Imperfect Birds

by Anne Lamott

  She told Bob she had been sort of in love with her teacher Robert, had taught him tennis all summer and fantasized about going to bed with him, and how Fenn had come along and saved her from that. Robert had a wife and all these little children—it would have been a complete disaster for everyone.

  “But weren’t you able to see on your own what a terrible idea it was—and so, not do it?”

  “We’ll never know now. I think he wanted it, too.”

  “It’s common for high school girls to fall in love with young teachers. It doesn’t make you a bad person. But it also doesn’t mean Fenn saved you—except he actually helped you fail more quickly.”

  “What if I kill myself with a sharp stick?”

  “You wouldn’t be able to, at least not for another couple of weeks when we give you knives. We care that you want to damage yourself. We know how it is to have such feelings. We want you to learn to live with those feelings without having to hurt yourself.”

  “Fuck you. I’m going to smoke dope as soon as I get out.”

  “We’re not drug bounty hunters. This is a place where we try to leave you off better than we found you. That’s all we can do. And no matter what, we love you.”

  Elizabeth was in severe physical withdrawal, feeling as strung out and tweaked as when she had stopped drinking. Her hands trembled off and on during the day. Jungle drums beat out their message of needing a fix, needing time with Rosie. She could not get songs and jingles to stop playing in her mind, “Didn’t She Ramble” for a whole afternoon, and the jingle from Mr. Clean. She would get to speak to the therapist, Bob, on the eighth day, and he would read her a letter Rosie had written. But not knowing whether Rosie hated her forever, whether she was near death from starvation or cold, plagued her every thought. She felt scooped out, eviscerated, wispy, and dazed.

  It was rather amazing that after everything they had been through, the different kinds of drugs, the lies, the sneaking off in the night, all she wanted was Rosie. Elizabeth was any junkie coming down; craving had entered her brain and was not going away. It was a sharp, pointed, immovable force, just like not getting the substance your body and mind were crying out for—nicotine, booze, sex, coffee. The voice of craving was extended, high-pitched, but muffled. She felt helpless as a bug.

  “This is a bottom for you,” James told her. “And that means there is a chance things can rise. We could have lost her. She had become insane.” He held Elizabeth in bed until she fell asleep, which was after one, even though she had taken a pill.

  On the fifth night, Rosie made fire. She spent that afternoon slogging through the snow searching for sticks. It was getting colder. She called out her name every single minute, like the instructors had told them to. She was seriously numb but ended up with an armful of sticks and twigs.

  The sun was going down. Tyler’s fire flickered thirty feet away. She tried to find her own ingenuity and bedrock, as Bob had talked about; he told them that if they did not give up, they would find it. He had promised. Kath keened and pounded the ground in between her efforts to start a fire. The instructors had shown them how to do it a few times, and they could all make embers of their char cloth. But Rosie could not make fire.

  The sunset was orange in the white sky between the pines. Her stomach cramped with the thought of warm rice and lentils going down, with cheesy. She squinched her toes to try to get some feeling back.

  She made a fire nest. First she wrapped a thick hank of grass around her thumb and twisted it the way she twisted her hair into a messy bun after combing it with her fingers. She laid it on the ground, shredded tinder—dry leaves and pine needles and twigs—and tamped these down into the nest.

  Her knuckles were scabbed from all the times she had tried to get fire going before. You had to take your gloves off so you could feel the quartz strike the steel handle just right, and your hands froze, but it was good to have frozen hands in case the quartz sliced into your skin. Her nails and skin were nearly black. Jo and Alice would die if they saw her hands now. Alice got her nails done every two weeks, short and French-tipped. Rosie took the steel in her right hand, and the quartz in her left. Then she put the bit of char cloth on top of the finest shredded grass in the nest.

  She struck downward as hard as she could. When nothing happened, she struck downward again, and again, smashing the steel in her right hand against the quartz, over and over, listening to the click amid the pine trees, until she was out of breath and her knuckles were bleeding. Finally two sparks flew off the steel and onto the char cloth on her tinder bundle and a wisp of smoke appeared, but died. She kept going. Her body warmed, and then she was sweating like a pig, and it was dripping onto her nest, so she moved her head so she wouldn’t put out the sparks, and one landed on the char cloth and there was another wisp of smoke, like a tiny bird’s snowy breath, but it went out, too, and her own breath dissolved into the freezing-cold air, and she kept striking the quartz and rivulets of blood trickled out of her knuckles.

  She shook the sweat off her brow, stretched her aching neck, and prepared for one final strike. She smashed the steel down against the rock, and a spark began to glow on the char cloth, nestled in the nest on the ground. She dropped everything and bent down to fold her nest in half, like an open-faced sandwich of spark and smoke and grass. She continued to blow on it, barely exhaling at first, then breathing softly like a mother blowing on her child’s poison oak, and she did not stop until the spark and smoke and tinder bundle turned into flames.

  On the sixth morning, Elizabeth first noticed that it was sort of lovely with Rosie gone.

  There was no tension, no metallic vibe, no mean glances, no wet towels on the floor. She read the paper over a cup of coffee by herself in the thin sunlight pouring through the kitchen window.

  She went outside in her bathrobe, stood still in her garden until the air, moist and cold, slapped her—Wake up, wake up—like after a hangover. Almost everything had died in the cold except the California stuff that was always there, purple flowers, myrtle maybe, funereal lilies, weedy daisies, muck, mush, and grass. The grass was fresh green with old dead stuff underneath.

  There were two tiny roses, one alive and one dead. In the middle of the live one, a deep peachy pink throbbed, the petals lighter and lighter as they gradually scalloped out. The dead one was ivory and sapped, like a used tissue, but still beautiful because it held its shape. Ah, note to self, Elizabeth thought, sitting down in the dirt: Hold your shape. The earth was damp but she sat still anyway. A red-tailed hawk hovered in the sky not far away. Really red, she thought to herself. That’s a dye job.

  After a while she went inside to get ready to go to a protest rally with Rae at San Quentin, where there was to be an execution that night. Joan Baez was going to sing by candlelight sometime in the hours before midnight, but Elizabeth would miss that part: James had an essay due, and she had promised to edit it after dinner.

  So whatcha got for me today?” Bob asked.

  Rosie was dreaming again. They all were. She told this to Bob. “I forgot what it’s like to dream. It’s like being Alice in Wonderland.”

  “With THC in your system, you don’t dream. And you need to. Otherwise it is like losing one of your senses. Dreams are part of your wholeness.”

  “Why?”

  “Because when you’re dreaming, you’re not the one calling the shots. So it’s a reprieve.” The instructors made them keep track of their dreams in their journals. Tom, the tall, heavy one, said, “There is a lot of power in your dreams—hopes, fears, truths.” Hank, the instructor with the goatee, told them that the dream world had rules in it. You couldn’t read a clock in your dreams. It would not give you the time. If the lights were on in a room, you could not turn them off in a dream.

  She woke up from food dreams, double cheeseburgers. Some of the grease had dripped and she woke up licking her forearm. It was so real. She wanted that taste of salty grease so badly.

  Bob told her that in indigenous tribes all over th
e world, the dream world was like church.

  She used to dream: she could remember bolting from nightmares and gasping them away, desperate to get back to her normal crazy daily routine.

  Every day Bob was willing to hear whatever dirt any of the kids had going on anyone else, mostly Kath, whom they all had a hard time understanding, and besides, she was a whiny pain in the ass and brought them all down. You could admit to that, if you tried to respect her anyway, for doing everything they did, even the steepest hikes and dressing on the coldest mornings, eventually. “Let me hear what you got,” Bob would say.

  “I hate it here so much I can’t even say it in words. I’m so furious I could die.”

  “Rosie, look. You’re mad because you made a choice to be stoned all the time, to hang with an older guy with a drug problem, and to fail. You and he agreed to lie and cheat and steal to stay stoned, even though your parents said they would send you away. Your choice to do that is what is making you mad.”

  The only way to warm up during the day was to move around, but you didn’t want to when it was so cold. The cold was like daggers, even in the heavy all-weather Search and Rescue gear. Kath kept flinging herself onto her back like Yertle the Turtle and screaming that she wouldn’t walk one more step. The wilderness instructors would say nicely, “I hope we can get to our site before dark.” The other kid would start to shout at her: You pussy! We’re just trying to get to where we’re going. Get up. Start hiking.

  “I’m going to run away while you’re sleeping, you brown-nose losers,” she would reply.

  No one had ever made it a mile, the instructors explained to Kath. She’d be lost instantly, she’d just go around and around in circles, and they would find her. Plus, the program was the second-largest employer in Davis, so if somehow she got to the road—which was unlikely—anybody who picked her up would either work for the program or have a relative who did. This made Rosie smile unexpectedly and think of Rae, who saw the world that way: Everyone was on God’s payroll, whether they knew it or not. Everyone was part of God’s scheme, having been assigned to either help you or drive you crazy enough so you’d give up on your own bad plans and surrender to God’s loving Love Bug ways.

  She was plagued by thoughts of her future, ruined now by her parents’ behavior: What decent college would take a girl who had missed her senior year? Was she supposed to go to some ordinary college now? Be any old person? No, that couldn’t happen—it would mean they had won.

  Early on the sixth night, at dusk, the instructors had them go gather wood for a communal fire, and then select a staff-shaped piece. This would be the truth stick. Bob came out that night, and they had their first truth circle, only Kath went to hide in her tent and brood.

  They took turns burning symbols on the truth stick with a heated nail—moon, flames, a primitive eagle, their names. Bob taught them about how to do an emotional rescue, when you went to help another person by showing up and handing them the truth stick, so they all went over to Kath’s tarp and handed her the stick. She was sitting with Hank and crying like a baby, but she took the stick, and then joined them at the fire; she burned her name into the stick. They all said why they thought their parents had put them here, drugs and alcohol, and in Kath’s case, a boyfriend with hep C with whom she had shared a needle.

  “But only one time!”

  The boys tore into her about being an idiot, and Rosie thought she was lying, that she had used a needle with the sick boyfriend more times than she could count. If it had been Rosie, it would have been way more than one time; crazy but true, not that she had used needles, or ever would, probably. They tried to get Kath to tell the truth, but she was in total denial. Bob was right, Rosie thought, remembering something from the other day: Trying to reason with an addict was like trying to blow out a lightbulb.

  Elizabeth still felt skewered by cravings for Rosie, but things were ever so slightly better. Rae was getting her out. They had gone shopping at the local garden store, which was having a sale on bark nuggets and mini bark nuggets, with which she would need to blanket the garden when the weather turned really cold, but she could not decide which to buy, bark or mini bark, and they left rattled and empty-handed. Then, in Rae’s car, she could not remember how to roll the window down. The button was on the panel between the bucket seats, but it took her a few minutes to remember this. She and Rae drove by the Parkade, hoping that the kids would look as insane and vacant as usual, and some of them did, and this helped, but a few looked lively and young and free. Bark or mini bark, she kept thinking, bark or mini bark?

  Elizabeth chewed and sucked on the knuckle of her thumb, as if to extract marrow. It hurt. Rae did not say anything. Elizabeth suspected a conspiracy between James and Rae, to let her feel like shit for as long as it took, instead of trying to fix the unfixable. But Rae usually cracked under the strain of holding back comforting words and advice, as she did now: “You get to talk to Bob, soon! And you get a letter from Rosie. In the meantime, we know where Rosie is, and that she’s safe.” Relief flooded Elizabeth’s nerves, and the anxiety on Rae’s face subsided.

  “You know one thing I may be getting used to, Rae? You know one thing I sort of like about not having Rosie underfoot?”

  “What’s that, baby?”

  “Call me crazy, but I love not having someone endlessly challenging me, and making me feel like a crazy shit all the time.” Elizabeth looked around in the car with wonder. “I’m pretty sold on that.”

  Every morning at dawn someone shook them awake in the dark, time to get up, and some mornings the instructors handed out pepperoni or cheese sticks that had mysteriously appeared in the night. Every morning her heart sank when she woke and found that she was still in the woods. She obsessed about Fenn and knew he had left her. Maybe ninety days from now, when she was back home, he would leave the new girlfriend for her, if he had one. Or she could wait in a lovely way for him to cycle through, and arrive back at where they had left off. Not knowing was making her lose her mind, so she made herself think about what her friends were doing right that minute, and how great it would be to smoke a joint, and about her bucket kids, the littlest ones playing in the tall grass.

  She wondered whether the parents of her Sixth Day kids knew she’d been sent away, and whether they were upset that such a bad person had been in charge of their children. She wondered whether she could ever work there again, with this on her record, although what sort of record would this be on? The county Bad Persons ledger? And how about the parents of the other high school seniors—were they horrified to find out she’d had to be sent away? Or were they jealous, that her parents had done what they couldn’t?

  There was no ease in the snow, just plodding and clomping ahead. It found the imperceptible cracks in her Search and Rescue gear, and managed to splat in there. It was squeaky on the soles of her boots, and thudded when it fell from the branches. She felt like a speck of protoplasm on a stick under the sky.

  You always needed to squint, and this made your eyes hurt. Sometimes the snow was fluffy and light like feathers—how could anything so pretty make you feel so bad? Other times it was heavy and wet. The gloves were supposed to be good enough for the Arctic, but you were so cold you felt your hands were made of skeletal corpse-bones because none of your fingers could work together. But it was better than not feeling them, which meant you were in trouble. Trying to warm them up was agony, rubbing your big paws together, but it helped. The tips of their noses froze, and they rubbed them with the back of their frozen gloves like lepers.

  On the seventh day, Bob did an incredible thing. He showed up with candy, peach gummy rings. You tied a piece of floss to the ring, and then the other end to your middle finger, and held the ring about six inches from your mouth. You had to focus on the ring and how badly you wanted it, and make it come to your mouth without moving your finger. “There are tiny muscles in your fingertips that you’ve never noticed you had, because you never needed to,” Bob said. “Your mind is in contac
t with that which will help you move the floss in a circle, until the ring passes by your mouth and you can eat it.”

  It was true, like a Ouija board, how without your fingers’ even seeming to move, you could get the muscles to flicker, tremble, stir, and bring you the ring.

  Bob said: “There is so much you have all been ignoring inside you, that you let die in yourselves, deep psychic muscles. You used your skills to get high, to get by, to maintain whatever illusions you needed to keep using.” He let them each try the rings five times, and they could all do it, could get the string moving in a circle, and each got five candy rings. Their moods were expansive as they laughed and chewed and marveled.

  “What other flavors do you like?” he asked when he left that day. It was ridiculous—gummy rings as some sort of payout for their neglect and misery. Oh, well, what ev: “Watermelon and lime,” she called out one second before he disappeared.

  “You got it. See you tomorrow, then.”

  They all got to their feet and waddled on, like toddlers, or old people worrying about breaking their hips. There were so many ways to get hurt—fall on the treacherous surface and twist your ankle, or plunge through the ice that crunched underfoot and drown.

  Whatcha got for me today?” Bob asked.

  She didn’t want to say. Last night she had felt psychotic in her sleeping bag, although she had not made a sound, just thrashed and moaned. He coaxed it out with his patience and his kind face.

  “I’m going crazy here. My mind is like a horrible yammering, so noisy and miserable. Being here is destroying me. I’m afraid the cold will freeze me, but it will be so seductive that I won’t fight back. That I’ll die alone. Or go crazy and hurt someone. I’m afraid my mother will die while I’m gone. That if I let up, I’ll go nuts.”