Imperfect Birds

by Anne Lamott

  It took James all day to write a three-page story of the treachery of everyday life. It was called “Ducks in a Row.” Elizabeth thought up the title. It was amazing what a smart, charming piece he had made from the insanity. He had turned it into an allegory about how when you think you’ve finally got your ducks lined up, they turn and peck you to death. How life and time were a conveyor belt moving you along, and blessing came when you realized it wasn’t your conveyor belt. And that no matter how protected and noble you felt, how much in control, we were all being conveyed, all the time, borne astride the Möbius strip of time.

  “You’re a genius,” she told him, handing back the essay with a few typos circled. She stood behind him at his computer and pointed out last-minute typos, which he corrected.

  “You helped me so much with it. You’re my Alice B. Toklas, my muse, and my beloved.”

  Their rift was healed, not by the ordeal, stupid and exquisite, nor by the alchemy that gave him this essay, but by what was revealed: the depth of their fearful stress, the gag snake coiled inside the peanut brittle can, and how much they needed each other.

  He went into the city on Thursday night to record it, after making Rae and Lank listen over the phone. Lank said, “You’re a better man than I. I would have gotten in my car and driven through the front windows of the store.”

  Rae said, “What an experience. You got humility out of it, James. And you got to experience your self-repair mechanism.”

  “Humility is so overrated, if you ask me,” said Lank.

  “I agree,” said Rae. “But it’s like a stone in the gizzard that helps us digest the indigestible stuff of our lives.”

  “Whoa, Rae, that is so incredible,” said Lank. “Can James use that?”

  There was no way out of seeing The Seventh Seal with her mother. She’d promised to be there on time. Rosie met Alice at Pali Park after Bible school, and they’d eaten some dope banana bread someone was passing out, hiked around Bon Tempe Lake in the heat, gone for a swim, although that was illegal, because Bon Tempe was part of the watershed, fallen asleep in the shade of a laurel grove, gone back to Pali Park and nibbled at banana bread crumbs. They tripped out under the redwoods, let their friends spritz them with spray bottles, used Visine, and then walked arm and arm into town.

  They made plans to meet later. Sighing wearily, Rosie stepped inside the theater and found her mother in the lobby, waiting in line for popcorn. Almost everyone there was old—Elizabeth’s age or older. They said hello to each other in a sort of hushed way, like they were at church or in the presence of a baby. Two people said how much they loved James’s work on NPR. She and her mother got popcorn, Diet Pepsis, peanut M&M’s to share.

  Rosie felt loopy, mildly disoriented, probably not the perfect space in which to see The Seventh Seal. She started eating M&M’s to stabilize herself, then caught her mother shoveling popcorn in like one of the Coneheads eating mass quantities. It made her lose her appetite.

  The movie started. A seriously bummed knight and his squire were sitting on the rocks at the beach. Mist and smoke—so far so good. But then Death arrives on the beach. Death, for God’s sakes. This was going to be a long movie. Even the squirrel on the fallen log looked like the end was near. The knight challenges Death to a game of chess, and says he wants to meet the Devil, because the Devil knows God. The squire was all yawns and belches, and then terrible ugly drinking songs.

  Rosie watched as well as she could, closing her eyes whenever she needed to escape. She imagined Robert beside her, the hair on their arms glowing like it had in the sun. She saw herself trace the outside of his lips with her fingertips.

  “Pretty amazing, right?” Elizabeth whispered, and Rosie wanted to cry out, “You dragged me from Bon Tempe for this? For corpses and filth, plagues and bugs?” She held her tongue, but, in her mind started telling Alice how smack this movie was, how out there—and she realized that telling it as a story made the bad stuff watchable. As soon as she turned it into a story to tell Alice and Jo, or Robert, she got her humor back.

  So she paid attention, and started telling Robert what she saw: “So let’s see, it gets festive all of a sudden, because Death decides to mingle more—he pays a visit to a woman who’s dying of plague, in a rotting house. But he’s a bad houseguest. . . .” Finally the dope started wearing down a little, thank God. “Oh, now what’s this?” Rosie told Robert in silence. “Here’s a sweet little family, all spirit and light and bounce. The dad is a happy-go-lucky entertainer. Boy, is he in the wrong movie. But I don’t have a good feeling about this. Why would you make a movie like this?” Why, on the other hand, would she and Alice take the poisoned Quaaludes a second time? Go figure. “Oh, darn,” she said to Robert: “The nice family is gone, and now the guy who talked the knight into joining the Crusades is stealing a bracelet off a plague corpse. Don’t you hate it when people do stuff like that?”

  Talk about a buzz-kill. This movie was the exact opposite of everything she loved about life. Like a great rave, for instance, the highest thing on earth. All the great energy, the scene, decorated to glow and inspire under black light. The Hard Candy one in Oakland was great, with cut-outs of lollipops covering the walls, and during Easter vacation, the Trip and Dicular one, which Rosie never quite got the concept of, but which was so totally incredible, lots of people wearing white, which was totally the most beautiful look under black light. It was totally PLUR—peace, love, unity, respect. Like the complete total opposite of this movie. Except for their fashion thing was kind of hooker Seventh Seal: Rosie and Alice both wore corsets, torn black fishnet stockings they’d bought at a lingerie store in the Haight, with money Alice got from selling her ADD meds, plus a tiny theft she had done with Ryan, a fancy set of harmonicas. Rosie always stashed her rave clothes at Alice’s; her mother did not obsess about Alice’s private life.

  Rosie looked around in the dark at all the attentive old people in the theater. She closed her eyes and tried to doze to the fluty Swedish voices as a backdrop. She was definitely coming down now, and it must not be too much longer. She ate a handful of M&M’s.

  Back on the Swedish beach, the light was all wrong and the silence was way too silent. Even the nice old moon was bad, like a vapor lock into another world. Then, in a church, the knight confesses to Death accidentally and gives away his strategy. The place where the knight is supposed to come clean and have prayer turns out to be the place of betrayal. Oops.

  Then the family appears again, on a beautiful hillside, like Landsdale in the spring, and the earth is providing for them and their little guy, their little bucket kid: the sweetness of strawberries, the milk, like the earth is giving them communion after all this flesh and blood. She wished like mad that the movie would end this way. Would that have killed the guy who made it? Because for a few minutes there it was actually like the energy at a rave, all love and kindhearted community, all the good parts—obviously not when the thugs showed up and hung out in their red bandanas, staring down hot girls, selling whatever they had that night, probably E, or GHB, or Valium to come down with. That was the only bad part; that, and the whole day after, when you pretty much wanted to kill yourself.

  But things in the movie were okay; the knight seems to be with his wife. He has come home. He gets to see her again before he dies. And he is okay in a certain way, in a plaguey dying kind of tragic way, because there’s light in his face. She’s feeding the fire, and is not startled to see him. She says to him, lovingly as can be, “I see the boy you were before you left,” and that pleases him. Who would have thought he could ever feel this again? So that is kind of a trip.

  Then the movie cuts to the glade where the family is waking up, and Jof, the dad, is having one of his visions that makes his wife think he is nuts, he’s seeing the dance on the hillside at dawn, Death leading the way, and the Fool at the end. And then it’s all over; thank you, Jesus. Rosie and Elizabeth sat there together in the dark for a very long time. It was the most terrifying, terrible movie Ro
sie had ever seen, but people were going, “Oh my God, so great, so great,” and blah blah, and Rosie felt like she should never smoke dope again, in case she got trapped in memories of the people with boils and thirst and plague, and Death’s face.

  “Talk to me, Mommy,” Rosie said like a little child.

  “Let’s go get cocoa at the Roastery,” her mother said, and they got up in the dark. Rosie wanted to take her hand but couldn’t risk any of her friends’ seeing her outside the theater. There was no one else in the Roastery but an anorexic girl Rosie knew from school, who was getting coffee to go, and a drifter you saw around town sometimes who always wore a floppy hat, so she and her mother had nicknamed him Gilligan. He was someone the kids could shoulder-tap if they needed someone to buy for them. He jutted out his jaw in greeting.

  They went to the counter and ordered bowls of lentil soup. Rosie was basically a vegetarian now, except for bacon and occasional beef jerky. They sat at a table by the window and stirred their soup while it cooled.

  “That girl looks like a skeleton,” Elizabeth said. “Like someone from the movie.”

  “She is. She weighs in the eighties now. Also, she throws up. She’s so great at it, she can throw up silently into a Coke can.”

  Elizabeth drew back. “Jesus. Well, everyone is good at something, right?”

  “Why did you make me see that movie? It totally freaked me out.”

  “Oh, baby, I’m sorry. It’s considered one of the great movies of all time.”

  “Yeah, but maybe a little bit of a downer?”

  “It isn’t to me. I mean, granted, it’s not Yellow Submarine.” Rosie smiled into her soup, and blew on a spoonful. “Greatness and truth are exhilarating,” Elizabeth added.

  “Yeah, but the truth in it is like, ‘It’s all decay, end of the world, shoot me now, dude.’ ”

  “Yeah, that was an awful time. It felt like the end of the world to them. I know what that feels like.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, like when your dad died.”

  Rosie stirred her soup. After a minute she nodded. Then she turned her head around at the sound of the door opening. In came shaggy sun-streaked hair and tan muscles. She didn’t recognize him for a second, because he wasn’t wearing his wire-rimmed glasses, but it was Fenn. She looked back at her soup. Would he remember her? And then, impossibly, he came to their table, and said her name. Rosie said hey and looked up, but now he was smiling at Elizabeth.

  “I saw you guys at the movie,” he said. “Pretty great, yeah?” He smelled so male, like sea salt and leather seats, like gunpowder must smell, like the astronauts said moondust did.

  Rosie shook her head with amazement. “Yes,” she agreed. “It had . . .” she struggled for the right word. “Truth, and greatness,” she said finally. She and her mother exchanged a blank look.

  “Hey, how’s that soup?” he asked.

  “Delicious,” said Rosie, and then added boldly, “Want a taste?” He raised his eyebrows with pleased surprise and she handed him her spoon. He reached into her bowl, God, he smelled so delicious, and raised a spoonful to his lips.

  “Oh, that is good,” he said, and then called out to the girl behind the counter. “Hey, I’d like a large soup to go, and extra bread.” He turned back to them.

  “How many times have you seen it?” he asked Elizabeth.

  “Four, maybe? I first saw it with my father when I was Rosie’s age. How about you?”

  “Two or three.”

  “Can you join us for soup?” Elizabeth asked, and Rosie wanted to die. She wanted him to stay, but he said he had to be someplace.

  “I just popped my head in the door to say hey, ’cause you were one row in front of me. Then that soup smelled so good. I was surprised to see you there, Rosie.”

  “Why?” She looked up at him, tilting her head with shy petulance, not knowing whether he had insulted her or not.

  “You were the youngest person by far. I couldn’t have seen it at sixteen.”

  “Seventeen.”

  “Sorry. Still, I was afraid of death at seventeen. I didn’t like it—but the fact of death does not have to be the fear of death. I mean, that’s the hope in the movie.”

  “Exactly,” Rosie said.

  He turned back to Elizabeth. “I’m Fenn.”

  “Elizabeth. I like what you just said. If your time is up, there’s no loophole—no amount of cleverness, prestige, no piety. And this is what we live with. Death in the movie is like the world’s greatest teacher, or grandparent—he’s very matter-of-fact. No bullshit, kind of tickled by everyone’s efforts to avoid him, but also somehow decent. Tired, but tireless. He has his job. He’s there, and you come.”

  Fenn looked stunned. “Wow,” he said. “Nice to meet you.” He smiled and shook his head. “Are you a teacher or something?”

  Rosie swelled with pride. Way to go, Mom. You knocked it out of the ballpark. Then Fenn bowed good-bye. Rosie watched him go, mournful with interest. Come back! His jeans hung off his hip bones.

  Elizabeth watched her watch him go. Rosie was not breathing.

  “Why are you staring at me, Mom?” You got so sick of having people stare at you all the time. She crossed her arms against her chest.

  “I just love you, Rosie. And you’re so pretty.” Rosie hated grown-ups’ eyes on her. This was why she had so many pictures of eyes on her walls, rock star eyes, animal eyes, the eyes of God or angels, because you got to choose what was looking at you, for once in your life, instead of being stared at by perverty men or your mother. Rosie scowled. Her mother was looking at her like a fawn. But Fenn had been impressed by what she’d said. Like, maybe it would be cool to have a mother more like Jody’s mom, Sarah, so self-assured, who could keep a good job and defend her kid against attackers. But this was kind of amazing, too, her mother talking like one of your really great teachers.

  “Tell me more about the movie, Mama. I have like fifteen minutes.”

  “Well, I’m honored, Your Majesty. It’s very dark, obviously, but half of life is night. And it is only because he is being pursued by Death that the knight finds and saves the little family, and it reconnects him with innocence, and what is worth fighting or living for: goodness. Once again, after having been nearly destroyed in the Crusade, he starts to experience the triumph of being alive. And besides, Rosie, what are we left with at the end? What does Jof see, after his vision of the Totentanz, the dance of death? The baby, the dawn, the birds.”

  She’d forgotten how different Rosie could be in public, although Rae had been telling her this, how the armor came off and with it the dark energy, the indirect gazes and blankness. Tonight they walked out of the café shoulder to shoulder, like girlfriends. When Rosie was a block away, she turned and waved good-bye to her mother like a child.

  The good news was that James was home from the city by the time Elizabeth got back from the movie. The bad news was that he was already at work on a new piece someone at the studio had suggested, and couldn’t listen to her story about Rosie and the movie right away. “No, no, don’t write,” she protested, caressing his head from behind as he sat at his desk. “I have so much to tell you.” He grabbed her arms and kissed both hands.

  “I missed you!” he said. “But give me half an hour. I have to get these notes down before I forget.” He never used to say this when he was working on his novel—he’d always been glad for interruptions then. She missed that time. No one could take from him what he had then, because it was so meager, and no one wanted it, the hard work for so little pay, the domestic peace and pleasures he’d mustered. But now there were several people in his life who could destroy his sense of self with the merest criticism or indifference. “Half an hour, darling,” he said, and kissed her good-bye.

  James was right: the new job was the biggest thing that had ever happened for him. She wasn’t even employable. So she cuddled with Rascal on the bed. A siren blew and in a split second her heart tripped over its own feet and he
r head filled with a slide show of Rosie in danger, an ambulance, or a stranger’s van, the windows steamed up, an evil ugly man inside. She couldn’t breathe, and then scenes from the movie dropped into the frenzied hole of a panic attack, and she tried to straighten it all out, to quiet and comfort herself, but she felt anxious and strange.

  She burst back into James’s office. He looked up from his computer. “I’m sorry to interrupt,” she said. “But I’m having an episode. And I’m so lonely.” He got up and said it was really okay, and came to stand beside her, and when she told him about the bad van, he made the simple sounds of comfort, no real human words, gentle moans, like during sex, or as to a child who has banged her knee, with lots of ellipses in between. It was like music, his holding her, and the soft moans; certain chords got struck again, and she held on for dear life, and the song she hadn’t heard in so long resounded, and standing together hanging their heads by his office window, they could hear the same tune again.

  FIVE

  Salt

  Lank sat beside James on the cushions of the Fergusons’ old couch.

  Their shoulders touched. James’s eyes moved from person to person, door to door, through the bay window into their front yard, straining toward every creak and house noise like a bodyguard. Moonlight caught the bare skin of Lank’s soft crown. His dark eyes were hooded and his lips pursed, like a man weighing his options. Elizabeth and Rae had pulled up chairs. Rae alone had been crying.

  A yearbook from Lank’s school sat on the coffee table, opened to the pages of the Journalism Club, of which he was the advisor, where in a photo nine young people looked up from a layout table where they were composing the weekly high school newspaper.

  The boy in the photo with the Giants baseball cap, Jack Herman, had died early this morning in a car crash. He had graduated last year and finished two semesters at Cal. Amelia, the Goth girl, had suffered a spinal cord injury. They had left a party in the Valley after police broke it up. Melanie Hertz, who was now in jail, had brought a baggie of Ecstasy to the party. The parents of the kid having the party had paid for a keg, to keep him off the road. The cops allowed the kids to drive home unless they were clearly drunk, in which case parents were called. Jack and Amelia had gone over the back fence, laughing, urging others to join them, but no one had. They had crashed into a tree as they came around White’s Hill, a mile from town.