by Anne Lamott
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.
nineteen
flower girl
These 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 lo
t 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.
twenty
sam’s brother
I got pregnant during Advent fifteen years ago, after which I had almost no further contact with Sam’s father, John, for years. Who could have imagined that over the last seven years the three of us would become a quirky, tender family? Last week Sam and I went to visit his father in Canada for the fourth time. We came back home on the first Sunday in Advent.
This time Sam was going to meet his half brother, his father’s first son, who is forty. No one had been ready to take this step until this year, and suddenly we all were. Sam was more excited than I’d seen him in a long time. I was, too, but—well, you know me with my bad nerves. John’s son was going to be staying on John’s marvelous boat with his wife and baby. Sam would stay with John at his apartment, and I had booked a hotel with room service and cable TV, as I had not completely lost my mind.
John picked Sam and me up at the airport, took us out for sushi, and dropped me at my hotel. They headed off to John’s apartment. My hotel was on the shore of an inlet that flows into Vancouver, with snowy mountain peaks across the water, trees seemingly aflame on every hillside, and a bustling harbor beneath my window. I was going to take a cab to John’s later, and we would all meet up for dinner.
I holed up in my room with CNN and Kit Kats from the mini-bar, and grew increasingly tense. What if Sam’s brother couldn’t reach out, what if Sam went into adolescent glower mode, what if . . . I imagined everything that could go wrong that night, and then moved into the more spacious realms of gum surgery and colon cancer. I got some communion Milanos out of the mini-bar, performed the sacrament, and then prayed that I could just keep the faith. I have a lot of faith. But I am also afraid a lot, and have no real certainty about anything. I remembered something Father Tom had told me—that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. Certainty is missing the point entirely. Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns. Faith also means reaching deeply within, for the sense one was born with, the sense, for example, to go for a walk.
First I showered off that horrible butt smell you get from being on an airplane. Then I bundled up and went outside. I prayed that everything would go all right, for Sam’s sake. I wish faith wrapped you in a bubble, but it doesn’t, not for long.
During Advent, Christians prepare for the birth of Jesus, which means the true light. All your better religions have a holy season as the days grow shorter, when we ask ourselves, Where is the spring? Will it actually come again this year, break through the quagmire, the terror, the cluelessness? Probably not, is my response, when I’m left to my own devices. All I can do is stay close to God, and my friends. I notice the darkness, light a few candles, scatter some seeds. And in Nature, and in my spiritual community, I can usually remember that we have to dread things only one day at a time. Insight doesn’t help here. Hope is not logical. It always comes as a surprise, just when you think all hope is lost. Hope is the cousin to grief, and both take time: you can’t short-circuit grief, or emptiness, and you can’t patch it up with your bicycle tire tube kit. You have to take the next right action. Jesus would pray on the mountain, or hang out with the poor or the imprisoned, or—as I’ll get to in a moment—start doodling in the sand.
I walked around town for a while, stopped at some bookstores, bought myself a lipstick, a cup of cocoa with extra whipped cream, and then dropped by an old stone church.
The church was small and beautiful, cold and dark. This gave me some relief: we live in darkness. People know this by the time they turn twenty-one; if they don’t, they’re seriously disturbed. I started to get freaked out about dinner—there are six people in the world with whom I can bear to eat. And besides, what if the added weight of Sam’s brother, with his inevitable baggage, caused Sam’s life and mine with John to buckle and collapse?
What if Sam’s heart got broken again? As with most kids who are fourteen, it has been spackled and duct-taped and caulked back together many times as it is.
The church smelled dank and musky, like Sam’s dirty laundry, but I sat quietly. My mind perched on top of my head like a spider monkey and thought of more things that could go wrong at dinner, and whose fault those things would be. I tried to drop my attention from my head to my heart, which is actually an ascension of sorts. My heart is so amazed that John and I have made a little family for Sam. Still, my mind chattered on, as if the spider monkey had taken acid. My mind is my main problem almost all the time. I wish I could leave it in the fridge when I go out, but it likes to come with me. I have tried to get it to take up a nice hobby, like macramé, but it prefers to think about things, and jot down what annoys it.
Another problem involves what I think the light looks like. I have thought, over the years, that the light would look like success, a good man, a child, a Democratic president, but none of these was right. Moses led his people in circles for forty years so they could get ready for the Promised Land, because they had too many ideas and preconceptions about what a Promised Land should look like. During Adven
t, we have to sit in our own anxiety and funkiness long enough to know what a Promised Land would be like, or, to put it another way, what it means to be saved—which, if we are to believe Jesus or Gandhi, specifically means to see everyone on earth as family.
I left the church and took a cab to John’s. I cannot tell the whole story, but Sam says that I can share the following brief report: His brother is tall and warm. They looked enough alike that I could see they were related, but not so much that I had to breathe into a brown paper bag. And they were both a little shy. Sam’s brother’s wife is smart and lively, and their baby is lovely beyond words. We connected, in the perfectly imperfect way of families. We ate and were kind to one another. We watched TV and raced around after the baby. Sam staked out turf close to both me and his father, and ventured out as small children do to try new lines of conversation. I was hoping that something dramatic would happen, and I’d have a great story to tell, but after several hours I realized that this is the best story there is: A small group of related people came together, willing to be supremely uncomfortable, so that Sam could know his brother, and his brother’s family, and therefore come to know a bit more about who he is. This is why we did it.
I am also allowed to report that Sam’s niece and my niece Clara were born on the exact same day—I tell you, when God is not being cryptic and silent, He or She is so obvious. Sam was wonderful with his niece that day, like a cross between Big Bird and Tony Soprano. “Hey, you,” he called to her, when she was babbling incoherently over the sound from his TV show, “put a sock in it.” Then he performed the two most important functions for an uncle—made farting sounds to amuse her, and took care that she didn’t get her fingers caught in any drawers.