For the last twenty-odd years I have gone to Catholic Mass almost every Sunday, as believer and skeptic, supporter and critic, seeker and sought, trying to be faithful to the experience that brought me to the Church in the first place. I’ve clapped and sung at gym masses, where lay people preach and children dance to guitars and tambourines, and I’ve yawned through somber, poorly attended masses in irreligious Catholic countries. When I’ve least expected it, I’ve discovered myself in the presence of the holy, perhaps at a small-community mass in a spare, white room with no music, no statues, a single branch in a vase suddenly trembling and radiant, cracking to reveal the splendor of its making.

I received the sacraments of Baptism, Confirmation and Communion at the Easter Vigil in 1982. But nothing can give me a Catholic childhood, reflective patent-leather shoes, nuns with rulers, or fish on Fridays. Nothing can infuse me with the Roman Catholic culture of my city, Chicago, with its division into Polish, German and Italian parishes, its struggle to be a religion of the powerful as well as of immigrants. For me these ethnic traditions are no less foreign, and just as Catholic, as the rattling sistrum and drum of the Church’s Ethiopian Rite, with its women ululating, “le, le, le, le, le” on a single, high note. In other parts of the world, the Church struggles with its converts over such cultural issues as polygamy and ancestor worship, but my cultural baggage is no less strange. In some ways, I am as alien to the person sitting by me in the pew as a South Sea Islander on a pig hunt.

* * *

My search for God and entry into the Church were vibrant, if conflictual, parts of my thirty-year marriage to Eric, a man twenty-two years older than I. With his death in 1988, my spiritual fervor weakened, displaced by grief that threatened my stability. At fifty I found myself a single parent of a ten-year-old girl and a mentally handicapped seventeen-year-old boy, as well as two college-aged sons, and I devoted myself to the needs of children, to therapy and to my work, teaching dance and choreographing. I dropped out of Church committees, like liturgy planning, as I struggled to be a person and a mother without being a wife. But I continued to make and direct dances for churches, as part of worship or as concerts, and I tested the waters of the mass each Sunday, searching for the immersion of my initial baptismal plunge.

Thirteen years later, the children on their own, I moved to Chicago’s north side and found myself without a parish. I hoped to find one with the rich, up-to-date liturgy of my first church, St. Thomas the Apostle on Chicago’s south side, with its inclusive language, occasional lay preaching, enthusiastic, folk-style music and intellectually solid theology. I’d been wandering, disappointed, for a couple of years when I stumbled into the gym mass at St. Gertrude’s on the first Sunday of Advent.

Four nests of greenery were arranged throughout the open space, each one supporting a candle at waist height, and a blue drape hung behind the improvised altar. At the beginning of mass, the tiniest children circled in the center. Those who could manage fire held lighted tapers, and those too young had candles with paper flames. As the choir sang “O Come, O Come, Emanuel,” they processed to the first candle and lit it.

The children’s action was dance without dancing, if “dance” is taken to mean deliberately elaborated movement. It was all the children could do to get to the candle and light it without setting each other’s hair afire. They were simply performing the liturgical action of kindling light, and there was no room for self-conscious gesture, performed for its own sake.

The world hushed; I took a sharp breath and felt myself settle into remembered layers of meaning, as the old story of hope and expectation unfolded in the gestures of the youngest tellers. I knew that I would be at St. Gertrude’s as more children were added each week, dancers accumulating with the candles, the light building until it breaks into the dark of Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, radiating from the cradle to defy winter’s gloom. I had found a home.

For the first time since my years of intense mourning for Eric’s death, I was released from an endless waiting game. I sensed a playful God, one that might be hiding but whom I could seek, one from whom I would no longer hide. As my faith flickered back into life, I began to reflect on its strange journey, sometimes rescuing me when I didn’t even know it existed and other times getting confused with my own desires and ambitions, just when I thought it was strongest.

As I slipped into this community, I began to suspect that the story was bigger and more complex than a door opening and slamming shut within ten years. I scribbled pages and pages freehand on a yellow legal pad, recalling the time when each Sunday was an expedition into the virgin territory of faith. At first, the writing was just “telling,” the page a substitute for Eric’s listening ear. Then the page began to speak back to me, showing me things I’d forgotten or hadn’t suspected, revealing connections among childhood, adolescence, early religious experience and its distant ripples in my present life.

On March 12, 1977, when I was thirty-nine, I flew with my husband, Eric and three of our children to Jamaica for spring vacation, leaving our six-year-old, disabled son, Stefan, with my parents in D.C. We speeded in a rental car on the unaccustomed left side of twisting roads, trying to reach our hotel before dark. Swerving to avoid an oncoming truck, we hit the embankment, rose for a weightless moment, then tumbled and rolled. Stillness. Something heavy pinned my right shoulder.

“Are you on top of me?” I asked. Shouts approached, and someone righted the car, dumping Eric back behind the steering wheel and revealing my three-year-old daughter, Natasha, beneath me, limp, blood streaming from her neck, teeth broken. Baby teeth, I told myself, just baby teeth. Up the embankment I saw nine-year-old Tom, thrown from the car but uninjured. “Where’s Anton?” I asked.

“We’ve turned him over,” said a stranger’s voice, “and he’s all right.” Thrown out the downhill side, he’d fallen in the ditch beneath the car. As we raced in a jeep over dirt roads toward a hospital in the tiny town of Santa Maria, I found myself bargaining. “If I can have this one thing…” To whom? Not God. I was pleading with anything or anyone that could transcend harsh, material reality, that could reverse the flow of Natasha’s life, her body seeming to liquefy as it threatened to slip from my lap. Anton, eleven, wept muddy tears on the seat across from me, while Tom pushed me back into my seat each time the careening jeep jiggled me to the edge. “If I can have this one thing, then…” What? I had nothing to offer in return, nothing but my impotent wish. I craned my head toward the driver. “Please hurry,” I begged over the motor’s racket. My baby’s eyes rolled up in her head, and someone screamed into the wind—my husband. I knew his doctor’s eyes had seen a sign. “If I can have this one thing…” I’d never pleaded for anything before.

Attendants rushed Natasha into one treatment room and Anton into another, while Tom remained among the local families in the small, crowded waiting room. Eric and I stayed with Natasha, as darkness invaded the room with the speed of tropical night. The nurse listened to Natasha’s heartbeat, then passed the stethoscope to Eric at his request. With two hands pressed together she began rhythmic compression of the baby’s chest, then listened again. I went out to the waiting room to report to Tom. Eric checked the other treatment room, but Anton’s diagnosis would have to wait for a bigger hospital. We hurried back to Natasha. The nurse compressed the baby’s chest more slowly, then took the stethoscope from her ears, drew back, and pulled the sheet from the foot of the gurney up over Natasha’s face. I pulled it down to kiss her stomach, her lips and her face, counting: she’d lived for three years, two months and fourteen days. Raising my hands, I grabbed the neck of my shirt to tear it, but couldn’t quite inhabit that traditional gesture of grief. I pulled the sheet back up over Natasha and went out to tell Tom.

My living children tugged at me, pulling me back from the abyss. Anton was hospitalized in Kingston after a lurching ambulance ride across the mountains, Eric fearing that Anton had a ruptured spleen. Children in the waiting room stared fearfully at my white hair, dyed red by Natasha’s blood. Neither Eric nor I suffered more than a black eye, and Anton was only bruised and battered. Hair filled with gravel, he raved and flailed, semiconscious, and then slept, sedated. We went to a hotel. Tom, nine, bore the brunt of grief undiluted by a struggle for physical healing.

“It’s hard,” he said, the next morning, “to wake up to the sound of you crying.” Eric and I drew Tom into the circle of our embrace, amazed at how little it helped. Food turned to cardboard in my mouth, feeding myself an outrage against one who couldn’t eat. We wandered around the hotel pool, violated by sun and air, and yet we took one step, and then one more, and then one more. After Anton’s torn eyelid had been repaired and a cast put on his badly sprained ankle, he left the hospital and flew with us back to Washington. There we picked up Stefan, and returned to Chicago.

The week after, I went back to work at the Body Politic, a theater complex in Chicago where I taught modern dance and choreographed for my dance company. I tried to collect myself and focus on the work, to let its rhythm carry me. The moment I became involved, the knowledge of loss came charging back, as though punishing me for forgetting. I wondered if I would ever be able to simply eat an egg, drink a glass of wine, take a walk or snuggle for a night of sleep.

* * *

A week later, distraught, I grabbed pad and pencil and descended alone to our bright yellow kitchen, the light reddened by reflection from the dark orange ceiling. Pots and pans hung from hooks, collected from college apartments and garage sales, trips to the Maxwell Street market and the Salvation Army. Here, as the children were born and grew, Eric and I had had long dinner conversations by candlelight. Here the little boys had retired to platzies, blanketed corners where they could rest after eating when adult dinner took too long, until their father roused them to extinguish the candles with a copper snuffer while he sang the Austrian national anthem, loudly and off key, then agreed to “carry both,” as they demanded, one in each arm, to bed. Here I’d taught the boys to cook, standing them unsteadily on chairs at the counter and giving them potatoes to peel and carrots to wash, holding one hand between them to stop a push while stirring rice into onions on the stove, keeping one eye on my third son on the floor. And here on another stark night, I’d come to realize that Stefan, the baby on the floor, would only slowly learn to walk or speak, would never read or write or hold a job.

When Stefan was newborn, we’d called him, “Zen baby,” for his peaceful nature, marveling at how little he cried. Soon we began to worry about his floppiness and failure to sit up on time and started weekly visits to speech and occupational therapists. Eric defended him against the expert’s tests, hanging onto his conviction that Stefan was special, perhaps even holy. “Developmentally delayed,” said the social worker to whom we talked while Stefan had therapy. Eventually I said the dreaded word: “retarded.” By that time he was three and couldn’t walk. A name couldn’t make it any worse than it already was, I thought. I wanted to say the word before someone said it to me. More than anything, I hoped Stefan would never hear it, would never know this harsh fact about himself. “Retarded, retarded,” I repeated to myself. A “retard” was a discard, but retarded was all right, I thought, just a fact about a person. We listened to the news about Nixon’s wrongdoing on the radio, while Stefan played on the floor, lying on his stomach and propping himself up on his hands. I’d said the unacceptable word to Eric, and he’d shared my embattled joy that Stefan would never be able to accomplish any serious evil.

Now Stefan was six, and I rued the sense of security I’d felt when I’d faced the fact of his condition, my false conviction that I’d paid my dues and earned safe passage for all my children. The weird orange light shimmered in the night kitchen, and my once solid, settled innards seemed all water, as fluid as my daughter had been the day she flowed away. The body’s mostly water. Eighty-percent? Or is it ninety-eight? I wanted to disgorge my watery self, pour it out, turn inside out, sink into earth. The light bounced harshly from walls to lined, yellow pad. Natasha had been my only girl. Not only flesh of my flesh, but my kind of body.

Newborn, her sucking mouth had called forth a rush of milk and made my womb contract, seeking its former size. While I nursed her, I read Adrienne Rich’s Of Women Born and felt the intimate dialogue between mother and child of which she speaks. Natasha’s whole self sucked with such effort that her forehead shone, and my throat ached with her yearning. My old ideas of womanhood began to shift and heave, ruptured by the intense efforts of this woman-child. Her mouth, my nipple, my womb, her microscopic eggs like seeds inside her: body called to body with coursing waves of sensuality. My womb: her former home; her womb: my future, as echoes of ancestral births called to the children Natasha and her children would bear. If she was so wonderfully made, then so was I. I loved her length and the tidy seam of her pubis. Her blue eyes always seemed to ask, like Princess Lise, as she died in childbirth in War and Peace: “I love you all, and have done no harm to anyone, and what have you done to me?” It seemed, impossibly, as though Natasha’s birth had been a grief foretold.

The pencil, the pad, the chasm that separated me from Natasha. Where was she, and what did “gone” mean? I thought vaguely of physical laws of conservation of matter and energy. The “g” sound nudged my mind, not the hard “g” of “girl,” but the soft “g” of the woman she would never become: generate, vagina, her generous being. Being? Without being, nothing. No thing. But she had never been a thing. How could she cease to be? Genesis, the vegetating vegetation where the car had rolled, my stomach divulging. The words bounced around the kitchen, flitted along the curtains and slid to rest on the paper, capturing images of tropical seed, fruit and juice. I pictured Natasha in evanescent flight, a fragile bird once trapped, set free in an explosion of time, and myself crashing into the brick wall of brute fact.

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For years before the accident, I’d dreamed of houses with an “other side.” I’d enter a childhood home, like the house on Dumbarton Avenue where we lived when I was ten, in Washington’s Georgetown. I’d pass the piano room that would later be my bedroom and then climb the stairs to the second floor, where the living room looked out through French doors to the long, narrow garden. I’d continue up to the third floor and enter my bedroom, glance out the window at the garden and take a peek at the neighbors’ flowers, then pass through a dream door into a room I’d never seen before. Sometimes it was a living room furnished with the clean lines of Danish modern, much like our own, and sometimes cluttered and cobwebbed, full of old dishes and rusty tools. Other rooms led from this one on and on into rooms ever new and mysterious, occasionally narrowing to nightmare constriction, sometimes opening to vistas of lake and meadow. How could I have missed this up to now?

As I grieved that night in the yellow kitchen, those other rooms opened to me. The air filled with paradox, reality and dream exchanging roles like a pair of linked tumblers doing somersaults. Life could be stifled in the tropics as easily as fruit burst from the trees. Weeds could grow through concrete, unstoppable, yet no one could hold Natasha’s ebbing life. I began to feel—to hope, to believe? —that I would meet her again someday. The love that bound us together felt stronger than the harsh fact of separation, strong enough to crash through that wall.

Everything was different. Before the accident, I’d approached the Body Politic timidly, always parking facing south, toward home, as though that could ensure my return to a safe haven. Upcoming performance seasons always threatened to reveal my inability, the hollow at my core. What if I failed to produce new work? Feeling undeserving of studio and theatre, I walked with my head down, eyes on the floor. Now I strode into the theatre, fearless, and addressed the tech director.

“I want a platform built in that corner, a raked platform to simulate a mountainside.” I imagined the dancers as Jamaican women with jugs on their heads, descending a mountain at daybreak, necks swaying, innocent of what the day would bring.

“Sure, we can do that,” said the tech guy. “You mean you want to change the theatre to the diagonal?” He indicated the skewing of banks of seats to face the mountain.

“Right,” I said, walking to the opposite corner. “This’ll be front.”

“Do you want it to fill the whole corner?” he asked, starting to measure along the wall.

“Yes, so the dancers can descend along a winding path.” I began to visualize a slow accumulation of bodies, starting from the top, a sort of six-person version of La Bayadere, the classical ballet sequence that starts with one person doing an arabesque and backbend and builds to twenty or thirty, each entering from up center and winding back and forth downstage. “Can we have an entrance at the back?” He explained how he could mask an entrance and allow the dancers to enter at the mountaintop. I paid no attention to what it would cost, for I’d forgotten how to worry. Mountains and theatre seats, success and failure had lost their importance. The worst thing had already happened, and nothing else mattered.

Sights and smells and tastes, perceptions that I had considered “real,” now seemed a shimmering, changeable surface, but what the underlying reality might be, I didn’t know. Whatever it was, it united me with Natasha, no matter how far beyond the trees she’d flown or how unknown she was to flesh or fruit or seed. Her vivid, continuing presence contradicted my faith in empirical fact, my secular upbringing, and drew me to the edge of the world I’d known. As I peered beyond, the horizon receded, suggesting there was more than I could see, an “other side” to the world like the other side of the house. Maybe she’d be running ahead of me, like when she took my father’s hand and dashed into a field, chasing her brothers on a tractor, saying, “Wanna ride, wanna ride, wanna ride!” Maybe she’d be in my arms, every inch of me welcoming every inch of her. I didn’t know. But somehow, somewhere, I’d meet her once again. My critical self said, “illusion of a grief-stricken mother,” but the feeling remained, strong and real as pinched flesh. I had no idea what to do with it.

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