“In fact,” she says, “as it will be our last session together…Actually, until you ever come up to the San Juan Islands—and you must bring your children up! All that nature! They’ll go crazy!
“Anyway, forget the tea. Let’s drink some of this.”
And she lifts out of a crate a bottle, with little pieces of straw falling off of it.
“It’s—what? A 1984 Chateau de la Roi du Rhône…”
“Oh!” I exclaim. “A big nose, hints of chocolate and vanilla, very tanniny. With a giant caboose at the end.”
“Yes!” she says in surprise.
“Pair with lamb. Aging potential of ten to fifteen years.”
“Yes, yes…” she agrees.
“In short,” I finish triumphantly, “the chateau is still reeling from it. It’s a fruit bomb!”
“How did you know?” she marvels, sticking what appears to be a surgical instrument into the top of the wine. There is a muscular pop, a glug, and out she pours it, into large, twin pear-shape-bowled glasses.
“That’s what I’ve been wanting to tell you,” I say. “This is but one wine of eight I had at a wine tasting at some friends’ of mine, Kent and Maria, like two years ago. I used to be so confused and slow-minded! I couldn’t even put a to-do list together! But my memory for detail now—my recall—is incredible. Now I remember everything!”
“Wonderful!” she exclaims. “So it must be going well, then? Your new project? What is it—a book, a novel, a play? And oh, here’s to being offered your job back at KCRW and not taking it—good for you,” she exhorts, clanking her glass with mine. “I’ll never get over what happened at KCRW. Really! In this time where Bush and his Supreme Court are already clamping down on free speech, the last thing we need is for public radio to—”
I feel a weary glaze coming on and I hurriedly say, “Yes, thank goodness THAT’S over with—”
“Which leaves room for you to focus. To go back into your artistic zone. So…what’s next?” She puts her glass down and leans forward, palms pressed together.
And once AGAIN I fear a weariness coming on. “I—I guess, well, I have a TV writing project I got called about. It’s about obscenity, and the First Amendment…”
“Network?” She proffers a palm.
“Cable,” I say.
“Cable.” She proffers the same palm, implying no difference.
“Uh-huh,” I say.
The other palm goes up. Now there are two palms. “Which you’re conflicted about because I know how much you’re bothered by the collaborative process—”
“No—”
“Aha. Something has changed. You are now COMFORTABLE with the collaborative—”
“I mean—I guess the thing is—” My voice is shrill. “I guess I don’t really care that much about my Art anymore!”
Ruth stops. She reclines back into her tan leather armchair, ever so slowly, like a canny charmer backing away from a weaving cobra.
“I mean I care,” I rush in, to mitigate the blow. “I guess I just don’t feel like talking about it anymore. I’m forty-three years old, I’ve been at this creativity game now for twenty years, and…I guess I no longer consider it a tragedy to have a day when I don’t create, nor some kind of stunning miracle to have a day when I do. You know? I’m a writer. I write. Some days are better, some days are worse, my career goes up, my career goes down, but if it’s not working out at this point, I’d better just SHUT UP ABOUT IT ALREADY!” I hone in on the poster behind Ruth, on Frida Kahlo—oy, there she is again! “I’m moving toward fifty!” I blurt out, feeling suddenly angry, and not sure quite at what. “Good Lord! I just want to GROW UP ALREADY!”
“Mm-hm,” says Ruth, closing her eyes and putting her face into clasped-together hands. She slows down her breathing, and our conversation. “Tell me,” she intones. “I’m listening.”
There is a beat, during which the waves crash.
I take a harsh short breath.
I hate moments like this.
To calm myself, I reach into my bag and take out my knitting. Just touching the fluffy sapphire-colored wool, with its little red and violet spots, like hidden jewels, and unfolding the cascading foot-and-a-half length of my muffler, and its many satisfyingly even stitches…I instantly feel a lift.
I sit back on my chair and begin to absorbingly clack my needles.
“I certainly saw what a personal breakthrough you had via the whole KCRW incident,” Ruth prompts. She waves a fist with a thumb in it. “Good for you!”
“I guess the main thing I have to report is that for once in my life I am incredibly happy,” I reply. I have moved to the end of my row, which was almost finished, and now flip over the muffler and begin a new row. This new row picks up a little more of the violet, within the sapphire. The whole effect is very pleasing. It’s such a kick-ass scarf.
“Really? How have you been sleeping?” Ruth asks, a bit pointedly.
“Much better now that I knit,” I reply. “And if I do pop awake at two A.M., well, these days, I always have some kind of enjoyable project going—”
“NOT ON THE COMPUTER!” we say together, her warningly, me triumphantly.
“Exactly!” I say. “Only manual projects. Only working with my hands. No screen. And I must say, I’m so into knitting now. Oh my GOD, do I love my knitting. It’s almost obscene how much I look forward to it. It makes me happy. Look at this scarf! Just looking at it makes me really, really happy. That’s why I’m graduating from therapy after two decades. I’m just pretty…damn…happy.”
“Well, hallelujah!” Ruth laughs, clapping her hands together, suddenly merry, pouring us each a second glass of wine. “Happy graduation! Marta? Can you bring out the—you know, the…”
“Yes, Mum,” I hear the call.
And in a moment we are surprised with the most delectable cheeseboard. Ruth points. “This is a Triple Crème, this is Humboldt Fog, this appears to be a shingle of—”
“Ooh, a shingle,” I say.
“Marta? I want to say a Gruyère. But aged. Very mellow.”
“Oh!” I exclaim, feeling a stab of pleasure as I taste it. “With the wine—!”
“So tell me, my dear?” Ruth asks. “You have been coming to me since you were twenty-three. We’ve been together through the single phase, the married phase, the breaking-away-to-do-your-art phase, the now-you-are-blocked phase, then you wrote, then you had children, you came in with Mike, there were all those big sleep problems, then you were fired, now you are forty-three, what I call a midland journeyer…Why so happy now?”
She tilts her chin on her hand. I know I have the fullness of her attention, and the joy of being listened to rises within me. I have wine, I have cheese, I have my knitting—there is nothing not perfect in my universe.
“Well, because…Actually, it’s rather Oprah-esque,” I reply. “I have finally had my mid-forties…Al-Gore-standing-on-a-dune-in-his-shirtsleeves moment.”
“I LOVE him!” Ruth groans, hugging herself as she falls backward into her chair. “Now, now, now THIS is the Al Gore I always knew was WITHIN. The twenty-first-century Al Gore is like Atlas…unleashed! If only I had been his therapist when he was running for president! Remember what we talked about when you were fired? And I told you about the—” Here she balls her fist up. “The fuck you! Did you see An Inconvenient—”
“No, I didn’t, but I heard it’s very good,” I say quickly, not wanting to lose the thread. As much as I deeply admire Al Gore for his bold breaking-away/standing-on-a-dune-in-his-shirtsleeves moment, I do not wish to share my therapy session with Al Gore. Or global warming.
Ruth makes a note. “Inconvenient Truth. I’ll give you the DVD—”
I wrench the conversation back to my point: “Anyway, the point is I ADMIRE Al Gore because of his dune-in-shirtsleeves moment.”
“Because—?” she asks. “What does that moment mean to you?”
“Well? It is the moment when you stand on a shore and you confront your human
ity. It is the moment you turn your life to…service. Is that possible? Does that make sense? SERVICE.”
“Go on.”
“I have…I have…Well, my happiness has come from thinking of myself less as a competitive individual in a footrace I can never win, and more as part of a beautiful mass social undertaking, like building a cathedral that will live on after me.”
“Cathedral?”
“Okay, well, here it goes.” I put my knitting in my lap, to focus. “It’s like the cathedral is democracy. Which looks beautiful from a distance, say one hundred years later. But on a day-by-day basis, building the cathedral of democracy isn’t pretty. Feh! Democracy—when you really experience it—can be tedious, poorly lit, and not always charismatic. It’s about getting one hundred little raffle tickets in on time, because democracy is made not with one big check but with many small nickels. It’s—well—about waiting in line at the DMV.”
“The spiritual ‘aha,’” Ruth continues, picking up the thread. “That’s very medieval. Very archetypal. Many of the female Catholic saints…You know how much I love…” And here she gestures to a tiny wooden gold-embossed painting above her. “Catherine of Thiels.”
“Catherine of Thiels?” I ask.
“A very obscure saint,” Ruth says. “Some even argue Catherine of Thiels was never properly canonized. The Belgians—!” She puts her hands up. “Anyway.”
“Where IS Thiels?”
Ruth nods, with the anger of it.
“Exactly!”
“No, I mean I really don’t know.”
“Thiels was a very, very small medieval town that had only, like, limited flax production. Maybe some herring. Some wool dying. That was the problem. It wasn’t really an important town.”
“But for her witchcraft they burned her!” I exclaim, anticipating the story, making my “Fuck you!” fist.
“Noooo,” Ruth answers, draining her wineglass. “Catherine didn’t die. She lived to a ripe old age, which in those days was thirty-seven. But she was known for doing countless good works—ministering to orphans, teaching them the domestic crafts, bringing food to the poor…Catherine was known widely for her exquisite needlework—”
“I guess it’s true that that doesn’t sound very—”
“But the point is, an angel came to her. She had a transformative experience. Before she was simply a merchant’s wife—she was counting his money and supplies, in a tower in Thiels. But then—as the story goes—the angel comes to Catherine and tells her to put down her coins in the counting house and to SERVE THE WORLD—And hundreds of other people SAW the angel, apparently there were witnesses—”
“I guess it’s still a kind of borderline…I thought to be a saint you had to be burned at the stake—”
Ruth puts her palms up. “Like I said. There’s still a debate.”
I place my knitting in my basket and stand up to study Catherine. But my attention keeps getting pulled away to the burning eyes of Frida.
“Ruth? Frida Kahlo—For me, she has become kind of the Coca-Cola sign of—Can I—?” I make a twirling motion with my hands.
“Of course,” Ruth replies. “It’s just a reproduction. Put her face down on the couch if you want. The movers will anyway.”
I carefully lift Frida off a hook, balance her on my hip to give her one last close look…and suddenly I’m yelling.
“I guess I’m just tired of Frida Kahlo’s crazy-ass buggy eyes lookin’ at me from every espresso bar and museum calendar and drink coaster! You had some responsibility for your own happiness too, Frida!” I am holding her before me and yelling right at her! “Diego Rivera—that old drunkard you stood by, he has shit to answer for! Not ME!” My words are a little slurry, but I feel I’m in an utterly safe space.
“I’m going to use the loo,” Ruth says. “Have a look at Catherine. Take your time. If you look closely, you’ll see she’s really quite wonderful.”
I tilt Frida against the wall and pick up Catherine instead, the small would-be Catholic saint, a quiet package, medieval, weathered old oils, gold-embossed. I have come to this office for twenty years. How is it I have come here for so many years and never seen this?
The small painting, not more than a ten-by-ten box, shows a tiny woman, in a fluttery white head veil, kneeling before an altar in her small green, red, and blue medieval bedroom. Around her knees, on the floor, are ordinary household items—baskets of fruit, loaves of bread, a jug of wine, spilled coins, possible needlework, and is that a satchel of knitting? Knitting!
It’s either knitting or a set of slightly scary medieval dental instruments, perhaps for fixing the teeth of the poor, which in medieval times, you have to admit, would be a daunting prospect.
An angel of indeterminate gender, with brown pageboy haircut, is less leaping through the saint’s twin open peaked medieval windows than sort of dancing forward to Catherine. In one hand, he/she holds a slender gold trumpet, which he/she blows, and in the other he/she proffers various items: a sceptre of some kind, a small booklet on a chain bearing ornate medieval letters, and some sort of…almost slightly military breastplate—
I look more carefully into the small white face of the angel, with her wide-set brown eyes, and small tipped nose, and realize, in a 2001: A Space Odyssey hallucinogenic flash moment, the light around me smearing into tunnels, that, oh my God, it’s—
“Joan from Valley Co-Op! Oh my God! The angel! It’s Joan! It’s Joan!” I exclaim in amazement. And Catherine—the face of Catherine also looks like Joan! And all those household objects around her…the needlework, the scissors…Probably in another basket around the bed are raffle tickets for the Spring Jamboree! Which Catherine/Joan was probably known for, in Thiels, and people were probably tired of the Jamboree…Which is why, no doubt, she didn’t land the saint thing.
“Oh good Lord,” the bishops probably said. “Do we have to give it to Joan? That’s probably what she would love. Sainthood! Joan!”
And in an automatic move, to calm myself, I reach for my knitting, but looking at my own knitting basket, I realize…
I look back at the painting…
“Oh my God,” I exhale, almost hyperventilating. “I literally feel like I’m plunging into some sort of a Hunter S. Thompson acid trip, where the room is hot, and forms and colors are unusually vivid—!”
“Which is very common in perimenopause,” Ruth says sympathetically, returning. “Unless treated with medication.”
“In this painting, I see myself! And I realize…I am also Joan!”
“Yes,” Ruth says breathlessly, dropping back into her chair. “Yes? Joan of Arc?”
“Well, yes/no/I suppose/maybe!” I cry out. “I realize I, too, have knelt at a small medieval chapel in the middle of my life, in Thiels—”
“In Van Nuys,” Ruth says.
“Exactly. An unremarkable town. We, too, are not known for anything. And anyway, in the echoing shallows of my forties—which in Catherine’s case would have been the echoing shallows of her late twenties—”
“What with the speeded-up medieval hormonal—”
“Whatever. Exactly. I realized, in the middle of my life, I, too, have had the experience of the angel coming to me, blowing her trumpet, and calling me out of my regular life!”
“Who was that angel?” Ruth asks breathlessly.
“Well, unfortunately, the angel was Joan. Of the Parents for Public Schools. Who I call the Parents Fools. And also her husband, Walt, who looks like a kindly ferret and who came bearing a great many gloomy books by Jonathan Kozol.”
Ruth puts her hand on her turquoise caftan chest.
“Oh, dear.”
“That’s right,” I say bitterly. “Unfortunately, like Catherine, my angel was the Angel of Social Work. And that Jonathan Kozol…Good Lord—have you read his books? All those poor, black, inner-city children in their hopeless public schools. And the government not DOING anything about it, decade after decade. GOD, are his books depressing.”
; “Hm,” Ruth says. “Not so good for the insomnia, I gather.”
“Exactly,” I say. “I sometimes think Pfizer should invent the antidepressant Zokol, for help after reading Kozol. At one point I was going to put all my Jonathan Kozol books into a wicker basket like orphaned kittens and I was going to bring them to you to help me drown them. I’ve felt at certain times, the Parents for Public Schools—my new cause, all those earnest people—have been this load I’ve been CARRYING. It’s like I’m CARRYING the Angel, who is so heavy, so heavy—”
Ruth leans forward excitedly. “That’s another famous Catherine of Thiels image! Where she is shown walking from city to city CARRYING the Angel—Oh, where are my sacred art books—” She wheels about herself, looking. “Of course, they’re all PACKED already—But where Catherine’s CARRYING the Angel—In some versions, the Angel is literally riding on her back—”
“The Angel of Social Work,” I repeat bitterly. “I call it the Way of the Flat Brown Shoes. Sometimes I wonder why I was assigned this Angel. Sometimes this Angel is an Angel I want to throw back. I live in Los Angeles, for crying out loud! I mean, I’d so rather be saddled with the Angel of Global Warming. The Angel of PETA! The Angel of Free Speech—”
“You DID carry that Angel—” Ruth points out.
“Ah yes, Freedom of Speech—in Los Angeles, it’s among the most popular of our amendments. The First, that’s the Jennifer Aniston of the amendents, whereas the Second Amendment—the right to bear arms—not so much. Well, at least I didn’t get the Angel of the SECOND Amendment, which is probably more like a demon on a Harley. In my neck of the woods, the Second Amendment is almost as unpopular as public education.”
“Well, you’re the Freedom of Speech queen!”
“For five minutes I was. But that was a whole year ago. At a recent party I saw my old Times editor, Josh, who said, ‘Now I hear you’re a public-school activist. Good for you. Rah rah rah,’ he finished, and then his wrist fell, desultorily, toward the sushi plate.
Mother on Fire: A True Motherf%#$@ Story About Parenting! Page 24
