Chapter 10 #3
“Well,” she said. “Once, when you were a baby, we didn’t have any money.
We were really poor back then, if you recall.
We were about to get evicted, and then a check came in the mail from your dad.
Only one he ever sent. Just in time to keep us from getting thrown out on the street.
That seemed like a miracle at the time. Boy, I’ll tell you, it sure did. ”
“I guess you could call that a miracle,” I said, though it didn’t really compete with a resurrection.
“Another time,” she said, “I had a bad feeling about a plane, and I waited so long to pack that I missed the flight. And then the plane actually crashed. I’ve told you that one before. These kinds of things happen, Arthur. Not like yours, I guess. Not a miracle miracle. But signs and messages.”
“So you believe in God,” I said. “I guess I didn’t know that, either. I thought you were more of a Goddess person.”
“Goddess,” she scoffed. “Who cares? It’s beyond gender, whatever it is.”
“But you believe in something,” I said.
“Of course I do,” she said. “Not a man-in-the-clouds kind of thing. But something.”
“So how would you describe it?” I said. I was curious to hear.
After all these years, we’d never directly discussed our ideas of the divine.
We’d talked about many issues grazing on the topic—questions of religion and mysticism and magical thinking—but never that very personal conception of what may or may not exist at the bottom of it all.
I hadn’t discussed it with almost anyone, for that matter.
It was one of the topics that no one wanted to broach out loud, which was partly why I wrote my books.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “It’s hard to explain. The thing I believe in, I don’t know what it is. I don’t call it God. It’s like God, but it’s not God, exactly. It’s not not God. But it’s not God.”
“So what do you call it?” I said.
She seemed almost embarrassed. “I call it Goddy.”
“Goddy?” I said.
She laughed. “Like, ‘Hey, old buddy, old pal.’ Goddy. I say, ‘Okay, Goddy, let’s roll up our sleeves and figure this out.’ Or, ‘What do you think, Goddy?’ Goddy is someone with good common sense. Or then sometimes it’s like, ‘Here, Goddy, Goddy, Goddy.’?”
“Like a cat,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “Sometimes. Goddy can be like a cat. Not that he’s a ‘he,’ like I said. But I’ll say ‘he’ right now. You never know what Goddy is thinking. You can only treat him nicely and hope for the best. Give him what he wants. Hope he doesn’t bite you. That’s Goddy.”
“Sounds like God to me,” I said.
“But in my mind,” she said, “it’s something different.”
We talked more about God, and all the different forms He or She could take in people’s imaginations.
We concurred that the idea of a Goddess was mere semantics.
As if women weren’t as cruel and unforgiving as any patriarch.
We talked about the prohibition of writing God’s name, or representing Him in images, which we both felt made sense.
We entertained the idea of the Godhead as something like a cosmic fountain or a mysterious cube.
And all the while, my mom kept asking about Sarah, too, trying to gather more intelligence.
It would all come out eventually, I knew.
It would be a scandal. But for now I didn’t want to talk to my mother about my sex life.
Thankfully, she was mostly interested in the miracle, and we kept returning to the theological plane.
“I’m sure I told you about the time my sister had a religious experience, didn’t I?” she said, lighting her fourth cigarette. I heard the lighter spark, the pop of her lips, the exhalation. By then I’d moved into the kitchen and was pouring myself a third whiskey.
“If you did, I don’t remember,” I said.
“This is back when we were in our forties,” she said.
“You were in your late teens, I guess, off in Asia or something, on one of your trips. She got way out there. I suppose calling it a religious experience is debatable, but to me, that’s what it looked like.
She was under a lot of stress at the time.
She was getting divorced from Terry. And Sam was only six and having those asthma attacks.
She went deep into a state and kind of snapped. ”
“I don’t think you ever told me this,” I said.
“She didn’t sleep, literally, for months,” my mom said.
“There were tons of endorphins coursing through her body, tons of fear. For a while, she was just super alert, getting everything done. But then she started telling weird jokes that no one else got, and then the revelations started. Her eyes got all glassy and intense, like a saint’s eyes.
And she started doing weird things. In her house, she built this circuit of gongs.
She had meditation bells, sleigh bells, handbells.
And they corresponded to exercise stations.
She had to go around the house and gong every bell and do some push-ups or jumping jacks or ride her stationary bike.
Then it got worse. She started tying bottles and cans to her clothes, walking around with smeared makeup all over her face, offering guys on the street hand jobs.
It was terrifying. We ended up having to take her to the hospital. ”
“Poor Aunt Ellen,” I said. “Sounds like she had some kind of breakdown.”
“You could call it that,” she said. “But it was something else, too. She was comprehending things during that time. She was communing with something on a different level. It was hard not to see it. She still claims she learned a lot from that experience. It was like something came into her. Like a possession. After that, I understood why people believe in demons and witches. She was taken over by something.”
“But she came back,” I said.
“Yeah, she got medicated,” my mom said. “But it was in the ER that I met a doctor who told me something I’ll never forget.
I was so scared during that time, honey.
It was her experience, but it was intense for me, too, you know?
Extremely intense. I was looking for any kind of reassurance I could get.
And this doctor, she was terrific. She took me aside and told me she saw this kind of thing all the time.
All the time. And she said it was always the same, too.
For women, she said, it was always about the body.
They got obsessed with their holes. They’d start having really inappropriate sexual relationships, talking really dirty.
It was all about mortifying the flesh. And it was true, Ellen did some of that.
“And for men,” my mom said, “it was always about God. Men would hear voices. They’d receive commands from outer space, uncover secrets that only they could understand.
They’d comprehend conspiracies that no one else knew about.
God and sex, she said. Those were the ways people communed with the divine.
Or the way the mind broke. I’ll never forget that conversation. ”
“So you’re saying I’m delusional,” I said. I was back on the couch, staring at the ceiling. It was two o’clock in the morning where she was.
“No,” she said, from across the continent. “Not at all. I don’t think you’re crazy at all, sweetheart. I would never say that. It’s just interesting is all. What’s real and what isn’t. It’s very hard to say, even on the best days. Tonight, I’m just glad you’re safe.”