by Anne Lamott
The pastor started the sermon by singing “I Need Thee Every Hour,” and the pianist followed with the sweetest descant before the congregation joined in.
Mattie tried to listen to the sermon but had trouble concentrating. What should she do about everything? Or anything? About one single thing? Then the pastor, as if reading her mind, said that it took time to know God’s will; that even Jesus didn’t arrive at “Thy will be done” quickly, or He wouldn’t have spent so much time in the garden.
After the service, Daniel opened the passenger door for her. She picked up the Bible he always brought to church and turned to the psalm again. “‘As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for You, O God.’”
“That was so beautiful,” Daniel said as they drove. “‘As the deer pants for streams of water.’” He pulled into the drive-through window at Blondie’s, where he ordered three strawberry milk shakes.
They were late getting to Daniel’s because they stopped by the side of the road to drink their shakes. Pauline was at the bedroom window when they pulled into the driveway. They got out of the car, and Daniel held up the third milk shake toward the window, as if raising a toast to Pauline. She disappeared from sight.
“Come in and say hi,” Daniel insisted to Mattie. Pauline threw open the front door, gorgeous in a shift of coral gauze, an ivory moon and star hanging from a soft white cord around her neck. She held her arms out to Mattie. Stepping up for a hug, Mattie felt vaguely threatened. Pauline gave Daniel a warm kiss and ushered them into the kitchen, where bread was baking. By then Mattie was nearly asthmatic with terror. Pauline put her shake in the refrigerator while Daniel and Mattie sat at the table. Pauline put water on for tea.
“Have you and Al made up? I heard about the fight,” she said. Mattie suspected this was meant to show that Daniel shared everything with her.
Mattie shook her head no, whispered, “Not yet.”
“Well, everything’s going to be fine,” Pauline replied. Mattie nodded miserably, and then felt Daniel’s foot nudge hers. It was not exactly footsie, but it seemed a steadying connection just the same, like her father might have made during conferences with her unhappy teachers. Mattie smiled into her lap.
“Have you read the latest Doctorow?” Pauline asked. Mattie shook her head. “It’s fantastic. I can lend it to you if you want.” Mattie felt a prick of suspicion.
“That’s sweet of you. Thanks.”
“It’s by my bed,” Pauline said. “Why don’t you go get it?”
• • •
Mattie trudged up the carpeted steps as if an angry parent were waiting for her upstairs. Daniel had offered to retrieve the book, but Pauline had needed him to open a jar of jam. The bedroom looked so beautiful, so simple. Daniel had done the carpentry himself, and Pauline had chosen and found the furniture and fabrics at secondhand stores. He had built window seats, and she had covered them with buttery-hued damask cushions and ivory throw pillows. You couldn’t have such light colors with kids around, Mattie thought. You needed patterns, jungle fatigues. You couldn’t have anything nice. Sunlight streamed through the windows. Mattie turned toward the sleigh bed. On it was a tray with two coffee cups on saucers, a blue Chinese bowl holding one strawberry and a lacy pile of strawberry leaves. The book was on a bedside table, beneath a pair of tortoiseshell glasses.
Mattie walked slowly to get the book she no longer wanted. As she got close to the bed, she could smell the residue of sex. It smelled as if someone had just returned with a good catch, a hold full of bass on ice—bleachy, sweaty love. God, she thought, shaking her head and picturing Pauline: You got me. The comforter was sheathed in the palest blue. Mattie reached for the book; she felt Pauline rubbing her nose in the comforter: Mine. We are the ones, Pauline was telling her, we are the ones who make love.
• • •
Mattie limped downstairs to the kitchen with the book. She stared off in the distance like Otis as she walked. Something inside her shifted; the veil parted for a second, long enough for her to realize something new. Pauline had sent Mattie to her room to put her in her place, but not because she was simply sadistic. She’d been afraid. Mattie wouldn’t need to be put back in her place if she hadn’t fallen out of it. Pauline was afraid that she was losing Daniel. She wanted him back. And she wouldn’t need him back if Mattie didn’t have him.
Mattie could not look at Pauline or Daniel when she stepped into the room.
They all made too much conversation while they had tea.
• • •
Mattie gave Daniel the blue shoe a few days later. They were in the middle of a heat wave, an Iowa July, deep watermelon days. She’d run into him at the garden store, where he was buying topsoil. It was sweltering. “What’s this for?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I just thought you might like it for a while.”
• • •
Mattie and Al hadn’t spoken in a few weeks. Lewis hadn’t returned. Isa wept for him when she called Mattie, afraid his son would force him to stay in Georgia. What could Mattie say? Just that he’d return. “Come out to the pool with us, Mom.”
“I can’t wear a swimsuit anymore,” Isa said stiffly.
Mattie laughed. “Yes, you could,” she said. “You still have great legs. But wear a light shift, if you’ll feel more comfortable. I’ll pack a lunch and pick you up at noon.”
She took her mother, Ella, Harry, and Stefan to the high school pool. They made a nest of towels under an umbrella for Isa. Mattie offered her a frosty can of apple juice before jumping into the water with Ella. From the pool her mother looked like an old sock monkey. Harry and Stefan disappeared into the shouting, splashing chaos of the deep end, while Mattie and Ella stayed where it was shallow. They had tea parties on the pool floor, the web of sun their tablecloth, holding their breath and imaginary teacups, pinkies extended, in the shimmering net of light.
• • •
One Friday afternoon when Mattie arrived at the superette to work, Ned whispered with an odd urgency that he and William had just spotted Abby. They’d been driving past the shacks early that morning, when they’d seen her sitting in the ice plant that grew near the huts, drinking from a brown paper bag.
“You won’t tell anyone, will you?” Mattie implored, thinking of Al.
“Excuse me, Ned.” A woman was taking him by the arm. Mattie turned to look at the Blondie’s manager, Suzanne. “I need thirty pounds of ground beef. You got that much in the freezer?”
“I think so,” said Ned. “Don’t worry,” he told Mattie. “I’m not going to tell anyone.” He walked off with Suzanne.
Suzanne linked her arm in his. “Tell anyone what?”
• • •
Angela listened to the whole story over the phone. “An electrical storm is building.”
“Secrets get out, don’t they?” Mattie said.
“I guess so. The truth seems to want to establish itself. It always eventually floats to the surface, like a dead body. Look at J. Edgar Hoover. The dresses—and Clyde—didn’t come out till he’d been dead awhile.”
Mattie laughed for the first time all day.
• • •
On a horrid hot evening in late July, Isa got on a bus one night, for no reason anyone later could discern, least of all Isa, and fell getting out. She ended up in the medical center at The Sequoias with a sprained ankle, badly bruised and deeply disoriented.
After she hung up with the nurse, Mattie called Al. He arrived with Katherine ten minutes later. It was a relief to see him. Katherine threw her arms around Mattie and held her. She wore a green knit cap. Her bangs were growing out in front of her eyes. She brought the children chocolate milk to distract them while Mattie and Al headed out.
Isa was asleep in bed. Through a curtain that separated the two patients, Mattie and Al caught a glimpse of an old black woman in the next bed. A chubby young Filipino nurse came in. Her name tag read “ESMERELDA.”
“Mommy’s going to be okay,
” Esmerelda promised.
“How long do you think she needs to stay here?” Mattie asked.
“Mommy needs full-time care until she can walk again. If you can get a nurse, she could go home in a few days.”
Isa woke up groggily but snapped to with a look of intense concentration. Then she took in the strange surroundings and burst into tears.
“Why am I here? Get me out! I’m perfectly fine. Oh, Mattie, please get me out!” But she wasn’t going anywhere.
• • •
Mattie stopped by the medical center with Daniel the next afternoon. Isa was terribly agitated. “Jesus Christ, she and her family’re driving me crazy,” she whispered, indicating her roommate. “All these black yahoos.” Mattie shushed her mother, horrified.
The roommate’s family showed up at that moment. They greeted Mattie and Daniel like long-lost family and introduced themselves as the woman’s daughters and grandson, and smiled with nervous good manners at Isa. She glowered at everyone.
Mattie was telling Isa how the kids were spending their summer, when the other woman’s daughters began softly singing “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.” It was beautiful at first, the daughters and the grandson singing, and Mattie closed her eyes to listen better. Then a harmonica started—it must have been the grandson. The sound was harsh and tinny, as if someone had started accompanying them on dental drill.
“Jesus Christ!” Isa exclaimed. “I told you—didn’t I tell you?”
Mattie glanced inside the curtain in time to see the sleeping woman reach out a crablike claw and grip her grandson’s wrist. Her daughters sang to her, and her grandson started playing harmonica again, and Isa cried out in pain, her fingers stuck in her ears, reminding Mattie of Ella. A look crossed the other woman’s face too, but you couldn’t tell whether it was recognition—whether this tinny accompaniment was getting through the sponge of her coma—or whether it was just terror at the calamitous noise: The drill! The drill!
• • •
When Nicky came by with the children that evening, Harry ran into the living room to play with his pet. He wailed in surprise. Otis was gone. He’d made a break for freedom. Mattie did what they do in the movies—she secured the area and called in a search party, Al and Daniel, who combed the house. Harry proposed holding an article of Otis’s clothes for Stefan’s retriever to smell. But Mattie pointed out that Otis had no clothes.
“Otis has no clothes?” Harry asked sarcastically, and she felt she’d been trapped in an episode of Perry Mason, with Raymond Burr about to produce one of Otis’s bathrobes or brassieres. Harry whipped out Otis’s leash, with its tiny name tag. Stefan’s dog sniffed it, and with Harry exhorting him, raced around for a while.
“Get that fucking dog out of here before he eats Otis,” said Al.
“Don’t swear at the children, Al,” said Mattie.
When the excitement of the search was over, the real sorrow began. Part of Mattie was exasperated—this was an iguana. But loss was loss, and the children were inconsolable. They cried for Otis and all the other sad things in the world.
Harry locked himself in the bathroom. When he finally let Mattie in, his eyes were red and swollen. “Mommy?” he said. “God has stopped loving this family.”
Mattie told him not to give up, that there was still hope, but that if Otis didn’t return, maybe it was God wanting to give Otis his freedom.
“Otis will die outside, though,” Harry said. “He’s cold-blooded.”
Mattie’s heart may have been cold toward Otis, but it was so warm toward Harry. She promised they would find him.
“He’s just a big heartbreaker,” Harry cried.
Oh, Harry, Mattie thought, but secretly she hoped Otis would not come back. She fantasized about how much bigger the living room would seem once cleared of Otis’s cage. She thought with a kind of moral righteousness about mothers in other countries who did not have the luxury of worrying about their kids’ pets. Otis, with his hot rock and his lettuce leaves, was living more luxuriously than half of the world’s children. And then she thought, What about dealing with this one boy’s broken heart?
She imagined Otis staying outside all night, hugging his shoulders to his little chest, shivering. That got her down on her hands and knees to begin another search. She even went through Ella’s Beanie Baby collection—maybe Otis was pulling a Hannibal Lecter, had hollowed out the chimpanzee and was hiding inside. She looked in Harry’s closet and then, almost as an afterthought, went through his GI Joe trash can. Otis was at the bottom.
Mattie called for Harry. He raced in joyfully, reached into the trash can, and picked Otis up. Ella came in, clutching her chest like a verklemmt old auntie. Harry put Otis in his cage in the living room, and the three of them stood looking at him. He didn’t move, didn’t blink, just stared. Harry went to the kitchen for some lettuce, and stood over the cage holding a leaf like a bottle of milk for an orphaned newborn calf. Otis didn’t move toward it. Harry refused to go to bed until Mattie promised to stay awake with Otis for a while. Otis did not move at all. She sat there holding a lettuce leaf, the two of them looking off in the same direction.
As she was staring into space, a feeling stirred in her. Her eyes had glanced off something that she should have paid attention to. The feeling was so strong that after she was sure Harry was asleep, she retrieved the GI Joe trash can. But there was nothing special inside—wadded pieces of paper covered with Harry’s precise and spidery figures, a red plastic car, food wrappers, dirty twine, punched-paper dots. Mattie looked at Otis again. He was looking at her. “Do you know what I’m supposed to notice here?” she asked out loud.
She clapped her hands to her mouth. Isa knew. Isa had known all along, not only that Alfred had girlfriends: Isa had known all along about Abby and Noah, and knew still, somewhere deep in the Otis part of her brain.
Mattie sat rocking, her head in her hands.
Everyone had known. The game had been to keep from knowing what you knew—and certainly never to say what might be true. If you let even a trickle in, it might wash you away. The game was to hope that everyone else would agree not to know what they knew too.
• • •
Mattie and Al used to go to the pier with their parents, when Nick’s Cove was still a thriving restaurant. Now the pier and restaurant were in near-ruins, but thirty years before, this had been a working pier. Commercial fishermen brought in their catch every morning, men would unload the rope-handled boxes full of fish from the boats, and someone from the restaurant would come by with a wheelbarrow to cart them off.
Mattie sat on the wet sand across from fog-shrouded hills rolling down to the bay, several hundred feet from the shacks, which balanced on spindly stilts like long-legged birds. Beneath them, on the beach at low tide, she could see the flotsam and jetsam that had flotted and jetted onto the sand—a mud-encrusted shopping cart, shredded foam buoys, a yellow rubber glove.
Mattie kept her eye on the smallest cabin, the one in the middle, with the prow. The only sounds were the cries of gulls, the surf, an occasional car on the road up past the beach. Finally she noticed motion through the window, the flash of what looked like a ghostly old man, some kind of ancient mariner. He disappeared, and there was no more movement.
The smells of the low tide were very strong, swamp smells, and the water was deep baby blue. Patches of darkening sky broke through the fog. Mattie watched and waited and thought about the blue on the paint-can key. She wondered if Isa knew where that room was, the one Alfred had painted. Then Mattie saw the face again, small and obscure.
The face appeared ruddy and wrinkled. Mattie turned to see what the eyes would be seeing, a reflection of trees floating on the blue sparkling water. When she looked back to the shack’s window, the face was gone. Then the window opened slowly, and the person inside tossed something out, something red, a bowl of reddish-gold paint, or a soup of tomatoes and saffron. The strands fluttered balletically in the air like prayer flags: long, thick reddis
h-gold hair. Abby, newly shorn, stood holding her face toward the sky.
Mattie leapt to her feet and ran as fast as she could to the cabin. She looked in the window but saw no one inside. She jiggled the door; it was locked. “Abby!” she cried. She knocked, pounded, looked again through the window, half expecting to find Abby surrounded by baby-blue walls. The weathered and battered walls were instead a dingy, uninspired white.
nine
On a cold morning in September, Mattie returned to the shack. She wanted to do right by Al, and give him time to let Abby’s presence in town sink in, and then go out with him some afternoon. But school had started, and he could go only on weekends. When she asked if he wanted her to wait for him to go, Al said no, his presence might scare Abby away. Mattie thought he might be a little afraid of seeing her. She went by herself.
A storm was gathering. The gulls sounded like chimps, and over the roar of the wind and the surf, she could hear chimes. Standing on tiptoe and craning her neck, she could see through one of the windows. She could see a screened-in cold cupboard, where a buckled pack of tortillas perched between a brick of orange cheese and a pint of milk. Cut into one wall was a rectangle where a Murphy bed must have been hidden away. “Hello?” she called feebly, but all she heard was the wind and the waves, the gulls, the chimes, the bass beat of her heart.
She pouted and tried to think straight. Somehow, impossibly, Abby must be in here; maybe she was folded up inside the Murphy bed. Maybe she was hiding, feeling the way Otis might feel when the three cats sat beside his glass cage and watched his every move, scheming and dreaming of lizard for lunch. Mattie turned and walked back down to the beach.
Gulls lined the pier, crabby and nasal, like Angela’s uncle Irving. Mattie listened to them kvetch: “Oh, can it, Phil.” “Jeez, my knee’s killing me.” The pilings supporting the pier were splayed drunkenly, dropping off entirely as the pier extended out to sea. Daniel once said it looked as if the pier had tried to take a long walk down its own short self. Should she call him from the pay phone? He could be out here in an hour. Meanwhile, she could keep Abby treed inside the cabin, like a possum.