by Anne Lamott
“Yes, that’s right. Jerry Howard.”
“Jerry Howard,” Mattie said, the name returning like a fragment of dream.
“Yes. Are you okay? You’re perspiring. Shall I get you some water?” Mattie fought back a wave of nausea.
“Okay,” she said weakly. “Yes, please.”
Yvonne got up, limped to the bathroom, and returned with a glass of water. She watched Mattie sip it. “Well. The boys hung out in his living room talking, while he took them one by one out to the garage and gave them blow jobs. Alfred didn’t think it was wrong. All the other boys did it too. It felt great. Then all of them stopped but Alfred. He thought it was a good deal, that he was getting as good as he gave. He loved the candy bars, the Cokes, Jerry. And his parents fought so much that he really hated to go home. I never got Alfred to see how harmful it must have been, or really even to talk about it much.”
Mattie saw a confusion of people in her head: Neil and Yvonne; Abby and Al chasing her around with a hose on hot summer nights at Neil’s; her dad at ten years old, reaching for a chocolate bar in a garage, an older man bending toward him; Yvonne holding out a candy bar too; all that fucking turquoise; her mother, with her bright blue eyes, holding newborn babies, Al and Mattie, Harry and Ella—and Noah. Mattie felt herself blanch. She had the most terrible thought.
“Did my mom ever see Noah?”
“Just once, by accident. Of course, that was all it took. She ran into Abby and Noah up at Kaiser.”
“God.” Mattie’s chest felt crushed.
“Your dad had been dead for a little while.”
“Was it obvious who the father was?”
“A dead woman would have known,” Yvonne said.
Mattie closed her eyes. Currents of grief passed through her, and she breathed through each one, as if in labor again. It had been painful the first time she’d seen Harry’s face in Alexander, and that had been after a divorce. How had Isa endured? Mattie had an urge to call her and see how she was doing, to try by a show of love and kindness to make up for all the pain Isa had borne—but it hadn’t worked when she was a child, and it wouldn’t work now. She stared out one of Yvonne’s windows, covered with a lace curtain, at a blur of kumquat leaves. Beyond the tree, in the furry green distance, she could see her mother in the waiting room at Kaiser, mortally wounded not by the blast of the nuclear bombs she rallied against, not by a bullet fired by the gun nuts she marched against, not by the cancer she had feared, but by a child’s beautiful features. Mattie squinted until she could see the child, and then her father at ten, no taller than Harry was now, walking along like Harry on his way to the school bus stop, his eyes brown and concerned, glancing around as he passed the hero fireman’s garage, kicking at weeds, calling to the neighborhood dogs he knew.
eleven
Early morning was gray and fuzzy. Fog pressed against the windowpanes. Mattie sat next to Otis’s glass cage in the living room. The little dragon had grown a couple of inches, and his skin was dull and hazy, a sign that he was about to shed. Harry, who had looked up iguanas on the Internet, announced that Otis needed to soak, and be rubbed with a lubricant too, to help the shedding process.
“That is not going to happen,” Mattie told him.
“Jeez!” he said. “You’d only have to do it twice a day.”
“You could do it, honey.”
“You’re so mean. Why can’t you be a normal mother? A mother who wants her child to be happy?”
Ella sat nearby. She had done her own hair that morning, and the blond pigtails sprouted on top of her head like a space girl’s antennae. Her pinkie dangled over her lip as she read a Dr. Seuss book. Mattie was working long days at the superette, and Nicky was not around much. Al usually hung out with the kids after school until Mattie got home.
Harry seemed caught in a web of fears. Mattie had taken him and Ella into town for ice cream one night, and they were eating sundaes at a table when two policemen who patrolled on bikes came in. Harry froze, as if he were about to be busted. His hands trembled, as though he’d just realized he was violating the terms of his probation by eating a caramel sundae.
The policemen, without being asked, stopped by and introduced themselves, and gave both children police officer trading cards with their own pictures and biographies. When Harry took his trading card home, new fears ignited. Now he was afraid of wrecking the card. When Daniel fished it out of the pocket of Harry’s shorts before starting a load of wash, Harry went white—aware how close a call it had been, feeling more than ever the menace shimmering beneath the very things meant to shelter, protect, or clean.
Mattie told Harry she’d help him soak Otis later, but only if he’d be in charge. He snuggled up closer to her, gratefully. “If it was Jesus, wouldn’t you help him soak his shedding skin off?” She nodded. He patted her. “It will make you happy to help Otis feel fresher.”
They soaked Otis that night, and the next day his old skin lay beneath him on the floor of his cage like a bathrobe he’d stepped out of. Mattie watched him in his noble-lizard mode. He was no more responsive to her than to any of the rocks in his cage. She thought idly about pouring Drano over him. “How would you like that?” she asked. Otis didn’t move. He gave her nothing to work with. If he was nervous, she would know how to calm him. If he was lonely, she would move in closer. But nothing, ever—only the A side, noble frozen lizard, or the B side, electric lizard, tearing around his cage, spewing shit. Sometimes he’d accidentally look at her, but she’d slide right off his eyes.
A lamp glowed on a corner shelf, a tender light reflected on the window so it looked like the rising sun. The real sun had still not risen. When the phone rang, Mattie did not get up to answer. It was probably Isa. Mattie half believed that her mother’s subconscious was picking up signals about Yvonne’s reappearance in Mattie’s life. She closed her eyes as the answering machine began playing its recorded message. Thinking of Yvonne sent anxiety through Mattie’s mind—not because Yvonne had slept with her father for twenty years, not because Yvonne had pulled back Alfred’s bandages to reveal his sexual wound, but because Yvonne lived in the Personal Care units at The Sequoias, where Isa needed to live now too. Obviously, they couldn’t live in the same place. Whoever it was hung up without leaving a message.
Mattie continued to sit beside Otis. She stared in the direction he was looking, woman and iguana facing southeast. Her mind spun around an ice rink, doing figure eights. Hi, Yvonne, she imagined saying into the phone. Shall we get together and talk some more about you and my dad? Hi, Abby. Shall we get together and talk about you and my dad? Hi, Noah. Want to get together and talk about you and my dad? Maybe we could all get together and lay memories of him out on the floor like quilting squares. Then I could have my dad back.
The phone rang again, and the machine took the message. It was Isa, crying about a lost red dog. Mattie got up and answered. “Mom. Whose dog are you talking about?”
“My dog, for Chrissakes. God, Mattie. My little red dog. Have you lost your mind?” Mattie stared through the window. The lamp’s light was reflected outside, oval, flattened, hanging in a homely, straggly tree. The tree was bald except for the explosion of needles at the top, like a skinny person with a cloud of hair, holding in its arms a lozenge of sunrise.
“Do you mean your cat, Mom?” Mattie asked.
There was the splutter of indignation. Isa hung up. Mattie’s stomach turned to worms. She sat back down near Otis.
The phone rang again an hour later. It was Lewis. “I’m here with your mother,” he said. “I think perhaps you should come over.”
“What’s she doing?” Mattie asked.
“She’s going up and down the hall, accosting people, looking for her little red dog.”
“But she doesn’t have a little red dog,” Mattie pointed out.
“Mattie, I think you better come on down,” Lewis said. She’d never heard him sound so hopeless before. He mentioned that there might be a studio opening up in Personal C
are soon, and they could move her. He told Mattie that it would break his heart—Isa’s loss of autonomy, of her cat, and the view of the mountain. But Mattie worried only about how Isa could bear to see Yvonne again, daily, relive a lifetime’s humiliation. It would destroy the marriage Isa liked to pretend she’d had. Please let her have a big stroke, Mattie prayed.
She called Dr. Brodkey. “Listen,” the doctor said. “One of my older patients who has some of your mother’s symptoms, although he has Alzheimer’s, is responding to Prozac. I think it’s worth a try.”
• • •
Driving to the drugstore to pick up the prescription, Mattie found herself wondering: If the right medication could bring Isa back to her old state, bright, animated, bossy, and incredibly annoying, would Mattie want her? Would she want more years of the old Isa—to be talked to alternately as if she were the queen’s eunuch and the Christ? Part of her hoped for her mother just to die, suddenly, soon. Another part of her hoped there were sweet memories for Isa still to come. Hope, as Augustine said, was costly. Lord, she prayed. You there? She saw Jesus’ face, smiling, those kind dark eyes. She gave him Harry’s ferocious look of defiance: What if, she challenged, what if I give her a bunch of vitamin K foods? Broccoli! Liver! She paused for dramatic effect. Kale.
She had prayed for help, and now a pharmacy clerk was getting Prozac for Isa. Maybe it would help her mother perk up and quiet down. Maybe they could buy her a couple more seasons; then she could die in her sleep, in a bed in Personal Care. Mattie and an aide would have tucked her into bed the night of her death, called good night at the door before Isa sailed away. Mattie closed her eyes and imagined how sweet it would be to take that kind of care of Isa. “I think I want to be like a ship’s chaplain,” she exclaimed in a whisper. The clerk hummed loudly as she rang up the order. So I’m crazy! Mattie agreed. You could be busy crazy, or you could be crazy like religious people who worked in soup kitchens. This is the kind of crazy she wanted to be—soup-kitchen crazy, ladling out soup to people who felt like Otis on the inside, frozen, frantic, alien. She threw back her shoulders. I got it, she called silently to God while the clerk put the Prozac in a bag. I’m back! I’m a ship’s chaplain now! The clerk gave her the bag, a receipt, and an encouraging smile. “You just take this exactly as prescribed,” she said.
• • •
When Mattie arrived with the Prozac, Lewis and Isa were sitting side by side on the couch in the living room, holding hands, looking grim and red-eyed. Their walkers were side by side too, like dogs ready for a nice walk. Mattie hugged her mother, who clung to her. Lewis’s dark irises were spotted with old age and cataracts. The moles on his dark skin were multiplying, and light skin tabs spread like glitter, as if his face were a star map, a universe of planets. Mattie bent to kiss him, smooth the skin in the hollows of his cheeks. “Your mother was worried about a little red dog,” he said. Mattie nodded. “But not anymore, right, Isa?” Isa nodded.
“I have a cat,” Isa said, proud but shaky. The cat hid beneath the curtains, peering out as if Mattie might toss a grenade its way. The apartment smelled of urine—Isa’s and the cat’s. Mattie noticed a long, broad brown smear near the easy chair, like fingerpaint, too big to be the cat’s. She got a sponge and cleaned the streak on the carpet.
“How did you manage to spill food under your chair?” she asked as she sponged up the shit. Isa looked amused, and pleased, and shrugged; her eyes were sunken and inflamed.
“Mom,” Mattie said, after throwing away the sponge. “Mom, your doctor called.” This was not the literal truth. “Your bloodwork raised a few questions.” This was not quite true either; Isa had not had bloodwork. “She’s prescribed a new medication. And she insists you move into Personal Care for now.”
“No!” Isa cried out. “No, I will die first.”
“Isa,” said Lewis. “Just till you’re stronger.”
“I’m not going anywhere! You can both go to hell!”
“Mom, now, be smart about it,” Mattie said. “You’ll still have an apartment—it’s just down there at the other end of the property. You and Lewis can see each other every day, just like now. And someone will be there to help you get started every morning—help you bathe, give you your meds. And make sure you get healthy meals. Then at night they’ll help you get ready for bed. They’ll be there if you fall. I’m going down to Personal Care right now to see where you are on the waiting list, because we’re taking the next bed.” Mattie sounded more definite than she felt. She strode toward the door with a confidence she was not actually experiencing.
Isa had her fingers in her ears and was chanting in secular tongues. Mattie was desperate to win back her love and trust, but like Ulysses ignoring the sirens beckoning from the rocks, she walked on toward the door.
She went to Personal Care to talk to the director. There was now just one person ahead of Isa on the waiting list. Who, Mattie wanted to ask. Can I get a name and an apartment number on that? What was she going to do, trick the person into going out to the parking lot some night, and mow her down? She walked back to her mother’s apartment not knowing what to expect or what to do. She had told a kind of a truth, although not one that lined up perfectly with the facts. Now she was going to trust God.
Her mother was clutching her cat and crying softly. Mattie stayed with her as long as she could before going to pick up Harry and Ella at school. “I promise you, Mom, it’s going to be okay,” she said. “Better than okay. Right, Lewis?”
“It’s true, darling Isa.” He stroked Isa’s hair and brow like a longtime lover.
• • •
As she drove toward Ella’s school, Mattie remembered a story the pastor had recently told, about a girl who was crying in the night. When her mother came to comfort her, the girl said she was too afraid of the dark to sleep. “But God’s with you, comforting and protecting you,” the mother said.
“But I need someone with skin on,” the little girl said.
This is who Mattie wanted to be in the world: God with skin on, someone who would show up and listen, bring you a glass of water if you were thirsty. Al was God with skin on for Mattie. So were Angela, Daniel, Lewis, her pastor, her children. Isa wasn’t, though. Isa was the scared, autistic parts of Mattie’s mind, with skin on, the parts most needing the love that terrified them most.
• • •
Daniel had picked up pad Thai for dinner. They ate on trays in front of the TV with the kids, something they rarely did. Yet they all seemed to want to be together, and still be left alone. Mattie tried to look at Daniel and the kids with ship’s-chaplain compassion as long as she could. Then she noticed that Harry was eating like someone shoveling hay onto a flatbed truck, and Daniel was watching TV too intensely, acting like someone who’d had a lobotomy. Ella ate fussily, with her bleeding pinkie in the air, like Quentin Crisp. Out of nowhere, Mattie felt a rage, volcanic eruptions of frustration. She considered throwing all the trays against the wall.
She closed her eyes. Help me out of this mess! she prayed. She stared at the TV but saw nothing there, until finally she saw herself and Al at the table with Isa and Alfred, Isa starving herself down to a size 8, five-nine and one hundred twenty pounds, Mattie growing fat, Al stoned on LSD, and only Alfred seeming to enjoy his food, talking in his teacherly way about minus tides out at the Cove. Mattie used to eat the way Harry was eating now, and she saw that she was doing to Harry and Ella exactly what Alfred and Isa had done to her—pretending there were no shadows falling across the house like black fabric. Harry’s were in the shapes of shadow puppets—of Lee, whom his parents had betrayed, whom he then betrayed by accepting her kindness; of Mattie, whom he blamed for the divorce; of Nicky’s new children, who scampered and cooed while Harry worried and plotted like a hunchback prince: no wonder he had bad posture. Ella’s shadow looked like Mattie’s had, cast by parents who didn’t love each other anymore, who had loved each other, though, until the daughter came along. Ella’s father disappeared from her daily lif
e when she was two. Her shadow was an echo where her father used to be.
• • •
Noah called Al one night, and after clearing his throat, hemming awhile, asked if Al had some pictures of his dad he could look at. “I only have a couple,” Noah told Al. “I’d like one from when he was little. And one from when I would have been little. And maybe one when he was my age now too.”
“Mattie has almost all our pictures,” Al said. “Maybe we can put together an album for you, and bring it out.”
“I don’t need an album,” Noah protested. “Just a few pictures will do.”
“But could we bring them out?” Al asked.
He told Mattie all this later, under the trees in his garden.
“He said we could come out?”
Al nodded.
“He didn’t say, ‘You can come out, but not your fat weepy sister’?”
“Wait—let me think.” Al thought. “Nope, I don’t think he said that.”
• • •
Mattie felt stuck in a rut with Daniel. “How will I know when it’s time to go to bed with him?” she asked Angela one night.
“You’ll just know,” Angela said. “You’ll be afraid, but it will be like jumping off a low cliff into cold water. And then it will be wonderful once you’re in.”
Mattie fumed a bit; Angela could be so grandly reassuring. Hoping to get a rise from her, she asked, “How long did you and Julie go out before you went to bed?”
“You can’t go by that.” Angela laughed. “This is you, and Daniel, not even out of his marriage.”
“Tell me anyway, Angela,” Mattie insisted.
“Oh, I don’t even like to think about it,” Angela replied. “You know the old joke about lesbians: What do lesbians bring on the second date? A U-Haul. Let’s put it this way: It didn’t take as long.”
• • •
Most nights after dinner, Daniel would put Ella on his shoulders and they’d stop by Harry’s room to see if he wanted to come along for a walk. Ella liked to smoke the cold night air like a forties movie star.