Imperfect Birds

by Anne Lamott

  Rosie was going to walk to Fenn’s, as her parents had gone to a meeting and movie. “Wild times, huh?” James had said. Rosie put on her sexiest tank top and more makeup, and set out down the trail to the main street in town. It was a mile away. There was not much light on the trail, only a crescent moon and distant streetlights, and this made her very afraid, which made her hate herself. What a loser, to be almost eighteen, and still scared that creatures might pop out at her in the dark.

  She walked as fast as she could past the bushes that lined the trail, and told the story of her walk to herself in her head, as if she were telling Alice, and she made it funny because this made her less afraid. There was rustling in the bushes, she said into her imaginary phone, a rusty kind of rustling, which could have meant a mountain lion, or a bum. Her heart pounded like bongo drums. What if a raccoon with rabies jumped out and clawed me, or possums, which were so disgusting, with those penisy hairless white tails.

  She got a side ache from walking so fast, but did not stop until she saw the lights of the Parkade.

  Rosie found some people congregated under the streetlights like night church, had a few sips of beer, and then walked to the apartment that Fenn and a few other older boys rented, a block and a half away. There were two guys from her class hanging out by the door, two kids hardly anyone at school ever talked to, although she tried to be kind whenever she saw them, who hung with the other nerds in the distant fourth corridor of the school grounds, along with the special-ed kids. She hung out with them now for a few minutes while working up the courage to go inside. One of them shared his beer with her.

  There were two Valley kids sitting in the stairway, slow-paced long-haired organic types who lived in the counterculture town just over White’s Hill, and at the top of the stairs, two Landsdale kids who had grown up here and would never leave. A girl from her French class was inside, along with a few other popular girls, who were there with their boyfriends, looking through the racks of CDs above the stereo, from which reggae rap blasted. She waved to them from the stairs, where she’d stopped to get her bearings, and then someone handed her a pipe and a sip of screwdriver.

  Alexander was here. Everyone said he was only smoking heroin, not shooting it. He’d told her once in the Parkade that he was often at the apartment where Fenn lived, he was friends with the roommates, and sometimes they let him spend the night on the couch when his parents had kicked him out. She went over and stood with him, and when he handed her his cigarette, she took a puff, and then another. “You can keep it,” he said. He’d told her once that he’d been a fourth-corridor kid freshman year, and then he got into smoking dope, and then dealing a little, and then suddenly he looked like one of the older Parkade dirt children. A lot of kids had tried to save him for a while: he was smart, but goofy on purpose, to make people laugh. She really liked him, and loved the cigarette.

  “There’s beer, and Fenn’s squeezing fresh orange juice,” he said. Rosie shrugged. The living room was cozy and pleasantly lit, with so many candles that the light was golden, as if there were a fire in the fireplace, and it smelled of all sorts of delicious fragrances—flowers, grasses, citrus, oranges, weed. A few girls from the sophomore class were sitting with a guy on one of the couches, each holding a beer. Rosie said hey to everyone and stubbed out her cigarette. The girls on the couch were pretty, with thick eyeliner and long, poufy hair. They said hey back, and one of the guys she didn’t know pointed her to the kitchen, where a machine whirred.

  Her heart raced and the side ache returned.

  Fenn was at the counter, bent over a whirring juice machine, and did not hear her when she said hello. His curly light brown hair, clean and thick and sun-bleached, was pulled back into a short ponytail. She reached forward and tugged on his T-shirt to get his attention. He turned around, holding an empty orange half. “Hey, what a nice surprise!” He had such a handsome face, long wide slanty blue eyes, a straight nose, and high cheekbones. “Where’d you come from?”

  “My house. What’re you making?”

  “Fresh screwdrivers. Make ya one? Will you take these to Cassie and Andrew?” He handed her two glasses. When she returned from the living room, he handed her juice in a marmalade jar. She stood behind him while he squeezed orange juice for himself. He was not as tall as she was, but had long legs, poking from his worn khaki cargo shorts; he had a faded, perfectly frayed black T-shirt. When he turned around, he handed her a half-pint of vodka. She poured some into her juice but couldn’t even taste it, so she poured in more.

  He whispered, “Let’s sneak outside and sit on the steps. People can squeeze their own damn juice if they want refills. There’s the prettiest little moon.”

  They never even got around to a second drink. Out on the steps, he handed her a pipe, which turned out to hold the most amazing mellow dope, and she paused only a few seconds before taking it, flushing away the thought of her shocked and betrayed mother, and they sipped their drinks in the warm evening, with the moon lighting up the backyard at the foot of the steps. He smelled like oranges and the sea, and it made her faint and giddy and mute. He lit a cigarette and handed it to her, and lit one for himself. Pretty soon their shoulders were touching. He had muscles in his arms because he worked construction with his uncle Joe.

  “I thought you were a drug dealer,” she said smiling. “That’s what people say.”

  “Sorry to disappoint you,” he said. “Have you also heard of the fourteen-year-old girls who hang out here all the time, that me and my roommates have sex with? And that I got Alexander onto smack?” He shook his head. They talked about the house he was helping build in the Valley, solar-powered, and about how their parents’ generation had destroyed the earth. He was five years older than she was.

  Sometime later, when the fog came in, cold and damp like heavy smoke made of snow, they went inside. He got a zippered hoodie for each of them from his bedroom. She peeked in: there were a girl and a guy on his bed, about her age, sleeping. The room emitted a sweaty smell.

  He and Rosie sat on one of the couches and listened to Nine Inch Nails with everyone else for a while, then stepped outside a couple of times to smoke.

  They moved on to plain fresh-squeezed orange juice, and then he got them a wool blanket and they sat outside on the steps and ate an entire quart of Jamoca Almond Fudge, passing it back and forth. She thought of turning sideways to kiss him with a mouth full of coffee ice cream, but didn’t. She felt too shy. They talked about movies, they loved all the same ones. He said that The Seventh Seal had changed him—because it turned out that Death hadn’t won, even though the knight was going to die. What Fenn said took her breath away, and made her love the movie, too. They shared at least three cigarettes, Camel filters. And then it was nearly midnight. He let her use his toothbrush so her breath would be fine if she got caught sneaking back indoors at home, and offered to drive her, but now she wanted to run up the trail because she was full to bursting. Her new life, her true life, had finally begun.

  She was on the phone all morning with Alice, telling her about the party, the joyful news of her and Fenn’s connection. “God, he’s so hot,” Alice said, and Rosie said yeah, but that wasn’t even the thing; the thing was his mind and how cool he was, and Alice kept saying, “Oh my God,” that it was totally awesome, dude. Rosie studied hard most of the afternoon. She felt so happy that she helped a little around the house, did her own laundry, and even ate dinner with her parents without making it an international incident. After dinner, by prearrangement, Alice called and Rosie listened for a minute and then said, “Oh, I don’t know. Let me ask.” She turned to her parents with the phone tucked. “You know that guy Fenn?” she asked her mother, as she helped clear the table. “Who we saw at The Seventh Seal? And then at the Roastery?”

  “Yeah, I know who he is. The surfer.”

  “He’s having a party tonight, and he’s really good friends with Alice’s boyfriend—they work on the same construction crew sometimes, for Fenn’s uncle Joe
, and Alice wants me to go with her, in case things get a little wild, because she’s being piss-tested, too.” The Uncle Joe part was so innocent, and convincing, but her parents still had to have a secret conference in James’s office, like it was Yalta instead of some stupid party. “I passed the piss test yesterday, remember?” she shouted through the closed door.

  So she got to go to Fenn’s apartment that night with her parents’ permission and the promise to be home by midnight again.

  His roommates were still in the living room, like they’d never left, and different girls were drinking beer and there were more teenage boys, all of them juniors or seniors. Another woozy couple was passed out on Fenn’s bed. Alice was at her boyfriend’s house; his parents were out of town. Rosie knew hardly anyone here.

  Fenn kissed her in the kitchen, slowly, deeply, and she stepped back, smiling. They made fresh-squeezed orange juice for themselves again, and poured in vodka from a fresh half-pint, and went out on the back stairs, again, to look at the crescent moon, again, and they talked about the music they loved, slow rap, and the Beatles, and the trouble Fenn had gotten into when he was still drinking too much, and the time she got busted at the party on the hill, which he’d heard about.

  As they cuddled, she told him about Jody running away with her army man, and he said, “Well, if he gets sent off somewhere scary, she’ll be tucked in his heart as he goes into battle. She’ll mean so much to someone.”

  “That is incredible for you to say, because she doesn’t mean much to herself, because her parents basically destroyed her when they sent her off to wilderness. And none of the adults can see that.” He touched her thigh as she spoke, as if smoothing out a crease. They were both in worn khaki shorts, and his legs were as long as hers, which no one’s but Jody’s and maybe Elizabeth’s were.

  It was like talking to Robert or Rae. Their legs touched on the steps, his warm, soft, furry smoothness on hers, and she felt her soul amplified, like at the end of a party at someone’s house with perfect people there, and Led Zeppelin on the stereo, or up on the mountain with Jody and Alice, ’shrooming late at night under the stars. She didn’t feel small and cringy like when her parents were all over her with their suspicions and Gestapo commands. She was someone real and meaningful, with Fenn on the back steps, legs touching, about to go to bed together, tomorrow, maybe. She could literally fall into his sloping blue eyes. Love was like that, when it was no longer just your own soul howling in its own dingy wilderness. You got to feel draped with something noble instead of something sloppy and always falling short, like you felt secretly on the inside half the time.

  Right before she had to leave, he said, “Can I ask you something?” She nodded, thinking he would ask her about her first time, or if she was on birth control. But instead, he pointed to a drop of water hanging from a geranium beside him, in moonlight. “In the morning, if the sun was up and that drop was still there, would it contain limitless rainbows?”

  “Not necessarily,” she explained. “Maybe it would. But my understanding is that it would contain limitless water.”

  He thought about this in silence. Then they kissed again. When she looked at her watch, it was eleven forty-five—she’d be in huge trouble if she was late. She brushed her teeth with his toothbrush again, and ran home as fast as she could, like a deer, like a colt, like the girl she used to be.

  NINE

  Lagoon

  They made love the next afternoon in his room like young adults in a movie, so loving and slow and yet hot, sexy and romantic and great beyond all imagining, and it hurt only when he first entered her, but it hurt good, and she loved most when it was over and they lay together in a tangle and stroked each other’s faces and hip bones and tummies. They used a rubber, the first time, and then they ate hash brownies he had made, and were so amazingly stoned that she couldn’t deal with the whole condom thing, only his skin in her, soft, hard, furry, smooth, slow-motion eternity.

  After that she thought about him every minute, every hour all day every day. In chemistry she thought about the soft yellow streaks in his hair, the downy blond fuzz right below his belly button, his large hand on her hip bone. Thoughts floated like fish through her mind as she tried to concentrate on what Robert was saying. Now she thought of Robert only when she was in class, even when he bent over her to look at her calculations. Fenn had saved her. The smell of Robert’s aftershave now made her sick, the smell of someone in decay. She and Fenn were the beauty of youth being adults together. He smelled like the ocean, like a carpenter, like nails and wood, like the field of hot grasses where they lay after school. She knew the smell of his warm brown thighs. He kept his room clean, scented with candles, he always had bud, enough to lay some routinely on Alice. Couples weren’t allowed to crash in his room at parties anymore; it was reserved only for the two of them these days—the one of them.

  He understood how afraid her parents were now that she was growing away from them, and he kept on baking her brownies with hash oil so she wouldn’t smell of weed. They laughed about how it was almost an act of charity. He also had a source for pure Ecstasy, with no meth at all in it, nothing to fuck up her mind or drug tests, and it reminded her of what it had been like her first few times and why they called it Ecstasy. He made her come over and over with his mouth. Alice thought she was exaggerating, but if anything, she downplayed it because Alice’s Evan didn’t love oral like Fenn did. Anyway, that wasn’t even the great part. The great part was after in his arms, under the covers, in his room, in their hippie town, near San Francisco Bay, on the great big wide quilted earth.

  He was polite and shyly conversational with her parents when he came to pick her up for meetings.

  That’s what he and she called it when he came to get her during the week. They had concocted a story about attending the young people’s meetings nearby that they’d found listed on Elizabeth’s AA directory, and they went to one meeting a week so they could regale James and Elizabeth with stories. They pretended to be at meetings twice a week on school nights, so at least they could be together briefly. The druggie kids at the young people’s meeting were old friends from the Parkade, way cooler than the general prison population at Rosie’s high school. On weekends, she and Fenn hiked, read out loud in his bed, drank, made love and vegan meals. She admitted to her mother and James that they were sexually active, which was the phrase you used with parents. Her mother hugged herself and hung her head like an old Latvian widow, and James went off to his study to kill himself, he said. She promised her mother that they were using condoms, even though they weren’t, and not too much more was made of this. What were they supposed to do, say, “You cannot sleep with him, Rosie?” Right.

  The parental units had imposed a twenty-eight-day trial period to see if Rosie could stay clean for a month, go without weed or anything else they were able to test for with their little Captain Midnight decoder-ring urine tests. They’d felt powerful and in charge when they’d changed the curfew to eleven for those twenty-eight days. Rosie had gone ballistic initially, but it was actually working out fine. She was getting her homework done, mostly, stabilizing the parents, and living the life she had dreamed of and despaired of never having. She was happier than a person had any right to be. And the funny thing was, her parents really liked Fenn. They naturally thought he was too old for her, but Elizabeth understood why she loved him, and James just threw his hands up and said it was all hopeless, and they’d never think anyone was good enough for her and blah blah blah. He seemed resigned to Fenn, and even sort of liked that Fenn had read the same books he and Elizabeth had, and that he had a full-time job with his uncle Joe. Fenn even came up with a thought for James—that life at the Parkade was not unlike life at the Bolinas lagoon, in the ebb and flow and symbiosis and beautiful strangeness of its inhabitants, if only you had eyes to see beyond the asphalt and cars.

  James and Elizabeth had been so inspired by this that one morning in October, they had gotten up early and driven to West Marin t
o sit on the banks of the lagoon with rain boots, a notepad, binoculars, and no agenda. You had to do things early in the day now, as Indian summer had descended a week ago, with all the tumult of heat and bugs, lurid sunsets, red as when you’ve been lying in the sun and it has begun to burn your lids.

  Elizabeth always found Indian summer to be a stolen and peculiar time, nature compressed. It was confusing after a couple of weeks of milder days, with hints at the edge of coldness, but not enough mild comfort to rest into. Fall was her favorite season, a season for grown-ups, the wild, bright colors of flame, and when your insides tightened in the cold, you felt more present and on guard than in the balmy softening days of summer. The fall said, Get cracking. Indian summer said, Oh, stay with me just a little bit longer.

  The beauty of early morning at low tide in the mucky tidal flats, crisscrossed with ribbons of channels like arteries and veins, made them both whisper in awe.

  The last time they had been here, the tide had been high, and the water looked like an ocean that humans could splash in alongside the ruddy ducks and mallards, a big soup bowl filled with cattails, weeds, flotsam. “Duck soup,” she said. “Yum yum.”

  “Oh my God, I am so going to tell Rosie you said that!” They laughed, because Fenn was a vegetarian and so now Rosie was entirely vegetarian, too. When they forced her to sit at the table for dinner, she stared at the roast chicken as if they’d served up one of her bucket children on a platter, piled high with potatoes and carrots on the side. Elizabeth made her brown rice and beans, and she ate the big salads they had every night from Elizabeth’s garden, but Rosie must have lost close to ten pounds in the last six weeks. Five nights a week Elizabeth and James ate vegetarian, too—pasta, tofu, beans, cheese—but one night she and James happened to be eating a whole poached halibut with a spicy Thai ginger sauce. Rosie eyed it in despair.