by Anne Lamott
There were hundreds of sea gulls and sandpipers when the tide was out, cormorants, mudhens, and mallards diving all at once so you might see three or four duck butts sticking into the air. The middle cabin, built like a boat, with a brave little prow to fend off the waves, was wedged between bigger cabins on either side, also ghostly and abandoned.
“I guess even ghosts need summer homes,” Daniel said.
“There’s something so sad about these cabins,” said Mattie.
“All beach houses are sad when there are no kids digging in the sand outside,” Daniel said. “You know what they remind me of? Ice-fishing huts in the Midwest, the ones they drag out on the ice. They cut holes in the ice and pull out tough, whiskery, inedible fish.”
“Pike-ish things.”
Neither spoke for a while. Mattie looked up into a dark, empty window of the smallest hut. “I love this,” she said. “I could live here. Could you?”
“I could live anywhere there’s light.”
Mattie felt an intoxication, of sea air and beer. “I could live wherever you were.”
“I could live wherever you were,” he said right back, and they looked into the darkness underneath the deserted restaurant to the left, Nick’s Cove. “Living here must be like taking a journey twice a day,” Daniel said. “Only it would be the water that journeyed. You would just sit inside, and the water would flow up to you, surround you. And hours later, the water would rush past you again, flowing back out to sea.”
• • •
Mattie was in love with Daniel, of course; this was the X within the circle on her map: I love Daniel. It was wrong, he was married. But it was true. His friendship was an amulet. When she told him things she was thinking, about Harry or Ella, Alfred and Abby, rage against Isa and Lee, he said it back to her in language that showed he understood what she’d said. He had the time to hear, like a person who believed there was someone alive beneath the rubble of herself, who heard the soft sounds she could still make from the broken parts that had waited decades to be missed.
• • •
Mattie called Isa every morning and saw her often, and she tried, God knows she tried, to bring love and patience to those visits. She thought of the words of Teresa of Ávila, who said, “The Lord doesn’t so much look at the greatness of our works, as at the love with which they are done,” and this sounded fine except when it came to Isa. There was so much stuff marbled in, all the memories of their lives together: years of anger and revulsion. Mattie had heard someone say once that we have everything inside us that Jesus has, only He doesn’t have all the other stuff too. So she asked herself, If you’re as loving as possible when you’re with your mother, does it still count if there are other parts too—hands, for instance, trembling with rage?
Isa had lost ground but was holding her own in her compromised way when July began. One afternoon when Mattie was on her way to Safeway, it occurred to her that Isa might like to go shopping too, so on the spur of the moment, she called. Isa was instantly excited; she did need two things, she said, cat food and toilet paper.
Mattie drove by to pick her up. She let Isa putter and find her own pace and did not nudge and manipulate her into hurrying. Isa wanted to show Mattie things in her apartment that she was proud of, even though Mattie had seen them a thousand times: the view of Mount Tamalpais from her living room window; her huge, sulky long-haired cat. Mattie was watching her mother attentively. She had morphed into a new creation, no longer the ageless, athletic activist but now a tentative old woman. There was something oddly birdlike about her, but also something more relaxed. She often had an air of radiance about her, the radiance of silver hair.
From time to time, Isa tipped over into full dither, though, just like that, her mind popping to the surface like a seal, goggle-eyed, “Here I am!” then disappearing into the waves, “Oops—good-bye.”
Mattie felt happy to be with Isa and also pleased with her own patient helpful self. But when she said, “We really have to go now, Mom,” she caught a look in her mother’s eyes that made her wary. It was the craftiness she had been used to seeing in Harry’s face when his toddler gremlins had risen to the surface. It was the look of somebody lying in wait, ready to pounce. Isa said, “Honey?” in this way she had.
“Yes?” Mattie asked rather squeakily.
“Why don’tcha go get my coupons?”
Mattie thought this over. “No,” she decided. “Not the coupons. We don’t have time. You just need a couple of things.”
“Oh, honey, for God’s sake,” Isa said. “Go get the coupons!”
“I’m not going to. Once we get the coupons, forget about it. It’ll turn into a shopathon.”
So, with a look of exasperation, Isa went off to get her own coupons. Mattie started to laugh. How bad could things get? Isa reappeared, beaming, innocent, adorable. She was Coyote Trickster: like a lot of old people on fixed incomes, she lived on the margins now, made do with very little, sneaked past her children’s comfort zones, wreaked havoc with their need to control. She’d use her coupons, suck up her daughter’s precious time, but she’d save a few pennies. Mattie did her Lamaze, pitiful shallow breaths as if she were giving birth to her own mother, or trying to crawl back inside her.
• • •
By the time they got to Safeway, Mattie saw she had barely half an hour before she’d have to pick up the children.
“Let me run in and get whatever you need,” Mattie said.
“Oh, no.” Isa shook her head. “I need to go in myself.”
“Why? What do you need? Toilet paper and cat food, right?”
“I want to go in myself,” Isa insisted. “I only like certain brands. Besides, I’m not an invalid.”
A siren went off in Mattie’s head: She’s armed, Mattie thought. She’s got the coupons in her purse, and she’s just crazy enough to use them. Do not let her get out of the car.
“I’m pressed for time. Please let me run in,” Mattie begged.
Mattie’s pastor often said that we are Jesus’ presence here on earth and so we need to act like Him. Mattie thought about this, and squirmed. Would Jesus have let his mother get out of the car to buy toilet paper and cat food? Would he have been in a swivet because Mary had coupons in her purse? No. So they parked and Mattie helped Isa out of the car. They took baby steps to the line of shopping carts. When had her mother stopped being able to walk? The carts were jammed into one another. “Mom,” Mattie said, “we don’t need a shopping cart. Don’t you just need toilet paper and cat food?”
Her mother turned to her, wild-eyed, her lips pulled into a tight smile. Mattie drew back, crying out silently, Where’s my mother? What have you done with my mother?
Isa reached out to pat her arm. Mattie tugged at a cart, pushing the others back with one foot like a grumpy mime, until it finally came free. Sometimes having an elderly mother was like having a toddler, only you felt like attacking her more often. Breathe, Mattie whispered, there’s still time. She fell in behind Isa.
Since she had a few things to pick up herself, Mattie told her mother where the cat food and toilet paper were. “Okay?” Isa gazed back at Mattie blankly.
Mattie got what she needed and went looking for Isa. She checked in the cat food aisle and the toilet paper aisle, and Isa was in neither. Mattie went to wait in the express line; now she had ten minutes left.
She noticed Isa in the deli section. “Mom,” Mattie called to her impatiently. “Come on.”
“Okay, honey,” Isa said, and waved. Then she headed in the opposite direction. “Mom, come here!” Mattie called. She did not want to lose her place in line—now there were people behind her.
“I still need toilet paper.” Isa’s voice faded into Doppler effect.
Mattie looked at her watch. Then she looked as far away as she could, into the Siberia of the produce department. Isa was out there now, with her cart, next to two store employees. She appeared to be dealing cards to them. They took what she had dealt them and disp
ersed throughout the store, and Mattie realized that her mother was dispensing coupons.
She imagined a quick trip to the housewares department to buy a hammer. One blow should do it. She stood there quietly instead, refusing to lose her place in line with six people behind her. Also, if she bought one more item, she would no longer qualify for the express line.
“Mom,” Mattie called as nicely as she could, as if admonishing a mischievous child, “come here.” Isa tottered toward her with her cart, scanning for any clerks who might be returning to her with items from their scavenger hunt. She waved to Mattie again.
Mattie, now at the head of the line, let a woman go before her. Only if Isa came right then and still qualified for the express line herself would Mattie be on time to pick up the kids. There was nothing else she could do, so she prayed.
She prayed to see Isa through God’s eyes, from the inside out. Nothing happened, that was too much of a stretch. So she prayed to see her through the eyes of a friend, the eyes of someone besides her overly critical daughter. Eventually she began to see her mother differently. She saw this gawky, tremulous woman with a badly pleated memory, working hard to keep living independently. She saw an elderly woman cadging coupons so she could pay her own way and not have to ask her skittish children for help. So Mattie stood in line as patiently as she could. She let six people go ahead of her. And by the time her mother popped back out of the waves to stand beside her in line, goggle-eyed and blinky, Mattie’s heart was soft toward her again. Mattie knew this was not clinically a miracle, but it felt like one; or maybe not a miracle, but grace, if grace meant you went from small and hassled and full of hate, tapping your foot with impatience, to holding your mother’s warm hand.
“Mom!” Mattie said, but Isa could hear in her daughter’s voice that she was not mad. She turned to the man behind them and said, with her nose in the air and her eyes squinched shut, “This is my daughter,” as if introducing him to the queen.
• • •
Mattie and Daniel picked up the broken glass scattered across the living room floor. She and Harry had been playing catch in the front yard when Ella, furious at being left out, had cried that she could play too; she grabbed the softball from her mother and pitched it through the window. Falling glass pierced the cover of Otis’s cage, missing the iguana by inches.
Mattie wanted to charge a replacement window at Yardbirds right away, but Daniel argued for some time. He wanted to see if they could make the window larger. Daniel said God would provide the glass if they were patient. He had a feeling. “‘Your young will have visions,’” he said, quoting the prophet Joel, “‘and your old will dream dreams,’ and your middle-aged will have occasional hunches. There’s so much money in this county right now. Someone is preparing to remove a large pane of glass from their home. And we will put it in yours. In the meantime, let’s staple up some Visqueen.”
They stapled it to the outside frame. Harry manned the staple gun until Stefan came home. Then he took off to play. Mattie slipped him a dollar to let Ella tag along.
Mattie and Daniel took a break in the shade of the pear tree. She brought a Dos Equis for each of them and some fresh guacamole she had made. It was creamy and chunky, with lots of lime and salt.
She had spent twenty minutes at the health food store that morning picking out perfect avocados, holding each in her hand as if it were part of Daniel. She closed her eyes at the store and daydreamed about a look she wished he’d give her. She remembered the weight of his hand on her shoulder. She felt the spot at the end of the fruit where it had been attached to the tree, and traced it with her finger. This aroused her, and she thought she must be going mad.
She felt stranger than ever these days. She sometimes found herself wanting to lean forward and smell Ned’s neck, to sink her nose into his throat like a vampire. She knew Ned was a stand-in for her father, and it was unsettling for desire to come in on the same wind as disgust. She thought endlessly of Abby and Alfred together. She felt both weak and dithery, a little like Isa, and voracious and neglectful too, as Isa used to be. Mattie wanted to devour her children when she wasn’t with them, but she could hardly tolerate their neediness when they were about. Ella clung to her like a starfish, and Mattie saw herself peel away her fingers as she and Al used to peel the arms of starfish off the boulders at Pelican Rock.
• • •
At Nicky’s, only good things were happening. With his new salary increase, they were adding a room to the house. Mattie and Nicky had raised their two babies in the one room; but Nicky’s kids were each going to have their own. Lee’s cramping had passed, and now she was glowing again like a night-light—the best of being womanly and young. Their big boy was heartbreakingly beautiful. Nicky got a Saab. They had their porch enclosed to keep the bugs off their perfect skin and lives. They hired a sixteen-year-old named Katie to come in the afternoons to take care of Alexander. On some Sundays she dropped Harry and Ella off at Mattie’s, where, after the English garden and swing set at Nicky’s, Mattie’s family must have looked to her like trolls living under a bridge.
Nicky’s house had Persian cats lolling about on Persian rugs.
Mattie had Otis.
He continued to stare off into eternity in his glass cage by the living room window, shedding and having his terrible episodes. The first time Katie came in with the kids and peered into the glass, Otis had a prolonged shit-spewing episode. She had said, “Oh, God!” with such disgust that Mattie felt a roar of corresponding shame.
But Harry redeemed the moment: “That’s my boy,” he enthused.
• • •
Isa was often at Mattie’s these days, because Lewis was still at his son’s in Georgia and she got lonely. She was antler-thin, and clearly not all there. Left on her own, she rarely put dinner together, although when she did, no matter how many times Mattie reminded her, she always included foods rich in vitamin K. She’d call Mattie to tell her. “Aren’t I a good girl?”
“Mom,” Mattie would sigh. “The Coumadin doesn’t work if you eat foods with vitamin K.”
“And you got your medical degree where?”
These pressures would have seemed more or less bearable. But then Mattie and Al had a terrible fight. They’d been getting along well, sharing in the help Isa needed, rattling along in basic agreement that for the time being neither would do anything rash concerning Noah and Abby. They agreed to let the shock of Noah’s existence settle in, and wait until they figured out their next move. But one night Mattie told Al what Ned had said, that Abby had been seen briefly. Al surprised her by blowing up.
“Oh, shit, Mattie! You told Ned? Ned will’ve told everyone. Now everyone is going to say our father ruined Abby’s life.”
Mattie grimaced. She had somehow forgotten it was such a secret, because she’d so easily given it up to William. But she couldn’t really explain the calculus of trading the secret for William’s kindness. She was mad too that Al would question her judgment. “Ned won’t tell anyone,” she said haltingly. “And Daddy didn’t ruin her life. He gave her Noah—which was the best thing that ever happened to her.”
Al flushed. “You weren’t going to tell anyone but Daniel and Angela. Now everyone knows but Noah. He’ll know soon enough, and then he’ll understand why we’ve been skulking around town like pedophiles.”
“We aren’t the pedophiles, Al. Daddy was.”
Al sucked in his breath as if she’d punched him. Mattie knew the ground kept shifting under them both—first she insisted that Noah was a gift her father had given Abby, and in the next instant that Alfred was disgusting. But there wasn’t time to sort it out. She looked for traction, to defend herself against the most unlikely enemy of all, Al.
“Oh, for Chrissakes, Mattie. It was the sixties,” Al said, turning away from her.
“So it was okay to be a sexual predator in the sixties?”
“Listen to you. We don’t even know what happened. What if she seduced Daddy?” he asked, glaring.
>
Mattie whistled, slow and accusing. “She was my age.”
“That’s not the point. The point is . . . Shit, the point is, the point is . . .” His cheeks were pink with emotion. He folded a bank receipt into a fan and did not look up. “The point is we had a deal. I only told Katherine, like we agreed, and you were supposed to only tell Daniel and Angela. We had an agreement. A plan. Now you’re plowing straight ahead, all by yourself.”
“So my boyfriend told his father. What is the big deal?”
“The big deal is that we had an agreement to do it together,” Al said. “This is how it always ends up in our family, everyone just going off alone—doing whatever they feel like, and not honoring promises.”
“I thought you wanted to welcome Noah into the fold.”
“You said you wouldn’t tell, and then you did.”
“God, you sound like Harry,” Mattie said. “What, are you going to go tell Mom on me now?”
“You’re in the wrong, Mattie. Just admit it.”
“‘It was the sixties,’” she sneered. Al got up and stalked toward the door. Before he slammed it, he looked back at her with Harry’s fury, Ella’s desolation. Then he was gone.
• • •
“Everything’s just awful,” Mattie told Daniel days later as they drove to church. He had agreed to drive Mattie’s car, because she felt too shaky. “Al and I haven’t spoken since the fight. Isa’s barely functional. My car is falling apart, and I have no windows in the living room. It’s Cannery Row at my house. Nicky has cats that cost more than we spend on groceries in a month.”
Daniel listened. He stopped at a light and turned to her. “But Mattie,” he said, “we have Otis!”
In church he put his arm around her. The pastor read from Psalm 42: “My soul is downcast within me; therefore I will remember you from the land of the Jordan. . . . I say to God my Rock, ‘Why have you forgotten me?’” Mattie wiped at her eyes.