Imperfect Birds

by Anne Lamott

  “There’s one almost every year,” Lank said. “So stupid. He had everything: great parents, a marvelous mind, Amelia. He was the funniest kid I ever taught. Everyone liked him. His father had season tickets to the Niners. And yet partying with friends in the countryside, under the moon, smoking weed that costs what teachers make in a week, something beckoned him, promised more, a little more fun, a little more power, and he followed.”

  James shook his head, sighed, continued his vigilant scan of the room. Elizabeth poured herself another cup of tea from the pot James had brewed, and stared into it as if to read her future.

  “Where are you?” he asked.

  “Thinking,” she replied. “In the old days, this would have been the perfect excuse for us all to get sloshed. I wish Rosie would check in soon.”

  The phone rang just then, startling them into small laughs. Elizabeth got up to answer it.

  “Hello?” she said softly. “Hi, darling.” She could tell Rosie knew about Jack and Amelia. “Oh, baby. Where are you?” She heard Rosie breathe, sniffle, sigh.

  “Out at Jody’s aunt’s house.”

  “Are you?” Elizabeth bit her tongue, silent for a moment, pissed off but wanting to appear sensitive. “You didn’t ask if you could go to the beach tonight.”

  “Mama, cut me some slack. A kid died. Someone a lot of us knew.”

  “He was one of Lank’s students. He and Rae are here. Did you know him?”

  “Not well. But I knew her—she’s at the same fashion design institute where Alice wants to go. She’ll never walk again, Mama.” Silence. “Some kids knew them both. We’re all sitting around. Vivian made us grilled cheese sandwiches. We’re safe and sound here and need to be together. Do you understand?”

  “Of course I do, darling. But you still need to be home by curfew.”

  “No, no, not tonight, Mom. Let me come home later. Or stay here overnight—Jody and Alice are . . .”

  Elizabeth almost caved in, hating to make her daughter unhappy, hating to defy her and risk her wrath. But if she said yes, then she would live in fear of Rosie’s being out all night with other traumatized teenagers. “No,” she made herself say. “I want you home by one. I need you to be in your own bed.”

  “Mom, don’t be like that.”

  “Don’t tell me not to be like that. Be home at one. Rae needs you at church tomorrow afternoon, for the ceremony.”

  “I have a lesson with Robert at two.”

  “That works—Rae and I don’t need you until four. I love you, baby.”

  Long pause, then a sigh, and, “Love you, too, Mom.”

  She did not actually know Jack Herman at all, nor was she with Jody and Alice, at Vivian’s house, eating grilled cheese. She was in the phone booth at the gas station. But she was definitely feeling terrible about the boy’s death. How could you not? The thing was, you knew your luck would give out if you kept driving too fast when you were drunk, let alone on Ecstasy, too, and the kids who’d known him said he always drove fast with the stereo blasting. So the other thing was, if you were tripping, like on E, but you had to drive for some reason, you should go extra slow, and totally focus.

  She was with some girls from school whom she had come upon at the Parkade, three blonde girls you always saw together, who had a reputation for being stoners. Jody was with Claude at the Fillmore, Alice was trying to break up with Ryan because there was a new guy she liked. The blonde girls were fairly popular, not Homecoming level, but still bottom of the top tier.

  They ended up hanging with some guys in the dark at the top of the trail that meandered through the countryside, the bay and laurel, live oak and manzanita, where people ran and walked their dogs during the day. One girl had brought her dog, Brownie, a beagle, and someone else had brought a pint of vodka, which they were mixing with cranberry juice and lime juice from a plastic lime. The girls had perfect bodies, like Alice, not so tall as Jody or her own horrible freakish self; two of them took AP classes, two had their own cars. They all had it going on, way on, way more than Rosie ever would, but the best thing was that it was fun to talk to them—she made them laugh and they seemed to like her. All the boys smoked, so the girls sat apart from them and talked about books and guys and life, while chewing on the ends of grass, or their hair. The girls listened to Rosie with respect as she spoke, maybe because she was going to be a senior. She felt beautiful in the moonlight. It illuminated the foothills below, which looked like a theater backdrop, each one higher than the one in front, until they stopped at the summit of Mount Tamalpais, bowing before the sleeping lady.

  She had to walk the two miles home, tipsy, maybe drunk, and it sobered her up. Things would be fine as long as she didn’t get stopped by the cops. There was a town-wide midnight curfew for teenagers, which was a joke, since they never brought anyone in unless they thought the person was holding. Rosie wasn’t, except for a roach; actually, a pretty good-sized roach. They had smoked some killer dope, and the moon lit the town like a Christmas diorama. The cops were a joke. They wanted all the kids to like them, so when they busted up a party because the music was too loud and neighbors were complaining, they mostly shooed people out in a mellow and groovy way. Sometimes the parents were at home, sometimes the parents had even bought for their kids, so they wouldn’t be getting drunk somewhere else, but the parents always said innocently that they thought the kids were just listening to music, even though everything smelled like a concert at the Fillmore. If the cops did stop Rosie, she could probably talk her way out of it. She had used the arsenal of products she always kept near, Visine, breath mints, and moist towelettes.

  A siren roared in the night, waking Elizabeth, and her mind began to spin with scenes of Rosie being killed, by rapists, murderers, burnouts who milled around town all night, sleeping at dawn in the brush, but mostly with a vision of every parent’s nightmare: a bloody car crash, Rosie going up in flames when the engine exploded, or even dead but untouched after hitting her head in that one lethal spot, like the father in A Death in the Family, with only the small blue mark on his chin. The second siren was the last straw, and Elizabeth ran to the phone to call Rosie at Vivian’s house. She was actually gasping for breath as she dialed, digging the fingernails of her free hand into the back of her phone hand as hard as she could to contain herself, when the front door opened. It was almost two.

  “Jesus!” Elizabeth shouted, slamming down the phone.

  “Hi, Mommy,” Rosie said, stepping through the front door, and Elizabeth whipped around at the sound of her voice, so crazy with anxiety and adrenaline that she simultaneously wanted to sob with relief and tear out chunks of her child’s hair.

  Rosie comforted her the best she could. She talked her mother into going into the bathroom with her, where she peed while Elizabeth leaned against the sink. Rosie believed this would create a sense of intimacy. “Let me brush my teeth, Mama,” she said, easing her mother over to the side. She brushed her teeth and tongue, and then washed her face with warm water, and looked up at their reflections in the mirror as she dried her face with the towel Elizabeth handed her. Her mother looked grim, but not majorly so—more like she was pretending to look grim and stern. Rosie studied the pterygium creeping over her iris. “Is this getting bigger?” she asked with false alarm, and Elizabeth’s face fell with worry.

  James was furious with Elizabeth in the morning for not grounding Rosie, although he had been asleep when she got home.

  “She was an hour late,” James said. “She missed curfew. It’s black-and-white.”

  “But it was a special case, what with the accident.”

  “She doesn’t get to come home at all hours. Period. We’ve talked about this,” he reminded her. “Teenagers need to feel a corral around them. They’re not safe without one.”

  Elizabeth knew this was true.

  “But it was a crazy night for the kids,” she said without much conviction. “We need to choose our battles. I was glad she came home. You didn’t even wake up.”r />
  “Because I wear earplugs. I choose not to let Rosie destroy my sleep.”

  “Well, I don’t have that option—I’m her mom.”

  “She says one thing and does another. She blows off curfew. She randomly announces she’s spending the night at the beach, instead of asking us if she can. And then what, she hitchhikes home? That’s your system. Did you ever think that maybe if Rosie keeps pulling the rug out from under you like this, it’s partly because you keep getting back on her rug?” Elizabeth nodded, so glad Rosie was safe in bed. But James went on. “Listen: Every time you draw the boundary way outside of what we’ve agreed on, she has to come back that much farther, to even meet us halfway.”

  Lank had arranged for a substitute so that he could take a mental health day, and he stopped by at nine to pick up James for an all-day hike at the water district lakes. Elizabeth made them cinnamon toast and ersatz mocha, with strong coffee, Rosie’s cocoa mix, and whipped cream. “These are all my favorite foods,” Lank said. He looked older. Elizabeth reached out to stroke his fair freckled cheek with the back of her hand.

  “Is there a service?”

  “Yes, on Sunday. At the Catholic church in Larkspur.”

  “Oh, so the family is Catholic. Maybe that helps a little. Do you think?”

  “Rae thinks so. And Rae is right about almost everything, eventually. Nothing can help these people today. But maybe in a year, they will have come through.”

  They sat nursing their drinks. Lank took off his glasses to wipe his eyes. James called from the bedroom that he was almost ready. “I wish I had faith, Elizabeth,” Lank said. “I wish I were a Catholic or a Jew. Or Anabaptist. Or AA, or anything. I wish I believed Jack was still alive somewhere, being silly, cracking jokes. I wish I believed that he did not die in vain.” They sat in the comfortable silence of old friends. “I do believe in kitchens, though,” he said, looking up. “I believe they are holy ground.”

  Elizabeth smiled. Lank burst out laughing.

  “What?” she asked, somewhat taken aback by the shift in his demeanor. He laughed and laughed, and again had to take off his glasses to wipe his eyes. The soft red hair around his tonsure was sticking straight out on one side like a baby rooster. “You want to hear a joke Jack Herman told me once?” Elizabeth nodded, skeptical, and concerned for Lank’s mental state.

  “There was a second-grader named Mike who could not do math for the life of him, no matter how many tutors or how much extra help his parents gave him. He was always just barely getting by or falling behind. So for third grade, his parents put him in the local Catholic school. Right away, he starts doing better—coming home right after school, doing his homework, and starting to pull ahead of his classmates. And when the first report card comes, he’s actually gotten an A. His mother says, ‘Mike, what was it? Was it the nuns? Was it all that structure?’ And he says, ’Nah. But on the first day of class, when I saw that guy nailed to the plus sign, I knew these people weren’t fooling around.’ ”

  Lank and Elizabeth laughed so hard that he had to take off his glasses yet again to wipe his eyes and nose, and they sat that way, heads hung, until James came in, took a look at them, and not knowing what else to do, got a box of Kleenex, setting them both off again.

  Rosie slept so late that at eleven Elizabeth poked her head into the room. Rascal was sitting on the edge of the bed, watching Rosie sleep. Elizabeth sniffed the air, detecting the faintest whiff of alcohol. She came closer, bent in to smell Rosie’s breath, which she’d surreptitiously sniffed last night. It had smelled fresh. It smelled dry and musty this morning, and there was definitely the hint of alcohol in the air. Elizabeth realized with a start that it was coming out of Rosie’s skin. She reached to shake her awake, sickened by the memories of her parents’ own scent as they metabolized vodka from the night before, and in fact, by the memories of her and Andrew on mornings after, which for her had become pretty much all the time after Andrew’s death.

  “Were you drinking last night?” she asked, shaking Rosie. “Wake up.”

  Rosie couldn’t focus right away. “God!” she snapped. “Get away!”

  “Were you? I’ll go buy a Breathalyzer if you won’t tell me the truth.”

  She had been urged to buy one, along with some home urine tests, by a counselor who addressed the junior class parents. And she had certainly meant to buy both, and definitely would now, later today. Rosie sat up.

  “After we left Jody’s aunt’s last night, we stopped by the Roastery, with a girl Alice knew, a girl who went out with Jack freshman year. And the girl had a half-pint of tequila. So we all sat outside for a while, and we all had a couple of sips—that was all there was! A half-pint, for four of us. I had like, two big sips. That’s all.”

  “It shouldn’t smell this strong if you only had two sips.”

  Rosie threw her hands up, exasperated, disgusted. “Fine, don’t believe me. Call Vivian.”

  Elizabeth was glaring at her, huffing.

  “Mama, maybe you’re just extremely sensitive to it, because you don’t drink anymore. Remember how you thought Rae had been drinking that time, and it was just polymers from her wrinkle lotion?”

  Elizabeth looked away. Then she sank to the bed. “Could you please do only a little bit of everything, and not get in trouble with it, and live to be eighteen, and not scare me to death? Very often? Please please please?”

  “I don’t do much of anything, Mommy. Come here.” Rosie patted the space next to her on the bed. Elizabeth stretched out beside her. Rascal came to stand on her chest, treading as if she were his mother and he a kitten.

  “Love can be so painful,” Elizabeth said, grimacing each time he flexed. Rosie watched her out of the corner of her eye. Then she slid a blanket between her mother’s chest and the cat’s claws. Rascal continued treading, eyes closed, drooling. “Are you teaching tennis today, darling?”

  “Yeah. I told you, at two. And then church at four, to help set up.”

  “I’ll see you there. Rae thinks a lot more people may come for the salt ceremony, because of the accident. People need to cry together. She and I are going to cook all afternoon.”

  Elizabeth wandered around the house, exhausted in part from having had to get up when Rosie had finally gotten home, and partly because of her antidepressants. Some days they left her feeling logy and too mellow. Yet at the same time, her stomach was often filled with butterflies. She wanted to experiment with taking just half a dose every day. She should tell James or Rae that she was having this thought. Or even her psychiatrist, come to think of it. But they really didn’t have the money. An hour with the shrink cost what James made at his radio job every week. So she went to an AA meeting at noon instead.

  A young businessman in his mid-thirties was the speaker, with a wild story of alcohol and coke, involving violence, crazed spending, jail for public displays, and two overdoses. It was hard to believe—he looked so Ivy League. When he was finished with his story, he chose service as his topic for discussion, and when no one raised a hand, he volunteered that every morning when he took his psychiatric medication, he knew he’d done his community service for the day.

  Elizabeth went up afterward and thanked him profusely for saying that.

  Robert was late for their lesson, but Rosie had tucked a copy of Waiting for Godot into her racket cover and stretched out to read in the grass beside the tennis courts. She pretended to focus as she turned the pages, chewing on the ragged nail of her baby finger. But she couldn’t stop thinking about Amelia, now imprisoned in a frozen body. She had called Robert to see if he wanted to cancel his lesson, and he had all but begged her to meet him at the courts, saying he had never needed a work-out so badly. Her heart wheeled around inside like it was on a tricycle.

  Her feelings puzzled her. There was definitely something between them. Alice, who was the best at understanding guys, said that if you thought there was something going on between you and a guy, there was. It wasn’t like Jody and Claude; more like
when Stuart Little falls in love with the beautiful two-inch Harriet Ames, and buys a souvenir birch-bark canoe in which to take her rowing at twilight: love in an old-fashioned way. She would try to love Robert from afar. He kind of seemed to love her, for her mind—the only A student in her physics class—and for helping him to get so good at tennis; and the looks on his face when they talked about stuff like The Seventh Seal and literature made him seem entranced. She thought about him more and more these days, in a deeper way than when you have a crush.

  She yelped when he sat down beside her, and felt herself turn red. Raising one hand to her chest, she said, “You startled me!” She gave him a look of mock aggravation, then crossed her arms.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, sitting down. “I thought you saw me walking here. You were lost in your book.”

  “It’s okay.” She was still lying down, using the log as a headrest and pillow. He sat with his back against it. Her long brown legs stretched out before them. She sat up, and they both swiveled so that they faced each other, and he asked her if she knew anything more about Jack and Amelia, and she told him there had been Ecstasy at the party, that Melanie Hertz was in jail.

  He shook his head. “Melanie Hertz is a wonderful kid. She’s a honeybee. There’s a funeral at St. Patrick’s on Sunday,” he said. “Are you going?”

  “I didn’t really know him,” she said. “We’re doing a grief ceremony at Sixth Day Prez this afternoon, if you or anyone wants to come. At five.”