Dinner Party

So, what do I tell people I "do" now?

He should lift up the self by the Self
and not sink into the selfish;
for the self is the only friend
of the Self, and its only foe.

Bhagavad Gita, 6.6

I hate dinner parties but I keep forgetting that. I may have always hated them but, since I’ve started going to houses of worship in earnest, doing nothing else but that, they’ve really begun to fill me with dread. But I didn’t know we were going to one when Marisa said, “Come on over for dinner. Ken and I haven’t seen you in ages. Sunday night at seven?”

Ken and Marisa were safe. They knew what I was doing and weren’t too freaked out. “Sure! We’ll be there.”

But on Friday, when I called Marisa to say, “The lemons in our back yard were great so I made a lemon chiffon pie and I’m bringing it.” Marisa said, “Oh, I guess we’re going to have a lot of dessert then. My friend Lissa is going to cooking school and she’s bringing a dessert, too.”

Strangers. I was going to have to talk to strangers. At some point they were going to politely ask, “So what do you do?” That question was kind of fun to answer when I worked for Ed Bradley at 60 Minutes. Now? "I'm going through the conversion training for the seven major religious traditions?" That's a conversation starter.

I made it all the way until dessert without the subject coming up but then Marisa, who thought she was being a good host, said, “So, Marley, tell us what’s going on with your work.”

I’ve gotten the explanation down to a few sentences and I can usually turn the conversation around to get people to talk about their beliefs and family traditions, about their experience with faith, but I wasn’t lucky that night. These were kind, thoughtful, curious people who went right for the jugular: “What’s happening to you? How is it changing you? What are you feeling about it so far?”

I could feel my eyes blink as I looked into Lissa’s sweet earnest face – she really wanted to know something of my insides. I could feel my eyes blink…and blink again. It was an overture of friendship, of intimacy…and I couldn’t think of a thing to say.

My feelings? What am I feeling? Heck if I know. Maybe spending so long as a journalist has made me incapable of accurately seeing myself. Maybe there’s such a thing as being too open-minded. I’ve presented myself, arms flung wide, over and over and over again hoping to feel the irrational tug of faith. I’m even oddly fascinated by my obedience to this uncontrollable drive to do all of this and feel like my own lab rat sometimes but how can I say that? It sounds almost disassociated.

“But you must have found yourself changing in some way, haven’t you?

I wanted to scream: I have no idea what I’m feeling, what’s happening to me, so I cannot tell you what I don’t know myself. And I am okay with that until I am asked over and over and over again to report in: ‘Marley, how is this affecting you? How is this changing you?’ I don’t know. But I’m going to find out if I can, but back off and give me time.

I need to do this, to see if taking these actions will change me, change my perceptions. But is it change I’m after? Or do I really want knowledge? But if it’s only knowledge I’m,after, wouldn’t I have just kept reading books?

No, knowledge alone isn’t it. Perhaps the desire to find out about all of them, all of the faiths, is a workaholic’s way to avoid coming to know anything deeply, a sophisticated dodge, like Swami Sarvadevananda said you dig ten feet here,then ten feet there, you never get any water. I don’t know. Maybe. But when I went looking for someone else’s description of what it felt like to practice each faith, hoping to start this journey farther down the road, I couldn’t find it in any form I could understand, in any form that started from the very beginning for those of us with nothing. How can I go deep if I don’t have any idea where water is likely to be …for me?

What has changed is I can’t give glib answers any more. I can’t pretend to know something I don’t. I can’t talk about feelings and change I haven’t identified and feared I’d never identify. I can’t chat, can’t entertain, and I certainly can’t trot out my innards over dessert. All I can do is hope that, by writing all of this down as I go along, all the facts, the actions, the confusions, the moments of connection, maybe one day I’ll be able to come to understand for myself what changed, what was changing, what I was feeling and be able to do more than shrug and stammer, “So, how did you grow up?” in the effort to make it safely through one more dinner party.

Telling them...

So I finally came clean with Mom and Dad.

I didn’t do it until just before I started all of this in earnest. I was afraid to tell them. I'm an alleged grown-up with kids of my own and I'm still worried about what they think about what I'm doing, even more fearful of what they'll say. To be fair, I've had decades of experience telling them things they didn't want to hear. When I came home from an expensive fancy college to tell them that I wasn’t applying to medical school, that I wanted to get a job in television, my mother said, “What did we send you to college for?”

Now this? They're going to think I'm an idiot.

I'd put off telling them for months. When I quit my job running the regional public television newsmagazine, I kind of forgot to mention that I knew what I was doing next, specifically. They heard “writing,” they heard “more time with Luke and Matt” and that my husband’s work was doing okay, so Mom and Dad didn’t really ask too many questions.

On the phone, Mom had said, “Maybe now you won’t have to work so hard all the time. I hate to see you run ragged.”

“Me, too, Mom.”

But I talk to my parents so many times during a week it just got plain weird not to tell them what was going on, especially when this project was becoming my life, especially when we were all going to be together for their fiftieth anniversary at their honeymoon spot in Florida.

__

In my suitcase, I brought two things to give them: a pair of patchwork pillowtops I’d made for them with their wedding photos ironed on the center squares of each and a copy of the pages I’d given to Hemu and her sadhu, the same ones I'd given to Swami Sarvadevananda. I took the pillowtops out right away – they were a big hit – but the manuscript stayed in the bottom of the empty suitcase until the day before we were meant to leave.

Not long after breakfast, I walked into their hotel room, handed over the paper held together by brass grommets, and took Luke and Matt to the beach.

Hours later, fingers wrinkled, salt baked into skin, I sent the boys ahead to take showers and opened the door to Mom and Dad’s room. Beyond the entrance hall, Dad sat with his back to the sliding glass door, scratching words into the squares of his spiral-bound double acrostic book. It wasn’t late but the sun was already behind the tall building we were in, its shadow crossing the pool and even the beach beyond. His pose was so familiar it was like a hug: one leg crossed wide over the other to support the hard pad, left hand curled around a pen, head down and slightly tilted. His hair might be baby fine and white with a whisper of tan skin beneath but the scene was the same since I was little. He seemed so happy when he was like this. He seemed so alone.

“Hi, Dad.”

Dad’s hearing is flawless for someone nearing eighty but his puzzle concentration is absolute. I tried again. “Dad?”

“Oh, hi. Boys have a good time down there?”

“Yeah, where’s Mom?”

“She’s getting ready.”

Screaming through my head was: Did you read it? Did she? Nothing in his eyes or voice said anything so I didn’t either. Forcing it felt wrong. Besides, I knew better than to start with Dad; he let Mom handle stuff like this. So I just asked, “When are we leaving for dinner?”

Looking up over his reading glasses, “Half an hour.”

After the fastest shower I knew how to take, I was back, a kid waiting for approval of a lumpy handmade ashtray.

I know I’m not supposed to care what they think, what she thinks. I mean, when am I going to get over this? I’ve investigated bad guys while at 60 Minutes, I’ve worn hidden cameras in dangerous places, I’ve interviewed a serial killer on death row and many other criminals in prisons and jails, in my last job, I’ve made decisions that an entire staff didn’t like, and yet I’m still tiptoeing around looking for signs in my parents’ eyes.

Why do I care? What am I waiting for? Permission?

And then I knew: the dread of having this very conversation and others like it is what’s stopped me dead for decades. I feel like I was born with only one subject on my mind: Is there a point and, if so, what is it? Is the visible all that’s real? Yet it’s taken me half a lifetime to become either stubborn enough or driven enough to make anyone else’s reactions meaningless…. that’s probably overstating it…to make anyone else’s bad reaction less important. But, for all that progress, I was still standing there, desperate to know what they thought.

The smell of Jean Nate and the sound of charm bracelets always told us when my mother was ready to go out. My parents didn’t go out often when we were little but, when they did, Mom loved dressing in red and black, sometimes with big wide belts or dresses she’d made, some dramatic. The bracelets were still there but the playful smell and dramatic outfits were gone. In their place were long pieces of silk and comfortable shoes.

Dad picked up the plastic hotel key from the table and called for the car while Mom finished putting a few things into one of her tiny sparkly purses. I gave up looking for them to say something. It was plain: she knew I was waiting, knew I wanted to know, but she either couldn’t figure out what to say or maybe she hadn’t even read it yet. Maybe she wanted to wait until she could figure out what she even thought about it.

Maybe she didn’t want to ruin dinner.

But, as I held the hotel room door open and turned off the light, Mom stopped and looked up at me and said, “I really never knew you had this problem, I really didn’t. I mean, you told me how you thought I should have taken you to art museums more and, you’re right, I probably should have, but I never knew about this.”

All I could do was laugh. I put one arm around her shoulder and kissed her jaw, the only part she would really let me near, as she continued with various permutations of this all the way down the long hotel hallway, with Dad following behind, until the elevator door opened and there were strangers inside.

And we had a really nice dinner.