by Anne Lamott
Finally, Sam and I came up with a solution: The first night, he put his sleeping bag and pillow right beside my bed, where our old dog, Sadie, could peer out at him tenderly. The second night we moved the sleeping bag three feet away, to the foot of my bed. The next night, he moved three more feet away. On the fourth night, he made it to the door. He slept there two nights before he was able to put his sleeping bag in the hall. I kept the door open.
“Are you okay?” I called to him in the dark.
“Yeah,” he said, in his small but manly voice. The short hallway to the living room took three nights to master. Then there were four nights in the living room, as he crept overland closer to his own room, with four three-foot scootches, one stall, and one night when he had to drag his sleeping bag back three feet. Sometimes he would call out, “Good night” again to hear my voice. There was one valiant worried night in the hall between my study and his room.
“See you tomorrow, Mom.”
“Love you, Mom! Doing okay out here, Mom.”
A few times he called for me to come sit with him. My nearness lifted him. Sometimes grace works like water wings when you feel you are sinking.
And then, at last, he spent his first night in his spooky new room, bravely, on the floor.
That’s me, trying to make any progress at all with family, in work, relationships, self-image: scootch, scootch, stall; scootch, stall, catastrophic reversal; bog, bog, scootch. I wish grace and healing were more abracadabra kinds of things; also, that delicate silver bells would ring to announce grace’s arrival. But no, it’s clog and slog and scootch, on the floor, in silence, in the dark.
I suppose that if you were snatched out of the mess, you’d miss the lesson; the lesson is the slog. I grew up thinking the lessons should be more like the von Trapp children: more marionettes, more dirndls and harmonies. But no: it’s slog, bog, scootch.
Until a few weeks ago, I had been scootching along pretty well for a while in size-ten pants, having lost a little weight, feeling I’d nailed the food and weight and body-image business, when all of a sudden my foot met air, and I was unmoored. Within minutes, I was on the edge of full-on food binge, assault eating. I couldn’t even remotely find my way back to the path that I’d relied on for the past fifteen years, the path of feeding myself when I am really hungry, trusting my own appetite, and staying at the same weight without too much painful obsession. I was starving, and nuts.
I prayed for God to help me find my way out, and what I heard was, “Call a friend.” But something edgier was speaking more loudly, and I pricked up my ears at the sound, even though an old man at church once told me never to give the devil a ride. Because if he likes the ride, pretty soon he’ll want to drive. It felt as if someone determined and famished had taken the wheel.
I tried doing what usually works when I’m lost: lifting my eyes off my feet and looking around for any clues that might help me get oriented, like the moss on trees, which supposedly tells you which way is north.
And I did discover an important clue—that whenever I want to either binge or diet, it means that there is some part of me that is deeply afraid. I had been worrying about Sam more than usual, and only partly because he had just begun to drive. I had been worried sick about Bush for five years now. There was a terrifying epidemic of breast cancer in my county; like so many others, I had friends who were trying to survive. And lately I’d fallen back into my old habit of acting like classroom helper to the world, doing too many favors for people, at the expense of writing, rest, and gyroscopic balance. I had been to a funeral. I had had a molar pulled. I had recently seen the skin on the back of my neck under fluorescent lights in a hotel mirror. I hadn’t seen it in years; now it looked like it was upholstered in a few inches of the Utah desert. Everything was too much.
All I could think to do was what every addict thinks of doing: kill the pain. I don’t smoke or drink anymore, am too worried to gamble, too guilty to shoplift, and I have always hated clothes-shopping. So what choices did that leave? I could go on a strict new diet, or conversely, I could stuff myself to the rafters with fats, sugars, and carcinogens.
Ding ding: we have a winner.
I got in the car and headed to Safeway.
It had been a while since I’d had a Safeway apple fritter, but all of a sudden, this was what the thing driving really wanted. A perfect fritter, in the classic tradition, a Frisbee-size patty of deep-fried dough, crisp and crunchy around the edges, doughy in the center, covered with a sugar glaze that makes me think of the Sherwin-Williams logo, the can of paint being poured over the globe. I used to eat fritters in mass quantities, as the Coneheads would have enjoyed them, back when I binged and purged. Then, in early sobriety, I’d snack on them sometimes, because your body craves a replacement for all the sugar you once got in alcohol. Since then, I’d buy one every so often, the way a regular healthy person does, because for no particular reason I’d want one. But this time I went to Safeway and bought all sorts of healthy decoy foods; then I slunk over to the bakery.
And they were out of fritters.
In the history of Safeway, it has never once run out of apple fritters. I understood instantly that God was doing for me what I could not do for myself. I did not turn to the doughnuts, the bear claws, the Danish; I was not hungry for those. I had not been attacked by random lust for just any old sugar-and-petroleum product.
I put all the decoy foods back, left the store, and drove to another market. On the way over, the person at the wheel said, It’s not that big a deal. Anyone would understand if you binged every so often.
I asked nicely, Now, who exactly is “anyone” again?
Anyone.
I knew this was true. Even Jesus would, although somehow I don’t see him ripping open a package of Hostess Ding Dongs for me. But thinking of him reminded me that food would not fill the holes or quiet the fear. Only love would; only my own imperfect love would.
I hate this.
I felt like the man in the joke who has fallen halfway down a cliff and is hanging on by a vine, who calls out for God to save him. God says, “Just let go, my son. I’ll catch you.” The man thinks about this for a minute and then yells out, “Is there anyone else up there?”
And there was: the thing that was driving. Instead of using my cell phone to call a trusted friend, I continued to the second store, where I bought three apple fritters. Also, a pint of Ben & Jerry’s New York Super Fudge Chunk and some Cheetos. Sam loves them, I would say, and it was true. And I got some jalapeño poppers, deep-fried and oozing melted cheese. Mint Milanos. Sara Lee chocolate-dipped cheesecake bites. My mother loves them, I would say; and she did, before she died.
After I paid, I got in the car and took my first bite of fritter, and it was good, the perfectly crisp sugar glaze on the outside, and I nibbled off all the toes of crispness that stuck out, like Kliban’s folksinging cat who loved to eat them mousies. I nibbled the outside inch of the first fritter until I hit the doughy center, and then I nibbled the tiny toes off the second one, and the outermost ring. And then, as I pulled into my driveway, the crisp little toes of the third.
The first spoonful of the New York Super Fudge Chunk was more than good: it was excellent. So were the next ten, the next twenty. By thirty, though, I couldn’t really taste much, so I took a break. Then I moved on, to the Mint Milanos. And they were good. Especially the top four cookies in their little paper panties; especially dipped in milk.
I was so lost. I couldn’t follow the bread crumbs back to the path of mental health, because I’d eaten them all. So I ended up eating junk, off and on, until bedtime. I can hardly describe how I felt when it was over: like a manatee alone in an aquarium.
It is hard to remember that you are a cherished spiritual being when you’re burping up apple fritters and Cheetos.
I brushed my teeth and stretched out on the bed, and prayed just to feel semi-okay again. I initially felt shame at praying for such a stupid thing, when people all over and in my own
life are struggling to survive the end of their worlds. Big surprise: nothing happened. I was in a traffic jam of thoughts. My pastor, Veronica, says that believing isn’t the hard part; waiting on God is. So I stuck with it and prayed impatiently for patience, and to stop feeling disgusted by myself, and to believe for a few moments that God, just a bit busy with other suffering in the world, actually cared about one menopausal white woman on a binge.
Back in bed, I remembered an old sermon of Veronica’s in which she said that when we are with other people, they should be able to see Jesus’ love in our faces, his tender-compassion in our hands. Sometimes I think that Jesus watches my neurotic struggles, and shakes his head and grips his forehead and starts tossing back mojitos. The bad driver certainly whispers this to me. But this time, I decided to fake it and pretend that I had believed what Veronica said, and respond to myself as gently as I would to you; this is all I am ever really hungry for. I got myself some cool water, a pair of soft socks: scootch, scootch. Then waves of nausea and self-loathing, backtrack, bog. I thought of all the times my friends have given off light in the darkness, by their generosity, by trying to help in the world, by simply making it through the hard patches with a little dignity, so that other people could see that this could be done. So I was simply kind to myself, and I scootched. I burped my terrible Cyclops burps, which brought such relief that I finally remembered who I was: one of the sometimes miserable all-of-us. I was a soul, not a faulty digestive system. Not a bad neck; not my ruckles and wrinkles and pouches. A woman with a few small, unresolved issues.
When I remembered that, I was finally able to call a couple of friends.
I told them that I was lost, and fat, and had once again, in trying to give myself comfort, turned to the wrong thing. That I’d been bingeing all day.
Oh, honey, they both said. Oh, bubbie. How can we help you?
Telling helped a little. It felt as if maybe the worst was over. “But why didn’t my faith protect me?” I asked one friend.
“It did,” my friend pointed out. “You found your way out of danger—and disgust—through humility, and even confession—to the love of safe people. Now you are safe again.”
This was true. I had been in such a toxic pond. But I wanted my faith to be an edifice that I could run to. Strong, clean, pure. A mighty fortress is our God? Haha. Thanks for sharing.
“You’re a hero to me,” my friend continued. “You struggled through something really miserable. You told the truth, when it’s so tempting to cover up and disguise it. You said, ‘This is the mess of my life, and I need help.’ And now you are being helped.”
Grace arrived, like the big, loopy stitches with which a grandmotherly stranger might baste your hem temporarily. When I woke the next morning, I felt more kindly toward myself. I’ve been pretty relaxed about food—mostly—for the last few weeks. The spirit lifted me and now it holds on lightly, like my father’s hands around my ankles when I used to ride on his shoulders. In one of my earliest memories, I see myself on Halloween, four years old. My older brother is up ahead with his kindergarten friends, dressed as a hobo with a burnt-cork mustache. My father and I are walking past the school where I will start a year later. I can see the blacktop of the playground illuminated by a streetlight. My father is holding on to my mask. I am too afraid to wear it. I am afraid of everything at that age—the dark, my dreams, sleeping alone, snakes. And I hate masks, because youcan’t breathe right, or see very well through the eyeholes—I must have still had my wits about me. But I love my silky costume. I remember picking it out all by myself, for the first time ever, at the five-and-dime. It is black with a white oval on the chest. I am a panda. We walk along on the scariest night of all, one of my father’s hands holding my mask, one holding me lightly through the darkness.
Dear Old Friend
We turn toward love like sunflowers to the sun, and then the human parts kick in. This seems to me the only real problem, the human parts—the body, for instance, and the mind. Also, the knowledge that every person you’ve loved will die—many badly, and too young—doesn’t really help things. My friend Marianne once said that Jesus has everything we have, but he doesn’t have all the other stuff, too. And the other stuff leaves you shaking your sunflower head your whole life through.
I got a message to call my aunt Gertrud last week. She is not my blood aunt; she and her husband, Rex, were my parents’ best friends, our two families like one. She became Sam’s grandmother one month after conception: neither of her children decided to have kids. I remind her whenever she nags me about something that I ruined my figure to give her a grandson.
She and I stick together.
Her skin is still beautiful, soft, brown, and rosy. It is like very old deerskin gloves. When she was younger, she had silky chestnut hair, very European, but she let it go gray and then radiant moon-white. She was long-legged and looked great in shorts and well-worn hiking boots. Our families spent many weekends together, on Mount Tamalpais, at Palomarin, on the Bear Valley trail at Point Reyes. She had the total lack of self-pity of many people who have survived war, and high expectations that everyone would proceed without complaint or excess. She was not patient with children who lagged behind on the path; she brought us sandwiches on black bread, and dry, perforated raisin bars to eat by streams and rivers. My father, taking pity on us, brought Cokes and grape sodas, and chubs of salami.
Gertrud was also an expert seamstress with great style and taste. She was sort of—what is the word?—cheap, but she accessorized perfectly, at Monkey Wards and Cost Plus. She sewed some things for me over the years, especially as I neared adolescence, so thin that nothing from stores could do justice to my peculiar beauty. She made me two tennis dresses when I was twelve, sky-blue grosgrain trim on one, embroidered cloth daisies on the other; my eighth-grade graduation dress, of periwinkle blue; a hippie shift when I was fourteen, out of an Indian bedspread from Cost Plus; a bigger one when I suddenly filled out, and then some.
My mother and Gertrud raised their kids together, played tennis at the club, fought for left-wing causes, shared a love for cooking and reading, and subscribed to The Nation and The New Yorker. Our families were at each other’s houses all the time. My father and Rex sailed on Rex’s boat many weekends, sometimes up the San Joaquin Delta for a whole week. Gertrud was a server, manic and industrious. My mother was a mad little English duchess; people waited on her, in the town where we lived, and then in Hawaii, where she moved when she and my father divorced. Gertrud saved; my mother charged. My mother moved back home broke, ill with diabetes and then early Alzheimer’s. Gertrud hovered over her, clucking, mending, fixing things, or trying to.
After surviving breast cancer twice, Gertrud was the one who got dealt the cards to be the survivor, the one who got to see how things came out. One pays an exorbitant price for that honor. A few years ago, my mother died, devastatingly. Five years before that, Gertrud’s husband had died of cancer, and twenty years before that, my father. They were the people with whom she had planned to grow old.
Our families are still close, and I am particularly devoted to her. This does not preclude my making a fist at her in public or over meals when she is aggressively stubborn. “That’s enough out of you, old woman,” I thunder, and she shakes utensils in my direction, like a conductor.
Until two years ago, Gertrud was still hiking in the mountains with me and with her other friends, and when you watched her, you could see how much ground she had lost. Even as she had to steady herself with a walking stick while she pointed out alpine wild flowers—crabbing that you should know their names by now—you thought, “Please let me look like this at eighty.” Then, when you saw her in the convalescent home, frail, pale, defeated, after botched surgery to replace her hip, you thought, “Please don’t let me live this long. Please, Jesus: shoot me.” But then she resurrected. She came home and set her life in order. She has to rest more than before, but she still lives alone and drives. She keeps up her garden, and she makes u
s cheesecake for our birthdays. She looks iconic now, shrunken-apple-dollish, small as a child, terribly thin, yet stylish and beautiful.
When her daughter called from Oregon last week, and left me a message that Gertrud was depressed about selling her house, and would I please give her a call, I got on the phone immediately.
I hadn’t even known she was definitely selling the house. The last I’d heard, she was selling just a parcel of land below the house her husband had built. This was where she had always wanted to die, in this falling-down house where, from the deck, you can see all of San Francisco Bay, Angel Island, Alcatraz, the entire span of the Golden Gate Bridge, the lights of San Francisco, the sailboats, the ferries. Once you could see the railroad yard from it, and the trains, and you could walk a hundred yards to the trestle that took you above the yard to Main Street, until it was all torn down.
For the past few years, Gertrud had spoken about how one day she might need to leave, for some sort of assisted-living apartment, but this was the first I’d heard of her actually selling. We’d all been supportive of her keeping the house forever, but inside we’d hoped that she’d have a nice cerebral accident before she had to move—a nice, sudden Hallmark death while dozing.
I called and asked her what was happening. She was distraught. She was going up to San Rafael at five to sign the papers selling both her house and the parcel of land. The realtor handling the transaction was one of Rex’s old sailing buddies, and the buyer, the grown son of childhood friends of hers from Germany. “I can’t talk to you or anyone now,” she told me.
“At least let me drive you there tonight,” I begged.
“No. This is something I need to do myself. Please pray for me.” Now, this scared me seriously, as Gertrud is a confirmed atheist. Her deep spirituality is absolutely antireligious, rooted entirely in Nature and caring for people. She has made her daily rounds all the years I’ve known her, taking food and comfort to sick friends. She was the local head of UNICEF forever.
