by Anne Lamott
Also by Anne Lamott
HARD LAUGHTER
ROSIE
JOE JONES
OPERATING INSTRUCTIONS
BIRD BY BIRD
CROOKED LITTLE HEART
TRAVELING MERCIES
Copyright © 1989 by Anne Lamott
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the Publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
The author wishes to acknowledge the tremendous love and guidance of Bill Turnbull, Jack Shoemaker, Nancy Palmer Jones, John Kaye, Cindy Ehrlich, Abby Thomas, Ross Feld, Don Carpenter, Peggy Knickerbocker, and the reference librarians at the Sausalito Public Library.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA [previous edition]
Lamott, Anne.
All new people: a novel / Anne Lamott.
p. cm.
I. Title
PS3562.A4645A79 2000
8131.5421 — dc21
99-045925
Jacket design by Kelly Winton
Text design by Dave Bullen
COUNTERPOINT
2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318
Berkeley, CA 94710
www.counterpointpress.com
Distributed by Publishers Group West
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
ebook ISBN 9781619028852
This one is dedicated to Bill Rankin,
James Noel, and the people of
St. Andrew Presbyterian Church,
Marin City, California.
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
I AM LIVING once again in the town where I grew up, having returned here several weeks ago in a state of dull torment for which the Germans probably have a word. There is green, green moss on the bark of the elms we shinnied up as children, when this was a railroad town. A thousand memories have returned in the past few weeks, odd and long forgotten, triggered by the sight of ancient houses, the smells of eucalyptus and the sea. They emerge as in those pictures we made when we were young, where you crayon circles and squares and patches of bright color until no more white paper shows, and then crayon over this with black until no more color shows, and then etch a picture with the tip of a paper clip—but by then you’ve forgotten where you put each original color, so that spidery Miró objects appear: red-violet trees, green horses, blue stars.
An old woman I’ve known all my life, named Angela diGrazia, calls hello from her garden, just across from the little white church on the hill. My brother started a fire in her kitchen wastebasket when he was four. Her old man and my father and the other men in the neighborhood, most of whom worked in the railroad yard, gathered once a year to stomp grapes, from which they brewed potent, battery-acid wine. I can remember her old phone number—GEneva 5-1432—but not her husband’s first name. I wave to her but do not stop, partly because I’m late for my appointment, and partly because our conversation is always the same. First she complains about her back and the gophers, and then exclaims that there’s never been any doubt about my paternity, although in fact there was, on my part. My brother told me every chance he got that mom and dad were not my real parents, and I believed him, partly because no one else in my family but me had wildly curly hair. “I remember the day your parents brought you here to live,” he’d say with an air of wistful reminiscence. “Your mother was wearing yellow pedal pushers. And your father was a Negro.”
Wildflowers bloom on the marshy fingers of earth that run down below the steps of the church. When the hillsides turn brown in the summer, millions of flowers appear in stripes: California poppies, leopard lilies, monkey flowers, buttercups, grass of Parnassus—brilliant white stars—and black jewel flowers. Black jewel flowers are dark garnet red, not known to exist any where else on earth but on these hillsides. You can still see San Francisco, Alcatraz, and Raccoon Strait, but when I was a child, the hills were shaggy and bare. My father took us on walks behind the hills, naming birds for us—juncos, robins, meadowlarks—and one evening at dusk we came upon a gypsy camp, their cars and wagons in a circle. The gypsies showed us small clay nudes—but maybe I’ve made this up. My brother doesn’t remember, and my father has passed away. My brother and I caught tadpoles and frogs in the streams that cut through these hills, and my brother used to bring me to his fort up here behind a cluster of cypress trees, and make me undress for his cronies, who in exchange gave him baseball cards.
The old railroad yard is now the site of offices and condominiums, and I am headed there to see a hypnotist. My mind is an unholy puppet show. It is not on my side, does not have my best interests at heart.
There is the matter of forgetfulness, how in my early thirties I already exhibit a worsening feeblemindedness; and how my mind is full of the forgotten, events that happened long ago and over the years that bred and feed my urbane derangement. And how I have told most of my stories so many times that it has become a way of forgetting.
One thing I know for certain is that my memories are not the same as those of my brother or mother or father; we all have our own version of what really happened, of how it really was. It is a Rashomon history. If you took our four versions and laid them one on top of the other in bands, as they do in sound mixing, you would end up with a song of my family.
I pass the field where we as a town burnt our Christmas trees on Twelfth Night. There would be a hundred trees or so, pine and fir piled like a massive haystack beneath the night sky, moon and stars. Then whoooooosh, it was lit and began to burn fast, really fast, crackling, snapping, with a roar somewhat like the surf, and it smelled like the essence of Christmas, a sharp thick smell like a pungent rain-clean forest, and we hooted and cheered at the roaring wild orange flames in the night.
My best friend all those years was a Catholic girl named Mady White who lived half a mile away, whose family I adored because they said “mann-aize” and “toelit” and “warsh,” and because on Fridays they served tuna-noodle casserole or English muffin pizzas. Mady’s mother wore her hair in a French knot, and you could push her pretty far before she would resort to the universal cry of motherhood, “You go to your room right now, and you go home, Nanny Goodman.” Sometimes she would let us eat popcorn and tomato soup for dinner on Fridays, but unlike my mother she wouldn’t feed the hobos. Once she gave a hobo who came to her door The Power of Positive Thinking. Hobos still arrived in town when I was a child; they’d get on the trains up north, thinking they’d arrive someplace from which they could go someplace else, but our town was the end of the line. So they would come by our houses looking for chores, chopping wood or raking leaves. My own mother would bring them glasses of cold apple cider while they worked, and send them packing with a brown paper bag of salmon salad sandwiches.
My father went to see a hypnotist a year before he died. He and my mother were visiting friends in New York, and one of them recommended hypnosis to help him quit smoking again. “It was truly something,” he wrote to me. “I was half expecting Lon Chaney, Jr., in Inner Sanctum—‘Luke eento my eyes,’ he would say, and then send me forth on a quest for gopher blood or head cheese. But my man looked like a Great Gray Owl, with agate-hard eyes; there was a picture of him and his wife on the wall and you could see that just as the shutter clicks he is saying, ‘No, I won’t miss you, not any of you.’ This look is what I would have expected to discover in the deepest recesses of my soul, but what I found instead was a soft tranquil pool. Afterwards, I went without smoking for nearly an hour.”
My hypnotist is sixty
or so, smiling and kind, John Kenneth Galbraith in L. L. Bean clothes. “How are you?” he asks.
“Fine,” I say, and offer as proof a leering rictus of a smile.
His uncluttered desk and chair and the chair beside it, in which I now sit, are the only furniture in his office. On the wall is a print of a Chinese lion, the only decor. One window looks out on the bay, through trees.
“What are you here to work on?” he asks.
“Oh,” I say, “anxiety, melancholia; fears of loss, rejection, death, humiliation, suicide, madness . . .”
He is nodding at me, kind and thoughtful, “Okay, then,” he says, “tell me what your strengths are.”
Squirming, fidgety, I finally allow as to how I can be sort of kind, sort of funny.
“All right then. You’ll need to remember that later.”
“How long is this going to take?”
“Altogether? Maybe a couple of hours. Let’s begin.” He asks me to close my eyes. “Good. Now take a few deep breaths. All right: now think of a color you really love, a color you find soothing, and breathe that color in and out, over and over.”
I settle on chick yellow, inhale it, exhale it.
“Now, while breathing in your color, say to yourself, over and over and over, ‘I am hearing . . . , I am seeing . . . , I am feeling . . . , but fill in the blanks, ‘I am hearing—my voice, I am seeing—black, I am feeling—skeptical, I am hearing—my heart . . .’”
I am hearing my breath, I am seeing spangly black, I am feeling skeptical, hearing the rustle of leaves, seeing my own face, hearing the hypnotist clearing his throat, seeing the sea, feeling hungry, hearing birdsong, seeing our hillsides in winter, Ireland green, feeling relaxed. “Deeper and deeper,” the hypnotist says, “over and over and over.” After a long while, I am aware of an amniotic silence in my head, and then I am aware that I’m on the verge of drooling.
“Now,” he says. “Beginning with today, I want you to go backwards in time, and ferret out the memories of pain: of despair, rejection, terror, shame. Freeze each memory, study it like a photograph, and then go backwards to the next one. Take as much time as you need.”
The first moving slide appears on the screen in my head. I see myself lurching away from the home in Petaluma that I had shared with two couples in love, a home to which I had fled when my marriage broke up, a home so full of romantic gazes that I felt alternately like the lonely innkeeper and the court jester. Climbing down the porch stairs with two heavy suitcases, bolting for my car, consumed with memories of pain, staggering like Gabriela Andersen-Schiess coming around the track in the final lap of the Olympic marathon, where the pain and exertion are so great that they could have caused brain damage. I study this still with absolutely bemused detachment. I go back several months to the end of the marriage, in the ramshackle house on the Petaluma River. The water was so beautiful at sunset it could make your stomach buckle. We lived there for three years, my husband and I. The hills went from green in the winter and spring to golden yellow, Northern California in her blond phase, and the hay grows taller and taller, until you wake up one morning to the sound of the hay-cutting machines, which leave the hay on the ground in drifts, and then the bales appear, neatly stacked, golden blocks. By the end of our marriage we sound like Harold Pinter characters, clipped and malicious but ever genteel. Scenes from our marriage that even this morning sent a sickness rushing up my spine. But now I am blithely reviewing them as though I’m on nitrous oxide, placidly aware of the pain. I see our eventual aggressive indifference, hear our gratuitous lies, realize the great betrayal was being replaced in his heart by his work. Lacking the courage to live a quiet anonymous life, he chases down fame as an artist, and finds it to be a cold, beautiful woman who makes it clear he doesn’t quite deliver, and I am made to pay, over and over again. Unfolding backwards through the years, I finally arrive at the hardest memories of all, the joy of falling in love.
“Backwards, backwards,” says the hypnotist.
I am on Mount Tamalpais, twenty-four years old. A week or so before, I had finally emerged from the grief of losing my father, poking my head tentatively out into the world like the aged Japanese warrior coming out of the forest, desperate to know if the emperor is still in power. In town, I ran into the love of my life, a man with whom I had broken up around the time my father got sick, six months ago. We started talking and joking around, and he invited me along for the ride to Petaluma for cocktails with the couple who were our best friends. They were so happy to see us that we ended up staying for dinner. My lover had never before been so publicly demonstrative with me, and I mentally ran through the reasons I shouldn’t start up with him again, but it was obvious as the evening progressed that he was falling back in love. When we went to leave, the engine of his car caught fire, and we had to spend the night with our friends. Clearly a case of divine intervention—God meant for us to be lovers again. And so I began to relax, and fell in love again. Our friends drove us home late the next morning, but we were all so relieved that my lover and I were back together that we stopped to buy champagne and take-out Chinese food and drove up the mountain for a picnic.
We are sitting on a knoll at the top of the mountain with what looks to be a view of the entire world. Over to the right is the deep-blue Pacific, and hillsides roll down beneath us everywhere you look, ridges and limitless trees, the bay gray-green and peppered with boats, and San Francisco as lovely as Atlantis. My lover appears to be almost sick with love and has never seemed so devoted, and our friends are singing the first lines of “What a Diff’rence a Day Makes” to us, and we’re all looking bashful and goopy. Finally we are walking to the car, and our friends are looking at their watches, and ask us nonchalantly if they can drop both of us off at my lover’s house to save time—they’ve got to get back to Petaluma—and I say Sure, and my lover says No, clearing his throat, and that there’s a bit of a problem, and we all cock our heads nervous-sweetly, and I say, Don’t worry, I won’t stay, I’ll just call a cab from there, and he looks stricken and finally blurts out that a woman is waiting at his house for him. I stand there on the mountain frozen by public disgrace.
I study this slide. Backwards? Backwards then. Except for my father’s illness, I’m mostly seeing a sort of moving police lineup of boyfriends and breakups and the ensuing small breakdowns, and then I see a clip in which my father and I are talking heart-to-heart in his study. It is nighttime and we are sipping whiskey, I am twenty-one and sitting on the floor with my back against the closed door, and he is at his desk. He is trying to talk me out of beginning an affair with the married man on whom I have a crush, and who (as I confide to my father) is after me. You’ve had your married affair, he says, and it took you a year to get over. Didn’t you learn anything at all from the experience? Because, baby, ignorance is curable, stupidity is forever. I hang on his every word. We drink more whiskey and talk. We are so close, cronies, allies, family. He says that the clean thing would be not to sleep with Richard, and that there was happiness in clean. And I’m nodding, suddenly solemn and wise, and promise the both of us to nip this one in the bud. So when I do proceed with the affair, I lie through my teeth to my parents about where I am going at night and who I am seeing. The married man and I have a ball, and there is absolutely no way my parents can find out. Except that one afternoon there was a letter to my parents from the wife. I was met at the front door by my father, who was almost crying as he handed me the letter. My mother came into the hall looking at me with an expression I’d only seen on her face when she was watching Nixon on TV: Liar! Liar!
I study the three of us for a moment. “Backwards,” says the hypnotist.
I see myself at nineteen in love with a man who was not particularly bright, but handsome and streetwise and cool. We had been sleeping together for three weeks or so when my period started, and it started just an hour or so before we went out to celebrate something at a fancy restaurant. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him what was going on. He was n
ot enlightened. He didn’t like the smell or taste of women’s bodies. “This is wonderful,” said the therapist I was seeing at the time, when I called for an emergency consultation. “You’ve always had this disgust toward your own body, and now you’ve found someone you can share that with.” She coached me on how to tell him, urged me to just get it over with, but God, it filled me with so much fear, fear that he would want me to go sleep outside in the hut until it had passed. And all through dinner at this fancy restaurant he made sexy little jokes about what he had in store for me later. I would laugh prettily and try to blurt out the news. I kept trying to tell myself that it was really no big deal, that it was okay to have periods, that it just meant I was a woman, and so on and so on, but I couldn’t get a word out. He insisted that we go home to his house, and we held hands in the car and I tried to blurt out the first few words and I couldn’t, until we were finally in his bedroom. “Oh,” I said. “There’s something I wanted to tell you.” He took off his cuff links and started to pull his shirt off over his head and said to me, “Wait, wait, I want to tell you something first!” I nodded and smiled, waiting.
“Good news!” he said. “Clean sheets!”
Nineteen, eighteen, seventeen. There is lots of sorrow and low self-esteem but I also remember it as having been a time when my family was particularly close: we all fought against Nixon and marched against the war and boycotted lettuce and tried to stem the tide of developers who were building homes for rich people, building shops for tourists. I see myself returning from my only year in college, knowing more then than I ever will again. I spent the year hanging out with other bleeding-heart liberals who worked for McGovern and who would never ever drink Gallo or Coors, unless there was absolutely nothing else around. In my struggle to find out who I am, I take only philosophy and literature courses, reading most of the required books so that I could say I had read them, or because a paper was due, and I develop some rather gross intellectual pretensions. For a while I affect a slight and artsy lisp, and then move on to a scholarly, William F. Buckley stammer. I see myself sitting at my parents’ dinner table telling them about the courses I was taking, and I see my hands near my mouth, gnarled with passion and emphasis, saying something like “The—thuhhh—thuhhh—theeeeee matrix through which we studied Thales of Miletus . . .” and my generous parents somehow manage to keep straight faces as I blather on and on; but after dinner when I’m headed upstairs, I hear them chuckle. I stop on the stairs and slowly turn toward the sound. My mother is saying softly, “The—thuhhh—thuhhh—theee uh matrix,” and I can hear that my father is laughing through his nose. “Dear God,” he says.