Imperfect Birds

by Anne Lamott

  “Oh, I thought you were mad at me for being so abrupt with my suggestions.”

  “I’m sorry I was such a baby. You nailed the problem—too many details and ideas. Not enough structure or story. It’s like Gertrude Stein said, that she could always write good sentences, but she never quite understood paragraphs. That’s me, in this piece.”

  Deeply relieved, she left him to his rewrite, her secret still untold.

  Rosie woke up the next day and wondered what it might be like to take acid or Ecstasy with Robert. They could candy-flip—take a little of both—although maybe not their first time together. Maybe he’d go to a rave with her in Oakland. She doubted he had ever done E. The fantasy enthralled her; time turned soft and druggy.

  She kept trying to reach him at the office the next day, but he never picked up. She left a chipper message on his machine, and waited for him to call back.

  Alice called twice, Jody once, speeding on Alice’s Adderall, saying she was going to run away from home to be with Claude in San Diego, she knew a girl there from rehab she could stay with, but Rosie thought it was just the speed talking. A couple of hours later, Rae called to discuss the schedule for next week, after which, with school starting, the summer program at Sixth Day Prez would be over. Alice called to say Jody had phoned her from the Greyhound bus station in Salinas—she really had run away from home to be with Claude. They both cried out in worry and loss and amazement, and Rosie’s stomach wrenched with jealousy, that Jody loved someone this much that she would throw away everything to see him again—God, she was going to be in massive trouble when she returned. Rosie couldn’t stop thinking about Robert, how close she felt when they sat on the grass side by side, how she could feel the tuning fork between them.

  The grass had just been cut the last time they played before she was grounded, and it had stained her shorts and smelled as strong as lacquer. It turned her on even to remember it. This feeling, of love, was so much greater than the few times she’d had sex, when you felt like you and the guy were meat machines with various levers. All that slapping flesh and spit and grotesque rearrangements; plus things going numb. But she and Robert were like a beautiful movie, or like the part after you’re done in bed, when you get to lie in that bubble wrap of closeness. It was your souls touching.

  The next morning, Elizabeth was on her knees weeding near in the flower bed near Rosie’s window, impatiens and columbine. Rosie discovered this when she threw her window open, her room already hot and bright with sunshine. She said hello to her mother, and her mother answered, “Hello, darling. What are your plans for today?”

  Jeez, Rosie thought, it was like living with a secret agent. She shrugged.

  They were only five or six feet apart, separated by an open window, so Elizabeth heard the phone ring, and saw Rosie race for it. “Hey, cuz, wha’ up?” Rosie said, without enthusiasm. “No. I’m fine.”

  She must have a crush on someone, Elizabeth realized, and went back to weeding. Then she heard the beeps of Rosie’s dialing, and then a moment later heard her hang up. Rosie dialed again, and hung up again. Ten minutes later Elizabeth saw her near the window, on the phone, heard her leaving someone a message in her smallest voice, high in her throat, trying to sound casual as she asked the person to please call her back.

  Elizabeth fluffed the soil around a flower, straining to hear. A few minutes later, she listened to Rosie dialing again, heard a soothing male voice. She pretended to be fully engaged when Rosie opened the window wider.

  “God,” Rosie screamed through the opening. “Are you spying on me?”

  Elizabeth rolled her eyes with disdain and went back to weeding. But later in the day, when Rosie was in the shower, Elizabeth hit the redial button, waited for the connection, and frowned when she heard the distinct voice of Robert Tobias on his answering machine.

  Rae picked Elizabeth up early the next morning, as the sun was coming up, for the field trip Elizabeth had agreed to show up for, come hell or high water. They drove along Highway 1 listening to the classical station and eating pumpkin scones, and it was sweet. Not until they passed Bodega Bay and entered Sonoma County did Rae reveal their destination: she had signed them up for a women’s sweat lodge.

  Elizabeth felt sure Rae was joking. Signing her up for a sweat lodge was like signing Richard Nixon up for Sufi dancing. She laughed at the very idea, even as far as Jenner. They discussed real things, like why it was taking Elizabeth so long to tell James the secret—she even promised Rae she would tell him tonight. But when Elizabeth wanted to stop at the Kruse rhododendron reserve, and Rae shook her head, and said they were in a hurry, Elizabeth’s heart sank. “I wasn’t kidding, hon,” Rae said. Elizabeth passed rapidly through the first four stages of grief—denial, as this could not be happening; anger and swearing, the way she had reacted when Rae took her on that backpacking trip years ago, during which they met James and Lank; bargaining, I will give you anything, plus two chits for alternate field trips, if we turn around; and depression, eyes staring, wide, dead.

  She did not ever get to acceptance. They drove to the banks of the Gualala River, on the border of Mendocino.

  There were six women waiting for them. Two were beauties, one blonde and tall, the other tiny and dark with voluptuous lips. One woman was plain, in early middle age, with the light brown skin of a child. One was at least seventy, with fluffy, feathery white hair and a huge black mole on her cheek that looked like a licorice gumdrop. One was black, average size and Elizabeth’s age, with a friendly face. Her partner was black, homely, quiet, fierce. She looked as if she had been dragged along, like Elizabeth.

  “What brought you here?” the friendly black woman asked Rae.

  “Our church may start offering members sweat lodge as a spiritual tool—so we’ll have more to offer than talking and worship. I wanted to see what it was like. But mainly, it’s a chance to spend the whole day with Elizabeth.” Rae turned to beam at her. “She’s the angel God sent to me when I was at my lowest.”

  Elizabeth shook her head. “I’m not even speaking to you, Rae.”

  “I came because I’m sluggish and toxic,” said the elderly woman. “My mother was big on Adele Davis and taught me that when the skin excretes toxins, it’s like the soul excretes all this shit, too.”

  They were standing near a round hut about ten feet in diameter, four feet tall, covered with blue plastic tarps and army blankets, that looked like a Volkswagen Bug-sized wigwam. The leader, Bonnie, a tall, solid woman with braids, in a shift, attended to the nearby fire, on which small rocks heated.

  Bonnie told them briefly about the sweat lodge tradition among Native American tribes, and then had them strip to their underwear, which they did shyly, not looking at one another’s bodies. She then held the tarps open so each woman could bend low to crawl inside the lodge. They seated themselves clockwise, as instructed, east to west like the sun. Rae was the plumpest, but her fat was firm, with only a few dimples. Flattened cardboard boxes served as seats. Inside, the unsightly hut was a hemisphere created by bending willow branches into a dome, connecting them, and covering them with more sticks. In the center was a hole, into which Bonnie soon placed the hot rocks.

  It was like a sauna in a cave made of trees. Elizabeth was glad she did not have to sit next to Rae, who was on the other side of the hole. Bonnie handed a bucket of water to the woman nearest the opening, and came inside, pulling the tarps down, and sat.

  Elizabeth felt for a few moments that her mind might snap. This reminded her of the bamboo cages in The Deer Hunter, like rats might swim by. But then curiosity settled into her, and she started taking notes for James in her head, only partly to stay calm. It was pitch black. In the darkness, you felt like one organism, she told him, enclosed in the membrane of willow.

  “It’s going to get very hot,” Bonnie said. “We’ll do four rounds. I think you will be pretty uncomfortable, and want to bolt. You can do that if you need to, or you can tough it out. If you breathe in the heat and
steam, they will center you.”

  Someone nickered in the dark, like a pony. Elizabeth did not think she had made the sound.

  Bonnie spoke. “First, try to release the lies the world has told you about yourself, okay? See if you can connect with the person you were, before the lies.”

  The rocks in the center sizzled and hissed when Bonnie poured a cup of water over them. Terror flushed through Elizabeth. It was shocking, so hot and elemental. But she breathed, and remembered being croupy as a little girl, how her mother created a steam room in the bathroom with scalding water from the shower pouring against the porcelain tub, and held Elizabeth on her lap as the steam burned its way through Elizabeth’s nose, throat, and chest, and how after a while mucus jiggled loose from her lungs and she stopped barking like a seal.

  Elizabeth felt like she was in the bottom of the earth; guck jiggled free from her lungs. That was satisfying. She savored it, then moved into a tumbled oceanic nonbreathing panic, and then into neutral spacelessness. In and out of the feeling of being faceless, nameless, unconnected. When the hiss of the steam subsided, she whispered across the rocks, “Rae, are you there?”

  “I’m right here, darling. Right across from you.”

  In the darkness, and closeness, she imagined telling James that she had felt like a marine mammal voluntarily on a rotisserie. Stuff continued to loosen from her lungs. Bonnie called out prayers to the east, prayers to the west, and Elizabeth felt her soft, ploppy body pour off sweat. At the second round, though, when Bonnie poured more water on the rocks, the blast of heat was unbelievable, and Elizabeth felt like she was trapped in the trunk of a car next to a fire; the smoke and the mist stupefied her like a huge fish. It was hell. She hugged her knees to her sweaty, rubbery chest, and somehow the twig that was jammed into her ass helped her breathe, like Andrew gripping her hand too hard through a contraction. She heard someone get to her feet, and then a voice in the dark saying, “That’s it for me, I have to get out.”

  “Okay,” said Bonnie. The tarp opened as one of the black women left, and flapped shut. The women gasped for the cool air that came in. Bonnie crooned, “We are here, to heal the damage, for the next generation. We are here, on the earth, in darkness, to heal the damage, in ourselves, for the next generation.”

  Elizabeth heard Rae say, “I can’t breathe, I have to get some air,” and Elizabeth called across to her, “It’s okay, you can do it,” and Rae said, “No, I need to get outside for a second. I’m claustrophobic.” Elizabeth almost got up, too; anyone would have understood. She heard the rustles and shuffle and slap of Rae getting up and heading out. Elizabeth couldn’t see anything except the burning rocks, and the rocks weren’t giving off light. The flap opened. She saw Rae briefly as she wiggled out on her stomach, her heavy thighs illuminated by the sunlight now flooding into the hut along with cool, clean air.

  She was surprised to find that she was okay with Rae gone—free, and strangely less alone. Beings of some sort seemed to hover nearby, banging a teakettle softly, saying, Pay attention to us.

  She took long breaths, still holding her knees to her chest, breathing in the steam, and it was the only thing she had felt since Rosie’s birth that might qualify as dilation. Through this, something in her slipped lower, or deeper, or something, to a place where she did not feel the burden of her wrinkled, aching bones. She felt as if nesting dolls surrounded her, Andrew, her parents, lovely and much older than when they had died, aunts and uncles, old friends. She felt more contained and larger inside the willow dome than she had ever felt in her life, except for the times she had taken acid or mushrooms, so many years ago. The heat was terrible. She felt miserable and ecstatic, listening to invisible voices in the silence, and for once she could hear them above her own human whir, anxiety, manners, biography, armor, distractions; she shed these all like a virus, and found a speck of light inside that was not her at all, a fleck of gold in the sandy streambed soil within.

  Later, having survived a fourth round of steam, Elizabeth and the other two survivors—the oldest woman, plus Bonnie—stepped out into the sunlight. They cheered themselves. “This is probably the single greatest achievement of my life,” Elizabeth said, and when the other two women laughed, she said, “You don’t understand. I’m not kidding.” They toasted themselves with cold water, and stretched. Later she found Rae in the river, sitting in the shoals, deep in conversation with two other women. Rae turned to Elizabeth and said, “My warrior.” Elizabeth managed a small smile as she stepped into the river and splashed around. The water was freezing; it forced her to snuggle with Rae.

  “I’m sorry I tricked you into coming,” Rae said in front of everyone, and even though Elizabeth was now glad she had come, she stayed silent. “And I’m sorry I had to get out so early. I felt like an armadillo on a grill.”

  It was a lovely afternoon in the sun, eating beans and corn tortillas Bonnie had brought, talking about the experience, laughing, shaking their heads, swearing they’d stay in touch.

  On the way home, Elizabeth slept all the way south to Sea Ranch.

  When she woke up, she looked over at Rae in the driver’s seat for a long time. “What,” Rae said finally.

  “I felt something today. A speck of something, way deep down inside me, at the bottom of the well. It wasn’t God. I don’t believe in God. But it was not me.”

  Rae drove along, considering this. “ ‘Not Me’ is a good name for God.”

  “Thank you. As long as you understand that it’s lowercase.”

  “Some people call God Howard, as in ‘Howard be thy name.’ Or Andy, as in ‘And he walks with me, and he talks to me.’ Was it anything you could ever turn to in prayer?”

  “You’re suggesting I turn to an entity called ‘not me,’ lowercase, for answers, and comfort?”

  “What does it matter? If prayer works, does it even matter if there’s a god or not?”

  “What if I prayed for knowledge, and it turned out Rosie’s using a shitload of drugs?”

  “Then you’ll know one thing that’s true. But to find that out, all you need to do is buy fancier drug tests and test her more often, no matter if she has tantrums.”

  Elizabeth mulled this over. “That’s what James says. So maybe I’ll do it.”

  When they approached the mall off 101 in Novato, Elizabeth told Rae to pull onto the exit. More accurate urine tests would make James happy. And as long as she was going to tell him how she had betrayed him, she might as well do something to please him, too. Rae pulled into the parking lot outside Target.

  Inside, they searched the aisles until Rae finally found the drug tests in the back.

  Elizabeth reached for three boxes. They were expensive. Turning toward the checkout lines at the front of the store, she grabbed Rae by the shoulder. “Rosie is going to go ballistic.”

  “Better furious than dead or brain-damaged. It’s not your problem. Your problem is to find out what is true and to do the right thing.”

  As they walked past the endless shelves of shit for sale, the smell of disinfectant stuck to Elizabeth’s nostrils. “I’m sweating like a pig, Rae. I wish we’d had this discussion at the river, on sacred ground.”

  Rae pulled her to a stop. She mopped Elizabeth’s forehead with her sleeve. “There’s only sacred ground. The only holy place is where we are.” Elizabeth stared up at the store’s fluorescent lights. All she knew after what they’d been through today was that she was going to tell James the truth, tonight, and test Rosie for all kinds of drugs, in the morning.

  She put her fingers to her throat to feel her weak, rapid pulse, and put her boxes on the counter. Her shoulders sagged. Behind her, Rae pushed her nose into the space between Elizabeth’s shoulder blades, like a big dog. Usually under the stark fluorescent lights of stores, Elizabeth felt like a rump roast on display at Safeway, but she was not thinking about that now. She was thinking of how Rosie used to be, before whatever it was had gotten her: the siege, the possession, whatever you wanted to call it
. She listened to the buzz that the lights above her were making, to let people know that the bulb was about to go out, a soft, not unpleasant buzz, tissue paper on a comb.

  EIGHT

  Twoest

  Rosie rarely used cocaine, because she hated to spend so much of her money at once—sixty bucks or so in one night—when it took so long to earn. When you got blow free, there was nothing better. It didn’t show up in your urine for long, which was good since her mother was now on a testing jag, giving Rosie OTC piss tests every few days. She had been in Elizabeth’s bathroom one day recently, using the tub for a bubble bath, when she’d seen all the new urine tests under the sink. The new batch of kits tested for THC, opiates, methamphetamines, E. She hated that Elizabeth had become so distrustful. That was no way to live. What her mother did not appreciate was how much stuff Rosie had weaned herself off by the end of her sophomore year, like cocaine, which she had been doing many weekends. When she first got close to Jody and Alice, they were doing blow all the time. But it had been easy to stop in the spring, and the only reason she had gotten into it the other night was that Jody had run off to be with Claude in San Diego, and she and Alice had felt genuinely heartbroken.

  Jody was really gone; it hadn’t just been the speed talking, after all. She had called two days ago, to say she was staying with a girl from rehab in San Diego, near the base where Claude was stationed. The girl had stayed clean, and Jody had to if she wanted to crash there for a while. She got to see Claude breifly every day, and go out with him on weekends. They went to motels for their dates. There was nothing her parents could do about it, either, because she was eighteen: she was free.

  Rosie was still dozing at noon, the last Saturday before school started. She lay in her messy bed with Rascal asleep beside her and daydreamed of school and of Robert. Every so often James poked his head in and called her a sleepyhead, told her to get up, make her bed, seize the day. She was seizing the day her way—a made bed meant you were in their world. All kids wanted to dive into bed and be lying down safely, especially until about noon. When you were standing up, you were so vulnerable. Lying there, floating on the surface of the bed, like a cushioned pond, you didn’t know where it would float you, but surrounded by a hundred images and scribbles, you knew it would be somewhere lovely, a portal to take you someplace more real than the jail of your parents’ home and school.