Imperfect Birds

by Anne Lamott

  But when Rosie stirred, and the sheet at her neck fell down, her clavicle showed, white and skeletal. Elizabeth could only stare. She wanted to pound the glass, hard, with her fists against the window, crying out Rosie’s name, and then force- feed her milk shakes. She prayed to the speck of something she’d seen at the sweat lodge that wasn’t her, and then in desperation to Mount Tam, as the Miwok had, “Do something. Help, please.” But she was faking belief. She felt nothing. She tapped the glass, and her groggy daughter opened her eyes, saw her mother, turned to look at the clock, looked back, small smile, and they waved small barely perceptible waves, like spies.

  Rosie lay in bed awhile and felt like she was dying. She and Fenn had taken ketamine the night before, and then a few sips of cough syrup to come down. She lay as still as she could, like when she was little, after her father had died, when she used to lie in bed and pretend she was dying, wearing a white Victorian nightie. She and Fenn knew all the drugs that either didn’t show up in over-the-counter drug tests, or were easily masked, the way the bleach in the eardrops bottle kept masking the THC in her system. There were other great products out there that totally flushed toxins out of your urine, but only for five hours, and she hadn’t quite figured out her mother’s test schedule. Definitely one weekend morning, but then maybe once midweek, although her mom hated to send her off to school in a bad state. “Keeps a girl on her toes,” she had said to Fenn.

  Her parents would be very down on ketamine, Special K, because all the literature said it was a horse tranquilizer, but it was really a perfectly safe drug. It was lovely, or at least the stuff Fenn’s connection in San Francisco gave them was fine. Fenn’s guy had a nurse he bought from, so it was the good stuff, pharmaceutically pure. It was both deeply relaxing and beautifully hallucinatory, like good mushrooms, like a waking dream. Also, twice they took LSD in the low golden hills, sitting in hippie Buddhist poses, lying together gazing into each other’s eyes, feeding each other sections of orange; the afternoon in bed, naked but not having sex, warm and close as she’d ever been with another human being; and then at sunset, on the steps where it had all begun for them, under the crescent of moon.

  Rosie was genuinely glad to see that her mother was in less pain since she had started testing negative for everything. She loved her mother and hated that she suffered so. Everyone was more relaxed. Dinners were calmer now, always based on food from Elizabeth’s field trips with Rae to the farmers’ market. Then she often got to go to a meeting with Fenn, or she would pretend to, and would stay up a little later doing homework. She and James and Elizabeth talked about regular old things at the dinner table. James asked her stuff that he needed for his stories, and this made him grateful, and she loved doing this for him. Like the other night he had demanded to know in his agitated, joking James way how it could be true that a feather and a coin dropped from the Transamerica pyramid would land at the same time. She felt like he was treating her like they were equals.

  “Here’s my best shot and simplest answer,” she began, and tried to explain that gravity acts the same on everything no matter what its mass.

  “Theoretically,” James qualified. Rosie shook her head: Sorry, Charlie.

  James put down his fork and reached for his notebook. You’re not going to like this, she warned him, but as far as she knew, it was something that was just accepted, based on lots of experiments and observations. The reason a feather and a penny fell at different rates was wind resistance. The feather was not allowed to accelerate to its full potential of approximately ten meters per second per second, which was the acceleration of any falling mass in a vacuum—that is, a place where there was no air resistance. “Slow down,” James cried out, and her mother smiled. Rosie had to repeat it. When he finally caught up, she continued. The lighter an object was, and the wider its mass was distributed, the more it was affected by air resistance.

  James stared at her with amazement when she paused.

  “I’m sorry my explanation is so shallow, but I guess I don’t really get it, either,” she added, which made them all laugh.

  “It was the opposite of shallow,” her mother said.

  Rosie was on a roll. “It does all seem very counterintuitive, though, right?” Her parents both nodded, and James even had to write that phrase down, too. It was sort of pathetic. Her parents’ memories were going, tearing like fishing nets. She wanted them to feel better about themselves, so they could leave her alone. “It’s frustrating,” she added compassionately, “how much must just be accepted for the explanation to make sense.”

  All day Sunday she felt so poorly that she didn’t even want to get together with Fenn; they talked on the phone twice. He didn’t feel great, either, but he was still going out to Stinson to surf. “Want to go with?” he asked, and she almost said yes; just to watch him from the shore was heaven. Yet she sensed that he was only being nice by inviting her, and in the end she said no, she needed to catch up on homework.

  Elizabeth babied her with trays of healthy food, but Rosie’s mind felt whipped, jangly. Though she wished she could make her mother happy, she wanted to be happy, too, happy and free—was that so crazy a desire? She wanted to be with Fenn every minute she could, wanted to be out in the world, mostly wanted to be done with high school. She took a nap with Rascal and then such a long shower that she used up all the hot water and made James be pissy and have an episode.

  She felt like she was always trying to keep six plates spinning in the air, trying to keep her stories straight, trying to keep everyone happy. No wonder she was tired all the time. Monday morning she felt somewhat better. Then her mother had to go and give her a piss test.

  “I took one a few days ago,” she said, “and it’s a Monday. We never do this on Mondays, so I can start the week out on a positive note.” But her mother held firm, and marched her into Rosie’s own bathroom, as if to trip her up.

  Thank God she had finally remembered to put a cosmetic bottle with bleach in it among her makeup and lotions. She closed the door wearily and went to the toilet. You sort of had to laugh about the whole thing—how dogged and determined her mother was, like a little child trying to make letters. She peed into the cup, reached for the Clinique toner bottle, and poured a few drops into the urine.

  “You almost done in there?”

  Rosie yawned and wiped herself, put the bottle back, washed her hands.

  “Here you go, Mama,” she said, handing her the plastic cup. She watched Elizabeth check the temperature strip, and was heading back to her bedroom to get ready for school when something stopped her in her tracks: her mother was sniffing loudly, like a cartoon character, only not funny.

  Rosie turned around to find her mother’s nose deep in the plastic cup.

  Elizabeth looked up, wild-eyed, terrified. “Do I smell bleach?” she asked, and smelled it again. “Rosie! Is there bleach in this pee?”

  TEN

  The Fall

  Rosie faced her mother, eyes narrowed with disdain even as she felt the ground beneath her turn to sand. Her heart pounded the way it did after the cheapest cocaine, going so fast that she felt like she might be having a stroke, and yet still she sneered with disbelief at such bald-faced foolishness, at her stupid, stupid mother who stood there in the bathroom holding out the cup of pee like it was plutonium. Rosie’s mind churned and she desperately tried to figure out the angles. If she went ballistic, she could beat her mother down, deflate the story into something more manageable, and continue her life as it had been. And then there was a second person inside her, composing excuses and words of contrition. She wondered if she should try to calm this crazy idiot by throwing her mother the bone about having smoked one hit with Alice. That would get her to do what Rosie wanted: dial back the drama, love Rosie again, be grateful for her honesty, and relieved—it could be so much worse than Elizabeth imagined. But a third person inside Rosie calmly pointed out that it really was so much worse than Elizabeth imagined, way worse, all the raves and Ecstasy, al
l the unsafe sex she’d had before Fenn, the times she’d gone down on some guy, all that fucking oral, because he was holding cocaine. It was so disgusting, so shattering to recall, that it stopped her in her mental tracks—maybe she had been out of control for a while—and right when she looked up, her mother got this crazy look on her face where frozen disbelief met rage and weirdness the way it had that day on the trampoline three years ago, and that pierced Rosie, knowing what her mother looked like when she went crazy. All in a swirl like when drugs were coming on too hard, she needed to calm her mother down, needed to sneak out of this mess with her freedom intact; she needed her mother to be strong, she needed a mommy.

  Then her mother started to shake, Rosie could see this from six feet away in the carpeted hall, and the first voice inside her came back and she saw that she could win now by going cold, and derisive, although lying might do real damage to her mother, who was tilting her head and looking at Rosie as if she were a speck on the horizon, way far away, and she heard herself saying out loud that she had lied, she had had a hit with Alice at school on Friday—one hit after all these weeks—but then she felt like you do when you see an outlying breaker on the ocean coming right at you and you’re thrilled because you think you can catch it and ride it all the way into the shore. It’s getting bigger too quickly as it approaches, but you’ll still be able to ride it, even though it rises above you, now such a gigantic wave, with so much more water than you could have possibly seen, that it’s going to wipe you out, it’s going to hurt.

  And she glanced at her mother, who was looking into the small cup of pee as if now she were about to raise it to her lips, and the wave came crashing down.

  Truth poured forth as Rosie wept from a makeshift mourner’s bench on the rim of the bathtub, where she cried over her sins, or at least the sins of the last month. All the grisly details spilled out, the secrets, the lies, the truth, that she had smoked dope a number of times during the last few weeks; that every time she had had a pee test during the last few weeks, she had added some drops of bleach to mask the THC. She’d taken acid, too, once, and ’shrooms, too, with Fenn. Also, she and Alice had sniffed her boyfriend Evan’s plastic cement, on his dare. She buried her face in her hands and wondered out loud what was wrong with her.

  James, running from the living room, confronted a locked bathroom door. Muffled sounds of Rosie choking for breath followed, interrupted by a tinkle of water. When Elizabeth unlocked the door, he stepped in, taking in the scene as if at a car accident: Elizabeth slumped against the wall, her face pure white, her neck flushed red, her chest heaving. A cup of pee with a stick in it sat by the sink. Rosie clawed her fingers through her hair, trying to pull it out. She insisted that she loved the meetings, the kids there, the whole scene, and was finally done, really fucking done with getting high. She hated herself for what she had put them through, but it took what it took, right?

  She repeated this until James robotically told her to shut her up. “Why are you letting her talk, darling?” he asked Elizabeth. She looked at him as if she hadn’t noticed that he was there, then bobbed her head around like a wooden toy bird, pecking. Rosie got to her feet, sizing up the situation: James sniffing at the bottle of eardrops that Elizabeth held to his nose, as if it were wine; the cup of pee with two Advent windows turning blue.

  “You can test me every day, and I’ll go to outpatient rehab—I’ll even help pay,” Rosie cried at the door. “Believe me, I’m done.”

  “Honey, that’s wonderful,” said Elizabeth, and Rosie seemed to think she meant it. Her face was watchful yet safe, like a gopher that has nearly made it to his hole. She slunk away. The unbleached urine was positive for THC and methamphetamines.

  “Jesus,” said James. “The hits just keep on coming.” He stroked the stubble on his chin. “What bothers me is that she admitted to mushrooms and acid, yet those didn’t show up.”

  “This panel doesn’t test for those,” Elizabeth explained. “How can I be so stunned and numb at the same time?” He shrugged. She dug her nails into her brow, making indentations in the skin, then into the back of one hand, making red half-moons.

  “Stop that,” he said. “What do you want to do?”

  “Maybe outpatient treatment. We can afford it, it’s not very expensive. But it didn’t work for Jody, they eventually needed to send her away. There’s Allison Reid’s Adolescent Recovery, which costs a fortune. But one of Allison’s big success stories OD’ed her first semester in college. We cash in your SEP-IRA, pray for our own early deaths. I’ll call Jody’s mother later, see what she knows—she won’t know about low-cost programs, because they have money. Alexander’s family went through the county program and thought it was great—he graduated early, and got a scholarship to Santa Cruz, but of course, now he’s smoking heroin.”

  “So there’s that.” He reached out and touched each fingernail of her right hand.

  She limped toward their bedroom but stopped at Rosie’s door to listen to the silence. When she opened the door and saw Rosie sitting on her bed incuriously glancing at a textbook as if it were any other school morning, Elizabeth felt a twig snap inside. She slammed Rosie’s door so hard she thought it might come off its hinges. She bellowed, opened the door, and slammed it full-force again and then again and again. But still it did not break or splinter. She felt sick and dizzy from the seesaw of trusting Rosie and then being betrayed; from caving, saying yes, when she was more afraid of defying Rosie than of Rosie’s safety; felt exhausted from trying to find enough resolve within to say no and then being pilloried by Rosie, from the overwhelming fear of saying either yes or no. She opened the door and slammed it closed again, sick of being afraid, of holding her breath, sick of feeling numb, and then feeling the rage. She opened the door and slammed it.

  James came into the hall but did not stop her. When she was done, she collapsed on the carpet in the hallway. She heaved for breath. Still James did not come to comfort her, because there was no comfort, and Rosie had been right—it took what it took.

  The next day’s sky was lower and rich, silver gilt like vermeil. Fall’s first snap called for sweaters, and Elizabeth usually loved this, when the sky was washed-out blue and cool until you noticed the low sun on your skin, the fresh briskness of the air. This time, as in the autumn when Andrew died, she wished it behind her, wished to be already months past these miserable heartache days.

  She called Anthony, who insisted she call Allison Reid. She did, and was stunned by the cost. She asked if there was a sliding scale for payment. There wasn’t. She called the county’s biggest outpatient rehab next. Though it was much more affordable, there were no spaces. “But they come up all the time. I’ll call you the minute we have an opening. Just hang tight,” the receptionist told her, sounding tired.

  James wanted to issue a fatwa against Fenn and Alice, or at least a no-contact clause. Elizabeth fought for strictly monitored visits, largely because she felt that this would help maintain whatever peace they could manage and would give Rosie less to rebel against—and something they could take away from her if she fucked up—but also because it would please her. Elizabeth was so hungry for this, and so defenseless against Rosie’s verbal freeze, the thin, stilted monosyllabic tone. Elizabeth felt James’s impatience with this plan, but to her surprise, he said it was her call.

  So it was nighttime young people’s meetings for Rosie. Elizabeth and James drove her there together. They planned to stay at each meeting with her the whole time, but she adamantly refused: they would be the only parents. So they agreed to meet her on the porch outside when she was done. Fenn was usually waiting with Rosie when they came to pick her up. Where there had been seven-o’clock curfews for dinner on school nights, now one of them picked Rosie up right after school three days a week, and Alice dropped her off the other two. She had to walk through the door by three-thirty, or she would lose her computer, too. Weekends had been canceled entirely until further notice. If she could put together two weeks of meetings a
nd sobriety, she could meet Fenn for a movie. They would drop her off ten minutes early, pick her up at the theater ten minutes after the movie ended.

  Rosie was okay with this at first, relieved if slightly impatient with the new structure. The first few days, she swept through the kitchen like a bear in a campsite, grabbing food. She talked on the phone with Fenn and Alice and did homework. She looked better right away: her skin grew clear, and she began to put on weight. It could have been so much worse. She wasn’t allowed to smoke at all, anywhere, and that was sort of a drag. But she bore down on the long-term homework assignments, and took the Valium that Alice had brought her from her mother’s stash. Some mornings at school she mixed Adderall and Valium. Nothing else, as she was pretty much on the wagon. She’d thought James and her mother would totally prohibit her from seeing Alice and Fenn, so any time at all with either of them was a victory.

  There was even a part of her that liked these quiet days, a chance to settle down and regroup, prove to herself she was fine. Being a senior was actually kind of cool, because you ruled the roost, and people looked up to you. She made sure to get her homework done after school and still had time to check in with Alice on the phone. She had boring but mostly friendly dinners with her parents, and frequent AA meetings with Fenn and the chill kids from town. Sometimes the speakers were so hip and hilarious and wise that it almost made you want to be an AA person. Other times meetings gave you funny stuff to talk about later, like this blonde babe named Cassidy who shared that the pain of betraying her parents had been crippilizing—a word that Rosie, Fenn, and Alice now used all the time. Or at the very least, the hour passed quickly and got the parents off her back. She made it a point to share in a pleasant voice with her parents what was going on: Alice had applied for early admission to the Fashion Institute and RISD; Jody’s boyfriend had shipped out to Dubai, and Jody might be coming back from San Diego; Fenn was on a new construction site, in Point Reyes, and he wanted them all to drive out to the coast to see it some weekend. Sometimes, though, it hurt so much to have lost Fenn and her freedom that she felt cold and dead. She tried to stay up about it—this was only temporary. Some days she came home and crashed until dinner. You were exhausted all the time when you were a teenager, stooped with the weight of early mornings, pressure, and backpacks.