Plan B (2 page)

 

I
wear something on my wrist that one would not expect a Presbyterian woman to wear: a thin red cotton cord that was blessed by the Dalai Lama, and given to me by my Buddhist friend Jack Kornfield. It's quite ratty, with what look like rings of laundry lint circling it. I separate these rings with my thumbnail when I am fidgety, as if counting with the beads of an abacus.

Jack and I take walks every few weeks, when we are both in town, often in the hills above the meditation center he founded nearby. He teaches his students, and has taught me, to slow down, breathe, and take care of everyone, which is of course the same message Jesus
taught—that breath is our connection to holy spirit, to our bodies, minds, and soul; and that if the devil can't get you to sin, he'll keep you busy. Jack is about my age and height, slight and very Jewish: he brought me homemade chicken soup last time I was sick in bed. He also seems vaguely East Indian, smooth and brown, and gives off a light, spicy, ancient smell.

Breathing has never been my strong suit. I've never been very good at breathing. When I was young, I was afraid that if I stopped remembering to breathe, I'd have cardiac arrest. I was always much better at holding my breath for long periods of time, the length of the pool, or of the tunnel that leads to the Golden Gate Bridge. At the age of two, I used to hold my breath in public until I passed out. My first memory is of coming to on the planks of the boardwalk in Tiburon, my father nudging me from way high up, with his shoe. Then he reached down kindly and pulled me back to my feet. He had been dead several years before his sister told me that he used to hold his breath and pass out on the streets of Tokyo, where his parents were Presbyterian missionaries. I think he was a little angry: held breath is the ultimate withholding; you're not taking anything in, you're not putting anything out.

I am a little angry, too. I feel that we began witnessing the end of the world in Super SloMo once George W. Bush became president, and some days it takes everything I can muster not to lose my hope, my faith, and myself. One out of six women in my area is now being diagnosed with breast cancer. My son is in his teens, and I am in menopause: I have not felt this clueless and tired since Sam was a colicky baby. We are both more testy now on a regular basis, quicker to anger, and in my case, to weep and reevaluate the meaning of life. Sometimes I feel like the big possum who has been coming into our driveway lately, worried and waddly. I hear that the stress hormones possums produce are off the charts. Possums live only a few years in the wild. I suppose that if I had two penises and still fainted a lot, I'd be stressed to the max, too.

I am fifty, and have only now figured out why you are supposed to have babies when you are young: so that by the time your child is in his teens, one of you is stable some of the time, and you the mother are not racked with back pain and Alzheimer's. Sam has grown tall and muscular. I have grown wider, stiff, and achy. I trip a lot and hit my head on cabinets I forgot were there. I get into the shower with my glasses on. And whereas I always had a
slim waist, I suddenly have two stomachs—a regular tummy and another one below that, which I call the subcontinent. This older body is both amazingly healthy and a big disappointment.

Jack knotted a number of blessings into my cord last year when he tied it on my wrist, to protect me from the values and judgment of the world, from the disaster of my own thinking, and to allow me the forgetting of myself. I tug at the red cord constantly: it was an anointing of sorts, and I will take all the anointing I can get. My pastor, Veronica, explained recently that in the Twenty-third Psalm, when David says that his Shepherd anointed his head with oil, it referred to the fragrant oil a shepherd would put around his sheep's mouths to prevent an infestation of flies. Otherwise, the flies would lay their eggs in the soft tissues of the sheep's mouths, and when the eggs hatched, the sheep would go crazy, butting their heads against trees to dislodge the infestation. When my head is filled with worries and resentments, the cord helps me remember that I was anointed. I am safe, even when my cup is not exactly runneth-ing over.

I used my red string as an audiovisual aid last Sunday when I got to give the sermon at church. First I walked around, letting everyone see it. Then I spoke briefly about
the red cords that gave us life, that connect us to our sources: the image of Christ's blood, and the umbilical cord that stretched from my mother to me, and from Sam to me, cords carrying life. Then I moved on to the story of Rahab, from Joshua 2 in the Hebrew Bible, whose life was saved by a red cord. She was one of the bad girls of the Old Testament, a prostitute in Jericho, at the end of the Israelites' wilderness journey. Joshua was their leader, Moses' anointed successor. When Rahab's story begins, Joshua and his army are camped on the River Jordan across from Jericho, which they are about to invade. He sends two spies into Jericho to find out how strong the opposing army is.

The spies want to blend in, so they go to stay with Rahab, the most infamous prostitute of her time, figuring that if they go to the local Travelodge, they'll stick out, but that at Rahab's, half the men in town will be there, and no one will notice them or say anything. It is like, “If I see you in New Orleans, I won't see you in New Orleans.”

Rahab lives in an apartment built just inside the walls of Jericho, like a Pueblo or Anasazi dwelling; her windows are built into the outside wall.

The king's spies visit Rahab's—on official business, no doubt—and report to him that Joshua's spies are staying
with her. The king sends his soldiers to Rahab's to demand that she turn over Joshua's spies.

But word has it that the Israelites are under the protection of a loving God: everyone has heard about the Red Sea's parting, and that God has cared for the Israelites in the harsh desert for forty years. In that dark and scary time, with war about to break out, and no standing in her own community, Rahab feels something in her heart that tells her to align herself with the people of God. So she lies to the king's soldiers, and says that by the time the gate to the city was closed at dark the night before, the spies had already gotten away. Actually, she hid them on her roof, in stalks of flax.

Why did she hide them, since, by the calculus of the world, that act endangered her?

She did it because she was desperate, and so she listened to her heart. In my experience, there is a lot to be said for desperation—not exactly a bright side, but something expressed in words for which “God” could be considered an acronym: gifts of desperation. The main gift is a willingness to give up the conviction that you are right, and that God thinks so, too, and hates the people who are driving you crazy. Something spoke to Rahab through her heart, or through what Mel Brooks, in “The 2,000 Year
Old Man,” refers to as the broccoli: “Listen to your broccoli, and your broccoli will tell you how to eat it.” Something told Rahab that if she aligned herself with the people who had been brought so far by faith, she would be safe as well. This gave her the radical conviction that she should be cared for. Rahab believed that God was trying to get her attention, and she listened.

I try to listen for God's voice inside me, but my sense of discernment tends to be ever so slightly muddled. When God wants to get my attention, She clears Her throat a number of times, trying to get me to look up, or inward—and then if I don't pay attention, She rolls Her eyes, makes a low growling sound, and starts kicking me under the table with Her foot.

Rahab got the spies of the Israelites to swear that if she didn't rat them out, they would spare her and her family.

She let the spies out the window and down the wall by rope. And they gave her a red cord to tie in the window. They returned to tell Joshua their news; and Joshua moved his great army across the Jordan and, in the words of the old spiritual, fit the battle of Jericho. And the walls came a-tumblin' down.

But Joshua's soldiers saw the scarlet cord in Rahab's window, and spared those she had gathered inside, and all
because she turned to the spirit within her, the secret place that, as Robert Frost wrote, “sits in the middle and knows.” She went on to live a life of great honor, marrying an Israelite and becoming one of the four women mentioned in Matthew's genealogy from Abraham to David to Jesus.

You've got to love this in a God—consistently assembling the motleyest people to bring, into the lonely and frightening world, a commitment to caring and community. It's a centuries-long reality show—Moses the stutterer, Rahab the hooker, David the adulterer, Mary the homeless teenager. Not to mention all the mealy-mouthed disciples. Not to mention a raging insecure narcissist like me.

When I finished my sermon last Sunday, everyone clapped like mad, and I felt like Miss Spiritual America, with a red cord and an invisible tiara. I greeted everyone after the service with humility, ducking my head shyly and all but pawing the ground with my foot. A few of the older women teared up when they thanked me, remembering the wreck I'd been when I first started coming to St. Andrew, a year before I got sober.

Then I went home and had a huge fight with Sam.

It's hard to imagine things can get so ugly so quickly, just because the word “homework” has come up, but they do. I was savoring my morning in church, while making us sandwiches, when Sam innocently mentioned in passing that his science report was due the next day, but he had left his binder in his locker at school, and would automatically be docked a grade for lateness. He'd had a month to complete the assignment, he'd given me his word that he was on top of it, and I was furious.

I spluttered and fumed in the kitchen, and stormed down the hall to my own room, like a Cossack—or like my mother used to do when she headed down the hall to my older brother's room to bellow at him because he hadn't done his homework. I would flatten myself against the wall and stop breathing, or huddle in my younger brother's room, trying to distract him from the chaos.

Sam shouted that I was turning out like my mother. He can always find the soft parts of me, where there is no turtle shell for protection.

I slammed the door and started hitting it with my fist. Then I lay facedown on the bed. The kitty tried to comfort me but accidentally started chewing the red cord off my wrist. Jack came into my mind. What would he do?

It's hard to tell with him. Once I called to say hello, and he was making liver and onions. Usually he suggests that I be kind, and breathe, and take a walk. So I did.

It was drizzling outside, but I was so miserable and without a plan that I put on a raincoat, called Lily, my dog, and headed outside to the open-space hills behind my house. I go up there almost every day with Lily. It is a quiet and holy space. My family scattered my mother's ashes there last year, two years after she died: it had taken me that long to stop being mad at her, for having been such a mess my whole life. On the hillside is a mysterious concrete piling where I like to sit when there is dew on the ground, or a mist, so my pants won't get wet. I have a 360-degree view of my town and the mountain and the foothills. In the early morning, I can see the sun rise above the nearest suburb, and when I come at dusk, the sun sets out toward the farmlands of rural Marin and the Pacific Ocean. Your senses are bathed in smells and sounds and visions, whether you want to receive or not, because the only walls are the tall eucalyptus to the east. You feel unprotected and small and buffeted by the wind, and this defenselessness is a crack through which fresh air and water can enter.

I sat on the piling. The drizzle had stopped, but the air was still moist—a warm, windy spring evening. The willows, hectic in the wind, were sticklike and gray, their leaves not quite out, yet you could feel them pushing through.

I fiddled with my red cord, separating the rings of laundry lint: I can't figure out how these rings could have formed on the cord, as I have never removed it; still, there are three knots, and seven rings of lint.

When he finished tying it, Jack said that the cord was my new transcript. “You have gotten an A-plus, Annie, for your work during this life.” But Jack feels this way about everyone, and it almost ruins it for me that he thinks we are all doing so well with such difficult material as being alive, having parents, kids, bodies, minds, certain presidents.

All wise people say the same thing: that you are deserving of love, and that it's all here now, everything you need. There's the memoir by a Hindu writer,
It's Here Now (Are You?),
and one of my priest friends says the exact same thing, so I think it must be true—that when you pray, you are not starting the conversation from scratch, just remembering to plug back into a conversation that's always in progress.

There I sat on the hill, hands folded in my lap, eyes closed, and I started to relax. But then I made a cardinal mistake: I started to think about how holy I was acting, in the face of teenage contempt and shirking; how grown-up, spiritually, emotionally. And this pleased me.

And it was bad.

It was like, “Batter up!”

First the dogs arrived, three of them, from out of nowhere, barking at Lily and me until their owner stepped into the clearing and commanded them to be quiet. I smiled and waved, but closed my eyes so that she could see that I was in holiness mode. “It's windy!” she cried. I opened my eyes. She had a walking stick, and looked like a shepherd, of bad dogs.

“What's your dog's name?” she shouted. I told her. “What kind of dog is she?
Where'd she get those ears? Here, Lily! Here, girl
.” The woman sounded like someone from the shouting Loud family, on the old
Saturday Night Live
.