by Anne Lamott
When they dropped Lewis off at The Sequoias, Mattie said, “I wonder where Mom is. Her car’s gone.”
“Probably at the store,” said Lewis. “She shops for us on Sunday.”
“Tell her to call me when she gets back, will you?”
Lewis doffed his bowler in reply.
Isa didn’t get home that day. Instead she called in a rage from a police station, where she was being held. “Jesus Christ!” she fumed. “They wouldn’t have brought me in if I were younger. This is ageism! Call the ACLU. Call AARP.”
“Mom! What happened?”
It all tumbled out too fast. “What happened was, goddamn Caltrans had their machinery parked illegally by the side of the road. And I veered to the right because someone was making an unsafe lane change, and it startled me, I suppose, and I pulled over to the right and the next thing I knew, there’s a crashing smashing ripping sound, and it’s their goddamn machinery gouging my passenger door like a can opener.”
“You drove up on the shoulder of the highway?”
“I told you. I pulled over because another person was making a lane change, and Caltrans had abandoned some machinery there. . . .”
“Excuse me, ma’am.” Mattie heard a male voice. “You cannot tie up the phone. Do you or don’t you want me to talk to your daughter?”
“I want you to leave me the hell alone, young man.”
“I’m afraid I’m going to have to insist on having the phone.”
“What are you, the Gestapo?”
After a few more words were exchanged, a man came on and introduced himself as the arresting officer.
“The what?” said Mattie.
“Your mother hit some Caltrans machinery that was parked on the shoulder near the Strawberry exit, machinery that was clearly marked with a flashing sign. And then she kept driving.”
“Mein Kommandant!” Isa called out in the background.
“Your mother destroyed the sign, and her car door.”
“Ja, ja ja,” Isa shouted.
• • •
Mattie went with Al to pick up Isa at the police station. She was pale and fluttery, clearly unnerved, and the officer behind the front desk glared at all of them as they passed by. Mattie and Al had already examined the passenger door of her VW in the parking lot on their way in: it was crumpled and torn. “We’re sorry,” Al told the officer in his most placating voice. The man threw his hands up and wouldn’t speak to them. Al drove Isa’s car to Mattie’s, the door secured with a bungee cord.
Mattie took Isa to see the doctor. When Dr. Brodkey asked Isa to describe the accident, Isa looked at Mattie with pleading eyes, like someone who did not speak the language.
“Well, my God, it was absolutely reckless endangerment,” she cried. “I intend to sue for damages.”
“Mom, why didn’t you just stop? Why did you keep going? That’s where the trouble came from.”
“Caltrans left machinery on the road!”
“On the shoulder of the road!” Mattie said.
“Shhhh,” Dr. Brodkey soothed. “Mattie’s concerned, Isa. To tell you the truth, I’m concerned too. I’m hearing a faint murmur I’ve never noticed before.” She tilted her head to listen again. “I’m going to schedule an echocardiogram. Otherwise, you seem fine. You can get dressed now.”
Mattie and her mother did not look at each other after the doctor left. Isa gazed around the room in slow motion, as if toward a mysterious sound. When Mattie approached with her camisole, Isa squinted as if Mattie were far away, or in bright light or shadow.
“Stay with us tonight,” said Mattie. “So I can keep an eye on you.”
“Oh, great,” Isa replied. “Just what I always wanted.”
• • •
A week later Mattie and Lewis took Isa in for her echocardiogram. In the waiting room Lewis kept them all talking, distracted and connected. Mattie smiled at the clarity of his gaze that saw so little, the spray of small moles on his cheekbones, the crosshatching of his brow. He sat upright like a rock, the essence of a benevolent old man, not truculent or ashamed like so many old white men she’d known. When it was time for the test, Isa gripped Mattie’s hand so tightly as they walked that Mattie’s fingertips turned purple; still Mattie let her hold on. The technician, a woman, sat in front of a bank of machines and instructed Isa to take off her sweater and bra, then hop up on the table.
Mattie took her mother’s purse and turned to help her out of her clothes. Isa lifted her arms like a child, and Mattie pulled the sweater over her head. Isa had a slightly sour smell. And she had on the same camisole that she’d worn the week before. It was soiled, as though she’d been using it as an apron.
The sight of her mother’s body still shocked Mattie whenever she saw it, the withered breasts otherwise so like her own, moles everywhere, bad-looking ones on her back, along her bra line.
Mattie helped Isa onto the table, where she stretched on her back and stared like a corpse at the ceiling.
“Okay, darling, now lie on your side,” said the technician, and the kindness in her voice shamed Mattie.
• • •
Watching Isa’s heart was like watching the sonogram of Harry when he was still inside, a baby floating in sepia-colored clouds in a fan-shaped frame. Isa’s heart valves opened and shut like the mouth of a baby bird, a gaping beak opening and closing. Isa lay stiffly on her side, as if it hurt when the technician moved the apparatus around on her chest.
“You okay, Mom?”
Isa nodded, staring straight ahead. Mattie took her hand, and again Isa held it tight. On the screen, the light wavered like sun filtering down through the surface of a pool. Mattie thought: My mother’s heart!
“Am I okay?” Isa asked.
“I’m just taking movies for the doctor,” said the technician.
“But do you see anything wrong?”
“You have to talk to your doctor. This is what all hearts look like, darling. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
“What a trip,” Mattie said. The technician nodded.
“I’m lighting it so we can see the direction of the blood flow.” On the screen were flashes of fire, explosions, patches of cool blue ice.
“It looks like aerial spy photography now,” Mattie told her mother. “And now it looks like the surface of Mars!”
“But does it look like everything is okay?” Isa asked again.
“Yes, Mom. To me it does. It looks like everything’s fine.”
And everything was fine, at least with her heart. The doctor left a message on both their answering machines. On Isa’s she said that the results of the echocardiogram were terrific, no abnormalities, she must have been hearing things when she thought she heard a murmur, all the walking over the years and watching her diet that Isa had done had paid off. On Mattie’s she said this also. But she added that she was concerned about something else.
“I can’t quite put my finger on it,” Dr. Brodkey said. “I know that when I saw her, she was shaken by the accident, and yet she still didn’t seem like her old self. I sense there’s something going on in there, and I’m going to order a few tests. I’ll tell her they’re all routine.”
• • •
Al came for dinner that night. Isa made a halfhearted effort to join in the dinner-table conversation, chastised Harry to sit up straight, cut Ella’s chicken off the bone for her, and then absentmindedly began eating off her plate. Ella watched anxiously as the food disappeared. “Thank you, Mom,” Mattie said enthusiastically, moving the plate back onto Ella’s placemat, and Isa slowly looked around for her own, which was right in front of her. “Mattie?” she said in a small voice. “I think I’m ready for bed.”
Mattie helped her out of her chair. Everyone said good night, and she took Mattie’s arm to steady herself. Mattie put her to bed in her own bedroom, after helping her into a nightie, which hung on Isa. Mattie sat beside her on the bed, rubbing her back and shoulder blades as she did Harry’s and Ella’s, until Isa dr
ifted off; Mattie would make up the sofa bed in the living room for herself.
Al, meanwhile, tried to get the children into a bubble bath but they raced away. Finally he caught Ella and carried her like a rolled-up rug under his arms. “People don’t carry people, Al,” she cried, but he paid her no attention. Harry got Al to put her down and chase him, by calling him a doo-doo butthead. Mattie scooped Ella up and buried her nose in her daughter’s neck. She smelled like a flower bed, dirt and petals.
When everyone else was asleep, Mattie and Al sat with Marjorie in the yard, a clear, starry sky overhead. Through the thick lower branches of the towering redwood tree, she saw a star flicker, a light as sharp and bright as a diamond. She pointed it out to her brother. How could that be? The branches were so dense, and yet a glittering pinprick of light had shone through, like a tiny ornament on the inner branches of the tree.
four
Lee and Nicky had their baby in early July, a big, blond, hunky, chunky boy, named Alexander. Mattie came outside in the postapocalyptic heat to admire him in his infant car seat not long after his birth, one day when Nicky came to pick up the children. This was the most divorced Mattie had ever felt. After he drove off with his three children, she lumbered back inside, hearing the sucking sound of her thighs. She spent the morning cleaning the house like a domestic robot, and the afternoon shopping. She bought several new lipsticks, skin cream that cost what she spent on food every week, art supplies for the children, saltwater sandals for Ella, new luggage for traveling nowhere in particular, and a two-pound box of Godiva truffles.
It was too hot. The days were endless and too bright and there was nowhere to hide until it got dark, and the dark was too short. Mattie felt as if she were in a torture chamber with her eyes taped open.
In the following weeks, Nicky glowed with an inner light, an angel revealing himself to unbelievers. Mattie tried to think spiritual thoughts, but instead found herself fantasizing about dashing Drano into his face. She had all the symptoms of meningitis, and then her hip went out. She limped around like Walter Brennan. Angela tried to convince her that this was a blessing; she had no choice but to move really consciously, so each step had meaning. Secretly, though, Mattie believed she was dying. Harry began having nightmares, crying out in the night for Mattie to come to him, or silently climbing into her bed. She did her best to comfort him. Who was supposed to comfort her? He kicked all night. Ella developed a new habit, nuzzling a sore she had caused on her wrist by chewing on herself, holding her wrist as if it were sprained, and nibbling at the skin. Mattie worried about the sore, and about appearances—what would other mothers think? That her daughter was cannibalizing herself? She tried to move her daughter’s wrists away from those small, perfect white teeth, but Ella always resumed with a look of satisfaction: I can do something for me that you can’t do. There must have been comfort in the pain, and in the stopping of the pain—a circuit: she got to cause the tingle, and she got to release it.
Earlier in the summer, Isa had fainted near the mailboxes at The Sequoias, but she had come to quickly. At first Dr. Brodkey thought Isa had suffered a minor stroke, but she decided to wait until the problem presented itself again. She put Isa on vitamins, and Isa improved. When Mattie picked Lewis up for church on Sundays now, he stressed how much Isa had done that week, how far she was walking, as if without these assurances Mattie might pop her into a home.
Then Marjorie began to decline, retiring to the dark, cool space beneath Mattie’s bed.
Mattie lost ten pounds in the months after Alexander was born, and looked both chic and gaunt. When she went in for a fitting at Sears, it turned out she was no longer a perfect size 12. Sears had no choice but to let someone else fill in until Mattie gained the weight back. The fittings manager, a perfect size 18, obviously felt terrible as she delivered the news. But Mattie was euphoric. She almost quit forever right then. She felt a wholeness in being thin, pride in firmer thighs and an orphan’s face. Anyone would want to comfort her, encourage and feed her—not that she would eat someone’s vile food. Yet she worried about how she would pay the bills. She bought a coffee milk shake on the way home, and one the next day too. A month later she was able to work again.
For a number of weeks, she and Nicky did not sleep together. It was too hot and the days were longer than necessary. Summer meant too much sunlight and not enough moon, but the break from Nicky brought relief to her mind, and it settled, like a pond. The children improved. Harry slept in his own bed again, and Ella stopped eating her wrist. Then in August, Daniel and Pauline flew off to Florida to visit her parents, and Lee drove baby Alexander to Carmel to see her parents and sister for the weekend. That night Nicky called after the children were asleep. Mattie told him about Marjorie, and they cried together on the phone. The next thing she knew, he was in her living room stroking Marjorie. A stiff scotch later he was stroking Mattie.
She was hungover in the morning. She felt caught in a permanent moment of separation, the letdown of having had sex with someone she no longer loved; of having had sex to get further away. She tried to pray and feel genuine contrition but could not, and she told Jesus, I have to trust that you still like me this morning. You said you would never leave me, and I am holding you to your word. She made the children blueberry pancakes. Harry was sleepy, cross, and disorganized as usual, Ella rather dopey. Mattie missed Daniel and wondered if he missed her. She imagined Pauline at the Florida shore, in a bikini, flaunting that big lasagna ass, saying poetic things to Daniel about the surf.
• • •
When Daniel and Pauline returned from Florida, Mattie invited them out to Samuel P. Taylor Park. But Pauline wanted to stay home and putter. “You have him today,” she said to Mattie, as if they were Mormon wives.
Mattie and Daniel sat alone inside the circle of tree. “The wood in here is the color of a hawk,” he said quietly.
Mattie watched spiders and bugs. “It reminds me of organ music,” she said. “It’s pulsing, and deep and swelling and rhythmic.”
Daniel closed his eyes. “You’re right. It’s like sitting in a big organ pipe.”
They sorted the earth through their fingers like children, the dirt and the feathery needles, leaves, bony twigs, soft heathery moss, bits and bones and stones. Their knees touched once but mostly they kept them in. Mattie tucked herself into a corner. It hid her, although it filled her with vigor too. “This is a space out of the world,” Daniel said. Mattie moved her hand in a circular motion over the bark. The wood beneath her palm had been burned. It was soft and almost furry, like a horse’s neck and flanks.
• • •
That week Harry’s nightmares began again and he returned to her bed. She hated to admit it, but she enjoyed the company. The cats woke up when Harry came in. When he slept, the two younger cats leapt on his feet if he tossed, and the old cat, who slept near the pillows, washed his face and eyes at his slightest movement.
Ella was working her sores once more, nuzzling and nibbling the red abraded spots, like someone discovering fire and then trying to keep it alive. One spot was on her left wrist, where she would wear a watch one day. She looked at the wrist with constant longing, as if to see what time it was, to see whether it was time to eat her arm again.
One morning Mattie found bloody dog stools on the living room floor. The vet said it was just a matter of time. How could the end of the world be just a matter of time? The children cried off and on, and lay with Marjorie beneath Mattie’s bed.
There was no time that summer for Mattie or Al to pursue the trail of the paint-can key, or the little blue shoe. Al wanted to, but Mattie no longer felt sure they had even belonged to Alfred. The kids were with her more since the baby had been born, at least every other weekend, and Isa called too often—sometimes seven or eight times in a day. She usually got the answering machine and left increasingly hostile messages, as if Mattie were there but avoiding her. Mattie made the rounds, taking the children to their stations—friends’ houses, parks,
movies, swimming pools—trying on clothes at Sears when there was work, shopping for Isa and Lewis, helping Pauline and Daniel make or deliver sandwiches, and she returned home to listen to the record of her mother’s disapproval. Isa needed rides now everywhere too, as her doctor had finally persuaded her to stop driving, and Lewis needed the rides that Isa could no longer offer. Mattie felt she had two more children, big, slow, old children. At one point Isa grew muzzy and dazed again, and Mattie took her to the doctor’s. After a thorough going-over, the doctor administered a test, called a mini-mental, to check for dementia. Isa counted back by sevens from one hundred, and repeated a string of words that the doctor recited at the beginning of the test: “Red, wheel, rose, Colorado.” She aced the test, and looked over at Mattie as if she might stick her tongue out: Told you so.
Isa called Mattie the next morning to say, “Red, wheel, rose, Colorado.” Mattie laughed and shook her head.
Nicky gained weight along with the baby. It was the first time Mattie had seen him chubby, and it made her happy to know that he hated his new soft belly and fat cheeks. There was no time for him to go to the gym anymore. There were only slow hikes on the weekends, with Alexander in a Snugli, Harry and Ella walking alongside in expensive hiking boots. Afterward Harry did impersonations for Mattie of Nicky on these hikes—wide-eyed and jovial and pretentious: “Oh, Zander, look at the birdie! That’s a little flycatcher. See the yellowthroat? Hi, birdie! Can you wave, Zander? Want to know what its eggs look like? Oh, where’s the birdie going? Oh, don’t cry, honey—Mean birdie! Don’t cry, honey.” Mattie would laugh at Harry’s renditions, but she also remembered their own walks three years earlier, Harry trotting along beside Nicky with Ella in the baby-pack, learning about the dotted blue-gray eggs of cedar waxwings.
Harry’s posture was terrible. It had worsened since Mattie and Nicky had separated, but she did not nag him about it. Harry had enough to deal with. He could be funny and sweet, but then he would make Ella cry with whispered songs about worms and graves. He grabbed colored pencils out of her hands, punched her arms when she wouldn’t obey him. And sometimes he was such a whiner. Where had Mattie gone wrong? His friends’ mothers said he was the most polite child they knew—Mattie believed that good manners covered a multitude of sins—but at home he hurt Ella and some days what came out of his mouth were only complaints: “I hate this cereal, you knew that.” “You look stupid in that shirt, like a hippie.” “You read this book all wrong, Daddy reads it funnier.”