by Anne Lamott
Angela said, “I know a guy who can play the didgeridoo.”
“You make that sound like a good thing,” said Mattie. But she ended up hiring him anyway to play at the party, which would be in late January.
She invited Al and Katherine, her mother, and the new boyfriend, Lewis, a dapper old man from the South who lived in the same retirement community. He was half black, cocoa brown with a spray of moles across his cheeks and a film of near-blindness over his black eyes. She invited Daniel and Pauline, Angela and Julie, some friends from church, and some friends of Nicky’s and hers from before the divorce.
• • •
Curiously, Mattie’s spirits began to rise, even though many days in a row brought cold rain. Some mornings the sun hauled itself up reluctantly, rolling like a slow bowling ball across the sky. As Mattie started to come out of her funk, everyone else grew depressed; she called Angela one night and found her grumpy and withdrawn.
“I’ve been so down too,” said Mattie. “But for no reason, a few days ago I woke up feeling lighter inside. As if help was on the way. Someday soon, the light will return. That was the message of Advent, right? And Hanukkah. I was thinking we could have a little retroactive ritual at my party.”
“Ix-nay, ix-nay,” Angela said.
“Come on—a ceremony with candles?”
“No, no, no.”
“Look—you’re Reform, right?”
“Of course I’m Reform. I’ve got a crucifix on my front door.”
“Well, what if we made it a party for the depressed?”
“Listen, Mattie, I left you alone when you were down. Can you call me tomorrow when the drugs wear off?”
Al was in a bad mood too, and said he wouldn’t come to the party if there was a ceremony, unless it was a small-animal sacrifice. Pauline was depressed as well, but then, as Mattie had learned, Pauline was often depressed. One Sunday, Mattie had made her some soup and tried to talk her into going to church, but she had not been interested.
“I’m a dancer,” she said, as if this explained anything.
Daniel and Mattie went to church without Pauline. They sat together whispering before the service began. Their shoulders touched. They shared a hymnal when they stood to sing. The sermon was on forgiveness, not one of Mattie’s strong suits. She asked Daniel if he could fix the porch light after church, and he said sure.
Mattie made them lunch when he was done, quesadillas and homemade salsa and lemonade.
“Daniel? Has there ever been anyone you couldn’t forgive?”
He thought about this. “Yeah, there was this guy, it took me three or four years. It was a man Pauline had danced with, when she was a dancer, in her twenties. He was very handsome, and they’d been together before she and I hooked up. She was always on the phone with him, and I hated this guy. Hated him. But I prayed for him anyway. One morning I woke up, and the first thing I did was to feel around for my hostility toward him, like for my wallet, and in that instant, I saw that I had become his jailer. But being his jailer was making me his prisoner.”
“Then what happened?” Mattie felt glum. He was telling her the story of her and Nicky.
“When I got out of the loop, their friendship fell apart. Pauline fell apart too. She had what I guess you’d call a minor breakdown.”
“And now she’s okay?”
“Yeah, she’s fine.”
I’m Nicky’s jailer, Mattie said to herself. The mole on Daniel’s bottom eyelid was no bigger than the head of a pin. It hung suspended near his iris like a star.
So she did exactly what Daniel had done. She went around praying for Nicky and Lee, and when one of them called, she made herself be sweet. She didn’t sleep with Nicky for a while, claiming, whenever he hinted, to have a cold. She let the machine pick up when he called late at night, and she silently repeated, a dozen times a day, “I pray for you both to have everything that will make you happy.” She did it even though she really felt no peace, just hatred and jealousy and self-loathing. Then one morning she woke up in the cold and the dark, and the ugly feelings were gone.
Now when Mattie thought of Nicky or Lee or heard their voices, the needle didn’t always move to the right or the left. She had to pinch herself to make sure she wasn’t dreaming. An infected splinter had worked itself loose, risen to the surface. Quirky blessings began to arrive. A family with a girl Ella’s age moved in down the block, and then their cat had a single kitten, a calico, which Ella and Harry talked Mattie into taking; so now they had three cats. But the best development of all came one Saturday morning when Mattie was having toast with Daniel and Pauline in the breakfast nook and Lee arrived to get the children. The three of them had been celebrating when Lee arrived, because all three had been working lately. Mattie had had a few weeks’ work at Sears; if she sucked in her stomach, she was still a perfect size 12. Pauline had been assisting at dance classes at a local theater. And Daniel was doing carpentry and odd jobs, including the delivery of a sandwich he’d invented to the best delis in town—Daniel’s Chopped Salad Sandwich. The sandwich was good, with lettuce, tomato, artichoke heart, avocado, water chestnuts, and a lemony aïoli, on thick slices of white bread that Pauline baked every day. Mattie sometimes helped make the sandwiches, and Pauline gave her a third of the profits when she did, often a hundred dollars a week for a few hours’ work a day in their light-filled kitchen.
Lee knocked on the kitchen door that Saturday morning. “Come in,” Mattie said, and called for the children. She smiled and introduced Lee to Pauline and Daniel, and then Pauline cocked her head to listen.
“You have such a pretty voice,” she told Lee, “all trills and burrs. But I can’t quite put my finger on your accent. Are you from Glasgow?”
Lee smiled sheepishly. “Well, actually,” she admitted, “I’m from Oregon. But my parents are both Scottish, and I guess that influenced me when I was learning to speak.”
Mattie’s face broke into a smile, and she wanted to crow, but instead said, “Ahh!” warmly. It was too good to be true: Lee had been faking her cute little accent. Her little burrs, her little itty tro! Mattie couldn’t stop beaming, beaming at Harry when he burst into the kitchen. He burrowed up against his mother loyally, and Mattie hummed and imagined Lee in a kilt, blowing away on bagpipes.
• • •
A dozen people came to the housewarming party, the last Saturday in January. Angela had flown up alone the day before, and she and Mattie stayed up all night cooking: jambalaya, fried chicken, bell peppers fried with mustard seed, chocolate mousse.
Al and Katherine were the first to arrive. He was wearing a tie-dyed Rastafarian T-shirt, and dribbling a basketball he’d brought for Harry. Katherine wore her usual organic medley of cotton and suede and silk, with the brown shoes that Al called her frogstompers. She brought Mattie a jar of pumpkin butter. She tried to peer into the living room to see who else might be there, like a girl at her first boy-girl party.
Isa arrived next. “Are you getting a little fat, Al?” she asked after exchanging kisses with him and Katherine, as if this were the wittiest possible thing to say. She’d come with Lewis, who doffed his brown fedora the moment he stepped inside. A few old friends trickled in, all wonderfully dressed.
Daniel wore a dark green silk shirt tucked into black pleated pants, and the kind of sandals men wear in advertisements for Puerto Rican rum. He had twisted his wiry hair into short dreadlocks, and had never looked better. Pauline’s thick curls were piled high and loose on top of her head. She had gained weight because of the new antidepressant she was on. Mattie wanted to ask, “Would you mind coming into the bathroom and hopping up on the scales for me?” Then she began to worry Pauline was pregnant. People had babies so late nowadays. Pauline was coming up on forty. It pleased Mattie to think that Pauline was older than she and Daniel were. Daniel fluttered around her, bringing her plates of food from the table set up outdoors beneath an umbrella. Mattie kept noticing Pauline’s hands resting on the swell of her belly unde
r a simple stylish black linen dress and found herself growing more anxious. She prayed to have a moment of clarity, and by God, she did. It was that she was mad as a hatter. That’s okay, she said, patting her own shoulder. All your better people were.
“You look wonderful,” Mattie told Pauline, and that was true—she looked stunning. Two other women were wearing simple black linen shifts similar to Pauline’s, but they were poised and lean and busy, darting around as if trying to catch something they could put to use, while Pauline just sat there, regally. Finally she got slowly to her feet, and said, loudly enough that anyone nearby could hear, “Is there Tampax in your bathroom?”
Mattie nodded kindly, flooded with relief.
She hadn’t seen some of her guests since before she and Nicky had split up. She’d forgotten how much she enjoyed them, but she felt shy too. She sat with Daniel, Pauline, and Lewis on the periphery of the group. They all grilled Lewis as if he were a teenage boy who wanted to date their daughter. He held up to scrutiny, telling the story of his coming to live in California. He’d moved from Alabama during World War II to work in the Sausalito boatyards, then stayed on in Marin City afterward. He had been a welder by trade, but was retired since 1980, when his vision began to fail.
“Marin City—that’s where we go to church,” Mattie said, meaning herself and Daniel.
“Really, which one?” When Mattie told him, Lewis clapped his hands to his cheeks. “Would you consider bringing me along?” he asked. “We lost our pastor at New Hope Baptist, and I don’t like his replacement at all.”
Mattie made plans to pick him up at The Sequoias on her way to Daniel’s the next day. This made Isa look as if she might put her finger down her throat. Mattie ignored her.
“How much can you see?” Mattie asked Lewis.
“The outline of you, and the palette of you. Not much else.”
“Why don’t you leave him alone? Let the poor man eat in peace.”
“Isa, darling,” Lewis said. “This is how people get to know one another.”
Mattie wanted to make a bullhorn of her hands and bellow, “Run! For the love of God, run while you can,” but Isa was now wrapping her silky strings of touch and attention around Lewis, gripping his hand with reassurance, smoothing a crumb of food from beside his mouth.
• • •
Guests came over to pay their respects to Isa as if she was the Godfather. It was quite touching to hear them lay their lives out like smorgasbords. Oh, Isa, this is so tasty, and I think you’ll like this, it will make you proud of me, and Here’s an interesting morsel. And Isa would taste it, and say with her kind face, You’ve made such a good banquet. Oh, these are such delicious dishes.
• • •
Nicky honked when he pulled up in front of the house. Harry and Ella poured out of the backseat, dressed in their best clothes: Harry in cords and a white dress shirt, Ella in a black velvet party dress trimmed with lace. Harry picked her up like a sack of potatoes and carried her over to Mattie. After hugging and kissing Mattie, Angela, Isa, and Al, he hauled her off toward the sandbox.
Mattie listened to songbirds over people’s voices, the tinkle of glasses and ice cubes, the clink of forks on plates, and then, all at once, to her son’s sharp cries from the sandbox. Red-faced, Harry was weeping, clutching at one of his eyes like the Cyclops, while Ella looked on with horror and people streamed over to help. “What is it?” Mattie asked, bending in close. “Let me see.”
Katherine came over and squatted beside Harry. “Take your hand away, sweetheart,” she said. She opened his eye with her long pale fingers. “You’ve got a little sand in your eye,” she said. “Will you come inside and let me flush it out?”
“I’ve torn my cornea,” Harry sobbed. “As if you even care.”
“Harry, you can watch your tone,” said Mattie.
“Will you come inside with me?” Katherine asked again.
“No, I want my mom to do it.”
Katherine shrugged at Mattie.
Mattie put her arm around Harry’s shoulders and looked into his eyes. She wondered whether she had known the word cornea at six years old. When he didn’t stop crying, she sighed quietly, took him by the hand, and said, “Come on, honey. Let’s go flush out your eye.”
He looked as if someone had splashed acid in his face. In the bathroom, she tried to wash out whatever it was with water, and when that didn’t work, she plopped down on the toilet to think.
“The crying will wash it out,” she said, pulling him into her lap. He tore at his eye, rubbed hard, whimpered, and she cooed and patted him with mounting hostility. The sand did not dislodge, but if it was indeed sand, the crying would wash his eyes for him. What would Jesus do? Roll his eyes and growl softly, as she was doing? She pictured Jesus and the men He lived with, whiny bachelors all—“Can I be first?” “What about me, Lord?”—and saw Him sigh and head back up the mountain. Where could she go?
Her child sobbed in her arms, and she held him. Boy, she thought, when Jesus said we must become as little children to enter the kingdom of heaven, He was definitely not referring to Harry. Maybe He had been misquoted. Maybe He did not say you must be like little children, but that you should eat little children—with a little butter and garlic. She exhaled softly, and Harry heard. He lurched out of her lap and tried to figure out whether she was mocking him. With his hand cupped over his eye as if to keep it from spilling out of its socket, he careened around the bathroom. “Stop!” she wanted to cry. “It’s sand in your eye, not napalm!” She did not believe he was in any real distress, and her heart refused to budge, to give, to breathe. She did not like children. She should not have had any. This one was already ruined.
“I want to go to the hospital,” he said, reedy, imperious, blaming.
“I’m having a party!” she implored. He was gasping for breath now, but she persuaded him to take off his clothes and step under the shower. She watched him through the glass door. “Open your eyes!” she called to him. Open your heart, she heard in silent reply; but she couldn’t. So she did what she could: she opened her own eyes instead.
And under the torrent of water she saw a hunched and miserable boy, skinny, lonely, exiled—a refugee camp of one. “Honey?” she said. He stared up at the spray with his eyes open, looking demented. She tapped the glass. He looked over at her, and she was softened by his bleary agony. Suffering was suffering. She opened the door and reached gently inside for him, holding out a towel. “Honey, let’s get you some help.”
“Who could help us?”
“I don’t know.” Harry didn’t say anything, and she toweled him off. When she finished with his hair, she draped the towel over him like a drop cloth over an old lamp. She lifted one corner and peered into his wild face. “What’s going on?” she whispered.
“Daddy’s going to have a baby,” he wailed.
“What?” The news knocked the wind out of her.
“Daddy and Lee are going to have a baby!”
Heat rose in her. “They are?”
Harry nodded. “I heard her tell it on the phone.” He gasped for breath, quavering. “Daddy didn’t tell me.” They sat together on the toilet while he wept. Finally he grew quiet and fell asleep. Amazing that he was so like her. She held him sprawled across her lap.
She listened to him sleep, and to the sounds of the party. After a while she carried him to his bedroom, where she laid him on his bed. She dressed him in a T-shirt and Power Rangers underpants, and covered him with a blanket. She went to the kitchen, found the little blue shoe on the counter, put it in her pocket, and walked back outside.
Lewis turned his head toward her, but his eyes looked up, as if to the hills, from the shelter of his brows and deep folds of skin. His eyes were as black and round as knots in a tree. He was eating jambalaya with great pleasure, his loud digestion surprising them all from time to time. Mattie offered him the shoe and he turned it over in his hand. “It was my father’s,” she said when he gave it back.
&
nbsp; “Of course it was not your father’s,” Isa insisted from beside him.
“It was, Mom,” said Al. “It was in the old VW bus.”
“Why on earth would your father have had such a preposterous gewgaw? I’m sure it was not Alfred’s.”
Mattie felt she would burst with resentment. “Why are you being so mean today?”
“It’s simply idiotic, Mattie.” Isa waved her away. Al growled. Katherine patted him on the knee.
“Why would you call me an idiot at my own party?” Mattie cried.
“Oh, for Chrissakes,” Isa exclaimed, sounding genuinely distressed. “I only meant, what do you think you’ll find by poking around Alfred’s old things? It’s gruesome.”
Mattie went inside to compose herself. She sat at the kitchen table and closed her eyes. She was thinking of a line from a poem by Rumi, “Through love, all pain will turn to medicine,” and in her mind she flicked the poem like holy water onto Isa’s haughty face.
• • •
The didgeridoo player arrived just in time, as Isa was trying to persuade Lewis to throw away his brown fedora. When Ella saw the musician carrying the long instrument over his shoulder, she ran to greet him. Al went inside to wake Harry. The musician set up in the garden, near the food table, and soon began to play. Out came a low, windy moan, an eerie dirge. Isa drew back and looked at Lewis with horror. “Oh, for Chrissakes,” she said, laughing. Mattie covered her eyes to block out her mother. She sensed someone sitting down on the bench beside her—Pauline. Mattie felt a stir of affection for her, and took her hand. Ella climbed into Mattie’s lap. Al stepped into sight, with Harry gripping his new basketball in his arms. They sat down on the ground together, Al crossing his legs Indian style, enveloping Harry.
The voice of the didgeridoo was a call from far away, from centuries back. If you pressed your ear to the ground, Mattie thought, this was the tone the earth would make. The music resonated like an ancient god, or what desert winds must have sounded like to the first ears on earth. She closed her eyes again. She felt doomed, and lumpy, fat and old. She tried to recall the women from church, their triumphant wideness, centered and vigorous, and this helped. Ella clung to her like a baby koala. Mattie nuzzled her, snorfled her neck. The didgeridoo sounded like an enormous animal panting at the end of its life. Mattie looked up and found Daniel standing before her, lifting her daughter into his arms. He held her in front of his chest, his long hands knitted together effortlessly to make a seat in which round, rosy Ella perched, somewhat worried, but curious. “Want to dance?” he asked her. “I’m probably the only person you know who can dance to the didgeridoo.” Ella thought this over, tugging on her chin like an alchemist.