by Anne Lamott
We saw a fox-red robin on the way, and then, on the beach, cormorants, gulls, a couple of ducks, and a tern. We collected a pile of driftwood. Ed stacked a short, neat bundle of wood in my outstretched arms, then gathered up as much as he could carry, and we headed home. We stopped when our arms began to ache and sat down on a curb, with the wood on the street by our feet.
Dad had left all the breakfast dishes in the sink and gone to work in his study. Casey was in his room, working on the gold rush paper, and Mom was in the backyard pulling weeds. No one seemed to notice we were home. Ed and I dumped the wood into the box by the fireplace and stared aimlessly around the living room, looking for something to do.
“Want me to make you an omelet, Nanny? You haven’t eaten at all.”
“I don’t know.”
“Would you eat it if I made it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Would you try?”
“Yes.”
“Come out and keep me company.”
I watched him beat two eggs and cube some Velveeta, and I smelled the butter sizzling in the black iron pan.
“Your grandfather used to say, ‘Think about what you are doing, not about what you are thinking,’” he told me. “Your daddy and he, boy, they used to go at each other. Mother would cover her ears with her hands, whimpering, ‘Stop it, stop it.’ God, I still miss them. And my kid, all the time. Yeah. ‘The young will see visions, the old will dream dreams.’ Oh baby, no breaks.”
I ate my omelet alone in the dining room, reading a Richie Rich comic. The cat slept on the table in a patch of sun. Casey tried to snatch the comic book away from me, and we hit each other but didn’t do any real harm. Sometimes when he hit me, he left bruises. I would cry, flailing away, and scratch or bite. He always won, but then I’d always tell on him. We could hear Uncle Ed running water in the sink. Casey rolled his eyes and pantomimed chugalugging, I shook my head. Then Casey picked up my last big bite of omelet and swallowed it whole. I revved up for a tantrum, then didn’t bother. I walked out to the kitchen with my plate.
The sink was full of suds. Ed, with his sleeves pushed up, stood at the sink with his head bowed; he seemed almost to be praying. I watched him until he opened his eyes and looked over at me. Then he looked toward the doorway and waved to Casey. I turned around and looked at my brother, who had his hands jammed into his pockets. Then I looked back at Ed, who was swallowing hard and squinting. “Ah!” he said, nodding pensively. “There it is, duckie. There’s that clean plate,” and I slowly, carefully held it out to him, as if I had brought him a meal.
Right before the Fourth of July, my mother, Natalie, Ed, and I walked into town to do errands. Natalie had been around our house more than usual. Her boys had gone off to Yosemite with their father for a couple of weeks, and Ed kept showing up in tennis shorts, swinging a racket he kept in a wooden press with four screws that were always gouging his legs, pretending he had come by to see if Dad wanted to hit some. Then he and Natalie would end up going to the nursery together or even (once that we knew of) up on the mountain. They dropped me and Casey off at the rec center one Saturday morning, and on the way there Natalie unwrapped a stick of Doublemint before handing it to Ed, and Casey looked at me side-ways, inscrutable.
Natalie had an artificial hip, the result of a bad car accident, so as we walked to town we all limped along with her. She and my mother met before I was born, around the time Casey was learning to walk and Natalie’s twins were beginning to crawl. They met at a commie garden party in Sausalito. Natalie was seated at a table, and my mother joined her at the invitation of a mutual friend. The two women found they could make each other laugh. They could engage each other, get down and dirty right away, and as they got tipsy, they fell in love in the way that women do—the miracle of finding your best friend, the purest, deepening relief.
After that, they often walked together along the shore; everyone called them Natalean Marie. Mom with that huge nostril, Natalie hitching along; Mom with her big white buck teeth, Natalie with her drag-queen eyes. Natalie became an aunt to Casey and me.
So there we were, walking along into town—me and my mother, Natalie and Ed—across a footbridge that spanned the railroad yard. The grown-ups were talking about the Bay of Pigs, and I was staring down at the trains and the tracks below us, the ties and spare parts in the flattened brown grass beside the tracks, the smells of oil, diesel smoke, and iron. I could hear the clatter and hammering, the welding, the whistle of the diesel locomotive, the rumble of passing freight cars; I could hear it in my ears in the muffled way you hear the ocean in a conch, because the railroad yard was still.
Beside the yard was the wild blue bay, filled with sailboats, ferries, fishing boats, woolly green Angel Island, Alcatraz, and the Golden Gate Bridge. I was studying everything intently because there was a funny smell between Natalie and Ed, as intangible as the sound of an approaching migraine. It made me edgy. I knew how lonely Natalie had been, and I had heard my mother on more than one occasion tell her she had to have a lot of faith, that she didn’t have to go looking for a new man with her butterfly nets and dart gun; when God thought she was over her marriage, He would drop the right man right into her lap, and she just had to be careful not to stand up too quickly and let him fall out.
I held my mother’s skeletal hand, she hummed her hymns, and Natalie and Ed walked behind us on the bridge. In my daydream, the sturdy footbridge that passed above the trains became spidery, rickety, swaying, more like a bridge of rope in a rain forest—any second it might break and I would be hanging by the fraying hemp just above the mouths of crocodiles.
Up the road a bit, across from the rock seawall, we approached Mady Whites house, and I wanted to turn back so the Whites wouldn’t see us. They lived in a small mansion with a magnolia tree in front that was nearly as big as our whole house. They didn’t like my parents, who were middle class at best; and they wouldn’t like Natalie because she wore too much mascara and was divorced, and they wouldn’t like Ed because he drank. And since I was the fourth in this chain gang, they wouldn’t like me anymore, wouldn’t let me come over and comb Mady’s long, straight white-blond hair.
They were a perfect couple, Mady was a perfect girl, and I didn’t get what my mother meant when she told Casey and me we must try not to compare our insides to other people’s outsides: I just knew that I wanted Mr. and Mrs. White to like me. I knew they didn’t approve of my parents. Once our families were at adjoining tables at the local Italian restaurant. We exchanged pleasantries, and my parents ordered a carafe of red wine, which I knew was too much for two people. The Whites had bottles of Coke with their spaghetti and meatballs. After dinner, my father bared his teeth so my mother could inspect for trapped food, and I remember blushing, wanting to die of shame. Mr. and Mrs. White had to avert their eyes from my chimpanzee parents, who would next be raking through each other’s hair with long shaggy fingers, rooting around for lice.
There were swallows on the road where the White family lived, and they dipped and darted through the air, blue-black on top, camel and cinnamon colors beneath.
“God, that’s a big magnolia tree,” Uncle Ed said. It was a beauty, fifteen feet wide, fifteen feet tall, in full bloom—big flowers opened like cups, white on the inside, rosy purple on the outside, with a scent like violets. This was the tree we climbed when I came to play, when I wasn’t inside combing Mady’s hair. I was in this tree once in the winter when I heard a migraine coming. I looked around, although there was nothing to see or hear, and I waited and prayed to the baby Jesus, “Please don’t let me get one.” Mrs. White was going to take us to a ballet matinee, but there was no way out; I was headed into that private white one-pointedness. The air was like sheet metal waiting to vibrate, to crackle like when we simulated thunder and lightning during the school plays. I started to cry, “Oh no, oh no,” and climbed down out of the tree. Mrs. White drove me home, and my mother put me to bed. The room had to be black, and word went out through the hou
se, “Nanny has one of her headaches.” Everything grew silent, mountain silent. I lay frozen, waiting, holding on. My mother or father brought and applied and removed cold compresses. They sat on my floor in silence, with their knees drawn up to their chests, chins on their knees, doing whatever they could in their heads to make me better, to make me sleep, until, some hours later, I did.
Half a block away from the Whites’ house, though, Ed’s old slate-blue Nash Rambler pulled up, with Peg behind the wheel. She honked. Ed was walking next to me, Mom was next to Natalie; we all stopped and turned to gape at Peg, who gripped the wheel—grim, sad, beautiful, fat, a Gibson-girl madonna. In the backseat Lynnie waved to her father and me. Time stopped, it was like a dream. Ed’s eyes got wide, and he cocked his head and bent at the waist so he could peer into his car. His girl wore one of Casey’s old white T-shirts and white toy pearls; her mousy brown hair was in braids. She looked like an angel. Ed waved to them, wagging his hand like children do, waving as if to say good-bye, bon voyage, as if they were about to drive off down the road.
“I’ll talk to you all later,” he said, looking from my mother to Natalie. He rubbed underneath my chin with one finger, the way you pet a cat, and walked over to the driver’s seat. My cousin and I waved at each other. Peg rolled down her window, and Ed leaned in to kiss her; then Peg slid over, Ed got in, turned to salute us and put the car in first.
Natalie turned to my mother and said dryly, “My, my.”
We walked along the rock seawall for a while; the tide was high and hitting the rocks two and three feet below us, spraying us with cold green water, wild salty water, and the whitecaps churned and bobbed like crazy rabbits.
Panicked and full of free-floating guilt, I walked ahead of my mother and Natalie, who fell into a hushed, animated conversation I didn’t want to hear. I thought for a moment I heard a migraine approaching like distant mosquitoes, but I didn’t get one. They’d never been that easy to predict. Once I got one at a Hayley Mills movie with Peg and Lynnie. Once I got one when the Whites had taken a bunch of us kids to the county fair and then back to their house for Hawaiian Punch and popcorn. I called my parents in tears to come get me, but they were off somewhere. Forsaken, I lay down on a cot in the Whites’ laundry room, waiting, waiting, waiting, hot tears trickling from the outside corners of my eyes into my ears, on to the pillow. I held my breath as much as I could and listened to the other children laughing, fighting, whining, popping popcorn. The popping sounded like they were using a jackhammer to clear the wax from my ears. But finally I got ahold of Casey. He came and got me, rode me home on the handlebars of his bike, and when we got there, he put me to bed and brought me cool compresses and sat on the floor of my pitch-dark room, waiting for Mom and Dad to come home.
Three
IVY GREW everywhere. It surrounded the house and vines hung from the rafters of the porch. It was all crazily green. Beyond the stone steps were redwoods, pine, cypress, laurel robed in moss. Ivy climbed their trunks. There were three kinds of groundcover: ice plant, baby’s breath, ivy. Through every window you saw leaves and ferns, moss and ivy, kelly greens, army greens, black greens, lime greens, heathery greens, and the red bark of redwoods, and the true blue sky breaking through between trunks and treetops. One day I thought I saw monkeys playing in the branches several hundred feet away, but they turned out to be the neighbor children, playing on the roof of their house, with the transparency of all those trees between our houses superimposed on them. In the long, boxy living room I stared out on the days and pretended to be captive inside a terrarium, or sometimes inside an aquarium, watching the fish swim by.
We were housesitting late that summer in the town to the west of our own. The house belonged to a man who taught at the same place as my father and who had gone to Italy for a semester. We had rented out our house to a visiting professor at the seminary and his family so that we would have a bit more money in the fall and my father wouldn’t have to teach so many hours. I missed being on the water, but we were at the foot of the mountain. Sometimes when we walked around town and suddenly looked up, the mountain was there like Mount Fuji, white with clouds where snow would be. The mountain, the Sleeping Maiden, was a dark wild green.
My father couldn’t sleep in the new house. He was tired all the time. He was in what my mother called an agitated depression. She was in a lethargic depression. Casey was hardly ever around, and I was terribly lonely. I had always secretly believed that I was the only real human and that everyone else was a robot, but that summer I came to feel just the opposite, that everyone was real but me.
My father was ranting all the time, mostly at my mother. He ranted about our finances, he ranted because he was fiercely disappointed in Kennedy, he ranted about his lack of sleep. This was a big one that year, his lack of sleep. When people asked him how he was that summer, he told them how tired he was and that he couldn’t sleep properly, and they would say things like, “That’s funny. I always fall asleep at exactly eleven o’clock.” They really did say things like that, I heard it with my own ears. Then my father would rant that people were insensitive shitheads, that if people asked how you were and you said you were really broke, they wouldn’t say, “That’s funny, I have tons and tons of money.” He ranted about the heat. He ranted about our cat Jeffey, who kept biting him on the top of his head. He ranted because Casey was never home, and because I wouldn’t leave the house.
“Darling, it isn’t my fault,” my mother said. “She’s going through a phase.”
“It is your fault, though, Marie. It’s unhealthy for you to be so afraid of running into people you know, and now Nanny’s caught it from you. It’s just beyond me why you can’t just say hello to people and then keep moving. I say to Nanny, ‘Darling, it’s so beautiful out, why don’t you put down your book and go outside. Get on your bike and go play in the schoolyard,’ and she offers some lame excuse, but I know the truth. I know what she’s thinking is, she might run into someone she knows.”
I missed our house, and I missed the trains and the railroad yard and the beach, the crabs and the starfish, and I missed getting to see Mady White every day, and I missed our blackberry bushes.
One night I was lying in bed listening to the wind and the frogs. The night birds were silent. Then I was aware that Natalie had come over and was downstairs with my parents, and that they were drinking brandy and that there was a fire going and that something was terribly, terribly wrong.
I went in and woke up Casey and we sat huddled together at the top of the stairs, scanning the empty hall, straining to hear. Casey finally figured out what was going on. Natalie was pregnant. I did not know how she could be pregnant since she was no longer married. I really did not.
“God, you’re so lame,” Casey whispered at me. “Remember when Peg went away? Remember all those times Natalie and Ed went off together?” He was staring up and out the window above where we sat at the top of the stairs. I imagined a tiny diamond star in the space where the rest of the moon would have been if it were full.
Those three adults, Natalie, Peg, and Ed, were the people closest to Casey and me besides our parents. They were the people that baby-sitters were to call if we got hurt, which we often did when Mom and Dad were gone. Natalie drove Casey and me to the hospital a dozen times over the years. She taught us to play tennis even though she couldn’t run around at all because of her artificial hip, and she taught Casey to ride a ten-speed bike even though she couldn’t ride one anymore, and she got him his first binoculars when he was nine. She took me to a beauty salon when I was six for my first manicure—she was having her beehive dyed black as she did every month—and she gave me my first purse and my first tennis racket from the local salvage shop. She drove our dog Wayne to the vet when he had to be put to sleep. I can’t remember a time when she wasn’t in our family. She is in my earliest memory. In it I am sitting in her lap in a sailboat near Alcatraz, listening to my mother and Aunt Peg throw up off the bow. Everything was bright blue, the sea
and the sky, Natalie’s turtleneck sweater, my father’s and Uncle Ed’s eyes, but what I mostly remember are the sounds, the seals, the gulls, my father and Ed singing shanteys, my mother and aunt throwing up, and Casey with his fingers in his ears singing nursery rhymes.
Ed just adored Peg all those years. You could see it in his face when he watched her, and in how lovingly he teased her, in how hard he could make her laugh, in how often he tried to get sober, in how often he started to dance with her out of the blue. Peg might have just brought hot dishes in from the kitchen and set them down, and Ed would be coming into the dining room with drinks or the salad, and he would take her into his arms and dance with her for a minute. Then she left him for two months and he pined and cried, and at the very end of it he got my mother’s best friend pregnant.
My mother kept telling everyone that everything was going to be okay. She kept telling us that we had to remember to live in the solution, not the problem, and that the solution was God, until Peg told my mother that if she said it one more time she would take a rock and hit her on the head.
Peg was in my parents’ room with my mother one morning when I got up. She was crying. I got out of bed and went downstairs, poured myself a bowl of corn flakes and went out to the porch. Casey was reading a book, eating Sugar Pops one by one. Squirrels raced along the branches, leapt from tree to tree, and I listened to their chatter and to the blue jays screaming from the treetops, and over it all to the voices of my mother and aunt through the open bedroom window.
“Why can’t she get an abortion?” Peg asked.
“Because she’s a Catholic.”
“But I have nowhere to turn, don’t you see? I can’t throw him out—he’ll move in with her.”
“No, it isn’t like that. It isn’t an affair.”
“Well then what on earth do you call it?”
“They just went to bed. You were gone, you had left. And they just went to bed.”