Imperfect Birds

by Anne Lamott

  “Hey, who’s there?” she asked in the dark, and then their faces materialized, as two people called out hi to her, friends from school. She leaned against a tree, let it hold her up. “I am so wasted,” she said, laughing.

  One of the three blondes from the night before stepped forward, and they hugged.

  “Be careful. Someone here is selling sherms,” the girl said—joints laced with angel dust.

  “I’m fucked up, but I don’t think it was dust.” Rosie started laughing with pure joy, at the long stretch of the woods that embraced her, the tree trunk that held her up, the twinkling stars above, the whole fucking beautiful diamond universe, above her, below her, around her, inside her. This was the Truth, the capital-T truth, even when you weren’t stoned. It’s what Einstein proved—that it was all energy, and it was all One.

  She hugged everyone in the group, her new best friends, and then someone else came up to see who they were. First you heard the crunch of leaves, the rustly, scuttly sound of the dry oak leaves. No one could sneak up on you. Every time someone entered the meadow, you heard their shoes crunching on the fire road, and heard them greeted by the girl with the glow-stick bracelets and cups. It was like having a sound map of the new world.

  She wandered off to see who else was here. Each time the drill was the same—“Hey, who’s there,” then faces materializing in the dark, hugs, or introductions, then hugs for the new best friends. Whatever she had smoked had given her bright and dreamy hallucinations, and they took her to a soft, gentle place where she wanted to hold the whole world like Mother Teresa with an AIDS baby, and weep at its beauty.

  After several plastic cups of beer, she ended up dancing for a long time, sometimes with boys, sometimes with girls. She should think about starting back. Everyone was getting pretty loaded. Several girls had thrown up in the chaparral, one boy was having a loud sobbing nervous breakdown about what a misfit he was. His friends surrounded and comforted him. The hillside smelled more like eucalyptus than the fire road had, which was closer to the flowers in people’s gardens. The bay smelled like your father slapping aftershave onto his cheeks, but you didn’t have to have hair in the sink, all the slapping sounds, or the father.

  She climbed up the hillside, squinted into a group of ten or so kids. “Who’s there?” she asked, and was soon reconnecting with friends from school. They had washed out an empty milk carton and filled it with beer so they wouldn’t have to return to the hub so often. It was great, but after another cup, Rosie needed to sit. She plopped down onto the grass, clumsy as Alice, laughing at her efforts. Others sat down with her, and filled her cup. Everyone loved her, she could tell by their faces lit by glow sticks in the moonlight.

  And then she heard cars down below, several at once, not like when the shuttle came by from Safeway, and then kids were shouting and screaming. Rosie and her new crowd gaped at each other, as people in nearby crowds leapt to their feet. “It’s the cops, it’s the cops!” various people shouted in the night, and then there were cops shouting, “Stay where you are! Stay put!” Everyone was swearing, scrambling, streaming down the hillside to breaks in the brush on either side of the trailhead. It sounded like they were having fun, a mob moving as one.

  Rosie and her friends scrambled farther up the hill, trying to avoid the police flashlights. There had to be five cops at least, shining their flashlights, grabbing at the nearest kids, but some kids ran past them and out of their grips like greased pigs. The cops caught a couple at a time, and led them off to the fire road where their cars were, and came back for more, but mostly the kids outmatched them and got away. Everyone in Rosie’s group hung together, standing behind trees, holding their breath, peering down. Now a lot of kids were falling and rolling down the hill like an avalanche, like logs or little kids, laughing and screaming when they hit against rocks and branches, twenty of them rolling below where Rosie stood, all the way down the hill.

  It was a movie, a crazy strobe-lit movie gone bad, and no one in Rosie’s group dared to move. The kids below who had gotten hurt stopped where they were and called out for others to help them, but only more cop cars arrived, and police poured into the corridor. “Shit fucking hell, if my parents find out,” someone whispered. The boys Rosie was with took off for the higher area, trying to tug the girls, who were rooted in the pandemonium and shouting. They let go and took off when a woman in uniform stepped out from behind a redwood trunk.

  “Stay where you are,” she said to the girls, cold as the moon, and reached out a black-gloved hand for Rosie’s wrist, extinguishing the light of the glowing blue band.

  SIX

  The Big Fish

  Elizabeth lunged for the phone in the dark, but James got to it first. When she tried and failed to grab it from his hands, she clenched her fists at her chest like a child praying.

  “Yes?” he said. She turned on her lamp and watched his face. He was digging his fingers into his scalp, and she was relieved to see anger, not grief. “She’s fine,” he told her.

  “What is it, for God’s sake?”

  James listened on the phone a moment, before turning to her. “The police busted her and a few kids at a party in the hills behind Manor, where there was alcohol. They’ve got her at the station.” Elizabeth climbed out of bed, clutching her chest. “We can go get her, or they will take her up to juvenile detention for the night.”

  “I can be there in ten minutes.”

  But James shook his head. She grabbed for the phone. He ducked, dodging her.

  “Has she been drinking? . . . Just beer, are you sure?” He nodded to Elizabeth. “And what about drugs? . . . Okay. . . . Yeah, I bet she’s mad. She’ll get over it.” He threw his free hand up with general frustration. Elizabeth looked around frantically for her shoes. “Can we leave her there for the night? . . . Why not? . . . I see, I see. Of course.” Elizabeth pulled on a shirt. “What’s the very longest we could leave her with you at the station before you had to take her to juvie? I seriously do not want to make this easy for her.” James listened. “I mean, what if it took us five or six hours to get there?” After a minute, he said, “I cannot begin to thank you. You must be a parent.” He looked at his watch. “Fantastic. Six it is.”

  Elizabeth turned on James the instant he put the phone down. “She’d just been drinking beer, so what—she’s seventeen! It was the last of the big summer parties! For Chrissakes!” This is what Elizabeth’s mother used to say whenever she was drunk or annoyed. Hearing her own voice repeating these words silenced Elizabeth briefly. Shaken with anxiety, she did not know what to think or feel besides doubt and worry and questioning of her every move as a mother. Then she plunged on. “She’s such a good kid—and you’re going to leave her in jail?”

  “She’s not in jail. And we’ve found rolling papers. Pipes from our friendly neighborhood smoke shop. And you found pills in her pocket after Jody’s party.”

  Elizabeth pinched her arm as hard as she could, and it hurt like hell. But she had to be dreaming. How had they gone from Rosie hoisting tennis trophies above her head at the net to Rosie under arrest, or whatever she was under?

  “This is a lucky break for us, Elizabeth. It’s so important that we really see what’s going on,” James said. Elizabeth ground her teeth to keep from slapping him; even though she knew he was right, she hated him for it. He went on, seemingly impressed by his own calm and insights. “A, that when you’re dealing with an alcoholic or addict, you’re already outnumbered. And B, it’s revealing what we’re about to dig up in her room. Because the cops aren’t supposed to keep her there just so we can teach her a lesson—but they’re going to. Come on, baby—we can go through her stuff while they watch her for us. We can find out what’s true.”

  The room was relatively tidy, compared with, say, Jody’s, which looked like an explosion at the flea-market jeans hut: twisted jean corpses, incense, used plates and bowls, plastic smoothie bottles. But because Rosie’s was not so bad, it took a while to break the code; to discov
er the resiny smell of dope at the bottom of a box; to find among all her books the two hollowed-out volumes holding papers and a plastic cigar tube of bud; to locate the Cuban cigar box with a false bottom beneath which were flecks of weed, razor blades, three lavender-pink tablets that Elizabeth recognized as Percocet from James’s first gum surgery, and eight hundred dollars in cash.

  “It’s the money that she’s made this summer,” Elizabeth said defensively.

  James nodded nicely and said, “Okay.”

  “For Chrissakes, James, she’s worked nearly every day at Sixth Day Prez, or teaching tennis.”

  “Hm,” said James, “good point.”

  Elizabeth blew up for the second time. “Don’t you dare use that Al-Anon crap against me. ‘Uh-huh. Okay. Good point.’ I hate it when you do that.”

  “What do you want me to say, baby? We just found a razor blade in Rosie’s shit. Do you remember what you and I used razor blades for?”

  “Not very often. That’s my point! She’s experimenting.”

  James looked exasperated, furious at her for not seeing things his way. “Experimenting means you try something two or three times. More than that is ‘using.’ ” James found a pint of rum in Rosie’s tennis racket carrying case, where the can of balls was supposed to be, and a festive four-pack of vodka lemonade at the bottom of her laundry hamper. “Jesus Christ,” Elizabeth said in despair, as the pile of booty mounted on Rosie’s neatly made bed: Zig-Zag rolling papers, a roach clip, lighters. “What next? Glue?”

  She began to cry. “This is going to be good in the long run,” James said. She sat on the floor with her back to the wall by Rosie’s door. “There are all sorts of people locally who help kids and families in trouble with drugs. Anthony, for instance.”

  “Jesus, you make it sound like Panic in Needle Park. It’s weed.” James rolled his eyes. “Okay, weed and pills. And one razor blade.” Elizabeth almost managed a smile. “This does not make her a drug addict.” James nodded sagely.

  She screamed into the air between them, then buried her face in the bedspread and kept bellowing until she felt better. James got to his feet. “I’m going to go make us some mint tea.” She sat breathing deeply with her eyes closed when he left. The stuff on the bed was like the display at the museum at San Quentin, of shivs and syringes made out of pens and toothbrushes. Elizabeth laid her head in her hands and rocked.

  They managed to sleep for a few hours, then lay in the dark, resting their eyes. The dawn was light gold above the tree line. By the time they went to pick Rosie up at the station, the golden border was gone.

  Rosie sat hunched over a table in a small room behind the front desk, and Elizabeth watched her for a moment through the window in the door. Her long arms were crossed, eyes opaque with disbelief. “Look at her,” James whispered. Rosie looked up at them, and then slowly down at her watch with a hint of a smirk—she was not going to show anyone much of anything in this public place. “As if we all work for an airline, and her flight has been delayed,” he said. A police officer led them in.

  “Rosie,” Elizabeth called, but Rosie didn’t seem to hear.

  “Rosie!” James said sharply, and she looked up slowly.

  “I hear you,” she said. “The whole town can hear you. Can we just go, please?”

  “Listen, you don’t get it, do you, baby?” he asked. “You’re in a fuck of a lot of trouble.” Rosie looked away with contemptuous amusement, as if he were delusional. He seethed. Elizabeth stepped between the two of them.

  “We are not bringing charges this time,” the officer told James and Elizabeth. He turned to Rosie: “But next time we catch you with dope or alcohol, I will throw you in juvie so fast you won’t know what hit you. We’ll be watching for you.” He shot James a knowing glance.

  Rosie considered his words, as if he were a waiter at her table reciting the specials of the day. “Okay,” she said slowly, as if he had talked her into the lasagna.

  The officer advanced upon her. “Listen, miss,” he said quietly. “I will be goddamned if some snotty-nosed stoner high school kids are going to burn down our beautiful hills. I see you so much as smoking a cigarette in an open space again . . .”

  Elizabeth wanted simultaneously to fling herself at his legs and pull him off her daughter, and to choke Rosie with her bare hands. In her corner Rosie seemed to have decided that the service at this joint sucked. She got to her feet and walked out the door, head held high.

  In the car, she let herself fall apart, crying, spewing out rage and accusation: How on earth could they betray her like this, leave her there for hours in that piss hole; what the hell good did they think that would do? Did Elizabeth ever think about anyone but herself? Did James even have a clue what it was like to be a real parent? Did it matter to them at all that they had turned her into someone who had to lie, just to have the semblance of a life, and not be treated like a baby? It was stupid bad luck, for God’s sake, that the cop had grabbed her and not the other kids. She hadn’t even done anything wrong.

  Horrible James didn’t say anything, and he looked like he might start humming. He had learned this at his meetings—Rosie realized that she was now the gorilla in the cage he had to stay away from. Her mother cried daintily, like a little old lady. They made her sick. In her core she felt a deep fury and a rage for freedom.

  A cold calm descended, all at once, like there was hard glass inside her. She knew she was scary, and that this immobilized them. Rosie smiled.

  By the time they got home, the rift was so big that it scared even her. Where could they go from here? No way would they let her out today. “Go to your room,” said James, reading her mind. “You’re grounded forever.”

  She lay in the dark on her bed, listening to music. Nothing could capture the feelings inside except Axl Rose and Bob Dylan. She played them as loud as she could without risking a warning—her parents were turning into old neighbors who hassled the young—or a visit. Worst of all would have been a real conversation.

  She began to open drawers, her hamper, and handbags, and raged as she discovered they’d taken almost everything; they’d raped and pillaged the room. She sat on the floor and fumed, breathing hard like she’d been running. Everywhere she looked, her stuff had been taken. She whipped open her tennis racket case to find the rum missing. Then she looked in the well of a marble-based pen-and-pencil set, a trophy for winning the state doubles tournament in San Jose, and found a plastic bag that earrings had come in—thank God they had not found her stash of Ecstasy. She and Alice had gotten it at a rave in Oakland, a while ago, before summer began. The memory lifted her spirits. An older woman—maybe in her thirties—had brought her little boy, in his one-piece sleeper, although he must have been at least seven already; it was decorated with rave glow spots, white plastic cut-outs that the black light would catch, the M&M’s logo on each one. Maybe the mother thought he would blend in, like a prop or the gigantic peanut M&M’s decorations. Rosie had played with the boy for a while in a corner, even though she was stoned out of her mind, had taken two tabs at once because she had been taking it too much and had a little tolerance going. That was why she had quit E.

  She dozed. When she woke up, she found that her mother had left a tray of kindergarten food on her bedside table—peanut butter and jelly on wheatberry bread, cranberry juice and carrot sticks, Oreos and an apple. She didn’t want to be in this abyss. The first time she saw her mother come in, as the sun sank beneath her windowsill, she turned to the wall, and said, “I have nothing to say to you.”

  The second time her mother came by, Rosie was blubbering like a baby, partly out of exhaustion and fear, but also so her mother would comfort her, hold her quietly, promise it would all be okay. She wanted her mother to save them both, so she could get on with what she had been doing, with her wonderful grown-up life—Jody and Alice and the guys they hung with, lying on the sand at the beach, lying on the golden grass in the hills. What, was there a law now, you couldn’t smoke outside?r />
  They were all so careful, the kids she knew. They would never start a fire. She missed Robert and Rae and the kids at the church, the little ones, her bucket kids, whom she pulled around on the lawn in the big plastic tub, singing their funny songs and screaming every time they hit a bump.

  She was starving to death by dinnertime, but when Elizabeth came in to get her, she claimed not to be hungry. This usually freaked her mother out, but tonight she did not try to change Rosie’s mind. Rosie heard her footsteps recede down the hall.

  “Wait a sec, what’s for dinner?” she called after her, but James answered.

  “Bread and water.”

  Robert and she had a lesson tomorrow—they had to let her out by then, or she would lose all respect for them both. Jailers!

  But the next day at one, Elizabeth drove her to the courts, waved in the friendliest way to Robert, as if from a float, and said she’d pick Rosie up an hour and fifteen minutes later. The fifteen minutes was to prove how serene Elizabeth was.

  Elizabeth got a cup of coffee at the KerryDas Café while waiting, and took it to the steps of the Parkade. Townspeople went about their business in every direction you looked, walking in and out of stores before her, getting gas at the station to her left, lining up with little kids for the last big matinee of the summer, heading to their cars in the parking lagoon behind her. Some of the town’s delinquents and no-hopers and high school kids milled around the Parkade, Rosie’s peers, younger or a few years older. Among them were two who had had nervous breakdowns, one out of nowhere her first month in college, one after massive amphetamine use at Santa Cruz. They milled in groups at the bottom of the stairs, in the bus kiosk, in the steps in front of the theater, making themselves villages of commerce and knowledge and sulk. Otherwise, they would feel small and ridiculous. Please God, even though I don’t believe, please, if you are there, don’t let Rosie end up here next year, Elizabeth prayed.