hitting another, and fingered the diamond heart that I wear on a thin gold chain around my neck. He bought the heart for me last December, at the Mervyn's holiday sale. A few days before Christmas, he thrust the box at me. I turned away from it, because I wanted to wait till Christmas, but he ripped the wrapping paper off, then opened the box for me. There was a small gold heart studded with diamonds, the exact piece of jewelry I had always wanted. He watched me with enormous pride and pleasure. “One hundred fifty-nine dollars at Mervyn's, Mom,” he said, proudly, and added, “Retail.”

I asked a friend of mine who practices a spiritual path called Diamond Heart to explain the name, because I instinctively know that both Sam and I have, or are, diamond hearts. My friend said our hearts are like diamonds because they have the capacity to express divine light, which is love; we not only are portals for this love, but are
made of it. She said we are made of light, our hearts faceted and shining, and I believe this, to a point: I disagree with her saying we are beings of light wrapped in bodies that merely seem dense and ponderous, yet actually are made of atoms and molecules, with infinite space and light between them. It must be easy for her to believe this, as she is thin, and does not have children. But I can meet her halfway: I think we are diamond hearts, wrapped in meatballs.