Plan B (15 page)

 

M
ost of me was glad when my mother died. She was a handful, but not in a cute way. More in a life-threatening way, that had caused me a long time ago to abandon all hope of ever feeling good about having had her as a mother. She was a mix of wrathful Old Testament opinion, terrified politeness and befuddled English arrogance—Hermione Gingold meets the dark Hindu goddess Kali. And God, she was annoying. I mean this objectively. You can ask my brothers, or her sister. I used to develop tics in her presence. Yet most of who I have become is the result of having had her as a foil, and having her inside me: as DNA, as memory; as all the weird
lessons she taught, and the beautiful lessons, too—and they are the same.

While she was alive, I spent my life like a bitter bellhop, helping my mother carry around her psychic trunks. So a great load was lifted when she died, and my life became much easier. For a long while, I did not miss her at all, and did not forgive her a thing. I was the angriest daughter on earth, and also one of the most devoted. My brothers and I gave away most of her things—clothes, books, broken junk. One thing was left behind, and this was the plastic crematory box, with her misspelled name, that held her ashes. We couldn't figure out how to pry it open. In the many months it had taken me to retrieve the box from the closet, I discovered that I had forgiven her for a number of things, although for none of the big-ticket items—like having existed at all, for instance, and then having lived so long. Still, the mosaic chips of forgiveness I felt that day were a start. After I carried the box of ashes from the closet, wrapped it in pretty paper, and placed it on a shelf in my living room, a few more months passed before I felt like doing anything further. This is what happened next:

Around that time, Veronica gave a sermon about how, with the war raging in Iraq, now was not the time to
figure everything out—for instance who was to blame. It was not the time to get a new plan together and try to push it through. It was time to be still, to center ourselves, to trust what we'd always trusted in: friendship, kindness, helping the poor, feeding the hungry. Having felt scattered for much of the past two years, I took Veronica's words to heart, and began to get quiet whenever possible, to take longer walks, to sit in beggy prayer and fretful meditation. My mind kept thinking its harsh thinky thoughts, but I would distract myself from them gently and say, “Those are not the truth, those are not trustworthy, those are for entertainment purposes only.” Eventually I had quieter thoughts about my mother, to see her through what the theologian Howard Thurman called “quiet eyes.” Not totally quiet eyes, in my case. But quiet for me, and then quieter still.

Gerald May wrote, “Grace threatens all my normalities.” I tell you. It had taken two years for me to bring her out of the dark closet. Now I felt it was time to scatter her ashes with the family, to honor her. The problem was, I didn't honor her. I meant to, but all I really felt was sorry for how hard her life had been, and glad that she had finally passed. This is what the elders of our church call dying—passing, as in acing her exams, or turning down
the offer to renew her lease. “Oh, yeah, she passed,” they reassure you, and theologically, I believe, they are right on both counts.

That was where I was when Veronica urged us to be still. And when I did, I found out once again how flexible and wily the human spirit is. It will sneak out from behind the bushes like a cartoon cat and ambush you if you're not careful, trick you into giving up a teaspoon of resentment, get you to take one step back from the frozen ground. Mine was lying in wait for me the day I found a photograph of my mother when she was sixty, and while my heart didn't leap, it hopped, awkwardly, as if its shoelaces were tied together.

In the photo, she is wearing her usual heavy makeup, which I have always believed was a way of maintaining both disguise and surface tension; it always humiliated me. But in this one picture, instead of feeling humiliated, I could finally see what she was shooting for: to appear beautiful, and worthy, a vigorous woman on this earth. She is posing in front of a vase of flowers, clasping one wrist with her hand, as if trying to take her own pulse. She had been divorced for eight years or so by then. One of her eyebrows is arched, archly, as if one of her children had once again uttered something dubious or socially
unacceptable. One-third of her is in darkness, two-thirds in light, which pretty much says it.

You can see what a brave little engine she was, even though she'd lost everything over the years—her husband, her career, her health. But she still had her friends and family, and she stayed fiercely loyal to liberal causes, and to underdogs. And I thought, Well, I honor that, so we'll start there.

The next thing I knew, I had called my relatives, most of whom still live in the Bay Area, where we all grew up, and had invited them to dinner on my mom and her twin's birthday, to scatter her ashes. Those ashes of hers were up against a lot—our lives were better since her death—but I believed that if we released her, this would release us, and she could release herself. Or I would have a complete breakdown and start to drink again, and Sam and I would have to go live at the rescue mission. I knew only that scattering her ashes was the next right thing.

Two weeks later, three aunts, an uncle, half a dozen cousins, my brother and sister-in-law, a six-year-old second cousin, and a friend came to dinner at my house. I adore these people. I have also had fights with some of them over the years, have said terrible things, have been accused by one of great wrongs, and told I would never
be forgiven. We've had the usual problems: failed marriages, rehab, old resentments, miserable lumpy family secrets, harshness and intensity. But we have loved and cared for one another over the years. We're just another motley American family, enduring. As my friend Neshama's father-in-law used to say, looking around on holidays and shaking his head, “We are a bum outfit.”

After dinner, we hiked up the hill to the open space near the house. One of my aunts, who says to say she is fifty-four, totters when she walks now, and needs arms to hold on to. Dallas, my six-year-old cousin, glommed on to Sam, who dragged him along like carry-on luggage, rolling his eyes but pleased. The wind was blowing, and the sun was starting to go down. Sam and Dallas tore to the top of the hill, while the rest of us, blown and buffeted by the wind, took one another's arms, and walked in an unsteady procession the rest of the way.

The sun was setting behind a ghost cloud, illuminating it, imposing a circle of light over it, like a cookie cutter. Eucalyptus trees circled around us, at the edge of the grass, as if holding down the earth, bricks on a picnic tablecloth in the wind. The trees were the only things between us and the horizon. We could see 360 degrees above fleecy trees, golden hillsides, towns. The wind
made us feel more exposed than usual: it was so gritty that it flayed us—but lucky us, someone pointed out, with bodies to be assailed.

Dallas tore around the periphery having goof attacks, flirting with Sam. “Does anyone want to see my fireworks?” he kept calling out. “Will anyone come and see them?”

“When we're done,” his mother told him sternly. “Now leave us alone.”

We stood in a circle for a few minutes. “I knew that if I asked you to come tonight, you would,” I said. We all cried a little. My cousins had really loved my mother. She had a sweet voice, one of them said, and was always kind to them. My aunt Gertrud said, “The nature of life is harsh, and Nikki got some terrible breaks. It wasn't fair how things turned out for her. But she did a lot of good in her life, and we will always miss her.”

“Yes, we will,” a couple of people responded, the way we do at church. My heart was heavy with missing her, even as I felt the old familiar despair that she had been my mother. I just tried to breathe.

The reason I never give up hope is that everything is basically hopeless. Hopelessness underscores everything—the deep sadness and fear at the center of life, the
holes in the heart of our families, the animal confusion within us. When you do give up hope, a lot can happen. When it's not pinned wriggling onto a shiny image or expectation, it may float forth and open like those fluted Japanese blossoms, flimsy and spastic, bright and warm. This almost always seems to happen in community: with family, related by blood, or chosen; at church, for me; at peace marches.

Then my brother Stevo walked a few dozen feet away from where we stood, and began to pry open the plastic box with a knife. “Want to see my fireworks?” Dallas cried, and his mother shushed him again. He raced about on the hillside. It was distracting, like having a puppy in church, but the setting sun defused my annoyance, and I remembered C. S. Lewis's observation: “We do not truly see light, we only see slower things lit by it.” Except for Dallas, we were as big and slow as animals at a watering hole. We watched Stevo take out the bag of ashes and open it into the wind. He flung her away from the sunset, and the wind caught her and whooshed her away. Some of the ashes blew back onto my brother, and onto Gertrud, who stood beside him, scattering flowers into the plume. Ashes always stick and pester you long after you have
scattered them: my brother looked as if he'd been cleaning a fireplace.

Then Dallas called out again, “Want to see my fireworks now? Doesn't anyone want to see my fireworks?” We all turned back toward the sun, where he stood, and gave him the go-ahead. He reached into his pockets, withdrawing fists full of something, and, looking at us roguishly, flung whatever he held up into the air. It turned out to be tiny pebbles, but he tossed with such ferocious velocity, as high as he could manage in the wind, that when they rained back down on us in the very last of the sun, they shone.

 

T
hese are such rich, ripe times for paranoia and despair that each celebration, each occasion of tribal love and music and overeating glows more brightly against the swampy backdrop of the war in Iraq. I have never been more paranoid in my life—some days I'm like the comedian Emo Philips, who thought the man hammering on the roof next door was calling him a paranoid little weirdo, in Morse code. But I see people rising up, resisting, gearing up for another fight for decency, for freedom, for the poor, for the earth. And beating back the right wing's fever dream is going to be one of the all-time great fights. People are helping one another keep their
spirits up. Great movies are being made, brilliant columns continue to be written, and wonderful art is being created, poetry, histories, edgy comedy, and theater. Along with the paranoia, I feel some hope. It didn't hurt that I recently served as a flower girl in a friend's wedding.

The bride and her parents are among my closest friends. I adore her, and so of course I wanted to be the best flower girl, creating a path of breathy joy upon which she might walk—the evanescence of rose petals, the sweetness. But there were a couple of problems: there were two other flower girls, one eight years old and the other three.

At first I could see no reason to have two little girls there to rain on my parade. Then I had a moment of clarity: It was not my parade.

I'd wanted to be an Herbal Essences shampoo vision, someone in a flowing dress with a garland in her hair. Someone who looked as if she should be accompanied by a unicorn. Instead, alongside those two young girls, I was going to look like Woody Allen in
Zelig
.

There was only one other woman in the bridal party, besides the bride—her sister, the maid of honor, who was
the mother of the three-year-old. She had chosen a gauzy dress of heathery rose, flowing but deceptively tailored—in other words, you had to be thin to wear it. I know this because the bride asked me to try it on in my size at the vintage-style bridal store where the maid of honor had found her dress. I did, and I could barely get into it. Even the next-larger size hurt, like tight panty hose. I slunk away.

I called the bride and said the dress was hopeless. She said to look for something from the same designer, and suggested I make an appointment with the store manager, who is hip and helpful. I did.

The morning of my appointment, I tried to keep my perspective. Building a wedding is a recipe for muddle—the bridal party, the families, the guests, the minister, the vows, the food. You're attempting to make something beautiful out of unruly and unpredictable elements—the weather, the nuttier relatives, the rivalries, disorders, and dreams. Out of mostly old neurotic family and friends, you hope to create something harmonious. You do so as an act of faith, hoping that for a brief period of time, the love and commitment of two people will unite everyone; and it will sort of work. Even if the weather or
personalities are worrisome, the breezes and water will flow through the structure of your wedding, will sanctify and change it, and it will hold.

I went to my appointment with the store manager. She was very nice. Perhaps a bit thin. Still, I thought of her as my caseworker. I told her that even the larger size of the heathery rose dress had been tight. “Oh,” she exclaimed, “this line runs really small! You could try on the extra-large.” I am not overweight; I used to be five-foot-seven, before I became a victim of what my son calls the old-age shrinking thing. Now I am five-foot-six, and weigh around 140. So let's say medium. Or let's remember the bumper sticker with the picture of the cat that says, “I'm not fat—I'm fluffy.” I'm a little fluffy in the stomach now, and in the butt. So with the caseworker continuing to cry out that the line ran small, I tried on the extra-large, and it was hideous.

I felt despondent for caring. I am a feminist and a progressive—I'm sure I'm on the attorney general's enemies list. At any rate, he's on mine. I prayed for sanity and militant self-love to return—normally I'm just an ordinary American woman, still vulnerable enough after a lifetime of brainwashing to compare myself miserably with the fourteen-year-old models in magazines who are made up
to look like twenty-year-olds. But now I was comparing myself unfavorably with an eight-year-old and a three-year-old.

This was not a bridal issue anymore, or even a fashion issue. It was a psychiatric issue.

I announced to my caseworker that this dress would not work in any circumstance, in any situation, like Sam-I-am in
Green Eggs and Ham
: I would not wear it on a boat, with a goat, with a turtle, in a girdle. My caseworker understood, and said we would find another dress from the same line as the maid of honor's. I tried on everything, and finally found a two-piece outfit by the same designer that you could buy in separate sizes—a medium blouse, say, and an extra-large skirt. I looked fine in the store, even pretty.

When I tried them on at home, however, I nearly fainted. I looked like Dame Edna. I called the bride to say I had to return the outfit, and would drop out of the wedding party. But she'd seen the outfit, at the store, and loved it.

I had a stern talk with myself, about getting out of myself to be a person for others, for the bride and her family. But after that, it was all downhill. There was the matter of the shoes, the unhappy details of which I will
spare you, except to say that it was a total fucking nightmare. I went to six different stores on three different days before I found wine-colored Mary Janes with sexy, slutty crossover straps. They were the sort of shoes Courtney Love would have worn to a wedding in her Hole days, and they would go with the outfit, if I tore it, and wore lots of smeary red lipstick.

Everyone in the family was more joyful and excited and anxious as the wedding day approached. That's what's so touching about weddings: Two people fall in love, and decide to see if their love might stand up over time, if there might be enough grace and forgiveness and memory lapses to help the whole shebang hang together. Yet there is also much discomfort, and expense, and your hope is that on the big day, energy will run through the lightest elements and the heaviest, the brightest and the dullest, the funniest and the most annoying, and that the whole range will converge in a ring of celebration.

At the rehearsal the night before the wedding, we all met at the chapel—the bride and the groom, the father of the bride, the priest, the maid of honor, and her three-year-old daughter. The eight-year-old flower girl could not be there, and she did not really need to be, because
there is no one more capable and helpful than an eight-year-old girl. The rehearsal went without a hitch, as long as the maid of honor was holding her daughter. But when she put her down momentarily, the three-year-old just sort of lost her mind. So for the rest of the rehearsal, her mother held her, and we got through it. It was actually a lot of fun.

On the ride home that night with the priest, I bleated out the question that had been on perhaps all our minds: What would we do if the little flower girl melted down during the actual wedding?

“Is it wrong to sedate children before they perform in a ceremony?” I asked. “To give them the merest hint of sacramental wine? Or Klonopin?”

The priest laughed. We drove along. I imagined the girl having a tantrum. I saw myself make threatening gestures at her with my fist.

Here's what the priest said: “I promise you it will all work out, in its own perfectly imperfect way. Weddings are about families, and families can be a bit of a mess under stress. But the love that will gather tomorrow night is much more important than anything else on earth, and bigger than anything else on earth, too. Because finally, that love is sovereign.”

The next morning, I got my fingernails painted. The backs of my hands have had dark brown spots for years. The first time I showed them to my dermatologist, I thought they were melanomas. “They're probably what we used to call liver spots when I was younger,” I said jocularly. He peered at them. “We still call them liver spots,” he said. For the wedding, I wanted pretty pink nail polish to distract from them. I had my toenails painted as well. Not to brag, but I happen to have nice feet. They weren't even going to show, but I would know that my pink toenails inside my pretty red shoes were leading the way. They were like my inside three-year-old. You celebrate what works and you take tender care of what doesn't, with lotion, polish, and kindness.

Before leaving for the wedding, I smoothed on lots of lotion, a little makeup, my petit-four outfit, my red shoes. I tucked a lipstick and a bag of peanut M&M's into my purse, and left for the church with my boyfriend.

The other flower girls looked angelic, and miraculously, the eight-year-old had complete dominion over the three-year-old. The women hung out together in a room near the back entrance to the chapel—the bride, her mother and her sister, her two best friends, and the flower girls. The three-year-old clutched the
eight-year-old, would not let her go, stared at her adoringly. I handed out M&M's and told everyone they were tranquilizers. I didn't feel any age, just giddy with surprise at the paradox that I may have looked old on the outside but felt so young on the inside. It's almost everyone's secret—we look in the mirror, saying, “Who is that old person?” while inside there's pretty much the same person we always were. A lot of stuff falls off—your vision, your youth, your memory—but better stuff is left behind.

When the processional was to begin, the three-year-old panicked, as expected, and my heart sank to see her look around desperately for her mother. She cried out her mother's name, but only once. “Shhh, shhh,” I said, “let's go, darlings.” The eight-year-old took her hand. There was a moment's pause. Then they began to march along together, and I fell into step beside them, and we tossed those translucent petals into the air.