Imperfect Birds

by Anne Lamott

  “We’re all afraid of the same stuff. Mostly we’re afraid that we’re secretly not okay, that we’re disgusting, or frauds, or about to be diagnosed with cancer. Really, nearly everyone is, deep down. We want to teach you how to quiet the yammer without drugs, and TV, danger, et cetera. We’re going to teach you how you can create comfort, inside and outside, how you can get warm, how you can feed yourself. And even learn to get through silence.”

  “There is no quiet place in me to rest, especially in all this snow.”

  “There is, though. There is wilderness inside you, and a banquet. Both.”

  Elizabeth sneaked off to the library to use the computer there. She rarely felt the need to go online. She could use a computer in a limited way, and James had just taught her how to Google, but today she didn’t want him to find out what she was looking up.

  Logging on, she felt like a pedophile looking over her own shoulder, heart pounding. She Googled “deaths at wilderness facilities, from exposure, suicide, violence.” She found a few mentions of death by neglect at army-style boot camps in the United States, and endless diatribes against wilderness programs in general. But she also found testimonial essays by kids who said they would have died without intervention, or ended up in jail or as runaways. Then she Googled “teenage traffic fatalities”: six thousand kids had died nationwide the previous year. She would have thought more. Then she looked up Greyhound schedules from San Francisco to Salt Lake City. Then she Googled James, and with held breath read responses to his radio essays, most of them complimentary, a few effusive, and a few fully demonic. She Googled the people who had written the most wrathful letters, but didn’t find anything actionable. She Googled Rae: her website, random praise for her weavings, and displays of her public successes. Then she Googled herself: nothing. That pretty much said it. What had she been expecting? Elizabeth Ferguson, stay-at-home mother and wife, recovering alcoholic with a history of psychiatric problems and a teenage child recently institutionalized for drugs, spends her days reading, ruminating, and playing with the cat.

  “Where were you?” James asked when she returned home.

  “Oh, just hanging out at the library.”

  After dinner the phone rang. When Elizabeth picked up, a woman with a sultry voice asked to talk with James, and Elizabeth’s mind flared with panic. He was having an affair. She’d been right all along—it wasn’t that KQED was his mistress: he’d been seeing someone young from the production department. Or who waitressed next door to the station. “Can I help you?” Elizabeth asked with enormous hostility. It was a woman from the valley, with a dog. Someone had come by who could take him, but she had promised James he could have first dibs. “Really,” Elizabeth said. “First dibs.” She felt busted—here she’d leapt to the conclusion he was having an affair, when he’d just been out dog hunting. God, maybe she’d been wrong about the extent of Rosie’s dark and secret life, too; maybe she and James had overreacted, and they could go pick her up. Then she smiled kindly to herself, and remembered the Post-it: Tomorrow.

  She handed him the phone. “It’s a lady with a dog,” she said.

  He grimaced with guilt, took the phone and listened. “Oh, dear,” he said. He looked over at Elizabeth. She kept her expression neutral, although she was seething—he’d gone to check out a dog behind her back. Their family was in deep shit, they were broke and overwhelmed, but he was saying to the woman, “Boy, Ichabod is a great dog. I fell in love with him. But I had no business pursuing this, and I have to say no. Thank you for checking, but we’ve got way too much going on.”

  Elizabeth looked away, looked back at James in his guilt, and grabbed the phone.

  She clenched her teeth. “Wait,” she said into the receiver. “Let us at least come by in the morning. Is nine too early? Let me find a pen.” Then she turned to James and mouthed, “Ichabod?” He nodded with deep contrition.

  Rosie was raw all the time but she plodded on. Her nose ran and froze, and she tried to rub it away and that rubbed her skin raw. You sniveled all the time here. The snow turned you into something pathetic. It made your horrible leaky self visible.

  On the seventh night they all got to write to their parents. Bob was going to call the parents tomorrow, and read the letters over the phone. They could use one whole side of a page of binder paper. And the parents could fax them a letter the day after.

  Rosie thought for a long time before she began to write. It was so weird, how friendly she felt all of a sudden. Mama, who gave me life, she wrote. I am okay. I hated you for the first few days. I know you think you sent me here to save me. Although I think this is pretty extreme and I am still very mad. I miss you, though, and Rascal and James (sort of) and Lank and Rae. I want to come home. I would be so good, you could test me every morning. I know it is too late but I feel very desperate. Please find out from Jo or Alice about Fenn, even if it is bad news for me. I didn’t use NEARLY as much as the other kids here. Never meth. Well, once or twice. They say I get to see you and James at the end of the month. Please smuggle Rascal in your biggest purse. It is so cold here you won’t believe it. And at night it is so quiet that it is like hearing music among the planets (if there are owls in outer space). The snow is beautiful and a nightmare, and I will never voluntarily go into snow again. It looks like clouds and smoke and fog, and it burns the inside of your nose and lungs. It has incredible shadows in it and is also full of light. Every so often we see jackrabbits frozen in motion behind the trees. They look like they are judging us. (Tell James he cannot use this stuff!) Love you, miss you. Give Rascal a treat for me or a smack on the butt. Rosie.

  The first thing Bob said to Elizabeth was, “Rosie is healthy—doing fine.”

  “Fine? What does fine mean?” At her AA meetings, FINE was a common acronym for fucked up, insecure, neurotic, edgy.

  “It means she’s eating, she’s learned to make fire. She’s doing her chores.”

  “Does she hate me? Does she hate us?”

  “No, no, not at all. Listen to this letter. I’ll stick it in the mail later so you’ll have the original. You can each fax one letter a week, as can any adult in her life. Except Fenn. Here it goes: ‘Mama, who gave me life.’ ” Elizabeth clenched her fists in sudden joy.

  When Bob finished, neither of them spoke for a minute, until he broke the silence to say he would fax her and James a copy later.

  After they got off the phone, she went and curled up on the couch, beneath where Rascal lay. He stared down at her like a vulture in a tree. James came over and took her feet in his lap and rubbed them with her socks still on. Ichabod lumbered over and planted a huge, heavy, hairy leg across her chest so that she couldn’t have gotten up supposing she’d wanted to. It was hard to say or even guess what kind of dog he was, but he was mellow and large, maybe eighty pounds, with short brown fur, orange eyebrows like a rottweiler, and hanging folds of skin around his jaw, like a shar-pei.

  Pearly mist covered the garden when she went out the next morning, and her baby rose was already dead, and no new ones had bloomed. The willow tree branches, without leaves, were sticky, witchy fingers. There was broad green grass, and grass like sparse old-lady hair. The yard was not hospitable now, but lovely in its way, full of green gray brown. It was not neat and efficient, though. It was taking its time. Ichabod sat near her, a solemn blur of dark. He watched her have her morning cry. Then they got up together and went inside.

  On day eight, the beginning of the second week, the day Bob was going to read Rosie’s letter to Elizabeth, the fax machine at the office broke down, so he couldn’t fax it to Elizabeth, too, so she could read it to James later. Rosie spent all afternoon trying to hold back tears, feeling she would freak out entirely, like Kath, with whom she had bonded in the last few days. The kids muttered with paranoid thoughts about how the instructors were fucking with them—what were the odds the fax was broken today, when they were supposed to get letters from home tomorrow? As they murmured angrily together, Rosie felt strangely close t
o the other kids. Tyler, who was not only handsome but smart; small Joel, whose skin was about eighty percent better; goofy Jack, the quiet, googly Arlo kid; and Kath—they had each other’s back. If one of them got called out for slacking off or doing something stupid and potentially dangerous, they all exchanged glances of commiseration and of what general dicks adults could be.

  Bob said that if the machine wasn’t fixed tomorrow, he would drive into town to retrieve their parents’ letters at Kinko’s. Then he told them he had a surprise for them later, after dinner.

  Rosie was fire-maker for the whole tribe that night. She got a roaring fire started. Kath still hadn’t made one, but now was at least trying. Rosie and Kath had helped each other finger-comb their hair that day, and plotted how to steal some duct tape from the instructors so they could wax each other’s eyebrows. They pooled their rice and lentils with the boys and cooked the food in one battered pot that Hank gave them. They sat in a circle with their instructors, gobbling it down under the thinnest slice of moon that could ever be.

  At the business store in Landsdale, a young man tried to help Elizabeth fax Rosie her letter, full of details about the new dog and how much they missed her, and how much she’d scared them, and how proud of her they were. But something was wrong with the recipient’s fax, and the young man promised to keep trying until it went through. Elizabeth went to visit Rae. She pounded on Rae’s door over the sound of the loom and then, without hearing Rae’s voice, stepped inside the cottage. It smelled of lanolin, fiber, and wet wool. Rae looked up from the loom in the middle of the small living room. It seemed as big as a grand piano. Elizabeth came up behind Rae to kiss and nuzzle her soft, sweet-smelling neck. Then she sat in the window seat to watch, and dreamily imagined Rosie reading her letter again and again.

  Rae, shoving the comb downward through the warp, looked somewhere between harp-playing and rowing, as she dragged the woolen thread down.

  “Can we drive up to Utah when you’re done, and get my Rosie back?”

  “Sure,” said Rae, running the threaded shuttle through the warp. Then she smote her forehead with the palm of her hand. “Wait—shoot. Never mind. This tapestry is due tomorrow morning. Besides, bringing her back might kill her.”

  Elizabeth thought this over. “Finish up already. I’m bored to fucking death.” Rae held up five fingers: five minutes. Elizabeth let her shoulders slump and sighed loudly, and went back to daydreaming about Rosie.

  “Did you get your letter off? And how’s the dog?”

  “The fax machine in Davis was down. The entire town has probably been wiped out in an avalanche. And the dog is sweet. Ugly-adorable. Except for the penis.”

  “That red lipsticky thing? Or the whole furry outside situation?”

  “James says that the furry outside thing isn’t the penis—it’s a cod-piece. It’s just his little underpants.”

  Rae rolled her eyes. “Thanks for sharing, James. I’ll have Lank Google it.”

  Elizabeth stared. “Really, Rae? You can Google that?” Rae shrugged, nodded. “Isn’t it wild, how you can find out so much, yet know so little?”

  Rosie whipped her head around to the sound of voices in the woods. “Listen,” she said. The kids looked at one another with fear. What was it? They gaped toward the sound of crunching boot steps on the ground, on ice and branches, but then heard other kids’ voices, and the instructors could not keep straight faces. Maybe it was over, Rosie thought, her heart hurdling over itself. They had learned their lesson—God almighty, had they learned their lesson—and now they were going home.

  Six teenagers in orange Search and Rescue gear stepped out of the woods, followed by two huge male instructors and a woman. The new kids, three girls, three boys, were all smiling, and reached for Rosie and the others, who had clustered around. After a while these new kids shepherded Rosie’s tribe over to the fire.

  They’d brought them brownies from someone in the office and a chub of pepperoni. “We are your emotional rescue,” one of the boys announced. “The isolation phase is over, and from now on, we’re going to check on you every week, no matter where we are in our own process.”

  Rosie’s whole body flushed. “You mean, we’re not going back with you?”

  “Of course not. You have three more weeks out here, then two more months to go. We have one more week, and then we move to the hogan and the longhouse, and then Academics. We’ll come visit you from there. And in another week, you’re going to visit a new tribe who will be on their eighth day, as their emotional rescue, because you’ll be old-timers by then. We’ll be your mentors, and the newer ones will be your mentees.”

  “We brought food and ourselves,” one of the girls added. “Plus, the truth. That we’ve been in your shoes, we uniquely know how bad this week was, and we swear it gets better.”

  What a bunch of mental cases, Rosie thought. I wonder what the instructors are paying you—thirty peach rings? They’d obviously drunk the Kool-Aid. She wouldn’t let that happen to her.

  She looked around until her eyes landed on the woman instructor, who was brown-haired and homely in the firelight, talking quietly with Kath, who was laughing, and Rosie’s heart broke with longing for her mother, but she refused to cry. She froze herself out, cauterized the place where she wanted to sob, and drew in the dirt with a stick for a few minutes. And then the woman came over and sat beside her.

  She was prettier up close, with a cute smile and dark eyelashes, but she had a big nose.

  “Hey,” said the woman. “You’re Rosie. I’m Taj. I’m with the kids who are two weeks ahead of you.” Rosie looked at her and nodded but couldn’t think of anything to say. She had a nice smell, with a hint of something womanly, like lotion. Rosie hadn’t smelled a clean female in more than a week. “I wanted to tell both you girls, we’re sorry about the Kotex, but you can let Bob know when you have your period and we’ll help you get rid of the used napkins at the end of every day. I know it can be kind of gnarly.”

  “Then why didn’t they just give us Tampax, that we could bury, and have some privacy?”

  Taj sighed, shook her head. “About two years ago, a girl here hated it so much that she left one in for days, to induce toxic shock—so she’d either get to go to the infirmary or die.”

  Rosie stared at Taj, and let her mouth drop open. “Death by tampoon?” Taj nodded enthusiastically. “Now I have heard everything,” said Rosie. Taj laughed and put one arm around Rosie’s shoulder, and Rosie let her draw her in, and she buried her nose in Taj’s neck and smelled it as long and deeply and quietly as she could, holding on to the smell like a life preserver and trying to hold back tears.

  “You’re going to end up being glad for this experience,” said a boy with red curls poking out from under a navy blue watch cap. “I know it’s hard to believe.” That was a good one. Rosie grew hard and imperious. Then the aroma of chocolate wafted over. It smelled so much like her mother’s kitchen that her mouth began filling with desire.

  “It starts getting more interesting for you tomorrow,” said the curly-haired boy. “Now that you know how to survive, you get to be a family, a community. In another week, you start learning Search and Rescue. We’ve got our first real assignment tomorrow at dawn, joining forces with the local SAR squad and firefighters.”

  Rosie took off one of her gloves and reached for a brownie. She could see the cracks in its surface by firelight, like dried desert. The inside was wet, moist, exquisite. Search and Rescue, that was another good one. As if adults would trust a bunch of loser kids to rescue something precious out here in the middle of nowhere.

  TWELVE

  Ox Eye

  Elizabeth took a picture for Rosie of Ichabod in the garden near a dead rosebush. Rain would come soon enough and bring water-color skies and riotous green to town, but in the meantime, everything was dry, bristly, sticklike, as if the garden itched. Ichabod was a good dog and a mellow companion, and Elizabeth liked talking to him, as he looked Hasidic and thoughtful. She tol
d him to smile before she took his photo; someone should smile around here. James had found two cheap plane tickets to Utah for a family weekend, and they would fly there Friday afternoon. There was a lodge near the wilderness facilities in Davis, thirty miles from Salt Lake City, where the parents would stay and the group sessions would be held. Things could go well, or horribly, or be a mixed grill of progress and discouragement, whereas she and James needed something major to have happened to Rosie; they’d spent their last dime, and run out of options. After dinner the first night, the parents would meet the instructors and therapists in the big upstairs room at the lodge. The adults would have orientation, and then the kids would come in, do a presentation of their wilderness skills, and spend an hour with their parents. Saturday was breakfast together, all-day family therapy with all five kids and all ten parents. Sunday was breakfast, half a day’s family therapy, and then the kids would go to the next leg of their journey, called the Village, a month indoors at the longhouse and the hogan by the river.

  Elizabeth spent some time in the garden, where she usually found solace, but not today, not with Rosie gone. Today it was dry like someone who had cried too much. She moved through her plants slowly: since Rosie had left, four weeks ago, she and James had both slowed down. Maybe they now got to act their age, instead of trying to act more energetic around Rosie so she would not think they were decrepit.

  They both had much to do before leaving. They had to pack for the snow—it was only twelve degrees in Davis. James had a story to record, and an appointment with the dean at the College of Marin, where he would begin teaching English comp half-time after the first of the year. It was a real break: they needed the money, and it might be great material for his radio pieces. He was only medium bitter about having to take a real job. Elizabeth had to drive Ichabod up to Lank’s house for the weekend, and arrange for a neighbor to feed Rascal. She was to have one last talk with Bob on Thursday afternoon. That night she and James were going to a rally at the Parkade that Rae had helped organize with the people of Sixth Day Prez, to consecrate this piece of land on which so many of the town’s children had gotten so lost. It had been planned since Jack Herman’s death. And she had a date for tea with Jody and Alice on Friday morning.