Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace (4 page)

I daydreamed about Pammy. Near the end she said of her young daughter, “All I have to do to get really depressed is to think about Rebecca, and all I have to do to get really joyful is to think about Rebecca.” I floated around slowly, crying; the mask filled up with tears—I could have used a windshield wiper. I felt very lonely. I thought maybe I wouldn’t feel so bad if I didn’t have such big pieces of Pammy still inside me, but then I thought, I want those pieces in me for the rest of my life, whatever it costs me. So I floated along, still feeling lonely
but now not quite so adrift. I starting thinking of Pat, big and fat and comfortable enough to wear a swimsuit in front of us. I laughed, remembering what she’d said about the ladder, and I accidentally swallowed water. I watched the small fish swim in and out of the feathery sea plants, and I thought of beautiful, wild, happy Rebecca. This made my heart hurt, too, yet I felt a little lighter inside. And just then Tom came paddling over, and I was aware of his presence beside me although I couldn’t actually see his face, and for the longest time we lay there bobbing on the water’s surface, facedown, lost in our own worlds, barely moving our fins, side by side.

I
went around saying for a long time that I am not one of those Christians who are heavily into forgiveness—that I am one of the other kind. But even though it was funny, and actually true, it started to be too painful to stay this way. They say we are punished not for the sin but by the sin, and I began to feel punished by my unwillingness to forgive. By the time I decided to become one of the ones who are heavily into forgiveness, it was like trying to become a marathon runner in middle age; everything inside me either recoiled, as from a hot flame, or laughed a little too hysterically. I tried to will myself into forgiving various people who had harmed me directly or indirectly
over the years—four former Republican presidents, three relatives, two old boyfriends, and one teacher in a pear tree—it was “The Twelve Days of Christmas” meets
Taxi Driver
. But in the end I could only pretend that I had forgiven them. I decided I was starting off with my sights aimed too high. As C. S. Lewis says in
Mere Christianity
, “If we really want to learn how to forgive, perhaps we had better start with something easier than the Gestapo.”

So I decided to put everyone I’d ever lived with, slept with, or been reviewed by on hold, and to start with someone I barely knew whom I had hated only for a while.

I’d had an enemy—an Enemy Lite—for some time, the parent of a child in Sam’s first-grade class, although she was so warm and friendly that it might have astounded her to learn that we were enemies. But I, the self-appointed ethical consultant for the school, can tell you that it’s true. Somewhere in the back of my mind I knew she was divorced and maybe lonely, but she also had mean eyes. In the first weeks of school she looked at me as if I were a Rastafarian draft-dodger type and then, over time, as if I were a dazed and confused alien space traveler. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I had a certain amount of trouble adjusting
once Sam started first grade. I couldn’t seem to get the hang of things; there was too much to remember, too much to do. But Sam’s first-grade teacher was so kind and forgiving that I just didn’t trouble my pretty head about schedules, homework, spelling lists, and other sundry unpleasantries. Nor was I able to help out in the classroom much. There were all these mothers who were always cooking holiday theme-park treats for the class; they always drove the kids—including mine—on their field trips, and they seemed to read all the papers the school sent home, which I think is actually a little show-offy. Also, it gave them an unfair advantage. They knew, for instance, from the first day that Wednesdays were minimum days, with school out half an hour earlier than usual, and they flaunted it, picking up their kids at just the right time, week after week.

I somehow managed to make it into October without figuring out this scheduling quirk.

Finally, one Wednesday, I stopped by Sam’s classroom and found him—once again—drawing with his teacher. The teacher said gently, “Annie? Did you not know that school gets out half an hour early on Wednesdays?”

“Ah,” I said.

“Didn’t you get the papers the school mailed to you this summer?”

I racked my brain, and finally I did remember some papers coming in the mail from school.

And I remembered really meaning to read them.

Sam sat there drawing with a grim, distant stare.

Well, my enemy found out.

She showed up two days later all bundled up in a down jacket, because it was cold and she was one of the parents who was driving the kids on a field trip. Now, this was not a crime against nature or me in and of itself. The crime was that below the down jacket she was wearing spandex bicycle shorts. She wears bicycle shorts nearly every day, and I will tell you why: because she can. She weighs about eighty pounds. She has gone to the gym almost every day since her divorce, and she does not have an ounce of fat on her body. I completely hate that in a person. I consider it an act of aggression against the rest of us mothers, who forgot to start working out after we had our kids.

Oh, and one more thing: She still had a Ronald Reagan bumper sticker on her white Volvo, seven years after he left the White House.

The day of the field trip she said sweetly, “I just want you to know, Annie, that if you have any other questions about how the classroom works, I’d really love to be there for you.”

I smiled back at her. I thought such awful thoughts that I cannot even say them out loud because they would make Jesus want to drink gin straight out of the cat dish.

It drove me to my knees. I prayed about it. I prayed because my son loves her son, and my son is so kind that it makes me want to be a better person, a person who does not hate someone just because she wears spandex bicycle shorts. I prayed for a miracle; I wrote her name down on a slip of paper, folded it up, and put it in the box that I use as God’s in-box. “Help,” I said to God.

There wasn’t much noticeable progress for a while. I was asked to bake something for the farewell party on the last day of school. I couldn’t do it. I was behind in my work. Also, I was in a bad mood. But I at least went to the party, and I ate the delicious cookies my enemy made, and we mingled a little, and I thought that this was progress. Then she had to go and wreck everything by asking, “Did you bake anything?”

I don’t bake. I baked for school once and it was
a bad experience. Sam was in kindergarten at the little Christian school he attended, and I baked a dozen cupcakes for his class Christmas party and set them out to cool. Sam and I went outside to sweep the AstroTurf. (Okay, okay, I also don’t garden.) Suddenly Sadie came tearing outside—our dog, who was so obedient and eager to please. But there was icing in the fur of her muzzle and a profoundly concerned look on her face. Oh my God, she seemed to be saying with her eyes: Terrible news from the kitchen!

Sam looked at me with total disgust, like “You ignorant slut—you left the cupcakes out where the dog could get them.”

The next morning I bought cupcakes at Safeway. Like I said: I don’t bake.

I also don’t push Sam to read. There wasn’t much pressure for anyone to read in first grade, which was good because my kid was not reading. I mean, per se.

My enemy’s child was reading proficiently, like a little John Kenneth Galbraith in a Spider-Man T-shirt. He is what is referred to as an “early reader.” Sam is a “late reader.” (Albert Einstein was a “late reader.” Theodore Kaczynski was an “early
reader.” Not that I am at all defensive on the subject.
Pas du tout.
)

Sam and this woman’s child were in the same second-grade class, too, and the next thing I knew, she had taken a special interest in Sam’s reading.

She began the year by slipping me early first-grade books that she thought maybe Sam could read. And Sam could certainly read some of the words in these books. But I resented her giving them to us with a patronizing smile, as if to say her child would not be needing them because he was reading the new Joan Didion.

I went to the God box. I got out the piece of paper with her name on it. I added an exclamation point. I put the paper back.

One day not long after, she sidled up to me at school and asked me if I had an extra copy of the book I had written about being a mother. It is black-humored and quite slanted: George H. W. Bush was president when Sam was born, and perhaps I was a little angry. I had these tiny opinions. I wrote an anti–George Herbert Walker Bush baby book.

So when she asked for a copy, I tried to stall; I
tried to interest her in my anti-Reagan writing book. But she insisted.

A few days later, filled with a certain low-grade sense of impending doom, I gave her a copy, signed, “With all good wishes.”

For the next few days, she smiled obliquely whenever I saw her at school, and I grew increasingly anxious. Then one day she came up to me in the market. “I read your book,” she said, and winked. “Maybe,” she whispered, because my son was only a few feet away, “maybe it’s a good thing he doesn’t read.”

I wish I could report that I had the perfect comeback, something so polite and brilliantly cutting that Dorothy Parker, overhearing it in heaven, raised her fist in victory. But I could only gape at my enemy, stunned. She smiled very nicely and walked away.

I called half a dozen people when I got home and told them about how she had trashed me. And then I trashed her. And it was good.

The next time I saw her, she smiled. I sneered, just a little. I felt disgust, but I also felt disgusting. I got out my note to God. I said: Look, hon. I think we need bigger guns.

Nothing happened. No burning bush, no cereal
flakes dropping from heaven forming letters of instruction in the snow. It’s just that God began to act like Sam-I-Am from
Green Eggs and Ham
. Everywhere I went there were helpful household hints on loving one’s enemies, on turning the other cheek, and on how doing that makes you look in a whole new direction. There were admonitions about the self-destructiveness of not forgiving people, and reminders that this usually doesn’t hurt other people so much as it hurts you. In fact, not forgiving is like drinking rat poison and then waiting for the rat to die. Suggestive fortune cookies, postcards, bumper stickers began to pop up here and there—everything but skywriting—yet I kept feeling that I could not, would not, forgive her in a box, could not, would not, forgive her with a fox, not on a train, not in the rain.

One Sunday when I was struggling with this, the Scripture reading came from the sixth chapter of Luke: “Forgive, and ye shall be forgiven.” Now, try as I might, I cannot find a loophole in that. It does not say, “Forgive everyone, unless they’ve said something rude about your child.” And it doesn’t even say, “Just try.” It says, If you want to be forgiven, if you want to experience that kind of love, you have to forgive everyone in your life—
everyone, even the very worst boyfriend you ever had—even, for God’s sake, yourself.

A few days later I was picking Sam up at the house of another friend and noticed a yellowed clipping taped to the refrigerator with “
FORGIVENESS
” written at the top—as though God had decided to abandon all efforts at subtlety and just plain noodge. The clipping said forgiveness meant that God is for giving, and that we are here for giving, too, and that to withhold love or blessings is to be completely delusional. No one knew who had written it. I copied it down and taped it to my refrigerator. Then an old friend from Texas left a message on my answering machine that said, “Don’t forget, God loves us exactly the way we are, and God loves us too much to let us stay like this.”

Only, I think she must have misquoted it, because she said, “God loves you too much to let you stay like this.”

I looked nervously over both shoulders.

A couple of days later my enemy’s boy came to play at our house, and then she came to pick him up just before dinner. And for the first time, while he gathered his things, she sat down on the couch, as if she had done this before, as if it were the most
natural thing. I felt around inside my heart, and it was not so cold or hard. In fact, I even almost offered her a cup of tea because she seemed sad or maybe tired. I felt a stab of kindness inside, until her son came bounding out of Sam’s room, shouting that he’d gotten 100 percent on his arithmetic test and Sam had gotten two wrong.

“Traitor!” Sam shouted from his room, and slammed the door.

By bedtime, Sam said he forgave the boy but didn’t want to be friends anymore. I said he didn’t have to be friends, but he did have to be kind. At breakfast, Sam said he still forgave him, but when we got to school he said that it had been easier to forgive him when we were farther away.

Still, several days later, when the mother called and invited him to come play that afternoon, Sam desperately wanted to go. She picked him up after school. When I went over to get him, she offered me a cup of tea. I said no, I couldn’t stay. I was in my fattest pants; she wore her bicycle shorts. The smell of something baking, sweet and yeasty, filled the house. Sam couldn’t find his knapsack, so I looked around for it. The surfaces of her house were covered with fine and expensive things.
“Please let me make you a cup of tea,” she said again, and I started to say no, but this thing inside me used my voice to say, “Well . . . okay.” It was awkward. In the living room, I silently dared her to bring up school, math tests, or field trips; I dared her to bring up exercise or politics. As it was, we had very little to talk about—I was having to work hard making sure she didn’t bring up much of anything, because she was so goddamn competitive—and I sat there politely sipping my lemongrass tea. Everywhere you looked was more façade, more expensive stuff—show-offy I-have-more-money-than-you stuff, plus you’re-out-of-shape stuff. Then our boys appeared, and I got up to go. Sam’s shoes were on the mat by the front door, next to his friend’s, and I went over to help him put them on. As I loosened the laces on one shoe, without realizing what I was doing, I snuck a look into the other boy’s sneaker—to see what size shoe he wore. To see how my kid lined up in shoe size.

And I finally got it.

The veil dropped. I got that I am as mad as a hatter. I saw that I was the one worried that my child wasn’t doing well enough in school. That I was the one who thought I was out of shape. And
that I was trying to get her to carry all this for me because it hurt too much to carry it myself.

I wanted to kiss her on both cheeks, apologize for all the self-contempt I’d been spewing out into the world, all the bad juju I’d been putting on her by thinking she was the one doing harm. I felt like J. Edgar Hoover, peeking into the shoes of his nephew’s seven-year-old friend to see how the Hoover feet measured up, idly wondering how the kid’s parents would like to have a bug on their phone. This was me. She was the one pouring me more tea, she was the one who’d been taking care of my son. She was the one who seemed to have already forgiven me for writing a book in which I trashed her political beliefs; like God and certain parents do, forgiven me almost before I’d even done anything that I needed to be forgiven for. It’s like the faucets are already flowing before you even hold out your cup to be filled. Before forgiveness.