by Anne Lamott
“Okay,” she said. Daniel took a chisel from her tool box and pried off a board. Underneath was the absence not just of insulation, but of anything. There was only framing. “Oops,” said Daniel. “They forgot to put up walls.”
Mattie examined the void between the two-by-fours. “What can we do?”
“We need to put in some insulation, some drywall, then prime it, and paint. And then this room will be bright and warm.”
That night she asked her mother for the money, and called Daniel with the good news, but got Pauline instead. They talked and then she asked to speak to Daniel. He wasn’t home. “He’s delivering sandwiches,” Pauline said. “Can I give him a message?”
“Tell him I have the Sheetrock money. And Saturday would be great.”
After a pause, Pauline said, “Saturday’s not going to work for us.” Mattie felt a flicker of anxiety. “I got tickets for Mark Morris, and I’m hoping to spend the day in the city with Daniel. That is, if you can spare him.” Mattie held her breath. The kitchen grew silent except for the buzz of a light. “Can’t you do it Sunday?”
“No, we’ve got church.”
“I don’t think Daniel will be at church. We’ll be in the city overnight.”
Mattie stammered. She had been put back in her place. But as it turned out, Daniel did want to work the next weekend.
“I don’t want to see Mark Morris,” he said to Mattie later over the phone. “I already told Pauline that. We just had a terrible fight about it, and she left. I couldn’t have been clearer—I told her I’d go with her, but not for the whole day, and not overnight—but she made plans for us to stay with a friend of hers who I hate, and I’m not going. I want to spend the day working on your house. And I want to go to church on Sunday.”
Mattie thought about calling Pauline to straighten things out. Instead she called Angela, who advised her to keep her nose out of it. “This is really none of your business,” she said. Mattie waited to see how things worked out, and on Friday, Daniel called saying he would be there first thing in the morning.
“Is Pauline still mad?” Mattie asked.
“Oh, yeah. Big-time.” Daniel cleared his throat. A bracing warmth flushed through Mattie, like the first sip of a martini.
• • •
Pauline went to the city by herself, and Daniel came over in a subdued and distracted mood. He and Mattie took up all the walnut paneling and piled it into his truck. They hauled it to the dump in San Rafael, ate hamburgers at Wendy’s, and went to the hardware store in town. They bought a roll of insulation, and Sheetrock, then worked through the afternoon. By nightfall, they had half of the insulation stapled up.
“I should’ve gone with Pauline,” Daniel said when they were finished. “I should’ve arranged to meet her in the city. And gone to see Mark Morris with her. I don’t even know if she’ll come back in the morning now. Once when she got mad, she stayed away for days.”
“Where did she stay?” Mattie asked.
“I don’t know. But I felt sick the whole time she was gone.”
His color was terrible, as if he had a stomachache. Mattie felt better than she had in quite a while. Today was the tomorrow she’d been worrying about before Nicky’s wedding, but now, thanks partly to Daniel, she was okay. She went and got the blue shoe from the kitchen, and pressed it into Daniel’s hand. “Here,” she said. “Hold on to this. You need it more than I do.”
He looked at it. “Wow.” He closed his long fingers around it and jammed his hand into his pants pocket.
Daniel couldn’t go to church the next morning. Mattie was surprised by how disappointed she was. She had picked up Lewis, and they drove together. At church they sat near the choir, to be enveloped by all that singing. Mattie battled against a rubbery, numb sensation when she thought about Daniel rushing after Pauline, and she got a little sick when she thought of Nicky’s joy in Lee’s pregnancy. But this is where I am, Lord, she prayed, this is how it is with me right now. She felt her own brokenness deeply, a longing to come clean and be helped, a signal going out from her. Yet she also found herself wishing she hadn’t given Daniel the blue shoe. Having the shoe meant that he would come through; he and Pauline would make up. Mattie realized, with a start, that she didn’t want them to make up. When she got home, she found a message from Daniel on the answering machine: he had gone to the city and would be back the next day to finish the job.
He couldn’t come the next day, though, or the next, and on Wednesday she had a fitting gig with Sears. This was fine with her; she was still a perfect size 12, her one claim to fame, and she liked being needed, by grown-ups, at least for the moment, at least by Sears.
Daniel came over on Thursday. They finished stapling the insulation and began hammering the Sheetrock, but they didn’t talk much. He had another job on Friday, so they finished on Saturday. He showed her how to smear the Sheetrock with something he called mud.
And then he gave her a report about the previous Saturday night. He had gone to the city that night, to the Marines Memorial Theatre, dressed in his best clothes, and waited outside to spot Pauline and her friends. He’d bought a scalped ticket for one hundred dollars, which she ended up being mad about, because she’d given his ticket away and now they were out a hundred dollars and didn’t even get to watch the performance together. He stayed overnight with her at her friend Adrienne’s, the one he hated, and Pauline had forgiven him. Mattie said how glad she was.
On Monday, Mattie and Daniel painted the walls and ceiling Navajo white. What had been a cold, dark, blotchy room was now warm and full of light. Mattie felt as if a big cleansing wind had swept through both the room and her soul, blowing the ghosts of her parents away.
• • •
A few days later, Al came over and stretched out on the couch to relax. Within five minutes, he was reading the kids a book one of them had thrust at him. He was like a jukebox: Harry or Ella made a selection and then nudged the machine to get it to play the song. Each time he finished a book, Al made a great show of exhaustion, crying out, “That’s it! No more.” The children would titter and glance at each other, and run off to find another book.
Al escaped, for a moment, to the kitchen. Mattie was cutting paper-thin slices of Parmesan, laying each slice on a piece of buttered sourdough baguette. He picked one up and dispatched it in a bite. “Hmmph,” she said, and continued slicing. He picked up another and ate it too. “Al!” she cried.
“I’m as hungry as a dog.” Hearing the word dog, Marjorie clicked into the kitchen, and Al fed her a few chunks of bread.
“How come Katherine gets so mad at me?” Al asked. “At cute old me?”
“Maybe because you don’t want to have babies with her.”
“I don’t want to have babies with anyone. I have Harry and Ella already.”
“And she wants her own.”
“But I was such an unhappy kid,” Al said. “How many other people do you know who had therapists back then when we were kids? None. You had to be really far gone. And I was. I was blowing things up at, like, eight. Me and my friends stole purses from old ladies. We stole beer from the Corner Market when we were ten. I had huge problems at school. And Daddy still didn’t want to spend money on a therapist, till I started with this hand-washing thing. That got his attention.”
“Why do you think you were so unhappy?”
“Why do you think you were?”
Mattie thought about this. “Because I was raised by screwed-up, unhappy people in a bad marriage. Daddy had some kind of secret life, in Washington, and Mom was sort of—what’s the word?—pathological.”
Al lifted the lid off the Wedgwood sugar bowl and looked in. He took out the paint-can key and began to clean his nails with it.
“Don’t do that, Al. You’ll chip the paint off.”
“Mattie!”
“I just want to keep it the way it was when we got it. Like evidence.”
Al laughed. “Evidence of what? There’s a room painted blue som
ewhere. Or not. So what?”
He walked the saltshaker over to the paint-can key, and smashed it into the key, grimly, like the boy he had been once, when he’d pushed little toy metal cars and plastic army men around this same table. He looked up at her now with such affection that she blushed. He stood beside her while she diced an apple, and tugged her braid. “Toot-toot,” he said.
• • •
Pauline came along with Daniel one afternoon, bringing a gift—a bread machine. Mattie saw it as a peace offering: they had not spoken since the Mark Morris weekend. The bread machine was the same kind Pauline used. She had kept it in her garage for a while and thought Mattie might like it. Mattie gushed over it, even though she did not want a bread machine. She was so tired as it was all the time; when would she bake bread? But Pauline wanted her to have it, and Mattie wanted to get back on good terms with her. She could always put it in the garage next to Isa’s ice cream machine. They could be roommates.
“This is great,” Mattie assured Pauline, who looked quite pleased with herself.
“The smell of dough makes you proud to be an animal,” Pauline said. “An animal that sniffs things and gives off smells, salty or sweet or yeasty.” Mattie nodded. It was actually true.
After Pauline and Daniel left, Mattie found three aprons and she and the children began to make their first loaf. Harry measured flour, Ella measured salt.
“When I was a child, Isa made bread all the time, white bread, can you imagine? This was before she became a health food nut. White bread, black bread, Danish pastry for your uncle Al.” She remembered Isa kneading dough, like a masseuse, wiping at her damp furrowed brow with the back of her sleeve, punching the dough down—Whap! Take that! And so, wafting through the tension in the house, a house full of books, the best hi-fi equipment, great jazz albums, fine food and expensive booze, were comforting smells from a world of gingham aprons.
• • •
Isa called and Mattie told her to stop by. When she arrived, the children jumped up and down and screamed, and dragged their grandmother to the kitchen to see the great new machine and the rising dough. Isa made a great fuss over it while they were within earshot. But when they left the room, she made a face of disapproval.
“What?” Mattie asked.
“A bread-making machine? Why on earth would you need a machine to make bread? Isn’t that the whole point? The mixing and the kneading and the slapping and the shaping?”
“Yeah, you’re right. But Pauline really wants us to have it, and you saw how happy it makes the kids.” Mattie rolled her eyes. “Let’s have a drink.”
“It’s going to end up in the garage with the ice cream maker,” Isa predicted. Mattie smiled, and made old-fashioneds for them both. Isa looked worn. Even the bright African fabric of her pants and tunic couldn’t disguise how dull and perplexed she seemed. The tan foundation on her face ended in pasty dewlaps, and she’d taken to painting eyeliner on her lower lid, so that her eyes would show up within all those folds.
“Are you okay?” Mattie asked, and Isa said, yeah, sure, maybe a little tired. She launched into stories about the losers at The Sequoias, the space cadets, the terminally ill, and the nuts on the third floor, as if to demonstrate that she was as sharp as ever. There was a floor where the nuttier people lived, Isa insisted. They were slackers, complainers, troublemakers. They’d gotten Revi, her favorite housecleaner, fired. Mattie listened. Listening was love, somebody had once said. Her mother was all too much, too many words, too much makeup, too much frenzy. But when Isa brought out a folded-up copy of a letter she’d written to The Sequoias’s director, protesting Revi’s firing, asserting that it was outrageous and possibly racist, that neither she nor any of the other residents would rest until justice was served, Mattie felt a rush of love for her mother. Isa had demanded that Revi be reinstated at his ten-dollar-an-hour job. How deeply she fought for underdogs. Her whole life she had shown up and protested, written letters, phoned in fresh troops, agitated for the rights of those who she felt had been treated poorly, who couldn’t speak up for themselves. There were framed photos all over the house of her parents in hard hats, with shovels, placards, paintbrushes.
But there was also such denseness and hostility in Isa, the need to manipulate and goad, the need for reassurances to which she would not admit, greediness, grabbiness, contempt. “Let’s have another old-fashioned,” Mattie said.
Isa cast a skeptical, prying eye at her. “Darling, do you drink more than you used to?”
“God, Mom! Of course not.”
“I worry. I have always worried, about you and Al, and maybe watched you a little carefully, because of your father’s binges.”
“Binges? You mean those weekends at Neil’s? Wine with dinner?” Mattie felt an uncomfortable stirring.
“I’m going to go,” Isa said, and she rose. “Talk to Al. He knows.”
“Daddy didn’t have binges, Mom. And Al would have told me.”
“Okay, fine.” Isa held up her hands: I come in peace. She smiled a self-satisfied smile.
• • •
Mattie went right to the phone. “Al. Maybe I’m going crazy. Mom was just here and she bombed me. She said to ask you about Daddy’s binges. That you’ve known all along.”
Al groaned. “That’s all such bullshit—so Isa. I mean, Alfred drank with his buddies on weekends. He had a cocktail with Mom every night. And wine with dinner.” He stopped talking. Mattie could hear the line buzz.
“Tell me what else you know.” She’d expected far more protest, a more reassuring set of memories. The long silence terrified her. “Say something! You’re scaring me.”
Al didn’t talk for a moment. “I don’t know much, Mattie. I did use to see him out in West Marin, when I was a teenager. I was out there a lot with my friends. And I’d see him with Yvonne, from time to time, but Neil wouldn’t be with them. I saw him once at the Bolinas Fourth of July parade, and he was pretty loaded, even though it was only nine in the morning.
“But everyone was getting high then, you know? Once I was in San Francisco on a Saturday, when Daddy was supposed to be away on one of his trips. I thought he was in Washington. Me and my friends were going to a tribal stomp in Golden Gate Park. We had to go down Lombard, because someone had a connection there for great acid. And I was sitting in the car with Matt Gold, while Jeanie went in to buy the acid, and I saw Daddy in the doorway of a pizza joint. I could tell he was trying to duck out of sight. But he pretended to be thrilled to see me.”
Mattie took this in. Did she want to know what came next? “Alone?”
“No.”
“Was he with a woman?”
“No, well, that was the thing—he was with Abby Grann. She was just a girl, around your age, right? They both looked upset, and then Daddy started waving at me. He asked where I was going, and I told him. I said, ‘I thought you were away on business,’ and he said that the flight had been canceled, he wasn’t leaving till that afternoon. And he’d happened just that moment to have run into Abby.
“I was so relieved not to get busted that I didn’t really think much about it then. He was definitely loaded that time. He asked if I needed some money, which I did. He gave me twenty bucks, and then put his arm around my shoulders. Then he said good-bye to Abby too, and walked away from us both.”
• • •
Mattie and the children put the risen dough in a bread pan and then into the bread machine. It sat on the kitchen counter, a squat robot. Ella closed the lid, Mattie plugged it in, Harry turned it on.
Almost immediately they heard a loud ticking. The bread machine sounded like it had a bomb inside. “What is it?” Harry cried out, his face red with worry and pain, while Ella moaned. Mattie turned off the machine, unplugged it, then reached her hand down through the dough to the blade and tightened it. She turned the machine back on and tiptoed away, but the ticking started again.
“I don’t think I can handle this,” Harry fumed, and he pushed Ella brusquely on h
is way out of the kitchen.
“People don’t do that to people, Harry,” Ella cried.
“You draw with your sister,” Mattie told him, and set the children up in the living room. She returned to tinker with the machine and finally figured out what was wrong: the bread pan was not pushed down onto the heating coils. She adjusted it, and soon the machine was making a low hum.
“Crisis averted,” she said to herself, and went into the living room. But minutes later there was a new noise, a thunk and rumble, like the sound of unbalanced laundry in the washer, followed by a crash.
Harry raced out of the living room. Mattie lifted Ella into her arms and ran for the kitchen too, where they found the bread machine lying on its side on the floor, the pan nearby, a round blob of dough like a rejected organ beside it. It looked as if the machine had committed suicide.
“Oh, God!” Harry looked at Mattie wide-eyed.
“What should I do?” she said.
“Maybe it’ll still work,” Harry said. Mattie put the machine back on the counter and tried to fit the lid on. The lid was bent, badly askew, and she loosened screws and tried to realign it. When she found she couldn’t, she closed the lid, and even though the machine still looked broken, she decided to try again.
Two hours later they had a perfect loaf of golden-brown bread. You could have put it on the cover of a magazine. God, it was amazing: you took a pile of flour, some water and sugar and salt and yeast, what looked like ash, and then not too much later, you had food for your family.
It turned out to be terrible-tasting, though, with a texture like sawdust. The children loved it anyway. They wanted slices one inch thick, slathered with butter and honey. They ate so much bread that night that Ella almost threw up and Harry passed out on the living room floor. But it was great to toast your own bread, even if it didn’t quite turn out: it was a little rough, but comforting, like a soft beard.
• • •
Daniel’s dreadlocks were nearly an inch long now, the light brown of his eyes. She sat with him and Lewis at church. Lewis had his black bowler, but during the service he held it in his lap. Mattie sneaked glances at the nappy dreads springing from Daniel’s head. Daniel smelled of beeswax candles.