by Anne Lamott
But Mattie didn’t call. She knew Daniel was preparing for a long vacation with Pauline. They would drive halfway across the country, to Michigan, where Pauline had grown up, staying in motels along the way. Mattie and Pauline were barely speaking, and when they did talk, the air was charged with tension. Mattie usually waited for Daniel to call. She’d had to phone the other day, though, and she prayed as she dialed that Daniel or the machine would pick up. “Hey,” Pauline said lazily after Mattie said hello. “How you doing?”
“Good. Lots going on.” She told Pauline briefly about Isa, and Pauline made clucking sounds of warmth and commiseration.
“How’s that cute William?” she asked.
Want his number? Mattie wanted to respond. “He’s good.” Please, she wanted to cry, I’ll give you twenty bucks if you’ll put Daniel on. “He’s terrific.”
“You don’t want to let that one get away,” Pauline said.
Mattie laughed and rubbed her eyes with her free hand. “Is Daniel there by any chance?”
“Yeah, he’s taking a nap. Let me have him call you back.”
“Great,” Mattie said.
“How’d you like that book I lent you?” Pauline asked.
• • •
Mattie looked back up at the shack, at the little ark. It was an embracing shape, the color of depression and old age, bleached out and neutral. It was the color of exhaustion, the color of old people who do not get out much anymore. Mattie turned away, toward the low hills across the bay. If only she could see that face again—Abby’s face in the window, ghostly, distant. Mattie smelled seaweed, oyster shells, gulls.
All she could do was turn like a ballerina on top of a jewelry box, seeing now the tawny fog snuggling down into the dips of the hills, now the crossbeams under the deserted restaurant, now the pilings, peglegged and clubfooted, the gulls sitting sentry. The sloshing and lapping of the waves was so comforting, like someone helping a child fall asleep, shhhh shhhh shhhhh, and she could think only to keep turning slowly in the sand.
At the window where Abby had been, there was no movement, no shadow. Across the water, plumes of fog in several shades of gray, low and rounded like recumbent bodies, like the photos of nudes that resembled sand dunes. She could no longer remember, if she had indeed ever known, what Abby had to offer, but she knew only that when she herself was a teenager, gawky and always scared, sure that no one liked her, pining for her glamorous father, missing him desperately and calming herself with images of him out there saving the world, Abby had gotten his attention instead. And on one of those weekends when Mattie had been missing her father, imagining him in Washington, he’d been only miles from home, at some nearby hospital—maybe the one in Tomales where the ranchers’ wives gave birth. Maybe there he watched his infant son emerge from a girl as young as his children, his soul-sick daughter, his alcoholic son.
Mattie imagined her mother back then, spinning slowly as she herself spun now in the sand—looking for her husband, for what they had had, for their future together, while he tiptoed away to Abby Grann. Maybe Abby was a green shoot that broke through the pavement of a marriage that was killing him. Mattie looked back up to the rotted pane where she had seen Abby, the window old and clouded as beach glass.
• • •
The door of the shack creaked when Mattie opened it. No one was there, but the window was open, the window through which the red hair had been strewn. “Abby?” Mattie said softly. There were old moldy dog smells, and some milk going bad in the cold cupboard, Coke bottles on a counter with an inch of soda left, cigarette butts at the bottom. “Abby?” You could reach up and touch the ceiling. This was a home you could put on, pull down over your head like a serape, carry off with you. Mattie walked a few steps to the window, glanced down at the piling on one side of the shack, where dusty ivy reached from the earthy banks of the beach, flowing and twining into heaps of watery seaweed. The shack felt like a jail cell. In the middle of the back wall, on the shore side, was an incongruous little door that seemed to lead directly outside, ten feet above the beach. It had a rusty latch to keep it from banging in the wind. Mattie supposed there must be a closet, with a window, inside. Two posts, three feet apart, held up the ceiling in the middle of the room. Maybe there had been a door here once, and two rooms, but now you could walk through the door frame to nowhere and back.
Mattie crossed to the cold cupboard. If you looked through its screen, you could see crescents of beach. Beside the sink were a kettle on a hot plate, an empty box of Lipton’s tea bags, and the last bag, drowned and tangled in its own string on its paper envelope. Mattie turned back and gave a tug to the small door, but it wouldn’t open. She stood with her back against the door, rubbing her eyes. Maybe she had only imagined Abby. The face had looked so distant and dreamy at the window, as if she weren’t really inside, as if she’d been superimposed on the glass. Mattie tugged again. There was some give, but the door opened only slightly. The gap closed suddenly, the door pulled snugly again, as if by a spring inside. Mattie tilted her head. She heard the weather-noisy sea, the wind, the gulls, the chimes—and she heard someone breathing.
She took hold of the latch and pulled it as hard as she could. The door groaned and opened. Sitting there, on her haunches, on top of a toilet seat in a most cramped space, clutching her knees to her chest, hiding her face behind a curtain of bangs, was Abby Grann.
Abby’s hair, cut just below her ears, was dirty and matted. She wore the clothes of a beggar in a fairy tale—a long faded red cotton peasant dress, the hemline ragged and muddy above socks pierced by foxtails. Over the dress hung a shapeless Irish fisherman’s sweater, sagging to her ankles, full of holes like a fishing net. Mattie thought of the Fisher King’s queen in her raggedy guise, gathering herbs to take away the pain of his wounds that would not heal.
Mattie gasped and drew back, her nostrils flaring with all the smells that assailed her—urine and rust, and unclean breath, and cigarettes, and underarms, and dirty feet. Abby had covered her face with her huge hands, and had begun humming a tuneless song, like a child who believes that not seeing the parent means the parent cannot see the child.
After a long moment Mattie reached out and touched Abby’s red cracked knuckles. Behind her was a tiny window, and a view of bay and hills, blue water, green hills, swaying trees, rolling fog.
“Abby, I’m Mattie,” she whispered.
Nothing—no movement, no motion, no sound but the tuneless song.
Then Abby lowered her hands, and her face shone with an expression of ruined beauty. Her skin was fair, with roses in the hollows of her cheeks and red plaid blotches near her eyes. These were Neil’s eyes, hazel, almost green, wreathed in black lashes, deep and bloodshot. Her mouth was Neil’s too, long and full.
Eyes closed, Abby hummed. Mattie’s heart hammered in her chest.
“I’ve been wanting to talk to you so long,” said Mattie. Abby looked over her shoulder through the window with a direct view to the bay, to water no longer so rough. The wind had quieted and the waves were nearly smooth. The tide was rising; it would soon cover the pilings of the house.
“I want to talk to you about my father.” Nothing, no sound from Abby but the tuneless song, and eyes that looked around without expression, landing on Mattie’s gaze but not stopping, as if Mattie’s eyes were windows she didn’t have time to look through just now.
Abby was like an ostrich; if she just sat there long enough, maybe Mattie would go away. Mattie felt desperate. “I have a son too,” she said in a rush, “a little boy named Harry, who looks like Noah. But he’s only nine.” Mattie sank toward the plywood floor, holding the door open with her knee.
Talking to Abby was like trying to lasso a fish, throwing out a lariat here and there: each time, fwap, it landed dead on the floor. Abby looked at her, her face tilted slightly like the man in the moon, and then stood. When she rose, Mattie stepped back. Abby slipped past her.
What was Mattie supposed to do, rush her, wrestle
her to the floor, handcuff her? She felt her stomach drop. She’d expected that finding Abby would change everything, or at least change something. She watched as Abby shuffled out the door, down the dirt road toward the deserted restaurant. Mattie’s vision began to blur with fatigue, the lack of sleep the night before, but also with exhaustion born of hopelessness. She shook her head to clear it, but words and thoughts flapped around her head. She let her head drop, and leaned over and slid down onto the plywood floor, made a pillow of her hands, and closed her eyes.
• • •
Mattie drove to the superette. When she arrived, Ned was closing for the night, ringing up his last two customers at the register. He unlocked the door to let her in.
“There you are. William says he hasn’t heard from you in a few days. You coming tomorrow?” Mattie nodded unconvincingly.
She stood by awkwardly while the two customers paid, and focused on the rolls of fly strips festooning the superette. Ned locked the door behind the last customer, turned the OPEN sign to CLOSED. “What’s going on?”
“I just saw Abby Grann,” she said.
“Oh, God. Well, let’s go to my office.” Ned turned off the lights and led the way. His thick rubber soles squeaked with each step.
The back room was crammed with produce boxes, some stacked and full, some flattened, some wedged between a desk and a chair. Ned pulled the chair toward her. He retrieved a pint of Johnnie Walker from the desk drawer, and poured them each a couple of inches.
Mattie told him everything about her encounter, and Ned listened. When Mattie was finished, he fished a pack of Lucky Strikes out of another drawer. He lit one and offered it to her. She shook her head. He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply, looking as if he was trying to recall someone’s name. He rubbed his eyes. The smoke from his cigarette wafted toward the ceiling like a ballet dancer. She remembered an obscure line of Meister Eckhart’s—about how, if the soul could have known God without the world, God would never have created the world. She thought now that if God could have given her Ned without her having to date William, she would not have had to date William. Her mouth opened slowly with an insight: it was wrong, she now realized, to go out with someone who simply filled a space meant for Daniel.
• • •
The children were asleep when Mattie got home. She related her adventures to Al and Katherine, who had come by to care for them. Katherine took Mattie’s hand in hers. Her fingers were as long and elegant as a pianist’s. Al barely spoke.
“What are you thinking?” Mattie asked him.
“It’s just so sad, is what I’m thinking. I’m thinking about Mom, and what she’s been through. What it would be like to have a husband who’d fucked a teenage girl. I’m thinking I wish I could save her.” He gripped the hair above his forehead, and pulled it backward, as if he were trying to scalp himself. Katherine touched his arm. He turned to her. “You cannot imagine what it took for her to get that shrink in place for me. It meant crossing my father, going against his will. It meant spending money we didn’t have. It meant giving up what little free time she had, to work as an office temp—filing, typing memos! And then driving me to the therapist, and waiting till my hour was up. And I’m thinking, What do I have to give her now?”
“You’re so loyal to her,” said Mattie.
“But I’m annoyed with her half the time too.”
“Yeah, well, she’s annoying. But you’re loyal anyway.”
After Al and Katherine left, Mattie went to the kids’ rooms to tuck them in. Harry, as always, slept with one leg on top of his blanket. Ella was on the floor beside her bed, where she had nestled her dolls. The bottles of nail polish were lined up on her bedside table.
The next morning, Mattie sat at the kitchen table with Daniel, drinking coffee, with Ella asleep in her lap. She and Daniel were saying good-bye.
“Oh, I don’t really want to leave, Mattie. Too much is happening.”
“Then why are you going?” she asked.
“I don’t know how to get out of it. I have to do it, to save my marriage.”
“You don’t, really.”
“Don’t have to go, or don’t have to try and save my marriage?” She shrugged. Daniel began to do origami with his shirttail.
“I hate to leave when you have so much going on,” he said. He reached into his pants pocket and pulled out the blue shoe, held it out to her on his palm the way you offer a sugar cube to a horse. Mattie pushed his fingers closed around the shoe, her hand covering his, cupping it so the blue shoe wouldn’t run away.
• • •
She called William and told him she needed to see him. He said stiffly that he was sorry but he’d kind of figured things out for himself. He’d decided to save himself the trip. Mattie felt more hurt than she’d expected. She said, “Okay, then. Well, I guess I’ll see you at the store,” and he said, “Okay, then. Good. See you soon.”
“He’s in a rage because you initiated it,” Angela told her later on the phone. “I’d push all the furniture up against the door if I were you.”
“It’s weird. The needle’s not moving to the left or the right.”
“The needles are moving all over the place, just not on the one dial you’re staring at. There is serious movement going on inside you, with Isa . . . Abby . . . Daniel. How’s Isa, anyway?”
“She’s Otis part of the time, and George Wallace the rest,” Mattie said.
Isa was so foggy and tired these days that Mattie and Al had had to hire aides for fourteen hours a day. Mattie had gotten a small line of equity loan on the house to pay for the extra help—an aide to be there at seven when Isa woke up, and stay all day, while trying to remain out of sight, because otherwise Isa would be unpleasant. Mattie had seen one afternoon how awful it could be. Isa was staring contemptuously at the aide, who’d been begging her to take a shower.
“Why don’t you get out one of your voodoo dolls, and shower it instead?” Isa asked. She’d widened her eyes until they were nearly all white, like a demented voodoo queen. Isa was scared to death herself, Mattie saw, and getting meaner every day. She wouldn’t shower, even with someone right outside the bathroom to help her if she fell. There was a rail, and a shower chair, but even those were not enough; she needed someone to hold her, hand her soap, help her rinse, yet she would not allow this. “Why don’t you button your lip,” she told the woman.
“Yes, ma’am,” the aide replied.
Another aide, Lorraine, a heavyset African-American woman, had cooked Isa pumpkin soup and corn muffins, which she was finishing up one afternoon when Mattie arrived. “That looks so good,” Mattie had told Lorraine, at which point Isa pinched her nostrils shut and held her nose in the air to show that she thought the food stank. Mattie’s heart sank again. It was hot and humid, and a heavy smell of urine filled the place, because no matter how clean the aides kept things, there was urine in the sofa and the mattress. Mattie noticed pajamas in a bucket in the shower, and in another Isa’s good-looking tailored trousers with three pairs of soaked underpants and Depends inside them.
The aides did the wash every day. Mattie brought rolls of quarters for them to use at the machines, and sat with her mother while they did the laundry. These were women Isa would have scrambled to support in her organizing years, women she would convince lawyer friends to represent pro bono, women whose children she would have clothed with shirts and pants her own kids still wore. Now she had turned into a caricature of the racists she had hated.
Mattie continued to pray for a miracle. Al had started tutoring a student two nights a week to help pay for the aides. Mattie had increased her hours at the store. The last time she had taken Isa in for a checkup, Dr. Brodkey found a bedsore on Isa’s bottom, caused by her lying too long in her own urine. The doctor insisted that Mattie take a brochure to look at with Al, from a nearby nursing home, The Willows, that took Medi-Cal.
They read the brochure that night, miserable as could be. On the cover was the picture of an old man s
itting on a bench beside his handsome, caring son. The man seemed to be shuffling even though he was sitting down, a look of wooden dignity on his face, his vacant eyes glittery. The hands in his lap at first seemed to be in repose, but were undoubtedly gripped with fear like Isa’s.
“I can’t do this,” said Al. “I’m sorry. I just can’t.”
“You can’t look at a brochure with me?”
“I can’t put our mother in a nursing home.”
Mattie prayed even harder for a miracle.
Toward the end of September, Lewis came home. He was stunned by how much ground Isa had lost. He sat with her as much as he could, and called Mattie every few hours. The Isa who had come home from the medical center was simply not the same Isa who had gone in.
• • •
Harry was in fourth grade now, and there was at least an hour of homework every night, real homework. No matter how hard she tried, Mattie could not get him to sit down, do the work, put it away, dust off his hands, and reclaim any of the night. It was hopeless, she thought. He had no future. He would have to work at 7-Eleven when he grew up, helping people find the longer straws for Slurpees.
His backpack looked as if he’d stolen it from a wino. At bedtime on Sunday nights, he would announce, “I’ve got homework.”
“Oh, Harry, why didn’t you mention this before?” Mattie would say.
“God. It’s not a big deal,” he’d reply disdainfully. “Where do we keep our dowels, and cheesecloth?”
• • •
One evening, during a heat wave, Mattie drove out to Abby’s shack. The day had been fierce and red. Mattie had been sitting at the kitchen table when she happened to look up and see the silhouette of a squirrel behind the curtain, racing across the sill, hunched and hurried as a spy. The next thing she knew, she had risen and gone to find her purse.
