by Anne Lamott
“Why now, though, Rae? Why is it so acute for me now? Is it because Charles is dying?”
“I think that’s a part of it.”
“But crazy? I feel so strange. Remember Joyce’s Mr. Duffy, who lived a short distance from his body? That’s how I feel.”
They were nearly to Charles’s house. It was warm and quiet in the car. Elizabeth shook her head. “I don’t really want to see Charles.”
“Why don’t I take you home? We can see Charles another day.”
Elizabeth stared out the window. “No, it’s okay,” she said. “It’s worse if I don’t go.” She closed her eyes for a moment. “I’m scared that I’m so crazy, Rae.”
“Oh, we’re all crazy, honey. But most of us don’t have your style.”
CHARLES looked like a corpse, gray and motionless. His mouth was open, his eyes were closed, and he did not wake up while they waited. Rae rubbed his feet. Elizabeth sat in a stiff-backed chair near his shoulders and studied him patiently, as if he might wake up in a moment. He crystallized all that free-floating sadness inside her. She imagined Andrew’s cold empty body in the morgue back east, nearly ten years ago. She hadn’t seen his body, only the urn of ashes. Charles had taken her out on a borrowed boat, and he sailed them under the Golden Gate at sunset one night. They tied up at a little cove beneath the headlands, and they drank from a bottle of Bushmills, Andrew’s favorite drink, and Charles poured most of the bottle into the ocean in the moments after Elizabeth poured out Andrew’s ashes. Rosie had stayed home with Grace. Elizabeth hadn’t cried. She had comforted Charles, who read the Twenty-third Psalm and sang sea shanties—“The Golden Vanity” and “One-Eyed Reilly’s Daughter.” He had wept all the way back to the harbor. The stars were very bright that night, she remembered that, like diamonds in the black sky. She watched Charles sleep now and thought about James coming home in a couple of days, and having to tell him how Charles was fading; she thought about holding James in bed, making love, being held, and she looked over at Rae, who was motionless now, holding Charles’s feet, eyes closed, stricken. She thought about the abyss of Rae’s loneliness, the dignity she managed to muster. Charles groaned, shifted. She tried to imagine the effect that their being around for his dying was going to have on her and Rae, and Rosie. She didn’t know what that effect would be, because it was like a tiny green shoot whose flower was growing in the dark. But sitting with him today gave her this hard gift: it let her acknowledge one incandescent part of the world that would soon be gone, extinguished.
four
ELIZABETH had woken up full of hope the day James was coming home, and opened her eyes to the sound of the mockingbird out in the sycamore tree. She called to Rosie down the hall, with a fantasy in her mind of Rosie bounding in, dressed in her tennis gear, ready to go yet glad to stretch out on the bed with her mother for a moment. Instead, she had to call out a second time before Rosie finally appeared in the doorway in tattered cutoffs and a T-shirt from the ragbag. She lumbered in, her head jutting forward, her arms dangling down long and monkeylike: Australopithecus in shorts.
“Hi, honey.”
“Hi, Mom.”
“I thought you had a match today.”
“Uh-uh. I don’t play my first match till tomorrow. I got a bye.” A bye meant you automatically moved past the first round, where almost everyone else started out. Often the seeded players got a bye.
“What round are you in?”
“Round of sixteen.”
A lot of kids were gone now, playing tournaments out of state, some up in Canada, some off with their families for summer vacation.
“What are you going to do then?”
“Go to Hallie’s. To play on the trampoline. See ya!”
Elizabeth watched her leave.
“I love you,” Elizabeth called. “Wave to me.” Their old first-grade parting: I love you—wave to me. Rosie turned and waved.
EMPTINESS descended. She made herself a cup of coffee. Streams of slanting sunlight poured in through the kitchen window, and she considered the incredible soup of particles illuminated by the shafts of light, the dust and fibers and fuzzes. She pushed herself up from the table, not sure where she would go once she was standing. She idly cleaned up the kitchen, watching movies in her head of James coming home, making love, Rosie on the trampoline, breaking her neck, Rae at the loom, weaving.
The phone rang, and assuming it was Rae, Elizabeth picked up the phone and said, “Hi, honey.”
There was silence on the other end. Elizabeth’s eyes widened. “Hello?” she asked.
After a moment, a gravelly male voice said, “Rosie’s late.”
“What? For what? Who is this?”
“For her match.”
“Who is this?” asked Elizabeth. “I thought she had a bye.”
“No. She’s late.”
Her mouth opened as an image of Luther appeared in her mind and seized her. It was Luther’s voice, the voice of a shade, of a dirty white spook. She looked around quickly, as if he were hiding in her kitchen studying her. Her heart raced, and she couldn’t catch her breath for a moment; he had looked up their number, felt bold enough to call. She felt like she was tipping over, like she might fall to the ground; she sank into one of the kitchen chairs.
“Leave us alone,” she cried, but heard only a dial tone. Terror lapped at her like little waves. She felt violated, as if a Peeping Tom had been watching her go about her business. Neither the old wooden walls of this house nor the love of their friends could protect them; the walls could be scaled, the house invaded. She looked at the phone in her hand until it went dead. She got up and went to the kitchen window with a sudden conviction that he was across the street, watching her through binoculars in a phone booth that had sprung up like a mushroom overnight. But no one was out on the street at all, and there was no phantom phone booth. Elizabeth tried to think, tried to figure out what to do next. She wanted to hear Rosie’s voice, be sure she was okay. She called Hallie’s house. Hallie’s mother answered.
“Hi, it’s Elizabeth. I need to talk to Rosie.”
“Well, you’ve just missed them. They’ve already left.”
“What do you mean? Left for where?”
“For the city, remember? They were taking the ferry in.”
Elizabeth froze.
“Rosie went to the city?”
“I thought you knew. I thought you’d given permission.”
“When are they due back?”
“I said I’d pick them up at the 2:30 ferry.”
“Let me pick them up instead,” said Elizabeth, beginning to tremble. She said good-bye and hung up the phone. Goddamn lying little shit, she thought. God almighty.
She peered back out the kitchen window, surveying the picture-perfect neighborhood, the sun on the trees, brilliant gardens. How had this horrible man become a part of their lives, watching her daughter—dark and smelly, leering, silent—how had things gotten so out of hand that he felt emboldened to call them at their house, as if he had the right to keep tabs on Rosie? It was open season on children these days, especially girls. There was no safety out there anymore. A girl in the next town over had been missing a week; she’d left to go visit a friend one day after her swimming lesson and hadn’t been seen since. A little boy from Kentfield had been found dead, stuffed in a kiln, last winter. Anxiety covered her like sweat. She called Rae, whose answering machine was on, and hung up. She walked upstairs to Rosie’s room, just because it was the only contact she could have right now with her, and opened the door. It looked like a cross between a rummage sale and a homeless camp under a bridge, and it smelled like the latter, vile beyond all imagining. It stank; it smelled like sweat and decay, dirty concrete, like rain on the sidewalk. She took Rosie’s racket out of its case and looked up at the wall, bright with newspaper photos of great women players, framed pictures of Andrew, inspirational sayings culled from magazines over the years, little weavings Rae had made her, dried flowers, and a bumper sticker that
said, “Oh, lighten up,” which finally caused Elizabeth to snap. Before she knew what she was doing, she had lifted up the racket and smashed it against the wall so hard that it left a gouge in the Sheetrock. She gaped at the hole, tottered, then smashed the racket on Rosie’s unmade bed, the smelly wrinkled sheets full of crumbs. They bounced when struck, like water on a hot skillet. She stared at one of the pictures of Andrew; he was barefoot, in khaki shorts, his long, long legs dangled over the side of a broken-down chair. He was laughing, squinting a bit crazily in the late afternoon light. Tears sprang to her eyes. After a moment she shuffled out raggedly, holding the racket over her shoulder like a hobo’s stick without the bandanna.
She went downstairs to the kitchen. She sank into a chair at the kitchen table. Trying to slow down her breathing, she tipped her head back to stare at the ceiling. Finally she located the number for the tournament desk and called to say that Rosie was sick with the flu.
“Well, I wish you’d let us know earlier, then,” said the voice primly. “Her opponent has been waiting for twenty minutes.” And Elizabeth saw herself threaten the person with the racket she now held poised like a blackjack.
She gripped her forehead as if suddenly stricken with migraine. The corners of her mouth twitched downward.
OUTSIDE the kitchen window, her roses, the valiant old girls, still blooming apricot and lavender and red, looked funky and worn out, as if after having produced so many magnificent flowers, they just wanted to go to sleep. The harvest is past, she thought, remembering words Rae had read them once from the Bible. “The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.”
After a while, she began to wander from room to room, straightening things up, sitting down and staring dazedly off into space, getting up again to arrange books on the bookshelves. She worked her way upstairs, where she put clean sheets on her bed, and then without actually meaning to, she climbed in and pulled the sheets over her head. She lay in the dark for quite a while, dazed, and then dozed off and on until noon.
HE was walking toward her on the beach. They were each wearing a pair of his Levi’s, even though she was five months pregnant. He was walking toward her from the Bolinas end of Stinson Beach. His hair was windblown, and his nose was a little sunburned. The sun was going down, and she had fallen asleep after sharing a bottle of wine with him in the late afternoon. No one knew back then that you shouldn’t drink when you were pregnant. He had brought along a book of poems, Auden, to read to her. “You shall love your crooked neighbour With your crooked heart,” she remembered all day, and it gave her such relief. Andrew was as good-natured as an easy baby. Walking toward her from the spit at the far end of the beach where the water in the channel rushed back out to the sky, where gulls cried and pelicans skimmed by impossibly low and graceful, he held out his fists to show her he was hiding a treasure from her, something he’d found on his walk. It was early fall, and the beach was almost deserted because everyone else was back in school. He walked toward where she sat on the blue blanket in the sand with the sun going down behind her, and you would have thought she was an apparition or at least a movie star by his look of entrancement. He sat down beside her with his hands closed around the treasure and he asked her to pick a hand, and she picked the left, and he uncurled his finger to present her with a sand dollar. She smiled and began to study it, shake it to hear the sand inside; it was perfect and whole, the size of a silver dollar. “That’s the one I found for you,” he said, and she went back to studying it, smelling its salty sea smells, but he cleared his throat to get her attention and jutted his chin toward the right hand, which was still in a fist, and she tapped it too, and he opened his hand to show her a second sand dollar, this one the size of a quarter, the one he had found for the baby.
THERE was an hour left before Rosie’s ferry was to arrive, and she drove into the downtown area to do errands. She felt deeply confused, eager to see Rosie alive yet filled with a need to punish her for lying, for giving Luther an opening into their lives. It took her nearly twenty minutes to find a parking space, and once she did, she needed to sit there collecting herself before she could go into the hardware store, the nursery, the market. Car engines revved, sirens tore through the steady drone of traffic. A woman with a large, serious-looking baby in a backpack opened the passenger door next to Elizabeth’s car, hoisted her daughter out of the backpack and into the child’s car seat. While the mother went to get into her own seat, the baby girl frowned at Elizabeth and banged the front of her car seat, like a Supreme Court justice, a rattle as her gavel.
Nothing was in stock anywhere; everywhere she went, all the petty functionaries of the world conspired to thwart her from behind their counters, behind the bulwarks they’d established against encroaching chaos, real and imagined, serving their long lines with grim self-importance. She bought the makings for chicken cacciatore, which she could cook and heat up for James when he finally got home. And then at the checkout line, she happened to glance out the window of the Safeway as she waited for her total, and she gaped as Luther, or someone with Luther’s exact shape and shuffle, walked into the convenience store across the street. Her mind spun, and she thought about bolting; then she turned slowly to the sound of the checker’s voice, telling her how much she owed, and as if under water, she handed him two twenties and checked back to make sure Luther, or the man who looked like him, had not escaped. She imagined Andrew talking to Luther, firmly but respectfully telling him he must leave their little family alone entirely. James should be here, taking care of them. Did Luther know he was away? She was going to have to go talk to him herself; no, she was going to threaten him with arrest or grave bodily harm, she was going to shout into his face that he must stay away from her child.
Stepping toward the doorway, she looked across the parking lot to the convenience store on the other side of the street. She could see Luther’s dark shape at the checkout counter, and she stood taller, drawing herself up to give herself courage. She also noticed a young Mexican couple on the pay phone just outside where she now stood, and she saw their child in ragged clothes, a boy of three or four, hanging on the little divider between the automatic door and the phones, waiting for them to finish. She stepped toward the area rug by the exit door just as the boy stepped down onto a four-inch strip of pavement to the left of the door’s arc, and without registering what he had done, because she was hurrying to confront Luther at the cash register, she stepped onto the rug, and the door swung open and smacked the child on the side of the head.
Elizabeth and the child both yelped. The child covered his head with his arms, folding his elbows around his face as if to ward off further blows. Elizabeth cried out apologies and finally thought to step off the mat. His mother flocked to him, talking softly while waving to Elizabeth not to worry, not to see them, look away, look away, and the little boy wept. When they lifted him off the mat and stepped away from the door, she rushed out to their side.
The mother lifted her stunned child into her arms, gentling him, as Elizabeth kept saying again and again how sorry she was, and then they turned and walked away quickly, almost running.
Elizabeth stood there feeling skinned. When she finally looked across the street, Luther, or the man with Luther’s shape, was gone.
ELIZABETH stood in the shadows at the far end of the dock, watching people pour off the ferry. Finally the girls came traipsing toward her, both of them now in Hallie’s tube tops, both wearing Hallie’s makeup, Hallie looking like a thirteen-year-old hooker, Rosie trying to. Elizabeth felt afraid in the cool salty breeze.
When Rosie looked up, expecting to see Hallie’s mother but seeing her own instead, the color drained from her face. Elizabeth shook her head with disgust. Rosie craned forward almost imperceptibly to take a reading, and Elizabeth looked away, as if it pained her too much to look at her own daughter.
“Hi?” Rosie asked when she drew near.
“You’re in disgrace, Rosie Ferguson. You blew off a match—”
“No, you didn’t. And I know you didn’t. How? Because you know who called me? Guess.”
Rosie shrugged. Hallie was looking around for a means of escape.
“Guess.”
“Mommy, I have no idea.”
“I’m so angry! I’m as angry as I’ve ever been.”
“Mommy, what’s the matter with you? Why are you being like this?”
“I want to smack you!”
“Mommy!” Rosie looked with profound anxiety from her mother to Hallie and back to her mother.
“Luther.”
“Luther called?”
“Yes. To tell me you were late for your match. Let’s go,” she said to the two girls. “Let’s start walking.”
“I have to wait for my mother,” said Hallie.
“You wish,” said Elizabeth.
THEY drove along the main street of town across the bay from San Francisco, past the waterfront, past the old railroad yard. The girls sat in the back seat, looking furtively at each other from time to time, long sideways glances, and then out the window, and then at each other again.
“I hate it that you lied, you rotten little shit,” said Elizabeth, gripping the wheel with both hands, avoiding the rearview mirror because she did not want to see her daughter’s eyes, full of deceit, and she did not want her daughter to see her own, full of hate.
They pulled up at Hallie’s house, and the girls looked at each other. After a moment, Rosie waved. Hallie held an imaginary phone to her ear, and Rosie nodded.
“Forget it,” said Elizabeth. “Rosie’s not going to be on the phone again for about six weeks.”
“Mom!”
“Thank you for the ride, Mrs. Ferguson.”
“Call me Elizabeth,” she sighed.
WHEN they got to their own house, Elizabeth got out without saying a word and slammed the door.
Rosie got out and ran after her. “What are we going to do now?”