by Anne Lamott
Rosie stared off into space, considering this. “Huhhh,” she said. She put her nose to her mother’s and breathed warm soft air out, onto the tip of her mother’s nose, into the nostrils, breathed her mother’s air in, and then, raising her lips as if in a kiss, whispered, “Mommy, Mama.” Elizabeth felt her child’s heart beating faster than it ever had before, as fast as an infant’s, a hummingbird’s. “Mama.” The air was hushed, like in the moments after an echo. “Mommy?” Rosie whispered. “I need to tell you one more thing.”
“Tell me, baby.”
“It’s big.”
“Tell me.”
Rosie’s wide blue eyes never left hers. “I cheat. I cheat in tennis.”
Elizabeth drew back as if from a gust of heat; Rosie abided, her head still at a tilt, her lips parted slowly, her eyes now closed, her own nostrils flaring and moist. She nodded.
“Honey,” Elizabeth whispered. “What are you telling me?”
“This summer, Mom, this summer I got so afraid a few times, when I was losing to girls who weren’t any good, I got so afraid I started calling balls out that were in.”
“You called balls out that were in?”
“Like, for example, I played Deb, you know, who I hate, and I was seeded way ahead of her, but I was totally tanking a match. And so she hit a ball that landed on the line, and I called it out. And I did that a whole bunch of times this summer.”
Elizabeth, sitting in the chair with her huge scared child, gaped.
“Did you win matches that way that you would have lost otherwise?” Rosie sighed and nodded, miserable, sick.
“Oh, my God, sweetheart. I’m thunderstruck.”
“I know, Mom. I tried to tell you a million times. The thing is, I’m not a cheater. I’m someone who cheated a few times.”
“What does that mean?”
“Mommy, that’s what Luther told me tonight; that’s what he told me. I thought I was a cheater, but now I know I’m not. And no one could tell me that I wasn’t, because no one else watched me so closely, no one else knew, no one who could help me knew.”
“Rosie, what are we going to do? Do many people know? Should you turn yourself in?”
“The girls I cheated know. Sometimes their parents were there.”
“What about the officials?”
“I don’t know. Maybe there’ve been complaints.”
“How on earth, how the hell did Luther find this all out?”
“He just saw me. Almost every time I did it.”
“Oh, honey. Oh, Rosie. I don’t know what to say. Why do you think you cheat? Rosie, you’re such a great player.”
“It was because, I guess, I’m just okay. I’m not one of the best. Just one of the pretty good. I wanted to be in the top ten. And I’m not going to be. Not ever again.”
“Why?”
“Because the younger kids, the twelve and unders, are great. They take over, they start to beat us. You start to feel like a loser. I don’t want James to feel I’m wasting all this money and I’m still a loser.”
“Darling, you are not a loser. And anyway, James couldn’t care less if you ever pick up a racket again. Maybe—would it make sense if you called someone who was in charge of junior tennis, maybe one of the people on the sportsmanship committee?”
“Oh, God, Mommy. I can’t even think about that.”
“How come?”
“Too scary.” Elizabeth nodded. “I don’t want to even tell anyone.”
“Well, we have to tell James, honey.”
“We do?” Elizabeth nodded. “And Rae, and Lank?”
“Yep. This is a family thing, Rosie. Rae and Lank are family. And this is what families are for. That’s just the way it is. But we need to go to bed now, it’s late.”
But neither moved. They listened to the chorus of night creatures, the pulse beat of crickets.
“Mommy?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you think Simone is making a mistake?”
“Yeah. A huge mistake.”
“What should we do?”
“What can we do? We’re just going to love her, accept her. She’s family. And her baby will be family.”
“I wish we had a real family.”
“See, darling, I think we do. Don’t you?”
“Not a real family, like the other kids. Like Deb Hall, or Hallie. We’re—I don’t know.”
“We’re what? Say it.”
“We’re like some family you’d get at a garage sale.”
seven
THE Sunday before Labor Day, Elizabeth got up early, even before James, and went downstairs to make the coffee. Outside the sky was a clear Chagall blue. Elizabeth opened all the downstairs windows. She put on Schubert’s Trout, which had been her father’s favorite piece of music, and she walked around the living room dusting with a sock of James’s she had found in the downstairs bathroom. She lingered over a lavish dresser of her mother’s, slightly battered, with drawer pulls of Victorian leaves. On top, on the plainest blue linen napkin, were tiny framed photos of her parents, her mother as a toddler, her father in his cap and gown the day of college graduation. There were several little paper boxes Rae had made, a stone from the beach, the bigger of the two sand dollars Andrew had found, the tiny one lost now, a picture of Elizabeth’s grandmother, a picture of Rosie as a baby. The thing was, you put all the stuff you loved in boxes to shield them, protect them, contain and magnify them and give them a home; and when you put the little boxes on a linen or a doily, it said that this was sacred space. But Elizabeth thought Luther had gotten inside their little boxes, the boxes of Elizabeth’s family, and once someone got inside, you no longer had any kind of shield, you no longer even had the illusion of ever having had a shield. You were as vulnerable as a smart little kid.
A memory rose and draped itself like a transparency over her vision. She saw a small girl in the dark listening to a scary radio program, she couldn’t remember now which one. And there was a pool of shadows hovering over her, a pool extending from the edge of the bed to the end of the universe; and she huddled there on her bed in the dark, too afraid to get up and turn the light on, even the lamp on the bedside table, and the shadow got bigger and closer, like a cocoon around her, and somehow she crashed through the edge of the circle, through the cocoon, and turned on the lamp. And she sat there, upright in bed, looking around and blinking, seeing her room in the light—there the old radio, there the rug, the rocking horse.
She looked around her living room and felt so much better than she had in a while that she began to cry again, and she sank onto the couch and cried so hard that drool collected behind her bottom teeth and then spilled into her lap. She cried until she heard footsteps upstairs, James’s, coming down the hall, and she tried to stop and collect herself but couldn’t, and when James came downstairs and sat with her on the couch, she kept on crying. He held her and no one said a thing. Finally when she stopped, he peered down to look into her face.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi,” she said tremulously, and smiled.
“You okay?”
She smiled. She thought maybe she was or would be soon; she looked at his eyes, so pretty and green and kind, and she didn’t care if she looked blotchy and nuts, because she felt a flicker of something like a candle inside her, a child’s birthday candle in the dark cave of her lifelong fear, the fear of her fear and the fear of her grief. It had kept her in a barren, isolated place, kept her away from life. And she wondered, was her grief the way home?
“LANK was over for breakfast,” Rae announced later that day over lemon tea in the kitchen.
“He was?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, that is good, isn’t it?”
“He’s really great to talk to.”
“What do you talk about?”
“You.”
“Oh, Rae. Are you dating?”
“You mean in the biblical sense?”
“I mean in any way at all.”
<
br /> “I don’t think so. Actually, come to think of it, maybe yes. I mean, I don’t really know. Usually by now, after all these phone calls and a couple of walks, I’ve given the guy a nice blow job. Just out of sheer anxiety. You know, to break the ice. I mean, a girl can get so damn anxious sitting there on the couch with them, hour after hour. I’ve given guys blow jobs just because I’ve run out of things to talk about.”
“Oh, Rae. Who hasn’t?”
Rae laughed, and then Elizabeth joined in, tilting her head back to laugh at the ceiling for what seemed like the longest time. Rae’s foamy laughter flowed around her like surf, not washing her away but washing through her, over her, buoying her up. Then they were silent for a while, just a couple of women surfing on near hysterics, alone together in a sunny kitchen. Rae gathered crumbs from the morning’s toast into a tiny pile, separated out one big crumb, rolled it around the wood under her forefinger, rolled it over to Elizabeth’s place at the table, and deposited it there for her. Elizabeth smiled. After a minute, she covered it with her finger and began to roll it around the table. It felt like a scratchy little ball bearing.
“I remember a few months ago, when I was strung out over Mike,” said Rae, “you said something about how I was powerless over the craving to call him. But that underneath the craving were jewels, the jewels of being more intensely inside life, and that Mike was the detour away from them.”
“Did I say that?”
“Yes. Maybe I’m paraphrasing a little. I really felt it was true. Don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“And I keep trying to do what Wendell Berry said.”
“What did Wendell Berry say, Rae?”
“Practice resurrection.”
Elizabeth gripped her mug tightly and peered down into it, as if trying to read tea leaves. She lowered her nose against the dark brown brim, as if she were going to push her face all the way down inside, as if it were a rabbit hole into which she was trying to disappear. But after a moment, she raised her head, and strained to hear the gray-gold song of a mourning dove.
eight
THE letter from the sportsmanship committee of the junior tennis league arrived in the mail the exact same day James received word that his gig at the radio was over. James brought the mail upstairs to the bedroom, where Elizabeth was dozing. She had a terrible head cold. He handed her his letter. “It is time to give another local author the opportunity to have his or her voice heard on the air,” it began. Then he handed her a letter from the junior tennis association, and they looked at each other with alarm.
“Isn’t it too early for the rankings?” he asked. “Should we open it?” She shook her head.
“It’s for her. We have to wait until she gets home from school.”
IT was the first day of school, the chaos of teenagers not knowing where to be when. Eighth grade. The weather was warm and blue; summer was still here. The hillside behind the school yard was amber and velvety, dry. Rosie and Simone sat under the great oak in the pasture below the hill, an oak twice as wide as it was tall, where it was illegal for them to be. Kids came here to smoke in the dry grass. Rosie and Simone ate their lunches and listened to the sounds of the kids hanging out at lunchtime, some in quiet groups on the blacktop, others shouting, talking loudly, taunting passersby; playing baseball in the field; younger children, mostly the sixth graders, hitting big red rubber balls against the backboard. Rosie and Simone were dressed exactly alike today, in huge blue jeans, T-shirts that hung almost to their knees, black high-top Keds. They both drank cranberry juice in little glass bottles. It was their new drink. It was too hot and Jason had left for college without saying good-bye. Simone had gotten Rosie to call him at home and pretend to be someone else, and Jason’s mother had told her very nicely that he had already left for school two weeks before. Simone’s only contact with him was through her mother’s lawyer, who was trying to get him to sign a paternity stipulation. His parents’ lawyer had informed Veronica that they would arrange for DNA testing at Thanksgiving, to see if their son was in fact the father. In the meantime, the sideways glances of junior high were upon them. A rumor had gotten started, Rosie was not sure how, and Hallie had asked if the rumor was true, and Rosie had said yes. Then everyone knew. The teachers found out; Veronica was summoned. It was decided that Simone could continue coming to this school for the time being. Hallie blended back in with the popular girls, was friendly and distant now with both Rosie and Simone. Their homeroom teacher, Mr. Flemish, was especially kind to Simone, who was the subject of endless whispered conversations. The nice kids didn’t know how to respond appropriately and so said nothing. One of the popular boys, during lunch one day, pantomimed jerking off when Simone passed him on the blacktop, and when she retaliated by declaring loudly that he was a jerk-off, she was sent to the principal.
ROSIE and Simone had taken to wearing thick black liquid eyeliner, like the hoodlum girls at school who dressed open, as the kids put it, cheap and sexy, and dated high school boys. Rosie loved the eyeliner, was sure it made her look beautiful.
Elizabeth did not say anything about the makeup. So many spikes and arrows had come at Rosie all summer from so many directions, and she had managed to stay open to it all in so many ways that perhaps a little camouflage was just the thing, the lightest possible shield.
JAMES and Rosie sat at the kitchen table while she opened her letter. “Dear Rosie,” it read. “This is a very painful letter to write, as we understand that it will be a painful letter to receive. But we have become aware of a number of complaints having to do with your line calls. Our usual policy is to mention these complaints discreetly and to hope that this mention will convince the person that much greater care must be given to avoid even the appearance of dishonesty. Please do not hesitate to contact us if we can help you deal with this situation in any way.” She held the letter with trembling hands, aware that James was watching her. She felt humiliation like sirens going off inside her, like a flush and a chill both at once.
“Can I see it?” James said. She looked up at him, handed him the letter, and watched while he read it. “Wow,” he said, exhaling loudly.
He did not say anything else. She felt as naked as a baby bird and as cold. She rested her chin in her cupped hand and her fingernails on her bottom lip, and dug her nails into her lip to try and stop the trembling. It felt good, like a sharp compress.
“What do you think we should do, James?”
He reached forward to brush some of Rosie’s bangs off her forehead. “I don’t know yet,” he said.
“Did you ever just want to kill yourself when you were a kid?”
“Honey, look. When I was in eighth grade, I was like … like … a male version of the little woman in Poltergeist.” She considered him. His gaze was level and kind. After a moment she smiled, just barely, and then looked down at her lap.
“Mommy was the tallest eighth-grade girl in the state.”
“That’s what she says, honey. There wasn’t an actual competition.”
“And then you two found each other.”
James nodded.
“What if the kids at my school find out?”
“About all I know for sure at this point is something Rae says from time to time: that one is really in charge of very, very little.”
She picked up the letter and read it again.
“I think I want to go talk to them,” she said at last. “I want to tell them certain things, so they feel differently about the whole thing.”
“This, this letter, does not require that something outside of you happen. This is about something happening inside of you.”
Rosie looked at him blearily. “I hope they don’t rank us number two. We should be number one. It would be great for Simone if she got to be ranked number one in the doubles. Because it’s probably her last year. I mean, let’s face it.”
“Oh, sweetheart.” They looked at each other in silence. “Let’s go play catch in the backyard,” said James. “And w
ait for your mom to wake up.”
“I don’t want to, James.”
“Well, I need you to. C’mon, Rosie.”
LANK came over the next day and brought Elizabeth a present wrapped in newspaper: a cactus in bloom. It was fabulous, like a strange-looking woman in a fancy hat.
“What’s the occasion?” she asked.
“I’m happy you’re on the mend. Anyway, it’s just a porch present.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, my aunt Tat in Texas used to always bring little gifts wrapped in newspaper, so you wouldn’t think it was any kind of big deal, and you wouldn’t get your hopes up like you would if it came in wrapping paper and ribbon. Also, it meant that you didn’t have to write a thank-you card, because it was just a porch present.”
“So are you my caseworker for today?” she asked.
“I guess. I wondered if you would go help me pick out a great pair of shoes.”
Elizabeth thought this over. “Is this a trick to get me outside?” Lank nodded. “Okay.”
Bruno was on a blanket in the back seat of Lank’s car. Elizabeth made a quiet fuss over him while Lank cleared textbooks and stacks of binder paper off the passenger seat. He waited by her side of the car while she climbed in, and then closed the door for her. They drove along. It was a beautiful warm day and he had some Mozart on the stereo and she didn’t feel like she had to talk. A few times she looked over at him and smiled, and he would crinkle up his big nose so much in smiling that a great crease appeared between his eyes, and his teeth looked very long, and she felt that she trusted him entirely. They had not been alone together in a long time, and she wanted to tell him all these memories that had come back to her. She stared out the window, listening to the sound of the car’s hum, of the oboe’s joyful lament, and her mind floated. And for some reason, in all that peace, with Lank and the woodwinds and the yellowing mountains in the distance, her mind turned to sex. She remembered the night when the Adderlys had agreed to watch Rosie, and she had picked up a biker and brought him home to screw. It was only one week after Andrew’s funeral. She remembered the biker’s big arms, his long shimmering black hair that brushed her breasts as he moved over her. She remembered that the old woman who used to live across the street had watched the man leave the next morning through binoculars. There were still flower arrangements all over the house, mostly dying now. There was a brown paper grocery bag of rotten persimmons on the front porch that the biker pointed out to her, because they had gone bad, were attracting flies. She did not remember having seen them before he pointed them out, and their presence on her porch filled her with a deep shame.