by Anne Lamott
“Oh, for Chrissakes, Al.” She widened her eyes. “God, I just sounded exactly like Isa.”
Al took the last letter out of the envelope, unfolded it, and began to read. He handed Mattie the letter. “Fuck you, Alfred,” was all it said. “You’re dead to me.”
Mattie stared at the words on the page. There was no date on the letter. She handed it to Al. He held the letter to the light, as if a watermark might appear with further instructions.
• • •
There was no time in the new year to do any more sleuthing. Driving, laundry and homework, gardening, trips to doctors and the vet all got in the way. Ella’s wrists were better again, Harry loved his second-grade teacher, whom he planned to marry one day. Al and Katherine were doing well. She was gone a lot, once to Appalachia, once to see her parents in Vermont again—her father had heart disease—but when she was around, she watched and listened to Al with amused affection. And Mattie didn’t sleep with Nicky once.
She and Nicky had grown into some kind of friendship. Mattie had held Alexander for the first time. She hadn’t meant to. Lee and Nicky had both made sure to leave him home when either of them came to pick up Ella and Harry, but finally a day came when Lee needed to bring Alex with her. He had grown into a big, solid, jolly boy, who looked like Nicky, or a fair, chubby version of Harry, and smelled like baby shampoo. Mattie felt sick to see Harry in the face of her replacement’s child. She reeled and could hardly breathe. But all she could do was smile at him and say hello. He threw himself into Mattie’s arms. Mattie felt his wiggly toughness for a moment, and then he stopped, stared into her stranger’s face, saw that he’d made a terrible error in judgment, and bellowed for Security.
• • •
Mattie asked Isa casually one night if she and Alfred had ever painted any of their rooms light blue. “Oh, for Chrissakes, of course not,” Isa brayed. “We would never have painted any of our rooms anything but white.” When it came out that Mattie was asking because of the paint-can key, Isa cried out—in what seemed like real rage—that Mattie would be the death of her if this insanity, this chasing of rainbows, kept up.
• • •
Marjorie declined more quickly all of a sudden, spent more and more time under Mattie’s bed. She had bloody stools again. Her tender longhaired vet said she would have to be put to sleep soon. One night when the kids were with Nicky, Mattie started crying and couldn’t stop: how was she going to survive this? She called Daniel and Pauline. Pauline was in the city. Daniel offered to come over with Chinese take-out.
They ate with the TV on in the living room. Suddenly, Last Summer was on the classic movie channel.
“This will be just the thing,” Daniel announced. They watched in silence for a while, spaced out but together. “I’m going to faint in this heat,” Daniel kept saying in a Southern voice, exactly like Elizabeth Taylor fanning herself. “I’m going to faint.”
“Thank you for coming over so quickly,” Mattie told him, sniffling.
“I’m going to faint,” Daniel trilled. Mattie looked at him out of the corners of her eyes, and smiled. She turned back to the movie. She started to feel that she could go on.
“Why did Elizabeth Taylor’s son get eaten again?” she asked.
“I don’t remember. I think the other guys were angry with him.”
She smiled but her heart felt infected with sadness about Marjorie.
“Tennessee Williams must have figured out that you really get people’s attention if you have someone eat somebody else,” he said.
“Yeah, well. It certainly got mine.”
• • •
Marjorie’s gas got so bad that it hurt their eyes, but Ella still crawled under the bed and lay with her in the cool dark. She took stuffed animals along for company and made up stories for Marjorie about fairies and field mice. Mattie peered under the bed one morning and found Ella sucking her thumb, which seemed like progress. At least she was not gnawing at her skin. She was stroking Marjorie’s back with her other hand. Mattie crawled down beside them, while Ella tended to Marjorie like a candy striper, stroking her dark shape. Mattie lay on her back and stared at the slats of the bed from below. It was like being in a cage, or inside the ribs of Jonah’s whale.
Harry called Nicky at work that day, crying about Marjorie, and Nicky came over for dinner that night. He sat at the table with the children while Mattie cooked roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, which he loved. Marjorie lay at their feet.
“We have been so lucky to have such a perfect dog, haven’t we?” Nicky asked, and the children nodded. Tears streamed down Harry’s face. “There’s no way around the awfulness of this part of it, though.” He took a sip of red wine. Mattie diced carrots for the salad on a cutting board, feeling grateful for his help, for his having shown up. “I never even heard the name Cavalier King Charles spaniel till I met Marjorie. In fact, I thought Cavalier meant they didn’t care—like, ‘Oh, so another cat got run over on Maple, well, fuck it.’” Harry gasped, and Ella clapped a hand over her mouth.
“Nicky!” Mattie cried, but she laughed too.
“Where did we get her again?” Harry asked.
“I’d always wanted a little dog,” Mattie said, as they started to eat. “So I answered an ad in the newspaper. This woman had a Cavalier King Charles spaniel, but the woman was nuts. She grilled me over the phone for an hour.
“Then there was a follow-up call. I arranged to meet Marjorie. It was an awful scene. She was jailed in a crate underneath a birdcage in the woman’s living room. There were feathers floating down on her head, which startled her every time they hit. But for me, it was love at first sight. She was so gentle and elegant.
“I asked the woman why she was giving her away. I couldn’t believe it. The nutcase told me she had too many children and too many pets. And she couldn’t give away the children.
“So I got to take the dog home. She climbed onto my chest and sprawled there like a bearskin rug. She stared at me without blinking, all the way home. It was like she was trying to communicate with me telepathically, but I wasn’t enough on the ball to make the connection.
“Then your dad fell in love with Marjorie too.” After dinner Nicky lay with Marjorie in the cool darkness on the floor beneath Mattie’s bed, with Harry and Ella beside him, while Mattie washed the dishes and cried.
• • •
She took Ella to the pediatrician, a kindly man with fluffy silver hair named Dr. Silver, who asked Ella if she thought she could find an alternative to chewing on her wrist. She told him, to Mattie’s surprise, shyly, yes, she could. And what was that alternative?
“M&M’s,” Ella said.
Dr. Silver wrote her a prescription for a large bag of M&M’s. Mattie got it filled.
Marjorie stayed alive. It was an amazing, if gassy, miracle. The flatulence was terrible. Al said it smelled like air wafting up from bloated corpses in Civil War photographs, but Marjorie hung on.
Then during an uncharacteristically hot week in late February, she took a turn for the worse. She stopped eating almost entirely. Angela flew up to be with Mattie and the children. It was over. Mattie called the vet and asked if he would come to put Marjorie to sleep at the house. Mattie asked Isa to take care of the children. Mattie and Angela sat with the sick dog in the kitchen, an oscillating fan on the counter, and drank lemonade while they sweltered and panted, and Marjorie kept farting from under the table. Angela peered down at the dog and said, “Woo-wee, honey. That is some serious situation you’ve got going on down there.” She fanned the air, but then gamely climbed under the table.
Ella came in and joined Marjorie and Angela, and each time Mattie peeked, Ella was gazing at Marjorie with wide, round eyes of grief, taking surreptitious bites on her sore. Then Harry came home. He stormed into the kitchen and sized up the situation, bellowed in pain, and climbed into Mattie’s lap. Over the sound of the fan, Marjorie’s breathing was loud and labored.
“What’s the matter with Marjorie’s
breathing?” Harry asked. Mattie shrugged. He got under the table with Ella and Angela. Mattie went to join them. Marjorie’s chest rose with a gasp that accompanied each breath.
“She’s very sick, Harry. We’re going to have to put her down.”
Ella’s wide eyes brimmed with tears. She bent her head to her wrist with a balletic grace and nibbled at the sore place.
• • •
Mattie located Harry in the bathroom, behind a locked door. “What will we do?” he bawled. He cried out in grief and pounded the door. “What can we do? I’m so afraid!”
“Please let me in, darling,” Mattie pleaded.
“No—no way. If I do, you’ll talk to me about God.”
“I promise not to.”
“I don’t believe in God. I think when you die you go blank. I won’t go to church anymore if Marjorie dies. I don’t like anyone at church, I don’t even know their names, they don’t mean anything to me.”
“I promise not to talk about God,” Mattie repeated, and he let her in.
She sat on the floor near the toilet, Harry on the rug in front of the sink. He cried with his head buried in his arms, and shook off her attempts to touch him. When he seemed done, he looked at her, his eyes lined in red, and asked if they could have Marjorie frozen.
“Like cryogenics, where they freeze you and bring you back someday?”
“Yeah, when they find a cure. Stefan’s mom told us about it.”
“Well, no one knows if it works. No real scientists think it does. And they don’t freeze dogs. It costs a fortune.”
“But wouldn’t you try to get the money, if it was me?”
“Honey?”
“Mommy! I don’t want to die. I’m so afraid.” He started crying again.
“But darling, you probably won’t die for eighty years.”
“I don’t even want to die in eighty years.”
“We’re almost too sad about Marjorie to go on, aren’t we?”
Harry didn’t answer. Mattie handed him a box of Kleenex. He wiped his nose on his sleeve and then shredded a tissue. He shredded another. A snowdrift grew while she thought of what to do.
“What do you believe in?” she asked. “I thought you believed in Jesus.”
“I do, I just believe in all the other gods too.”
“Oh,” Mattie said nicely. “What other gods?”
“The Greek and Roman gods.”
The snowdrift of Kleenex grew higher.
The pastor had said once that when people could not imagine surviving physical death, he told them that the bulb could not conceive of the flower it would become. Mattie tried passing this along to Harry. He moaned, butting his nose against the shoulder of her T-shirt, like a horse trying to get you to give it the lump of sugar. She found this touching, until she realized he was wiping his nose on her sleeve.
“Eewwhh,” she said.
Harry lay on the bathroom rug, and Mattie gave him a backrub. He was tight and stiff. The red faded from his face, and she rubbed his shoulders until he yawned. “I’m going to fall asleep,” he said.
“Right here?”
“Uh-huh.”
She stretched out on a small portion of the rug, and Harry moved closer so she could hold him. “I just really want to be frozen when I die,” he whispered.
“Okay,” she said. “You can be frozen.”
They fell asleep on the bathroom rug. The cats sat in the doorway, watchful, appalled.
• • •
While Angela drove the weeping children over to Isa’s, Al arrived at Mattie’s with Katherine, whose eyes were red. She brought wildflowers from their glade, in a makeshift vase of wet napkins and tinfoil. Daniel came alone, with a loaf of bread Pauline had made for the mourners. He hugged Mattie and slid the little blue shoe into her hand. “Oh my God,” she whispered. She jammed it in her pocket. She called Nicky, who began to sniffle and said he’d be there soon.
Everyone lay on the floor with Marjorie and did a laying on of hands. They turned over onto their backs to look at the underside of the table, as if they were out beneath the stars.
Kafka said that the point of life is that it ends, and Mattie supposed that to some extent this was true. She and Angela watched Marjorie, whose eyes stared at nothing, who struggled for breath. “She’s been getting ready to leave for a while,” Mattie said.
They made a bed for her under the table, with a fluffy blue baby blanket. Marjorie looked again at Mattie, weak and sweet and trusting. Nicky arrived and climbed under the table with them, and Marjorie wagged her tail. Mattie and Angela sat up, and Nicky turned to Mattie and hugged her, and then Angela, their first hug in years, and they all waited for the vet.
• • •
He arrived at a little after six, with his brown bag, and joined the crowd under the table. Mattie offered the vet a glass of wine, but he declined the offer. He scratched Marjorie behind the ears. “There are going to be great cat butts in heaven to sniff,” he told her in a priestly tone. Marjorie wagged her tail at the sound of his voice. Mattie and Nicky stroked her, telling her over and over, “You are a sweet girl, such a sweet girl,” and everyone was teary except the vet, who looked sad and tired. Marjorie wagged her tail to the end, but without much life force, like windshield wipers on a car with a nearly dead battery. She was making a soft, muffled peeping and cooing that baby dolphins might make the first moments after they were born. The vet gave her an injection in the leg, and a few seconds later, while Mattie stroked her head, she breathed in and then out for the last time, like a sigh.
• • •
Isa insisted that she and the children be there for the burial that night. “They need to say good-bye. There will be grief, but it’s going to be there anyway. It’s better to see it. This way, they can remember how alive she was, but this is what happened, and they can say good-bye.” Mattie knew that her mother was right.
Mattie carried Marjorie’s body, still in the blanket, to the backyard, near the ranunculus, where she was to be buried. The flowers were jaunty and brawny, like their muscular name, in stained-glass colors.
Mattie had shown Nicky where to dig the hole. It was harder work than he had expected. His shovel kept hitting rocks.
The children wept and moaned when they saw Marjorie’s body on the light-blue blanket. Ella threw herself into Mattie’s arms, while Harry fell to his knees beside the dog and wailed piteously. It was absurd and cathartic, and Mattie could see that he was weeping for everything, all that he had lost so far, all the sad things that were still to come. Isa sent Mattie inside for a box, and when she protested, Isa snapped at her. “Oh, for Chrissakes, Mattie, of course you need a box. We always used a box.” Mattie remembered that this was true, all those birds and field mice she and Al had buried in this yard so many years before, old cats, and once a litter of dead kittens, always in a shoe box. Isa had believed that children should bury the family pets, just as she insisted that Mattie and Al watch each litter of kittens and puppies be born.
Harry and Ella had buried birds before, and mice that the cats had killed. They seemed to like burying things. They knew to make a bed for Marjorie with the blanket, in the box Mattie found, and they tucked her in while Nicky dug deeper. Angela picked rocks out of the growing pile of dirt.
The light was fading. Pauline arrived and lingered on the patio away from the others. Finally the hole was big enough for the box, and the children placed Marjorie in her box inside. Nicky shoveled dirt on top, and the children pushed in dirt too, and when the box was covered, they patted the dirt down hard with their fists, as if punching down bread dough. They decorated the grave with everything they could find, a ring of rocks, flowers, wood, crayons, plastic figurines. Daniel made a cross from two twigs tied with a bit of dirty string, and Mattie went inside for a black Magic Marker so they could write Marjorie’s name on the cross. That’s who was there, and everyone should know. That lump in the ground was our pet, she would say, if anyone were to ask, and this was her name.<
br />
five
One rainy morning in mid-March, Ella sat at the window staring like a cat at the snakes of water that raced down the pane. Mattie stood beside her chair so that they could watch the storm together. She traced the back of Ella’s ear with the tip of her nose, and listened to Harry playing out in the rain. A few boys from Harry’s class were over at Stefan’s today. One was handsome and blond and cherubic. This gave him enormous power and leverage. Another was doughy and tense, like an incompetent guard in the yard at San Quentin. When the sun shone through the rain, Mattie thought the storm might be nearly over, but then the sun slid back behind the scrim of clouds, and the rain kept coming down.
She was glad for the rain. After pummeling and pricking for days, the wind had stopped and the rain began to fall. March was a teaser, so springlike and soft and warm and bright, the hills lush and green and dotted with wildflowers, but as soon as your soul relaxed in the balminess, then whoosh! A horrible cold stepped forth, worse than in winter because the days had been promising something and then reneged.
“How can you do this to me?” Harry cried one day at the biting wind.
“I can do anything I want, because I’m March,” said Mattie.
• • •
Mattie was depressed, and agitated. She felt paranoid and personally betrayed. The spiky wind seemed crueler than in other months because she’d put her winter coat away during those hot days in February, and she felt silly making a fire in springtime.
She was banking on the vernal equinox, comforting herself with the belief that on that day, when the darkness ebbed and the light returned, all sorts of things would fall into place. She needed to get out more, she thought, otherwise how would she meet a man? If she met a man, she would never have to sleep with Nicky again. It would help her forgive Nicky, and Lee, and Alexander. One day she thought she was getting there, until she saw Harry watching his father and Alex together out on the lawn, through the window of his bedroom, and Harry looked like someone who had just discovered his new lawn turned to Swiss cheese by gophers. Mattie’s heart grew harder.