by Anne Lamott
A month later, Joanne called and asked if I could come to their house the following night. Their best family friend would be with us. I should come around dinnertime. They would have a simple meal for us; there would be toast, tea, and pudding for Mel.
He was in the kitchen when I arrived, very thin and weak, but still definitely Mel. Their friend was there, teary, solemn, and amiable. Joanne had prepared soup for us, with bread and cheese. For the next couple of hours, Mel asked us to put certain CDs on the stereo—Bach, Dylan, Leontyne Price. We shared our favorite stories. He was absolutely clear as a bell, brilliant as ever. We all cried a little, but not at the same time. The air smelled faintly of honey and laundry, and illness.
I remember coming upon a cat once, in tall grass on a hillside near a fire road. It was barely alive. Its eyes were open, and I had to bend in close to see that it was still breathing. I almost picked it up and took it to my vet, but my instincts told me to leave it, that it would be frightening for it to leave the soft grass on which it lay, and the smells of the sun and its own body in the weeds.
Joanne and their friend had wine. Mel had a scotch. We ate in the kitchen. At about eight, Mel looked at Joanne and said he was ready.
The lighting was soft in the bedroom. He went into the bathroom, changed into worn, light blue pajamas, and got into bed, wasted, sad, sweet, and comfortable. The friend and I stood around, or sat nearby. Joanne stretched out on her side of the bed.
Later I went into the kitchen and crushed the pills with a mortar and pestle, and stirred them into applesauce in a tiny Asian bowl.
Mel grimaced when I fed it to him, like a child swallowing medicine. He thanked us, told us how much he had loved his life, and how he wished he could live with us forever. But every person owes God a death, he said, paraphrasing Shakespeare, and everyone should be as lucky as he.
He told us about the presents he had left for each of us. Mine was a framed eight-by-ten-inch photograph of Abraham Lincoln that Mel had kept on the wall in his study, a reproduction of the last picture of Lincoln taken before he was assassinated. There was a crack running across his forehead, from a flaw in the ancient plate. Mel wanted me to be guided in my work by the depth of sorrow and compassion in Lincoln’s eyes.
After a while, Mel looked around, half smiled, and fell asleep. The three of us got up to stretch, to get wine or water, to change CDs. Mel breathed so quietly, for so long, that when he finally stopped, we all strained to hear the sound.
The Born
Everything was going swimmingly on the panel. The subject was politics and faith, and I was onstage with two clergymen with progressive spiritual leanings, and a moderator who was liberal and Catholic. We were having a discussion before an audience of 1,300 people in Washington, D.C., about many of the social justice topics on which we agree; we were discussing the immorality of the federal budget, the wrongness of the president’s war in Iraq…Then an older man came to the mike and raised the issue of abortion, and people just lost their minds.
Or at any rate, I did.
Maybe it was the way in which the man couched his question, which was about how we should reconcile our progressive stance on peace and justice with the “murder of a million babies every year in America.”
The man who asked the question was soft-spoken, neatly and casually dressed. First Richard, the Franciscan priest, answered that this was indeed a painful issue, but that it was not the only “pro-life” matter with which progressives—including Catholics—should concern themselves during elections. There were also the “pro-life” matters of capital punishment and the war in Iraq, poverty and HIV. Then Jim, the Evangelical minister, spoke about the need to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies, and the need to defuse abortion as a political issue, by welcoming pro-choice and pro-life supporters to the discussion with equal respect for their positions. He spoke cautiously about how “morally ambiguous” the question was.
I sat there frozen. The moderator turned to me and asked if I would like to respond.
I did: I wanted to respond by pushing over the table.
Instead, I shook my head. I love and respect the Franciscan and the Evangelical, and agree with them ninety-plus percent of the time. So I did not say anything at first.
When I was asked another question, though, I paused. There was a loud buzzing in my head, the voice of reason saying, “You have the right to remain silent,” and the voice of my conscience, insistent. I wanted to express calmly and eloquently, that people who are pro-choice understand that there are two lives involved in an abortion—one born (the pregnant woman) and one not (the fetus)—and that the born person must be allowed to decide what is right: whether or not to bring a pregnancy to term and launch another life into circulation.
I also wanted to wave a gun around, to show what a real murder looks like. This tipped me off that I should hold my tongue until further notice. And I tried.
But then I announced that I needed to speak out on behalf of the many women present, including myself, who had had abortions, and the women whose daughters might need one in the not-too-distant future—people who must know that teenage girls will have abortions, whether in clinics or dirty back rooms. Women whose lives had been righted and redeemed by Roe v. Wade. My answer was met with some applause, but mostly a shocked silence.
Pall is a good word. It did not feel good to be the cause of that pall. I knew what I was supposed to have said, as a progressive Christian: that it’s all very complicated and painful, and that Jim was right in saying that the abortion rate in the country was way too high for a caring and compassionate society.
But I did the only thing I could think to do: plunge on and tell my truth. I said that this was the most intimate decision a woman could make, and she made it alone, in her deepest heart, though sometimes with the man by whom she was pregnant, with her dearest friends, or with her doctor—but without the personal opinion of, say, Tom DeLay or Karl Rove. I said that I could not believe that men committed to equality and civil rights were still challenging the basic rights of women. I thought about the photo op where President Bush had signed legislation limiting abortion rights, surrounded by nine self-righteous white married males, who had forced God knows how many girlfriends into doing God knows what. I thought of Bush’s public appearance with children born from frozen embryos, whom some people call “snowflake babies,” and of the embryos themselves, which he called the youngest and most vulnerable Americans.
And somehow, as I was speaking, I got louder and maybe more emphatic than I actually feel, and said that it was not a morally ambiguous issue for me at all. I said that fetuses were not babies yet; that there was actually a difference between pro-choice people, like me, and Klaus Barbie.
Then I said that a woman’s right to choose was nobody else’s goddamn business.
This got their attention.
A cloud of misery fell over the room, and the stage. At last Jim said something unifying enough for us to proceed—that liberals must not treat with contempt and exclusion people who hold opposing opinions on abortion, partly because it was tough material, and partly because we would never win another election.
Not until the reception afterward did I realize part of my problem—no one had told me that the crowd was made up largely of Catholics. I had flown in at dawn on a redeye, and in my exhaustion and hibernation had somehow missed this one tiny bit of information. I was mortified: I had to eat several fistfuls of M&M’s just to calm down.
Then I asked myself: Would I, should I, have given a calmer answer? Wouldn’t it have been more useful, and harder to dismiss me, if I had sounded more reasonable, less spewy?
I might have presented my position less stridently, less divisively. But the questioner’s use of the words “murder” and “babies” had put me on the defensive. Plus, I was—I am—so confused about why we still have to argue with patriarchal sentimentality about minuscule zygotes, when real, live, already born women, many of them desperately poor, get such sho
rt shrift from the government now in power.
Most women like me would much rather use our time and energy fighting to make the world safe and just and fair for the children we do have and do love, not to mention the children of New Orleans and Darfur. I am tired and menopausal and would like for the most part to be left alone: I have had my abortions, and I have had a child.
But as a Christian and a feminist, the most important message I can carry and fight for is the sacredness of each human life, and reproductive rights for all women are a crucial part of that. It is a moral necessity that we not be forced to bring children into the world for whom we cannot be responsible and adoring and present. We must not inflict life on children who will be resented; we must not inflict unwanted children on society.
During the reception, an old woman came up to me and said, “If you hadn’t spoken out, I would have spit,” and then raised her fist in the power salute. We huddled for a while, and ate M&M’s to give us strength. It was a communion for those of us who continue to believe that civil rights and equality and even common sense may somehow be sovereign one day.
Forgivishness
It’s hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head.
—SALLY KEMPTON
as quoted in Esquire magazine, 1970
Nudges
If my heart were a garden, it would be in bloom with roses and wrinkly Indian poppies and wild flowers. There would be two unmarked tracts of scorched earth, and scattered headstones covered with weeds and ivy and moss, a functioning compost pile, great tangles of blackberry bushes, and some piles of trash I’ve meant to haul away for years.
I used to create a lot more garbage, and then I got sober twenty years ago. Now I try to clean as I go, because sober people taught me that a willingness to help clean up the mess we’ve made is a crucial part of adult living; that our scary, selfish, damaging behavior litters the planet. I confess that in my emotional trash heap are some rusty old cans from ten and twelve years ago, when several close friendships broke up irretrievably.
Garbage hardens your heart.
My friend Father Tom says that when we appear before God, God will say, “I love you very much. I forgive you all your crap. Now go clean up your mess, and then come into heaven, because lunch is waiting.” I don’t want to miss lunch the day they serve Blum’s coffee crunch cake, so I finally got to that one pile not long ago.
Just after I got sober, I met a wonderful couple, funny, charming intellectuals. They were spiritual in the same way I was and am, which is to say devout, with a sometimes bad attitude, a black sense of humor, and tendencies toward gossip and character assassination. We hit it off instantly.
They lived in the South, but they both occasionally taught at writers’ conferences in California, and I saw them whenever they were in town. Our sons were born a month apart, and two years later, we lost longtime best friends to cancer. We saw each other through.
I was always a little jealous: they had met and married during their senior year in college, where they slipped away for long weekends in bed, drinking scotch and reading Anna Karenina out loud. This was almost more than I could bear—to have read Tolstoy out loud to each other. In bed!
Hemingway I could have handled, or beer. But Tolstoy? And scotch?
Also, they had money. They both worked at universities, and help from their families had bought them a beautiful home with a huge backyard.
I was a renter. A year before she died, my best friend described my house politely as a rattrap, which it was. But it was definitely one of your nicer rattraps, as these things go, with shade trees and a huge sunlit kitchen.
One summer, when our sons were nearly four, the couple invited Sam and me to stay with them at a rental house on the Gulf Coast. They sent us tickets: I did not have any money. The man had gotten a big advance for his second novel, and a vacation at the shore was a dream come true.
We had one of those rare vacations that are as casual as a kitchen: long days in the sand with our sons, swimming, watching sunsets, making meals. We took turns reading the boys to sleep. We were all kind of in love, except for, well, the arithmetic—the two of them, the one of me.
Then, that fall, I noticed during our phone calls that the man was talking about his money perhaps a little more frequently than was strictly necessary. I was barely making ends meet. Besides his big advance, he had a movie deal in the works. He and his wife were thinking of buying a summer house, near the one where we had vacationed. I felt wormy whenever the topic came up. I said all the right things, in my best girl voice, which I like to think drowns out the voice of the snake inside me.
I became the Dickensian orphan, gripping the window, peering in at the happy couple in their big house. I felt so less-than, and so jealous.
At the same time, I wanted to say, “Wouldn’t it make more sense for you to discuss purchasing a second home with another home owner? Instead of a rattrap-renting single mother?”
Jealousy always has been my cross, the weakness and woundedness in me that has most often caused me to feel ugly and unlovable, like the Bad Seed. I’ve had many years of recovery and therapy, years filled with intimate and devoted friendships, yet I still struggle. I know that when someone gets a big slice of pie, it doesn’t mean there’s less for me. In fact, I know that there isn’t even a pie, that there’s plenty to go around, enough food and love and air.
But I don’t believe it for a second.
I secretly believe there’s a pie. I will go to my grave brandishing a fork.
When I was young, I used to be so jealous of other girls that it crippled me. I was a good girl, but underneath that plank of sweetness, the worms lived in the moist earth. I didn’t know other people were just like me, beautiful and awful, kind and insane. Like all smart kids, I knew where the tunnels and the food were, under that plank, so mostly I did okay, unless something lifted the plank, and then you would see me lying exposed in the light.
When I was ten, I was so jealous of my pretty tennis partner that during a sleepover at her house, after she’d gone to bed, I hid in her closet and splashed water on her catgut racket strings, the best and most expensive kind (my family could afford only nylon), because moisture made the catgut fray.
I grew up and developed some of the skills and wisdom that life gives us. I learned to take myself less seriously, and this helped me panic less. I acquired a little more depth, after seeing enough of life’s fluctuations to know that you come through. And I still get jealous.
One day, thirty years after I wet those tennis strings, my writer friend called me to say that he and his wife had bought their summer house. “You’ll love it,” he told me. “You’ve got to come out this summer. We’ll send you tickets. Please say you’ll come.”
I didn’t want to go, because I sort of hated him, and me, and wanted to splash water on his strings, or stab one of us in the neck with the pie fork.
“That is so sweet of you, honey,” I said. “That’s great!” What I meant was: Why do you keep mentioning your multiple houses to me, you asshole?
I couldn’t help noticing that I had crossed a line.
“They can come!” he called to his wife, and then said to me, “Can we send you guys tickets for early June?” He asked me if I had any questions.
I did. I wanted to ask, casually, “Do you think the huge, fat larval flying things in my kitchen are termites?” I dug my fingernails into my hairline to calm myself, like a teenage cutter without the courage of her convictions.
I do not know why I thought it made sense to go, in my condition at the time. My friend Tom says that “Why?” is not a useful question.
The question I asked myself was: “How bad could one trip be?” This is what I would like on my tombstone. The answer this time was: From the first morning after they picked us up at the airport until the last, miserable morning, it felt like junior high. With the strain of feeling like the country cousin, the poor relation, I felt as if I were having a nervous breakdown. I fe
lt jealous, alone, defensive. Everything the couple said about the new house, the impending movie deal, and their marriage set me on edge. I flinched, cringed, skulked, and lied in my good-girl voice. I hid in my room, weeping, and rang up a $400 phone bill talking to my therapist in California.
I’m not going to excuse my behavior with examples of what they said that triggered me. Well, maybe just one:
Some friends of theirs came out for a picnic on the beach at sunset, a handsome couple with adorable children. It was the third day, and I had already started to go bad, like a soft cheese.
My hostess had had intestinal distress all day and could manage only saltines and ginger ale on the beach. So I ate for two, out of general unhappiness. When Sam insolently tossed his sandwich into the sand, I overreacted, grabbed his arm too tightly, and made him cry. The other children huddled with their parents. I rushed to apologize and comfort Sam, but it was too late. Everyone could see who I was—the Bad Seed in the sequel, Motherhood. And then, as if I were an eight-year-old, I was sent to my room.
My host suggested firmly that I go inside and collect myself.
And the most stunning part of the story is that I did.
I went to my room, on the second floor, and left a message for my therapist, who was not in. I stared out the window, the girl who used to gaze miserably down at the ground from her dentist’s fourteenth-floor office in San Francisco, wanting to jump. One of my earliest memories is going with my mother and older brother into San Francisco on the Greyhound to see our dentist. I wear a camel’s-hair coat and short white gloves; my brother wears slacks and a clip-on bow tie. If we are both good, we will go to Blum’s for coffee crunch cake when we are done. I am alone in the dentist’s waiting room, drawn as if by a magnet to the window, seeing myself unlock the window and climb out, seeing myself fall onto the pedestrians on Sutter. Instead I run to the coffee table and hurl myself into Highlights for Children, lost and terrified, searching the full-page drawing of a tree for all fifteen objects hidden within, a toucan, a bicycle, a shoe.
