Forgiveness 4 You

I was in the bookstore, sitting behind the counter reading Dostoyevsky, when a small woman walked in: short red coat, long dark hair, black boots with buckles down the sides. She stopped inside the doorway, unwinding the scarf from around her neck.

Her face was interesting—strange and sad. Not beautiful according to the surgically-nipped-news-anchor style of our time. Yet striking and very beautiful in a way that evoked something ancient: deserts, roiling storms, hieroglyphics on the side of a cave. Her forehead was clear and broad, her nose a little hawkish, her mouth full and nearly as red as her coat. She stood looking me up and down, her large, dark eyes moving over my body like hands.

This happened to me often. Over the years, I’d grown accustomed to being leered at when I was wearing my robes. What surprised me was that this didn’t stop when I switched them out for the uniform of the underemployed forty-two-year-old: khakis, sweater vest, cracked leather shoes. Some women, not all but a large minority, seemed to smell something of my old life—candle wax, incense, the ether of old unanswered prayers—because they pressed up against me on the L, breathing deeply, their excitable nipples making little dents under my upraised arm.

That’s how this one looked at first glance: as if she were following my scent, preparing to leap the counter and take me in her teeth. So I cleared my throat and said, “May I help you find something?” At which point she swallowed and cleared her throat a couple of times. Her large dark eyes were damp.

“Can you help me?” she echoed—incorrectly, I first thought. Then I realized she’d actually meant it as a question. Was it possible I could help her? She assessed me shrewdly, narrowed eyes gleaming even through her tears. Then she glanced around the room, and I followed along, seeing the neat, shabby shelves as if they were from a grade school library, as I imagined she might. Books spilled from everywhere—half-full boxes and glass cupboards and stacks on the floor. We had run out of space; it was part of the charm of the shop.

“Do you have anything on regret and what to do about it?” the woman asked briskly. “Or maybe how to make it go away? Because I’m not sure I can …” Here, she broke off and stared down at her pointed boots. “I apologize,” she said after a moment, speaking again in her firm, certain voice. “That was terribly inappropriate—and completely unlike me. I don’t know why this is happening. I should probably leave.”

This wasn’t unusual, I wanted to tell her: the sudden outpouring of sadness followed by apology and confusion. It was the way these things had to be unraveled; for two decades I’d specialized in exactly this, parsing the blame and responsibility and absolving the guilt for everyone but myself.

I was marked. It had happened even before I took my oath, the day I went to God with what I’d done and He appeared to me in the form of a tattoo artist named Sol. Since the moment I confessed and his needle pricked my chest, I’d been unable to slip through life like a normal man. People regularly dissolved in my presence—even those who didn’t realize they were harboring shame. Old, young, every race and color, even dedicated atheists and thieves. Nine times out of ten it scared them, so they would abruptly say goodbye and leave.

But this woman was—however reluctantly—standing her ground. Slowly she raised her head, and I watched as she recognized the Sol in me. I put my book down and came out from behind the counter, walking with my head straight forward, hands folded, in the slow, reverent way I was taught.

It was just the two of us, which was not unusual for Brooks Books at 3:30 p.m. on a cold Tuesday in February. I put my hand on the woman’s shoulder and pressed down through her wool coat to the bones below. She was a 110-pound warrior dressed in thick winter clothes.

“Would you like to sit?” I asked, pointing to the beat-up leather chairs that Oren, our owner, keeps near the gas fireplace—a set-up that encourages people to settle in and read, but not buy.

“I’m so sorry!” she said again, pulling a pair of rhinestone-studded sunglasses from her purse and slipping them on, as if the sun—which had been in hiding for weeks—were suddenly breaking out in our shop. “Something is going on. I never do things like this! I actually just came in for a …” She gestured oddly with the toe of one boot, a masked Midwestern Audrey Hepburn in glittering frames.

“No,” she said. “A manicure.” She pulled off one leather glove and presented me with a small, chapped hand. “There used to be a place. They had a paraffin wrap I loved. I could have sworn it was here.”

“Next door,” I said, tipping my head to the east. “It closed in January.”

“Well, I should go then,” she said uncertainly. But still she stayed, and I moved forward another inch or two.

I didn’t want this one to leave. The image of an empty afternoon yawned in front of me. And it had been a long time since I’d met anyone who stirred my desire to minister. The last person who found me was a loud, bald man clearly in search of a quick fix. He’d been buying a guidebook to Prague, talking rapidly about his mother’s Alzheimer’s. She didn’t remember him anyway, so what did it matter if he saw her? That was the refrain. I’d kept my mouth shut and handed him his receipt without a word.

But this sprite of a woman, hiding behind her dark glasses and fighting the urge to confess, was definitely different. I tested the air, leaning forward and then back. There was definitely something compelling me toward her. My spiritual radar was rusty, yet her appearance felt like a sign.

“My name is Gabe,” I said, shaking the hand she’d offered as evidence. My own swallowed hers whole. “Why don’t you stay and warm up? I can’t help you with your nails, but I’ll make you a cup of tea.”

Just then there was a brief flash of light through the door’s half-window. “Thundersnow,” she said and shivered. We slid slowly toward the chairs in unison, as if on a conveyor belt.

I flipped the switch on the fireplace, producing an immediate wisp of heat and a chemical orange glow. “I remember that manicure place,” I told her, chatting to put her at ease, “because when I started working here—it was a couple weeks before Christmas—I’d go home every night with the smell of chemicals on my clothes.”

I nodded, too, though this was the first time I’d heard the term. I didn’t tell her about those nights when I would walk through the lighted streets yearning for my old life the way children want their mothers, remembering until it was painful the candlelit silence and safety of a chapel at dusk. I didn’t tell her about climbing the stairs to my shoddy one-room apartment where the acetone—if that’s what it was—would rise in a vapor as I shucked off my coat. Or about how I would stand there, paralyzed, still aching to go back twenty-two years and save myself.

At least, not yet. Some of this would come later at the nightclub down the street, over martinis she charged to her business account. Some of it would come much later, when I once again had everything to lose.

“Listen,” she said, removing the sunglasses, her eyes an endless brown-black and once again unwavering. “I don’t know what that was back there. I’m not the sort of person who cries in front of strangers. I guess I’ve been under a lot of stress.”

“It’s work,” she said, slipping off her little pointed boots and tucking her feet under her. “Which has been crazy. I mean, you don’t know crazy until you’ve run an ad agency single-handed.” She seemed to be warning me, in case I was considering doing such a thing.

“That sounds very challenging,” I murmured, my back to her as I rummaged in the cupboard. When I get into the groove, I’m like a backup singer; all most people really need is to hear the familiar echoes and refrains. This woman was different though. She kept going off script.

“It is. But, oh! I apologize. That sounded really pompous, didn’t it?” She shook her head. “This is exactly what my ex-husband used to accuse me of: ‘You’re constantly telling people how successful you are, Madeline.’” Her soprano had gone several notes deeper to become a parody of a man. “But he’s right, I shouldn’t do that,” she said in her own voice.

The water was boiling, and luckily there were two packets of Earl Grey left. I made the tea and handed a cup to the woman. Madeline. “Sugar?” I asked. She shook her head no, hair rustling over her shoulders with a brisk and pleasant sound.

“He was my second husband. My second ex-husband now, I suppose.” She set her tea down and removed her coat. Underneath she wore a tight, buttoned suit. “Damn. What an error in judgment that was. Second marriages! They never seem to work.”

She glanced at me, and I was tempted to agree. Imagine, I might say to her, trying for a second marriage when your first spouse was God. Sometimes, inside my head, I’m kind of an ass.

“But there was Cassidy.” She paused and looked into her lap, and I watched guilt draw its white blind down over her face. “This is ridiculous. I’m making a fool of myself, talking about all this. It’s just the surprise, I think. Finding you here. The thunder. Hormones, probably.” She spoke matter-of-factly, like the commercials for women’s remedies on TV. “Thanks for the tea. I should go.”

It was the second time she’d announced her departure, and there was no earthly reason for me to delay her. I had books to unpack and an H. P. Lovecraft display to build. Yet there was something compelling me to keep her. Goodwill, loneliness, attraction, it didn’t matter. I acted on whatever it was.

“You haven’t even tried your tea,” I said with more authority than I’d assumed in a year. “Sit. Tell me what happened. Maybe I can help.”

She shook her head. But she didn’t get up. “You can’t help. No one can. I did a terrible thing to that girl, and there’s no way for me to ever make it up.”

“Go on,” I said, settling back. There was a feeling of security: I knew exactly how this part should go. “It’s all right. What did you do?”

She sighed and warmed her hands around her cup. “When I started seeing Kevin,” she began, “Cassidy was four. She was so sweet, and I really, truly thought I loved her father. So I took her out, to the zoo and Six Flags and the Christmas show at Marshall Fields. All the things I never got to do as a child.”

But Madeline shook her head again. “Not exactly. I mean yes, my parents survived mostly on welfare and food stamps. There was family money somewhere, a lot of it, from what I understand, but my grandparents kept cutting us off. And when my parents took us places it wasn’t to zoos or amusement parks, it was to union rallies and protests.” She looked at me squarely. “By the time I was in third grade, I knew how to chain myself to a fence.”

I laughed, the image in my head of Madeline now in her nice suit with shackles around her arms. “So you wanted something different for Cassidy?”

“God, yes. I wanted everything for her. Kevin and I were married when she was five, and Cass was the maid of honor. She had this gorgeous little blue dress. White flowers in her hair. She looked like an angel, you know?”

“Yes.” This time I spoke with actual knowledge. I knew how it was to look down an aisle and see little girls floating toward you like seraphim.

“Then, I don’t know what happened. It was like the minute we got married, Cassidy started to go … bad. She did disgusting things, like eating with her mouth wide open or picking her nose when we had company. And I mean aggressive nose picking, shoving a finger up there and twisting it and pulling out these long …”

Madeline grimaced and shook herself. “Then there was her room. I tried promising her rewards, an allowance, more TV time, but she kept gathering trash. More and more of it, until the whole house smelled.” Again, she sighed. “Ooh, so awful. It was the kind of smell that made you just not want to come home. I spent every weekend cleaning her room, throwing out moldy applesauce containers and half-full cups of juice.”

She stopped and took a sip of tea, looking around as if to reassure herself that she was no longer surrounded by filth.

“Cass must have gained ten pounds that first year. And we’re talking about a six-year-old! Her hair was always snarled, and she wouldn’t let me brush it. She screamed like I was killing her whenever I tried. Then when she was in first grade, the real tantrums started. I told Kevin he had to deal with her. It was his responsibility. She wasn’t my …” She broke off as if startled.

“Right,” she said. “Only the thing is I’d promised at our wedding that she would be. There was a little part of the ceremony where I ‘married’ her. I, Madeline, take you Cassidy as the daughter of my heart, to love forever. I wrote it myself. It was …” Madeline sniffled, then her face grew stiff and disapproving. “A really good script, that’s what it was. Crowd pleasing.”

“Her mother was long gone; she took off when Cass was six months old. Never sent so much a birthday card. It was like she just zeroed out her own daughter. Moved on. But then I …”

“You …?” I tried to resist, but the man I used to be squatted inside me, patient, offering up his psalms and birds of hope. “You did the very same thing?”

That’s when Madeline wept. Not as she had before, the held-back tears of a woman standing at a counter in an unfamiliar shop. This was serious and personal. She turned slightly so I would not witness her shame.

“Yes. By the time Kevin and I finally divorced, she was nine. And impossible. We’d have split up even without her problems, but Cass was a constant issue—she was all we ever talked about. She snuck food, stole it if she had to. She outweighed me by twenty pounds and she was only four and a half feet tall. She had no friends. There was an incident at school where she hurt a younger boy.” Madeline was staring at her hands, clenching them in her lap.

“Cass was acting out constantly at school; at least twice a week we’d get called in to talk to the principal. We were considering sending her away to a special place for children with … issues.” She sighed and drew herself tighter in the chair.

“That sounds like a hard decision.” As always when I heard a story like this, calamity building inevitably, I felt the pain of my penitent. But I also felt—corny as it sounds—like an instrument of God. Or at least like something finer than myself.

“But we couldn’t. Kevin lost his job, and there wasn’t enough money. We started fighting all the time. The bills for Cass’s therapy were piling up. It seemed like there was no way out, except …” She held her hands up, palms open to the heavens. “I moved out, told him I was just done. I quit, as Kevin’s wife and as Cassidy’s mom. It was so freeing.” She shivered. “The relief was incredible. I don’t think anything in my life has ever felt that good.”

“This is the problem with being human,” I told her. “We’re given incentive to do all the wrong things.”

“Exactly!” I could feel the wind of her vigorous approval and watched the calm settle in the valleys of her face. In the confessional at St. John’s I’d been unable to see, contained in the privacy of my own little upright coffin box. This was better, talking to people up close. But also confusing in that the rules seemed to disappear.

“I was elated for about a year, as if I’d awakened from a bad dream. You know how you think, Oh, I’m so glad that wasn’t real? That’s how it was. I kept telling myself I couldn’t have stayed even if I wanted to; I never belonged in that family. Then Christmas came, and it was like this door opened.”

Madeline looked at me. Her gaze was naked and afraid. “Do you know what I mean?”

I could not answer but simply sat, silent, remembering. Every Christmas I could recall, that door had opened widely: for me, for my parish, for the entire city it sometimes seemed. Sadness poured from some endless spring, infecting the people of my congregation, leading them to kneel before me and go limp. I was for the entire month of December patching together souls and sending them back to their lives still bleeding. I could see sadness leaking from them like drops of icy, gray rain.

And between ministering to those other souls, during this season I confronted my own yawning door. There was something about the silence of snowfall; it sent me right back to the streets of my youth. I would see the same skinny boy, hunched in his jacket, walking alone in the dark. Over and over I would dream of him alone in his bedroom, back against the chipped blue wall, heart beating so fast he was struggling to breathe.

I don’t know how I would have responded, but just then, the bell over the shop’s door chimed and a woman entered, roughly Madeline’s age but dressed in jeans and clogs, her long graying hair pulled back in a clip. She clopped into general fiction, and I rose—one hand extended, palm flat. The beginning of a benediction.

My customer was standing in J–M, scanning the shelf, her body alert and tense. I’d been at the bookstore only two months, but I knew what this meant. It was a situation that had to be handled delicately, depending upon the disposition of the woman herself. Some were furtive, whispering their request. Others opened the book to read right there, crowing and hooting, backing helplessly into cartons and stacks.

“May I help you?” I asked, and she turned suddenly, as if I were a cannibal on her stairs. Definitely a type-one woman; she’d need to be nudged.

“We have some of our more popular books on display in front,” I said, nodding toward the table of ladies’ sex thrillers that Oren told me accounted for 60 percent of his sales and had probably saved him from bankruptcy for two years running. The woman blushed and muttered something that could have been “thank you,” rushed to the table to pick up a book with silver handcuffs on the cover, coughed noisily as I processed her credit card, grabbed her plain paper bag, and left.

When I returned, Madeline was grinning through her tear-stained face. “Poor baby,” she said, chuckling. “Probably hasn’t been laid in years.”

For one panicked moment, I thought she was talking about me. But I recovered quickly, clearing my throat and finding my pulpit voice. “People come here seeking solace for all manner of things.”

“I suppose.” Madeline looked at me, wary but also amused. The shamed, apologetic woman of only a few minutes before had vanished. “What is it that makes you such an expert? Why am I sitting here telling you my life?”

I leaned back in my chair. Doubt. This second phase of penance had come quickly to Madeline, but I could tell already she was smarter than most of the strangers who poured out their lives.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I just seem to understand these things.” Then I shrugged, a gesture I’ve adopted only since coming to the outside.

There was a stretch of silence, and I thought Madeline might have moved on in her mind, deciding this was ridiculous, talking to a stranger about her past. But when she stirred, she did not gather her things and leave. Rather, she went on, “It was temporary, that first feeling I had about Cassidy. It went away right after Christmas. Then the next year, it came back. I ignored it, and it went away again. But now this year …” She paused and looked at me for assistance.

She shook her head. “Nope. And it’s late February. Every day I wake up and expect it to be gone, only I feel worse. Less like the person I intended to be. It’s, um, sticky. Sometimes …” She paused for a moment and when she spoke again I had to lean in to hear. “I think I’m going crazy. We’re all alone: just me and this ominous thing in my head.”

“About two weeks ago,” she said, nodding. “She has a new mom. Kevin’s on to wife number three, would you believe?” Madeline snorted, and I saw, as clearly as if the devil were waving a flag, where her guilt was all stopped up.

“Cass said …” she swallowed. “She said they’re a real family now. Mary—that’s the wife’s name—helps her. Mary understands her. Mary would never …” Madeline swallowed hard. “Mary would never disappear the way I did. I asked Cass if we could meet sometime for lunch, and she said no, that she had no reason to see me. I’d been a terrible mother, and she was glad I’d left. But it wasn’t nasty, the way she said it. It was just …” A look of pure terror crossed Madeline’s face. “True,” she said.

“You know the answer,” I said softly. “Cassidy is happy now. She has a new family. You can’t disrupt that.”

“Oh, I know. Only …” In the background the hot pot burbled, reminding me that I’d forgotten to switch if off. A cello suite played on the stereo. And Madeline crumpled into her chair, a pile of designer clothes crowned with hair. “It means I never get out of this. Cassidy won’t forgive me. I’m here forever. I’m stuck.”

I thought about how often in my life this had happened: I would listen to the story someone told about selfishness and wrongdoing, and mostly I would be thinking, You do not deserve absolution. Sometimes, in my own dark heart, I would lobby for those people to suffer more. It would be tempting to banish them from my church.

Once, when a parishioner confessed to having gotten drunk in college and beating up a homeless man for no reason other than boredom, I’d sat clenched with the desire to rip open the door of my little compartment, then his, and strangle him in the aisle with my knee to his neck.

“What bothers you most?” I asked now, looking—as I’d learned to do—for the way toward God.

Madeline raised her head, and oddly she looked as if her face had been washed clean. If she’d cried off her makeup, I wondered, where had it gone? And how did her bare skin make her appear both older and younger than before?

“I think about her, Cassidy, going to bed on those nights after I left. Lying there, waiting for me to come back, maybe crying. Realizing that another mom had left her.” No self-pity, little drama. I softened. Madeline, despite her confession, was good.

“But Cassie’s doing well now,” I said. “In fact, she’s better off than before. It sounds like she has a wonderful stepmother, and your leaving—as badly as you may have done it—had to happen in order for Mary to come into her life. For Cassidy to have a stable, happy family, which you and Kevin couldn’t provide.” Madeline blinked as if she were awakening. Damn, I was good.

“You can’t change the past, but even if you could I might argue in this case that you should leave well enough alone. You will never know what caused your ex-husband to seek this woman out. It may even have been related to something you did or said.”

“Is this an it-was-meant-to-be lecture?” Madeline asked, her tone wary, and I struggled not to laugh.

“Hardly. That’s a philosophy for radio ministers and embroidered pillows. What I’m saying is, if you wouldn’t change things for Cassidy now, you need to move forward. Take this lesson, learn from it. Be better. And move in the only direction that’s available to you.”

Madeline was rapt. And why was she listening to this from a bookstore clerk? Because she so desperately wanted what I was offering. That’s the only answer I have.

“That makes sense,” she breathed, alive now and re-inhabiting her clothes. “But how do I get Cassidy to see it?”

“You don’t. You leave Cassidy alone, because going forward you’re going to do what’s right for her.”

“But …” I watched her struggle, looking at her hands. “I want to be forgiven.”

Finally she looked skeptical. Angry, even. Her eyes narrowed. “It’s not that easy,” she said, reaching for her handbag and beginning to rise. “You can’t just forgive me. It doesn’t work that way. You don’t speak for God.”

I leaned back in my chair and stared at her calmly until she stopped and sat back down. “You’d be surprised,” I said.

Dear Isaac—

How’s Austin? I imagine it’s all warm and dusty with gorgeous men in cowboy hats dancing to country music in the streets. I’ve never been to Texas in my life but if we get one more blizzard, I swear I’m going to fly down and plant myself in your guest room—maybe find one of those country-western guys. Though I probably won’t be able to get on a plane because every time you turn around this year O’Hare is closed.

Speaking of men, I met an interesting one today. I cried in front of him within ten minutes (and by cried, I mean bawled) in the middle of a bookstore. Do you see what’s happened to me since you left??? I have no one to talk to or go to movies with. I have to play dragon lady all the time. It’s lonely! Damn you and your baby-seal-killing oilman boyfriend. How is Foss, by the way? If I come down, will he explain fracking to me? Never mind, I don’t really want to know.

Work is a horror show. (Are you sure you don’t want to come back?) We were runner-up on the Prudential pitch, spent about $150K that I personally signed off on. Then they went with Razorfish, which I kind of knew all along they would. The venture capital guys are really pissed! Saatchi was all set to buy us if we got Prudential and a piece of Toyota, but now they’re backing off and I’m going to have to fire maybe 12%. Your old pal, Scott? First to go. Don’t tell him, or I will have you killed.☺

‘Cause, sweetheart, I have this crazy idea for how I might be able to get us back on track. And it could be a cash cow if it works. But I’ve had a few drinks, and it’s possible I’ll wake up tomorrow and realize this was the dumbest drunken scheme ever. I’ll write and let you know. Right now, I need to get in bed with my Rabbit.

I still hate you for leaving.

Love,

MMM