Anne Lamott

by Imperfect Birds (v5)

  EIGHT Twoest Rosie rarely used cocaine, because she hated to spend so much of her money at once—sixty bucks or so in one night—when it took so long to earn. When you got blow free, there was nothing better. It didn’t show up in your urine for long, which was good since her mother was now on a testing jag, giving Rosie OTC piss tests every few days. She had been in Elizabeth’s bathroom one day recently, using the tub for a bubble bath, when she’d seen all the new urine tests under the sink. The new batch of kits tested for THC, opiates, methamphetamines, E. She hated that Elizabeth had become so distrustful. That was no way to live. What her mother did not appreciate was how much stuff Rosie had weaned herself off by the end of her sophomore year, like cocaine, which she had been doing many weekends. When she first got close to Jody and Alice, they were doing blow all the time. But it had been easy to stop in the spring, and the only reason she had gotten into it the other night was that Jody had run off to be with Claude in San Diego, and she and Alice had felt genuinely heartbroken. Jody was really gone; it hadn’t just been the speed talking, after all. She had called two days ago, to say she was staying with a girl from rehab in San Diego, near the base where Claude was stationed. The girl had stayed clean, and Jody had to if she wanted to crash there for a while. She got to see Claude breifly every day, and go out with him on weekends. They went to motels for their dates. There was nothing her parents could do about it, either, because she was eighteen: she was free. Rosie was still dozing at noon, the last Saturday before school started. She lay in her messy bed with Rascal asleep beside her and daydreamed of school and of Robert. Every so often James poked his head in and called her a sleepyhead, told her to get up, make her bed, seize the day. She was seizing the day her way—a made bed meant you were in their world. All kids wanted to dive into bed and be lying down safely, especially until about noon. When you were standing up, you were so vulnerable. Lying there, floating on the surface of the bed, like a cushioned pond, you didn’t know where it would float you, but surrounded by a hundred images and scribbles, you knew it would be somewhere lovely, a portal to take you someplace more real than the jail of your parents’ home and school. She rolled over and fished a miniature Snickers bar out of a plastic Halloween sack from her night table. The OTC tests didn’t scare her: she had it all worked out. She could test positive for weed for a while without it being a problem, since it lingered in your system for a month or more, even if you had stopped using, which Rosie insisted she had on the day after she’d gotten busted. Then, in two weeks, she could use bleach to mask the THC. Her mother had tested her before she did the cocaine, and it would be out of her system before she got tested again. She didn’t ever use opiates or meth, so that wasn’t an issue. She hadn’t done Ecstasy in weeks. There’d been so much speed in the E lately, but someone said it wasn’t meth or dexedrine, so she didn’t have to worry about her mother knowing about it from the urine tests. Whatever it was, Rosie hadn’t liked the jangly nervousness it produced. She turned on her side. Rascal complained. That speed was the kind that made you want hard-core rave music in the party house, unlike pure E, which made you want trance music and was so lovely. The bad speed could make you think too much. Then you had to make sure Alice was right there to be with you. Then it would be like, “I’m so happy right now with Alice,” passing a pacifier back and forth till it was in shreds. You’d laugh, but then ten minutes later, you’d be like, “Now I don’t want to share this feeling with people,” so you’d wander off to be by yourself in some quieter space. Then in ten minutes, the speed would make you go, “I’m superlonely right now, no one is talking to me,” and you’d wander off to another room to look for people. But even with a bunch of people, a certain song could play and you’d turn around and see all these happy people, dancing and taking care of each other, and you’d think, “Aren’t I supposed to be happy?” Then maybe a few minutes later, you would be happier than you’d ever been before. She was going to chill, take a break from the E till some good stuff came through town. Where everyone wanted to give to each other, do PLUR—peace, love, unity, respect—share ChapStick and gum, pacifiers, massages. Sometimes when she was peaking, she would feel her eyes roll back in her head and she’d get afraid that something bad might happen—but then people would steady her, and she’d be dancing again. She’d get a mix of butterflies and wanting to puke, but this was just all part of what they called coming up, part of the E coming on, the elevator going too fast; and then she’d get really cold and know she was getting high, about to be in bliss. Rosie got up and went into her parents’ bathroom. She found a bottle of eardrops on the bottom shelf of the medicine cabinet, rinsed out the bottle and dropper a few times, then went to the laundry room and filled the bottle with bleach. She heard James talking to himself as she passed his study. He must be on the final draft of a story. He always read late drafts out loud. No one in her family had gotten an earache in ages, plus this was past its expiration date. Her parents should try to stay on top of stuff like that. Like, what if she really had an earache, and there was only this expired shit? It was typical. She screwed the dropper in tightly, and returned the bottle to the shelves. This time when she passed the study, she went in. James looked over his shoulder at her. When he smiled, the terrible crow’s-feet around his eyes grew deeper. He looked so much older lately. He should take better care of himself. “Hey, Buckerina,” he said. “Want to read my story?” She shook her head, wandering over to the far wall. His work embarrassed her, but she loved it in here. It was like an older-guy version of her room, words and images all over the walls, like decoupage without the varnish. Bits of paper with things jotted on them, stuff he was working on, quotations, photos, art. “Whatcha workin’ on?” she asked, to be polite. Something about the Parkade, he said, but not to worry, she wasn’t in it. There was a beautiful line of Rilke’s on the wall that she’d read before: “Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.” “Where’s Mama?” “At a meeting, then a hike and a rally with Rae. Sure you don’t want to read my piece?” “Later,” she said, although his asking was supposed to be an honor; he usually asked just her mother. His pieces were direct and ordinary, like journals, which she liked about them; they were dry and wistful like Salinger, but maybe not with that same genius. He could be snarky and judgmental about everything and everyone, like she and Alice and Jody often were, but his stories always stopped on a dime, ended all wrapped up too neatly, like packages, which was not at all like real life. He was trying to get on her good side by letting her seem to be of service to him. She knew all of his moves. It smelled of paper and books and pencils in here, like you’d expect of a writer’s study. But also honey candles from France that he splurged on—how could you not love a guy who burned lightly scented candles, who loved and offered up the fragrance of honey and beeswax? And she did love him, she always had, in all the years since he’d become a part of her family. He went back to the pages he held in his hand, and she ran across the other quotations on the wall until she got to the scrap of paper in Thelonious Monk’s own reproduced handwriting, “Make the drummer sound good.” She was going to do just that, make both her parents sound good by doing well. She’d stick to beer and a little weed for a few months, until her first-semester grades were in and she was home free. Maybe an occasional hit of Alice’s Adderall. She studied the back of James’s head, how gray he was getting, the widening bald spot, the turkey-skin neck. When he dropped his head onto his chest to think, the baggy skin on the back of his neck looked less wrinkled, more like it used to. He peered at her over his shoulders, his reading glasses at the end of his nose. “Go make yourself some breakfast.” She hated how strict he had gotten, and how he always thought he was right, but he was great, too, if you thought about it: hip, hardworking, and steady. She and her mom were lucky to have him. He was their drummer. Elizabeth was sitting in a noon meeting, drinking bad coffee and eating an Oreo. She had deliberately plopped down next to a grumpy old man from San Francisco,
because she didn’t want the happy alkies to foist themselves on her. It was good to be here, away from James and Rosie for a while, out of the fray. She was glad that Jody was gone. She hoped she would find her way, but Jody and Alice were such a part of Rosie’s recent frightening behavior; maybe now there would be less temptation. She found herself thinking about Robert Tobias. Was it even possible that Rosie had something going on with him? Why else would she have been calling him like that and hanging up, then speaking in such a nervous baby-doll voice? Elizabeth remembered the wired, obsessed hell of being the girl who called the boy a dozen times and hung up. She saw Rosie in those tiny tight clothes she wore for tennis all summer, those breasts barely contained in sports bras and halter tops. It came back to her now, how Rosie showed off for Robert on the court, sitting so close in the grass afterward. Trying to pay attention to the meeting’s speaker, who was really funny, she imagined Rosie flirting with Robert, and him looking at her with hard eyes. Even the grumpy guy was laughing about how when the lady speaking had a few drinks she went from being dark and runty to feeling tall and Swedish. But Elizabeth’s mind kept jumping to Robert. Surely he would not risk losing it all—his wife, his children, his job, his benefits, his future—to take advantage of Rosie’s schoolgirl interest in him. But then again, it was the oldest story told. A lovely girl had always been the prize. The speaker said something that James would have liked, and Elizabeth wrote it on the back of her checkbook. Its acronym was LOVE: letting others voluntarily evolve. Very kicky. But what about when the person was your child, making bad choices? How could you trust life with your own kid, when you knew how unforgiving and capricious life could be? What was so wrong about wanting your gifted kid to ace her classes, get a good scholarship, go on to do great things in the world? Let alone survive adolescence, without brain damage, or paraplegia, or AIDS? Rae’s knees were bothering her, so she and Elizabeth walked only a couple of miles on the old fire road behind the baseball field by White’s Hill. Scattered like confetti in the tall golden grass were tiny salmon-colored stars, almost like taffeta ruffs for circus dogs, surrounding magenta petals, with bright yellow centers—“So much crammed into one teeny flower,” Elizabeth said, laughing. The air was dotted with butterflies, white and yellow and cheap knockoff monarchs; butterflies were wind energy made visible. And sticky monkey flowers were everywhere this time of year, even growing out of the craggiest rocks near the road, where all the renegade flowers and succulents hung out. The rally they were going to was to support Marin’s low-cost housing, minimal as it was, and even that threatened by developers who wanted to run out the poor and retired, and install nice malls and apartments. Not many people turned out, maybe a hundred or so, mostly from the low-cost housing at the retired Air Force base in Novato. But two county supervisors showed up and spoke, rousing the crowd, and Maria Muldaur led the crowd in a shimmying rendition of “We Shall Not Be Moved.” Most wonderful of all were four men from Darfur, who’d gotten the dates mixed up—their big rally here was next week, and many people who stood near them promised to attend, including Rae. The men looked tired and displaced, wearing ceremonial clothes—fur loincloths tied across their blue jeans, over their rumps; metal headdresses, adorned with hawk or eagle feathers, that looked like a cross between Julius Caesar and football helmets—but they stayed to lend their support, doing a Darfur dance to the old civil rights song. The morning school began, Jody called to let Rosie know she was thinking of her and to say she wasn’t necessarily coming back right away. She could not bear to be away from Claude, she said. If her parents came after her, with no legal right to do so, she and Claude would go hide out in Mexico, one mile away. “What about your life here?” Rosie wailed. “What about school? What about us?” “I’ll see you whenever I can,” Jody cried. “Please try to understand.” She planned to get her GED at the local junior college. She might split her time in two places, San Diego and Landsdale. She might get married. They wanted children. “Oh, Jo, you’re so young. This is going to take you down.” “I was going down again anyway, not getting anywhere, just treading water up there. At least now I have company.” “But what about me? Alice and I were your twoest—I mean, your two truest pals.” “I love you forever, but you know what I mean. Claude is my beloved.” Getting ready for school, which meant choosing just the right torn jeans, a light blue camisole over a lavender tank top, and a red bra whose straps showed, Rosie spiraled down into mad jealousy. Jody was someone in a movie, she was someone’s comfort. The man she loved might end up broken, but he’d always have a beautiful girl’s love to protect him. The thought of a child living on was a kind of immortality. It was like going from pimply, clueless, trivial, to being a Rilke poem: “I know that there is room in me for a huge and timeless life.” Rilke must not have been in high school when he wrote this. She told Jody she’d send money if she got stuck, and hung up. She put on makeup, a light coat of foundation, kohl under her eyes, sugar-pink gloss. She couldn’t eat breakfast. Her parents were at the table with coffee, reading the paper. James was shaking Red Rooster hot sauce onto his scrambled eggs, and her mother asked if she had everything she needed, like she was a child. “Come give me a kiss,” she said, like Rosie was about to go off to kindergarten. Rosie bent in, and kissed her mother behind an ear. “Pew,” Elizabeth said. “Your hair smells like smoke!” “Thanks. I was with people last night who were smoking. Sometimes I’m in places where people are smoking dope, but I’m definitely trying to stay off it now. I’ll be able to give you clean urine soon.” “Honey, look,” said Elizabeth, “if you can avoid smoking dope and cigarettes, and don’t start sneaking out all the time, we can do this on our own, as a family, without having to get out the big guns, like therapists, or outpatient rehab.” James looked over the top of his paper, over those old-man reading glasses. “I know! God, Mommy! How many times do you have to tell me?” Rosie frowned at James as if he had been eavesdropping, slammed out the door, and stormed off to school on foot. Senior year meant you were royalty in the muscly shuffle of the corridors, amid the voices; the clanging, banging, reverberating locker doors; the announcements to which no one, not even the teachers, listened; and the odor—Stephen King ghost smells of old meals from the lunchroom, ancient sour milk, and chalk, and over the B.O. the boys’ body wash that made them smell like clean wet dogs, and the girls’ delicious fruity shampoo, and the toxic locker odors of food death that the janitors could not eradicate over the summer. She met up with Alice near the glass trophy cases. Alice wore a long, skinny knit skirt with a baby-sized camisole of saffron silk. Her hair was gathered in four braids secured with shells and bows. She was bohemian beautiful, but not like the popular girls who were all thin and gorgeous, like models in expensive almost identical clothes. Rosie told her about Jody’s call that morning, and Alice covered her face with her hands and said she was going to cry, although she didn’t. They had ten minutes till their first class, French 4, and Alice had to run to the bathroom. “Come with me, baby girl,” she begged, but Rosie said no, that she’d forgotten something. “Meetcha back in five.” They hugged and kissed as if it could be months until they met again, clutching at each other and smoothing out each other’s perfect makeup. Rosie walked as fast as she could through the throng, herding herself through the multilegged beast of the student body to Robert’s science lab. She had meant to make herself wait until third period, when inorganic chemistry met. But it would be fun to poke her head into his classroom and see his reaction. She opened the door a few inches and peeked in partially like she’d seen women do in movies, as if they were behind a veil instead of a door. He was at his desk, talking to students: clean-shaven, hair trimmed, killer handsome in a white button-down dress shirt open at the neck. She smiled in at him, but he did not seem to see her at first. Only she knew how gorgeous his legs were, tan and soft with golden hair; only she knew what he smelled like close up, over the scent of the grass on which they sat so close, so often. Yet still he didn’t look up. And when he did, he seemed puzzl
ed, friendly but puzzled, like why was she there? He had almost no expression, then smiled distractedly and went back to talking to a pale pimply boy. She was stunned for a second, but then she got it, as the first bell rang, the five-minute prison yard warning. Oh, duh. She got it: He was trying to act natural, like she was any old student. She raced down the hall. Adelle Marchaux’s French classroom was like an elegant garden compared with the smelly chaos of the hallways. Rosie took a seat beside Alice in the front row, to show honor and affection for her odd and petite teacher. Adelle had the same young-boy hairdo as always, poorly cut, the elf liquid eyeliner, poorly applied, pointy ears, tiny arms, loose and flowing clothes. Bonjour bonjour bonjour flew, all of the kids were seniors, all almost fluent. Adelle talked to each student, charming as could be, asking them about their summers, their health, their parents, in French. She spoke and clutched at herself and grabbed at the air, then pouted. It was such a part of being or speaking French, that pout. Alice had put it exactly right last year, explaining to Elizabeth why they loved this odd woman so—“She’s psycho, in a good way, like us. She’s a true person.” Rosie gazed off; the beautiful French sounded faraway and romantic, like Robert on the beach that first night, on the court, the grass, shoulders skimming. “Rosie,” Alice hissed, and Rosie tried to snap back to reality. God, let it be that Robert was playing it cool, only feigning the casual stance toward her. Let him love her. They wouldn’t even ever need to touch—simply love each other, that would be enough. “Mademoiselle!” Adelle was calling. “Concentre!” Rosie heard Alice hiss again. She looked up slowly at Adelle, in time to see the pout. She tried to clear her mind, smiled to indicate her embarrassed return; but Adelle was staring at her. “Où es-tu aujourd’hui? Nous te perdons. Reviens, reviens.” Where are you today? We are losing you. Come back, come back. Second period was boring, civics with an androgynous troll who’d been teaching here since the year Kennedy was elected president, so the class was mostly on the greatness of JFK. And inorganic chemistry was a nightmare. She might as well have been invisible, or anyone. She did not cry during Robert’s class. She went up to his desk, once the other fifteen mostly nerdy kids had filed out, but he got up and passed her by and did not stop until he got to the door. Turning back, he asked quizzically, “Is everything okay?” She cocked her head at him, and he said, “I need to be somewhere.” And that was it. He was gone. She pushed past kids in the hallway and burst into the girls’ bathroom, into the hornets’ nest of primping girls. The buzzing stopped and she locked the door of her stall closed, and when the buzzing resumed, she started crying. Are you stoned?” Alice asked her when they met up for lunch. “Your eyes are so red. What happened? Here—here—have my Ding Dongs. Here’s a napkin.” Rosie reached for the napkin, and tried to dry her eyes without smearing her mascara and kohl. Alice enveloped her in a hug. Rosie said she was getting her period, was PMS’ing like crazy, that was why she’d been crying, why she couldn’t concentrate. “Oh! Do you want an Adderall?” Alice clucked with concern. Rosie shook her head. All she wanted was dope. She felt for the pouch in her pocket, full of eye drops, mints, and towelettes. Sighing, she scanned the crowded blacktop until she saw a cute guy who always had good dope, who waved when he saw her, and beckoned her over. The three of them walked around to the back parking lot and got high. The rest of the day she walked around feeling like a bird that had flown into a plate-glass window. The weed didn’t help at all, and in fact she was glad when it wore off. She didn’t eat all day, and couldn’t eat that night, either, and she kept starting to cry, and of course her parents tried to pry it out of her, and Alice called and tried to pry it out of her, too. She kept saying she was having really bad PMS and was going crazy. She retreated to her bedroom and tried unsuccessfully to study. How could she even go back to school? She couldn’t believe she was still stuck there. It was literally a nightmare, a Kafka novel. God! She couldn’t believe she had to see him every day for the rest of the year. She was so miserable in her own skin, an ugly unwanted fraud. This was the story of her whole life. She was a too-tall, dead-father girl. She leaned forward and lowered her head all the way to her desk, and hid in her own arms. Elizabeth had kept Rosie’s secret from James for so long that the substance no longer held much meaning—it must have passed the statute of limitations—but it had inserted a slight reserve between her and James, and they had let this distance slide. She found herself picking at everyone—picking at James for gobbling his food, picking at Rosie for picking at her face. Finally, when they were doing dishes one night, when Rosie was locked in her room doing homework, Elizabeth managed to say, “There’s something I wish I’d told you a few weeks ago.” James dried the salad bowl with a flourish and put it on the counter. “Shoot.” “Oh, I don’t know, it sounds silly now.” He turned to look at her, worried. “What?” She turned off the water and shook her head, and told him a brief version of what had happened: How Claude was leaving, how Jody had been distraught, how she and Alice had sneaked over to their house that night, how Rosie had sneaked out. She had hoped against hope that James would wave it away, but he tilted his head, his face contracted and dark. “What?” he said. “How could you? We’re supposed to be in this together.” “I’m sorry,” she said, genuinely, and tried to take his hands, but he pulled away. “God, what else haven’t you told me?” “I’m trying to find a balance between you being my whole life and Rosie being my whole life, too. Trying to celebrate times when we all get along—and screwing everything up.” He looked at her with hostile disbelief, put down the dish towel, and trudged out of the kitchen. “Stop,” she called out when he stepped through the doorway. She stood facing him, penitent and bristly and teary. He stared back at her. Tears ran down her face. She hoped they might soften his heart. Her tears had on occasion washed the motes out of both their eyes, obstructions from the stream. But not this time, or at any rate, not right away. “ ‘We are each our own devil,’ Elizabeth. ‘And we make this world our hell.’ ” He vanished down the hall. She heard his office door close. She went and stood outside but didn’t knock. “Can’t you forgive me this one time?” Silence. She did not know where to start. Rebuilding trust was the hardest work, hopeless at first. You felt like Humpty-Dumpty. She stood at James’s door until Rosie’s opened. “What are you doing out there, Mommy?” “Can I come into your room?” Elizabeth asked miserably. Rosie sighed, and held the door open so her mother could come in. They sat at the foot of the bed. “Your dad’s mad at me for keeping the secret about you sneaking out.” “A, he’s not my dad. B, that was days ago—like, get a life, James. C, he’s always mad about something, because he’s short, and now he’s losing his hair.” “You can’t really believe that,” Elizabeth said defensively. “That’s such bullshit. Don’t you think it may have to do with you sneaking out—or me lying?” “I don’t know. It’s not my problem, Mama! Can’t you see how unhappy I’ve been? I can’t study. I’m not eating. I’m picking at my face. Look at my skin!” There was a scattering of pimples at her hairline, red and sore. “Darling, why? Tell me what’s going on.” “Hello? Jody is not coming back? She’s my best friend. And I hate school this year, it’s like prison. I can’t believe I’m stuck there with all those outcasts and snots and infants. And Robert’s class sucks this year—he’s changed. He’s an asshole now.” “Just since school started, honey?” Rosie nodded. “Can I ask you something? Without you getting mad?” Rosie nodded again, touching her forehead until Elizabeth drew her hand away. “Was something going on between you two this summer?” “How stupid are you? You’re a joke. Why would you even think that?” Elizabeth studied Rosie’s face, full of scorn and fury, and knew in a flash she was lying. “I don’t know. You seem to have this great rapport. And closeness.” “Stop spying on me! You’re the one going crazy—call your shrink.” And it was the disgusted sneer more than the words that made Elizabeth erupt. “How dare you! I’m not a liar, or cruel! You’re a spoiled little shit!” She got to her feet, hating herself and her child. How could they
say such hateful things? She locked herself in the bathroom and cried silently until she was raw. Desperate, she tried to pray, until she remembered she didn’t believe in god—but she had felt that shard of something deep inside that she could only call not me, so she cried out in silence to the speck of light, Help me! I’m begging. She felt the wet pounding of her heart in her stuffed-up head. She hit the bathroom rug so hard that her fist hurt, and she cradled it like an injured bird. Eventually, James came knocking. “Honey?” he asked. “What are you doing?” After a while, she said, “I’m praying.” There was a long silence. Then, astonished, “You are?” “Go away. I hate everyone. Rosie made me promise not to tell you, so I didn’t, and then when I did, you blow up, and she hates me. Everyone is horrible to me, and I hate me.” She heard his footsteps going away, down the hall. She wiped her nose on the top of her T-shirt, waiting. After a while, she heard him return. “Do you even hate Rascal?” he asked. “James? Why do you make me choose between you and my child? I can’t.” He poked something into the lock, and after a minute it popped open. The door opened a few inches, and Rascal dropped to the floor inside. “Leave me the fuck alone!” she shouted. Rascal lumbered to Elizabeth’s side, tasted her blurry wet face, and butted his huge orange head against her until she took him into her lap. She finally came out, and went to James’s office and sat on the carpet by his desk. He got out of his chair and sat facing her. Then they both sat on the rug, like children at a tea party on the floor of a pool. She felt disgusting, red and unstable. “That was so hitting below the belt,” she said. “To bring Rascal into it.” “To begin with, you need to tell me all of your unsaids, Elizabeth. They’re killing us. You’ve been using your sincereness in counterfeit ways.” “I’m so sorry,” she said, sick to her stomach. She did not point out that the word was “sincerity.” Her mouth tasted like matches. She looked away, at the darkening night through his window, the branches of the kumquat tree. She wondered whether there was such a word as “sincereness.” They sat unspeaking until her tears and misery wore him down. “Tears give you such an unfair advantage.” He shook his head. “I’ve always hated to see women come undone.” He hit the carpet with his fist, hard, and it startled her. “Okay,” he said after a moment, coming to a decision. “We start over.” He scooched closer to her, and they held each other on the bottom of the pool. They clung to each other in bed that night, and he rubbed her neck in sympathy. “She’s an awful child,” he whispered. “We must be saints, the both of us.” She smiled in the dark, against his skin. “Let’s get rid of her,” he whispered. “Let’s kill her.” “We could drop her off in a basket at the convent,” Elizabeth whispered back. He was spooning her when she woke, still patting her with sympathy, and the pats turned to love. Elizabeth woke Rosie for school, and Rosie was tense, not knowing where they stood. “That’s so scary when you do that, Mama,” she pleaded. “When you flip out.” “I won’t have you speak to me like you did last night, Rosie. I’m not going crazy. I don’t believe you when you say you and Robert had nothing going on. You were lying to us all summer, repeatedly. But I am trying to avoid having to pay for you to see a shrink or go to rehab. But you need to talk to someone. Your counselor. Or Reverend Anthony.” Rosie considered this. “How about Rae, instead? She’s my safest person.” Elizabeth talked this over at breakfast with James, and they both agreed to Rae. A few days later, after school, Rosie went to see Rae at church. Rae’s office was no bigger than a walk-in closet, which is what it had been before she’d brought in a narrow desk, a white rattan bookcase, and a worn easy chair. There was a framed photo of Lank, and a framed shadowy book cover, from The Luminous Darkness by Howard Thurman. Rae looked soft and pink in the low light of the lamp, the pupils of her large eyes full. Rosie held her knees to her chest, her head hunched over, her long limbs tucked beneath her. “Everything is going so badly! Mama and I fight all the time. And I hate school.” Rae was silent for a moment. Then she said her churchiest thing: “How can I serve you?” Rosie let her hair fall over her face, tried to hide behind it like it was a duck blind. “You know Jody’s gone, right? Maybe forever.” “Yes, your mother told me. Is she safe? Do you know where she is?” “Not really. Somewhere near Claude’s base. And Alice has a boyfriend. My two dearest friends! School’s screwed up, too, and I hate all the dweeby little boys.” “And tell me what else is going on. Are you getting stoned a lot? Drinking?” “No!” Rosie said vehemently. “I mean, God! Did my mother put you up to this?” “Look, I was sitting here innocently reading Mary Oliver when you called.” “Well, of course I was smoking a little dope, like everyone, until a while ago. And I’ve been trying not to smoke since then.” “Trying not to? Or not smoking, since then?” “Jesus, give me some slack.” Rae sneered in the nicest possible way. Rosie growled. The smell of lemons wafted in from somewhere, or oranges, or grapefruit. “It seems like there’s something else, way deep down, that’s troubling you.” Time was stopped and fluid at the same time, like resin, and Rae’s face was a blur of chestnut hair and big eyes and a child’s cheeks. “I would never trust you again if you told my mother.” Rae considered this for quite some time. “All right,” she said finally. Rosie studied her. “I sort of, I don’t know. Fell in love with a married man.” Rae’s mouth opened. “Wow.” “I am so totally fucked! I feel like I’m in a whirlpool, going down.” Rae nodded in sarcastic agreement—like, Yeah, no shit. Rosie looked at her. “Thanks a lot.” “What do you want me to say? You are fucked. Not morally. But I’ve been there, honey bear. It’s the worst I’ve ever felt in my life. Worse than when my folks died.” “Well, we’re not sleeping together yet.” “Seriously? Thank God. I mean, that would make it so much worse.” “It would?” Rosie asked. Rae nodded, visibly relieved. “Then why do I think about it all the time? And why do I want it so badly?” “Because you’re a little lonely. But sex with him is the fail-safe line, Ro. Who is he?” Rosie looked away. “Is he a teacher?” “God, no! And I thought we loved each other. But now I don’t know. He has a family.” Rosie expected Rae to roll her eyes, but she only tilted her head slightly, as if Rosie were a painting or a view. “Nothing’s turning out right. Senior year was supposed to be so great. It’s all broken and fucked up. My best friend has run away, and my other best friend is in love, and I’m so lonely and stressed. I’m already behind in school. Plus I’m going to have to see this guy every single day—” “So he is a teacher, right, darling?” Rosie shook her head, pleading. “It doesn’t matter. What does matter is that you haven’t started sleeping together. That is so huge, hon. Once you go there, I can promise you’ll eventually come to know what hell truly means.” Rosie pulled back to look Rae in the eyes. “Swear you’re not going to tell my mom?” Rae called Elizabeth two minutes after Rosie took off. “She’s madly in love with a teacher, who she thought was in love with her, although she says they haven’t slept together, and she says it’s over.” “Oh, shit. It’s Robert Tobias. That jerk! What an asshole. What do I do?” “I guess we hope, if she’s telling the truth, that she really is done.” “You mean, you think she may be lying? She may be—she lies about everything.” “Or that it’s mostly in her mind. That he gave her mixed messages, and she ran with it.” “Yeah, but Rosie didn’t make this up out of thin air. I don’t want her to drop out of inorganic chemistry. She needs it on her transcript if she’s going to get a scholarship to a good college.” “Elizabeth! What she needs is tough love. Allegiance, and a chance to start over. She doesn’t necessarily need to go to some Ivy League school.” “She’ll still need to get a scholarship—and that means she needs one last great semester.” “You say those are the things she needs, hon—but those are all things you need for her. And your parents probably said those exact things to you. They were a lie then, and they are now, too. I mean, I don’t even know what inorganic chemistry means. Do you? What is it, dead compounds with their little feet sticking up in the air?” Elizabeth managed a laugh. “Wait, that would be AP inanimate chemistry.” She felt less sure of ever
ything when she hung up. It was a nightmare. All she could think to do were the most ordinary of things: plant the flowering pear that was still in its pot from the nursery, labor over a vegetable stew, clean out the bottom drawer in the kitchen where the whole world ended up. When she went in to say good night later that evening, Rosie was in bed, wearing a lacy white camisole, almost Victorian really, her thick hair spread out on the pillow like a peacock’s tail. Elizabeth sat on the bed with her for a few minutes. “I’m so tired tonight. Are you?” “Exhausted,” said Rosie. She rolled over to face her mother, and let Elizabeth massage her neck and shoulders. Her mother smelled like an old lady in a thoughtful mood. “How are things going in chemistry, darling?” “Fine,” Rosie answered, “same old same old,” although they weren’t. Chemistry was much harder for her than physics had been, and more competitive because all of them were preparing for the AP test in May. It was so painful to have to see Robert pretend that she was any old student; she’d been used to being his physics star. He was kind and funny with all of the students, they were the cream of the crop, and he loved their debates, even when they were just trying to show how smart they were, but there was no way anyone would know by watching him with her that they had had something special between them. Now it was just him asking for her take on acid-base reactions or how to determine what pH you’d end up with when you used different combinations of chemicals, or what ev, like she was some random nerdy nerd. Instead of how they used to talk about love, and rivers. She thought about Robert all the time now, even more than she used to, all day every day, and waited for him to approach her with an explanation for why he had cut her off. I love you, he would say, but my wife was catching on. Or, One of my children is sick; and I have to play it cool for now. But as the days passed and he didn’t come forth, she began to give up. He made her sick. The only thing, she thought, was that she had the goods on him, if he even thought about giving her less than an A. Jody didn’t call the next week, and Alice got grounded for taking a twenty out of her mother’s wallet—her mother was suddenly worse than Rosie’s, after hardly ever having been home before. Now she kept tabs on the amount of cash she carried, like the Treasury Department. Elizabeth wasn’t that bad yet. One Monday somebody told Rosie that Fenn and his roommates were having a party that coming Friday, and Rosie went into overdrive: she was easygoing and hardworking all week, and did not have one fight with her parents. Thursday night she passed a drug test, thanks to a few drops of bleach from the bottle of eardrops. Her mother gave her the high five—such a cornball—and Friday morning Rosie asked if she could go to a party at her chemistry lab partner’s house, if she was home by midnight. In her most persuasive voice, thick and creamy with lots of eye contact, she said the lab partner’s parents would be home—she could have them call Elizabeth once Rosie arrived, since she didn’t have the number on her. Elizabeth allowed that they didn’t need to go that far. James said they did. Her parents argued while Rosie put on her makeup. Her mother said, “Don’t make me be the lone vigilante mom tonight,” and James backed down. Rosie was going to walk to Fenn’s, as her parents had gone to a meeting and movie. “Wild times, huh?” James had said. Rosie put on her sexiest tank top and more makeup, and set out down the trail to the main street in town. It was a mile away. There was not much light on the trail, only a crescent moon and distant streetlights, and this made her very afraid, which made her hate herself. What a loser, to be almost eighteen, and still scared that creatures might pop out at her in the dark. She walked as fast as she could past the bushes that lined the trail, and told the story of her walk to herself in her head, as if she were telling Alice, and she made it funny because this made her less afraid. There was rustling in the bushes, she said into her imaginary phone, a rusty kind of rustling, which could have meant a mountain lion, or a bum. Her heart pounded like bongo drums. What if a raccoon with rabies jumped out and clawed me, or possums, which were so disgusting, with those penisy hairless white tails. She got a side ache from walking so fast, but did not stop until she saw the lights of the Parkade. Rosie found some people congregated under the streetlights like night church, had a few sips of beer, and then walked to the apartment that Fenn and a few other older boys rented, a block and a half away. There were two guys from her class hanging out by the door, two kids hardly anyone at school ever talked to, although she tried to be kind whenever she saw them, who hung with the other nerds in the distant fourth corridor of the school grounds, along with the special-ed kids. She hung out with them now for a few minutes while working up the courage to go inside. One of them shared his beer with her. There were two Valley kids sitting in the stairway, slow-paced long-haired organic types who lived in the counterculture town just over White’s Hill, and at the top of the stairs, two Landsdale kids who had grown up here and would never leave. A girl from her French class was inside, along with a few other popular girls, who were there with their boyfriends, looking through the racks of CDs above the stereo, from which reggae rap blasted. She waved to them from the stairs, where she’d stopped to get her bearings, and then someone handed her a pipe and a sip of screwdriver. Alexander was here. Everyone said he was only smoking heroin, not shooting it. He’d told her once in the Parkade that he was often at the apartment where Fenn lived, he was friends with the roommates, and sometimes they let him spend the night on the couch when his parents had kicked him out. She went over and stood with him, and when he handed her his cigarette, she took a puff, and then another. “You can keep it,” he said. He’d told her once that he’d been a fourth-corridor kid freshman year, and then he got into smoking dope, and then dealing a little, and then suddenly he looked like one of the older Parkade dirt children. A lot of kids had tried to save him for a while: he was smart, but goofy on purpose, to make people laugh. She really liked him, and loved the cigarette. “There’s beer, and Fenn’s squeezing fresh orange juice,” he said. Rosie shrugged. The living room was cozy and pleasantly lit, with so many candles that the light was golden, as if there were a fire in the fireplace, and it smelled of all sorts of delicious fragrances—flowers, grasses, citrus, oranges, weed. A few girls from the sophomore class were sitting with a guy on one of the couches, each holding a beer. Rosie said hey to everyone and stubbed out her cigarette. The girls on the couch were pretty, with thick eyeliner and long, poufy hair. They said hey back, and one of the guys she didn’t know pointed her to the kitchen, where a machine whirred. Her heart raced and the side ache returned. Fenn was at the counter, bent over a whirring juice machine, and did not hear her when she said hello. His curly light brown hair, clean and thick and sun-bleached, was pulled back into a short ponytail. She reached forward and tugged on his T-shirt to get his attention. He turned around, holding an empty orange half. “Hey, what a nice surprise!” He had such a handsome face, long wide slanty blue eyes, a straight nose, and high cheekbones. “Where’d you come from?” “My house. What’re you making?” “Fresh screwdrivers. Make ya one? Will you take these to Cassie and Andrew?” He handed her two glasses. When she returned from the living room, he handed her juice in a marmalade jar. She stood behind him while he squeezed orange juice for himself. He was not as tall as she was, but had long legs, poking from his worn khaki cargo shorts; he had a faded, perfectly frayed black T-shirt. When he turned around, he handed her a half-pint of vodka. She poured some into her juice but couldn’t even taste it, so she poured in more. He whispered, “Let’s sneak outside and sit on the steps. People can squeeze their own damn juice if they want refills. There’s the prettiest little moon.” They never even got around to a second drink. Out on the steps, he handed her a pipe, which turned out to hold the most amazing mellow dope, and she paused only a few seconds before taking it, flushing away the thought of her shocked and betrayed mother, and they sipped their drinks in the warm evening, with the moon lighting up the backyard at the foot of the steps. He smelled like oranges and the sea, and it made her faint and giddy and mute. He lit a cigarette and handed it to her, and lit one for hi
mself. Pretty soon their shoulders were touching. He had muscles in his arms because he worked construction with his uncle Joe. “I thought you were a drug dealer,” she said smiling. “That’s what people say.” “Sorry to disappoint you,” he said. “Have you also heard of the fourteen-year-old girls who hang out here all the time, that me and my roommates have sex with? And that I got Alexander onto smack?” He shook his head. They talked about the house he was helping build in the Valley, solar-powered, and about how their parents’ generation had destroyed the earth. He was five years older than she was. Sometime later, when the fog came in, cold and damp like heavy smoke made of snow, they went inside. He got a zippered hoodie for each of them from his bedroom. She peeked in: there were a girl and a guy on his bed, about her age, sleeping. The room emitted a sweaty smell. He and Rosie sat on one of the couches and listened to Nine Inch Nails with everyone else for a while, then stepped outside a couple of times to smoke. They moved on to plain fresh-squeezed orange juice, and then he got them a wool blanket and they sat outside on the steps and ate an entire quart of Jamoca Almond Fudge, passing it back and forth. She thought of turning sideways to kiss him with a mouth full of coffee ice cream, but didn’t. She felt too shy. They talked about movies, they loved all the same ones. He said that The Seventh Seal had changed him—because it turned out that Death hadn’t won, even though the knight was going to die. What Fenn said took her breath away, and made her love the movie, too. They shared at least three cigarettes, Camel filters. And then it was nearly midnight. He let her use his toothbrush so her breath would be fine if she got caught sneaking back indoors at home, and offered to drive her, but now she wanted to run up the trail because she was full to bursting. Her new life, her true life, had finally begun. She was on the phone all morning with Alice, telling her about the party, the joyful news of her and Fenn’s connection. “God, he’s so hot,” Alice said, and Rosie said yeah, but that wasn’t even the thing; the thing was his mind and how cool he was, and Alice kept saying, “Oh my God,” that it was totally awesome, dude. Rosie studied hard most of the afternoon. She felt so happy that she helped a little around the house, did her own laundry, and even ate dinner with her parents without making it an international incident. After dinner, by prearrangement, Alice called and Rosie listened for a minute and then said, “Oh, I don’t know. Let me ask.” She turned to her parents with the phone tucked. “You know that guy Fenn?” she asked her mother, as she helped clear the table. “Who we saw at The Seventh Seal? And then at the Roastery?” “Yeah, I know who he is. The surfer.” “He’s having a party tonight, and he’s really good friends with Alice’s boyfriend—they work on the same construction crew sometimes, for Fenn’s uncle Joe, and Alice wants me to go with her, in case things get a little wild, because she’s being piss-tested, too.” The Uncle Joe part was so innocent, and convincing, but her parents still had to have a secret conference in James’s office, like it was Yalta instead of some stupid party. “I passed the piss test yesterday, remember?” she shouted through the closed door. So she got to go to Fenn’s apartment that night with her parents’ permission and the promise to be home by midnight again. His roommates were still in the living room, like they’d never left, and different girls were drinking beer and there were more teenage boys, all of them juniors or seniors. Another woozy couple was passed out on Fenn’s bed. Alice was at her boyfriend’s house; his parents were out of town. Rosie knew hardly anyone here. Fenn kissed her in the kitchen, slowly, deeply, and she stepped back, smiling. They made fresh-squeezed orange juice for themselves again, and poured in vodka from a fresh half-pint, and went out on the back stairs, again, to look at the crescent moon, again, and they talked about the music they loved, slow rap, and the Beatles, and the trouble Fenn had gotten into when he was still drinking too much, and the time she got busted at the party on the hill, which he’d heard about. As they cuddled, she told him about Jody running away with her army man, and he said, “Well, if he gets sent off somewhere scary, she’ll be tucked in his heart as he goes into battle. She’ll mean so much to someone.” “That is incredible for you to say, because she doesn’t mean much to herself, because her parents basically destroyed her when they sent her off to wilderness. And none of the adults can see that.” He touched her thigh as she spoke, as if smoothing out a crease. They were both in worn khaki shorts, and his legs were as long as hers, which no one’s but Jody’s and maybe Elizabeth’s were. It was like talking to Robert or Rae. Their legs touched on the steps, his warm, soft, furry smoothness on hers, and she felt her soul amplified, like at the end of a party at someone’s house with perfect people there, and Led Zeppelin on the stereo, or up on the mountain with Jody and Alice, ’shrooming late at night under the stars. She didn’t feel small and cringy like when her parents were all over her with their suspicions and Gestapo commands. She was someone real and meaningful, with Fenn on the back steps, legs touching, about to go to bed together, tomorrow, maybe. She could literally fall into his sloping blue eyes. Love was like that, when it was no longer just your own soul howling in its own dingy wilderness. You got to feel draped with something noble instead of something sloppy and always falling short, like you felt secretly on the inside half the time. Right before she had to leave, he said, “Can I ask you something?” She nodded, thinking he would ask her about her first time, or if she was on birth control. But instead, he pointed to a drop of water hanging from a geranium beside him, in moonlight. “In the morning, if the sun was up and that drop was still there, would it contain limitless rainbows?” “Not necessarily,” she explained. “Maybe it would. But my understanding is that it would contain limitless water.” He thought about this in silence. Then they kissed again. When she looked at her watch, it was eleven forty-five—she’d be in huge trouble if she was late. She brushed her teeth with his toothbrush again, and ran home as fast as she could, like a deer, like a colt, like the girl she used to be.