On the Divinity of Second Chances (2 page)

The Moon on the Magnificence of Change
(May 15)

The moon above sees it all, and since she is an orb that appears to come and go, the moon understands the cycles of second chances. Yes, change is inevitable, she understands, but it can be done with some grace. She does not cling to last month’s trip around the Earth, and she does not project herself into next month’s. She shows us a slightly different expression each time we see her. She is both the same moon and an infinity of different moons.

The moon sees Anna and Phil, like Uranus and Neptune, seemingly sharing aspects in common, but definitely in their own enormous orbits. Anna would be the colder of the two. The moon sees them lie in bed, backs turned to one another, both sleepless, unbeknownst to the other. Phil’s neat salt-and-pepper hair topping his clean-shaven face could convince the moon that under the sheets Phil could be wearing a suit. As he eyes
Feeding the World Through Bioengineering Farming Market Trends
and
Agribusiness for the Twenty-first Century
on the floor, a tear creeps out of the corner of the eye that touches the pillow. He studies both his bottle of heart medication and his bottle of aspirin, and contemplates the volatile stock value of various drug companies, booming with the release of new products and plummeting with the announcement of new law-suits. This distracts him from his sense of loss. Then his eyes rest on his wedding picture and his sense of loss returns. He misses his young, strong physique. He becomes painfully aware of the sense that, unbound by muscle tone, his belly lies on the bed in front of him. He misses his thick hair. Most of all, he misses the love in Anna’s eyes, and the look of pure invincible-ness in his own. He wonders at what point his life became a series of losses, or perhaps one long, slow continuous loss.

Next to Phil, beads of perspiration begin to build on Anna’s forehead and soak her short, dark hair. She rolls her eyes as she throws the covers off herself, gets out of bed, opens the dresser drawer for a new nightshirt, and walks out of the room. She stops to study a picture of her two daughters, Olive and Jade, and her son, Forrest, taken almost two decades ago. For three people who came through her body, they could not look more different from one another. Olive, the oldest, has Anna’s dark coloring and Phil’s analytical eyes. Even as a child, she wore the expression of a deliberate and methodical mathematician.
How could my intelligent girl be living with such a loser?
Anna wonders. In contrast to Olive, Jade’s wild red braids, which she clearly had slept on several nights, depict a personality that is anything but deliberate and methodical. Anna studies Jade’s sparkly crescent-moon eyes. Instead of looking at the camera, Jade was looking elsewhere as she laughed. Anna wonders if perhaps Jade still had her invisible friend, Grace, even then though she had stopped talking about her several years before.
Maybe Jade needed her vivid inner reality to cope with our somber family. Maybe if I had been a happier mother, Jade would not have needed an invisible friend,
she thinks. After all, of all her children, Jade was most tuned in to everybody. Anna’s own discontentment would have hurt Jade most, she reasons. Anna’s brow furrows as she wonders what she did, what she did that was so wrong that her youngest son felt the need to run away and never be heard from again. Tears fall from her eyes as she examines Forrest’s face for clues. He has her eyes, large, dark, and infinitely soulful, almost like black holes. He squats in front of his older sisters, his arms wrapped around that damned chocolate lab, Moose. Forrest’s hair was longer than Moose’s fur, but about the same color, and since Forrest is squatting in the picture, the dog and he appear to be about the same height. Moose might be a little taller, and is without question more massive than Anna’s little boy.
Where is my little boy now?
She feels the familiar stabbing sensation in her gut. She gently touches the photograph frame with fingertips and notices she did not successfully clean all of the oil paint from her cuticles. The hot flash, now over, has left her soaked and shivering. She continues on to her luxurious bathroom. On the marble counter next to a white potted orchid, she keeps a framed picture of her own mother, Pearl, so she can watch nature’s progression, sad and cruel, as it slowly turns her own face into that of her mother’s. Pearl’s eyes are harsher, her jowls larger, and her face and figure much fuller. Other than that, the two women look the same. Anna studies the progressively looser tissue near the corners of her own mouth that she believes are the beginning of jowls. She notices how the places on her face above and below her cheekbones get more hollow every day. She wonders if the tissue that used to be near her cheekbones has fallen to the place under her jaw that blends into her neck. She flexes the front of her neck in different ways to see if she can suck that tissue back up into place. She can’t, of course, and she finds the muscles and tendons that stick out in her neck ghoul-like. She rips her soaked nightshirt off, turns the hot shower on, and steps inside.

The moon sees Forrest, much like Mercury in retrograde. Sometimes what is actually moving forward appears to move backward as it corners a bend. He sleeps in his tree house built deep in the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho in a tattered sleeping bag covered with a couple deerskins. His hair is long and unkempt, and his beard is equally nestlike. He twitches as he sleeps, his expression troubled. The moon sees her own light shaft through open windows, unfiltered, since Forrest has no panes. It illuminates the newspaper stapled on the walls for insulation, but it cannot illuminate the senseless violence in the words. A pair of homemade moccasins sits on the floor, and a couple rabbit pelts hang from a branch nearby. The moon listens as below, coyotes yip to her a love song.

The moon sees Olive like a nebula, the source of new creation. Olive is unaware of the creative forces at work. Her long, straight, dark hair stretches out above her because she cannot stand to have it touch her neck at night. Her open mouth makes tiny moist noises as she breathes in and out, much like a baby. By her side of the bed sits a checkbook, balanced to the penny. Neatly pressed professional clothes for another day at the bank hang on a hook on the closet door. Next to her sleeps her boyfriend, Matt. He sleeps on his back with his mouth closed and silent. Two copies of
Snowboard
magazine, a tipi catalog, and a DVD of
Dogtown and Z-Boys
sit on his night-stand. While Olive’s side of the room is neat and organized, his is cluttered with cargo shorts, skate shoes, dirty T-shirts and underwear, his long skateboard and his short skateboard, and loose change.

The moon sees Jade, much like the sun, radiating light wherever she goes, bringing things to light and transforming that which wishes to be transformed. The wild braids of her childhood are a little tidier now, and though she is asleep, she still laughs from time to time. Above her hangs a batik tapestry of a group of African women sitting in a circle. Draped on the back of a chair are two pairs of batik pants, a Sly and the Family Stone T-shirt, and a holster for massage oil she wears around her waist when she works. She sleeps on her back, smiling at the ceiling, under a quilt made of African fabrics, mostly yellow. On top of the quilt, wedged up against her, sleeps Aretha, Jade’s dog, a mix of rottweiler and husky. Aretha’s head rests on the pillow next to Jade’s face, and one of Aretha’s black, silky, floppy ears rests against Jade’s cheek. The moon knows this ear is the reason for Jade’s happy dream. Aretha opens one eye, looks at Jade sideways, closes it, and falls back to sleep.

Finally, three states away from the others in Idaho, the moon sees Anna’s mother, Pearl, who, much like Jupiter, takes up a lot of space and has a spot that is prone to irritation. Fortunately, she has the space she requires on the vast South Dakota farm she inherited. As for the spot that is prone to irritation, his name is Dean, and he is her neighbor. A wisp of smoke from the smoldering plastic in his burn barrel drifts across Pearl’s fallow fields and through her open window. Pearl awakens, detects the smoke, mutters obscenities, and makes her way to the kitchen for a midnight snack. The moon shines through the kitchen window and dances on the jar of mayonnaise and the glistening plastic bag of leftover turkey she takes out of the refrigerator. She saws off a couple slices of Beatrice’s homemade bread and assembles a sandwich. As Pearl stares out the window, raising an overgrown eyebrow, plotting an act of war against Dean, the moon highlights the bags and jowls in her face, accentuating her fierceness. The silver of Pearl’s butch pixie appears to match the silver of the pistol that rests in the open kitchen drawer in the moon’s light. Pearl chews her turkey sandwich slowly, calculating her options. Eventually, she opts not to engage in an act of war tonight, for opening the door to go outside would wake her beloved friend, Beatrice, who sleeps in the pink room next to Pearl’s. The moon knows Pearl would do anything for Beatrice, even, yes, hold her fire, at least for a few more hours.

From above, the moon watches this family as they show their dark sides and light sides, as they orbit and reinvent themselves. She remains in the sky, reminding those below of the power of illumination in darkness, of reflection, and of the magnificence of change.

Jade on the Laundromat
(May 17)

There’s nothing like the hypnotic sound of washing machines. I fold my T-shirts, still stained on the sides from where I wedge the oily arms of my clients above my hip to get a better grip. I find the sound of the Laundromat so soothing. I have effortless moments of that emptiness for which all those who meditate strive. Yes, Laundromats sound a little like the ocean in a way—nothingness. Just emptiness. I love losing myself in the low rumbles of Speed Queens and Maytags. I don’t even care about my massage sheets going rancid and the little bits of Kleenex all over my personal laundry. I have yet to get a load of laundry through without a Kleenex hiding in a pocket. None of it matters.

“I like these Laundromats better than church,” my spirit guide, Grace, says, pulling me out of the emptiness. “More meditation, less fear.” We nod together and look around. Three other customers also appear to be in the emptiness—one, a young man who rode in on a skateboard with his bag of laundry thrown over his shoulder like Santa, and the other, a Mexican couple, also folding laundry.

Olive doesn’t even say hi to Aretha, my “Rusky” (rottweiler-husky, the new superbreed) who waits for me outside the glass doors. She just storms in with her pink plastic laundry basket and a small red plastic bag on top. She drops her basket in front of the washing machine closest to me and picks up the plastic bag. “It’s over,” she announces. “Matt left.” I watch her dig in her bag. As her announcement sinks in, I try to figure out the appropriate reply. Anything supportive I say now could be used against me if they get back together later.

“Wow,” slips out. “Are you okay?” Good. That was a good thing to say. That was the right thing to say.

Olive pulls out six pairs of new cotton bikini underwear, rips off the tags, and throws them in the washing machine. “Oh, I’m fine,” she says with residual anger around the edges. “I’m fine and I’m through with wearing uncomfortable underwear.” She spikes the underwear tags in the garbage, then puts her quarters in the machine and scoops out some detergent from her box.

Okay, I’m really not sure how to respond to that . . . Amen, sister! perhaps? “Well, cotton is king,” slips out. Jesus! Where is my self-censor mechanism?

Olive walks to the other side of the Laundromat and, as usual, starts digging in the lost and found box. “What does a person have to do to keep a mate? Half my sock drawer is full of singles!”

I look at my own bare feet. Yeah, not my problem. “Why don’t you donate them to the kindergarten so kids can make sock puppets?”

“Then what happens if I find the mate to one of the socks I’ve given away? I don’t want a
Romeo and Juliet
ending in my sock drawer. God, where do you suppose they go?” She begins to sort her laundry into two machines.

“I think the Laundromat is a portal to other dimensions, and that’s where the socks go—other dimensions,” I joke. She gives me that look. She doesn’t get my humor. Never has. I swear everything I say irritates her. I’ve learned there’s really nothing I can say or do about that.

Suddenly, Olive’s eyes bulge and she pukes right there in the garbage, just like that. I jump up, put one arm around her, and, with the other hand, pull the garbage closer to a bench so she can sit and let it all out. She pukes again. “The smell in here is too much for me,” she tells me as she starts to run for the door. I quickly push in the quarters to start her machines, then run out to help her into her car and drive her home.

Grace sits in the backseat with Aretha. “She doesn’t know it yet, but you’re going to be an aunt.”

Olive on Crossroads
(May 17)

Crossroads. I think about them a lot—why we go one way and not another. To what degree is our life dictated by fate and to what degree is it a choice?

I ask because last night something happened that would have looked like a choice had someone been there to watch it, but it felt predetermined, as if I was there only as a formality.

When I try to remember last night, I can’t put the events in order. I can’t even recall most of what I said. I remember thinking. I remember thinking in that way you do in those five long seconds it takes for your car to slide off an icy road once it begins to spin, where time slows down and you find yourself with enough time to figure out the meaning of life, although you don’t actually figure it out because instead you’re thinking about what your dad’s reaction will be when he sees your smashed car.

In a way, what happened last night is not so different from sliding off the road. In the same way Dad always told me not to hit the brakes on an icy road, he also told me Matt was never going to amount to anything. In both cases, I had to see for myself that Dad was right. He was. I hate that.