by Anne Lamott
Mattie told him what her therapist had said once, that you should go only as fast as the slowest part of you could go. “Have you talked to Pauline?”
“No. She’s said some things that are pretty hard to forget.”
That was all he wanted to say. When she put the phone down, it rang again. She picked it up, sure that it was Daniel. But this time it was Ned.
• • •
The snap of a match, the smell of sulfur and then tobacco. Outside the shack window a burst of evening sun was burning through the fog. The leaves of the trees on the road tossed furiously. Mattie and Abby were drinking weak milky tea. The Murphy bed was unfolded, made up with white sheets and Mexican blankets.
“I really miss my dad,” Mattie said. Abby had color in her cheeks now, perhaps from walking on the beach. But there was no light on in her eyes.
“I remember your father’s feet,” Mattie said. What an odd thing to say, but it was one true thing. “He had long, bony feet. Like flippers.”
Abby looked at her as if she were speaking backward.
“Isn’t that funny?” Mattie asked. “I can’t always remember to turn my engine off when I get out of the car, but I remember that your father’s second toes were longer than his big toes. And he had a five-o’clock shadow, like Nixon. He must have hated that.”
Abby’s face became cool and mean, her chin jutting with disdain. “He was such an asshole,” she said.
“Who?”
Abby didn’t seem to be about to answer. “My father.”
“I thought you meant mine,” Mattie said. Abby shook her head.
The waves crashed on the shore. The gulls cried. Mattie couldn’t think of a thing to say. Finally Abby spoke. “‘Sometimes when I’m lonely, Don’t know why, Keep thinkin’ I won’t be lonely, By and by.’”
“What’s that?”
Abby scratched her head. It sounded like sandpaper.
“From a book of poems Alfred gave me for graduation. Langston Hughes.”
“Graduation?”
“From eighth grade.”
Mattie’s stomach bucked, and she held her hands out like a beggar. “Tell me more. Please.”
“I remember when he came to the carriage house where I was living, after I ran away from home. First he didn’t believe my baby was his, but he was the only man I’d gone all the way with until then. He gave me money for an abortion and took me to the city to have it, but I got out of the car and ran away. He screamed ‘You stupid bitch’ at me in the streets. We were on Lombard. I remember we saw Al that day, right in the middle of fighting, on Lombard. Then Yvonne told him he had to help me, or she would leave.”
There were vacuums in Mattie’s heart, caffeinated, froggy. “What? What do you mean, she would leave?”
Abby cocked her head. “And what do you mean?”
“I mean, what are you saying? You make it sound like Yvonne was involved with my dad too.”
“I don’t know what you’re saying.” Abby picked tobacco off her tongue and scratched her head again. Now it sounded like a rodent trying to get out of a box. It sounded like the rats that had been in Mattie’s walls. “Is this a joke?” she asked.
“Tell me what you mean! That my dad and Yvonne were together?”
Abby stubbed her cigarette in an abalone shell ashtray. “Of course they were together.”
“But I thought she and your dad were the couple.”
Abby knitted her brow. “They were too.”
Mattie felt for the pulse in her neck, to see if she was surviving. It was a river of heartbeats. God, she prayed, God God God God.
The shack was almost dark, although the sun was still setting across the water. Abby got up and went to the toilet. She didn’t close the door, and when she didn’t come out, Mattie went to investigate. Red-faced, exhausted, Abby was hunkered down on the seat, the huge sweater down to her ankles. She hugged her knees to her chest, and her cheek rested on one knee.
Mattie had questions to ask her still, but she saw that the conversation was over for now. She walked through the ghostly door frame to the sink, rinsed out her cup, laid it on a paper towel to dry. She turned back to Abby and said to the half-opened door, “At some point down the road, I need to talk to Noah.”
“No, you don’t,” Abby said after a long silence. “Leave the poor baby alone.”
The bathroom door closed slowly. Mattie stood at the sink and hugged her own shoulders. The rising tide swirled and crashed around the pilings below the shack. Mattie was perched on the edge of a crevasse. She could hear the tide rushing past her on both sides of the house. The sea smelled strong, too strong. Everything smelled too strong. The lights of the town across the water glittered gold and distant as stars, while the sun lay flattened and red between the water and the star-filled night.
ten
The October sun shone on Noah’s tall, narrow cabin on a rise in the middle of a field five minutes from the Cove. Mattie drove past. She knew even before she took the paint-can key out of her pocket that the flecks would match the paint of the house, although the hard sun glowing in the blue silk sky had faded it over the years. Oaks and bay laurels hemmed in the field. The house itself looked as if it had been set down in front of a blue studio backdrop, a house-shaped hole in the sky. Seeing Noah’s truck in the parking lot of the library had emboldened her to drive out here. Ned had drawn her a map on a scrap of brown paper bag. She’d pushed it deep into her pocket, alongside the paint-can key and the little blue shoe. She wanted to tiptoe up to Noah’s house and peek inside. But she was afraid to get too close. She rolled down the window and breathed the outside air. It smelled fresh and old at once, grandfatherly and green.
She drove closer. She couldn’t imagine what the point was. This was ridiculous: he wasn’t home, and she was going to be late for work. But the secret she’d been keeping all these years, without even knowing what it was, had made her feel like one of those people whose metal fillings picked up radio stations, tinny music that played inside their heads. And now she wanted the bad fillings pulled. A breeze rustled the shining limbs of the bay trees. Leaves fluttered, nervous and playful, gold, green. She thought of the limbs as Japanese dancers, now twining around one another, now giving one another room.
• • •
Mattie sat at her kitchen table with a cup of coffee several days later, tracing her lifeline with the paint-can key, thinking about the decisions she needed to make. What should she do about Noah, Isa, Daniel? The children were with Nicky. Daniel, who was staying in the laundry room, had gone to fix Pauline’s car. He’d be back, and he’d feel melancholy. It was not exactly the romantic Hallmark fantasy Mattie had hoped for, to have a deeply depressed Daniel living with her, yet she liked having him around. The children adored him, and camped out in the laundry room whenever they could. He’d had a brainstorm too, persuading Mattie to let Ella get her ears pierced. And by God, Ella had stopped biting her nails so much. Now she endlessly twisted the posts in her ears instead.
Isa was back at The Sequoias. The aides had stopped giving her foods containing vitamin K, so the medicine could kick in, and it did: she stopped having strokes. But Mattie and Al played a shell game with The Sequoias personnel, to keep them from noticing that Isa was too frail in mind and body to remain where she was, in Independent Living.
Mattie sat at the table, obsessing, orbiting around herself. She was sick of her worried, hostile mind. It would have killed her a long time before, she felt, if it hadn’t needed the transportation.
She realized with a start that the tables might be turned; she hoped Noah would not stalk her, or sneak onto her property, or fixate, or spy on her. She stared off into the middle distance and let her focus blur. Then she closed her eyes and sat as still as she could, waiting. She prayed, hummed idly. And something floated into her brain, a cellophane butterfly of thought, the most radical thought of all. She could tell the truth.
Mattie did a double take, and her lips parted in a half-smile. W
hat a concept! Tell the truth, and let go of the results. People sometimes called out to her pastor, “Say it!” Say what is true: tell Daniel, and even Pauline, that she was in love with Daniel, and hoped to be with him someday. Let Daniel and Pauline figure out what they wanted to do. Tell Isa that she was no longer strong enough to live alone. Here were her choices: The Willows, or Personal Care. Tell Noah that she was his sister; he could do what he wanted with that. She hoped he would want to be her brother. She felt she was standing on a snowy slope at Lake Tahoe, afraid and game at the same time, trying to get her balance and catch her breath, her lungs seared by the cold. So that is what I would do, she told the ceiling, as if it had been standing with its hands on its hips, waiting for her final answer.
• • •
She thought she’d start with Daniel, since he was closest, but when she went to knock on his door for dinner that night, she heard him on the phone with Pauline: “That is so crazy. That is so provocative. Because she and I are not sleeping together. That is not what this is about.” Mattie felt crushed, and confused and angry: We’re not sleeping together yet, she wanted to shout through the door. Then it will be what this is about. But then, maybe he didn’t know he was in love. This was a fly in the ointment.
The next morning the phone rang at dawn. It was Isa, crying hysterically about a terrible fire at Mattie’s.
“No, no,” Mattie tried to reassure her, “maybe you dreamt it.” But Isa did not believe her. “I tell you, Mom, I’m right here in my house, everyone’s fine.” Isa hung up on her.
When Daniel came out of his room, she told him what was happening.
“What are you going to do?”
“Yesterday I had an epiphany. I realized that all I ever have to do is to tell the truth, and let go of the results. That was my first inclination. But now I’m leaning toward sedation.”
“Sounds like a plan.” Their eyes met briefly, and she thought about telling him that she was in love with him. But a moment later, unable to catch her breath, she thought, What were you thinking? and reached for the newspaper.
Lewis called later in the morning, asking breathlessly if everyone was okay. He had been awakened by a call from Isa. “Please try to convince her, Lewis, there is no fire,” Mattie told him. Two hours later the receptionist from The Sequoias called: Isa was stopping people in the hall to tell them about the terrible fire at her daughter’s house. Mattie drove over with some Valium. She gave them to Lewis, with instructions to dispense them to Isa whenever the obsession with the fire started up again.
The fear resurfaced every few hours for a week. Lewis ran out of Valium. Isa grieved for Mattie’s lost photo albums and dead animals. The director of The Sequoias called a number of times, expressing worry about Isa’s state, and Mattie lied and said that her mother was having trouble adjusting to some new arthritis medicine. She told the director she’d call Isa’s physician. After Mattie had left a message for Dr. Brodkey, Lewis called her to say that Isa had struck at him in frustration. Mattie called Dr. Brodkey again, this time saying it was urgent. She left a message at Al’s school, asking him to call the minute he could. She cleaned house while waiting. When neither of them called back, Mattie got in bed with the phone and a seven-ounce Hershey bar with almonds, and stayed there past noon eating chocolate. The doctor didn’t call until dinnertime. By then Mattie had figured she’d rounded the corner to being a perfect size 14. At this rate, she’d be a 16 by Christmas. Maybe Sears would rehire her. Dr. Brodkey said she’d write a prescription for a sedative; she’d run out of other ideas.
• • •
Days passed in a blur. Mattie usually loved autumn most—the tang in the air, shorter days that brought with them the sense of deepening and rest. She loved the elegant light, the pumpkin and scarlet leaves. And she didn’t even mind Thanksgiving. Everyone knew just what to do: you sat, ate too much, got stupefied. Then you cleaned up and everyone went home.
They had Thanksgiving dinner at Mattie’s house. Daniel made a table extension out of plywood, which they covered with one of Isa’s old lace tablecloths. Mattie roasted a turkey. Al and Katherine brought side dishes, Lewis fresh cranberry sauce, tart and lumpy and delicious. Katherine remembered a can of the jellied kind for the children. Isa seemed sedated, not speaking much, her eyes intelligent but her mouth frozen into a simulation of interest. It was easy, a series of conversations about the latest national news, town gossip, the children’s school, Lewis’s family. All talk of fires had been put out. They sat down, with Mattie and Daniel as heads of the table, and Lewis said grace. Everything was going well until Pauline called.
“Hey,” she said to Mattie. “Have you already sat down to eat?”
“Yes, but just barely. What’s up?”
“I need to borrow Daniel’s car, to drive into the city. My starter’s shot.”
“Shall I go get him?”
“No, no. I’ve got a cab outside. I’ll be over in ten minutes.”
Pauline let herself in, flounced into the dining room, and gave everyone expansive hugs and kisses. Isa cried out with such joyful surprise to see Pauline that it might have been Bobby Kennedy who’d just walked in. Pauline pulled up a chair between Isa and Al, beaming at them both. “Hey, you,” she said to Daniel.
She looked wonderful, luminous, her lush hair, now streaked with a few strands of gray, piled on top of her head, and held in place with black lacquer chopsticks. She reached out to touch Daniel’s hand when he said something that pleased her—acting twinkly, coquettish, sarcastic, wrapped like a package in a deep-lavender pashmina. Daniel seemed happy to see her so buoyant, but not as happy as Isa.
“Oh my God, but this is marvelous,” Isa exclaimed. Her face had pinked up. “Why haven’t we seen you more?” Pauline shrugged, as if it didn’t make sense to her either. Isa turned to Mattie. “Has she ever looked more beautiful?” Mattie replied that no, she never had. “But I mean, this just makes our day, doesn’t it, Mattie?” Mattie nodded, yes, it sure did. She smiled nicely at her mother, wondering if there was any vitamin K–rich food on the table with which to induce another stroke—just a small one, to make her stop talking.
When Pauline accepted a plate from Daniel, with samples of everything, Mattie’s stomach tightened with unhappiness, and she excused herself to the bathroom. She checked herself out in the mirror before returning: she looked sweaty and dumpy from working in the kitchen. She splashed cool water on her face, powdered her nose, put on lipstick.
Pauline kept the conversation flowing, and flirted with everyone, Harry and Ella, Al and Katherine, Lewis and Daniel and Isa, everyone but Mattie, with whom she was overly cordial. Katherine was cold toward Pauline to the point of being rude, for which Mattie adored her. Pauline described in great detail some driftwood figures that had appeared overnight at Bolinas Beach, sculptures of beach musicians. She’d gone back twice to see them. The kids would love them. They made you feel wild and creative. Mattie sat feeling like Bartleby.
Isa brightened under the sun lamp of Pauline’s attention. She spoke in complete sentences, in paragraphs even. She seemed to be tracking. She and Pauline held hands. Mattie imagined her own hands around Isa’s neck, throttling her.
Pauline said her good-byes, and took Daniel aside. While Mattie turned to watch, Harry crawled loyally onto her lap. She nuzzled his head gratefully. Daniel looked as if he had a headache, and Pauline looked sorry, but she retrieved her black wool coat and put it on. Mattie rose to join them.
Daniel wiggled the car key off his chain and gave it to her.
“Good-bye,” Pauline cried gaily. “I’ve got to go right now or I’ll be late!” Daniel turned slowly toward Mattie, looking like a little boy who had just seen his only balloon float out of reach and head for the open sky.
• • •
A few days after Thanksgiving, Daniel sat Mattie down at the kitchen table and told her that he and Pauline had had a really good talk. “We spent a lot of Friday on the phone,” he said. “I went and saw
her yesterday.”
Mattie’s face would not cooperate with her wish to appear cool. She could feel her mouth purse like a child’s, like Ella’s, into teary disappointment. Daniel sighed loudly and shook his head.
“Are you going back?” Mattie’s voice broke.
“I don’t know what I’m doing, but this arrangement is making her nuts. It would make me crazy too, if she stayed with a man—even her best friend.”
There was no sound in the kitchen but the hum of the refrigerator, the song of chickadees in the branches outside.
“I have to go pick up the kids from Nicky’s today,” she said abruptly. She left without looking at him.
• • •
Mattie stopped by Isa’s with the children, and they stayed for dinner and watched TV with her. Mattie ordered in pizza and let the aide take two hours off. She wanted to go home, but delayed returning so that Daniel could stew in his own juices and indecision. By the time she realized that she was the one in the stew pot, and sped home, he was gone.
His things were still there, but he didn’t call and he hadn’t come back by the children’s bedtime. Harry acted out, anxious and mean, rough with the cats, flicking their noses and laughing when they mewed. Mattie sent him to bed, lay down with Ella, and read her Yertle the Turtle. They heard Harry crying next door. Mattie softened. “Honey,” she called. “I’ll be right there.”
She put down the book and tucked the covers around Ella’s neck. They said a quick prayer, and Mattie kissed her. She put Raffi on the tape player, so Ella could listen as she drifted off. Then she went to see Harry. He was pressed up against the wall in the dark. She climbed in bed beside him and rubbed his thin back through his pajamas.
“Do you think he’s ever coming back?” Harry asked in a quavering voice.
“Oh, yeah, I do. But honey, I don’t know if he’s really with us.”
