by Anne Lamott
Noah looked up at the two of them when they walked toward the door. Had they found everything they needed?
Al nodded. “What are you reading?”
Noah held up a paperback on his desk. Revolutionary Road, by Richard Yates. “It’s my favorite book.”
It had been a favorite of Alfred’s too. Noah ran his fingers through his hair a number of times until it stood straight up in a tuft on his head. “I’ve never read it,” Mattie said. Al picked up a long rubber band and began threading it across the fingers of both hands, as if making a cat’s cradle.
“It’s about loneliness,” Noah said. “All these people in families, trying to connect and love each other, but they can’t get it to work. It’s about sad lies. You need to read it. Everybody should. It’s the best book in the world.”
So she and Al did. She read it with Noah and her father in mind. It was so great that it made her a little crazy.
• • •
Nights in mid-June stayed light forever, and were sometimes so warm you could hardly sleep, sometimes cold enough to require a blanket. Some nights Mattie went to sleep in a T-shirt and underpants, covered with a sheet, and woke to rising fog, the willows outside her window tossing like restless sleepers.
One morning when Harry and Ella were still at Nicky’s, Mattie went in to plug in Otis’s heat lamp. He looked more still than usual. He looked utterly dead. She wasn’t positive, so she lifted the lid off his cage to nudge him, and realized she was too afraid to touch him.
She fetched some chopsticks and nudged him with them. He seemed to be in the later stages of rigor mortis. She cried out. She called Daniel and asked if he could come over right away to help her. Then she paged the vet. It was eight o’clock on a Sunday morning and he sounded tired. “I think Harry’s iguana has died, or is dying,” she said. He offered to meet her at the office.
Daniel showed up not long after. He picked Otis up and set him back down. “Boy, he’s really dead. Poor Harry. Poor Otis.” Daniel placed him in a shoe box through which Mattie had gamely poked some holes.
In the car they were silent, crushed on Harry’s behalf.
The vet lifted Otis out of the box and set him on a towel on the examination table. Otis lay still, looking small and pathetic and touching, like a guy with a sunken chest other men would jeer at. The vet examined Otis on one side, then turned him over. Otis was on his back. The vet put his stethoscope on Otis’s puny chest. The steel circle of the stethoscope was almost wider than Otis. The vet closed his eyes and concentrated, as if he were Christiaan Barnard considering a difficult case. After a moment he admitted, “I don’t actually know what I’m listening for. But he’s definitely alive.”
Mattie’s heart leapt. “Really?” she asked breathlessly, hardly daring to hope.
“Shouldn’t you take his temperature?” Daniel smiled meanly. The vet handed him the thermometer, and he drew back.
“Is this your first iguana?” Mattie asked.
“Yes.” He stroked Otis for a while, then turned him over onto his stomach. Otis blinked, and looked around. He took one step, then another.
“Oh my God,” Mattie whispered. “This is like being at Lourdes.”
• • •
They sat side by side in front of Otis’s cage, watching him as you might watch TV. Every time Otis moved, she and Daniel smiled, as though they were watching their baby sleep. “I’m so happy,” Daniel said sadly. She saw that his head had dropped as if in prayer, and then she became aware that he was moving closer to her. She believed he might put his arm around her.
His arm was on the couch behind them, but his hand had moved. His arm hung in the air for an instant. Then he lowered it across her back. His hand cupped the round of one shoulder, the way a hand might cup the head of an infant, the fullest a hand could ever be.
“That was a beautiful thing you did for Harry,” Daniel told Mattie. His hand was still on her shoulder. When he lifted it, she couldn’t believe her shoulder hadn’t turned to silver.
• • •
When William came over that night, he was in a state of testy exhaustion. Mattie felt metallic with PMS, lonely and needy. William swiftly disappeared into her bedroom to rest before dinner. Harry was pitching cards into a salad bowl in his bedroom. She left them both alone as long as she could, playing with Ella outside, helping her make a village in the dirt with acorns and pine needles, broken glass, bits of plastic. They paved the streets with patio gravel, and Ella made a campfire circle of pebbles, with torn red rose petals for flames, while Mattie worried about William. When she couldn’t bear worrying anymore, she went inside to hear about his day. She stepped into her room, expecting to find him resting, but found him on the phone instead. When she caught his eye, he said into the receiver, “Just a sec.” Then he looked up at her as if she were a salesperson. “Whatcha need?” he asked.
She told him she didn’t need anything. In the hallway she heard him say softly, “So go on.” She felt that something frightening was happening. She went back into her room and stretched out on the bed on her side, then stared at him plaintively, so he really had no choice but to get off the phone. He apologized to whoever it was, and promised to call back later.
Mattie asked, in a child’s high, worried voice, “Who was that?”
William sighed. “I can’t do this tonight,” he said. “I’m too tired.” He got to his feet while Mattie dug her fingernails so deeply into her scalp that she knew there were indents and maybe even blood.
“Don’t go,” she said with her eyes squinched shut. “I’m tired. I need to be with you.”
“All I want,” he said tersely from the doorway, “is to come here after a long day at work and lie down for a while. Talk to a friend on the phone, kick back. Then I’ll want to be with you and the children, and help make some dinner, and catch up with you when we can be alone. Is that so fucking much to ask?”
Mattie took a series of rabbity breaths. “But you seem to be having this secret phone call.”
“Secret phone call? Jesus.” He sank into the chair cushions. “If I wanted to have a secret phone call, I wouldn’t have it from your fucking bed.”
She tried to hold it back, but the sentence cascaded out. “Nicky always did.” William heaved another sigh. Desperation rose inside her, and she went to sit at his feet like a dog. She put her head against his knees and held her breath, and after a long, long moment, he began to rub her head gently. Mattie’s mind swirled with fearful scenes of his leaving and what a bad night it would be. He stroked her head and made sounds of exasperation, the way she did when Harry or Ella was up in the middle of the night, when she herself was desperate for sleep.
As in an epiphany, she suddenly saw the way to keep him here tonight, to have him drop all current charges. She said softly, “There’s something I need to tell you.” She took a breath and looked up into his worried face. “You’re never going to believe this,” she said. She tried to swallow what she was about to say, tried to think of a decoy. Please don’t let me tell William, she prayed.
“How bad can it be?”
She groaned, and then she told him.
“What?” he said.
She nodded, miserably, so afraid he would be angry with her for keeping the secret from him. She covered her face with her hands and kept nodding. His face shifted from angry to concerned. He helped her to her feet. He put his arms around her and nuzzled the side of her cheek the way she did when her children were afraid, and a few moments later she began to feel a little better.
eight
Late June was supposed to be tender and verdant and mild, a cheerleader for summer. The promise of June was supposed to signal, “Oh, we’re going to have such fun!” But May’s winds, which were supposed to stop, never did. There were conditions from all the wrong seasons, mixed up together—too much heat one week, and when that passed, the fog returned, grim, gray, biting. Then it was glorious for a few days, mild and blue, until the winds of spring, and two days o
f rain. “Ha! I’m deep summer. Ha! Now a winter storm. Ha! I’m windy spring, whooo, whooo.”
Life in June and early July mimicked the weather: wind, rain, glorious heat, fog, blue skies. Mattie had more money. Nicky finally made associate professor, with tenure and a raise, and could offer her three hundred dollars more a month. And Ned hired her to work for fifteen hours a week at the store at a decent hourly wage. She liked it there, stacking fruit, ringing up groceries when Ned stepped out, sweeping, freshening up the place in general, chasing dogs outside. Ned loved her, and she was fond of him, and she loved the way he smelled, like a blanket. He let her pick the radio station that played during the day, and so she could listen to NPR and get paid. Ned gave her groceries at a great discount. She overheard the latest gossip; everyone seemed to tell Ned everything.
Noah came in from time to time, and she would ask him about books. Then he would disappear for a while. There would be a substitute at the library, who never knew where Noah had gone. “Oh, you know how Noah is,” she’d tell Mattie, gaily. Things with William were just barely okay. She wasn’t in love with him any longer, and he wasn’t in love with her. Still, she mostly liked having him around. She liked his looks, his relationship with his father, and the store, and she liked that because of him, she no longer slept with Nicky. It bothered her when she felt she was using William, but her conscience did not force her to give him up. She liked it when old friends saw her with him for the first time at the movies or a restaurant; Angela referred to him as Mattie’s beard. Her children liked his presence in their lives too—he had the basics down: he could draw and play catch. He took Harry and his friends to macho movies that Mattie refused to see. Maybe it made the children feel more secure that their mother was capable of acquiring a nice-looking boyfriend. Whenever Mattie thought about breaking things off, she’d have a pleasant time with him, and she’d decide to let things ride a while longer.
Isa fell again, and Dr. Brodkey finally agreed to schedule a CAT scan. When the results were in, Dr. Brodkey showed Mattie and Al areas of her brain that looked more like Swiss cheese than gray matter. Isa was definitely having infarcts, the doctor said.
“What an ugly word,” said Al. “And what does it all mean?”
Dr. Brodkey pointed to spots on the X ray. “It means strokes big enough to knock out a small lake of brain tissue, called a lacuna. They leave behind dead brain tissue, which the body converts to scar tissue. So she loses mental ground. The good news,” Dr. Brodkey said somberly, “is that it’s not Alzheimer’s.”
“And that’s good news because . . .” Al sounded skeptical.
“Because there are medications for what she has,” the doctor replied. “We’ll start her out on Coumadin, an anticoagulant. A blood thinner. Dosing can be tricky in the beginning, but we’ll get it right. She’ll need to avoid foods with vitamin K—like broccoli and spinach, because Coumadin is a vitamin K antagonist. Coumadin will help slow down the rate and frequency of these mini-strokes.”
• • •
Having the children home during the day in summer was a mixed blessing. Mattie loved seeing them more, but she still needed time for housekeeping, shopping, gardening, and helping Isa, and for her work at Sears and the superette. She had taken a break from making sandwiches with Daniel and Pauline, as relations with Pauline were strained, but still her life felt dense, compressed. She set lower standards for housework, for everything she could. While this struck her as being the secret of life, it was a solution that drove William crazy. He’d shake his head impatiently at the cats sleeping on a pile of unfolded laundry on the couch; he’d turn pale when he found out that she’d accidentally left her car engine idling all day in front of the superette when she had raced in late, after dropping Ella off at day camp.
Harry lurked around the house, watching Otis, flipping cards across his room, begging rides to other boys’ homes, needing this, needing that. It was like having a homeless person staying with her. I need money, I need food, I need a ride, I need you. Ella was usually busy with her art and dolls and her friend Pearl. She groomed the dolls endlessly, cooed to them, tucked them into her bed at night and then slept on a quilt on the floor so she wouldn’t disturb them. She was trying very hard not to bite her nails, without success.
When Mattie heard Ella tell her dolls, “You’d be so pretty if you stopped biting your nails,” she interrupted her: “Did someone tell you that?” Mattie asked, and Ella told her. Mattie called Pearl’s mother and said she knew that her intentions were good but to please never mention the nails again. Mattie prayed for a solution to Ella’s nervous habits; but she did not get an answer.
One Sunday night, when Nicky dropped the children off, Mattie noticed Ella’s nails were painted with pink glittery polish, a good reason not to bite them. Ella preened. She did things so that her sparkly nails would show—picked things up ostentatiously with her forefinger, and washed her face with her palms so the beautiful nails might fan out, like someone with a new engagement ring.
Mattie called Lee the next day to thank her, and they actually fell into a comfortable talk. Lee was having a difficult pregnancy, with cramps and spotting and fear. Mattie heard herself say she would pray for Lee and the baby. Then she went off to Longs, and returned with five bottles of nail polish in shades from light pink to scarlet.
Isa had tried putting something that tasted like poison on Mattie’s bleeding nails to keep her from biting them when she was little, but that had never helped. Maybe beautiful polish could do what aversion never had done. Ella actually gasped when she saw all those bottles of polish. Mattie bought polish remover too, a soft file, and cotton balls, and Ella immediately wanted her to apply a new color. Mattie buffed the nails, and smoothed thick cream into the ruined cuticles. They both blew on Ella’s fingers, and she held them up to the sun until the cream had been absorbed. Then, wearing her reading glasses, Mattie applied a coat of rose pink. The smell was intoxicating. Ella waved her fingers, flapping them to let the polish dry, and because she could not contain herself. She resembled a baby canary trying for liftoff. But by breakfast two mornings later, she had picked at her nails, peeled the polish away in flakes. Mattie touched Ella’s hands, and Ella wrung them like a widow. Later Mattie found her picking off polish while she talked to her dollies.
“Oops!” Mattie said. Ella looked down at her hands. “It’s okay,” Mattie told her. “Let’s take off the old polish and try again, okay?” The polish remover smelled, and burned the nicks around Ella’s cuticles. She cried out, so Mattie bathed her fingers in water and blew on them.
Ella wanted scarlet next. “I love these little fingernails,” she said, studying the bright red. But they looked terrible.
• • •
As hard as they tried to settle into summer, new stresses sprang up: Harry punched Ella in the arm over some minor disagreement, or a trip to the swimming pool had to be postponed. The oldest cat was feebler every day, walking into walls and into the other cats. Ella’s nails always found their way back to her mouth, and she’d scrape the polish off with her teeth and pick at the flecks.
One weekend Harry was to go camping with Stefan and his mother in the Sierra foothills, and Ella would have Lee and Nicky and Alexander to herself for the two days. Mattie helped her choose her prettiest clothes, and packed her swimsuit and her dolls and all her bottles of polish. Ella left hand in hand with Lee, looking back to smile at Mattie. When Nicky brought her home on Sunday, the polish on Ella’s fingernails was so badly chipped that it looked as if they were bleeding from the nail bed, like silt rising to the surface in tiny ponds.
Mattie spent that whole weekend with William—one night at her house, one night at his. She had worried about Harry, afraid that harm would come to him, that he would drown or be bitten by a rattlesnake, or that he’d get homesick and want to come back early. William couldn’t figure out where her mind was. She took advantage of this: it helped keep him on his toes. He seemed to appreciate her more when she grew inat
tentive. It was like having a boyfriend on easy credit terms.
Harry returned from the trip swollen with poison oak. Ella caught it, and it ringed her eyes. Lewis’s son in Georgia had kidney stones, and Lewis had to fly down to care for him. Left to her own devices, Isa subsisted on broccoli, spinach—anything rich in vitamin K. There was no overt bad reaction, but slow deterioration followed. The children scratched their welts and sores. Mattie thought that locusts could not be far away.
• • •
The first time Mattie worked at the superette after telling William about Noah, Ned pretended not to know. He was shooing dogs out of the store when she arrived. They were not allowed in officially, but they sneaked through the gap in the warped frame of the screen door. Ned was always shouting at them. “Out, out,” he was saying when Mattie stepped around him to go inside. She knew that later Ned would give the dogs’ owners bones from the butcher counter; and the dogs would be back the next day.
Ned hugged her, and she stood toeing the linoleum. She put on her apron, saying to the floor, “William must have told you about my father and Abby, right?” She did not look up.
After a moment, Ned admitted, “Yes, he did. What a shock. I knew Neil and Yvonne—and your folks, in passing. And Abby. I always felt like I had to love Abby, because I didn’t know if anyone else did.”
Mattie nodded.
“Listen, honey,” he said. “I don’t know if this matters to you. But someone saw Abby yesterday.” His face was going in and out of focus. “A couple at the bar last night said they’d seen her in the window of one of those huts next to Nick’s Cove.” Mattie took her apron off. “It was the smallest hut,” he continued. “The one in the middle.”
• • •
The pier next to the clapboard cabins looked like an abandoned train trestle disappearing into the pinprick of perspective. There was no handrail, no pilings dribbled with pitch, no nothing on which to get your balance, just decomposing salt-rotted wood. It was all turning to dust. The deserted shacks sat on stilts a hundred feet away. Abby had been seen in the window of the smallest one, Ned had told her. Mattie shivered, trundled back to work, and returned a few days later with Daniel.
