Crooked Little Heart

by Anne Lamott

  SO she ended up back with Simone. They practiced together almost every day after school, spent countless hours in each other’s rooms, speaking in a private language somewhere between pig Latin and the “Name Game” about boys, their weight, their mothers, the dogs they would have one day. Elizabeth rarely came to pick Rosie up at Simone’s anymore, since the girls lived within six blocks of each other and were big enough now to walk home, even at night. But a few times a year, she came by and always exchanged a few friendly words with Veronica, although most frequently they were just firming up arrangements about which one of them would drive the girls to their next tournament.

  Elizabeth and Veronica had thought about being friends when the girls had first begun to play at the park together, over nine years ago now. Elizabeth had been widowed six months earlier. She had been drinking at the time and had come inside one afternoon to pick up Rosie after a play date. The two mothers had ended up having a couple of beers in the kitchen as they compared notes about the raising of daughters. Veronica had only been eighteen when she gave birth to Simone five years before, against the ferocious wishes of Simone’s father, who was happily married. Rae had asked once, “Why would a happily married man sleep with Veronica?” Elizabeth thought the answer was obvious: she had a certain 1920s beauty, an arrogant sauciness, a waterfall of thick black curls, and a round, succulent bottom.

  Veronica had made them both coffee, and into their second cup they each poured a healthy slug of brandy. The girls ended up having cereal, popcorn, and tomato soup for dinner in front of the television, while the women moved on to sangria, and then on to more brandy.

  Veronica was intense and earnest. Elizabeth knew by dinnertime that there was no real basis for friendship, yet she kept pouring herself another drink. While Simone practiced ballet leaps around the kitchen, Rosie watched the mothers out of the corner of her eye and finally gave her own a look of flat sternness, a face such as you might encounter in an aged and deeply religious Dane. Elizabeth rolled her eyes and poured herself another Drambuie. The girls were put to bed in Veronica’s room, and the women stayed up well past midnight, talking.

  Simone’s anonymous father had given Veronica a lump sum to leave him alone, and she had used it to open the first facial and nail salon in Bayview. Women, especially married women, loved her ditzy maternal attentiveness, the soothing New Age tapes that always played while she and her girls worked, the candles, the incense, the cooing sympathy. Her business thrived. Men, especially married men, loved the intensity of those round black eyes, loved her tiny clothes, and she was forever flying off with Simone and her beaus to places like Vail and Cancún.

  Elizabeth did not remember driving home that night, although in the morning her car was parked perfectly in front of the curb. She had even turned the lights off and locked the doors, which she discovered when she went outside, squinty and stiff, unbalanced by seasickness and a pulsarlike headache, to investigate: Was anything unpleasant embedded in the grille or dangling from the fenders—antlers, for instance, or worse?

  Over the next few months, Elizabeth had wiggled her way out of any more social evenings with Veronica, but she was always grateful and relieved for Veronica’s hospitality toward Rosie. Among other things, she couldn’t imagine being friends with someone who collected mystical New Age chotchkes—stars, moons, whales—made of clay and metal and glass. There were always lots of angels represented, as well as candles so artistic you would never think to burn one: candle stars, candle angels, candle women dancing in a circle.

  Elizabeth was always amazed by the amount of stuff in other people’s lives. On their shelves, tables, counters, on every smooth shiny space in their homes, little artifacts sat, passively protective. Even Rae’s home was filled with religious kitsch. Elizabeth understood the need for fairy tales and happy endings, but she also suspected that everyone was trying to fill up and decorate the white space out of fear that the white space was the abyss. James said that Veronica, with her crystal star charms, her dancing women candles, and—as he put it—all those fucking angels, was practicing a form of idolatry and that this worship saved her the pain of being responsible, of being aware and alive and grounded.

  Lank and Veronica went out a few times, and even to bed, but Lank, with his pre-Mayan figures, and Veronica, with her God’s-eyes and wind chimes, did not have much to talk about.

  “She’s kind of a—I don’t really know the word,” Lank confessed.

  “Mindless twit?” said James.

  Lank nodded gravely. “She’s got those crazy black Rasputin eyes. They made little Lank very tense.”

  Veronica gave Elizabeth a petulant little angel paperweight after their one long night all those years ago. Elizabeth had guiltily thrown it away. Several months later, when Elizabeth stopped in at Veronica’s one morning to pick up Rosie, she’d seen the same angel paperweight on Veronica’s little altar by the front door. Veronica was upstairs helping Rosie get her school gear together. There was usually New Age music playing, or disco exercise tapes blaring from the den, but that day the only sound had been Simone’s little cat batting a pushpin around on the hardwood floors. Elizabeth, who had a mild hangover, found the sound annoying. She felt like she was inside a bowling alley. She wondered if Veronica had been going through her trash or if she bought them in bulk, to give as door prizes. At any rate, Veronica was now using the angel to hold down an eagle feather on a scrap of sky-blue silk, so neither would blow away.

  seven

  EASTER was early that year, the third Sunday of March. Rae had made Rosie a small woven picture for Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, the day when Jesus was baptized by John in the river Jordan. The picture was of the river, blue and green with golden satin threads to show the shimmer, and with a smear of ashes on it, real ashes from her wood-burning stove—ashes to remind us, as Rae said, that this is all a passing show.

  Rae had become a Christian two years before, which was a source of great consternation to everyone. It was one thing when she had believed in God in a general, ecumenical kind of way, another when she began making space in her chair so that Jesus might sit down beside her. They all hoped it would pass, like a cold, but it showed no signs of doing so. She also remained a left-wing activist, but now she went to church every Sunday, began every morning with prayer and Scripture, and tried to see Jesus in everyone—even Luther, even Republicans. She had not yet begun referring to God as “the Lord,” but Lank had said bitterly just the other day that this was right around the corner.

  Rosie went to church with Rae on Ash Wednesday. She was expecting this big gospel choir, because Rae always talked about this beautiful choir at her church, with all these black people singing, and Rosie knew that black folks had something special because the few black girls at her school were always the first to start off the dancing at the school dances and they were so so much better than the white girls, so much bigger in their dancing. She didn’t really know how to describe the difference, because a lot of the popular girls were technically very good dancers. But that day at Rae’s church, the guy who played piano was terrible; even Rosie could pick out all the wrong notes he was playing, mistakes that threw the choir off. And instead of bleachers onstage filled with swaying singers in choir robes that Rosie had been half-expecting, there were only eight people, singing, “Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior.” This one black woman was crying even as she sang: “Hear my humble cry,” she was singing, “while on others you are calling, do not pass me by,” crying, crying, so it came out as kind of a warble, and the pianist was playing notes that didn’t even sound like they were part of the same song, and Rosie felt very uncomfortable with the lack of competence. Then she noticed Rae swaying slightly in her seat, listening, her eyes closed in this way that made you think she was seeing some huge vista inside her head, a view she was trying to memorize so she could use it in a weaving someday.

  ROSIE hung Rae’s small unframed piece above her bed between a photo of her dad and a photo of Pete
r Billings with one muscular bronze arm around her and one around Simone; they had been at the indoor courts in San Rafael, fifteen minutes from Bayview, practicing at night. Peter held a membership there that allowed him to bring a van full of students at night whenever it rained. Rosie didn’t like playing there very much. The club reminded her of an airplane hangar, eerie with purplish light from long tubes that hung from the ceiling and that swayed when hit by a lob. Each light was like an elongated sun, and every time you looked up, you had to squint or be blinded. And the smell was mucky, like hot wet dirty shoes. She liked being with the boys, though, the older boys, who teased her and laughed at her jokes. She remembered the night the photo was taken, during Christmas vacation last year. Now she was already at least an inch taller. In the photo she and Simone both looked like silly kids. Simone’s breasts were much smaller in the picture, but Rosie remembered that Peter made a little joke when he gave Simone a dollar for a soda; he said to please get him change in nipples and dimes and then he pretended not to have done it on purpose.

  That made her feel just the opposite of the way she felt with Rae in church that night, when she too finally closed her eyes, and she heard why Rae was having joy—because something was happening in spite of the incompetence of the pianist and the singers. Something was happening in spite of how funky the surface of the music was, like spirit rising up through all the dreck of the world.

  ON the night before Easter, Rae stretched out on the couch in the living room after dinner as if she were at her psychiatrist’s. James and Elizabeth sat in easy chairs beside her. Rosie was lying on the floor working halfheartedly on a report for social studies.

  “Are you comfortable down there, Rosie?” Rae asked.

  “Pretty much.”

  “Because you could always try to shove a huge, foul, arthritic old woman over to one side of the couch.”

  Rosie smiled at Rae affectionately. “It’s okay.”

  “I’m missing Mike so badly this week. I can’t believe how I still feel after all this time—I mean, it’s been almost two months, right? I still feel like I’m in nicotine withdrawal. In fact, Rosie darling? I’ll do anything if you’ll run to the store and get me a pack of cigarettes.”

  “Rae, you don’t smoke. Remember?”

  “I don’t? Did I used to? Did I quit?”

  “Uh-huh. A few years ago.”

  “Do you think you will call him?” James asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Rae. “Maybe. Probably.”

  “He doesn’t have much to give, Rae,” said Elizabeth. “Meanness, and crumbs.”

  “Well,” said Rae, “it’s better than nothing.” Elizabeth smiled gently. “I was so comfortable with Mike, because I’m so good at fending off sadism. It’s what I learned to do well as a child. And to thrive on turnip juice—emotionally, it was all my parents had to offer. It’s a little bitter perhaps, and dehydrating. But it tastes like love to me. And that’s what Mike has to offer. Turnip juice in a beautiful goblet.”

  “Do you hear how crazy that is? To give your heart to someone like that?” Elizabeth said.

  “Uh-huh,” said Rae.

  “You want him to be tuned into you, and he keeps saying, ‘Hey, honey, turn on the radio and twiddle the dials.’ ”

  “I know,” said Rae. She closed her eyes.

  “He’s a narcissist in delusion,” said James.

  “And what’s the delusion?”

  “That’s he’s not a narcissist.”

  THE next day Rosie went over to Lank’s in the afternoon to work on her report, a five-page paper on any topic she pleased. She had chosen the history of women’s tennis, and so far her report, which Elizabeth had read over breakfast, began:

  The history of women’s tennis is that for a long time, there were some great women tennis players, touring the world with the great men. This was long before Billie Jean King played Bobby Riggs, who was a sexist little jerk, and who lost to her. Helen Wills Moody was one of the early greats, Suzanne Lenglen was another. But they were amateurs, just as the men were. If you played at Wimbledon, you just won a trophy, unlike now when you win hundreds of thousands of dollars. Of course there was also a sexist period when the men started winning prize money but the women won toaster ovens. Things could not have been less fair, although of course this was the case in “all walks of life,” so you’d hardly notice one more little thing. But even before this, in the 1950s and part of the 1960s, there were some touring pros, like Rod Laver, and Ken Rosewall, and one of these was a woman named Maria Bueno, from Brazil, who was an extremely great athlete. These touring pros traveled around the world playing each other in exhibitions, and were paid under “the table.”

  Rosie adored Lank. He was the first man she had loved in a romantic way, when she was ten and found him so sexy she could hardly breathe, with his cherubic face, that soft fair skin, and his big body like a friendly bear. He was so different from the other boys and men she knew—the tennis boys mostly, and Peter. He was the exact opposite of Peter, partly because he was so uncoordinated but also, he was so sweet and regular. Peter was like a movie star who happened to be a great tennis player. Her mother said one of the things she loved about Lank was that you could still see his baby self—the animal self, the dreaming self, the self that didn’t have language, the self that was fluid and full of appetite and satiety and frustration, that could not cover its nakedness with motor control.

  Lank was lacking in motor control.

  He was one of the least coordinated men Elizabeth had ever seen. James, who played basketball with him and a few of their friends once a week, said that Lank was the Pee-Wee Herman of the sports world, simultaneously stiff and rubbery. And even Rosie, who watched him with basset-hound eyes, had to admit that he wasn’t much of an athlete. She had played tennis with him the summer before, because he’d said he played, and on the first shot he lifted his back leg like a garden statue and hit a backhand so stiffly, with his back leg still poised behind him, that it looked like a stream of water was about to spout from the top of his head.

  But he knew how to be a friend, and he knew how to get kids to want to do well in school. Whenever Rosie had a report due, she’d take all of her notes and research over to Lank’s for an afternoon. He always made her describe the report in one or two sentences, “as if you were writing copy for the TV listings,” so she’d know exactly what she was and wasn’t writing about.

  Now Rosie was bent over Lank’s cluttered kitchen table, trying to figure out what else she could say in the report. She cared passionately about her subject: she and Simone and all the other girls on the junior circuit talked about the history of women’s tennis the way Democrats used to talk about the civil rights movement. Just the other day at breakfast, Rosie had been discussing the women’s long march from the early days of Helen Wills Moody, Althea Gibson breaking the race barrier, to the great Maria Bueno, to Margaret Court and Rosie Casals and the pivotal moment when Billie Jean King whipped Bobby Riggs, “that froggy little butt,” as Rosie called him. Her eyes were flashing as she recounted the miracle of Chris Evert’s transformation from goody-goody to one of the leaders of the movement, like Martin Luther King, and when James volunteered gently that perhaps he wouldn’t go quite that far, Rosie stalked from the table and shouted down from the top of the stairs that James was a froggy little butt, too.

  LANK loved Rosie in much the same way Rae loved Rosie, in the unabashed and spoiling way of godparents. He loved her company, the warm quality of the companionship she was able to show to people who made few demands on her, who took her as she was, unlike the bottomlessly annoying and judgmental way of her parents. They sat at his table today, side by side, Rosie writing her paper, Lank correcting homework and answering her questions. Bruno slept on the floor beneath the table as they worked, pressed against Rosie’s ankles like a warm furry log. She inhaled Lank’s smells, the saltiness, his maleness, like soil.

  LANK’S last girlfriend had been fifteen years younger
than he; she spoke in a little Kewpie-doll voice.

  “She’s a lot smarter than she looks,” he said when James and Elizabeth were rolling their eyes about her one day. “And she’s very sweet, and very honest.”

  Dust motes danced in the flickering gleams of sunshine that streamed through the kitchen windows.

  “Lank,” said Elizabeth. “Honesty does not mean telling a couple of strangers about your urinary tract infections over dinner.”

  “First of all, you’re not strangers, you’re my best friends. And second of all, she was just explaining why she wasn’t having drinks that night—because of her medication.”

  “She pronounced vagina ‘pagina,’ ” Elizabeth said. James smiled. Lank looked away.

  “All right. Maybe she’s not Susan Sontag.” He rubbed his eyes, then turned to Elizabeth. “How did she work it into the conversation?”

  “It was just some throwaway line. Some passing reference. To her cat’s pagina.”

  Lank stared off into space for a moment, mulling this over. “So she wasn’t actually talking about her own, then. It could have been worse.”

  James actually brayed with laughter. Elizabeth reached over and took Lank’s hand. “Lank,” she said sternly, “it was bad enough.”

  “It’s so easy for you guys to make fun of me, because you have each other. But James, you had that girlfriend who pronounced spaghetti ‘basketti,’ ” said Lank.

  “But the point is I have a brilliant, handsome grown-up now, a woman who—”

  “Well, you lucked out,” said Lank. Elizabeth turned to James and nodded vigorously.

  “But you could have Rae,” said James. “She’s pretty, she’s smart, she’s hilarious—she’s funnier than either of us.”

  “But she’s fat. She needs to lose fifty pounds. And now she’s religious. So into Jesus. It makes me edgy. And anyway, she’s not interested in me.”

  Elizabeth had to admit that this was true. Rae liked him as a best-friend-in-law, but she didn’t find him attractive. Also, as she confided to Elizabeth one night, she thought he was a tightwad.