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on it. I added an exclamation point. I put the paper back.
    One day not long after, she sidled up to me at school and asked me if I had an extra copy of the book I had written about being a mother. It is black-humored and quite slanted: George H. W. Bush was president when Sam was born, and perhaps I was a little angry. I had these tiny opinions. I wrote an anti–George Herbert Walker Bush baby book.
    So when she asked for a copy, I tried to stall; Itried to interest her in my anti-Reagan writing book. But she insisted.
    A few days later, filled with a certain low-grade sense of impending doom, I gave her a copy, signed, “With all good wishes.”
    For the next few days, she smiled obliquely whenever I saw her at school, and I grew increasingly anxious. Then one day she came up to me in the market. “I read your book,” she said, and winked. “Maybe,” she whispered, because my son was only a few feet away, “maybe it’s a good thing he doesn’t read.”
    I wish I could report that I had the perfect comeback, something so polite and brilliantly cutting that Dorothy Parker, overhearing it in heaven, raised her fist in victory. But I could only gape at my enemy, stunned. She smiled very nicely and walked away.
    I called half a dozen people when I got home and told them about how she had trashed me. And then I trashed her. And it was good.
    The next time I saw her, she smiled. I sneered, just a little. I felt disgust, but I also felt disgusting. I got out my note to God. I said: Look, hon. I think we need bigger guns.
    Nothing happened. No burning bush, no cerealflakes dropping from heaven forming letters of instruction in the snow. It’s just that God began to act like Sam-I-Am from
Green Eggs and Ham
. Everywhere I went there were helpful household hints on loving one’s enemies, on turning the other cheek, and on how doing that makes you look in a whole new direction. There were admonitions about the self-destructiveness of not forgiving people, and reminders that this usually doesn’t hurt other people so much as it hurts you. In fact, not forgiving is like drinking rat poison and then waiting for the rat to die. Suggestive fortune cookies, postcards, bumper stickers began to pop up here and there—everything but skywriting—yet I kept feeling that I could not, would not, forgive her in a box, could not, would not, forgive her with a fox, not on a train, not in the rain.
    One Sunday when I was struggling with this, the Scripture reading came from the sixth chapter of Luke: “Forgive, and ye shall be forgiven.” Now, try as I might, I cannot find a loophole in that. It does not say, “Forgive everyone, unless they’ve said something rude about your child.” And it doesn’t even say, “Just try.” It says, If you want to be forgiven, if you want to experience that kind of love, you have to forgive everyone in your life—everyone, even the very worst boyfriend you ever had—even, for God’s sake, yourself.
    A few days later I was picking Sam up at the house of another friend and noticed a yellowed clipping taped to the refrigerator with “ FORGIVENESS ” written at the top—as though God had decided to abandon all efforts at subtlety and just plain noodge. The clipping said forgiveness meant that God is for giving, and that we are here for giving, too, and that to withhold love or blessings is to be completely delusional. No one knew who had written it. I copied it down and taped it to my refrigerator. Then an old friend from Texas left a message on my answering machine that said, “Don’t forget, God loves us exactly the way we are, and God loves us too much to let us stay like this.”
    Only, I think she must have misquoted it, because she said, “God loves you too much to let you stay like this.”
    I looked nervously over both shoulders.
    A couple of days later my enemy’s boy came to play at our house, and then she came to pick him up just before dinner. And for the first time, while he