Crooked Little Heart

by Anne Lamott

  “He’s not a tightwad, he’s a teacher. He doesn’t have that much money,” said Elizabeth.

  “Besides, Rae,” added James, “you two could have the most beautiful children.”

  “You guys never give up. And besides, I don’t think I like children.”

  “But you adore Rosie.”

  “Rosie,” said Rae, “is God.”

  ROSIE did not sleep at all the night before the last big dance of the school year, the May Day dance, the most special one of all, when seventh and eighth graders danced till ten in the gym to music videos playing on a big screen onstage. Some of the kids would be sneaking beer, she knew; some of the kids would be smoking outside—the big kids, eighth graders, smoking in the shadows.

  Rosie wore long black shorts and cowboy boots. Simone had outgrown the boots and had given them to Rosie, along with her training bra, which Rosie wore underneath a tiny white T-shirt. Elizabeth had nearly cried when she saw Rosie dressed for the dance. There were the smallest of all breasts pushing against the shirt, like beautiful gardenias, and those long legs widest at the knee, and those camel-colored cowboy boots that seemed three sizes too big. Rosie wore a little blusher and some lip gloss, her hair pulled back in barrettes. She appeared downstairs when she was ready to go, standing against the wall like a mouse, watching for her mother’s reaction.

  “You look so beautiful, Rosie. Like a model in a magazine.”

  Rosie scowled, pleased; she appeared to be grinding out a cigarette with the toe of one cowboy boot. She went out to the living room, picked up a magazine, rifled through it, waiting for Simone, who finally showed up wearing a short white skirt, new cowboy boots, and a black tube top filled to bursting. Rosie looked at her with wonder and desolation.

  “You look great,” Simone said. “Those shorts are totally cool.”

  “You do, too.” Rosie’s voice was hollow, flat.

  They sat a few feet apart on the couch, with their heads dropped all the way back so they could stare at the ceiling. When Elizabeth came in to offer them some juice before they left, both girls rolled their heads from one side of the couch to the center, rolled their vision across the ceiling, so that their eyes might meet.

  THERE were two strobe lights set up, and picnic tables with benches, the tables covered with black-and-red-checked paper tablecloths. Not all the lights were on, so it was dim enough to dance like real people, not like the little kids dancing midday under bright school lights. Watching the music videos gave your eyes something to do besides stare at how beautiful all the other girls were. Simone was talking to a group of boys and girls who were clustered around the screen, and Rosie stood there and listened to the rhythm and blues video blaring now. But it was too loud; she felt blanketed in its thrum, in its river of loudness, instead of being able to hear what was great about it. She could smell Simone’s horrible rose toilet water, like incense from Mexico that would be sold in a tube with a picture of Mary on it looking depressed. Being able to pick out her smell was like having a fishing line connecting them, and this relieved her. She started missing her mother. She stared off into space, hating herself because she was at a dance with music videos on a huge screen and strobe lights and all she could think of was needing to call her mother and make sure that she was okay; the fear was like Ajax cleanser sprinkled on her insides. The bejeweled flickering colors of the strobe light made her feel off balance, like when you spin too long, unwinding, on a rope swing.

  The black girls started doing their dances, the Tootsie Roll, Butterfly, so fine in their movement and style that you wouldn’t be surprised to see them dancing in music videos someday. And then only a few guys had the nerve to ask a girl to dance, and these same five boys and the five girls they asked kept changing partners among themselves. Simone was one of them, but Hallie wasn’t, and Hallie locked on to Rosie, and Rosie let her, trying not to think about that bad business with the party, and Hallie told her about who liked whom, who had gone how far with whom, and you had to shout to be heard. The crashing music and strobe lights enveloped her, but Rosie couldn’t discern a pulse in the music, just sound, like she was inside too much energy. She looked at the boys who were dancing, and she felt both desire and hopelessness; her pelvis tingled and tightened inside her. Simone was dancing like a stripper in a nightclub Rosie had seen on TV once, and Rosie could not take her eyes off her. She was dancing with an eighth-grade boy named Dylan, and after a couple of minutes he bent forward to whisper into Simone’s ear, and Simone stopped dancing and stood there not moving but somehow looking like she was about to shimmy. Then she and Dylan pushed past the other dancers and ducked through the open back door.

  Rosie watched, hoping they’d pop right back in, but they didn’t. Simone had been letting boys feel her up practically since she first got breasts. She liked to kiss; she loved to kiss, but she told Rosie it wasn’t enough for boys. Boys liked the other things too. Her pelvis tightened again, like it was holding its breath, and she turned toward the stage to watch the music video. Now there was footage of seals, popping their heads out of the surf as if to the beat, cheerful and sad all at once. At first she thought they were the seals who lived in the bay, the ones you saw from the ferry or who sunned themselves on the piers of San Francisco or at the beach on the Hospital Cove side of Angel Island. In the video there was an old one sitting by himself on a rock above the water, and maybe it was his wet doggy eyes or the tatters in his coat, but he made Rosie think of Luther.

  And she saw Luther watching her, there at the dance, from the screen, hidden inside the seal.

  Simone loved dolphins, but Rosie loved seals. She thought dolphins were smug and fishy, with their skimpy little eyes. It was hard to imagine truly snuggling with dolphins, but seals seemed made to snuggle, they were boneless and floppy like sofas. Around her more and more kids were dancing, but she was locked into the seals on the screen. The sweet dog eyes of the old one were looking right into the camera, right into her. The music was too loud. One of the seals came splashing out of the surf onto the sand, this guy who had been so speedy and graceful in the water but was so clumsy on land. There was something in its lumpy wigglishness that made her think of herself—not of her athletic outsides but of her secret, private self. She looked around for Simone but could not find her. One of these days Simone is going to go too far, she said to herself—it was a line from one of her favorite novels, uttered by the angry mother of a teenage girl as she raised a cup of poisoned coffee to her lips …

  On screen the most amazing thing was happening: in the shadows of the beach, one of the seals was pulling off its seal suit, pulling the wet brown rubbery skin down past its head, to reveal a sad and beautiful woman within, and the tight suit slipped down over and past her shoulders, the way you’d slip out of an off-the-shoulder evening dress. Oh, Mom, she thought, missing her mother again, I wish you could have seen it; it was exactly what it feels like to be me. Where you mostly think you’re one shape but deep inside you know you’re many. So awkward here at the dance, but so fast on the court, like the woman who had been inside the sealskin—one skin, another skin, same stuff. She pictured Luther watching her swim, Luther with his wet brown eyes.

  “Hey!” said Hallie. “Earth calling Rosie.” Rosie looked away from the screen, from the seals. She smiled at Hallie and the other girls. “Do you see Simone?” she asked, and Hallie looked around and then jutted her chin toward the door. Simone was stepping back inside, all discombobulated, tugging at her tube top, sweeping blonde hair away from her eyes, wiping away smeared lipstick. God, Simone, Rosie thought, why don’t you be a little bit more obvious? Simone looked over and tried to catch her eye, but Rosie looked away, back to the stage. Another music video was starting, with three men in grass hula skirts playing electric guitars. She wondered if the woman would ever wriggle back into the seal suit. Hallie jabbed her in the ribs with her elbow and smiled in exasperation. Rosie closed her eyes tightly to clear her mind. When she opened them, a whole lot of girls had sta
rted dancing together side by side, and Rosie began to move with them in one spot, weaving like a cobra, slowly at first and then faster, and her cowboy boots began to move beneath her, and lead her around the floor like a partner.

  eight

  ONE rainy night in early May Elizabeth was vacuuming the living room rug, since the girls planned to sleep on it later. They had gone off to the indoor courts for an evening of practice with Peter and some of his better boys. They would be home by nine or so. James was upstairs working in his study. He had offered to help her clean, but she had not wanted his help. She did not even want music on the stereo. She just wanted to be alone in the silence, and clean.

  The floor of their living room was honey-colored wood. When she and Andrew first moved in, it had been varnished brown and deeply scarred, of no distinction. He had spent a week on his knees sanding it with a small hand sander, blasting off the ugly brown shellac until beautiful amber pine appeared. Hag to princess, he said, when the surface dross was gone, the gouges and scratches and discolorations. Elizabeth called it their second-chance floor. They bought a thick green rug, sea-foam green, just big enough for the two of them to lie on. Sometimes on sunny afternoons they put pillows from the couch on their little rug, and they read. They read poetry, books on the Renaissance, novels with no plot, on the quiet green island that was their marriage.

  THEY are lying on their rug with Rosie, who is four years old and asleep face down on Andrew’s chest. He is sleeping too. Elizabeth studies them for a moment, listens to them sleep. Then slowly she reaches out and touches the distinct arch of Andrew’s dark brow. She strokes it with the lightest touch. She feels like a mother wiping away sorrow, or headache. After a moment, he opens his eyes, blue as a Siamese cat’s, blue as Rosie’s. There is nothing more intimate, she thinks at that moment, than tracing a loved one’s eyebrow. Those delicate hairs, so close to the vulnerable eyes; one is saying, tracing the brow, I am right next to your unprotected place, and I am blessing it. Rosie makes an impossibly loud snore, like an old pug, and they both smile, and Elizabeth just keeps tracing the one eyebrow with her baby finger, without taking her eyes off his.

  THAT rug was no longer there. Elizabeth had thrown it out a few years after Andrew’s death. There had been too many other men on it. She had never really wept for Andrew; there had been Rosie to tend to, and besides, she felt somehow protected by the newness, the unbelievability of it all, of having gone from being totally married to being a widow. The stabbing sense of loss never caught up with her. She’d kept it at bay, night after night at the bar, drinking Scotch and water, bringing home that night’s suavest available man, anyone semihandsome who could make her laugh. She had been through a lot of carpenters, businessmen, poets, painters, writers, some cowboy types, even a biker or two. And when this stage had come to an end, more or less of its own accord when Rosie was seven or so, Elizabeth had gotten a new mattress for her bed and replaced the sea-foam rug with a handsome dark green dhurrie. James had courted her on this rug four years ago. They used to lie on it in front of the fire. Now Rosie and Simone slept on it in sleeping bags whenever Simone stayed over, because Rosie’s single bed had grown too small for the two of them.

  It seemed lately that Simone had spent every weekend night here with them; Veronica was dating someone new, and perhaps that partly explained things. But whatever the case, James and Elizabeth had fallen asleep most nights recently to the sound of the girls in late-night whisperings of boys and tennis, of the places they would live when they were older.

  Rosie never had insomnia when Simone spent the night. They slept side by side in their separate sleeping bags, huddling against each other like puppies.

  James had always maintained that there was good crazy and there was bad crazy and that you just had to make sure you stayed good crazy, but it seemed to Elizabeth that Simone was in danger of teetering off toward bad crazy. “No, no,” said James. “Boy crazy, not bad crazy.” But Elizabeth wasn’t so sure, and the more time she spent with Simone, the more she worried that bad things were in store.

  She was so lovely, fair as early morning sun. She was a powerful child, though—perhaps the natural result of her having started school a year late. Elizabeth had always been aware of her power to hurt. Even at five, Simone had had the ability to turn men’s heads, with her pouty lips and long thick yellow hair and plastic high heels. Yet she could also be surprisingly loyal and tender. Elizabeth could remember driving home after a day on the beach, not too long after Andrew died, Rosie and Simone side by side in the back seat of their old station wagon. Simone still had half a bag of potato chips left, while Rosie had eaten all of hers. Simone took one small bite of a chip and then handed it to Rosie, who took a tiny bite also, and they did this until it was gone, a potato chip communion.

  Even at that age she could make the world stop turning with her will, her games. Elizabeth and Rosie used to drop by her house on their way to the park and stand waiting on her doorstep while Simone tried to make up her mind about whether to go with them or not. Head down, toeing the ground, clinging to her mother’s dresses, refusing to commit—she exerted the power of the held breath, the power of not taking anything or giving anything away. It was a very quiet tantrum, and it must have been such hideous fun to watch the parents fling themselves around trying to get her to do what they wanted.

  The girls had played together nearly every day that year.

  So it came as a shock when, after Veronica had dropped Simone off early one morning, Simone announced primly, “This is the last time I’m coming over, Mrs. Ferguson.”

  “But you two have so much fun together,” Elizabeth protested.

  “I need to make new friends besides Rosie,” said Simone.

  But, Elizabeth wanted to cry, you are her only friend, and her daddy has just died. And she only weighs forty pounds in this heavy world! Elizabeth wanted to shout, “Get out of here or I’ll set the dogs on you!” But they had no dogs.

  Rosie was trying very hard to stay cool. Once she had cried when she had to say good-bye to Simone, and Simone had said, “This is very disappointing, Rosie.”

  Now Elizabeth said, “Simone? You will always be welcome at this house.” She did not mean it for a second. What she did mean was—You don’t want us? Well. We don’t want you. In fact, we hate you.

  Rosie looked stricken but did not cry. “Honey?” she said. “Everything’s going to be okay. I honestly don’t think Simone means it.”

  “Yes, I do,” said Simone.

  It was so painful to endure your child’s pain, especially a broken heart.

  She took the two children to preschool, although Rosie had barely blinked in the last half hour. Then she spent the morning reading the paper. She wondered if Simone was just panicking because Veronica was talking about their moving to another state. Or maybe the tiny cruel part of her heart had started beating all of a sudden. There are so many reasons why a small child’s heart turns hard.

  That afternoon, Elizabeth and Rosie were reading on the floor in the living room, when Veronica called to see if Rosie could come over to play at their house.

  Oh, I’m sorry, Elizabeth wanted to say. Rosie’s a little booked up. Maybe next week—no, no, wait, next week’s no good …

  But instead they met Simone and her mother in the park ten minutes later. Simone’s announcement was never mentioned again.

  SOMETIME later, before kindergarten began, Simone and Veronica moved to Vail. They came back for visits from time to time, but by first grade Rosie had become best friends with Sharon Thackery. Then when Rosie was eight and a half, Sharon and her family moved out of town. Rosie’s heart was broken. She began taking tennis lessons, and at ten years old she entered and won her first tournament. She started looking around for a doubles partner. She had a new best friend named Tina, but they were not completely dedicated to each other, as Rosie and Sharon had been. And Rosie still missed Sharon.

  Charles Adderly had given Rosie a magic set for her birthd
ay that year, and one morning Elizabeth was cooking a cheese omelette with parsley and mushrooms for herself and James, when Rosie called to her with some urgency from the living room. Elizabeth turned off the heat on the stove and went to investigate. She found Rosie sitting on the dark green rug, hunched over her black magician’s hat to hide its contents from view, fiddling with something secret inside.

  “What do you need, honey?” Elizabeth asked.

  “I’m doing something magical. It’s about missing Sharon. Watch me.”

  “Okay.”

  Rosie appeared to go into a trance. Her eyes fluttered. She felt about on the dark green rug, pulling up invisible things that she then dropped into the black cone of the hat. “I am dropping dust,” she intoned in a spooky voice. “Dust and air.” Then with her eyes still closed, she moved her hands like a sorcerer’s over the space above the hat, casting a spell, massaging the magic into being. She opened her eyes and lowered her head down into the magician’s hat, then held it on with one hand while she slowly raised her head. Elizabeth was stunned to see that Rosie’s eyes were brimming with tears. They spilled over and trickled down her cheeks. Elizabeth sat down on the green rug with her daughter.

  “Honey!” she said. “You’re really missing Sharon, aren’t you?”

  Rosie nodded without looking up. “I want her to move back.”

  “Of course you do.” Elizabeth looked at her child, and she believed that the Buddhists were right—that if you want, you will suffer; if you love, you will grieve.

  “Mama?” Rosie pushed her fists against her eyes.

  “Uh-huh?”

  “Does anyone love Mr. Thackery?”

  Elizabeth slowly tilted her head, stunned.

  “You mean, besides Sharon and her mom?” she asked gently.