by Anne Lamott
“Of course he’s with us,” Harry said. “He lives here now. He’s ours.”
“Oh, honey. He’s actually still married to Pauline.”
“Yeah, but he should be married to you.”
“What makes you think so?”
“Duh. It’s so obvious. She thinks she’s so great.” Mattie kissed her son, smelled the sweet skin. “Plus, she’s got that big fat ass.”
“Harry!” Mattie laughed. “Stop. We don’t care what her butt looks like.”
“I don’t think I’ve seen such a big jiggly butt in my whole wide life.”
• • •
This conversation cheered her up enormously. She stretched out on the couch and read until nearly midnight, looking up each time she heard a car pass, rearranging her face into expressions of sultry kindness. But when Daniel didn’t come home by midnight, she got in bed and cried, as quietly as she could. She tried to cry herself to sleep, yet she stayed wide awake.
She imagined a murderer sneaking in the front door. She imagined Daniel coming home, walking into her arms, taking her teary face in his hands and bending to kiss her. She imagined Daniel and Pauline in bed, the intense sexual relief of making up. This pleasure might be reason enough to stay married. She took a sleeping pill with brandy, but it didn’t help. It only impaired her, made it hard for her to walk to the bathroom for a pee. She looked at the demented woman in the bathroom mirror, and saw mug-shot numbers across her chest, after her arrest for stabbing Pauline and cutting off her head with a chain saw.
When had she started letting herself go? She needed a haircut, and a face-lift. She needed to start dyeing her hair. Her wrinkles were deeper, her eyes exhausted. Finally she heard Daniel’s car pull up, and his key in the front door. “Hi, kitties,” she heard him say. He was thoroughly drunk, talking to the cats, slurring. She sighed with relief.
• • •
Pauline called the next morning when Daniel was still in bed. Mattie had brought him orange juice and aspirin and coffee first thing, settling into the kitchen herself with the paper.
“Let me ask you something,” Pauline said. “How do you get this to come out right?”
Mattie thought it over. “I don’t actually need to make it all come out right for everyone,” she said. “Things sometimes happen, Pauline.”
• • •
In the weeks that followed, Mattie was tired all the time from working at the store. When she got home the children fought, and she shouted at them and slammed doors; her mother called every few hours, again crying about the fire, and Mattie repeated tightly that there was no fire, that everyone was fine. But no one really was fine, especially her. She used to be sweet, able to tolerate so much more.
Now if people cut her off in traffic, she was ready to follow them home.
One afternoon she found everyone hiding from her in the laundry room. Daniel was in his beach chair, reading. Ella was sitting on the futon with her back in the corner, drawing. Harry was lying beside her, facedown, wearing swim trunks imprinted with sharks, and an orange plaid shirt with a collar. The cats were stacked up on Daniel’s bookshelf, like opium users on dosshouse beds. Everyone turned to look at her as if she were armed.
“Hi, you guys,” she said. “Don’t you want some more light?” She flicked on the switch, filling the room with overhead glare. Ella shaded her eyes. Her nails were bleeding again. Harry ignored her. Daniel looked up fretfully. He had lost ten pounds in two months. She walked into the room and turned on the two reading lamps so everyone could see better, although none of them wanted to. “Harry,” she said nicely, “you really can’t wear sharks with plaid.” Harry turned to Daniel.
“Mattie?” said Daniel, and got up to offer her his seat.
“I can’t sit down,” she said shrilly. “I’ve got a whole house to clean! While you all laze around like the gentry. What do you think I am, the scullery maid?” She walked toward Ella, who dropped her sketch pad into her lap and put her bleeding hands in front of her face as if to fend off blows. “What are you doing, Ella?” she yelled. “Jesus Christ.”
“Mom!” Harry shouted at her. She took a step toward him, not knowing what she might do; there was ringing in her ears and Isa’s fire burned in her head, and she whipped around and hit the wall as hard as she could. Her fist went through the Sheetrock. The children screamed.
Mattie stood there, her fist hidden, swallowed up by the wall, surprised by how easy it was to punch a hole in Sheetrock. The room was silent except for the footsteps of the cats as they fled. Ella started to cry.
Daniel led her to the kitchen, where he made an ice pack for her hand out of a Ziploc bag. The children huddled in the doorway, as if she were dangerous. They looked like refugees.
“I’m having a hard time,” Mattie said.
Daniel suggested he drop the children off with Nicky and Lee, but Mattie couldn’t bear being the kind of mentally ill mother whose children had to be dropped off at their father’s house after her episodes.
“But you are,” Al pointed out when she called him from her bedroom. He laughed, and she did too.
Mattie and Daniel and the children hung out, uneasily, through the afternoon, and then, at sunset, they drove to Bolinas to look at the driftwood musicians on the beach. Mattie hated to admit it, but Pauline had been right. This was an astonishing creation, musicians jamming by a crumbling seawall. The sculptures were six to seven feet high, jaunty, exuberant, made of wood and whatever else had washed ashore in storms of the previous winter. They were elongated like Giacomettis. Wild heads and rolling eyes, skeletal ribs and round tummies, exploding hair, hands and fingers and instruments of hoses and ropes and twigs, eyes of juice-bottle tops, ratty pirate pennants.
The children shouted and screamed and raced around like dogs. A horn player blew a driftwood trombone, a pedal-steel guitarist and a bass player strummed kelp strings. All of them had twigs for toes, except the lucky vibe player, who wore mildewed boots. A mop-headed Rasta groupie with a tubular stoned look watched, and a coyote with a kelp mane howled with his head thrown back. There was a black marimba player, maybe singing harmony, with black zori hands and a kerchief of green fishnet. The drummer had an Amish broom beard, his chest the old foot liner from the floor of a truck. People milled around, pointing out details, laughing.
Someone eventually built a bonfire. Mattie and Daniel went to warm themselves, smiled at the other grown-ups. It was getting cold. Bottles of wine and flasks of brandy emerged from purses and pockets, and were passed around. Mattie and Daniel took sips of whatever came their way. “Where are the kids?” she asked.
“They’re right over there,” Daniel said, pointing down the beach. Her children were moving across the sand, gathering materials. Harry had a tangle of wire or fishing line; seaweed streamed from Ella’s hands.
“My father would have loved this,” she told Daniel. He nodded, and reached for the bottle that someone was holding out to him. “This is what it was like when I was a kid, with Al and Abby in Neil’s backyard—meeting up with whoever was there to go take a look at what had washed ashore.”
Food appeared—cheese, bread, apples. Daniel pulled a bag of M&M’s from his jacket pocket, and people picked them from his cupped palm like Communion wafers. The children made a cat near the musicians, with wire whiskers, seaweed tail, red juice-bottle-cap nose, and green cap eyes, and Mattie felt restored by what two kids could make from a bunch of beach junk tacked to driftwood poles.
• • •
She had somehow kept neglecting to tell Daniel she loved him. Actually, he asked her not to: after Christmas dinner, when everyone else had left, and the children had gone to sleep, she believed she was getting the nudge from God; this was the night to tell him. It took a while, and a shot of brandy, and it took ignoring something inside her that seemed to be trying to flag her down. But sitting by the fire, with the tree lights on, she took a deep breath and said shyly, “I’d like to tell you something.” Daniel looked sick. “Are yo
u okay?” she asked.
“I’m afraid you’re going to say something that’s too interesting for me to handle right now,” he said. So she shut herself off like a flashlight.
She asked God and Angela what to do. Angela came through as usual. “Can’t you give the poor guy a break? He’s clearly not doing very well. Can you imagine the laundry room as a hospital room? You wouldn’t try to get someone to get it together, or get them to date you, just after they’ve been admitted. You’d take them as they are, and you’d do what you could to help.” So Mattie tried. Her heart grew softer, some of the time. He was really a mess, losing weight, not sleeping. There was something egg-wet and spiky about him, like a newly hatched bird. She watched him in the garden with Ella, picking flowers or playing fairies, or persuading Harry and his friends to help paint cabinets. His being there, the intimacy of the day-to-day, the sounds of sleep and the bathroom, his late-night pain on the phone with Pauline. It began to extinguish her lust. She started fantasizing about making love with Nicky again, or William.
One night she blew up at Daniel after he’d been holed up in his room on the phone with Pauline. “I’ve been waiting to call Angela all night!” she snapped. “Now it’s too late!”
Daniel looked at the phone in his hand as if he had no idea how it had gotten there. He turned to her. “Do you want me to move out?” he asked quietly. “I think this is too hard on you. You have so much going on.”
“No, no,” she said, instantly mortified. “I’m sorry I’m being so ugly. I’m just not myself.” But she was herself, and that was the problem. She had wanted to move outside the small flower bed of her old sweet helpful self, and had imagined stepping into a wild, overgrown garden of jungle flowers and exotic ferns. Instead it seemed that inside her was a septic field: it was disgusting. She was short with everyone, Isa, the children, Daniel. There was no end to the depravity of her thoughts now. She thought about killing her children, and the cats. She wondered how Otis would like to be put down the garbage disposal.
Mattie told Daniel that she really wanted him to stay, which she did. The next day he made a cinder-block bookshelf with three pine slats, as if to prove himself, and he brought some books from home. Mattie and the kids came to his room often, alone and together, plopping down on his bed where slanting afternoon sun lit the walls and the futon.
He bought a fan at the Salvage Shop. Mattie knocked on the door one hot day in January and stepped in. He was sitting on his beach chair with a book, while Ella slept, boiled and butterflied like a shrimp, on the futon. Daniel put his book on the floor. Mattie nudged Ella over and stretched out beside her.
“How you doing?” Mattie asked.
“I’m a cuckoo clock,” he said.
“Yeah, you and me both.” His dreadlocks were trimmed to just below his ears. He still had the most beautiful lips she’d ever seen, the palest pink. He tucked his hands under his thighs as if they had to be contained, as if they would lash out otherwise, or fly away.
• • •
Isa had become strangely quiet. Where had all that energy gone, all those memories and opinions, all that talk? She watched people talk now, and listened, beaming. Lewis stopped in to see her several times a day. He brought her snacks from the dining room under his coat: fruit, buns, slices of cheese, anything he could sneak out that didn’t have vitamin K. He let her show him the shrine of Alfred every day, the photos in frames in the hall, and listened to the tour of their marriage again and again: Oh, here we are with baby Al! Here we are at the St. Francis Hotel, on our twentieth anniversary, just as in love as the day we met! Here we are at Mattie’s graduation; here we’re camping in Yosemite the year before Alfred died. Lewis sat by her bed while she slept, and he prayed or read the book of Psalms he carried with him everywhere. He made her walk every day down the halls of The Sequoias. “Oh for Chrissakes,” she would grouse, but would walk with him for twenty minutes, as far as the Personal Care units—which she treated like a forbidden zone. Then she’d turn around and head for home.
Isa needed to move into Personal Care, that was clear. She regularly fell out of bed in the middle of the night. The aides put pillows on the floor to cushion her fall. Mattie called The Sequoias one day to ask if there were any rooms in Personal Care. “No,” said the director, “but you can put her on the waiting list.”
“And how much does it cost again?”
“Thirty-eight hundred dollars a month, with the special fund kicking in five hundred.”
“That’s great,” said Mattie. “Let me get back to you on it.”
• • •
“Where are we gonna get it?” Mattie asked Al.
“What are we coming up with now, with her Social Security, you, me, and Lewis?”
“Twenty-five hundred, total.”
“That’s not so bad. We’re close. We only need eight hundred more.”
“And who’s going to tell her she has to move? You know there are no cats in Personal Care.”
Al looked at her thoughtfully. “I think you should tell her.”
“Maybe we should kill her, in her sleep.”
“Okay,” he said.
• • •
It was Al, not Mattie, who decided it was time to visit Noah.
Al called her one day and said, “I don’t want to sound like a Nike ad, but why don’t we just do it? Get it over with. Drive out to Noah’s and say hello.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that.”
They practiced their opening lines as they went out to the Cove two days later. “Hi, I’m Mattie,” she said brightly.
“The tone is all wrong. You sound like a flight attendant.”
Mattie lowered her voice to basso profundo, slow. “IIIIIII’m Mattie.”
“Good. Very Tales from the Crypt.”
“What do I say next?”
“What do you want to say?”
“I want to say, ‘I’m Mattie, and this is Al. And maybe you know this already, but our father was Alfred Ryder too.’”
Al made a face of surprise, like a grown-up playing peek-a-boo.
“I’m Mattie, and this is Al,” she tried again. “And the fact is . . .”
“What’s the fact, Mat?”
“The fact is, we’re . . .”
“We’re Alfred’s older children,” Al said. “We never knew our father had another son until pretty recently. And that child turns out to be you. So we’re Alfred’s three children. We didn’t know how to proceed, or what would be best, so we decided to take a chance and say these words to you.”
“That was perfect,” said Mattie, and repeated it. They drove past the library, which was closed, past the superette, where Ned’s truck was parked in front. They flashed through the downtown area to the old two-lane highway to Marshall, toward Noah’s house.
• • •
From the car, Al and Mattie watched Noah sitting on the front porch of the light-blue house. He was drinking a beer and reading the paper. They got out of the car and waved. He watched as they walked toward him, but he didn’t wave back. There was a wicker basket beside him, and a fan. His hair was short, buzzed, dark. He wore a black T-shirt faded nearly to gray. When they got closer to the porch, they saw that the basket contained a grizzled basset hound.
Noah looked up with polite defiance when they walked up the steps. Mattie saw by the expression on his face that he knew who they were.
The dog opened its wino eyes, took them in, and fell back to sleep. There were succulents everywhere on the stairs, in cracked and broken pots, and a branch of a bay tree stretched over the railing onto the porch. The dog emitted a windy, comatose growl.
“That sure looks like an old dog,” Al said.
Noah ran his hand back over his own bristles as if to push them off his forehead. He shook Al’s hand. Mattie wondered whether she should say something obvious about the dog, so he would like her too.
The dry grass was cut back twenty feet from the house, a lion-blo
nd brush cut, framed by the bay trees. Noah reached down to scratch the dog’s ears. Mattie and Al continued up the porch steps, uninvited, and sat on the broad rail.
“Hi, Noah,” said Mattie. “I’m Mattie. This is Al.”
Noah looked at her skeptically. “We’ve met at the library.”
Mattie closed her eyes and rubbed her forehead. All she had to do was get the first sentence out. Help! she prayed. She found herself saying calmly to her feet, “We’re Alfred’s older children. We never knew our father had another son until a few months ago. . . .” When she was finished there was silence, except for the crickets and birds, the rustle of leaves and grasses. Noah was squinting at her as though she had spoken in broken English. Then the dog opened its boxy jaws and bayed operatically, as though hearing grievous news.
Everyone laughed nervously. Al squatted beside the dog and petted it. Noah stared into his lap, and squeezed the tip of his forefinger as if trying to force a splinter to the surface.
“You are a handsome guy,” Al told the dog, scratching its rear. The dog yawned.
“I don’t mean to be rude,” Noah said. “But I have to leave soon. I have a gardening job.”
“That’s okay,” said Al. “We just wanted to say the words out loud. We didn’t know if you knew already, or if you’d care, but we came anyway.” Mattie felt huge and ungainly, and drunk. When Noah glanced over, she threw her hands up in a shrug, as an old Italian might, accepting a compliment or condolences. The dog barely moved. “There’s nothing like a good dog,” Al said. “It’s like having God around, isn’t it? Is yours sick, or is he just old?”
“Both,” Noah said. He squatted beside the basket and scratched the mottled silkiness of the dog’s ears. Al continued to pet its haunches, seemingly oblivious to Noah. After a moment, Noah moved his head closer to the dog and to Al, and Mattie had to look away from the two heads bent over the dog. She saw in them her father at two ages. She started weeping, as silently as she could manage. The smells of hot golden grass, manure, oil from Noah’s truck, and the dirty dog clotted in her throat. Noah and Al looked at each other, the silence stretched tight between them. Al smiled, tapped his crossed bottom teeth, their father’s teeth. Noah instinctively touched his too. “God,” he said.