Divorce

… we must continue to beg the stranger to come into our lives because in the stranger may come the only honesty and insight we can get in our plastic worlds. The abbot is instructed to listen to the criticism of the stranger because, the Rule teaches the community, “God may have sent that one for that very reason” (Rule of Benedict 61.) The problem is that we may need to learn to practice hospitality of a different kind these days to get the same results.

Wisdom Distilled from the Daily Joan Chittister, OSB

The man in the crevice knows I will never love again. He crouches and watches as I walk the beach below him and he cackles with crazed insight. There is something in the way I appear, predictable and alone, moving in tandem with the dog and the waves, that signals to him a kindred spirit. “Like what I‘ve done to the place?” he inquires without waiting for a reply. He gestures to the tattered silk scarves and pieces of tapestry he has tied to the bushes competing with the weeds for this tiny plot of urban landscape, bordered on each side by lakefront condo parking lots. He does not live in the little crevice to which he has laid his claim; he only visits. “Oh, yeah. I own property on the south side and here in Rogers Park,” he tells me but Margaret, who has lived here the longest of all my condo neighbors, is dubious. “He’s probably from the Arbor,” she speculates and points westward, away from the lake, in the direction of the residential facility that houses the chain smoking men and women who pace the sidewalks west of Sheridan Rd. Wherever he lives, the man in the crevice returns with frequency, bringing more items to festoon his plot. Last time I passed by I noted the addition of a stool, small table and brightly colored plastic flowers. On the days he is not lost in mumbling soliloquies he stands tall and salutes. This man in the crevice wears purple pants and a stained stove pipe hat and his matted hair stirs with the wind. Sometimes his merry blue eyes find mine. “Sister,” they proclaim.

*

A screamer lives across from me. During the winter her anguish is silent but come the warmth she broadcasts to the neighborhood: “You make me so goddamned sick. I can’t stand it anymore.”

My first summer here in my condo by the lake she made my heart race and I called 911 to report suspected domestic abuse. It took a few weeks to realize she lived alone and that her lacerations were self-inflicted. When we meet outside we are cordial and neighborly, 2 aging women living with dogs which waddle and snort. So appropriate is her public demeanor that I began to doubt the authenticity of what I’d heard until one day I encountered her as she descended the back stairs carrying 4 bulging garbage bags. One slipped from her grasp and spilled its contents—decaying food and hundreds of Styrofoam packing peanuts. “Jesus fucking Christ, you are such a fucking idiot. You can’t do anything right,” she began in her banshee wail but then she started to cry. Our eyes met and she unfurled her winter’s tale of despair over the wheezy dog’s death, her inability to throw away the newspapers on which he had relieved himself, the stench, the bugs, the chaos closing in on her. I nodded, swallowed, wished her well.

My sister.

*

“You, my dear, have never understood the pleasure of the spectacle.” In my leaky memory, so did Biff deride his wife in Carson McCuller’s novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. We who know the importance of the spectacle live here in Rogers Park, Chicago’s last stand before acquiescing to the north shore suburbs. The Eleanor Rigby’s of the world find their way here as do the gaunt refugees who globe trot from Eritrea to Juneway Terrace. To the south of my beach front yard there sits a grassy plot with park benches and collections of plastic bags hanging on fences for the convenience of dog walkers. Larry presides here, swaggering and slurring his words, bumming cigarettes, kissing the hands of women who allow this. He cries as he roughly pets the dogs which venture too close. To the north of me there is a young man who walks the streets in camouflage pants and bulletproof vest. He wears black leather gloves and is given to standing stock still gazing upwards. One night my daughter and I found him standing as if paralyzed on our beach, head flung back, eyes riveted on the black sky. An electrical field encircled him and we cut a wide swath, dragging my bulldog, Henry, on his leash till were safely inside. “I thought he was going to detonate,” said Moira in a statement of the obvious.

*

I told my son about the man who crouches in the crevice and he snorted in derision. “You’ve got to get out of Rogers Park,” he repeated as he has done for the past 3 years. Gabe lives in a swanky part of the city, homogenous and self-satisfied. The 28-year-old runners pass each other on streets lined with outdoor cafes, gleaming with promise, slick with poise. “I would never leave Rogers Park,” I tell him and we stare back at one another over that bridge of exasperation and affection upon which the generations traverse.

And that is why I will never love again. It is diversification that enchants me; particularity is something else again. We’ve got it all wrong, McCullers told us. We begin with the most sacred challenge of all—the love of another human being—and we do so without requisite practice and training. And then we wonder why it all goes so hopelessly awry. We must start small, she told us, begin to love a tree, a rock, a cloud. Work our way toward the sanctity of a person. To reframe, how much easier to embrace the whole wild carnival than attend to the anguish of the bearded lady? In my son’s neighborhood the tanned young women and men with their earphones are crisply outfitted for assured success and they will pledge unending devotion to another of their tribe in stunningly excessive pageantry. Here in Rogers’ Park the lakefront winds lift our matted and graying hair and we leave tattered remnants like banners on fences, bushes, to mark that we are here. Here for this moment. Our eyes meet and dart, a dance of recognition and repulsion.

*

Sometimes when the beach is too icy or windswept, Henry and I walk westward, beyond Sheridan Rd, down to the park in front of the el tracks. When it rains, the scruffy lawn becomes a swamp. Chairs behind the bushes cast shadows and rumors. Two weeks ago a 16-year-old boy was shot to death there, igniting a Ceasefire rally. When the angry crowds dispersed, one might imagine a gathering of malingering spirits—McCullers’ wounded hunters mourning one of their own. Frankie in search of the we of me, Singer mourning a deaf beloved, Ms. Amelia, heart shattered by a hunchback dwarf. All the lonely souls hidden behind boarded windows or crouching in crevices.

Tonight Henry and I visited the park for the first time since the crime. The lawn has been reseeded and in between the plastic City of Chicago garbage cans, the struggling lilac trees send skyward their elegiac bloom.