Imperfect Birds

by Anne Lamott

  “Oh! Do you want an Adderall?” Alice clucked with concern.

  Rosie shook her head. All she wanted was dope. She felt for the pouch in her pocket, full of eye drops, mints, and towelettes. Sighing, she scanned the crowded blacktop until she saw a cute guy who always had good dope, who waved when he saw her, and beckoned her over. The three of them walked around to the back parking lot and got high.

  The rest of the day she walked around feeling like a bird that had flown into a plate-glass window. The weed didn’t help at all, and in fact she was glad when it wore off. She didn’t eat all day, and couldn’t eat that night, either, and she kept starting to cry, and of course her parents tried to pry it out of her, and Alice called and tried to pry it out of her, too. She kept saying she was having really bad PMS and was going crazy.

  She retreated to her bedroom and tried unsuccessfully to study. How could she even go back to school? She couldn’t believe she was still stuck there. It was literally a nightmare, a Kafka novel. God! She couldn’t believe she had to see him every day for the rest of the year. She was so miserable in her own skin, an ugly unwanted fraud. This was the story of her whole life. She was a too-tall, dead-father girl. She leaned forward and lowered her head all the way to her desk, and hid in her own arms.

  Elizabeth had kept Rosie’s secret from James for so long that the substance no longer held much meaning—it must have passed the statute of limitations—but it had inserted a slight reserve between her and James, and they had let this distance slide. She found herself picking at everyone—picking at James for gobbling his food, picking at Rosie for picking at her face.

  Finally, when they were doing dishes one night, when Rosie was locked in her room doing homework, Elizabeth managed to say, “There’s something I wish I’d told you a few weeks ago.”

  James dried the salad bowl with a flourish and put it on the counter. “Shoot.”

  “Oh, I don’t know, it sounds silly now.”

  He turned to look at her, worried. “What?”

  She turned off the water and shook her head, and told him a brief version of what had happened: How Claude was leaving, how Jody had been distraught, how she and Alice had sneaked over to their house that night, how Rosie had sneaked out. She had hoped against hope that James would wave it away, but he tilted his head, his face contracted and dark. “What?” he said. “How could you? We’re supposed to be in this together.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, genuinely, and tried to take his hands, but he pulled away.

  “God, what else haven’t you told me?”

  “I’m trying to find a balance between you being my whole life and Rosie being my whole life, too. Trying to celebrate times when we all get along—and screwing everything up.”

  He looked at her with hostile disbelief, put down the dish towel, and trudged out of the kitchen.

  “Stop,” she called out when he stepped through the doorway. She stood facing him, penitent and bristly and teary. He stared back at her. Tears ran down her face. She hoped they might soften his heart. Her tears had on occasion washed the motes out of both their eyes, obstructions from the stream. But not this time, or at any rate, not right away.

  “ ‘We are each our own devil,’ Elizabeth. ‘And we make this world our hell.’ ” He vanished down the hall.

  She heard his office door close. She went and stood outside but didn’t knock. “Can’t you forgive me this one time?” Silence. She did not know where to start. Rebuilding trust was the hardest work, hopeless at first. You felt like Humpty-Dumpty. She stood at James’s door until Rosie’s opened.

  “What are you doing out there, Mommy?”

  “Can I come into your room?” Elizabeth asked miserably. Rosie sighed, and held the door open so her mother could come in. They sat at the foot of the bed.

  “Your dad’s mad at me for keeping the secret about you sneaking out.”

  “A, he’s not my dad. B, that was days ago—like, get a life, James. C, he’s always mad about something, because he’s short, and now he’s losing his hair.”

  “You can’t really believe that,” Elizabeth said defensively. “That’s such bullshit. Don’t you think it may have to do with you sneaking out—or me lying?”

  “I don’t know. It’s not my problem, Mama! Can’t you see how unhappy I’ve been? I can’t study. I’m not eating. I’m picking at my face. Look at my skin!” There was a scattering of pimples at her hairline, red and sore.

  “Darling, why? Tell me what’s going on.”

  “Hello? Jody is not coming back? She’s my best friend. And I hate school this year, it’s like prison. I can’t believe I’m stuck there with all those outcasts and snots and infants. And Robert’s class sucks this year—he’s changed. He’s an asshole now.”

  “Just since school started, honey?” Rosie nodded. “Can I ask you something? Without you getting mad?” Rosie nodded again, touching her forehead until Elizabeth drew her hand away. “Was something going on between you two this summer?”

  “How stupid are you? You’re a joke. Why would you even think that?”

  Elizabeth studied Rosie’s face, full of scorn and fury, and knew in a flash she was lying. “I don’t know. You seem to have this great rapport. And closeness.”

  “Stop spying on me! You’re the one going crazy—call your shrink.” And it was the disgusted sneer more than the words that made Elizabeth erupt.

  “How dare you! I’m not a liar, or cruel! You’re a spoiled little shit!” She got to her feet, hating herself and her child. How could they say such hateful things?

  She locked herself in the bathroom and cried silently until she was raw. Desperate, she tried to pray, until she remembered she didn’t believe in god—but she had felt that shard of something deep inside that she could only call not me, so she cried out in silence to the speck of light, Help me! I’m begging. She felt the wet pounding of her heart in her stuffed-up head. She hit the bathroom rug so hard that her fist hurt, and she cradled it like an injured bird.

  Eventually, James came knocking.

  “Honey?” he asked. “What are you doing?”

  After a while, she said, “I’m praying.”

  There was a long silence. Then, astonished, “You are?”

  “Go away. I hate everyone. Rosie made me promise not to tell you, so I didn’t, and then when I did, you blow up, and she hates me. Everyone is horrible to me, and I hate me.”

  She heard his footsteps going away, down the hall. She wiped her nose on the top of her T-shirt, waiting. After a while, she heard him return.

  “Do you even hate Rascal?” he asked.

  “James? Why do you make me choose between you and my child? I can’t.”

  He poked something into the lock, and after a minute it popped open. The door opened a few inches, and Rascal dropped to the floor inside. “Leave me the fuck alone!” she shouted. Rascal lumbered to Elizabeth’s side, tasted her blurry wet face, and butted his huge orange head against her until she took him into her lap.

  She finally came out, and went to James’s office and sat on the carpet by his desk. He got out of his chair and sat facing her. Then they both sat on the rug, like children at a tea party on the floor of a pool. She felt disgusting, red and unstable.

  “That was so hitting below the belt,” she said. “To bring Rascal into it.”

  “To begin with, you need to tell me all of your unsaids, Elizabeth. They’re killing us. You’ve been using your sincereness in counterfeit ways.”

  “I’m so sorry,” she said, sick to her stomach. She did not point out that the word was “sincerity.” Her mouth tasted like matches. She looked away, at the darkening night through his window, the branches of the kumquat tree. She wondered whether there was such a word as “sincereness.” They sat unspeaking until her tears and misery wore him down.

  “Tears give you such an unfair advantage.” He shook his head. “I’ve always hated to see women come undone.” He hit the carpet with his fist, hard, and it
startled her. “Okay,” he said after a moment, coming to a decision. “We start over.” He scooched closer to her, and they held each other on the bottom of the pool.

  They clung to each other in bed that night, and he rubbed her neck in sympathy. “She’s an awful child,” he whispered. “We must be saints, the both of us.” She smiled in the dark, against his skin. “Let’s get rid of her,” he whispered. “Let’s kill her.”

  “We could drop her off in a basket at the convent,” Elizabeth whispered back.

  He was spooning her when she woke, still patting her with sympathy, and the pats turned to love.

  Elizabeth woke Rosie for school, and Rosie was tense, not knowing where they stood.

  “That’s so scary when you do that, Mama,” she pleaded. “When you flip out.”

  “I won’t have you speak to me like you did last night, Rosie. I’m not going crazy. I don’t believe you when you say you and Robert had nothing going on. You were lying to us all summer, repeatedly. But I am trying to avoid having to pay for you to see a shrink or go to rehab. But you need to talk to someone. Your counselor. Or Reverend Anthony.”

  Rosie considered this. “How about Rae, instead? She’s my safest person.”

  Elizabeth talked this over at breakfast with James, and they both agreed to Rae.

  A few days later, after school, Rosie went to see Rae at church. Rae’s office was no bigger than a walk-in closet, which is what it had been before she’d brought in a narrow desk, a white rattan bookcase, and a worn easy chair. There was a framed photo of Lank, and a framed shadowy book cover, from The Luminous Darkness by Howard Thurman. Rae looked soft and pink in the low light of the lamp, the pupils of her large eyes full. Rosie held her knees to her chest, her head hunched over, her long limbs tucked beneath her.

  “Everything is going so badly! Mama and I fight all the time. And I hate school.”

  Rae was silent for a moment. Then she said her churchiest thing: “How can I serve you?”

  Rosie let her hair fall over her face, tried to hide behind it like it was a duck blind.

  “You know Jody’s gone, right? Maybe forever.”

  “Yes, your mother told me. Is she safe? Do you know where she is?”

  “Not really. Somewhere near Claude’s base. And Alice has a boyfriend. My two dearest friends! School’s screwed up, too, and I hate all the dweeby little boys.”

  “And tell me what else is going on. Are you getting stoned a lot? Drinking?”

  “No!” Rosie said vehemently. “I mean, God! Did my mother put you up to this?”

  “Look, I was sitting here innocently reading Mary Oliver when you called.”

  “Well, of course I was smoking a little dope, like everyone, until a while ago. And I’ve been trying not to smoke since then.”

  “Trying not to? Or not smoking, since then?”

  “Jesus, give me some slack.”

  Rae sneered in the nicest possible way. Rosie growled.

  The smell of lemons wafted in from somewhere, or oranges, or grapefruit. “It seems like there’s something else, way deep down, that’s troubling you.”

  Time was stopped and fluid at the same time, like resin, and Rae’s face was a blur of chestnut hair and big eyes and a child’s cheeks.

  “I would never trust you again if you told my mother.”

  Rae considered this for quite some time. “All right,” she said finally.

  Rosie studied her. “I sort of, I don’t know. Fell in love with a married man.”

  Rae’s mouth opened. “Wow.”

  “I am so totally fucked! I feel like I’m in a whirlpool, going down.”

  Rae nodded in sarcastic agreement—like, Yeah, no shit.

  Rosie looked at her. “Thanks a lot.”

  “What do you want me to say? You are fucked. Not morally. But I’ve been there, honey bear. It’s the worst I’ve ever felt in my life. Worse than when my folks died.”

  “Well, we’re not sleeping together yet.”

  “Seriously? Thank God. I mean, that would make it so much worse.”

  “It would?” Rosie asked. Rae nodded, visibly relieved.

  “Then why do I think about it all the time? And why do I want it so badly?”

  “Because you’re a little lonely. But sex with him is the fail-safe line, Ro. Who is he?” Rosie looked away. “Is he a teacher?”

  “God, no! And I thought we loved each other. But now I don’t know. He has a family.” Rosie expected Rae to roll her eyes, but she only tilted her head slightly, as if Rosie were a painting or a view. “Nothing’s turning out right. Senior year was supposed to be so great. It’s all broken and fucked up. My best friend has run away, and my other best friend is in love, and I’m so lonely and stressed. I’m already behind in school. Plus I’m going to have to see this guy every single day—”

  “So he is a teacher, right, darling?” Rosie shook her head, pleading. “It doesn’t matter. What does matter is that you haven’t started sleeping together. That is so huge, hon. Once you go there, I can promise you’ll eventually come to know what hell truly means.”

  Rosie pulled back to look Rae in the eyes. “Swear you’re not going to tell my mom?”

  Rae called Elizabeth two minutes after Rosie took off.

  “She’s madly in love with a teacher, who she thought was in love with her, although she says they haven’t slept together, and she says it’s over.”

  “Oh, shit. It’s Robert Tobias. That jerk! What an asshole. What do I do?”

  “I guess we hope, if she’s telling the truth, that she really is done.”

  “You mean, you think she may be lying? She may be—she lies about everything.”

  “Or that it’s mostly in her mind. That he gave her mixed messages, and she ran with it.”

  “Yeah, but Rosie didn’t make this up out of thin air. I don’t want her to drop out of inorganic chemistry. She needs it on her transcript if she’s going to get a scholarship to a good college.”

  “Elizabeth! What she needs is tough love. Allegiance, and a chance to start over. She doesn’t necessarily need to go to some Ivy League school.”

  “She’ll still need to get a scholarship—and that means she needs one last great semester.”

  “You say those are the things she needs, hon—but those are all things you need for her. And your parents probably said those exact things to you. They were a lie then, and they are now, too. I mean, I don’t even know what inorganic chemistry means. Do you? What is it, dead compounds with their little feet sticking up in the air?” Elizabeth managed a laugh. “Wait, that would be AP inanimate chemistry.”

  She felt less sure of everything when she hung up. It was a nightmare. All she could think to do were the most ordinary of things: plant the flowering pear that was still in its pot from the nursery, labor over a vegetable stew, clean out the bottom drawer in the kitchen where the whole world ended up.

  When she went in to say good night later that evening, Rosie was in bed, wearing a lacy white camisole, almost Victorian really, her thick hair spread out on the pillow like a peacock’s tail. Elizabeth sat on the bed with her for a few minutes. “I’m so tired tonight. Are you?”

  “Exhausted,” said Rosie. She rolled over to face her mother, and let Elizabeth massage her neck and shoulders. Her mother smelled like an old lady in a thoughtful mood.

  “How are things going in chemistry, darling?”

  “Fine,” Rosie answered, “same old same old,” although they weren’t. Chemistry was much harder for her than physics had been, and more competitive because all of them were preparing for the AP test in May. It was so painful to have to see Robert pretend that she was any old student; she’d been used to being his physics star. He was kind and funny with all of the students, they were the cream of the crop, and he loved their debates, even when they were just trying to show how smart they were, but there was no way anyone would know by watching him with her that they had had something special between them. Now it was jus
t him asking for her take on acid-base reactions or how to determine what pH you’d end up with when you used different combinations of chemicals, or what ev, like she was some random nerdy nerd. Instead of how they used to talk about love, and rivers.

  She thought about Robert all the time now, even more than she used to, all day every day, and waited for him to approach her with an explanation for why he had cut her off. I love you, he would say, but my wife was catching on. Or, One of my children is sick; and I have to play it cool for now. But as the days passed and he didn’t come forth, she began to give up. He made her sick. The only thing, she thought, was that she had the goods on him, if he even thought about giving her less than an A.

  Jody didn’t call the next week, and Alice got grounded for taking a twenty out of her mother’s wallet—her mother was suddenly worse than Rosie’s, after hardly ever having been home before. Now she kept tabs on the amount of cash she carried, like the Treasury Department. Elizabeth wasn’t that bad yet. One Monday somebody told Rosie that Fenn and his roommates were having a party that coming Friday, and Rosie went into overdrive: she was easygoing and hardworking all week, and did not have one fight with her parents. Thursday night she passed a drug test, thanks to a few drops of bleach from the bottle of eardrops. Her mother gave her the high five—such a cornball—and Friday morning Rosie asked if she could go to a party at her chemistry lab partner’s house, if she was home by midnight. In her most persuasive voice, thick and creamy with lots of eye contact, she said the lab partner’s parents would be home—she could have them call Elizabeth once Rosie arrived, since she didn’t have the number on her. Elizabeth allowed that they didn’t need to go that far. James said they did. Her parents argued while Rosie put on her makeup. Her mother said, “Don’t make me be the lone vigilante mom tonight,” and James backed down.