In Spite of Everything

by Susan Gregory Thomas

  Now, however, I wasn’t sure about anything I had thought before. Sitting in the minister’s living room, I told him, frankly, that I didn’t know what else to do but pray for help and that I wasn’t sure how to do that. He sat quietly for a moment and then prescribed to me lectio divina, Latin for “holy reading.” He explained that this form of prayer dated back to the twelfth century and was intended to be a feasting on the Word (making it, he said, a particularly fitting form of prayer for writers and talky people in general). It is composed of four sequential parts, he said: lectio, in which one reads a scriptural passage slowly and attentively, not so much for comprehension as for grace and beauty; meditatio, in which the Holy Spirit working within you will illuminate—actually light up—a particular phrase in the scripture; oratio, in which one lets this phrase roll over and repeat itself internally, and in so doing, enters into intuitive conversation with God; and finally contemplatio, simple, loving comfort in God—joyful rest. He instructed me to start with the Psalms, to open to any page and just begin. Make sure you set aside at least an hour to do this, he said, and try to do it at the same time each day.

  Oh, I thought. I didn’t really know what I had been expecting from my visit. But as I left the parsonage, the black weight pulled down on me with new force. I think I had almost hoped he would do something magical, like a laying on of hands: to touch my forehead and relieve me with some kind of surprising, special blessing. There hadn’t been any miracle. Ridiculous.

  I waved politely to the minister and pulled the door closed behind me. It was a clear late February afternoon. The streets were bright, antiseptic—a study in physics, light refracting off every plane. As my eyes adjusted, I felt it materialize: The demon I’d deposited at the threshold was exactly where I’d left it.

  I was not looking forward to night.

  But night came. I read my children several books and lay down with them until they fell asleep, as I always did. Although I often ended up falling asleep with them and would have been happy to do that on this night, I was wide awake. There was nothing for me to do but go into my room and sit on my bed, eyes open. I knew I wouldn’t be able to do anything but that, and I didn’t want to do that. But lying between my kids with this black thing clinging to my chest felt wrong, as though I was letting a monster into their room. So I got up.

  I sat on the bed in my room. When we were renovating the house, we had decided that our bedroom would be painted a meditative blue, with nothing hanging on the walls to busy it. Now, contemplative quietude was cold space. My gaze drifted over to the stacks of books, which I hadn’t bothered to organize, lined up against the baseboards. I didn’t want to read any of them. They were mostly giveaways that my mother had just cleared out from her own house to make room for a move to a condo—outdated feminist literary criticism, the lesser works of John Dos Passos and Upton Sinclair, coffee table books on Modern chair design and the plight of Venice. There were two cards posted on my mirror. One was from my agent and friend, Tina. It had arrived paper-clipped to a check for a thousand dollars and a note: “Don’t say anything—just cash it.” I ripped up the check and taped up the note. Another was a homemade Valentine from my friend Heather. She had drawn a heart and written in the middle of it: “You are here.”

  But as I was looking away, my eye landed on the giant Bible, with its gilded pages and medieval art, that Pru had given me for Christmas that year. She had been very excited, and proud of her present. She had chosen it for me because, she said, “You like God, Mama.” When I’d said I guessed that was true but wondered what in particular had made her think so, she explained, “You like church, and I don’t really, but I also just know that you like God.” Bunny rabbit. It is hackneyed to say that your children pick up more on what you do than on what you say you do, but it is nonetheless true. I guess I had inserted the whole idea of God into my children’s lives a lot more than maybe I’d realized. That made me glad. Yet there was my baby’s Holy Bible, and there I was on the bed thinking about what she, with her little mammal face, had said to me. And I was thinking that I had pushed the whole God thing precipitously. Or maybe not precipitously, just stupidly, desperately. I had made it up to make myself and my children feel better. Of course, I loved my children. I loved my children. And in some ways, I could muster up the idea that there was something Greater for them. But I could not muster it up for myself. It wasn’t real. This void was real. It had always been real. My heart wasn’t ice. It was dust.

  I sat there for a long time.

  At some point, I just opened it up. I don’t know what hour of night or early morning it was; it was very dark out. I didn’t decide I am going to do this now, nor did I feel some force compelling me to open it—nothing like that. It’s just that one moment I was not doing something, and the next I was. I happened to flip to Psalm 60.

  O God, thou hast cast us off, thou hast scattered us,

  thou hast been displeased; O turn thyself to us again.

  Thou hast made the earth to tremble; thou hast broken

  it: heal the breaches thereof; for it shaketh.

  I did begin to feel something, reading this.

  Thou hast shewed thy people hard things: thou hast

  made us to drink the wine of astonishment.

  Reading on was too much. What had been black and static now roiled. I could not read it.

  But then I got to it. It didn’t light up on the page, as the prescription of lectio divina had described that it might. I can’t explain it except to say that I came through something and got to it.

  Who will bring me into the strong city?

  I lifted my head. I closed the book. I sat.

  After a long time, I realized that I was not just sitting anymore. I felt light.

  One of the outcomes of practicing lectio divina is that it compelled me to read the Bible regularly. Frankly, I’d never really gotten much out of the Bible. Everyone says how wonderful its language is, how powerful its imagery is, how central a knowledge of it is to a basic understanding of Western literature and philosophy. The latter is incontestable, but as for the rest, I don’t know—not so much, for me anyway. It’s not that I didn’t like the people in it. I love Moses and Jacob: all their conflicts, tantrums, and doubts. And Jesus, to me, is the very definition of hard-core punk. Indeed, my first tattoo, at age nineteen, was a Jesus fish because my friend Nate and I had decided that—as the primitive password of the early, persecuted Christians—it was the most powerful symbol of rebellion of all time. But the Bible itself? It’s not at all smart, sensitive, or educated of me, but I always found the language arcane and autocratic, the imagery obvious. I read the Bible so that I could read Donne, Dante, Spenser, and Shakespeare, but I used it primarily as a reference book. I once even got a bit of a thrashing from an assistant philosophy professor at Columbia when I was sophomorically critiquing something about symbolism in the Bible’s literary style in a paper. He actually called me into his office and put it to me point-blank: “Do you not appreciate that for millions of people, the Bible is a sacred text?” I realized later that he was basically telling me not to be such an asshole—that for most of the people who read it, it isn’t symbolic—but at the time, I was shocked. Is he crazy? I remember thinking. God, how’d a rube like that get a gig teaching here?

  Coming to the Bible with nothing left was different. I have heard people talk about the “gift of desperation,” which sounds to me like junky New Age self-help twaddle (as does any phrase invoking “gift”). While I still bristle at it, I now understand this expression. Moreover, it was precisely the desperation in the biblical voices of David, Solomon, Jeremiah, Job that helped. It isn’t the vernacular of contemporary depression and angst, does not evoke a vocabulary that includes “good boundaries,” “owning” this or that feeling, or “taking care of” oneself. It is the language of flat-out despair. It is that of Lear on the heath, of Macduff after he learns that Macbeth’s henchmen have slaughtered his wife and all his children: “All my pre
tty ones? / Did you say all? O hell-kite! All? / What, all my pretty chickens and their dam / At one fell swoop?”* This is the kind of language that I understood.

  I understood the imagery of physical mortification. To someone in despair, this imagery is not symbolic; it is the thing itself. Before my father died, I had not understood this. Being with him in his last twelve hours of life, watching him actually die, holding his cold, swollen hand, changed that. It is a luxury of inexperience to think in metaphors; death is death is death. What’s more, I had always been very proud of my “tough as nails” status; I could power through anything, and often had. But my physical response in the days and weeks after my father’s death cut me off at the knees. A cold became a three-month case of pneumonia. I just couldn’t get better. I sustained permanent lung damage. I’d never been sick like that, ever; now I carry around an inhaler.

  I started to practice lectio divina every night after my children went to sleep. It became my favorite time of day. It made me feel as if I was not alone.

  I would sit there at first, blackness palpably pressing at my head, shoulders, and stomach, and I would start reading. As I did, a lambent warmth would seep in, through my forehead and then just above my stomach. I could also see it, in the proverbial mind’s eye, glowy and solar. Reading a psalm, I felt it swelling to the extent that I was almost buoyant in it. It was good, almost essential, to have that floaty sense of incubation, because when the meditatio phase moved in—the part in which a phrase lights up—the lines that ebbed in my mind during oratio were hard. Lovely, but sharp-edged, like glinting diamonds.

  God is in the middle of her; she shall not be moved.

  Psalm 46

  Behold, you desire truth in the inward parts.

  Psalm 51

  Make me to hear joy and gladness; that the bones

  which you have broken may rejoice.

  Ibid.

  In the end, contemplatio. Rest. I needed it. I would continue to need it.

  In the late spring, just eight months after we had bought it, we put our house on the market. As word of our separation spread, the cozy, familiar neighborhood in which we had lived, in three different places over nearly a decade and a half—longer than I’d ever lived anywhere in my life—had become bare and mean, like a savanna. I could not walk down the street without bumping into another mother of young children, who wanted to know how I was “doing.” Except for a few friends, I could sense something hyenalike as they stared into me. I felt as though I was being watched, a wounded animal about to be separated from the pack. Or at least that’s how it seemed. It would have been difficult for it not to have.

  When I left Park Slope, I moved into an apartment above a vacant Laundromat in a neighborhood whose streets I’d been scared to walk down just five years earlier. When a vagrant, mute alcoholic moved into the abandoned storefront with the permission of the landlord, I could no longer have my children stay there safely. I told Cal that we should explain to them that the apartment was too uncomfortable, too hot—better to wait until Mama found a really good place to live. Okay, Cal said, sounds good.

  I saw Zanny and Pru every day. We went to free public beaches. Often, I didn’t even have enough money to buy them Popsicles, a dollar apiece.

  By midsummer I was broke. I wasn’t just running low—I was bankrupt. I had put everything into our house, in cash. I had some savings left from a mutual fund, but I ran through it by August and was looking for quarters under the sofa. It never occurred to me to ask for financial help from Cal. I had always made my share of money; we were equal partners. But I had no work; even if I had been offered it, I’m not certain that I could have done it. For the first time in my life, my grit vanished. I was lost.

  There was some physical disintegration. I vomited intermittently. I didn’t tell anyone about it, didn’t go to the doctor. I got used to it.

  My hair started to come out in clumps. Then, I became infested, and reinfested, with head lice. After the fourth bout, I cut off my hair and bleached it within an inch of its life. Combined with my weight loss, I looked eerily as I had as a teenager.

  Nearly a decade after I’d quit, I started smoking again.

  Pink welts burst open all over my body. They itched and itched. I clawed at my skin until my stomach, arms, and legs were rutted with scabs. Ultimately, I had to go to the emergency room. When the registering nurse asked me for my name, I said, “Job.” She looked at me. “Name,” she said. I was given Benadryl and steroid shots for stress hives. In the examining room, the doctor asked me if I had been subject to domestic abuse.

  I stuttered.

  I kept the light on all night long. I couldn’t read a book. I didn’t have a TV. I knitted a lot. I continued lectio divina, but often, it was hard to concentrate. Often, I gave up and sat.

  My babies. It had been a huge mistake to bleach my hair, the lice notwithstanding. The change in hair, the change in weight, the scabs patched over my skin. To children, mother’s body is home. Now my body was different. After all the home improvements that Cal and I had insisted were necessary to provide our children a homey home, only to watch as those “improvements” destroyed our family anyway, I had done something even more devastating to my babies’ sense of home: I had done a gut job on my own body. The only thing I could do was to reassure them that it would return to the way it was very soon, that things were unsettled right now; once they settled, my hair, body, everything, would, too. I was still Mama, and they were still the schmushkies. This was a hard time, but it wouldn’t be hard forever. My children. What could I say? When I was with them, during the day, I was fine. I was myself, they were themselves; we did Mama and Zanny and Pru things. What was I doing?

  I could not be with other people. When you are in this kind of desolation, people become afraid of you. Even if you are doing a decent job of disguising your feelings, they can still see what’s happening physically. It is frightening to them. Friends said they wanted to come visit, to help. Few did. I understood this.

  I was a derision to all my people; and their song all the day.

  He hath filled me with bitterness, he hath made me drunken with wormwood.

  He hath also broken my teeth with gravel stones, he hath covered me with ashes.

  And thou hast removed my soul far off from peace: I forgat prosperity.*

  There was a hallucinatory quality to all this. I did not understand where I was. At night it was the worst, because I was not with my children. I was not where I lived. I was not with Cal and my babies, in our cozy, gemlike apartment. I was not there. I was here, in this hollow apartment in Red Hook, with its broken door and fluorescent lights and no phone, its mattress on the floor, its vagrant drunk outside the window, terrors, terrors. I could not understand where I was. Where were my children? Why weren’t my children here? What was I doing?

  Alone. I was alone.

  * Macbeth, Act IV, scene iii.

  * The Book of Lamentations (King James Bible), III, xiv–xvii.

  NINE

  LEVITATE ME:

  DIVORCE AND DENOUEMENT

  One morning, at the end of that summer, I woke up and thought: Mom.

  I had not seen my mother since early spring, when she and Joseph had come to see Zanny and Pru. It had been five months. A lot had happened in these five months. I wanted to be with my mother.

  I knew that she would be in Maine, at the family’s old vacation place. I called and asked her if it would be okay if I came with Zanny and Pru. “Of course, Pickle,” she said. “Just get in the car and come right now.” So I picked up the girls from Cal, and we went. We arrived late that evening. The next day, while the girls were down at the beach playing with Joseph, Mom and I sat on the porch, and I knit frantically. It was the first time that my mother had seen me scabby, wasted. “Oh, my darling,” she said, trembling. “I had no idea how bad things had gotten.” I put down my knitting and saw my bitten hands. “Yes,” I said.

  Later that night, after the children had gone t
o sleep, my stepfather said to me: “Dear, why didn’t you tell us?” My mother and stepfather would transfer money into my bank account. They would lend me the old station wagon that they had planned on selling. I looked up at them standing in front of me, Joseph’s arm enfolding Mom’s shoulder.

  One day after lunch, Zanny and Pru and I decided to row from our beach to the end of a nearby point and back. We zipped up our life preservers and set off. But the farther I rowed, the more it became clear that I had misjudged the distance, and by the time we reached the point, my arms were locked stiff in spasms; I had rowed almost five miles. I dragged the boat up onto the beach and flopped down, while the girls helped themselves delightedly to the beach’s treasure chest of sea urchins and sand dollars. It was going to start getting dark in about an hour or so. I couldn’t believe how irresponsible and reckless I was. What the hell was I thinking? I should have turned around after the first mile, but I’d persisted, sure that the point was going to be around the next bend. Now, I could barely move. How was I going to make it?

  Who knows whether, as many world cultures believe, one’s ancestors appear with mysterious gestures of help at critical times. But as I was sitting there, I felt my dad. I did not “hear” him but rather sensed him saying, “Come on, Suze-o! Piece of cake—tough as nails!” I broke into a huge grin. Then I got up. “Okay, baby rabbits, back in the boat!” I called. “We’ve got to get back in time for dinner!” The row back was hard, and while I did not let on to the girls that I was genuinely scared for our safety, I definitely cursed and howled for a good ten minutes, and then we started singing songs to keep the rowing rhythm going—and, really, just for fun.