AN: For Jenny, who wanted to know what happened to Joan and Adam. And for Lar, who wanted to hear the Yakuza story.In other words, I am running out of wacky Luke/Grace anecdotes and will be euthanizing this baby soon. Many thanks to all of you who've encouraged me in this mad endeavor.
It's no secret that my aunt Joan is crazy. She is, as my father puts it so eloquently, a few valence electrons short of a full outer shell. Fortunately, she is crazy in a genial, inoffensive way that makes her mildly interesting, and not in a way that makes her likely to grace the cover of Schizophrenia Digest.
Rumor has it that Joan talks to God.
Everybody in our immediate family knows about this, but for obvious reasons, we refrain from discussing it with others or even among ourselves. My uncle Kevin's revolving door of girlfriends we can joke about, but Joan's ability to converse with the divine remains untreaded territory. Part of this is due to our sensitivity toward mental health issues, but I suspect that perhaps somewhere deep within all of us, we really do believe that God talks to Joan.
For starters, it would account for a lot of my aunt's erratic behavior. She is known to take up a variety of random projects, which range from taking sudden road trips to the middle of nowhere to searching for rare coins in the bottoms of water fountains. Joan's life is a perpetual scavenger's hunt; she collects unusual experiences, pieces of people's lives, strange truths found in consoling desolate people in the dead of night.
That's another thing about Joan --- she has some sort of light-filled quality to her that attracts the lost, the lonely, the walking wounded. And she is always willing to help them in whatever misguided way she manages to come up with. She has this random passion toward small, easily overlooked things, this weird energy that makes her burn so bright, my grandmother Helen is often worried that Joan would self-implode.
All of this, in addition to her readiness to give us whatever we wanted for our birthdays, Elizabeth Rove and I became convinced when we were no more than seven or eight, that if there indeed was a God and if he had any common sense at all, Joan would naturally be the first one he talked to.
As founding members of Joan's fan club, Elizabeth and I were guilty of actively encouraging her lunacy. We volunteered to be her test subjects when she learned French cooking. We stayed up all night with her to watch foreign films with no subtitles, when somebody wanted her to familiarize herself with Tarkovsky. We dyed her hair and dyed it back when we saw that platinum blond was effectively advertising her mid-life crisis. When she disappeared to the North Pole, every other week Elizabeth and I sent her a box containing life's necessities: candy bars, tampons, gossipy magazines that had nothing to do with reality whatsoever.
Joan's sudden excursion to the North Pole was yet another one of the inexplicable things she did. As usual, she neglected to tell anybody about it until she reached the Arctic Circle, whereupon she called home and left a message on Grandma Helen's answering machine. "I'll be back in a couple of months," she shouted to make herself heard over the fuzzy background noise. "Don't worry."
My grandmother, of course, worried. She still worries, regardless of the fact that even after years of flakiness, Joan has managed to stay in one piece. Grandma Helen is not unaccustomed to her middle child's anomalous behavior, but worry has always been Grandma's default mode of operation. "If she'd only settle down," she laments to whoever will listen to her. "Maybe then she'll stay out of trouble. And be happy, even." (At which point my mother will point out that this is a disgusting, chauvinistic old-fashioned school of thought. "Why does a woman need a man to be happy?" she is wont to demand, and somebody will say, "Um, Grace? You're married." To which she replies, "Yeah, but only so I'd get joint medical insurance and someone tall to change the light bulbs," which nobody believes, possibly not even my mother herself.)
So my grandmother continues to set Joan up on blind dates, all of which end up in disaster, frequently with Joan screaming at her mother to leave her alone. Sometimes I wonder if Joan is ever lonely. As far as I know, Joan has been engaged twice, the first time to a member of the Japanese mafia, and the second to a master's student in theology, with whom she got into an argument on the subway over the nature of God.
Some may find it surprising that the second engagement dissolved much more bitterly than the first. "Oh, that," Joan laughs whenever we ask her how she ended up almost marrying a member of the Yakuza. "It was just a little misunderstanding. See, I was supposed to help Masao show his father that he can fulfill his true nature without going into organized crime, but his dad took it the wrong way. It's not as melodramatic as you think. The Yamamotos are nice people. Really."
Why it didn't work out with Daniel, however, remains largely a mystery. "I don't want to talk about it," Joan says with a quiet hurt in her eyes that compels us to shut up. Over the years, we've come up with the conclusion that Daniel must have learned about Joan's secret, and considered it too much to handle. Or perhaps he couldn't find it in himself to believe her.
The closest semblance to a love life Joan has is her non-existent relationship with Adam Rove. These two, apparently, have been doing this strange dance for years. When Adam and his ex-wife were embroiled in their bitter divorce, Joan returned to Arcadia to give moral support and taught Elizabeth to double-dutch out all her anger. (This happened the summer I was seven. Elizabeth and I spent an entire month jumping rope while her parents and their lawyers marched in and out of court to battle for her soul.) When Joan landed herself a job as a curator for an art museum, Adam spent three months teaching her about art so that she would seem as though she knew what she was talking about.
Joan and Adam are too close, too comfortable with each other for any re-ignition of a romantic relationship; they are content to be friends, because they tried the dating thing way back in the Mesozoic era, and it resulted in a fiasco of catastrophic proportions. Most people don't realize this, so they often question us as to when Adam and Joan are going to give up and get back together. "It's never going to happen," Elizabeth would explain, rolling her eyes in exasperation. "They function better when they're apart. If they really do hook up, Christ, there will be so much misery I'm gonna need to take a shotgun to their heads as a humanitarian act."
Joan made her trip to the North Pole the year I turned sixteen. When she returned after five months, I had acquired my driver's license and was given the responsibility of picking her up at the airport. Her flight was to arrive at noon, but it was well past two o'clock and she still hadn't showed up. I called home to see if my father had heard anything from her, only to be surprised when Joan answered.
"What are you doing at my house?" I asked.
"I forgot where I put the keys to my house."
"I have the keys to your house. What are you doing out of the airport at all? I'm supposed to pick you up!"
"I took a different flight."
"What? Why didn't you call?"
"You told me you lost your cell phone."
"And I also told you that I was using yours until you came back."
"Well, I'm not going to call my own number. That's just ridiculous."
I ordered Joan to stay put and wait for me to come back, and then I called my grandmother and confirmed that Joan was, indeed, still crazy.
To thank me for sending her the junk food, on which she had subsisted for the entire duration of her stay in the arctic, she took me out for dinner that night. By the time we left the restaurant, the clouds had gone from the color of half-and-half to that of a hematoma, and the sky was working on its way to a shade of inky blue.
"Weird," Joan said. She had spent five months in a land of endless light, and was no longer accustomed to the concept of nighttime. She kept looking up at the sky, nearly tripping off the curb and into traffic.
I took her arm and said, "Here, hold on. What, five months and now you're senile?"
"You are officially my least favorite niece," she snapped.
"Hey, I saved you from having to eat seal blubber for five months."
I ducked when she swatted me with a take-out menu, and when I stood up straight, I realized that we were standing eye to eye. All along I'd been under the assumption that Joan was taller than me, but now I saw that we were the same height. I studied her a little longer, searched her face for the traces of the girl she had been at sixteen.
"What's it like?" I asked as we waited to walked back to my father's ancient Toyota Prius, Polluter the Second.
"What's what like? Eating seal blubber?"
"No." I let a few moments sink between us, weighing down my words. "Talking to God."
Joan looked at me as if I were pulling some sort of practical joke on her, which, empirically speaking, was not improbable. Then she realized that neither of us were joking, and she chewed on her nail thoughtfully. "Talking to God," she said, "is a little bit like living in the North Pole. There's so much light that you can see things normally you wouldn't see, things you don't want to see. Things you want to hide from, but you can't, because of all that light. And maybe you end up seeing all the, say, spider webs in your igloo, but you also get to see good stuff, like the way the sun bounces off the water underneath the ice when you go ice fishing."
Divine clarity and divine madness are often only separated by a thin line. At that moment, I had no doubt at all that Joan is able to walk along it, arms spread out to keep her balance. If this had been a Hollywood movie, I would have had an epiphany. I would have stayed up all night, dwelling in the wisdom of my aunt's words, even if they were adorned with inappropriate metaphors.
But this was real life, and real life rarely allows for the seizing of such opportunities. So instead, I simply asked, "Did you really live in an igloo?"
"Yeah, right," she said. "I'd die without central heating. Hey, let's go to Dairy Queen."
When I was in ninth grade, Joan decided to take a Chinese language course. It didn't matter that she had no talent in languages whatsoever --- high school French had been four years of pain for both her and her teachers ---because somebody wanted her to take it. She wanted to know if I wished to accompany her and spend my Saturday mornings learning how to count to ten with a bunch of elementary school kids.
"Not really," I told her. "Honestly, I think I'd rather go to temple."
"You never go to temple. Your mother doesn't even go to temple."
"But you don't make my mother take Chinese lessons with you."
Next, Joan asked Elizabeth Rove, who just snorted. "First of all, I'm in Maryland," said Elizabeth over the phone. "I'm not driving through three states just so I can defend you from a bunch of nine-year-olds. Look, I already have enough trouble remembering to capitalize my nouns in Deutsch. I don't need another language, thank you very much, especially one that doesn't have verb tenses."
"Whoa. It doesn't have verb tenses?" Joan asked, and it became obvious that she was no more than an overgrown teenager operating on a teenager's impulsivity. I felt so sorry for her that I gave in and registered for the course to keep her company.
Chinese class was, all in all, physical and emotional torture. We were enrolled in the beginner's section, which meant for eight months, we sat in Lilliputian chairs in the gymnasium of the cultural center, reciting a series of sounds that made little sense to either of us. I was the second oldest student in the class; Joan was the oldest. Everybody else had barely finished losing their baby teeth.
We were so hopelessly bad that even our young classmates pitied us. They made an effort to help us do our homework, and tried to teach us useful phrases that were mostly spoken in cartoons. As a result, Joan and I could say, "He attacked the armadillo with a light-saber and then disappeared into a wormhole," but ask us to describe the weather and we'd bang our heads on the table.
I quit once my eight months were up, but Joan persevered. By some stroke of luck, she had managed to pass the beginner's course and was wading through the intermediate section. On a lucky day, she could speak simple sentences like a baby on the eve of learning to talk, but beyond that, she made little progress.
Time and time again, Joan teetered on the verge of giving up. But a fellow classmate's encouragement or the sudden appearance of a smiley face sticker on her worksheet would boost her spirits, and she stumbled on, believing that with enough tenacity and goodwill from her teacher and the kids in her class, she would someday be able to master the language.
To know Joan is to know that faith exists. How else can one explain her refusal to surrender? And while we listened to her butcher the Chinese language and waited an extra hour every week for her to order eggrolls in Mandarin, my parents and I wondered if religious people behaved in the same way. If faith is really about trusting yourself and trusting somebody else bigger so much that you are willing to make a complete idiot of yourself and still be all right with it.
As Joan muddled her way through Intermediate and continued onto Advanced (my father had a theory that the teachers simply gave her a passing grade so that they wouldn't have to face her for another year), I learned Chinese by listening to my neighbor Lisa yell at her parents. "God, Mom, you are such a bitch," she often hollered in the universal tone taken by sulky, disenfranchised teenagers, regardless of what language they speak.
One afternoon, Joan came over while Lisa was borrowing the phone, speaking her native language with a fluidity that sounded as beautiful as poetry, and as incomprehensible as calculus.
"What's up with her?" Joan asked.
"She's breaking up with her boyfriend," I explained. "She has to use our phone because her parents don't know that she has a boyfriend."
I went back to factoring polynomials as Joan eavesdropped on Lisa's conversation. Midway through a problem involving three variables, my aunt grabbed my pencil from me and waved her hands in an excited frenzy. "I know what she's saying!" She tried to contain her exhilaration in a whisper and failed miserably. "She's calling him a cheating scumbag. Ohmygod, I actually understand this. I understand every word she's saying."
As Lisa threatened to get a restraining order on her boyfriend, Joan listened on, breaking into a smile that could dry up the rain, the kind that Archimedes must have worn on his own face when he jumped out of the bath and ran down the street, shrieking "Eureka!" I was suddenly struck with a notion that if one could find a way to bottle up Joan's wonderment, her sheer sense of being, and sell it on Amazon, a lot of therapists would end up on the streets.
When Lisa finally hung up, muttering "that little asshole" (another phrase I was well-acquainted with, having heard it through the walls too many times), Joan reached over and tapped my friend on the shoulder. "Say it again," she begged, her voice filled with awe and wonder, as if she had just seen Lazarus walk out of his tomb, Moses part the Red Sea. "Please, say it again."