by Anne Lamott
I see myself a year earlier, my senior year.
I go to a tiny private high school for rich hippies, although I am neither, and one night at dinner I announce, sighing with poignant resignation, that, after all, the unexamined life is not worth living. My parents smile nicely at me, the same way my cousin Lynnie smiles at me when I complainingly remark that all these cats on Market Street keep asking me for bread. She peers into my face and asks, “They do?”
I look at that girl, at me and my pretensions, and then I see another moment in my senior year.
It is one of those Northern California dappled dawns, pink-blue-gray, and I have taken the early commute ferry across San Francisco Bay. Every morning I stop to pick up my best friend at her apartment on California at Larkin, and we walk to our little hippie high school together. This morning I get into her elevator and am joined on the second floor by a sweet handsome man maybe ten years older than I, who has soft black curly Jewish hair. I think I have seen him before, I think I have had a crush on him many times, or else he just looks like the man who organizes the action at peace marches, who introduces the rock groups on weekends at Golden Gate Park, who performs with the improvisational comedy troupe we go to see every weekend, who taught us how to clean up the beach and shorebirds below Slide Ranch, near Stinson, after the oil spill, who taught us what to say when we manned the phones at Suicide Prevention. We say hello and the door closes and then something comes over him, pain in his face, and he leans against a wall, grimacing, and I see that his knee is in spasm. I ask, can I help, can I help, and he nods and begins to slump to the floor. “I’m having a seizure,” he whispers, and all I can think of doing is grabbing for his tongue so he doesn’t choke to death, but he says, “Sit on me and hold my shoulders down.” So I sit astride him and press his shoulders to the floor, and then he starts moaning and writhing, aroused and leering. “Ahhhhhh!” I shout and leap to my feet, nauseated with shame. I stare at the picture of this moment. I have never mentioned it to a soul.
Even years later I couldn’t bear to think of it, and couldn’t keep it out of my mind. It was one of the wormy memories that made up the House of Horrors ride in my head, where around every corner your cart goes flying into the mouth of the snake, or into the fire. But here I am watching it blithely. “Backwards, backwards,” he says softly and I hear the soft rubbery knock as he taps his pencil eraser on his desk.
I am sixteen and in love with an older man, and it is a cat-brown night in San Francisco. I have told my parents that I am staying overnight with my best friend, but I am at my lover’s apartment, and we have made hash brownies to eat the next day at Golden Gate Park, where Quicksilver and Santana will be playing. My lover is in bed and I am wrapping the brownies in foil, and nibbling at the corners and crumbs, just for the taste of the fudge. Everything is normal and lovely, and both of us fall asleep. Then I’m awake, the room is pitch black, and the cat is on my chest, and when I stroke it, its back is as long as a tunnel, my hand is going off into eternity. I bolt into a sitting position and turn on the light. The bed and the floor don’t exist or maybe they do somewhere way way down below; I’m sitting on an infinite expanse of solid white air. My mouth is so dry that my tongue comes off my palate like Velcro, and I can’t breathe. I’m having a heart attack! I shake my lover awake and try to explain that I’m dying, but I can’t talk right—I sound like an Australian talking through Novocain and Quaaludes.
He drives me to the hospital and we are walking toward the emergency ward. He is grouchy and worried, and finally I realize that I’m just stoned from the brownies. I drop back, and when he turns to find me, I am lurking in the corridor like an egret, and I have to tell him I made a mistake: I’m not really having a heart attack, we can go home. And he looks at me with a hatred bordering on horror. “Ferret them out,” the hypnotist coaches.
I am a sophomore at my hippie high school, where three of our students have died this semester, three out of a hundred and fifty, all three with socialite parents. One jumped from a window on Geary on acid, another walked into the sea, the third OD’d on smack in the student lounge. I am one of the few non-hippies, and my English teacher adores me; he is Bertrand Russell at forty, only funnier, and I live to please and astonish him. He assigned a difficult paper on Moby Dick, and several days later I learned that two of my eight classmates were using the Cliffs Notes, so I cleverly used the Monarch Notes and paraphrased its interpretation into an impassioned, possibly brilliant essay. Three days later, he read it out loud to the class, without saying who had written it, and my classmates cheered when he was done and I squirmed demurely, basking in glory and his approval until I saw him reach into his desk for a copy of the Monarch Notes, heard him read the passages from which I had cribbed my essay. I went brain dead. Rigor mortis set in. Class must have ended at some point because my teacher and I were alone, and he looked sad and guilty. I cannot see what happened next, I really can’t, and so after a minute I go backwards.
I see the day when the last train left town.
My junior high is on the grounds where the dairy farms used to be, and I hate seventh and eighth grade daily but especially the nights when there are dances. I see myself taking it all out on my mother. I see myself punish her with sullen, aggressive laziness. After dinner, when she asks me to take out the garbage or do the dishes, I look at her like she just must be out of her mind. I remain at the table after my brother has gone upstairs to study, and my parents to the living room to read, and I wearily cradle my forehead in the palm of my hand, cursing my fate. Then I get up and carry the dishes past her as if they are limestone blocks for her pyramid.
Seventh- and eighth-grade dances, and gym: I pretend that my periods have started for about six months before they do, doubling over with monthly cramps so painful that I look like a man who has just been kicked in the old gwaggles. And one of the other mothers mentions these cramps to my mother one morning, and when I get home from school that day, my mother is waiting. And I have to discuss the ruse with her, which is all about desperate unhappiness, and I cringe, crying, the entire time.
I want to look and be like everybody else, but I feel so weird, so other. Everybody else wants to look like Jean Shrimpton or Cher, so I get my hair straightened and end up looking like a cross between Herb Alpert and the Shirelles.
Sixth grade is easier to take. Men are tearing down the building that contains the turntable in the railroad yard, the roundhouse where they fixed the locomotives, and they fill in the swamps where we used to raft, and build a Safeway, a ritzy hotel and a B of A. My parents march for civil rights. Our teachers show us Reefer Madness films, and we thoroughly believe the message—a mother walks in on her son smoking dope, and screams as if she had found him hanging from the rafters. Bad people, scabby and drooling, use drugs. So it is with a sense of horrified betrayal that I read an article by my father in which he describes an afternoon spent with his writer friends on a porch in Stinson Beach, drinking red jug wine and smoking marijuana. He has pulled the rug out from under me, and I march into the living room, holding the magazine, glare at my father who is reading a poem to my mother, and say slowly, “Daddy? You have brought shame upon this family.” And he howls.
There is always one problem or another in having a father who is a writer. My brother and I secretly believe he can’t hold down a job. Mady White has an uncle who “can’t hold down a job,” who stays at home all day (like our father) and paints toreadors and clowns on black velvet. I stand outside my father’s study after school and listen with despair as he types. I also listen with despair when my parents fight in their bedroom about things that usually stem from there not being enough money; in my bedroom next to theirs I have to lash myself to a tree and wait for the storm to pass.
The allowance he gives her for groceries never lasts the month, and it is only by hook and by crook that she keeps us fed and clothed. I see her meet me at the door one day after school, in fourth grade: she is holding one of my white Mary Janes, but
the strap has been chewed off and the rest is pockmarked with the teeth of our mongrel dog, and my mother is actually begging me not to tell my father—she’s so stricken with guilt that you might have thought she had chewed up the shoe herself. She’s whispering, she’ll buy me another pair with next month’s grocery money, and I am so ashamed of her shame, and so afraid of her fear, that I cross my arms and glare.
The hypnotist coaches me, “Earlier, earlier,” and I look through a hundred migraines, the shame of migraines. Shame is where I live, shame and loss. I got migraines at birthday parties, I got one at the Nutcracker, one at the Grand National. I look through all those hours spent lying still in the dark pierced with white head pain, hallucinating. Once I got one at a movie theater with a family of Christian Scientists and I told my girlfriend, who told her mother. I thought they would take me home, but instead the mother whispered to me to rub my temples in a circular motion, and she showed me how to do it. I tried and I tried as the headache was building, expanding in concentric circles; the girlfriend and her mother both massaged their temples in circular motions along with me, all three of us staring at the screen like the migraine version of the monkey-see, monkey-do monkeys. But finally I had to get up and go into the bathroom and throw up, and then I lay on the floor with my face pressed against the cool tiles, and I kept scooting around on the floor because the tiles under my face would heat up the way pillows do. Then I remember them standing there in the doorway staring down at me, afraid, and that is all I remember. I was in second grade.
I can’t see anything else for a minute—and then I see myself at Girl Scout camp for the summer, when I was seven years old, with a marble-sized growth on my arm, a vaccination reaction, and all of us girls are splashing around happily, whooping it up, when all of a sudden the knobby growth on my arm pops off into the water. The girl beside me screams, and all the little girls head for the shore shrieking, as though someone has spotted a fin.
“Ferret them out, ferret them out.” I woke up from a dream at Mady White’s house in first grade, screaming for my father, a dream in which the streets were wall-to-wall with people, and airplanes were dropping us bundles of food. In real life there was a book on the population explosion on the hamper next to the toilet at our house. My parents had explained what the book was about, and I picked it up all the time, and I’d look at the headlines on the back cover, gasping. I was six years old. In the dream I couldn’t find my parents or my brother in the crowd and I screamed and screamed and woke up everyone in Mady’s family, including the new baby, who cried at the top of her lungs for an hour or so. In the morning everyone was tense and exhausted, especially Mady’s four-year-old asthmatic brother, and I sat there politely at the breakfast table, staring into a bowl of corn flakes, asking in a whisper for someone to please pass the milk.
It is getting hard to remember now. I see scenes of being caught by my parents in lies, or with stolen goods. I see myself with Lynnie in her basement on the day after Easter, doing one of our nudie revues, the dance of the veils—Arabian Nights—wearing only face veils and veil sarongs. We have drawn concentric circles around our nipples to represent belly dancers’ brassieres, and we tantalize the sultan—we whip off our sarongs, little Gypsy Rose Lees, naked as baby birds. Then we hear my uncle, Lynnie’s father, clear his throat. He is in the doorway beside our neighbor John—who goes to Cal and happens to be the man I want to marry—and they are both utterly flabbergasted. We scream and cup our hands over our ballpoint-pen brassieres, and both of us burst into tears. I study the moment, move on.
I think I must be five years old or so, and my brother comes into my room one night, anxious and sad. “They’re coming to take you away tonight,” he says.
“Who is?”
“Your real parents, your mother and father. The Negro.”
“No, no,” I cry. “Hide me! Let me sleep with you tonight!”
He shakes his head wearily. “They’ll only find you,” he says.
I am in Children’s Hospital, not yet four years old, standing in a crib in a ward with nine other children. It is morning and I am talking to my parents, and studying seven black stitches above my right eyebrow, where a cyst was removed while I slept. My parents are beaming with pride. I am feeling very grown-up and sassy, and report to my parents that one of the kids screamed all night, woke us all up, and made us all start crying.
“That was you,” says the nurse.
“No it wasn’t,” I say as if she is an idiot, or lying. And she says yes it was; she had been on duty. The world drops out from underneath me because suddenly I remember standing up in my crib, it is pitch dark and perfectly silent and I am completely disembodied and think I am in outer space, and I scream and scream for my parents. There is a rush of humiliation, a sickening aloneness as my parents try to mollify the agitated nurse.
I stay with this frame for a while. I haven’t thought of it in nearly thirty years. But I’m stuck, can’t go any earlier, and so return to the hospital.
“Are you thinking that you’re there?” asks the hypnotist. I nod. “Are your parents in the memory with you?” Yes. “All right then. We’re going to do a little visualization. I want the adult in you to enter the scene. The adult in you can be funny and kind, you said so before we started. Now go to your parents and thank them for raising you, and explain that you are old enough now to assume responsibility for the child.”
Even in the trance I am filled with derision. This is precisely the sort of thing that gives California a bad name. But I swallow my reservations and walk up to my parents. We do not hug. I stand there shuffling. They look concerned, kind. I am the same age now that they are in this moment. It is too painful to see my father. “Go on,” the hypnotist says.
“All right,” I say out loud. In the dreamy trance I stare at my feet and tell them I won’t need them anymore, that I am going to try to raise this child of theirs. I look up to see that they are nodding and it makes me feel shy and stupid and homesick. “Go to the kid now,” the hypnotist says. “Give her a hand.”
So I walk to the crib and stand beside it and look at the miserable child. Her sad face is screwed up with shame and I want to bolt. It is more than I can stand. Finally, though, I lift her out of the crib and sit down on a nearby chair and hold her in my lap. We sit there rocking. A long time passes; we rock.
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” I say finally, not out loud.
I try to think of things to say that are funny and kind, but all I can do is rock her and stare off into space. “That nurse was a shithead,” I say. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Now,” the hypnotist says. “Play all of your memories forward, all the ones you’ve looked at today, and each time step in to give the younger you a hand.”
So the adult me stepped into my own history, to help, and I went toward the memory of Lynnie and me in the basement doing our nudie revue, and the adult me was funny and kind, snappy, compassionate, there with the kid, saying, “You didn’t do anything wrong,” holding her, teasing her, getting her to relax. Then I went into the lake at Girl Scout camp with all those shrieking girls streaming and splashing out of the water, and I was there standing beside my seven-year-old in the water, making her laugh as I flailed about in mock panic, gaping and gasping at floating pine needles and twigs. And I was there with my eleven-year-old when she felt like a Russian hunchback at the junior high dances, me pointing out a boy whose fly was down and a popular girl dancing with toilet paper stuck to the heel of her shoe; and I was there in high school parties and classrooms, there the day I was caught plagiarizing the Monarch Notes for my paper on Moby Dick. “Hey, babe,” I say to the fifteen-year-old who is cradling her head in her arms, crying soundlessly, alone in the classroom except for the mortified male teacher, “babe, I think maybe this guy didn’t handle this all that well. And what was he doing, big UC Berkeley grad, using Monarch Notes to prepare for his classes?” And I was there with the younger me in bed with all those men, some col
d, unfaithful, married, impotent (“Oh dear,” I say to the twenty-year-old when a nearly impotent young lawyer is on top of her, frantically pumping at her, “it’s sort of like he’s doing his push-ups, isn’t it?”). And then I’m there the year my marriage ended in the ramshackle house with cows on the hillsides around us, not able to help very much, just there in the room while she packs, letting her see that I am there, because the worst of it all, time after time, was the utter, abject aloneness. And then the adult me even slipped ghostily into the person sitting there in the hypnotist’s office, like when a double vision slides together into one image, and I sat there for a while feeling sort of old and full of vague yearnings.
I opened my eyes a crack and smiled toward my lap, and suddenly remembered what it feels like to climb the stairs of a New York City subway station, about to go up and outside alone, maybe not knowing exactly where I am, only that I am not completely lost.
One
SOMETIMES THE bay was choppy and gray in the cove, and sometimes it was so still that you could see the little town reflected on the water, upside down. The hills held working-class houses, and millions of trees, mostly cypress, maple, elm, oak, and eucalyptus. You could see the treetops on the water, surrounded in the reflection by bright clouds and sky. There is where the ferry slip used to be, where the trains were loaded and ferried across the bay to San Francisco, and over there is where the footbridge was that spanned the railroad yard. To the right are the long, low, weathered brown buildings of the boardwalk shops. Every year at Christmastime, a five-foot star of white lights appears on top of the grocery store; you could see it every night for miles, until it was taken down on the Epiphany, the night when the families gathered to burn Christmas trees in the railroad yard. There might have been a dozen or so arks in the cove, although around the turn of the century there were forty or so, and not far away, along these shores, were Chinese shrimping villages. A little white church sits on a hill overlooking the town and the bay, and behind it all is a mountain. In the olden days, a train crossed this mountain; there are fire roads now where the tracks used to be. On the other side of the mountain, there used to be missions where Indians sick with tuberculosis were brought to mend in the sun. In the reflection of the town on the water, sandpipers zip in tight formation, dipping suddenly, like ice skaters, flying now at an angle where their white undersides flit on the water like strobe lights, dipping again and disappearing for a moment. My family rented a small coffee-colored house next to the elementary school, below the little white church on the hill, above the railroad yard.