FOUR The Heat By the time The Seventh Seal came to town, the summer’s heat bore down like a fever. It was hard to be arrogant these days when you felt like a panting dog in a steam bath, but you could still be cranky. Hardly anyone was happy about the weather, except for the little kids splashing in the creek at the park, and Rosie’s bucket kids, whom she spritzed with water during lessons, and the teenagers horsing around at the picnic tables under the shade of the redwoods. Rosie was jealous because Jody had fallen in love—with a soldier, for God’s sake, who was five years older than she. Alice was unhappy because her boyfriend, Ryan, was turning out to be a dick. Rosie’s parents were unhappy, because James’s job at KQED meant he spent less time at home. Robert was unhappy because something had come up at home and he could take only one tennis lesson most weeks now, and Rosie was unhappy about losing that extra money and that lovely time alone with him. Yet everyone’s solution seemed to include making plans to see The Seventh Seal. It was like the circus had come to town, the Death ’n’ Decay Cabaret: Alice’s mother had gone opening night, Jody’s grandmother Marion was going tonight with a grandson. Rosie and her parents were going tomorrow, Rae and Lank were going the day after. It was ludicrous. Adults didn’t have the sense of the little kids splashing around in the creek in their Batman underpants. There were many things that made it hard to respect them. A, they had destroyed the planet. And B, it was so easy to pull the wool over their eyes. All Rosie had to do to put her parents’ minds at ease was to say she was giving a tennis lesson that afternoon after VBS and she didn’t have to check back in with them for hours. Then she would call and breathlessly recount how far Robert had come this summer. Then she could say she and Alice were stopping by the Sustainability Center to see if the people there needed help. She would feed them details to make it sound more authentic, like tonight, for instance. She’d told them that now there was a sign out in front of the building that said, “If you are here and we aren’t, we’d love you to come inside and take this shift.” James had laughed over the phone and said to be home by curfew, midnight during the summer. She and Alice had only passed the sign on their way to the Parkade. They had bought Quaaludes from a guy who’d just been to Florida, ten dollars a tab, which was a rip, but she’d make twenty during her lesson with Robert the next day, so she treated Alice. Someone on the street had given them each a lager, and the ’ludes started coming on fast, so she called to say they had passed out leaflets on the street for the Sustainability Center and she was going to stay at Alice’s. Her mother asked if she could volunteer, too, someday, and Rosie said, oh, sure, the center needed all the help it could get. Not that she and Alice had ever actually gone inside. They had a great night, perfectly stoned with a bunch of other teenagers on the open-air expanse of grass at Pali Park, surrounded by redwoods. Older people came by and played guitar, and they sang and floated and flirted and drank only a few sips of strawberry wine that a cute hippie mother offered them. Then they went to Alice’s and listened to rap because her mother still wasn’t home, and they tried on combinations of textured scarves and filmy tops to wear over their camisoles and cut-offs—wild color combinations, lots of orange. Alice said, “Everything goes with orange,” and she had impeccable taste. Apricot, coral, persimmon, and tenne, which was tawny orange-brown tinged with gold. She felt groggy the next morning at VBS, even though she’d stopped for a double latte on her way from Alice’s to the church. It didn’t matter, though, Rae was unusually distracted, and the kids were easy and funny. Rosie read them the story of Moses in the bulrushes, and when their attention flagged, she spritzed them with the misting sprayer people used for houseplants. But when she tried to review what she had read to them, not one of the kids remembered a thing about Moses. “What’s with you guys today?” she asked, although it was she who was not with it. “Just tell me about baby Moses.” The kids could see that she was discouraged, and one boy finally raised his hand. “Okay,” he said, with a look of grim concentration, “wasn’t he the little guy with the monkey?” She still felt strange and trippy in the afternoon on the tennis court, and when Robert asked if she felt okay, she said she hadn’t slept well. His strokes had improved greatly, although when he served he still looked like someone fending off a cloud of bats. Even through the foggy Quaalude hangover, she took pride in his improvement, in what they had managed together, and when they sat down with Cokes in the grass after the lesson, she felt a real closeness with him. They were a foot apart, but their arms, resting on bent knees, were nearer, and she could feel a vibration between the dark hair on her long arms and the golden hair on his. The closer they got without actually touching, the more she could feel it, hear it, like a tuning fork, or some phantom instrument you’d play to make spirit music at a séance. “ ‘Love is life,’ ” he said all of a sudden. Oh my God: they’d been discussing his serve. “ ‘All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source.’ ” Oh my God—was he proclaiming his love for her? She couldn’t think of what on earth to do in response, so she squinted at him skeptically. “Leo Tolstoy,” he said. She smiled. “Will you write that down for me?” “Beside it being all we need to know most of the time, it is not incompatible with quantum physics—especially the field theory. Only mistake he made is that he is not a particle, he’s a wave.” Rosie nodded. He fished around in the cover of his tennis racket until he found a pen and a scrap of paper, and began writing. She was going to memorize it, recite it to her parents that night, and the part about Tolstoy being a wave. But not say that he had told her. Just while passing the salad, whip it out. He was studying her with a slightly worried look. “What?” she demanded. “You okay?” he asked. “Should I be worried about you?” “Yeah,” she said. He looked at her sideways, amused. She yawned expansively and got to her feet. “The heat is really getting to me. I’m going home to take a nap.” “See that you do,” he said. He worried about his students. Last year a girl in honors physics had slit her wrists on her bedroom floor and died, was dead in there all night because her parents didn’t find her until their alarm rang, and the van from Aftermath Crime Cleaners came to remove the rug, and paint over the blood splatters on the walls, and somehow get rid of the smell. Other gifted students of his were big stoners by senior year, failing and even sometimes dropping out. She was his star, though. She gave him nothing to worry about. Just heat prostration. Robert smiled at her and said good-bye, and the funny thing was, she actually did go home, although she’d told Jody she’d go to her house after tennis and meet her soldier, Claude. She called instead and said she didn’t feel well. Jody was hurt that Alice and Rosie had done Quaaludes without her, since those didn’t show up in urine tests, plus now they’d both blown off meeting Claude. Rosie felt queasy driving home. She found her mother weeding in the garden, and said she felt funny. It must have been the sun, she said. She was going to lie down for a while. When she got up, her parents had already had dinner, but her mother heated up some pumpkin ravioli with pesto, and served her in the living room. James had made a salad from the garden, and was playing Bach concertos. The three of them ended up in the living room, reading, listening to Bach, and it was not awful. Rosie felt that disembodied séance feeling again a few times, but it passed; it was sort of nice, once you stopped fighting it and no one noticed. She met up with Alice, Jody, and Claude in Alice’s bedroom the next afternoon. Alice’s room was so great. There was not one inch of empty wall space or ceiling. Her mother was cool and had even let Alice shellac the posters, photos, artwork, mementos, so that they didn’t fade and shred like some of Rosie’s best pieces. James’s rules amounted to censorship. Your room was supposed to be your own goddamn world. The layering and hodgepodge of Alice’s room was a cozy thrill. Alice, Jody, and Claude were lying on Alice’s bed when Rosie arrived, so she sat at the desk and tried not to sta
re at Claude. He was older than they were by several years but he seemed much older, and there was something about him with his buzz cut, long-lashed eyes, and big nose. He was handsomer the moment he spoke with his faint southern accent. Alice was telling them about their Quaalude night. Claude had to pass urine tests, too, at the Presidio, where he was stationed for the time being, so he couldn’t even smoke weed. “But I can drank,” he drawled, and pulled out a half-pint of Southern Comfort. Rosie had never had this before; he took a pull and handed it to her, and it went down both hot and smooth, like whiskey cough syrup. Jody wasn’t drinking, but Alice took a swallow and handed it back. They peppered Claude with questions. He had already done basic training in North Carolina and was going away to an American base in Germany after a brief stint in San Diego. Then he was going somewhere secret, to fight in a peacekeeping mission. “Isn’t that an oxymoron?” Rosie asked. “Yeah, you want to know what oxymorons are?” he retorted. “Oxymorons are a couple of teenage gals who take drugs someone says are Quaaludes, which they don’t even make anymore. That could be full of lye, or GHB.” Rosie sneaked a look at Alice. Her face was flirty and indignant. “They make them in Africa,” she scolded. He rolled his eyes. “I saw it on the Internet.” “Well, thanks for that, sugar. So you buy what someone tells you is a Quaalude from Africa, which could mean any old crazy chemical combo, even lye, that they use for crank. What if you girls accidentally took date-rape drugs? Huh?” He said it like a brother might. Jody looked both relaxed and royal in his arms, shimmery with love, longer and leaner than Claude—she had to bend her knees to intertwine her feet and legs with his—and more grown-up, even though her dark, wispy hair was garnished like a child’s with cranberry-colored clips. Rosie approved. He even left them the rest of the bottle when he had to get back to base. Jody went with him, after hugging Rosie and Alice. The two of them lay on the bed like puppies, and every time Rosie started to drop off, Alice woke her with some fearful thought about what Claude had said. “I’m so tired I feel like I have leukemia,” she said. “Do you think there was African voodoo lye in the pills?” “Nah,” Rosie told her. “They just make you tired the next day. Price of admission. What ev.” “Maybe we should just sleep it off.” Rosie threw her hands up. “Every time I drift off, you wake me to ask if we’ve been poisoned.” Alice laughed and promised not to talk. They lay back to back in the hot room. Their favorite hip-hop and rap stars were on the wall and the CD player, like people of their daydreams, tromping through their very own lives. There were mementos from when Alice was younger, like ribbons and backstage passes, from when stuff had been easier, and you weren’t pressured to death every living second. Everything was inside out and upside down in Alice’s bedroom, like she’d gotten to shake up a glorious container of all her favorite images, and spill it out onto the ceiling and walls. It was like a kaleidoscope. This time Rosie was wide awake, while Alice snored softly beside her. Rae came into her mind, and Rosie breathed deeply, the way Rae had taught her. She let her eyes roam around the room. Half of this stuff was code—you knew what it signified, but a grown-up would think it was gibberish, like they used to think about the songs of humpback whales, that they didn’t mean anything, just because scientists couldn’t interpret them. There were pictures of whales and otters all over Alice’s walls. They used to thrive in San Francisco Bay, till the traders killed them all. Rosie had to keep her room neat enough so James would not freak out, but not so neat that they could figure it all out, break the code, of who you truly were, what you were up to, your values, your truest parts. The code was all that you were made up of—the whole, not a neat little version for your parents to admire and trot out for their friends—you were layer upon layer of ideas and erasures and new ideas and soul and images. She looked at the pictures, most of which Alice had downloaded from her computer—foreign cities, female hip-hop stars, oceans and sunsets and tide pools, rivers and creeks, and all the animals that swam and flew and clung to the seaweed, like the otters that the adults had killed off. Rosie was particularly troubled by what people had done to the otters. And to polar bears. It just freaked her out. She started to doze, and when she woke up, three hours had passed, and Alice was still asleep. Rosie shook her roughly. “It’s six!” she said. “So what?” Alice asked groggily, sitting up, rubbing her eyes. “Do we have something we have to do?” Elizabeth was in the middle of making dinner when Rosie called, but luckily it was two things Rosie hated—split pea soup and swordfish—and it was easy to ask if she could stay for dinner at Alice’s. “Her mother’s making paella,” Rosie announced, which made Alice clap in silent appreciation. “Oh, Mommy, I’m sorry, I forgot—can’t we go to the movie some other time? . . . Okay, then, I promise. It would be great if you could let me off the hook tonight . . . Yay. Thank you.” She hung up the phone and raised her fists. “What movie are you going to see?” Alice asked. “Seventh Seal. We were supposed to go tonight. It’s not a big deal, only now James can’t go with us. What should we do tonight?” “I wonder if we could get more ’ludes.” Alice’s face was pensive, but Rosie didn’t respond, in case Alice was joking. “I’d do it again, would you?” Rosie shrugged, noncommittally. The good parts had been great. The séance feeling afterward, the drugged exhaustion—not so great. Alice’s mother wasn’t home, so they left her a note saying that they would be eating at Rosie’s. They each took two of Alice’s Adderall, being so groggy and all, then headed to the Parkade to check out what was happening. The next morning, Elizabeth and Rae walked up a trail halfway between their homes. The fog layer below was so thick it looked like you could walk to Japan on it. Even in the heat, which here managed to be dusty and steamy at the same time, this was a place of spectral beauty, white flashes blinking on and off in the sunlit bay, hills flocked with Renaissance golds and greens. “How is my Rosie?” “Doing fine. She’s having a great summer, working with you and Anthony, teaching tennis, hanging with her buds.” “Not getting into trouble?” Elizabeth shrugged. They walked along the dry brown trail. “It’s always so beautiful up here. Even now, my least favorite time of year.” “I know—it’s still so pretty in this horrible, dusty scorched heat. It’s like saying how beautiful a woman is when she’s in labor—just wait. Just wait until fall and winter.” Elizabeth nodded, and they walked along in silence. “Rae, you know, I haven’t felt tempted to drink in a long time, but sometimes these days I would kill for a cigarette,” Elizabeth said after a while. “Just to take the edge off.” “No, no,” Rae begged. “Smoking is disgusting, and kills innocent bystanders. But darling, how about chewing tobacco?” This made Elizabeth smile. “No, seriously—you could carry a lovely light blue glass cup as a container for spit.” Elizabeth jabbed her lightly with an elbow. “Is there something in particular that’s getting to you?” “I have a bad feeling lately. Sometimes with Rosie I’m not sure she’s telling me the whole truth. She’s very up-front about smoking marijuana from time to time, and she’s told me the few times she was drinking at parties. But I get a grippy feeling in my guts sometimes, when other kids get busted or sent away, because their parents usually didn’t have a clue how deeply their kids were into drugs and secrecy. I think Jody is clean, but Alice seems like a player, like someone who’ll do anything for—and around—guys. Plus her mother isn’t home much. I don’t know, Rosie loves her so much. And she gets A’s. You see Rosie every day—do you think she’s okay?” Rae nodded. “With me, she’s great. She’s the picture of health, tan, strong. The children adore her. She’s like a movie star to them. And she’s so patient, so empathetic.” “Maybe it’s me I’m worried about, then. All my decisions are so tentative—it’s hard for me to say no to her if she wants to go out. I’m so afraid of her wrath that I cave. I’ve also been getting that grippy feeling with James lately. Not that I think he’d ever have an affair, but I’ve sort of lost him to the bitch seductress NPR. He’s gone much more, off to the city to record, or meet with his producer, or off on adventures that might lead to a radio piece. It’s like livi
ng with an addict—he gets high when he turns in a piece that they love, or when he goes in to record, and crazy high when they air it, and then he crashes, and needs me to pet him back to life. We don’t make love very often. I don’t know. He gets home late from the studio, after spur-of-the-moment dinners with the producers and other radioheads. He gets up at dawn. He’s never been happier.” “Oh, baby.” “I dreamed the other night that he was having an affair. It was hell. He’d given a woman a huge diamond ring, like those lollipop rings but real.” “When I’ve had an upcoming show, and Lank is preparing for a new semester or grading finals or term papers, we get funky, too. The braid starts to unravel.” “It’s just miserable. What makes it all sort of work again?” Rae pursed her lips, mulling this over, pushing her way through a misty curtain of spiderwebs. Elizabeth followed. “Nothing magical. Hooking back into ordinary rhythms—getting up at the same time, letting down together at the end of the day, offerings of food.” “Sitting together and reading at night, talking back and forth about what we’re reading. Talking about the people we know. Now I remember, and that’s what I crave.” It wasn’t supposed to have turned out this way, that when a dream came true for James—a weekly gig on NPR—their marriage took a hit. Before, they’d been a couple in which the husband was a brilliant writer and the wife was his muse, his most astute reader and advisor. Their house had been organized around the novel he was working on, which she loved so much: he needed to be left alone and quiet, or needed to pump her for details, imagery, compliments; he needed her total invisible immersion in his work. They were outside the stream of time: artists. Now everything in their lives was either grist for the mill or of no interest. It was emotionally exhausting for both of them, the ups and downs, his stock in himself rising and falling according to external stimuli. A failure, a hero, a star, a goat, all within a couple of days, or even hours. “What can we do about it, Rae?” “In my experience, there’s not much you can do about it from the outside. You just live with the bad patches, with the held breath and held body, clamming up, withholding the twigs of connection, and then something comes along, maybe a coincidence, or something bizarre, or he’ll say something that’s both surprising and familiar, and you’ll say to yourself, Oh, my person is not gone.” “But you have so much faith, and I have so little.” “So fake it. Act as if you believe that this is all being sorted out for you, by God as Kelly girl or caseworker.” That night, Elizabeth and James stopped off at Safeway on the way home from the library for milk, muesli, and tinfoil. They went to stand in the express line. There were three people ahead of them, and four in the next line over. James noticed with a groan that the red-haired matron at the front of their line had a full shopping cart of items, which she had begun placing on the conveyor belt. He growled quietly to Elizabeth, who patted him. “Excuse me,” he asked the checkout clerk, “isn’t this the express line?” Elizabeth shot him a look, but he ignored her. “Wait, maybe we got in the wrong line.” “This is an express line.” The clerk pointed up to the sign, “Twelve Items or Less.” Now the matronly woman groaned and turned to glare at James. Then she started returning items to her shopping cart. The checker waved her arm to stop the woman from putting things away. “It’s fine,” she said. James stared blankly at the packed cart. But right then, the young woman behind James reached around Elizabeth and said, “I recognize your voice! You’re James Atterbury, aren’t you, from KQED?” James smiled and nodded quickly, turning back toward the register, clearly not wanting to start a dialogue. “I love your stuff, Mr. Atterbury—your stories, essays, whatever they are. We all do.” He nodded his thanks again and smiled tightly, and Elizabeth noticed several people in their line and the next paying attention to him now. She heard the checker’s chirpy voice reassuring the matron, “Really! It’s fine. I’ll do you really fast.” The redheaded woman laid some items back on the conveyor belt, and turned to smile with great satisfaction at the people in line, like a triumphant child. But then she leered at James. “Well,” she said smugly, “I’ve been told by management that I can stay in this line, even though I guess you’re a famous movie star.” James visibly recoiled. The woman was staring at him like prey as she now blindly placed more and more things on the belt. She raised her white eyebrows with amusement, bovine, unblinking, like an aggressive Swiss cow. James actually shrank back from her. “Please don’t talk to me,” he said. The woman turned to mug for the people in the line. “I guess we’re lucky to have a celebrity with us tonight—even one in such a hurry . . .” “Please don’t talk to me or look at me,” James said. “Lady, stop,” said James’s admirer. “Lighten the fuck up.” James shot her a grateful look. “You don’t get to tell me what to do,” the red-haired woman said happily, and smirked. James flung his items onto the conveyor belt, grabbed Elizabeth’s hand, and dragged her past the matron. “Come on, lighten up, buddy,” said the woman next in line, and people murmured their agreement. The redhead looked as if she’d just stepped into her own surprise party. Elizabeth dragged a stunned James out the door, hot fluorescents lighting their way outside. Inside, people were explaining their positions—the clerk, the admirer, the other customers—while the red-haired lady spoke baby talk. “God almighty,” James thundered, sweating in the passenger seat of the car, wiping at his brow. “I just got abused! And I didn’t even get my milk. What did I do wrong? I try to be a person of goodwill, and reason, and modesty—and I was just standing there!” “She was batshit, hon. Let it go.” “I hate that place. I’m never going back. It’s like some faceless Soviet system.” “Is it possible you’re mad about something else? Like, say, hypothetically, Rosie?” “No. We were getting honest food, and something to keep it fresh. We weren’t buying caustic substances that eat the earth.” They sat in silence. He looked up. “Do you think I need to go in and apologize? Or am I just nuts?” “Maybe both,” she said. James sighed, thought for a moment, and got out. She shook her head with affection, watching him go. She couldn’t wait for him to come back. All these years together, and she still felt like a lovingly anxious dog around him, thrusting its nose into its person’s thigh. He was hanging his head sheepishly when he returned ten minutes later, holding a shopping bag and a gallon of milk. “I apologized to the checker,” he said, getting into the car. “Now she’s my new best friend.” He put the grocery bag on the floor, shimmied into the driver’s seat, snapped on the seat belt. “I am not a psychiatrist, but that woman was a sadomasochistic death-dog. I say that without judgment. But I over-reacted because she made me feel the way Rosie does—abused and totally powerless. I want to say out loud that you were right, I am furious at Rosie, for her snottiness, her lies, the way she sneaks around and plays us, her bland derision towards us, the way she talks to you sometimes. The bullshit about those pills you found in her jeans, and the whole contemptuous lie machine of Rosie. Okay? There. I’ve said it.” She patted him. His outburst calmed her, made her feel useful and sort of elegant: it was nice not to be the crazy one all the time. James started up the car, put it in gear, and together they headed home. It took James all day to write a three-page story of the treachery of everyday life. It was called “Ducks in a Row.” Elizabeth thought up the title. It was amazing what a smart, charming piece he had made from the insanity. He had turned it into an allegory about how when you think you’ve finally got your ducks lined up, they turn and peck you to death. How life and time were a conveyor belt moving you along, and blessing came when you realized it wasn’t your conveyor belt. And that no matter how protected and noble you felt, how much in control, we were all being conveyed, all the time, borne astride the Möbius strip of time. “You’re a genius,” she told him, handing back the essay with a few typos circled. She stood behind him at his computer and pointed out last-minute typos, which he corrected. “You helped me so much with it. You’re my Alice B. Toklas, my muse, and my beloved.” Their rift was healed, not by the ordeal, stupid and exquisite, nor by the alchemy that gave him this essay, but by what was revealed: the depth of thei
r fearful stress, the gag snake coiled inside the peanut brittle can, and how much they needed each other. He went into the city on Thursday night to record it, after making Rae and Lank listen over the phone. Lank said, “You’re a better man than I. I would have gotten in my car and driven through the front windows of the store.” Rae said, “What an experience. You got humility out of it, James. And you got to experience your self-repair mechanism.” “Humility is so overrated, if you ask me,” said Lank. “I agree,” said Rae. “But it’s like a stone in the gizzard that helps us digest the indigestible stuff of our lives.” “Whoa, Rae, that is so incredible,” said Lank. “Can James use that?” There was no way out of seeing The Seventh Seal with her mother. She’d promised to be there on time. Rosie met Alice at Pali Park after Bible school, and they’d eaten some dope banana bread someone was passing out, hiked around Bon Tempe Lake in the heat, gone for a swim, although that was illegal, because Bon Tempe was part of the watershed, fallen asleep in the shade of a laurel grove, gone back to Pali Park and nibbled at banana bread crumbs. They tripped out under the redwoods, let their friends spritz them with spray bottles, used Visine, and then walked arm and arm into town. They made plans to meet later. Sighing wearily, Rosie stepped inside the theater and found her mother in the lobby, waiting in line for popcorn. Almost everyone there was old—Elizabeth’s age or older. They said hello to each other in a sort of hushed way, like they were at church or in the presence of a baby. Two people said how much they loved James’s work on NPR. She and her mother got popcorn, Diet Pepsis, peanut M&M’s to share. Rosie felt loopy, mildly disoriented, probably not the perfect space in which to see The Seventh Seal. She started eating M&M’s to stabilize herself, then caught her mother shoveling popcorn in like one of the Coneheads eating mass quantities. It made her lose her appetite. The movie started. A seriously bummed knight and his squire were sitting on the rocks at the beach. Mist and smoke—so far so good. But then Death arrives on the beach. Death, for God’s sakes. This was going to be a long movie. Even the squirrel on the fallen log looked like the end was near. The knight challenges Death to a game of chess, and says he wants to meet the Devil, because the Devil knows God. The squire was all yawns and belches, and then terrible ugly drinking songs. Rosie watched as well as she could, closing her eyes whenever she needed to escape. She imagined Robert beside her, the hair on their arms glowing like it had in the sun. She saw herself trace the outside of his lips with her fingertips. “Pretty amazing, right?” Elizabeth whispered, and Rosie wanted to cry out, “You dragged me from Bon Tempe for this? For corpses and filth, plagues and bugs?” She held her tongue, but, in her mind started telling Alice how smack this movie was, how out there—and she realized that telling it as a story made the bad stuff watchable. As soon as she turned it into a story to tell Alice and Jo, or Robert, she got her humor back. So she paid attention, and started telling Robert what she saw: “So let’s see, it gets festive all of a sudden, because Death decides to mingle more—he pays a visit to a woman who’s dying of plague, in a rotting house. But he’s a bad houseguest. . . .” Finally the dope started wearing down a little, thank God. “Oh, now what’s this?” Rosie told Robert in silence. “Here’s a sweet little family, all spirit and light and bounce. The dad is a happy-go-lucky entertainer. Boy, is he in the wrong movie. But I don’t have a good feeling about this. Why would you make a movie like this?” Why, on the other hand, would she and Alice take the poisoned Quaaludes a second time? Go figure. “Oh, darn,” she said to Robert: “The nice family is gone, and now the guy who talked the knight into joining the Crusades is stealing a bracelet off a plague corpse. Don’t you hate it when people do stuff like that?” Talk about a buzz-kill. This movie was the exact opposite of everything she loved about life. Like a great rave, for instance, the highest thing on earth. All the great energy, the scene, decorated to glow and inspire under black light. The Hard Candy one in Oakland was great, with cut-outs of lollipops covering the walls, and during Easter vacation, the Trip and Dicular one, which Rosie never quite got the concept of, but which was so totally incredible, lots of people wearing white, which was totally the most beautiful look under black light. It was totally PLUR—peace, love, unity, respect. Like the complete total opposite of this movie. Except for their fashion thing was kind of hooker Seventh Seal: Rosie and Alice both wore corsets, torn black fishnet stockings they’d bought at a lingerie store in the Haight, with money Alice got from selling her ADD meds, plus a tiny theft she had done with Ryan, a fancy set of harmonicas. Rosie always stashed her rave clothes at Alice’s; her mother did not obsess about Alice’s private life. Rosie looked around in the dark at all the attentive old people in the theater. She closed her eyes and tried to doze to the fluty Swedish voices as a backdrop. She was definitely coming down now, and it must not be too much longer. She ate a handful of M&M’s. Back on the Swedish beach, the light was all wrong and the silence was way too silent. Even the nice old moon was bad, like a vapor lock into another world. Then, in a church, the knight confesses to Death accidentally and gives away his strategy. The place where the knight is supposed to come clean and have prayer turns out to be the place of betrayal. Oops. Then the family appears again, on a beautiful hillside, like Landsdale in the spring, and the earth is providing for them and their little guy, their little bucket kid: the sweetness of strawberries, the milk, like the earth is giving them communion after all this flesh and blood. She wished like mad that the movie would end this way. Would that have killed the guy who made it? Because for a few minutes there it was actually like the energy at a rave, all love and kindhearted community, all the good parts—obviously not when the thugs showed up and hung out in their red bandanas, staring down hot girls, selling whatever they had that night, probably E, or GHB, or Valium to come down with. That was the only bad part; that, and the whole day after, when you pretty much wanted to kill yourself. But things in the movie were okay; the knight seems to be with his wife. He has come home. He gets to see her again before he dies. And he is okay in a certain way, in a plaguey dying kind of tragic way, because there’s light in his face. She’s feeding the fire, and is not startled to see him. She says to him, lovingly as can be, “I see the boy you were before you left,” and that pleases him. Who would have thought he could ever feel this again? So that is kind of a trip. Then the movie cuts to the glade where the family is waking up, and Jof, the dad, is having one of his visions that makes his wife think he is nuts, he’s seeing the dance on the hillside at dawn, Death leading the way, and the Fool at the end. And then it’s all over; thank you, Jesus. Rosie and Elizabeth sat there together in the dark for a very long time. It was the most terrifying, terrible movie Rosie had ever seen, but people were going, “Oh my God, so great, so great,” and blah blah, and Rosie felt like she should never smoke dope again, in case she got trapped in memories of the people with boils and thirst and plague, and Death’s face. “Talk to me, Mommy,” Rosie said like a little child. “Let’s go get cocoa at the Roastery,” her mother said, and they got up in the dark. Rosie wanted to take her hand but couldn’t risk any of her friends’ seeing her outside the theater. There was no one else in the Roastery but an anorexic girl Rosie knew from school, who was getting coffee to go, and a drifter you saw around town sometimes who always wore a floppy hat, so she and her mother had nicknamed him Gilligan. He was someone the kids could shoulder-tap if they needed someone to buy for them. He jutted out his jaw in greeting. They went to the counter and ordered bowls of lentil soup. Rosie was basically a vegetarian now, except for bacon and occasional beef jerky. They sat at a table by the window and stirred their soup while it cooled. “That girl looks like a skeleton,” Elizabeth said. “Like someone from the movie.” “She is. She weighs in the eighties now. Also, she throws up. She’s so great at it, she can throw up silently into a Coke can.” Elizabeth drew back. “Jesus. Well, everyone is good at something, right?” “Why did you make me see that movie? It totally freaked me out.” “Oh, baby, I’m sorry. It’s consider
ed one of the great movies of all time.” “Yeah, but maybe a little bit of a downer?” “It isn’t to me. I mean, granted, it’s not Yellow Submarine.” Rosie smiled into her soup, and blew on a spoonful. “Greatness and truth are exhilarating,” Elizabeth added. “Yeah, but the truth in it is like, ‘It’s all decay, end of the world, shoot me now, dude.’ ” “Yeah, that was an awful time. It felt like the end of the world to them. I know what that feels like.” “What do you mean?” “Well, like when your dad died.” Rosie stirred her soup. After a minute she nodded. Then she turned her head around at the sound of the door opening. In came shaggy sun-streaked hair and tan muscles. She didn’t recognize him for a second, because he wasn’t wearing his wire-rimmed glasses, but it was Fenn. She looked back at her soup. Would he remember her? And then, impossibly, he came to their table, and said her name. Rosie said hey and looked up, but now he was smiling at Elizabeth. “I saw you guys at the movie,” he said. “Pretty great, yeah?” He smelled so male, like sea salt and leather seats, like gunpowder must smell, like the astronauts said moondust did. Rosie shook her head with amazement. “Yes,” she agreed. “It had . . .” she struggled for the right word. “Truth, and greatness,” she said finally. She and her mother exchanged a blank look. “Hey, how’s that soup?” he asked. “Delicious,” said Rosie, and then added boldly, “Want a taste?” He raised his eyebrows with pleased surprise and she handed him her spoon. He reached into her bowl, God, he smelled so delicious, and raised a spoonful to his lips. “Oh, that is good,” he said, and then called out to the girl behind the counter. “Hey, I’d like a large soup to go, and extra bread.” He turned back to them. “How many times have you seen it?” he asked Elizabeth. “Four, maybe? I first saw it with my father when I was Rosie’s age. How about you?” “Two or three.” “Can you join us for soup?” Elizabeth asked, and Rosie wanted to die. She wanted him to stay, but he said he had to be someplace. “I just popped my head in the door to say hey, ’cause you were one row in front of me. Then that soup smelled so good. I was surprised to see you there, Rosie.” “Why?” She looked up at him, tilting her head with shy petulance, not knowing whether he had insulted her or not. “You were the youngest person by far. I couldn’t have seen it at sixteen.” “Seventeen.” “Sorry. Still, I was afraid of death at seventeen. I didn’t like it—but the fact of death does not have to be the fear of death. I mean, that’s the hope in the movie.” “Exactly,” Rosie said. He turned back to Elizabeth. “I’m Fenn.” “Elizabeth. I like what you just said. If your time is up, there’s no loophole—no amount of cleverness, prestige, no piety. And this is what we live with. Death in the movie is like the world’s greatest teacher, or grandparent—he’s very matter-of-fact. No bullshit, kind of tickled by everyone’s efforts to avoid him, but also somehow decent. Tired, but tireless. He has his job. He’s there, and you come.” Fenn looked stunned. “Wow,” he said. “Nice to meet you.” He smiled and shook his head. “Are you a teacher or something?” Rosie swelled with pride. Way to go, Mom. You knocked it out of the ballpark. Then Fenn bowed good-bye. Rosie watched him go, mournful with interest. Come back! His jeans hung off his hip bones. Elizabeth watched her watch him go. Rosie was not breathing. “Why are you staring at me, Mom?” You got so sick of having people stare at you all the time. She crossed her arms against her chest. “I just love you, Rosie. And you’re so pretty.” Rosie hated grown-ups’ eyes on her. This was why she had so many pictures of eyes on her walls, rock star eyes, animal eyes, the eyes of God or angels, because you got to choose what was looking at you, for once in your life, instead of being stared at by perverty men or your mother. Rosie scowled. Her mother was looking at her like a fawn. But Fenn had been impressed by what she’d said. Like, maybe it would be cool to have a mother more like Jody’s mom, Sarah, so self-assured, who could keep a good job and defend her kid against attackers. But this was kind of amazing, too, her mother talking like one of your really great teachers. “Tell me more about the movie, Mama. I have like fifteen minutes.” “Well, I’m honored, Your Majesty. It’s very dark, obviously, but half of life is night. And it is only because he is being pursued by Death that the knight finds and saves the little family, and it reconnects him with innocence, and what is worth fighting or living for: goodness. Once again, after having been nearly destroyed in the Crusade, he starts to experience the triumph of being alive. And besides, Rosie, what are we left with at the end? What does Jof see, after his vision of the Totentanz, the dance of death? The baby, the dawn, the birds.” She’d forgotten how different Rosie could be in public, although Rae had been telling her this, how the armor came off and with it the dark energy, the indirect gazes and blankness. Tonight they walked out of the café shoulder to shoulder, like girlfriends. When Rosie was a block away, she turned and waved good-bye to her mother like a child. The good news was that James was home from the city by the time Elizabeth got back from the movie. The bad news was that he was already at work on a new piece someone at the studio had suggested, and couldn’t listen to her story about Rosie and the movie right away. “No, no, don’t write,” she protested, caressing his head from behind as he sat at his desk. “I have so much to tell you.” He grabbed her arms and kissed both hands. “I missed you!” he said. “But give me half an hour. I have to get these notes down before I forget.” He never used to say this when he was working on his novel—he’d always been glad for interruptions then. She missed that time. No one could take from him what he had then, because it was so meager, and no one wanted it, the hard work for so little pay, the domestic peace and pleasures he’d mustered. But now there were several people in his life who could destroy his sense of self with the merest criticism or indifference. “Half an hour, darling,” he said, and kissed her good-bye. James was right: the new job was the biggest thing that had ever happened for him. She wasn’t even employable. So she cuddled with Rascal on the bed. A siren blew and in a split second her heart tripped over its own feet and her head filled with a slide show of Rosie in danger, an ambulance, or a stranger’s van, the windows steamed up, an evil ugly man inside. She couldn’t breathe, and then scenes from the movie dropped into the frenzied hole of a panic attack, and she tried to straighten it all out, to quiet and comfort herself, but she felt anxious and strange. She burst back into James’s office. He looked up from his computer. “I’m sorry to interrupt,” she said. “But I’m having an episode. And I’m so lonely.” He got up and said it was really okay, and came to stand beside her, and when she told him about the bad van, he made the simple sounds of comfort, no real human words, gentle moans, like during sex, or as to a child who has banged her knee, with lots of ellipses in between. It was like music, his holding her, and the soft moans; certain chords got struck again, and she held on for dear life, and the song she hadn’t heard in so long resounded, and standing together hanging their heads by his office window, they could hear the same tune again.
Anne Lamott Page 4
