The Cloister Walk (12 page)

After the service, several sisters gathered around us and would not hear of our leaving until they'd fed us. I'd hoped to find a dazzling ethnic restaurant in Los Angeles, but the meat loaf, mashed potatoes, and steamed zucchini we were served went down just fine. The hospitality of the nuns was dazzlement enough. Younger sisters briefed us on the community's history; they have the top of the mountain because in the mid-1920s a nun had been determined to buy it. People thought she was crazy to buy a lot of scrub brush on top of an isolated mountain way out in ranch country. The elderly of the community, dignified women in wheelchairs, the former president of the college among them, were introduced to us as other sisters, and several students assisted them with their meals, and with mobility.

The western wall of the dining room was mostly glass, to take advantage of the view. As the darkness intensified, I sensed that we were floating between the stars above and the lights below. One of the sisters, an octogenarian with an impossibly youthful demeanor, leaned on her cane and said to me, “Imagine our being here, with all this, just like the rich people.”

“Sister, I said, “you
are
the rich people.”

This comment on my book
Dakota,
which became a surprise best-seller in 1993, is by far the best response I received. It bored my sister Becky. Not for the first time in our relationship, she became a kind of
amma
for me, a desert mother challenging my complacency, allowing me to see the world (and myself) in a new light. By calling me back to the important things in life, my sister seemed as wise and stern as Amma Syncletica, a desert monastic of fourth-century Egypt, who said that “it is impossible for us to be surrounded by worldly honor and at the same time to bear heavenly fruit.” Syncletica sums up, I believe, the difficulty writers have in America in surviving success: to keep bearing fruit one must keep returning, humbly, to the blank page, to the uncertainty of the writing process, and not pay much heed to the “noted author” the world wants you to be. Becky's letter was a godsend—reading it over, I found myself released from much of the tension induced by sudden notoriety, the rigors of a book tour stretched out over nearly two years; too much travel, too much literary hoohah.

Becky's life has been a kind of desert. When she was born, the doctors at Bethesda Naval Hospital gave my mother too strong a dose of anesthesia. Having already given birth to two children, she knew something was wrong when she couldn't push enough to release the baby from the birth canal. Precious oxygen was lost. My mother recalls one doctor saying to another, “You got yourself into this mess; let's see you get yourself out.” While the doctors squab-bled, my sister's brain was irreversibly damaged.

Becky is diagnosed as “borderline.” She is intelligent enough to comprehend what happened to her when she was born. She is not intelligent enough to learn mathematical computation. A tutor my parents hired when Becky was in third grade told us that Becky could grasp a concept long enough to work out several problems in the course of an hour-long session, but that by the next week she'd have forgotten what she'd learned and have to start all over. Her teachers had been passing her along; there were no “special ed” programs then, and no one knew what to do with her, or where she belonged. Becky's life has been lonely in ways that most of us could not comprehend.

Yet our family ties are strong, and for years we've acted as Becky's advocates within the educational and medical establishment, sometimes taking consolation in the fact that Becky is a good enough judge of human nature to wrap psychiatrists round her little finger. Several times, when she's been given a tranquilizer or some other drug she didn't like, she's learned enough about the contraindications to fabricate symptoms so that the doctor would be forced to change her prescription. When she realized that alcoholic families were fashionable—or at least “in” with therapists—she convinced one psychologist that her mother was an alcoholic. (My mother is the sort of person who, on a big night out, might order a bit of crème de menthe.) In order to survive in her desert, my sister has often resorted to being a con artist: you get what you want by telling people what they want to hear.

She learned all this, of course, in the bosom of our family. Our parents decided when Becky was very young that she didn't belong in an institution but with us. I believe that being raised with myself and a brother, both older, and one younger sister was good for Becky. I know being raised with Becky was good for me. Very early on, I had to learn to respect her intelligence, although it was very different from mine. I also came to respect her tenacity. When she was two years old, and learning to walk was still beyond her capabilities, she became adept at scooting around the house, always with a security blanket in hand. I also had to learn to discern the difference between what Becky was truly incapable of knowing and what she was simply trying to get by with. When she destroyed my first lipstick by writing with it on a brick wall, I took off after her. She yelled, “You can't hit me, I'm retarded.” She learned that she was wrong.

When I was in high school, I began to discover how much my sister and I had in common. We were both in difficult situations—I was a shy, ungainly newcomer at a prep school where many of the students had been together since kindergarten, and Becky had a particularly unsympathetic teacher. On coming home from school, she'd immediately go to her room, and play mindless rock music—“Monster Mash” is one that I recall—while she danced around the room (and sometimes on her bed). She talked to herself, incessantly and loudly. The family accepted all this as something Becky needed to do.

One day, as Becky carried on her usual “conversations,” with her teacher, with other girls in her class, with a boy who'd made fun of her, I was doing homework in the next room and realized that I, too, needed release from daily tensions, a way to daydream through the failed encounters and make them come out right. Usually I lost myself in reading or practicing the flute, but sometimes I listened to music—Joan Baez, the Beach Boys, Bob Dylan, Frank Sinatra, Verdi overtures—and imagined great careers for myself, great travels, great loves. I didn't have the nerve to stomp around my room and yell as my sister was doing, but our needs were the same.

We were both struggling with our otherness, although I did not know it then. Rejection comes to everyone, of course, but for those who are markedly different from their peers, it is a daily reminder of that difference. To most people, my sister and I didn't seem to have much in common, but I knew from that day on that we were remarkably alike. If nothing else, this insight helped me to survive the intensely competitive atmosphere of my prep school. I knew that getting a D on a math test was not the worst thing in the world. And when I got an A-plus in English, when my writing won praise from my teachers, I could put it in perspective. I knew there were other kinds of intelligence that were just as valuable, and needs that could not be satisfied in school.

Our parents are nearing eighty years of age and, while they often seem to have more energy as the years go by, the fact of their mortality looms large for their children. Becky, God bless her, is incapable of hiding her fears. We went for a walk one Christmas Eve not long ago, and she said, out of the blue: “I don't want Mom and Dad to die. I worry about what will happen to me.” “It scares me, too,” I replied. “But
everyone
is scared to think about their parents dying.” I'm not sure I convinced Becky on that score—she tends to think that she's alone in her suffering, and all too often in her life that has been the case. But I believe I did manage to reassure her that her brother and sisters would not abandon her.

As we walked through a light Manoa Valley rain—bright sunlight, prickles of moisture on bare skin—I remembered the two little girls who used to hide in their rooms every afternoon after school. How good it is to have those difficult years behind us. Becky will tell you that she's “slow.” I guess I've always been fast by comparison. What does it matter, on the borderline? We're middle-aged women now, and our parents are old. As for the future, human maturity being what it is, the slow process of the heart's awakening, I sometimes wonder if Becky is better equipped for it than I.

For nearly twenty years, my immediate family has lived as a three-generation commune in Honolulu. The arrangement is not uncommon there, because of the many Japanese- and Chinese-Americans, for whom such family structures are traditional. Many of my high school friends had grandparents living at home. For my family, the venture began as a way for everyone to have a place to live in the face of Hawaii's exorbitant housing prices, and at first it spanned four generations—my father's mother lived there for a time. But over the years, the family has found many reasons to value this way of life. “There's always somebody home at my house,” one niece told her kindergarten teacher, who had asked how she might reach family members during the day. (With two ministers, a financial planner, a jazz musician, and a law office manager, there's only one person who works on a nine-to-five schedule.) And one year, I was touched to hear my four-year-old nephew call out, “Anybody! Anybody!” when he was in some kind of jam and needed help. I was one of four family members who responded (three adults and a teenager), and I thought to myself, there are worse ways to learn about trust in this world.

My parents, while they were worried at first about becoming free baby-sitters, tell me that they can't imagine any other way to have grandchildren except on the intimate, daily basis they currently enjoy. The commune has seen two deaths—my grandmother Norris and aunt Kathleen—and four births, of my three nieces and one nephew. We recently sent our first fledgling out into the world; the oldest niece has graduated from high school and is adjusting to life in a college dorm. The family also has survived for years the Christmas visits of myself and my husband. We're forgiven for lingering well into January, putting off our return to winter, as I bake bread and my husband cooks a splendid Christmas dinner, including chocolate mousse from scratch. (One niece, on having her first taste at the age of three, asked why she couldn't have it
every
day.)

For many years, Christmas with my family meant going to hear my dad's Dixieland band play in the hotels in Waikiki, on Sunday afternoons and in the early evenings, five to nine P.M. the rest of the week. The band, and the music itself, had become a kind of ministry for my dad. He's a preacher's kid, after all. They always attracted a group of dancers, mostly middle-aged couples, and I loved to watch the complicated steps—the Balboa, the Charleston—done with such evident ease. On Christmas Eve, they'd get couples stopping in for a few dances before going to Mass, but for other people, my dad's version of “O Holy Night”—with the band's singer, Sydette, in a sexy silver lamé cocktail dress, and him on cello—was about all the religion they were going to get. And people took it seriously; the dance floor would clear, the cabaret would quiet down. It was so serious, in fact, that the song occasioned the only act of violence the band witnessed in over ten years at the club. One year a tipsy couple remained on the dance floor, moving suggestively, clinging to each other more than dancing, and a bodybuilder—one of those intensely muscular men who was unbelievably light on his feet when doing the fox trot with his wife—lost his temper. “This is religious music, dammit,” he said, picking up the couple and depositing them, more or less gently, on a sofa. Sydette and my dad kept on going.