by Anne Lamott
“What?” said Elizabeth.
“He checked out a few days ago. Someone came by to give him a ride somewhere.” She seemed stunned. “I bet he went to Oregon. That’s where he’s from. He didn’t leave any way to get hold of him. He’s just gone.”
“Wow.”
“He didn’t even say good-bye.” Rosie’s face clouded over, and Elizabeth reached for her, but Rosie sidestepped her on the way out the kitchen door, and Elizabeth let her go. She listened to her daughter stomp upstairs, heard the door to her room slam. Elizabeth remained at the kitchen table, imagining Luther in James’s favorite shirt in the car of a friend, heading home.
ROSIE lay face down on her bed, Elizabeth beside her.
“He’s just gone,” Rosie said into the pillow, in a voice an octave higher than usual. Elizabeth lay facing her child’s trembling body. “He’s just gone,” she said again. They lay on their sides, several inches apart. Rosie’s breath smelled like milk. With all that hair gone, she looked like a baby again and, like all babies, closer to the place where she had come from.
Rosie finally spoke. “Mommy,” she implored, “the worst thing that could ever happen happened to us,” and Elizabeth inhaled sharply. “And you don’t even know what I mean, do you? You don’t know if I mean Mr. Thackery, or Simone, or Luther, but what I mean, what happened to us was that my daddy died. And I don’t even know if we cried.”
“We did a little.”
“But we loved him more than anything. We loved him more than the whole world, and then one day like lightning he was just gone.” Elizabeth was trying not to cry, because she didn’t want Rosie to be afraid, and because in the face of that wild grief it was all she knew how to do. “I remember being on his shoulders, walking through town with him when I was little. On his shoulders. I remember how huge his hands were, holding my ankles. I remember how everyone loved him and was glad to see us. But you were too shy and people weren’t that way with you. But when we walked around, Daddy and me, people invited us in. That weekend before he went away, he took me into town, he was meeting old man Grbac for a drink at the bar, but he had me with him, I don’t know how that could be, but that’s what was happening. Maybe it was at a restaurant, so I could be there with him.” It was autumn, she remembered, and he was wearing the dark green shirt Charles and Grace had given him for his birthday. He had it on over a white T-shirt. She could remember that she could see the top of his T-shirt even though the green shirt was buttoned. “I thought he was a god, Mommy. I thought that’s what God looked like,” she said. Elizabeth reached out with her top leg and covered Rosie’s, and they lay there entwined. “And he walked so fast, remember that?” She smiled.
Elizabeth nodded. “Because he had the longest legs,” she said.
Rosie remembered being up on there on his shoulders, how her bottom bumped on the bones in his shoulders, and that he’d just washed his hair because he was going on the trip the next day, but he’d used her baby shampoo. So he smelled like a baby, and he couldn’t get it to lie right because it was too clean. “And I remember we passed that old man who used to live in the house the Thackerys bought, and remember, they had that incredible persimmon tree?” Elizabeth nodded. “It was full of ripe persimmons. I can remember the exact color they were, and the leaves were orange yellow, like the color of the peaches in that book of Japanese fairy tales Charles gave me when I was little.” Elizabeth held her breath. “And the old guy was reaching up for the persimmons with this contraption he’d made of bamboo. He’d split a bamboo stick and pushed the slats apart and stuffed a small red ball down into it to hold the slats open, like a funnel. So it looked like a badminton birdie. And he could reach up with this thing and jiggle a persimmon so it would drop into the bamboo funnel, and then he’d pick it out gently and place it in a basket. He had a whole basket full. They looked like a basket of orange tennis balls.” Elizabeth exhaled, her chest burning, and when she inhaled again, her breath quavered. “And Daddy stopped so we could watch for a while, and he made such a fuss; he kept telling the old guy what a brilliant invention it was, because it turned out the guy had thought it up himself. And he wanted to give daddy a big bag of persimmons to take home. Daddy tried to explain we were heading into town and that we had to hurry home, because he was leaving on this trip.” Rosie’s face opened and tears poured down, some running the length of her long straight nose before dropping onto the pillow. “He said he’d come back the following weekend, when he got back from his trip. But the old guy said they might be too ripe by then, and we should take them right that minute. So Daddy did, even though it was kind of a pain in the neck to lug them down to the bar and back.” She stopped and covered her eyes with the palms of hands, and Elizabeth felt a wedge finally open her heart, and still entwined they cried and cried and cried for all those years of having missed Andrew, of having loved him more than life.
“WE’VE looked everywhere,” Elizabeth told James an hour later, when she and Rosie finally emerged. “And we can’t find your shirt.”
“Have you guys been crying?” he asked them, looking at their faces, their eyes swollen with tears.
Rosie looked guiltily at the floor and walked off.
“We felt so sad about Andrew,” Elizabeth said. He nodded and seemed scared, but Elizabeth took his hand and kissed it. He looked back at her. “But you know what, James? Maybe now I can allow him to go and be what he is. Which is dead. Maybe now I can let him finally die.” She looked at him almost shyly. “And—I don’t know. Maybe I can even let Rosie go and be what she is.”
“Which is what?” he asked gently.
She clutched her neck, as though the words she needed were stuck inside. He took her hand and lay his cheek down on it.
“Say it,” he whispered.
“A young woman,” she whispered back.
HIS reading at the local bookstore that night went well; two dozen people showed up. He read beautifully. Elizabeth and Lank sat together, as miserable as tennis parents at the very beginning before anyone had shown up, proud and relieved for him when people finally came. Later in bed James admitted that he was unbelievably grateful that anyone had come at all on a Friday night, yet surprised and ever so slightly bitter that more people hadn’t. Then he laughed out loud.
NO one wanted to go to the tide pools the day after the reading except Elizabeth. Rae and Lank were going to a matinee in the city. James was back at work on his novel. Simone and Veronica were at the flea market. Veronica’s lawyer had squeezed some money out of Jason’s family for clothes and furniture, and they had spent the last few weekends at the flea market, looking for a crib, a swing, baby clothes. “They’re eating it all away, though,” Rosie confided with enormous hostility. “They look through one batch of stuff and then they stop for Vietnamese noodles. Then they find one little pair of booties, and they celebrate with doughnuts.” Simone had already gained thirty pounds, and there were still two months to go. Two months! Rosie found herself missing Simone already even though she saw her every day. She could feel her friend traveling away from her like a slow train. It hurt too much to think about. School was hard, the rains had begun, and on this cool winter weekend morning, all she wanted to do was to flake—lie on her bed and read Kurt Vonnegut, watch television, maybe eat a TV dinner for breakfast. So Elizabeth almost had to go out to the Pacific tide pools by herself. But finally she convinced Rosie to come along for the ride.
“Why do you love those tide pools so much?” Rosie asked. “I wish we could go to the water slides instead.”
“I love them because of all the life that goes on in them without me. And I love the silence.”
They didn’t talk much on the way out. Elizabeth looked over at her from time to time.
“You okay?” she asked at one point.
“Uh-huh,” said Rosie, nodding.
“Good.”
“Mom?”
“Yeah?
“Can I drive?”
“No.”
“Wh
y not?”
“Because you’re thirteen and a half.”
“But Veronica—”
“Rosie? Stop.”
Rosie stared down at the floorboards and smiled.
SHE took off down the beach by herself, walking on the soft wet sand. She wore baggy clothes, jeans big enough for two of her to fit into, a faded flannel shirt of James’s, recovered from the ragbag, over a tiny black T-shirt, and lots of liquid black eyeliner. Her hair looked particularly terrible today, still spiky tufts but flattened on one side from sleep. Elizabeth stopped to watch something in a tide pool but noticed out of the corner of her eye the S shape Rosie had gotten her body into, her chest sunk in and her head down and tucked, as if life were trying to propel her forward while her body held her back.
Elizabeth went over to the reef and stood for a while in the bracing spray. Then she slowly hunkered down to peer into a rocky pool the size of their kitchen sink. She was entranced by the color, movement, surprises, by all the same things that monkeys love. She watched a nudibranch crawl slowly out from behind some seaweed, this violently colored sea slug, bright orange with spikes. A tiny porcelain crab that could fit on a dime, frightened by the arrival of the nudibranch, held up its claw threateningly, and then scuttled off. The smell of the tide filled her—rich, salty, the smell of kelp and brine and a hint of decaying meat, the whole chemistry of the earth in solution. Elizabeth studied Rosie, way at the other end of the reef, watching her own tide pool. You couldn’t tell from here whether she was a boy or a girl. Elizabeth thought of the cute bouncy kid in tiny tennis dresses, bounding around the tennis court in the early spring, wide-eyed, taking in everything. A light breeze blew in off the water.
Elizabeth felt like God standing there, so huge and alone, staring down at this tiny world at once so mysterious and transparent, its creatures so helpless. Water, returning after low tide, wafted over the tide pool, and everything that was loose in it waved. All that hunting and hiding and frond waving, and all those millions of other things going on that you couldn’t even see.
Nearby anemones sat wedged against a corner of the reef, pulpy and skittish, pebbles stuck to their green flesh like gelatinous rubble, spiky white tentacles waving in the water. She had to crouch down to touch one, cause it to retract from a flower to a blob. After a while it turned back into a flower; when she touched it again, it retracted back into a blob. Looking up, she was surprised to find Rosie now looming over her.
They looked down together then at the anemones, the snails, and hermit crabs.
“They’re so ridiculous,” said Rosie. “Borrowing shells from each other and then wearing them around like huge hats. But I guess I kind of like how they lug them around,” she continued, using the toe of her shoe to point at a hermit crab. “Like they’re taking their nice new house for a walk.”
Elizabeth shifted her weight, and her shadow crossed over a crab the size of a fingernail; it rose up, shaking its claws at her like an old man waving his cane.
“I’m starving to death,” said Rosie.
“Are you really?”
“Uh-huh.”
“What if we go get some lunch and then come back?”
“Can we buy magazines to read while we eat?” Elizabeth nodded. They headed back toward the car. The soft roar of the ocean, it seemed to Elizabeth, was the sound of the earth breathing; the wind seemed to go just any old way, but the waves definitely had a pulse. She walked along side by side with her quiet rangy daughter—who even half smiled at her once—in the tiny black T-shirt and voluminous jeans, the worn flannel shirt big enough for a lumberjack now tied at her waist, dragging along on the ground. Rosie sang softly. And Elizabeth suddenly saw that Rosie was no longer her mother’s golden child but was now her own odd person. For as long as she could, Elizabeth strained to hear the two together, the antiphony of tune and ocean, until she had to stop for a moment and close her eyes with the sudden feeling that something that had dropped was rising on its own.
acknowledgments
It would not be much of an exaggeration to say that this novel, like all my work, is a collaboration.
To begin with, after God looked through His Rolodex and found the perfect little boy for me, He set about finding me a new editor. Robin Desser is just the most amazing woman.
Endless thanks to the legendary Elizabeth McKee, my first agent, who always wanted me to write about tennis, and to Chuck Verrill, my ardent advocate and wonderful friend.
Neshama Franklin is so articulate, so clear and lyrical and right, that I can not imagine having written this book without her.
John Kaye is awesome. I wish you could meet him. He’s one of the smartest, funniest people on earth.
Father Tom Weston is one of the others. He’s a great friend, brilliant, hilarious, greatly rich in spirit. Among other things, he was this book’s dogged gardening consultant. Dr. Paul O., who taught me about acceptance, was my medical advisor, and I just love him so much.
Hillary Bendich and Susan Hayes gave me invaluable weaving insights.
Maggie Fine, of Santa Fe, helped me understand the soulfulness, intelligence, and integrity of teenage girls, because she is a person with those qualities in rich abundance. Her mother, Lynn Atkison, was generous beyond words in teaching me about what it means to be the mother of a teenage girl. I owe this family a debt I will probably never be able to repay.
Mallory Geitheim, Judith Rubin, and Anne Huffington are three brilliant women and teachers.
Jim Bedillion was an invaluable source of tennis tournament information and lore; ditto to beloved old tennis friends Darby Morris, Bee Kilgore, and Nancy Chance.
Maggie’s friends Alecka Barna, Jolene Butler, and Amanda Mather spent a whole day with me, telling me secret things.
Leroy Lounibos went to a thousand tennis matches with me; and there is no one on earth more fun to travel with. Doug Foster shared his great insight. Charley Carney gave me one of his best stories. Sheila Lopez—the gifted dancer and director—revealed for me the shimmering beauty of a teenage girl’s dark side. Claire Barcos and Lindsey Cimino were always there to answer my questions. The mothers of all of Sam’s friends took extra care of Sam so I could finish: Judy, Sara, Rachel, Joanne, Sue, Jill, and Mary. And so did the dads. And our life would not function at all without my brother Stevo’s help.
Once again, the world’s toughest and most insightful copy editor, Nancy Palmer Jones, saved me from myself.
And I cannot imagine life without the unspeakably precious people of St. Andrew Presbyterian Church, Marin City, California. Come join us: services at 11:00.
about the author
Anne Lamott is the author of the novels Hard Laughter, Rosie, Joe Jones, and All New People, as well as two works of nonfiction, Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year and Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. A past recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, she lives with her son, Sam, in northern California.