Anne Lamott

by Imperfect Birds (v5)

  SEVEN Speck of Light The three girls tramped up the walkway to Rosie’s front door. Rosie and Alice supported Jody between them like a wounded soldier. What could you tell your mother to lessen the consequences of having snuck out in the night while grounded in the aftermath of having been busted? Certainly not the truth, that Jody and Alice had tossed pebbles at her window until she woke and let them in, at two in the morning. Jody had broken down because Claude was going to be transferred. Alice said she’d threatened to kill herself, which was why they had needed both meth to get through the night, which would show up in Jody’s drug tests, unless she gave her parents no reason to test her until the drugs were out of her system, which was why Jody needed to call from Rosie’s and say she’d been there all night. Rosie was clean and thinking clearly: She had been the designated driver of Alice’s car. She would tell a bit of truth in the interest of credibility, explain about Claude’s leaving. She intended to deny having snuck out in the middle of the night. She would say instead that the girls had come for her at dawn, one of them in more pain than could be borne, and stood beneath her window, in the midst of columbine and impatiens, in the airy floral first light of the day. Rosie neared the door of her own house, relieved to be sober and in the self-important role of a nurse. How often she, Alice, and Jo were up at dawn, on something or coming down, no ground beneath them, wired or fried or tripping, the sky not necessarily overhead. But this time she was only tired. She rehearsed her speech to raise as few suspicions as possible. You had to feel sorry for Elizabeth, she thought—getting tricked like that all the time, like a child. As Rosie helped hold Jody up, forging the path to the door, pride stirred inside her. She had seen herself in hero moments like this her whole life, in waking dreams: badly burned in the movie where she had saved a family from a fiery death, straggling home into her mother’s arms with one useless leg wrapped in charred rags, or holding her bloody side where a bullet had entered, in the movie where the mad-man shot her as she pulled the beaker of anthrax out of his hands. But this time was especially sweet, because Alice and Jo were real, her comrades, and they needed her. She felt calm and warm; peers with her peers, all she had ever wanted. Her mother opened the door, and stood pale, mute, and stunned, taking in the sight of the three girls as if they were polar bears. She reached for the collar of Rosie’s jacket, to yank her inside, but Rosie shrugged her off. “Stop, Mama!” Elizabeth grabbed for her again. “Stop it, I said!” Elizabeth drew back, as if winding up to strike Rosie, or about to be struck. Rosie stepped forward and reached for her mother’s wrists, and Elizabeth did not shake her off. They stared into each other’s eyes. “You two need to go home,” Elizabeth said, finally peering over Rosie’s shoulders at Jody and Alice. But Rosie shook her head no. Elizabeth exhaled with contempt. “God damn it,” she spluttered. “I am so mad at you guys I could spit.” Another hated expression of her mother’s. She gritted her teeth, made fists, fumed. “Get the fuck in here and start explaining.” Rosie sized her up, then eased her into the lead, pushing her toward the living room. Elizabeth shook her off and stormed forward. Rosie stepped into the house and the other girls followed close behind, like a line of ducklings. As Rosie launched into her story, of the pebbles on the window at dawn, Elizabeth listened in silence on the couch, between Rosie and Jody. Alice had pulled up the easy chair and from time to time raked her fingers through Jody’s short hair. Elizabeth glowered at Rosie. “I was sound asleep, Mom—and I know I was already in trouble, but I snuck out to hang with Jody until she could get in touch with her shrink, because it seemed like an emergency.” Jody fiddled with the tips of her fingers. Alice pulled her sweat-shirt sleeve down, and moved on to inspecting her palm, tracing the life line, reading her future. Rosie began to pick at her cuticles. When Elizabeth let her eyes go out of focus, she could see four-year-old girls rubbing the silk edge of their blankets, four-week-olds with tiny fingers knitting. Jody’s eyes were downcast, like those of the Madonna, unprotected and innocent, all the eyeliner and cool fallen away, grief eyes. Elizabeth reached for her hand. Now, as she sat between such tall girls, as tall as she was, five-ten, Jody taller, they looked like lost giraffes instead of ducklings. Jody cried. After a while, Elizabeth began to ask her questions, harsh yet concerned. Why was Claude leaving, and when? Soon. Why hadn’t Jo told her own mother, and why hadn’t they just called, for Chrissakes, with Rosie already in so much trouble? “ ‘Why?’ is not a useful question,” Rosie said. “Like Rae always says.” “I’ll call my mom now,” Jody said, standing, but Elizabeth pulled her down. “Alice, go get Jody the phone,” Elizabeth commanded. “It’s in the kitchen.” They turned their three giraffe heads as one to watch her go. “Please, Mom, please don’t tell James I snuck out—just this one time. I promise I won’t ever do anything like that again.” “I have to tell him, he’s my husband. And besides, I’m so angry at you, I could see red.” Her mother again: so angry she could spit or see red, but instead she always had a nice drink, and two hundred cigarettes. “But I’m your child. And I need a break so badly now.” Rosie managed to be both piteous and commanding. “I don’t know,” Elizabeth said. “You’re so grounded.” This was ludicrous, as Rosie was already grounded. “Just let it go at that for now.” She did not want to ease Rosie’s misery—any willingness on Rosie’s part to pull herself together would come only from pain, from finally wanting to come in from the cold. Alice returned and thrust the phone at Jody. Jody keyed in her number and had hardly begun explaining before they could hear her mother start shouting. “I know, but Claude is moving!” Elizabeth and the two girls listened. “I was headed home, when Claude broke the news. I lost it! I sat in Alice’s car all night, crying. Then we came to get Rosie. And we’re still here.” This was technically true. “You can talk to her—I swear, she’s sitting right next to me.” Elizabeth reached for the phone, but Jody shook her head. “So call her if you want. I’m out the door. Home in ten.” A siren bawled in the distance, and Elizabeth felt a flush of fear in her stomach, even though her daughter was sitting beside her. She got up to go to the bathroom, and so did not see the girls look around at one another, sad and also amused, their faces as flat and wide-eyed as those of china dolls. Elizabeth went out later that afternoon and bought some over-the-counter urine tests for marijuana and cocaine, and hid them away in her bathroom. Dinner was pleasant enough, and Elizabeth hated to risk stirring things back up, but after Rosie had cleared and washed the dishes, Elizabeth sent her into the bathroom with a plastic cup for pee. Rosie went without protest. It tested positive for weed, but not for cocaine. Rosie assured her, “Don’t forget, it could take a couple of weeks to be clean. THC stays in your system so long.” Elizabeth was relieved about the cocaine, but two weeks seemed a long time to wait for a sense of progress. Not telling James her secret was eating at her, too, and in the morning, she called Rae, meaning to share it with her. But instead, she blurted out, “Rae, I’m having such a hard time with Rosie, or maybe I’m having a hard time with me—but it’s like there’s no difference anymore. I get so afraid that something bad is about to happen, and I tried to talk myself out of that, and I go to a meeting, and I’m better for a while, but when I come home, I have to shut down because the vibe at this house is so intense—and then all the repressed meanness underneath me wants to burst out. Mommy as ultimate mean girl. Some days I could explode from all the warring states in me, the whole convo under the convo.” She stopped then, to listen to what she’d said: “convo under the convo” was their private slang for the deeper conversation under the audible conversation, the world beneath the words. “Then tell me, Elizabeth, honey—what is not being said that is causing the screaming inside you?” Elizabeth stared off into the middle distance and shook her head. “So many things.” “Oh baby, I’m going to meet Lank at the Target in Novato, he just got paid. Want to come with us?” Elizabeth stifled a mewing sense of disappointment. “No. I only needed to hear your voice. I’m okay.” “I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Give Anthony a call at the
church, and make an appointment. He’s great with adolescents, and drugs, pretty good on marriage, and free.” Elizabeth filed away the recommendation about Anthony: the mood at the house had perhaps been better in the last three days. Rosie acted resigned to her fate, sleeping late but then pouring herself into books and assignments, James hard at work in his office. Elizabeth stuffed down her unease. James insisted that Rosie cancel her tennis lessons. When she called to tell Robert she was grounded, for missing curfew, he made sounds both accusatory and sympathetic, and said it was actually fine, as he was buried in things to do before the start of school. He asked her how the paper on Kazantzakis was coming along, and she read to him from the epilogue of the book but hoped he thought she had memorized it: “O sun, great Eastern Prince, your eyes have brimmed with tears, for all the world has darkened, all life swirls and spins, and now you’ve plunged down to your mother’s watery cellars.” He said, “Jeez, Rosie, you’re only grounded a week!” and they laughed like friends. In fact, she had read only thirty of the seven hundred seventy-four pages between the epilogue and the prologue, but that was because she had a gnarly project on Reconstruction due for AP history, in which she had to argue for the South, for its rightful rage and resistance to the North’s military occupation; and a paper in French on Simone de Beauvoir, of whom she did not approve because of her submission to the awful Jean-Paul Sartre. “You’re a Soviet hard-liner, Ro,” James commented at dinner. “No margin of error for the weaknesses of two people who changed life for the good, forever?” “Don’t hector the children,” Elizabeth said to James. “And I’m not a child,” Rosie said crossly to her mother. But then everyone smiled. Three dinners in a row were lovely, something that could not have been said any other time recently. But keeping the secret from James pained Elizabeth off and on. She had been cooking special dinners to compensate, and two nights ago they had made love. She was a bad person. Tonight she had made garlic eggplant, dragon prawns, brown rice, and as usual, salad from the garden. Also, she had bought everyone a cheap present at Landsdale’s variety store: socks for James, lip gloss for Rosie, a catnip Spiro Agnew for Rascal. It was like old times, Rosie jacking avocado off James’s plate, James responding with a droning air attack on Rosie’s last prawn. When Lank called later in the week, Elizabeth answered the phone. It turned out he was calling to talk to her, and a ray of gladness shone through and surprised her. “Are you doing okay, Elizabeth? Rae told me you were struggling after the bust.” “Maximumly.” She heard a quiet sniffle of laughter and a moment’s silence, the way Lank held space for you in case you wanted to continue, without crowding the words that might need a minute to form. She found herself desperate to ask him about the secret, but did not want to talk behind James’s back. “But we’ve had a few nice days in a row, and I’m trying to go with that.” “I’d say go with the flow,” he replied, “except James says that the people who tell you that are usually the angriest people on earth. Who’d stab you if they had a fork.” “Yeah, I’ve heard that riff.” She laughed. “I am grateful things are better, and at the same time, what comes most naturally to me is pretending everything is okay whenever I can, and that ends up making me nuts—my mom used to pretend I was okay when I was getting wasted as a teenager, and then she’d smoke three packs a day. So it’s a fine line.” “I hear you. It’s about paying attention. When people ask me how I am these days, I say, ‘Better than I think,’ because it’s good to notice that my life is pretty great, even if my mind isn’t.” “Exactly,” she said. “I think my inner groundskeeper drinks or does crack cocaine, probably both. But at least I’m starting to realize that this stuff with Rosie is something to get through, and not figure out. There is no figure. The only figuring I can do is work on my own equilibrium. So most days, or part of most days, I’m doing okay.” “That’s good to hear, but at the same time, I’m worried for you, Elizabeth. I remember that phrase you used after you had your little breakdown, to describe your feeling of cluttered numbness. I remember because it was so beautiful, perfectly descriptive of most of us most of the time, but for you, it was overwhelming, and it knocked your equilibrium out from under you.” Elizabeth caught her breath in the silence that followed. Then she smiled. “I love you, Lank,” she said. “I love that you reminded me of that. That’s exactly right.” She began to form the first words of the sentence she was so desperate to share—I’ve been keeping a secret from James—but Lank said he had papers to grade. Sigh: everyone else was so busy, James with his deadlines, Rae with her good deeds, Lank with papers to grade, Rosie with her lessons, her homework, her bucket kids, her all-consuming drive for independence. But then he asked her, “Hey—you wouldn’t by any chance be willing to help a bunch of us clean up dog poop on the Sunnyside fire road, would you? We’re in danger of losing it as an off-leash trail.” She paused. “Wait, what?” she then said. “You want me to help you pick up dog shit? What kind of crazy invitation is that? I don’t even have a dog.” “I know, but I do, and this is the last place in Novato our dogs can run off leash. Look, I know it’s a long shot.” “No, no,” she said, “I’ll do it.” Rae was perplexed. “You say no to my offer of a free noontime concert at Lake Merritt? To Schubert and Bach? But yes to this?” “I haven’t told James, and it’s making me nuts.” “So tell him when we get off the phone. Jeez. Did you call Anthony?” “No. I didn’t want to rock the temporarily sweet boat. I have to betray either James, by keeping the secret, or Rosie, by telling, when I promised.” “You are betraying you, is whom you are betraying.” “It sounded therapeutic, to hang with Lank. And I’m on the side of the dogs.” “Jeez, Elizabeth, you are not getting out enough.” “Well, then, here’s my chance.” It was definitely counterintuitive, to choose dog shit over a quiet talk with Anthony in that bright and aromatic office. But at any rate, she met up with Lank and six other middle-aged people a few days later. The weather had cooled down. Lank looked five years younger in the Giants cap that covered his bald spot; he had begun referring to what was left as his hair spot. He gave her the greatest hug, and she looked over his shoulders to the dry golden foothill, covered with oak and laurel, spreading out below them like a hoopskirt, all the way to the glistening bay. It was heaven up here, sky unscrolling baby blue all the way to Berkeley and San Francisco, socked in with billows of gray fog to the west, on the way to the beaches. He handed her a wad of plastic bags, blue ones that had once held The New York Times, clear ones from the Chronicle. They worked together, commenting on the more prodigious piles, comparing notes with others. An hour in, just as she was about to ask his advice, Lank pantomimed throwing a knotted sack at her, like a discus. They’d stopped to laugh, and it took another half-hour for her to say the words, “Lank? I need to tell you something.” He sat her down on a log and took a seat beside her. She sighed, and began. She told him the secret she’d been keeping from James, of Rosie’s sneaking out while grounded, the lengthening list of Rosie’s lies and mistakes this summer, what a good father James was, but how unyielding he could be. And by the same token, how easily he caved when Rosie’s attitude improved; his wretched need for things to not trouble Elizabeth, for Rosie to be nice to them both. And how maybe, with James out of the loop and this incident behind them, there was a chance for the family to start afresh. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes, took off his hat and rubbed his head, looked old and squinty again. “Honey,” he said finally, “listen. I love Rosie almost like she’s my own. She’s everything cool in a person—she’s sharp, sensitive, funny, articulate. She’s got it all.” Elizabeth nodded, smiling, pleased. “But she’s also a lying suck.” Elizabeth did a double take. “Jeez,” she said. “That’s a little harsh. And besides, she’s my lying suck.” “I work with them every day, and even the good kids break your heart. They can be so wonderful, then just diabolical. They’ll all lie, even when the truth would work. And how much more evidence do you need that Rosie can’t be trusted? She’s trying to break free, to individuate. Like you are, from James, by keeping the secre
t. I know you feel too dependent on him. Rosie hates how dependent she is on you. Rosie feels cornered, and she thinks you and James are her problem. And she’ll do anything to win, to get away with more and more. But James—oh my God. Has there ever been a more loyal friend?” She shook her head slowly. “He’s a mensch, and he’ll stand by you through thick and thin. He’s your guy, hon, your beloved. Don’t let Rosie win this round. I say, or rather Rae says, Tell the truth and shame the devil.” The next night, Elizabeth asked James to take a walk with her after dinner. They went out in T-shirts and rolled-up jeans. A glowing moon, still more than three-quarters of its disc illuminated, was ringed in a fuzzy corona. They held hands, walking under the branches of their neighbor’s persimmon tree. “Rosie’s in such a good place tonight,” said Elizabeth. She was working up to the half-sentence blurt that there was something she needed to tell him, and she knew by now that she did. After leaving Lank yesterday and heading home for dinner, she had tried to convince herself that she was keeping the secret so as not to endanger her relationship with Rosie. It was draped in virtue: I’m doing it for others. But she admitted the truth to herself as she’d drifted to sleep in James’s arms. Keeping the secret was a kind of protection from her daughter’s wrath. She took James’s hand under the moonlight and said again, “She’s in a good place.” James was silent for a while. “Tick, tock, tick, tock.” This pissed her off, and she reconsidered telling him, but the imps inside were pushing out and through. He had noticed her preoccupation at dinner. “You seem far away,” he’d said, but she had shrugged it off. She hated to admit that it gave her the power of double-dealing, playing Rosie off James. Now, walking around with him, she tried to say the first words. “James?” she managed. So far so good. She almost said, “I’ve been keeping something from you,” but now he seemed distant, and at the same time, it was so lovely to be alone, holding hands, and she knew what he would say: “How could you!”—the mantra of the betrayed. Then, “We’re supposed to live in trust, Elizabeth, and you’ve dumped all over that.” Then he began to talk. “Even though I get so angry with Rosie, I know things could be a whole lot worse—look at what other parents are going through. Some of these kids are total lushes already. I don’t actually think Rosie is. We need broader-spectrum tests than the ones you got—her eyes are clear most of the time, and she doesn’t smell boozy.” They both sighed loudly at the same time, and this made them laugh. “Hey, want to walk to the Parkade?” he asked. “At least we can see how much worse her scary little friends are doing. That’ll cheer us up.” Elizabeth poked him, and he laughed enthusiastically at his own awfulness. They walked along for another five minutes, and came up the steps from the movie theater. At nine p.m., the Parkade was crawling with teenagers, some huddled in groups, plopped on various stairs, furtively peering out from the bus kiosk. There was a random milling quality, and yet a sense of cohesion and sanctuary. “I want to write a piece about this place,” James whispered. “Don’t tell Rosie.” They knew many of the players tonight. Some of them had been friends of Rosie’s since kindergarten, in the school district she was in before they moved to Landsdale. Alexander, a friend of hers from kindergarten who’d moved to town a few years ago, stood leaning against a tree near the liquor store, a beautiful blond hippie boy now, the former Eagle Scout who was doing smack. The senior class lushes who had overdosed on alcohol and ended up in the emergency room. Antonio Brooks, who was leaning against a car near the kiosk, and who had accepted a full basketball scholarship to Marquette, was said to be dealing hash oil. You baked it into brownies, or somehow smoked it using the tube of a Bic pen. It was hopeless: you could close every smoke shop in the county and the kids would still find a way to get high. “What would the angle be, James?” “Let’s sit here on the curb.” They lowered themselves, groaning. “I would go into the medieval-modern aspects of their lives, how they try to come off as nomads, from olden times, even though they’re rich kids with homes to go to, even when they’re wrapped in blankets for a few days. Maybe they stay out nights, and sleep in cars, but their homes are up the street. Some of them go too far, like Alexander, and become primitive, and dirty. The parents keep bailing them out. Setting new and lower standards.” “How do you know all this?” “The Al-Anon mothers tell me. The ones who are trying not to let their kids live at home when they’re using.” “How on earth could you turn your child away, if he or she were suffering?” “What if trying to save them was helping the kids stay sick? What if your help is not helpful?” “Oh, stop, James. That’s dereliction.” “Some of the older ones really are street people,” James said, ignoring her, pointing to an older boy who was obviously on a long-term brute course, a preppy caveman in a button-down shirt, with dread-locks and a slack mouth. “I know they are lost cases, and I feel for them and their families. But they buy beer for the kids—for Rosie.” This was true. She recognized Fenn coming up the Roastery steps, stopping to talk to the young street guy with the floppy hat whom she and Rosie called Gilligan. “That’s a sweet guy—Fenn. We say hi to each other,” she said. He looked his usual sun-streaked self, shaggy but composed, in a button-down shirt, dark glasses tonight instead of the wire rims. He fished a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket, handed it to Gilligan, then reached into his back pocket and took some cash out of his wallet. “Oh my God, is this a drug deal?” James asked. But Fenn gave Gilligan a bill, gripped his shoulder like a politician, smiling, and took off down the steps. “You’ve gone crazy, James. He’s helping out a street person.” James continued to glare in Fenn’s general direction. Without answering, he pulled out his notebook and scribbled into it. She read what he had written: “Clusters of arrogant young people filled with self-loathing, sharing beliefs in a circular cage of parked cars, holding beliefs that make them feel safe, connected, guarded. Surfer Samaritan, or dealer?” Elizabeth remembered herself at ten, still lonely and always worried, about how crazy her parents and the friends of theirs were scaring her half to death with their moist affection, their fights and crying, and the drunken end of their night dancing. She remembered how much time she’d spent alone in the backyard, setting up horse jumps with broom handles, being the jumper, being the horse. Blink, and she was twelve again, and she had huge breasts and boys ogled her, and men did, too, and shouted things to her from cars and construction sites; blink again and she would sleep with a teacher in high school, who would give her all the great books in the American canon, and with whom she would start drinking, and who she would feel had finally thrown on the lights for her. After a while they got up and walked home, without Elizabeth’s telling him the secret. James started a draft for his Parkade piece that night. Rosie was on her bed with Rascal, reading Robertson Davies. She came in later to say good night to Elizabeth. Rosie smelled clean and delicious, and lay down beside her mother, burrowing. She had brought Rascal with her, and flicked lightly at his ears to pester him, and when he batted at them, Rosie and Elizabeth laughed; it was silvery and warm, heaven. “You didn’t tell James, did you, Mama?” Elizabeth shook her head. “Thanks. That’s great.” Rosie sighed. “Hey, let’s get James a dog for Christmas.” “I’ll get you a drug-sniffing dog, is what I’ll get you,” Elizabeth said in a menacing voice. Having a secret gave you a hit of power, a kind of self-esteem, and love was unleashed in her; love that had been dormant during the recent bad weeks flowed. It was like a magical opening: she and Rosie were learning to love and trust each other in a new way. Maybe it was an illusion, she thought, but hell, she would take it. Elizabeth was asleep when James finally came to bed, and when she woke up in the morning, he was already back at work. He’d left her a first draft on the kitchen table. It wasn’t good yet—there were too many details, and no ending in place. She did not like it when he needed her to read new material before he’d nailed it; so when she finished reading the draft, she only said it was going to be great. “You hate it,” he said, which he always said. “I love the material,” she responded, “but it’s just not there yet.” She liked the st
uff about the wealthy kids dressed alike in rags, how afraid they were underneath it all that they might lose their individuality. She liked where he’d said that even with their piercings and tattoos, with all that was so alive in their souls—their wildness, spontaneity, silliness, spirit—they were consumed with thoughts of death, their own, and that their parents lived in a kind of death, gray and hassled, multitasking, microwaving organic food, plopped in front of the TV, because these things were all they had energy for. So yeah, they loved coke and speed and Ecstasy, driving too fast, dangerous sex with people who had had dangerous sex with multiple partners. But what, she asked James, was the story? She had been too brusque, had hurt his feelings. He went into his office and slammed the door. She sat down at the kitchen table and stared miserably into a cup of black coffee: This was not about his work. It was about the distance between them now because of the secret. Having it had been like nectar initially, even last night, lying with Rosie in bed. Then it was like nectar that has gone off. Now she held on to her stomach because the secret was indigestible, sitting there in her solar plexus, where indigestible emotions lodged. She went into his office to apologize, and started to try to tell him the secret, but he had already moved from having his feelings hurt to gratitude for her great job editing him, and it seemed a shame to muck with his love and reliance on her. “You saved me from looking like a jerk,” he said, and kissed the back of her hand. “Oh, I thought you were mad at me for being so abrupt with my suggestions.” “I’m sorry I was such a baby. You nailed the problem—too many details and ideas. Not enough structure or story. It’s like Gertrude Stein said, that she could always write good sentences, but she never quite understood paragraphs. That’s me, in this piece.” Deeply relieved, she left him to his rewrite, her secret still untold. Rosie woke up the next day and wondered what it might be like to take acid or Ecstasy with Robert. They could candy-flip—take a little of both—although maybe not their first time together. Maybe he’d go to a rave with her in Oakland. She doubted he had ever done E. The fantasy enthralled her; time turned soft and druggy. She kept trying to reach him at the office the next day, but he never picked up. She left a chipper message on his machine, and waited for him to call back. Alice called twice, Jody once, speeding on Alice’s Adderall, saying she was going to run away from home to be with Claude in San Diego, she knew a girl there from rehab she could stay with, but Rosie thought it was just the speed talking. A couple of hours later, Rae called to discuss the schedule for next week, after which, with school starting, the summer program at Sixth Day Prez would be over. Alice called to say Jody had phoned her from the Greyhound bus station in Salinas—she really had run away from home to be with Claude. They both cried out in worry and loss and amazement, and Rosie’s stomach wrenched with jealousy, that Jody loved someone this much that she would throw away everything to see him again—God, she was going to be in massive trouble when she returned. Rosie couldn’t stop thinking about Robert, how close she felt when they sat on the grass side by side, how she could feel the tuning fork between them. The grass had just been cut the last time they played before she was grounded, and it had stained her shorts and smelled as strong as lacquer. It turned her on even to remember it. This feeling, of love, was so much greater than the few times she’d had sex, when you felt like you and the guy were meat machines with various levers. All that slapping flesh and spit and grotesque rearrangements; plus things going numb. But she and Robert were like a beautiful movie, or like the part after you’re done in bed, when you get to lie in that bubble wrap of closeness. It was your souls touching. The next morning, Elizabeth was on her knees weeding near in the flower bed near Rosie’s window, impatiens and columbine. Rosie discovered this when she threw her window open, her room already hot and bright with sunshine. She said hello to her mother, and her mother answered, “Hello, darling. What are your plans for today?” Jeez, Rosie thought, it was like living with a secret agent. She shrugged. They were only five or six feet apart, separated by an open window, so Elizabeth heard the phone ring, and saw Rosie race for it. “Hey, cuz, wha’ up?” Rosie said, without enthusiasm. “No. I’m fine.” She must have a crush on someone, Elizabeth realized, and went back to weeding. Then she heard the beeps of Rosie’s dialing, and then a moment later heard her hang up. Rosie dialed again, and hung up again. Ten minutes later Elizabeth saw her near the window, on the phone, heard her leaving someone a message in her smallest voice, high in her throat, trying to sound casual as she asked the person to please call her back. Elizabeth fluffed the soil around a flower, straining to hear. A few minutes later, she listened to Rosie dialing again, heard a soothing male voice. She pretended to be fully engaged when Rosie opened the window wider. “God,” Rosie screamed through the opening. “Are you spying on me?” Elizabeth rolled her eyes with disdain and went back to weeding. But later in the day, when Rosie was in the shower, Elizabeth hit the redial button, waited for the connection, and frowned when she heard the distinct voice of Robert Tobias on his answering machine. Rae picked Elizabeth up early the next morning, as the sun was coming up, for the field trip Elizabeth had agreed to show up for, come hell or high water. They drove along Highway 1 listening to the classical station and eating pumpkin scones, and it was sweet. Not until they passed Bodega Bay and entered Sonoma County did Rae reveal their destination: she had signed them up for a women’s sweat lodge. Elizabeth felt sure Rae was joking. Signing her up for a sweat lodge was like signing Richard Nixon up for Sufi dancing. She laughed at the very idea, even as far as Jenner. They discussed real things, like why it was taking Elizabeth so long to tell James the secret—she even promised Rae she would tell him tonight. But when Elizabeth wanted to stop at the Kruse rhododendron reserve, and Rae shook her head, and said they were in a hurry, Elizabeth’s heart sank. “I wasn’t kidding, hon,” Rae said. Elizabeth passed rapidly through the first four stages of grief—denial, as this could not be happening; anger and swearing, the way she had reacted when Rae took her on that backpacking trip years ago, during which they met James and Lank; bargaining, I will give you anything, plus two chits for alternate field trips, if we turn around; and depression, eyes staring, wide, dead. She did not ever get to acceptance. They drove to the banks of the Gualala River, on the border of Mendocino. There were six women waiting for them. Two were beauties, one blonde and tall, the other tiny and dark with voluptuous lips. One woman was plain, in early middle age, with the light brown skin of a child. One was at least seventy, with fluffy, feathery white hair and a huge black mole on her cheek that looked like a licorice gumdrop. One was black, average size and Elizabeth’s age, with a friendly face. Her partner was black, homely, quiet, fierce. She looked as if she had been dragged along, like Elizabeth. “What brought you here?” the friendly black woman asked Rae. “Our church may start offering members sweat lodge as a spiritual tool—so we’ll have more to offer than talking and worship. I wanted to see what it was like. But mainly, it’s a chance to spend the whole day with Elizabeth.” Rae turned to beam at her. “She’s the angel God sent to me when I was at my lowest.” Elizabeth shook her head. “I’m not even speaking to you, Rae.” “I came because I’m sluggish and toxic,” said the elderly woman. “My mother was big on Adele Davis and taught me that when the skin excretes toxins, it’s like the soul excretes all this shit, too.” They were standing near a round hut about ten feet in diameter, four feet tall, covered with blue plastic tarps and army blankets, that looked like a Volkswagen Bug-sized wigwam. The leader, Bonnie, a tall, solid woman with braids, in a shift, attended to the nearby fire, on which small rocks heated. Bonnie told them briefly about the sweat lodge tradition among Native American tribes, and then had them strip to their underwear, which they did shyly, not looking at one another’s bodies. She then held the tarps open so each woman could bend low to crawl inside the lodge. They seated themselves clockwise, as instructed, east to west like the sun. Rae was the plumpest, but her fat was firm, with only a few dimples. Flattened cardboard boxes serve
d as seats. Inside, the unsightly hut was a hemisphere created by bending willow branches into a dome, connecting them, and covering them with more sticks. In the center was a hole, into which Bonnie soon placed the hot rocks. It was like a sauna in a cave made of trees. Elizabeth was glad she did not have to sit next to Rae, who was on the other side of the hole. Bonnie handed a bucket of water to the woman nearest the opening, and came inside, pulling the tarps down, and sat. Elizabeth felt for a few moments that her mind might snap. This reminded her of the bamboo cages in The Deer Hunter, like rats might swim by. But then curiosity settled into her, and she started taking notes for James in her head, only partly to stay calm. It was pitch black. In the darkness, you felt like one organism, she told him, enclosed in the membrane of willow. “It’s going to get very hot,” Bonnie said. “We’ll do four rounds. I think you will be pretty uncomfortable, and want to bolt. You can do that if you need to, or you can tough it out. If you breathe in the heat and steam, they will center you.” Someone nickered in the dark, like a pony. Elizabeth did not think she had made the sound. Bonnie spoke. “First, try to release the lies the world has told you about yourself, okay? See if you can connect with the person you were, before the lies.” The rocks in the center sizzled and hissed when Bonnie poured a cup of water over them. Terror flushed through Elizabeth. It was shocking, so hot and elemental. But she breathed, and remembered being croupy as a little girl, how her mother created a steam room in the bathroom with scalding water from the shower pouring against the porcelain tub, and held Elizabeth on her lap as the steam burned its way through Elizabeth’s nose, throat, and chest, and how after a while mucus jiggled loose from her lungs and she stopped barking like a seal. Elizabeth felt like she was in the bottom of the earth; guck jiggled free from her lungs. That was satisfying. She savored it, then moved into a tumbled oceanic nonbreathing panic, and then into neutral spacelessness. In and out of the feeling of being faceless, nameless, unconnected. When the hiss of the steam subsided, she whispered across the rocks, “Rae, are you there?” “I’m right here, darling. Right across from you.” In the darkness, and closeness, she imagined telling James that she had felt like a marine mammal voluntarily on a rotisserie. Stuff continued to loosen from her lungs. Bonnie called out prayers to the east, prayers to the west, and Elizabeth felt her soft, ploppy body pour off sweat. At the second round, though, when Bonnie poured more water on the rocks, the blast of heat was unbelievable, and Elizabeth felt like she was trapped in the trunk of a car next to a fire; the smoke and the mist stupefied her like a huge fish. It was hell. She hugged her knees to her sweaty, rubbery chest, and somehow the twig that was jammed into her ass helped her breathe, like Andrew gripping her hand too hard through a contraction. She heard someone get to her feet, and then a voice in the dark saying, “That’s it for me, I have to get out.” “Okay,” said Bonnie. The tarp opened as one of the black women left, and flapped shut. The women gasped for the cool air that came in. Bonnie crooned, “We are here, to heal the damage, for the next generation. We are here, on the earth, in darkness, to heal the damage, in ourselves, for the next generation.” Elizabeth heard Rae say, “I can’t breathe, I have to get some air,” and Elizabeth called across to her, “It’s okay, you can do it,” and Rae said, “No, I need to get outside for a second. I’m claustrophobic.” Elizabeth almost got up, too; anyone would have understood. She heard the rustles and shuffle and slap of Rae getting up and heading out. Elizabeth couldn’t see anything except the burning rocks, and the rocks weren’t giving off light. The flap opened. She saw Rae briefly as she wiggled out on her stomach, her heavy thighs illuminated by the sunlight now flooding into the hut along with cool, clean air. She was surprised to find that she was okay with Rae gone—free, and strangely less alone. Beings of some sort seemed to hover nearby, banging a teakettle softly, saying, Pay attention to us. She took long breaths, still holding her knees to her chest, breathing in the steam, and it was the only thing she had felt since Rosie’s birth that might qualify as dilation. Through this, something in her slipped lower, or deeper, or something, to a place where she did not feel the burden of her wrinkled, aching bones. She felt as if nesting dolls surrounded her, Andrew, her parents, lovely and much older than when they had died, aunts and uncles, old friends. She felt more contained and larger inside the willow dome than she had ever felt in her life, except for the times she had taken acid or mushrooms, so many years ago. The heat was terrible. She felt miserable and ecstatic, listening to invisible voices in the silence, and for once she could hear them above her own human whir, anxiety, manners, biography, armor, distractions; she shed these all like a virus, and found a speck of light inside that was not her at all, a fleck of gold in the sandy streambed soil within. Later, having survived a fourth round of steam, Elizabeth and the other two survivors—the oldest woman, plus Bonnie—stepped out into the sunlight. They cheered themselves. “This is probably the single greatest achievement of my life,” Elizabeth said, and when the other two women laughed, she said, “You don’t understand. I’m not kidding.” They toasted themselves with cold water, and stretched. Later she found Rae in the river, sitting in the shoals, deep in conversation with two other women. Rae turned to Elizabeth and said, “My warrior.” Elizabeth managed a small smile as she stepped into the river and splashed around. The water was freezing; it forced her to snuggle with Rae. “I’m sorry I tricked you into coming,” Rae said in front of everyone, and even though Elizabeth was now glad she had come, she stayed silent. “And I’m sorry I had to get out so early. I felt like an armadillo on a grill.” It was a lovely afternoon in the sun, eating beans and corn tortillas Bonnie had brought, talking about the experience, laughing, shaking their heads, swearing they’d stay in touch. On the way home, Elizabeth slept all the way south to Sea Ranch. When she woke up, she looked over at Rae in the driver’s seat for a long time. “What,” Rae said finally. “I felt something today. A speck of something, way deep down inside me, at the bottom of the well. It wasn’t God. I don’t believe in God. But it was not me.” Rae drove along, considering this. “ ‘Not Me’ is a good name for God.” “Thank you. As long as you understand that it’s lowercase.” “Some people call God Howard, as in ‘Howard be thy name.’ Or Andy, as in ‘And he walks with me, and he talks to me.’ Was it anything you could ever turn to in prayer?” “You’re suggesting I turn to an entity called ‘not me,’ lowercase, for answers, and comfort?” “What does it matter? If prayer works, does it even matter if there’s a god or not?” “What if I prayed for knowledge, and it turned out Rosie’s using a shitload of drugs?” “Then you’ll know one thing that’s true. But to find that out, all you need to do is buy fancier drug tests and test her more often, no matter if she has tantrums.” Elizabeth mulled this over. “That’s what James says. So maybe I’ll do it.” When they approached the mall off 101 in Novato, Elizabeth told Rae to pull onto the exit. More accurate urine tests would make James happy. And as long as she was going to tell him how she had betrayed him, she might as well do something to please him, too. Rae pulled into the parking lot outside Target. Inside, they searched the aisles until Rae finally found the drug tests in the back. Elizabeth reached for three boxes. They were expensive. Turning toward the checkout lines at the front of the store, she grabbed Rae by the shoulder. “Rosie is going to go ballistic.” “Better furious than dead or brain-damaged. It’s not your problem. Your problem is to find out what is true and to do the right thing.” As they walked past the endless shelves of shit for sale, the smell of disinfectant stuck to Elizabeth’s nostrils. “I’m sweating like a pig, Rae. I wish we’d had this discussion at the river, on sacred ground.” Rae pulled her to a stop. She mopped Elizabeth’s forehead with her sleeve. “There’s only sacred ground. The only holy place is where we are.” Elizabeth stared up at the store’s fluorescent lights. All she knew after what they’d been through today was that she was going to tell James the truth, tonight, and test Rosie for all kinds of drugs, in the morning. She put her fingers to
her throat to feel her weak, rapid pulse, and put her boxes on the counter. Her shoulders sagged. Behind her, Rae pushed her nose into the space between Elizabeth’s shoulder blades, like a big dog. Usually under the stark fluorescent lights of stores, Elizabeth felt like a rump roast on display at Safeway, but she was not thinking about that now. She was thinking of how Rosie used to be, before whatever it was had gotten her: the siege, the possession, whatever you wanted to call it. She listened to the buzz that the lights above her were making, to let people know that the bulb was about to go out, a soft, not unpleasant buzz, tissue paper on a comb.