The Cloister Walk (23 page)

Mary of Egypt lived in the fifth century, but her story is all too familiar in the twentieth. Running away from home at the age of twelve, she became a prostitute in Alexandria. At the age of twenty-nine, she grew curious about Jerusalem and joined a boatload of pilgrims by offering the crew her sexual services for the duration of the journey. She continued to work as a prostitute in Jerusalem. On hearing that a relic of the true cross was to be displayed at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, her curiosity was aroused again, and she joined the feast-day crowds. But at the threshold of the church some invisible force held her back. Suddenly ashamed of the life she'd led, she began to weep. Kneeling before an icon of the Virgin Mary, she begged forgiveness and asked for help. A voice said to her, “If you cross over the Jordan, you will find rest.” Mary spent the rest of her life, forty-seven years, as a hermit in the desert.

Late in her life, Mary encounters a monk who had come to the desert for a period of fasting, and she tells him her story. Touchingly, she relates that she had missed the fish she used to eat in Egypt, and the wine—“I had enjoyed wine very much,” she says. The monk is amazed to discover that Mary knows many Bible verses by heart, for in the desert she has had no one but God to teach her. She asks him to bring communion to her, when next he comes to the desert, and this he does. On his third visit, however, he finds that Mary has died. A lion—which contemporary audiences would have recognized as a symbol of Christ, the lion of Judah—comes to help him dig her grave.

Monks have always told the story of Mary of Egypt to remind themselves not to grow complacent in their monastic observances, mistaking them for the salvation that comes from God alone. And in the Eastern Orthodox churches, Mary's life is read on the Fifth Sunday of Lent, presented, as the scholar Benedicta Ward tells us, “as an icon in words of the theological truths about repentance.” Mary's story is an important one, but not because she seems particularly relevant to teenaged prostitutes, or because the world would be a better place if prostitutes thought better of things and headed for the nearest desert to live in caves. Repentance is not a popular word these days, but I believe that any of us recognize it when it strikes us in the gut. Repentance is coming to our senses, seeing, suddenly, what we've done that we might not have done, or recognizing, as Oscar Wilde says in his great religious meditation
De Profundis,
that the problem is not in what we do but in what we become.

Repentance is valuable because it opens in us the idea of change. I've known several young women who've worked in the sex trade, and one of the worst problems they encounter is the sense that change isn't possible. They're in a business that will discard them as useless once they're past thirty, but they come to feel that this work is all they can do. Many, in fact, do not like what they become. The facile thinking of middle-class America—I'm OK, you're OK, your pimp is OK—isn't of much use to these women once they recognize that they need a change.

The story of Mary of Egypt opens the floodgates of change. It comes from a tradition of desert stories suggesting that if monks and whores can't talk to each other, who can? The monk who encounters Mary still has a lot to learn; his understanding of the spiritual life is facile in comparison to hers, and he knows it. Mary, for all her trials, is like one of those fortunate souls in the gospels to whom Jesus says, “Your faith has made you whole.” Benedicta Ward has said that these stories are about deliverance from “despair of the soul, from the risk of the tragedy of refusing life, of calling death life,” which may be one function of the slang term for prostitution: it is called “the life.” But the story of Mary of Egypt is one any of us might turn to when we're frozen up inside, when we're in need of remorse, in need of the tears that will melt what Ward terms “the ultimate block within [us]; that deep and cold conviction that [we] cannot love or be loved.” In this tradition, Ward says, virginity, defined as being whole, at one in oneself, and with God, can be restored by tears.

—St. Augustine

A dark plaid, deep reds and browns. My favorite dress. Soft cotton, no scratchy lace. Buster Brown shoes. An occasion; my mother has set my hair in rags overnight and in the morning she lets me brush out the curls. Then we go to a department store in downtown Washington, D.C., where along with other children, I have tea and cookies with the Easter Bunny. I have the photograph to prove it.

I love singing in the cherub choir at the First Methodist Church in Arlington, Virginia. In the picture I pose before the altar, hands pressed together, eyes closed tight as if I am praying hard. But I am thinking about the way I look, in the starched white collar and big black bow tie, my arms like angel wings in voluminous pale blue sleeves.

Much is made of new things. The electric stove, on which I promptly burned the palm of my right hand. The television. There's a story on television that I like very much, because it is the same story I hear at Sunday school. I love Jesus; I love to sing about him. But now the story changes; something new, as dark as the clouds behind Jesus' face. He is nailed to a cross; he is going to die. I have never seen a movie in which someone dies, and I do not like it. Especially Jesus. How can I sing about him any more, if he dies? I run into the kitchen, where my grandmother Norris is cleaning a fish. I am in tears. It is Good Friday, she tells me, good because it's the day Jesus died, because he died to take away my sins. I don't know what this means; I am transfixed by the fish's eye. Something is wrong here, very wrong. I go to my room, climb inside my wardrobe, and shut the door. I am going to stay there a long time. I am not going to come out, ever. The grown-ups have gone crazy, or they've lied to me, they've kept it hidden, what a terrible world this is, where Jesus dies.

 

We each have a purse and matching hat. White gloves, socks with lace cuffs. Crinolines under stiff cotton skirts that make us feel important. Patent leather Mary Janes. My two little sisters and I pose for a photograph before leaving for church. We stand by the station wagon. “Robin's egg blue,” my mother had called it. I like to think of the car as an egg, my family hatching through the doors. For my youngest sister, it is her first purse. It distracts her. She swings it back and forth, hitting us on the knees.
Quit it,
we say.
Shush. Stand still for the picture.

 

Sunrise at Punchbowl cemetery. My father's band is here, the 7th Fleet Navy Band, and also the church choir he directs in downtown Honolulu. That's why I'm here, to sing in the choir. It feels odd to be singing so early, to be up before the sun. It is hard to imagine all this death; I have not lost anyone to death, except the collie we named Lady. Her death seemed so large, I felt the need to do something. I set my toy ironing board up in the back yard and covered it with one of mom's old tablecloths. Death was hungry, and I couldn't do enough. Not just dog biscuits and Lady's collar, but some of my things, my favorite marbles, and a Golden book—Scuffy the Tugboat—and a copper bracelet that I bought with my allowance on vacation the summer before; it all went on the makeshift altar. I couldn't do enough. Death was empty, and I tried to fill it.

I remember one morning when our neighbor came over as we were eating breakfast, still in her nightgown, her thin hair in rollers, gray at the roots. Out of breath, she said,
Harry's collapsed,
and my father ran next door and called the ambulance and missed a whole morning of work. After school that day, a new phrase, “dead on arrival.”

I remember the front page of the newspaper on the day that the plane crashed in Rio de Janeiro with members of the U.S. Navy Band on board. Everyone died. My father's face turned ash-white; he looked old, not like my dad any more. He had known all the people on that plane. He cried, and my mother cried. She told me that if we had stayed in Washington, my father would have been on that plane and he would be dead. I could not imagine this.

The men's voices drone, I am sleepy and hungry. The soldiers' white crosses are beautiful in the morning light. Such a peaceful place, such terrible deaths, and so many. Easter Sunrise Service.

 

Spring break, spent with friends from college. My favorite was at Montauk, walking in cold sand, watching the sun come up. Easter is a blank space on the calendar, and I barely remember the Easters of my childhood. Once, though, my mother and I are visiting her parents in Lemmon, and we go to church on Easter Sunday with my grandmother. I grumble over having to dress up and deliberately sing flat on the hymns, until my mother jabs me with her elbow.

 

After college, Manhattan, my first apartment. My roommate and I furnish it mostly with hand-me-downs from her family's home on Long Island. The necessity of buying things—even salt and pepper shakers, or a small Oriental carpet—terrifies me. It seems risky, this pretense to adulthood. One Thursday night in spring, my roommate brings home some mescaline, a gift from another Juilliard student. I am not much for drugs, except for a little pot, but I agree to take it with her on Friday night after work. For a time, it is a giddy high, and pleasant; from our little balcony we watch the lights change along West End Avenue and are unaccountably amused. But then she says something that seems sharp to me, and I'm afraid to reply. The clouds rolling in from the west, along the Hudson River, come too fast. They roil, coiling like snakes about to strike. As if they would tell me something, but in a language I don't know.

I can't look at her face, or my own face in the mirror. I can't sleep; thoughts come too quickly, one on another. If I were a machine, I'd be a ticker-tape printing. I wonder if I am a ticker-tape; if everything about me, everything I thought I knew, is false. My life a pretense, an evasion—thoughts tick away, too fast—me as I want to be, not as I am. I get up, turn on a light, but don't dare go outside. I sit at the card table we use for meals. I sit, holding on. I know that if I let go, even once, I will go to the balcony and jump to my death. I don't know why this should be so, but it is so. I sit for hours.

When it grows light outside, I get up and go to the bathroom, clinging to the walls, still afraid to let go. I imagine that I am on a space walk, and my tether must not break. I am afraid to wake my roommate, afraid that she'll be angry. I lie down in bed but am afraid to sleep. Later, she wakes up and wonders if she should take me to a hospital. No, I say. She cuts a grapefruit and hands half of it to me. I begin to cry, because I think she hates me, but now she wants to feed me. Not like the Jimmy Cagney movie, I say, where he grinds the grapefruit into a woman's face, and I am crying. It's a bad trip, she says. And I say, I guess so, and for the rest of the day she mothers me, watching me and feeding me and not going out, because she's afraid to leave me alone. All that Saturday, we watch old movies. She makes popcorn and hot chocolate. We watch Kirk Douglas in
Ulysses,
which I think is the story of Jesus.

On Sunday I am better, but still shaky. You have to pull yourself together, she tells me. You can do it. We had planned to walk to a friend's apartment, a horn player who lives with a woman named Barbara, a Rockette. As frightened as I am, I am not going to pass up the chance to meet a Rockette. The windows of the building across the street from her apartment are blind eyes that spark with malice; watching us, and mocking. It is difficult to be with people; the words they use, everything they do, has too much meaning; inside the poem of their lives, I can't keep track of my own. I want to sleep. I am a graceless guest. I spill half a plate of food on the floor. No matter, she says. Barbara is a cheerful woman, and a good cook. She fills my plate again and says something that makes me smile for the first time in days. Happy Easter, she says. On Monday I am afraid to put on a pair of shoes. I stare at the shoes in my closet and am afraid of them all. I have to force myself to get dressed and take the bus to work. It is weeks before I can ride the subway without an offhand temptation to throw myself on the tracks. I write to a friend, “I think I need to
live
better, but I have to do things step by step. It is the journey of the embryo.”