Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace (6 page)

M
y pastor, Veronica, said yesterday that God constantly tells us to rejoice, but to do that, to get our ’joice back, we need to have had joy before. And it’s never been needed as badly as now, when the world is hurting so badly, because joy is medicine.

San Quentin may not seem the obvious place to go searching for joy, but my friend Neshama and I went there last week to teach inmates how to tell stories. I would work with them on the craft of writing, while Neshama, who found her voice through the oral tradition, would pass along what she’s learned in her work at a guild where people teach one another to tell crafted stories from the stage.

I was glad to be there, for a number of reasons. First of all, because Jesus said that whatever you did to the least of His people, you did to Him, and the lifers in penitentiaries are the leastest people in this country. Just look to see whose budgets are being cut these days—the old, the crazies, the children in Head Start—and that’s where Jesus will be. He also promised that God forgives the unlovable and the unforgivable, which means most of us—the lifers, me, maybe you.

Second, my father had taught English and writing at San Quentin during the 1950s and 1960s. He published stories in
The New Yorker
about his students, and then wrote a biography of San Quentin; I grew up hearing and reading about his students and the place itself. He did not bog down in complex moral and ethical matters—victims’ rights, recidivism. He just taught the prisoners to read good books, to speak good English, and to write. My father treated them with respect and kindness, his main philosophical and spiritual position being: Don’t be an asshole. My brothers and I stood outside the gates of San Quentin with him and his friends over the years, in protest and silent witness whenever someone was going to be gassed.

And last, I was happy to be there because one of the inmates, Wolf, the head of the Vietnam vets’ group there, had asked me to help some of his friends with their writing.

I had been inside the grounds for worship services at night but had never visited during the day. When we went, it was pouring rain. Waiting outside the walls with Neshama, two San Quentin English teachers, and a friend from church, I felt aware of the violence and fear of the world. I hardly know what to feel most days, except grief and bug-eyed paranoia. But my faith tells me that God has skills, ploys, and grace adequate to bring light into the present darkness, into families, prisons, governments.

San Quentin is on a beautiful piece of land in Marin County, on the western shore of San Francisco Bay, with lots of sun, views of the bridges, hills, windsurfers. I tried not to worry as we waited. On Sundays, Veronica kept repeating what Paul and Jesus always said: Don’t worry! Don’t be so anxious. In dark times, give off light. Care for the least of God’s people. She quoted the Reverend James Forbes as saying, “Nobody gets into heaven without a letter of reference from the poor.” Obviously, “the poor” includes prisoners.

Jesus had an affinity for prisoners. He had been one, after all. He must have often felt anxiety and isolation in jail, but He identified with the prisoners. He made a point of befriending the worst and most hated, because His message was that no one was beyond the reach of divine love, despite society’s way of stating the opposite. God, what a nut.

Finally, we stood outside an inner gate, showed our IDs to the guards, and got our hands stamped with fluorescent ink. “You don’t glow, you don’t go,” said one cheerful, pockmarked guard, which was the best spiritual advice I’d had in a long time.

As we stepped into a holding pen, my mind spun with worries about being taken hostage, having a shotgun strapped to my head with duct tape. I don’t think Jesus would have been thinking these same thoughts: everything in Him reached out with love and mercy and redemption. He taught that God is able to bring life from even the most death-dealing of circumstances, no matter where the terror alert level stands.

Our group was allowed to view the outer walls of the prison, which was opened in 1852. San Quentin possesses great European beauty—ancient-looking walls, elegant gun towers. It’s like a set from Edgar Allan Poe. Someone with the right
attitude could do something really nice with this place, something festive. It could be a cute bed-and-breakfast, say. Or a brewery. I did not know who would be inside, only that most of the convicts were murderers serving life sentences. I imagined that some would be sullen and shifty-eyed, and others charming cons, trying to win me over so I would marry them and get them better lawyers, and consort with them on alternate Tuesdays. I knew there’d be camaraderie, violence, and redemption inside, because I’d read my father’s accounts and the accounts of others. But those were written years ago, when you could still believe in caring for prisoners without being accused of being soft on crime.

Jesus was soft on crime. He’d never have been elected anything.

In the courtyard, we were met by several staff people, and then by Wolf and two of his friends, all polite and clean-shaven, with Vietnam vets caps on. We stood within the circle of prison buildings, in the center of concrete cell blocks. The grounds are brightly landscaped by the inmates, but the buildings look like a child’s play structure that has been left outside for a hundred years—a plastic and
castley hodgepodge of stone and concrete, ornate, crumbly, deteriorated.

There’s razor wire everywhere, and a constant clanging and banging of gates and cells and doors. Guards carry arms and keys that could be from the Middle Ages. Prisoners walk all over the grounds, as slowly as monks, with nowhere much to go. Of course, we saw your better inmates, the really polite ones, not the hard cases, not the men on death row. Those we saw and spent time with seemed to be sliding by, relatively seamless and calm. They’re mostly older; you sense that their testosterone levels are down.

I like that in a prisoner.

Wolf and his friends showed us classrooms, the chapel, and the hobby shop, where inmates work making wooden cable-car jewelry boxes and stained-glass hummingbirds and crosses. “Should you guys be trusted with knives and saws and extremely sharp implements?” I asked nicely.

They laughed. “We earned the privilege by good behavior,” Wolf told me. He showed us the old dining hall with the long walls covered in murals done in black and brown shoe polish by inmates. The murals depicted California’s history and their
own—the Miwok on Mount Tamalpais, Sir Francis Drake on the beaches of West Marin, the Spanish missions, the Gold Rush, heroes of labor, farm-workers, artists, prisoners, saints—and hidden inside the pictures were secrets only the prisoners could see.

We walked to the main cell block. The prison is overcrowded. The prisoners are double-celled, double-bunked. The cells are grotesque, like a Croatian zoo. I understand how the families of victims might think the prisoners deserve this, but seeing them stuffed in these cages affected me the same way seeing photos of the displayed corpses of Saddam Hussein’s sons did. You had to ask yourself: Who are we? And what next? Bloody heads on stakes outside the White House?

“What are you reading?” I asked a man in one cell.

He held out his book: true crime by Ann Rule.

Wolf led us to another dining hall, where sixty prisoners had gathered in bolted-down chairs near a stage to hear us speak. Behind them, kitchen staff and prisoners were preparing the next meal, with guards nearby.

What you might call the aesthetics left something to be desired—an echoey, cavernous space,
like a hangar, metallic, with the racket of people preparing food. It smelled like cheap meat and old oil and white bread.

I went onstage, took a long, deep breath, and wondered, as usual, where to start. I told the prisoners the same things I tell people at writing conferences: Pay attention, take notes, give yourself short assignments, let yourself write shitty first drafts, ask people for help, and you own what happens to you. They listened dutifully.

Then I introduced Neshama, with a concern that the prisoners wouldn’t quite get her—this intense grandmother with a nice big butt and fuzzy gray hair, wearing a loud plaid flannel dress. I had invited her because I love her stories and knew it would be more fun for me, and because some people at San Quentin, like Neshama, hate to write but love to read and tell stories.

I had extremely low expectations: I hoped a few prisoners might form a guild, like the one to which Neshama belongs; I hoped they wouldn’t hurt her, or overcome her, or try to make her marry them. She walked to the mike and told her first story, her version of a folktale. It was about a man with no luck, who comes upon safety, wealth, and a beautiful woman, but is too busy looking for fancier luck,
somewhere else, to even notice her. Neshama painted the story with her hands, leaning into the crowd, and drawing back, hopeful or aghast at the unlucky man’s journey, smiling gleefully at the story’s close. And the place went nuts. She stole the show right out from under me, like a rock star, while I looked as prim and mainstream as Laura Bush. Here they had thought Neshama was going to teach them a lesson, and she had instead sung them a song. Their faces lit up with surprise. She was shining on them, and they felt her shining on them, and so they shone back on her.

They asked her questions. Where do we find these stories? And Neshama told them: “They’re in you, like jewels in your hearts.” Why do they matter? “Because they’re treasures. These memories, these images, come forth from the ground of the same wisdom we all know, but that you alone can tell.”

The prisoners stared at her, mesmerized. They looked like family, and neighbors, black and white and Asian and Hispanic, all in their blue denim clothes. Some looked pissed off, some bored, some attentive; the older ones all looked like God.

When I at last got Neshama off the stage, I gave them a second round of my best writing tips.
There was warm, respectful applause. Neshama got up and told another story. It was about her late husband, and a pool he would hike to, where there was a single old whiskery fish swimming around. Neshama stripped her story down to its essence, because only essence speaks to desperate people. And the men rose to give her a standing ovation. It was a stunning moment. All she had done was tell them, “I’m human, you’re human, let me greet your humanness. Let’s be people together for a while.”

Neshama explained her storytelling guild to them, and one of the guards sat down to listen. We did a duet, the two of us answering questions, telling the men useful stories of our own work, and the writers we love, whom maybe they would love, too, who have filled our communal well from many years and different backgrounds.

We had evoked the listening child in these men, with the only real story anyone has ever told, that the teller has been alive for a certain number of years and has learned a little in surprising ways, in the way the universe delivers truth. While I saw these men through the haze of our desire that things go well, I also saw beautiful rough glass, tumbled in the turbulent and unrelenting streams
of prison life. I saw that these men looked out for one another. I saw that they had nothing but the present, the insides of their minds, glimpses of natural beauty, library books, guilt, rage, growth, and one another. I saw that these lives were of value. I had a sudden desire to send them all my books, all of my father’s and friends’ books, as well. Also to donate my organs.

Why did these men make me feel like being so generous? Maybe it was all the fresh air we’d brought in, the wind and the rain and ourselves. It was as if we’d come with an accordion, and as we talked and listened, the bellows filled and let breath, ours and theirs, in and out past the metal reeds.

H
eroes come in all circumstances and ages. The prophet tells us, “Your old will have visions; your young will dream dreams.” Elderly women in a retirement community in Mill Valley protested the war in Iraq on a busy thoroughfare with placards every Friday for years. A man I know of twenty-two, halfway to a medical degree, is pursuing ballet dreams in New York City. Some people my age—extreme middle age—train for marathons, or paddle down the Amazon, or skydive, or adopt. They publish for the first time.

Me? I may have done the most heroic thing of all. I went on match.com for a year.

The thing was, I had just done something
brave, which was to write a memoir with my son, tour the East Coast with him, and appear on stages before hundreds of people at a time. But one dream coming true doesn’t mean you give up on other lifelong dreams. You’re not dream-greedy to want, say, a cool career and a mate. And having realized this one long-shot dream with my grown child gave me the confidence to try something even harder: to date.

I recoil even from the word “date,” let alone the concept of possibly beginning a romantic relationship. Those woods are so spooky. I have an almost perfect life, even though I’ve been single since my last long-term boyfriend and I broke up four years ago. I really do, insofar as that is possible in this vale of tears—a cherished family, a grandchild, church, career, sobriety, two dogs, daily hikes, naps, perfect friends. But sometimes I am lonely for a partner, a soul mate, a husband.

I had loved the sleeping-alone part. I rarely missed sex: I had tiny boundary issues in all those years of drinking, and by my early twenties I had used up my lifelong allotment. I overserved myself. I do love what Wodehouse called the old oompus-boompus when it happens to be in progress, but
wouldn’t go out of my way. Additionally, I have spent approximately 1,736 hours of this one precious life waiting for the man to finish and pretending that felt good. And I want a refund.

What I missed was checking in all day with my person, daydreaming about him, and watching TV together at night. There, I’ve said it: I wanted someone to text all day and watch TV with.

I am skittish about relationships, as most of the marriages I’ve seen up close have been ruinous for one or both parties. In four-fifths of them, the men want to have sex way more often than the women do. I would say almost none of the women would care if they ever got laid again, even when they are in good marriages. They do it because the man wants to. They do it because it makes the men like them more, and feel close for a while, but women love it mostly because they get to check it off their to-do lists. It means they get a pass for a week or two, or a month.

It is not on the women’s bucket lists. I’m sorry to have to tell you this.

Also, ninety-one percent of men snore loudly—badly, like very sick bears. I would say that CPAP machines are the greatest advance in marital joy
since the vibrator. They transform an experience similar to sleeping next to a dying silverback gorilla into something like sleeping next to an aquarium.

And the women are not crazy about the men’s secret Internet-porn lives. But perhaps we will discuss this at another time.

Yet union with a partner—someone with whom to wake, whom you love, and talk with on and off all day, and sit with at dinner, and watch TV and movies with, and read together in bed with, and do hard tasks with, and are loved by. That sounds really lovely.

I had experienced varying degrees of loneliness since my guy and I split up. After our breakup, I had just assumed there would be a bunch of kind, brilliant, liberal, funny guys my age to choose from. There always had been before. Surely my friends would set me up with their single friends, and besides, I am out in the public a lot doing events at bookstores and political gatherings, the ideal breeding ground for my type of guy. But I hadn’t met anyone.

People don’t know single guys my age who are looking for single women my age. A sixty-year-old man does not fantasize about a sixty-year-old
woman. A seventy-year-old man might. And an eighty-year-old—ooh-la-la.

Almost everybody wonderful whom my friends know is in a relationship, or gay, or cuckoo.

I went onto match.com with a clear knowledge that relationships are not the answer to lifelong problems. They’re hard, after the first trimester. People are damaged and needy and narcissistic. I sure am. Also, most men a single woman meets have been separated or divorced for about twenty minutes.

The man of my most recent long-term relationship, whom I’d been with nearly seven years, was in a new, committed relationship about three weeks after we split up. I am not kidding. You can ask him. We’re very friendly.

So I signed up at match.com. This—subscribing—means you can communicate with people at the site, instead of just studying the profiles, questionnaires, preferences, and photographs for free. I subscribed and answered the questions.

My preferences are: smart, funny, kind; into nature, God, reading, movies, pets, family, liberal politics, hiking; I prefer sober, or sober-ish.

So the first morning, eight profiles of men varying in age from fifty-four to sixty-three arrived by e-mail. Most seemed pretty normal, with college degrees, which I don’t have, but certainly meant to; some attractive; mostly divorced, but some, like me, never married; some witty, some dull, some bizarre; sort of like real life.

Curiously, almost without exception, they were “spiritual but not religious.” I thought for a while that this meant ecumenical, drawn to Rumi, Thomas Merton, Mary Oliver. But I have come to learn that this means they think of themselves as friendly. They are “glass-half-f kind of people.” That’s very nice. They like to think that they are “closest to Buddhism” and “open to the magic that is all around us.” They are “people people.” They are “open-minded and welcome all viewpoints.” They are rarely seeking religious nuts like me—rather, they are seeking open, nonjudgmental women. (The frequent reference to wanting a nonjudgmental woman makes a girl worry. What if you’re pretty nonjudgmental, but then Tiger Woods asks you out for coffee, or Phil Spector, and little by little, more is revealed?) A strangely high number of them mention that they hope you’ve left your
baggage at the airport—because, I guess, they are all well! How great. I love this so much.

Eight new guys arrived every day, along with a remnants section of men who lived pretty far away. Some of my eight guys were handsome, if you could believe their profiles, and in my case the profiles tended to be pretty honest. They mentioned that they drank moderately, or never, or socially (the most you can admit to; there is no way to check for “drinks alcoholically”).

For my maiden voyage, I had coffee with an accomplished local man, who said his last girlfriend had been religious, a devout Jew, and this had driven him crazy. I said I was probably worse. We parted with a hug.

I selected a nice-looking Englishman with grown children for my second date. He said he had a good sense of humor, loved movies. He was, perhaps, the tiniest bit fat. I don’t care much about weight, or hair loss. I e-mailed, and we arranged to meet at a Starbucks halfway between our homes, on a Sunday morning before my church.

This is a true story: He was ten minutes late, and shaken; he had just seen a fatal motorcycle accident on the Richmond–San Rafael Bridge. He
had stopped to inspect the body, because he was worried that it was his son, although his son rode a dramatically different brand of motorcycle. He had gotten out, talked to the police, and taken a peek at the corpse. This sort of put the kibosh on things for me. I recommended that we reschedule to a day when he hadn’t seen any dead people. He wanted to proceed. I got him a nice cup of tea.

I liked him, though, and we exchanged adorable and kicky e-mails, arranging another date, for sushi, and he was lively, cultured, and sort of charming in his e-mails and texts. But at lunch, during the first forty-five minutes of the conversation, he accidentally forgot to ask me anything about my life. It was fascinating, that we did not get around to me until that one question. Then I got cut off.

My pointing this out politely in an e-mail the next day did not sit well.

The next guy was highly cultured, a creative venture capitalist who was familiar with my work, and he turned out to be a truly excellent conversationalist. We had a coffee date, a long walk on the beach, a candlelit dinner, texts and e-mails in between, definite chemistry, and then I didn’t hear from him for five days. If I wanted to go for five
days without hearing from a man with whom I had chemistry and three almost perfect dates, I would repeat junior high.

My friends were great. They turned on the man immediately. (Of course, I talked mostly to my single friends and to Sam about match.com.) They knew how brave it was of me to go on dates. I was their role model.

This pattern repeated—a flurry of dates, followed by radio silence on the man’s part—and made me mourn the old days, when you met someone with whom you shared interests, chemistry, a sense of humor, and you started going out. After a while—okay, who am I kidding, sometimes later that day—you went to bed with him, and then woke up together, maybe shyly, and had a morning date. Then you made plans to get together that night, or the next, or over the weekend.

But that is the old paradigm. Now, if you have a connection with a match.com man, he might have nice connections with two or three other match .com women, and so each date and new dating level—coffee, a walk, lunch, and then dinner—is like being on a board game, different-colored game pieces being moved along the home path in Parcheesi.

Every few weeks, I went out with a new man and practiced my dating skills—i.e., listening, staying open, and bringing the date to a friendly close. My son has “We don’t give up” tattooed on his forearm, which is sort of our family motto. So I didn’t give up, even when that day’s date had an unbuttoned tropical shirt, or explained that there is no real difference between Republicans and Democrats.

Sam told me not to give up, that I would meet a guy who was worthy of me, quote unquote. That made the whole year worthwhile.

One of the bad coffee dates was a kingly little man who bore an unfortunate resemblance to Antonin Scalia, complete with tasseled loafers, and was snotty and disappointed until he figured out that I was a real writer. Then he wanted to be my BFF.

I saw the profile of a handsome religious man, who had graduate degrees and a great sense of humor and did not look like Antonin Scalia. He said he believed in courtesy and friendliness. Okay, I’ll bite. The only iffy answer on his questionnaire was that he was “middle of the road.”

I dropped him a line.

He wrote back fifteen minutes later. “Your politics are abhorrent to me.”

I loved that. “Middle of the road” almost always means conservative, I promise. It means the person is Tea Party but would consent to getting laid by a not-hysterical liberal, which rules me out.

A man with a graduate degree, a great sense of humor, spiritual but not religious, wrote to say he loved my work and felt we were kindred souls. We met at Starbucks. He was very sweet and open, but had a compulsive Beavis and Butt-head laugh. After ten minutes of this, my neck went out on me.

Then I met a man who was as far to the left as I am, in the weeks before the presidential election! Heaven. He was English also. I am powerless in the face of foreign accents.

Or rather, I used to be.

We went out four times in rapid succession, for coffee, lunches, a hike. We had chemistry, laughed a lot, sent lots of e-mails. But we didn’t touch. I thought, in my mature and/or delusional way, that this would come, but it didn’t. I made a few practice casual touches, but he didn’t respond.

My consultants said that I should pay attention to this. Part of me didn’t believe them—this guy
knew we weren’t on hikingpals.com. We both wanted mates. But then I got it, that my horrible friends were right, and he didn’t feel physical with me. I felt teary and surprised. I wrote to him, with my e-mail voice high in my throat, saying that maybe it wasn’t going to happen, and maybe we should take a break while I went out of town.

He said he wanted to pursue this and for me not to throw in the towel.

Hooray. My heart soared like an eagle. We stayed in touch by e-mail while I was gone for a couple of weeks.

I got home. He asked me out to lunch, and we had an easy, entertaining time. Afterward he wrote that he had really enjoyed it. I asked him if he wanted to go for a hike on Thanksgiving morning, before the hordes and riffraff arrived at my house. We had coffee in the kitchen with my son and younger brother, and then we had the most beautiful walk. We hiked the next morning, too. Then, in a feat of derring-do, I invited him to a movie that night and kept my adorable little starfish hand on the space where the armrest would have been, if I hadn’t stealthily raised it when he
went to get popcorn. But he didn’t reach for my hand; and to make a long story short, we haven’t seen each other since that night. After four days of silence, I wrote to say that I guessed it wasn’t going to happen. He wrote back that, yes, this was probably true; it had felt friendly but not romantic.

Now he is my mortal enemy.

That was four months ago. There have been some smart, sweet guys since, even one recently. And today, I had coffee with the first guy, from almost exactly one year ago. We compared notes; he loved “Your politics are abhorrent to me,” and commiserated about the second Englishman. He and I don’t have huge chemistry, but he’s a good guy, and it was pleasant.

You could say that my year on match.com was not successful, since I am still single, have been reduced to recycling my Starbucks companions, and am pleased with “pleasant.” To have gone out so many times took almost everything I had, and then I didn’t even meet the right man. You start to wonder if there’s something wrong with you.

Nah.

But I have two weeks left till my membership expires. Anything could happen. God is such a
show-off, and I never give up on my dreams. Plus, amazingly, I have learned how to date. I can meet guys for coffee and hang out with them for an hour, and either not have to see them again or keep my heart open, hoping I do. Talk about awesome. I did it.