4
Far from sensing hurt, anger or exasperation from her companion, she felt a warm caress on the side of her cheek. Pushing a stray curl behind her ear, he managed to convey deep affection in a simple gesture
“Time to move on, Grace.”
And then they were rushing through space. Grace thought she felt a wall of air pushing against her body as they moved through the distance between her last vision and the next. So strange to whiz by at the speed of something akin to light—country light’s sophisticated town cousin. She could feel them reaching their destination as the momentum of her body began to slow as if pulling into a station, a nonexistent locomotive braking at the prescribed phantom platform of their next stop.
“Why do we travel differently every time?”
“How can I explain this? By providing identifiable contextual sensations, I can help you travel through dimensions you cannot yet perceive or comprehend. If I didn’t provide these sensory illusions, you wouldn’t survive the trips physically or intellectually.”
“You mean I could lose my mind?”
“It would be a race between your mind and your body. Your organs would fail pretty fast if I didn’t protect them”
“My organs are really here and not back home in my bed?”
“Where do you think here is Grace?”
“I don’t know, somewhere where my unprotected organs could be destroyed?”
“Your organ failure here wouldn’t necessarily preclude you being, at some place in what you call space and time, back in your bed, if bed is where you really are.”
Not helpful. Grace grabbed her head in frustration, as if she might be able to squeeze out some revelation. She knew she should probably just quit asking questions but couldn’t help herself. She hated not knowing, not understanding.
“I just don’t get it. How about a more simple question. What exactly was that invisible train ride?”
“Exactly? That’s not really a more simple question. Here’s an oversimplification: you are traveling inside the cocoon of me. Imagine if I took you into space. I would need to accommodate your need for oxygen or regulate against pressure changes, right?”
Grace shrugged, biting back the obvious remark about her not being a rocket scientist,
“If you say so.”
“Think of me as your rocket ship. Inside of me you are protected from all the rigors your body, mind and spirit could not withstand. In this case, the media I am bringing you through are much more alien to you than outer space.”
Grace squinted and tried to imagine a medium more alien to her than outer space. She felt if she could just concentrate hard enough she might catch a glimmer of his explanation. Maybe if she looked into a mirror, she could peek at it over her shoulder like an intellectual Annie Oakley.
“Why a train ride?”
“That’s what I meant by identifiable contextual sensations. You understand the feeling of a moving train. You understand it pulling into the station. These familiar sensations put your mind and body at ease with the idea of moving from one location to the next.”
“Why is it different every time?’
“Two reasons. If I did it the same way every time, your conscious mind, possibly even your subconscious mind, would become attuned to the illusion. You might see past the trick which is protecting you and glimpse the unfathomable.”
Grace furrowed her brow. She felt as if she were reaching for something on the very top shelf of a pantry. She didn’t even know what her fingers were brushing against but as she stretched she only made glancing contact and pushed the object further back into the dark corner of the cabinet. She exhaled in frustration, momentarily giving up the pursuit.
“What’s the second reason?”
“It pleases me. I love to see the look on your face when I introduce you to each new gift.”
“So far the everythingness, you know that ambrosia thingamajig? That was my favorite.” Grace lapsed quickly, basking in remembered delight. Her lack of comprehension nagged, marring the peace of her reverie. Again, she stretched her arm out in a renewed effort to discover the hidden object, without luck.
“Do you think if I were smarter you could explain it more thoroughly?”
“Childlike acceptance of your limited understanding is the best tool for coping with matters beyond your comprehension. Even the most brilliant human has built-in limitations that do not provide them access to my knowledge. Genius lies in humble acceptance. Some call it faith”
Grace scrunched her face in concentration one more time.
There it is!
A name, a melody, a memory, something. And then it scurried away.
“Here we are.”
The elusive item snuggled away into the recesses of Grace’s brain fissures as she turned her attention to the newest scene. She groaned audibly when she recognized herself standing in front of her mom and dad. This particular memory had nagged Grace with the persistence of shameful regret. She didn’t plan on enjoying the view. Here, she had arrived at the age when she had started to stop liking herself.
“This was one whacked-out night.” She murmured, becoming the audience to a familiar conversation.
Grace felt a renewed dismay at the look of confusion on her mom’s face. Her mother’s bewildered eyes reminded her of the times her grandmother, teetering on the brink of dementia, would forget where she had left her purse and then wildly accuse her grandchildren of grand larceny. Under indictment, the kids would mobilize, finding the bag in question where she had craftily secreted it under any number of pillows in the house. That familiar mask of panic, alarm, suspicion, inability to decide whether to trust her own instincts or the reality being presented to her, had passed in an untimely generational trick to the unfamiliar location of her mom’s face. Terrifying the first time, Grace liked it less on its second go-round. Able to recite the words that accompanied that look, from memory, she mouthed along with her mother:
“You mean I’m pregnant?”
Incredulously, her mom pointed at her own belly housed in an Indian cotton patchwork dress of turquoise and magenta. Looking down at herself, just past a yoke of floral motif appliqué, this bewildered woman was confronted with the undeniable reality of five months worth of baby pushing a green-blue sea of material into a mini spinnaker. Grace watched as her younger self and father simultaneously rolled their eyes and exhaled with frustration. She felt familiar shame at this reaction. Adding insult to injurious insult, she was profoundly mortified to witness, as a third party observer, how her behavior so closely imitated her father’s. There they stood, wrinkled foreheads, disapproving frowns, arms folded in judgement across their respectively heartless chests. Grace was reminded of an image from a Dr. Seuss book. The kangaroo standing in all her gloriously ugly indignation and the baby in her pouch echoing with a ‘Hmmmph too.’
“What a jerk.” No correction came from her side. He didn’t even inquire of whom she spoke. She thought she felt a nod of agreement disturb the air next to her.
Hmmmph too.
Having so recently seen a gloriously younger version of her Mom, the sudden toll that nine years had taken struck Grace hammer to anvil. Pregnancy had never done her mom any particular favors. Gone was the nature-girl waterfall of hair, it hung dull and lifeless, mousy and insipid. The ever-present tan of the tennis player, sailor, gardener had turned to boiled fish pallor. Grace was sure, under that tent of fabric, her mom’s legs had finally been brutalized by varicosities of constricted blood-flow. Worst of all, at the end of those legs her mother had surrendered to the tyranny of shoes. No saucy, flirty shoes to mitigate the betrayal, these were brown utilitarian clodhoppers, serviceable for a pregnant woman with aching legs. Grace quickly mourned the passage of her mother’s gorgeous youth and felt a stab of guilt for her part in stealing her mom’s essence.
“You don’t need to pity your mother because her outward appearance has changed. She is beautiful in the only way that is truly important. She will always be beautiful in my eyes.”
In stark opposition to his words, Grace noticed herself. Despite her ugly attitude, young Grace looked sweet in a crown of french braid that reached from one ear to the opposite, sprigged with fresh baby’s breath. Her mom had shopped with her, helping find and buy a gossamer confection of white cotton. The yoke of the blouse was beautifully embroidered, a necklace of intricate floral design, each flower stitched in vibrant floss of colors stolen from a Cézanne palette. The multi-tiered flounces of the peasant skirt had a matching row of needlework just above the final ruffled flourish.
White canvas espadrilles with a rope-covered three-inch wedge heel, laced up her ankle. Grace hadn’t been able to sleep the night before, contemplating the shoes her mom had so unexpectedly let her choose. Graduating from eighth grade had become secondary to the excitement of wearing her first pair of high-heeled shoes. Late by only seven years, Grace realized how much fun she and her mom had together while getting ready for this evening. What a waste to have missed fully enjoying the experience in actual progress. Too bad, because good times were a rare commodity in the unlucky thirteenth year of her life.
Her mom spoke again in a panicky voice,
“There’s a baby inside me right now?”
Grace, still seven years shy of an inkling of understanding, was busy being furious with her mom for spoiling everything with her bizarre behavior. She pulled her flute apart and slammed the pieces into the crushed blue velvet nest of the case, trying to convey displeasure with every violent movement. A piece of spittle flew off the mouthpiece and hit the hemline of her mother’s dress. Grace flinched as if her pubescent self had deliberately spat on her mother.
“To be fair, I was already pretty angry before my mom started acting strange.” If her companion could only understand the mind of a thirteen year old girl, maybe he would give her brattiness a pass.
“Hmmm?” Listening sounds prompted her to continue.
“I just wanted to go to the dance after. Just for a little bit. Everyone else was going and they wouldn’t let me.” Grace gestured toward her parents with refreshed annoyance.
No more listening sounds.
“Well, don’t you think it a little ridiculous. How much trouble could one thirteen year old get into in one hour?”
“Is that a serious question?”
“Okay so I could have gotten into plenty of trouble if I tried. Or, I guess, even if I didn’t. But in this case I think we can safely assume that in the gymnasium of a middle school in the suburbs of America with twenty chaperones around, I would probably have kept my darker impulses in check.”
“Grace, just to be clear, trouble doesn’t only depend on your own impulses but that is another discussion. In the interest of time I will concede your highly debatable point so that you can focus on the real reason we are watching this.”
Grace mumbled, overcome by nervous anticipation,
“I was kind of hoping that the point was that I had unreasonable parents and their crushing of my independence provoked me to bitterness and caused me to rebel in sneaky ways.”
Silence. Dead silence.
Grace turned back to the sight of her mom. A couple, Mr. and Mrs. Crane, parents of Tabitha, with whom Grace shared a stand in the flute section, started to approach Grace and her parents. As her mother’s eyes continued to dart hither and yon in an almost cartoonish impression of nervous confusion, her father turned his back abruptly on the approaching couple. He leaned down toward Grace and whispered,
“I have to get your mother out of here and safely home before anyone talks to her. I’m going to take her to the car. I can just imagine how fast it will get around your school and then the whole town if your mom starts asking her questions about phantom babies and surprise pregnancies.” With a heavy emphasis on the word her, Grace’s dad jerked his head backward in the direction of the woman who was quickly gaining on them. He was right, Mrs. Crane had probably instinctively sniffed the makings of a petit scandal and was hunting it down with the efficiency of a bloodhound. If she caught up with her quarry, she would have disseminated the goriest details of her mom’s altered state before the night was out. Grace didn’t miss the quick Machiavellian ember that lit amber sparks in her own young eyes,
“Okay Daddy, you take Mommy out but I already promised to help put stands and chairs away back into the band room. I’ll meet you at the car when I’m finished. Okay?”
Grace wished her companion couldn’t hear the false sweetness in her voice that clashed with the cold calculation in her eyes. While she was counting on her father’s distraction to blind him to his daughter’s quickly hatched ulterior plans, she knew her fellow observer wouldn’t be fooled. Sick with guilty knowledge, she watched as her dad agreed and whisked his wife away from the threat of Chatty Cathy, the notorious teller of tales.
Funny, her name really was Catherine.
Thirteen year old Grace waited until her parents were out of sight and then sprinted past Her Chattiness, as fast as her wedges could carry her in the opposite direction of the band room. She didn’t bother to worry about what Mrs. Crane would make of her mad dash as she made her way down one hall and then another. She hustled to a sliding halt on the dusty floor in front of double doors marked with a plastic sign: Cafeteria. A glittering ball suspended in the middle of a dimly lit room was visible through glass squares at the top of the wooden doors.
Omniscient Grace watched helplessly as her eighth grade counterpart blithely glided through the doors and into the graduation dance. On a tight schedule of treachery, she searched hurriedly through the crowd for her friends. She found them in a loose circle, dancing and talking. She ran over into the middle of the group.
“You’re here!” Two girlfriends screamed. Grace had relished their excitement, having anticipated the thrill of her grand entrance. She hadn’t noticed the four other people who retreated a step back, instinctively crossing their arms, annoyed by her loud look-at-me arrival.
“I thought you weren’t allowed to come.” Behind her, the voice of her mad crush spun her around. The truth was embarrassing on so many levels. She couldn’t exactly tell them, ‘Well my mom can’t remember that she’s pregnant or anything from the past two years of our lives for that matter. She’s really freaking my dad out so he rushed her out to the car. He was totally distracted, especially when Mrs. Big Mouth McGee, you know your mom Tabitha, almost caught up with us to have a chat. So, brilliant me, I am capitalizing on this moment so I can sneak into the dance I was already forbidden to go to.” So she went with the less freakish lie,
“Well, I can’t really stay but my dad said I could come say hi and have one dance before I go home to the party my family is having for me.”
Grace willed the dark haired boy she faced to take the hint and ask her to dance. She hoped the force of her desire would move Chad like a marionette, causing his mouth to say,
“Can I have that dance?”
She stared at him hard, sure that her brain could overpower his. She was confident her superior will would triumph when suddenly, out of nowhere, Chad’s girlfriend appeared by his side. Apparently she had misdirected her psychic energy. The foiler of her plans, perfectly named Cindy, gave Grace a sweet smile as she slipped her tiny hand, prettily manicured with bubble gum pink, into her boyfriend’s. Grace hated the girl even more for being so genuinely nice.
“So much for that plan.” Observed the observer.
Thwarted, Grace ungraciously turned her back on the couple and began to dance with the two girlfriends who had been sufficiently wowed by her arrival. Despite being at the dance she had dreamed of, she wore a bitter mask. She glanced obsessively at Chad and his perfectly perky partner, whispering things that Grace chose not to hear. She was sure she was making derogatory remarks about Chad’s eyebrow or the shape of his poor Cindy’s derriere. Grace was ashamed and hoped by not hearing, her companion would also not hear.
“Was it worth it?”
Grace startled to attention, guilt making her jump a little in her own skin, if indeed this was her own skin.
“Worth what?”
“Worth lying to your dad, sneaking around, leaving your mom to sit in the car when there was clearly something wrong with her.”
She turned to his challenge, facing him defiantly. Her mouth prepared a defense but when she saw his face only the truth would come out,
“No.” she exhaled the word. Simple honesty was a relief.
“Even though they didn’t go to the hospital that night, she did have a stroke.”
Grace winced at the bald confirmation of a suspected truth.
“Yeah. One time, about four years later, I had to go to some college interview and I left her all alone in the house. She was sitting there on the floor of the kitchen leaning against the cabinets. She did not look good and when I asked her what was wrong she told me she felt like an orangutan was crushing her chest. I was the only one home with her but I was worried about missing my interview. She told me to go, that she’d be fine in a minute.” Grace choked on her words, renewed guilt swallowing the syllables. “I left and she wasn’t fine in a few minutes or even a few hours. Thank goodness my mom decided to call her friends, Marcia and Mary, who rushed over and insisted that they call a doctor. They brought her to the emergency room and the doctor told her she had had a heart attack. Her heart condition finally acknowledged, I was released to find out more about it. I read some stuff on my own and realized that this graduation night’s event could have been some sort of stroke.”
“You reacted poorly on this night. You had no compassion for her.”
Not wanting to talk about her lack of compassion, she veered the conversation down a side lane.
“It would have been a lot easier to be more sympathetic if I had known what was going on. Maybe I could have gotten out of my own thirteen year old space if we didn’t wait four years to find out there was something really wrong with my mom. Why didn’t we go to the hospital that night?”
Grace knew he knew she was attempting a diversion. Still, he didn’t dismiss her.
“I know you think you know why Grace. The truth of a situation is always much more complex than you can possibly know.”
“Okay maybe I don’t know exactly why we didn’t go to the hospital that night. I’ll tell you what I do know for sure: it wasn’t our amazing faith in God’s healing that kept us out of the hospital. That was the party line but that was a load of baloney– convenient baloney.” Grace gathered momentum hoping to make sure everyone received an unhealthy share of blame. “You wanna know my theory?”
Again he patiently waited to hear her out. “I think it was because we didn’t have medical insurance. Dad was laid off and started his own business. Medical insurance just didn’t fit into his budget. How convenient that at that exact period of time we stopped believing in the efficacy of doctors and started exclusively believing in the healing powers of God. Fine if you don’t have money for the doctor but why did it have to become our theology? So irritating.” She paused as if waiting for an answer but really, she wasn’t finished. “That’s the practical side of it. The cherry on that bit of dysfunction is that going to the doctor’s is what normal people do. When you’re different than everybody else you simply don’t do what the common rabble do. ” Grace’s voice was soaked in acerbic sarcasm.
“Grace, you are such a smart girl. You make quick observations that are astute and scathing but inadequate to comprehend the whole. Certainly you don’t presume to judge someone else’s heart?” She clamped her mouth shut despite his questioning tone. “Even if you could, our business tonight is to look into your heart. Don’t you see that identifying others’ bad choices doesn’t mitigate your own bad choices?”
“Even when their bad choices have given direct birth to me making those bad choices?”
“Have your bitter, secret observations helped to heal you? Have you ever openly discussed this with the people you are angry with? Has your private speculation regarding the failures of others made you stronger or fixed the mistakes you have made?” Grace refused to respond to questions he already knew the answer to. He laid a protective hand on the nape of her neck and she relaxed into it despite herself. His voice began to soothe, “It is perfectly natural to point the finger of blame, but it has no effective purpose in helping you, in healing you, in making you whole.”
“So I’m just supposed to forget about all the garbage that’s ever happened in my life? If somebody else’s actions have harmed me, I’m supposed to sweep it under the rug?” Grace was happy to prolong any discourse that led them further from the other subject.
“No Grace. But it isn’t healthy to dwell on the negative, to hang onto it like a precious treasure.”
This insight took Grace by surprise. She knew exactly where she had secreted her treasure trove labeled ‘sins against Grace’. Like a well worn leather pouch filled with precious gold, she kept it around her neck, hidden but ready for the moment she wanted to share blame for her poor behavior.
“Additionally, your black and white analysis of the motivations of others leaves no room for subtle nuance. Have you ever done anything without having a thousand different factors affect your behavior?”
“I rarely know why I do the things I do,” she blurted, cooperating against her will.
He smiled affectionately at her admission, “So, you barely know what is going on inside yourself. How can you possibly guess at the fine inner workings of another? How can you know anyone else’s precise motives?”
Again, she was surprised by his truth. She remained unable to anticipate the tremendous power of his ability to pierce her heart.
“You should know this Grace: even the smallest step motivated by honest love for me is credited as an act of faithfulness. If you paint every person’s actions, small and big alike, with the wide brush strokes of your jaundiced anger, you miss the minute details of that love and faithfulness. And though the entire canvas has become tainted in your eyes, those small acts of faith are like undiscovered jewels: beautiful droplets of ruby, sapphire, topaz that shine in the universe as a testament of love and trust.”
Grace was confused by the mash-up playing in her mind. Not just two conflicting emotions played incongruous melodies in one space. Grace tried to enumerate the different threads creating this tangled jarring mass. She was annoyed, feeling like a child over whose head an adult conversation is taking place, crucial words being spelled out cryptically, leaving her in the dark. She was flattered because, in truth, her companion was addressing her as the other adult in the conversation, as if she had the intelligence and maturity to sustain this dialogue. She was paralyzed with frustration because, despite his confidence in her, she still couldn’t identify the crucial words in this conversation and didn’t really understand all he was saying.
Finally, in an overriding note, she was taken aback by his sudden fervor. He seemed to speak out of nowhere on the subject of love. Unexpected and, to her mind, out of place, his words were, nonetheless, outrageously true. Like an earthquake, the truth shook her and knocked down the nicknacks of her understanding, shattering them on the floor. His poetic descriptions left her speechless, adrenaline shaking her veins, fine hairs standing on end. Gentle as can be, he stroked her hair,
“Grace, I know you have heartaches and truly I want you to cast all your cares on me. But I know which of your burdens are your heaviest. If you will just trust me, I can lead you to the place where we find those burdens and bring you relief.”
Despite her confusion, his kindness was leading her into the temptation of trusting him, at least for one conversation. She threw up her hands,
“Fine then, you lead the way.” He squeezed her hand in appreciation.
“We were talking about your reaction to your mom’s distress,” he prompted. Immediately she felt her rebel rise up but quickly quelled the insurrection. To demonstrate her capitulation she responded,
“Part of me thought she was faking. It was so weird that she lost her memory and her grasp on reality.”
“Curious.”
“What?”
“Why would you think she was faking? Was she a dishonest person?”
“No,” she admitted reluctantly, “but it was creepy. I guess I would rather she had been faking.”
There was a silence indicating waiting for something. She conceded,
“Okay, there was something else. It is possible that because I was kind of a sneak and a liar I thought deceit might be lurking under everyone’s exterior. Don’t forget I had no doctor’s diagnosis to explain inexplicable behavior. All by myself, I had to come up with an answer that made sense to my thirteen year old world.”
“Kind of a sneak?” He didn’t give her an inch for personal dishonesty.
“Really? That’s where you want to go? All right, I was a big fat sneak and a constant liar. Honestly though, they wouldn’t let me do anything. I couldn’t wear pants. I was never allowed to go over anyone’s house, I couldn’t watch T.V. and I never got to go to parties. No haircuts, no blow-dryers, no makeup. I couldn’t even use pimple medication. I could go on forever with the list of don’ts. They practically forced me to sneak and lie.” She hoped the outrageousness of these prohibitions would make her case.
“Just out of curiosity, did you even once feel fulfilled when you put pants on behind your parents back? Did the empty places inside you get filled up when you snuck over to your friends’ parties? Did watching TV at someone else’s house make you feel like a complete person? Did that borrowed pimple medication resolve all your blemishes? Did you feel any better after you went to the dance?”
“No. Obviously you know that or you wouldn’t even ask.” Grace was sullen, her internal guerrilla asserting herself against the wobbly legs of newborn trust. Wanting him to see her perspective she continued, “Why did every little inch of my life have to be such a struggle though?”
“If these things aren’t really fulfilling why did you struggle so hard to get them?”
“I just wanted to be normal. Even though it only lasted for about eighteen months, this period of can’t and don’t and no seemed to last forever for me. Days came in an endless parade of new things my parents came up with that I wasn’t allowed to do. I literally thought they went to bed at night just to plot their list for the next day. Ironically these prohibitions were supposed to make me get closer to God or something. What a joke. Each new rule just made me more determined to avoid Him and His giant list of Do Nots. All I could ever think of was the things I wasn’t allowed to do: from wearing shorts and pants, to watching tv, to liking boys. I literally couldn’t focus on my life because I was fixated on the things I was missing out on. That can’t be good. If they had let me live like a normal person I would have behaved like a normal person should.” Grace wanted him to concede that her parent rules were excessive and detrimental.
Why did I have to live like that? One break over the fence in a year wasn’t that big a deal.
His voice was so gentle, letting her know that he felt compassion for her while he stripped away the fat of what she had said,
“Grace, you live in a broken world. In it, there are countless people who lead horrible lives filled with wretchedness even from birth. They don’t have mothers, they don’t have fathers, others are beaten and molested and left for dead or worse. It would break you to know the things I have seen people endure.”
Grace interrupted with the full force of her snottiness,
“Are you seriously going to give me the poor starving children in Africa who would love to eat my spinach lecture?”
“No Grace, I am trying to tell you that even the people who have endured the very worst this world has to offer have the opportunity to choose right or wrong for themselves, regardless of their circumstances.”
“So what?” Grace couldn’t seem to control her ungracious tongue. “I don’t really see how that applies to me.”
“Like everyone else, you have always had, and still have, the opportunity to make your own choices, regardless of your circumstances.” He paused letting his words really sink in. She ruminated over his seemingly simple statement. She wanted to make a thousand arguments to dispute this assertion, explaining how certain circumstances were just insurmountable, making it impossible to make the “right” choice. She used air quotes in her brain because,
Who’s to say what’s right and what’s wrong?
She shrank away from this piece of treachery, hoping her companion hadn’t been eavesdropping on her thoughts again. She was unequivocally sure that he knew the difference between right and wrong. Her heart skipped a beat when he started speaking again,
“By the way, what you so dismissively labeled as ‘the story of the starving children in Africa’ has a powerful purpose. It’s a reminder to anyone who has forgotten how abundantly blessed they are and how much they have taken for granted. You have no idea how bad life can be and the depths that parents can reach in failing their children. I hope you never forget how fortunate you have been in this life. Your parents made those rules because they loved you and wanted the best for you. Even when they made mistakes and failed, as all humans do, there was never a malicious intent to harm. They were trying to do their best.”
Having dodged the ‘right v. wrong’ bullet, she was peeved to find herself surprised between the eyes with what she hadn’t seen coming. She folded her arms across her chest stubbornly.
“Well their best made my life miserable. I don’t see why I have to be grateful just because my parents didn’t stink as much as the worst parents on earth.” His voice grew stern, piercing through her façade of petulance,
“Grace. Look outside yourself for just one moment. You were embarrassed because your parents made you an oddity in a small, narrow minded culture. Not everybody in the world, throughout history, in the future or the past does, has or will conform to these limited cultural structures of your suburban American childhood. But you were so desperate to be the same as a small subset of people, that you were willing to do whatever was necessary to conform.”
“You’re always turning this on me.” Grace interrupted to derail his train of thought. She didn’t want to trust him anymore, even with the simplest conversation. She wanted to wrestle control of the steering wheel out of his hand.
“Yes Grace, you’re completely correct. I am trying to turn your focus on you. Take, for example, your embarrassment over your enforced code of dress. You were so worried about what kind of clothes you had to wear and what people would think of you. You should have been far more concerned with the quality of compassion and mercy that you clothed your spirit in. You dreamed every day of wearing a pair of jeans as if that would make your life better. But what are blue jeans compared to the garment you weave with your words, attitudes and actions? Imagine, you could have crocheted such a delicate scarf of love by attending to your mother when she was clearly unwell. You could have made the better choice. Instead you made the choice to satisfy your own desires. You did this on your own, Grace. Don’t try to share the blame.”
Something tugged at her heart at the idea of weaving a beautiful garment of love for her mom but she hated everything else he was saying about her,
“Man, you’re harsh. You know, I was only thirteen.”
Undeterred he pushed on, “Grace you are so determined to make me see what I already know about your parents, that you are deliberately denying what you don’t want to see about yourself. I would like you to honestly face yourself. What do you see?”
“Why do you want me to say it out loud? It’s humiliating enough to have my every bad trait paraded in front of my eyes. Why do I have to announce the thing?’
“Grace, we haven’t really covered every trait. I’ve isolated your viewing to some crucial behavioral patterns that have led you ruined, to a beach, face down in the sand. Remember, to make the change you have to acknowledge it, enunciate it and stop doing it. Speak up!”
His command was stern. She straightened her shoulders put her hands behind her back like an obedient schoolgirl and looked at him with angry and obstinate eyes,
“I have a habit of seeking fulfillment from things that can’t give me any real satisfaction: a pair of jeans, a dance with a boy, even a lovely piece of candy. Additionally I have a perverse habit of desiring a thing more if I cannot have it: being told to wear only skirts, liking a boy only after there’s a girlfriend in the picture or finding a piece of candy all the more achingly beautiful because it is forbidden. The further the thing is from my reach the more I am sure it will be exactly what I desire.” Her singsong recitation indicated rebellion.
“And?”
Grace glared at him and grit her teeth, “And in my desperate reaching for the things I desire I often don’t think of the consequences of my actions to myself and those around me.”
“Isn’t that a relief?” As he said the words, the weight of guilt from that night of graduation lifted. She had desperately wanted to be annoyed but could only feel the lightness of freedom. For years, that night had weighed heavy on her. Her secret sacrifice of her mom’s wellness had nagged at the back of her conscience. That night had not ended with the dance. Grace had slipped out of the gym, miserably unsatisfied and hurried out to the car where her mom was still disoriented. A very long night had ensued.
Without being transported, Grace mentally viewed a snippet from later that night. The family had been gathered around her mom’s bed. Grace was still fuming that her family ‘party’, lame as it had originally seemed, had been cancelled by her mom’s altered state. Her mother sat in her bed, propped up against pillows, grey faced and bewildered, completely unable to reconcile her memory with the present.
“Can somebody explain one more time why the girls can’t wear shorts even when they play sports? That just seems impractical.”
Grace’s snit was forgotten in an instant. Without moving a muscle, she had light-heartedly leapt up from the foot of the bed and skipped around the room in delight. She would never have dared to ask this question. She was more pragmatic (read sneaky), simply salvaging an old pair of shorts, shoving them in her school bag and changing at school. This method had always been easier than honest confrontation. Now her mom was broaching the subject with her dad, who seemed completely nonplussed by the challenge to now accepted standards of family practice. Hearing her own unarticulated insubordinations coming from her mom’s mouth had made Grace want to run over and hug her. Even now, Grace wanted to cross into the space of her own memory and wrap her mom in that scarf of love she had never crocheted. The image of her mother’s eyes opened wide with questioning innocence was rebranded on Grace’s brain, superimposing itself on the original memory, embossing it with new depth.
“There seem to be so many rules and I don’t understand the reason for them. I don’t remember our life being like this.” Her mother had shaken her head in bewilderment.
In all, there hadn’t been that many questions. But the questioning opened up a floodgate of ‘Why are we doing things this way?’ and ‘When did we become this family?’ Even after she had regained her memory, her mom’s questions echoed with resonant change. Once a reevaluation began, one by one, many of the draconian restrictions in their home had loosened slowly and then lifted. It had been the beginning of relief. In place of the bundle too heavy for a back to bear, a lightness of joy returned to the family.
During what Grace secretly called The Reign of Terror, even her mother had changed into a dour old lady, virtual twins with the pitchfork wielding farmer’s wife in that painting, American Gothic. Grace was never sure if it was physical, psychological, emotional or spiritual or some magical amalgam of factors but after that night, her mom’s appearance began to change back to normal: her skin began to glow again, her hair gained some old bounce, her breath even smelled better. She began to sing again—happy songs with her beautiful voice. Grace had spent so long guiltily focusing on her own poor behavior of that night, she had failed to acknowledge the good wrought by her mother’s loss of memory. They had been released from painful bondage by the elixir of a few innocent questions triggered by an undiagnosed stroke.
“You don’t always see the whole picture right away Grace. Sometimes you never do. Even more often, the entire picture is right in front of you but you are busily staring at your own solitary image that you fail to adjust focus to take in the whole. It is a common human propensity.”
Grace kept being surprised at meeting him on a bend in what she considered her private mental path.
How did he know I’d be there?
“Would you say it was a good thing that my mom had a stroke that night? You could make the point that if she hadn’t had that stroke that we would still be living crushed under rules that only served to make me hate my parents and distrust their angry God.”
“Would I say that? No. You are trying to define a picture of cosmic proportions by looking through the peephole of your own perspective and then explaining it with words that are insufficient to grasp the whole.”
“Was that a yes?”
“You are being deliberately obtuse. Defining your mother’s stroke by your own relief at wearing pants again is as single-minded as defining her stroke by how your eighth grade graduation was ruined.”
“Isn’t it natural for a person to want to understand the things that happen in her life? Put it into perspective as it pertains to her?”
“Very natural. That doesn’t make your definition correct or complete. Imagine if a baby tried to explain how her mom bakes a cake. Here’s what you would hear: agooooo, gurgle, mama, papa. The infantile babble might accidentally converge with cake baking at the word milk. Even this convergence would be limited by the fact that the baby would say nana, baba, meew or some other nickname for the substance that comes out of a mother’s breast or the powdered formula in a bottle. The word would be unrecognizable and the baby wouldn’t even be talking about the same kind of milk used in a cake.”
“I literally have no idea what you just said. I think you lost me at agoo.”
“You are the baby Grace. You have a baby’s understanding of the broader world of cake baking. When you try to describe and define events on your own terms, it is simplistic at best but mostly gibberish. Even when you do get a glimpse of a right idea, your understanding of it is limited to your personal experience. You’re explanation of that idea is limited by your vocabulary. There is a wider whole than you can imagine.”
“So I can’t try to define it?”
“You can do whatever you want Grace. But you were trying to get me to agree with your definition. Not only can’t I agree with your finite definition but I have more to show you. I have the vocabulary. I have the big picture. I have the ingredients. I know how to bake the cake.”
Grace, always the student with her hand up first and most aggressively, was hurt.
“I thought you wanted me to see things and tell you what I learned from them.”
“Grace, tonight I want you to see you. I don’t need you to take everything you see, categorize it, label it, put it in a box, wrap it in thematic paper according to its label, and add a coordinating bow. You don’t have to earn my favor by getting the right answer about everything in the universe. I already loved you.”
His smile filled her with assurance and then reassurance. Grace froze; a wild animal caught in the cross-hairs of the sights of the hunter. Ages too late for self preservation, Grace realized that she had been looking into his eyes through the whole exchange.
How did I ever survive without looking at his face?
He left her no time to ponder this ancient question.
“Time to move on, I have something to show you.”
reminds mee of willie wonka singing
ReplyDeleteThere's no earthly way of knowing
Which direction we are going
There's no knowing where we're rowing
Or which way the river's flowing
Is it raining?
Is it snowing?
Is a hurricane a-blowing?
Not a speck of light is showing
So the danger must be growing
Are the fires of hell a-glowing?
Is the grisly reaper mowing?
Yes, the danger must be growing
'Cause the rowers keep on rowing
And they're certainly not showing
Any signs that they are slowing!
the story or the picture?
ReplyDeletestory...invisible trainride. being one place and suddenly being in the next after a trippy ride. the ride never being the same twice
ReplyDelete