Crooked Little Heart

by Anne Lamott

  “Honey, are you okay?” her mother asked. Rosie looked down into her lap. Couldn’t they see that she wasn’t okay, that she was troubled and lonely and still full of secrets? What did she have to do, go hang herself in the upstairs bathroom for them to notice how sad she was?

  “I think I’ll go on up to my room,” she said, and got to her feet. She really didn’t even know exactly what was troubling her, whether it was the cheating, or Simone being pregnant, or if it was loneliness, a huge heavy loneliness. She was afraid people would say she was feeling sorry for herself.

  “Shall I come upstairs with you for a while?” Rae asked, putting down her book, but Rosie shook her head. She had been noticing all night that Rae liked sitting near Lank on the couch, being quiet, reading, like James and Elizabeth, like the couple that everyone else was except her.

  Simone was a couple with her baby.

  “You sleepy tonight, baby?” James asked, and she shrugged.

  “I think I’ll lie down and rest for a while,” she said, and couldn’t believe it when all the adults nodded, as if this were a perfectly reasonable thing for her to do and not the oddest thing she could think of to say. God! Lie down and rest? A thirteen-year-old, at 9:30?

  She lay on the bed, closed her eyes, and pretended she was in a coffin. She was wearing a white satin nightgown and lipstick. Someone had put one perfect red rose on her chest, beneath her crossed hands. People were sobbing—her mother especially, and J. Peter Billings. Their tears dripped onto her pale, peaceful face. The church was filled with tearful kids, from school and the tournaments, dressed in their Sunday best, holding lighted candles, swaying in grief. It was so sad that she started to cry herself and lay there wiping at her eyes for quite some time, feeling like her heart would break.

  After a while she got up and put a Eurythmics tape in her boom box and turned it on loud, waiting for someone to come upstairs and yell at her. But James only yelled from downstairs for her to turn it down, and she did.

  She stomped around the room for a moment, until she remembered what her mother used to call when she was younger. “There’s the angry clubfoot again,” she had heard her say. It used to really hurt her feelings, but they didn’t care. They never thought of anyone but themselves.

  She sat in her room and thought about cleaning it up, but lay down on her bed instead. She imagined various tragedies, saw herself in a hospital bed in traction, her mother and James and Rae and Simone and Hallie in a circle around her, weeping with relief that she was going to live. She saw herself on a gurney in an ambulance, bleeding nearly to death from knife wounds, smiling a tiny battered sliced-up jack-o’-lantern smile at her devastated mother, winking to say, I’ve always loved you, Mom. She saw herself with her eyes swollen shut, purple and black, in the wreckage of a burning car, dragging a small child away in her arms, her legs crushed beneath her, clumsy as a seal on dry land. Then she imagined shielding the small child with her body as the car exploded with thermonuclear intensity, felt and smelled her skin blister. She got up and went to the mirror. It was so hopeless. She was so homely, with horrible ropy hair, teeth as big as shingles, and eyes so blue they appeared crossed. She squinted at her reflection to see what she’d look like with her eyes swollen shut, and she practiced small smiles. Then she opened her eyes and pinched her left cheek. A pink blotch appeared. She pinched it harder, until the skin reddened. Her eyes watered, and her heart stirred with a gasp of tenderness for this girl in the mirror, with all her problems and heartache, her dead daddy, pregnant friend—skinny and lonely as a heron. She stared at her reflection, reaching up to stroke some hair off her forehead and then down the side of her face with the back of her hand, softly, gently. Then, as if in slow motion, without being particularly aware of doing so, she made a fist and hit herself on the cheekbone. Tears sprang to her eyes, and she cried out softly. It took her a moment to catch her breath. Then, closing her left eye, she made a fist, turned it all the way toward her so that the knuckle of her middle finger was aimed right at her, and hit herself again. This time she didn’t make a sound. She could hardly breathe. She touched her cheek gingerly, felt its heat, felt that it was already swelling, looked in the mirror and saw that her left eye was already closing. She looked up on the bookshelf above her, located just the right trophy, got it down, and used the corner of the base to hit herself on the cheekbone one more time.

  WHEN she appeared downstairs, holding one side of her face with both hands, she had to pretend to be crying before anyone even looked up. Then everyone bolted to her side.

  “Rosie, Rosie! What happened?”

  “One of my trophies fell off the shelf,” she said, whimpering. “I knocked against it, and looked up, and it just hit me on the eye.”

  “In the eye, or near it, on your face?” James said, trying gently to pull her fingers away so he could have a look. And her mother led her to the couch, where she was made to sit while Lank and Rae prepared an ice pack and a cool drink of water. James sat beside her, holding her with one arm, peering at her with enormous concern.

  “Wow,” he said admiringly, his face creased with worry and love. “You’re going to have some shiner.”

  HER cheekbone was indeed bruised and somewhat swollen in the morning. She assured her parents that she was really okay, and in fact, she felt more like herself than she’d been in weeks. She felt visible, for one thing, and someone deserving special care. Everyone noticed her, everyone was sympathetic. The boys at the club paid more attention to her than they ever had before, and Rosie dropped her eyes and smiled down at the ground, basking in their concern and admiration.

  She felt very powerful, like she was really around, really somewhere, no longer floating, lost and invisible, but back inside her head, grounded, looking out through her eyes, calm, loved. It was great.

  There was still some swelling the next morning when she got up, but the bruises were already fading. So she took a ballpoint pen and colored in a circle on the palm of her left hand, then wet it with spit, as if making a paste, and dabbed a little on her face, lightly rouging her cheek in blue.

  “Oh, I think it’s worse today,” her mother groaned when Rosie appeared for breakfast. Rosie smiled bravely.

  “It feels a little better, though,” she said.

  James invited her into town to do errands that morning with the promise of a hot fudge sundae at the other end, and when the man behind the counter at the hardware store looked up at her and whistled, James said, “Yeah, well, you oughta see the other guy.”

  The next morning there was only a slight sense of tightness, only the faintest bruise. Rosie sort of wished she could have it forever, or something else like it—a broken leg, for instance. A cast and crutches—people always flocked around the kids who turned up at school on crutches. But still, she felt better than she had in a long time. She and her mother went out to a diner for pie two days later, where they sat in a booth and had to listen to this young mother, maybe eighteen or so, carrying around her squalling baby. “It’s like a teakettle,” Rosie said, and this made Elizabeth laugh, and they looked at each other and shook their heads, and Rosie rolled her eyes, and Elizabeth heaved a sigh, and neither said Simone’s name but they were together in a skeptical, boggled space, and Rosie felt close to her mother again.

  THEN James and Elizabeth had a little fight at a tournament.

  James had insisted on coming along but could hardly sit still, getting up every twenty minutes or so to check his messages. Elizabeth gave Rosie encouraging looks whenever Rosie looked over. Sometimes James was sitting beside her, watching, pulling for Rosie, other times his seat was empty. Elizabeth was simultaneously annoyed with him and sympathetic. He had not heard from Mel, the producer of his radio essays, in over four days, after having sent him a new piece he hoped to read on the air. He had a short story at The New Yorker that an editor had asked to take a look at two months before and a tentative offer of a film option on his first book, and he went off to call in for messages twice in
one hour.

  “What time is it?” he asked Elizabeth, when he returned a few minutes later.

  “Nearly two.”

  “Then I’m not going to hear from New York at all today.”

  “Look, as it turns out, at eleven you weren’t going to hear. At one you weren’t going to hear. You’ve spent five hours today waiting to hear, when it was not something that was going to happen.”

  “Elizabeth? Give me a break.”

  “I hate for you to go through this. It drives me crazy. It’s like Rae waiting to hear from one of her possible fiancés. It saps her of her strength. It keeps her stuck in fantasy. I mean, especially with Mel—he’s a sadist, James. He’s passive aggressive. He’s someone Rae would date! Can you imagine having to wait for one of the men Rae would date to validate you as a writer?”

  “This is about trying to earn a living. We have a daughter with a very expensive habit. We have bills.”

  “Darling. This is not about Rosie. It’s about your self-esteem. That’s all. We’ll scrape by however things shake down in New York. Do you want to know what I think? I think New York is the mother you wish would approve of you.”

  “Spare me the details, darling. Just tell me what to do, O sighted master.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Honestly.”

  “Just pay attention. Watch tennis. Enjoy my company.”

  James closed his eyes and let his chin drop onto his chest. Elizabeth resisted the urge to roll her eyes; he looked like he had just found out he had cancer.

  “But, Elizabeth, you know how it is. It’s like a broken tooth my tongue can’t stay away from.”

  “I think you try to get New York to love you the way you should have been loved when you were little. But New York is huge and inscrutable and narcissistic; it’s so self-involved that your needs and wants are irrelevant. Your needs and wants are funny to New York. It laughs about them. It laughs itself sick.”

  “I know,” he said. “You’re absolutely right.” And then twenty minutes later he went to check his messages again.

  ROSIE did not know that this had been going on until later that night, when she listened in on a phone call to Rae. She went to her room, left the door open, and put on a rap tape, too loudly, but Elizabeth just closed the kitchen door without saying anything to her. Rosie sighed and studied her made-up face in the mirror—the blush, the gloppy black dye on already black lashes. She leaned forward and kissed the reflection of her lips, closing her eyes, tilting her head, smiling. Then she wiped the pink lips off the glass, or at any rate rubbed it into a cloudy smear, so it made her think of someone’s lips who is a little drunk and has been kissing, like Simone that night she got pregnant, when she finally emerged from the boat, her lipstick smeary and askew. Her face had been all—what was that word—sultry, all hot and humid like the weather was now. She’d looked like one of the high school girls who sat in cars with older boys and smoked, and she’d looked at Rosie that night like Rosie was her little baby sister, sent by their mom to make her come home. It did not occur to Rosie to go get a sponge and clean the mirror. It did occur to her to smash herself in the eye again. But as she raised the trophy up she stopped and reconsidered. It was too soon to do it again. People might figure it out. She would have to think of something else. In the meantime, she stared at herself with sorrowful eyes, holding the metal trophy, the gold-plated woman about to serve so confidently. She studied the gold-plated woman, her look of triumph, of victory earned honestly; and then she looked back in the mirror, at her own sorry face, the look of sadness, the face of a cheater, and she couldn’t decide if she looked more like Mary, the mother of Jesus, or a baby monkey at the zoo.

  eleven

  ELIZABETH went back out into the neighborhood on the first of August and registered three Democrats to vote. This was about all she had to show for the last two months, but still, presidential elections had been won on less than a vote per precinct, and she came home enthusiastic about the day. She went directly to James’s office to tell him how great it had been to be out in the sun, trying to be of help. She had excused herself for interrupting and begun to tell him about all she had seen, but he had looked at her almost wearily, and she ended up feeling that all of her excitement was going into a drain around her feet. She felt hurt and tight, needing an arm around her shoulder, but James was oblivious to this; he stayed near the phone, waiting for the right call.

  Rosie and Simone were at Hallie’s together, Rosie on the trampoline and Simone, Elizabeth imagined, sitting in a patio chair with her hands folded over her stomach. When Rosie called at six to say they’d both been invited to spend the night, Elizabeth’s first inclination was to say no.

  “Why don’t you guys come home, and we’ll go out to a movie?”

  “God, Mom,” Rosie said, as if her mother had proposed they come over and cut out paper dolls.

  In the end, Elizabeth said okay, though the night then loomed ahead of her like a dim cave to be entered alone. James came out for dinner and went to great lengths to be civil and to ask her questions about her afternoon, but it was too little too late. She felt alone. It was not that they were not on the same wavelength—that seemed too linear—it was more that they were not in the same wave field, that wonderful net they could sometimes bounce around in.

  She didn’t say anything that night, thinking he would pick up on the hurt and comfort her and meet her, but he didn’t, and so by the next day she was not trusting him. She realized how lost she was now and how lost everything else was too—the relationship, its harmonies, its ease.

  She called Rae.

  “Can we go for a walk?” she asked. “Do you have plans for today?”

  “Well,” said Rae, “I have to finish a couple of weavings by the end of next week.”

  “Okay,” said Elizabeth. Her voice quavered slightly, and she cleared her throat to steady it.

  “Come over!” said Rae. “We can talk while I weave.”

  But Elizabeth said no, no. Rae needed to work. And she had work to do in the garden.

  THE fog rolled in. Elizabeth was glad for the thick mist, through which only a weak and distant light shone. Most people thought of sunshine as being great weather, but sunshine was pitiless. You could see every pore. Fog, though, was a cloak for the psyche. The poor old mind had so much to do all day, all its machinations and things to remember, its fear, the incessant juggling; God, it was so great to stop.

  She began to pull the weeds that grew around the roses. Once she looked up at the window of James’s study and saw that he was watching her solemnly. Then he smiled and waved. She waved back. He bent his head, as if in prayer, returning to his keyboard. She studied her succulents, with their leathery purple-black leaves. They looked like something you’d find in an S-and-M fern bar. She noticed a little purple guy who seemed a bit dry, and as if pouring an old ancient mariner another rye at the bar, she gave him a little water, imagined him closing his eyes and inhaling deeply with relief.

  ALL that day and the next, Elizabeth guarded the words that had recently flowed so freely. Her voice got tight first, and then James’s followed, although life went on; the cooking continued, the serving, eating, cleaning. She had learned over the years that you didn’t mess with the surface when things were like this, because that was all that was left. So there was no more yelling. All the fluidity that was their life together had hardened; if one of them yelled it might crack them both, leaving shards on the floor to step on. They needed a mutuality, anything that might bring them back into the same world, onto the same side, something to bat around together. But Rosie went off with Simone to the sectionals in Palo Alto, and the heartbeat of the house was more and more arrhythmic.

  A belly laugh could have rerhythmed the house. But there wasn’t one. The absence of what was supposed to be happening filled the house. They kept skirting this absence, which sat in the middle of the living room floor under a drop cloth; they gave it as wide a berth as possible.

&
nbsp; ROSIE checked in from Palo Alto. She had lost in the quarterfinals of the singles to someone ranked higher than she, and she had played great. She and Simone had won their quarterfinal doubles match. This was the first tournament in which Simone had played since her miscarriage scare; her doctor had said it was fine to play, and she was playing beautifully. “How are you?” Rosie asked.

  “Fine, darling,” said Elizabeth.

  But Rosie did not believe her. She could hear something in her mother’s voice, a nervousness, but she didn’t press because she didn’t want to come home. She was having too much fun. She hated herself for feeling this.

  ELIZABETH stood at the phone for a moment before hanging it up, and then she walked toward James’s study, wanting to reach out and give him some affection. But when she stepped inside, he barely looked up, even though he said, “Hello,” nicely. She looked at his back for a minute.

  “Whatcha doing?” she said.

  He cleared his throat and did not look at her. “Working.”

  “I’m just missing everyone, James. I feel so lonely tonight.”

  He began to shuffle things around on his desk, shoving a stack of notes over to one side, gathering loose paper clips together with a cupped hand.

  “I’m sorry about what I said. About Mel and New York.”

  “You know what?” he said, his face pinched and rather cold. “We live together and we’re close, and yet you say these things that really undermine me.” James shook his head. “I want to talk about this,” he said. “But I need to press on right now. I need to get this work done.”

  It was very scary. She felt once again how fragile their relationship was. There was such fear in not knowing how, when a retreat starts, it will ever end or ever reverse itself. And the hole was so huge, the hole of their discontinuity. Their marriage was a glass mountain, and here they had slid to the bottom, and she wanted to start climbing back up, with him climbing back on the other side, and they would check on each other’s progress, and there would be the very gradual getting back together. But no one took the first step uphill. She believed this would happen, because it always had, but two days later they were still sleeping on opposite edges of the bed.