Our Lady of the Lost and Found Page 3

  People are always telling me how lucky I am. Most often they say it while shaking their heads, sighing, and rolling their eyes. I suppose they have a point, and yet their insistence upon my luckiness makes me uncomfortable. They do not say it in a kind way.

  Much as these people like to think of me as lucky, they also like to dislike me for it. They want to remind me that somehow I don’t deserve it. They want me to feel guilty, as if my living a happy life somehow takes away from their chances of ever doing the same. Any admiration they may harbor for me is offered only grudgingly, with reluctance, suspicion, or downright envy. Then they dismiss me with a wave of the hand and go on to enumerate the long sad list of their own miseries, their bad breaks, their bitter grievances against God and the world. I do not count these people among my true friends. What exactly are they accusing me of?

  It’s not that I don’t believe in luck. At various times in my life I, too, have carried a pink rabbit’s foot in my pocket, a four-leaf clover in my purse. I have put my faith in a lucky sweater, a lucky jacket, and a lucky teddy bear. I once bought a pair of earrings shaped like horseshoes. I still pick up pennies in the street.

  I can think of many examples of good luck, none of which have anything to do with me and my life.

  Imagine a tornado striking your street and yours is the only house left standing. Imagine winning the lottery the first time you ever buy a ticket. Imagine that you are finally going to Paris for the vacation you have been dreaming of all your life. Imagine missing your flight because of a traffic jam on the way to the airport. Imagine the plane you were supposed to be on crashing into the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Imagine the seat cushions, the suitcases, the bodies floating on the cold black waves.

  Or imagine going to your friendly neighborhood bank on a Tuesday afternoon. Imagine depositing a birthday check from your aunt, wiring money to your brother who has fallen on hard times, or withdrawing your last thirty dollars, which you are either going to spend sensibly on a quart of milk, a loaf of bread, a dozen eggs, and a bag of apples, or else you’re going to blow it on that fat new novel you’ve been just dying to read. Imagine that five minutes after you have left the bank, a man with a gun takes the tellers and all the customers hostage. Imagine him making them lie facedown on the floor and then shooting them one by one in the back of the head. Imagine yourself at home eating an apple when the story comes on the six o’clock news. Imagine your mouth falling open, the sweet juice running down your chin, the half-eaten apple rolling around the room.

  I also believe in bad luck and take appropriate measures to guard against it. I do not walk under ladders. I do not open my umbrella in the house. If I happen to spill the salt, I always toss a pinch over my left shoulder. I watch out for any errant black cats who might be considering crossing my path. I am careful around mirrors. I frequently knock on wood.

  But much as I may be as superstitious as the next person, I seldom think of myself as lucky. I do consider myself extraordinarily privileged to be able to make a living doing what I love the most. I realize that few people can say the same. But I do not like to think that the course of my life has been determined solely by luck. I like to think it all depends on what you do with what you are given. I think of myself as having made a series of decisions and then worked hard to end up here.

  Good luck is something you cannot take credit for. Good luck is also something that most people just naturally assume they deserve (whereas other people frequently, in their estimations, do not). Bad luck is something that happens to you through no fault of your own and which you do not deserve (but which other people, on occasion, do). Either way, luck is beyond your control. It engenders neither credit nor blame. It has nothing to do with volition, desire, effort, or will. I try to explain this to the people who harp on my luckiness but they don’t listen. They think I have always been blessed.

  Whenever I hear the word lucky, I think of the dog that lived next door to us when I was a baby. Lucky was a young border collie, so named because he was the seventh puppy of the litter. In those days, in the warm months, babies were often put outside in their carriages to sleep in the shade. Every afternoon when my mother put me out for my nap, Lucky would amble over from his yard to ours and flop down on the grass beside the carriage. In those days, there were no fences. I, of course, was too young to remember this, but there are pictures in the family album of Lucky stationed beside my carriage with his chin resting on his crossed black paws. That swaddled bundle inside is me. My mother tells me Lucky guarded me like that every afternoon for as long as I slept and would not let anyone into the yard, including my father once, on a day when he came home from work early.

  For a while, Lucky did live up to his name, surviving many canine calamities over the years. There was a fight with a German shepherd, a battle with a barbed wire fence, a taste of poisoned meat, and a brush with the lawn mower. At various times, Lucky swallowed, without serious ill effect, a live bumblebee, a warm charcoal briquette, a whole candy cane, a blue crayon, a pink mitten, and a foam rubber duck.

  When I was seven, Lucky chased a cat into the street where he was hit and killed by a truck. The cat ran on, oblivious. I think it was a beer truck, I think the cat was black, but I could be wrong. It was a long time ago.

  So these are the facts, some of them anyway.

  I am telling you all this now because I want you to know from the outset that I am a normal, rational, well-educated, well-adjusted woman not given to delusions, hallucinations, or hysterical flights of fancy. I do not drink or do drugs. The only voice I hear in my head is my own.

  I want you to know from the outset that I am not a psychotic, an eccentric, a fanatic, or a mystic.

  I want you to know that I am not a lunatic.

  Arrival

  It began on Monday, the day after the sighing in the corner. I got up at six o’clock, my usual time, feeling well rested and clearheaded. I made the coffee and brought in the newspaper. I skimmed the front page in case there were any earthshaking events I should know about. There was nothing catastrophic so I read my horoscope and then put the paper aside, planning, as usual, to give it a more thorough reading later on. I made my to-do list for the day and then spent a quiet hour at the kitchen table drinking coffee and continuing my second reading of The House of the Spirits. The radio played at low volume in the corner, broadcasting muffled music, sports scores, weather and traffic reports into the room. The sky was clear but there were scattered showers in the forecast. The radio announcer predicted an unsettled afternoon with great panache, as if he had just peered into his crystal ball and seen the future.

  Two black squirrels chased each other up and down the telephone pole across the street, then back and forth along the line between my house and the pole. The smaller squirrel lost its balance briefly and hung for a breathless minute by its front paws, its back feet scrabbling frantically in midair. It managed, by a series of splendid acrobatic contortions, to heave itself back onto the line and the game continued.

  I wondered if they ever fell off. I imagined furry bodies plummeting from the sky and thudding onto the concrete sidewalk below.

  But this time the squirrels came safely back down to earth, raced up my driveway, and disappeared. All four of their ears were black.

  I had breakfast: a bowl of yogurt, a slice of cantaloupe, a piece of toast, more coffee. I tidied the kitchen. Then I had a long bubble bath and, while I soaked in the water till my skin was all wrinkled, I thought about painting the bathroom green. I got dressed and went into my study.

  A square, spacious room, it is large enough to accommodate several bookcases, two filing cabinets, a stationery cabinet, and three desks: a white one for my computer, a plain wooden work table in front of the window, and an oak rolltop which was my gift to myself when I sold my third book. The room also contains a chair on wheels for navigating from desk to desk, a large armchair for reading, and all the smaller accoutrements of a home office.

  I turned on my compu
ter and checked my e-mail. I sent a few replies and then made some phone calls. There were travel arrangements to be made for a reading I was to give the following month. There were, as always, papers to be filed, books to be shelved, and bills to be paid. I also spent half an hour reorganizing my stationery cabinet.

  My mornings are not usually so leisurely. When fully immersed in working on a book, I keep a regular (some would say “rigid”) daily routine. But when the events I am about to tell you took place, I was between books. My last manuscript was in the hands of my editor and I was just beginning to think about my next book. It was in the very earliest stages of creation and so still far too fragile to be discussed with anyone. I was jotting down my ideas in a crisp, new spiral-bound notebook with a red cover. What I had so far were pages and pages of unconnected images and free-floating snatches of dialogue that were swirling through my mind like the high- and low-pressure systems churning across the continent on a television weather map:

  A woman stands at a window. The early morning light is soft and forgiving. Her eyes are locked in the middle distance. Her thoughts, for the moment, are stalled in space. Not wishing or remembering, worrying, waiting, hoping, or regretting, the woman, for now, is neither happy nor unhappy. She is not thinking about herself. She begins to hum tunelessly. The sunlight is warm on the window. The new day begins to gather momentum.

  In the dream about the valley, there were buttercups and clover, a man and a woman making love on a green blanket in a green pasture, their legs entwined like vines, and the cumulus clouds floated above them. But it was only a dream.

  I said that I loved him.

  He said that he loved me.

  What it all boils down to is this: who said it first? Therein lies the story.

  The pink flowers, called alstroemeria, are still alive but the white ones, freesia, which he said would last longer, have already died.

  I am sleeping better lately but the weather remains unseasonably warm.

  Sometimes the woman at the window is me.

  On the last page of the red notebook, I had started a list of possible titles for the book:

  Absolute Truths.

  Beginning, Middle, End.

  Definitions of Happiness.

  The History Ahead of Us.

  Victims, Villains, and Excess.

  This first stage of writing a book involves a lot of thinking time which, to the uninitiated, appears to be a lot of time wasted doing nothing more than looking out the window. I sat at my work table and did some of that.

  From the window of my study I can see my own backyard and portions of the backyards of three adjoining lots. That morning, I tried to decode the laundry hanging on the clothesline in one of those other yards. Studying laundry on a line strikes me as a suburban version of reading palms, tea leaves, or tarot cards, a method of divination useful in determining not so much the past or the future but the present, which, to my way of thinking, is a state every bit as occult and enigmatic as the other two, requiring, but seldom accorded, equal measures of interpretation and exegesis.

  The neighbors whose laundry I attempted to decipher that morning had just moved in at the beginning of the month. I had not actually met them yet, but the family appeared to include a man, a woman, and two young children, hardly an unusual arrangement. That morning their clothesline was full. I wondered if they had heard there was rain in the forecast. I looked closely at the items on display. Such nosiness, I tell myself (but I call it curiosity), is a necessary attribute for a writer.

  In addition to a conventional assemblage of towels, pillowcases, and socks of several sizes, there were five identical shirts: short-sleeved, with blue and white vertical stripes, buttons down the front. Next to the last shirt was a large white teeshirt printed with the face of Jesus in vivid deep colors. The five shirts and the teeshirt, all man-sized, were hung by their tails so that Jesus’ face was upside down, smiling in a friendly way while flapping gently in the breeze.

  I meditated on this configuration of shirts and came up with nothing. But I made a note of it, certain that it was something I would use someday.

  I heard the mailman and went to see what he had brought. All writers have intense relationships with their mailmen, whether their mailmen know it or not. There were the usual pizza flyers, credit card bills, and letters from charitable foundations requesting donations. There were catalogs from a computer warehouse and an outdoor clothing manufacturer. There was a letter from a former student asking me to write her a grant recommendation and one from a graduate student who wanted to know why I had used the word apparently forty-one times in my last book. There were no checks.

  I ground some more coffee beans and made another pot, decaf this time. I bundled last week’s newspapers and put them in the recycling box in the basement. I filled up the salt and pepper shakers. I cleaned out the fridge. I turned up the radio and listened to an interview with a ninety-year-old blind man who carved duck decoys. I tried to think about my next book and not think about it at the same time. Proceeding in a gingerly fashion, I tried to sneak up on the ideas that had been nudging at me without scaring them away.

  The grandfather clock tolled twelve and I thought about lunch. Should I have cream of asparagus soup or a toasted tomato sandwich? While trying to decide, I watered the plants in the kitchen. Then I refilled the watering can and went into the living room.

  There was a woman standing in front of the fig tree.

  She was wearing a navy blue trench coat and white running shoes. She had a white shawl draped over her hair like a hood. Over her right shoulder she carried a large leather purse. In her left hand she held the extended metal handle of a small suitcase on wheels that rested on an angle slightly behind her like an obedient dog.

  —Fear not, she said.

  I was too stunned to be scared. I put the watering can down on the coffee table and stared at her.

  —It’s me, Mary, she said. Mother of God.

  I must have looked blank. She went on, smiling.

  —You know. Mary. Lamb of the Redeemer. Queen of Heaven. Pilgrim of Peace. Daughter of Zion. Ark of the Covenant. Fount of Beauty. Summit of Virtue. Sublime Peak of Human Intellect.

  She paused. I could not speak. Her eyes twinkled. She went on:

  —Mother of the Mystical Body. Unplowed Field of Heaven’s Bread. Cloud of Rain That Offers Drink to the Souls of the Saints. Virgin Most Venerable. Virgin Most Powerful. Virgin Most Merciful. More Holy Than the Cherubim, the Seraphim, and the Entire Angelic Hosts.

  —Hello, I said.

  She put down her purse and then set her suitcase upright beside it. She pushed a red button and the handle retracted. She slid back the shawl, and her fine hair, which was dark brown streaked with silver, fell in tangled waves around her shoulders. She rummaged in her coat pocket, pulled out an elastic band, gathered her hair in her hands, and tied it back at her neck.

  Recovering my manners, I said:

  —Come in, do come in.

  —It would appear that I am already in, she said.

  —Yes, indeed, I stammered. Well then, may I take your coat?

  —Thank you, yes, she said.

  She took off her trench coat, then the shawl, folded them over her arm, and stepped toward me where I still stood in the same spot, my feet apparently frozen to the floor. She handed me the coat and the shawl.

  Close up, I could see her face more clearly. She looked to be about my age, perhaps a few years older. Her skin was very smooth, golden brown as if she had been spending time in the southern sun. Her eyes were deep brown and the skin below them was a little crepey and thin-looking. There were fine friendly lines around her mouth.

  She was wearing a long black dress. Between her breasts there was an embroidered red heart with pink rosebuds encircling it and yellow flames shooting from the top. The heart was pierced by a golden sword. Her skirt at first appeared to be decorated with heavy silver embroidery. But when she reached down to straighten its folds, this embellis
hment proved to be hundreds of tiny metal objects somehow fastened to the cloth. They jingled a bit and glinted in the sunlight streaming through the front window.

  Of all the things I might have said at that moment, of all the questions I might have asked, what came out of my mouth was:

  —I was just thinking about making some lunch. Are you hungry?

  —Oh yes, she said. I’m famished. And may I use the washroom, please? It has been such a long journey. I’d like to freshen up and change my clothes.

  She spoke softly and slowly, with a slight accent that I could not place. There was something of Europe in it, Latin America too. France, Spain, Italy, Mexico? I couldn’t tell. Listening to her was like reading a book in translation, where the cadences and inflections of the original language hang like a memory just behind the words.

  With me still carrying her coat and shawl in my arms and her carrying her purse and her suitcase, I showed her to the bathroom. I hung up her things in the front closet. I watered the fig tree as had been my original intention when I first went into the living room.

  Then I went back to the kitchen and got out the bread, the milk, two tomatoes, and a can of soup. I thought we should have both soup and sandwiches. She’d said she was famished and I suddenly realized that I was too.

  I opened the can of soup and emptied it into a pot on the stove. I added a can of milk and stirred it in with the silver whisk. I remember hoping that she liked asparagus, worrying in case she might be lactose-intolerant.

  In fact, I remember every single thing I did and thought while the Virgin Mary freshened up in my bathroom and I made lunch. Those fifteen minutes and all that came after are indelibly engraved in my mind, each moment like a single frame from a movie, one frame after another fixed in my brain, isolated and illuminated, set impeccably apart from everything that has happened to me before or since.