Our Lady of the Lost and Found Read online

  My attention was caught by the full-page story of a woman named Ellen Sanderson who had been killed in a house fire in the large city to the west where I used to live. The top third of the page was filled by a photograph of this woman hamming it up in a jolly pose in front of a brick wall with frilly white curtains at the window and a pot of geraniums hanging beside the door. She looked to be about my age, of average height and weight, with tidy dark curly hair and glasses. She was wearing a stylish, kneelength summer dress and woven, low-heeled shoes. The story of her death was actually the story of her double life.

  Ellen Sanderson had been employed as a secretary at a large insurance firm for the last ten years. Her coworkers knew her as a friendly, outgoing woman: busy mother of two teenagers, Sarah and Michael; happy wife of Bob, owner of a plumbing company; active member of a book club, a bowling team, and the church choir. Ellen kept photos of her family on her desk, changing them annually as the children grew. There was also a charming picture of their dog, Comet, a grinning yellow Lab. Ellen was well liked at work, especially known for the stories of family life that she told during lunch and coffee breaks with a flair for entertainment and humor just like Erma Bombeck.

  She was very proud of their large home in the suburbs and liked to always have a new decorating project on the go. Sometimes she brought in paint chips, fabric swatches, and wallpaper samples to show what she was working on. None of her coworkers had ever been to Ellen’s home, but once she had everything finished just right, she told them, she was going to throw a party and everybody would be invited. She was proud of her garden, too, and said she had once received honorable mention in a contest held by the local Horticultural Society. Sometimes she brought in flowers and shared them around the office. Sometimes she went out for drinks after work with the other secretaries, but not often because, although Bob was a wonderful man, she said, he was a lousy cook and, if she didn’t get home and make supper, the kids would be dining on potato chips and chocolate ice cream.

  But her death told a different story.

  Shocked enough in the first place by this tragedy, her friends at work were puzzled by an obituary that made no mention of Sarah, Michael, or Bob. At the funeral, they were even more shocked to discover from Ellen’s neighbors and her only surviving relative, a cousin from California, that she had, in fact, been a reclusive, never-married, childless woman who lived in a small apartment near the train station. There was no family, no house, no garden, no book club, no bowling team, no choir. There was no dog. The photos on her desk, as it turned out, were of her cousin’s husband and children and the picture of the dog was the one that came with the frame. Apparently the flowers she brought to the office had been purchased at a nearby shop.

  When interviewed by the journalist, the cousin admitted that she had suspected for years that Ellen was creating a fictional life for herself. She speculated that it had all started when Ellen was around thirty.

  —Maybe she was tired, the cousin said. Tired of people always asking when she was going to settle down, get married, have children. Maybe she was tired of asking herself the same questions. Maybe she just wanted to feel normal.

  The cousin told the reporter that she’d said nothing about it to anyone because she figured Ellen had a right to reinvent herself any way she wanted to. She wasn’t hurting anyone, she wasn’t committing any crimes in either of her incarnations, and she was happy enough in both.

  —Maybe one life story is as good and as true as any other, the cousin said. Ellen had the best of both worlds. And besides, how many of us would not want to rewrite at least some part of our lives, if only we had the chance or the nerve?

  I read parts of Ellen Sanderson’s story aloud to Mary, who had started to clean up the kitchen.

  —Not one of us is exactly who we appear to be, she said when I was finished.

  —True enough, I agreed.

  —And what about you? she asked over her shoulder as she headed down the hallway to get dressed.

  It was a leading and/or loaded question, one I could have answered in any number of ways.

  After we were both dressed, we set about doing the regular Saturday chores, and I chose then to answer Mary’s question by picking up the story of my life where I had left off the day before. While we did the housework together, she encouraged me to go on with my story, and again she listened quietly, without judgment or impatience.

  I am both the victim and the villain of this story.

  I was about to turn thirty when I moved to this city. I was tired. I was still alone. I found myself slipping into the everseductive slough of despair. This was hardly unpredictable, considering that I had reached an age at which most people begin to have some reservations—about themselves, their lives, the past, and the future. This swamp of self-doubt led, also not unpredictably, to an obsessive spasm of self-examination. I desperately wanted to figure out what was wrong with me. I spent an inordinate amount of time studying pop psychology paperbacks and doing quizzes in women’s magazines. I gave serious thought to questions like:

  Would you rather be a dead hero or a live coward?

  When you get up in the morning, do you check the color of your tongue?

  If your best friend sleeps with your boyfriend, do you blame the man?

  When somebody’s dog licks your face, are you disgusted?

  Have you ever thought you would be happier living alone on a desert island?

  Do you frequently pray for favors or forgiveness?

  My answers to these and other equally metaphysical questions would, the authors assured me, reveal my true personality. Using an intricate numerical scoring system, I would find out once and for all if I was pessimistic, optimistic, passive, aggressive (or passive-aggressive), impulsive, reliable, anxious, depressed, tender, or tough-minded. My score would also determine if I had leadership qualities.

  Everybody knows these quizzes are stupid and I knew it, too, but I could hardly help myself. I felt compelled to seek them out and complete them, just in case everybody was wrong, just in case there really was one quiz somewhere that would explain my self to myself, a catechism of self-help that would open the door to the happiness to which I felt I was entitled but which stubbornly continued to elude me.

  The trouble was that these quizzes allowed no room for uncertainty, no room for explanations, contradictions, exceptions, or extenuating circumstances. And so, given the choice of answering Yes, No, or Sometimes, I always chose Sometimes.

  Sometimes I take my left sock off first.

  Sometimes I wash my hands when they’re not dirty.

  Sometimes I watch sad movies in the middle of the night while crying and eating chocolate ice cream.

  Sometimes I pray for favors and forgiveness.

  The trouble was that Sometimes always scored zero. So no matter how carefully I calculated my score at the end of the quiz, I always ended up with nothing.

  Finally I had to admit that I was getting nowhere and I made an appointment to see a therapist. After three sessions, she said there was nothing wrong with me. This was nice to hear but I was not convinced. I still believed that if only I tried hard enough and poked deep enough, I would wake up one morning utterly changed. As in my relationship with time, in my relationship with change I was chronically ambivalent. While mostly dreading change, at the same time I was also always longing for it.

  After moving to this city, I stopped looking for love and ostensibly put all my time and energy into writing instead. Unlike love, literature, I figured, was something I understood at least partially, something for which I had already demonstrated an aptitude, a measure of talent, what some had called a gift. But still I thought of my singleness as a temporary condition and, although I was no longer actively seeking love, secretly I was practicing a kind of reverse psychology: secretly I was just waiting for love to find me instead. While thus biding my time, I kept thinking that if I told myself often enough that I did not want or need a man, then surely, in keeping with the
irony that seemed to be the driving force of my life, the right one was bound to come along.

  As far as love and romance went, my theoretical goal became finding (or being found by) the one man with whom I could truly be myself, the same self that I was when I was alone. This man, while also being his same self with me as he was when he was alone, would proceed to love me for (rather than in spite of) my own true self, including the unsightly spider veins in my legs, the crepey skin around my eyes, the cellulite dimples in my thighs, my rather dismal history with men, and my tendency to think too much. The longer you contemplate it, the more complicated this theory becomes. According to both the uncertainty principle and practical experience, this theory, appealing and idyllic though it may be, is perhaps neither a reasonable nor an attainable goal. I dated a handful of men during those years but not one of them was the right one.

  When I was in my thirties, I sat astride the spiky fence of time, living my life as if the present had little value in itself, as if it were merely a way station: a coda to the past and a preamble to the future.

  During those years, I existed in a constant state of regret and anticipation. Regret: for all the mistakes I had made, all the years I had wasted, all the times I had made a fool of myself (mostly for love, always for love). Anticipation: believing that just around the corner lay happiness, peace of mind, the perfect life, and that someday I would indeed reach that mythical promised land if only I could get through now and make my way to then. But the ever-present underbelly of all this anticipation was sheer dread: my sometimes paralyzing fear that just around the other corner lay calamity, disaster, tragedy, and death—a sudden, random, gruesome death or a painful, prolonged, also gruesome death—either way, an early death, by which my future would, of course, be rendered utterly null and void. Happiness around one corner and tragedy around the other—that left two corners still unaccounted for. I did not know what to think about them.

  I tried to hold these two opposing pictures of my future in my head simultaneously. I tried to figure out how I could live each day as if it might be my last, while at the same time fully expecting that I would indeed live forever—and happily at that.

  When I was not thinking that my life was going to end before I got to the good part, I was still thinking, in my heart of hearts (which may be where such thoughts are located—if a thought can be said to have a location—thoughts of the heart rather than of the mind, maybe then not what I should call thoughts at all, but do, for want of a better word, thus giving testament to the all-pervasive struggle of trying to put into words that which resists language—perhaps not thoughts at all then, but something else again: hopes, wishes, dreams, delusions, or rumors of faith) that everything I had lost along the way would someday be returned to me a hundredfold and more, that all my trials and tribulations would be rewarded and revealed to have been worth it in the end, that I would indeed eventually find that proverbial pot of gold at the end of the proverbial rainbow, never questioning where I, like most people, had acquired the idea that God does indeed have a happy ending in store for each and every one of us, never doubting that “happily ever after” was exactly what I deserved.

  (Fond as I am of long looping sentences cantilevered with clauses and stitched together with commas as intricately as lace, the preceding is arguably the most complex sentence I have ever written, providing still further evidence of what every writer is bound to discover eventually: that not only is language, that finest of human inventions, inherently inadequate as the tool for the expression of that which we most want and need to say, but that punctuation and grammar have their limitations too.)

  Despite occasional lapses into pessimism, cynicism, and downright despair, still we cling, by and large, to the prospect of a happy ending, a fortuitous dénouement that we perceive as a promise, a covenant, a God-given birthright: All things shall come to he who will but wait. Perhaps I should not generalize or presume to speak for everyone but who, after all, hopes for an unhappy ending?

  Perhaps our dogged devotion (practiced with varying measures of patience and impatience) to the pursuit of our own happiness is the ultimate manifestation of what Coleridge called “that willing suspension of disbelief…which constitutes poetic faith.” His call for faith has as much to do with life as with literature, with reality as with poetry, with truth as with fiction. We are holding out for a happy ending but take a look around: how many people do you know who are actually having one?

  Our persistent belief in our own future happiness is perhaps the better part of faith in our ordinary everyday lives: Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

  Against all odds and despite all evidence to the contrary, still we trust that there will indeed be a light at the end of the tunnel, of our own personal tunnel anyway. But what if there isn’t? What if there is only the back wall of the tunnel, a concrete wall four feet thick and covered with spiderwebs, mold, graffiti, and bats?

  I am both the victim and the villain of this story.

  Grace

  As for myself, I have come to think of Mary as the patron saint of “both/and” passion over “either/or” reasoning, and as such, she delights my poetic soul. Ever since I first encountered Mary…I have learned never to discount her ability to confront and disarm the polarities that so often bring human endeavours to impasse: the subjective and objective, the expansive and the parochial, the affective and the intellectual.

  —Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace

  This is not irony so much as grace, that in learning to be faithful to his vow of celibacy, the monk developed his talent for relationship.

  —Kathleen Norris, The Cloister Walk

  By mid-afternoon on Saturday, Mary and I had vacuumed the whole house including under the beds, dusted everything including the books and the pots and pans hanging on the cast-iron rack, cleaned the bathroom from top to bottom, and washed the kitchen floor. We had also stripped and remade the beds, changed the towels, and carried all the dirty clothes down to the laundry room in the basement.

  As we sorted it into appropriate piles, I could not help but notice that her clothes were no more unusual than mine and that, as far as our laundry went anyway, neither of us came close to matching the mystery of my neighbor’s shirts that I had been trying to decipher the day she arrived.

  I put in the first load and then launched into a detailed lecture on how to work the washing machine. As I droned on, Mary reached past me, twirled the several dials, and closed the lid with a laugh.

  —I think I’ve got it, she said. You know, it’s been centuries now since I had to do laundry on a rock in the river.

  Back upstairs, she proceeded, without comment, to pull the refrigerator away from the wall and vacuum all the furry dust off the exposed coils on the back, while I fussed around her with embarrassment, muttering about sloth and sin and how I’d meant to do that weeks ago. She waved away my apologies and promised not to look in the oven.

  As I have already said, I am a perfunctory housekeeper, tending to approach the whole enterprise with ambivalence at best and with seething resentment at worst. I have always thought of these tasks as being somehow separate from and at odds with my real life. And, while performing them, I am frequently bogged down by the knowledge that no matter what I do accomplish, it is essentially a futile exercise because it will not stay done for long. Whether this is part of my nature or simply a matter of long habit, I cannot say for sure. Maybe it’s nothing more than a case of protracted adolescent rebellion against my mother, who was always cleaning something and seemed to derive inordinate amounts of satisfaction, pleasure, and pride from the never-ending eradication of dirt, dust, and all forms of untidiness.

  Mary, too, tackled each new chore with fresh vigor. She actually seemed to be enjoying herself. But how often did she have to do housework anyway? I wondered. Perhaps even cleaning the toilet could be an amusing novelty if you only had to do it every twenty years or so.

  Despite
these rather unkind thoughts, still I suspected there was something important to be learned here. Mary seemed to approach housekeeping as an action, rather than a reaction. As she worked, it was clear that she was involved not in a process of negation (of dirt, dust, and the inevitable debris spawned by every activity of daily life) but of creation (of order, shiny surfaces, perfectly aligned towels, floors to which your feet did not stick). She seemed to have no doubt that what she was doing was important. She had faith, obviously, in the restorative power of domesticity.

  But I decided to leave the contemplation of the possible joys of good housekeeping for later. Mostly, by mid-afternoon, I was just glad to have accomplished as much as we had. I was not willing to even consider the possibility that the Virgin Mary had come to me to teach me a lesson about keeping a cleaner house and enhancing my spirituality in the process.

  For now, it was time to make my weekly pilgrimage to the grocery store. Mary said that, if I didn’t mind, she thought she would just stay home. She had a few things she needed to do, she said. I did not question what those things might be. I headed off alone, reflecting yet again on the fact that, since I work at home and set my own hours, I could conceivably get my groceries anytime, so why do I always end up shopping on Saturday afternoon with seven million other people?

  I returned an hour later, with an empty wallet and a car full of food. As I carried three or four bags at a time in through the back door, I noticed that Mary’s runners were not there in the porch where they had been. Her brown cardigan was not hanging from the wooden rack on the wall. In fact, there was no sign of her at all.

  I went into the kitchen. The radio was still playing softly into the now very clean but very empty room. I called her name. There was no answer. I went back into the porch and called down the stairs, thinking she might be in the laundry room finishing up the last couple of loads. There was still no answer.