The Opposite of Fate (7 page)

To leave academia was a terrifying idea, however. It meant abandoning the dream my parents had nurtured in me since the age of six, that I would become a doctor of some sort. Within that doctorate were all the embellishments of my ego, my sense of worth, my place in the world, and hence all my worries as well, the fear that I would never be good enough, that I would forever be struggling to hide that I was a fraud, doomed one day to fail and reveal how inadequate I truly was. But if I left the doctoral program, what could I do instead? What could I do that was worth anything to anyone, including myself? I could see nothing.

I remembered that Pete had once suggested that I apply my linguistics knowledge toward working with disabled children.
He had said this a month or so before he died. He himself had intended to make computerized equipment for people with disabilities. At the time, his suggestion held no appeal for me. I was not particularly fond of children, except as objects of research, and I knew nothing about disabilities.

But once I quit my doctoral program, I found a job listing for exactly what he had in mind: a language development specialist for a county program serving children, newborns to five years old, who had developmental disabilities. At the interview, it was as apparent to the administrator as it was to me that I was both overqualified and specifically unqualified for this job. When the interview ended and I stood to leave, I heard Pete telling me that I should simply tell this woman my motivations in applying for a job with exactly these challenges and unknowns. And out came my story of Pete’s death and my pledge to do with my life what he had intended to do with his. Ten minutes later, I was hired.

It was my job to observe the children, informally assess their communication skills, and then work with parents and teachers to devise a plan and help them carry it out.

I remember the first talk on language development I gave for the parents. I mustered all my knowledge, prepared a detailed examination of the steps and processes entailed in language acquisition, and delivered an impressive one-hour lecture to a dozen parents, many of whom had just been told their babies had Down’s syndrome, cerebral palsy, autism, or some rare congenital disorder that would lead to an early death. At the end of my talk, a mother came up to me and said, “You are
so
smart.” I never felt more stupid. You just have to learn how to learn, I heard Pete say.

After that, I would listen to parents as they discussed their
hopes for their children, and then together we would cry before we set out to find new hopes. With the kids themselves, I learned to play, to discover what made them laugh, what they could not resist watching or touching or reaching for. I found myself observing not deficits but the qualities of souls. Over the next five years, I had opportunities to work with more than a thousand families, and from them I sensed the limitlessness of hope within the limits of human beings. I learned to have compassion. It was the best training I could have had for becoming a writer.

Of course, not everything about me had changed for the better. I still worried incessantly about every detail of my life, twisting the permutations of these anxieties into knots. I remember one day, some six months after Pete died, when I was fretting over money, or rather, our profound lack of it. I was driving across the Bay Bridge in our rickety VW bus, coming home from my job, which netted me barely enough for rent, utilities, and food. Lou was in law school, and what little he earned went toward his tuition and books. But now we had a crisis: Our recently adopted cat, Sagwa, had gone into her first throes of heat the night before, and in searching for her Romeo, she jumped out of our fourth-story apartment window. Luckily, she lived, but fixing the resulting broken leg was going to cost us $383. How would we pay for it? We couldn’t save that amount in a year. Why the hell did we get the damn cat?

I heard Pete say: “Come on, it was an accident. You worry about things over which you have no control.” By then, I had heard his counseling voice many times. In the weeks right after his death, I had believed he was speaking to me across the divide. But now, with the natural waning of grief and shock, I had
returned to thinking it was merely my imagination conjuring what he might have said.

“Easy for you to say,” I responded. “You’re dead. I have real bills.”

I heard him laughing. “These things happen by themselves. They’ll take care of themselves.”

I was about to banter back when I felt something slam the side of the bus, and send me swerving across a lane of traffic on the bridge. I fought to regain control, finally pulled over, and got out of the car with shaky legs. A man rushed up to me.

“Are you all right? I’m so sorry. I don’t know what happened. Thank God you’re not hurt.”

We went around to the side of the VW that he had rammed. At first I could see no sign of damage, but when we bent down and looked at the panel that curved under the bus, we saw it: a long gash, barely noticeable in a vehicle riddled with dings and oxidized paint.

“Get some estimates,” the man told me. “Send them to my insurance company and they’ll pay.”

“It’s not worth it,” I said. “Even though it’s not my fault, this will be reported to my insurance company and my rates will go up.”

“I see what you mean,” he answered. “Well then, just get one estimate and send it directly to me. Here’s my card. I’m the vice-president of this corporation. I’ll send a check to you directly.”

Fair enough. I drove to the first body shop off the ramp. Ten minutes later, I heard Pete laughing as I stared at the written total for the estimate: $383.

I will relate only one more dream. It was the last.

On Lou’s birthday that year, the trial ended, with a conviction on two counts. First-degree robbery. First-degree murder. That night, I dreamt that I met Pete in a garage, a rather prosaic location for a farewell meeting. He told me this was the last dream, now that the trial was over. I protested, “These are
my
dreams. I get to decide when they end.” Pete ignored what I said, and went on: “You’re going to meet my friend Rose—”

“Rose!” I sneered. “Fat chance. She hates me.” When I had called her months before to tell her Pete was dead, she had been curt almost to the point of rudeness. Then again, I had been the same with the messenger who delivered the news to me.

“Rose is going to become very important to you,” Pete said. “She’s a writer, and she’ll be helpful to you when you become a writer.”

“Who said I was going to be a writer?”

“That’s all I wanted to say,” Pete told me, and then, as if going down to the corner store, he left me there.

After that, I still had dreams about him, but they were different, nothing at all like the dream-lessons. The new dreams conveyed the full horror of his death, for in them he was not dead, as I had feared, but alive, as I had hoped. Having survived near-strangling, he was brain-damaged, confused and suspicious, preferring to live as a beer-drinking recluse, unsure of who he was and uninterested in finding out.

Each year for seven years, on the anniversary of Pete’s death, I lost my voice. It must have been a psychogenic gesture for the horror I could not talk about. And yes, eventually, Rose and I did connect with each other, tentatively at first, through brief letters,
and then in lengthy missives, both of us grasping to understand the transcendental experiences we have had since his death.

If you’ve followed this story so far, you have already understood that Rose is indeed a writer, and that she was the first person to encourage me to write fiction, suggesting what I might read for inspiration and to which little magazines I might send my first attempts.

Enough time has passed that I can now more reasonably assess that period after Pete died. I have considered that those dreams were the subconscious by-product of trauma and grief, or the delusional thinking that enables a person to cope with horror. The metaphors were ones I have had all along, and through the need to survive, I brought out their meanings. Whatever they sprang from, the dreams were a lot more cost-effective than psychoanalysis. As to the counseling voice of Pete, guiding me toward the job with children, that was my own, pushed by fear of failure to the point that I made myself finally hear it. The coincidence of the $383? Well, that’s odd, and hard to explain, except to say that when you are looking for coincidences, you will surely notice them. There are rational answers for everything. Sometimes I think about what they might be.

And yet no matter what these dreams and coincidences were, everything that happened during those months from my birthday to Lou’s had a wondrous effect on me, on the shape of my life. It pushed me, enlarged my outlook, and sent me searching for what I should believe in. Does it matter what the origins were?

Today I am neither a believer nor a skeptic. I am a puzzler. I still puzzle over what Pete’s story presents: what I fear, what I dream, what I believe. I ask myself: What’s real? What’s
important? What do I gain in believing one reality over another? What do I lose? And if we understand the mysteries of the universe, if they end up being explained entirely by mathematics, as Pete said they could be, will they still bless us with the same amazing joy?

• faith •

These are remarks I gave at the memorial of my editor, the late, great Faith Sale, who died on December 7, 1999.

T
he first time I talked to Faith on the phone, I was a publishing neophyte. I didn’t know what serial rights were. I thought Faith’s remark about “interest from the clubs” meant that places like Club Med might stock
The Joy Luck Club
in their beachfront stores. The year was 1988, and after talking about the book I was finishing and other literary concerns, I told Faith I was interested in attending a national book convention with a friend who had invited me. Faith immediately cut me off: “Oh, no! You shouldn’t get caught up in all those publishing parties. They’ll ruin you as a writer.” Parties? I didn’t know that book conventions held parties. Frankly, I was interested in going because my friend said I could score a lot of free books.

It wasn’t until after I got to know Faith well that I realized how ironic it was that
she
warned me away from parties. Faith was, after all, the ultimate publishing party girl. And those who knew her well also know that I can say this without detracting whatsoever from her reputation as a serious and hardworking literary editor. In later years, whenever I went to the American
Booksellers Association convention with Faith, it took us two hours to go from one hall to the next. She knew everybody, had to talk to everybody, and I felt like the recalcitrant kid impatient to make her way to the amusement rides. She was late to almost everything as a result, late even to her own passing from a disease that commonly took people much earlier. And thank God for that. Thank God for her stubbornness, for her need to control every last detail before she could let go.

If Faith had stayed with us longer, I think she would have been seduced one way or the other by the Internet, as had been my plot. I know she touched her fingers to the keyboard at least a few times, once to send me an e-mail, other times to play solitaire and Freecell. And had she dabbled further, I think she would have discovered eBay, the great cyber bargain basement. We shared that—the art of the cheap deal. We used to go around the corner from her apartment on West Eleventh Street to an outlet called SubPrice, where we could buy stretch-velvet tops and leggings for five bucks.

That love of a bargain was still very much in evidence the day before her final operation. I was telling her that I, a New York carpetbagger, was going to hold a fund-raiser in my SoHo loft for a certain political candidate, about whom Faith held, shall we say, ambivalent feelings. The fund-raiser would probably take place in March, some four months away. “Do you want to come?” I asked, and I tried to sound casual. In hearing her answer, I figured I could gauge how she felt about the upcoming surgery and her chances of surviving it. Faith immediately said, “Of course. But I’m not going to
pay.
”

In Faith, I had not only an editor and a cohort in bargain
shopping but a mentor and a friend, someone who knew my best intentions and intuitions as a writer and how these fit in with the rest of my life. She knew all the details of what I did, whom I saw, what happened on my vacation, what my mother said, what she didn’t say. Faith also called me during the last hour that my mother was alive.

Faith Sale and my mother on a shopping spree in New York, 1992.

Whenever I gave Faith something to read, she’d ask me what I wanted from her as an editor. “Keep me from embarrassing myself in public,” was my usual answer. And she did keep me from exposing the glitches in my prose, but she also prodded me to go deeper, to be more generous in the story I had to tell, to not hold back, to show what was most important in my life and on the page. She had an unerring sense of what mattered—to me. She could help me find it, though there were many ways in which we differed in taste and opinions. Olives, for example. She could not abide any dish littered with canned olives, a favorite of mine. And music—who would want to assault his or her ears with anything less than classical music or Broadway musicals or the rocker Michael Parrish, her son-in-law? Then there was the matter of ghosts. I was raised with them. She was not. But here Faith
was diplomatic. She indulged me. She listened with genuine interest when I told her about unseen visitors whistling in my kitchen, about the TV’s turning on by itself, about my version of ghostwriters, who, by the way, also provide research and editing on request. She was not going to argue scientific logic with me, since, delusion or not, ancestral spirits and reincarnation increased my material multifold. And for my part, I liked to remind Faith now and then that she, oh esteemed one, had after all served as editor for George Anderson, the world-famous talk-show host to the dead. And more than once I recalled for her benefit the time my mother had written her a note thanking her for “the book” and for helping her feel closer to “the other side.” Faith was quite touched; she thought that my mother was referring to
The Joy Luck Club
and that her own help in publishing it had brought my mother fond memories of her family. I had to break the news to Faith that my mother was talking about George Anderson’s book
We Don’t Die.
I’m not done tormenting Faith about this. I plan to have regular séances with her in which we discuss how and why she was wrong in her opinion about an afterlife.