by Anne Lamott
They snuggled in the kitchen. Sunshine washed in through the windows. Ella described a long dream about horses, and Mattie listened to the rills in the stream of her daughter’s words, and then they went to find her glasses so she could practice reading.
• • •
Mattie and Ella stood in the garden staring at the six-foot stretch of fence that now lay nearly flat on the ground. Everything was blooming, an absurdity of blossoms. Some were delicate and demure and Asian, others like popcorn, and there was an apricot tree with testosterone near the rotted planks of the original fence.
Mattie used to stand on the two-by-fours near the base of the fence when she was little, peeking over at the life of the street, dogs walking by as if on the way to work, children on foot or bike, cars and strangers and fire trucks. Now anyone nearby could see her standing there, and she felt as if her pants had fallen to the ground.
She always felt guilty when she began a construction project with Daniel. He was like a practice husband to her: this is what it would be like to have someone who would help you when things broke down, someone to go to the movies with, someone to whom you could hand off the plates you had just washed for a quick rinse and stacking in the dish rack. This is what it would feel like to sit at church with a partner, to go for a drive and have someone besides the children with whom to talk.
Pauline lay on the couch at home much of the time now, according to Daniel, resting her back, sleepy from a new antidepressant. One Sunday when Mattie had stopped by to pick Daniel up for church, Pauline came into the living room in her bathrobe, sleepy and sexy and insolent, and Daniel told Mattie that he’d be staying home today. He was sorry he hadn’t called and saved her the trip. Pauline said he should go anyway.
“Oh, no, I want to be with you,” he said.
“Daniel, I want you to go, don’t you understand?” she said sharply.
Daniel looked crushed. Pauline hung her head. Mattie felt unhappiness flowing between them like an air current, and was ashamed to find her own mood soaring.
“You should do whatever you want,” Pauline told him. “Stay, if you want to. I’m going to go lie down.” She turned and limped back to the bedroom.
Daniel looked blank. Mattie held her breath, desperately wanting him to come with her. “Can I still go with you?” he asked.
“Yes, of course.”
He tore around getting ready, looking for his glasses, ironing a shirt. Then he grabbed his worn Bible, and they walked to the car together.
• • •
Pauline was making nice when they went to the movies together that night. This put Mattie in an extremely sour mood. She and the kids had been late picking up Daniel and Pauline, because Harry would not wear anything over his T-shirt, although the night was cold, and it was hard for Mattie to stop trying to goad him or jerk him, because she was freezing. Pauline stood up for Harry when Mattie tried to blame him for their lateness. She said, “Whether Harry wants a sweater or not is really none of your business. He’s a big boy now,” and Harry sighed with gratitude. Ella had dressed up in her parka with a furry hood.
Mattie wanted to grab Pauline by the throat, but she settled for two boxes of bonbons. She sat with Ella on one side, Pauline on the other. Daniel sat on the other side of Pauline. Mattie kept herself from leaning across Pauline to talk to Daniel all through the movie, and comforted herself with the knowledge that they could talk later, in the car. She tried to lose herself in the movie, about a little girl on a farm and her fierce, loving old grandmother, all earth force and hardwood and velvet. All of a sudden Mattie sensed motion, and looked around to see Pauline turning in her seat, beaming at her. Mattie smiled and went back to watching the movie, but ten minutes later, she felt more ducking and bobbing, and looked over to discover Pauline grinning at her again, in an odd combination of threatening and submissive expressions. Stop looking at me, Mattie wanted to cry—why are you looking at me! She pulled her shoulders in more closely and glared at the screen. More ducking, bobbing, and Pauline’s little head up too close again, covering her mouth as if she’d made a faux pas, a tiny belch. This time Mattie refused to look back. She moved imperceptibly closer to Ella and stared at the screen while Pauline stared at her.
This went on for more than an hour, Mattie trying to hide in the magic of the movie, Pauline tapping shyly at the sides, wanting in. Mattie, trying not to be penetrated, missed much of the movie.
• • •
“She is so annoying,” Mattie complained to Angela on the phone that night, after putting the children to bed.
“Oh, boy. How does Daniel react?”
“I couldn’t see him. God. I am so lonely that I’m going to vomit. I’m never going to have a boyfriend. How do you find people to date? I don’t even have the right underwear. It’s all hopeless.”
“You listen here,” Angela replied. “God is about to put a guy onto your conveyor belt. He’s assembling him right now, doing a complete workup on him. You’re going to be doing errands, and this guy is going to emerge from the conveyor belt of the luggage bin. And you just have to lift him up like a duffel bag. And he’ll be single, and available.”
“Why does Daniel love her? And why was I mean to her tonight?”
“She’s so invasive. It’s like some simultaneous need for revenge and connection, like Isa getting close enough to stick the knife in. Then saying, ‘Look how close we are now!’”
• • •
Outside, the day was balmy and crisp and sparkling, and inside, church seemed warm and muscular as a heart. During the first hymn, she felt the weight of the choir lift her, carry her. She was sitting, as usual, between Lewis and Daniel. Lewis looked older now, but so much soul shone through his tiredness it didn’t really matter. He was as excited as a birthday boy because the pastor had asked him to give the children’s sermon on the Gloria Patri. Lewis was using a walker today, and he wore a black suit and blue shirt for the occasion. After confession, the pastor held his hand out toward him, as if inviting him to dance. Lewis made his way to the front, smacking his walker on the floor with every step. He stood before the congregation with his brown face held upward, as if being inspected by a mother with a washcloth.
He appeared to have fallen asleep standing. The children fidgeted in their chairs. After a moment, he addressed the semicircle of children. “Glory!”
They looked at him nervously.
“Say that with me: Glory! That’s what we’re here to say.”
“Glory,” the children whispered.
He began to sing the Gloria Patri, so slowly that Mattie held her breath. Each word echoed back into itself. The sound pierced her, got into her deepest places with oxygen, without the plink of piano or the distraction of the correct notes. Lewis sang loud and off-key. You could hear the roughness, and in the silence between notes you could hear a baby snoring in his mother’s arms. Lewis quavered on, and you could hear the elegance of dusty endings, an old man singing near a snoring baby boy.
• • •
Mattie had high hopes for the vernal equinox, and the new fence. The equinox was going to bring a man, and the fence would keep Nicky out.
One Friday, she and Daniel walked along the planks of the fence to where the rot stopped, then back to where the latch would be placed once there was healthy wood to attach it to; from where the fence had to end, to where it could begin, so they would know how many planks to buy. Daniel came over before dinner and dug the first hole, a foot deep, and then poured Quikrete on a board. Harry held the hose on it while Daniel stirred everything with a shovel. Then Harry held the post in place while Daniel poured in the Quikrete. They held the post while it set. They slapped five. Harry did a chicken dance of joy.
The next morning she and Daniel and Harry tore down the part of the fence that was going to be replaced. This immediately improved things—now there was air and light and view and space, instead of just collapse. When the debris was cleared away, the area to be framed became apparent. They
put in three more posts, and leveled them carefully.
Daniel showed Harry and Ella how to make sure the wood was straight, when the bubble rose to the center of the level. “Now that we know these posts are level and true, everything can be measured from them. Once you know where true is, it defines everything else that has to happen.”
He nailed in braces, one near the top of the posts, one near the bottom, to hold the two-by-fours they put in next. Then they hammered in the planks. Daniel hammered in the first two, and set Harry up with a hammer at the third. He arranged planks for Harry to nail in. He set Ella up at the first plank, so she could practice hammering. Daniel nailed in planks with a few manly strokes, while Mattie nailed with a girly rat-a-tat woodpecker style. Harry nailed angrily, Ella as if she were a holistic nurse and the fence needed a gentle energy treatment with her hammer. When they ran out of wood, they looked through the planks from the old fence. The salvageable ones filled the remaining space exactly.
After lunch, Daniel got out his power tools and put in a latch. He worked with such humility. Right after Mattie had moved into the house, she asked Nicky to come over one afternoon to shorten the legs on her bedside table. He swaggered in under his heavy belt of tools, all but tipping his hat, and flipped the little table over like a heifer he was about to brand.
Daniel’s work made a great fence, solid and true, with hilarious charm.
“If we had had to make a perfect fence,” Daniel said, “we would not have had to start with what we had on our hands, which was part of a fence to build on and not much money. But that’s what we did have to work with.”
• • •
“Today we arrested entropy,” she told Nicky when he happened to call that night. “We pushed it back fifteen feet.”
“Can I come see it?” he asked, and she tried to say no but after a moment said okay. She wanted to get laid, but she also wanted to lie in bed afterward and talk, about nothing in particular. He would hold her close, and he always made her laugh. The moon shone on the new wood, as they stood together admiring the fence she had helped build, to keep him out.
• • •
She kept praying for a man of her own. Some nights she lay in bed and imagined gazing into Daniel’s eyes. One night she even made out with the back of her hand, like a teenager. She remembered lines she loved from a T. S. Eliot poem: “I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope, / For hope would be hope for the wrong thing.” But still, she hoped. Sometimes when the phone rang she thought, Oh, maybe that’s him, a man the universe has selected, calling to introduce himself. But it was usually Isa, forgetting she had just called a few moments before.
• • •
Mattie did not want to be the parent to her parent, but who’d asked? You just did it, like you did the dishes all those years, because the dishes needed doing. She tried to bear witness to her mother’s decline as lovingly as she could. Some days went better than others.
Sometimes she could keep her heart open even when Isa was being mean and bossy. Other times she imagined running her mother down in the parking lot. When she felt like this, but acted humanely, it seemed to repair something inside herself. It gave her a sense of how she might have felt if she hadn’t had Isa for a mother. It was not facing what life dealt that made you crazy, but rather trying to set life straight where it was unstraightenable.
• • •
Isa came over one morning to watch the children while Mattie did errands. When Mattie returned, she found that Isa had apparently gone snooping in her desk. Isa held Neil’s letters up, like a reprimand. “Is that what you wanted?”
Mattie put her groceries away, turned from her mother. “I just want to know more about my dad.”
Isa sneered. “This is about Neil, not your father.”
“I just want to know the truth.”
Isa’s face was grim and cloudy. “Oh, you want a little truth?” she asked malevolently. Mattie wanted to run and hide in her bedroom, as she used to, when Isa looked at Alfred in that way, breathing hard like a bull. “Here’s a nice Neil story, Mattie. One year he taught at Squaw Valley at the writing conference, and he invited us along. Abby was with him. Neil brought her up to the mountains to get her away from bad influences, right? But he was the worst influence for miles. What a joke! He stood with your father and me on a balcony overlooking a barbecue, pointing to the women and girls he’d slept with so far that week. ‘I got her,’ he’d say. Then point to another. ‘And her. I may get her tonight.’ Your dad laughed, by the way.”
Mattie could not take her eyes off her mother, her sudden strength, her passion. “God, Mom,” she managed finally. “That’s pretty bad.”
“Want more truth? I can give you more. That awful Yvonne Lang, I loathed that woman. Why Neil ditched his first wife for that cow, I’ll never know. Now, Nancy was a real lady. She went to Smith. I don’t even think Yvonne went to junior college. She’s why Abby ran away.”
“Why?” Mattie’s voice broke like a little girl’s. She remembered Yvonne as the only adult in their circle who paid any attention to the children. “She was always kind to us kids.”
“She let herself go. All that ridiculous ethnic jewelry. She looked like a medicine man.” Isa moved forward in her chair as if she was about to stand but instead kept falling forward until she slid out of her chair, unconscious, onto the floor. Mattie ran to her side.
Isa awoke right away, and looked into Mattie’s frightened eyes. Mattie fussed, but Isa shushed her. “Just help me up, and give me a hand to my bed.”
“You’re at my house, Mom,” Mattie reminded her. Isa lay on the floor with her daughter crouched beside her, and looked at the floor as if she were an astronaut, and the air above the blue linoleum were outer space, rolling out in every direction as far as you could see.
• • •
The doctor told Isa that she was fine, it had just been a little spell, but she called Mattie later to say it was almost definitely a small stroke. She didn’t know what to try next. As it was, she ordered more tests, new medicine, but Isa had more episodes.
It was like watching her play Red Light, Green Light, moving forward until made to freeze for an instant. Each time she started again, there was less of her working. Her steps were more tentative. Gone was the stride of the bossy woman. Now as often as not she wanted to hold on to Mattie’s arm, and she moved much more slowly. One day she might seem her old self, the next day a version ten years older. The complaints never ceased, and the new theme was that Mattie and Al came to her house only to take her on errands; she never got to go anywhere nice with them. If they did something fun, they did it with each other. She was right to some extent: what made most outings fun was that Isa wasn’t there. So on the spur of the moment one Saturday, they decided to take her along with the kids to the beach.
Al had shown up at Mattie’s early that morning and announced that today was the day. They were going out to find Abby. Mattie resisted. “We’ll do it another day. I promised Mom I’d take her somewhere nice.”
“We’ll take her to the beach at the Cove instead,” Al insisted. “She can play with the kids. We’ll be close by. She doesn’t need to know what we’re up to. One of us can go into town to look for Abby. The other can stay behind and baby-sit Mom.”
• • •
The fog burned away before their eyes. Isa and the children began a secret project at the north end of the beach. Mattie and Al stood out of earshot. They walked along past heaps of seaweed deposited by the tide like pieces of wet and tangled fabric, fabulous after the rain, so many colors and textures that something inside Mattie’s soul wanted to sort them out, at least the lovely cream- and rose-colored ones, hang them up to dry, or lay them neatly in piles—let someone else deal with the dark, oily greens.
She had been surprised that morning to find the blue shoe still in the pocket of the jeans she was wearing when they built the fence, and she had been rubbing it ever since. It fit so perfectly in her fingers; she felt
for the slight rise of the laces. They could still see Isa and the children near a great rock, building a house of twigs and stones and seaweed.
Mattie was the first to notice what looked like a piece of driftwood in the surf ten feet from the shore, a blob caught in the random violence of the waves. Then a head, a bird’s head, lifted out of the water and was gone, lost, submerged. The bird’s wing rose a moment later, flapping.
“Look,” she said to Al. They stopped, and Al made a strangled cry, as if there were a person in the waters, but suddenly the bird was gone again. Nearby, sandpipers, gulls, and murres scrabbled and pecked for food in the sand. In the surf, the wing rose like the arm of a swimmer on his last few breaths, rose again, fell, and the bird was pushed closer to shore.
“Should we try to save it?” Al asked.
Mattie held her palms up. “I think we should sit down and be still.”
Eventually the bird washed onto the sand and the waves poured over its broken wings, marbled brown and gray and white. It was barely able to lift its head, sloe eyes full of exhaustion. It was dying, this was clear. All of its tail feathers were gone; it was a raggedy garbage bird whose body you’d find in the seaweed. The waves came back for it, washed it back into the surf.
“We have to try and save it,” Al said, now moving toward the bird.
“What, and take it to UC Med? See if they can put something back together, with enough pinions and thread?”
The bird was tossed with terrible force on the waves. “I can’t watch,” Al said, but he did. Mattie felt for the blue shoe in her pocket. She was sure of only one thing: the ocean smelled familiar to this bird; the ocean, the sand, and the sky were its home. She and Al would smell as comforting as wolves.
“Why shouldn’t we do something?” Al asked.
“Because there’s no fixing and there’s no saving, Al. There’s helping sometimes, but not this bird.”
Mattie looked out toward the horizon. The bird thrashed in the foam and spray near the shore. It flailed and flapped and made it to the shore like a broken toy, and then began to flop its way toward a heap of seaweed and bulbs.
