by Anne Lamott
My father was a writer, and my mother an endless source of material. One of the stories The New Yorker ran began like this: “My wife gets these depressions.” In it he describes her as having the movements and gestures of a rich European homosexual. She was quite funny looking, elegant yet deformed, and when she walked around the house wearing only underwear and one of my father’s dress shirts, and lipstick, she was so sexy we swooned inside, my brother and I. But like Picasso’s young girl at the mirror, her face didn’t match itself: her eyes were dark green but the left one drooped, badly, and her right nostril was as big and round as an aggie. Her teeth were large and white and buck, and her hair was long and black and wiry, her skin was white, and she had beautiful soft-pink milkmaid cheeks.
She was a Christian, and not afraid of death or getting older. She thought of her body as being a car she would one day leave by the side of the road, and she wasn’t afraid of things like snakes or driving across the Golden Gate Bridge in our Volkswagen bus, but she was afraid of revolving doors and houseplants. She always froze outside the revolving doors at the department stores around Union Square; she would watch people go in and come out, go in and come out, and she would begin to bob her neck slowly, like a turtle, to square and unsquare her shoulders and begin gauging the door like my young girlfriends and I did in the schoolyard when two of us would be turning the jump rope and the third would be tensed up, waiting for the exact right moment to dash in and pick up jumping.
She was secretly convinced that houseplants sucked up oxygen, somewhat like Thurber’s grandmother who was convinced that electricity was dripping invisibly out of empty light sockets when the wall switch was left on. My father explained on more than one occasion that houseplants do just the opposite, in fact—they suck up our carbon dioxide and secrete oxygen—and my mother always responded, “Yes, in theory.” She and her mother, Bette, had a falling out over this right after I was born, because Bette brought over three little pots of African violets to put on the dresser beside my crib, and my mother wouldn’t even let them stay in the house. Bette found them in the garage, on the shelf where my father kept little glass jars of nails and screws and washers. My mother apparently thought that when the adults left the room and turned off the lights, the plants would creep across the dresser, high-dive into the crib, and smother the infant, like cats.
On Sundays my mother went ro the black Presbyterian church in the subcommunity where the railroad workers lived, and on Fridays until I was five, she and my father went to Communist meetings in a huge North Beach basement. When I was five, John Kennedy came along and they stopped being commies and became liberals instead. On Sundays she walked to church all dressed up like a movie star, but with that crazy nose and drooping eye.
Sometimes Casey and I went with her, although it meant walking past the cemetery, which was filled with the parents and grandfathers of our town’s oldest people and with soldiers killed in the two world wars and Korea. I recognized half the names on the tombstones, the names of our neighbors. Sometimes out of the blue my mother would go into the bathroom, close the door, and cry about the bombs we had dropped on Japan, and cry because Casey and his friends were growing up. While serving cake and ice cream to a dozen boys at Casey’s ninth birthday, my mother paused, took a long deep breath, and fainted. After you passed the cemetery, though, you got to walk past the salt marsh, where once my mother and Casey and I came upon dozens and dozens of coots, ducklike birds with black heads and dark slate bodies. All the water had flowed back into the bay, and the coots were marching along the marsh’s small muddy dunes, crying low laughing cries, and on the silt their footsteps sounded like rain.
My mother believed that God is our father, and we are all the children of God, and therefore we are all brothers and sisters. We were all one family whose home was the earth, and just as we had to love our cousins and aunts and uncles—even if we didn’t always like them—we had to love everyone on earth. God knows it was sometimes hard to like Uncle Ed, who was always getting drunk and hurting Aunt Peg’s feelings, and teasing me and my cousin Lynnie too much and making us cry. Once, when Lynnie and I were standing on either side of my mother at the piano, angelically singing all twenty-two verses of the English ballad “Matty Groves,” Uncle Ed got the giggles, and as the song went on, and on, and on, Ed’s giggles got worse, and he eventually had to leave the room. And another time, Casey and I got Aunt Peg three jewelry pins that were her initials, M for Margaret, E for Elizabeth, G for Goodman, pins that were at least two inches tall, studded with rhinestones, and she hugged us both to pieces and pinned them to her sweater. And she puffed out her chest when Uncle Ed came into the room, smiling in a funny way I couldn’t understand—it was more of a grimace—and Uncle Ed stopped in his tracks, blinked, covered one of his eyes, and read the letters slowly, as if her chest were an eye chart.
Ed was the second son. No one had ever been as interested in him as they had been in my father, the family’s golden boy; no one but Peg. Ed was a roguish sweetheart, Ed was a clown, but he could also be a terrible boor, and even my father would lose patience with him—until Ed would become as contrite as a dog and everyone would want to love and forgive and protect him again.
I did not understand the ties that bound Ed and Peg, and I worried constantly that Peg would leave him, would get a divorce. Hardly anyone got divorced in those days. Divorce was as stark as death. I did not understand why Peg would put up with him when he was drinking, although everyone liked to go around saying that she had the patience of a saint. Peg was a lady. People always sort of assumed that she had been raised in the South, the shy daughter of monied Texans, perhaps. She had a beautiful milk-and-roses complexion, long, long lashes, and she wore the most wonderful hats in the sun. I do not remember her ever having worn pants. She covered her mouth when she laughed, blushed easily, held her head high. She had gained fifty pounds when she was pregnant with Lynnie, and never took the weight off for any length of time, just as Ed could never stay on the wagon for more than a couple of months. I overheard my mother tell my father in their bedroom that she thought Peg took Ed in the same way—and for the same reasons—that Ed took drinks.
“And what are those reasons?” he asked her.
“She can’t stand her feelings.”
Peg made each of us feel that she loved us without there being any conditions on that love. (Well into my twenties I would still crawl into her lap.) I was so afraid she would leave Ed, and us, as afraid as I was that my parents would somehow end up getting divorced, that I turned into a hypervigilant little child, trying to make sure that everyone stayed in love with everybody else, a little bat of a child, a one-child war room. I tried to make sure that Peg didn’t eat too much and that Ed didn’t drink too much, and when they did, that everyone would forgive them, and I tried to draw Lynnie out in conversation because she was the shyest person I had ever seen and I was afraid that her rather rabbity shyness would cause Peg to eat too much and Ed to drink too much. Sometimes I was so obvious in my attempts to manage everyone’s emotions for them that I must have seemed like a tiny stewardess on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and I would catch my parents looking at me as though I had cracked.
The only reason I could see for Peg staying with Ed was that he could make her laugh so hard. In fact, one of the first memories I have is of walking through Union Square on a hot summer day when I was five, Casey was six, and Lynnie was four. Peg had to go to the bathroom quite badly and the seven of us were scurrying toward Macy’s so she could use the ladies’ room there. All of a sudden Ed started making shusshing sounds, like running water, like a waterfall, and Peg started to giggle and to hit at him with her purse, but he wouldn’t stop, and we all started laughing so hard that Peg and my mother and I all ended up wetting our pants. We had to sit in Union Square for half an hour, letting the sun-warm boards of the benches and the air circulating through the slats dry us off. We kept moving from bench to bench, and we couldn’t stop laughing. My father and un
cle and brother and cousin went off hand in hand and returned with cones of popcorn so we could feed the pigeons as we dried; and I can’t remember before or since having been so entirely happy.
My mother insisted that God loved Ed just as much when he was drunk or boorish as He did when Ed was being endearing, and that we had better try and do so too. We really, really tried.
Having dabbled in the literature of the Eastern religions while she was in college, my mother half believed that you and God conferred before your human birth and chose the circumstances of your life—your station, your kin, and the triumphs and calamities you would face—chose them all as you choose a week’s worth of breakfasts, lunches, and dinners while staying in a hospital. Maybe last round you had been a rich, blind recovering alcoholic in Minnesota, and next round you would need to be a beggar in Calcutta—but this round, you needed to live in a Northern California railroad town, you needed to be married to a novelist who could barely support you and your two strange children, you needed to have one huge nostril, and this side of the grave it might not make any sense to you why, before birth, you had arranged for this life.
My mother’s religious eccentricity often drove my father crazy, although he was one of the gentlest men who ever lived. But at the same time, he relied on her continually to soothe the savage beast, as did my brother and I. You went to her when an ache in your heart was too huge, or when you had what she termed rat madness, and she usually said one of two things. The first was “Dwell in the solution,” which was shorthand for something a Christian writer named Emmet Fox once said, which was, Do not dwell in the problem, dwell in the solution; the solution is God. Now, my father didn’t believe in God, but he believed in the existence of the sacred, of the holy; it was pretty hard not to believe in anything in the face of Bach, or our mountain. (“It was good enough for the Indians,” he used to say, and my mother used to trick him into going up there, when his spirits were low. “Get the kids out of my hair,” she would say on a weekend afternoon, late enough in the day so that we’d eventually end up running into a sunset. We’d drive up the mountain and hike around, and my dad would walk along, mulling things over in silence, and by the time we were heading back to the trailhead, he would be happy, pointing out birds, and Casey and I would be lagging behind him like it was the Bataan death march. Then he would buy us a Shirley Temple at the mountain inn, and buy himself a dark German beer, and the classical station was always on, and the sun would set in bands of rose and salmon, in the darkening blue sky.) And the other thing my mother would say—her other battle cry was, “Honey, it is gawwwwn.” She brought this home from church one Sunday morning, courtesy of an old black man named Fred, who kept up a reverential patter during the sermon, saying, “Uh huh . . . oh yeah . . . ay-men . . . praise God . . . uh huh . . . oh yeah . . . ay-men.” And after this one particular sermon, he asked my mother how she was, and my mother confessed she was still annoyed, having lost her favorite sweater that week, and Fred looked at her like she was on fire, and said, “Honey? Sugah? It is gawwwwwnn.”
My mother said it when we were unhappy about a performance—reviews, a little-league game, a spelling bee—or lost possessions, and it always cooled out the people in my family. So I tried it on Mady White’s mother when she was shouting at Mady and me for having broken a pitcher. I held out my palms in a gesture of papal benediction. “Honey?” I said, “Sugar? It’s gawwwwwnnn,” and Mady’s mother just lost her mind. By the time I got out the door she was actually braying.
Uncle Ed reacted badly to it once, too. You could never tell how things were going to bounce with Ed, even when he wasn’t drinking. He looked like an angel and had fought on Guadalcanal, and except for that one time when he giggled so hard, he got misty when Lynnie and I gathered around the piano to sing our unrelenting ballads. He would sit on the porch for hours with Casey and his friends, teaching them to whittle miniature totem poles, telling them war stories, or he’d lift fat Peg into the air and spin her around, kissing her. But then, twenty minutes later, he would sour, brood, and glower and just generally pollute the atmosphere. One Christmas, after being sober over a month, he had a couple of glasses of wine with dinner. That was okay, he was being sweet and funny, and then all of us kids who were present that night went into the back room to play at knocking down a donkey piñata stuffed with candy and toys. As we learned later, Uncle Ed began muttering at the dinner table about a cabin he’d owned and sold at Lake Tahoe ten years ago—about how he’d sold it so they could get by the year Ed nearly totaled himself in a car crash, and he pounded the table and asked my father what he thought it would be worth today if he hadn’t had to sell it. When my dad said, “Shit, Ed, it is gone,” Ed leapt up, stomped into the back room, and picked up my brother’s baseball bat. We thought he was going to hit us, but he swung instead at the piñata. The first swing missed altogether, and missing made him lose his balance, but my father arrived in the doorway just as Ed smashed the piñata in half, showering us with bright cellophane-wrapped candy and trinkets.
We didn’t see much of Uncle Ed that winter, in fact we didn’t see him again until February 21, the day before Casey’s tenth birthday. I remember the date because we had a lame young white-tailed deer in our woodshed that my father found in the railroad yard, where it must have been hit by a slow-moving train. Our vet, who came by to examine it, said that if she was going to get well, she would do so within six weeks, and if she wasn’t walking by then, she would have to be put to sleep.
The vet said that only one person should tend to the deer, so that she didn’t get comfortable around humans, and that she should have a warm nest in the shed, and be bottle-fed three times a day. “It’s Casey’s deer,” my father said, and none of us argued. Casey wanted to be a vet when he grew up. So the vet said to Casey, “Son? You understand your instructions? And try not to get too attached—because if she isn’t walking by the end of six weeks, we’ll have to put her down. If she is walking, she will be able to return to the woods.” The vet consulted a calendar he had in his wallet and figured out that six weeks from the day would make it February 22, which was the day Casey would turn ten.
So day after day Casey went out to the woodshed with a baby bottle of warm milk and honey. Our idiot dog, an aged basset hound named Wayne, who smelled to me like old hairy glands, was forced to stay inside except for the twice-daily walks through the railroad yard that my father took him on, and my mother watched Casey tromp out to the shed and back, twice a day, watched this from the row of windows above the kitchen sink, and she cried and hid in the bathroom sometimes, and kept telling Casey to dwell in the solution, and that the solution was God. My father was quiet those six weeks, but he’d often put his arm around Casey’s shoulder in a “Hey, buck up” kind of way and ask, “Any luck?” And I was especially nice to Casey and pretended I thought the deer was going to be all right, although I had read nearly everything Marjorie Rawlings had written and was nobody’s fool.
When Casey seemed depressed and defeated by the deer’s lack of improvement, I got so sad on his behalf that I would crawl into bed and cry; but when he was acting insufferable, filled with self-importance like he had the baby Jesus out there in the straw, I half hoped the deer would have to be put to sleep. Then I would feel such guilt, such a slimy fear about who I was, that I’d know somehow I was going to die.
From Casey’s reports, the deer seemed to love him, but she wouldn’t get to her feet. Three weeks passed, then four, then five, then six. On February 21, Casey asked our mother what kind of a solution was coming to pass. She said that maybe it wasn’t the solution we had hoped for, and that this side of the grave there were many many things we wouldn’t understand. But! Casey had been an instrument of God’s mercy and love because, instead of the deer being ripped up by dogs and foxes in the woods, she had been nursed for her last six weeks by a young boy who saw to it that she was kept warm and free of fear, bottle-fed milk and honey. Still anyone could see how badly Casey’s heart ached.
He and my father were playing a lackluster game of chess when Uncle Ed arrived. I was at my swimming lesson at the rec center, but this is what happened, according to Casey: Uncle Ed, three sheets to the wind, had come to offer solace, having been told by Aunt Peg that tomorrow would be the day the deer would be put to sleep. He insisted that, since all hope was gone, there was no reason he shouldn’t be able to see the deer. Casey didn’t want him to, but finally it was agreed that Ed could poke his head in the shed door and look at the deer for a moment. So Casey and Ed trooped outside, Ed telling Casey his own sickly animal story from childhood, and when they got to the shed, Casey opened the door, and Ed lurched forward, missed the one-inch step, tripped, totally lost his balance and careened inside, where he crashed against a wall.