by Anne Lamott
When my therapist called back, she reminded me that my hosts were not the problem: if you’ve got a problem, you usually have to go look in the mirror. They had been caught up in my childhood drama; they were in my life to help me heal something old. She had me get myself a cup of tea and wrap myself in a shawl. My mental fever broke. I made a fire in the fireplace downstairs. When everyone trooped in from the beach, Sam came over to cuddle with me, and I hung my head and made an apology to everyone. The couple and their guests were kind and understanding. We sat by the fire, warming ourselves. Then my hostess, holding her stomach and laughing prettily, said, “I just don’t think I have ever felt so thin and so rich.”
We all laughed—what a witty thing to say! After a while, we all went to bed, and first thing in the morning, I sneaked into town, found a pay phone, and changed our return reservation to the next day.
When I told the couple this later in the day, they were angry: I was wrecking the vacation, I was being secretive and controlling—which was and is true, and which probably ever more shall be.
Sam and I left the next day, and I have not seen the couple since.
We spoke about two weeks later. They were still upset about my behavior. I apologized and said I’d try to make amends, as soon as I could.
It has taken me only twelve years.
I don’t know why all of a sudden I began to feel haunted by the experience, the ruined friendship, this one particular garbage heap. But I kept getting the Holy Spirit nudge, and the other day I sat down and wrote them a letter, and tried to clean up my mess.
I said that I hated what had happened, and my part in it, and that it had made my heart ache over the years. I did not explain or justify my triggers—the jealousy, especially, because trigger implies weapons, weapons imply aim, aim implies combat, combat implies engagement. All I wanted was to feel less engaged, less stuck: I wanted to let it go, which is so not my strong suit, any more than forgiveness is. I wanted to be a person of peace, who diminishes hurt in the world, instead of perpetrating it.
But I felt scared. Will they write back, and what will they write, and what if they don’t? What if they’re reading my letter out loud and snickering, or reading it to their friends from the picnic, and they’re all comparing notes on how crazy I am? Maybe they forgive me, maybe they don’t. But I finally, finally forgive me; sort of–ish. No curtain of light or soft angel voices, but the understanding that forgiving myself makes it possible to forgive them, too. Maybe this is grace, or simply the passage of time. Whatever you want to call this, I’ll take it. I paid through the nose for this one.
All I know is, I was able to pick up a pen. I said it, I sent it, and the best I could do, surprisingly, seems to be enough. As of this writing, months later, they have not written back, but I’m no longer crouched over the problem, looking furtively over my shoulder. I’m lurching forward in my life again, and it feels as if someone finally cracked open a window that had been jammed.
The Carpet Guy
I was driving along one day not too long ago when I passed a small carpet store nestled between several taller commercial buildings. It had been sandwiched there forever; you’d expect to find it gone someday, like a missing tooth. In front was the perfect carpet remnant for our children’s room at church, rolled up and leaning against a fence. It was sea-foam green, and only fifty dollars. I pulled over, picked up the rug, walked into the store, and gave the man behind the desk fifty dollars in cash.
“This is perfect for our nursery school at church,” I enthused. He was middle-aged, plain, and so quiet that at first I thought he might be mute. He gave me a receipt, and we said good-bye.
That Sunday, I dropped the rolled-up carpet in the room where the little kids meet. One of the mothers called me the next day. She said that when they had unrolled the carpet, they found a moldy spot in the middle, and so she returned it to the carpet guy.
“Did you get our money back?”
“No, his bookkeeper wasn’t there. But he’ll have the money later today. Can you pick it up? And bring your receipt.”
I stopped by the store the following day. “Hi,” I said to the man. “I’m from the church. We had to return a rug, and the woman who dropped it off said you would reimburse me.”
There was a moment’s pause. “Someone already picked up the money.”
“That’s not possible,” I explained. “No one else would have picked it up.”
I fished my receipt from my purse, and held it out to him. He studied it, nodded. “Someone picked up the money. An hour ago.”
“But no one else would have picked it up.”
We both held out our palms, the universal sign of being amiably perplexed.
I was not particularly alarmed at this point. There had been a simple misunderstanding, I felt, and we could clear it up. If you are sincere and rational, and trust in goodness enough, everything sorts itself out.
I went to a pay phone and called the woman who had returned the rug. “Did you stop by and pick up the money from the carpet guy?” I asked.
“No, I thought you were going to.”
I went back to the store. The man was finishing up some business with another customer, so I waited. This time I noticed how crummy the place was. Carpets were rolled up by the dozens, stacked to the ceiling like timber, and the lights were dim; this was a place where something bad was going down, it seemed.
When the other customer left, I threw my hands up with a faint maternal gesture of displeasure. “No one else picked up the money,” I said.
“Yes,” the man answered. “An hour ago.” He tapped his ledger; it was soiled, and filled with tiny words and numbers. A pencil notation in the margin read $50.00. He tapped it. “Fifty dollars.”
“Look,” I said, now in my sternest Sunday-schoolteacher voice. “I don’t want to make trouble. But no one picked up the money. And I’d like it. Now.”
He tapped the $50.00 again.
“That doesn’t mean anything,” I said. “I’m from a Sunday school. This is for little children.” For good measure I added, “With asthma.”
He tapped the ledger yet again, then waved me away, like a servant, or a bee. This wasn’t fair! I wanted to wail, wounded and self-righteous.
“Hey,” I said. “Buddy.” I had my hands on my hips, and I glared. I was as furious as I can ever remember being, thinking about the innocent little children at our Sunday school, the asthmatic little children, scampering about on the mold, seizing up. Sunday school made me remember to pray—Help! Help!
I got my answer: Start behaving well, and you will feel better. This is what Jesus would want, and he had to be there in the rug store. Maybe he was being embarrassed to tears, like when your kid has a tantrum in public. I stared off at the log-pile of rugs. I was trembling; you could have cracked walnuts with my self-righteousness. Jesus doesn’t hold this against a person. His message is that we’re all sort of nuts and suspicious and petty and full of crazy hungers, and everything feels awful a lot of the time, but even so—one’s behavior needs to be better. One needs to be decent. So I would try.
“We’ve got a problem,” I said.
He rolled his eyes. See—that’s where decency will get you, I thought. I tried another tack: “Do you want me to call the police? Huh? How about that?”
He waved me away again. The door to the most primitive place inside me opened, where the betrayed child lives, terrified, wounded, murderous. On top of everything, I felt a deep, familiar self-loathing.
As we glared at each other, I found it kind of heady, like a drug. But I stormed home and called a man who went to my church, Sam’s Big Brother, Brian. Although he is not formally a member of Big Brothers, he has been helping me raise Sam since before he was born; he’s Sam’s forty-five-year-old brother. He does not look the part of an enforcer—he is owlish and sturdy and enthusiastically neutral, positive and well behaved. Not at all a hired-assassin type. However, he was coming by to see Sam that night. So there was that.
I told him the whole story over the phone.
He was flabbergasted. “How about if I call him?” he volunteered. “And I’ll call you right back.”
He didn’t call for half an hour, and when he did, he had been reduced to the same contagious craziness I had been in. “I told him I hoped I wouldn’t have to come down there after work. But he hung up on me twice.”
“So how did you leave it?”
“I said I’m stopping by after work today, at five. And he better have it.”
I went for a walk: that is what Jesus always did. He gave crazy people some space. He would say, “Go ahead. You’re a mess. Go be a mess. Work it out. We’ll talk again.”
I was still a mess when Brian arrived at our house at five-thirty.
“God, I wanted to kill the guy!” he reported. “He kept saying someone else had picked up the money and pointing to his ledger.”
“Did you get the money?”
“No—but he promised he’ll have it tomorrow. His bookkeeper wasn’t there.”
I put my head in my hands. First the man had said someone had already picked it up. Now we were back to pretending he had a bookkeeper.
The next morning I stopped by the rug store again. I had said my prayers. I had asked to be respectful and not lose my mind. A balding man with a long ponytail was sitting with the carpet guy at his desk, both of them smoking.
“Hi,” I said, nicely, to the carpet guy. “My friend Brian said you would have the money if I stopped by today.”
He looked at me and smirked. Then he turned to his friend and twirled his finger near his ear, the universal sign for loco. This cracked his friend up.
I fumed, twisting in the wind. “Where the fuck is my money?” I demanded.
“It has been taken care of,” the man told his friend, who nodded.
And I fell right past my fixation with being right, into the dark, swampy underside of human discourse. I found a weird nourishment in our exchange. I was very focused. I saw myself choking the man with my bare hands, but instead, desperate, I grabbed his phone off the desk. And in the most menacing way possible, I started dialing.
I called Brian at his office, while brandishing the phone like a grenade.
“He won’t give me the money,” I told Brian, not taking my eyes off the man.
“Put him on the line,” said Brian.
I handed the man the phone. He held it to his ear. Then I heard a voice from the other end that sounded like Tony Soprano. But it was dear churchgoing Brian, saying, “Don’t make me come down there again! You are doomed if I have to come down there again! Give her the goddamn money!”
The man shook his head and sneered. “Fifty dollars,” he said ruefully, like, I wouldn’t normally put up with this shit unless it was way more than fifty dollars. He opened his top drawer and took out a checkbook. “Fifty dollars,” he said in a comical voice, as if he were horsing around for a child as he wrote.
He wrote a check for fifty dollars, leaving the “Pay to the order of” blank, handed it to me.
“Thank you,” I said grimly.
I headed for the bank, which is a couple of blocks away. I filled in my name, endorsed the check, and handed it to the teller. A moment later, she said, “Oh. I’m sorry. There are insufficient funds.”
I finally laughed, into my chest, quietly. “It’s okay,” I said. I took the check and turned away. If you had seen me, you’d have thought she had just given me a hundred dollars for being so nice about the whole thing.
I sat outside the bank for a while. Look, I said to God, it’s to You, pal. You copy that? Then I sat in the sun and kept starting to laugh. I felt deep inside that I’d gotten it, though I could not quite have said what I’d gotten. I didn’t get the delicious taste of release I’d been expecting, when a wrong has been righted, but I got something better, a kind of miracle: I stopped hating myself. The carpet guy had cheated me, but he was also an innocent bystander in a very old story: he was the ledger inside me of every time I’d been humiliated and stiffed.
Well, I said to God, the Eagle has landed. Now what am I supposed to do? After a few minutes, I knew: I got the noodge in my heart to go to the Safeway near the rug store and buy a bouquet of daisies for the carpet man. One has a moral and a spiritual obligation to clean up one’s side of the street. I wrote him a note: “Here is your check back. I am very sorry for the way I behaved. Anne.”
The carpet store was locked, but the dim lights were on. I knocked softly. When no one opened the door, I tied the daisies to the doorknob with the metal twist-tie that held them, and dropped the check and my note through the mail slot. Maybe this was what Ecclesiastes meant about casting your bread upon the water; it’s so little, usually only crumbs, but how nourishing the casting is.
And then I went back home.
I called the carpet store from my kitchen at five, for no reason. I recognized the man’s voice when he answered.
“Hi,” I said. “This is Anne Lamott.” There was a silence, loud and dark.
“I got your letter,” he said. “That was a decent thing.” And just as I began to savor his words, he added, “But you behaved badly!”
I had behaved badly? It all started up in me again, but this time it didn’t take over, because something got there first. You want to know how big God’s love is? The answer is: It’s very big. It’s bigger than you’re comfortable with.
“Yes, I know,” I said. It was true and it was all confusing.
We’re invited more deeply into this mystery on a daily basis, to be here as one-of; a mess like everyone else, and not in charge. That’s why we hate it.
There was another silence, and then we said good night at almost the same time.
Dandelions
I don’t hate anyone right now, not even George W. Bush. This may seem an impossibility, but it is true, and indicates the presence of grace, or dementia, or both. While I still oppose every decision he makes and am appalled at his general level of malfunction, I no longer want to hurt him. I’d like to see him be run out of office, but as I’ve been making friends with the hatred and cruelty in me, my heart has softened slightly, as if treated with a meat tenderizer. Not hating Bush has brought with it several astonishing gifts. One is that the less I am consumed by him, the more I can be consumed by, well, myself, and those things I love about life. I seem to hang on to my hates because they help take my mind off the cracked reflection in the mirror. Another gift is that I can model genuine forgiveness toward Sam, and demonstrate that in this cold, scary world, whenever possible, we pick up after ourselves and turn up the flame of our lanterns just a smidge. Learning to unhate Bush has also given me the tools to learn to forgive several other people, including most recently the husband of one of my best friends.
Nell’s husband has short-man syndrome. Eddie is one of those deadly dull people who is so upbeat that I suspect he would subconsciously like to go through the neighborhood, house by house, with a machine gun. He seems oblivious of the effect that his long, rambling monologues have on people—he doesn’t notice the blank faces, the fingers flexing like those of people buried alive, the ocular tics. You could write down his words verbatim, show them to him, and he’d probably say, “I know someone just like that!” Then he’d tell you about that person until your teeth hurt. His hostage-taking is passive-aggressive, and is only one reason I dislike him. A good marriage is supposed to be one where each spouse secretly thinks he or she got the better deal; but Eddie—and this is another reason I dislike him—thinks Nell got the better deal, because she got him: he married her even though she was heavy. She’s a nearly perfect human being, while he talks too much, desperate for love and, on top of it all, arrogant. In other words, except for his dullness, he and I have a lot in common.
The polite answer to why Nell married him is: Nell settled. This happens with one’s coolest girlfriends, who sometimes mate with people not worthy to drink their bathwater, and I mean that in a warm and nonjudgmental way.
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I learned how to unhate Bush the only way people ever really learn things—by doing. It’s a terrible system. If I were God, I would have provided a much easier way—an Idiot’s Guide, or a spiritual ATM, or maybe some kind of compromise. But no, even the second person of the Trinity had to learn by doing, by failing, by feeling, by being amazed. God sent Jesus to join the human experience, which means to make a lot of mistakes. Jesus didn’t arrive here knowing how to walk. He had fingers and toes, confusion, sexual feelings, crazy human internal processes. He had the same prejudices as the rest of his tribe: he had to learn that the Canaanite woman was a person. He had to suffer the hardships and tedium and setbacks of being a regular person. If he hadn’t, the Incarnation would mean nothing.
When it came to Bush, I had to pull out all the stops. Big sickness, big medicine: I talked to spiritual people with a black sense of humor, read great works on forgiveness, and repeatedly prayed that I would not hate him. Somehow this torrent flushed some of the gunk out of the dirty cup of me. I forced myself to turn off CNN and to put aside more time to sit in stillness. And I realized once again that we’re punished not for our hatred, for not forgiving people, but by it. Miraculously, I finally got sick and tired of feeling punished by Bush. I drank more water, which moves things. All of this jiggled some plaque off me like an electric toothbrush in super slo-mo. (And to be honest, it helped beyond words when Bush’s approval ratings began to tank. More than anything.)
With Eddie, there has never been real incentive to learn to love him, because I disliked him only a little. Bush was my high-water mark. Eddie did not make me recoil, but before Nell was diagnosed with cancer, I avoided him because he would be so long-winded and upbeat. Sometimes when I went over to pick her up for the movies, he’d trap me in the doorway like a bouncer at a bar. All of Nell’s friends gossiped about him, because he was so aggressively boring. Worst of all, he made little digs about Nell’s weight and absentmindedness, as if we would ever collude with him. She mentioned smirky things he had said to her over time that girlfriends simply can’t forgive. But after Nell got sick, I was relieved that she had Eddie to help her through chemo, and to sleep with, even though she did not love or even really like him. Now that Nell was almost done with treatment, however, I was sad that she’d never be able to get rid of him, with all he was doing for her. No more “Give Eddie enough rope” years. They had not been lovers in years. They were roommates.
