In Spite of Everything (29 page)

I started to practice
lectio divina
every night after my children went to sleep. It became my favorite time of day. It made me feel as if I was not alone.

I would sit there at first, blackness palpably pressing at my head, shoulders, and stomach, and I would start reading. As I did, a lambent warmth would seep in, through my forehead and then just above my stomach. I could also see it, in the proverbial mind’s eye, glowy and solar. Reading a psalm, I felt it swelling to the extent that I was almost buoyant in it. It was good, almost essential, to have that floaty sense of incubation, because when the
meditatio
phase moved in—the part in which a phrase lights up—the lines that ebbed in my mind during
oratio
were hard. Lovely, but sharp-edged, like glinting diamonds.

In the end,
contemplatio
. Rest. I needed it. I would continue to need it.

I
n the late spring, just eight months after we had bought it, we put our house on the market. As word of our separation spread, the cozy, familiar neighborhood in which we had lived, in three different places over nearly a decade and a half—longer than I’d ever lived anywhere in my life—had become bare and mean, like a savanna. I could not walk down the street without bumping into another mother of young children, who wanted to know how I was “doing.” Except for a few friends, I could sense something hyenalike as they stared into me. I felt as though I was being watched, a wounded animal about to be separated from the pack. Or at least that’s how it seemed. It would have been difficult for it not to have.

When I left Park Slope, I moved into an apartment above a vacant Laundromat in a neighborhood whose streets I’d been scared to walk down just five years earlier. When a vagrant, mute alcoholic moved into the abandoned storefront with the permission of the landlord, I could no longer have my children stay there safely. I told Cal that we should explain to them that the apartment was too uncomfortable, too hot—better to wait until Mama found a really good place to live.
Okay
, Cal said,
sounds good
.

I saw Zanny and Pru every day. We went to free public beaches. Often, I didn’t even have enough money to buy them Popsicles, a dollar apiece.

By midsummer I was broke. I wasn’t just running low—I was bankrupt. I had put everything into our house, in cash. I had some savings left from a mutual fund, but I ran through it by August and was looking for quarters under the sofa. It never occurred to me to ask for financial help from Cal. I had always made my share of money; we were equal partners. But I had no work; even if I had been offered it, I’m not certain that I could have done it. For the first time in my life, my grit vanished. I was lost.

There was some physical disintegration. I vomited intermittently. I didn’t tell anyone about it, didn’t go to the doctor. I got used to it.

My hair started to come out in clumps. Then, I became infested, and reinfested, with head lice. After the fourth bout, I cut off my hair
and bleached it within an inch of its life. Combined with my weight loss, I looked eerily as I had as a teenager.

Nearly a decade after I’d quit, I started smoking again.

Pink welts burst open all over my body. They itched and itched. I clawed at my skin until my stomach, arms, and legs were rutted with scabs. Ultimately, I had to go to the emergency room. When the registering nurse asked me for my name, I said, “Job.” She looked at me. “Name,” she said. I was given Benadryl and steroid shots for stress hives. In the examining room, the doctor asked me if I had been subject to domestic abuse.

I stuttered.

I kept the light on all night long. I couldn’t read a book. I didn’t have a TV. I knitted a lot. I continued
lectio divina
, but often, it was hard to concentrate. Often, I gave up and sat.

My babies. It had been a huge mistake to bleach my hair, the lice notwithstanding. The change in hair, the change in weight, the scabs patched over my skin. To children, mother’s body is home. Now my body was different. After all the home improvements that Cal and I had insisted were necessary to provide our children a homey home, only to watch as those “improvements” destroyed our family anyway, I had done something even more devastating to my babies’ sense of home: I had done a gut job on my own body. The only thing I could do was to reassure them that it would return to the way it was very soon, that things were unsettled right now; once they settled, my hair, body, everything, would, too. I was still Mama, and they were still the schmushkies. This was a hard time, but it wouldn’t be hard forever. My children. What could I say? When I was with them, during the day, I was fine. I was myself, they were themselves; we did Mama and Zanny and Pru things.
What was I doing?

I could not be with other people. When you are in this kind of desolation, people become afraid of you. Even if you are doing a decent job of disguising your feelings, they can still see what’s happening physically. It is frightening to them. Friends said they wanted to come visit, to help. Few did. I understood this.

There was a hallucinatory quality to all this. I did not understand where I was. At night it was the worst, because I was not with my children. I was not where I lived. I was not with Cal and my babies, in our cozy, gemlike apartment. I was not there. I was here, in this hollow apartment in Red Hook, with its broken door and fluorescent lights and no phone, its mattress on the floor, its vagrant drunk outside the window, terrors, terrors. I could not understand where I was.
Where were my children? Why weren’t my children here? What was I doing?

Alone. I was alone.

O
ne morning, at the end of that summer, I woke up and thought:
Mom
.

I had not seen my mother since early spring, when she and Joseph had come to see Zanny and Pru. It had been five months. A lot had happened in these five months. I wanted to be with my mother.

I knew that she would be in Maine, at the family’s old vacation place. I called and asked her if it would be okay if I came with Zanny and Pru. “Of
course
, Pickle,” she said. “Just get in the car and come right now.” So I picked up the girls from Cal, and we went. We arrived late that evening. The next day, while the girls were down at the beach playing with Joseph, Mom and I sat on the porch, and I knit frantically. It was the first time that my mother had seen me
scabby, wasted. “Oh, my darling,” she said, trembling. “I had no idea how bad things had gotten.” I put down my knitting and saw my bitten hands. “Yes,” I said.

Later that night, after the children had gone to sleep, my stepfather said to me: “Dear, why didn’t you tell us?” My mother and stepfather would transfer money into my bank account. They would lend me the old station wagon that they had planned on selling. I looked up at them standing in front of me, Joseph’s arm enfolding Mom’s shoulder.

One day after lunch, Zanny and Pru and I decided to row from our beach to the end of a nearby point and back. We zipped up our life preservers and set off. But the farther I rowed, the more it became clear that I had misjudged the distance, and by the time we reached the point, my arms were locked stiff in spasms; I had rowed almost five miles. I dragged the boat up onto the beach and flopped down, while the girls helped themselves delightedly to the beach’s treasure chest of sea urchins and sand dollars. It was going to start getting dark in about an hour or so. I couldn’t believe how irresponsible and reckless I was. What the hell was I
thinking
? I should have turned around after the first mile, but I’d persisted, sure that the point was going to be around the next bend. Now, I could barely move. How was I going to make it?

Who knows whether, as many world cultures believe, one’s ancestors appear with mysterious gestures of help at critical times. But as I was sitting there, I felt my dad. I did not “hear” him but rather
sensed
him saying, “Come on, Suze-o! Piece of cake—tough as nails!” I broke into a huge grin. Then I got up. “Okay, baby rabbits, back in the boat!” I called. “We’ve got to get back in time for dinner!” The row back was
hard
, and while I did not let on to the girls that I was genuinely scared for our safety, I definitely cursed and howled for a good ten minutes, and then we started singing songs to keep the rowing rhythm going—and, really, just for fun.

Somewhere, about halfway along, Pru yelled: “Dolphins!” We looked, and on the seaward side of our boat, there were three gray
porpoises looping in and out of the black water. “It’s a mommy dolphin and her children, right, Mama?” cried Pru excitedly. “You don’t
know
that,” said Zanny. “It could be a
daddy
or just three
grown-ups.
” I rolled my eyes. “Whoever they are, they’re
awesome
,” I said. Zanny giggled. The porpoises continued to lap alongside us, and we watched them as we slowly heaved forward with every stroke. “But you know what, Mama?” said Zanny. “I think they’re trying to make sure we get home okay, don’t you think so?” It did look that way. The threesome accompanied us right to the cove of our little beach, then undulated away.

We waved and cheered to them as we pulled in to shore. Pru hopped out onto the rocky beach and went tearing up the meadow to the house, shouting at the top of her lungs so that Mom and Joseph would hear her, “Dolphins! Dolphins! Dolphins!” I pulled the boat up, and then Zanny and I started making our way through the meadow. “I can’t believe you rowed so far, Mama,” she said. “You’re
strong.
” I gave her a smushy hug. “Everybody had a job—you guys did the singing and talking, and I did the rowing, right?” I said. “We’re a pretty scrappy crew, huh?” Zanny nodded. “It was nice of the dolphins, too,” she said.

That evening, as I was trying to put the girls to bed, my mother kept on intruding with more and more stories about Odysseus and Scylla and Charybdis and Circe and various plot turns in
The Odyssey
to which she wanted to compare us and our afternoon adventure. The girls and I were exhausted, and we just wanted to sleep.

“Ma!”
I shouted. “Stop! Please!” My mother stopped on a dime, her eyes wide, and she held up one finger as she reached in her pocket with the other hand, rummaging for something.

“What are you
doing
?” I moaned. She produced from her pocket a stack of thick white business cards and handed them to me.

“I forgot to give these to you earlier, and I just want you to look at them right now,” she said.

“I will look at them in the morning, Mom—we have to
sleep
,” I pleaded.

“It will take you
less
than a moment—just look at them, and then I’ll go away.” I sighed self-pityingly and looked at one of the cards. Engraved in a refined Tiffany’s typeface were two words:
STOP TALKING
. I looked up at my mom. She smiled impishly.

“The idea here is that you, Joseph, Zanny, and Pru are to hand me one of these cards should I become too effusive, all right?” she said. “Now, off to bed with you all, intrepid swashbucklers!” I laughed so hard that I did, for the first time, actually lose command of my bladder. As I ran to the bathroom, Mom tucked the girls in, and when I returned, she hugged me fiercely.