Our Lady of the Lost and Found Read online

  I thought maybe a branch of the fir tree outside was brushing against the corner of the house in the wind. I went to the window and pushed the drapes aside. The rain had stopped but the pavement was still wet, glistening in the glow of the streetlights. The grass in my front yard looked lush and moist, visibly green even in the darkness. I thought I could smell it right through the glass. The air was perfectly still.

  I looked behind the fig tree. I saw a dust bunny, a dime, and three dead leaves the vacuum cleaner had missed. I turned off the television. I listened. I heard the grandfather clock ticking, a car passing, the fridge humming in the kitchen.

  I decided the sighing must have been my imagination, the way sometimes in the street you think you hear someone calling your name but when you stop and turn, there is not a familiar face in sight and the crowd on the sidewalk parts impatiently around you, then regroups and charges on.

  I locked the doors, turned off the lights, and went to bed.

  That night I slept soundly and deeply, undisturbed by dreams, desire, or any prescient inkling of what was going to happen next.

  Facts

  Name. Address. Age. Sex. Height. Weight. Hair. Eyes. Marital Status. Education. Occupation. Income. Religion.

  I will tell you what I can.

  I am in my mid-forties. I have brown eyes and short brown hair that is just beginning to go gray. I am of average height and weight. I use makeup only sparingly: mascara always, and a little lipstick when I think of it. I save the foundation, the blusher, and the eye shadow (brown only, never blue, green, or mauve with sparkles) for special occasions. I do not pluck my eyebrows or wax my upper lip. Having been a chronic nail-biter since the age of five, I am proud to say that I recently conquered that bad habit and have now entered the wonderful world of nail polish.

  If you passed me on the street, you wouldn’t notice me. This does not especially bother me. I have outgrown the need to draw attention to myself and have no particular desire to stand out in a crowd. Anonymity, I have found, has its own rewards.

  I dress in a style I like to think of as casual but chic, favoring outfits that subtly reflect my artistic inclinations. I do not wear polyester, plastic, or fur. I have never owned a cape or a beret. I am not extravagant in my sartorial spending. I take extreme pleasure in finding great clothes on sale cheap.

  I am myopic. I have worn glasses since I was nine years old. I have never worn contact lenses because I don’t like the thought of sticking them in my eyes. The glasses I wear now are bifocals. My optometrist was amused when I asked for them at my last visit. He said most people are reluctant to take this step. He said most people get depressed when they have to make this first concession to aging. Not me. My bifocals are the type without that visible line across the middle of each lens. They don’t look like bifocals, yet I often feel compelled to tell people that they are.

  I do not long to be young again, nor am I especially afraid of growing old. These days I am looking at the lines in other women’s faces and finding them beautiful.

  I am in consistently good health. The sickest I have ever been was when I succumbed to a particularly virulent strain of the flu five years ago and was laid low for a whole month. On my doctor’s recommendation, I’ve had a flu shot every fall since and have never been sick like that again.

  I have never been married. I live alone. I own my own home. For reasons which will become clear soon enough, I cannot tell you my name.

  Nor can I tell you the name of the city in which I live. Suffice it to say that it is a medium-sized city in the western hemisphere on the northern shore of a large lake. I have lived here for fifteen years. I fully expect to die here. I cannot imagine a reason good enough to make me want to leave.

  After finishing high school, I left my hometown to attend university in a different city, not this one, a larger city two hundred miles to the west. My major was English Literature, my minor, Philosophy. I filled out my program with an eclectic assortment of other courses. After graduation (with honors) three years later, I knew three things for sure: I did not want to do postgraduate studies, I wanted to stay in the city, and I wanted to be a writer when I grew up.

  During the ten years I lived there, I held down a variety of jobs, some full-time, some part-time, for all of which I was more or less overqualified. I worked as a secretary in a real estate office, a clerk in a bookstore, a tutor for reluctant readers, a typesetter for a weekly newspaper, a bank teller, and, for one disastrous week, a waitress. I did whatever I had to to keep food in the fridge and a roof over my head. The rest of the time I wrote. Short stories mostly, the odd poem, some book reviews. Then I started a novel.

  While living in that city, I moved eight times, from one small apartment to another in all parts of town. I lived on top floors, main floors, and in basements both damp and dry. I had roommates, both male and female, good and bad, and when I could afford it, I occasionally lived alone, an arrangement which I much preferred.

  After ten years, I was tired of packing and unpacking boxes and sending out change-of-address cards. Things had happened that I did not understand. For months I wallowed in a welter of depression and uncertainty. The only thing I knew for sure was that I was ripe for a change.

  So I decided to move to this city, a much smaller one. I had been here several times on long weekends just to visit and I liked it. I was thirty years old and I was ready to begin my life again. I gave notice to my latest landlord and my current employer (I had been doing typing and filing at a small law office for the previous six months) and began to make some serious preparations for moving. A week later, my maternal grandfather died and left me some money. Of course I was sorry to see him go, but I thought of the inheritance as a stroke of luck, a happy coincidence, a soupçon of serendipity. Now I am more inclined to think of it as grace.

  With that money I put a sizable down payment on this house. Located on the northern edge of the south side of the city, it is a three-bedroom, red-brick bungalow. According to the real estate agent, it was built in 1950. Although it looks rather small and unremarkable from the outside, inside the rooms are spacious and bright, the casement windows are large, the ceilings are high, and the hardwood floors are immaculate.

  At the front facing the street are the living room on one side and the large, sunny kitchen on the other. A long hallway runs down the center of the house. Behind the living room is my bedroom. Behind that is the back bedroom, used for guests, sewing, and miscellaneous arts-and-crafts projects. The bathroom is behind the kitchen and behind that is what was once the master bedroom and is now my study. There is a wooden deck at the back and the whole backyard is tastefully fenced. I have a vegetable garden, many flower beds, and several large trees and bushes both front and back. Modest by some standards, all this feels quite luxurious to me.

  Shortly after I bought the house, I got a job teaching two writing courses at the local community college. But I did not think of myself as a teacher. I thought of myself as a writer. I had already published a dozen short stories in magazines and anthologies. I had been interviewed once on national radio and twice on local cable television. My first novel had just been accepted by a major publishing house and was due out the following spring.

  When my book was published, it received considerable critical acclaim. The reviewers bandied about words like honest, wise, unflinching, and insightful. One even said it was a tour de force. Admittedly, this outpouring of adulation was tempered by those other reviewers who used words and phrases like mundane, neurotic, no plot, no villain, no reason to read this book. Perhaps worst of all was the one who dismissed it as light but pleasant reading. I was favorably compared to a number of famous writers. This was flattering but, as is often the case when you’re told that you look like someone else, I mostly could not see the resemblance. Still, all the praise was more than I had dared hope for and it provided me with more than enough encouragement to go on. The truth is, I would have gone on anyway, but the positive response to my novel
boosted both my confidence and my determination. I could now call myself a writer, even on my income tax form, without feeling like a pompous little liar.

  Since then I have published a collection of short stories and two more novels, each garnering a little more praise and making a little more money than the last. After the publication of my second novel, I decided to quit teaching and write full-time. This was considered a wildly risky (and/or ridiculous) move by most of the people I knew, including my parents. Now that I am doing quite well, all of these dissenters are quick to assure me that they had faith in me right from the beginning, that they always knew I could make a go of it.

  Although my name is not exactly a household word and you will probably never find my books for sale in supermarkets or drugstores, still I am reasonably successful, both on this continent and abroad. I am now published in translation in several foreign countries.

  My fiction is of the sort called serious (which means that although it is frequently humorous, it is not meant to be purely entertaining and it may or may not have a happy ending) or literary (which means that it is not of a genre like romance, horror, fantasy, mystery, or science fiction, and it seeks to shed some light on the larger truths of human nature and experience) or domestic (a word which means it is often about women and many of the scenes take place in kitchens, bedrooms, and shopping malls) or postmodern (a word which nobody really knows what it means).

  Generally speaking, I write about the lives of ordinary people, both male and female, about lives which, upon closer examination, turn out to be not so ordinary after all. My stories are frequently ironic and I like to tell them in unusual ways. I am not especially attracted to the traditional beginning-middle-end approach to narrative.

  People often ask me how much of my fiction is autobiographical, how much of what I am writing is actually the real story of my own life. I freely admit that some parts of each book are true but I am not about to say which parts or how true.

  I try not to be cranky about these questions. I try not to say that it is nobody’s business. I try not to say that all of it and none of it is true. I try not to bring up the issue of what do we really mean when we say “real” and what are we truly looking for when we say “true”? Instead, I like to quote the American author Jayne Anne Phillips who wrote, in the disclaimer to her short story collection, Black Tickets:

  Characters and voices in these stories began in what is real, but became, in fact, dreams. They bear no relation to living persons, except that love or loss lends a reality to what is imagined.

  I cannot tell you the titles of my books because then you would be able to figure out who I am.

  I am the middle child of three. I have an older brother and a younger sister. My brother is a civil servant with a lovely wife and three adolescent children, two boys and a girl. My sister and her husband recently opened their own restaurant. They have one young daughter. My siblings and their families all still live in the city where we were born and raised. I go there once or twice a year to visit and we always spend Christmas together.

  I had a reasonably happy childhood and my adolescence was no more or less angst-ridden than necessary. In my final year of high school, I graduated at the top of my class. Asked to contribute a bit of biographical information or a morsel of pithy wisdom to accompany my picture in the yearbook, I, with adolescent bravado and pretention, wrote: Embrace the absurdity of life.

  My parents are old now but alive and well, minding their own business in a retirement community in the sunny south. They go golfing and swimming every day. They belong to a bridge club, a book club, and a gourmet cooking club. Their lives are busy and full. We write and phone regularly. We see each other for a week every summer. Either I go there or they come here. They are healthy and happy. We all act as if they will live forever. Maybe they will.

  We are an ordinary middle-class family with the usual share of joys and triumphs, problems and disappointments.

  I would also like to mention that there is no history of insanity in either my immediate or my extended family.

  Although I visit my family regularly and must make frequent trips to give readings and lectures, I do not like traveling. I have learned the hard way that it is not advisable to say this out loud in certain circles. People who love traveling can be a rather zealous bunch, a touch self-righteous, and easily offended by my failure to appreciate their point of view. They tell me over and over again that traveling is exciting, interesting, educational, that it will expand my mind and broaden my horizons. They are persistent in their attempts to convert me, convinced that if only they can get me to listen to the voice of reason, I will finally see the error of my parochial ways and head for the nearest travel agent.

  But I am not convinced. Myself, I truly believe that home is where the heart is. There is no place that I would rather be. This means that I do not spend a lot of money on frequent lavish vacations to exotic locales. In fact, I do not spend a lot of money on anything except books. I do not think of myself as a cheapskate but the habit of careful budgeting is long ingrained and it serves me well. I live frugally and quietly. Like many writers, I am a solitary person by nature and my lifestyle reflects that.

  I like gardening and sewing, and I have been told that I have a flair for interior decorating. I have also been told that I am a good cook. At one time I could have dazzled you with dishes like Chicken Cacciatore, Beef Stroganoff, and Roast Pork Stuffed with Sauerkraut. But lately, having reached an age at which you finally realize that you are not immortal and that if you take better care of your body, it will last longer, I have nearly cut meat out of my diet altogether. These days I would be more likely to tempt you with Zucchini and Barley Casserole, Marinated Cauliflower à la Greque, or Lentil Soup Creole. I am not a good baker, however. My cookies burn, my cakes fall, and my puddings always curdle.

  I don’t like playing cards, checkers, backgammon, or chess. I like word games, crossword puzzles, and Trivial Pursuit. I began collecting stamps when I was ten years old and, although philately has long since gone out of fashion, I still enjoy it occasionally, especially in the winter when the evenings are so long and dark.

  I am not athletically or musically inclined. I don’t know how to swim, ski, skate, or play any game involving a ball. Although they say you never forget how to ride a bicycle, I suspect I probably have. I do not know how to play the piano, the guitar, the tuba, or the violin. In fact, the last time I played either a sport or a musical instrument was back in high school when I had to.

  I am not religiously inclined either. The last time I was in a church was for my sister’s wedding twelve years ago. The time before that was for my grandfather’s funeral.

  Both these ceremonies took place in the same church back in my hometown, Saint Matthew’s United, where my brother and sister and I were baptized and where we attended Sunday school as children. My mother was an Anglican and my father was a Methodist. They did not attend either church. We children were sent to Saint Matthew’s United because it was close to our house and we could walk there by ourselves while our parents stayed home Sunday mornings and had a long breakfast or went back to bed. They apparently had no strong feelings about religion and even then I suspected that we were sent to Sunday school mostly so they could have some time to themselves. And yet, when my cousin Sarah married a Catholic man and converted, they were upset for reasons I did not understand. One Sunday morning a few years later, Sarah, her husband, and their young daughter were involved in a car accident on their way home from mass. Thankfully, no one was injured. It was the other driver’s fault. This accident seemed to prove my parents right about something and, in the next few weeks, they referred to it frequently with a kind of smug satisfaction, as if their reservations about Sarah’s conversion had been thus confirmed.

  I have not dabbled in the New Age spiritual stuff that has become so popular in recent years. I’ve had little or no acquaintance with crystals, prisms, angels, and the like. Like most people, I read m
y daily horoscope in the newspaper but believe it only when it tells me something I would like to hear. I have never been attracted to such trappings of the occult as tarot cards, palm reading, or runes. I did have a brief flirtation with the Ouija board the summer I turned fourteen. The only questions I really wanted to ask were what was the name of the man I would marry and how many children would we have. Every time I asked, the Ouija would indeed spring to life and move mysteriously around the board. But every time I asked, the answers were different: Andrew, Robert, David, John, four, three, two, none. I soon lost interest, and the Ouija board went to the attic.

  As for some of my other personal habits…I probably watch too much television. I read two or three books a week, mostly fiction. I figure these two facts balance each other out. I keep track of my reading in a list on my computer. Last year I read 133 books. I do not keep track of how many hours I spend in front of the television.

  I prefer baths to showers. My favorite color is blue. My favorite season is spring. My favorite time of day is morning and my favorite day of the week is Monday. I like coffee. I like Beethoven and Bach. I like a quiet rain. I am afraid of subways, snakes, and young people with blue hair and rings in their tongues.

  I do not know if I take myself too seriously or not seriously enough. Sometimes one, sometimes the other, sometimes both at once. Engaged, as I seem to be, in a never-ending conversation with myself, there have been many times when I wished I could stop thinking so much, when I wished I could just shut myself up and get on with my life. Now that I am in my forties, I like to think I am doing just that. We all have our issues and I like to believe that I have dealt more or less successfully with mine.