by Anne Lamott
When Mattie talked to Daniel about this, he told her a joke to console her, about a new monk in a silent monastery, who was allowed to speak only two words every five years. The first time he came before the elders, he said, “Cold floors.” Five years later, permitted to speak again, he said, “Terrible food.” And five years later, “I quit.”
The elders looked at one another, and then turned to the monk with contempt. “I’m not surprised,” one said. “You haven’t done anything since you got here but complain.”
Harry’s body was filled with complaint too—rashes, diarrhea, and two cavities in his teeth, although he flossed and brushed every night. It was Angela who recommended counseling again. Mattie made an appointment for them to see her therapist.
But when the day came, Harry refused to go. He escaped Mattie’s grip, diving under her bed, where Marjorie lay sleeping. “We need to get you help for these nightmares,” Mattie said, peering in at her son and dog.
Harry looked at her. “You already know what it is,” he whispered.
Flooded with heat and too many heartbeats, she stared back.
“I heard Daddy be here that night. Another night, too. Why?”
A spinning wheel inside her tossed silken lies into the air. “Oh honey,” she said, “you’re right, your daddy was here, but he came to get some insurance papers, files, things he needed for his work that got mixed up in my stuff. I’ll show you the files, they’re in boxes on the top shelf of my closet. Come out, I’ll show you.” He did, and she pointed out boxes filled with shoes she no longer wore, high on the shelves of her closet, and he looked at them with relief.
• • •
Mattie went to see the therapist alone that morning, the last day of August. She told Dr. Nolan about sleeping with Nicky, and Harry’s nightmares, and then sat fidgeting miserably as if she’d been sent to the principal’s office. “I’m not here to absolve you,” Dr. Nolan said kindly. “That’s not my job. But I can tell you a couple of things. One is something we used to talk about a lot—that when you feel disgust for yourself, it keeps hope alive. It means that somehow your relationship with Nicky is still current, that your dad is still alive, giving that look of disgust to Isa. It’s home! Home is still intact. So that’s the vocabulary of being involved with him—disgust with yourself.”
“What do I do?”
“What if you put your children’s pain ahead of your own needs?”
After their session, Mattie sat on the front step of the therapist’s building, crying. The sun was a sheet-metal disk in the deep-blue sky. The lawns in the neighborhood were brown. She thought about driving out to the beach to walk in the surf. There might be fog at the beach. Fog was the moon’s cousin, like nurses with cool compresses for her temples, and she drove out to Point Reyes, and there was fog, and it was good.
A few days later she went to talk to her pastor, to confess that until recently she had been an adulterer, who slept with her ex-husband, lied to her children, mocked her mother. She wanted to start over, she cried.
He listened kindly. He must have been about her age, but seemed older, wore horn-rimmed glasses and lace-up Hush Puppies, geeky, wise, and sweet. “That’s wonderful, then. Your new twenty-four hours starts whenever you decide it does. I’ll tell you what’s most amazing to me,” the pastor said. “That Jesus comes to people like us. Cowards, liars—even mother-mockers! And entrusts us with the kingdom of God, with carrying the message of peace. We get that peace too, when we surrender to the horrible belief that God loves us anyway. Surrender, or just plain run out of bullets.”
• • •
Marjorie lived longer than anyone expected, but right after school started, Harry in second grade, Ella in nursery, she began having seizures. Katherine often came by to sit with her, and said encouraging things, as if the dog were a toddler lying miserably under the table.
One day she took a biscuit out of her pocket and fed it to Marjorie. She turned sadly to Mattie. “She doesn’t look great. I would get some prednisone from your vet, to make her more comfortable. That’s what Al and I did when our dog was dying.”
The prednisone did help, and Marjorie got better for a while. Her appetite was good, and Mattie and the children took her for walks every day, and she walked along sniffing the deep smells of fall, of hibernation and holiday. “‘O Death,’” Daniel said during one walk with Mattie and Marjorie, quoting Dorothy Parker, “‘O Death, where is thy sting-a-ling-a-ling?’” And indeed, life and Marjorie both continued along.
The leaves changed color again, red, orange, yellow, and purple, and flew like flags. Almost a year had passed since she’d opened her front door and found Daniel standing there, staring down at his feet.
Mattie was so aware of the darkness in the fall. She put lights up everywhere, candles, white Christmas tree lights, a string of plastic fish lights that Al gave her. She loved the shorter days, frowning, lowering, Heathcliff days, and she liked the early nights, the wintery rawness in the air. Someone kept taking the snow globe and giving it a good shake, so you went from sunlight piercing through the moody day, to wind and rain and storm, storms that drove you inside to the fire. Another shake of the globe, and you woke to the blush and slash of a winter sunrise.
Isa had a disturbing episode on Thanksgiving. She was holding a gravy boat out toward Lewis at Mattie’s dinner table, when suddenly the gravy boat began to tilt. It all happened in slow motion, people turning to watch Isa pour a stream of gravy into Lewis’s lap, Lewis taking the gravy boat from her hands.
Again, the doctor was not overly concerned. Isa seemed fine during an examination, steady and clear. Meds adjusted, she began walking two miles a day with Lewis on the path that ran along the salt marsh beside The Sequoias.
December seemed like it would never end. Each day was so short, and yet lasted forever. Mattie hated December. If God would only make her His West Coast representative, she would cancel the whole month. Everyone was mentally ill, frantic and tired. To make matters worse this year, Harry and Ella spent their first Christmas Eve away, with Nicky and Lee and little Ratzo, as Al called Alexander, now almost six months old. Mattie spent Christmas Eve with Isa and Lewis, Al and Katherine, and went to the movies Christmas Day until it was time to pick up the children. She ached with missing them, ached with missing her father. She remembered one Christmas Eve at Neil Grann’s, she must have been ten or so, when all the adults were thoroughly bombed by dusk. Her mother had stayed home with the flu. Somehow no one had quite gotten dinner together at the Granns’. Mattie, Al, Abby, and a few other kids had played outside in the freezing cold, until finally Yvonne thought to make them grilled cheese sandwiches. Mattie remembered waking up Christmas morning and knowing her parents had had a fight. Her father smelled hungover at breakfast. Isa had made bacon and cinnamon buns. “That Yvonne Lang is crazy,” Alfred had declared, by way of placating Isa. “Absolutely mad,” he’d said with amusement, although Mattie kept thinking, But she was the only one who remembered to feed us.
Mattie, Harry, and Ella tried to stay up until midnight on New Year’s Eve, but they were all asleep by ten o’clock, on blankets in front of the fire, Marjorie and the cats curled up with them. The morning brought a sense of briskness and new beginnings, brilliant green grass breaking through the earth. Mattie had everyone over for black beans and rice: Isa and Lewis, both bright and excited to be at a party during the day; Daniel and Pauline, pale and hungover; Katherine and Al. Katherine was all in blue—light-blue cap with bugle beads, light-blue leggings, a gray-blue turtleneck. She looked like a nurse for herons. She mulled cider on the stove, filling the house with the scent of cloves and apples and cinnamon with cinnamon sticks as stirrers. Mattie lit her candles, the Christmas tree lights, the bass fish lights, to celebrate that the year had turned. It was going to whap them around for a while, but it was marching toward more light.
They walked through town after lunch, Marjorie along beside them. They faced into wind and drizzle. Mattie felt goaty in
her walk.
• • •
The next time Mattie walked into town, Marjorie couldn’t make it home and Mattie had to carry her. The vet had run out of good ideas. Mattie found her mind breaking up like a bad cell phone connection. She had felt this way as a teenager, but her father had always been there to see her through. She went to look for him in the attic, where his boxes were stored. But she found only white powder over everything, fluffed out from the insulating material around the pipes in the attic, glittering in the flashlight beam like asbestos.
She called Daniel to tell him that she and the children had been breathing asbestos dust all this time and would surely die. Daniel came right over. He found her crying at the kitchen table because the children had black lung disease.
Daniel got out the ladder and disappeared for a time. He came back to report that there was no asbestos in the attic. He took her into town for a hot fudge sundae, and she could breathe again.
• • •
Mattie told Al she’d been plunged into a panic over their father. They were sitting at the kitchen table, and Mattie was turning the paint-can key over and over in her hand. “I don’t know why I’m missing Daddy right now,” she said. “I just feel like if he was around, we would be okay. He’d help us when we were broke, he’d be in charge of taking care of Isa, that wouldn’t be on us anymore. He’d be our dad. We’d be people in the world with a dad. It would be like having a president there for you, caring for you. And if you had that, you’d feel safe.”
Al rubbed his eyes. “Mattie. That’s a fantasy dad. Right now, I’m not even sure who Daddy was. We need to poke around, maybe see if we can shed some light on how we all got so—lost.”
“What’s that going to get us?” Mattie said. “Maybe just more pain and disillusionment.”
“Maybe, maybe not. And besides, disillusionment is good.”
“But even if I wanted to be more disillusioned, we have nothing to go on.”
“Sure we do,” Al said. “First of all, we have memories, and photos. We’ve got boxes of stuff in the attic, details, clues. And we have the desire to pursue this. Plus, there were all those things in the glove box of the Volkswagen, right? There was the daisy bracelet. That was yours. There was the library card, which belonged to him, his car registration, the bottle opener from the bait shop in Marshall. So all that stuff was his. It could be telling us some kind of story. A story about our father; about our family. It intrigues me—this little blue shoe, this nothingness little blue shoe, and a paint-can key. He opened a can of blue paint with it one day. What did he paint? We never had a light-blue room.”
• • •
Later that afternoon, when Harry was at Stefan’s and Ella was down for a nap, Al took out the ladder and set it up under the crawl space, climbed the steps, and pushed the door over onto the floor of the attic. Mattie followed. She felt terribly afraid and teetered on the stepladder with her head poking through the passage.
She pulled herself up with a hand from Al, and they stood hunched over, breathing in the fusty smell of things moldering in boxes, stuff Isa and Alfred hadn’t wanted to see anymore. That was why you put things in attics. Mattie smelled mice, mold, moths. Al switched on the light.
There was old familiar furniture with limb problems. “Oh,” she could imagine her father saying, “this would take me five minutes to fix,” but he had never gotten around to it. The floor joists and ancient electrical wires were lit by a dusty, greasy bare bulb. Mattie turned her flashlight on and started reading the sides of boxes. They were actually labeled: “Hats,” “Artwork,” “Children Misc.,” “School Papers,” “Alfred.”
She imagined her parents bringing their things up here, and the illusion that if it’s there in your attic, it will be held, and it will be whole, in a museum: memory will not flee, and so neither will you.
She sensed the mice, quicksilver, furtive, hallucinatory.
Al lifted one corner of an old oilcloth. It had become a mouse nest, covered with droppings, sawdust, bits of insulation. Mattie recoiled, holding one hand to her heart like an elderly aunt.
They walked around in a crablike Quasimodo crouch; they scrabbled.
“Wow,” said Al, looking around at the boxes, the plastic garment bags hanging from a wooden pole, the hobbled furniture, the wrapped pipes. “Where do we even start? I guess with the Alfred boxes.”
Mattie felt they’d been returned to childhood, spying on their parents, holding their breath. They were looking at their parents’ insides—at their mother’s handbag collection, their father’s uniform from the navy, which had been eaten by moths.
“God, this is such a trip, Mat. I am running on so much adrenaline.”
“This is Mom and Dad, saved in boxes. Mummified. It’s as close to ancient Egypt as we’re ever going to get.”
Mattie closed her eyes and inhaled the smell of wood, hot wood, insulation, and dust, looked up at the pipes, wrapped like mummies. There was something exposed here that wanted her and Al out; something trapped. Once there had been framing and open space and fresh air flowing over the wood, and you could stand right here on a ladder and see for a distance in every direction. But the carpenters had closed it up. Now it felt tiny and sealed off, breathing only its own stale air.
In one of the boxes marked “Alfred” were things that should have gone in the “Children Misc.” boxes: filigreed, speckled drawings Mattie and Al had made in elementary school, diplomas from kindergarten and high school, report cards, which they pored over. Mattie had gotten all A’s every year, Al had gotten C’s and D’s, an occasional B-minus. He fumed over old injustices. “That fucking bitch Mrs. Hauser, I should have gotten a B-minus in fifth-grade math. I was robbed. That’s why I turned out the way I did.”
There were the love letters Alfred had written to Isa from his naval post in Germany, letters Mattie and Al had written from camp, letters from Neil Grann. There were letters Alfred’s parents and grandparents had written to him when he was in the navy and in college. There were letters from his brother and sister, postcards from everywhere.
They worked in silence, opening the topmost letters, reading snippets to each other, carefully refolding the letters and putting them back in envelopes. Some of the letters simply could not be opened, almost turning to dust in their hands.
Neil’s letters were in a manila folder, like a manuscript. Only one of them was still in its envelope, at the very back of the folder, the return address being the Cove, which was just north of Marshall—one of the nearly deserted coastal towns between Stinson and Mendocino. There was a restaurant there called Nick’s Cove, with two mounted deer heads on the wall, a great old pier that fishermen still used, three rickety huts on stilts attached to the restaurant. Alfred used to take the family to the restaurant on Sunday afternoons, for barbecued oysters and deep-fried-seafood platters, or just past it, to parties at Neil and Yvonne’s.
Neil had wanted to write. Actually, Neil had wanted to be a famous writer, although he did not seem to write very much. Mattie remembered, over the years, hearing him describe a novel he’d been working on forever, which he never seemed to finish and which in fact seemed to decrease in pages over time. It concerned the latest drunken marriage of a reclusive bon vivant, who had beatnik friends in their own unhappy marriages. “It’s just dreadful,” Alfred had confided to Mattie.
“Am building a separate floor for Abby, Ryder,” Neil wrote in a nearly illegible scrawl on a piece of plain paper. “She has become impossible. So it’s this, or a private school for bad girls in Switzerland. Her mother can’t or won’t take her. Her mother’s insane. Abby’s safer here with me. At any rate, I’m getting ready to hoist four 6 × 14 × 28-foot Douglas fir beams ten feet in the air, the slightest misjudgment of which will render me akin to a frog on wet pavement.”
“Ryder,” he wrote in another letter, “Absolutely terrible weekend with Kiernan and his new lady. I can only think of it as a go-for-broke effort to outrage and violate the concept
of ‘host’ and that of ‘guest.’ Also such peripheral things as ‘friendship’ and ‘reasonably good manners.’ Won’t bother with the details, except for the one which goes that they spent eighteen of their twenty-four hours grousing about the guest house, keeping the sliding door shut tight against the mild fall weather, the birds, the water, the trees, the . . . ah, shit. Yvonne hung in with me the whole time. Ladies are mostly O.K.-to-delightful, unless you are espoused to them. But Yvonne is gold.”
They got to the second-to-last letter. Mattie let Al read it while she went to get Ella up from her nap. When she came out of Ella’s room, her sleepy red-faced daughter draped over her shoulder, she heard Al call from the kitchen. He had come down from the attic too, and now stood by the table, holding up a finger.
“Listen,” he said.
He took a deep breath as Mattie sat down beside him. Ella wandered off, whispering for the kitties. “‘Abby has moved out to live with a friend’s family,’” Al read. “‘Abby calls sometimes, loaded, to say hello, but we end up in fights. Yvonne says to tell you she found a place for her friend, so not to worry, cheap and remote, run-down, needs repairs. Saw two ospreys fishing this a.m. Many ospreys here.’”
“Huh,” Mattie said. “Why is it so interesting to you?”
“‘Run-down,’” he read. “See? Maybe it needed a fresh coat of paint.”