by Anne Lamott
• • •
Thanks in part to a crushed Valium that Mattie had put into her breakfast applesauce at Dr. Brodkey’s suggestion, Isa was remarkably docile as they came to the Personal Care reception area and checked in. Mattie had asked the receptionist to refer to Yvonne as Mrs. Lang, and so she did when she buzzed Yvonne’s room.
Yvonne joined them for the trip to Isa’s new room. Her bed, dresser, and TV, her couch with its antimacassars, her easy chair, her table and bookshelf were all there. So was the pousse-café of Isa’s life: boxes of photos and clippings, of figurines and souvenirs, of schoolwork and art her children and grandchildren had done, of other treasures and medicine bottles. The rest of her things would be divided between Goodwill and Mattie’s attic. The photos of Alfred that had hung in her hall all these years were stacked on the pine table.
Isa turned to survey her new surroundings. She looked at Yvonne, who was staring at Alfred’s handsome framed face, and her eyes narrowed. Mattie held her breath. Then Isa sank to the couch. “Tillie,” she wept, “come sit by me.” She batted at Mattie and Al when they came close, said that they were traitors and that she hated them. Al looked at her with despair.
Isa studied Yvonne, beseechingly. A dark cloud crossed her face, and then curiosity, a striving to place this person; a moment’s grief, and then blindness, Oedipus blinding himself so that he could go on; and then pride. “Tillie!” She held out her arms. “Tillie!” She pointed to her walls, her photos, her boxes of keepsakes. “Look at all my things!”
• • •
The next week, Mattie and Daniel took turns doing housework and helping Harry with his homework, then went to their own beds to read at night. This had been her salvation with Nicky—books that spirited her away without her having to leave. One night, after the kids were asleep, Mattie heard Daniel on the phone, gently and firmly telling Pauline that he really wasn’t ever going back.
He was sullen and withdrawn at breakfast the next morning. That afternoon, Pauline called and told Daniel she had filed for divorce. Things had been a mess ever since. Pauline called constantly, and hung up when Mattie or the children answered, and she called in the middle of the night. She told Daniel she was going to move to the city, and was trying to get the house ready to sell. He urged her to move out immediately, so he could make repairs and fix the garden, but she wouldn’t budge.
Mattie’s mind spewed out fearful thoughts. She took extra hours at the superette, where the work and Ned’s companionship calmed her. She loved the smells of the store, loved the dust that blew in through the broken screen door, that came in on dog paws, that you could never clean off the rough and ancient surfaces. In Ned, she felt that God had jiggled a dad out of the universe for her. She fantasized about making love with Daniel, but held back. Sex seemed so scary, now that she was close to getting what she thought she wanted. Love made your stomach ache. Left to their own devices, people were dangerous, and she was too; they were all marred, so scarred and scared. Her only hope was that she and Daniel would not be left to their own devices. Standing beside him singing in church, she imagined she was being held in someone’s soft warm hands.
They spoke the same language. One night, sitting on Daniel’s futon, near tears, she asked, “Why would a loving God take everything away from my mother?”
“I don’t see that God is taking anything away from her,” Daniel said. “I see Him taking care of her instead: it’s her illness that has done all the taking.”
• • •
The weather went crazy in late April and May, offering a few seasons in a few weeks: fog, then rain, and then a heat wave, an eerie autumnal snap, and then more rain. What the hell was that, people wondered, movie trailers for the whole year?
Daniel came to Mattie’s room one night when she was already in bed.
“Come in,” she said, putting her book down on her stomach.
He sat in her rattan chair. “Hi. You’re the systems analyst on the sleeping-together project, right? The timing consultant?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
His hands were folded in his lap, as though he were about to ask a banker for a loan. She took off her reading glasses, and Daniel came more clearly into focus. He was not as thin as he’d been during the worst of his depression. He had color in his cheeks from working on a roofing job for the past three days. The light in the room was soft and low.
“What I want to know is,” he said slowly, “how much longer do we have to wait?”
“I don’t know,” she answered. “I’m so afraid. I’m afraid if we’re lovers, we’ll ruin it somehow. And I’ll lose you. So I don’t quite know what to do.”
“You could let me love you, which I do. If you gave me an approximate date, like say, June twenty-first, the summer solstice, when we could think about climbing into bed, that would be plenty for me. I’d mark off the days on the wall of my room, like a prisoner.”
She took a deep breath. “How about an approximate time?” she asked.
He leaned forward in the chair. “Okay,” he agreed.
She looked at her watch, pushed the button that illuminated it. She followed the second hand as it went all the way around, once. “All right, then,” she said. “How about now?”
Daniel stayed in the chair, a little shocked. After a while he got up and came to sit beside her on the bed. She put her book and glasses on the table, and without taking her eyes off him pulled her nightie over her head. He rose slightly to kiss her, really kiss her for the first time, and without meaning to she crossed her arms in front of her breasts. He kept kissing her like in the movies, and then he laid his head on the blanket over her lap. She stroked his ropy hair and felt his breath light as a wing through the covers, and after a moment she turned off the lamp in case the children came in.
• • •
The children did come in, but not until breakfast time. Ella ran and leapt into bed between them, and scuttled into her mother’s arms. Mattie was back in her nightie, Daniel in his T-shirt and boxers. They had been snuggled up together. Harry cried out, “What’s going on?” as if he were Mattie’s father discovering her on the couch with her teenage boyfriend. He put his hands on his hips.
Mattie sat up against the pillows. “Daniel and I love each other, and are going to be together now,” she said.
“But what about Pauline, and what about Daddy?” Harry demanded. “And what about me?”
• • •
No amount of talking was going to make much of a difference, and so Mattie answered questions: No, he won’t be your new daddy, Nicky will always be your dad. Daniel and Pauline are getting divorced. No, we’re not going to have a baby. Yes, he’ll move out of the laundry room. No, you can’t get a puppy.
That night Harry and Ella both dawdled, stalled, whined, made demands, needed more water, needed still more assurances, needed to get up and pee, needed Mattie to stay with them until they were sound asleep, needed more water, needed to poop, needed to call their father. “No!” At that Mattie put her foot down. “You can call him in the morning.”
“I need to talk to him now,” Ella wailed.
“You can’t keep us from calling our dad,” Harry sobbed.
A few weeks later, after their nightly walk, after the children were showered and in bed, Mattie and Daniel sat in the living room reading. The cats milled around nervously, like armed guards, the children cried from their beds for favors, water, pees, company. After fifteen minutes of their pleading, Mattie went to Ella’s room and sat on her bed. They whispered in the glow of the night-light. Ella had her baby finger in her mouth, and Mattie gently removed it. When she held it to the night-light, she saw that there were only two bloody spots, where Ella had groomed hangnails with her teeth. Even in the low light, Mattie could see new growth, white crescent moons.
• • •
Mattie went to Yvonne’s one afternoon, when Al had taken Isa to the doctor. She simply wanted to sit with Yvonne in the strangeness of it all. Also,
now that she had Daniel, she was missing her father with a new fierceness. Yvonne came to the door in a black velvet shirt, many strands of turquoise, and flashy silver earrings that drew attention to her aged face, as if to announce: Look, I’m a thousand years old and it’s okay.
“Come on in. I’ve made some tea. And one of the men down the hall brings me pastries,” Yvonne said. “I’m not supposed to eat them, because of my heart.” The scent of cigarette smoke hung in the air, although there was no sign of ashtray, matches, or cigarettes. Sweets, men, smokes. The sand in her hourglass was running out, and Yvonne was savoring every last bit.
A few minutes later they sat stiffly with cups of peppermint tea and lemon bars. The hollow in Yvonne’s throat would have accommodated a Ping-Pong ball. Would Mattie have that cave under her chin one day, a balcony of turkey skin above it? She should be so lucky. They drank tea, ate sweets.
Yvonne stared off through the window, at white roses on scrawny stems reaching up like giraffes trying to peek inside. “I miss my fireplace,” she said. “All crones should have a hearth.”
She was so beautiful and full of appetites, and Isa was such a mess. And Mattie’s father was so dead. “My mother didn’t know the first thing about my dad,” Mattie said at last.
Yvonne leaned forward in her chair. “Sure she did, Mattie. They were deeply in love for a long time. They couldn’t think about how it would turn out when they got married—no one does—and if they had, they wouldn’t have gotten to have you and Al.”
Mattie gripped her forehead so that her fingernails dug into flesh. She felt Yvonne’s hand on her arm, light as a cornhusk.
• • •
Mattie had thought that love would save her and make her whole. But instead she often felt worse, fragmented, crazier. She tried to plant seeds of mutual accommodation, letting Daniel be how he was and feel however he felt. She tried to plant what she hoped to sow. You couldn’t grow tomatoes from apricot seeds. She’d start out fine, but then the way he pronounced a certain word might sicken her, or the way he scraped food back into his mouth with a spoon, like he was feeding the baby of his own self, would make her want to pull back.
She felt much less patient with Isa and the children too, and almost incapable of talking to Nicky or Lee about arrangements. She snapped more, spewed. Maybe she was getting Tourette’s.
On bad days, Daniel’s love smothered her. She couldn’t breathe, and she couldn’t talk to him about it, because she was afraid he would move out and she would die. Yet she couldn’t stand his snores in the night, which woke her, or the way he waited for her to wake up every morning. One morning when the children were at Nicky’s, she cried when Daniel started to make love to her, and asked him to please not touch her. Daniel was hurt, and pulled away, and when she wanted to snuggle up with him, he got out of bed and said, “I’m not an ATM!”
Then they both cried and were kind to each other all day long.
• • •
Early one Saturday morning, Mattie dreamt that she and Abby were swimming in warm ocean water, surrounded by baby kangaroos that floated and bobbed around them like dolphins, playing. Abby was smiling, young and gorgeous again. When Mattie woke up, she was laughing too, but by the time she told Daniel the dream, she’d started to think it was an omen—that Abby was dead.
“How do you get that Abby is dead based on that dream?” Daniel asked.
“Because I don’t think she’ll be happy again this side of the grave. I think she might have cancer or something, lung cancer from smoking.”
“Call Noah and ask. Tell him you have photos of your dad for him.”
“God, remember when I was just going to tell the truth? And trust God?”
“I know. What happened?”
“Well, it’s like that old joke: It was going great, and then I got out of bed.”
• • •
She called Al to ask whether he would mind if she visited Noah without him, and he said, no, not at all. Just as she was about to dial Noah’s number, the phone rang. It was Isa.
“Hi, Mom,” Mattie said. “How is everything?”
“You finally got your wish, Mattie, didn’t you? You put me away.” With that she hung up.
Mattie closed her eyes and rubbed them wearily. It was all fubar—fucked-up beyond repair. It was one of her father’s expressions, enlisted-man slang. She smiled, looked up, whispered: Hi, Dad.
She called Noah at the library. “Hey. It’s Mattie,” she said.
“Oh, hey.”
“Al said you wanted some photographs of Dad.”
“Yeah,” he said. The word Dad startled the both of them.
“I could drop some by today. I have to come out for work.”
“Today’s not a great day for me. I’m training someone.”
“I could drop them off at your house while you’re working, then,” she said.
There was a pause. “You could?”
“Yeah.”
“Wow. That’d be cool. You can leave them inside the front door.”
“Okay. Is Abby okay?” Sheepishly she told him about her dream.
“That’s like the best dream anyone’s ever told me,” Noah said. “Thanks, huh?”
“But I thought maybe it meant your mother was in trouble.” There was silence at Noah’s end. “So your mother’s okay?” she said weakly.
“A social worker from the county is helping her out now. It turns out she has diabetes, but the kind where you can just take pills. She got food stamps, and a couple of cats’ve showed up. She’s basically a street person, you know, a street person with a home.”
“Is there anything she needs that I could drop off while I’m out there?”
“A couple pairs of thick socks,” Noah suggested. “The diabetes is bad for your feet, if you don’t keep them clean, which she doesn’t. If you get infections, you could lose a foot. That would be great. I mean, if you got the socks.”
Where is my little blue shoe? Mattie wanted to ask, but she didn’t, and in fact, she found out later when she stopped by Noah’s house with the photos.
It was sitting on the table by the door, at the center of a cairn of white garden stones, the turquoise bold against the white. She picked it up and whispered, “Hello,” as if they shouldn’t be seen together. She took the photos of her father out of her purse and made a wreath around the stones and the little blue shoe, a garland of pictures of her father, as a baby, as a boy in a long-sleeved striped sailor shirt, scattering birdseed in Venice, in his Berkeley mortarboard and gown, and at the beach in Bolinas, sitting in the sand where the driftwood musicians now jammed, binoculars around his neck. There was a beer in the sand beside him, and he was waving to whoever held the camera. This one had been taken a year before he died. She looked at it for a long time before stepping back out into the bright spring sun. The light on the green hills was like powdered sugar on a cake, sifted through a doily.
• • •
Mattie worked all day at the superette and her feet ached from standing, but she drove to Abby’s anyway, to deliver the socks and some food Ned had put together.
Abby opened the door to her shack, peering nervously through the opening; she was trying to keep a little white kitten inside. It was two months old or so, and looked like a cheaply made Siamese. She scooped it in and let Mattie step past her. Abby had dark bags under her eyes, a basketball of gut bulging out of her T-shirt. The T-shirt was tucked into her stretch leggings, like Tweedledum, and she wore an old blue watch cap; it was all Mattie could do not to offer a fashion consultation. Along with the ocean and mildew, the place now smelled faintly of cat box and urine, as Isa’s apartment had.
There was plenty of milk and cheese and eggs in the cold cupboard, and several bottles of medicine on the counter by the sink, the hot plate nearby, with the kettle on top, boxes and cans of food on the shelves. Mattie put her bag of groceries on the counter, then showed Abby the socks; she told her that Noah had asked her to bring them.
&nb
sp; The kitten threw itself at Mattie’s ankles, and she got on the floor to play with it, feeling grains of cat litter under her hands. She saw that there were kerosene lamps on the counter, and a wood-burning stove with its pipe set up. Abby got on the floor beside Mattie to play with the kitten. She looked like an alien encountering such a creature for the first time, simultaneously puzzled and charmed. She held a dirty dishcloth out for it to charge and whipped it away at the last second. They played with the kitten for a while. Abby’s bare feet smelled awful. They looked horrible, dirty, the nails like a tree sloth’s, the toes crossing one over another.
“Put on the clean socks,” Mattie said. “You’ve got to keep your feet clean and warm.” She was so used to bossing her mother that it seemed only natural to order Abby around too. When she handed her a pair, she realized that it wouldn’t do any good for Abby to put them on her dirty feet. They would only press the filth into her skin. Could I get a partial credit, Lord, for just bringing them out to her? Mattie wondered. Nope, said Jesus, sorry.
The bottoms of Abby’s feet were caked with grime, cracked with fissures in which Mattie could see grains of cat litter. She started to imagine herself washing them, and prayed, Please, anything but that. Yet just as Abby had peeled away the paper band around the socks, Mattie heard herself tell her to stop.
“You can’t put those nice new socks on dirty feet,” she said. “Let me heat some water.” And by God, ten minutes later, Mattie was gently bathing one of Abby’s feet in a salad bowl of warm soapy water, wiping the grime off her ankle and heel and toes with a dish towel and Ivory soap, working the cat litter out of the cracks in her sole.