Crooked Little Heart

by Anne Lamott

  “The more often you visit Charles, the better your life will be,” Rae had told Rosie when he’d first gotten sick. “It will be hard, but it will be worth it.” But when Rosie visited him now that he was bedridden at home, she felt awful. She hated his smells, she hated how hard it was to think of things to say, how phony she felt saying them.

  Charles’s nurse, a big boring blonde named Arlene, usually left his visitors alone once her fierceness and fussiness had made it clear that he was hers, her prize rosebush or show dog: clean, fresh, fed, combed. Elizabeth, so much taller than Rae or James or Rosie, always bent down low to him, peered into his fine handsome face, smelled the hint of decay that no amount of sponge baths and bedside tooth brushing and lemon glycerin swabs could cover.

  Rosie had had a strange thought come to her the last time she’d visited Charles, the first weekend in March. He’d been sitting up that day in his wheelchair in the living room, in a broad band of sunlight that accentuated his paleness. Despite his emaciation, he looked like the pictures of the Buddha Rosie had seen in some of Rae’s books: so peaceful and yet also so focused. Rosie burbled on about her exploits on the tennis court and, during silences, picked at her cuticles, and while Rae or Elizabeth spoke to Charles, she studied him. Later in the car, with Rae driving and Elizabeth in the backseat, she said to no one in particular, “He’s like orange juice concentrate now. Like all the water is gone.”

  Rae searched in her rearview mirror and met Elizabeth’s eyes.

  “Why do you think that is, Rae?” asked Rosie, her head tilted back against the headrest of the car seat.

  “Well. We’re in these watery, confused states so much of the time …”

  “Maybe it’s our way of swimming through life,” Elizabeth offered.

  “Yeah,” said Rae. “But Charles is starting the plummet. So he’s stripped everything down, because there’s enormous specific gravity in that. If you see what I mean.”

  “Well, I don’t,” said Rosie.

  “Think about swimming, about diving from a high dive. When you do a dive, to protect yourself and to be economical, you pull everything in: you curve yourself. You concentrate, you don’t leave parts sticking out. And you don’t let your attention wander, because it could be fatal.”

  Rosie thought about this. She had her tennis racket with her, a Wilson graphite that cost over two hundred dollars. She needed two of them when she went off to tournaments, in case the strings broke on the one she was using. The strings cost seventy-five dollars. She got her rackets strung very tight, like the boys, like the men.

  Sitting in the back seat with her mother and Rae in the front, she pushed the strings around as much as they would go; they creaked. Passing a grove of redwoods, Rosie opened her window to peer up at them, breathe in their primeval scent, squint at the canopy of leaves so that they blurred into a great doily of green.

  ROSIE and Simone got to play with two older boys at Golden Gate Park that afternoon. It was very foggy, as usual in San Francisco. Peter had arranged the match with the boys’ pro. He was going to meet them there after his lessons were over and watch them play. Veronica drove them to the courts and then left to go shopping in the old Haight Ashbury district. One of the ex-tournament players who still hung out at the Golden Gate Park courts had told Rosie about what these courts were like in the sixties, when a constant parade of hippies passed by on their way to the Polo Grounds, where the Grateful Dead might be playing, or the Airplane. The women who played here as girls, some of northern California’s finest, said there used to be perverts just outside the gates of the carousel, sitting in the grass or on benches, bottles of Midnight Express in brown paper bags beside them, seeming to pet small birds or puppies that sat in their unzipped laps. Now these girls were women who played hard hot doubles with the men, hanging out all day on the court, in the clubhouse, like outlaws who played tennis.

  Luther was a regular here, Golden Gate his home turf. Rosie imagined him out by the carousel gates, all those years ago, fondling himself, but the woman who told her about the sixties said no, no, Luther was just a spectator, just a burned-out old guy. He had not been there to watch them in those days, but the women here sat with him sometimes now and said that he had a great eye for tennis, that he loved the tennis of the public parks. He was never seen playing, but these people thought he used to from the insightful way he spoke about the game. The players waiting for a court here wore much rattier clothes than you saw at the clubs; there was a woman who looked like a hooker and who could beat any of the men at Rosie’s club, an old Asian man in chinos, great players who looked like bikers and maybe actually were, people smoking—smoking! Every time Rosie noticed Luther, for instance, he was smoking. People came over and sat with him or near him, hung out for a while, and then after a while pushed off and went elsewhere.

  Rosie kept looking up from the court, expecting Peter. The boys, who were fifteen and sixteen, played hard with the girls, hitting ground strokes that cleared the net like bullets, which the girls whacked back over the net using the power of the boys’ shots. The boys looked at each other, amused, impressed. Rosie, watching an overhead smash come at her at over a hundred miles an hour, kept her racket in close, met the ball early, way out in front of her, barely swung, blocked it hard and low so that it tore down the middle of the court and split the space between the two boys; both thought the other would get it, and neither did. One of them wolf whistled.

  Rosie felt thrilled, like an Alpine skier must, going almost too fast, right on the edge of being out of control. She looked up to the bleachers, longing for Peter to see her playing like this, smiling his lazy pleased smile. But he was not there. Luther was. He was sitting by the court next to the one where Rosie was playing, and he was smoking, and smiling, and Rosie knew why: she was on fire. She had nothing to lose, nothing to fear, and so was playing at the top of her game. Once she looked up after she’d put away an overhead smash, angling it so wide that the boys didn’t even bother running for it, and Luther was laughing, nudging an ancient Asian woman in the ribs, as if he had taught Rosie the shot.

  She felt sparklers in her stomach.

  At one point she raced after a lob that went over her at the net, and she lobbed it back so brilliantly, sending it over both boys at the net, that even Simone looked bashful and victorious when the boys shook their heads with amazement, and Luther laughed a loud throaty laugh of appreciation and something like joy, as if she had just done a magic trick, and when Rosie looked up and accidentally met his eyes, he took her picture with an imaginary camera.

  It made her afraid she had gone too far.

  Afterward, Simone bought everyone Cokes at the snack bar, and the boys hung around her. Is she giving off something? Simone was so entirely girl, so busty and juicy, like there was mercury inside her. Rosie couldn’t believe the stupid things Simone said and how the boys acted like they were pearls of wisdom. Simone said, “I might want to be a chef. I love to cook. But I hate food,” and Rosie watched the boys go Uh-huh, isn’t that interesting, watching her intently.

  Simone, Rosie wanted to say, you’ve never cooked a thing in your life! You can’t even toast Pop Tarts right. They’re always burned or cold and uncooked. But the boys were squirming with fascination. It made Rosie feel vaguely sick. The boys smiled at her from time to time, as if she were Simone’s homely little brother.

  “I just go nuts if someone mistreats an animal,” Simone was saying. Rosie watched the boys try not to gape at her tight T-shirt over those swollen breasts, the succulent plump thighs and arms, her pouty mouth. “Like, it really bothers me when people kill wolves.” Wolves? Rosie could hardly believe her ears. “Wolves are really incredible. They have a secret kind of thing about them.” Rosie looked into the faces of the boys, who were both so handsome, so tan, and she wondered if either of them might ever dance with her at one of the dances, with her, with her, with her.

  The boys had a secret kind of thing about them, and Simone had it, too. Rosie did
not have it and was not even sure what it was, unless it was sex appeal— if that’s what those words meant: you talked to a boy about wolves—warm, shaggy, mysterious, dark, golden-eyed and dangerous—and it made you want to dance with each other. Rosie only had the cravings, the fantasies. “I totally hate poachers,” Simone continued, and it turned out one of the boys hated poachers, too. Rosie felt torn between trying to memorize exactly what Simone said so she could tell James later and wanting to stay here with Simone and the boys, so close and salty and masculine.

  Finally Rosie had to turn and walk a few feet away so she wouldn’t burst out laughing at how ridiculous Simone could be—like Veronica, so flirty and cheap—and as she whipped around, she walked right into Luther. He was standing there like a wall, like something that had risen up out of the sea. She hadn’t noticed him before, or maybe he had just arrived, and she smacked into him, bumped back and peered up into his face, like you look up the trunk of a redwood, and he smelled like a tree, like bark and sap.

  “You played like Billie Jean King out there,” he said. His voice was soft and sounded rusty with lack of use. She could smell cigarette smoke on him, too—like a tree in a mist of cigarette smoke. She worried that she was weaving like a cobra in a basket being hypnotized, partly because it was so great he didn’t say she played like a boy. People were always trying to give her the ultimate compliment and say she’d just played like a boy, and it made her furious. But now she felt like Luther’s words were an attempt to touch her, and her first thought was to scream so that Simone’s new boyfriends would see that she wasn’t his friend.

  And then she remembered him in the bleachers, watching her play, and without meaning to, she flushed pink in the hollows of her cheeks, up through the brown baby skin.

  five

  WHO was it who said that God created man because he loved the stories? Elizabeth relished the stories one heard in AA. No one came in on the wings of victory; everyone had terrible stories to tell. Many, if not most, people’s stories were far worse than her own. For instance, at the last meeting, Elizabeth had met a woman who had rowed her children out onto San Francisco Bay with a thermos of apple juice dosed with Demerol so they would be out like lights before she dropped them off the boat and into the cold sea. But she hadn’t gone through with it and had gotten sober two months later, twenty years ago. She had grandchildren now and still went to meetings nearly every day.

  Sometimes, sitting on one of the metal folding chairs in the basement of the church, Elizabeth felt a hot dry lump in her throat. Her story was so tame, the worst things pretty run-of-the-mill. Right after Andrew died, she had gone through men like paper towels, some married, some not. She had drunk whiskey every night until she was able to sleep, and so was hungover most mornings when she went to get Rosie up for school. She had driven a thousand times under the influence, putting strangers and even Rosie at risk, as well as Sharon, Simone, and children whose names she no longer remembered, picking them up, dropping them off, chewing peppermint gum, sucking on Sen-Sen, willing herself to concentrate. She could remember driving Rosie and Sharon around one night when she was so drunk she had to close one eye to focus. So when Thackery jerked off for her daughter, touched her arm with his erection, Elizabeth was busy with her own guilty secret. And Elizabeth was so out of it that she was almost useless to her child: it was Rae to whom Rosie turned for help.

  ROSIE worried that her mother used to be addicted to alcohol and now was addicted to these meetings. She came along sometimes to keep her mother company, but there were a number of things she hated about them. More than anything she worried that they would run into people they knew, parents of kids from school or the club, and everyone would know her mother’s secret. And Rosie hated sitting under the fluorescent lights in dingy church basements. The incessant clapping wore on her nerves, and the earnest missionaries with their Styrofoam cups of coffee and little sayings embarrassed her. She didn’t like that they called their book the Big Book, like they were all at the teddy bears’ picnic. In the early days of her mother’s sobriety, Rosie was just relieved that her mom didn’t have boozy breath and pass out anymore. James had recently moved in, and not long after he and Elizabeth had gotten married, at City Hall, and Rosie had spent the whole day worrying that her mother had a bottle hidden in one of the closets, that her mother would blow it again like she’d been blowing it for so long, promising to be somewhere or to do certain things and then drinking too much instead. Rosie was afraid James would leave them. But he didn’t.

  Rosie had gone to a meeting with her mother a year ago where her mother “shared”—told stories of what it was like to be drunk all those years, what it was like to be sober. And it was so strange for Rosie to watch her odd, shy mother up at the front of the room. Her mother twisted her long thin fingers as she spoke, as if she were working on a Jacob’s ladder, about to pull her hands apart to show you the final construction of yarn. Her mother would stare down at her feet like she had an outline of her speech written on her shoes, and then she’d look up from time to time, smiling like some smart, bashful little kid. In front of all those people her mother said that though she felt afraid sometimes that there wasn’t quite enough money, being Rosie’s sober mother made her rich. Then she pointed at Rosie, so everyone could see. Rosie stared down into her lap, although this pleased her very much. And Elizabeth said one thing at the very end that really blew Rosie’s mind, about how when she first got sober, she felt as if the mosaic she had been assembling out of life’s little shards got dumped to the ground, and there was no way to put it back together. It was a whole life’s worth of little mosaic chips. So she simply began to pick them up, shard by shard, getting to know each one. And week by week, life began getting better.

  When Rosie and Elizabeth had gotten into their car that night, Rosie turned to her mother. “Mom,” she whispered, in the dark of the car, staring at her mother’s profile in the flickering streetlight. She felt like a spaceship was trying to land on their car, and her mother leaned in close to hear better. And then Rosie couldn’t think of how to say what she was feeling, so she just sat as close to her mother as she could, in silence. She first noticed that night that her mother’s breath smelled like tea, real tea, English breakfast tea, and even now, it still smelled like tea—so maybe her mother was addicted to the meetings now, to all the corny little sayings and the rest of it, but anything, anything at all was worth this sweet tea breath.

  EVEN though Elizabeth had been sober all these years now, she still had not discovered what she wanted to do with herself. So almost everyone had stopped asking her when she was going to figure out what she wanted to be. She took care of her family. She was a Democratic precinct worker for her neighborhood. She loved gardening, she liked reading James’s manuscripts and helping as much as she could; she had a good editor’s eye and the ability to be both tough and full of consolation. She liked puttering around the house. She liked cutting things out with scissors, although she joked with Rae that it was only one symptom of her undiagnosed autism. But these days she found the world so bright and loud and untrustworthy that it hurt her nervous system. She might look composed, but she’d always understood people rocking or tapping the sides of their head for hours on end, putting the world in order, giving it a rhythm. She missed the days when she and Rosie could spend hours together sitting on the floor cutting out paper dolls, paper pueblos, paper forests. Nowadays she clipped all the write-ups from the local paper about the tournaments in which Rosie played. She found the sound of the scissors delicious and calming, the sharp blades closing with metallic precision; it reminded her of the huge paper cutters from her school years, the whooshing forest sounds of all that paper falling away, the beauty in those executions. No wonder Madame Defarge sat there knitting as the aristocrats were killed by the guillotine. It was fun listening to the sound of lopping.

  Elizabeth smiled at her own odd, dark mind. She sat in the garden by the new cactus Lank had given her for Christmas, studying
the plant’s long reptilian fingers. Such ugliness, yet out of them had already come such surprises: elegant red silky flowers. She had spent an hour tending her roses—apricot brandy roses, white roses, Joseph’s Coat roses—spent some time smelling the fragrance of the antique purple roses. She cut off the dead heads, weeded around them, saw that they needed a little drink. Well, she thought, don’t we all.

  Roses took so much work. She sifted snail poison into the soil around them. “You kill snails?” Rosie had once asked weepily, as if they were little kittens. “Yeah,” Elizabeth said. “I killed about thirty this morning, and I feel great about it. They were killing my favorite plants. I see this as war.”

  Time started in a garden, James liked to remind her. Studying the old plants and new growth in their yard, she thought again of how surprising James was to her. They had been married four years now. He was not what she had had in mind. As a lonely teenager, Elizabeth had longed for a certain kind of man, someone big, someone like Louis Jourdan in Gigi, to come along and find her, recognize her as a good person. He would be elegant, quiet, gentle and adoring, a great dancer. James was none of these things, except gentle and adoring. He was a terrible dresser. But he had come into the bathroom just this morning, while she was brushing her hair, and he had stood behind her, with his arms around her waist, his chin buried in her shoulder, and together they had studied their reflection. Elizabeth, so much taller than he, looking younger at forty-two than she had five years before, pale with hazel eyes and a long straight nose, a tousled bob of thick black hair now flecked with gray; and James with his crazy Einstein hair and eyes as green and clear as the scent of pine, somewhat wrinkled and maybe a little tired. He liked to say of them that they were both in very late youth. He would be thirty-seven on his next birthday. He wore a derelict T-shirt, shapeless and torn; she wore a fresh white one, with pearls. Looking at each other in the mirror, they had narrowed their eyes at the same time, as if staring into the sun, and smiled.