by Anne Lamott
“Oh, my brave honey,” she said. She said good-bye and settled back into watching Rosie play. She was slaughtering the other girl, as the kids would say. But she had gone from the thing with Mr. Thackery, from his shadowy study, to the world of tennis, of clubs and lessons and matches and practice and pretty, accomplished children—and then Luther appeared, and Elizabeth could see again that the snake was everywhere.
He was watching the match again. She felt as though a Peeping Tom were watching her child, putting her at psychic risk, and there was nothing she could do. She noticed Rosie avoiding Luther’s gaze, concentrating fiercely, but then flouncing past him during the change of sides in a way that made Elizabeth wonder if her child was finding power in ignoring him. She felt scared of her having any connection with him at all. She wondered again if Rosie missed Luther when he didn’t show. She wondered if Rosie felt more drawn to him now that Peter was away, now that Peter had left her for his national boys. Maybe it felt like he was abandoning her. Elizabeth licked her lips and scowled, then looked over to discover that Luther was gazing at her with worry, worry and kindness. Then he turned back to the match, where Rosie moved in to the net like a skier, dipping down on a backhand volley and chipping the return back over the net crosscourt, so low and crisp and unexpected that it got lost on everyone’s radar for a moment—everyone’s but Rosie’s and Luther’s, who watched it catch the line on the other side of the court. Rosie grinned, Luther smiled, and then they looked at each other for a moment. As Rosie bent down to tie her shoe, a chill raced up the back of Elizabeth’s neck. God almighty, how rich children’s dark sides are, beautiful and slinky as coral snakes. She looked over at Luther again, sitting in the shadows, lost in thought, and she felt that somewhere an invisible noose was tightening.
THAT night after dinner Rae was sitting in the old easy chair, wearing a worn denim jumper with nothing underneath, and she looked tan and ripe and beautiful. Her hair was loose, spilling down her back in waves of dark light, and she wore black espadrilles that tied at the ankle. James and Elizabeth had gone for a walk. Rosie and Rae had declined their invitation.
They were playing catch with a roll of toilet paper that Rosie had secured with rubber bands so that it would not unfurl. They had been throwing it back and forth in silence from ten feet away without missing.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Rae asked eventually.
“Talk about what?”
“Is anything troubling you? Besides Charles?”
“Are you spying for my mother?”
“Uh-huh.”
Rosie tossed the toilet paper roll at Rae. “Simone told me about something she did the other day, I can’t tell you what, but I’ll tell you this. It is not very good news.”
“You’re sure of that?”
“Yep. But I really cannot tell you what it is.”
“Okay,” Rae said finally. She seemed to ponder her own knotty weaving on the wall; the room was silent, as if waiting for something. Finally Rae gave Rosie a long sideways look. “Can I tell you one quick story?” she asked. Rosie, watchful, nodded.
“Long ago,” Rae began, “there was a farmer who lived in the hills of China. And one day out of the blue, several wild horses crashed through the gates of his farm, causing a great deal of damage. ‘Oh, no,’ cried the neighbors. ‘This is terrible news.’
“The old farmer shrugged. ‘Bad news, good news—who knows?’ ”
Rosie closed her eyes and smiled, seeing in her mind’s eye the ancient Chinese hillside, the nosy chickenlike neighbors.
Rae continued. “The next day the horses came back, and the farmer’s twenty-year-old son managed to capture one.” Rosie saw it—a stallion, fiery and exquisite. “All the neighbors ran over to admire it,” said Rae. “ ‘Oh, how wonderful,’ they cried. “ ‘What good news.’ ”
“ ‘Good news, bad news—who knows?’ shrugged the farmer. And then, several days later, the farmer’s son, attempting to break the steed, was thrown and his leg badly broken. The neighbors rushed over, peering in at the young man in bed. ‘Oh,’ they cried. “This is awful news.’ ”
“The farmer shrugged,” Rae said. “ ‘Good news, bad news—who knows?’ ” Rosie blinked. “And then? A few weeks later, the Chinese army came by, conscripting all the area’s young men for a war raging in the south. And of course, they couldn’t take the young man with the broken leg.”
“ ‘Oh,’ ” Rae cried. “ ‘This is wonderful news.’ ” Rae glanced at Rosie, who nodded, as if in surrender. “The story goes on—but maybe it’s time for you to tell me what your not-good news is.”
Rosie shook her head, seeing Simone. “No,” she said finally.
“But you’re positive it’s not good?”
With a sidelong glance at Rae, Rosie shrugged. “Good news? Bad news? Who knows,” she muttered to herself. She tossed the roll of toilet paper back and forth from her left hand to her right, then looking up impishly, she heaved it to Rae.
four
ELIZABETH asked James to change the lightbulb in the kitchen one morning in late May, because she had so many things to do to get ready for the picnic with Rae and Rosie that day. He sat at the table still reading the paper. She was doing half a dozen things at once, trying to get everyone ready for the day, and besides, she hated changing lightbulbs in this one particular fixture. You had to do it by braille, unscrewing unseen screws that held the glass globe in place, while your arm started to fall off and your neck got stiff. And then, when the screws finally came off, there were all those dead flies glued by sticky dust to the underneath brim. She felt like she was doing almost everything around the house but this one thing that would illuminate her work area so she could do even more for everyone else. James, sitting there reading the paper, could see just fine and so did not think to leap up and change the bulb. But Elizabeth knew that by the early evening the room would be filled with shadows, and preparing dinner would be hard and annoying, and so she said this to James, who said with slight irritation that he was going to change the lightbulb in a minute.
“Please will you just do it now?”
“You want me to leap up onto my little stepladder with my toolbox and coveralls and change it? Right this very second?”
Elizabeth nodded.
He sighed and wandered off, and she thought he would return in a moment with the ladder. She watched him out in the front yard on his way out to his shed to get the bulb. But first he stopped to unscrew something on the manual lawn mower, and amazingly, he got distracted. She swallowed her annoyance; he would eventually get around to the lightbulb. He liked to fix motors, to putter with his car, or take apart the lawn mower. He liked to do things outdoors, in his manly domain. It was part of his hunter-gatherer legacy. He didn’t like to change lightbulbs. Don Knotts could change lightbulbs. It occurred to Elizabeth, as she prepared the picnic basket, that she liked to put things away, while James liked to haul things out and create huge projects over which he could then look so serious; it seemed to her that James liked projects that, as someone had once said about artichokes, looked like there was more when they were done with than when they were begun.
He finished with the lawn mower, and went out to his shed, and still had not reappeared by the time Rae stopped by to pick up Elizabeth and Rosie. Elizabeth, for everyone’s sake, had stopped by the shed on the way out, and reminded him with extravagantly good-natured noblesse oblige to please change the bulb before they got home from their picnic.
They had the loveliest day at the national park, stretched out on towels on the banks of the creek, reading, talking, wading, eating, dozing again, and Elizabeth tried not to think about the morning. But when she and Rosie walked into the kitchen that evening and she threw on the light switch, holding her breath, nothing happened. She looked at Rosie, who shook her head.
“Men,” she said to Rosie.
Rosie rolled her eyes. “Should me and you do it?” she asked.
Elizabeth considered this. “You and
I,” she said. “Let’s not let him off the hook so easily. Besides, it’s too dark in here to do it now.”
“Then how will he do it when he gets home?”
“That’s not our problem. Our problems are blood sugar and world peace.”
They were both tired and hungry and yet so wanted to continue the sweetness of the day that they set about good-naturedly in the dimness to make themselves a simple meal. They sat down together at the table to leftover soup and bread and cheese and ate by candlelight.
“Mama? Do you mind if I read my new magazine while we eat?”
“By what, flashlight?”
Rosie shrugged and nodded.
And so they ended up together, Rosie with her Seventeen, Elizabeth with a book, reading in silence with flashlights. The only sound was the turning of pages, like waves lapping the shore. Elizabeth looked up from time to time to study her strange silky daughter in the candlelight, staring solemnly at page after page of emaciated beauty, with the baby finger of her free hand hooked over her bottom lip just as she had when she had read fairy tales at eight in the window seat, horse stories at ten, Nancy Drew mysteries at eleven, and now advice on weight control and boys.
A MOMENT later, there was a horrible sizzle and stink; Rosie, slumping, had gotten a bit of hair singed in the candle flame. There was a sudden pinch in Elizabeth’s solar plexus, a sinking feeling, a rage at James. He must have assumed that she was going to change the bulb herself; he must see her as his mother, his nag of a mother. It was all hopeless. It meant that there was something really wrong with the relationship.
Elizabeth opened a can of mandarin oranges for dessert and knew that the syrup was spilling down the side of the can and onto the counter, as she tried by flashlight to spoon some into two bowls. It would be sticky soon and bring on ants, and all she wanted was to clean everything up and go to bed. She had lost her bearings in the dark. The kitchen was her territory, and it was supposed to be appetizing. But because of James’s dereliction, it was a mess. She found herself lurching here and there, tripping, knocking things over, smoldering with resentment.
“Mommy? Why don’t you sit down?”
THEY read their magazines and ate their mandarin oranges by flashlight and candles, a parody of an elegant dinner party. Good cheer and improvisation were burbling again in the visible world, but a roiling feeling had begun in her gut. She felt tired and short in her chair, as if she and Rosie were hunkered down in a cave.
They carried their dishes to the sink. Rosie, in bare feet, could feel crumbs and stickiness.
“How pathetic,” she said to Elizabeth. “Men can be such slobs.” And she wandered off to the ruins of her room.
• • •
AFTER a while Elizabeth went upstairs to read but found herself back in the kitchen two hours later, still waiting for James to come home. Rosie was up in bed with her latest teenage gothic. Elizabeth peered down into the nearly empty can of mandarin oranges, holding a flashlight on them with one hand, spearing segments one by one with a fork in the other. She hated leaving a mess for the morning; it always felt like part of you was still outside your body. Besides the threat of a bug invasion, there was the fear that the mess, the stickiness and crumbs and dirty dishes, could grow by themselves in the dark. Smells, growths, moss and mold, furry mold like troll hair, fuzz with fur on it. It could start composting. A miasma of smells would rise.
She shuffled around the house, went back to the dark sink, where she closed her eyes in the dark, and then went back upstairs, where she sat miserably for a while on the toilet. She could feel the seat embossing her butt. It was one of the stations of despair.
JAMES was still not home at ten, by which time she was livid. She got in bed and read for a while, and eventually turned off the light. A little while later, she heard him tiptoe in.
“Are you awake?” he whispered in the dark. She grunted softly. “I want to hear about your day; I want to tell you about mine. It was so great. Please don’t be asleep.” But she lay there like a smoldering log as he took off his clothes and dropped them softly on a chair. She heard him yawn, heard and felt him crawl into bed.
“Are you really asleep?” he asked. She yawned, made the smallest possible sound. He put his knees in the crook of her knees, and where there was usually a yielding, she was stiff. Straightening her knees would be too overt. He flung his arm over her, as he did every night in the presleep position, in that fitting together, the key in the hole. But she pretended to be asleep, breathing as shallowly as possible, trying to breathe out as little as possible; otherwise, who knew what might burst out—tears, invective, molten fury. If he didn’t offer anything, she wasn’t about to. “You always …,” she wanted to cry out. “You never …” You don’t listen to me, you don’t care—you only care about yourself. She felt like she was in a bunker, and she listened to him sigh, clearly now getting that she was annoyed, punishing him, but he didn’t want to blow his day or his sleep.
And when he was asleep, Elizabeth lay in the dark for two hours, her eyeballs as rigid as her body, listening to his soft snore; then she got up and read in the living room until nearly four in the morning, and finally, finally she fell asleep.
JAMES was reading the paper and drinking coffee when she got up at nine. “Hi!” he said.
She could barely look at him. There were crumbs and snail tracks of stickiness on the table. He had not bothered to wipe it all up before sitting down to read.
“What is it, Elizabeth?”
“Remember the lightbulb?”
“Ah!” He smote his forehead, gripped his head as if being pierced with migraine, beat the table. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” he implored. “Sit down; let me get you some coffee.”
“Just change the fucking lightbulb.”
“Do you want me to do it now?” he asked, surprised. She nodded. “I will. But have some coffee, let me finish mine.”
“No.”
“No, you don’t want any, or no, I can’t finish mine.”
“No, you can’t finish yours.”
James stood there, as sullen as one of the teenage boys on the tennis tour. Elizabeth cleaned off the table, poured her own coffee, and sat down with the paper. There was always that feeling in her soul that the bottom could drop out of their marriage. There were so many areas where things could go irreparably wrong. And the jacket was always waiting in the closet, the jacket of being a martyr and a bitch, the jacket she was now wearing.
JAMES worked with great concentration, as if changing the dressing on a burn instead of a lightbulb, and when he was done, he walked to the wall switch and turned it on. The kitchen was flooded with golden light. “Watson,” he cried, “come quickly. I need you.” Elizabeth glowered at the paper. James turned the light off. She gawked at him. He turned it back on with a flourish, and then off. Elizabeth looked away. He turned the light back on with a gasp, a happy intake of air, like a child playing peekaboo. And then he turned it off. Elizabeth buried her face in her hands. The light went on again, and then, a moment later, off. Finally she smiled, and he turned the light on and left it.
THAT night when he bent his knees into the crook of hers, she yielded, melting into him, and they made love. Life was normal again, life was good—Bosnia to Paris in twenty-four hours.
He turned over with a big schlumpy male plop, now out of the presleep position and getting ready to drift off. He rearranged himself like a gull, shimmying his ruffled feathers back into place after landing.
five
CHEATING was much easier the next time.
It was at a tournament only twenty minutes from home. She arrived in a great mood, having driven over with her mother and Rae for a ten o’clock first-round match. She was slated to play Deb Hall, who was unseeded in singles, although a frequent and ferocious rival in doubles. And after studying the draw, she realized there was a good chance that she could actually win one of the singles trophies, either the one for first place, which was a marble desk set with a fountain p
en, or the runner-up trophy, a tall garish figurine mounted on fake marble, which looked just like the Statue of Liberty about to hit a forehand volley.
Rae bought her a Coke and they sat with Elizabeth waiting for Rosie’s name to be called. Rae always made such a fuss over her whenever she came along to a tournament, making sure Rosie was warm or cool enough and that she had eaten just long enough before so that the food would not cause stomach cramps, ogling Rosie’s name on the posted list of seeded players. It was sort of embarrassing. Rae didn’t believe that Rosie was really just one of the pack on the junior tournament circuit. Still, when the tournament director called her name and that of her opponent, Rosie stood up, feeling for the moment like a championship thoroughbred, long-legged and muscular, raring to run.
LUTHER was sitting behind two ten-year-old girls, watching their loopy rallies. Rosie, walking behind him with Deb, smelled slightly sour BO. She turned once to look back over her shoulder at him with a slight sneer, and he smiled at her and winked.
“God,” she said out loud and shivered.
A dizzying number of balls were going back and forth across the nets as she and Deb walked to their court. She had breasts that bounced a little when she ran, and Rosie could not take her eyes off them. Deb never put one away, and she didn’t take any practice shots at the net, but by the same token, she didn’t miss very often either. She chased down everything, patted each ball back, and before they had even practiced their serves, Rosie had psyched herself out.
Her breathing changed. She could hear her pulse. Movies were playing in her mind where she saw herself leave the court in disgrace, losing to this bouncing girl, no ranking, no seed. Rosie took a dozen practice serves, made about half of them, felt a crick in her elbow. Deb took only two practice serves, hard and flat, both well in.