Sex, Mom, and God

One recent morning I happened to be riding a full Greyhound bus from Boston to New York. The advice I gave The Probably Unsaved Asian Young Woman, as I’ll call the person I met on that bus, was pretty good (though maybe since I was still labeling people, I was less cured of my fundamentalism than I thought).

The seat next to me was open. The only other empty seat was across the aisle next to a heavyset girl in her early twenties. She was talking loudly on her cell phone and sniffing compulsively while brushing her lank sandy blonde hair away from her pudgy white face. Her sniffing and the incessant dragging of her fingers through her hair seemed to be connected; one action accompanied the other. Had my mother been there—not as she is now at the very sweet and forgetful age of ninety-six, but as she was when she was fifty, vibrant, young, beautiful, and energetically opinionated—she would have described the cell phone talker as “a young woman who clearly doesn’t know the Lord.”

If This Unfortunate Young Woman, as Mom would have called her (and as I instantly labeled her) had been happier looking, speaking in a less-petulant tone, and carried on a quieter, more intelligent series of cell phone conversations or if she’d worn something besides too-tight, too-short shorts hugging her bulging dimpled thighs, she might have been attractive. Sniffing, those Unfortunate Shorts, her hair-sweeping, and her head-tossing might have been forgiven. But The Unfortunate Young Woman’s face was set in a terminal pout, and her side of successive phone conversations (which she conducted one after the other, like a chain smoker lighting each cigarette off the butt of the last) consisted of badmouthing her friends to other friends, combined with an unforgivable “where-I’m-like-at-right-now” travelogue.

If the driver on the Boston to New York run is a smoker, he pulls over at a rest stop near Hartford under the pretense of letting his or her passengers stretch their legs. Almost everyone buys something to eat at the Roy Rogers/Pizza Hut while the driver stands by the bus feverishly consuming two cigarettes. He or she sucks the air through those cigarettes with such nicotine-deprived desperation that each drag creates a quarter to half an inch of ash, and you can hear the tobacco sizzle. Some of the passengers also smoke while others ferry food onto the bus.

For the rest of the way, the air in the bus is redolent of french fries and glopped-up, too-thick Americanized “pizza,” not to mention the smoke smell clinging to the smokers’ clothes. Weirdly, instead of these odors being nauseating, they combine to foster a mood of friendly domesticity that always makes me feel as if our bus-riding collection of strangers is forming into some sort of community that would, in the event of a terrorist attack, flat tire, or alien invasion from outer space, stick together and share food.

Even without an alien invasion, I’ve had fellow passengers who hadn’t said a word to me before the rest stop offer me french fries soon after we’ve climbed back onboard. I once shared several chicken nuggets with a Polish tourist. Something about disembarking together and then ten minutes later trooping back onto the bus—with everyone obeying the unwritten rule that you go back to your former seat—makes for bonding.

That said, our driver wasn’t a smoker. There was to be no rest stop. And so I never did develop any community feeling toward The Unfortunate Young Woman, especially since ten minutes out of Boston, after the driver announced that we were stopping in Newton for more passengers, the sniffer arranged herself—on purpose—in such a way as to claim both seats on her side of our row. She spread out like a stranded jellyfish melting on hot sand.

I didn’t even have a briefcase to protect my open seat. Nor, given that I mow my lawn and cut and stack firewood (and don’t have a sweet tooth), do I have any extra body mass to spread out when it’s most needed. So, short of feigning a particularly severe Tourettesyndrome-type of outburst and/or off-putting Pentecostal-style speaking in tongues, I was defenseless.

The new passenger, a short young Asian woman with a studious intelligent face that was a bit scrunched looking—everything compressed, flatter, and wider than optimal—was timidly glancing back and forth at the two open seats. I tried not to make eye contact. She looked from the open seat next to me to the one across from me being smothered by The Unfortunate Young Woman’s flaccid right thigh. I was too cowardly to contort my face, twitch uncontrollably, or scream “Praise Jesus!” so instead—something like Sir Alec Guinness playing Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars and instructing the storm troopers to let Luke and him pass unmolested—I projected several telepathic thoughts: Sit next to the big girl! Please, sit next to the big girl! Ask her to move over! Ask!

The Probably Unsaved Asian Young Woman looked my way again, then back at The Unfortunate Young Woman’s open seat. As the bus left Newton, The Probably Unsaved Asian Young Woman peered at the rows behind us. I knew that nothing was open back there. Still undecided and still standing, she held onto the back of a seat as we rounded the bend out of the parking lot and headed for the Mass Pike. I knew that the decent thing to do was to offer to move so that she could step to the open window seat next to me. I’m ashamed to say that instead of moving, I decided to take a last stab at projecting more telepathic thoughts: “No right-minded twenty-something woman chooses to sit next to a fifty-eight-year-old man!” I thought as hard as I could. “Sit next to the nice, albeit extra-large girl your age! She’s made herself look far bigger than she really is! It’s the oldest trick in the book! Ask her to move! There’s plenty of room for you both! You can lower the armrest and contain her! The large ones fall asleep, so you’ll have a nice quiet ride. Sit there! SIT T-H-E-R-E!”

“Of course,” I muttered, given that my mother had a “special burden” for the Chinese and that I’m the product of British boys boarding schools from back in the day when politeness counted. I usually play the part of a gentleman by habit, if not by inclination. I smiled as if I’d just noticed her and swung my legs around into the aisle, making room for her to step to the window seat. It was the right thing to do, and besides I’ve arrived at the F-you stage of life.

Once you’re old enough to know that the accomplishments and possessions you once craved aren’t what they’re cracked up to be, and once you spend enough time on your hands and knees crawling around with your ten-month-old granddaughter finding everything she does deeply fascinating—say, taking boxes of raisins and cornmeal out of a kitchen cupboard again and again—then everything else in your life begins to be fascinating again, too.

Each grandchild Genie and I have been blessed with is something like cataract surgery: The misty veil lifts, and I see more clearly, not that I’ve ever had cataracts. The F-you stage sounds antisocial. It’s not at all; it is just my way of saying that these days I’m content to let the chips fall where they may. The point is that the F-you stage isn’t directed against anyone, just against the Virus of False Certainty that is threatening to destroy us. The F-you stage is a state of mind that I fell into after hitting my fifties, wherein I say what I think because almost nothing much embarrasses me these days, except my own past false certainties. Knowing you could and probably are wrong about most of what you say is freeing. There is a peaceful sort of “knowing” in admitting unknowing once you accept the basic human Paradox: The evolution of our species is a journey, not a destination, and we are only just at the very beginning.

In my grandchild-rejuvenated, F-you frame of mind, I talk to strangers as if they were old friends. People respond to selfrevealing, even self-flaying transparency. So strangers talk to me. They tell me surprisingly intimate details about themselves. I’m a good listener. I also give outrageously forward personal advice. For instance, while flying to Los Angeles, after hearing one divorced and unhappy middle-aged guy’s life story, I told him to track down his high school sweetheart and start over. On a train to Washington, D.C., I told a young Harvard Business School graduate who said he didn’t find his career rewarding to forget his fancy job on Wall Street and join the Marines while he was still young enough to “do something useful.” I advised a businesswoman I met on a flight to London, who (in return for me telling her about how I got Genie pregnant when we were teens) told me about her struggle to “balance career and family,” to go ahead and have a third child if she wanted to, and “damn the career consequences!” I’ve told atheist Jews that they need Jesus, and Evangelicals that the best thing they could do is never set foot in a church again, that they should become secular Jews. I’m sure I’ve had next-to-no effect on most people, besides making this or that bus or plane ride interesting and/or intolerable; I may have helped one or two people and probably ruined a few lives. I enjoy the conversations nonetheless and get a strange adrenaline rush from offering unsolicited advice.

Before we were off the Mass Pike, The Unfortunate Young Woman was blessedly asleep, and once she stopped talking, I was able to shift my mood from dyspeptic brooding to my usual look-out-thewindow I-84 daze. The Probably Unsaved Asian Young Woman next to me had her laptop open, and when she typed, her elbow protruded across the armrest. I wasn’t wishing The Probably Unsaved Asian Young Woman ill. I was merely passing the time by visually measuring the airspace her elbow was poking into between our seats. My eyes were tired from editing a draft of this book, so I’d decided not to read. And looking out the window wasn’t that interesting because I know every inch of I-84 as it winds through Connecticut. Thus, I was just killing time by measuring my seatmate’s elbow intrusion.

Glancing at my seatmate’s laptop, I saw that she was writing something about education. Did I have a right to read what was on her screen? Sure I did. She wasn’t angling the screen for privacy, and since I was contributing a portion of my airspace to her elbow and thus allowing her to type and read her notes at the same time, I was helping her. Typing with one hand and holding papers with the other didn’t work out very well. There were gaps in the typing action. The Probably Unsaved Asian Young Woman interrupted her work several times by reaching down to her backpack to extract various snacks in the form of Power Bars. When she bent down to scrabble around in the backpack for the third or fourth time (she’d placed it at her feet), my seatmate’s T-shirt pulled up from her jeans and I glimpsed the base of her flawless ivory-colored lower back and the top couple of inches of her panties.

They were made of a black and expensive-looking gossamer material. Silk, I guessed. There was exceedingly delicate olive green and pink embroidery featuring a Roman vine motif something like the work one sees framing frescos at Pompeii. If I had to place a bet, I’d say that those panties were handmade in Italy.

From this brief glimpse I deduced not just that my seatmate had good taste in lingerie, but also that there was probably money in her family. This was no made-in-China-five-pairs-for-$10 piece of underwear. I’d say there was $155 worth of La Perla lingerie tucked under those mundane jeans. The panty glimpse also gave me insight into The Probably Unsaved Asian Young Woman’s love life. A woman doesn’t wear black gossamer silk panties with handembroidered Roman-derived motifs unless there’s someone in her life to wear them for.

When she sat up, I volunteered to hold her papers. This had nothing to do with The Probably Unsaved Asian Young Woman’s lingerie. Miserable cynics may scoff in disbelief; trust me when I say that my consideration of her underwear was fleeting, academic, and passionless! I only offered to hold her papers because from what I’d read on her laptop, her writing seemed to be serious and typing with one hand while holding papers with the other is tough.

After that The Probably Unsaved Asian Young Woman typed faster, but also (it seemed to me) was shooting me worried glances while trying to figure out if I was going to be a nuisance. Also, I think that she felt awkward repeatedly glancing down at my knees and keenly aware that I was perhaps reading her notes. Plus, I had to actually hold the papers since otherwise they would have slipped off my lap. The whole help-my-neighbor gesture was turning out to be far more cumbersome than I’d imagined.

I could sense her growing discomfort. Was my kindness a prelude to murder? Maybe she’d read about that crazy man in Canada who killed—then beheaded—the man riding next to him on a bus. That was also on a Greyhound. Maybe he’d started out on the trip being nice, too, before things turned mean-spirited.

Maybe my offer to hold her papers had embarrassed her and she’d only let me hold them to be polite. Maybe she really was tired and wanted a nap. Whatever her motivation, The Probably Unsaved Asian Young Woman retrieved her papers, then closed her eyes, and a few moments later her jaw relaxed, and unless she was a brilliant actress, she really did fall deeply asleep. The Probably Unsaved Asian Young Woman’s head sank forward, then jerked back up again several times, and then her mouth fell slightly open.

About fifteen minutes later when The Probably Unsaved Asian Young Woman awoke, I asked her what she’d been writing. This was something like telling God your troubles: He knows them all already but apparently likes to be asked and voluntarily kept in the loop. I’d been reading her paper, so I knew the phrases she’d been typing. She confirmed that it was a dissertation on education and women or, rather, “on Asian women and educational opportunities.” Speaking about her subject—with lots of boilerplate phrases like “Gender diversities and technology, achieving economic, political, and social equality”—my seatmate seemed bored. So we moved on to more personal topics.

Early in the postnap conversation, I mentioned Genie as in “My wife, Genie, loves walking in Central Park.” After that my seatmate seemed to relax—given that men don’t usually speak warmly about their wives if they intend to hit on strangers. Once the what’s-thisguy-really-want factor was taken out of the equation, I learned that The Probably Unsaved Asian Young Woman was getting her PhD at Columbia, that she didn’t like New York City “because at night I can’t see the stars,” that she was a year from being done with her PhD, that she was Chinese, or rather of Chinese extract: Her grandmother had lived in Taiwan then emigrated, her Chinese father and mother had been born Beijing but lived in America since they were toddlers, and her father was a professor at one of the best of the Boston-area colleges. She told me that her mother was also an academic and, like her father, also an international business consultant. Then she told me that she had a boyfriend in New York City.

No one in her family approved of her boyfriend, The Probably Unsaved Asian Young Woman said, “even though he went to Yale and started his own electronics business.” Her grandmother was an “out-and-out racist,” she said, and didn’t even pretend otherwise. So was her mother, though she pretended she wasn’t. The Probably Unsaved Asian Young Woman’s dad hadn’t expressed an opinion about the black boyfriend but was deferring to the women in the family.

“Yes. We’re incredibly close; or rather, we used to be. My grandmother cooks for us every Sunday, and we all spend the afternoon at her house eating together. She’s a great cook and cooks all week to prepare. There’s never been a problem in our family, until now. It’s breaking my heart. How could I have known? My parents are so liberal about everything else.”

Once we got onto the subject of family, marriage, Chinese bigotry against other races, men, children, her sister—who had married a Chinese American and thus served as a “why-can’tyou-be-like-your-sister” example her grandmother harped on—my seatmate talked to me the way you talk only to a complete stranger when there are two or three hours of a bus ride to kill, or the way a granddaughter might talk to a grandfather when she’s feeling desperate. I spoke to her the way a writer—who’s willing to tell his secrets in return for confidences while he’s fishing for good material—talks.

Whatever the sophistication of the consciousness-raising, postfeminist qualities of my seatmate’s dissertation, our conversation could have taken place at any time in history without even a nod to modernity. We talked about her boyfriend, love, and family troubles. Shakespeare would have understood the dialogue perfectly.

The Probably Unsaved Asian Young Woman was thirty and wanted children. Her boyfriend was thirty-two. He wanted to marry and start a family immediately. She didn’t want to “rush,” but she also knew that she was at the age where biology starts to matter and that if she waited a few more years, then added another year or two for career considerations, then had any trouble getting pregnant, she’d be closer to forty than to thirty when she gave birth. And if she wanted more than one child and wanted to space them, then the second child would be conceived on the cusp of her midforties. And, The Probably Unsaved Asian Young Woman added with a sigh, “midforty is old.”

So we’d traveled from a respectable consciousness-raising dissertation on educational opportunity for Asian women, to a Chinese family of academics (in self-consciously progressive Boston, no less) who were unrepentant racists, to issues of childbearing and marriage, passed through the 1950s as it were, and now were headed smack dab back to feudal China and arranged marriages.

“That’s all you can know. Being married will change who you both are anyway. So all you can know is if he’s kind. The rest is guesswork. When you’re married, the relationship changes you. So there are things you can’t learn until you are married, and waiting around won’t tell you anything more about what it’ll really be like after you make a commitment. That’s one reason that just living with a person doesn’t prepare you to be married. Everything changes after making a real commitment.”

I could see from the bemused expression on her face that my seatmate thought she’d either run into a nut or maybe a very forward and slightly demented guardian angel sent to nudge her to woman up and marry her black man. But I had launched. And at the F-you stage, when it comes to spewing wisdom (real or imagined), it’s something like having that second martini; there will be a third.

“I’ve done some interesting things in life, but nothing comes close—on any scale—to my children and my grandchildren,” I said. “Yes, it’s a cliché. And it’s true. Because I got Genie pregnant so young, I wasn’t even a good father, at first anyway. I don’t even remember who those two kids were who raised my children. We all grew up together, and yet looking back, there’s nothing I’d change but my meanness because you can’t get here from there by any path than the one you’re on. You don’t choose anything important. It just happens. The only choice you have is if you’ll make life’s accidents work.”

When the bus ride ended, my new acquaintance thanked me for the advice and said she was going to call her boyfriend and tell him that maybe she was ready to defy her family. Somewhere in the midst of our conversation my seatmate said, “We have too many options.” Then we talked about the fact that in most cultures (and in most of history) the big moments in life related to marriage, childbearing, and child-raising. Career was called work, and work was about survival; it was not a form of self-fulfillment, much less expected to be fun, let alone entertaining.

If you were lucky, you married someone kind. Kind or not, you were stuck with the choices you, or maybe your parents, made about who your partner would be, where you lived, what you did for a job, the social class you were born into, and the shape of your life. Cutting and running wasn’t an option. If you were lucky, you lived. If you were unlucky, you got killed because stupid people were sure that’s what their God wanted them to do to you. The number of children you had, how they were raised, what you taught them about right and wrong, and their expectations were shaped by what would have seemed to be a set of changeless inherited values.

Since the Depression, the invention of labor-saving machines, the liberation of women, the sexualization of our culture from cradle to grave, the invention of “teenagerhood,” and college as a rite of passage changed what people expected out of life. What had once seemed like inevitable facts—marriage, children, struggle, work, survival, village, town, community, the faith one was born into—became “choices.” So did growing up. In other words, learning to make the most of any situation you’re in became optional, just another choice. The concept of freedom was reduced to the soul-shriveling puny right to choose between consumer products. And relationships became mere choices, too, just like buying a car.

So here’s the question The Probably Unsaved Asian Young Woman and I hashed out: What hasn’t changed over time? Here’s what we came up with: People still crave Love. So how should we make decisions that take advantage of our new freedoms and yet help us to have a shot at happiness related to what never changes and matters most?

While riding the subway uptown after the bus ride, I had time to think, and here’s what I came up with in a wish-I’d-thought-ofthat-at-the-time way: It strikes me that our American society, from kindergarten through old age, while talking about how great families are (especially when selling worried young mothers and fathers “parenting” products that they don’t need) might as well have been designed to destroy family happiness. That’s because both the religious fundamentalist and the higher-educationworshipping consumer/choice models of existence and everything that goes with both “dogmas” fly in the face of the reality of what we fundamentally are: tribal, communal, and family-seeking animals craving Unconditional Love and Continuity and Creativity.

We human animals seek out meaning that transcends the sum of our physical parts. I know only one thing: that any worldview—be it religious or secular—that doesn’t start and end with the recognition of Paradox will become a tyranny. So I have rejected many of my past certainties and embraced the meaning I find in loving, raising, protecting, and praying for my children and grandchildren. I also feel that in some inexplicable way my mother’s prayers for her family have—and are being—answered every time Lucy says, “I love you, Ba.”

That subway ride took me to Genie. Genie and I love to visit New York City. We stay in a small hotel on the Upper West Side. We often walk to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. By the time we’re on the jogging path in Central Park, walking briskly around the reservoir, I feel the way I used to feel when I was eight and on my way to Italy riding on the train to our family vacation in Portofino. Our vacations were always as wonderful as I imagined they would be, even back when Mom brought along her Gospel Walnut.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is like some perfect childhood memory, except it’s not beyond reach. It is “about” watching wide-eyed children gathered in front of a painting with sketchbooks, making their own drawings. It is about taking my older grandchildren, Amanda and Benjamin, on pilgrimages to give them something lasting to hang on to, even though they sometimes roll their eyes and sigh when I “suggest” we’re going there—again.

The day after my bus ride I happened to be at the Met alone. Genie was off buying material at her favorite midtown fabric stores. I slipped away from a Matisse show I’d gone to see. Too many people were talking too loudly about the paintings, so I sought refuge in a place I knew would be quiet. There are very public parts of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But there are also some corners where it feels as if you’ve brazenly walked into someone’s home. For instance, there are hardly ever any visitors in the dim recesses of the Chinese galleries. People whisper. Everything seems intimate, almost forbidden. Sometimes visitors stumble in from the bigger, brighter parts of the museum and, as their eyes adjust to the cool dim indirect lighting, look around worriedly as if about to ask, “Are we allowed here?” Perhaps it’s the subdued light. Perhaps it’s the wood floors. But I think that the real reason for the sense that one is intruding is the intimate nature of the objects. Pens, inkpots, writing stands, tablets, finely wrought boxes—they seem as if they belong on a bedside table and are the sorts of things that children are told not to touch, ever.

I’m not “into” Chinese art the way Genie is and as my mother was, and so I’m ignorant about it. Unless Genie is with me to explain what I’m looking at, I rarely go to the Chinese galleries. But that day several ancient jade carvings “broke through.” They seemed so impossible. I thought, there’s no way anyone could carve so intricately without modern tools.

I started really looking. Maybe it had something to do with having talked to my Chinese seatmate the day before on the bus. Anyway, I forgot that I only wanted to spend a few quiet moments before heading back to take another look at a particular painting in that thronged Matisse show. I stood hunched over the glass case almost forgetting to breathe and peering through my reading glasses at microscopic gnarled pine trees and rocky paths cut out of green and gray semi-opaque rock, miniature worlds that drew me in as surely as those Bible stories that Mom read out loud used to enthrall me.

Looking at those jade landscapes, I felt as if I had been hiking with Mom and Dad through some alpine valley and the fog had unexpectedly lifted to reveal a heart-stopping view. I was also reminded of the evenings the previous winter when I had bundled Lucy up in my down parka and put on her hat and mittens and we’d go out into the garden to look at the stars.

I held Lucy clasped against my chest, and we stared up. Lucy gazed at the sliver of the universe we could see, and I stared down at my angel made of, and lit by, stardust. When she first looked upward at the vast glittering sprinkle of stars, Lucy’s breathing quickened, and then her breathing slowed along with mine as we both sank into a stunned reverie.

It was very much like the reverie I was gripped by when tumbling into those distant jade miniature worlds. Gazing at those jade universes, I connected powerfully with my mother’s enigmatic self as she was revealed in the sacrament of her flower arrangements. They were made of long-gone twig, moss, and leaf, but the liturgy they celebrated has survived in me. In the silence it struck me that Mom and I are very much alike: We each have spent most of our lives rescuing ourselves—from ourselves.