by Anne Lamott
“My sister’ll get me beer if I ask. Do you drink very much?”
“Well,” I said. “Pretty much.”
The railroad yard was deserted except for the birds. We crossed it and walked into town, where, at the dime store, I bought my first tube of white lipstick. Then we headed toward the rec center to buy cigarettes from the machine in the women’s dressing room. We cut through an overgrown green and heathery field. A red-winged blackbird sang clear liquid notes from a patch of milky orange moss. I was in heaven, eleven years old; and all the blossoms on the fruit trees in my town had fallen like snow to the ground.
Six
IT LOOKED AS though Natalie and her daughter and new husband might come up for my twelfth birthday party, but I didn’t let myself get my hopes up. They had intended to come up for the Fourth of July, because we hadn’t seen her or Lucy in over a year, and we had never met the man she had rather suddenly married. Peg was willing to test whether the acceptance and forgiveness she felt toward the situation would hold if Natalie and Lucy were back in town, especially since Uncle Ed was so desperate to see his daughter again; and my mother was keen on letting all concerned see that God’s grace, and time, were sufficient to heal such loss and confusion. By July first, however, Ed had shingles, I had had a cluster of migraines, my mother was laid up in bed with a sprained ankle and ringworm, Lucy had the runs, and Peg had the Turning Disease. So Natalie sent up a packet of photographs instead.
She looked exactly the same in the pictures as she had three years before, her beehive perhaps an inch shorter, those marvelous drag-queen eyes perhaps a little less crowded. Her new husband was a dead ringer for Fred MacMurray. In one picture he is holding Lucy out toward the camera as though she is an offering. She looked quite a lot like Lynnie, plain but angelic, with glasses and lots of red lipstick. The twins were nearly as tall as the new husband, very handsome, very straight. There was a picture of them in their wet suits, surfboards under their arms, posing in front of the San Diego tract house, looking cool. My mother first taped all the photographs to the refrigerator door, then took them all down in case Peg came over, and put them in the drawer of her night table.
One morning Peg stopped by after dropping Lynnie off at the ballet studio where Lynnie had a scholarship. She and my mother decided to walk into town for hot fudge sundaes at Nellie’s coffee shop. I deigned to accompany them, since it was on my way to Pru’s anyway. The leaves of the plum trees were purple black, and some of the trees were just beginning to turn—the few that do in this part of the world—flame colored. The backhoes and dump trucks and drills were all silent. We walked along the road above the railroad yard, where all working-class people still lived. In other parts of town and in the hills above us, rich people had moved in. People who had lived here all their lives had lost their views. Six months earlier the rec center had become a private swim and tennis club to which we did not belong. Pru and I still dropped by the women’s dressing room there, to use the cigarette machine, but I was no longer allowed to go swimming. But before us that day when I walked with my mother and aunt into town, the mountain and sky still looked like a backdrop in a play, flat and brilliant, ethereal. The mountain was deep blackish green, the sky turquoise blue, and in front of this backdrop the low rolling hills—still without houses, but not for long—were absolutely pastoral.
My mother’s limp had gotten less pronounced over the last couple of years, and since I no longer held her hand when we walked, walking with her no longer caused me to limp along too. Peg, though, always ended up limping. It caused me to wonder what it would be like when my mother and Natalie walked together, Natalie with her up-and-down limp, my mother’s more of a scuttle, like India Schuyler’s. India Schuyler was the person I most feared turning out like; only twenty-five years old but already crazier than a shithouse rat. She was a poet of local renown, who lived above the railroad yard with her husband, Alphonse, who was even older than my father. The two men were pretty good friends, and my father had once sent off a bunch of India’s poems to his agent, but even so, India would cross the street to avoid having to say hello to him. She looked like I felt half the time. Uncle Ed called her Alphonse’s pet ferret, and I always wanted to snick at her when we chanced to meet on the same side of the street. She was an unholy mirror. She wrote on her hands sometimes in ink to remember things by. I had peace signs drawn in ink all over the backs of my fingers that day. When we got to town, Peg nonchalantly took my hand, I began to scuttle too, filled with shame. I was nearly twelve and could not afford to be seen walking into town holding hands with a fat woman. I sighed and bowed my head and scuttled along, past the laundromat Pru’s mother owned and ran.
At the northwest end of the railroad yard, in town, landscapers had just rototilled the earth, waiting for the train tracks to be pried up, as they soon would be. They had driven five huge posts into the ground, to form a ring like Stonehenge, and inside the circle four dogs were milling around, as if in a corral.
I told Pru that day about my Uncle Ed and Natalie. We were sitting on her deck, drinking Frescas, smoking cigarettes, painting our toenails pink. My transformation was nearly complete. I was no longer a skinny little kid who loved Jesus and Burl Ives, at home in the trees, on boulders, in streams, dressed in my brother’s cast-off jeans. Now I was a skinny little kid in white lipstick, with my frizzy towheaded hair set every night so it looked like Doris Day and James Brown had mated. I wore the clothes Pru’s dark slutty sister Alison handed down to me: pegged light-blue jeans and cotton ribbed shirts we called poorboys. When she gave me a poorboy, I would wait all day and night for it to be time for bed so I could get up the next morning and wear it to school.
I told Pru how Ed used to drink, how Peg had left him one summer, how Ed had gotten Natalie pregnant, how my mother had been nearly killed by a car, how Natalie had moved away, down south, and how we hadn’t seen her for a while.
“How come?”
“Because it would have been too hard on my Aunt Peg.”
“Aunt Peg’s a big girl now.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Maybe Natalie has a new best friend.”
Now she was making me crazy. “She doesn’t have a new best friend. She and my mom talk on the phone all the time.”
“I bet she does.”
I wanted to smash my fist into Pru’s face, and took a sip of Fresca to swallow the lump in my throat.
“My dad never saw me,” she said.
“He didn’t?” I reached casually for the pack of Marlboros, posed like a tennis lady, stretched out languidly in a chaise lounge, waiting for my toenail polish to dry. I put a cigarette in my mouth, shook one out for Pru, and we lit them off one match.
“Is he alive?” I asked.
“Probably.”
“Is he Alison’s father too?”
“No. Her dad owned the laundromat. He died.”
“How’d he die?”
“He killed himself. With pills.”
“How come?”
“I think he was depressed.”
“Well, I guess,” I said.
“My father was never married to my mother. I think he was married to someone else.”
“Why do you think that?”
“Well, I know that, actually. My sister told me.”
“Oh.”
“My mother tried to have an abortion, down in Mexico, but it didn’t take.”
“How did you find out?”
“My mother told me.”
“God, that’s crazy, Pru.”
“She was mad. I smashed up the refrigerator, trying to break the lock with a sledgehammer.”
“Does your sister know who your dad was?”
“She says she doesn’t. But there was this boy in town where we used to live, named Jonathan Burley. And in fourth grade he had a crush on me. We weren’t allowed to play together, because his parents thought my mother was a slut. But one day we were waiting in the same line for four-square, and he was joki
ng around, and he pulled his bottom lip down, like this.” She pulled her bottom lip out and down, exposing her gums, and the two bottom teeth in front that crossed like fingers. She kept her lip pulled out, and looked off to one side and then to the other. “And his bottom teeth were exactly like mine.”
“Did you ever do anything, or ask your mom or anything?”
She let go of her lip. “No. I always just wondered. His eyes were blue like mine, but squinty. His hair was dark and straight like mine. I didn’t bleach it yet. I mean I was like ten years old or something.”
I thought of Natalie and her new husband raising Lucy, letting her think the new husband was her father. “You’ll love Natalie,” I said. “And she’ll love you. She’s really neat. You have a lot in common.” I said this because I wanted there to be someone who would love Pru. Probably all they had in common was that they were the last two people in California who were still ratting their hair.
My mother was kind but not exactly warm with Pru. She was, I suspect, bothered by Pru’s chubby sexuality, and she didn’t want me doing the things she suspected Pru of doing, doing the things her sister Alison was known to do with boys. I told her about how Pru’s mother had told Pru about having tried to abort her; I told my mother so that she would be kinder to Pru, and she was. I heard her ranting at my father in bed the night that I told her.
He took me and Pru to the Fillmore not long after. It was our first time there. We got all dolled up, in our miniskirts, poorboys, black fishnet stockings, fringed moccasins, and white lipstick, and my father drove us into the city in our Volkswagen bus. I do not remember who we saw or what it was like being there. I only remember that Pru had her period, and that when we got over the Golden Gate Bridge she right away asked my father if he would pull over at a gas station. She had to go to the bathroom. I got out with her, and when we were done in the bathroom, we came back into the sunlight to find my father in a phone booth, talking away.
He was always dashing to pay phones, all of my youth. I never asked who he had to call. But we’d be at the zoo or the natural history museum, or heading into North Beach for dinner, or whatever, and he would announce that he had to make a call, and all three of us would wind up waiting impatiently for him, late for dinner, late for movies.
I thought for a while he was CIA.
I remember how annoyed my mother got. On a number of occasions I would be standing next to her, outside the car; we were tapping our feet, and my mother would cross her arms and heave a sigh, and my father would crook his finger at her, beckoning her over, as if he needed to ask her something. Eventually she’d lumber over, and he would pull her to his side and drape his arm around her shoulder, as if now she was doing something just as nice as the thing we were being held up from doing. He did this with all of us, with Casey and me. And I remember how cross I felt that day he took me and Pru to the Fillmore, at a gas station on Lombard, waiting for him to get off the phone, complaining bitterly to Pru, who said it didn’t matter. He crooked his finger at me, beckoning me, and I shook my head and crossed my arms over my chest, and he kept crooking his finger, and I scowled and trudged over, calling for Pru to follow. I was sort of smiling when I got over to him, even though I was very annoyed, and he pulled me over to his side and draped his arm around me, and then reached over all the way to grab Pru by the nose.
“I worry about Pru,” he said one day. We were walking along the path between the salt marsh and the bay. The tide was low, the marsh all muddy dunes, populated with sandpipers, killdeer, gulls, half a dozen kinds of ducks, and a swan. I remembered being on the Bolinas lagoon one morning at dawn with my father and brother. The sky was bright pale blue, marbled with gray and roses, and all of a sudden a whistling swan floated into view like magic, from around the bend, huge and white and perfectly silent. Casey took a picture of it, which he still had up on his wall, a not very clear photograph of the swan hidden partly by the bullrushes, in the sun-red lagoon at the base of the ridge. It was next to the picture he had of the young deer he nursed back to health at ten, lying in her nest of blankets out in our shed, the only two photographs on walls otherwise devoted to posters from the Fillmore Auditorium.
“Don’t worry about Pru, Dad,” I said.
“I know, but I do, anyway. Her mother’s a real slob. And Pru’s going to get into trouble. How does she do in school? Not so well, I would guess.”
“Not so great. But it’s mostly because the teachers don’t like her.”
“Casey’s flunking English.”
“He is?!” This was a first for our family, probably for the entire history of my family.
“He’s stoned every weekend, we all know that. He comes home late Sunday, bleary-eyed, shot. I think they’re doing acid in the hills. It does no good to ground him. All hell is breaking loose, baby doll.” We tromped along. “This town is lost, that’s for sure. I don’t know. I don’t know. If Casey survives these next few years, then you know what happens—he gets drafted and has to go to Vietnam. Or Canada. I feel like any way you cut it, we’re going to lose him. I think this is why your mother’s so depressed these days.”
“She’s always depressed about something.”
“She’s often depressed, not always. It’s just unimaginably bad in the world right now. And we never seem to recover, it just gets worse. She keeps saying to her God, ‘I don’t get it; I don’t get it,’ and He doesn’t say anything back. She keeps thinking He’s going to pull a rabbit out of His hat. And yet of course she thinks He already has: the Lamb. And so she just grieves, because nothing makes sense to her anymore.”
“Poor Mommy.”
“What about me?”
“Poor Dad. Wanna get some french fries?”
“Sure I do. You buying?”
“I don’t have any money.” He smiled. We walked on, toward the waterfront dive at the end of the path.
“I’m sorry to be sounding so gloomy,” he said.
“That’s okay.” He started to cough, and we stopped for a minute. I stared out to sea as he coughed.
“It’s just that these really are difficult days. Too much happens in too short a time. Nothing sinks in. Half the time I feel made of rubber—but, at the same time, agitated, worried sick about your brother, always broke. I thought I’d be making more money by now. I thought I would have cut a wider swath.”
I watched our feet as we walked along.
“None of the old rules hold up these days. None of them seem to apply. Even time, you know? You’re too young to have studied this, but that’s what Einstein proved—that clocks were a joke. They weren’t measuring anything! They were chocolate bunnies!”
“You’re ranting, Dad.”
Neill Doughtery made the best french fries, like none I’ve had before or since. There was salt all over the plate when we finished. I took a sip of my father’s cold beer, just to show him I was growing up. Sometimes to make this point to my parents, I would casually shoehorn swear words into our conversations. “That damn wind!” I would say, or, unable to open a jar of jam, I would exclaim, “Oh, hell!” and they would smile nicely at me.
Out on the water in a space between two ratty boats, two brown ducks were paddling around on the silver green bay, floating, swimming back and forth. We could not see the shore from where we sat, because the wall below the windows blocked our view. My father raised his bottle of beer. “Here’s to Pru,” he said. “Here’s to Casey.” The ducks swam back and forth. Then they stood up, and looked for a moment as though they were dusting off their hands, after a job well done, and then they waded off, waddled away, purposeful and silly, out of our field of vision.
Natalie called to say she was almost certainly going to come up for my birthday, but wasn’t sure who else would be along.
“If everyone’s health holds,” she added.
“Oh, that’s fantastic,” my mother said, but almost immediately went into a depression. She felt so lonely, it was almost too hard to have someone she loved so much come ba
ck into her life for a day or two, only to leave again. Also, we were being ostracized in town by the tennis club crowd, people with whom my mother had once been friends. It was all because of an article my father had written that month for the Chronicle. In it he had mentioned that the people of our town had a rate of alcoholism second only to the Indians in the Oakland ghettos. He mentioned the soaring divorce rate, the number of children on drugs, the general lab-rat confusion. “Why did the doctor’s wife take another overdose?” he wrote. “Why do we drink as hard as the Indians do in Oakland?”
My brother’s high school teacher xeroxed the article for all of his students, and Casey was a hero. The people who already loved my parents, the people in the McCarthy campaign, the people at my mother’s church, were filled with praise for my father, and even Pru’s slutty sister looked at me with new respect. But the tennis ladies punished us, passed us on the boardwalk and looked away, and their husbands gave us tight, bemused smiles.
There were couples I knew, the parents of friends, who fought so much that hell wouldn’t have them, who were suddenly unified by their hatred of my father.
But my parents ended up fighting more. He was on a couple of talk shows, got a lot of attention, and acted different, loftier, and some of the most brilliant lines in the piece had been my mother’s observations. One thing led to another, and they fought. They never fought in front of me and Casey, but I could always tell. I was still like a bat. The air in the room in which they had fought always felt different—thinner, charged, alive. Once not long before my birthday I walked into the living room on a dark rainy morning, and the white walls were dark gray, as dark as the sky outside, black gray. The windows beside the pane-glass door and the panes in the door themselves were rectangles of eerie jade green, the green of winter grass, and they were veined with the shadows of branches—and I somehow knew my parents had had a fight. They were not around, were not even in the house. Maybe in my sleep I had heard them hissing at each other, maybe not. Our windows were deep solid green and I knew that they had fought.