Anne Lamott

by Imperfect Birds (v5)

  NINE Lagoon They made love the next afternoon in his room like young adults in a movie, so loving and slow and yet hot, sexy and romantic and great beyond all imagining, and it hurt only when he first entered her, but it hurt good, and she loved most when it was over and they lay together in a tangle and stroked each other’s faces and hip bones and tummies. They used a rubber, the first time, and then they ate hash brownies he had made, and were so amazingly stoned that she couldn’t deal with the whole condom thing, only his skin in her, soft, hard, furry, smooth, slow-motion eternity. After that she thought about him every minute, every hour all day every day. In chemistry she thought about the soft yellow streaks in his hair, the downy blond fuzz right below his belly button, his large hand on her hip bone. Thoughts floated like fish through her mind as she tried to concentrate on what Robert was saying. Now she thought of Robert only when she was in class, even when he bent over her to look at her calculations. Fenn had saved her. The smell of Robert’s aftershave now made her sick, the smell of someone in decay. She and Fenn were the beauty of youth being adults together. He smelled like the ocean, like a carpenter, like nails and wood, like the field of hot grasses where they lay after school. She knew the smell of his warm brown thighs. He kept his room clean, scented with candles, he always had bud, enough to lay some routinely on Alice. Couples weren’t allowed to crash in his room at parties anymore; it was reserved only for the two of them these days—the one of them. He understood how afraid her parents were now that she was growing away from them, and he kept on baking her brownies with hash oil so she wouldn’t smell of weed. They laughed about how it was almost an act of charity. He also had a source for pure Ecstasy, with no meth at all in it, nothing to fuck up her mind or drug tests, and it reminded her of what it had been like her first few times and why they called it Ecstasy. He made her come over and over with his mouth. Alice thought she was exaggerating, but if anything, she downplayed it because Alice’s Evan didn’t love oral like Fenn did. Anyway, that wasn’t even the great part. The great part was after in his arms, under the covers, in his room, in their hippie town, near San Francisco Bay, on the great big wide quilted earth. He was polite and shyly conversational with her parents when he came to pick her up for meetings. That’s what he and she called it when he came to get her during the week. They had concocted a story about attending the young people’s meetings nearby that they’d found listed on Elizabeth’s AA directory, and they went to one meeting a week so they could regale James and Elizabeth with stories. They pretended to be at meetings twice a week on school nights, so at least they could be together briefly. The druggie kids at the young people’s meeting were old friends from the Parkade, way cooler than the general prison population at Rosie’s high school. On weekends, she and Fenn hiked, read out loud in his bed, drank, made love and vegan meals. She admitted to her mother and James that they were sexually active, which was the phrase you used with parents. Her mother hugged herself and hung her head like an old Latvian widow, and James went off to his study to kill himself, he said. She promised her mother that they were using condoms, even though they weren’t, and not too much more was made of this. What were they supposed to do, say, “You cannot sleep with him, Rosie?” Right. The parental units had imposed a twenty-eight-day trial period to see if Rosie could stay clean for a month, go without weed or anything else they were able to test for with their little Captain Midnight decoder-ring urine tests. They’d felt powerful and in charge when they’d changed the curfew to eleven for those twenty-eight days. Rosie had gone ballistic initially, but it was actually working out fine. She was getting her homework done, mostly, stabilizing the parents, and living the life she had dreamed of and despaired of never having. She was happier than a person had any right to be. And the funny thing was, her parents really liked Fenn. They naturally thought he was too old for her, but Elizabeth understood why she loved him, and James just threw his hands up and said it was all hopeless, and they’d never think anyone was good enough for her and blah blah blah. He seemed resigned to Fenn, and even sort of liked that Fenn had read the same books he and Elizabeth had, and that he had a full-time job with his uncle Joe. Fenn even came up with a thought for James—that life at the Parkade was not unlike life at the Bolinas lagoon, in the ebb and flow and symbiosis and beautiful strangeness of its inhabitants, if only you had eyes to see beyond the asphalt and cars. James and Elizabeth had been so inspired by this that one morning in October, they had gotten up early and driven to West Marin to sit on the banks of the lagoon with rain boots, a notepad, binoculars, and no agenda. You had to do things early in the day now, as Indian summer had descended a week ago, with all the tumult of heat and bugs, lurid sunsets, red as when you’ve been lying in the sun and it has begun to burn your lids. Elizabeth always found Indian summer to be a stolen and peculiar time, nature compressed. It was confusing after a couple of weeks of milder days, with hints at the edge of coldness, but not enough mild comfort to rest into. Fall was her favorite season, a season for grown-ups, the wild, bright colors of flame, and when your insides tightened in the cold, you felt more present and on guard than in the balmy softening days of summer. The fall said, Get cracking. Indian summer said, Oh, stay with me just a little bit longer. The beauty of early morning at low tide in the mucky tidal flats, crisscrossed with ribbons of channels like arteries and veins, made them both whisper in awe. The last time they had been here, the tide had been high, and the water looked like an ocean that humans could splash in alongside the ruddy ducks and mallards, a big soup bowl filled with cattails, weeds, flotsam. “Duck soup,” she said. “Yum yum.” “Oh my God, I am so going to tell Rosie you said that!” They laughed, because Fenn was a vegetarian and so now Rosie was entirely vegetarian, too. When they forced her to sit at the table for dinner, she stared at the roast chicken as if they’d served up one of her bucket children on a platter, piled high with potatoes and carrots on the side. Elizabeth made her brown rice and beans, and she ate the big salads they had every night from Elizabeth’s garden, but Rosie must have lost close to ten pounds in the last six weeks. Five nights a week Elizabeth and James ate vegetarian, too—pasta, tofu, beans, cheese—but one night she and James happened to be eating a whole poached halibut with a spicy Thai ginger sauce. Rosie eyed it in despair. “What is with you tonight, Rosie?” James asked. “Nothing, just that I’m sitting here staring at what was once a living, sentient being. Like Rascal.” “A halibut?” James shouted. “You’re comparing Rascal to a halibut?” She leapt up from her seat. “I’m losing weight because I can’t stand to sit at this table watching you pick at dead beings!” She stomped off toward her room, turning just before she disappeared. “It’s so disgusting to me. It’s evil! I can’t live here anymore! I want to be emancipated.” James reached for Elizabeth’s hand. “It’s a delicious dead being, darling.” He took her hand here at the lagoon today, too, placing it back on her knee only to jot down notes. Low tide had revealed meals for every appetite, crabs, clams, mussels, fish, algae, seaweed, poultry, frogs, slime. Sometimes there were seals, hauled out in the mud, resting. This was their nursery, their bedroom. No one could swim all the time. “She’s doing better since she’s been with Fenn,” Elizabeth said out of nowhere. Birds hovered, swooped for food, flew in mysterious patterns; who knew what led birds where they went? James nodded. But within days of Elizabeth’s saying this, Rosie appeared to have taken up smoking. At first the smell was just in her hair and clothes, which she explained by saying she had been in a room with smokers, including Fenn and kids at the young people’s AA. Then Elizabeth caught a whiff on her breath, not that she and Rosie were often within breathing distance of each other, and when she asked, Rosie said, “God! I had like two puffs off Fenn’s cigarette. I’ve given up everything! So leave me alone.” There were already so many things on the table that Elizabeth let it go, and did not even mention it to James. He was so busy all the time. But a few days later she found some of Rosie’s socks mixed in with her own clean laundry, an
d when she took them to Rosie’s room, she found her window open and the air heavy with lemony freshener spray over a hint of cigarettes. She asked James what they should do—bribes, threats, graphics, tough love, more groundings? “What a great idea. I’m sure that will really make her want to quit.” “Shouldn’t we at least punish her? Or offer an incentive not to smoke?” “Elizabeth. Did your parents’ threats or bribes get you to not smoke when you were a teen?” She shook her head. “Are you kidding? They were always bumming them from me. But the thought of Rosie smoking freaks me out. The black lungs, wrinkly mouth—plus it makes people’s breath smell like cat boxes.” “Be sure to tell her that.” “Should we ask Rae to intervene? Or ask her to have the Sixth Day elders pray for Rosie? It couldn’t hurt, right?” “The only connection with a higher power that can help Rosie is Rosie’s own. She’s madly in love for the first time, and her boyfriend smokes. But he seems to be helping her stay clean—they’re going to meetings, right? That is a total lowercase miracle. Let’s back off the cigarettes for now.” That night Elizabeth began keeping a new secret from James. After dinner, Fenn had come to pick Rosie up for the young people’s meeting. He shook James’s and Elizabeth’s hands, and pretended to strangle Rascal on the sideboard. Elizabeth walked them out, on the pretext of heading to a women’s meeting in Ross. She followed them in her car from way behind, through town to his apartment. She sat in the car awhile but they didn’t come out. She noticed the binoculars from the trip to the lagoon, and would have used them to spy on Rosie and Fenn, if it hadn’t made her look crazy, especially to herself. The big fish would have had a field day with her: “Elizabeth is whacked.” She left a few minutes later. Elizabeth cruised slowly past the Parkade on her way to her meeting. There were only a few parked cars. Several older kids were near enough so she could see their piercings and tattoos, but not close enough for her to tell what the designs were, each unique, of course, to say that there was something different about each of them, something beautiful. In ragged jeans, ethnic shirts, frayed knit caps, and even one cape, they might have been the children of gypsies, from communal families who slept and wept and danced and sang together, instead of from nice suburban homes. Where else could they express all those inchoate feelings about their gypsy yearnings and the embedded sadness of life but here at the Parkade? They were smoking cigarettes, she could smell them through her partly opened window. She drove on. A block away, across from the movie theater, another group of kids had gathered, to smoke and yearn and sneer, mostly young women in scarves, coral and turquoise jewelry, torn lingerie. Elizabeth drove to her meeting, partly for cover, partly because her mind buckled with anxiety. The speaker at the meeting, a blonde woman in a fine tailored suit, shared how alcoholism had stolen her own childhood, and had now come back for her kid. She had tried everything she could think of to save him—giving him endless freedom, but mostly giving him endless consequences and no freedom, but neither had worked, and now he lived in his car. So she went to meetings, did not drink, swept her own side of the street, and released him to his higher power. He was a child of God, too. She said, “God does not have grandchildren.” Elizabeth smote her own forehead—she’d forgotten again that she was not Rosie’s higher power. The speaker noticed, and they exchanged smiles. Elizabeth went up afterward and thanked the woman for that line. She called Lank later. He was her expert in mutant teenage behavior. More than anyone she knew, Lank had seen the result of parents’ not setting clear boundaries—gifted teenagers going down the tubes, parents’ lives and hearts destroyed. “What do I do?” she asked. “Do I give her freedom and a long leash, wait for her to blow it in a big enough way for me to use heavy artillery? Pray that she survive? Or do I try to rein her in and hope she finally stops?” As usual, he did not answer right away, but she felt him draw close. She shut her eyes and leaned over as if their shoulders could touch. Finally he said, “You’re doing the right thing, Elizabeth, asking people with experience to help you find your way. Rae swears by Anthony’s counseling, for the kid and the parents. My experience with kids who are into drugs and alcohol is that they will get high, until the consequences become intolerable. So the parent can create consequences, by taking everything away—freedom, computers, and so on—but then you have to endure the kid’s hatred of you. And besides, kids will find a way to score anyway. They’re like trapped rats.” “I know you mean that nicely,” Elizabeth said. They laughed quietly and returned to shared silence. She listened to his light breath, pictured his monk’s strawberry tonsure, the rainforest-mammal brown eyes. “When I was a teenager,” she said, “and I went out to drink with my friends, it was like we were slot cars on predetermined courses. We’d walk in the same old ruts and grooves every time, like it was preset, and they always led us to the same messes. But did it stop us? No way.” “It’s like a board game,” he replied, “the teenage doper equivalent of Chutes and Ladders, or Candy Land. Only they land on Whirly Head, or Grutty Bedroom, or Pool of Puke.” She laughed. “That’s great, Lank. Can I give it to James?” “Of course.” She sighed, and ran her hand through her hair. “But some kids land in the morgue or jail. And Rosie’s not going to fold up her board—she loves the game. She lives for it. And even when she puts a week or so together of clean time, that whole milieu, the Parkade, it’s like Velcro.” “But if she doesn’t pull out on her own, you may have to fold up the board for her.” “You mean by sending her away? I don’t think James and I could do that.” Lank was silent again, and this time she could not hear his breath. Then he said, “James could.” She knew Lank was right, and it angered her, and it was her one ace in the hole. At bedtime, she set a trap for Rosie. “Sweetheart,” she asked, undercover again, this time as a masseuse, “how was the meeting?” “We didn’t go. We went last night, but tonight we changed our minds at the last minute, made a fire at Fenn’s and read—I read a book of his while he paid bills. Berryman’s Dream Songs—he had it, can you believe it? James has the same book in his study.” She held up a tattered copy as proof. Elizabeth had loved those poems so much. She and Andrew had read them out loud to each other in bed exactly one lifetime ago. He would have adored this daughter of theirs. The next morning Rosie was so churlish at breakfast that Elizabeth wanted to scream. “I can’t believe you think it’s okay to eat like that,” Rosie said to James, sneering, as she walked past the table where he sat wolfing down his cereal. “I always eat this way, Rosie. Way too fast, like a rat, okay?” “It makes me sick,” she replied, pouring herself a cup of coffee. Elizabeth had wrapped an English muffin with peanut butter and jam in a paper towel for Rosie to eat on the way to school, and she stuffed this into her jacket pocket. “My mother hates it, too,” she sniped at James from the door, as if suddenly possessed. “It reminds her of her mother, eating bacon. She told me that once, when you first started going out.” “Jesus, Rosie,” said Elizabeth, looking contritely at James. It was true, it used to drive her crazy, and still could, but he waved it away. “That’s amazing you remember that from ten years ago, missy, since you can’t seem to remember to flush various products out of sight.” “That’s disgusting, James.” “It’s true. You’re almost eighteen and you didn’t flush last night.” “How do you know it wasn’t Mom?” “Because Mom flushes,” he replied. “Everything that has ever been inside her, except pee.” “You’re a pig, James.” She turned in fury to the counter, picked up a vegetarian sausage Elizabeth had made for breakfast, and flung it at James. “You hate life.” In a split second, James, with an oily bullet hole on his T-shirt, leapt up and grabbed her by the wrists, but she was bigger than he was, and just as strong, and she twisted away. “Eat your animal flesh, James. Go ahead. You’re like the trappers in San Francisco Bay, who picked off all the otters last century.” “I didn’t kill any otters,” Elizabeth offered weakly. “Yes you did, darling, remember?” James said. “That one time. Remember?” “Don’t mock me!” Rosie thundered. “Your whole selfish generation has helped kill off this planet!” She stormed out the door. “Co
me home after school, you’re grounded,” James shouted, but the door had already slammed. It was doubtful she’d heard. Then the door opened again, and she shouted, “It was easy to kill otters, because they trusted humans! How does that make you feel?” Then the door slammed again. He came to sit beside his wife at the table. “God almighty, Bertha,” he said. “Jesus. She’s gone nuts again. Just like that.” She snapped her fingers. “We need help,” he said. She sat with her chin on her chest, eyes closed. James sighed, shook his head, and lifted her chin with one finger. “It’s good that we’re getting the otter thing out in the open, baby. If you don’t get it out, you can’t let it go.” They sat holding hands at the table. Rascal came in, yowling for food. James got up to feed him. “Look at poor innocent me,” he told the cat. “I was eating muesli!” Several days later, Elizabeth and Lank drove out to the lagoon. They sat on the bank where she and James had hiked a week before, not far from Lank’s favorite barbecued-oyster joint. James was going to meet them here and treat them to lunch, in exchange for letting him steal their observations. Lank and Rae were on a new diet, mostly seafood, vegetables, and fruit. His face, shaded by a Giants cap, was wider than when she’d last seen him, fat, fair, and open as the man in the moon’s. “Lank?” Elizabeth said. “Do you believe in evil?” The tide was high today. A thousand birds flew overhead squalling, gulls and terns tracing the shape of the sky, the dome, the globe, swooping for food, frogs and crustaceans and worms. “You mean outside of our addictions, puritan guilt, projections, domination, and generally despicable behavior? You mean like a force? The Big Bad? You mean like Henry Kissinger?” “Yeah. Like a grim force loose in the world.” Lank thought this over. “You mean besides the depravity of human will?” Elizabeth nodded. “Some sort of dark intelligence that’s pitted against God, and goodness?” She nodded again. Lank handed her the binoculars. “You mean like—” Elizabeth laughed and jabbed him with an elbow. “Nah. Not really. If I say Rae does, will you think she’s a wing-nut, like Oral Roberts, and get a new best friend?” Elizabeth nodded. “I know she thinks the drug trade is evil,” he said. “But we haven’t lost her entirely. She’s not about sulfur and rats, or Al Pacino as Satan. Yet.” “But you don’t believe.” “No. I believe in extremely sick people. I believe in extreme childhood abuse that leads to sociopathic adults. I believe in loose screws.” “I feel that dark forces are around the kids now, in this town and in their minds, and in the world. Lank, did you know Rosie smokes?” “God, I hope you haven’t said anything to her about it,” Lank said. “Why?” “Look, I’m a high school teacher. And rule one is, Any idea which comes from the parents must be resisted.” “I keep forgetting that.” “Oh, sure. My parents used to send me helpful things from Reader’s Digest like ‘I Am Joe’s Lung.’ That alone added seven years to my smoking.” The lagoon smelled so much sweeter at high tide, less gucky and fecund, less like frogs. It smelled of fresh nutrients, a salad bar for crustaceans. Later James scribbled down everything they said on his paper placemat at the Oyster Corral. Lank said, “The fish travel in clumps, the birds fly overhead in clumps—as above, so below.” Elizabeth gazed at Lank’s peaceful face as James scrawled away. Lank had taken off his cap, and the sun poured through the window above the beach directly onto his head. His thin red hair caught the light, like saffron threads in glass, just as it must have when he was a baby. They had all been heavy smokers once, and all considered quitting to be the hardest thing they’d ever done. James and Lank agreed that the more parents tried to get their kids to quit, the longer the kids would smoke. Elizabeth thought about all the ways she could try to persuade Rosie to quit, and started to offer her ideas, but James interrupted. “No, darling, Lank is around teenagers all the time. Listen to what he says.” “I think I’m right about this, Elizabeth. Helpful parents get in the way almost all the time, even when they’re right—especially when they are right.” “I wonder what Rae would say.” Elizabeth sounded mournful. “I already know the answer,” Lank said. “I actually asked her once what Jesus would do about my students who smoke, because at one of the reunions at my school, there was a woman who had early-stage emphysema. Rae said he would have held his tongue. That Mary had one very stressful encounter with him when he was an adolescent. It’s when he gets lost one day, for a long time, and she and Joseph finally find him in the temple. They do not beat him senseless. Mary just gives him the stink-eye, and asks, quietly, ‘What the fuck?’ ” “Rae didn’t say that!” “She did!” Lank replied. “Then Mary gets him back home asap.” James wrote this on his placemat. “Seriously. She doesn’t order him to never return to the temple, or he would have snuck back the first chance he got.” “Let’s enforce the drug laws at our house, Elizabeth. And release her to her own higher power when it comes to smoking, grades, and so on.” “But if someone had stopped that high school girl from smoking, she wouldn’t have emphysema now.” Still, she wondered whether the men were right. Lunch was lovely—calm, fun, delicious, the best she had felt in a while. But half an hour after she got home, she left a message for Robert Tobias on his answering machine. He called back after dinner, and Elizabeth heard Rosie pick up the extension. “Rosie, hang up,” Elizabeth told her. “Hi, Robert.” She heard a click, and then silence. “Thanks for returning my call.” And then Rosie burst in on the phone. “My mother called you?” she shouted. “You traitor, Mom. Mata Hari.” “Hang up, God damn it.” Rosie hung up loudly. Elizabeth shook her head: he must think they were crazy. “Sorry, Robert.” “That’s okay,” he said, but he sounded skeptical, as if expecting gunfire to ring out. “I called because I’m a bit worried about Rosie, and wanted to make sure she’s doing okay in chemistry.” “To tell you the truth, she isn’t the pistol she was last semester. Her work is definitely off. How much detail do you want? She does fine with the warm-up problems most days, but doesn’t join in the review of the content we’ve been studying in the textbook, or the current event in science we’re discussing. Her lab partner is carrying more than his share of the work. She seems distracted, and vaguely annoyed.” “That’s what I was afraid of.” “She’s a brilliant girl, but she’s been late a few times with her homework.” Elizabeth hesitated before asking, “Can she still get an A, though?” “She can get a B-plus for the quarter if and only if she aces the big test next week.” “God. What a difference a summer makes.” “It’s probably senioritis. Tell her to get her butt in gear. A B-plus shouldn’t hurt her on her college apps.” “Okay.” “Is there anything else?” She almost told him about Rosie’s crush, but she had already done enough damage. Rosie would be livid. “No,” Elizabeth said. “That’s all.” After she hung up, she knocked on her own forehead. Then she went down the hall and knocked on Rosie’s door. Silence. Then a long-drawn-out “God,” followed by a sharp “What?” Elizabeth gingerly let herself in. “Darling, I’m sorry I did that behind your back. I was worried. I’m your mom and I’m paid to be anxious. I was afraid you weren’t even getting an A-minus or B-plus, but he said you will if you do well on next week’s test.” “I already knew that, Mommy, and it’s humiliating that you called.” Rosie stared at her from bed. “I’m happier than I’ve ever been. I’m doing fine in school. I gave you a clean urine test. I’m going to meetings with Fenn. Will you please be a little happy for me?” Elizabeth picked at her cuticles and nodded. “I’m a good kid, Mom.” Elizabeth so wanted to believe her. Rosie was her outside heart. Elizabeth followed them to a meeting again two days later, and after they went inside, she raised her fist in victory. But the next afternoon, when she picked up Rosie for a dentist’s appointment, she swore she could smell a hint of marijuana when Rosie slid inside the car. And Rosie went nuts when she mentioned it: “Sniffer dog! Let’s go straight home so you can test me.” Elizabeth talked her down, and Rosie got her teeth cleaned, and when Elizabeth sent her into the bathroom with a piss test that night, it came out clean. Two days later, it happened again: Elizabeth could have sworn she detected the smell of burnt grass in Rosie’s bedroom. Rosie was
on the bed, cramming for her chem test, clear-eyed and minty, and watched Elizabeth with pity as she stopped to sniff the air like a squirrel dog. And again, clean urine. This time in the bathroom, holding a cup with her daughter’s no-longer-warm pee, the dipstick negative for everything, Elizabeth thought she smelled disinfectant, and felt a pang of fear. She sniffed around for the source. She went to get James, who was stretched out on the couch with his New Yorker. “Please don’t make me get up,” he begged. “It’s not unusual to smell disinfectant in a bathroom. Even in ours.” She let it go, although she checked out the medicine cabinet, and under the sink—for what, she did not know. Nothing was out of place. She wondered again if she was going mad. If she wasn’t, it meant Rosie was lying. Elizabeth’s mind was better than it had been in the past, still troubled and obsessed but not desperately so. It may have had to do with her going to extra meetings, now that she went at least once more a week after spying on Rosie. It might be that she was finally on the right medications. But for perhaps the first time in her life, she now had the conviction that when she thought something was going on, it was. The next time, before letting Rosie go inside the bathroom with her plastic cup, she frisked her daughter’s pockets. Rosie sneered at her. “You’re getting worse, Mama. Next you’ll want to do a cavity search, and you’ll still find nothing. Poor Mommy.” When Rosie brought home a B on the chemistry test, Elizabeth tried to be reasonable about the end of a straight-A transcript, surely not the end of the world. But when she searched for and found Rosie’s journal and discovered the sporadic entries were in French, her first reaction was panic. Then she felt a stab of embarrassment and hurt feelings, which turned into slightly amused admiration. Rosie had trumped her. So one day Elizabeth called Adelle Marchaux, who said Rosie was getting an A, and behaving well, except when she and Alice were too silly. “Elles se comportent commes des enfants,” Adelle trilled with mock annoyance: they behaved like children. Then Elizabeth rechecked the shelves, the bathroom drawers, Rosie’s room. Nothing but her birth control pills and matches—no papers, pipes, prescription drugs. Then she called Anthony at Sixth Day Prez. He made time for her to come in. He had gained weight but was still what Lank had once dubbed homely-lovely. His coffee-colored skin had a few more wrinkles, his smooth white hair was thinning, and his eyes were tired behind horn-rimmed glasses. He hugged Elizabeth so fervently in a bear hug that she was afraid he would lift her off the ground and hurt his back, or hers. “You’ve created a marvelous, magical child,” he enthused, sweeping his arm around the cluttered kumbaya office, full of art, candles, poems, batik. “Half of the art on these walls was made by our children under her guidance this summer.” A flock of origami doves flew at various levels from his ceiling, clumsy ceramic crosses hung from the walls, along with a banner of finger-painted palm prints. “Tell me what brings you here,” he said finally, looking at Elizabeth, and although she had confided in him before, she let everything pour out this time—the pills they had found in the summer, and the papers and pipes and the alcohol, and the Visine, the smell of weed, and the times they’d found out she had gone to a rave with Alice, the endless layers of lies and half-truths, footprints in the flower bed beneath her bedroom window, her getting busted at the party on the hill, the recently imposed twenty-eight-day test period, and the clean urine tests. Anthony steepled his fingers, nodding until she was done. She was going to confess that she had trailed Fenn and Rosie to some meetings, but really, this made her look irrational. As Anthony began to speak, Elizabeth interrupted: “I do smell dope, Anthony. She says she’s clean and going to meetings, but I tell you—I get whiffs of it.” He smiled, sad and kind. “I believe you.” She felt a flush of relief. “Let me ask you a question. Who would you say is running the show?” The question caught her off guard, and she laughed ruefully. “James would say she is. She’s almost never grounded these days. She’s mouthy, and we just let it go.” “And who would you say?” “I’m not sure. It depends. Maybe we’re too concerned with her happiness. We walk around on eggshells. If she’s sweet and calm, then we can be, too.” “Ching ching,” Anthony rang out. “Like Reagan trickle-down, right?” “Right. Just like it was in my family.” “Ching ching,” he said again. She tried not to laugh. It reminded her of the adding machine her father had used with such misery at tax time, the mechanical sounds punching through the silence, the crunch when the handle was pulled, the bell to announce a sum total. But what was the sum total here? “Ching ching, what?” she asked. One of Anthony’s front teeth was perpendicular to the others, as if someone had turned it ninety degrees before the pink clay of his gums had set. “This is a very common pattern, where, if a certain person in the family seems to be okay, the entire family can function. Look,” he added, “it’s hard, the hardest thing you will ever do, to live with a druggy teenager. I’ve been through it.” “She gets a four-point-two average, because she gets A’s in AP classes, or did until this semester. . . .” “Oh, so she’s not druggy? Then I’m not clear on why you are here.” “Okay. She has been druggy. Definitely.” Elizabeth clasped one hand to her chest. “Oh my God!” Her eyes filled with tears. “I don’t think I’ve ever said that out loud. But you made her sound like Janis Joplin. And the thing is, she’s going to meetings, and seems to be staying clean.” “Seems to be. But you still smell dope, right? Let me ask you something else: Is she sexually active?” Elizabeth nodded, and told him about what the other girls did at parties last year, and how she wasn’t a virgin, and now was madly crazy in love with Fenn. “And they’re using condoms?” “Yeah, she’s got boxes. She could open a 7-Eleven. Plus, she’s on the pill, and she swears they use condoms.” “But you’ve caught her lying how many times?” Elizabeth nodded slowly. “That’s a good point.” “So let’s assume she is having unprotected sex, and therefore she’s exposed to whomever he’s had sex with in the last six months. And can we assume that he is monogamous now?” Elizabeth nodded. “Oh, yeah—they are both totally in love with each other.” “And all the women he’s slept with in the last six months were clean of AIDS, STDs, and hep C. What about the ones he slept with in the days before Rosie, who wouldn’t have shown up yet? And another thing—we know that he’s never used needles?” Elizabeth’s mind was a fever dream of all the dirty girls Fenn had slept with, girls he would slip out the back door when Rosie was climbing his steps. Then she switched to thinking about Rosie in a coma in a hospital, waiting for a new liver. “So this is already a huge breakthrough day for you, Elizabeth, having this discussion. Facing these things head-on, these considerations.” She was glad to hear that, because she felt frantic despair. Anthony peered at her from underneath his brows, as if looking at a crying child. “Now, let me ask you. Under your care, she’s done booze, Ecstasy, Valium, Percocet, smoked joints laced with angel dust, and now is having unsafe sex and smoking cigarettes. My question is, When does she turn eighteen?” “Not for a few months.” Someone knocked on Anthony’s door. “Five minutes,” he called. “I’m very proud of you, Elizabeth. This has taken a lot of courage. Now let me tell you a few true things. It is your house, and you are the queen of that house, and you get to make the rules. She is a minor, and you get to demand that she not use any drugs at all, including nicotine. You are responsible for keeping her alive. Rosie needs to play by your rules, and if she simply can’t, you need to consider sending her away.” Elizabeth gasped involuntarily—how had the conversation escalated to this? “Nicotine is lethal, and one of the most addictive drugs. Is it still okay for you that she uses it? I ask this of all parents who come: Are you willing to see what you are seeing, and to know what you know? Are you willing to impose strict consequences and stick to them? If you think she is faking urine tests, do you still let her drive? And if so, who is the crazy person here?” There was silence in the room while this registered. Elizabeth stood to leave. “One more question,” he said, raising a finger theatrically in the air. “No, no, please, I can’t take it,” she said. “Can you forgive yourself for the mistakes you’
ve made so far—all the times you dishonored yourself by not trusting your own gut and instincts?” Elizabeth thought for a minute. “Can I get back to you on that?” They exchanged sad smiles. “Can I come back next week? I need this.” “You can come in later today if you need to. But I have to go now.” Afterward she sat in the sun on the front steps of the church, staring into her lap, beginning in her head sentences she intended to say to James that she didn’t finish. She scribbled down as much of the conversation as she could remember, tearing up as she wrote Anthony’s words about needing to consider sending Rosie away. Then she waved away the very idea, like smoke. Never. She hugged her knees to her chest, wiped her nose on the sleeve of her blouse. She couldn’t sort things out. Anthony said no smoking at all, and this made sense, while Lank said children had to run for their lives when you laid down the law, and that also rang true to her own experience. She got up and trudged to her car. Rosie arrived home that night before dinnertime, clear-eyed and friendly, as if nothing had happened at breakfast. Elizabeth was caramelizing onions to pour over wild rice, and when Rosie came to watch, they ran through the litany—how was school, fine; where’ve you been, studying at Alice’s house; are you and Fenn going to a meeting tonight, probably; how many clean days do you have now, eighteen. “Wow!” Elizabeth exclaimed. “Fantastic.” Rosie shuffled, at once pleased with herself and cool. Then Elizabeth smelled something alien and awful on Rosie’s breath, like sauerkraut. She said, “Pew!” and stepped back. “What have you been drinking?” Rosie burst out laughing, relieved. “Rejuvelac! At Alice’s. Do you even know what that is? It’s this nasty fermented shit that Alice and her mother swear by—for digestion and energy. I’m going to go brush my teeth.” “Is it alcoholic, though?” Elizabeth tried to appear unperturbed. “Of course not. It’s just a nasty hippie raw-food fluid.” Elizabeth smiled and stirred the onions. They smelled of butter and burnt sugar, but the smell of Rosie’s breath lingered in her nostrils after Rosie left the room. It was the smell of rot. The word “ergot” came into her head, and later, at the dinner table, she asked James about it. “What was it again?” “Some sort of grain fungus,” he told her. “I associate it with the Middle Ages, for some reason, or the Salem witch trials. It grew on rye that had gotten damp, and hungry humans consumed it, despite the taste, and everyone went crazy, and then died.” Rosie studied him, impressed. “You’re like a zoo key, James.” He doffed an invisible hat, and everyone laughed and devoured dinner. But peace did not last the night. Before bed, Elizabeth went into Rosie’s room with a plastic cup and asked her to go with her to the bathroom. Rosie protested the timing, but got up, releasing sighs and clicks of annoyance, and pushed past Elizabeth in the doorway. She headed down the hall to her parents’ bathroom. Elizabeth stopped. “Let’s use yours tonight, mix things up.” Rosie stopped but did not look back at her. “I’m already practically there.” Elizabeth felt a flicker of alarm but let it go. “What ev,” she said, mimicking Alice to lighten the mood, but Rosie pressed on, and almost had the door closed before Elizabeth stuck her foot in. Rosie whirled around. “What the hell? I’m not going to pee into a cup with you here, sitting on the side of the tub like a cop.” When she feinted left, as if about to leave, Elizabeth stepped in front of her and took her by the wrists. The air sparked. Silence, as before a storm, or after a slammed door. “Now,” said Elizabeth, staring her down but afraid. Rosie flung the cup into the tub. Elizabeth retrieved it, handed it back. Her daughter’s eyes were filled with anger and fear and tears of betrayal. Then she sneered with derision. She put the cup beside the toilet, wriggled out of her cut-offs, glared at her mother. “I hope you know what you’re doing,” she said, and the ugliness of the tone sent a chill through Elizabeth. Rosie pulled down her thong as she lowered herself to the toilet seat. Elizabeth saw a flash of dark hair and saw Rosie reach for the cup, but there was only silence. “I can’t go,” she said, scornfully. “I peed about five minutes ago.” She started to stand. “Uh-uh,” said Elizabeth. After what seemed like a long time, Rosie sat back down. Then she hung her head and looked over, solicitous. “Mommy,” she said. “Please just let me pee in peace.” They looked at each other a moment, and Elizabeth tried to channel Anthony. She felt she should not leave, but after a moment she did, and waited outside the door like a butler. When Rosie came out a few minutes later, she handed her a scant cup of urine. The green test strip on the outside of the plastic cup tested ninety-eight degrees. It was fresh and warm, and Elizabeth sat down on the toilet, tipped the cup so it covered the base of the stick, and waited five minutes. The five tiny windows each showed a single pink line, which meant negative. But Rosie definitely had been trying to hide something: Elizabeth squinted at the faint pink lines again, mulling it over. She felt efficient and suspicious at first, like a crime scene detective, then confused, deep in her animal being. Rosie asked if she could spend Friday night at Fenn’s. “Of course not,” said James. “You force us to sneak around like common criminals.” “Oh, Rosie,” he said. “That’s the nature of teenage love. Deal with it. You’ve got it good. As long as you keep producing clean urine, we’ll let you use the car, and we’ll keep the midnight weekend curfew in place.” “You’re so harshing me,” Rosie bellowed, bursting into tears. “What’s my reward for trying so hard to do well these days?” She smashed her fist against the wall. Elizabeth trembled. “What a jerk,” James said, utterly without sympathy. “Let’s go bathe in the moonlight while she stews in her own juices. That would make Anthony happy.” Rosie didn’t speak to them again that day, but she was friendly by dinner the next night. She worked on her homework until late. She spent Friday evening with Fenn and was home by curfew, then spent the day and evening with him on Saturday and got home only five minutes late. Elizabeth heard her get up twice in the night, once to pee, once to bang around in the kitchen. On Sunday both of them slept in. James brought Elizabeth café au lait in bed, along with The New York Times, and crawled in beside her to read. “Thank you, love,” she said. “I have ulterior motives,” he said. “I need you to read my piece later.” She raised the cracked blue bowl of hot pearly-white coffee to her lips, drinking deeply. Early that afternoon, Elizabeth went out to read on the front steps, under a bright cheerful flag of blue sky. She could see from where she sat that there were no footsteps in the dirt outside Rosie’s window, no flowers crushed in the dark, and she wondered as she often did how Jody was doing. She was glad that Jody had left town, even as she hoped that she was okay. She reached for the pencil tucked behind her ear and began James’s story, “The Wild Lagoon,” looking for things she and Lank had said that wonderful afternoon. The best thing of all was pure James: “Like Arthur Murray dance steps in the muck at low tide, you see a squirt from a clam when you put down your left foot, and when you lower your right, a crab raises itself and brandishes its pincer at you, menacing, absurd, and magnificent.” She corrected typos, made a few penciled suggestions. She was proud of this story. Before going back inside, she peered in the closed window at her long-sleeping daughter, her ropy curls fanned out over Raggedy Ann pillowcases. She still had the broad shoulders of an athlete, but her waist was as small as a child’s, dipping down like a valley between the hills of her breasts and her flanks. She was definitely thinner than usual, but this could be from falling in love, and with a vegetarian smoker, who had gotten her hooked on cigarettes, too. But when Rosie stirred, and the sheet at her neck fell down, her clavicle showed, white and skeletal. Elizabeth could only stare. She wanted to pound the glass, hard, with her fists against the window, crying out Rosie’s name, and then force- feed her milk shakes. She prayed to the speck of something she’d seen at the sweat lodge that wasn’t her, and then in desperation to Mount Tam, as the Miwok had, “Do something. Help, please.” But she was faking belief. She felt nothing. She tapped the glass, and her groggy daughter opened her eyes, saw her mother, turned to look at the clock, looked back, small smile, and they waved small barely perceptible waves, like spies. Rosie lay in bed awhile a
nd felt like she was dying. She and Fenn had taken ketamine the night before, and then a few sips of cough syrup to come down. She lay as still as she could, like when she was little, after her father had died, when she used to lie in bed and pretend she was dying, wearing a white Victorian nightie. She and Fenn knew all the drugs that either didn’t show up in over-the-counter drug tests, or were easily masked, the way the bleach in the eardrops bottle kept masking the THC in her system. There were other great products out there that totally flushed toxins out of your urine, but only for five hours, and she hadn’t quite figured out her mother’s test schedule. Definitely one weekend morning, but then maybe once midweek, although her mom hated to send her off to school in a bad state. “Keeps a girl on her toes,” she had said to Fenn. Her parents would be very down on ketamine, Special K, because all the literature said it was a horse tranquilizer, but it was really a perfectly safe drug. It was lovely, or at least the stuff Fenn’s connection in San Francisco gave them was fine. Fenn’s guy had a nurse he bought from, so it was the good stuff, pharmaceutically pure. It was both deeply relaxing and beautifully hallucinatory, like good mushrooms, like a waking dream. Also, twice they took LSD in the low golden hills, sitting in hippie Buddhist poses, lying together gazing into each other’s eyes, feeding each other sections of orange; the afternoon in bed, naked but not having sex, warm and close as she’d ever been with another human being; and then at sunset, on the steps where it had all begun for them, under the crescent of moon. Rosie was genuinely glad to see that her mother was in less pain since she had started testing negative for everything. She loved her mother and hated that she suffered so. Everyone was more relaxed. Dinners were calmer now, always based on food from Elizabeth’s field trips with Rae to the farmers’ market. Then she often got to go to a meeting with Fenn, or she would pretend to, and would stay up a little later doing homework. She and James and Elizabeth talked about regular old things at the dinner table. James asked her stuff that he needed for his stories, and this made him grateful, and she loved doing this for him. Like the other night he had demanded to know in his agitated, joking James way how it could be true that a feather and a coin dropped from the Transamerica pyramid would land at the same time. She felt like he was treating her like they were equals. “Here’s my best shot and simplest answer,” she began, and tried to explain that gravity acts the same on everything no matter what its mass. “Theoretically,” James qualified. Rosie shook her head: Sorry, Charlie. James put down his fork and reached for his notebook. You’re not going to like this, she warned him, but as far as she knew, it was something that was just accepted, based on lots of experiments and observations. The reason a feather and a penny fell at different rates was wind resistance. The feather was not allowed to accelerate to its full potential of approximately ten meters per second per second, which was the acceleration of any falling mass in a vacuum—that is, a place where there was no air resistance. “Slow down,” James cried out, and her mother smiled. Rosie had to repeat it. When he finally caught up, she continued. The lighter an object was, and the wider its mass was distributed, the more it was affected by air resistance. James stared at her with amazement when she paused. “I’m sorry my explanation is so shallow, but I guess I don’t really get it, either,” she added, which made them all laugh. “It was the opposite of shallow,” her mother said. Rosie was on a roll. “It does all seem very counterintuitive, though, right?” Her parents both nodded, and James even had to write that phrase down, too. It was sort of pathetic. Her parents’ memories were going, tearing like fishing nets. She wanted them to feel better about themselves, so they could leave her alone. “It’s frustrating,” she added compassionately, “how much must just be accepted for the explanation to make sense.” All day Sunday she felt so poorly that she didn’t even want to get together with Fenn; they talked on the phone twice. He didn’t feel great, either, but he was still going out to Stinson to surf. “Want to go with?” he asked, and she almost said yes; just to watch him from the shore was heaven. Yet she sensed that he was only being nice by inviting her, and in the end she said no, she needed to catch up on homework. Elizabeth babied her with trays of healthy food, but Rosie’s mind felt whipped, jangly. Though she wished she could make her mother happy, she wanted to be happy, too, happy and free—was that so crazy a desire? She wanted to be with Fenn every minute she could, wanted to be out in the world, mostly wanted to be done with high school. She took a nap with Rascal and then such a long shower that she used up all the hot water and made James be pissy and have an episode. She felt like she was always trying to keep six plates spinning in the air, trying to keep her stories straight, trying to keep everyone happy. No wonder she was tired all the time. Monday morning she felt somewhat better. Then her mother had to go and give her a piss test. “I took one a few days ago,” she said, “and it’s a Monday. We never do this on Mondays, so I can start the week out on a positive note.” But her mother held firm, and marched her into Rosie’s own bathroom, as if to trip her up. Thank God she had finally remembered to put a cosmetic bottle with bleach in it among her makeup and lotions. She closed the door wearily and went to the toilet. You sort of had to laugh about the whole thing—how dogged and determined her mother was, like a little child trying to make letters. She peed into the cup, reached for the Clinique toner bottle, and poured a few drops into the urine. “You almost done in there?” Rosie yawned and wiped herself, put the bottle back, washed her hands. “Here you go, Mama,” she said, handing her the plastic cup. She watched Elizabeth check the temperature strip, and was heading back to her bedroom to get ready for school when something stopped her in her tracks: her mother was sniffing loudly, like a cartoon character, only not funny. Rosie turned around to find her mother’s nose deep in the plastic cup. Elizabeth looked up, wild-eyed, terrified. “Do I smell bleach?” she asked, and smelled it again. “Rosie! Is there bleach in this pee?”