by Anne Lamott
She was at the intersection, waiting for the light to change.
I almost ducked back and waited for her to cross the street, but I wanted to tell her what a difference Pru had made in my life. I tapped her on the shoulder, and when she turned around, I felt just like I had every time she opened the door to me when I was young—afraid and obsequious.
“Hello, Mrs. Wallace,” I said.
She looked at me intently. “Hey there,” she said, and looked back at the light to see if it had changed. Then she smiled a little and began to fish around in her purse. She found her cigarettes, shook one out, offered the pack to me, and when I declined, lit her own. It was as long as a pencil.
“Are you living in the city?” I asked.
“Yeah. Not so far from here.”
“Where is Alison?”
“Down in Ojai, married to a dentist. They have three little kids. Not so little anymore.” She turned to watch the light. It didn’t change. She wasn’t going to say anything else to me.
“Well,” I said. I could hear the clank and purr of a backhoe somewhere nearby, tearing up a city street, the flutter and cries of the pigeons at Union Square above the scraping and rumbling and hum. I stood there behind Mrs. Wallace like a jerk for a minute, trying to think of something to say, but then the light changed and she turned to say good-bye.
“Nice to see you,” she said.
“You, too.” She stepped off the curb, and I stood where I was and watched her go. Her steps were small and precise, due perhaps to the tight skirt and high heels; in any case, while everyone else in the crowd Strode or bustled or lumped across the street, she looked as if she were trying to walk a perfectly straight and important line, a field sobriety test or a tightrope wire.
Casey was looking at me in his rear-view mirror.
“What.”
“You look pretty.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Now you stop that, girl. Or me and your mother’ll take you straight back to the home. Won’t we, Ma?”
My mother nodded, turned to my brother, and smiled. This is always the family threat, that we’ll put one another back in the home, where we won’t like it at all because they always take our things.
“And you don’t like it there at all,” he said. “And do you remember why?”
“Because they always take my things.”
“That’s right.”
“Ed says he needs you to call him,” I said.
“When did you see him?”
“Yesterday.”
“Okay.” From up here all the buildings in the railroad yard, the restaurants and shops with their blue awnings and the condos and the little bridge and the little lake look like a scale model an architect has built, peopled with half-inch plastic people, plastic dogs, and plastic trees. “Dear God,” my father used to say.
“What did Ed have to say?” my brother asked.
“Mostly we talked about Dad.”
Yesterday Ed was waiting for me in a booth at Nellie’s coffee shop. He had just run out of coffee when I walked in, and he was holding up his cup, crying “Nurse! Nurse!” It was hard to see him sometimes because he looked so much like my father, and it was hard to think of Lynnie still getting to have him, to have a father, and how her kids would get to grow up around him—crazy old beautiful Ed.
“I don’t think we’ll ever get used to it,” he said to me halfway through our breakfast. “I feel him around me sometimes though. And you know I don’t have no truck with real religion, with all that ‘who shot the Holy Ghost’ crap. But several times when I’ve been really low, late at night, before the dawn, or hell, who knows, midday, I’ve suddenly been aware of your Dad, crouched on the floor in the corner, sort of like a bird, just waiting there for me, keeping me company. Several times I’ve felt him sitting on my side of the bed, like I was a kid with a fever. Your mother says she feels this about Jesus sometimes—I remember once she was trying to explain this to your Dad and me—this was a long time ago, because I was still drinking. We were all over at your place. Lucy had just been born.”
“Lucy? You mean Lynnie.”
Ed struck his forehead. “Lynnie,” he said. “Your mother said she felt Jesus was like a scent in her life, in every room, and she also felt Him sort of following her around, moving around close by in whatever area she was in, like He was going back and forth around her, and your father said, ‘Rather like a pool sweep, darling?’” Ed burst out laughing. I laughed too, and the waitress brought us more coffee. Nellie died the same year my father did.
“After Dad got sick, he sort of vaguely believed that Zen thing that if there was a God, it wasn’t an old man, it was the spirit of a baby.”
“He told me the same thing, too. It always struck me as funny—that he ended up with a bright hard-core leftie who actually believed in Jeeesus. He sure loved her, though. He sure loved your mother. Those first ten years or so, though, I swear, their marriage was a three-legged race through life.”
“Wasn’t yours and Peg’s?”
“Yeah, probably. Of course it was, me drunk all the time.”
“Sometimes I feel like I don’t really care what happens, since Dad is dead.”
“That’ll pass someday. We have to give it more time.” He stared down into his coffee cup. “The other day I realized how it feels to me. It’s like when Peg and I had that view of the harbor, the mountain, the sky, that fabulous grove of pear trees down below us, between us and the railroad yard. But then Archer built that goddamn condominium there, and Peg and I would stare out the window—where we’d always stood to watch the pear trees, leafless or budding or drooping with pears—and our hearts would just sink. Just fucking sink. Because—you know the pear trees are still there, but you can’t see them anymore.
“You keep looking out the window, and each time you’re reminded of what was once there, and how much pleasure it brought you, and you gamely say to yourself that it’s still an exquisite view, that you can still see the mountain, some of the bay, Angel Island, Alcatraz, the sky, and a million birds, but the goddamn pear trees are gone.”
You can just see the top of the mountain from the steps of the little white church, so dark green as to almost look black. Casey went around in back to be with the other ushers, and my mother and I went inside briefly to lay our sweaters down on a pew in this plainest of all churches. Then we went outside, said hello to the other early arrivals, and went to stand by ourselves on the wide cracked steps that lead partly down the hillside. We sat down so my mother could smoke in comfort. The view was fantastic to the south, toward San Francisco: of the bay, the Golden Gate Bridge, the islands. The steps were badly cracked and beautiful, eight feet wide, speckled with rust orange moss, surrounded on three sides by fabulous tall windswept golden grass. I felt like having a cigarette, but did not want to start smoking again. One puff and I’d be on my third pack by midnight. In the spring the grass up here is brilliantly, crazily green, and a million wildflowers bloom, poppies and leopard lilies, monkey flowers, buttercups, and the dark garnet-red black jewel flowers. I brought Ed’s daughter Lucy up here once, to see them. My father had been dead about a year, and Lucy had just started studying art at San Francisco State. She was very shy and quiet, like Lynnie, but prettier. She grew up knowing that Ed was her biological father, and called him Ed on the rare occasions she came to town with Natalie. Her real father was Natalie’s husband Matt. He had been transferred to San Jose ten years ago, so my mother and Natalie got to see each other every few months. Lucy and Ed were friendly in a very sad and shy way with each other. She no longer wore horn-rims or even glasses but contact lenses that made her eyes crazy jewel blue, and she looked at Ed shyly with blue laser eyes.
My mother smelled of smoke and Chanel No. 5. We were sitting quite close together on the steps. There were almost no wildflowers this time of year, in all of that windswept gold grass, but near the steps and growing out of the cracks were stalks of yarrow, that white and feathery fern, as we
ll as some poppies and patches of wild mint.
The church bells were ringing. When we turned around, a lot of people had arrived, were standing around outside or filing in, the women on the arms of ushers.
“Pru and I used to come up here a lot,” I said.
“I never knew what the two of you did.”
“We’d sit here and smoke, talk about things. Sometimes we would make garlands for our hair.” I saw us then, twelve and thirteen, me all skin and bones with white processed hair, Pru still with her baby fat, sitting up here, staring off to sea. Pru had had an abortion. She had let a boy have sex with her, a friend of her sister’s, a sixteen-year-old boy. She had to stay overnight at a hospital in the city. Her mother had beaten her black-and-blue. Pru, who had had to tell the doctor that she was raped, also told him that the man had given her the bruises. Her sister stayed with her at the hospital. The doctor helped her set up a cot next to Pru’s bed. We didn’t talk about it very much but I stopped smoking dope for a while because it was so scary to think about stoned: the sex and the abortion.
My mother got to her feet and offered me her hand. I shook my head. “I want to stay here a few more minutes,” I said and she nodded. I watched her walk up the steps in her dressy white sandals; she doesn’t wear high heels anymore. There were several dozen people in front of the church, its white A-frame against the truest blue sky, on the hill in a field of prairie gold grass. Up in front of the church were people Casey and I went to school with, some of them with their children and babies and parents. I saw five older couples, my mother’s friends, standing together, all of whom I had known my whole life. Some had worked with my mother for McCarthy or McGovern or Carter, some were Republicans, but they had all been friends forever, and they had all lost a child in the sixties and early seventies. All of them had other children too, thank God, some of them ushers and bridesmaids today, and all of them were handsome and fit but made old by loss. Ginny Cohen died in Juvenile Hall of a drug overdose when she was fifteen. Doyle Yeats drowned in the lagoon, drunk, the same year. Eleanor Hunter died mysteriously in Peru when she was eighteen. Mattie Gold died in a backpacking accident, high on LSD. Ben Atchison died in a car crash with four other kids. There were probably a lot of other parents here today whose children had died, but they were not so noticeable, not all standing together. Everyone seemed happy. It was a wedding, after all. I was incredibly depressed.
I kept thinking of my own wedding—not in a church but in our ramshackle house just across the street from the Petaluma River, across the road from the low hills, bright green in the spring, shaggy and golden in summer. And of how the morning after our wedding, we awoke as the sunrise was opening up like a flower behind and below one of these hills, coloring the river rose and orange, so desperately full of love for each other we could hardly contain ourselves. “Please,” he said smiling, studying my face as if the meaning of life were on it, “let me go out and kill somebody for you.”
It was nuts to have married him. There were any number of reasons why I did. One was that he didn’t want to make love all that often, and neither did I at the time. It didn’t feel safe anymore. It brought up feelings in me of violation and foreboding, as if maybe something bad had happened to me as a child. It felt sometimes when I was in bed with a man that I was encouraging him to do whatever he wanted with me so that he would not fuck the three-year-old in the corner, so that he would not even notice her there. So it was convenient that he could go for days without wanting to make love. And also he was handsome and charming, and I thought that reflected well on me. When Lynnie and Peg first met him, I was already feeling that maybe he secretly wasn’t a very good man, but when I half expressed my fears to them, Lynnie said, “Look, we don’t care if he beats you.”
“Why are you looking so sad?” my mother asked. She had returned from having mingled with the other guests, and sat beside me on the steps.
“I guess because it’s a wedding. It makes me sad.”
“Uh huh.”
“And plus I miss Dad.”
“Me too.”
I hadn’t been in a church since a month or so after my father died. My mother and I limped to her church one Sunday. The old man in the corner was still miraculously alive, almost a hundred, still in the corner, stooped and faded. There were mostly women, mostly older. The ones who were more or less my age still had processed hair. Singing, they looked so beautiful, so free. Their little girls had heads full of braids and bright plastic barrettes. This generation was growing up proud, you could see something close to sassy in their faces and in how secretly pleased they were when they got to nod or shake their heads, and their braids were tossed around and the bright little barrettes in the shapes of airplanes and stars and animals tapped lightly against each other. I closed my eyes.
James wasn’t there anymore. There was a woman preaching, the Reverend Ms. Jana Smythe, who read the passage in John where Jesus is being crucified, with his mother Mary and Magdalene and the wife of Cleophas all at the foot of the cross.
“The women were last at the cross and first at the tomb, someone once said.”
And the old man in the corner said, “Ay-men.”
“There as the Saviour was dying, one of the most painful deaths of all.”
“My Lord.”
“Forsaken, broken, His heart nearly broken with sorrow.”
“Uh huh.”
“And that is the human experience! But there at the foot of the cross, huddled together, alone—there were no crowds, no lines.”
“No lines!”
“And He cried out to his mother, ‘Woman, behold thy son!’ And in that moment we see all of human pain and suffering; the hopelessness of human love, the helplessness of it all. ‘Love dies,’ the world says, ‘just give it time,’ but they stayed with this man. They stayed with him, huddled together, and that is maybe all we can do, and maybe it shows that life has more power than death, and maybe it shows that love has more power than hate.” That was what it felt like when my father lay dying; like he was being crucified, and all we could do was sit with him huddled together.
“What are you thinking now?” my mother asked on the steps of the little white church.
“No lines!” I said, and she smiled.
Half of the people milling around outside the church or filing in were the grown-up children Casey and I had gone to school with. They all knew me during the years I straightened my hair. I was not eager to go up and make small talk and have them remember or say what I looked like in those days.
Pru had taken me into the city the first time so I could get my hair chemically straightened like black people do, but at a white beauty salon her sister knew about. I just wanted to look like everyone else. I just wanted to look like anyone else. To have long blond hair I could fling off my shoulders and then fling around until it fell over my face and breasts, and then to fling it back over my shoulders like a bridal bouquet. I did not have flingable hair, even after it was straightened. That was all I wanted out of life: the hair, the breasts, the boyfriend. I had to sleep with my hair in plastic curlers every night so that it would be straight in the morning. It was like sleeping on a pillow-case full of roller skates. I have a confusion of feelings when I think now of the little girls at my mother’s church tossing their braids about, the braids secured and weighted down with bright barrettes.
“Let’s go up, darling. Casey keeps giving us the eye.”
“I just feel funny.”
“I know.”
“I’m the only one here without a husband.”
“Well, what about me?”
I hung my head and nodded, then I looked over at her and smiled. “Will you wait here with me a few more minutes?”
“Uh huh.”
The second time I had hypnosis, several weeks ago, I remembered all sorts of things I hadn’t recalled the first time—lots of bad moments of romance, some with a man who was now up above us being an usher, a romance during which I generated enough p
ain for myself to keep Berkeley lit for a year. But mostly I saw a lot of childhood scenes that I may not have thought about since they happened, scenes of how frightened and ashamed I had been and of how little comfort there was. One scene involved a good half dozen of the grown-up children here at the wedding today. I was six years old, and my father and I were walking along the path by the salt marsh, and we came upon ten children from my first-grade class who were all celebrating Mady White’s birthday. Somehow I had not been invited. They were all sitting within a ring of wild animals—egrets and herons mounted on driftwood, a snowy owl, a red-tailed deer, a raccoon, a silver fox. The children were seated on a plaid blanket surrounded by these animals, the girls in little dresses, the boys in slacks and blazers; and it was all like a dream, and I felt like howling with pain as I stood there hand in hand with my father, who then let go of my hand to reach for the pen and paper in his breast pocket. And the children cried hello to me and waved happily from inside the ring.
The thing was, I hadn’t even cried. After I had played through all of my memories and come to the earliest one, at the hospital at three and a half years old, when I screamed in the middle of the night, the hypnotist asked if I had cried at the time. I shook my head. “I want you to try to find all the tears you didn’t cry,” he said. “Just stay with the feelings, and see where they take you.”
They took me to a cathedral.
In the dream or whatever it was, I found myself on the lawn of a magnificent church, and knew that I was to walk inside, that someone was waiting for me.
It was a solemn and secret place. A high worship was going on. Everyone at the altar was in fabulous vestments, brightly colored, and mystical music was playing, Gregorian chants. But I went off to a small chapel to the left of the main nave, where inside the altar faced east. The room was lit by candles and the sun shone through stained-glass windows, and Gregorian chants were being sung in here also, quietly, deeply. All the people—all the players—of my life were here, the immediate family gathered around the altar, and on the altar there was a golden casket, like the ones in which they bury the relics of the saints. My first thought was that I had died and that everyone I’d ever known was here to bury me. Pru was alive again, as was my Grandmother Bette, as was my father. The pressure and weight on my chest after I saw my father made it hard to breathe and the air was too thin. Then I took my place at the head of the coffin.