The year is 2016! So much happened in the year 2015. The people rose up and said No more! There were peaceful demonstrations and a new government was instituted. One person, one vote. The stupid electoral college became a relic of the past. I never understood that anyway.
And that was just the beginning! Because of this new, true democracy, all kinds of scientific breakthroughs that had previously been discovered that couldn’t have come into practice under the corporatocracy as it was have now been implemented. Cures for AIDS and cancer, cures for Parkinson’s. Cures for many kinds of mental illness. Health care is fucking affordable. Alternative healing and therapy are covered! News is news and entertainment is entertainment! Funds for alternative energies are created, funds for public education are distributed fairly! College is free! The employment rate is up! Drugs are legal, and we have new gun laws, which is to say: no more guns at all! which means crime is down, which means prisons are closing. Racism is over. Well, no it isn’t. Let’s be serious. We have work to do there. But we have new, specific civil rights laws and we actually enforce them. And war is over. More or less.
— That’s a miraculous near future you’ve dreamed up there, Mom.
— Well, why not. You’ve encouraged me to make shit up.
But you and I still have some unresolved issues. So we plan a trip to Machu Picchu. I’ve wanted to go there for a spiritual experience ever since I read that Shirley MacLaine book. Shirley herself is going up with us as our guide, along with her personal shaman. We fly into Cusco with nothing we can’t fit into our backpacks, as dictated by Shirley, as dictated by the shaman. We are told to get good hiking shoes, to pack layers to take on and off, and to bring two things for the fire: a symbol of something to let go of, and an offering. I ask What kind of an offering?; you can tell I look nervous. You say Mom, you’re confusing “offering” with “sacrifice”; she’s not asking you to bring a puppy to toss into a pyre; I laugh. Shirley says Just a small totem you can carry that has meaning to you that you want to give to the earth in gratitude. We spend the first night in a tent at the bottom to get used to the elevation — of course, I’ve performed in cities with high elevations before, but this is eleven thousand feet, and you and I are both already dizzy and we’re still at the bottom. Shirley — who told us not to bring anything we can’t fit into our backpacks — has a donkey to carry what she needs. She’s famous, and the rules don’t apply to her, so she has a personal shaman and a donkey. Her shaman doesn’t speak English, and though Shirley doesn’t speak his language either, she will translate because she understands him psychically. You, I can see, are doing your best not to laugh about this, but I give you a nudge in the side and you let it go.
Shirley lays out a thin mattress stuffed with the hypoallergenic wool of a vicuna, two silk sheets on top of that because she has sensitive skin, and a cashmere blanket on top of that. You and I have one cotton sheet each to lay on the ground, so we put on all our layers and curl up together. The shaman has only the clothes on his back and appears oddly content. Shirley is dead asleep in about two minutes; she snores like a horse, which is hilarious at first, less so when we get no sleep whatsoever. In the morning she wakes us before dawn and we ask why she didn’t tell us to pack earplugs, and of course she denies that she snores at all. Absurd, she says. Chop-chop now, it’s time for the morning revel. She leads you out of the tent and adds another log to the fire. Sit down, sit down. The shaman hands Shirley what appears to be a bunch of leaves; she proceeds to rub these leaves over our heads and bodies and says a blessing in some unrecognizable language. Can I ask what that means, I say, Shirley says No. The shaman takes a small bottle from the donkey’s pack, hands it to Shirley. She takes a swig, hands it to me, I swig, I hand it to you, you swig. It tastes like dirt mixed with vinegar. We both make faces, hope we haven’t just swallowed some kind of hallucinogen. We are here to heal via becoming one with the earth, Shirley says, as all things do. We drink the earth water, we breathe the sacred mountain air, and offer our gifts to the fire as pieces of ourselves. I am hit with the strong sense that Shirley’s version of this ritual is dubious. You, of course, have never had any other sense about it. We will now contribute to the flames. Shirley stands up. I will offer this watch, given to me by my ex-husband. Om, na na, Om na na. She drops the watch, encrusted with jewels, into the center of the fire. It’s hard not to notice that Shirley’s tossed in something that we could probably trade for a house. Lois. Shirley gestures from me to the fire. I stand, remove a well-worn birthday card my mother had given me when I turned sixteen, when she suspected I was having some issues with my confidence. She hadn’t written much on it, but the poem inside was surprisingly moving, about growing up beautifully; that word was underlined twice, and I knew what she was trying to tell me, though it wasn’t her way to gush out loud, and it’s signed simply Mother. I start to well up as I put it into the flames; you reach for my hand as I sit back down. We go around the circle, watching as various meaningful items are thrown in as offerings. You make an offering of your father’s and my wedding bands, tied with a small satin ribbon, meant to express gratitude to us for coming together long enough to make you. When we go around the second time, with our items to let go of, I toss in a small suede pouch that contains two marbles I’ve had since I was a kid, one of those little ring puzzles that I swear is unsolvable, a photo of myself with the top of my head out of the frame, and a tiny starfish with two broken legs. Whoa, Shirley says. That’s a whole lot of metaphor for one little pouch. Is this not supposed to be a safe and loving space? I ask. Not necessarily, Shirley says. You stand up and say Well, since Shirley already tossed my mom in for me, I’ll let go of this instead. You toss in your puffy-eyed picture first grade school photo and a 2017 calendar. The past and the future, Shirley says. Brilliant. You could take a lesson from your daughter, Lois. Shirley, shut the fuck up, you say. I bust out in cackles.
We are a united front, victorious against Shirley MacLaine.
— This is pretty ridiculous, Mom. I think I’m going to have to cut it.
— I love this chapter!
— It’s all right, Mom, but I don’t think it really fits. Something about it feels too obvious. Or too silly.
— Let me have it.
— All right, we’ll talk about it later.
Enjoy Your Happy Ending
You become a successful writer. It was meant to be.
— I don’t believe in meant to be.
— Well, you should.
You live happily ever after.
— Oh come on now.
— No, look. You do. I can add this, if it makes you feel better:
You write books, you have relative peace of mind, you have a wonderful circle of friends. You have a solid marriage. Maybe you and Ben still disagree about some things, thirty years in — you want to say the perfect wise thing when he’s sad, he doesn’t want you to do anything; he wants only to be seen, you think he’s going to leave every time you disagree; even after decades, this thought, though ever smaller and smaller, never entirely goes away; this makes sense to me now, but you’re together, and you’re old and it’s good even if you still think he’s easily distracted when he lets the dogs off-leash at the beach; he thinks you worry too much, all the same exact issues as when you got your first dog a few years after you were married; but you’re both a little bit right, and this sort of thing is such a small part of your existence — the rest of which is sitting on the porch of your house upstate, reading, having dinners with friends, making very, very occasional appearances after you both retire. Here’s the thing: one of you will get cancer, or Alzheimer’s, or arthritis, or something, or you won’t, neither of you, you’ll both grow very old and creaky, and right after one dies, the other will die peacefully while sleeping, of heartbreak like they say, or maybe you’ll die in a car crash together because you decided to drive long past the time when you should have stopped. The greater likelihood is that one will be left behind. That’s just the deal. Do you want to fully understand that right now? I didn’t think so. I lived into my sixties with an unresolved story. You’ve already had a sort of resolution I never got. You don’t have to write a different ending for yourself. The worst could happen to you and you’d be okay. That’s the difference between you and me. I know this now. You might have some of me in you, I know you do, but you have way more of your father. I don’t know why I didn’t know this before. Maybe I did and I didn’t want to. Or I did and I didn’t want to see that it was a good thing.