by Anne Lamott
Even though these boys were so immature, she felt badly that none of them wanted to go steady with her. She kept waiting for one of her friends, like Hallie maybe or one of the other popular girls, to hand her a note that said, “Do you like so and so?” and if she said sort of, they’d write back, “Well, you better. Because he’s going to ask you out.” And then he would take her to the mall or a movie, be with her somewhere private like his house or hers, and kiss her. It would be a miracle, though—no one had ever asked her out on a date. She didn’t look like the beautiful girls. She was a little stick figure. Simone was beautiful and had had boyfriends and sometimes this made Rosie incredibly sad. But then when Simone was in hysterics because maybe the boy didn’t like her anymore, Rosie would feel old, and safe.
AFTER another solid week of rain, the sun finally came out and dried the courts. Peter had arranged for Rosie and Simone to play one afternoon with two sixteen-year-old girls at a nearby public park.
Riding their bikes to the court, Rosie and Simone passed a horse pasture and an old sawmill. Under the redwoods next to the bikepath, birds sang, squirrels darted out chattering onto the telephone wires, and the creek, swollen with the recent rains, burbled a wet drumbeat. The court lay in the dappled afternoon sunlight, and it smelled just as Rosie remembered it from the one other time she had played here—mucky, slightly mildewy because of the shade of the trees and the wetness of the creek. Under the redwoods, huge knotted tangles of roots hung like baskets over the water. She remembered the smell, a little like dirty socks, in a good way, salty, yeasty, breeding life.
Rosie lived in a world of smells. She always seemed to be sniffing things for information. All these things in her life filled her with confusion—her body, boys, how impatient she felt with her parents, her constant fear that her mother would die, thoughts of her future, memories—but smells, smells were clear, like a powerful radio station.
Simone did not go around sniffing things. She went around tossing her chest about, watching its effect on boys and grown men. She was already fourteen, so pretty and voluptuous, with shoulder-length blonde hair that looked great when it hung down, framing her face, her pretty full lips, charcoal gray eyes, and small straight nose, and it also looked great pulled back into a sloppy ponytail, with wavy little wisps and tendrils breaking free. Rosie already knew that beauty could save and protect you, that if you looked beautiful, people wouldn’t poke around and go in too deep—if you looked the way they hoped and expected, they wouldn’t look further into the dark parts that she read about in her creepy teenage horror novels. If you were pretty, the secret of your essential un-okayness would remain a secret.
The court under the redwoods alongside the swollen creek was hard and fast, like Rosie liked it, and both she and Simone served with utter confidence; they pounded back impossibly angled ground strokes, moving in together at the net to put away volleys or, with a flick of the wrist, to send over a tricky spinning little drop shot that the older, heavier girls simply had to give up on. Rosie could have played all day. She really wanted to be ranked number one again. She pretended they were playing in the finals at the state championships, the bleachers full of spectators, Peter watching proudly. Sometimes she liked when Luther watched her play, or she liked to pretend that he was watching; her edge, her focus grew tauter, like a string inside of her tightening, and she scrambled. She imagined him now in the shade of the redwoods, stepping out from behind the trunk, heavy-lidded and watchful as she skimmed over the hard court like a water skeeter. She got to everything that day, chased down the toughest shots and got most of them back, with no one really watching and nothing to lose. It was just a long hard game of doubles under the trees, in the crisp dappled sunlight of a late spring afternoon.
THEY pedaled home just as night began to fall.
Riding her bike made Rosie think of Charles Adderly, her mother and father’s great friend. Years ago, he had kind of tricked her into learning to ride a bike; she hadn’t wanted to learn at all, had only wanted to be able to do it. She was quite afraid of falling at the time. She had just turned seven and her dad had been dead a few years and maybe that made her more afraid. But Charles and Grace gave her a red two-wheeler for her birthday, with a rack on the back that you could clip things onto, hold your books with, and it had pink and magenta streamers pouring forth from the plastic grips of the handlebars, and one day right after her birthday, Charles said he would teach her to ride. He said, I’ll hold on to the rack in the back and walk along beside you. Just pedal and steer; I won’t let you fall. That’s all he kept saying—just pedal and steer, I won’t let you fall.
The next day, he came over after breakfast. He was tall and stooped and had gray hair that was receding at the temples, and he was handsome in the same way her father would have been if her father had lived long enough to grow old. Even though he had gotten too much sun over the years, hiking, sailing, bicycling with his wife Grace when she was still alive, Rosie thought he was very handsome for an old man. He looked like a retired astronaut.
They went out on the sunlit sidewalk together. She got on the new red bike and put her feet on the pedals, and he took hold of the rack and she started pedaling down the sidewalk. She felt so tight that her elbows were locked and even her knees were locked as much as they could be since she still had to try and pedal. She didn’t really trust him, but he kept walking alongside her while she wobbled down the sidewalk. “You’re doing fine,” he kept saying, “I won’t let go. I won’t let you fall.” They went all the way to the end of the block, turned around, and pedaled back home. She kept checking to make sure he was there behind her, and he was.
“Let’s do it again tomorrow, Rosini,” he said when they were back in front of her house. She didn’t really want to. She thought maybe taking a few days off in between lessons would be a good idea, but he was there the next morning when she got up; he was in the kitchen with her mother, drinking coffee, reading the paper, waiting for her. He smelled of powder, like the medicine powder you might sprinkle between your toes, and he smelled like clothes in the dryer. He always wore the same things, khaki or corduroy trousers, worn plaid shirts, moccasins. She went over and leaned into him at the kitchen table while he told her mother how beautifully she had done on the bike the day before.
This time they went four blocks, two blocks away from home and then back. He held on to the rack, and she was still terrified. He kept saying, “Just pedal and steer. I won’t let you go. I won’t let you fall.”
The third day he was in the kitchen again with her mother when Rosie woke up. He was wearing a red plaid shirt. They went outside, and she got on the bike and started pedaling. He took hold of the rack. She was feeling more confident, a little looser, and she picked up the pace a little, smiling finally, and he had to walk very quickly, almost trotting, to keep up with her. Then she started pedaling really fast, and after a minute she risked the quickest look over her shoulder to check in with him since he must have nearly been running, but he was gone, and she looked way back, and he was a whole block away, so far away that his shirt looked pink, and he was waving to her.
Now, pedaling home as the sky darkened, she remembered how much fun Charles had always been before he got sick. These days he would just open his eyes and smile at her from his bed when they went to visit him. “Is Charles dying?” she’d asked Elizabeth the last time they’d been there.
“Oh, honey. Yes; yes he is.”
ELIZABETH was standing at the kitchen window when Rosie and Simone pulled up on their bikes. She opened the window and called out a greeting, but Rosie either didn’t hear or was choosing to ignore her. Simone smiled and waved. Elizabeth waved back. Finally Rosie deigned to look up at her and jutted out her chin in greeting. Then she looked away. Elizabeth sighed, shook her head, and closed the window. Having a teenage daughter was one’s punishment for having been a teenage daughter. She went back to making dinner—chicken enchiladas and salad.
It grieved her to have given som
eone life who was now going to have to endure being a teenager. Some girls hit thirteen with gusto, filled with confidence, bursting through the door saying, “Here I am!” But not Rosie. Rosie was destined, just as Elizabeth had been, to edge through the back door with slouched, rounded shoulders, arms held in front of her chest. The heartbreak was huge, the sorrow of moving from the land of childhood, where life smelled like grass and earth and sap and berry pies—pies made from berries you and your best friend, scratched and stained, have gathered—to the steely metallic world of puberty, where everything smells like pennies, like sheared copper, and you still have friends but you all know now that you’re really just trading cards: you have a certain worth and dispensability. A year ago Rosie still smelled like a child, of clean dirt and salt and shampoo and sweets. Now, mingled with the clean soapy smell of shampoo, came the sharp whiff of medication, dabbed on her skin every morning to prevent breakouts, and of a flowery spray deodorant that smelled like week-old leis. The scent of a locker room hung in her bedroom now, too, for Rosie’s huge feet in the last year had begun smelling as gamey as James’s, like salt and dirt and fur, like a moose’s might.
Elizabeth remembered the sense of hopelessness she had felt at that age: the conviction that life was so tense and disgusting and false that she wondered how she’d ever survive. The deep disappointment of realizing at thirteen that although she’d survived childhood, the rewards she’d hoped for—respect, autonomy, romance, thrills, belonging—were still out of reach. She remembered feeling glamorous and aloof, like a twenty-six-year-old inside who was still stuck among all these children. The boys around her were all absurdly tiny, and she was alone, an outsider. She hung out with another misfit, named Jessie, and they’d barricaded themselves in Jessie’s room, talking conspiratorially, trashing the in crowd as conformists, shallow featherheads with no compassion. That she had to go home every night was a nightmare. Her room, which had been a refuge all those years, was suddenly too small. And everything was too real; life at twelve and thirteen, she remembered now, stopped feeling so cartoonish and instead started feeling steely and unpleasant. You couldn’t use toys anymore to shift the world through your imagination. Looking at her daughter, sad or sullen at the dinner table, Elizabeth remembered that feeling—that half the time the world was just there, life was just there, like a long dull irritating play, and the other half of the time it was fraught with danger.
When Rosie was six, smart as a poodle, and had just mastered tic-tac-toe, the two of them sat playing in the kitchen one day. Rosie hated to lose, as Andrew had hated to lose, and Elizabeth watched her daughter’s fierce competitiveness with some amusement. Rosie announced that the person who went first got to go twice in a row and that she in fact would go first. And that she would be O’s. A few minutes later, she drew a larger grid than usual and drew an O with wavy lines radiating out from it, like the sun. “That,” she said, “is a fireball.” Then she took a penny, slid it under the paper, and made an O with a pencil rubbing of Abe Lincoln’s head, unrecognizable and evil. “That is the devil warrior,” she announced. Then she handed her mother the pencil. “Your turn,” she said.
Elizabeth looked all over the paper for some place to put her mark.
“Where can I go to be safe?” she asked. Her daughter, looking at her with some pity, said softly, “There are no safe places for you, Mommy.”
THE girls were so luscious. Elizabeth had been watching them all morning at a weekend tournament in San Francisco: out on the court, where they both lost their first singles matches; milling around waiting to play a doubles match; huddled together on a bench whispering their secret thoughts and language. Rosie wore a sweet little dress with lace trim around the neckline that Simone had grown out of over the winter. Now Simone wore women’s tennis skirts and tight white scooped-neck T-shirts. Elizabeth glanced at her round sunny cleavage, the pale blonde milkmaid face. It was sometimes hard to take your eyes off Simone for her blossoming vanilla beauty, or Rosie, for that matter, so much smaller, but beautiful, raven haired, strong featured, like a fair-skinned gypsy, marvelously physical. Here at the tournament, Elizabeth observed their mix of unself-consciousness and hyperconsciousness. And she watched spooky Luther watch Rosie, feasting on her, getting juice from that wonderful nubility of flesh, female with no traces of age, seamless and dewy.
Elizabeth sat as far away from Luther as she could but close enough so he would know a mother bear was watching. She kept glancing at him out of the corner of her eye, taking in the worn windbreaker, dark bristly crew cut, the wolf eyes watchful and patient. She imagined him stalking Rosie, talking to Rosie softly, hypnotizing her. Once she had begged Peter Billings to get him arrested somehow, to for God’s sakes do something, and he had looked at her like she was a nervous case. He said Luther was actually a pretty smart guy, harmless, sad, maybe not so good to look at but certainly of no danger to anyone. She had seen Peter and Luther sitting together in the bleachers at the Golden Gate Park courts last summer, the sun glinting off Peter’s Hollywood blond head, Luther in a tattered jacket on a warm summer’s day, the two men—one so light, one so dark—watching Rosie play. Peter said Luther knew more about tennis than he did and that he just liked to watch the girls play. But was that all? she wondered.
She loved to watch the girls play, too. She loved their innocence but couldn’t remember having felt it herself, doing something so full of joy that she completely forgot about the watcher. Especially the self-watcher who judges and finds fault. She watched the girls get lost in the game and saw with a rush of anxiety that they didn’t stop to cover themselves. They were so naked.
Luther was, to Elizabeth, all that was wrong with the real world, all that was dirty and drunk and mysterious, all that was random and cryptic. She sneaked another look at him. He was ragged, a tree that the weather had whipped away at for too long. He was so dark, and he loved to watch her curly-haired girl in the tiny white dress. She watched her child deliberately avoid his gaze, almost meanly, seemingly not afraid, and the thought crossed her mind, Who is stalking whom? Did Rosie miss his dark attentions when he didn’t show up? Her daughter was now playing out of her head, hard, focused, inflamed. Elizabeth, looking from Rosie to Luther and back to her daughter’s bright body again, felt suddenly how thin the membrane was between order and chaos, how thin but there, real enough to palpate, like a fontanel.
three
ROSIE looked at herself in the mirror all the time now, half to see how she looked, half to make sure she was really there. She saw in the mirror the world’s saddest person. When she was eleven, she used to look in the mirror and imagine herself in the movies. Now, at thirteen, she saw herself all of a sudden as she imagined others saw her. Late at night, very late, when she explored the dark dangerous existential place where sleeplessness took her, she’d traipse down the hall to the bathroom, and look at her weird sick face in the medicine chest mirror. Under the awful humming lights she could see how other she was, could see the wrinkles and bumps and pores.
She had insomnia. Maybe it was hereditary; her mother had it too. The fear of not sleeping kept her awake until the early hours. Just last night she’d still been awake at midnight, and at one o’clock, and two—up and down, up and down, in and out of bed, to the bathroom, the kitchen for a bowl of cereal, finally to the TV room. She made a little rabbit bed for herself on the couch, with the pillow from her bed in its Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy pillowcase, and a quilt. It felt safer here than in her room. After a while her mother came downstairs and sat beside her in the dark. They were both vaporish with fatigue.
“What’s bothering you, darling?”
“I can’t sleep.”
“Are you reading something scary?”
“No,” Rosie lied. The truth was that she was always reading dark, scary books. Sometimes they were sort of racy and turned her on, although the only really dirty book she had ever read was Candy, which Simone had found in Veronica’s room. They had read it in Simone’s bed, in
the dark, under the covers, with a flashlight, and Rosie had felt half crazy with fear and excitement. But most of the books she read involved young girls and women who were taken over by various dead beings. Some days when she was gawky and tense and weepy, it was all Rosie felt good for—to be a vessel for powerful dark spirits, a gravy boat for ghostly sluts. An empty keyhole limpet shell that a wayfaring psychic snail might decide to inhabit in a tide pool. She read lines like “Taken over and ridden as she felt by the sudden dark forces of sex, Adriana wondered if her enthrallment to Jasper’s Ouija board was a way of not having to feel responsible for the sudden onslaught of evil sexual impulses and thoughts,” and she underlined them, read them again and again, voraciously. They whispered a dark edgy truth to her. She had in fact just finished rereading her favorite for the fifth or sixth time, a sort of gothic teenage version of The Group, where five or so girls at a private high school fell under the spell of a new and charismatic teacher. At first it just looked like these were schoolgirl crushes. But then they were completely taken over by her, and hideous fates befell them all—all, of course, but one. And the one, the chosen, knew by the end of the book that one day she’d grow up to be a teacher too, at a private girls’ school, and get to choose her own first batch of girls …