by Anne Lamott
Isa was not particularly taken with Katherine. “I find her rather—blah,” Isa told Mattie. “Al with that marvelous sense of humor, and Katherine a bit of a bump on a log, don’t you think? Not someone to show off to your friends.”
• • •
Mattie drove to pick Ella up at the day-care center at one. She felt too tired to walk the four blocks. They lay down for a nap together when they got home, but the phone beside Mattie’s bed rang almost immediately. “Oh, what’s the matter? You sound so sleepy,” Angela said on the other end.
“I was up all night. I hate my life. The only good part is the kids. Do you have any sarin gas?”
“I’ll go look as soon as we get off the phone.”
“Why did I leave Nicky, again? I’m so lonely, and so broke.”
“Because he was a total shit,” Angela said. “He used to look at you with contempt. Most of his friends were old girlfriends, and he wore them around his waist like a belt of shrunken heads, and shook them at you from time to time.”
“Oh, now I remember.”
“He’s just a mean guy.”
“But now I have rats.”
“It’s a good trade. Poor Mattie. Let me tell you the big difference between Nicky and God, okay?”
“Okay.”
“God doesn’t ever think He’s Nicky.”
Nicky was like the shipwrecked Professor on Gilligan’s Island, constantly coming up with ingenious inventions made of foliage, generators made from coconut husks, ice chests made from seashells, yet apparently never getting around to repairing the SS Minnow.
Mattie wished the man from Evergreen would show up. She was hungry. Maybe she should make Ella and herself a nice grilled cheese sandwich. But there was no bread. She’d been trying to remember bread for days. One of the last arguments she and Nicky had had before she left was over bread. He had called from the college to see if they needed anything, and she’d said bread, for toast and Harry’s lunches, and he had come home with a bag of fancy sourdough rolls, and she’d cried out, “Bread. I said ‘bread.’ Bread-bread.” And he’d looked at her pityingly because she was so clearly crazy—disgusting and petty. The children loved the rolls. Still, Nicky continued to look at Mattie with such dead meanness, such smugness in his eyes as they tore into the buns, that she knew in that instant she could leave. The next day she’d told him the marriage was over. She’d found him in the bedroom, in his special chair by the huge window, the one place inside where he was allowed to smoke, if the window was open. He was smoking, as usual, with the cigarette down in the webbing of his fingers instead of up at the top, as if he were at the Village Vanguard listening to Thelonious Monk and smoking a Gauloise Blonde instead of a Merit Ultra Light menthol. “It’s over,” she said quietly. He smirked, and took a long drag on his cigarette.
Free at last, free at last. And going down the tubes.
Ella turned to the sound of the doorbell. Marjorie barked from the other room. The Evergreen man was here.
two
When Mattie opened the front door, Ella in her arms, she found a woeful longhaired man in a brown jumpsuit on the front step. The Evergreen Pest Control patch above his pocket was not filled in with a name. He appeared to be in his mid-to-late thirties, with a fuzzy brown ponytail, long straight nose, black goatee, and closely set brown eyes that made him look like an incompetent bird of prey.
“So you have rats,” he said. When she nodded, he shuddered.
She thought he was joking, but the worried expression stayed on his face.
“I’m Mattie,” she said, “and this is Ella.” Ella burrowed into her neck.
“I’m Daniel,” he replied, staring at his feet. So Mattie stared at hers. Ella peered down at all four feet, as if looking over a cliff.
“Do you want to come in?”
“No, thank you. I’m going to start in the garage and the yard. I’ll set some traps, with bait in them for the rats to eat. That drives them out with a terrible thirst, in search of water.”
She imagined rats all over her yard, pulling themselves along on their bellies like thirsty men in cartoon deserts. “Is it safe for my animals?”
“Yep.” He sighed and stood straight.
“How long is this going to take?”
“An hour, maybe less. I’ll come back when I’m done.”
“Okay,” Mattie said, and closed the door. She sat on the living room floor with Ella and began playing with wooden blocks. They were building a castle with many windows.
After ten minutes the doorbell rang and the door opened. Daniel poked his head in. Mattie looked up from the floor.
“Do you need something?” she asked.
“Look, I’m going to be honest,” he said. “I don’t have the stomach for this job.”
“Pardon me?”
“This was my first day.” He pointed to the blank Evergreen patch. “My wife and I need the money. I’m a carpenter, but there’s not much work right now. I thought I’d have what it took to be an Evergreen rat man.”
She stared at him perplexed.
“If I can use the phone, I’ll explain that I just quit, and that they need to send someone else over as soon as possible.”
She looked at him. “That’s fine.”
“Could I have a drink of water?” he asked.
“All right,” she said. By the time she returned to the living room with a glass of water, he was already sitting on the floor working on the castle with Ella and talking on the cordless phone. “Great,” he was saying. Mattie sat down nearby, feeling suddenly shy. Ella was at her most engaging. Mattie listened to her making grunty sounds while adding to the castle, and to Daniel talking on the phone. She stared through the window at the persimmon tree across the street, still heavily laden with its fruit, a Renaissance color, like gilded borders, giving off warm light.
“They’ll send someone tomorrow,” he announced. “I don’t suppose you have any other work for me, do you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Things where I don’t have to kill anything—like carpentry, or electrical repairs.”
“Like odd jobs?” she asked. Daniel nodded. Ella handed him a yellow cone. He studied the castle and slid the cone carefully into an open window, as if it were a candle flame.
Mattie looked out the window. “Isn’t the world orange right now?” she asked. She sounded, even to herself, like a fruitcake.
But looking up from his work, Daniel said, “Orange keeps us warm.” This time Mattie nodded. “I’m cold,” he said, like a child.
“Would you like a cup of tea instead of water?”
• • •
He had large hands and long fingers. He filled the windows of the castle with colored cones and blocks and figurines that lay all over the rug—warriors, dinosaurs, sea creatures. Then, suddenly, he leapt to his feet.
“What is it?” she asked.
“I’m late for my next appointment. I have to go.”
Mattie frowned. “But you just quit your job.”
He thought about this. “Good point.” He inhaled loudly. Ella handed him a green wooden triangle. He used it to stab himself in the head. “I have to make some money today. I promised my wife. Thank you for the tea and for letting me play,” he said to Ella. Mattie felt afraid—she imagined Daniel as having killed the real Evergreen rat man, stolen his uniform, stuffed him into the trunk of his car so he could worm his way into her house. But a bigger part of her was desperate for him to stay. Daniel’s eyes were quiet and kind.
“Do you want to chop firewood? I could pay fifteen dollars an hour,” Mattie blurted out. She wanted him to stay. She’d come up with the money.
“Really? Sure.”
She took him out to the backyard, showed him a pile of logs Isa had bought long before, her father’s hatchet, and an old stump slashed with hatchet blows her father and Al had made over the years.
Inside, Mattie and Ella listened to the sound of splitting wood. Ella looked down at her be
lly button for the answer, as if it were a mailbox. They worked on the castle until Harry and Stefan burst through the door. “Do you boys want something to eat?” Mattie called. Without answering, they walked toward Harry’s room with the oddest possible gait, as if they were squeezing the cheeks of their bottoms tightly together. And when Mattie followed them to Harry’s room, she discovered they did have the cheeks of their bottoms squeezed tight, to hold Band-Aids in place, as Harry explained. They had each put an unwrapped Band-Aid in the crack of their bottoms in case they got hurt while playing. The two boys twisted yogically to extract the Band-Aids from their underpants.
“It’s okay,” Mattie said. “It’s good to be prepared. But go do that in the bathroom. Throw those in the trash. Why didn’t you carry them in your pockets?” she asked.
“Because we’re spies.”
Stefan was courtly with Ella, and stopped to admire her castle on his way to the bathroom, but Harry sidestepped her reach as you would the family octopus. “Who’s the guy in the back chopping up our wood?” he called to Mattie.
“He used to be the Evergreen man. Now he’s—well, I don’t know what he is now. He needed work, we needed wood for the fire.”
• • •
The days got shorter and darker, and there was the beginning of a ruddy sunset when Isa came over for late tea a week later. She wore pleated black linen pants, a gray wool sweater, and a periwinkle scarf, and moved like a woman balancing a tray on her head. She brought a perfect gift, beautifully wrapped, for everyone. For Mattie, a green serving plate with “Plate” written with a finger in the clay by the handicapped person who’d made it at the foundation on whose board Isa served. For Harry, a set of fancy felt-tip pens, for Ella, a stuffed bear with hair you could braid. “What’s the occasion?” Mattie asked. Isa sat on the floor and helped Ella braid the bear’s hair. Harry lay beside them petting Marjorie, the package of pens shoved into the pocket of his jeans. Although he was always drawing meticulous tiny figures, frightful animals, detailed buildings, he would not open it for days. He preferred the perfect look of brand-new things to the things themselves, loved the brief suspended moments before the inevitable depreciation of dulled tips and chewed caps.
“Your mother has a nice new man in her life,” Isa told Mattie. “But that’s all I’m going to say.” Isa zipped her lips as though Mattie were a three-year-old. Poor guy, thought Mattie. Watching her play with Ella, she tried to imagine her mother sitting with her and Al on the floor, and knew it had never happened. Her mother had always been so busy. She had always arrived home from work just minutes before Mattie and Al got home from school. She’d greet them warmly, still dressed for the office, and then turn on the TV. Sometimes she turned on the radio too, as if trying to create a little party with lots of voices. Her role was spokesperson for both parents: clear the dishes, clean your rooms, study harder—in Al’s case, study at all. Commitment and routines: homework, showers, dental appointments.
Mattie’s father took the joyful parts. He drank and danced, stood at his bookcases looking up a poem that he loved, or stared off into space after putting the needle down on a new album on the hi-fi. There was always music on when he was home, and he was always trying to get Isa to dance. But she would never have anything to do with him after dinner, there was too much work, and so he settled for Mattie, dancing around on the wall-to-wall carpet, first with her on his shoes like three-dimensional Arthur Murray footprints, then on her own feet, dipping, twirling, looking up to meet his eyes. He’d collapse on the couch with his drink and try to get Mattie to take off his garters and rub his feet, while Al hid in his room and Isa sterilized their living quarters. Isa would have put the house in an autoclave if she could have.
Watching Isa with Ella—they were both named Isabella—Mattie felt a pang of admiration for her mother. She had kept the family together all those years, with a husband who was gone every month, and a troubled son; she was always committed to her causes, and had even been jailed once after a mass protest at a nuclear power site. In her early seventies she was still quite beautiful. Mattie hoped she would age as gracefully as her mother. Isa had perfectly smooth silver hair, pearly dentures, crinkly eyes. Something dormant had woken in her when Harry was born. She seemed curious about the world again, no longer completely rooted to her routines and efficiency. This was the blessing of being a grandmother. She was no longer so hurried and paranoid.
Mattie felt jealous: when she was little, Isa had seen threats everywhere, things to fear and protect oneself and one’s children from—strangers, germs, dogs and dog shit, the Russians. But when Harry came along, and then Ella, Isa had relaxed, opened entirely to their love, holding their soft, warm bodies close, all that skin so fresh and new, not loaded with shame, not guarded against her or anyone else. Their heads were like fountains at which she might finally drink.
Isa looked up at Mattie, self-conscious now. “What?” she demanded.
“Oh, nothing,” Mattie said, looking away so that Isa could go back to her granddaughter’s sweet smells—her breath, her baby hair. Then it went on too long: Mattie pursed her lips and wanted to break it up, like a cop nudging someone slumped over at a bar. These were her babies, and she loved them more than anything—the delicious smells of their heads, so visceral, vibrational, intoxicating: all of it, all those baptisms, tears and soppy diapers, leaky breast milk, spilled formula, baths in the sink. Isa had had her chance.
Harry ran off with Ella’s bear, and Ella howled. Mattie yelled at him to come back, and he did. He picked up Ella and lugged her around the room as if she were the legless pencil man outside Macy’s. She sniffed back tears. “Chicken alert!” he shouted, and she started cracking up. “Chicken alert!” he shouted again, and she squawked.
• • •
One morning when the sky was moody and dark, Mattie found herself thinking of Daniel while she was folding laundry. It had been a couple of weeks since he’d come to kill her rats. The tiny mole on his bottom eyelid had made him seem smart and watchful as a whale. She entertained the fantasy of calling him up and asking him over, to play with the blocks, or chop more wood, or maybe watch one of Nicky’s nice movies with her. Andrea’s Big Day was a good one. Very tasteful. Rear Entry was equally tender.
At last, she was sleeping again. The rats were gone. Another man from Evergreen had come the day after Daniel’s visit, enthusiastically placed the poison in plastic tubs, and wiped out her rats. She tried to imagine what kind of wife Daniel would have, someone quiet, she believed, a little plain perhaps. He certainly wasn’t much to look at, but something about him had stirred things up inside her.
She called the Evergreen number and told the receptionist that Daniel had left something at her house; was there a way they could let him know? The receptionist sounded skeptical. “He left something there a couple weeks ago? Like what?” she asked. Like his panty hose, Mattie wanted to say.
The next morning she found him on her doorstep, a loaf of homemade bread in his hands. He was squinting at her.
“Did I really leave something here?” he asked. Mattie shook her head. She could hardly breathe. She hated being caught in a lie.
“I had some more odd jobs I hoped you could do, and I didn’t want Evergreen to know I was giving you work.”
“Oh,” Daniel said. “Well, great. Here. My wife and I baked bread this morning. I grabbed you a loaf on my way out.”
• • •
He fixed the drip under the kitchen sink, replaced a porch light fixture, went to the hardware store and got a new splatter guard for the garbage disposal, replaced the doorknob in Harry’s room, cut up more firewood, stacked it, washed down the walkway to the house with diluted bleach to remove the slime, repaired a hole in the fence where Marjorie had gotten out. He worked for four hours straight, and when he was done, she gave him eighty dollars.
“This is too much,” he said.
“No, no,” she insisted. “It’s fine. I just got paid.”
Ma
ttie made them tea, and toast from the bread he had brought. She wanted to ask if he had a church. Asking the question was a habit of hers that used to make Nicky furious; he said it made him feel he was married to a Jehovah’s Witness. As hard as she tried not to say anything, she blurted it out.
“No, I don’t. My wife’s not a believer, but I am. More or less. Do you go to church?” he asked.
“Oh, yeah.”
“Is the music nice?”
“You’ve got to come sometime,” she replied. It gave her a lift just to think of it. She loved how ragged the music sounded some days. The church was racially integrated, with more women than men, fifty to sixty in all most Sundays, plus twenty children from infants to teens. It was the only place where she could sing. She loved the big proud bodies of the women in the choir, and how they could swing, and how planted on the earth they seemed, with no apology for taking up so much space. It was as if they assumed they were beautiful, and only needed to decide what color to dress the beauty in. “Corner of Drake and First. Services at eleven every Sunday.”
And the very next Sunday, Daniel was there, sitting by himself near the door.
Mattie didn’t even see him at first. She was greeting her friends, helping the older people find seats, checking what songs they’d be singing, when she noticed him flipping through a hymnal. She caught his eye while the choir filed in, and blinked out hello in Morse code. He bowed in greeting, and now it was her turn to look down.