by Anne Lamott
Mattie sidled up to Al, who was spying on Noah through the space above the thrillers section. “Okay?” she whispered.
“He won’t open his mouth.”
She walked Al to the desk as if he were a child who needed help getting his first library card. “This is a great little place,” she whispered to Noah. He smiled.
• • •
She reported everything to Daniel, who dropped by for a visit that night. He listened without interrupting.
“Your brother has little goat feet?” he asked, and she nodded. He drew back, grimaced. She smiled.
“Like a dwarf?”
Mattie nodded vigorously.
Daniel pondered this. “Like little hooves?”
• • •
“I miss you,” William said when he called Mattie that evening. “Whatcha doing?”
“Oh, not much. Can you come over?” He did, and it was great to see him, to eat, and watch TV, and make love. She desperately wanted to tell him about Noah—but again, she didn’t. He always had gossip about people they’d seen at the store or the beach, who seemed like lovely, ordinary people. She held the secret of Noah in her pocket, like the blue shoe, or a live grenade.
• • •
At church one Sunday, during the Prayers of the People, Mattie said out loud, “I’m asking prayers for my mother, Isa, who seems to have something wrong with her mind. I’m asking prayers for my children, whose father is having another baby with his new wife. I’m asking prayers for me and my brother, that we can come to know God’s will. And I pray for a man named Noah.” She said his name in public for the first time, in the grave and tender silence of church.
• • •
Lee was starting to show. Mattie saw her whenever she dropped off the children. She’d become more beautiful as her belly expanded. She still had the fake burr, but it was growing fainter. One Saturday morning when Mattie dropped the kids off at Nicky and Lee’s, Ella clung to Mattie so tightly that Mattie had to pry her hands off her neck to set her down on the manicured lawn. “You’re a big girl now,” Isa would have scolded Mattie, if she, at five, had been so clingy; but anyone in his right mind could see that Ella was just a little girl. Alexander looked even more like Harry now. It was devastating to Mattie to see in another child the specific miracle of her son’s own face. It pierced her.
• • •
Isa no longer showered daily. She smelled like wild onions—another thing stolen from Mattie: her mother’s smell—African violets, tea, and almonds. Isa needed even more help now, four or five hours a week. Mattie and Al kept putting off dealing with it, though, hating to break the news to Isa, not to mention dreading the added expense. Lewis broached the topic with Mattie. He met her for a walk in front of The Sequoias. They went along the salt marsh, Lewis pushing his walker. “The good Lord will take care of Isa,” he said. “But we must help too. I have fifteen dollars a week to contribute. That will buy one hour. You and Al must pay for two each. I have taken this to the Lord in prayer, and I have received my answer—five more hours of assistance per week.” Mattie was amazed at his certainty and his initiative. His pants were flecked with food but his mind was unblemished. “Okay,” she said. There were wren tits singing from leafy branches, red-winged blackbirds everywhere.
They hired a woman named Mai to help around the apartment, clean, do laundry, be there when Isa showered in case she fell. Mattie felt as if she had a new baby, someone to keep clean and safe from falling: Isa was her eternity, scrolling back to the womb and beyond, scrolling forward into God knew how many years of decline.
• • •
William came over every couple of nights, and he and Mattie talked a few times every day. Still she did not tell him about Noah. She had been tempted to, but a caution inside her persuaded her to hold her tongue. It gave her a sense of power to withhold the information, and the secret, in turn, hardened her heart against William’s charms.
They pulled away from each other but didn’t discuss the idea of breaking up. He receded periodically, like a tide; she waited for his return. She preferred to be with Daniel. William had a certain hostility toward women. He ogled the young, Mattie began to notice, and made fun of older women. He was friends with many women he’d been involved with, and believed that this reflected well on him, but would say bad things about them to Mattie. He sometimes mocked their taste in music, or mentioned their sexual incompatibility, as if this reflected well on Mattie.
But Mattie liked having a boyfriend. She also liked not sleeping with Nicky. William filled the bed; he was a talisman against her ex-husband. She liked having someone to hold hands with at the movies. She and William liked the same books, and music. They shared the same liberal politics, although he fancied himself more of a radical than she because he didn’t even bother to vote. She liked talking with him on the phone. She liked obsessing less about Daniel. Maybe William didn’t have faith; maybe he didn’t have that deep visible soul, was not, when push came to shove, her soul mate, like Daniel, or Angela, or Al. Still, he was usually good company.
Pauline called one night to say she and Daniel were going to see Mark Morris, how about a double date?
On the night of the performance, Mattie got all dolled up in her fanciest vintage dress. With Daniel and Pauline she had arranged to meet William in San Rafael. He was standing under a streetlight outside the Double Rainbow ice cream shop, handsome in a black wool jacket and white shirt. Pauline gave a whoosh of appreciation when Mattie pointed him out, and Mattie felt a wave of happiness in having a good-looking boyfriend.
They ate near the Marines Memorial Theatre. Pauline’s skin glowed, and her hair was piled on top of her head, tendrils flowing out everywhere. “I love modern dance,” she said. “Alvin Ailey most of all. I love how those long-legged dancers carry the line with the least possible interference.”
“That’s a great way to put it,” said William. Daniel glanced at Mattie.
Pauline could seem so brilliant, so undepressed, Mattie thought. She watched her speak, noticed too how Daniel looked at her with pride. Glancing at William, she could see that he was mesmerized.
“Have you seen Mark Morris before?” Pauline asked.
“Never,” William admitted. “But I know he’s considered a genius.”
“He is. But prepare yourself. He’s—what’s the word, Daniel?”
“Elephantine?” Daniel said.
“Don’t be smart, darling.” Pauline turned back to William. “He’s a wild man. There are all kinds of body types you won’t have seen onstage before—stocky women, dark and muscular men running to fat, maybe one or two with long legs and high asses, going bald, in drag.”
“I can’t wait,” he said. “I’ve always wanted to see him.”
But when Mark Morris came out alone onstage for the first dance, with his swirly, curly hair and paunch, hammy legs with feet that managed to point, William drew his head close to Mattie and whispered, “Good Lord!” She tried to focus on the dance: I am what I am, Morris seemed to be saying, and I am going to share what I am, revel in it, and maybe then you will be able to revel in you too. William looked skeptical and appalled.
“I’m a bad boyfriend,” he said at the bar during intermission.
“No, no,” said Mattie, “you’re actually a good boyfriend.”
“I just love ballet,” he told Pauline. “So can you help me learn how to love Mark Morris?”
Pauline began speaking to William with showy passion. Daniel and Mattie ended up playing hangman at the bar. They exchanged secret glances, like bad kids. They drank cheap wine and she felt flirty. Maybe Pauline and William could fall in love, drink fine wine, and not believe in God together.
In bed with William that night, Mattie tumbled out with it: “Why isn’t it exhilarating to you that while everyone is usually so busy creeping around politely, being thin and healthy, cleaning up messes before anyone can see them, here’s Mark Morris celebrating messes and appetites and middle age and fat
butts?”
“Maybe those aren’t good things to celebrate,” he said. She felt stung.
He seemed so constrained, so neatly trimmed, someone who’d been doing topiary with his soul all his life. They lay in the dark, dozing off. He smelled to her like an old iron heating up on an ironing board.
• • •
When Mattie went to pick Isa up for dinner a few nights later, she found her lying on the floor of her apartment. Her pants were wet.
“Mom!” Mattie cried.
The children gathered around, and Harry, who’d seen police shows on TV, started shouting for people to give her air. He threw open the windows.
Isa sat up as if nothing out of the ordinary were going on. She refused to believe that she had fallen. It was simply that she had skipped lunch, and weakness had come over her, she explained. Mattie pulled her to her feet, and Isa went to look for her purse. “Mom!” said Mattie. “I don’t think we should go out. I think we should have some nice soup right here.” She knew that she was speaking slowly, as though talking to a half-wit. Isa pleaded, she’d been looking forward to going out all day. And so Mattie led her mother to the bathroom, purposeful, as she had once led her children to the toilet when they were potty training, and helped her wash and change into dry underpants and trousers.
At Denny’s, Isa ate dreamily, her pinkie in the air. From time to time she looked up and around at the children, hunched over their drawings, puzzled by their presence here as if Denny’s now let dogs sit on its banquettes. The circles of Isa’s mind were breaking free and floating away, like stages of a rocket dropping away on blastoff.
“Could we have a neurologist examine her?” Mattie asked Dr. Brodkey over the phone the next day.
“Yes,” she replied. “But I’d recommend that we put it off awhile. Once we open that door it’s hard to get it closed again entirely.”
“That door—what?—of having her diagnosed? Wouldn’t a CAT scan give you more information about what’s up? And what you could do to help her?”
“It’s an expensive procedure,” the doctor explained. “I’m not sure we can get it authorized.”
“But she was on the floor when I got there. She’s incontinent.”
“All right, then. Bring her to my office again. Let’s see what’s going on.”
At Dr. Brodkey’s office, Isa was bright and warm, answering every challenge tossed her way—counting backward from one hundred by sevens, remembering the words to the national anthem and the name of the doctor’s grandchild. By the time Mattie got her home and set out a simple dinner for her, Isa was all but speaking baby talk. Mattie put her in her easy chair in front of the TV, with a glass of cool water on the table beside her, the remote, her glasses, the phone, and some grapes to tide her over. Isa kept looking up at her as if she were a painting crookedly hung. “Is the thing with the—you know—the light in it working? Could you do the thing where you do it?”
After a brief interrogation, Mattie figured out that Isa wanted the TV on.
“I feel like we’re falling down the rabbit hole,” Mattie told Al the next time she saw him. “With Brodkey, she’s totally lucid, and with us, she’s like Shirley Temple on Quaaludes. I don’t know what’s real anymore. I think she’s usually the way she is around us—confused. It’s like the late, great Philip K. Dick said. ‘Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.’”
• • •
Mattie spent the weekend working with Daniel in the garden, planting tomatoes and building cages around them to keep the deer away. Pauline had gone off again, spending the weekend in the city at a film festival with friends. Daniel was distant, concentrating too hard.
“What do you think’s going on?” Mattie asked finally.
“I don’t know. If she wants to spend the weekend inside in the dark watching movies, fine. I want to be out in the sun. Maybe it’s my imagination, but she pulled away from me when you and William started going out. Isn’t that odd?” He dug a hole for a tomato plant. “Can I tell you something? Maybe you’ll think I’m crazy. But I’ve been thinking about getting an iguana for a long time. Because I think an iguana would be good company.”
“Oh.” They stopped working and sat in the shade, swilling apple juice. “Did you just say you wanted to get an iguana?” He nodded. He’d had several iguanas as a boy. Pets were not allowed in the apartment where he and his mother had lived, but she’d let him keep iguanas. He’d had one named Flor and one named Andy. A month ago, he found a man selling iguanas at the flea market in Sonoma. “It’s been a dream of mine lately, like other men might want a model train,” he said, and Mattie nodded as if he was making sense now, really cooking with gas.
After church the next day, they drove to the flea market and purchased a year-old iguana, which Daniel named Otis. “How’s Pauline going to be with this?” Mattie asked. Daniel shrugged. She herself was a little afraid of Otis. He was all ridges, green scales, lots of flashes of turquoise, bright eyes. The man at the flea market had sold Daniel a long glass box with a mesh top, which had an opening lined in tinfoil into which you could insert a heat lamp. On the way home they bought a collar and leash at a pet store; the man at the flea market had told them that iguanas like to go for walks on leashes.
Mattie could not imagine that Pauline would want or agree to an iguana. Maybe she would catch salmonella, which iguanas sometimes carry. Maybe she’d make Daniel pick between Otis and her, and he’d pick Otis—and Mattie. Perhaps Mattie could learn to love Otis. She hadn’t considered reptiles pets before. Show me someone on the street with a boa around his neck, she thought, and I’ll show you a very angry person.
They all drove to Daniel’s and set up Otis’s glass cage in the living room.
• • •
When Pauline came home the next day, her screams could be heard four houses away, according to Daniel. He showed up at Mattie’s with Otis and the glass cage in his car. Harry was home from school by then, and he cried out with joy when he saw the iguana at their house.
“But I don’t want an iguana either,” Mattie said. Harry and Daniel stood begging like puppies.
“Please, Mama. Please, Mama.”
“Please, Mat.”
So she said yes, because she wanted Daniel and Harry to love her. This also gave her a good excuse to call William.
“Want to come over and see my new iguana?” she asked.
There was a long pause. “Okay,” said William.
When he showed up that evening, there was much fuss and fascination with Otis. He was like a miniature dragon, a memento of prehistory.
Al could not believe she now had an iguana. He knew she was deeply afraid of reptiles. “Boy, you really do love Daniel, don’t you?” he said over the phone. “Tell me all about the little bugger.”
“Well . . . he’s a very strange creature. He usually doesn’t move or respond, except to have these terrible episodes from time to time where he tears around his cage like a balloon losing air, spewing these thin white ribbons of shit.”
“Well, you gotta love that,” said Al.
“He’s like an elegant and vaguely hostile scrap of leather.”
“Sort of like Mom?”
Mattie laughed. “Harry adores him. He says, ‘Oh, Otis, you are such a good little iguana.’”
Otis brought the family closer together. So much was going on all at once—Noah’s invisible presence in their house, Isa’s deterioration, Lee’s pregnancy. One day after Otis had a terrible episode, Harry came to sit in Mattie’s lap while she read in her rattan chair. He’d watched Otis carefully after the outburst, he told her. She sat with him in silence. “I’m very worried about Otis,” he said after a while, near tears. “I think he may have done something to his mind.”
In between bouts of madness, Otis was as basic as it got: stare, stare, lie on hot rock, stare, sneak to other end of cage, stare. Mattie wondered idly if he might be a spy. She had heard a local comedian once say that he thought p
eople with Down’s syndrome were spies for God, and she wondered if Otis might be one too. She could not see a single redeeming quality in him, except that Harry loved him so. Maybe she just preferred pets who sucked up to you.
“I’m going to get an iguana for my boy when I grow up,” Harry said.
“How do you know you’re going to have a son?”
“Well, I want a boy,” Harry replied. “I’d know how to work a boy.”
• • •
Whenever Mattie went to the Cove to visit William, she looked for Noah too. Whenever she saw him on foot or on skateboard, she’d stop to watch him, like a stalker. She bumped into him at Ned’s store and they said hello. She glanced into his basket and saw the makings for a Thai meal—noodles and fish sauce, lemongrass, a can of coconut milk, some tofu, red chilies, basil, some limes. Ned told her, “Whenever he goes traveling, he comes home and starts making the food of wherever he’s been. When he went to India, he learned to make all their curries and flatbreads and dal. That’s a beautiful child,” Ned said. “I love that kid.”
Noah was polite, careful, kind, and shy, easygoing, reserved. Mattie covertly watched him play basketball with some other young men one Saturday afternoon at the school on the edge of town. People gathered on the bleachers to watch them play; Mattie watched from her car. The men moved with balance and poise, like a street gang who had taken up ballet, but Noah was the most graceful of all. He could maneuver past other players, using moves he must have learned on the skateboard, fluidly darting and weaving, skating for daylight, parting the sea of crouching legs, faking with a move to the right so he could come in for a basket on the left.
She went to the library again with Al. Noah was at his desk, checking in books. He looked up and smiled nervously. Al walked off toward the biographies. Mattie lost herself in fiction. They watched each other watching him, over dusty spaces in the stacks.
