by Anne Lamott
The deer leapt to her feet, wobbling for a moment, absolutely wild-eyed with terror. Casey’s mouth was wide open and Uncle Ed was cursing, and the deer bolted out the opened door, past Casey, and into our yard.
Casey chased after her as she ran unsteadily around, and then Ed emerged from the shed hooting and hollering, and then our father ran outside. The three of them tried to sheepdog the deer back into the woodshed, but she stopped and looked around, sniffing the breeze, barely moving. Then she tore back toward the shed but kept on going, and jumped our dingy white picket fence, landing in old man diGrazia’s empty field, and ran toward a corridor of blackberry bushes and cypress trees.
Two recurrent problems wore my parents down.
The first was money. My mother could make ends meet on what my father earned from writing and teaching if absolutely nothing unusual came up—if neither of us kids got sick, and the dog didn’t get a foxtail stuck in his nose, and the cat didn’t get into a fight, and if we didn’t outgrow our uniforms (mine for the Brownies, Casey’s for Little League), if no one needed dental work, if the tires didn’t blow. Beyond the rent and food and utilities and clothes and gas, there were always bills at the drugstore, and at Sears, and at Mick & Pete’s Mobil station, and with the doctor (because even when we didn’t get sick, we had to go in for our well-children checkups), and God knows where else. It was always day-to-day, hand-to-mouth back then, and it was erosive to my parents to go year after year without the big special things.
My mother believed that if marrying rich was what God felt she needed in order to get closer to Him, then things would have conspired to have her fall in love with a rich man. She believed that to just barely get by was His will for our family, at least for the time being. She tried to just accept things, to try not to figure out God’s last name. But the fly in the ointment was that she hated to be cold. It made her stiff and edgy, and we couldn’t afford to keep the house heated all winter and spring.
So she would go into the bathroom and cry, not wanting us to see her, and the three of us would gather outside the door, pleading with her.
“Darling, come out, we’ll turn on the heat.”
“We can’t afford to.”
“We’ll get by, my love, come on out, we’ll all bundle up and go collect driftwood. Build you a big roaring fire.”
“Don’t coo at me, Robbie.”
“I’m not cooing. Don’t be mean to me.”
“You are so cooing. You’re bye-bye bunting me.”
“Mommy, it’s not totally cold today, it’s only cold.”
“Yes it is so totally cold. YOU COULD HANG MEAT IN MY HOUSE.”
The second thing that made my parents haggard was the sense that the world had ceased to be safe for children. We were taught not to talk to strangers, not to open the door to anyone when mom and dad were gone, not to take candy or rides from people unless we knew them really well—and this was twenty-five or thirty years ago, before so many lunatics were spiking Halloween candy and stealing children. The sad thing for my mother was that she believed too that God shows up on earth as Christ, or Buddha, or Krishna, either to pass the word about love and peace and fellowship, or to inspect the damage that we the tenants were doing, and He or She most frequently showed up in the guise of the lost, hungry wayfaring stranger. Every thing and every one who cropped up in your life was part of the test, as of an emergency broadcast system. Did you handle it—or him or her—with grace and kindness and good humor? Did you love everyone as brother and sister? Even the winos and Russians? My mother really tried. She was an easy touch. Winos and bag ladies asked her for change to buy a sandwich or to make a telephone call, and she gave them dollar bills, believing that it was none of her business what they spent it on, that Jesus hadn’t asked the blind man what he was going to look at after he was healed; He just healed him. Hobos came to our door, waiting for a morning train, and my mother gave them sacks of food and packs of cigarettes. When she found a Japanese family of three camped out by the salt marsh, waiting for money to be wired from Kyoto, my mother brought them home and made them stroganoff; they taught me and Casey to count to ten in Japanese and told us the story of the peach boy and the tongue-cut sparrow, and we let them sleep in our beds. A gypsy and her squalling baby came to our front door one night in the rain; my mother gave her a bottle of milk, some oranges, liverwurst sandwiches, and a package of Kents. We regularly took in battered women, although of course we were not told that their husbands had beaten them up; we were told that they had fallen down the stairs or been in minor car accidents. One woman named Nora came over again and again, always late at night, and Casey and I heard our parents soothe her, and once or twice my gremlins made me get out of bed and go see her, see her bruises and (what was worse) scratches. And then when I saw her at the boardwalk market, in daylight, in between tumbles, I had a sense of shy, mean power over her, and she always looked at me like I had just caught her shoplifting.
But one night something happened that shook my mother badly. It was around ten o’clock on a humid night in early spring. My father was in the city, hanging out with some other writers in North Beach, and my mother and Casey and I were on the porch, playing Parcheesi, sharing a pack of wild cherry Lifesavers. Our porch was enclosed with fine wire netting to keep out the insects, and the screen door was a piece of chipped, splintering plywood with a screen window and primitive latch, which was more to keep the door from banging in the wind than for security. It was a strange evening. The quiet dark was full of the songs of crickets and frogs and night birds, and our porch smelled of our eucalyptus trees and jasmine and my mother’s cigarettes, and there was so much moonlight on the roofs of the houses below us, and on the roofs of the trains and buildings in the railroad yard, that it looked like there had been a light snow. Then, after a while, clouds must have blown in on the night breeze, because it began to rain.
We played our game and listened to the patter on the roof of the porch, and the frogs kept singing but the night birds hushed. All of a sudden a car pulled up outside our house and stopped. After a moment the engine and lights were turned off, and the car door opened, and a man got out; under the streetlight he looked like a cowboy. He began to walk toward our porch, and my mother got to her feet and said, “You two go inside,” but we disobeyed and hunkered in the front doorway. You could tell that the hair on the back of my mother’s neck was standing up; we listened to the heavy wet footsteps coming toward us, and to the rain on the roof. Finally, when he got to the screen door, she noticed we hadn’t gone in and hissed at us to do so, and we did, leaving the door open just a crack. I went to get Wayne, our gassy dying basset hound, who was asleep on my brother’s bed. I pushed on the crown of his head, trying to get him to jump down and run to the front door and be Rin Tin Tin, but pushing on his head just made the baggy skin go down over his eyes like a watch cap. By the time I gave up and went back outside to the front door, Casey was outside with our mother, and the cowboy’s car lights were on, and then so was his engine, and after a moment he drove away.
“He wanted to use our phone,” said my mother. “And you know what I said, I said no. Because I didn’t want him to come in.” My mother sounded about to cry, her voice was higher than usual, quavery, blue. Casey and I did not know what was going on. But when my father got home, early in the morning, we were asleep in bed with her, one on each side of her, and we listened to them talk and pretended to be asleep, until my father carried Casey and my mother carried me to our beds.
She said, Five years ago she would have let him in to use the phone. My father said, Times had changed. My mother said she didn’t want us growing up to be afraid of strangers in the rain who came looking for help. She wanted us to love our fellow man. Otherwise, she wondered, what was the point? What was the sound of one hand clapping? My father didn’t know what to say. The Japanese answer the riddle by asking, “And what is the sound of the rain?” Which is to say, Silence, until the drops hit against something, an umbrella, or
a roof, or the sea.
My mother believed that God lit the stars and spoke to us directly through family and friends, musicians and writers, madmen and children, and nature—and not, as she had been raised to believe, through a booming male voice from the heavens. She and my father shared the beliefs that one must try to live in the now and be kind to everyone and to tell the truth, unless the truth was about Aunt Peg’s weight, or that my mother’s best friend Natalie on several occasions asserted that a girl simply couldn’t wear too much mascara, and the truth was that a girl could, and that poor old Natalie sometimes looked like a drag queen. But this marriage of my parents, which survived my mother’s depressions and the constant lack of money, nearly blew apart when my mother told my father he said “you know” too much.
It was in the spring of 1963 that it first began to bother her, this tic of his, thirteen years after their wedding and two months after he ended a brief miserable affair with some girl writer who had a loft in North Beach. All of a sudden my mother noticed that after every other word my father said “you know,” or at least so it seemed. It was all she heard when he spoke. As she told the story to Casey and me, a few years after he died, it got so that she was counting the you know’s per sentence. There could be anywhere between six and ten.
She really didn’t know what to do. If she mentioned it to him, it would be like telling him he had had bad breath all these years. He would be mortified, indignant. But if she didn’t tell him, if she had to listen to him say “you know” every other word for the rest of her life, she would lose her mind.
She discussed it with Aunt Peg, who said it was all in the handling. If my mother told my father out of love, in a gentle and reassuring way, my father would see that he had this habit, of which he was totally unaware, a habit that the people who knew him found vaguely annoying, a habit easily broken. He would be relieved it had finally been brought to his attention. He would be embarrassed and ultimately very grateful. It would be, Peg insisted, a beautiful gift.
“So,” my mother told my brother and me a few years ago, “I said to your father, ‘My darling? There’s this thing I need to tell you, that you do—that I’m sure you’re not aware of doing. Which is that you have the habit of saying “you know,” every few words. I mean, you say “you know” eight or nine times in each sentence.’ And his eyes grew wide, and he turned bright red, and he was looking at me like he did when he thought I had drunk too much at a party—sizing me up in a skeptical way, and oh God, I knew, I had blown the marriage; how had I been so crazy to think that someone as sensitive and insecure as your father would be grateful at hearing that every few seconds he did something irritating? So much for, ‘Darling, I have a beautiful gift for you.’
“He walked away from me. I called out that I was sorry, that I hadn’t meant to hurt and embarrass him, and he turned, at the doorway, and said, in an arch and British way, Oh, hadn’t I? Then how had I wanted him to respond?
“I said I had hoped that, after the embarrassment passed, he would be relieved, since it was something he was obviously unaware of, and something he could change.
“He asked, What if he didn’t want to change?
“I looked at him, levelly, and then shrugged.
“‘Do you want me to start censoring myself?’ he asked.
“I said I thought as soon as he was aware of doing it, it would fall away. After all, would it be like having to translate himself into French as he went along?
“He didn’t answer. He looked too tired to answer.
“‘What if I do it,’ he said. ‘What if I black out every “you know” before it gets out of my mouth? Then what would it be about me that you’d think I ought to change?’
“‘Darling,’ I pleaded. ‘It isn’t customs inspection; it isn’t as though I have other things secreted in the lining of my luggage. I feel so bad, I’ve hurt you—but there isn’t anything else I wish to declare—and we have to be able, along the way, to tell one another, for the rest of our lives, if there’s something that is driving one of us crazy. Otherwise, we’ll never make it.’
“But it was just excruciating, for both of us—worse for him though, of course. And I waited for him to retaliate—to say something about, I don’t know, my jiggly bottom, or my . . . nostril, or to say that, as long as adjustments were being made, maybe it was time for him to mention that he didn’t like the way I kissed.
“We were suddenly such edgy strangers, and although we’d been here before, I forgot that, forgot that it always feels like the new, permanent us. I forgot that somehow against all odds, the light always returns, that the light can’t help but return, but it is hard to remember when everything seems so dark and smelly, like you had your head up your, well, never mind.
“All I could do was to force myself, at gunpoint, not to dwell in the problem, but to dwell in the solution, and the solution was God. And your father went off to lie alone in the mud until his wounds could heal.
“The next few days were all stiff and hurt, and it was making you babies crazy, and I felt absolutely sure that we, your father and I, could never return to that innocence and trust—but I’ll tell you, he didn’t say ‘you know’ anymore. So I waited, and I prayed. Then Aunt Peg invited us all to brunch, after church the next Sunday, the Sunday before Easter, and at first I thought, No, your father and I would sit at their table like graven images and ruin everything for everyone, and then I thought, well heck, maybe this is part of the great solution.
“Sunday morning I somehow talked your father into going to church with me. We brought you kids with us—and I bet you don’t remember what happened. But there was a part of every service right after we sang the Doxology where the choir sang a selection, but on this particular Sunday old Fred’s daughter, Esther, was going to sing alone, a cappella.
“She was black as a person could be, shy, heavy, cherubic, twenty-five or so. She stood by the piano, closed her eyes, inhaled deeply, and sang the first crystalline notes of ‘Awake, My Soul,’ but then she missed the next note, and then the next—she was singing them both too high, and in the succeeding notes she tried to compensate, but instead she lost the melody.
“I mean, honey, it was excruciating. Esther had her eyes closed, her fists clenched, standing in front of us all, warbling away, way off key and out of tune, and tears were splashing down her face. No one in church was breathing, especially not me—because I thought it was all my fault somehow—I think I had a bit of an ego problem—but I felt wave after wave of guilt and self-loathing; my head was like a pinball machine, and its commotion had caused Esther to derail . . . And poor old Esther with the clearest, sweetest voice on earth wavered away and came to the end of the first verse. The pastor said softly, ‘Relax, relax,’ and Esther clenched her fists even tighter and started in on the second verse, and all the white people in church were in a wild frantic form of catatonia; you could have scrambled radar with our discombobulation.
“But then, the women in the first row of chairs, nearest Esther—the women who usually sang in the tiny choir, began to whisper the melody, humming it. You could barely hear them. And Esther’s hands were still in fists and her face was full of humiliation, but she could hear the melody; and she sang it over the softest possible singing of the four black women. And I swear, it was like, when a whale is weak or bleeding, the other whales in the school swim underneath it, and buoy it up to the air, so it can breathe.
“And we were okay after that, your father and I, stiff for a while, but knowing the worst was over. At Peg and Ed’s, all of you kids were terrific, which is to say, you all played out in the yard until the meal was ready. At one point I was talking to Ed, who wasn’t drinking that day, and Peg was in the kitchen, and your father came over to my end of the couch and kneeled on the floor beside me, talking all the while to Ed about some stories he was working on.
“And the thing was, I’d secretly read one, the day before. He had left it out on his desk and taken you kids up on the mountain, and som
ething made me read it. It was absolutely awful, whiney and dense, and I’d wanted so much to love it—to be able to confess that I’d sneakily read it, and that it was a jewel. But as it turned out, I had to keep my having read it a secret. I mean, what was I going to say, ‘Darling? I have another beautiful gift for you’?
“So I was listening to him talk to Ed, pretending to listen, and then I looked down at my wrist and noticed your father was toying very casually with the sleeve of my cardigan, just sort of absently playing with the cuff, and I looked over at his face, but he was staring intently at Ed as he spoke, and I looked back down at my arm, at your father’s long hand, a pianist’s hand, fiddling absolutely unselfconsciously with the cuff of my sweater, just like you would fiddle with your own.”
Two
ONE WINDY May my Aunt Peg left my Uncle Ed. He said he had been afraid that if she learned to drive, she’d drive away and leave him behind, and she did—learn to drive and drove away. Casey and I came home from our swimming lessons at the rec center one late afternoon and found Ed in the far corner of our backyard, scanning the bowl of sky in a daze. The sun, low in the west, behind the ridge, shone in reds and white through the treeline, through the dark green coop of eucalyptus, oak, and cypress. I was eight years old.
Lynnie went with Aunt Peg. They had gone to stay with Peg’s side of the family in Carmel. Her family had some money but refused to give Peg any, to punish her for having married my Uncle Ed. Poor old Ed. He really was sort of a loser. How two brothers born two years apart could turn out so differently is anyone’s guess, although they did have a number of things in common: tall thin bodies, round blue eyes, good (but smoke-yellowed) teeth, strong jaws, and long blunted noses. Their noses looked like my father and Ed had walked straight into walls before the clay had had time to dry. And they shared a neurotic tendency to become, in my mother’s words, ethical consultants at large—in traffic, in lines, at concerts, wherever.