Imperfect Birds

by Anne Lamott

  She rolled over and fished a miniature Snickers bar out of a plastic Halloween sack from her night table. The OTC tests didn’t scare her: she had it all worked out. She could test positive for weed for a while without it being a problem, since it lingered in your system for a month or more, even if you had stopped using, which Rosie insisted she had on the day after she’d gotten busted. Then, in two weeks, she could use bleach to mask the THC. Her mother had tested her before she did the cocaine, and it would be out of her system before she got tested again. She didn’t ever use opiates or meth, so that wasn’t an issue. She hadn’t done Ecstasy in weeks. There’d been so much speed in the E lately, but someone said it wasn’t meth or dexedrine, so she didn’t have to worry about her mother knowing about it from the urine tests.

  Whatever it was, Rosie hadn’t liked the jangly nervousness it produced. She turned on her side. Rascal complained. That speed was the kind that made you want hard-core rave music in the party house, unlike pure E, which made you want trance music and was so lovely. The bad speed could make you think too much. Then you had to make sure Alice was right there to be with you. Then it would be like, “I’m so happy right now with Alice,” passing a pacifier back and forth till it was in shreds. You’d laugh, but then ten minutes later, you’d be like, “Now I don’t want to share this feeling with people,” so you’d wander off to be by yourself in some quieter space. Then in ten minutes, the speed would make you go, “I’m superlonely right now, no one is talking to me,” and you’d wander off to another room to look for people. But even with a bunch of people, a certain song could play and you’d turn around and see all these happy people, dancing and taking care of each other, and you’d think, “Aren’t I supposed to be happy?” Then maybe a few minutes later, you would be happier than you’d ever been before.

  She was going to chill, take a break from the E till some good stuff came through town. Where everyone wanted to give to each other, do PLUR—peace, love, unity, respect—share ChapStick and gum, pacifiers, massages. Sometimes when she was peaking, she would feel her eyes roll back in her head and she’d get afraid that something bad might happen—but then people would steady her, and she’d be dancing again. She’d get a mix of butterflies and wanting to puke, but this was just all part of what they called coming up, part of the E coming on, the elevator going too fast; and then she’d get really cold and know she was getting high, about to be in bliss.

  Rosie got up and went into her parents’ bathroom. She found a bottle of eardrops on the bottom shelf of the medicine cabinet, rinsed out the bottle and dropper a few times, then went to the laundry room and filled the bottle with bleach. She heard James talking to himself as she passed his study. He must be on the final draft of a story. He always read late drafts out loud. No one in her family had gotten an earache in ages, plus this was past its expiration date. Her parents should try to stay on top of stuff like that. Like, what if she really had an earache, and there was only this expired shit? It was typical. She screwed the dropper in tightly, and returned the bottle to the shelves. This time when she passed the study, she went in.

  James looked over his shoulder at her. When he smiled, the terrible crow’s-feet around his eyes grew deeper. He looked so much older lately. He should take better care of himself. “Hey, Buckerina,” he said. “Want to read my story?” She shook her head, wandering over to the far wall. His work embarrassed her, but she loved it in here. It was like an older-guy version of her room, words and images all over the walls, like decoupage without the varnish. Bits of paper with things jotted on them, stuff he was working on, quotations, photos, art.

  “Whatcha workin’ on?” she asked, to be polite.

  Something about the Parkade, he said, but not to worry, she wasn’t in it. There was a beautiful line of Rilke’s on the wall that she’d read before: “Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.”

  “Where’s Mama?”

  “At a meeting, then a hike and a rally with Rae. Sure you don’t want to read my piece?”

  “Later,” she said, although his asking was supposed to be an honor; he usually asked just her mother. His pieces were direct and ordinary, like journals, which she liked about them; they were dry and wistful like Salinger, but maybe not with that same genius. He could be snarky and judgmental about everything and everyone, like she and Alice and Jody often were, but his stories always stopped on a dime, ended all wrapped up too neatly, like packages, which was not at all like real life. He was trying to get on her good side by letting her seem to be of service to him. She knew all of his moves. It smelled of paper and books and pencils in here, like you’d expect of a writer’s study. But also honey candles from France that he splurged on—how could you not love a guy who burned lightly scented candles, who loved and offered up the fragrance of honey and beeswax? And she did love him, she always had, in all the years since he’d become a part of her family. He went back to the pages he held in his hand, and she ran across the other quotations on the wall until she got to the scrap of paper in Thelonious Monk’s own reproduced handwriting, “Make the drummer sound good.” She was going to do just that, make both her parents sound good by doing well. She’d stick to beer and a little weed for a few months, until her first-semester grades were in and she was home free. Maybe an occasional hit of Alice’s Adderall. She studied the back of James’s head, how gray he was getting, the widening bald spot, the turkey-skin neck. When he dropped his head onto his chest to think, the baggy skin on the back of his neck looked less wrinkled, more like it used to. He peered at her over his shoulders, his reading glasses at the end of his nose. “Go make yourself some breakfast.” She hated how strict he had gotten, and how he always thought he was right, but he was great, too, if you thought about it: hip, hardworking, and steady. She and her mom were lucky to have him. He was their drummer.

  Elizabeth was sitting in a noon meeting, drinking bad coffee and eating an Oreo. She had deliberately plopped down next to a grumpy old man from San Francisco, because she didn’t want the happy alkies to foist themselves on her. It was good to be here, away from James and Rosie for a while, out of the fray. She was glad that Jody was gone. She hoped she would find her way, but Jody and Alice were such a part of Rosie’s recent frightening behavior; maybe now there would be less temptation.

  She found herself thinking about Robert Tobias. Was it even possible that Rosie had something going on with him? Why else would she have been calling him like that and hanging up, then speaking in such a nervous baby-doll voice? Elizabeth remembered the wired, obsessed hell of being the girl who called the boy a dozen times and hung up. She saw Rosie in those tiny tight clothes she wore for tennis all summer, those breasts barely contained in sports bras and halter tops. It came back to her now, how Rosie showed off for Robert on the court, sitting so close in the grass afterward. Trying to pay attention to the meeting’s speaker, who was really funny, she imagined Rosie flirting with Robert, and him looking at her with hard eyes. Even the grumpy guy was laughing about how when the lady speaking had a few drinks she went from being dark and runty to feeling tall and Swedish. But Elizabeth’s mind kept jumping to Robert. Surely he would not risk losing it all—his wife, his children, his job, his benefits, his future—to take advantage of Rosie’s schoolgirl interest in him.

  But then again, it was the oldest story told. A lovely girl had always been the prize.

  The speaker said something that James would have liked, and Elizabeth wrote it on the back of her checkbook. Its acronym was LOVE: letting others voluntarily evolve. Very kicky. But what about when the person was your child, making bad choices? How could you trust life with your own kid, when you knew how unforgiving and capricious life could be? What was so wrong about wanting your gifted kid to ace her classes, get a good scholarship, go on to do great things in the world? Let alone survive adolescence, without brain damage, or paraplegia, or AIDS?

  Rae’s knees were bothering her, so she and Elizabeth walked
only a couple of miles on the old fire road behind the baseball field by White’s Hill.

  Scattered like confetti in the tall golden grass were tiny salmon-colored stars, almost like taffeta ruffs for circus dogs, surrounding magenta petals, with bright yellow centers—“So much crammed into one teeny flower,” Elizabeth said, laughing. The air was dotted with butterflies, white and yellow and cheap knockoff monarchs; butterflies were wind energy made visible. And sticky monkey flowers were everywhere this time of year, even growing out of the craggiest rocks near the road, where all the renegade flowers and succulents hung out.

  The rally they were going to was to support Marin’s low-cost housing, minimal as it was, and even that threatened by developers who wanted to run out the poor and retired, and install nice malls and apartments. Not many people turned out, maybe a hundred or so, mostly from the low-cost housing at the retired Air Force base in Novato. But two county supervisors showed up and spoke, rousing the crowd, and Maria Muldaur led the crowd in a shimmying rendition of “We Shall Not Be Moved.” Most wonderful of all were four men from Darfur, who’d gotten the dates mixed up—their big rally here was next week, and many people who stood near them promised to attend, including Rae. The men looked tired and displaced, wearing ceremonial clothes—fur loincloths tied across their blue jeans, over their rumps; metal headdresses, adorned with hawk or eagle feathers, that looked like a cross between Julius Caesar and football helmets—but they stayed to lend their support, doing a Darfur dance to the old civil rights song.

  The morning school began, Jody called to let Rosie know she was thinking of her and to say she wasn’t necessarily coming back right away. She could not bear to be away from Claude, she said. If her parents came after her, with no legal right to do so, she and Claude would go hide out in Mexico, one mile away.

  “What about your life here?” Rosie wailed. “What about school? What about us?”

  “I’ll see you whenever I can,” Jody cried. “Please try to understand.” She planned to get her GED at the local junior college. She might split her time in two places, San Diego and Landsdale. She might get married. They wanted children.

  “Oh, Jo, you’re so young. This is going to take you down.”

  “I was going down again anyway, not getting anywhere, just treading water up there. At least now I have company.”

  “But what about me? Alice and I were your twoest—I mean, your two truest pals.”

  “I love you forever, but you know what I mean. Claude is my beloved.”

  Getting ready for school, which meant choosing just the right torn jeans, a light blue camisole over a lavender tank top, and a red bra whose straps showed, Rosie spiraled down into mad jealousy. Jody was someone in a movie, she was someone’s comfort. The man she loved might end up broken, but he’d always have a beautiful girl’s love to protect him. The thought of a child living on was a kind of immortality. It was like going from pimply, clueless, trivial, to being a Rilke poem:

  “I know that there is room in me for a huge and timeless life.” Rilke must not have been in high school when he wrote this.

  She told Jody she’d send money if she got stuck, and hung up. She put on makeup, a light coat of foundation, kohl under her eyes, sugar-pink gloss.

  She couldn’t eat breakfast. Her parents were at the table with coffee, reading the paper. James was shaking Red Rooster hot sauce onto his scrambled eggs, and her mother asked if she had everything she needed, like she was a child. “Come give me a kiss,” she said, like Rosie was about to go off to kindergarten. Rosie bent in, and kissed her mother behind an ear.

  “Pew,” Elizabeth said. “Your hair smells like smoke!”

  “Thanks. I was with people last night who were smoking. Sometimes I’m in places where people are smoking dope, but I’m definitely trying to stay off it now. I’ll be able to give you clean urine soon.”

  “Honey, look,” said Elizabeth, “if you can avoid smoking dope and cigarettes, and don’t start sneaking out all the time, we can do this on our own, as a family, without having to get out the big guns, like therapists, or outpatient rehab.”

  James looked over the top of his paper, over those old-man reading glasses.

  “I know! God, Mommy! How many times do you have to tell me?” Rosie frowned at James as if he had been eavesdropping, slammed out the door, and stormed off to school on foot.

  Senior year meant you were royalty in the muscly shuffle of the corridors, amid the voices; the clanging, banging, reverberating locker doors; the announcements to which no one, not even the teachers, listened; and the odor—Stephen King ghost smells of old meals from the lunchroom, ancient sour milk, and chalk, and over the B.O. the boys’ body wash that made them smell like clean wet dogs, and the girls’ delicious fruity shampoo, and the toxic locker odors of food death that the janitors could not eradicate over the summer.

  She met up with Alice near the glass trophy cases. Alice wore a long, skinny knit skirt with a baby-sized camisole of saffron silk. Her hair was gathered in four braids secured with shells and bows. She was bohemian beautiful, but not like the popular girls who were all thin and gorgeous, like models in expensive almost identical clothes. Rosie told her about Jody’s call that morning, and Alice covered her face with her hands and said she was going to cry, although she didn’t. They had ten minutes till their first class, French 4, and Alice had to run to the bathroom. “Come with me, baby girl,” she begged, but Rosie said no, that she’d forgotten something.

  “Meetcha back in five.” They hugged and kissed as if it could be months until they met again, clutching at each other and smoothing out each other’s perfect makeup. Rosie walked as fast as she could through the throng, herding herself through the multilegged beast of the student body to Robert’s science lab. She had meant to make herself wait until third period, when inorganic chemistry met. But it would be fun to poke her head into his classroom and see his reaction. She opened the door a few inches and peeked in partially like she’d seen women do in movies, as if they were behind a veil instead of a door. He was at his desk, talking to students: clean-shaven, hair trimmed, killer handsome in a white button-down dress shirt open at the neck. She smiled in at him, but he did not seem to see her at first. Only she knew how gorgeous his legs were, tan and soft with golden hair; only she knew what he smelled like close up, over the scent of the grass on which they sat so close, so often. Yet still he didn’t look up.

  And when he did, he seemed puzzled, friendly but puzzled, like why was she there? He had almost no expression, then smiled distractedly and went back to talking to a pale pimply boy. She was stunned for a second, but then she got it, as the first bell rang, the five-minute prison yard warning. Oh, duh. She got it: He was trying to act natural, like she was any old student. She raced down the hall.

  Adelle Marchaux’s French classroom was like an elegant garden compared with the smelly chaos of the hallways. Rosie took a seat beside Alice in the front row, to show honor and affection for her odd and petite teacher. Adelle had the same young-boy hairdo as always, poorly cut, the elf liquid eyeliner, poorly applied, pointy ears, tiny arms, loose and flowing clothes. Bonjour bonjour bonjour flew, all of the kids were seniors, all almost fluent. Adelle talked to each student, charming as could be, asking them about their summers, their health, their parents, in French. She spoke and clutched at herself and grabbed at the air, then pouted. It was such a part of being or speaking French, that pout. Alice had put it exactly right last year, explaining to Elizabeth why they loved this odd woman so—“She’s psycho, in a good way, like us. She’s a true person.”

  Rosie gazed off; the beautiful French sounded faraway and romantic, like Robert on the beach that first night, on the court, the grass, shoulders skimming. “Rosie,” Alice hissed, and Rosie tried to snap back to reality.

  God, let it be that Robert was playing it cool, only feigning the casual stance toward her. Let him love her. They wouldn’t even ever need to touch—simply love each other, that would be eno
ugh. “Mademoiselle!” Adelle was calling. “Concentre!” Rosie heard Alice hiss again.

  She looked up slowly at Adelle, in time to see the pout. She tried to clear her mind, smiled to indicate her embarrassed return; but Adelle was staring at her. “Où es-tu aujourd’hui? Nous te perdons. Reviens, reviens.” Where are you today? We are losing you. Come back, come back.

  Second period was boring, civics with an androgynous troll who’d been teaching here since the year Kennedy was elected president, so the class was mostly on the greatness of JFK. And inorganic chemistry was a nightmare.

  She might as well have been invisible, or anyone. She did not cry during Robert’s class. She went up to his desk, once the other fifteen mostly nerdy kids had filed out, but he got up and passed her by and did not stop until he got to the door. Turning back, he asked quizzically, “Is everything okay?” She cocked her head at him, and he said, “I need to be somewhere.”

  And that was it. He was gone. She pushed past kids in the hallway and burst into the girls’ bathroom, into the hornets’ nest of primping girls. The buzzing stopped and she locked the door of her stall closed, and when the buzzing resumed, she started crying.

  Are you stoned?” Alice asked her when they met up for lunch. “Your eyes are so red. What happened? Here—here—have my Ding Dongs. Here’s a napkin.” Rosie reached for the napkin, and tried to dry her eyes without smearing her mascara and kohl. Alice enveloped her in a hug. Rosie said she was getting her period, was PMS’ing like crazy, that was why she’d been crying, why she couldn’t concentrate.