Believe Me Part 8

"Oh, sure, and that's coming from you, who throws poetry at me before I've finished my coffee," I retorted. "Can't you just say yes or no?"

Avery tilted back in his chair and wouldn't look at me. He was discomfited. He didn't want to discuss this, which made me regret that I'd pressed.

"Maybe there's a G.o.d," he allowed, "but if there is, then He or She took away my mother, and didn't leave a note. I'm not looking as forward as Goran is, I suppose I could say, to being introduced to this Mighty Being."

"Right," I said, dropping my eyes to my desk.

At lunch, alone in the diner and bored by the paper, I began thinking about T. S. Eliot again. How he'd once filled the void I felt between the inanities of my secular culture-where we all swung our teen heads, drunk on vodka, to Joan Jett belting out "I love rock and roll"-and the Church's bland counterpoint. I was adrift until I came ash.o.r.e at the elegant cri de coeur that was Eliot's The Waste Land. A call to arms. Or a great huge sigh. Not that I had a nitwit's grasp of what he was saying. I came across Eliot in grade twelve English, at the same time, by coincidence, that the sweaty mound of Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now quoted from "The Hollow Men," which instantly reinforced my attraction to Eliot by indirect a.s.sociation with my crush on Martin Sheen.

"We are the tin men, we are the hollow men, foreheads stuffed with straw. Ha ha." I can't remember exactly how it goes.

Eliot appealed enormously to my overblown sense of alienation at the time. I quoted him sagaciously to my friends whenever we complained of the weather: "April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land." Nods all around. That was, like, so true! You kept thinking, okay here comes spring, and then not!

Of course, Eliot was all about the ambiguous conflation of offended intellect and bad mood, and that wasn't, technically, the same thing as religion. But there was his evocation of despair-sterile thunder, dry bones rattling, the polluted Thames, the jarring emptiness of a one-night stand. I made great, teenaged hay out of those images, flinging them about as melodramatic retorts to lousy dates and high school cliques. And somewhere within it all, I had a glimpse, however confused and hesitant, of the divine: "Who is that other walking beside you?"

The idea that there was more than earthbound life-a sparkling heaven, a sense of grace-was something that I understood, but could make no sense of. Heaven seemed far too convenient. It was my Protestant roots that entangled me with skepticism, I felt. Protestantism confounded itself by being too suspicious of reward. Cake, maybe, if you bake it yourself and don't waste a crumb. Otherwise, dry bones rattling.

It would be years and years-in fact, until I was confronted by Lester-until I began to get a certain idea that had eluded me before: that you had to work, spiritually, to reach a state of grace. It wasn't like Santa Claus handing me the gift of eternity. It wasn't about me at all.

20.

Here is a hard-earned mother's tip. I shall whisper it, for fear of hurting Calvin's feelings.

If your child is experiencing a transition, such as attending a new school, moving into a new house, or witnessing an illness in the family, do not shave your head.

This was Lester's reaction to Calvin's whimsical styling choice: "Daddy, where's your hair?" he burst out in shocked horror when I brought him home from daycare and he spied his father in the kitchen, reading Rolling Stone. Calvin's thick nut-brown locks had been shorn at the barber by impulsive request.

"You're disgusting!" Lester wailed, thoroughly undone. He fled the kitchen and shut himself in the bathroom, still in full winter apparel, sobbing. "Go away!" he shrieked, when I tried to follow him.

Perhaps a less extreme haircut had been in order.

"What did you do that for?" I demanded of Calvin, returning to the kitchen in a fury. I'd caught Lester's reaction like a flu bug.

"What?" he protested in dismay, patting his bald pate. "I hate having hat hair in the winter, it drives me nuts. So I shaved my head for the time being, so what?"

"So what?" I echoed, incredulous. "It looks totally alarming!"

"What on earth did you do to your head?" asked my mother, who walked in a few moments behind me carrying a bag of books.

"I see I'm a big hit," Calvin muttered, getting up to retrieve his Toronto Blue Jays cap from the hook behind the door.

My mother, bundled up in her camel-hair coat and a fur-trimmed hat that looked like a winterized trilby, brushed snowflakes from her shoulders and placed her bag on the table. "Here are some more library books for Lester. Frannie, have you read him Roald Dahl yet? I was hoping not."

"No, not yet. Thanks," I said, distracted. "Calvin, go talk to him. Don't just leave him crying in there."

My mother looked up alertly, suddenly conscious of the sounds of her grandson. "Have you and Lester had words?"

"Well, I wouldn't put it that way," Calvin said, adjusting his cap in the mirror above the sink. "He came home and found a bald man where his father used to be."

"Ah," said my mother, loosely clasping her gloved hands. "Well, it's not at all surprising that you upset him. Young children can be very frightened by that kind of physical transformation. They don't yet have a clear distinction between reality and fantasy-between what is possible and impossible. To him, you might be in the process of changing completely and, the next thing, your arms will disappear or what have you."

"Oh, please don't talk to me about arms," Calvin said, sitting down heavily at the table and holding his head between his hands.

"Do you remember, Frannie," my mother asked, "when your father and I were watching that j.a.panese film, Spirits Gone Away, and you came in with Lester and he was so terribly upset by the little girl's parents being transformed into pigs?"

"It was called Spirited Away, Mum," I said, still listening to Lester's m.u.f.fled sobs, which seemed to be calming down a bit.

"Well, that's the sort of image that really scares a child," she continued. "We expect them to be afraid of dinosaurs and monsters, but that's not it at all. Calvin, you need to go and show him that you're still the same. Let him feel your head."

"Okay, okay," said Calvin, heading for the bathroom with an air of resignation. My mother gave me a wintry kiss, her cheeks still ice-cold from her walk, and reminded me to come for dinner on the weekend. When the door had closed behind her, I took off my coat and pulled a Kraft Super Deluxe pizza out of the freezer.

"Aw, come on, Les," I heard Calvin cajole in the bathroom, "don't be so sad. I just wanted to look more like Caillou. He's bald, isn't he? And nothing else about him changes, does it? He runs around in his little cartoon world being earnest and having adventures, and the plot never develops-"

"What about Grandpa?" Lester interrupted. "He changed."

"What do you mean, little man?" I could hear a flicker of discomfort in Calvin's voice.

"He changed, Daddy! All of him changed. Granny says he turned into an angel. And now n.o.body can see him any more."

"Oh, well ..." Calvin replied lightly, hoping to dismiss this case in point. "That's different."

"Why?"

"Because it's different, Les." The upset in his voice was obvious. "I'm not going to die tomorrow just because I shaved off my hair today. I'm not leaving you, I won't suddenly disappear like that and leave you alone with your mum."

"How do you know?"

"I just know, okay?"

The air changed. I could feel it, and so could Lester, the way children uncannily sense when it's time for them to compose themselves and let the grown-up be the sad one. "I didn't say Grandpa disappeared," Lester offered, wanting to correct the record so that Calvin would feel rea.s.sured. "He didn't disappear, Daddy. His soul is in my heart."

I drew in my breath sharply and leaned back against the fridge. Wondrous child! Where the h.e.l.l did he get that?

21.

Here is a list of activities you can enjoy with your five-year-old in Canada during the winter, when a freak thunderstorm that some blame on global warming has neatly erased all the snow.

Watch TV

Watch TV

Watch TV Make m.u.f.fin Have a bubble bath

Color for ten minutes

Watch TV Walk to the neighborhood Starbucks whining constantly about how cold it is, order hot chocolate, suck the whipped-cream topping through a straw Watch TV

22.

Calvin flew back to Cape Breton for a few days to sort things out for Bernice, and Lester responded by growing despondent about the extinction of dinosaurs. Perhaps it was just a coincidence. But we were hanging out in the house, watching TV, and a doc.u.mentary called Walking with Dinosaurs came on the Discovery Channel.

In one episode, a computer-generated asteroid came streaking down to Earth just as a young pair of T. rexes were finding their way through the cycad forests of Montana, at which point all h.e.l.l broke loose.

The tyrannosaur hatchlings were blown sideways by the force of this wild impact-generated wind, and Lester watched, transfixed, from when the trail of stardust fell ominously through the twilit sky, to when Kenneth Branagh, lately employed as a narrator who horrifies children, explained the extinction of dinosaurs.

Dinosaurs ended?

He ran to his room in hysterics. Dinosaurs cannot just have ended; I understood that, as a mother. They were the mainstay of my son's daily imaginative existence. This was a child who made me sit on the bed and provide nature show voice-overs involving clashes between stegosaurs and raptors as he acted out the primal conflict amidst the hills and valleys of the floral-patterned rayon comforter. For Branagh merely to p.r.o.nounce them fini, all done, buh-bye, was incomprehensible. What did he mean to suggest? Had all the dinosaurs become angels as well?

My brain began to hurt. Couldn't I have had a normal son preoccupied with Hot Wheels? I tried to get around the crisis by pointing out that certain dinosaurs didn't end, technically, so much as evolve into birds.

"Hey, Les!" I exclaimed one morning before daycare. "Look what I've found in the news! According to new fossil finds in northeastern China, some dinosaurs grew feathers! They changed into birds."

Lester raised his eyes to me, wary. I couldn't be sure if he was feeling suspicious of my tone, or the news. "It's true, beauty," I insisted, scanning the article, "paleontologists just found one of them lying splat in some rock sediment surrounded by down, fluff and feathers. Do you see what I'm saying? They didn't go extinct, this article says, they just changed into birds."

I leaned over and ruffled his dark hair. "And this is interesting: the group of dinosaurs that sprouted feathers is the theropod. Like what, Lester, what's one of the meat-eating dinosaurs?"

"Velociraptor," he offered alertly, "T. rex."

"So, there you go," I told him happily. "They didn't go extinct, they just changed."

Calvin laughed, when I explained what I'd learned when we spoke on the phone that night, caught in small daily triumphs of insight. "You're joking," he said. "Are they saying that T. rex evolved into a budgie? That's like me evolving into a spoon."

Mmm. But I suppose that's the thing about evolution. The process involves a time scale that humans cannot get their heads around. It's really more about our inability to conceive of these transformations than about what is plausible. For, given enough time, lots and lots and lots and lots of time, curmudgeons like Calvin could, theoretically, eventually evolve into something resembling a teaspoon.

Or maybe that wasn't the thing about evolution. Lester and I leafed through a piece in the National Geographic about flying pterosaurs who were as big as F-18 fighter jets-can you imagine?-soaring through the prehistoric mists for 125 million years. Generation after generation after generation, catching fish and mating and catching fish and mating and acc.u.mulating a knowledge base of nothing at all. And the only conceivable point of this that I can conceive of is that, eventually, a spark of intelligence caught fire somewhere on the planet and moved things along. For, after intelligence evolved, so then did sociability, and love, and playfulness and artistry and consciousness and reverence.

We won't die so much as change. Everything connects. Life goes on. Theropods become pigeons and adapt to a brave new world of bread crumbs and parkettes, and humans lead the charge-along with elephants and dolphins and chimps-of further evolution toward a consciousness of G.o.d.

"Lo," I proclaimed to Calvin, after he got home from his frustrating visit to New Waterford, where his mother refused to entertain Dr. Pereira's prognosis. "We have a physical body and a spiritual body, so saith the Bible. And just because one evolveth into the other, which is invisible-that maketh it no less plausible than prehistoric fish evolving into airplane-size reptiles that fly. What sayeth you?"

"Cut it out," said Calvin, swinging open the door of the fridge. "Did you drink all my beer while I was gone?"

"Verily. Indeed it is so."

23.

In the ill.u.s.trious tradition of spiritual autobiography, be it memoir by C. S. Lewis or the rapturous testimony of Julian of Norwich, the seeker invariably has a mentor, to whom he or she addresses questions of faith as the revelations unfold. "Father, what is meant by unceasing prayer?" Or "Reverend Mother, how can I banish sin when I am such a wretch?"

I needed someone to whom I could pa.s.s along questions from Lester, such as, "When I'm an angel, will I still have my eyeb.a.l.l.s?" But I had my own yearning for answers now, too, and I felt it wouldn't be such a bad thing to have a mentor. But Andrew at Sunday school just wasn't cutting it for me. I couldn't respect a spiritual guide who clearly needed to go on Paxil. Though he was a wonderful ambulatory book of quotations, Avery was too skeptical. My best friend, Marina, who lived in New York, told me that she did believe in G.o.d, but she also felt certain that we were merely G.o.d's Sea Monkeys, and that he'd lost interest in us and forgotten where he'd put our packet of food. "How else do you explain that angels were popping up everywhere two thousand years ago, talking to shepherds and Mary and Abraham, and yet n.o.body's heard from them since?" she wanted to know. A mentor wasn't supposed to be asking me the questions.

My mother was irredeemably secular, my father typically vague, and no one else of their age and wisdom seemed suitable. How had I stumbled so easily upon Father McPhee in New Waterford, I marveled now.

For the time being, the only person I could really talk to about spiritual matters in Toronto was my cousin Kate, whom I joined for Ashtanga yoga every Thursday at noon.

Kate was a lawyer. A fiercely feminist lawyer who brought off brilliant resolutions for women in divorce cases, whom Kate deemed poorly treated by oafs and control freaks. She was also a devoted Quaker, which appealed to her practical activist side, although it had taken her years of questing about to settle on a suitable framework for her beliefs. In one memorable instance, dating back to the mid-1990s, Kate embroiled me in a weekend workshop with a shaman from suburban Toronto named Larry. At the time that she instigated this scheme, we were in her New York apartment on Was.h.i.+ngton Square, while I studied at Columbia and she took her master's in law at NYU. She was reading my Tarot cards, and puzzling out what it meant that I had received the Phoenician, upside down.

"Look, Kate," I pointed out, "you can figure out what the card means, but then you do have to concede that what you are doing is probably just imaginary."

She refused to concede any such thing, and an argument ensued in which Kate accused me of being "spiritually frigid," and this led, in turn, to my lying flat on my back, blindfolded, in a rec room in Mississauga the following summer.

"Start at the beginning," Kate had said, explaining to me why we had to go visit Larry. "With the first practices, the first principles. Begin with the universal beginning of religious quest, the shaman's journey."

"The what?" I asked.

"Shamanism, Frannie," she repeated, drawing out the syllables. "You know, Wade Davis? Carlos Castaneda? Tribal spirit work?"

"Give me another clue," I suggested.