by Anne Lamott
SIMONE was over for dinner after the girls got back from Palo Alto. Rosie looked into her mother’s face and tried to feel connected but her mother just looked kind, maybe a little sad. The eggs her mother was serving them from a platter were speckled black with bacon grease.
Simone began flinging herself around in conversation, the way she used to fling her body around. She ate like a horse, like a big fat peasant housewife in the Renaissance, and Rosie sneaked a glance down at her protruding belly, at the baby who was growing inside like a barnacle.
Simone reached for another piece of toast and spread an enormous amount of jam on it with elaborate care, in a back and forth motion like a carpenter spreading cement onto bricks. Taking a bite, she complimented Elizabeth for making such great toast, Rosie for having played so well that day, James for being such a famous writer.
Rosie was grateful for all that energy, which was filling the silences that had erupted in her parents’ lives like craters on the moon.
Simone pointed a crisp strip of bacon at James. “It must be fun to be famous,” Simone was saying to him, and Rosie saw that he was pleased, although it made him feel shy. “I have dreams of being famous myself,” she said. “For being an actress. I would love to win an Oscar. I’m not sure what I would say in my speech,” she said. “Because I’m not exactly sure what would move people most.
“I’m going to always make sure I’m not too selfish,” she continued, fluttering her eyelashes with indignation at the very thought, and James and Elizabeth exchanged a look of pleasure. Hope or something like it flickered like electricity inside Rosie—oh, they were loving each other again right that moment.
She turned to James and opened her mouth to speak, but Simone spoke first. “If you’re an actress, you usually have to marry a slime-ball.”
James turned to Simone. “Do you really imagine yourself married to a slimeball?”
“I think it goes with the territory, to tell you the truth, James. He’s rich, probably, let’s say, but he has affairs and he’ll beat me.”
In her mind Rosie suddenly saw a man raise his fist to strike Simone, and she cried out, “No!” But Simone studied the candle flame, mesmerized. “Nice people don’t marry actresses,” she said. “They marry housewives.”
THAT night after dinner, when Simone had gone home and Rosie was up in her room, she listened to her parents through the wall connecting them.
“I’m not in the mood, Elizabeth. I’m tired,” said James. “I just want to get some sleep.”
Here we go again, thought Rosie, lying on her bed with the door open, listening. She picked at her already ragged cuticles, at the tiny bumps on her face, then clasped her hands behind her neck so that her elbows covered her ears.
“So what’s wrong with that?” she heard James ask, sometime later. “He’s my goddamn employer!”
“What’s wrong is that Mel’s a monster. He’s Klaus Barbie. You get blackmailed by him and then you kiss his ass …”
Their voices were rising and rising, sliding around the walls into her brain.
“I do not kiss his ass. I just try to get him to let me know if the piece is going to run or not.”
“Then why do you always feel disgusting afterward?”
“How do you know I feel disgusting after?”
“Because you always go in and eat too much for the rest of that day. And you always want to have sex—or else refuse my advances—every night until you hear.”
“Stop it!” Rosie finally screamed. “Stop it!”
The house was quiet again. “God,” Rosie muttered. She scanned her room until her eyes rested on the photograph of her daddy, in the crummy old chair outside, smiling, gentle. He would never have yelled in such a pathetic way. He was always so dignified. Of course, maybe if he had lived to see her as a teenager …
She began to cry.
After a few minutes, she sniffled and picked up the book she was reading. It was about a beautiful old dog who’d gotten rabies. She wanted to go in and ask her mother if they’d ever had a dog; her dad had liked dogs, hadn’t he? But she knew better than to go into the bedroom now. She looked back at the photo of Andrew.
RAE called the next morning with desperation in her voice, and it bailed Elizabeth out, gave her something to do.
“Come over and garden with me,” Elizabeth insisted.
“I can’t,” said Rae. “I’ve discovered this little barbecue place that delivers, although unfortunately they won’t come more than three times a day.”
“Oh, honey. What’s the matter?”
“I called Mike.”
“Oh, no, no. What did he say?”
“He said he thought about me every day, that he’d been going crazy.”
“And what did you say?”
“I asked him to come over for dinner tonight. He said he could come tomorrow.”
“See? It’s never, never what or when you want. You want to see him tonight? Well, forget it. He needs to be in control.”
“But it was such short notice.”
“I’m coming to get you. There’s thirty-six hours until tomorrow night. And you need to really think about this.”
“I just really want to see him.”
“I’ll be there in half an hour.”
“JAMES,” said Elizabeth, in the doorway of his study, “Rae called Mike.”
“Was he home?” James asked. Elizabeth nodded. “Oh, shit. What are we going to do?”
“I’m going to go keep her company. Maybe we’ll go for a walk.”
“Okay. Tell her to hold out for cherish.” It was their code phrase for Rae. His eyes met hers.
“Okay. I’ll tell her.”
“I cherish you, Elizabeth.”
“I know you do.”
“It’s just that I have a bad personality.”
She came over to the desk and bent down to kiss the back of his head, and he reached behind him to pull her closer so that her nose was buried in his neck, and she smelled the faint scent of sweat, of James. She noticed him sneak a look at the page before him, but she didn’t pull away. The smell of his neck soothed her.
“I’m scared there’s something wrong with me, James.”
“There’s nothing wrong with you, Elizabeth. There’s nothing that wouldn’t get a great deal better if I wasn’t such a total asshole.”
ELIZABETH and Rae walked on the beach in the fog. Rae would have walked hand and hand if Elizabeth had let her. Neither of them said anything.
“The pain of being alone is so big sometimes,” said Rae. “It’s oceanic. Sometimes it’s dull and doesn’t command much attention. But right now it’s acute. I feel flayed.”
“I know.”
“But you don’t. You’ve had two great husbands.”
“Yeah, and one died violently, and one is a writer. But I never found a career. You’ve had this wonderful artistic life and lots of success. Everyone loves you, and they love your work. I envy that so much.”
“Oh, Elizabeth. I’m just dying. I want Mike to hold me.”
Farther down the beach, walkers turned into dream figures, shadowy and insubstantial.
“Let’s look at Mike for a second, okay, Rae? He always looked like he was about to become a giver, right? I mean, that’s what he does for a living. Of course, Mike as a professional giver and healer is like Richard Nixon as a Quaker.”
Rae laughed quietly.
“You’re a moth to the flame, though. Like Lucy with Charlie Brown and the football. Because that kind of inconsistency is always going to remind you in some really complicated way of your childhood. You get to hear ‘Home, Home on the Range’ playing softly in the background.”
“It’s better than being empty-handed.”
“Rae. It’s the call to the grave.”
“Maybe so,” said Rae. “But it also sounds like the dinner bell.” They trudged along the wet sand, the fog protecting them, masking them, as if it were trying to keep them in a dream.
R
OSIE got on her bike that foggy afternoon and started off down the road not knowing where she was headed. She was dressed all in black, from her black high-top sneakers to James’s Giants cap. She thought about going to the club, but it was no fun when Peter wasn’t around. He would be back in a week or so, and she fantasized about their reunion. She pedaled aimlessly along the sidewalks of her neighborhood, waving to acquaintances and to people she knew even less well, people she knew by sight but not by name.
Peter always gave her a bear hug when he’d been gone, then stepped back to size her up and see if she’d grown, even if it had just been a couple of weeks. It was one of their little jokes, something a father who traveled a lot would do. She smiled on the bike, peering up into his beautiful baby blue eyes, grinning with shyness and with being glad to see him. But he was glowering back, and she caught her breath. God, what if there was a message waiting for him on his answering machine? “Someone should tell you that one of your students cheats,” the message would say. “Rosie Ferguson cheats, she cheated against my kid. You shouldn’t be the last to know.” She pedaled faster and imagined steering the bike in front of an oncoming car, imagined the squeal of brakes, the crash. If she were in the hospital in traction, maybe he would know—maybe everyone would know—that she was sorry.
Her pulse pounded in her ears, hard, the Telltale Heart, and she pedaled faster, riding almost out of control; she still did not know where she was headed. But suddenly Simone’s face was on her mind, Simone who’d done something this summer that was maybe even worse than cheating. Rosie slowed her bike down, pedaled along for a moment, then turned in the direction of Simone’s house, practicing what she would say, silvery on the inside with panic.
“I NEED to tell you a secret, Simone,” Rosie said, standing in the doorway of Simone’s bedroom. There had never been and never would be a messier place than this room. Even Rosie’s looked relatively together compared to Simone’s. It was so bad that it was almost scary, especially when you tried to imagine the person who lived here having a baby. A baby could get lost in here, starve to death under a pile of tube tops. “I can’t tell you here,” said Rosie. “We need to be outside.”
The girls rode their bikes up to the site of the old Miwok Indian village. Now the area was mostly covered with houses, but there was still one side of a low hill that the town had preserved where nothing could be built; in the summer and fall the younger children still slid all the way down the hill on their butts, using sides of cardboard boxes like sleds. Charles used to bring her up here when she was little, and while she slid down the hill, he would find arrowheads and spearheads made of obsidian and scrapers made of antlers that the Indians used to clean the hides of deer and rabbit. He had found a whistle made of bone once but had given it to the museum.
Rosie got off her bike and sat with her back against an old oak tree, gnarled, battered and scarred as if it had been hit by lightning. The leaves were brown now in the summer, round and itchy looking, like moths. The Miwoks practically used to live on mush made out of mashed acorns. Rosie believed that she would have made a poor Indian; she did not actually even like oatmeal or Cream of Wheat. Also, she did not think it was playing fair to use scrapers made from antlers to clean deer hide. She spread her knees so she could study the clearing of soft dirt in front of her. She looked over at Simone, who was using her round belly as a worktable at which she was weaving a tiny pot holder of pine needles.
“So say it,” said Simone. “Say what the secret is.”
“I can’t.”
“What could be worse than what I did? Slutty old me?” Rosie gaped at Simone, surprised. Simone crinkled up her nose at Rosie, the way she did at boys sometime, and Rosie looked down. She began to fashion a village in the clearing for the little ants who were scurrying about, a mound of grass and flower petals for the ant children to use as a haystack, a pile of pebbles for cannonballs, a raft made of sticks on which to float down the river.
“What I did was the worst thing an athlete can do.”
Simone was silent at first; they could hear the shrill chirp of crickets in the afternoon heat.
“You’ll feel better if you just say it.”
Pedal and steer, pedal and steer; who would be holding on?
“Simone?”
“Uh-huh? Uh-huh, Rosie?”
“There were some matches this summer, when the people I was playing—Deb Hall once, Marisa DeMay—well, a few others, too, and they hit shots on really important points, like four games all, deuce, where if you won the game, you’d probably win the set. And even though I know you’re supposed to give your opponent the benefit of the doubt, I didn’t. I mean, all I did was to call these incredibly close shots—I mean incredibly close shots—out, when maybe there was a tiny chance that they were in. And I was sure, I was almost sure they were out—but you know, once or twice the girls acted like I was cheating them.”
“Well, that’s just ridiculous. I know you would never cheat, Rosie.”
“Well, the girls think I cheated.”
“That’s none of your business what the other girls think. That’s what my mother always says. It’s just your business what you think.”
“Yeah?”
Simone nodded. Rosie was buzzing inside with anxiety. She squinted at Simone for a moment.
“Simone?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I think I did cheat.”
Simone scowled. “Oh, Rosie. You didn’t cheat. That’s ridiculous. I’m your partner. Just stop that.”
Rosie opened her mouth, about to respond, and then she closed it again and dropped her head back so she could stare up through the ladder of branches above them. There were so many branches and so many leaves that a dozen feet up everything blurred and you could almost believe that the treetop disappeared into the clouds like a beanstalk.
“Does your mom know?” Simone asked after a while, as she wiped at her eyes with the back of her hands.
“Not yet. Hey. Why’re you crying?”
“Because I’m sad. And because it’s so great to not be the only person who messed up. It’s not so bad as when it’s just you.”
Rosie thought this over, nodded.
“Hey, Simone?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you think you still like me the same?”
“Like you mean before you told me?”
“Yeah.”
“I know I do. But I don’t actually think you cheated.”
An ant walked into a rose petal and then, like a little windup bumper doll, turned and scurried in another direction. “Simone,” Rosie said firmly. “I did.” She nodded, so Simone could see how solemn and true she was being. “I know just what I did, Simone, and I knew then, too. I could see their balls were in. They bounced in and they were so close and the point was so important to me right that second that I called them out.” She raised her shoulders to her ears in a slow shrug, took a long deep breath, and another. Simone looked at her like she was crazy at first, and then awe widened Simone’s face, and Rosie knew that Simone was beginning to believe her.
Rosie reached forward and began gathering up all the parts of her village, the grasses, the pebbles, the petals, the little black ants running all over; she gathered it all in the center as if for a giant bonfire. She had a strange feeling of calm, of balance, even as her heart raced. Her whole face was wreathed in apology, in shyness and shame, but she also felt something inside her, patient, attentive, wild, alert, like a wolf who was not hungry, who was not going to hurt anyone.
THAT evening James came into Elizabeth’s corner at the window seat and sat down at the far end.
“Is Rae okay?”
“Oh, yeah, sort of. She’s going to try and cancel Mike.”
“And you?”
“I’m kind of a mess, and I’m also okay. How about you?”
“I’m lonely—I’m missing you and I’m missing me. I’ll tell you what I’m missing most, Elizabeth. I always feel that you know what’s import
ant to me and that you will catch me when I fall. But if you don’t know what’s important to me, then how will you know when I’m falling?”
“I’m falling too, though, James.”
“But you mostly don’t act like it. That’s why I think it’s so hard for me to figure out what to do. You have us—me and Rosie and Rae and even Lank. You take care of us. You save us.”
“But who’s going to save me?”
“We are. I am. But I don’t know what to save you from.” She reached out to stroke his face and he closed his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly.
She did not feel that anything had changed, but she was glad for his warmth, for his kind attention. He wanted to crawl into her, she could tell, flooded with relief as he was to be on friendly terms again. Sex was the handy way to do it, the punctuation that says, We’ve come through this again. It wasn’t erotic so much as driven by something more mammalian, or maybe more marsupial. She relaxed into his body, and they began making love for comfort, not looking for the transports of sex where you want to lose yourself in the ether of it all. What they wanted was to find each other again and, in doing so, find themselves. Narcotized though she was by the sex and reconciliation, Elizabeth bolted awake from a dream at daybreak. In the endless silence of the neighborhood and the house, she felt weighed down by a blanket of dread and the sense that someone else was there, lurking in the corners, hidden in the blue-gray morning light of the bedroom. James was asleep beside her, but she looked around, gazing at the smoky shadows. She thought she felt Andrew’s presence, a gentle ghost the color of rain, standing out in its lightness against the obscurity of the dawn. But then she felt the shape grow murky, change from tall and straight to stooped, and she knew then that it was Luther who had been in the room, if only in her dream.
She saw him leaning against a windowpane, stubbing out a cigarette in the soil of a potted ivy on the windowsill. She could smell the smoke, watched him give her a crooked smile, like he knew something important he wasn’t going to share.