by Anne Lamott
My mother called Natalie from the dry cleaners’ phone and arranged to meet her at the ferry slip, where the trains were carried on barges back and forth to San Francisco. Jane, the child of the cleaners, a pale silent little girl, came along with us when we left. We promised to have her back in an hour. We stopped at the market and had the butcher slice us half a pound of paper-thin salami, and we bought a tiny jar of mayonnaise and a loaf of Wonder Bread, which I wanted so badly that my eyes filled with tears when my mother at first said no. Wonder was the living bread to me and we never had it at our house. We had wheat breads, black breads, dead breads. We took our food and a tiny wooden ice cream spoon for the mayonnaise over to the ferry slip across the railroad yard and sat down in a semicircle. Boats steamed and sailed past, off to Oakland, off to San Francisco, off to Angel Island, and the gulls cried and cars passed behind us, and the world smelled of diesel oil, old wood and rust, and cold salty water full of seaweed and crabs and cool clean fish. It smelled of the coast and of trains.
Finally we heard Natalie limping toward us, clodhopper nun-shoes on the rough splintering planks, and my mother turned her face up to be kissed and held her arm out rigidly for Natalie to hold on to as she lowered herself to the ground. She massaged her hip for a minute, and then turned to pat and tousle Jane’s hair. Jane looked like a ghostly deep-sea fish. I was not sure why we had brought her along.
My mother began making salami sandwiches, using her legs as a table. Natalie sat hyperventilating, chewing gum like a waitress in a diner, making cat’s cradles with a huge rubberband. It had been three weeks since she quit smoking. Her stomach stuck out more every day. She was wearing plaid pedal pushers and a peach-colored beaded cardigan, lots of mascara, lots of foundation, lots of lipstick, and a peach stretch headband, as though her big black hairdo were capable of any movement whatsoever, as if it had to be restrained.
“Is it getting any easier?” my mother asked.
Natalie shook her head and snapped her gum. In the first two weeks she would come over and sit down on our couch and then flop around all over the place, then suddenly hug herself around the stomach and moan. Then she would raise her head and stare at the ceiling in a way that made you think she might start keening. One day I picked up the phone in the kitchen right as my mother answered it in her bedroom and Natalie bleated: “MY HEAD IS FULL OF BEES!”
My mother invited her over for dinner that night and Natalie stopped crying. She and my parents were sitting around before dinner having martinis when Natalie started crying again. I brought her a box of Kleenex, and she pulled me into her lap and cried into my hair and kept saying, “I hate this, I hate this, I hate this.” My mother went outside to smoke. When she returned Natalie was sniffling bravely. I was in her lap and my father was holding her hand. “Darling,” he said. “It is the hardest thing on earth; the hardest thing I’ve ever done. And you’re under some terrible pressure right now, it may not be the right time to quit.”
“But it isn’t good for the baby.”
“Maybe it’s better than being tortured like this. The whole thing is wearing you down.”
“I feel a little bit better.”
“Good, but play it by ear. Marie smoked through both her pregnancies and the babies turned out fine. I mean, you’re holding Exhibit B.”
“Are you trying to get me to smoke?”
“No, no! I’m just saying that if it turns out to be too hard, and you end up having to smoke, we’ll love and admire you every bit as much as we do now.”
She looked at him with her big drag-queen eyes. “Really?”
He looked at her gently, rueful and wise, and then shook his head. “No,” he said and she laughed.
My mother gave Jane and me the remaining loaf of bread and asked us to disappear for a while, so we went to the edge of the apron and threw the bread to screaming gulls, sometimes sailing slices out sideways, like you skip pebbles, sometimes wadding slices up into ping-pong—sized balls and hurtling them at the gulls. I looked back at the two women talking. I thought of Natalie and Ed together. I did not know what went on when people made love and did not believe for a second what Casey had told me, but imagined Ed and Natalie hugging each other in bed, hugging, kissing, nicely, and then giving one another more aggressive snuffily hugs, and then God knows what. My mother was being careful not to smoke in front of Natalie. They were hanging their heads, sitting only a few inches from one another. Through it all Jane did not say a word, only chucked her pieces of bread into the water. She was beginning to unnerve me. I considered pushing her off the apron and into the bay.
My mother wouldn’t tell me what she and Natalie had been talking about until after we dropped Jane off at the cleaners. Hot starchy air billowed out when we opened the door. It was one of my favorite smells. It smelled like Peg and Ed’s house. They didn’t ever have enough money to take their clothes to the cleaners and so Peg always had the ironing board out and it smelled so good as she ironed her family’s clothes, of hot laundered clothing and starch and warmth. Ed spent too much money when he was drinking. He lived beyond their means, spending money he didn’t have on people he didn’t like. And so the family did without.
“What we talked about,” said my mother, after we left the cleaners, “was a plan I have. Ed and Peg desperately need some money, and we hardly have any to give them. But I’m going to go to Carmel and talk to Peg’s parents. They have all kinds of dough, but they’ve never liked Ed. The only time they ever helped them out was the first year after Lynnie was born.”
“How come they don’t like Ed?”
“Because he knocked Peg up, remember?”
“Why do you have to go?”
“I’ve been praying and praying, darling. And what I know is that they need money, so that Peg and Lynnie—and Ed if he wants—can get some therapy. So that Lynnie will have someone she can talk to about this. Peg and Ed are too far into their own pain to help her right now. But therapy costs an arm and a leg, and Peg can’t ask her parents for help right now. Now they’re punishing her for leaving Ed, even though they’ve encouraged her to do so.”
“You said there was going to be a solution. But things are getting worse and worse.”
“Oh, darling. I don’t know, maybe my going to Carmel is part of the solution. But you know me, honey, I’m the one who thinks God can do anything—your father says I’m going to end up on Market Street wearing a sandwich board for Jesus. And I really do believe He’s working all of this out for us. It’s just that I don’t know exactly how, or when. But He’s a foxy one, babe.”
We were sitting in the car and I started to cry.
“But we were going to go shopping,” I wept. “You said.”
“But darling, listen.”
“You. said.”
“I know I did. But we’ll have to put it off a week.”
I kept crying.
“Sweetheart, you hate shopping with me, remember? I don’t do it well, and it makes us both crazy. It’s like daddy says: By the time we’re done, we’re like two people slumped against the mission walls, dribbling, half passed out, and someone has stolen our shoes.”
“What about my school clothes?”
“Natalie’ll take you shopping. Remember how much fun you two had when you went that time?”
“Can’t I go with you to Carmel?”
“No.”
“Does Casey get to go?”
“No. Not even Daddy gets to go. I have to go alone.”
I remember that Casey and I were both hanging out in the study with our father on the morning my mother left. Dad was going over a manuscript with a blue pencil. Casey was absently cutting strips of paper on our father’s big green gridded paper cutter because he liked the whistling sound the sharp blade made when you brought it down fast. I was staring out the study window—filled with anxieties, troubled, dreamy, somehow numb and wired all at once. My mother had been on the phone with Peg all morning. Ed didn’t want her to go. Peg was afraid it would
make things even worse but was willing to let my mother give it a try. My mother kept saying that God could do anything. Like old black Willie at church always said, You just had to axe.
“God hasn’t brought you this far to drop you on your head now,” she said. “Wait and see. There is a way. You wait and see.”
In the second-story study the trees grew so close to the windows that it looked and felt like a huge tent had been draped over the entire house, a tent of redwood, pine, and ivy. I heard the rustle of my father’s pencil on his manuscript, crossing something out; the rush of the paper cutter’s blade as Casey cut another sheet of paper into strips; my mother on the phone with Natalie, down the hall. I went outside down those long Mayan steps and found a place in the ivy behind some trees where no one would ever find me, and called for the kitty in a whisper.
When Peg’s mother called that night, I didn’t even know who she was, but her voice was quavery as she asked to speak to my father.
“May I please tell him who’s calling?” I asked.
“This is Mrs. Schindler,” she said. “Peg’s mother”—and I knew right then that my mother was in serious trouble. I was crying by the time I got my father, who was in the kitchen making dinner, and he talked on the phone for a minute and his face went white and blank, and I raced up the stairs to get Casey, who looked furious when he saw how terrified I was. And then we were in the kitchen staring up at our father. He was having a drink of whiskey and wiping furiously at his eyes.
“Your mother’s hurt,” he said, “but she’s alive.”
Casey was saying, “What! What!” and then he slugged my father in the hipbone and hurt his hand and started crying, and my father said to Mrs. Schindler, “Wait a sec.” Then he put the phone down and grabbed Casey by the wrists. “She’s going to be okay,” he said. “She’s going to be okay.”
“Is it bad, is it bad?”
“Yes.” He was nodding, and then he pulled me into him and pulled Casey in against us, and it was like silent sirens going off in the room. “She got hit, really hard, outside the Schindlers’,” he said, “by a man,” and I started to weep really hard because in my mind I saw some man attack my mother, hit her in the face, bruising her, blackening her eyes like the women who showed up at our house in the middle of the night.
“She’s been hit by a car,” he said.
Mrs. Schindler said that a lot of things were broken in my mother, but the doctors said she would live. Mr. Schindler was at the hospital with my mother. Mrs. Schindler had tried to get ahold of Peg and Ed, but they were not home.
“I’ll be there in a couple of hours,” my father said. “Maybe three. I need to take care of the kids. I’ll meet you at the hospital. No,” he said after listening a minute, “I think it would be better if I left them here with Natalie. A friend of ours.”
Natalie arrived with her boys and two sleeping bags half an hour later, while my father packed his overnight bag, called the hospital, wrote down the phone numbers of the Schindlers and the hospital for Natalie, had another drink, and packed the bottle.
“She left the Schindlers’,” he told us. “I don’t know how things went, but she left and she was crossing the street, and that’s it. She got hit, that’s all I know. But I’ll call you as soon as I’ve seen her. And Nat, you need to call Ed and Peg. Mrs. Schindler is going back to the hospital. You know the number? Okay, good.” He gave everyone, including the twins, hugs and kisses. Casey and I walked him out to the car.
Natalie had found a package of my mother’s cigarettes by the time we got inside, and was smoking on the couch. We set up camp in the living room, with sleeping bags and pillows, sandwiches, cookies, mugs of cocoa, wine and cigarettes for Natalie. We lay in stiff positions watching television. Somehow time passed. It became night. Every so often Natalie went into the kitchen and tried to get ahold of Peg and Ed. My father called and told Natalie that my mother was lucky to be alive and would live. There had been a lot of internal bleeding and a lot of bones were broken and her right leg was smashed, but all in all she had gotten off easy. The Schindlers felt responsible. They had not been able to reach Peg either but spoke of her kindly. Then he talked to Casey for a while, and then he talked to me. He was on the verge of tears the whole time. He said it was from relief. I felt that the world was coming to an end.
I fell asleep with my head in Natalie’s lap. The boys were all stretched out on the floor in their sleeping bags watching a western. When I woke up I was in my parents’ bed. It was pitch dark and absolutely silent and I was deeply confused. Then I got out of bed and went downstairs. The clock in the living room said twelve-thirty. Casey and Dan were asleep, but the other twin, Matt, was lying on his stomach propped up on his elbows inside the sleeping bag, still watching TV, the volume so low I could hardly hear it. Natalie was lying on the couch smoking. She sat up when she saw me, and I lay down again with my head in her lap and she stroked me as she would a cat. I heard the trees outside the window blowing in the wind. Matt turned around to look at me and I couldn’t blink. After a while I started drifting off to sleep. Natalie’s pants smelled clean and crisp, like hospital sheets.
I came to at some point and heard Natalie on the phone in the kitchen. I looked down at Matt and saw that he was asleep. The television was on with no sound. I got up and went into the kitchen.
Natalie was standing with her back against the refrigerator. She had the phone pressed between her ear and shoulder, and held her arms out to me. I started crying again and walked over to burrow against her. She was talking to Peg. “If you and Ed want to go down tomorrow, why don’t you leave Lynnie here with us? Nanny would love it, I know. Right now it’s all boys. Anyway, I’ll call you as soon as Robbie calls me.” She didn’t say anything for a while and I had the impression that Peg wasn’t speaking either. “Jesus,” said Natalie. She stayed on the line with Peg awhile longer, although she didn’t say very much. I put my arms up for Natalie to lift me, which she did, although she hadn’t picked me up for over a year. I held on to her neck and wrapped my legs around her waist. Then I remembered she was pregnant. I held on, draped over her left shoulder. I heard the wind in the trees, the owl. She held the phone to her right ear and helped hold me up with her left forearm and she rocked with me from side to side.
By the time my mother got out of the hospital three months later, Natalie’s belly was as round and as full as the moon. Peg and she were speaking, not exactly like friends but more like divorced people who are starting to get along. They spoke once a week at the suggestion of Peg’s therapist. It was sort of a miracle. Maybe my mother had been right all along. I began to almost believe in God again, in whatever it was that my mother believed in, even though I didn’t quite know what that was; like when Mrs. Einstein said she really didn’t understand the theory of relativity, but that Albert did, and she knew he could be trusted. Natalie came over nearly every day and went for a short limping walk with my mother. We were back in our own home. Our dandelion patches were of two minds, half bright yellow flowers, half round heads of white down that the wind could scatter to seed. The leaves of our blackberry bushes were yellowing, some of them scarlet as poison oak and most still green, and at first you’d see only little dead berries and burrs but then a sprig with fat red berries. Ivy grew through the blackberry bushes; wrentits sang. I mourned when my mother left for walks with Natalie. At home Jeffey and I hung around her like a bad smell, and she needed to get away from us, even just to take a walk with Natalie, only a block or so at first, hobbling, hitching along.
Four
THE FORESTS all through Northern California were on fire. You could smell the smoke in the air night and day. My parents had gone away for the weekend, down to Monterey. My father had been back only six weeks, after having left us for a month. It was 1963, the year the fifties ended, and the fathers in our town were leaving. They walked out the front door, following the piper in his suit of many colors. No one knew who or what this new piper was, who played the tune that call
ed our fathers away, but one of the fathers had Playboys hidden in his study. His daughter and I found them one day and stared speechless at the huge pale-pink breasts and hairless pubes. It was our collective great fear, that our fathers would leave us, start new families with younger and prettier children; we had seen it happen before. There had only been two children in first grade whose fathers had left, whose new wives had babies. In third grade there were seven children whose fathers had left, and by the end of the fourth grade, the year President Kennedy was killed, nine out of twenty-three kids had fathers who were gone.
So it was no wonder the rest of us had become a little skittish. Once when I was spending the weekend with Peg and Ed and Lynnie, Ed was very late for dinner and Lynnie and I became convinced he had left for good. We had helped Peg bake and frost a chocolate cake from scratch, to surprise Ed when he came home from his new salesman job, but he didn’t come home. Lynnie grew even quieter than usual. We set the table, but Peg told us to go play for another half hour, so we went into the basement and stripped and did our nudie revue. While we were getting dressed, Lynnie whispered in my ear, “I don’t think he’s coming back.”
“You don’t?”
She shook her head solemnly.
I didn’t think he was coming back, either. We went up and into the kitchen, where Peg was crying at the stove, cooking three hamburger patties.