by Anne Lamott
Rosie tried to think of something to say, but Luther spoke first.
“I never seen you play better than you did that third set in Menlo Park. You keep playing like that, you gonna go to the nationals next year.”
Rosie flushed with pleasure.
“You gotta bring your serve up, though. You’re framing everything now on your ground strokes, volleys, that’s good. But your second serve is no good; that’s killing you. Can I show you something?” Rosie nodded, tilted her head. “No,” he said. “Not here. I need to take you somewhere.”
Rosie shook her head.
“I have to go home now.”
“You won’t be sorry if you let me show you,” he said. The swirl of fear began inside her, like she was riding the House of Horrors train, faces coming at her around every corner: her crazy mother up in bed; James, miming concern; Simone swelling up like a sea calf. Luther here, talking soft and low.
She did not look at him, but she stared out the open front door like there might be someone standing there with a card that said, Do it, or Don’t. But no one was there because no one ever was these days, and she saw her mother waiting for her at home in bed, mad and worried, and at that moment Rosie felt like a disembodied voice, like the housing for a dead grown-up spirit who looked back over her shoulder at Luther, like he was waiting for her at a soda shop table with a milkshake and two straws, and she shrugged.
THEY walked slowly down the empty street, four or five blocks from the Greyhound bus depot, ambling along like two long-lost friends. She had to tip her head up to see his face. He was much bigger than James, five or six inches taller, maybe the same height as Lank but weighing even more. The air was hot and smelled of flowers and the sea. She heard crickets, a night bird, a dog, their footsteps on the sidewalk, music coming out of this house, a commercial for dish soap from that one, Luther’s labored breathing. Boy, she thought, if Mom could only see me now.
She heard the sulfur snap of a match and smelled a new cigarette, and she wanted to tell him he should quit, her mother had, but the silence felt so cool and rich and it had been a long time since she had felt this feeling of really being somewhere in her body, on this earth, walking with this dark crazy man.
five
ROSIE and Luther walked up a windy road, several feet apart under the moonlit sky. They had been walking ten minutes now and were already in a good neighborhood where people with money might live, where the lawns were tended to, and TVs glowed blue from inside the old houses, and children in backyards pleaded not to come in, not just yet, and engines revved in a way that made you feel teenage boys were near. Luther was smoking. Rosie glanced at him out of the corner of her eye. He looked like a hobo from a history book, like someone who would come to your front door looking for work in the old days, like a traveling salesman who had fallen on hard times, someone you’d dress up like for Halloween by drawing a beard with burned cork on your skin and tying your things in a kerchief on a stick.
“Did you used to have a job?”
The ember of his cigarette glowed. “I had lots of jobs.”
“Like what kind were they?”
“Oh, Sales, mostly.”
“But then you lost it or something?”
“Or something.”
“Are we almost there, to where we’re going?”
“Another block or two. Why, you getting tired?” Rosie shook her head in the dark. It was so strange to hear Luther talking like any man. It had never crossed her mind that he could have regular conversations. Once one of the other girls’ mothers had said she had heard that he was quite intelligent, but he always looked so awful, like a jack-o’-lantern, that you couldn’t believe this to be true. Maybe he was very intelligent like Edmund Kemper, the serial killer in the Santa Cruz mountains. Her heart pounded. She kept thinking back to his hands under the greenish light of the bus depot, how clean they looked tonight compared with the rest of him—how they looked like they’d been scrubbed. Scrubbed too clean. There were no clouds passing over the moon just now, and it shone like a peephole into another kingdom, a kingdom of golden light on the other side of the sky. Long arm branches of the trees reached for them, spindly twigs like a witch’s fingers, crisp leaves rustled, and the night smelled yellow black; it smelled like mulch and rotted tree trunks, it smelled like grass turning brown, and the grass of lawns, growing green and tall, and it smelled like a fire somewhere, charred. Tree frogs croaked until Rosie and Luther approached, and then they stopped as if they were scared—as if everything was scared but the crickets.
“Did you ever have any good jobs?” she asked politely.
“Oh, yeah. I had a good job. I was on a roll. You know how sometimes you just get on a roll? And you just keep hitting the sweet spot, without even really trying, and the ball feels as big as a basketball, and you got all the time in the world to figure out your move? And you just can’t miss?” Rosie nodded in the dark. “This way,” he said, pointing up a hill, the ember of his cigarette describing a right turn. There were not so many houses on this street, not so many cars—more trees, dark, dark. Rosie felt so afraid that she couldn’t be sure she hadn’t just whinnied. “I was there for a few years, in that groove, until I got into a different sort of match. Then things spun out in a different direction. The ball was tiny again, not just its true size but so small I could hardly see it. The size of a marble.”
“Wow.” She sneaked a look at his face through the gray mist of cigarette smoke, and it was as dark and old as a hoot owl.
“Then everything caved in, and I felt scared all the time, a cold grippy fist in my guts. I started failing, falling apart.”
“So what did you do?”
“I did what you did.”
“What do you mean?”
Luther stopped, took a final puff of his cigarette, dropped it to the street, ground it out. “I cheated.”
A cold comet of wind raced through her guts, and her heart pounded in her ears like when you’re snorkeling and you suddenly realize the tide is carrying you out past the reef, out past your parents, out where the sharks are circling. She thought to run, run for the bushes, run for home where they would take her back and no one knew and no one ever had to know. She heard crickets, frogs. There were no cars along the road, no one to come save her. A thorny spindly branch reached out for her from a gate in a picket fence, and she smelled her mother’s roses.
He put his heavy burning black paw, his werewolf hand, on her shoulder, and then he whispered, “Rosie.”
She thought he was either going to bend down and choke her to death or kiss her on the lips like a boyfriend, and she thought that she would have to kiss him back. Then he whispered her name again.
Slowly she raised her head, her eyes.
“We cheated, you and me, and someone noticed. I noticed you; someone else noticed me. It hurt us. That’s not so bad. So many people cheat. So many people. Everywhere, on every level. Famous people have cheated, paid people to take their college exams, scientists who wanted to be famous have messed with lab results, made them up. Everyone’s cheated.”
“I don’t believe that.”
Luther shrugged. “You think it’s just you and me? Old awful Rosie and Luther?”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because I’m the only grown-up who knows, right? Me, and the parents of the kids you cheated.”
“See? You just said I’m a cheater.”
“No, I didn’t. I said you cheated. You did, right?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’m just saying that you don’t need to see yourself as a cheater. Because that’s not who you are. You’re someone who cheated. There’s a difference, and you should try to get that difference, or that’s who you’ll grow up to be. How many times you cheated so far?”
“I don’t know. Maybe five or six matches or so?”
“You’re thirteen years old. The time you cheated could be the summer you were thirteen. Mine was when I was almost fifty. I took
the summer off. That was ten years ago. I didn’t go back. I never worked again, because no one told me that they had cheated too, that everyone had.”
Rosie wiped at the spit in the corners of her mouth. She hadn’t even noticed that her mouth was hanging open. The moon was caught behind the highest, most skeletal branches of an old oak, and the tree looked like a Halloween crone, like it might cackle and wrap its long bony fingers around her wrist.
“Is that what you wanted to tell me?” she asked. “Because I have to go home now.”
“You can go home anytime you want, little girl. Or else you can let me show you something. Your call.”
She wanted to bolt, she wanted to tear home. She hung her head and followed.
He took her to the last home on the hill, a small mansion of adobe behind a thick wall of hedge. It appeared whitewashed in the moonlight, a miniature villa with high adobe walls, arches, and domes, even some sort of a tower in back. And yet for all the walls and sense of security, there was an opening in the hedge on the side of the house farthest from the street. All the lights were out in the house. There was no sign of life. They stepped through the opening. Hedge branches brushed her bare arms.
“Where are we going?”
“Shhhhh.”
“Whose house is this? Do we know these people?”
“Shhhh. Look.” There in the backyard of the mansion, laid out like a glade under the moon, was a tennis court inside a fence. There were no clouds passing over the moon now. Shining through eucalyptus and maples and oaks, it cast long fingers of shadow onto the green pavement of the court, made a lattice shadow where it shone through the net. A breeze rustled the leaves, but otherwise there was perfect silence.
“Whose court is this?” she whispered. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Luther reach into the pocket of his jacket, and fear raced through her; sure that he had a knife or a gun, she stepped away and turned to face him. He had fished out a tennis ball, glowing lime green in the moonlight.
“Huh?” she persisted. “Whose court?”
He smiled at her and then raised his eyes to look at the darkened house, peering in as if he could see something well lit and moving inside. “A family named Parrish lives here.”
“Do you know them?” she asked. She knew he could not have such fine friends, people who could own such splendor. “Should we be here? What will happen if they find us?”
She heard him smiling in the moonlight, exhaling through his nose. “It’s okay,” he said.
She didn’t believe him; worry buzzed like flies inside her.
“Let’s go,” she said, pleading, and still she waited, not able to breathe but hearing the gentle breeze, frogs in the distance.
“The living room ceiling is a skylight,” he said finally. A rush of adrenaline passed through her. Jesus, Jesus, she thought, he’s been inside that house. She thought of those nurses Richard Speck killed, how they sat around him in a cozy room, bound by his hypnotic powers. She saw Speck’s hands around their pretty throats, then thought of Luther’s hands, how scrubbed and clean they were tonight. Holding her breath, she wondered if Luther had been inside to rob the place, maybe even that day, and that’s why he was headed out of town on a bus. She looked longingly through the hole in the hedge by which they had entered.
“There’s a marble floor when you first walk in,” Luther was saying. “A spiral staircase. You could lie back on the couch right now and see the moon, the clouds.”
“How do you know that?” she asked, trying to make her voice sound stern.
“I had it built,” he said. “I had the skylight put in.”
It took her a moment to figure out what he was talking about.
“You mean … you lived here?” she asked finally. He nodded. Taking out another cigarette, he lit it, inhaled deeply, amused. “I don’t understand,” she said.
“Why don’t you come here?” Holding her breath, prickling with goose bumps, she looked at him helplessly.
“Tell me who lives here now.”
“I already told you. A family named Parrish.”
“But who are they? How do you know them?”
“Think about it.”
“How am I supposed to know?”
He sighed. “My wife,” he said. “My ex-wife and her husband, Donald Parrish.” The night was still now, except for the frogs.
“And they don’t mind if you come here?”
“No. And I hardly ever do.” She contemplated his face in profile, how solemnly he studied the night.
“Didn’t you hate having to give it up? Didn’t it drive you crazy?”
“Stop asking me questions,” he said.
“I just want to know.”
He didn’t say anything right away, and when he spoke, he had to clear his throat first, and his voice was quiet and low.
“No,” he said. “It freed me. After it was gone I wasn’t afraid anymore.”
She looked up at the darkened windows, heard the low whistle, like wind, of him taking a puff from his cigarette. “So now will you come here?” he asked.
She took two steps toward him. He bowed his head, gripped an imaginary racket, stood as if about to serve. She waited for the imaginary racket to come crashing down on her head. Instead, looking up, she found him waiting for her attention.
“Okay?” he said. “What you need to do after the toss is to wait. To wait, Rosie. To hold your left hand up in the air, pointing at the toss for one whole second longer. You need to wait. Just wait, watching; hang with it while it hangs there. You need to do nothing more often. Just watch, calm, friendly. Okay? You try that. You’re swinging too soon. You’re chasing the ball down. Let it just hang there a moment; you don’t need to do anything. Everything’s okay. Just wait with the ball.” She could not take her eyes off his left hand, suspended in the air in the moment of toss, palm open, graceful as a wing. “Pointing for one whole long second will keep you from closing up too early on the swing,” he continued. “Looking quietly, all the time in the world. Waiting. And then you swing.”
Rosie pictured serving just like he said, her left arm fully extended, pointing to the sky, like the Statue of Liberty, waiting a beat, and then smashing the ball across the net for an ace. She tucked her head down again, then suddenly began to bounce and catch the ball Luther had handed her, throwing it harder and harder against the asphalt. Then she looked up at her opponent, waiting for serve on the other side of the net. She squinted, pointing her racket at the spot on the court she hoped to hit, and slowly slowly dropped both hands for the windup, slow like a ballerina, dropping the racket down her back, tossing with her left hand, pointing to the sky, and holding it, still and poised.
“Now,” said Luther, and she swung.
six
ROSIE was an hour late getting home. Elizabeth had already called Simone’s twice, Hallie’s once, and was half out of her mind. When Rosie finally slunk into the house, shutting the door gently behind her, Elizabeth was so angry she felt capable of violence. “Where were you?” she demanded.
“Just walking around.”
“Every lie you tell chips away at you.”
Rosie thought this over, thought over the whole night.
“I ran into Luther when I walked past the Greyhound bus depot.”
“You what?”
“You want me to tell you the truth, or lie so you won’t get mad?”
“Tell me the truth.”
Rosie took a long loud breath. “I saw him when I was on my way home. And I stopped in to see him for a minute. God, there were about a thousand people around.”
“Why the fucking hell would you want to talk to Luther?”
“Because he knows things; he knows my game.”
“I don’t even know what that means.”
“Because you don’t know anything about tennis. He was really good in college, better than me. In Oregon.”
“I’ll take you out of tennis to keep you away from him.”
“You don’t
even know what’s going on. You just look at what people look like and think you know if they’re good or bad.”
“Don’t you dare talk to me that way.”
“Look at Mr. Thackery. Look how good he looked.”
She and her child glared at each other, poised on the ledge of pure will. She looked at her daughter, that face, hardly even a child, uncowed, direct.
“You’re grounded forever,” Elizabeth managed to say. “You’ll get to go to Simone’s at night when you’re about twenty-five. When her kid is almost as old as you are. You understand that, right?”
“Mom.”
“You’re grounded. Come here.” Rosie slouched toward her, head down with guilt, sucking on the cuff of her long-sleeved shirt. “I am very angry. And you have got to start believing me—that you must stay away from Luther. But right this second I just need to smell you.”
Rosie bristled. “Do you think I’ve been smoking?”
“I just need to smell you because you’re my girl.” Elizabeth drew her down into her lap, nuzzled her baby’s neck. “You do smell like smoke,” she said, surprised. “Do you smoke?”
Rosie shook her head. “No. Want to smell my breath?”
Elizabeth started to shake her head, and then nodded. Rosie groaned and rolled her eyes, then opened her mouth and puffed out a breath. Her mother sniffed it. “Okay,” she said. “I believe you.” She rocked slightly back and forth. “I’m so angry at you, Rosie. I’m not forgiving you yet, because nothing bad must ever happen to you. I could not go on living; it’s that simple.” She looked up at Rosie, who was watching solemnly. “I’m really furious. Do you understand?” Rosie nodded. Elizabeth gave her a terrible look of exasperation. No one spoke, the air in the room was like a rich quiet broth. After a while, Elizabeth sighed, and looked up. “I’m still mad,” she said threateningly, and Rosie nodded. “But anyway. You know what you said to me once, when you were little?” Rosie shook her head. “You bent your face in as close to mine as you could, so your nostrils were against mine, and you closed your eyes and started breathing deeply; then you said, without opening your eyes, ‘Let’s just sit here and smell each other’s noses.’ ”
