Ada sleeps in my arms for three days and suddenly I am her mother again. As I rock and hold her, I think of a CD a student of mine had given me. His campus group had remade a song by The Fray, “How to Save a Life.” In the song, a camp counselor asks how to save a child whose life has gone terribly wrong. “I would have stayed up all night had I known how to save a life.” Could he have saved this child’s life? I wonder. Is there ever a way to know how? As I nurse my daughter back to health, as I rock her, tell her I love her, hold her close so I can inhale the familiar scent of her shampoo, I realize perhaps I can save my children—some of the time.
Retrogression 47:
September 15, 2007, 6:56 p.m.
We see the store sign in the distance. I put on my blinker, turn into the parking lot, find a spot close to the store, and help the kids climb out of the car. We hold hands and walk toward the bright entrance.
Chapter 47:
Spelling Bee
Two of my students invite me to a play they are in called Spelling Bee. “Can I bring my daughter?” I ask them.
They reserve two tickets.
It is a northeasterly cold night and halfway there Ada has to use the bathroom, which tips our arrival time to almost late. We run into a restaurant, and she pulls down her pants as she enters the stall, almost tripping over her pant leg. Afterward, she stands daydreaming by the faucet.
“Wash your hands, Ada,” I say. “Or we’ll be late.”
When we arrive, I grab Ada’s hand and we race toward the building. The cold wind slaps our faces, and we sing the theme to the Lone Ranger to help distract us from the cold. As we enter the building, I see Ronnie Bonner and a teacher I know. I stop singing. They smile. Okay, so I have been singing the theme to the Lone Ranger. It’s no big deal.
My students play spelling bee competitors. One wears a display of feathers and homemade tan overalls. The other, more prim and proper, loses the spelling bee because he has an erection. Ada doesn’t get the less than subtle humor, but she is all over everything else, laughing and carrying on even during serious parts. We are like two schoolchildren, giggling and entertaining the whole aisle behind us. The audience loves Ada. Some pat her on the head. I even catch smiles from the actors when they hear her delight.
I find I am drawn into the plot, unable to spell any of the words, but caught in the emotional dramas that surround each spelling competitor’s life. At the end of the play, Olive, a shy girl whose parents are absent from the bee, sings to her mother, pleading with her to participate in her life. Tears stream down Ada’s face. We hold hands, cling to each other.
Once the play is over, Ada and I sneak out quietly. It’s past both our bedtimes, and it’s dark and cold outside. Our car feels miles away. I hold Ada’s hand as we jog toward the car, our breath in front of us, leading the way. I unlock quickly, open Ada’s door, and buckle her in, imagining at any second somebody could jump us. Nobody does. Soon all the car doors are locked and the heat fills our car with comforting warmth.
Retrogression 48:
September 15, 2007, 6:49 p.m.
“We should be going,” I say to my friend Joan. “Samuel’s getting so big he needs a new car seat. You’re getting big, Sam!” My son pulls at my arm. “Yeah, Mom. Let’s go get me a new chair!” he says, punctuating the word “new.” “Can I have one, too?” Ada asks. “No, sweetie. You got a new one last year.” “Don’t worry, Ada,” Sam says. “I’ll share mine with you.”
Chapter 48:
Women in Parking Lots
I am going to get my eye scraped. There has been a large, transparent bubble in the corner of my left eye for about a year and a half now, and I’m about to have it removed. When I first discovered it, I was in my car. I turned quickly and caught it in my rearview mirror. I decided to pull over and have a better look. In the parking lot, I saw a doctor I knew, the real-life inspiration for the movie character Doc Hollywood. He was standing in front of a copy center, his hair all over the place like Einstein’s. I parked my car and approached him. He had just photocopied a manuscript he had written that discussed every malady on the face of this earth in layman’s terms. He showed it to me. I showed him my eye. He spent fifteen minutes in the parking lot trying to figure out what it was, his hands practically in my eyes and my head leaning to one side.
Doc Hollywood and I concluded I needed to see an eye doctor. The doctor sent me to a specialist who drained the bubble a number of times, but it continued to refill. After months of this routine, the specialist sent me to a surgeon to cut the bubble out.
When I arrive at the surgeon’s office, I park my car on the tenth floor of the parking deck and begin to walk in the direction of the exit. As I draw closer, I notice a woman in front of the door that leads to both the stairwell and the elevator. Immediately she engages my glance and I imagine she wants something from me.
This woman at the door unnerves me, but I am not sure where else to go. Other than walking around ten floors of parking lot, there’s no alternative. I hide my wallet under my coat and move in her direction.
She is frail with blond, long hair, and it occurs to me she could be on drugs. Before I can skirt around her, she is in my face.
“I need your help,” she says.
I check to see if she has anything in her hands—a knife, a gun. Can I get away easily if she grabs me?
“I need your help. I’m afraid. I have this fear of elevators. I don’t expect you to understand, but could you help me get down from here?”
I hesitate.
“I am afraid of elevators,” she says again. “I was hoping to park on the first floor, but there were no parking spaces.”
I don’t move.
“Please,” she says again. “I can’t walk down all those stairs. I feel like I’m going to faint. I need somebody to take me down with her in the elevator.”
It happens suddenly. First, I recognize her plight. Then I know I can help her. I reach out and grab her hand. She has on red mittens. I look into her eyes and press the elevator button. We wait.
Years ago I was given a bad flu shot. For minutes I felt as though I was going to faint and then fell to the ground, stopped breathing, and had convulsions. I spent the next year afraid I would pass out. I asked strangers to help me cross the street and once crawled out of a two-hundred-person lecture class because I was sure I would drop to the floor if I stood up.
“I used to suffer from panic attacks,” I tell her as we wait. “But now I don’t. One day you won’t either. But I do know how you feel. You think you’re going to die.”
“Yes,” she says. “And I had to pull over twice on my way here because I was terrified I would pass out in the car. And now I’m scared to cross that bridge over the street to get to my counselor. Luckily my friend is going to meet me at the foot of the bridge.”
“Just get through one thing at a time,” I tell her.
“Thank you,” she responds.
“I know people don’t understand,” I say. “They think it’s all in your head, but it’s not. It’s in your body. It’s physical. You feel like you are going to faint.”
We continue to hold hands. When the elevator arrives, we step into it together. It’s at this point I know for sure: it’s my own hand I’m holding, my own heart I now comfort, yet from another place.
We are all the same, I think. If only we would talk to each other like we do in a crisis, then we would see how similar we are.
I think of the woman at the parking lot a few years earlier. When she asked how I was, I downplayed the event, hoping she would leave.
The elevator stops on the first floor, and I continue to hold her hand until we arrive at the bridge.
“I found this guardian angel up there who helped me ride the elevator,” the woman tells her friend.
“Oh really?” The friend smiles sheepishly. “Well, that was good of you,” she says to me.
“I used to suffer from panic attacks and they’re horrible,” I say.
I tur
n to the blond woman. “You will get through it. One day this period of your life will be a distant memory. Just the fact you had the courage to come here today means you’re going to be fine.”
She lets go of my hand. As she and her friend walk away, the thought occurs to me that I should have given her my phone number, but I stop myself from following. You did exactly what you were supposed to do, I tell myself. Now you need to return to your own life.
My oculoplastic surgeon’s name is Will. He has spent some time in Italy and traveled a bit. We speak about his visits abroad and his love of languages. Then he looks at my eye.
“It’s just under the top white layer, but it’s above the muscle,” he says. “This is good. It means we don’t have to do this in the hospital. We can do it right here if you’d like. In fact, do you want me to do it now?” he asks.
“Yes,” I respond. “Let’s get it over with.”
He nods. “It’s funny, the cells in your eye that produced this cyst are tear-producing cells. Those are tears in the bubble. Somehow these cells lay dormant all these years just below the surface of your eye until recently when they became active and began producing tears. I’m not sure what the catalyst could have been.”
In the past I would have lunged into my story about the parking lot attack, but today I don’t need to tell him.
As I sit with the doctor and joke with him while he scrapes my eye, I realize I’m brave. I’m getting my eyeball scraped. I was attacked, bruised and beaten, and I still went to work the following Monday, stood in front of three classrooms of students and told them why I looked the way I did. I carried two children through difficult pregnancies and gave birth to both of them naturally. I can now drive in the left lane on highways without having a panic attack. I’m no longer afraid of fainting. I was raped. I was molested. I can now admit these things happened.
I think about the woman in the elevator, and it occurs to me how absolutely beautiful she was in her frailty, so open, so honest about her limitations. I suddenly understand what I must have looked like to the world in my mid-twenties, when I felt the way she did. I allow myself to remember what life had been like that year. When I held the woman’s hand, I told her she would be okay. Suddenly I know for sure, I will, too.
Retrogression 49:
September 15, 2007, 6:46 p.m.
The kids hug Asher, Robbie, and little Kay. “I love yittle Kay,” Sam states as we walk away. “She’s so cute,” Ada agrees. At the door I grab the hand of Louise, the director of children’s religious education. “Great night,” I say. “I know,” she replies. “It went well. Did you meet the new minister, Christine?” “No, he was surrounded by so many people. Maybe tomorrow after the service I’ll introduce myself.” “You should,” she tells me. “The two of you should meet.”
Chapter 49:
When All Else Fails
By the time Lara was ten, her mother, a teacher, had been a recovering stroke survivor for half of Lara’s childhood. Lara’s mom eventually returned to the school where she had taught, but this time as a librarian. She would never again teach. Lara was ten years old the day her father picked her up early from school. He didn’t say a word, but Lara understood that a second stroke had been less forgiving: her mother was dead this time. Lara’s father coped with his wife’s death by having a string of girlfriends. Lara, her sister, and her brother, virtually on their own at night, drank alcohol as their family’s dirty dishes piled around them. When she was fourteen, Lara’s older brother ran a red light and smashed into oncoming traffic. Lara was in the car. She spent months in the hospital in a full body cast after the accident. During the first week, Lara’s sister never left her side. Then she stopped visiting altogether. One afternoon a few months later, Lara’s sister went to the top of an apartment building and threw herself off.
Lara began chanting with Buddhist friends. Buddhism is what saved her, made her turn from drugs and alcohol to community. Lara and I met many years later at a language school we had both worked for in Italy. We stayed in touch and I eventually recruited her to work with me in the United States, teaching Italian. After my attack, Lara invited me to chant with her. Each Wednesday morning I would go to her house and we would sit in front of the Gohonzon and recite the words Nam Myōhō Renge Kyō.
I could see why Lara had turned to Nichiren Buddhism during the worst period of her life. Every time I looked into the Gohonzon, the mandala venerated by Nichiren Buddhists, I felt a strange peace. Some days, in the outline of the letters before me that looked like human figures, I would see myself holding the hands of my children. Other days, somebody else was holding their hands, but no matter how far away I was from them, we were always connected.
Lara told me the correct place to look while chanting was directly at a heart symbol made out of letters in Sanskrit in the middle of the Gohonzon. I stared at the heart and before I knew it, my children were popping out of its center, glancing around, like two little ETs. Sometimes they were above my heart looking out with a delightful playfulness. Other times I could see them inside my heart, moving around, trying to get comfortable, like a gestation. I always saw my husband’s profile right next to the heart and one of my arms extended toward him. Often the Sanskrit letters looked like labor workers with hats, their arms extended out to my children, husband, and me, and I was one of them.
Although Buddhism had saved her, by her mid-thirties Lara was still haunted by the deaths of her mother and sister. The August before I was attacked, Lara returned from a trip to Italy with a big gash in her leg after her brother had crashed the motorcycle they were on, throwing her off the bike, over a wall, and down the ravine of a cliff. My husband said Lara shouldn’t drive with her brother, but I believed the real change needed to occur in the place where terrible tragedy takes up residence, close to her heart.
After I was attacked, we were the walking wounded, I with my black eye and Lara with a limp and a long scar on the side of her leg. Lara confided she chose the wrong type of men, men who were immature, claustrophobic, depressed, unfaithful—those she knew would leave her. Desperate to change this dynamic, Lara and I role-played. I was her sister.
“What do you want to say to me?” I asked.
“I miss you,” she responded.
“Are you upset with me?” I said.
“Yes. Why did you have to leave? I know things weren’t right, Dad was never home. But you could have told me you wanted to go.”
Lara’s voice cracked. Tears slid down her face.
“You could have told us. We would have all left, gone away to the beach, just the three of us, or to Spain, wherever you wanted. We were the Three Musketeers.”
When Lara left for Italy a year and a half after my attack, she had severed all ties with the uncommitted men she had been dating.
“I’m still emotionally drawn to one of them even though I don’t see him anymore,” she said. “He’s gorgeous, but that’s not the reason. He’s needy and I keep trying to fix him. Our relationship is like the one I had with my sister.”
“That makes so much sense,” I said. “You want to save him because you couldn’t save her.”
“You know, there are rumors my sister was raped the summer before she died. I’m going to find out more about my sister’s death the next time I’m in Italy.”
I, too, was changing. Self-reflection, conversations, writing it all down, had given me a new way of hearing myself in relation to others—the voices of Lara and Ada, Mark and Sam, my children’s teachers, the medieval-Sanskrit script that looked like labor workers or my children or both, my writing partners, survivors I had talked to along the way, my whole extended family, students, friends, relatives long gone whose voices live on in mine, the woman in the health food store, the man whose car I hit, friends I hadn’t seen in years—we all had one singular voice to share. Even the man who sat on the park bench two and a half years before, his voice, too, was a part of mine; if only that day either of us had known what to listen for.
July 1988.
I’m at a party in my early twenties, somewhat tipsy, with a woman from work and her friends. She introduces me to a man. He is tall, personable. We talk for over an hour and then he kisses me. I realize it’s late, after eleven, and I had promised my parents I’d be home by 11:30 p.m. “I need to find Esther,” I say. “I have to get home.” “I’ll drive you,” he says. But once in his car, he drives in the opposite direction and then down a dirt road. “I need my license,” he says. “I shouldn’t be driving without it. It’s just down the street at my house.”
He arrives at a small, dark cottage. “I’ll wait in the car,” I tell him. “No, you’re coming with me,” he says as he opens my door and grabs my arm. We move through the night. He unlocks the house and pulls me in. He pushes me onto a bed and I struggle to get away from him. He pins my hands. Soon he’s trying to have sex with me. “Please don’t,” I say. “Don’t do this. I don’t want to get pregnant. I need to be home. I’m not on birth control.” I’m saying this over and over again and then something almost stops me from breathing. I have remembered bits and pieces of this childhood memory with the man, but suddenly I remember the whole story and this memory freezes me in place. I stop struggling and watch as things unfold, but I no longer feel a thing.
Chapter 50:
Goodbye to the Man
All the Silent Spaces Page 16