Imperfect Birds

by Anne Lamott

  He laughed, and looked off, thinking. “Well. Sunshine is energy, and life is energy, so you are energy, and energy is all linked by what Einstein called ‘spooky action at a distance.’ Other physicists have called it ‘nonlocal connections’—you remember Bell’s theorem, of course. So we are all energy, and connected, and will remain so. There’s a man named Gary Schwartz at the University of Arizona who calls that energy ‘love,’ as Tolstoy does, and since there’s plenty of sunshine in Tucson, Schwartz ought to know.”

  God, it was so great, he talked to her like a grown-up, like a colleague. She listened to her heart, to the thwok thwok of people playing on the other court, to the squeak of rubber-soled footsteps on the grass beside their court. He dropped his voice, and spoke like a gangster, surreptitiously, out of one side of his mouth. “Your friends just arrived,” he said, holding her gaze.

  “Okay,” she said, looking back at him.

  She popped the ball up and down on her strings, then made it freeze, and stuffed it in her pocket.

  She looked over at Jody and Alice, who were sitting in the grass, watching. She waved, then looked at her watch, and flashed her hand at them twice—ten minutes. She and Robert rallied until one, the best they’d ever played, smiling secret smiles. But she never once looked into his face. Instead, she looked at her two best friends, who were leaning against each other, Jody’s arm tucked into Alice’s, lolling together like her mother and she did sometimes, or like lesbians.

  When she and Robert were done for the day, they thanked each other formally. She felt like when you were listening to great music and the bass got inside your body.

  Alice and Jody both looked as if they were close to tears when she walked over to join them. Four arms reached out to her, desperate as widows for her touch. Jody with her great posture and neat, sharp features looked like a secretary in an old movie, like she might whip out her pad and take shorthand, except for her chipped black nail polish and jaggedly sprouting hair. Alice shone as fair as the moon, all curves and curls, cheeks that looked like some auntie had just pinched them lightly, rose-pink blurs. There was a dusting of powder over the freckles on her nose, but in general she was wearing less makeup now, since she’d fallen in love again.

  Rosie plopped down in the small space between them, and they folded themselves around her in a sprawl. “I missed you guys!”

  What was it like being at the police department, they wanted to know. Was she in a cell, were there other kids with her, did she get arrested? She shook her head and smiled, trying to reassure them that she was really all right. How long was she grounded for, and when would she get her phone back? This had been such a nightmare! They acted like she’d been in isolation in a Turkish jail. It made her almost cry with self-pity.

  “Did your moms find out?” she asked them, and they shook their heads.

  She told them how cold it was in the police office, how she wasn’t in a cell, how two drunk men were brought in separately. She told them about how tweaked Elizabeth had been, as if Rosie had been busted with a pound of heroin and some syringes instead of just having two puffs of weed and some beer at a party. And what an asshole James was, how mean he was being to Elizabeth the last few days, but how her mother was totally on her side now, and that they were all made up. She was grounded a few more days, which was okay because she had so much work to do for English before school started.

  She felt Alice stretch out over her back, and dig that small cleft chin against her shoulder blade. “It will all be back to how it was,” Rosie assured them. “No biggie.” Then as one, they all shifted to the left, rearranged themselves as if they were trying to get comfortable sharing a berth, instead of lying on a huge green lawn.

  Rosie immersed herself in their smells and familiar bodies. Her love for Jody was the reason Rosie was able to keep it together at all these days, it was like a crush where you didn’t want to have sex—just kiss maybe—but then Jody asked, “And what on earth was that all about on the court?” in her bad clipped voice. Rosie drew back to look at her, askance.

  “What?” she asked, playing dumb, but secretly thrilled.

  “Like, hello?” said Jody. “He’s totally into you.”

  “That is all in your head,” Rosie insisted.

  Alice made her Kewpie-doll face of concern. “I know, I’m going to ask my guy friends if they know anybody good for you.”

  “Don’t you dare. I’ll never forgive you. Anyway, all the guys we know from around here are biohazard.” This made them all laugh. “I mean, except Claude.” The three of them shifted again, and wriggled together in a shimmy, like a bird composing itself on a piling. Rosie had her face burrowed into Alice’s warm neck, smelling of Nivea and weed, and Jody, on the far side, smelled salty clean like a girl just out of the sea.

  Jody stretched her arm all the way across Rosie to hold on to Alice’s arm. Out of her squished left eye Rosie could see the court where not long ago she and Robert had stood. Something had happened, like they’d exchanged a kind of rain check. She let herself be enveloped in the softness and heat of her girls.

  That night, she had a pleasant vegetarian dinner with her parents. Rosie read in her room all night with the door closed, James worked on his new story, Elizabeth puttered. Things were better.

  Rae called Elizabeth again the next day to see if she wanted to drive to Oakland for a concert at Lake Merritt, with Anthony and young people from church, but again Elizabeth said no. Now she was remodeling the living room.

  “You’re what?” Rae asked.

  “It’s like soul feng shui—I’m shoving things around, trying out new arrangements, trying out other rugs that we had in storage.”

  “And you’re doing that because?”

  Elizabeth plopped down into her father’s old leather easy chair. “I don’t know. I’m stuck in manic doldrums. Do you want to come help me?”

  “No, I want to hear the concert—people from the Oakland Philharmonic, Bach and Schubert. Please come. You never go anywhere anymore.”

  “Next time, I promise, okay? Next time, no matter where or for what.”

  “I already know what the next field trip is. And it will be very bad for you. Yet you have sworn to come along. You’re going to kick yourself.” Elizabeth smiled. “Very bad.”

  “I’ll take my chances.”

  It was wonderful to be pushing the couches and tables from place to place. It gave Elizabeth hope, shifting everything around and cleaning out drawers to get better function, new perspective. Look at me, she thought, pleased: she was not stuck in her old ways, where the shoes went here and her afternoons were spent there. This was a way of starting over. The big fish would be pleased.

  When she stopped to pee, she noticed that the medicine chest was jammed to bursting, too—so how could you possibly notice things missing? She filled a Hefty bag with outdated medicines and bottles of glop, and threw it in the trash.

  Then she sank down in a chair. Glancing at her watch, she saw that it was noon. Rosie was still asleep. This made her afraid, panicky even. James was in the city. She should have gone with Rae, but she needed to stay home to keep an eye on Rosie, make sure she didn’t sneak out. The spatial contours and sounds of her living room were once removed, as if she hadn’t come quite all the way back after space travel, or as if a thin invisible film separated her from where she was.

  She felt funny, like she was on an island, floating away. It was too quiet. Bad thoughts flowed through her mind like a stream, and she tried to clear her head of the mental flotsam—James in a car crash, Rosie in a coma. Rae with breast cancer, Lank teaching at Columbine, Elizabeth in the bin, in a silent scream. But right here and now, weren’t things just fine?

  Watery fear filled her. She had to distract herself, get herself to look away, like when you shook your keys at an otter at the zoo to get it to look up. Columbine was also a flower, growing in her garden, blue blossoms in the flower beds outside Rosie’s window. She should go look at them, or drive with
Rosie out to the creek beside the redwood where lavender and golden columbine grew.

  What was going on? She was having some sort of episode. She couldn’t call her shrink, he didn’t go into the office today. She tried to anchor herself, focus on the island instead of the flat gray water, the limitless depth of the ocean. What did we have on the island? Our bodies, our fear, coconuts and mango, our books, modest entertainments, goats if you were lucky.

  There was always Rascal, asleep on the kitchen counter, and Rosie, come to think of it, still in bed. Lots of connections you could make, if you just got up off your butt. She could see both Rosie and the columbine in one trip. She stood and walked across the invisible bridge to Rosie’s room, but when she threw open the door to let in the day, the bed was empty, the window open wide.

  SEVEN

  Speck of Light

  The three girls tramped up the walkway to Rosie’s front door. Rosie and Alice supported Jody between them like a wounded soldier. What could you tell your mother to lessen the consequences of having snuck out in the night while grounded in the aftermath of having been busted? Certainly not the truth, that Jody and Alice had tossed pebbles at her window until she woke and let them in, at two in the morning. Jody had broken down because Claude was going to be transferred. Alice said she’d threatened to kill herself, which was why they had needed both meth to get through the night, which would show up in Jody’s drug tests, unless she gave her parents no reason to test her until the drugs were out of her system, which was why Jody needed to call from Rosie’s and say she’d been there all night.

  Rosie was clean and thinking clearly: She had been the designated driver of Alice’s car. She would tell a bit of truth in the interest of credibility, explain about Claude’s leaving. She intended to deny having snuck out in the middle of the night. She would say instead that the girls had come for her at dawn, one of them in more pain than could be borne, and stood beneath her window, in the midst of columbine and impatiens, in the airy floral first light of the day.

  Rosie neared the door of her own house, relieved to be sober and in the self-important role of a nurse. How often she, Alice, and Jo were up at dawn, on something or coming down, no ground beneath them, wired or fried or tripping, the sky not necessarily overhead. But this time she was only tired. She rehearsed her speech to raise as few suspicions as possible. You had to feel sorry for Elizabeth, she thought—getting tricked like that all the time, like a child.

  As Rosie helped hold Jody up, forging the path to the door, pride stirred inside her. She had seen herself in hero moments like this her whole life, in waking dreams: badly burned in the movie where she had saved a family from a fiery death, straggling home into her mother’s arms with one useless leg wrapped in charred rags, or holding her bloody side where a bullet had entered, in the movie where the mad-man shot her as she pulled the beaker of anthrax out of his hands. But this time was especially sweet, because Alice and Jo were real, her comrades, and they needed her. She felt calm and warm; peers with her peers, all she had ever wanted.

  Her mother opened the door, and stood pale, mute, and stunned, taking in the sight of the three girls as if they were polar bears. She reached for the collar of Rosie’s jacket, to yank her inside, but Rosie shrugged her off.

  “Stop, Mama!” Elizabeth grabbed for her again. “Stop it, I said!” Elizabeth drew back, as if winding up to strike Rosie, or about to be struck. Rosie stepped forward and reached for her mother’s wrists, and Elizabeth did not shake her off. They stared into each other’s eyes.

  “You two need to go home,” Elizabeth said, finally peering over Rosie’s shoulders at Jody and Alice. But Rosie shook her head no. Elizabeth exhaled with contempt. “God damn it,” she spluttered. “I am so mad at you guys I could spit.” Another hated expression of her mother’s. She gritted her teeth, made fists, fumed. “Get the fuck in here and start explaining.”

  Rosie sized her up, then eased her into the lead, pushing her toward the living room. Elizabeth shook her off and stormed forward. Rosie stepped into the house and the other girls followed close behind, like a line of ducklings.

  As Rosie launched into her story, of the pebbles on the window at dawn, Elizabeth listened in silence on the couch, between Rosie and Jody. Alice had pulled up the easy chair and from time to time raked her fingers through Jody’s short hair.

  Elizabeth glowered at Rosie. “I was sound asleep, Mom—and I know I was already in trouble, but I snuck out to hang with Jody until she could get in touch with her shrink, because it seemed like an emergency.” Jody fiddled with the tips of her fingers. Alice pulled her sweat-shirt sleeve down, and moved on to inspecting her palm, tracing the life line, reading her future. Rosie began to pick at her cuticles. When Elizabeth let her eyes go out of focus, she could see four-year-old girls rubbing the silk edge of their blankets, four-week-olds with tiny fingers knitting.

  Jody’s eyes were downcast, like those of the Madonna, unprotected and innocent, all the eyeliner and cool fallen away, grief eyes. Elizabeth reached for her hand. Now, as she sat between such tall girls, as tall as she was, five-ten, Jody taller, they looked like lost giraffes instead of ducklings.

  Jody cried. After a while, Elizabeth began to ask her questions, harsh yet concerned. Why was Claude leaving, and when? Soon. Why hadn’t Jo told her own mother, and why hadn’t they just called, for Chrissakes, with Rosie already in so much trouble?

  “ ‘Why?’ is not a useful question,” Rosie said. “Like Rae always says.”

  “I’ll call my mom now,” Jody said, standing, but Elizabeth pulled her down. “Alice, go get Jody the phone,” Elizabeth commanded. “It’s in the kitchen.” They turned their three giraffe heads as one to watch her go.

  “Please, Mom, please don’t tell James I snuck out—just this one time. I promise I won’t ever do anything like that again.”

  “I have to tell him, he’s my husband. And besides, I’m so angry at you, I could see red.” Her mother again: so angry she could spit or see red, but instead she always had a nice drink, and two hundred cigarettes.

  “But I’m your child. And I need a break so badly now.” Rosie managed to be both piteous and commanding.

  “I don’t know,” Elizabeth said. “You’re so grounded.” This was ludicrous, as Rosie was already grounded. “Just let it go at that for now.” She did not want to ease Rosie’s misery—any willingness on Rosie’s part to pull herself together would come only from pain, from finally wanting to come in from the cold. Alice returned and thrust the phone at Jody. Jody keyed in her number and had hardly begun explaining before they could hear her mother start shouting. “I know, but Claude is moving!”

  Elizabeth and the two girls listened. “I was headed home, when Claude broke the news. I lost it! I sat in Alice’s car all night, crying. Then we came to get Rosie. And we’re still here.” This was technically true. “You can talk to her—I swear, she’s sitting right next to me.”

  Elizabeth reached for the phone, but Jody shook her head. “So call her if you want. I’m out the door. Home in ten.” A siren bawled in the distance, and Elizabeth felt a flush of fear in her stomach, even though her daughter was sitting beside her. She got up to go to the bathroom, and so did not see the girls look around at one another, sad and also amused, their faces as flat and wide-eyed as those of china dolls.

  Elizabeth went out later that afternoon and bought some over-the-counter urine tests for marijuana and cocaine, and hid them away in her bathroom. Dinner was pleasant enough, and Elizabeth hated to risk stirring things back up, but after Rosie had cleared and washed the dishes, Elizabeth sent her into the bathroom with a plastic cup for pee. Rosie went without protest. It tested positive for weed, but not for cocaine. Rosie assured her, “Don’t forget, it could take a couple of weeks to be clean. THC stays in your system so long.” Elizabeth was relieved about the cocaine, but two weeks seemed a long time to wait for a sense of progress. Not telling James her secret was eating at her, too, and in the morning, she
called Rae, meaning to share it with her.

  But instead, she blurted out, “Rae, I’m having such a hard time with Rosie, or maybe I’m having a hard time with me—but it’s like there’s no difference anymore. I get so afraid that something bad is about to happen, and I tried to talk myself out of that, and I go to a meeting, and I’m better for a while, but when I come home, I have to shut down because the vibe at this house is so intense—and then all the repressed meanness underneath me wants to burst out. Mommy as ultimate mean girl. Some days I could explode from all the warring states in me, the whole convo under the convo.” She stopped then, to listen to what she’d said: “convo under the convo” was their private slang for the deeper conversation under the audible conversation, the world beneath the words.

  “Then tell me, Elizabeth, honey—what is not being said that is causing the screaming inside you?”

  Elizabeth stared off into the middle distance and shook her head. “So many things.”

  “Oh baby, I’m going to meet Lank at the Target in Novato, he just got paid. Want to come with us?”

  Elizabeth stifled a mewing sense of disappointment. “No. I only needed to hear your voice. I’m okay.”

  “I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Give Anthony a call at the church, and make an appointment. He’s great with adolescents, and drugs, pretty good on marriage, and free.” Elizabeth filed away the recommendation about Anthony: the mood at the house had perhaps been better in the last three days. Rosie acted resigned to her fate, sleeping late but then pouring herself into books and assignments, James hard at work in his office. Elizabeth stuffed down her unease.

  James insisted that Rosie cancel her tennis lessons. When she called to tell Robert she was grounded, for missing curfew, he made sounds both accusatory and sympathetic, and said it was actually fine, as he was buried in things to do before the start of school. He asked her how the paper on Kazantzakis was coming along, and she read to him from the epilogue of the book but hoped he thought she had memorized it: “O sun, great Eastern Prince, your eyes have brimmed with tears, for all the world has darkened, all life swirls and spins, and now you’ve plunged down to your mother’s watery cellars.”