Our Lady of the Lost and Found Read online

  Fearing the worst, I was just heading for the front closet to see if her trench coat was still there, when suddenly she materialized at the end of the hallway, having apparently just stepped out of her room.

  —Oh good, you’re back, she said, sounding rather flustered. I was…I was…I was just outside having a look around, she added, by way of explanation, I supposed, for the fact that she was wearing both her runners and her cardigan.

  If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought she had a guilty conscience or at least that she was bent on keeping something from me and practicing the fine art of mental reservation in the process.

  She hung up her sweater and took off her shoes which, I noticed, looked a little wet. Then she helped me put away the groceries, chatting on about my garden, my flower beds, how it would soon be time to put in the annuals, and how the grass would need mowing before you knew it. She kept up a steady stream of conversation that did not require much in the way of response from me and that also did not allow room for any questions. Then she gave what struck me as an exaggerated stretch and a forced yawn.

  —It’s been a busy day, she said. I think I’ll just have a little nap before dinner.

  She went to her room and closed the door. I went to the basement and took the last load of laundry out of the dryer. Then I, too, had a nap, nodding off quickly in my white bedroom that was, I noted, even more soothing and attractive for having been thoroughly tidied and cleaned. I fell asleep happily, even while appreciating the freshness of the bedding and the orderliness of everything back in its place. I fell asleep quickly, secure in the knowledge that, for the moment anyway, there were no rambunctious dust bunnies gleefully reproducing themselves beneath me.

  After dinner that evening, I set up the ironing board in the living room. With Glenn Gould once again on the CD player and Mary curled up with a cup of tea in one of the armchairs, I proceeded to make my way through the pile of clean clothes in the wicker laundry basket.

  Ironing, I can honestly say, is one household chore that I do truly enjoy. I find it relaxing and comforting: the smooth pointed glide of the iron, the steamy hot smell of the fabric, the tug of the muscles in my upper arm. I still use a heavy steam iron that must be twenty years old now. I bought a new one once, not because there was anything wrong with the old one but just because I thought it was time. But I found it unsatisfying. It was too light in my hand, altogether lacking the serious and stalwart heft of the old one, so I returned it to the store with a flimsy excuse, got my money back, and carried on happily as before.

  While I ironed, Mary and I chatted about nothing special. Somehow, no matter what topic we touched on, the conversation kept coming around again to me. Was she gently steering me back to telling her the rest of the story of my life? Or was it simply that, the floodgates having been opened, I, being as self-absorbed as the next person, could not help but start talking about myself again?

  Whether or not I have rewritten the story of my past, now that I am in my forties, I have indeed had to rewrite the story of my future as I told it to my younger self. I have come now to the place in my life where I have to admit that it is not going to turn out the way I had assumed it would. I am not going to get married, have children, and live happily ever after in all the traditional ways. Now that I am in my forties, I can see that certain kinds of change are no longer likely, perhaps no longer possible. It is as if, while certain doors were opening before me, others were falling shut behind, closing silently, so silently that I never even noticed. It is as if for a long time my life was all potential but then, having made a series of choices, decisions, and mistakes, the other options became no longer available.

  I believe that sometimes you just have to decide: decide to stop feeling badly about yourself, decide to stop wanting what you do not (and apparently cannot) have. You must decide to stop believing that your real life (the life you were supposed to have, as opposed to the one you do have, this one in which you have been feeling unfulfilled, unappreciated, and unloved) is elsewhere.

  Having come now to this realization, I like to think that I have accepted it gracefully enough. Neither searching nor waiting brought me to the romantic happy ending I had in mind. I see now that neither regret nor anticipation served me well. Now I tell myself that what I am living is my life and I had best get on with it.

  I know I have lost something by coming to this conclusion, and yet it is liberating too. I have stopped hoping for the standard happy ending. I have stopped bracing myself for either the worst or the best. I think I have accepted the fact that, try as I may, there is no way of knowing what will happen next, no way of knowing how my story will end. If there is a trick to life, maybe it lies in being able to experience this uncertainty with detachment, rather than with doubt and fear. Although I do not always understand the difference between acceptance and resignation, still I am no longer holding my breath in the face of the future and this, in itself, is a great relief.

  Now I understand that an essential part of becoming happily middle-aged is being able to acknowledge and accept your limitations, to recognize that what you have always thought of as your weaknesses may be, in fact, your strengths, and so also may your strengths prove to be your weaknesses. Now I understand that losing one thing may open the door to finding something even better. The irony of this does not escape me.

  I have finally given up feeling sorry for myself about being alone, being alone again on a Saturday night, ironing maybe, as I was that night. Or watching a funny video and making my solitary-laughter smile and sound into the empty room. Or maybe watching a romantic drama and crying at a happy ending even more than at a sad one. It has been years now since I allowed myself the luxury of imagining a man there on the couch beside me, sharing my popcorn, handing me another Kleenex, rubbing my feet, or resting his handsome head in my lap.

  I try no longer to think of my singleness as something that has happened to me: something like a car accident, something unfortunate and unfair, something that I have suffered, through no fault of my own. Make no mistake: I am not always successful in this endeavour. But when I am, I can now think of my singleness as something that I have chosen. Admittedly, I do not yet know when or why I made this choice.

  I do know that my singleness is not some kind of ascetism or abnegation or martyrdom. Nor is it a punishment, a condemnation, an abomination, an embarrassment, an inversion of the natural order, or a cruel joke played upon me by God.

  Having been alone for all these years, I know a lot more about relationships now than I did when I was actually having them. Again, the irony of this does not escape me. Now I understand that finding a man is not the answer, whatever you think you have lost, whatever the question may be.

  That Saturday night, as I unplugged the iron and folded up the board (which emitted its customary earsplitting, metal-on-metal shriek in the process), I said:

  —Irony has been the hallmark of my life.

  Even to me, this pronouncement sounded more than a little pretentious.

  Mary looked puzzled for a moment and then she laughed.

  —Oh, irony! she cried. I thought you said “ironing.”

  —That too, I said, joining in her laughter.

  I admitted that I have been known, in times of great stress, to take half a dozen perfectly pressed shirts from my closet and iron them again, just for the sake of it, just to calm myself down. But for now I was finished and it was time to put the iron and the board away.

  Becoming serious again, Mary said:

  —Sometimes what looks like irony turns out to be in fact grace.

  Having abandoned my quest for love, now I have put my faith in books instead. The joy and satisfaction I take from them (from reading them, writing them, buying them, owning them) never diminishes and, unlike most things, is never diluted by repetition.

  On a good day, when I am writing and it is going well, this is the only time that I am truly happy. This is the feeling I love the most. This is enough. This
is better than winning the lottery. This is better than hearing the words “I love you” at long last fall from those much-desired lips that are at long last clamped onto yours. I might even go so far as to say that this is better than sex. (Or at least this is better than my memory of sex. I read somewhere once that it is because we can never remember exactly what sex feels like, that we are compelled to keep having it over and over again. I wish I could remember who said this. I also wish I could figure out exactly how this idea is connected to the theory that those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.)

  Of course there are bad days, too, days when the words won’t come and the possibility of my ever writing another good sentence again seems unlikely and I cannot imagine why I ever wanted to be a writer in the first place. On those days I am plunged into a pit of despair, crippled by a crisis of faith, engulfed by a mushroom cloud of misery unlike anything known, I presume, to the average accountant, beautician, bank teller, pharmacist, auto mechanic, or anybody else who has been smart enough not to become a writer and has pursued instead some saner, more reasonable, less capricious career.

  Much as I have convinced myself that books are enough, still there are times when I think of a book that was given to me twenty years ago by an old boyfriend, a slim volume called Books Are Not Life, But Then, What Is? I have never actually read this book, but I haven’t had the heart to give it away either, if only because someday I might or maybe because the man had signed it to me with all his love and that makes me feel guilty for having been unkind to him in the end.

  Much as I have convinced myself that what I have is enough, still there are dangerous moments in the day when my energy and my enthusiasm can abruptly leak away, when I lose faith and cannot get it back. I find myself then in the grip of what the early desert fathers called the “noonday demon” or “acedia,” one of the original seven deadly sins. This demon convinces me that my whole life is utterly devoid of meaning, nothing more than an apparently endless series of useless days that must somehow be endured.

  This seldom happens at those moments when you would most expect it. It seldom happens when I sit down to dinner alone (again), or when I climb into bed alone (again), or when I wake up in the morning alone (again). More often than not it happens at less predictable moments when suddenly and for no good reason, I feel bereft and unequal to the task at hand, be it making the bed, doing the dishes, going to the bank, washing my hair, or writing another book. Sometimes it happens when I walk into the kitchen and am confronted by the telephone poised there on its stand beside the fridge, mute but always harboring the potential of ringing at exactly the wrong moment or of not ringing ever again (either way announcing, after all, that it is not enough).

  I would like to know if other people have these moments too.

  These intermittent losses of faith (or confidence or courage or strength or nerve or heart or all of the above, each being a constituent of faith) would seem to have little to do with love or loneliness. Rather, they seem to be about something less tangible, something to do with purpose or meaning or a sudden visceral suspicion of the lack thereof. At my age, maybe they are intimations of mortality or maybe they are simply a reaction to the drudgery of dailiness, a mute reiteration of the age-old question, Is that all there is?

  Sometimes such a moment is brought on by a memory, a fleeting but vivid image from the past that springs to mind for no apparent reason. These memories take the form of pictures as clear and potent as photographs. I see myself sitting on the green wooden bench in the far corner of the playground where, as a child, I once ate three blue popsicles in a row, and where, as a teenager, I once kissed a boy for an hour straight. I see myself in a green dress in a dimly lit restaurant where I once put forkful after forkful of jambalaya into my mouth while my date ordered another bottle of wine and asked the waitress for her phone number. I see myself in a red plaid shirt waiting for the phone to ring. I see myself in a black wool coat shrugging my shoulders and walking away. I see myself in a white cotton nightgown crying.

  Mostly I bat away these memories and these moments like a horse batting away flies with its tail.

  —I’m okay, I say to myself when they catch me.

  —I’m fine, I say out loud into the empty house.

  Sometimes I say this a hundred times in a day. I would like to know if other people do this too.

  It was not until I told my story to Mary that I understood how much I am missing, how much I have lost, how hard I have worked to convince myself that I am happy with my life as it is. But I also began to understand how much I have learned, how much I have indeed changed. For all those years before, I was always dreading and hoping and waiting for change, imagining that when it finally happened it would be sudden and unmistakable, like turning on a lightbulb, like night and day, black and white, then and now. It was only in the telling of my story that I could recognize how change has been happening all along. Now I understand that change (like time, history, and words) is both quick and slow. Too quick. Too slow. Now I understand that it is time I stopped telling the story of my life only in terms of the men I have loved, lost or found or both.

  It was not until I told my story to Mary that I understood that the hardest person in the world to forgive is yourself. And that the hardest person in the world to have faith in is also yourself. I am still trying to reconcile who I am now with who I was then. I know my former self is still there, waving to me through time just like a phantom limb. I am still trying to figure out how I both am and am not the person I was then, the person I appear to be now, the person that I think I am; how I both am and am not the person that I will eventually become. If who I am now is the “real” me, then who was the person I used to be: an impostor, a fugitive in disguise, the out-of-focus shadow of my future self? If who I am now is the “real” me, then who is the person I will be twenty or thirty years from now?

  My own penchant for order and clarity does not happily or easily admit the contradictions and the opposites within me. I have problems with paradox. If I am this, then how can I be that? When I was younger, I thought I could be only one or the other. I did not understand how I could be both.

  From a very early age, we are indoctrinated into seeing the world in pairs of opposites. Think of all those children’s books in which the world is so clearly and cleverly laid out two by two: big and little, boy and girl, stop and go, up and down, happy and sad. Perhaps it is some unconscious atavistic longing for the simplicity of the old mechanistic universe (where there were no contradictions and all mysteries could be solved) that keeps us clinging to these tidy constructs: yes and no, weak and strong, give and take, love and hate, heaven and earth. Perhaps it is some subliminal collective nostalgia for the good old days of Plato and Heraclitus (before Einstein and relativity, Heisenberg and uncertainty, quantum physics and chaos theory) that keeps us stuck in the resolute land of opposites: body and soul, lost and found, life and death, good and evil, truth and lies.

  Fact and fiction.

  Victim and villain.

  Alpha and omega.

  Beginning and ending.

  Virgin and mother.

  Human and divine.

  It is time now to venture out of the comforting land of either/or opposites and travel into the uncertain territory of both/and. Time to realize that irony is not cynicism, paradox is not chaos, and prayer is not wishful thinking. Time to accept the possibility that these, irony, paradox, and prayer, are the still points, the thin places, the perfect quantum qualities. It is time now to admit that reality is not as simple as we would like it to be and that, given half a chance, it will indeed expand to fill the space available.

  Gifts

  And though I still make mistakes, I am less inclined to delude myself about their cost. I no longer expect things to make sense. I know there is no safety. But that does not mean there is no magic. It does not mean there is no hope. It simply means that each of us has reason to be wishful and frightened, aspiring and flawed
. And it means that to the degree that we are lost, it is on the same ocean, in the same night.

  —Elizabeth Kaye, Mid-Life: Notes from the Halfway Mark

  When I awoke on Sunday morning, I knew she was already gone. The very air in the house was altered by her absence.

  I got up slowly. I put on my glasses. I took my housecoat from its hook on the back of the door and wrapped it tightly around my waist. Even through my slippers the floor felt cold.

  I peeked into the kitchen. It was empty. I went down the hallway to her room. It was empty too. Everything in it was exactly as it had been before she arrived. The room, which had been somehow enlarged by her presence, had shrunk back now to its former size. It was once again a small, ordinary bedroom furnished with odds and ends. The bed, the night table, the bookcase, the armchair, and the trunk had all returned to their former simple selves. Reflected in the mirror on the dresser, they were nothing more than pieces of furniture with their subatomic particles invisible and their feet planted firmly on the floor, bearing little or no resemblance, I presumed, to that perfect furniture which graced Plato’s higher plane of reality.

  The closet door was open and I could see the few rejected items of clothing I had hung there a week before. The rest of the hangers on the rod were empty and swaying slightly in the still air as if in the wake of someone having passed by just a moment before.

  The curtains were closed and, in the shadowy half-light, I didn’t notice at first that there was something sitting on the folded afghan at the foot of the neatly made bed.

  I switched on the lamp and then I saw what she had left me. It was the carved wooden box into which we had put the milagros on the first night of her visit. Having still not completely shaken off my expectation of some flashy pyrotechnics, I lifted the lid cautiously. Again, no music, no light, no butterflies, no angels, no doves. And again, a frisson of disappointment on my part. But there were the milagros: an eclectic assortment of prayers and promises, a catholic collection of questions and answers, all the holy relics of the lost and found.