by Anne Lamott
This ethical consultancy was especially hard on Casey; he was the one with all the dignity. We would be in the express line at the Safeway—Casey and his friend Henry, me and my friend Mady—when suddenly my father would see that the woman ahead of us not only had a lot more items than the nine allowed by posted express-line law, but she was also going to try to con the cashier into taking a check, in further defiance of the rules. So the ethical consulting would begin. It was completely out of character for my father but not for Ed. They always began the same way, by pelting the consultee with excuse me’s until the man or woman understood that a consultation was in progress. So the consultee would hear, “Excuse me, yeah, excuse me, wait, excuse me—excuse me—listen. Excuse me, lemme just ask you something—lemme just, hey, listen, wait, wait, let me ask you something . . .” At this point the stranger would be looking at my father like he had a parrot on his shoulder.
“Lemme just ask you something,” he would say, with what sounded like real interest. There would be a brief but terrible pause, and then he would cock his patrician head, point to the sign above that read 9 ITEMS, NO CHECKS and inquire, eagerly, sweetly, “Can you read?”
The difference between the two men was that my father was a critically successful albeit poor artist, and my Uncle Ed was a door-to-door salesman. As we would say some years later, Ed just couldn’t get his act together, couldn’t make much of a living, couldn’t stuff down the feelings of rage, of existential dread. People like me, on the other hand, spent our teens and twenties trying to get our acts together and then were stuck with acts.
Anyway.
My mother had been in one of her depressions around the time Peg left Ed. She walked around the house a lot, a lit cigarette hanging from her mouth, her left eye shut, as if it were swollen, to keep out the smoke. She talked to her best friend Natalie a lot on the phone, hid in the bathroom and prayed a lot, prayed for grace and strength, hummed hymns, cried. Natalie brought her gardenias and floated them in a clear glass bowl. Sometimes she brought her twin boys over. We would all pile into her station wagon and head for the rec center, where we swam all day and lay on the bleachers steaming, salty, sweating chlorine.
We had all just gotten back from the rec center the evening Peg left Uncle Ed. Mom had gone inside; Casey and I had been sent out to the clothesline to hang up our wet towels and swimsuits, which was when we discovered Ed. “Hey,” we said and went to investigate, walking over a carpet of horse-red pine needles and then over another of copper oak leaves and acorns, over to the pear tree where Ed was standing. He looked down at us just as our father did when we finally caught up to him on mountain trails. His eyebrows were raised as if to say, “Hey, all right. There you are.”
“Your daddy home?” he asked.
“Not yet. Mom is. Come inside, Uncle Ed.”
Ed and our mother sat in the kitchen drinking beer, smoking cigarettes, and we heard Peg had left him. Casey and I went into Casey’s room and simulated disfigurement: we smeared Elmer’s glue on the backs of our hands to make them into the hands of the oldest person you ever saw, then carefully stitched our fingers together by passing thin needles underneath the top layer of fingertip skin until all four fingers of our left hands were stitched together. Then we pretended our fingers had bonded together in a dreadful smelting accident. We got along about half the time in those days.
Some time later my mother came in and asked if we would baby-sit Uncle Ed. “Take him down to the water,” she said, “we’re low on kindling.” She looked at our hands and rolled her eyes. We gingerly pulled out the threads that bound our fingers together and washed the glue off with hot soapy water.
Ed and Casey and I trooped across the deserted railroad yard to the little liquor store in town, where Ed bought us a bottle of Delaware Punch, bought himself a half-pint of Scotch and a pack of Kents, and bought a package of corn nuts for us to share on the way to the beach.
It was sunset, red and golden pink, and the water was calm, white-green. Tiny waves sloshed the shore, and it smelled like salt and rain and seaweed. Casey started making a pile of dry driftwood while Ed went to sit on a wet boulder half submerged by the tide. There were a lot of birds around, mostly gulls and ducks, a cormorant or two, one pelican soaring out past the lights of the nearest buoy. Near the shoreline over to the east was a long, broad sun-carpet of red, through which egrets waded.
Then my father appeared. Casey threw him a small piece of drift-wood by way of greeting. My father threw it back, waved to Ed, lifted me up, kissed me on the neck behind the ear, and, setting me down on the sand, took my hand and walked with me over to Ed’s rock. Ed handed him the bottle of Scotch, and Dad took a sip. He handed me up to Ed who settled me into his lap while my father climbed up and sat beside us.
“So,” said my father.
“Remember that friend of mine in the army who committed suicide by drowning?” Ed asked.
“Yeah, I do. But don’t scare Nanny.”
“Nanny? Does this scare you?”
“No,” I lied.
Ed took another sip of whiskey, passed the bottle to my father. “He walked into the water and swam away from shore, way way out beyond the breakers, till he was too tired to swim back. Then, I suppose, he sank.” We listened to the waves splash against our rock, swash against the shore. Ed put the side of his face down on top of my head, chewed on my hair. “I probably don’t even swim well enough to kill myself.”
We stayed on the rock another ten minutes or so, and then the four of us walked home. My mother was in the kitchen making tuna-noodle casserole, and Uncle Ed went in to watch her crush potato chips with her rolling pin. Dad made cocktails for himself and Ed and my mother. I went into the kitchen for some juice and saw that Ed was at the kitchen table wiping away tears. When he saw me, he got up and went to stand over by the cat box, which in those years was by the doorway between the kitchen and the back room. He asked my mother if she wanted him to take it out to the garbage and she said no, no, it could last another couple of days, things were so tight right now. Ed started picking a fight with her, asking how much could we save by making the kitty litter last an extra day or two. My mother just shrugged.
I was pouring apple cider into a glass, scowling. In my cold-stone heart I blamed my mother for everything. I blamed her when we were broke, I blamed her when she and Dad bickered, I blamed her and was ashamed of her because she was way too tall and had that one huge nostril and hid in the bathroom too often and cried, and because she bought gauze and adhesive tape instead of Band-Aids, and ointment instead of Mercurochrome. All the other mothers knew to buy Mercurochrome instead of ointment, or even better, Bactine. But she wasn’t like the other mothers, who wore dresses and nail polish and smiled. No one else’s mother wore her husband’s shirts to town.
But I went over to her and burrowed against her. She smelled good and called me little duckie, and she handed me one perfect potato chip, as if it were a slide she wanted me to study.
Ed got an old newspaper from the back room and began stirring through the kitty litter with the slotted spoon. Our kitty ran in, sat down next to his box and watched Ed troll for cat shit, watched him like Casey and I watched our mother when she went through our bags of Halloween loot.
Above the cat box was a picture of Jesus that hung on the wall in our kitchen, rendered in charcoal and pencil by a young man from Lebanon. Jesus’ hands were raised as if he was about to pray, but they were little more than the suggestion of hands; they looked more like gloves. My father always called the print “Jesus and the oven mitts.”
Someone at her church had given my mother the print. My mother went to church every single Sunday. She had made the leap of faith. She believed that the answer is always grace through faith. She believed that the answer to Ed and Pegs problem would be grace. “There is power in the name of Jesus,” she would say. And then Mady would come to play, devoutly Catholic Mady—and all hell would break loose. My beloved Mady and I might go looking for Mom, to s
ee if she would drive us to the rec center or to ask if we could bake cookies or to see if she’d give us some money, and we’d find her out in the backyard shaking her fist at the sky, calling God a cheese-dick. Her pastor had told her, “You can say anything to God, He can take it,” but this was apparently something the priests and nuns at Our Lady of Mount Carmel had forgotten to mention to Mady.
The fact that both Mady and her mother were such strange units did nothing to diminish my shame at my mother’s blasphemous outbursts. I went through a phase in first grade where I was convinced my mother was part of a coven that met in our basement on Friday nights. It all began on a summer morning when I was getting ready to go to a classmate’s sixth birthday party. I was wearing my lacy white Easter dress, a petticoat, little white socks, and black Mary Janes. Mady and her mother were going to pick me up and take me to the party, but first, my mother insisted, I had to eat a little lunch. There would only be glop at the party, cupcakes and ice cream and candy and punch, she said, so she made me a hot dog with nothing on it to spill. But I simply couldn’t eat and said so and was told then that I simply couldn’t go. The hot dog smelled like death, but my mother wouldn’t bend. When the phone rang and Mom went to get it, I took the opportunity to go out to the front porch, where I looked around, whistling casually, and threw the hot dog toward one of the rose bushes.
The second it left my fingers, I looked up and saw my mother openmouthed at the window, and it was like I was artistically placing the hot dog into the air in slow motion. My hand was poised, almost arthritically, like when you are playing horseshoes. And then I heard Mady calling my name; she and her mother were at our front gate. My mother burst through the front door only wearing one of my father’s old shirts and a pair of underpants, bellowing, “JEEESUS CHRIST ON A CRUTCH.”
I don’t remember what happened next, only that I was in the backseat of Mrs. White’s station wagon, staring blearily at the plastic Mother Mary mounted on the dashboard while Mrs. White checked the rearview mirror to see what on earth was chasing our car. And Mady gazed at her mother with blissful adoration.
I felt about as low and ashamed as I’d ever felt before. My stomach ached, my heart hurt. I tried to block out the scene with my mother, tried to feel happy I was heading to a party. Natalie used to tell my mother you had to get out of the pit as soon as you could. You had to get out of the pit as soon as you noticed you’d gone into it, otherwise you’d start furnishing it. I mean, since it looked like you were going to live there forever, why not make it more comfortable?
I was better when we got to the party. There were streamers, balloons, a magician who pulled a live rabbit out of his hat, pin the tail on the donkey, little paper cups of M&Ms. All the little girls got toy diamond rings; there was Burl Ives on the hi-fi singing children’s favorites. I was in heaven, I was the star, I was the clown. But Mady was cute as a button and rich, and I heard her mention my name to a group of giggling girls, and I saw the mother of the birthday girl scold her gently, and I heard Mady reply, in a friendly, dithery way, with her pretty, bee-stung lips pursed with complacence, ever so sweetly, ever so blithely, and ever so loudly, “But Nanny’s mother’s going to rot in hell for all eternity.”
Casey adored Uncle Ed all those years. They used to go for runs together through the woods early in the morning, and sometimes they went fishing out at Bass Lake in the summer. They both loved Jack London. Ed taught Casey everything he knew about cars, and they rebuilt some engines together. My father gave Casey his first toolbox and tools, but it was Ed who taught him how to use them. All of us loved Uncle Ed but he and Casey had something rare. You could see it in the way they hugged, even after Casey grew up. They didn’t hug like other men do, embracing and then thumping and thwacking each other’s back as if to put out a small fire. Casey and Ed actually held each other a moment or two and then, almost as an afterthought, they kissed on the cheeks.
They had some fallings-out over the years, usually about Ed’s drinking. He ruined Casey’s eighth birthday when he arrived staggering drunk, with a present for Casey, a samurai sword bought in Japan at the end of the war. It came in a dangerous-looking, jewel-encrusted case, and Ed had tied a bow around the handle. He lurched into the backyard where the boys were playing tag, waving the sword and beaming stupidly. Casey looked like he had just bitten into a jalapeño pepper. Dad and I were watching from the kitchen window. Mom was putting candles on a homemade chocolate cake. We heard Casey say, clear and angry, “You show up drunk at my party. I knew this would happen. I don’t even know why I invited you. You show up drunk as a bum. Uncle Ed,” he thundered, “I’ll remember this!”
Ed won Casey back a few days after the birthday party by showing up more or less sober one night with a small box wrapped in the Sunday comics. Casey was hurt, mad, shuffly, and didn’t want the present, but Dad took him into the study for a conference. Upon emerging, Casey begrudgingly took off the wrapping to find a hand-blown egg covered with watercolor and spidery ink. It was a portrait of a black pirate’s freighter sailing on seahorse-infested waters—blue, green, lavender water—flying the Jolly Roger, manned by peg-legged, eye-patched cats, one with a spyglass, one with a samurai sword, all shined on by a lemon-ball sun.
Jeffey, our cat, got kabobbed by a spike through the chest the month Aunt Peg left Uncle Ed. It was on a Saturday, and Mom was home alone with the ironing, the kitty, and our gassy basset, Wayne. She was listening to the Broadway sound track of My Fair Lady, ironing in the living room, no doubt with a cigarette hanging out the side of her mouth, one eye closed against the smoke, when she heard the cat make quiet peeping sounds. He was sitting in a square of sun in the kitchen, hunched over and bleary in that hung-over way hurt animals get. When she tried to pick him up, he screamed. He had a hole the size of a tennis ball in his chest between his front legs, surrounded by dried blood, and through it you could see his lungs beat. “Wow,” she said. “Okay.”
Clearing her throat, she went to call the cat clinic. She was told the vet was in the city playing tennis and would be back in half an hour. She called Natalie, but Natalie wasn’t home, so she went back and sat beside the cat for a moment on that square of sun, clearing her throat. The cat was silent, trembling, dignified, so badly hurt that Mom thought the dogs had torn him apart. She went out to get her smokes.
Outside the kitchen window in what we euphemistically called the garden, little birds were singing. My mother hummed a hymn, the cat sat upright, perfectly still, purred, cried from time to time and trembled. My mother sat down beside him again, humming her hymn, stroking the cat’s face, then got up, went into the bathroom and, with raccoon compulsiveness, put on mascara until it was time to go.
As it turned out, the dogs hadn’t gotten the cat at all. Our vet said he’d misjumped and landed on a spike or stake—it hadn’t gone through his back and somehow had missed the lungs and heart. The vet said we could come get him that evening.
My father hit the ceiling when my mother told him the bill was eighty-five dollars. He made eight dollars an hour teaching English at night at the local junior college: ten and a half hours shot to hell for a cat he hated. Ed had given the cat to Casey for his third birthday, but Jeffey loved only my mother. He had it in for my father, would wait for him to fall asleep reading on the couch and then nonchalantly bite him on the head. No wonder my father was mad, but, as my mother said, “What can I do?” My father threw up his hands, went into town, and got drunk. My mother stood at a window in the kitchen staring out.
Casey and I bolted awake when Dad came home from the city at three in the morning. He and my mother made up in their room. He was crying because Peg and Ed had split up. “It drives a sword through my heart,” he said, “to see a family break up,” and he cried in remorse because he’d been mean to my mother about money. “It’s only LETTUCE,” he bellowed.
When I woke up again it was morning, and Ed had come over for breakfast. Ed said he hadn’t had a drink in two days, and Dad was pouring them both
coffee while he cooked mushrooms in butter for omelets. Mom was in Casey’s room helping him write a paper on the gold rush. I went to hang out in the kitchen with the men. Dad made me weak tea with milk and lots of honey. I sat in Ed’s lap at the table, and we watched my father cook.
“Well, you’re right, you know,” my dad was saying. “I know I’ve never woken up in the morning and wished I’d gotten drunk the night before.”
“I wanted to last night, don’t get me wrong,” said Uncle Ed. “Got a call from the Chinks who own the apartment complex. They said they gave the job to someone else.”
“Baby, don’t call them Chinks in front of Nan. And you didn’t want it anyway.”
“Chinese people don’t like me.”
My father shrugged. “They don’t like me, either, Ed. I said to Marie the other day, ‘Why is the guy Jerry Berman hired to help at the hardware store so hostile?’ Not hostile, exactly, but cold. He isn’t with the other customers, not so far as I could see, but with me, I don’t know, you’d think he remembered seeing me in a gunboat on the Yangtze twenty years ago, tossing grenades into his little village.”
“Where do I go from here?”
“It’s Saturday, baby. Help me work on the shed, or help Marie. She wants to put in a garden. There’s weeding and hoeing to do, or you and Nanny go down to the beach and get driftwood. We’re always running out. And there’s a minus tide at eleven. But don’t let Nanny fall in is all.”
“What do I do if she does?”
“I won’t fall in.”
“You’ll go with me, then, girlie?”