Imperfect Birds

by Anne Lamott

  The storm had begun to subside. Elizabeth and James sat huddled at the kitchen table with papers strewn around them, computer printouts of rehabs and wilderness programs, price lists, photographs of natural beauty and healthy teenage hikers.

  “She’ll go berserk when we tell her,” James said. “She’s just going to lose her mind.” Elizabeth nodded. “How will we get her to Utah? No way we can afford a transport service. Those cost a fortune, thousands of dollars. This is going to break us as it is.”

  “I think you and Lank need to fly her there. You’ll have to lie, and say it’s some kind of weekend program for at-risk adolescents, strong-arm her if she resists.”

  “You and Rae make more sense, because you’re women. But she’d have an easier time escaping from the car than she would if she flew with me and Lank, wouldn’t she? So yeah, I’m in.”

  Elizabeth covered her ears with her hands as if she had sudden ear-aches. “Are we serious about this? About wilderness? A month in the snow? It’s freezing in Utah this time of year.”

  James looked at her, faking deep concern, tugging at his chin. “Wow,” he said. “Bummer.”

  Elizabeth almost shouted at him with shock and hurt—how could he be so glib, so callous? But she surprised them both when she laughed quietly, and the thin shell that surrounded her heart creaked like fault lines breaking open; her laughable armor of resistance, denial, delusion tremulously cracked like a coat of ice on a muddy puddle, and in the silence that followed, she gazed into her husband’s wide green eyes for the answer she already knew.

  ELEVEN

  Snow

  It was snowing and it was going to snow. That was a line from a poem Rosie had been assigned sophomore year, but she couldn’t think of the name of the guy who wrote it. She could not think straight or remember simple things, she could only sit in the dark mutter of her mind, in full hatred and devastation of her parents and life.

  James and Lank had kidnapped her. She was going to be away for ninety days. It had taken thirteen hours to get to Utah in a car that Lank had rented because it had snow tires and a children’s safety lock to turn the backseat into a holding cell from which Rosie could not escape.

  They had gone east at Sacramento, cut across Nevada, and taken her to a renovated cabin in a small town somewhere north of Salt Lake City. She had slept or kept her eyes closed most of the time, but not when she was upset. They had arrived in a blizzard at night; there were four other silent, furious kids who’d arrived before her, and their parents and duffel bags, and bearded men with clipboards hovering around. A lady found Rosie’s name on a computer. Lank had stayed in the car. Rosie had turned her back on James when he tried to say good-bye and how much they loved her. “Fuck off,” she said.

  She was not allowed to speak to the other kids. They were offered lots of camping snacks, but no one accepted any. Then they were each given a ridiculous pack that weighed fifty pounds, according to the three male instructors, with a sleeping bag and a pad all wrapped up in a tarp that would also be their tent. A cooking tin, baggies of bulk food, a few pairs of dry socks, a journal, a pencil, zip-lock bags of sanitary pads and baby wipes for the girls, toothbrush and toothpaste were tied up into the tarp with what the instructors called p-cords. Rosie had gotten her birth control pills—you couldn’t just suddenly stop taking them, or your skin would break out, and the boy named Joel got his Zoloft. An instructor with a goatee escorted them outside and they started walking, just like that. There were three boys and one other girl. The p-cords cut into your shoulders and back. The other girl was screaming that she hated her parents, would never forgive them, and they’d never see her again when she got out. They hiked to a clearing where there was more dirt on the ground than snow, half an hour away, and then set up camp. One of the three instructors made a fire, and the other two helped the kids make tents with their tarps and low branches, thirty feet apart from one another.

  She woke in the wilds before dawn, stunned beyond stunned, enraged beyond all words, a frozen deserted ghetto of one.

  It was not snowing right now but there was snow everywhere, and pine trees, hundreds of feet tall. She was sitting against a ponderosa pine that smelled faintly of vanilla, and she was hungrier than she had ever been. There was only so much food in her pack, and it had to last seven days. The younger pines had tops that looked like pyramids. She decided to run off that night as far as she could and bury herself alive in the snow.

  There were five silent kids in her tribe. That’s what the instructors called it, a tribe, like they were Scouts, two Girl Scouts, three Boy Scouts. Maybe they’d make potato prints later. The girl was like having someone on your chain gang who screeched and sobbed and flung herself to the ground, tripping up and dragging down everyone else. Rosie imagined killing her before they headed out tonight.

  The three outdoor instructors were all huge woolly mountain men, and they followed you everywhere.

  This first full day Rosie held snow in her gloved hand until it turned to ice balls, and then threw them at one instructor like a pitcher. He looked back at her with kind and infinite calm. “The gift of patience,” he said, “is patience.” All of the kids acted out all day, but the instructors had a way of getting you pretty calm pretty quickly. The handsome boy, Tyler, punched the smallest instructor, Mike D., who was only six feet or so, and he just said, “If you hurt me, I still love you. Tyler? I still love you.” Tyler wrestled Mike D. to his knees, and tried to kick him with his boot in his face, but Mike D. caught his foot and pushed him off balance. “However, we will tackle you if you go nuts,” he said.

  Joel cried a lot in the beginning, like Rosie and the other girl, Kath, did, like when they were frozen solid or unable to learn the lessons the instructors taught, like how to set the traps made out of sticks. Joel was a meth-head junior from Chicago, small and ratty with bad skin. All the kids had exchanged whispered shreds of information and then gotten called on it because they were not allowed to talk to one another yet. This phase was called isolation, and the instructors said the idea was to throw you back on yourself.

  Tyler was black-haired and arrogant. Joel never looked anyone in the eye, but he was good with his hands and could make the traps. Jack was kind of a goofy Arlo Guthrie knock-off, who didn’t talk much but made funny googly-eyed faces.

  Kath was skinny and slutty-pretty with scraggly dyed black hair. There was no way she had done well in school. She flung herself onto her back like a turtle every fifty feet when they hiked, and they had to wait for her to get up, while they froze to death. She definitely needed to be here.

  They hiked for hours, lugging the hefty packs through the cold, heavy snow like prisoners of war, and Rosie laughed bitterly to herself, about her mother’s conviction that parenting was so hard, oh, oh, it was so arduous, like Bataan. Yeah, right. After a couple of hours, they made camp. All of them had to set up their own tents, using their tarps and trees, quite far away from one another. Even though she felt nothing for the people here, she hated the isolation of sleeping so far away from others. At the Parkade, you felt inclusion, you were locked into your people, but here the instructors were doing divide-and-conquer or something, so you got that when you’re so solitary, you’re also absurd.

  She was too tired to run away and kill herself the night of the first full day.

  By the second morning her skin had broken out and there was no mirror, so she picked at the zits and they bled. There were no combs or brushes, so you had to use your fingers or else your hair would start to dread. She should let that happen, plus let her nails grow long and black so that when they found her body, she would look insane from what they had done to her, like Howard Hughes at the end. Being here skanked you out. You could only take a billy bath, using a sock to wash yourself with water drawn from the river in billy cans. She was lonely as a loon, with an unfamiliar inside crazy laugh bubbling up from within. At the Parkade, your voices united together in a song, called We. Out here each person’s voice was thin and re
edy and waiting to blow away.

  Elizabeth cried hardest at three every day, when school let out, even after James pointed out that Rosie came home in the afternoon only when she was grounded, and how rude or distant she’d be. Elizabeth threw up the first time she remembered that Rosie would not be home for Christmas, even after James reminded her how awful Rosie had been last year, withdrawn, spoiled, needing to be told two and three times to set the table, to ice the cinnamon buns and recycle the wrapping paper from her glut of presents.

  James tried to make Elizabeth stop crying, until he called his sponsor, who told him to get off her back. It was what she needed to do, and besides, something beautiful was being revealed. James told him, “I am never going to call you again,” but then called him that same night and asked him what was so goddamn beautiful about his wife’s broken heart. “Truth,” James reported to Elizabeth. He looked years older in three days, blackish-red half-moons under his eyes. With his reading glasses on, he resembled a little old man. Elizabeth lay on the couch petting Rascal like a post-lobotomy patient. James slid underneath her feet, and placed them in his lap, and pretended to chew on the big toe of her left foot through the sock until she laughed for several seconds. But a few moments later she was crying as if the sorrow came in on the same wave as the laughter.

  He made them both ginger tea. A moan of comfort escaped her. “I am temporarily semi-okay,” she said. They sat in silence, sipping their tea. “I used to drink this when I was pregnant with Rosie. I had the worst morning sickness.” She inhaled the scent. “Andrew was much happier than I was about having a child. I was afraid of how doomed you would be as a parent. And I was right.” Her reading glasses fogged up with steam, and she took them off and put them on the coffee table and screamed.

  The girls combed their hair with their fingers and braided it. This was one of the few things that calmed Rosie’s rabbity freaked-out mind, besides the sheer physical exhaustion. Every morning they broke camp, hiked, set up their tarp tents in a new site, gathered wood, and failed at fire instruction. The instructors said, “You’ll get it, we promise,” and the kids’ hands bled.

  Rosie obsessed about how long ago the first night seemed, the line of demarcation between all she had ever known and this new, alien existence. Time was all swirled up into a tangle, but she could still see the raggedy-ass cabin where this had all begun, the so-called SAR base, where she had been discarded by James and Lank. The cabin was used by search-and-rescue teams that operated in the mountains here. It was like a motel in the movies where all the promiscuous teenagers get killed. There was a box of shitty food for dinner, pita bread, peanut butter and jelly, granola bars, yogurt tubes. The instructors said, “Trust us. Eat the yogurt. You’re going to wish you had.” But all of them refused to eat, like six-year-olds.

  Hiking out that first night, Rosie had thought they would at least sleep cuddled together like freaked-out puppies, but instead they slept apart and she was scared to death all night. That night they got all their food for a week, which they were living on now—bulk hippie shit in plastic bags with twists, not even zip-locks except for the Kotex: oat flakes, powdered milk, raisins, dried fruit, sunflower seeds, bouillon, rice and lentils, and that was it. There was also this carcinogenic powdered-cheese product the instructors called “cheesy,” and a tin cup with a handle, sort of a tin bowl you could put over a flame.

  The second night the instructors made a big fire for all of them, but threatened that this might be the last time they did. They would need to start making their own, or live on dried fruit and cheesy. “So let us begin,” said the instructor named Tom. He looked like a basketball player who had gained fifty pounds and joined a militia. He told them to dig holes in the ground with sticks, and then gave them each an Altoids box with a hole in it, and a small square of red cotton. They put the cotton in the tin, and their tins on top of the fire.

  After a while, you could see a little flame poking out of the holes, and Rosie got two sticks, like the two instructors were doing, lifted her tin out like someone eating Chinese who didn’t know how to use chopsticks, dropped the tin into the hole she had dug, and then buried it. When she dug it out, the red cloth inside was black, and fragile, burnt but not ashen. It was called char cloth, Tom said, and he gave them waterproof plastic containers, smaller than film canisters, to carry them in. The instructors also passed out quartz rocks that the kids had found themselves at that day’s site, as well as steel handles, and showed them how to make a fire. Rosie did not pay attention to how you used the char cloth and tinder, the steel and quartz, because to do so would have indicated a willingness to participate in this charade. She was desolate, enraged, hating her parents, psycho- homesick, all these things at once. It was the worst she had ever felt, except for one time on acid when she had believed she was buried underground.

  She daydreamed endlessly of Fenn and her friends on the steps of the Parkade at night, definitely some of them looking druggy and vacant, like they had washed up on the concrete shore, but the others so happy and plugged in to one another and to the sense of ongoing transactions, and not just drugs, but stuff that filled and defined them: their music, most important; woven bracelets they tied to each others’ wrists; maybe a pipe; sometimes little things they had stolen, like turquoise jewelry, harmonicas. Under the sun and stars, just like here, but free and safe as carrier pigeons at their home lofts.

  Tyler got his fire going the fourth night, and the instructors showed them how to make rice and lentils in their tin camp cups, letting them use Tyler’s fire, and it tasted so great, though she hated to say so, especially with a bunch of cheesy on it, and sunflower seeds; she was starving. She loved it. She must be losing her mind. You stirred your food with a twig, and one of the instructors told them not to let the food stick to the cup, to wash the cup right away after eating, because they had to use it again in the morning for oatmeal, and anything you didn’t wash off was going to haunt you then.

  She lay sleepless in her sleeping bag, under the tarp she had tied to a tree, and she thought about dying in the cold, but mostly she thought about Fenn, his body so warm and tawny, his lips so soft and insistent, the feeling of sleeping in his arms. She wondered what it would be like to make love with Tyler, or get high with him, even on something legal, like salvia. She and Fenn had done salvia a few times because it didn’t show up on the urine tests. You could buy it right in town, over the counter at any head shop in the county. It was a legal herb, in various concentrations, on the shelves in the store right across the street from the bus kiosk on the north side of the Parkade.

  She got so depressed thinking of her old life, way back in history, like last week. Her heart was like a little dead animal. What had she done that was so terrible that her parents had to ship her to this place? Later she calmed herself, because she had to stay strong; she had to put on her game face tomorrow, try to start a fire, try to get released as soon as possible. She replayed great Ecstasy nights in her mind to hypnotize herself, replayed entire tennis matches, tennis lessons with Robert, sitting together talking in the grass by the side of the courts, acid trips, French finals, making love with Fenn, movies, meals. Salvia was sort of ridiculous if you thought about it. She and Fenn and Alice had taken it together. Jo had never done it—it hadn’t really been around when she was using. Plus now she was so into collecting her NA plastic key rings. You smoked salvia in a bong. You used a butane jet lighter so you could suck in the maximum smoke possible. It was totally legal. If you took five times extract, 5X, you went cartooning, but it left you on earth, which was totally a blast. With 10X you were still on the planet, but the planet had changed a little, for the better, a yellow brick road and a gingerbread house, really fun. And with 40X, you were ripped out of the world for a minute. It was so great. God, what if someone could get hold of something here? She and Tyler could get high together, under the white stars that broke through the black sky like the flames in their Altoid boxes.

  For some reason the fir
st twenty-four hours of her being here were never far from her mind. In the morning, the instructors had cooked oatmeal with raisins over a fire Tom had made, and powdered milk, which was basically foggy water, and then they broke camp. Rosie had memorized every detail of the hike from the SAR base to the first campsite, committed every detail to memory, because she was going to run away. A girl Rosie knew had snuck out of wilderness in Montana and hitchhiked home. Her parents hadn’t made her go back.

  Rosie and the others had to write in their journals for an hour every day. She marked off days on the back page like a prisoner. Up at dawn, breakfast, filtering water in the Nalgene bottles, breaking up the old camp, learning wilderness skills and lore from the instructors, trying not to die of the cold, hiking to the next site, setting up the new camp, listening to the wilderness instructors, waiting for Bob to arrive.

  Bob was pretty cool, actually. He was a therapist who came around lunchtime every day, occasionally with baked treats from women who worked in the office back in town, and the kids got to talk to him for an hour. He looked to be in his thirties, maybe forty, not as tall as Rosie, with gray hedgehog hair and wide, thoughtful brown eyes and wire-rimmed glasses. She ranted about Fenn with him, about what a rip-off this was, about her perfect grade-point average, and how she missed her life, how much she hated her mother and was going completely crazy, how her mother and James had taken acid when they were first together, how she’d found her mother drunk on the bathroom floor a few years ago, how she could feel the hair under her arms growing in like a wolf’s.

  She told him how afraid she was of going crazy, and asked when could she call Fenn and Alice and Jo, which turned out to be never, although they could write, and she could respond the second month, when they were inside the hogan by the river. She’d see her mother and James in three weeks.