by Anne Lamott
Somehow the arithmetic had stopped working. For a long time, the marriage worked like a mostly reliable car. He had been unfaithful to her once, with a student, and she’d almost left him. But they patched things back together, and then she got pregnant with Harry. Harry changed everything, for a while. And then Nicky began to withdraw, and she thought he was having more affairs, although he’d never admit it, and she wanted to leave with Harry, but then she got pregnant again, with Ella. Things were sweeter again briefly, and then horrible when he had the affair with the twenty-two-year-old, then better again after Ella’s birth. Then they grew apart again. She added up the columns every few months, and the positive column won, even if only by a tiny margin. Then one day she added things up, and she was short. And then she was short more often than not. Children, and the house, and the life they’d put together—hikes, walks on the beaches of West Marin, dinners with friends, mostly from the college, work for left-wing causes and candidates—were no longer enough of an excuse to stay together. Nothing worked consistently anymore, not the illusion or the self-made glue that had held them together, not even the armature of habit. For years, when she was scared enough, she made it a point not to hang out with the hollowness and dead spots in her heart. She made the dog of doubt go lie under the bed and stop sniffing around so much. And the physical pieces had fit, until the end. At bedtime they’d still snuggled and made love. They might lie down grim, but their limbs found themselves in old habits soon enough.
Angela and Al had advised Mattie to leave, but she stayed on. Finally the machine of the marriage broke down, and she said to herself, “If I stay, I’m going to the bottom.” She was more afraid of this than of leaving, and so she left.
• • •
The rats were the first thing she heard one morning as she woke up, even before the songbirds and the artillery of the recycling truck. She bolted awake, then lay listening miserably. Rat tails were so naked, like bone.
Mattie called Evergreen Pest Control. They would charge two hundred dollars for the first visit, and the check from Nicky wasn’t due for another two weeks, but she went ahead and made the appointment.
She’d thought about asking Nicky if he would split the cost with Isa—the rats were, after all, in the house where his children lived—but when she called, Nicky’s new girlfriend answered and Mattie hung up. He insisted that he had started seeing Lee only after Mattie filed for divorce, but this young, blond Scottish woman, two years out of college, had sprung so instantly into being his serious girlfriend that Mattie knew he must have been seeing her even before the separation. All of a sudden one day in October he was routinely referring to a girlfriend, and the children came back from a weekend with him reporting that she had been there overnight Saturday, and in the kitchen making pancakes when they woke up the next morning.
Lee was tall and thin and had the thick blond hair of a Breck girl. Mattie’s hair was growing thin, while her waist grew thick. She wanted to murder both of them in Nicky’s bed. Lee was at least ten years younger than Mattie. For months after they split up, Mattie and Nicky fought about the children, schedules, money—everything except Lee. They never said her name. Eventually there was improvement the size of a ladybug in their relationship, and then improvement the size of a tadpole. Mattie felt ill only some of the time. Her automotive hypochondria decreased and she only intermittently heard axles about to drop, tires about to blow. After hours of prayers and reading Scripture and endless talks with Angela and Al and her pastor, Mattie could talk to Lee, if Lee happened to answer the phone at Nicky’s, without feeling like hanging herself.
So she called Nicky’s house that night after making the Evergreen appointment, and he answered. He said that he would be glad to pay. He’d bring her a check the next afternoon.
When he came over for lunch the next day, they had a beer or two and talked about the rats, and the children. Then they went to bed. She had not planned on this, although it had been her idea to take him to the bedroom so he could hear the rats himself. “Oh, baby,” he said, with a look of compassionate misery on his suave, gypsy face. She looked out the window at the persimmons on the tree across the street, hanging like little orange Japanese lanterns. Their neighbor had given them a basketful. Mattie had baked persimmon puddings. She could almost smell them now. She looked back at Nicky.
A few days later he came by, looking for insurance papers she had accidentally packed up, and then, the day before the exterminator’s appointment, he dropped the children off late on a Sunday night, read them to sleep after their baths, and one thing led to another.
Mattie remembered the apostle Paul, crying out that he did all the things he was desperate not to do, and so few of the things he knew he ought to do. She promised herself she would never do it again.
She might not have, either, if Evergreen Pest Control hadn’t postponed the appointment until the end of the week. They were so sorry for the cancellation that they offered to take ten percent off the bill. Nicky called that night to see if the rats had been taken care of. She told him about the delay. He came over to console her.
• • •
The evening before the rescheduled exterminator’s appointment, Mattie was sitting in the garden with Harry and Ella. The early-December dusk was juicy and brisk, with an ache of diminishing light, and it made her feel both pensive and relieved; the days were so short now. She was yearning for bedtime when she heard the phone ring inside. It was Isa, calling to say that she was bringing a friend’s two grandchildren by for the night. Their house had burned down earlier that day, and the parents were in the hospital for observation. They were going to be fine, but Isa needed to stay with them at the hospital. This was so Isa: Isa the hero, Mattie the chambermaid to her mother’s need to do big, visible good deeds. But Mattie smiled; it was a role she loved.
Just before eight, Mattie and the kids heard Isa pull up in her Volkswagen bug. They ran outside to greet her. Under the streetlight, Isa’s bumper glowed with decals like Girl Scout badges, the alphabet soup of her days—decals for UNICEF, of which she was regional director for the Halloween collection; the NAACP, under whose auspices she tutored a teenage girl and registered voters; the ACLU, for which she did clerical work for death penalty appeals; AARP, which she had only recently joined; NOW, for which she did fund-raising; and AAA, her auto club, which she didn’t need, because men of all ages jockeyed to work on her car.
Two black boys sat solemnly on top of ACLU literature in the backseat, wrapped in one bright green blanket, so that they floated like a pair of sea otter babies swaddled in kelp while their parents went looking for food.
On the passenger seat sat a panting bug-eyed pug.
“Oh darling, I’m so sorry to do this to you,” Isa said, unfolding herself from the cramped front seat like a long-legged bird. “But what else could I have done?” She indicated the children, then the dog. “And we couldn’t leave the dog behind, the kitchen has no roof, the plastic is all melted.”
“It’s okay, Mom. Really. They’ll be fine. You can go now.”
But Isa came in with the boys, Alfie and Rue. She helped them get set up in the living room with Harry and Ella, and blocks, colored pencils, glasses of chocolate milk. Their awful pug, who had perhaps been tense even before the fire, ran around the living room and peed.
Isa let Mattie clean up the pee, and then the pellets, which popped out of the dog like bullets. Harry and Ella and Marjorie sat quietly on the oversize easy—Marjorie’s chair, it was called—watching all the commotion, while Isa bustled about, running command central, calling friends of the family and hospital personnel.
• • •
After Isa left, Mattie played with the kids—drew, built with blocks, read—and at ten put them to bed on the living room floor. At one, she heard her mother’s car pull up in front of the house. Wrapping herself in a quilt, she went outside. Isa rolled down her window. A handsome black man sat in the passenger seat. Isa introduced him as the children’s fathe
r, and he got out of the car to fetch his sons. Mattie offered to accompany him, but when he declined her help she simply told him where they were sleeping.
In the streetlight, Isa looked like a skeleton in a cheap wig, a figurine from the Mexican Day of the Dead. Mattie reached out to stroke her bony arm.
“I don’t know where we’d have been without your mother,” the man told Mattie when he returned, a sleeping child over one shoulder and the other boy walking beside him. People had been telling Mattie this since she was four or five. She shook her head and smiled at the ground. Somehow the man shoehorned the children into the backseat of the car without waking the younger boy. The man got in, and the dog sat on his lap. Mattie went to the driver’s side to kiss her mother good-bye, and they exchanged tired smiles. “You were a hero,” said Isa, and they gazed at each other, until she put the car in first and inched forward. The moon glowed like a porthole seen from the inside of a ship, looking out into an ocean of light.
• • •
Mattie could not fall asleep that night. She was too keyed up, and the rats had never been louder. She spent half the night trying, through force of will, to keep them from getting out and finding her children. She imagined them nosing Ella with their sharp furry snouts. Mattie could imagine one digging into her stomach, clutching at her aorta, trying to tear it loose. A rat was the only animal that would actually crawl over your head, as if you were a corpse, or a crop it was checking, and it might come back in a week to see how you were doing. Rats owned the night.
• • •
Mattie dragged herself out of bed at seven and got the children ready for day care and school. She made them breakfast, packed their lunches, got them dressed. Then she and Ella walked Harry to the bus stop at the corner, waited to see him get on the bus, and continued on to Ella’s day-care center. Mattie lumbered home feeling like a crabby, bloated robot, and called the men at Evergreen to see what time they were coming. When she found out not until the afternoon, she almost went back to bed. But there were boxes to unpack in the garage, and she had promised herself she would try to unpack one or two every day. She hadn’t returned calls from the week before, and she went around feeling as if she was several weeks behind on her housework all the time. There always seemed to be another batch of dishes in the sink, bottomless baskets of laundry.
She went out to the garage and opened a box at random. It contained her framed photographs. This gave Mattie a brief lift. She could set them out on the mantel. She unwrapped each photograph like a present. Isa looked up at her from forty years before, all soft waves and painted eyebrows. One side of her lips was turned up as though in a moment she might smile, and the other was turned down in prim disgust, like a person of nobility trying to suppress the horror of finding herself standing next to you. Mattie covered the disgusted side of Isa’s face with her hand, smiled at nice Isa with her crinkly brown eyes. The next picture she unwrapped was of Isa at age nine, not long after her father had died. She wore a dress, and ribbons in her hair, but looked as desperate and hungry as the wild child found in the forests of France. While looking at this picture with Mattie, her father had said that when you’re eating in the wild, you eat when the food is there. If you wait, someone might grab the potato out of your paws. “That’s the reason your mother is the way she is,” he’d said. “Starving. That’s how she gets so much done.”
When she found a photo of her brother at four, Mattie reached out to touch the scar on his forehead, which he’d gotten by falling onto the coffee table, soon after Mattie was born. He’d fallen a lot as a child; he’d had poor coordination and terrible vision. He was an angry kid, and no one knew exactly why. He wept whenever Alfred went away on business. He wept when his parents brought Mattie home from the hospital, and told them to give her to the neighbors down the street—Isa loved to tell this story. He sometimes punched Mattie in the arm, and wrecked her things. He was unfriendly to Isa and Alfred’s frequent dinner guests, which made Isa madder than anything. He was often sent to his room without dinner, and Mattie sneaked him oranges and saltines and boxes of Jell-O.
His parents sent him to a psychiatrist when he was twelve, after the counselors at school said they could not welcome him back the next year if his aggression was unchecked. He was often sick in the mornings during those early adolescent years. When he was ten, he’d hurt a neighbor’s cat (although not badly, as Isa was quick to point out, as if the cat had overreacted). He’d caused a child to have a biking accident, started a fire in a neighbor’s garage, blown up Mattie’s dollhouse in the backyard. Isa had insisted on the therapy, after the family had moved from an apartment into the house.
After he turned thirteen, Al’s troubles grew more serious. He started smoking, and stealing hubcaps. Then he took to dressing like Illya Kuryakin on The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and stealing spotlights off people’s roofs. He stole a slingshot from a friend’s father, and staked out neighbors’ houses for days, planning his assaults; he hurled good-size rocks through their windows. Late one night, after a few beers at a dance, he shot at a neighbor’s upstairs window. The man was cut by a big shard of glass and needed treatment, but first he called the cops, and they caught Al and threatened to send him to juvenile hall.
His psychiatric appointments increased to two a week. There went Mattie’s ballet lessons and family vacations. And Alfred started picking fights with Isa: wasn’t one session a week enough, at eighty dollars an hour—for Christ’s sake? Did she think that money grew on trees? Alfred was a lawyer at a small firm in San Rafael and worked as a legal advisor to congressional committees on civil liberties and welfare, and Isa worked part-time, running an office at a furniture warehouse, but they barely got by.
Isa soldiered on, though, signing on as an office temp to pay for the second appointment. So she grew even more impossible.
Next Al was drawn to the fast cars of older boys. He continued to see his therapist, and to smoke and drink and take LSD with his long-haired friends from high school. Mattie tried to save her family, by being good and helpful, trying to need almost nothing, willing to give all she had. She danced with her father, rubbed his feet, helped her mother with the cooking and cleaning. She remembered the first time Isa took Al to the therapist, leaving her alone in the house on a Saturday morning when Alfred was away in Washington. Mattie had been only eight. She’d walked around the house, feeling its hugeness, and its boundary—like standing inside a tree’s hollowed stump. She’d felt that if she made a sound, it would echo, and so she sat motionless in the rocking chair holding her cat for dear life.
• • •
Mattie loved her big brother, even though—or because—he didn’t seem to love her very much, or at any rate, very often. She understood why he never seemed to want to come home, hanging out down at the boardwalk, smoking, into the early evenings: home was hard. Alfred and Isa were unhappy, silently most of the time, but sometimes exploding. Mattie felt it was somehow her fault: she imagined they had all been happy before she was born. Alfred was often looped, Isa was always cleaning, or updating precinct lists, or baking bread, or putting stamps on mailers, or folding UNICEF boxes for trick-or-treaters, and Al found it hard to be there. Mattie felt she had to stick around, because it always cheered up her father to see her.
Occasionally, Al and Mattie shared joints in his bedroom and listened to the Grateful Dead on his stereo, and these were memories she savored. He went to the therapist for years, and eventually stopped ruining and stealing Mattie’s things, her 45’s, her baby-sitting money, all the things Isa let him get away with, maybe because she would have liked to do them herself, and then Al even started liking school, a little hippie school in San Francisco. He learned to drive his father’s Volkswagen bus, and he’d always give Mattie a ride, anywhere, anytime, just to get to drive. When he was not withdrawn or grounded or mad at the world, he and Mattie could make each other laugh. Then he’d gotten a scholarship to Cal, and as soon as he moved out of the family home, he finally began to l
ove Mattie, confiding in her, listening to her tell him her problems with boys. He stayed at Cal until he had a graduate degree in political science. Al gave a lot of credit to Isa. He remained ferociously loyal to her, even though, as he’d put it once, “First she keeps me from totally losing my mind, then she seems to try and drive me crazy.”
“Al!” Mattie said out loud now, and went to the phone to call him. He was teaching, though. The secretary said she’d give him the message.
Al looked both like their father and like Harry, except that he had gained weight in his face and stomach. Both he and Mattie had two huge front teeth, not especially white, which had required two years of braces for each of them. Neither of them had been able to close their mouths until after the braces, but they ended up with the shy, pleasant smiles of the formerly bucktoothed. Al taught addicted public high school students in a program called Smith and Wilson High, after AA’s founders. He’d been sober himself for a long time now. In his late twenties, no longer using drugs but drunk most nights, he realized he was deteriorating faster than he could lower his standards, and he quit. Now he lived in a glade at the edge of a twenty-acre estate owned by a local actor who’d hit it big. It was in the country, across a dirt road from the estate, inside a giant ring of fallen logs. Al had converted a chicken coop on the property into a real cabin, snug and warm, with illegal plumbing, and plants everywhere.
Sometimes his girlfriend, Katherine, lived with him, a lanky woman of forty who looked like an overgrown girl. She was out of town a lot, a social worker who traveled to poor communities around the country and helped set up medical clinics. She had a cabin of her own in Fairfax. Mattie was very fond of her. Katherine was so shy that it was hard to imagine her telling doctors and nurses and community leaders what to do. When she sat down, she curled around herself, wrapping one leg around the other as if she were made out of pipe cleaners. She had short glossy black hair, and was allergic to cats—she took medicine before visiting Mattie’s house or Isa’s. She and Al split up every six months or so—she wanted to have children, and he was not ready, and her time was running out. But they worked things out, and had stayed together for six years now.