Crooked Little Heart

by Anne Lamott

  In her mind, she saw herself running up the stairs toward him and pulling a knife from the waistband of her tennis skirt, stabbing him through the heart with it, killing him with her knife, and then she saw herself dying too. In this horrible moment she wanted obliteration. But turning back to the net, she realized that all she needed was to win four of the next six points—and she did, easily.

  Colleen would not shake her hand at the net when the match was over. She appeared to be in a trance. Rosie smiled nicely and went to put her racket in its case.

  People could be such bad sports. Colleen bolted away, and Rosie felt sorry for her, but mostly she was excited to be in the quarterfinals.

  She lost in the quarters, as she was expected to do, to the number two seed, who went on to upset the number one seed. She did not mind losing at all as long as she was expected to. And still no one but Luther and a few of her opponents knew Rosie’s horrible secret.

  It was not until early the following week, while practicing with Simone at the public courts in town—there was a round-robin tournament for the adults tying up the courts at their club—that panic set in. People were sitting in the chairs next to the court, watching her and Simone with loud and obvious admiration, and that was almost the best of all feelings, and so she was shaken when her mind began to race with bad images. There she was, running Simone all over the court, vaguely amused by the skill of her performance, when she suddenly and for no reason went from ruthlessly pelting the ball from one baseline corner to the other to watching a slide show in her head of future disgrace. Click: she saw Colleen notify the sportsmanship committee of the junior tennis association, saw herself called before them, charged with cheating. Click: she was playing in a tournament, center court, when out of the audience steps a tall dour man in a suit, like someone from the FBI, who whips his wallet open to show her a badge. Click: she opens the front door and Peter Billings is standing there, brokenhearted, looking at her with pain and contempt. Click: she’s standing in front of a closed door with SPORTSMANSHIP COMMITTEE stenciled across the pane of smoky glass, and she knocks and hears a friendly familiar voice she cannot place, a voice that says, “Come in”; flooded with relief, she pushes open the door, and there is Elvin Thackery sitting behind the desk, looking at her with disappointment, holding the little pocketknife he showed her that time when he put his dick on her arm, and he’s so unhappy with her now for having cheated that all she can do is hold her breath and try to look cute and harmless so he will take pity on her.

  “I have to go home now,” she said to Simone, who was always glad to cut a practice short. The spectators clapped as they walked off the court, and Simone bowed at the waist, like the star at curtain call, while Rosie dipped her head down close to her chest as if someone had just spritzed her with cold water.

  ROSIE began watching the mail, watching her parents for any sign that they had been contacted, but whenever she studied her mother’s face as she read or ate or thought, her mother would just look up and smile gently, in her sad and slightly spaced-out way, and then go back to her business. There was no indication anywhere that anyone knew, and she swore she was done with cheating for good, was starting over, starting now. But secretly, in some outlaw part of her psyche, she felt like she had discovered the secret of the universe.

  God, she thought. You spend all this time trying to do right but always feeling wrong, and you wonder why you never get ahead and why it takes so much energy, like tightrope walking. And then here she was getting away with cheating, and for some reason in that she found a huge relief. She’d stopped being so good, and she no longer worried so much about falling off the tightrope.

  She felt an electric thrill nowadays when she walked past Luther. It was sort of like when she woke up from a dream of kissing boys, or in real life, when Simone told her about kissing boys, about boys kissing her breasts, or how Jason Drake had put his thing into her underpants but not into her. Not really, not all the way. She met Luther’s eyes. His gaze was direct and even warm. She turned her back on him and walked away.

  SHE told herself it didn’t matter if you called a few balls wrong. And the grown-ups were so stupid not to catch her. It made her feel smarter, like she thought Simone must have felt smarter at first, having gone so far with Jason all those weeks ago. Her period was late this month; she had been so desperate for it to start since that day at the river. Natalie had told Rosie something odd the other day, when Simone had the stomach flu and had to default her match. Natalie said to Rosie, “Tell her to give me a call if she needs me,” and Rosie had passed it along when she called Simone that night. She asked Simone what that really meant—and how they would know what to do next—but Simone had been so cross with her that they ended up hanging up on each other. The next day, during a close match, she had tried so hard to be good and not cheat, because Simone was so stupid and cheap to let Jason go so far with her, and Rosie wanted to start over, to be a good person who could look down her nose at Simone. But at the same time, she was desperate to win, and wanting to win so badly made her feel like a kite pinned against a wall by a hard wind. And she cheated again, as if she were unable not to, as if she no longer had any choice in the matter.

  ONE week later, midway through the next tournament, playing in the round of sixteen late one afternoon, she played a girl who was seeded. Rosie wasn’t and it was okay to lose when you played against people who were better. And so she almost didn’t cheat, and then she did, at the last moment, as an afterthought, and it was so strange because the seeded girl didn’t even seem to notice. But Rosie had the sudden sense that a shadow had just crossed the moon, that someone was watching closely, judging. So she played with great sincerity and didn’t cheat again, rallied as well as she could, her brain filled with fear like the piercing sound of a dog whistle, until, walking back to the service line, she could discern by his general shape that a man now sat on a folding chair, watching her through the wooden slats in the chain-link fence. She looked up to see who it was. It was Luther, and she was flooded with relief. Oh, my God, thank you, she whispered, it was just Luther. Meeting his eyes for a moment, she felt that sliding-together feeling, that plugged-in sense of connection, the prong sliding into the outlet, but then no rush of fear, no jolt, not much of anything but boredom, nonchalance. As she felt how close victory was, her concentration returned, and euphoria poured through her like a watercolor wash, and she played so well that she took the girl to three sets, and then lost six-three in the third.

  FOR the next week or so, the fear of being caught returned, and she couldn’t or wouldn’t breathe deeply. It was a form of invisibility. The less air you use, the less beholden you are. She began acting outrageously, like a clown, like a whole circus, on and off the court. Elizabeth and James thought this was out of joy, out of moving so beautifully in your body, connecting with the ball and your partner and the air and the ground—the dance through the air. And sometimes it was; and sometimes she’d forget herself and play like she was dancing; and then Luther would turn up to watch her play, and she’d feel a shifting inside, a door slowly swinging open.

  She had read a lot about the darker parts of people; her books were full of darkness and lust, people possessing you, dark forces penetrating your soul, your old good soul. She knew things. She knew he had entered her.

  Whenever he came into the clubhouse or the bleachers where she sat watching others play, she felt his gaze on her like when the sun comes sneakily into a room and heats your hand. She found herself deeply aware of him. She kept her back to him, but she went near him more often, showing herself to him all the time without looking at him, without seeing his smirk, as if he had the goods on her, on her body. Someone watching her might have thought this was an offering But she was just trying to keep tabs on him by always knowing where he was, so that she could see that he wasn’t off telling the authorities, telling someone from the sportsmanship committee, whispering Rosie’s secret into someone’s ear. And yet she also believed, or knew
, that he would never betray her.

  There was no hiding after the anointing of his gaze. Each time, his eye slid over her and left an oily trace of knowledge.

  ten

  SIMONE came over to get Rosie one day at the end of June, in shorts and a tight little T-shirt. Veronica was outside in the car; she was driving the girls down to a tournament in Modesto. The skin of her arms was warm brown; her nipples showed through the thin cotton, like something delicious hidden in cream. Elizabeth stood at the sink, washing dishes.

  “My mom heard you on the radio,” Simone told James, licking her top lip, and wriggling in her chair as if her clothes did not quite fit right. “She said you were really funny.” He sat a bit straighter, a jauntier tilt to his chin, listening closely, as if Simone were dissecting postmodern comedy. “You must be getting famous, to be on the radio,” she said.

  “Let me put it this way, Simone,” he said, amused, avuncular. “Soupy Sales is more famous than almost any writer in this country besides Norman Mailer.” Simone’s gray eyes opened in indignation.

  “I love Soupy Sales,” she said.

  James slumped back down in his chair. He was silent for a moment. Then he nodded. “I know you do, honey,” he said mournfully.

  RAE called just after the girls drove off.

  “I’m worried,” said Elizabeth. “They’re so big, and Simone is so sexy, and they’re going to be so far from home and I’m sure Luther will be there. Maybe I’m just hormonal. Tell me not to worry.”

  “Don’t worry, Elizabeth.”

  “Okay. I won’t. How’re you?”

  “I’m doing okay,” Rae reported. “I’m actually having stretches of time where I forget to think about Mike at all.”

  “You sound a little depressed,” said Elizabeth.

  “I am. I’ve got a birthday coming up, you know. It’s making me sort of sad. Six months ago, I thought I had a boyfriend in place this year, old awful Mike, and that maybe we’d go up to Mendocino or something for the weekend. Now it’s just me again.”

  “And us.”

  “And you. That’s true. I’d sort of forgotten. I just asked myself about fifteen minutes ago how I thought I should spend my birthday, and I thought, Well, I could always take my Visa Gold card, charge it to the max, and then jump off the bridge with my nicest gifts.”

  “Yeah. Or you could come over here for dinner and a movie. Rosie’s gone for the week.”

  “All right, then. But next year, the Gold card.”

  IT was all going by too quickly. Was there even any point in caring so deeply when it all spun past like ticker tape? The last thing Elizabeth could remember, Rosie had been three years old, naked in sandboxes, painting the walls with poster paints, sitting skeptically on Santa’s lap. “And what do you want for Christmas?” Santa asked her that year. “A tree,” Rosie replied in a tiny trembly voice. “And what would you hope to find underneath that tree?” Santa asked. “Guns,” she said. Now she was off for a week two hundred miles away, staying overnight with strangers, “housing” with people during the tournament, calling in every night to report on how she’d done—so far she’d won two singles matches and was in the quarterfinals, up against the fourth seed. She and Simone were seeded first in the doubles and so were expected to win.

  Rosie had called that morning before playing; she hadn’t slept much, and she sounded as squeaky as an eight-year-old. Elizabeth listened and made sympathetic sounds.

  Rosie had a terrible time sleeping when she was away, and she often showed up to play morning matches on two or three hours of sleep. One time last year, before the finals of the state championships, she had called Elizabeth at four in the morning, scared out of her wits. She and Simone were housing in a dusty old mansion in San Jose, and Rosie was so afraid that she thought she might go crazy. Earlier that night, she had found a stack of old magazines on a shelf in the bedroom. Some were from the sixties, and when she was unable to fall asleep by midnight, she’d ended up thumbing through an ancient issue of Time. Simone was sound asleep, and at first it was good company, but then she had come to an article about a killer, a man with pockmarks and greasy hair named Richard Speck.

  “Oh, no, honey,” Elizabeth said over the phone. “I hope you didn’t read it. Tell me you didn’t read it.”

  But she had. At first she’d turned right past it, terrorized by the headlines—about the eight student nurses he had killed in Chicago—but it got me, she said in a hushed voice.

  Elizabeth had imagined Rosie in her nightie in a strange house, reading of the murders, riveted, her mouth open, not moving her head, the way she did whenever she was darkly entranced—her eyes hooded and flickering from one photo to another. Elizabeth remembered the story well, how Richard Speck had entered the little townhouse in Chicago, holding a gun on the nurse who answered the door; how he had bewitched the eight student nurses who lived in that little townhouse, beguiled them with his quiet jokey seductiveness, his greasy pockmarked power like a paralyzing freezing gas from an aerosol can. Elizabeth had closed her eyes, as dread drained through her. She remembered the eight young women who sat with him on the bedroom floor, almost as if at a tea party, mesmerized, thinking their magical thoughts, clinging to the shore of happy endings. The fear must have frozen or curdled their blood, for no one thought to try and overpower him.

  “Let’s think what we can do to help you through the night,” Elizabeth had said, turning to look at the shape of her sleepy husband who was yawning in bed beside her in the dark. A pulse raced in her head, “Honey,” she said. “This will not happen to you or to me. This happened years and years ago, in Chicago. Okay? And in two or three hours the sun will be up again.”

  “Mommy,” Rosie had asked, quavering, tremulous. “Mommy? Why didn’t the nurses even try to gang up on him? The article said he sat around with them for a while, talking and smiling, before he tied them up. He smiled, that’s what the girl who lived said. Then they had to listen to each other being killed. Mommy? Do you remember that?”

  “Yes.”

  “But the one girl hid. He must have lost count,” Rosie said. “Like on Halloween when you’re done with trick-or-treating, if someone hid a candy bar or two, there were still so many others you wouldn’t even notice.”

  They talked about it on the phone for half an hour, both in the dark, quietly, and Elizabeth steered the conversation to sweet ordinary moments, as much for herself as for Rosie. Finally Rosie said she was going to crawl into bed with Simone and see if she could get a little sleep.

  But later that morning, when the sun had indeed come up and James and Elizabeth had driven down to San Jose to watch the girls in the finals of the twelve-and-under doubles, Rosie had been so defeated by the nightmarish night that she almost didn’t care if she won or lost. Not caring had freed her. Simone had leapt around the court like a long-legged African cat, while Rosie moved as little as possible, quiet and broody as a gaunt young buffalo; still she’d played out of her head. Bleary and cross, she whacked backhands down the line, fired in aces, made impossible winners off their opponents’ best shots, and they won the finals in straight sets.

  She had not brought up Speck and the nurses again.

  Now, she and Simone were housing in Modesto. Elizabeth sighed as Luther shuffled once again unbidden into her mind. Her hazel eyes shrunk as if with strain; she wondered if he was a real threat to Rosie, this dark ruined man. Maybe, as James said, he was not evil, like the greasy satanic Richard Speck. And yet he cast a shadow, a penumbra, on their lives. In his psychic intrusion, his fascination with Rosie, he was looking for something on the other side of her beauty and health, on the other side of her clothes, her skin. And so she hoped that Luther was not in Modesto, watching the girls in silence, biding his time.

  IT was still hotter than hell at ten o’clock. Nearly one hundred degrees all day, there had been several hours after dinner when the temperature had dropped twenty degrees, and Rosie and Simone had hung out all evening with the Doyles, the c
hildless couple housing them. The heavily landscaped street where they lived was filled with life, couples of all ages sitting in beach chairs out on their lawns, children tearing around through sprinklers, racing past on bikes, tossing water balloons at each other. There was a lot more energy out on the streets than in Bayview, where in early July it seemed like everyone stayed inside, behind their gates, or went to clubs or up to the mountain. But the parents didn’t sit in lounge chairs on their lawn, and they didn’t let their kids play kick-the-can at night either, out on the street. Their children stayed behind fences with them.

  The couple who lived next door to the Doyles were young and blond and had Southern accents, like they were from Georgia or something, and they got the girls cans of Mountain Dew from the refrigerator in their garage. Two men who lived in a bungalow across the street invited the girls to play Ping-Pong out in their driveway, and the girls trounced them.

  “One more game,” they begged at 9:30, but Rosie explained that she and Simone had to be up at 7:00 for their matches. Please, please, they wheedled as Simone looked eagerly over her shoulder at Rosie, Rosie who had so much more sense, and Rosie shrugged.

  “How ’bout I get you girls another Mountain Dew?” one man asked, and Simone said no, she didn’t think so, and looked to Rosie, who shrugged and said well, okay, sure, thanks. It was not until she’d finished the second can that she remembered that this lemonadey clear yellow soda was actually full of caffeine, and she closed her eyes, knowing that another night of despair lay ahead.

  BECAUSE the Doyles’ old Tudor house was still so hot, the stucco and brick holding in the day’s heat, the girls chose to sleep in sleeping bags out on the screened-in porch. They were still awake at eleven, talking about their matches tomorrow and, in the same tone, about Simone’s period, which was now extremely late.