Imperfect Birds

by Anne Lamott

  A figure appeared in the sand, walking toward them, and someone dropped the joint into the surf to be extinguished, and Ethan, the only smoker, whipped his cigarette behind his back, so Rosie turned, thinking it must be the police, but it was her physics teacher, holding a child by the hand. Robert Tobias, her favorite teacher, here, in real life, on the beach.

  “It’s okay, Ethan,” he said, smiling. Maybe the cigarette smoke covered the pot. He had another child in a backpack, who was wearing a knit cap with stars all over it. Both children had gigantic martian eyes. Robert was pretty handsome for his age, probably mid-thirties. Feeling shy, she ducked her head, but he said her name. “Rosie! You get your grades yet?” She shook her head.

  “No one has. They’re late this year. Did I . . . ?” she began. He shrugged, and held out his hands in a gesture of Who knows? But she knew it meant she had aced the class. God! She was so pumped. It was weird to be so good at this one thing, this and writing. She was pretty sure she was one of his favorite students; someone had called her the teacher’s pet once. He ran his fingers through his cropped sworly brown hair, and said hello to the crowd as a whole. “Hi, Mr. Tobias,” they replied in unison. His eyes were big, like his children’s, and ringed with thick, dark lashes. Amazingly, he had five-o’clock shadow; he must not have been shaving on summer vacation. Rosie wondered whether his wife liked it rough and stubbly like that. She would run it by Alice and Jody. This was one of their big topics, the teachers, what their wives and husbands were like, and what they were all like in bed—who gave head, who didn’t, who came fast, who could last. Rosie imagined reaching forward to touch his stubble, and how it would prick her hands.

  James and Elizabeth crawled into bed around ten. You could still hear voices and laughter from backyard barbecues. Their domestic machine involved early nights, even on holidays, although Elizabeth often stayed up for hours reading. She loved being in bed. She could spend her whole life in the cave of her bed, empty until her person climbed in beside her and pulled up the covers, Andrew, then Rosie, now James. It was so much lovelier than being in all that light and exposure, and warmer because you were skin to skin. There was a lot more holding these days, in their middle-aged years, less sex, and James often fell asleep in her arms.

  She loved to listen to him sleep, unless she was pissed off. She knew every single personal noise—how he groaned when he repositioned, or got up, the weird throat-clearing that lasted forever first thing in the morning, although also sometimes he did it while he slept. There were random peeps, grunts when a little cramp got relieved, quiet farts, a lovely faint snore. He had described her equivalent sounds as concerto for woman and wind instruments, and used the phrase in the novel he was working on.

  They still had sex once a week or so. She didn’t have much drive, partly from the new medication she’d been taking since her last slip, but she had always come easily with him, and it reinforced the idea that they were normal and sexy. It was workmanlike but comforting, their legs wrapped together like clasped fingers, making one person out of two. She had always dreamed of this, of the Other, maybe everyone did. It was so lonely on the inside all those years. After she lost Andrew, she had lost half of herself, the most trusting and the sexiest parts, and when James miraculously appeared at the campsite in the mountains all those years ago, there was not one full woman to meet him. There were parts of her, the rest made up of Andrew being gone. Parts of her had never come back, and so it was amazing, really almost a miracle, if she had believed in that sort of thing, that she could get so close to another person, who breathed when she did, turned when she turned. It was not always the sexy closeness she had signed up for—they had gotten older and tired much faster than she had expected—but it was a closeness that worked.

  The breathing was a mutual pact. You tuned your breath to your person because then the little cave vibrated differently, in harmony: no longer two anguished individuals. It was like when her mother lay beside her when she was very little, when a person’s skin was one whole piece of beauty, like something Rae had woven out of silk, and your mother had access to your skin, and you got to be part of a breathing, touching organism that might ease into sleep.

  Rosie’s friends said good-bye to Robert Tobias, and drifted away, but she hung back to talk. She tried to think of something to say. Did he like to talk about physics on his days off? She remembered the first progress report she’d gotten last fall, when he’d written to her parents that she had an amazing mind for physics, answering on one day alone three increasingly difficult questions. She could remember the first one now, how she thought he was joking that day in class because the answer came so easily to her. What was e = mc2? Duh! The world was made up of energy that was frozen into matter. If you took matter and speeded it up, it was energy, like light, or radio waves. If you divided up energy, and slowed it down, it was matter. People, wood, raspberries—everything was slowed down energy.

  “Rosie!” he said to her, and she realized she had been spacing out. Could he tell she was stoned? She peered into his face. “I was asking you if you’d like to make some money this summer, and give me tennis lessons.”

  “Oh my God,” she said. “I’ll do it for free. It would be fun for me.”

  “I won’t let you. I’ll pay you twenty an hour, once or twice a week. We can play at Pali Park. How does that sound?”

  “I haven’t played in a few years,” she said. Twenty bucks!

  “I haven’t played since college, and besides, I wasn’t very good.”

  They made plans to meet at the park one day that week at two; his wife got home from teaching summer school at one, and could take the kids.

  After he left, euphoria caught her up like the wave that had sent her tumbling that time; she wanted to run like a child, but she made herself walk slowly, elegant, head held tall, like her mother, like this sort of thing happened to her all the time, a teacher seeking her out socially. By the campfire, she could see Alice taking a sip from a bottle, maybe the wine she had stolen from the party. Not watching her feet in the sand, Rosie felt something thick and rubbery against her ankles, and saw that she was standing in a pile of dark green seaweed. She remembered all the snakes of seaweed they’d played with as children, she and Beatrice Thackery, she and Simone, the boa constrictors they’d wrap around their necks. Burying beach balls in deep holes so the wind wouldn’t blow them away, digging deeper, stopping from time to time to try out the ball and the hole for size.

  She started walking again. She could see bird tracks by the moonlight, jeep tracks, footprints, all sizes, hers. It had been a long time since she’d thought of Beatrice Thackery and her pervert dad. She meant to stay in touch with Simone, who had sent a framed picture of her three-year-old son, which Rosie kept on her dresser, next to all those trophies they had won over time. It was so long ago, tennis, Simone, Mr. Thackery.

  She quietly sang a stanza from a Prince song to knock the memory of him out of her thoughts. She had started wondering at thirteen whether she’d be able to enjoy being with boys after seeing Thackery’s woody when she was eight, but it turned out she liked it fine, about a third of the time so far, which was pretty much par for the course for girls.

  The wind picked up, but over in the dunes they would be protected. Out in the open, the sandy air was hard on your skin and eyes, not like the feathery dust that coated you out on the trails when the wind kicked in. She went to stand by the fire. A boy she didn’t know teased her about having a crush on Mr. Tobias, and she sort of liked this. The smoke took a convoluted and circular path up from the fire, rising on currents of air.

  She remembered when she and Simone were ten or so. They’d won a local tennis championship and there was a closing party out here that the tournament committee put on. They were the youngest kids, along with two dweeby boys they ditched right away. The adults were grilling hot dogs and hamburgers. It was unbelievably hot, but only she and Simone went into the water. They did it because the older boys hooted with
appreciation; the Pacific was almost as cold as Lake Tahoe, which was snowmelt. She remembered Simone already had breast buds and wore a light blue gingham two-piece, and Rosie still had her horrible bleached-out Speedo with the flannel fish sewn badly by her mother in the bottom corner so she could swim in the deep end at the rec center; she was able to tread water for three minutes and save herself if the adults weren’t watching her closely enough. Unlike certain mothers she could name. After they’d gotten out of the water, she and Simone built monuments, castles of sand, with feathers and rocks and glass, and talked about the babies they would have one day, girl babies because they hated boys, although maybe Simone hated them a little bit less since the breast situation began. The beach that night was as big and white as a glacier field. Simone went off to use the smelly public bathroom, and turned to wave to Rosie like Marilyn Monroe. She was wearing seaweed draped around her neck, like a beautiful green scarf, like one Rae might have woven, with her usual secret tucked inside.

  Once, when Rosie was in sixth grade, at the closing party of another tournament, she hadn’t been asked to dance. She watched as Simone danced with her boyfriend, slowly, barely moving. Afterward Rosie was in a deep, weepy funk; she wouldn’t go outside, eat, or talk to her mother for days.

  Rae had whipped up a loose, airy mohair scarf to cheer Rosie, pale pink with a green secret inside.

  Rosie kept asking Rae, through tears, just to please tell her this one time what the secret was. She had never felt lower, skinnier, uglier, more deservedly alone.

  “Okay, okay,” said Rae. “Here it is.” She wrapped the scarf around Rosie’s shoulders, then leaned over to whisper in her ear: “You are pre-approved.” A calm sense of relief had filled Rosie’s chest, like stepping out of the cold into a warm car.

  She remembered the night of Simone and the seaweed scarf as a line of demarcation, the last time she still had a naive power, right before they became obsessed with boys and what they looked like; when she and Simone were inseparable, the only person the other one needed; when she had been number one for someone. She remembered looking up when a man called from the grill that dinner was ready, and how all the older boys leapt to their feet and raced over like dogs, while the older girls looked at each other and got up languidly; and that Simone was staggering across the dunes to get back to Rosie across the fathomless wasteland of sand that in her memory now looked like the moon.

  THREE

  Fenn and Robert

  Elizabeth saw Fenn Cross up close for the first time at the farmers’ market on a Wednesday night right after school let out for the year. She was waiting for Rae in the southeast corner of the Parkade, across the street from the movie theater. Its parking lot was useless for theater parking, with only eighteen designated spaces, but it held thirty booths of organic produce perfectly.

  James was in for the night, working on a short essay for a producer at National Public Radio, who had loved James’s novel. He was being auditioned for a weekly three-minute gig, great exposure if it worked out, and two hundred dollars a week—eight hundred extra a month. But he had been stuck on this three-page piece for days, was not even close to letting Elizabeth read it, but she knew he would pull it off. “Focus,” she’d said with mock menace when she’d left the house that night. “Trusting you.”

  She’d heard it said at meetings that a functional alcoholic was someone with a spouse who had a good job.

  Rae had warned her that she might be late that night, caught up in the final planning stages for the first annual Sixth Day Prez Vacation Bible School. Elizabeth was waiting in the shade under the movie theater awning when she saw him.

  Ten feet away from her, a fine-looking young man stood reading the posters in the glass display case. He was sturdy and tan, looked older than Rosie by a few years, with shoulder-length sun-streaked hair, and wire-rimmed glasses that added an air of studious ballast. He acknowledged her with a faint Buddhist bow and turned back to the posters. He smelled of salt and sea and sun, of sweat and muscles and lovely skin. It was sort of sickening. What did she exude? Atrophy and skin flakes.

  Rosie had first pointed him out not long after they moved to Landsdale. He was seated at a table on the sidewalk outside the coffee roastery, and Elizabeth had seen him there many times since, reading, or bent over a notebook, or holding court, or canoodling, as her father used to say, with some young hippie goddess or another.

  She glanced at her watch—Rae was twenty minutes late now—and when she turned to search the streets for her, Fenn was gone.

  She went back to studying movie posters. The theater played old art movies during the week, and first-run shows on weekends. She’d seen the current film with Andrew when she was very pregnant with Rosie, Truffaut’s Small Change. People always remarked on its charm, but she had been scared to death in the theater and forever after of all the ways children could and did die, how a pulse of danger bounced like sound waves against the most innocent, everywhere, every day. Andrew had gasped when the two-year-old fell out of the ten-story window—the child then bounced on the ground and clapped with joy—while she had sat there dark and nauseated with the general hopelessness of life. She had wanted to be a mellow and trusting parent, but had gone on to be the most terrified mother of all, rising like a shroud through Rosie’s life at every open window, every big wave that came near, every lone man and every gang, every swollen lymph node and lingering bruise, always vigilant, except for that one time when Rosie was four, at the Russian River.

  Elizabeth left the theater and walked onto the blacktop of the market. She bought a bottle of icy water from the man who’d been selling his flavored honey straws when Elizabeth and Andrew first stopped by, a hundred years ago, when they had to drive twenty minutes from Bayview to get here. Rosie had been four when they had discovered the weekly market. Most of the plastic straws’ worth of honey would end up on her clothes or in her hair, and all over Elizabeth, too, blueberry honey in dark navy straws, root beer float, orange cream, lime.

  Now when Rosie and her friends ate here, it was figs, mild California pistachios, cheeses wrapped in stinging nettle leaves.

  Elizabeth realized she would not be able to stay here—there were too many people and way too many smells: barbecued chicken wings, soy-and-tomatillo tamales, bouquets of local flowers, ripe strawberries, a hippie B.O. cloud of patchouli, weed, the brine of feta from Olema, and the sweet glue of honeycomb and sticky children. She turned to walk home, frustrated with Rae and herself and even with the poor innocent farmers’ market. There was something self-congratulatory about the whole thing, and a Loehmann’s quality, everyone so intent on getting huge amounts of the choice produce. Elizabeth never needed things in quantity, but on weeks when she didn’t buy a lot of stuff, she felt like a piker, wondering to herself why she was not overloaded with joy like everyone else.

  She hurried across the street to the steps of the Parkade, where a few teenage and slightly older males blocked her entrance to the ancient concrete steps. They were smoking, bored, sullen, superior, and like most teenagers everywhere, since all eternity, waiting for something to happen. One young man already had the aggressively tattooed neck you saw on middle-aged junkies in AA. She wanted to shake him—“What the fuck are you thinking? Is anyone ever going to hire a guy who has Jesus and a rattlesnake duking it out in front of a wrinkled sunrise?”

  Just then, Rae called out her name. She turned to glower at her friend, who stood across the street in front of the theater, but caught a rangy peripheral blur, more familiar to her than the various old women she saw in mirrors: brown limbs and long black curls. Holding up a finger to Rae, she called out, “Rosie!”

  Rosie was coming out of the bus kiosk, two hundred feet away, toward the group of boys sprawled on the steps now behind Elizabeth. “Rosie!” Elizabeth called again, as if it had been weeks since they’d last spoken, and they walked toward each other. Rosie took a few steps to the right, so that she could gesture to the teenagers on the steps, a gesture of e
xasperated, masculine apology—I’ll be right there, guys, the little lady needs me first.

  Rosie lowered her gaze to size up Elizabeth’s outfit, khaki shorts that were now perhaps a size too small, and a frayed floral blouse with an admittedly funny collar, with such shock and hurt that a stranger might have thought that Elizabeth stood there in snorkel flippers and a thong.

  “Mommy,” Rosie admonished. “I thought we had talked about that shirt. It really just will not do.”

  “But the color is good for me, right?” Cream, with soft orange flowers and pale olive leaves. Rosie rolled her eyes, and stepped into her mother’s arms for a quick hug. “May I please have some money? Like ten or so, for tamales?”

  Money was the way to Rosie’s heart, a five here, a ten there, a shopping spree every so often. Rosie and Elizabeth got high on shopping sprees like stylish crackheads, and the high could last the night. Otherwise, Rosie’s most frequent addictive need was to get out of the house and hang out with her friends, Elizabeth’s to see that Rosie was happy—both experienced the anxiety of withdrawal when these needs could not be met. Tonight Elizabeth bargained with her: she got to smell Rosie’s neck for a moment, and then she’d give her dinner money. Rosie paid stoically, standing straight and long-suffering, like someone at the tailor’s, while her mother burrowed under Rosie’s chin.