Imperfect Birds

by Anne Lamott

  “Darling, I’m sorry I did that behind your back. I was worried. I’m your mom and I’m paid to be anxious. I was afraid you weren’t even getting an A-minus or B-plus, but he said you will if you do well on next week’s test.”

  “I already knew that, Mommy, and it’s humiliating that you called.” Rosie stared at her from bed. “I’m happier than I’ve ever been. I’m doing fine in school. I gave you a clean urine test. I’m going to meetings with Fenn. Will you please be a little happy for me?” Elizabeth picked at her cuticles and nodded. “I’m a good kid, Mom.” Elizabeth so wanted to believe her. Rosie was her outside heart.

  Elizabeth followed them to a meeting again two days later, and after they went inside, she raised her fist in victory. But the next afternoon, when she picked up Rosie for a dentist’s appointment, she swore she could smell a hint of marijuana when Rosie slid inside the car. And Rosie went nuts when she mentioned it: “Sniffer dog! Let’s go straight home so you can test me.”

  Elizabeth talked her down, and Rosie got her teeth cleaned, and when Elizabeth sent her into the bathroom with a piss test that night, it came out clean.

  Two days later, it happened again: Elizabeth could have sworn she detected the smell of burnt grass in Rosie’s bedroom. Rosie was on the bed, cramming for her chem test, clear-eyed and minty, and watched Elizabeth with pity as she stopped to sniff the air like a squirrel dog. And again, clean urine.

  This time in the bathroom, holding a cup with her daughter’s no-longer-warm pee, the dipstick negative for everything, Elizabeth thought she smelled disinfectant, and felt a pang of fear. She sniffed around for the source. She went to get James, who was stretched out on the couch with his New Yorker. “Please don’t make me get up,” he begged. “It’s not unusual to smell disinfectant in a bathroom. Even in ours.” She let it go, although she checked out the medicine cabinet, and under the sink—for what, she did not know. Nothing was out of place. She wondered again if she was going mad.

  If she wasn’t, it meant Rosie was lying. Elizabeth’s mind was better than it had been in the past, still troubled and obsessed but not desperately so. It may have had to do with her going to extra meetings, now that she went at least once more a week after spying on Rosie. It might be that she was finally on the right medications. But for perhaps the first time in her life, she now had the conviction that when she thought something was going on, it was.

  The next time, before letting Rosie go inside the bathroom with her plastic cup, she frisked her daughter’s pockets. Rosie sneered at her. “You’re getting worse, Mama. Next you’ll want to do a cavity search, and you’ll still find nothing. Poor Mommy.”

  When Rosie brought home a B on the chemistry test, Elizabeth tried to be reasonable about the end of a straight-A transcript, surely not the end of the world. But when she searched for and found Rosie’s journal and discovered the sporadic entries were in French, her first reaction was panic. Then she felt a stab of embarrassment and hurt feelings, which turned into slightly amused admiration. Rosie had trumped her. So one day Elizabeth called Adelle Marchaux, who said Rosie was getting an A, and behaving well, except when she and Alice were too silly. “Elles se comportent commes des enfants,” Adelle trilled with mock annoyance: they behaved like children. Then Elizabeth rechecked the shelves, the bathroom drawers, Rosie’s room. Nothing but her birth control pills and matches—no papers, pipes, prescription drugs. Then she called Anthony at Sixth Day Prez. He made time for her to come in.

  He had gained weight but was still what Lank had once dubbed homely-lovely. His coffee-colored skin had a few more wrinkles, his smooth white hair was thinning, and his eyes were tired behind horn-rimmed glasses. He hugged Elizabeth so fervently in a bear hug that she was afraid he would lift her off the ground and hurt his back, or hers.

  “You’ve created a marvelous, magical child,” he enthused, sweeping his arm around the cluttered kumbaya office, full of art, candles, poems, batik. “Half of the art on these walls was made by our children under her guidance this summer.” A flock of origami doves flew at various levels from his ceiling, clumsy ceramic crosses hung from the walls, along with a banner of finger-painted palm prints.

  “Tell me what brings you here,” he said finally, looking at Elizabeth, and although she had confided in him before, she let everything pour out this time—the pills they had found in the summer, and the papers and pipes and the alcohol, and the Visine, the smell of weed, and the times they’d found out she had gone to a rave with Alice, the endless layers of lies and half-truths, footprints in the flower bed beneath her bedroom window, her getting busted at the party on the hill, the recently imposed twenty-eight-day test period, and the clean urine tests.

  Anthony steepled his fingers, nodding until she was done. She was going to confess that she had trailed Fenn and Rosie to some meetings, but really, this made her look irrational. As Anthony began to speak, Elizabeth interrupted: “I do smell dope, Anthony. She says she’s clean and going to meetings, but I tell you—I get whiffs of it.”

  He smiled, sad and kind. “I believe you.” She felt a flush of relief. “Let me ask you a question. Who would you say is running the show?”

  The question caught her off guard, and she laughed ruefully. “James would say she is. She’s almost never grounded these days. She’s mouthy, and we just let it go.”

  “And who would you say?”

  “I’m not sure. It depends. Maybe we’re too concerned with her happiness. We walk around on eggshells. If she’s sweet and calm, then we can be, too.”

  “Ching ching,” Anthony rang out. “Like Reagan trickle-down, right?”

  “Right. Just like it was in my family.”

  “Ching ching,” he said again. She tried not to laugh. It reminded her of the adding machine her father had used with such misery at tax time, the mechanical sounds punching through the silence, the crunch when the handle was pulled, the bell to announce a sum total. But what was the sum total here?

  “Ching ching, what?” she asked.

  One of Anthony’s front teeth was perpendicular to the others, as if someone had turned it ninety degrees before the pink clay of his gums had set.

  “This is a very common pattern, where, if a certain person in the family seems to be okay, the entire family can function. Look,” he added, “it’s hard, the hardest thing you will ever do, to live with a druggy teenager. I’ve been through it.”

  “She gets a four-point-two average, because she gets A’s in AP classes, or did until this semester. . . .”

  “Oh, so she’s not druggy? Then I’m not clear on why you are here.”

  “Okay. She has been druggy. Definitely.” Elizabeth clasped one hand to her chest. “Oh my God!” Her eyes filled with tears. “I don’t think I’ve ever said that out loud. But you made her sound like Janis Joplin. And the thing is, she’s going to meetings, and seems to be staying clean.”

  “Seems to be. But you still smell dope, right? Let me ask you something else: Is she sexually active?” Elizabeth nodded, and told him about what the other girls did at parties last year, and how she wasn’t a virgin, and now was madly crazy in love with Fenn.

  “And they’re using condoms?”

  “Yeah, she’s got boxes. She could open a 7-Eleven. Plus, she’s on the pill, and she swears they use condoms.”

  “But you’ve caught her lying how many times?”

  Elizabeth nodded slowly. “That’s a good point.”

  “So let’s assume she is having unprotected sex, and therefore she’s exposed to whomever he’s had sex with in the last six months. And can we assume that he is monogamous now?” Elizabeth nodded.

  “Oh, yeah—they are both totally in love with each other.”

  “And all the women he’s slept with in the last six months were clean of AIDS, STDs, and hep C. What about the ones he slept with in the days before Rosie, who wouldn’t have shown up yet? And another thing—we know that he’s never used needles?”

  Elizabeth’s mind
was a fever dream of all the dirty girls Fenn had slept with, girls he would slip out the back door when Rosie was climbing his steps. Then she switched to thinking about Rosie in a coma in a hospital, waiting for a new liver.

  “So this is already a huge breakthrough day for you, Elizabeth, having this discussion. Facing these things head-on, these considerations.” She was glad to hear that, because she felt frantic despair. Anthony peered at her from underneath his brows, as if looking at a crying child. “Now, let me ask you. Under your care, she’s done booze, Ecstasy, Valium, Percocet, smoked joints laced with angel dust, and now is having unsafe sex and smoking cigarettes. My question is, When does she turn eighteen?”

  “Not for a few months.”

  Someone knocked on Anthony’s door. “Five minutes,” he called. “I’m very proud of you, Elizabeth. This has taken a lot of courage. Now let me tell you a few true things. It is your house, and you are the queen of that house, and you get to make the rules. She is a minor, and you get to demand that she not use any drugs at all, including nicotine. You are responsible for keeping her alive. Rosie needs to play by your rules, and if she simply can’t, you need to consider sending her away.” Elizabeth gasped involuntarily—how had the conversation escalated to this?

  “Nicotine is lethal, and one of the most addictive drugs. Is it still okay for you that she uses it? I ask this of all parents who come: Are you willing to see what you are seeing, and to know what you know? Are you willing to impose strict consequences and stick to them? If you think she is faking urine tests, do you still let her drive? And if so, who is the crazy person here?”

  There was silence in the room while this registered. Elizabeth stood to leave.

  “One more question,” he said, raising a finger theatrically in the air.

  “No, no, please, I can’t take it,” she said.

  “Can you forgive yourself for the mistakes you’ve made so far—all the times you dishonored yourself by not trusting your own gut and instincts?”

  Elizabeth thought for a minute. “Can I get back to you on that?” They exchanged sad smiles. “Can I come back next week? I need this.”

  “You can come in later today if you need to. But I have to go now.”

  Afterward she sat in the sun on the front steps of the church, staring into her lap, beginning in her head sentences she intended to say to James that she didn’t finish. She scribbled down as much of the conversation as she could remember, tearing up as she wrote Anthony’s words about needing to consider sending Rosie away. Then she waved away the very idea, like smoke. Never. She hugged her knees to her chest, wiped her nose on the sleeve of her blouse. She couldn’t sort things out. Anthony said no smoking at all, and this made sense, while Lank said children had to run for their lives when you laid down the law, and that also rang true to her own experience. She got up and trudged to her car.

  Rosie arrived home that night before dinnertime, clear-eyed and friendly, as if nothing had happened at breakfast. Elizabeth was caramelizing onions to pour over wild rice, and when Rosie came to watch, they ran through the litany—how was school, fine; where’ve you been, studying at Alice’s house; are you and Fenn going to a meeting tonight, probably; how many clean days do you have now, eighteen.

  “Wow!” Elizabeth exclaimed. “Fantastic.” Rosie shuffled, at once pleased with herself and cool. Then Elizabeth smelled something alien and awful on Rosie’s breath, like sauerkraut. She said, “Pew!” and stepped back. “What have you been drinking?”

  Rosie burst out laughing, relieved. “Rejuvelac! At Alice’s. Do you even know what that is? It’s this nasty fermented shit that Alice and her mother swear by—for digestion and energy. I’m going to go brush my teeth.”

  “Is it alcoholic, though?” Elizabeth tried to appear unperturbed.

  “Of course not. It’s just a nasty hippie raw-food fluid.”

  Elizabeth smiled and stirred the onions. They smelled of butter and burnt sugar, but the smell of Rosie’s breath lingered in her nostrils after Rosie left the room. It was the smell of rot. The word “ergot” came into her head, and later, at the dinner table, she asked James about it.

  “What was it again?”

  “Some sort of grain fungus,” he told her. “I associate it with the Middle Ages, for some reason, or the Salem witch trials. It grew on rye that had gotten damp, and hungry humans consumed it, despite the taste, and everyone went crazy, and then died.”

  Rosie studied him, impressed. “You’re like a zoo key, James.”

  He doffed an invisible hat, and everyone laughed and devoured dinner. But peace did not last the night. Before bed, Elizabeth went into Rosie’s room with a plastic cup and asked her to go with her to the bathroom.

  Rosie protested the timing, but got up, releasing sighs and clicks of annoyance, and pushed past Elizabeth in the doorway. She headed down the hall to her parents’ bathroom.

  Elizabeth stopped. “Let’s use yours tonight, mix things up.”

  Rosie stopped but did not look back at her. “I’m already practically there.”

  Elizabeth felt a flicker of alarm but let it go. “What ev,” she said, mimicking Alice to lighten the mood, but Rosie pressed on, and almost had the door closed before Elizabeth stuck her foot in.

  Rosie whirled around. “What the hell? I’m not going to pee into a cup with you here, sitting on the side of the tub like a cop.” When she feinted left, as if about to leave, Elizabeth stepped in front of her and took her by the wrists. The air sparked. Silence, as before a storm, or after a slammed door.

  “Now,” said Elizabeth, staring her down but afraid. Rosie flung the cup into the tub. Elizabeth retrieved it, handed it back. Her daughter’s eyes were filled with anger and fear and tears of betrayal. Then she sneered with derision. She put the cup beside the toilet, wriggled out of her cut-offs, glared at her mother.

  “I hope you know what you’re doing,” she said, and the ugliness of the tone sent a chill through Elizabeth. Rosie pulled down her thong as she lowered herself to the toilet seat. Elizabeth saw a flash of dark hair and saw Rosie reach for the cup, but there was only silence. “I can’t go,” she said, scornfully. “I peed about five minutes ago.” She started to stand.

  “Uh-uh,” said Elizabeth. After what seemed like a long time, Rosie sat back down. Then she hung her head and looked over, solicitous.

  “Mommy,” she said. “Please just let me pee in peace.” They looked at each other a moment, and Elizabeth tried to channel Anthony. She felt she should not leave, but after a moment she did, and waited outside the door like a butler.

  When Rosie came out a few minutes later, she handed her a scant cup of urine. The green test strip on the outside of the plastic cup tested ninety-eight degrees. It was fresh and warm, and Elizabeth sat down on the toilet, tipped the cup so it covered the base of the stick, and waited five minutes. The five tiny windows each showed a single pink line, which meant negative. But Rosie definitely had been trying to hide something: Elizabeth squinted at the faint pink lines again, mulling it over. She felt efficient and suspicious at first, like a crime scene detective, then confused, deep in her animal being.

  Rosie asked if she could spend Friday night at Fenn’s.

  “Of course not,” said James.

  “You force us to sneak around like common criminals.”

  “Oh, Rosie,” he said. “That’s the nature of teenage love. Deal with it. You’ve got it good. As long as you keep producing clean urine, we’ll let you use the car, and we’ll keep the midnight weekend curfew in place.”

  “You’re so harshing me,” Rosie bellowed, bursting into tears. “What’s my reward for trying so hard to do well these days?” She smashed her fist against the wall. Elizabeth trembled.

  “What a jerk,” James said, utterly without sympathy. “Let’s go bathe in the moonlight while she stews in her own juices. That would make Anthony happy.”

  Rosie didn’t speak to them again that day, but she was friendly by dinner the next nigh
t. She worked on her homework until late. She spent Friday evening with Fenn and was home by curfew, then spent the day and evening with him on Saturday and got home only five minutes late. Elizabeth heard her get up twice in the night, once to pee, once to bang around in the kitchen. On Sunday both of them slept in. James brought Elizabeth café au lait in bed, along with The New York Times, and crawled in beside her to read. “Thank you, love,” she said.

  “I have ulterior motives,” he said. “I need you to read my piece later.”

  She raised the cracked blue bowl of hot pearly-white coffee to her lips, drinking deeply.

  Early that afternoon, Elizabeth went out to read on the front steps, under a bright cheerful flag of blue sky. She could see from where she sat that there were no footsteps in the dirt outside Rosie’s window, no flowers crushed in the dark, and she wondered as she often did how Jody was doing. She was glad that Jody had left town, even as she hoped that she was okay. She reached for the pencil tucked behind her ear and began James’s story, “The Wild Lagoon,” looking for things she and Lank had said that wonderful afternoon. The best thing of all was pure James: “Like Arthur Murray dance steps in the muck at low tide, you see a squirt from a clam when you put down your left foot, and when you lower your right, a crab raises itself and brandishes its pincer at you, menacing, absurd, and magnificent.” She corrected typos, made a few penciled suggestions. She was proud of this story.

  Before going back inside, she peered in the closed window at her long-sleeping daughter, her ropy curls fanned out over Raggedy Ann pillowcases. She still had the broad shoulders of an athlete, but her waist was as small as a child’s, dipping down like a valley between the hills of her breasts and her flanks. She was definitely thinner than usual, but this could be from falling in love, and with a vegetarian smoker, who had gotten her hooked on cigarettes, too.