Anne Lamott

by Imperfect Birds (v5)

  THREE Fenn and Robert Elizabeth saw Fenn Cross up close for the first time at the farmers’ market on a Wednesday night right after school let out for the year. She was waiting for Rae in the southeast corner of the Parkade, across the street from the movie theater. Its parking lot was useless for theater parking, with only eighteen designated spaces, but it held thirty booths of organic produce perfectly. James was in for the night, working on a short essay for a producer at National Public Radio, who had loved James’s novel. He was being auditioned for a weekly three-minute gig, great exposure if it worked out, and two hundred dollars a week—eight hundred extra a month. But he had been stuck on this three-page piece for days, was not even close to letting Elizabeth read it, but she knew he would pull it off. “Focus,” she’d said with mock menace when she’d left the house that night. “Trusting you.” She’d heard it said at meetings that a functional alcoholic was someone with a spouse who had a good job. Rae had warned her that she might be late that night, caught up in the final planning stages for the first annual Sixth Day Prez Vacation Bible School. Elizabeth was waiting in the shade under the movie theater awning when she saw him. Ten feet away from her, a fine-looking young man stood reading the posters in the glass display case. He was sturdy and tan, looked older than Rosie by a few years, with shoulder-length sun-streaked hair, and wire-rimmed glasses that added an air of studious ballast. He acknowledged her with a faint Buddhist bow and turned back to the posters. He smelled of salt and sea and sun, of sweat and muscles and lovely skin. It was sort of sickening. What did she exude? Atrophy and skin flakes. Rosie had first pointed him out not long after they moved to Landsdale. He was seated at a table on the sidewalk outside the coffee roastery, and Elizabeth had seen him there many times since, reading, or bent over a notebook, or holding court, or canoodling, as her father used to say, with some young hippie goddess or another. She glanced at her watch—Rae was twenty minutes late now—and when she turned to search the streets for her, Fenn was gone. She went back to studying movie posters. The theater played old art movies during the week, and first-run shows on weekends. She’d seen the current film with Andrew when she was very pregnant with Rosie, Truffaut’s Small Change. People always remarked on its charm, but she had been scared to death in the theater and forever after of all the ways children could and did die, how a pulse of danger bounced like sound waves against the most innocent, everywhere, every day. Andrew had gasped when the two-year-old fell out of the ten-story window—the child then bounced on the ground and clapped with joy—while she had sat there dark and nauseated with the general hopelessness of life. She had wanted to be a mellow and trusting parent, but had gone on to be the most terrified mother of all, rising like a shroud through Rosie’s life at every open window, every big wave that came near, every lone man and every gang, every swollen lymph node and lingering bruise, always vigilant, except for that one time when Rosie was four, at the Russian River. Elizabeth left the theater and walked onto the blacktop of the market. She bought a bottle of icy water from the man who’d been selling his flavored honey straws when Elizabeth and Andrew first stopped by, a hundred years ago, when they had to drive twenty minutes from Bayview to get here. Rosie had been four when they had discovered the weekly market. Most of the plastic straws’ worth of honey would end up on her clothes or in her hair, and all over Elizabeth, too, blueberry honey in dark navy straws, root beer float, orange cream, lime. Now when Rosie and her friends ate here, it was figs, mild California pistachios, cheeses wrapped in stinging nettle leaves. Elizabeth realized she would not be able to stay here—there were too many people and way too many smells: barbecued chicken wings, soy-and-tomatillo tamales, bouquets of local flowers, ripe strawberries, a hippie B.O. cloud of patchouli, weed, the brine of feta from Olema, and the sweet glue of honeycomb and sticky children. She turned to walk home, frustrated with Rae and herself and even with the poor innocent farmers’ market. There was something self-congratulatory about the whole thing, and a Loehmann’s quality, everyone so intent on getting huge amounts of the choice produce. Elizabeth never needed things in quantity, but on weeks when she didn’t buy a lot of stuff, she felt like a piker, wondering to herself why she was not overloaded with joy like everyone else. She hurried across the street to the steps of the Parkade, where a few teenage and slightly older males blocked her entrance to the ancient concrete steps. They were smoking, bored, sullen, superior, and like most teenagers everywhere, since all eternity, waiting for something to happen. One young man already had the aggressively tattooed neck you saw on middle-aged junkies in AA. She wanted to shake him—“What the fuck are you thinking? Is anyone ever going to hire a guy who has Jesus and a rattlesnake duking it out in front of a wrinkled sunrise?” Just then, Rae called out her name. She turned to glower at her friend, who stood across the street in front of the theater, but caught a rangy peripheral blur, more familiar to her than the various old women she saw in mirrors: brown limbs and long black curls. Holding up a finger to Rae, she called out, “Rosie!” Rosie was coming out of the bus kiosk, two hundred feet away, toward the group of boys sprawled on the steps now behind Elizabeth. “Rosie!” Elizabeth called again, as if it had been weeks since they’d last spoken, and they walked toward each other. Rosie took a few steps to the right, so that she could gesture to the teenagers on the steps, a gesture of exasperated, masculine apology—I’ll be right there, guys, the little lady needs me first. Rosie lowered her gaze to size up Elizabeth’s outfit, khaki shorts that were now perhaps a size too small, and a frayed floral blouse with an admittedly funny collar, with such shock and hurt that a stranger might have thought that Elizabeth stood there in snorkel flippers and a thong. “Mommy,” Rosie admonished. “I thought we had talked about that shirt. It really just will not do.” “But the color is good for me, right?” Cream, with soft orange flowers and pale olive leaves. Rosie rolled her eyes, and stepped into her mother’s arms for a quick hug. “May I please have some money? Like ten or so, for tamales?” Money was the way to Rosie’s heart, a five here, a ten there, a shopping spree every so often. Rosie and Elizabeth got high on shopping sprees like stylish crackheads, and the high could last the night. Otherwise, Rosie’s most frequent addictive need was to get out of the house and hang out with her friends, Elizabeth’s to see that Rosie was happy—both experienced the anxiety of withdrawal when these needs could not be met. Tonight Elizabeth bargained with her: she got to smell Rosie’s neck for a moment, and then she’d give her dinner money. Rosie paid stoically, standing straight and long-suffering, like someone at the tailor’s, while her mother burrowed under Rosie’s chin. “Narm, narm, narm,” Rosie joked now, the sound she had made up as a child to imitate a giant gnawing on a leg of lamb. “Don’t eat me! I’m young and have my whole life ahead of me!” Elizabeth laughed gently and fished a ten-dollar bill out of the pocket of her shorts. Rosie grabbed the bill from Elizabeth’s hand, cried out, “Thank you, I love you,” and without a backward glance raced off to the stairs. Elizabeth watched her go. It had been lovely to have a moment of public affection instead of the minimal grunt. Full-frontal time with Rosie was getting rare. Her energy at home was either complete exhaustion or racing to leave, muffled galumph or black-hole silence. She always seemed to be either on her last legs or just passing through on her way to real life, fueling up, needing money, always in hustle or flop. Leaning against the rail, towering above the tattooed boys, Rosie looked like an orchid. Elizabeth’s heart skittered at her youth and beauty; the devil is drawn to the light, being an angel himself. Get away from her, Elizabeth commanded him, although she did not believe in the devil, or angels, or for that matter, God. Yet an old saying fluttered like a ribbon in the catacombs of her mind, There is no devil, there is no hell, he assures them as he lulls them down his path. Rae was no longer standing outside the theater, but Elizabeth soon found her among the market booths, sitting on a wooden table made of a cable spool, watching the old lady who played the saw set up her boom box. Elizabeth glared at her wat
ch. “I’m so sorry, baby. Something came up. Are you mad?” Rae asked. “No. I hate you, though, and you’re not my friend anymore. Plus I’m starving, and my hip hurts like an old dog, and I have to pee.” “So go pee at the theater. I’ll spring for tamales when you get back.” By the time Elizabeth returned, Rae had persuaded the old lady who played the saw to attend Vacation Bible School, and was drawing her a map to the church. “I thought you said you’d get Rosie some work there,” Elizabeth reproached. “I did and I can. It doesn’t start for four more days. Plus, we need a special-events coordinator for the summer, one night a week, at fifteen dollars an hour.” “Oh my God, that’s great. Does she have to do toilets or floors?” “We have a janitor for that. So you forgive me?” Rae handed her a plate of tamales in red sauce, and Elizabeth nodded. The old lady plugged her boom box into the power strip that ran into the theater, and sat down on another cable spool. White fluffy hair, craggy face with a sweet, shy smile, she rosined her cello bow, arranged the saw between her legs, pushed a button on the boom box, and waited. An instrumental version of “Edelweiss” began to play, and she bent forward lovingly, eyes closed, a faint smile, Yo-Yo Ma on the saw. A crowd quickly gathered. It was so damn strange, like getting radio transmissions through your fillings. “Somewhere over the Rainbow” followed, then “San Antonio Rose.” Rae and Elizabeth stayed for the whole set. The notes were not going through your ears, but through the holes in you, the cavities. Chinese opera affected her in the same way, beautiful yet so improbable, exultant in the off-pitch. The tone was awful, horrible, and yet breathtakingly beautiful, almost more than Elizabeth could bear, and she could not figure out why she was so vulnerable to it, as the old lady worked away, creating vibrations that took you to places you hadn’t planned or agreed to go, an artist stripping away the jolly tune so you could see anguish, yearning, elation. The tone of the saw was so awful, and yet this woman was playing and loving it, and everyone loved it together, in actual wonder, with no bones to pick, no grades or cars or problems to compare, people so excited that an old lady in the age of synthesizers could get into all the old empty rumpled places in their bodies, where perfect pitch couldn’t take them. From her first morning at Vacation Bible School, Rosie loved working with Rae. Rae always brought her baked treats, or dollar bracelets from Cost Plus, and before class they’d cuddle on the extra-wide easy chair in the space Rae used for an office. They’d share stories about James and Lank, and how hilarious the two men were, or how something one of them had said was just so great or infuriating. On Rosie’s first day there, Rae told her a story she’d never forget, about a girl who was very close to her grandmother. Once a week, the girl and her grandmother walked from their house to the beach, where a lot of starfish would always wash up onshore. The grandmother had taught the girl that if a starfish was flexible, it was alive, and so you should throw it back into the ocean. If it was stiff, you could take it home. The day after the grandmother died, the girl was in such deep grief that she could not bear hanging out with her relatives at the grandmother’s house, crying, reminiscing, eating, offering up prayers. So she walked down the road to the ocean by herself, and started lifting starfish off the sand, to see if they were alive. She was still crying, but she felt better. Then someone in her family came to find her, and said, “Honey, you need to be with your relatives now. We have to stick together. What you’re doing here is just not really significant.” And the girl replied, “It’s significant to the starfish.” Rae said the whole Vacation Bible School was about this theme: that you were tended to, by tending to. Rosie thought for a moment. “The girl was the starfish she was throwing back,” she said. Rae nodded. They went to welcome the kids for their first lesson. Grown-ups would be meeting with Anthony in his office, for Bible study, faith walks, sacred Taizé chanting, prayer-shawl knitting, and voter registration in town. Children had always flocked to Rosie; for some reason, they could sense she had a knack for silly patience with kids, and this group was no different. They clung to her like she was a rock star, wanting to be lifted, noticed, and she saw how helpless and vulnerable they were. Rae had told her that some of their parents were really sick—part of the church’s outpatient ministry to drug addicts. One six-year-old didn’t have any parents, just a guardian named Sue; her single mother had died of AIDS, and she had a little sister who was only three and in with the nursery kids. A couple of little kids were shy as turtles, and you had to coax and trick them into trying out your games or snacks. The thing they loved best was when she threw a few of them at a time into a big plastic bucket with rope handles, which must have been used as a toy box, and dragged them all over the church grounds, up and down steps, over rocks, as they screamed with laughter. She called the whole gang of them her bucket kids; she also did arts and crafts with them, and read them stories. She held them on her lap when they fell or got their feelings hurt, and she made sure always to pay the same amount of attention to each child, even though she liked two of them the most. And the money was so great, fifteen dollars an hour, four hours at a time. Sometimes she and Alice lifted a pair of jeans or a camisole from shops in Sausalito or the Haight, and now she could tell her mother she’d spent her own hard-earned money. Jody didn’t go to the city with them very often, because they always ended up doing stuff that she couldn’t risk getting caught doing. Like the last time Rosie and Alice had been in Golden Gate Park, freezing to death in a sea of fog, they had ended up smoking dope under a tree with some homeless guy. It turned out not to have been a good idea, there was something besides weed in the joint and Rosie was tripping mildly and having scary thoughts, especially one where she saw herself trap a couple of the bucket kids underneath the dome of plastic, to scare them, and to have power over them; she saw herself pound on the sides of the bucket and not answer when they called her name. What was so awful was that she kept having these thoughts well after that day in the park; maybe she’d had it before, too, this bad mind. It just came into her head from time to time, to trap and scare the kids so that they would know how she felt a lot of the time, since you couldn’t very well trap adults under buckets. Her early days of summer were more full than she had meant them to be, with VBS every morning, and tennis lessons with Mr. Tobias. But she loved the lessons, too, and was good at both. By the end of just one lesson, she had managed to untangle his forehand, at least when she hit him balls from her bucket at the net, but when she tried to incorporate what he had learned, by rallying, he regressed to his former duffer ways, hitting with his weight on the back foot, swinging late, slashing at the ball like a swordsman with arthritis. His serve was like nothing Rosie had ever seen, with a leap straight into the air at the point of contact, a pirouette without the courage of its convictions. But the ball usually went in. The first time Rosie tried to straighten things out for him, to get his body weight forward, he ended up smashing himself in the shin with his racket head, which was how they ended up sitting together in the grass. He held a cool can of Coke to the mass below his knee while they sat on the knoll beside the public court, talking about his lesson. She could smell his sweat and soap-clean skin so strongly that she had to wrap her arms around her shoulders and look away. “You don’t have to pay me for today.” “Of course I’m going to pay you. It was my fault. Besides, I’m not done. I’ve still got a little left in me. But do I really have to change my serve? It successfully throws everybody off. No way even Agassi could touch it.” Rosie did not know how to say delicately that he risked serious bodily harm if he continued to serve using only the strength in his arm, without getting his whole body behind it. “I’ve just known some . . . older people who’ve gotten shoulder injuries from serving wrong. Tennis elbow—bursitis.” “Older people?” “I didn’t mean that.” She flushed. “I’m barely thirty!” He held up his racket, as if he might smack her, and she ducked, feeling flirty and forgiven. “Why take lessons if you don’t want to do it properly?” He did not hurt himself playing after that, although she could not figure out a way to correct the way he
moved on the court, lacking any shred of elegance or athleticism, herky-jerky rat-dashes that made him run too close to the ball, and compensate with wild side steps and spin. Two lessons a week, which was forty dollars for her. He always brought two icy cans of Coke, and gave one to her. He couldn’t practice between lessons, though, because he had three kids, the two she had seen on the beach, and a baby, named Morgan. His wife must be the luckiest person on earth. He reminded Rosie of James, but handsome; all the kids at school loved him, and she felt privileged to spend time with him. She got to have fifteen minutes in the grass with him after the second lesson, drinking water and watching the very good players on another court. She’d thought of stuff she could casually bring up with him that he’d like to discuss. Like today, she’d begun the lesson at the net, where she had said, “So the universe is three spatial dimensions, right, moving through time, the fourth dimension, at the speed of light, right?” She had practiced it with her mother, dropping it into the breakfast conversation. Elizabeth had said, “Jeez—no wonder I’m so tired all the time.” Then James said, “In practical terms, this is why, after we dry our laundry, we fold it before all the creative motion and heat slow to a seeming halt—and inertia sets in and manifests as wrinkles.” But Mr.Tobias had nodded respectfully at the net, and went on to explain an early experiment that proved this. It was great when someone took you seriously. She continued, “The reason I mentioned it was, don’t you see how incredible it is that on top of it all, you are semi-successfully hitting a moving ball while running around the court? That everything is in motion, including the ball, our arms, our legs, the court, the earth, and yet every so often we hit a perfect backhand?” He looked utterly charmed for a moment. “Well, you do,” he said. “Oh, you’re doing just great. You’ve come so far, so fast, Mr. Tobias.” “Robert,” he said. “And that is very sweet of you to say.” She could feel her cheeks redden again, and she jerked her thumb back to his baseline, as in, “Go.” “Ready position,” she barked a minute later, and hit him a hard low forehand that she knew would give him a chance at a hard low return. Later he asked her what her mother did for a living. “She doesn’t really do anything,” Rosie said. “She stays at home, and takes care of James and me, picks up the house, pays the bills. James vacuums, she makes dinner most of the time. Also, if one of us needs a bag lunch, like if James takes off to do research or tape something in the city. She does the shopping, makes appointments. The garden is her big thing. Nothing in terms of real work. She’s like a subsistence farmer.” I’m going out tonight,” Rosie announced at dinner. “I want you home early, though, Rosie. You get up so early for VBS.” “I don’t remember asking for you to be my employment agency, Mom. You’ve got me working twenty hours a week. I don’t have any time to be a kid having a summer vacation.” “Oh, Rosie,” said Elizabeth, passing her a bowl of butternut squash. “It’s a great job, and you get to see Rae every day. And you need the dough for your clothes in the fall.” “Yeah, but you did it behind my back. I’m just asking for some consideration.” “What about thanking your mother for brokering this?” James snapped. “God!” “Stop, Rosie. Everyone stop and breathe.” James stabbed a cube of tofu, slick with peanut sauce, flecked with Thai chili and basil. Rosie drew her knife across the pile of silver noodles. “I’d had a great story I was going to tell you, but now I’m not going to, because it would be wasted on you.” James looked at Elizabeth and shook his head. “You’re such an asshole, James.” “Rosie, go to your room,” her mother said calmly. “I’m going out,” Rosie said, getting up and flouncing off. “You’re not going anywhere tonight, Rosie,” James said. “Plus, you just lost the car for a week, for breaking Rule One: Don’t be an asshole.” Elizabeth glanced up at the refrigerator, where James had posted his Updated Family Rules a year ago: 1. Don’t be an asshole. 2. Wait a few moments before entering a crosswalk. 3. When all else fails, follow instructions. “Yeah? Then how do I get to the child labor job you trapped me into?” “You can use the car for work.” Rosie stalked toward her room. “And I want your laundry done tonight, too,” James added. Rosie screamed. Elizabeth smiled at James. “It’s so hopeless, darling.” “It really is,” he said. “Maybe we’ll kill ourselves tomorrow, okay?” “We can’t. Rae and Lank are coming for dinner.” They were doing the dishes together when they heard Rosie stomp around in the hallway, open, and then, after a few moments, slam the door to the garage, where the washer and dryer were. “I can’t find my best jeans,” Rosie yelled. “Where did you put them, Mom? They were right here.” Elizabeth rolled her eyes. Half of Rosie’s sentences now began with “The reason I want to move out is,” and in a moment, Rosie delivered. “The reason I want to move out is that you are constantly messing with my stuff. . . .” “I didn’t touch your pants,” Elizabeth yelled back. “Keep looking.” “I can’t find them anywhere. Why do you always do this to me? I hate living here. I am going to go crazy if I don’t get out soon.” James handed Elizabeth a plate to dry, and kissed her. The silence in the house was pristine. “I love you,” she whispered. “Mom,” Rosie shouted. “Will you grant me emancipated-minor status?” James went to bed early to read, as usual, while Elizabeth stayed up and puttered, stacking mail she wanted to get to tomorrow, fluffing the couch pillows. She sank onto the cushions. Rascal leapt up beside her, rubbed his head against her shoulder. One of his eyes was runny. “What are we going to do, Rascal?” Elizabeth whispered. He climbed into her lap, clawed in a push-push motion on her thighs, butted her face with his great tabby head, and finally curled into an improbably small ball and nestled in her crotch, like a bird sitting on its egg. Rae had once made a room-sized weaving for Audubon’s Bolinas Lagoon Preserve, of egrets and herons nesting in redwood trees, and Elizabeth remembered now the secret ribbon woven into one branch, which bore the words of Rumi: “Each has to enter the nest made by the other imperfect bird.” It was a beautiful line but a lousy system if true, as it offered only the most meager support. And what did it really mean? That you encounter the divine in only the most humble, improbable places? Or that the solace and support the world has to offer are through your tiny tribe’s inner, patient hospitality, its willingness to accept your impossible lacking self. Could this be enough? And whose imperfect nest could she enter? James’s, Rae’s, Lank’s. But not Rosie’s these days. Teenagers offered their nests only to one another, far from their parents’ attention. Elizabeth closed her eyes. Rascal purred from her lap like a leaf blower. The house creaked. A siren went off in the distance, and instantly she thought of Rosie in the back of an ambulance, Rosie in a burning house—but Rosie was right down the hall, wasn’t she? Her stomach tightened. Elizabeth tried to calm herself by stroking Rascal, but his claws dug into her, and she imagined Rosie shooting dope. Climbing out her bedroom window after their fight, heading to the Parkade. Elizabeth knew it was crazy, but she got up anyway and padded toward Rosie’s room to check. Rosie was at her computer. She quickly closed up the site she’d been studying, got up and went to the door, where Elizabeth stood. “I’m sorry we had a fight, Mommy. But I never found my best jeans. And I paid for them myself.” She held the door like a shopkeeper trying to close up, with one last customer lingering in the doorway. Elizabeth reached out and touched her daughter’s cheek with her fingertips, and they looked quietly into each other’s eyes, like friends. Rosie tried to get out of dinner with Lank and Rae the next night. Elizabeth was arranging flowers from her garden in a heavy glass vase, yellow roses of three shades, light pink tea roses, purple Mexican sage. “Oh my God, I see her almost every damn day!” Rosie said. “You see Alice and Jody, too,” James pointed out. “You don’t see so much of Lank. He’s my best friend. You’re having dinner with us. End of story.” “Mom!” “Stay for the first course, darling. Okay? It’s something you like. Those big lemony seared scallops. And I need you to set the table.” Rosie looked at her, doubtful and pessimistic. “Yeah, but realistically, how many will each person get? Two or three, right?” Elizabeth wanted to throw the v
ase at her head, but it was one of the few left of her mother’s. She looked at the flowers lying on her cutting board, and then cut them slowly with the bread knife, with menacing pleasure, like Sweeney Todd. James smiled. “God, don’t mock me!” Rosie whined. “That’s all I get from you these days.” “Don’t come,” said Elizabeth. “It’s fine. We’ll divvy up your one microscopic scallop.” “No, Elizabeth—I already told her she’s staying. And that’s final.” Rosie made a clicking sound of derision and Elizabeth started to protest, as she no longer wanted Rosie to join them, but James held up one finger. “Stop,” he told Elizabeth. “Don’t do that. We agreed.” Then he left. Rosie clicked with disdain on her way to the silverware drawer. She stayed for the first course, questioning Lank about summer school, teasing Rae, flirting with them both, more or less ignoring her parents. She and James were both wearing tight Grateful Dead shirts, his stretched taut over his chubby belly, hers cropped above her navel. She cut up the two big scallops on her saucer, and savored each lemony, buttery bite, but Elizabeth believed she was doing this as an act of aggression. She picked up her plate when she was done, got up from the table, nibbled on Rae’s temple, kissed Lank’s soft, fuzzy bald spot, and saluted her parents good-bye. Elizabeth looked around at the company at her table. No one spoke. “It’s so wonderful to have you all here,” she said finally. “To be with people who aren’t mean to me. Who don’t make clicking noises at me.” “Is she being awful?” Rae asked. “She’s a pill. I spoiled her.” “We’re thinking of letting her go,” said James. “Do you want her?” “Hell, no,” said Lank. “I’m a high school teacher. I get that all day. If it’s any consolation, Elizabeth, this is what they’re all like with their parents. They can be perfectly lovely with other adults. It’s par for the course. In fact, you’ve gotten off easy. I’ve got kids in my class right now who’ve already done time in rehab and juvie. I have parents sobbing in my office, scared to fucking death. She’s really a beautiful person—with everyone but you.” Elizabeth shook her head. “It’s as if she can seal herself off from me, like in a zip-lock bag.” Rae reached over to stroke Lank’s pale cheeks. Looking into his face, she said, “Those are such lucky kids, though, to have you. Think of having had teachers like you.” “I did have teachers like me. That’s why I wanted to become one myself. And what has it gotten me? Hair loss, weight gain. No savings. And instead of having an inner child, like other people, I have an inner little old man. All teachers do.” James concurred. “I have an inner old man, too, now that I think about it. Tired a lot, quietly appalled every time he goes out in public.” “Exactly. The incompetence is killing him, and the rudeness. He tries to be a good sport, but I think he sort of misses Eisenhower.” James nodded and reached for the salad. It looked unadorned and boring, but there were surprises in every bite—crunchy jicama, candied nuts, peppery sprouts. “Lank,” Elizabeth said. “Knowing what you do about teenagers, what would you do if you were Rosie’s parents?” “Consequences, consequences, consequences! Pay attention. Snoop around. Take in what is what, no matter how it scares you. You know when you were a kid, and you had to pretend not to see what was going on right beneath your nose? Because if you did, you would see that your parents were crazy as rats, right—and that no one was in charge? So you unconsciously agreed not to notice, in order to survive? Well, that was then. Notice now. Notice good.” Elizabeth had one of those nights of shining metallic insomnia that she used to have every other night, before she started taking sleep medication. She had taken a pill at midnight—James had already been asleep beside her for an hour—but was still awake at one. She had had to put down her book because her eyes were so dry and sandy with wakefulness, and let herself rest with her eyes closed. Sometimes she would doze, but was up every forty-five minutes with a new bad dream: Rosie dead or dying, in all of her nightmares’ greatest hits—car crashes, leukemia—James with his other wife, whom Elizabeth was supposed to be a good sport about, and his little towheaded toddlers on swings, instead of the brooding and angry clubfoot of a teenager he was helping her raise. These were the hours of the black dogs, and she saw them watching her like jackals, cool and patient from the dark corner. At four she got up to pee again, out of wired boredom and exhaustion, and sat on the toilet, hanging her head like someone in a confessional. Then she went to snuggle beside Rosie. Even with Rosie beside her, she felt utterly alone in the dark, the space in her head stretched as tight as the silence between the notes of the old lady’s saw. Then Rosie flopped over loudly and nestled her butt against Elizabeth’s, and after a while Elizabeth fell asleep. It was five-thirty by Rosie’s bedside clock when Elizabeth woke. She padded down the hall and crawled in beside her quietly snoring husband and cat, and eventually fell back to sleep. She woke in the morning filled with details of everything wrong with her, a deconstruction of her life since the high-water mark of college, her fraudulence, her long-term lack of employment—a life wasted in a ping-pong game of narcissism versus self-loathing, punctuated by sloth and depression. Otherwise, the night had gone swimmingly. Besides, what were you going to do? She went back to sleep. James brought her coffee, juice, a toasted bagel, and The New York Times on a tray, and after she ate, hungover with lack of sleep, she closed her eyes again and slept until noon. She walked down the hall to James’s office, and poked her head in to say good morning. He told her he’d come find her as soon as he was done. She stopped at Rosie’s room, on the other side of the office, but Rosie was gone. Her bed was made, and there was a note in the kitchen that she was at Sixth Day Prez. James took a break from his work, sat with her near the new roses, made sympathetic noises, and helped her plan a day that would wear out the clock with a minimum of misery. The garden could use a hand, and he would load the van with boxes of clothes they’d saved for Goodwill. Elizabeth’s first thought when she found Rosie’s lost jeans jammed under the front seat of the beat-up old van they shared was how happy this would make Rosie, and what a hero she herself would be for at least a few hours when Rosie got home from VBS. Sand fell like tinsel from the pockets. Elizabeth stood outside the van and held them upside down, while sand spilled out. What, had she been planning to build a sand castle in her bedroom when she got home? And when had she even been to the beach? The party for Jody had been weeks ago. Elizabeth shook her head to clear it. Rosie had a secret life now, was putting together her own tribe, finding her identity there, and it was great to see, and it hurt like hell. She walked toward the garage to throw the jeans in the washer. She would surprise Rosie by having them clean and folded on her bed when she got home. Maybe she would enclose them in a band like the ones James’s dry-cleaned shirts came wrapped in. Hers would say “Pulling Out All the Stops for Our Cherished Customers.” She reached into the watch pocket, checking for coins. Her finger hit against something that was soft and hard at the same time. There were a few of them, and she rolled them out. Blue; light blue pills, Valium, with rounded V’s punched out at the centers, to emulate tiny hearts, like the yellow ones she had taken for a few days after the breakdown. Her stomach dropped as if she had just driven over a hill in the city. The yellow ones had been very strong, five milligrams each, all but knocking her out, and hard to get off. But the blue ones were the strongest, ten milligrams. She had had to be weaned off the fives slowly, over two weeks, by her psychiatrist, to the white ones, which were only two milligrams. She felt around the watch pocket until four pills sat in the palm of her hand, like breath mints. She thought of throwing them down the hatch all at once with one fell swoop. James was in the city recording an essay at KQED. Rae was at VBS. So she put the pills in her own watch pocket, put Rosie’s jeans and some towels in the washer, and started the load. She had no idea what to do next. She made herself take deep breaths. Maybe there was a reasonable explanation, she told herself, but something deep inside flickered. Oh, God,” Rosie said with amusement and contempt when Elizabeth showed her the pills. “They are not even mine! They’re Alice’s, she takes them sometimes for migraine. Remember? God, I’m
sorry you got so worried, but Mommy, you actually knew this. You’re having a senior moment.” And even though Elizabeth didn’t remember this, she was flooded with the narcotic of relief. “I thought they were yours,” she said in a little voice. But after thinking it over, she squinted one eye and asked, “Then why doesn’t her shrink give her five-milligram ones?” “He does. But she ran out on a Friday, the night we went to the party at Jody’s aunt’s, and Alice got a total migraine, and Jody’s aunt gave her some of these, but they’re ten milligrams, so she told her to split them in half.” “But why did she give her so many?” “Because the pharmacy was closed for the three-day weekend, remember? It was Memorial Day.” Elizabeth thought this over. “You swear?” Rosie nodded. “You’re not in any trouble with drugs?” “I told you, I have smoked dope. But it is totally no big deal to me. I got all A’s last term. I’m holding down two jobs. I’m a good kid, Mom.” Elizabeth stepped back, amazed to feel her old self again. Rosie’s face was soft and magnanimous. “Poor Mommy. Call Jody’s aunt if you need to double-check. I’d understand. I won’t be mad. I won’t think it means you’re spying.” Elizabeth shook her head emphatically, as if this was the most ridiculous thing she’d heard all day. She took her daughter’s hand, and brushed the back of it with her lips, gallantly, like a knight. Rosie took Elizabeth’s hand, turned it over like a palm reader, studied the network of creases, wrinkles, and age spots, then raised it forward to kiss with slightly chapped and very gentle lips.