Imperfect Birds

by Anne Lamott

  Rosie was at her computer. She quickly closed up the site she’d been studying, got up and went to the door, where Elizabeth stood. “I’m sorry we had a fight, Mommy. But I never found my best jeans. And I paid for them myself.” She held the door like a shopkeeper trying to close up, with one last customer lingering in the doorway.

  Elizabeth reached out and touched her daughter’s cheek with her fingertips, and they looked quietly into each other’s eyes, like friends.

  Rosie tried to get out of dinner with Lank and Rae the next night. Elizabeth was arranging flowers from her garden in a heavy glass vase, yellow roses of three shades, light pink tea roses, purple Mexican sage.

  “Oh my God, I see her almost every damn day!” Rosie said.

  “You see Alice and Jody, too,” James pointed out. “You don’t see so much of Lank. He’s my best friend. You’re having dinner with us. End of story.”

  “Mom!”

  “Stay for the first course, darling. Okay? It’s something you like. Those big lemony seared scallops. And I need you to set the table.”

  Rosie looked at her, doubtful and pessimistic. “Yeah, but realistically, how many will each person get? Two or three, right?”

  Elizabeth wanted to throw the vase at her head, but it was one of the few left of her mother’s. She looked at the flowers lying on her cutting board, and then cut them slowly with the bread knife, with menacing pleasure, like Sweeney Todd. James smiled.

  “God, don’t mock me!” Rosie whined. “That’s all I get from you these days.”

  “Don’t come,” said Elizabeth. “It’s fine. We’ll divvy up your one microscopic scallop.”

  “No, Elizabeth—I already told her she’s staying. And that’s final.” Rosie made a clicking sound of derision and Elizabeth started to protest, as she no longer wanted Rosie to join them, but James held up one finger. “Stop,” he told Elizabeth. “Don’t do that. We agreed.” Then he left.

  Rosie clicked with disdain on her way to the silverware drawer.

  She stayed for the first course, questioning Lank about summer school, teasing Rae, flirting with them both, more or less ignoring her parents. She and James were both wearing tight Grateful Dead shirts, his stretched taut over his chubby belly, hers cropped above her navel. She cut up the two big scallops on her saucer, and savored each lemony, buttery bite, but Elizabeth believed she was doing this as an act of aggression.

  She picked up her plate when she was done, got up from the table, nibbled on Rae’s temple, kissed Lank’s soft, fuzzy bald spot, and saluted her parents good-bye. Elizabeth looked around at the company at her table. No one spoke.

  “It’s so wonderful to have you all here,” she said finally. “To be with people who aren’t mean to me. Who don’t make clicking noises at me.”

  “Is she being awful?” Rae asked.

  “She’s a pill. I spoiled her.”

  “We’re thinking of letting her go,” said James. “Do you want her?”

  “Hell, no,” said Lank. “I’m a high school teacher. I get that all day. If it’s any consolation, Elizabeth, this is what they’re all like with their parents. They can be perfectly lovely with other adults. It’s par for the course. In fact, you’ve gotten off easy. I’ve got kids in my class right now who’ve already done time in rehab and juvie. I have parents sobbing in my office, scared to fucking death. She’s really a beautiful person—with everyone but you.”

  Elizabeth shook her head. “It’s as if she can seal herself off from me, like in a zip-lock bag.”

  Rae reached over to stroke Lank’s pale cheeks. Looking into his face, she said, “Those are such lucky kids, though, to have you. Think of having had teachers like you.”

  “I did have teachers like me. That’s why I wanted to become one myself. And what has it gotten me? Hair loss, weight gain. No savings. And instead of having an inner child, like other people, I have an inner little old man. All teachers do.”

  James concurred. “I have an inner old man, too, now that I think about it. Tired a lot, quietly appalled every time he goes out in public.”

  “Exactly. The incompetence is killing him, and the rudeness. He tries to be a good sport, but I think he sort of misses Eisenhower.” James nodded and reached for the salad. It looked unadorned and boring, but there were surprises in every bite—crunchy jicama, candied nuts, peppery sprouts.

  “Lank,” Elizabeth said. “Knowing what you do about teenagers, what would you do if you were Rosie’s parents?”

  “Consequences, consequences, consequences! Pay attention. Snoop around. Take in what is what, no matter how it scares you. You know when you were a kid, and you had to pretend not to see what was going on right beneath your nose? Because if you did, you would see that your parents were crazy as rats, right—and that no one was in charge? So you unconsciously agreed not to notice, in order to survive? Well, that was then. Notice now. Notice good.”

  Elizabeth had one of those nights of shining metallic insomnia that she used to have every other night, before she started taking sleep medication. She had taken a pill at midnight—James had already been asleep beside her for an hour—but was still awake at one. She had had to put down her book because her eyes were so dry and sandy with wakefulness, and let herself rest with her eyes closed. Sometimes she would doze, but was up every forty-five minutes with a new bad dream: Rosie dead or dying, in all of her nightmares’ greatest hits—car crashes, leukemia—James with his other wife, whom Elizabeth was supposed to be a good sport about, and his little towheaded toddlers on swings, instead of the brooding and angry clubfoot of a teenager he was helping her raise. These were the hours of the black dogs, and she saw them watching her like jackals, cool and patient from the dark corner. At four she got up to pee again, out of wired boredom and exhaustion, and sat on the toilet, hanging her head like someone in a confessional. Then she went to snuggle beside Rosie.

  Even with Rosie beside her, she felt utterly alone in the dark, the space in her head stretched as tight as the silence between the notes of the old lady’s saw. Then Rosie flopped over loudly and nestled her butt against Elizabeth’s, and after a while Elizabeth fell asleep. It was five-thirty by Rosie’s bedside clock when Elizabeth woke. She padded down the hall and crawled in beside her quietly snoring husband and cat, and eventually fell back to sleep.

  She woke in the morning filled with details of everything wrong with her, a deconstruction of her life since the high-water mark of college, her fraudulence, her long-term lack of employment—a life wasted in a ping-pong game of narcissism versus self-loathing, punctuated by sloth and depression. Otherwise, the night had gone swimmingly. Besides, what were you going to do? She went back to sleep.

  James brought her coffee, juice, a toasted bagel, and The New York Times on a tray, and after she ate, hungover with lack of sleep, she closed her eyes again and slept until noon. She walked down the hall to James’s office, and poked her head in to say good morning. He told her he’d come find her as soon as he was done. She stopped at Rosie’s room, on the other side of the office, but Rosie was gone. Her bed was made, and there was a note in the kitchen that she was at Sixth Day Prez. James took a break from his work, sat with her near the new roses, made sympathetic noises, and helped her plan a day that would wear out the clock with a minimum of misery. The garden could use a hand, and he would load the van with boxes of clothes they’d saved for Goodwill.

  Elizabeth’s first thought when she found Rosie’s lost jeans jammed under the front seat of the beat-up old van they shared was how happy this would make Rosie, and what a hero she herself would be for at least a few hours when Rosie got home from VBS. Sand fell like tinsel from the pockets. Elizabeth stood outside the van and held them upside down, while sand spilled out. What, had she been planning to build a sand castle in her bedroom when she got home? And when had she even been to the beach? The party for Jody had been weeks ago. Elizabeth shook her head to clear it. Rosie had a secret life now, was putting together her own tribe, fin
ding her identity there, and it was great to see, and it hurt like hell. She walked toward the garage to throw the jeans in the washer. She would surprise Rosie by having them clean and folded on her bed when she got home. Maybe she would enclose them in a band like the ones James’s dry-cleaned shirts came wrapped in. Hers would say “Pulling Out All the Stops for Our Cherished Customers.” She reached into the watch pocket, checking for coins. Her finger hit against something that was soft and hard at the same time. There were a few of them, and she rolled them out. Blue; light blue pills, Valium, with rounded V’s punched out at the centers, to emulate tiny hearts, like the yellow ones she had taken for a few days after the breakdown.

  Her stomach dropped as if she had just driven over a hill in the city. The yellow ones had been very strong, five milligrams each, all but knocking her out, and hard to get off. But the blue ones were the strongest, ten milligrams. She had had to be weaned off the fives slowly, over two weeks, by her psychiatrist, to the white ones, which were only two milligrams. She felt around the watch pocket until four pills sat in the palm of her hand, like breath mints. She thought of throwing them down the hatch all at once with one fell swoop. James was in the city recording an essay at KQED. Rae was at VBS. So she put the pills in her own watch pocket, put Rosie’s jeans and some towels in the washer, and started the load. She had no idea what to do next. She made herself take deep breaths. Maybe there was a reasonable explanation, she told herself, but something deep inside flickered.

  Oh, God,” Rosie said with amusement and contempt when Elizabeth showed her the pills. “They are not even mine! They’re Alice’s, she takes them sometimes for migraine. Remember? God, I’m sorry you got so worried, but Mommy, you actually knew this. You’re having a senior moment.”

  And even though Elizabeth didn’t remember this, she was flooded with the narcotic of relief. “I thought they were yours,” she said in a little voice. But after thinking it over, she squinted one eye and asked, “Then why doesn’t her shrink give her five-milligram ones?”

  “He does. But she ran out on a Friday, the night we went to the party at Jody’s aunt’s, and Alice got a total migraine, and Jody’s aunt gave her some of these, but they’re ten milligrams, so she told her to split them in half.”

  “But why did she give her so many?”

  “Because the pharmacy was closed for the three-day weekend, remember? It was Memorial Day.”

  Elizabeth thought this over. “You swear?” Rosie nodded. “You’re not in any trouble with drugs?”

  “I told you, I have smoked dope. But it is totally no big deal to me. I got all A’s last term. I’m holding down two jobs. I’m a good kid, Mom.”

  Elizabeth stepped back, amazed to feel her old self again.

  Rosie’s face was soft and magnanimous. “Poor Mommy. Call Jody’s aunt if you need to double-check. I’d understand. I won’t be mad. I won’t think it means you’re spying.”

  Elizabeth shook her head emphatically, as if this was the most ridiculous thing she’d heard all day. She took her daughter’s hand, and brushed the back of it with her lips, gallantly, like a knight.

  Rosie took Elizabeth’s hand, turned it over like a palm reader, studied the network of creases, wrinkles, and age spots, then raised it forward to kiss with slightly chapped and very gentle lips.

  FOUR

  The Heat

  By the time The Seventh Seal came to town, the summer’s heat bore down like a fever. It was hard to be arrogant these days when you felt like a panting dog in a steam bath, but you could still be cranky. Hardly anyone was happy about the weather, except for the little kids splashing in the creek at the park, and Rosie’s bucket kids, whom she spritzed with water during lessons, and the teenagers horsing around at the picnic tables under the shade of the redwoods. Rosie was jealous because Jody had fallen in love—with a soldier, for God’s sake, who was five years older than she. Alice was unhappy because her boyfriend, Ryan, was turning out to be a dick. Rosie’s parents were unhappy, because James’s job at KQED meant he spent less time at home. Robert was unhappy because something had come up at home and he could take only one tennis lesson most weeks now, and Rosie was unhappy about losing that extra money and that lovely time alone with him.

  Yet everyone’s solution seemed to include making plans to see The Seventh Seal. It was like the circus had come to town, the Death ’n’ Decay Cabaret: Alice’s mother had gone opening night, Jody’s grandmother Marion was going tonight with a grandson. Rosie and her parents were going tomorrow, Rae and Lank were going the day after. It was ludicrous. Adults didn’t have the sense of the little kids splashing around in the creek in their Batman underpants. There were many things that made it hard to respect them. A, they had destroyed the planet. And B, it was so easy to pull the wool over their eyes. All Rosie had to do to put her parents’ minds at ease was to say she was giving a tennis lesson that afternoon after VBS and she didn’t have to check back in with them for hours. Then she would call and breathlessly recount how far Robert had come this summer. Then she could say she and Alice were stopping by the Sustainability Center to see if the people there needed help. She would feed them details to make it sound more authentic, like tonight, for instance. She’d told them that now there was a sign out in front of the building that said, “If you are here and we aren’t, we’d love you to come inside and take this shift.” James had laughed over the phone and said to be home by curfew, midnight during the summer. She and Alice had only passed the sign on their way to the Parkade. They had bought Quaaludes from a guy who’d just been to Florida, ten dollars a tab, which was a rip, but she’d make twenty during her lesson with Robert the next day, so she treated Alice. Someone on the street had given them each a lager, and the ’ludes started coming on fast, so she called to say they had passed out leaflets on the street for the Sustainability Center and she was going to stay at Alice’s.

  Her mother asked if she could volunteer, too, someday, and Rosie said, oh, sure, the center needed all the help it could get. Not that she and Alice had ever actually gone inside.

  They had a great night, perfectly stoned with a bunch of other teenagers on the open-air expanse of grass at Pali Park, surrounded by redwoods. Older people came by and played guitar, and they sang and floated and flirted and drank only a few sips of strawberry wine that a cute hippie mother offered them. Then they went to Alice’s and listened to rap because her mother still wasn’t home, and they tried on combinations of textured scarves and filmy tops to wear over their camisoles and cut-offs—wild color combinations, lots of orange. Alice said, “Everything goes with orange,” and she had impeccable taste. Apricot, coral, persimmon, and tenne, which was tawny orange-brown tinged with gold.

  She felt groggy the next morning at VBS, even though she’d stopped for a double latte on her way from Alice’s to the church. It didn’t matter, though, Rae was unusually distracted, and the kids were easy and funny. Rosie read them the story of Moses in the bulrushes, and when their attention flagged, she spritzed them with the misting sprayer people used for houseplants. But when she tried to review what she had read to them, not one of the kids remembered a thing about Moses. “What’s with you guys today?” she asked, although it was she who was not with it. “Just tell me about baby Moses.” The kids could see that she was discouraged, and one boy finally raised his hand. “Okay,” he said, with a look of grim concentration, “wasn’t he the little guy with the monkey?”

  She still felt strange and trippy in the afternoon on the tennis court, and when Robert asked if she felt okay, she said she hadn’t slept well. His strokes had improved greatly, although when he served he still looked like someone fending off a cloud of bats. Even through the foggy Quaalude hangover, she took pride in his improvement, in what they had managed together, and when they sat down with Cokes in the grass after the lesson, she felt a real closeness with him.

  They were a foot apart, but their arms, resting on bent knees, were nearer, and she could feel a vibration between
the dark hair on her long arms and the golden hair on his. The closer they got without actually touching, the more she could feel it, hear it, like a tuning fork, or some phantom instrument you’d play to make spirit music at a séance.

  “ ‘Love is life,’ ” he said all of a sudden. Oh my God: they’d been discussing his serve. “ ‘All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source.’ ” Oh my God—was he proclaiming his love for her? She couldn’t think of what on earth to do in response, so she squinted at him skeptically.

  “Leo Tolstoy,” he said.

  She smiled. “Will you write that down for me?”

  “Beside it being all we need to know most of the time, it is not incompatible with quantum physics—especially the field theory. Only mistake he made is that he is not a particle, he’s a wave.”

  Rosie nodded. He fished around in the cover of his tennis racket until he found a pen and a scrap of paper, and began writing. She was going to memorize it, recite it to her parents that night, and the part about Tolstoy being a wave. But not say that he had told her. Just while passing the salad, whip it out.

  He was studying her with a slightly worried look.

  “What?” she demanded.

  “You okay?” he asked. “Should I be worried about you?”

  “Yeah,” she said. He looked at her sideways, amused. She yawned expansively and got to her feet. “The heat is really getting to me. I’m going home to take a nap.”

  “See that you do,” he said. He worried about his students. Last year a girl in honors physics had slit her wrists on her bedroom floor and died, was dead in there all night because her parents didn’t find her until their alarm rang, and the van from Aftermath Crime Cleaners came to remove the rug, and paint over the blood splatters on the walls, and somehow get rid of the smell. Other gifted students of his were big stoners by senior year, failing and even sometimes dropping out. She was his star, though. She gave him nothing to worry about. Just heat prostration.