by Anne Lamott
Mattie opened her fingers slowly so she could peek in at the little rubber shoe, as if examining a poker hand. Harry and Al were talking, and Daniel still held Ella in his arms, turning in slow circles. Mattie watched, listened, breathed in deep and slow: if the sound of the didgeridoo was a color, it would be rich and earthy, plant purple, like eggplant with light behind it.
three
It was the rainiest May ever. A sense of ordinary life had established itself by late winter, had risen from the chaos and comfort of schedules and lazy weekends, school and vacations, colds and flus and dentist appointments, long sleepy Saturday mornings of drawing together in Mattie’s bed. In early spring, they threw off their jackets and tore outside. The garden was in full crazy bloom and the children were growing like Topsy too, as Isa always said. They now spent three weekends a month with Nicky and Lee, so that Mattie could bring them to church one Sunday, piled into the car with Daniel and Lewis. She was just getting by financially: she had a lot of work at Sears, Nicky had increased her child support by one hundred dollars a month, the sandwich-making business continued to thrive.
Al had lost ten pounds since Christmas. He and Daniel were playing tennis once a week now. They were equally terrible, but fascinating to watch. Al struck frozen poses before hitting each return, as if a stream of water might pour from the statuary of his head; Daniel moved with the herky-jerk robot steps of someone in ski boots. Harry had his seventh birthday, Ella her third. Although she was both bright and watchful, she was still not talking very much. Mattie could see that she communicated brilliantly in other ways, but Nicky insisted on taking her to the doctor. Some people were just naturally quieter than others, the doctor said. Isa sometimes tried to badger Ella into conversing with her, and if Ella resisted, Isa would demand, “Cat gotcher tongue?” until Mattie would threaten her with a raised fist. The animals were fine, the kitten growing into a real cat and less of a holy terror. Marjorie was slowing down more. Isa and Lewis were together all the time: Isa seemed amused by this late-in-life affair. Lewis always smiled at her gently, and came to church with Mattie and Daniel on Sundays.
• • •
A storm woke Mattie at dawn. She lay in the dark room and listened to Marjorie snore, more like a bear than a sick dog. Two cats were asleep on the bed, the third on the chair. She had promised to take the children to Samuel P. Taylor Park today, even in the rain. She did not mind this weather, and certainly preferred it to the tyranny of a bright blue day, when old voices told you to get off your duff and go outside. Hours after a storm passed, the wet enlivening grayness—a watercolor brush on wet paper—made the wind and the howl all worthwhile.
She got up to make coffee. The animals sprinted to the kitchen at her heels like hungry Secret Service agents, so she fed them before putting the water on to boil. It was only seven. The paper was on the front step. She heard old man Buell across the street putting out his empty bottles for recycling, and Kathy Brock next door shaking a bag of kibble like maracas to summon her playboy cat. Ella would be getting glasses today, and then they could go to the park. Mattie hoped Al and Isa would come too. With Nicky and Lee’s wedding around the corner, the baby on the way, all that amniotic fluid drawing the children out of their gravitational orbits, they had to pull together now.
But Al called at eight, sounding worried. “Something strange has happened, and I don’t know what to make of it. The woman from The Sequoias just called to say that Mom was found this morning over by Safeway, wandering around in her pajamas.”
“What? What’d you just say?”
“It’s strange. She was apparently sleepwalking. Someone from Safeway stopped to help her, and walked her back home. He said she was fine as soon as he shook her. But the woman at the front desk was worried. I should take her in to the Saturday clinic at Kaiser.”
Isa refused to see the doctor. Al called Mattie later in the morning to report that he was at Isa’s and she had all but put the dresser up against the door to keep him out. She had eventually let him in, made him toast, and they had looked through an old photo album together. She seemed fine. He stopped by Mattie’s at lunchtime, and she made him beans and dirty rice; he played fairies in the rain with Ella.
It was two weeks more before they made it to the park, on another rainy day. The children rode in the back of the car, Isa next to Mattie. They sang along to Peter, Paul and Mary as they drove past green meadows and pastures carpeted with lupine, furnished with horses and sheep and cows, colts, lambs, calves.
After a while Harry whined, “Why are we going out there in the rain? We could be home drinking cocoa.”
“Oh, don’t be a poop,” said Isa.
“But this is dangerous to be driving around in the rain, with alcoholics driving around so fastly in their cars.”
“Why are you such an old worrywart?” Isa demanded.
The weather grew worse. When they got out of the car at the park, the children shielded their faces as they raced ahead toward their tree. Isa was walking tentatively, and Mattie spotted her as if she were on a balance beam.
“You okay, Mom?”
Isa nodded.
Harry and Ella burst into the opening of a tree, the same one that Mattie and Al had burst into when they were little, and Isa and Mattie followed. The tree was called a family-circle redwood, a great mother tree with several trunks around her, grown into her, and a tepee-shaped space inside. Half of the mother trunk was charred, perhaps from a lightning strike, and smelled like campfire; the unburnt parts were russet.
Mattie spread an oilcloth on the ground, deep wine-red against the duff, and they all sat down with their backs against the trunk. She poured paper cups of cocoa from a thermos. When the children had finished drinking, they asked to go outside. Mattie sat close to her mother, picking out her faint almond scent amid the smell of trees and burnt wood.
Inside the tree were slits and clefts and openings to another world within. The bark above them was more male, testicular, as Mattie pointed out to Isa. They laughed.
“Speaking of which, how are things with Lewis?” Mattie asked.
Isa yelped with indignation. “You get your head out of the gutter,” she cried, hitting Mattie on the shoulder with an imaginary purse, blushing but pleased.
The hollow rose high inside the tree. Much had burned away, but more was left than had been taken, so the tree had kept growing.
• • •
Mattie went to bed again with Nicky in June, two weeks before the wedding. This was a new low. She prayed to God to help her say no when Nicky called, asked for the strength to call him back and cancel. But she didn’t cancel, and he came. Maybe the reasons she so wanted to stop sleeping with him—the secrecy, the sinfulness, the disgust—were also the things that pulled her into bed with him. Sleeping with Nicky helped kill the desire, for weeks at a time, to get back together with him. But there was a sweetness this time too, a quiet familiarity. Their bodies still fit so wonderfully in motion, like hands rubbing lotion into each other.
“It’s hard to imagine giving this up,” Nicky said. “I suppose we ought to, though.”
“Yes, of course,” she replied. “It’s not good for the kids, and the baby you’re going to have. Or Lee. Or us. But other than that . . .”
They were quiet awhile. “Remember when we were in Idaho, when you were pregnant with Harry?” Nicky asked. She nodded in the dark. She remembered the scent of the lodgepole pines, and the river at night where the salmon were spawning. How they thrashed and splashed, like sharks in the starlight. “Then a few weeks after we got home, Harry was born. That was when life really began for me.” She started to cry. He could not stay long enough to console her.
After Nicky left, she put on her robe and went out to stand in the drizzle. It was cold but the water felt good, like punctuation. The rain got inside her robe, and she walked around the garden feeling wet and silvery.
• • •
In the morning, while she made breakfast, the children s
tood at the window in the kitchen, hypnotized by the drops of rain on the glass. Ella’s white-blond hair, mussed with sleep, was the brightest thing in the room. Harry, with his brown skin and dark hedgehog brush cut, glowed like wood. Mattie stood next to them while the eggs fried, watching the rain on the window. It was like watching ants march in a line to their colony, from many into one. The kids tracked drops that threaded their way down the glass, and Harry, endlessly competitive, cheered on rivals in a horse race of water beads, shoving Ella when she tapped on the window and interfered with one drop’s natural course. “People don’t shove people, Harry,” she cried.
Mattie went back to the stove to flip the eggs. Harry, now drawing faces on the steamy glass, said, “Mom? How will you and Daddy get back together if he marries Lee?”
Her heart sank.
“Daddy and I aren’t going to get back together. We are never going to be married again. Lee is going to be your stepmother.”
“Should we call her Mom too?”
Mattie spun around and jabbed at the air with her spatula. “Don’t you dare.”
Harry considered her. Then his face darkened. “So will Lee die at the same time as me and Ella? Or just you?”
“What?”
“Won’t you and I die at the exact same time?” he asked in rising panic.
Mattie placed food on the table. “No, honey. Where did you hear that?”
“From Stefan. He and his mom are dying at the exact same second.”
“No, they’re not, darling. And besides, I’m thirty years older than you. So you and Ella—and Stefan—will probably live much longer.”
Harry gaped at her. He pushed his eggs away. Then he covered his face with his hands and began to sob, which got Ella started too. “If I had known that,” he cried, running back to the window, “I would never have agreed to be born.”
• • •
The sun returned and poured through the kitchen and bedroom windows, but the living room remained dreary, because it had only one window. Mattie wanted to install a bigger window, but she had no money, and the windows Daniel inherited at work sites were single-paned, like the one in the already drafty living room.
Then Pauline called one day to say she’d had a brainstorm. “Let’s find a mirror to put above the fireplace.”
“There are already too many mirrors in this house. Anyway, I need a real window in the living room, not a mirror.” Mattie was suspicious of Pauline’s kindness. “I want to look at myself less, not more. Plus, they must be very expensive.”
“First of all, mirrors are a kind of window,” Pauline said. “They bring light and the outside world to a wall that doesn’t have an opening in it. They can be an opening of light. You don’t have one in the living room. And you can buy a fancy, beautiful one at a junk shop.”
So Mattie went to a used-furniture store with the bedside tables she had bought with Nicky, and traded them for a big mirror with a white ropy wooden frame around it. And it did let in the world, the garden and the sky, it did let in the light, and the darkness. The only thing Mattie didn’t like about it was having to see her own tired reflection, the tinsel of gray in her hair.
• • •
When Nicky came by to pick up the children on the afternoon before his wedding, Mattie tried to act both as harried and as nonchalant as she could. She was wearing a sleeveless blouse that she’d meant to change, as she was sweaty from cleaning. She raced about, getting Ella ready. Lee had picked out the children’s wedding finery. Mattie could not remember having felt so phony and smiley, so unfine, in her entire life. She was with Ella in her bedroom when the doorbell rang. “Oh, there’s your daddy now,” Mattie said, and Ella clung to her. They walked to the kitchen and Mattie called for Harry, but he did not come, and when they opened the door, they found Nicky there looking chagrined.
“Hey,” he said to Mattie. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” she replied, with enormous hostility.
He reached for Ella, who stuck to Mattie like a bandage.
“Come on in,” Mattie told him. “We’re not quite together yet.” She handed him the children’s overnight bag, and sat at the table with Ella.
“Where’s Harry?”
“I don’t know. He’s here somewhere.” Ella put her thumb in her mouth and sucked, and Mattie nuzzled her hair. Ella ducked her head.
“Honey, don’t suck your thumb,” Nicky wheedled, and Mattie glowered at him. He winced, and got up to look for Harry.
Mattie looked fondly at the expanse of chubby belly between Ella’s pants and her T-shirt. After a moment Ella peered down too, as if over the side of a low bridge. She slowly inserted her thumb in her belly button and pushed it in, making contact after a moment with something deep inside. “My belly,” she whispered to Mattie.
“Yes.”
Ella pushed her thumb deeper into her belly button. Her gaze lost focus and she began to relax in Mattie’s arms. Nicky, looking grim, appeared in the doorway to say he couldn’t find Harry. Mattie went to search, and found him in a corner of the laundry room, holding Marjorie tightly.
When Nicky and the children finally left, Mattie went to cry in the bathroom. She cried so hard that she threw up. Then she sat on the couch in the dark living room and cried even more. The three cats gathered around her like physicians, and Marjorie crawled onto her lap. In the dark, the new mirror looked like an underground tunnel.
After a few hours she went to get the little blue shoe, which was now in an empty sugar bowl on the kitchen table. She took out an album of family photographs and looked at pictures of her father—as a young groom, and then with baby Al in his arms; on the porch at Neil Grann’s with his arm around Yvonne, Neil’s girlfriend; with Mattie on his shoulders, him holding on tight to her skinny ankles. She checked the messages on her answering machine. Angela had called twice, and Isa had called to invite her to a Meg Ryan movie—leave it to Isa to have the world’s worst solutions for grief. Al had called to say he and Katherine would come over if Mattie just gave the word. Mattie did not feel like being around a couple. Daniel had called to say that he and Pauline were going to the ballet and sent their love, and Harry had left a message, in a tiny voice, that he wanted to ask her a question about the sky. Mattie really listened, as if he were there: “When does what you smell become the sky? When is it not just the air right around you? Like when would the smell of grass that was coming up from the dirt be the bottom of the sky?”
• • •
Daniel and Pauline took her to the movies the next day. Nicky and Lee would be at City Hall about then. Mattie sat in the aisle seat with Daniel beside her. Pauline handed her some Kleenex across Daniel’s lap. Mattie felt better when the movie was over, because that meant the wedding was over too. Pauline invited her for dinner, but she wanted to be alone, with her pets, and maybe a small cheese pizza. In a perfect world, she would have had Daniel over alone. It was not a perfect world. She ate pizza, drank beer, took a Valium, and read herself to sleep.
• • •
Al called the next day and announced, “I think we’re going to have to put Mom in a loony bin.”
“Okay,” Mattie said.
There was silence. “You’re supposed to ask why.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Why do we have to put Mom in the bin?”
“Because she has ten bags of cat food in the cabinet next to the stove, all opened, none of them even half empty. And she has three bowls of kibble on a placemat, all the same brand and flavor, for the one cat.”
“I’ve noticed that, but it’s not so bad. It’s not like sleepwalking to Safeway.”
“I don’t think she should be driving. I mean, do you let an old person drive until they kill somebody, or crash into a parked car?”
“I don’t know. I don’t actually have an owner’s manual for Isa.”
• • •
When Nicky dropped the children off that night, he poked his head in long enough to say that everything had gone fine. Th
e children ran into her arms. Harry smelled as sweet and pungent as sawdust, Ella as deliciously odd as puppy breath. The touch of their skin, the smells, made her whole again, like an animal lost in the wilds that finds its mother.
She looked up to see Nicky watching them, and she tried to appear elegant and maternal and spiritual, but inside she thought, Nyaah-nyaah, our children don’t do this with you!
• • •
Soon after the wedding, she decided to remodel her bedroom. It was dark and ugly, with walnut paneling from the fifties. Daniel and Pauline’s bedroom looked like a solarium for honeymooners, cozy and sweet and filled with light and a nice view. She asked Daniel if he’d help her.
“Yeah! Let’s tear down that horrible paneling. And maybe put in more windows. I’d love to, it would be fun. A great project.”
He asked her if the walls had insulation; she didn’t know. “Let’s take off one or two panels and see,” he suggested, but she didn’t want to do it; she was afraid of what might be underneath.
“How bad could it be?” Daniel asked blithely. “No offense to your father—this paneling was a popular look from the pages of Argosy at that time. We had it too. It was just as ugly at our house, with everything but antlers and a mounted moose head.”