by Anne Lamott
“What is going on here?” Rosie demanded. “Get off the floor, Mom.”
“Get out of my room,” Elizabeth said.
“I thought he was hurting you!” She slammed the door behind her and stormed down the stairs.
ELIZABETH and James didn’t speak for the rest of the day. Rosie stayed over at Rae’s, and James slept on the couch.
All night Elizabeth, in the dark alone, heard a poem playing in her head, as if on a radio whose signal she was suddenly beginning to receive. James James said to his mother, “Mother,” he said, said he: “you must never go down to the end of the town if you don’t go down with me.” She remembered listening from the doorway when Andrew, holding Rosie on his lap, read it to her. She remembered the exact sound of his voice, low in timbre, soft and kind, and she remembered hearing the poem again after Andrew died, before she met James. Now she kept turning her head up toward the sound of the poem playing, and then she would realize that it was playing somewhere inside her, but far away.
RAE had come to get Rosie when she called. Driving back to her cottage, though, she disclosed that Lank had stopped over that night and would still be there when they got back. Rosie said, “Lank is at your house?” It was such a strange concept, as if Rae had casually announced that Veronica had dropped by.
He’d never been by for a visit before, she said, although they spoke on the phone quite frequently now, like friends, and then tonight she’d been weaving when she heard someone outside call her name. Looking out her front window, she discovered Lank in her garden on an ancient rusty black one-speed bike like the one Einstein tooled around town on. And so she had invited him in for tea.
Rosie felt her eyes squint with disappointment. “What what what?” Rae demanded.
“I was going to ask if it was okay if I spend the night.”
“Of course you can spend the night. I want you to. Lank wasn’t going to, honey.”
Lank’s old bike was indeed leaning against the wall by the front door of Rae’s house, but Rosie didn’t see him when she stepped inside. The smell of the fibers was always so strong when you first walked into Rae’s cottage. Sometimes, like tonight, they smelled like grains; they smelled like oatmeal.
Lank banged his head on the top of the bathroom door as he came out a moment later, and everyone gasped at the soft thud. He held up one hand like a traffic cop to stop Rosie and Rae from their worry, and covered his forehead with the other, his brow so broad that his hand did not entirely cover it. “I’m fine,” he said, blinking as if he had just woken from a nap, slightly dazed, looking as wise as babies sometimes do.
He was very quiet company. He said that he knew Elizabeth and James were having a bad time because he talked to James every day, but he knew also that it would pass. The three of them sat around and they talked about things for a while—nothing in particular, movies, books, food. There was a Bible on the pillow in the window seat. Rosie looked around the room. There was something new on the loom, much lighter, birds in rich blue and shimmery yellows, cotton and silk, no wool. The colors bounced off the silk and came to meet you.
“What are you making?”
“A shawl for your mother. Fall will be here soon.”
“What is the secret you wove in this one?”
“A dried petal from one of her roses. It’s a little scratchy; you can get up and feel it if you want.” Rosie went to the weaving, held up a hand, and looked to Rae for directions. “There, underneath that first yellow bird. Feel it?” Rosie nodded. “ ‘The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.’ I came upon that in Jeremiah the day I started this weaving. It’s a line I read to your mom once that she seemed to like, and I thought, Let’s weave in a little sorrow. It seemed like that would make it more healing than just a whole lot of happy colors.”
Rosie kept fingering the rose petal. She could feel its crisp edge; it felt like a scab. There was a beautiful clay wall hanging over the loom, of a young Madonna, her head wrapped in an indigo scarf that draped down to her chest to shield the little baby. Mary was only a teenager. How old was she when she had Jesus? Rosie wondered. She looked up into Mary’s downcast eyes, crossed her own slightly to blur the vision, to see Simone in the indigo scarf. She felt all this lust inside her. She felt gooey and greasy from longing and confusion. Simone must have too, out there on the boat; she must have known the boy didn’t love her, she’d hardly ever even really talked to him before. How much greasier could you feel than to be drunk and have a guy put his penis in you? A phrase came to her: the fruits of sin. Rae never talked like that, but Rosie knew that phrase, the fruits of sin. All of a sudden here’s a slut and a beautiful baby, so now the mother looks like a saint, even if she’s a slut mother—not that Simone is a slut, because Simone was her best friend and a really sweet person, maybe a little dumb even though she couldn’t help it, but still, all she meant was that it was like having all that lust that you’re so afraid of, and all of a sudden it’s on display, and then you get to be a mother. Out of your sluttiness comes a beautiful baby. It was like what Rae said was the whole point of making beautiful cloth—taking some yarn that everyone thought was so ugly and weaving it into a sweet piece of your picture. Rosie came out of the daydream to look back over to where Lank and Rae were sitting.
Lank was starting to tease Rae a little, and she was teasing back, kind of cranky in a light way, and Lank sounded just like James, this friendly complaining banter, and Rae was doing it back, but Rosie could feel the edginess of it, the scab of the petal hidden beneath the silk bird, and Rosie turned to them and said in this tiny voice like Tweety Bird, this little voice that shamed her, “I need you not to fight,” and just like that, just like that, they stopped.
THE next morning, James came into their room early. Sun poured in shiny and white through the windows from behind the leafy branches of their trees. Elizabeth opened her eyes. This was the part she hated, the moments of first waking up, of having to come to. The room was so tidy though, and that made her feel safe, and she realized before she saw him that he had been taking care of the house, straightening up, keeping things together.
He looked like hell, so tired. There were more crow’s-feet around his eyes. When had that happened? she wondered.
“I miss you,” he said. “I feel like something is slipping away from us, and you seem unable to help me stop it. I want us to make up and have a good marriage and be best friends, but I have to tell you something.” His words came out fast, as if there were just a moment in which to say them, and he was sitting so close to her that she could feel his breath on the side of her face. “You know, sometimes I feel like I’m married to both you and Andrew—it’s as if Andrew is hidden underneath the house in a thick canvas body bag. All of a sudden, sometime this year, I felt like he came back to live with us. And you—you won’t let anything take the body bag away. And I’m fucked up about having done something wrong—not because I slept with someone else five years ago, when you and I were dating, for Chrissakes. To me it wasn’t a big deal. It didn’t mean anything. But I know I was a total shit to keep on lying about it. It must have felt like Gaslight to you; it must have made you feel like you were crazy.” He looked up at her for a moment, seeking her eyes, but then he lowered his own. “I did do it. I did it, and I know that it messed with you. I do. And maybe that little secret, that lie, is something in me I had to hold on to, that I couldn’t give up. I don’t know why. But I don’t have it in me right now to do a deep archaeological dig with you. And I can’t do the digging all by myself. And I am definitely not the person you’re going to allow to take that body bag out of this house. I know that, and I don’t know what to do. And I’m so tired. I just want you back.” He lay down beside her, so they were facing each other, and he put his knees against hers; the soft skin and sharp bones of their legs formed a sort of bridge.
She rested her head back against the pillow and stared at the ceiling. Time moved slowly, silently.
“Thank you,”
she said. Neither of them said anything for some time. “But if you want me back,” she continued finally, “you have to let me go. Maybe that’s not what you have in mind. Maybe you just want me to absolve you and to snap out of this thing. But what I want is for you to release me from the tyranny.”
“What tyranny?”
“The tyranny of your attention and will.”
James continued to lie on his side in silence, knees against his wife’s. After a while she reached out her hand and stroked his soft wild hair. Then some familiar brown-bag miracle occurred, one that had occurred before after fights and estrangement, where she began to feel as if water had been wearing away at the stone of their being stuck and that finally there was a little channel flowing through her—of resignation, and a fierce desire for ease.
“Want to take a nap with me?” she asked.
“I’m just going to lie with you a moment. Then I’m going to get to work.”
After he left she pulled the covers up over her head. There was no air under the covers, but she did not want to surface. Rae dreamed that marriage would save or fix her, like James dreamed that fame and fortune would fix him. And life with Andrew had felt like that, like she had been saved and whole, like there were few sharp edges. But Andrew had been so easy, unambitious and mellow. They drank together and so were often slightly anesthetized. Things were less real, more like a dream—and there were no teenagers in the family.
She could hear James working in his office. Under the sheets, she opened her eyes and could see that there was light on the other side of where she was.
If marriage was a comforting garment you could wrap around you, a fight could rip it loose and leave you standing bare and alone in a high wind, the high wind of the messes of your marriage, all that was frayed and grubby. Too many harsh words spoken, and too much unsaid, too many compromises snatched at the garment, leaving it grubby and frayed. It was so hard, though, after a fight, because one hardly had the strength or desire even to bend down and pick up the garment at your feet. But then when you did, it would feel warm and heavy and have the smell of your beloved, which is so incredible and familiar and also a little rank, with the mammalian essence of life and the sweat of battle.
four
ROSIE was walking the six blocks home from Simone’s one night not long after. Simone had really begun to show. She had pulled up her baggy T-shirt that morning so Rosie could admire the hard mound of belly below breasts that were already swollen. Rosie had been unable to breathe again until Simone pulled the shirt back down. Veronica was talking about taking them to live in Squaw Valley, having the baby there, away from the prying eyes of the people of Bayview. Jason, the baby’s father, had not called Simone once, although Veronica had recently gone with a lawyer to visit his parents. It was agreed that after the baby was born, if blood tests proved that Jason was the father, his family would give Simone some money every month.
She couldn’t stand that Simone would have a baby to love, that she herself would no longer be needed, although Simone assured her that everything would be exactly the same as before—“except,” she said brightly, “we’ll have a baby.” Rosie smiled. Yeah, sure. A horrible thought crossed her wild mind, an image of Simone bleeding profusely, losing the baby, miscarrying, just being old Simone again with Rosie.
She left, wanting to be alone, needing to walk and to be outside.
She hated to go home these days, her mother so quiet, James always hunched over his desk, working, and there was always the worry that the sportsmanship committee had called or written about the cheating, that they had tracked her down.
Dusk was settling on the town like a spell. San Francisco was coming to light: the lights of the bridges were on, like Christmas tree lights or necklaces; the lights of the buildings shone yellow, and the sky and the water of the bay shone orange, both reflecting the sun going away—orange like the saffron robes of Zen monks you saw around town sometimes. Everything glowed—the bay, the city, the sunset, the darkness of sky behind it. The only sound she heard was her own footsteps. Everyone was at home eating. James was playing basketball with Lank and the guys tonight. Maybe Rae was around; approaching the Greyhound bus depot, Rosie thought about calling her, so she wouldn’t have to go home to an empty house. But she didn’t have a quarter. She shouldn’t have walked through this part of downtown. It was the crummy part, no little boutiques or cafés, just the depot and a gas station that was closed and a laundromat. The streetlights had just come on, giving the sidewalks a ghostly, metallic sheen. She walked along feeling like she was on a street at twilight in some space station where people weren’t doing so well. She kicked a rock out of her path, glanced through the windows of the old bus depot. Her eyes widened with alarm.
There was Luther, sitting by himself on a bench in his raggedy windbreaker and dull black shoes, reading a Chronicle, waiting for his bus.
She stopped and stepped backward so that she was no longer in front of the windows. Her heart raced, and she leaned forward to spy more efficiently.
He didn’t look up, as she had expected him to. Frame it, she heard him whisper. So now she framed him. The greenish overhead lights inside the depot shone down, cast a garish illumination on everyone inside; all the people looked just awful, like they’d just been told they all had cancer, even the little kid in his mother’s arms, who was looking up at the propellers of a broken wooden fan, spinning slowly on the ceiling. But she bore down on Luther with her vision, so the background disappeared, and she no longer saw the bank of game machines that stood against one wall, two pinball, one Asteroids; no one was playing. And she just looked at him. In profile, from a distance, he was actually sort of good-looking, a little like Paul Newman at the end of Butch Cassidy, right before he and Butch step out into the gunfire. She breathed in loudly, exhaled with her mouth pursed, like someone in labor, and she felt a tug in her groin. A feeling she didn’t know was there came over her: a tenderness toward him, a sense of his dejection. Darkness was settling in on the street where she stood, and it bathed her, as his creepiness bathed her, as a stirring of maternal love bathed her too, making her feel womanly now, like a person with curves and composure. It made her feel grown up, no longer geeky, and without giving it much more thought, she walked to the front door of the depot and, head high, walked on in.
The stench of ammonia enveloped her as she left the fresh air of the wide street; it was all she could smell at first. And then as she stood inside for a moment, unseen by Luther, she isolated other smells, of high school locker rooms she had changed in before and after matches all over the state, and a stale apple smell of spilled whiskey or wine, like the kitchen and her mother’s room used to smell in the old days. Tobacco. An officious metal fan rotated back and forth on top of the cigarette machine, blowing the bad stinking air around everyone’s heads, and the men’s room opened, sending out a sudden sharp reek of urine that took Rosie by surprise. Luther still didn’t look up from his paper. Why should he? She moved toward him. The worst smell of all was coming off his body, coming off his legs, she thought. She cleared her throat. Finally he looked up.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey yourself,” he replied; he did not seem particularly surprised to see her. He gave her a shy crooked smile. “What are you doing here? You should be at home.”
“That’s where I’m going,” she said. She looked around at the other customers just for something to do. “Where you going?”
“Home.”
“Where’s your home?”
“The American. On Mission.”
“Oh. In San Francisco.”
Luther nodded.
She toed the linoleum. She could hardly breathe. He smelled like sweat and the stale apple smell. She stood with her head tucked down so that her ear almost touched her shoulder. Someone who’d never met her before might have thought this man was family, an uncle perhaps, down on his luck but loved by this loyal lean girl in tennis shoes that cost what this man spent on food
in a month.
Rosie chewed on her bottom lip and looked toward the broken fan on the ceiling.
“Do you have anybody in your family?” she asked hopefully.
“Sort of.”
“Any kids?”
“Well, not who’s still a kid.” His voice was low and gravelly, like he had a frog in it, could clear it if he wanted to, but he didn’t seem to want to or he knew that it wouldn’t help. “I have a grown-up. A daughter in Oregon, maybe your momma’s age.”
“You don’t call her on the phone and stuff?”
“She’s probably married twenty years by now.”
Rosie lowered her head and raised her eyes. “When d’ja see her last?”
Luther laughed and shook his head. “Thirty years ago? Something like that.”
“She was still a little girl?”
“She was twelve. Twelve and a half.”
Rosie gasped. “Oh, my God; that’s so horrible. I mean, no offense.”
“None taken.”
“What was she like, your daughter? What was her name?”
“You sure ask a lot of questions.” Smiling a private smile, he fished a crumpled pack of cigarettes out of his windbreaker, shook one out, and lit it. He turned his head when he exhaled so as not to blow smoke into her face.
“Her name was Jane. Janie. Beautiful girl. Champion athlete, just like you. Great swimmer, good runner, too. Faster than the boys her age. Good girl, good mommy. Bad daddy.”
Rosie considered this. “My mom quit drinking five years ago.”
“Isn’t that wonderful?” She looked up into his face suspiciously, afraid he was being sarcastic or that he found her self-righteous, but he looked friendly. Even though he was dirty, his skin was nice and dark and he looked sort of wise. She was only a little afraid.