Anne Lamott Read online

  TWO Memorial Day At sunset a few days later, a parade of small clouds lined up low over the westernmost hills of Landsdale, perfectly spaced and aligned. James and Elizabeth sat in a rasping wicker porch swing that the sellers had left behind in the trashed garden of the rickety and voracious house, overpriced until you factored in the sunset. The sky was soft pink; the night was cool. When the clouds crashed and stumbled forward one into another, James gathered up the tea tray and they went inside. Rosie had not eaten with them that evening, as she was heading out soon to a party with Jody and Alice in Stinson Beach, forty-five minutes away. She was in her bathroom, reapplying foundation. She was actually going to two parties, although her parents knew only about the first. Rosie had told them about the one at Jody’s aunt Vivian’s house. She said they were spending the night there, which was true if you substituted “evening” for “night.” But none of the girls knew yet where they would sleep. After the party, a bunch of kids from Landsdale, Bolinas, and Stinson were meeting on the beach. The girls would figure out where to crash later, depending on who else showed up, who was holding, and how things in general shook down. Aunt Vivian’s party was to celebrate Jody’s return from three months at a rehab in the mountains of Santa Cruz. She had been home a month already, but this was the first Saturday that worked for everyone in the family. Her parents had sent her off because she did too much alcohol and cocaine—she had ended up at the ER one night around Christmas, having overdosed on both, and Alice and Rosie were relieved that her parents had stepped in, although having her kidnapped at three a.m. by morbidly obese Samoans seemed a little extreme. What sucked, though, was that she was now expected to stay off marijuana, too—as if that had been part of the problem. At the rehab, she had received enough credits in independent study to finish out the current semester, plus had earned a whole semester’s worth of credit toward her senior year. So she had only one more semester to go before graduation. She had stayed clean nearly a week after her return, and was still off alcohol, coke, and weed. The other stuff, which she used mostly on weekends, was legal, like Alice’s Adderall for ADD, her parents’ sedatives, the family cough syrup, and salvia which you could buy in variable strengths at any head shop. Nothing that would show up in the urine tests or on a Breathalyzer. So if Rosie wanted to do Ecstasy, say, or mushrooms, she and Alice did them when Jody wasn’t around. James and Elizabeth greeted them after they barged in. They wore camisoles over tank tops, and jeans. Alice, who had already been assured by the dean of the San Francisco Fashion Institute of Design that she would be accepted next year, wore a silver sweater that seemed to be made of spiderweb and bugle beads, cropped at the armpits, and a pale orange silk scarf. “Oh my God,” said Elizabeth. “You’ll freeze to death.” Rosie appeared in the hallway. “Mom, please don’t mom everyone to death and wreck this for us.” “It’s okay, Elizabeth,” Alice said. “We have down jackets in the car.” James advanced in his most menacing way toward the girls. “Look me in the eye, Jody.” He seemed ridiculous: she towered over him, like a tree, taller even than Elizabeth. He wagged a finger in her face. “You are totally loked,” Jody said, and smiled. Rosie felt half in love with Jody, because she was so smart and cool and beautiful, even with that straggly hair that required expensive cuts to look barely okay, after a great deal of mousse and fussing. Tonight she had punked it out with plastic barrettes gathering up the thin sheaves. Jody thought of herself as a freak, a giraffe, but Rosie found her exquisite. She had written a poem about her in English class, about her soft brown eyes, and about how in her company you felt that there was a shimmery barrier around her, or a channel to a higher realm, of spring weather, the clouds and breezes, the shifts in the air. Maybe Elizabeth had given off that same sense once when she was younger, of being a conduit—tall, slightly alien, stately, reserved, and lovely, hard as this was to believe. Like, would it kill her mother to dye the gray streaks in her hair? James shook his fist at Jody like an old man angry with the weather: “You don’t drink anymore, right, Jody? Still off the sauce, Jody? That’s all behind us now, right, Jody? Right, Jody?” he shouted. “Right, Jody,” Jody said. They gave each other a smile, and touched fists in a gang handshake James had invented, roe-sham-beau, that segued into gobbledygook sign language. “Okay, then, sweetheart,” James asked, “how is your writing coming along?” Jody gave him two thumbs up. Rosie had shown him some of Jody’s stories and poems, and he’d told everyone that she had a gift, like duh, hello, she’d only been winning prizes since third grade. A number of times, he had edited her stories while she paced like an expectant father in Rosie’s room, and he lent her books that she had to read if she wanted to be a writer: lending meant a future discussion. It was great to have a stepfather who could genuinely help your friends. “And you, Alice,” he now said. Rosie watched him turn to threaten Alice. “Are you an alcoholic, Alice? Huh, Alice?” She gave James a look of wounded and amused scorn, and Rosie smiled. Alice drank, but preferred weed and mushrooms. Moony, dewy Alice, with long reddish-blond hair and pale blue eyes, looked so innocent, her face an angelic foil to the tight camisoles and baby-doll tops she favored. She was the most sexually active of the three girls, and had been since she was thirteen. She usually wore jean skirts no longer than Rosie’s tennis dresses, torn tights, rakish caps, scarves, and always perfect earrings. “Cool duds, dude,” Alice told James. “Very Mr. Rogers.” Rosie smiled as Alice looked him over, holding her palms out in wordless appreciation of the magnificence of his madras shorts. He polished his nails on his gray cardigan. “Have you decided whether or not to apply to Parsons, Alice?” James asked. Rosie loved this about him, the way he remembered details from your life, like names, or what you were reading. Alice shook her head. James offered her his fist for the special handshake. Rosie would not have admitted to anyone that she loved Jody more than Alice. Alice had come with Jody; they were a set when Rosie started school here last year. There were lots of girls like Alice at school, sexy and fun, giddy, the life of the party. James said that having her to dinner was like inviting a bubble bath to join you. And Rosie loved her, but she’d never met anyone quite like Jody, who had some sort of quiet power. Jody looked like she’d stepped out of the first Mozart opera Rosie had seen—very restrained, but like she might flick her crop and all the horses would rush right at you. “I’ll need you all to do a Breathalyzer when you get back,” James continued, and everyone knew he was teasing. He shook his finger at them. “Urine tests, lie detector, stool samples . . .” Elizabeth swatted at him. She and Rosie exchanged put-upon glances, but in fact, Rosie’s parents had never tested her for drugs or alcohol. She had successfully weaned herself off cocaine without Elizabeth’s having known that she’d even tried it, let alone done it every weekend for months. Let alone stolen twenties from Elizabeth’s purse, and from the family emergency fund, which she hated about herself. But her parents were so fixated on Elizabeth’s reclaimed sobriety that they did not particularly worry about whether Rosie was drinking or not. She was discreet about it. If she smoked dope or drank, she had a tiny kit in her purse, with Visine, breath mints, and towelettes with a strong scent. They were so clueless about Rosie’s private life that the first time James had confided in her about Elizabeth’s slip, two years ago, Rosie was coming down off Ecstasy, trying not to grind her teeth into paste as she listened. He wanted to share his belief that in the long run, the slip had been a blessing in disguise. Rosie nodded, paying extra attention so James wouldn’t notice how tweaked she was: Okay, blessing in disguise, what ev, as Alice said. He wanted her to go to his Al-Anon meetings now, for the families of alcoholics, or Alateen, but so far she had evaded him. He told her stuff about the meetings, hoping she would glean kernels of understanding or amusement the way he did, such as that people there said that AA was for problem drinkers, and Al-Anon for problem thinkers, spouses and parents of alcoholics, who hid out in their rooms, secretly thinking alone, having good ideas on how to rescue and fix the drinker. She pretended to listen. He always came
back in a better mood after meetings. He had made Rosie go to a psychologist with him after Elizabeth’s slip. They were still in the old house and Rosie was finishing her freshman year. The therapist had said a few very cool things that Rosie remembered, like that they had not caused Elizabeth to start drinking again, which was good, and that they couldn’t keep her from drinking if she decided to, which was bad. Rosie had not understood why they couldn’t keep her mother from drinking, and James had tried to explain that addiction was like dancing with an eight-hundred-pound gorilla: you were done dancing when the gorilla was done. Wow, the drinker thinks at first, the music is great, and what a wonderful dancer! But then when you get tired and want to sit, the gorilla wants to do the merengue, and you have to keep going. You feel sick, you hate yourself, you want to stop, but now the gorilla wants to waltz. “So what do we do?” Rosie asked when James told her all this. “You stay out of the gorilla cage. You don’t even go in to clean it.” “What about when it needs it? Like when she gets very down?” “You don’t clean it, just for today. Because after you freshened it up, if she was still sad, you’d think it made sense to get between her and the gorilla.” “But what’s the worse that could happen?” “Well. It could tear your arms off.” “Sometimes I want to push her down the stairs for starting to drink again,” Rosie admitted. “Just for today, you don’t push anyone down the stairs. Okay? Maybe tomorrow.” The next morning when Rosie woke, she found a sign James had taped by her desk that said, “Tomorrow.” Elizabeth saw this, loved it, made her own sign, and taped it to her mirror. She shared it with Rae, and now there was a sign in Rae’s house, too, taped to a kitchen cabinet, “Tomorrow.” And Elizabeth had not had a drink since. But in Jody’s aging Camry, a campaign button on the dashboard insisted on the opposite—“¡Ahora!” Now! It was from a recent rally for immigrant rights in San Francisco that she, Rosie, and Alice had gone to with Rae and Elizabeth. There were feathers stuck into the stereo speaker on the dashboard, and a small plastic Mary standing on top, although Jody did not believe in God. Rosie believed in something, some sort of energy field or force, like a cross between the oceans and their cat, Rascal. More on the Rascal side. No, more on the ocean side—force, beauty, vastness, sheer rhythmic being: her physics teacher, Mr. Tobias, was helping her with a paper for her college applications that said you could prove this with quantum theory. The girls drove along the windy road in the dark, past all their favorite places: low hills, talkative creeks, redwood groves. Björk sang from the speakers in the car, all weird emotional beauty and snowy purity, and Alice passed out Adderall to help them stay awake for the long night ahead. James and Elizabeth sprawled in the living room all night and read with Beethoven on the stereo. They were not celebrating Memorial Day, although Rae and Lank had invited them to a jazz concert in Napa. Every so often Elizabeth looked up and asked whether James thought Rosie was dead in a fiery car crash, and James said jeez, he hoped not. They gave Rosie a lot of independence, partly because she seemed to have such a good head on her shoulders, had never gotten into any real trouble, but mostly because she did so well at school: the three girls had gotten almost all A’s, even when Jody was going down the tubes, even in honors classes, and for Rosie even in physics. She was a good writer, but not like Jody, and arty, but not like Alice, who was like a hip-hop Coco Chanel. Alice was the one who would put Landsdale on the map, with awards in fashion design. It was the physics that made Rosie unusual among Landsdale students. Andrew had had a gift for physics and math, and had almost gone into engineering, and he always insisted that Rosie had inherited the genes: before she could walk, she’d begun tinkering with strollers, her own and those parked nearby. She would crawl underneath to have a look. Once, at two years old, before she was talking, she had started Andrew’s car. It seemed a philosophical thing, or instinctive hardwiring, that she could see relationships between things, a scientific version of what James had—the noticing genes necessary to be a good writer. Rosie’s mind liked to do things with its hands. She liked to imagine things that you could not see, like black holes and the far side of a pyramid. She was at home in the abstract realm of witnessing and synthesizing. Elizabeth watched James read. Looking up at him from the window seat, she remembered the first years after Andrew’s death, drinking so hard, flailing, all those sexual encounters one shouldn’t have had. It was unbearable that he was gone, gone-gone, as if a Hoover had vacuumed him up. “James?” He put his book down, looked over the top of his glasses. “Do you think we should worry more about Rosie? The odds of her being an alcoholic are way better than average. And her two best friends, Jody with her history of abuse, and Alice such a party girl, even though she’s so accomplished—” James interrupted her. “We know she’s gotten drunk a few times with them. And we know they smoke a little pot. But first of all, you can’t worry yourself into serenity. We keep our eyes open. And secondly, Rosie is her own person now.” Though he said it in the spirit of reassurance, this insight had the opposite effect. Elizabeth clutched at her throat and breathed like a dying asthmatic to make him laugh, but then panic and sadness rose inside her like a swamp monster, and tried to pull her down. Rosie stayed on the outskirts of the party, feeling like her usual loser self, shadowy as a frond. There were greetings and friendly confusion around her, Jody’s relatives pouring in from all over Northern California. Rosie knew some pretty squalid details of the family—alcoholism, infidelity, and even incest, although the incest guy in the family was not here, and two of the alcoholism people held cans of Diet Coke. Jody’s oldest uncle had come down from Santa Rosa, looking unchanged since Rosie had last seen him, while his wife looked older; all the wives here looked like their husbands’ big sisters, watching out for baby brother. This completely freaked her out. Jody’s mother, Sarah, was medium tall, with frosted hair, a perfect nose, and a nice sense of humor. She worked as a copywriter for an advertising firm in San Francisco and had a no-nonsense way about her. Rosie liked her for her strength—she seemed like the kind of mother who never panicked, who stayed calm by drawing on reserves of inner strength; the sort of mother who would be able to lift a car off her child, unlike Elizabeth. Alice liked her for her normalcy and casseroles, as her own mother ate mostly raw food and some sort of vegan seed disks, like you’d attach inside a bird’s cage for it to peck at. Jody’s mother dressed like a relaxed woman with style and money, lots of fitted fancy third-world blouses. Alice’s mother was only thirty-six, and a Sufi teacher. She thought of Alice as her roommate or little sister, and rarely came home before midnight. Alice had met her father only a few times over the years, which was fine. He was sixty-five and had many young children with many young women. Jody’s grandmother Marion sat in a safari chair with a cup holder. She was ninety, weighed about forty pounds, and looked like polished bone. Rosie had met her a few times with Jody, and a couple of times at Rae’s church. She was across the patio, under the trees, and Rosie signaled to her that she would join her in a minute. She always tried to hang out with the oldest people because otherwise they got ignored. Old people seemed to like her. Also, she was good with kids. Great: old people and kids; why couldn’t she be good with guys? Alice came over to show Rosie the bottle of wine she had just stolen from the pantry, and tucked it into her backpack to share on the beach later. They hung out for a while: Alice kept looping her fingers through Rosie’s hair, combing it, and gathering hanks of it, to coil around her hand. Jody really couldn’t hang out with the two of them, she had to schmooze with the relatives, so when Alice wandered off, Rosie went over to talk to Jody’s grandmother. Grandma Marion grasped Rosie’s hands with her papery moth fingers like something from the grave, and begged to hear about James; women of all ages loved James. That’s one thing Rosie appreciated about her mother—that she’d gotten a guy all the other women in town wanted, even though he was short. And that her mother had managed to get him to stay, and to adore her. Rosie shook her head at Marion with hopelessness—where did you even start? James was a treasure trove of silly be
havior. Like he might point to a tall middle-aged black man and say in a hushed tone, “Oh my God, is that O. J. Simpson?” Once he’d stopped in his tracks and gasped at a scrawny old gypsy woman, and said, “Is that Keith Richards?” But she didn’t know whether this was Grandma Marion’s kind of humor. So she told her about how he’d stumble across a funny line and then run it into the ground, and for some reason, it just kept making you laugh. Not that long ago, he’d discovered Old Bay seasoning, and he’d say it like Walter Brennan, he’d go, “I’m going to add me a shake of Ollld Bay.” Then he’d find a way to work it into every other sentence, about anything. He’d say, “When summer approaches, there’s nothing better than the lingering taste of Ollld Bay.” Marion clapped and laughed, so Rosie continued. “Then there was the old-Indian-saying stage, where you could be talking about anything, and he would get a far-off look on his face and say solemnly, ‘That reminds me of an old Indian saying,’ and he would say, ‘What goes around comes around,’ or once, ‘With time, even a bear can learn to dance,’ which was Yiddish, for God’s sake. And the Indian-name stage, where he would announce that his Indian name was Bucky, or Lemonhead.” Marion laughed like a whale clearing its throat, a clicking whistly moan. When she ran out of James stories, Rosie asked Marion about when she was young, until Marion needed to get up to use the bathroom. It took a while to get her to her feet—you’d think you could lift her up easily like a feather, but because of her arthritis, even though Rosie tried to lift her as carefully as possible so nothing got yanked, she kept folding up like a card table. Rosie thought of Amish people lifting the wall of a barn they had finished but that had started to come apart. Finally Jody’s father noticed what was happening, and arrived at his mother’s side. Together they got Marion up and in balance, and she walked off on his arm like a marionette. Rosie went upstairs to the aunt’s bathroom for a little recon. There was a half-full prescription bottle of Valium, and she shook a bunch into her hand, a few for tonight, a few just to have. If you washed one down with wine or whatever, along with an Adderall, you were pretty animated, but calmer than you would have been. She tucked them into the watch pocket of her jeans for later. She liked being a fly on the wall here. She felt welcome and trusted. She could tell that Jody’s parents liked her. Rosie thought it was because she was kind, excelled in school, and had been a tennis champion: if any of the three girls seemed a bad influence, it was Alice, who dressed wild and had been sexually active for so long, and whose mother was home so rarely. And Rosie liked watching Jody’s family because you could see that they cared about one another. They had pulled together for Jody, like a web around her. She felt a pang of jealousy, because she had such a tiny pathetic family herself, but she was relieved that the parents had stepped in. The relatives kept sneaking peeks at Jody, holding their breath with worry, but also trying to give her as much room and slack as possible. Jody had been on perilous ground before, doing so much cocaine, blowing guys to get some of their stash, and she could have died one night in a car crash that killed the girl in the front seat. So now she was back and people wanted her to be safe and well, and maybe they felt like if they were toxic and fake around her, she would get sick again. So they reflected their very best at her and she was reflecting it back. There was not a single guy at the party to flirt with, let alone hook up with later, except for one cute football player Alice sort of had dibs on. None of them were virgins anymore, Jody and Alice not by a long shot. Rosie had had sex three times, but not yet with anyone she loved. She obsessed about it all the time, about how next time she wanted it to be romantic and meaningful, so you could cuddle, instead of just having to get it over with or get back into the cocaine. Romantic meant you had been gazing into each other’s eyes for at least a couple of weeks, and the first, slow kiss with him was not the night you went all the way; more like in a beautiful romantic movie. The first time was very nice, actually, at some older girl’s apartment on Blithedale who didn’t even go to junior college yet, who would probably not even ever leave town. Rosie and a senior had gotten to use the girl’s bedroom, and the senior was actually the perfect person to lose her virginity to, and afterward, for a few days, every bump in the road that she drove over triggered her, reawakened the erotic feelings she had had. Everything did, as if a lava lamp of being fully alive and soft would bloom in her crotch and rise up through her. Then the next two times, once with the senior at his house, and once with another guy in his car, she’d hated it. She went to find Alice. The food on the grill smelled like it was ready, and Rosie wanted to leave as soon as they ate. Jody would have to stay until the party was over, but she and Alice could go early to the beach. Alice was totally male bait, and you could usually get something going with a guy if you were with her at a party, and in the mood. A lot of guys had used their hands on Rosie when they hooked up and she gave them all oral, but only a couple of the boys she’d been with, friends with privileges, had ever gone down on her. It was great and she had come, but maybe because it was so rare it was almost too intense, so crossing an inside line. The smell of barbecue mingled with the scent of the pumpkin spice candles on tables under the plum and apple trees, and blended with the smell of charred ribs and salmon, plus people’s various body products, and the smell was too strong, like the Old Testament, like meat at the altar, like people being grilled. It made her think of cannibals. She considered taking a Valium. She used to have nightmares of being boiled in a cannibal stockpot. Cannibals, quicksand, dinosaurs, and murderers, those were her hugest childhood fears, but more than anything she’d been afraid of her mother dying. She still had an obsessive fear of Elizabeth’s dying, which was weird because she hated her half the time. Her mother could be so lovely and regal, but also self-centered and self-destructive. It made Rosie sick. Now her mom was so intent on keeping everyone around her calm, so desperate for everyone to love and forgive her and be happy and trust her that sometimes she vibrated with it, like brass wires. Rosie hated herself for being so afraid. That’s why she made herself do so many things that seared her. She couldn’t decide on her looks, whether she was pretty or hideous. Or plain. The last time she took acid, with Alice at a rave in Richmond, she had already taken a couple of tabs of Ecstasy, because she could no longer get off on just one. The acid was an afterthought—it was supposed to be very mild, this cute purple candy dot—but she’d sort of lost it. She’d had to go into the bathroom to pull herself together, things had gone from shimmer and rainbow to stark, the sky from kaleidoscope to shifting electromagnetic sand beneath her, expanding out to the bad kind of infinity. Her face in the mirror looked like a sweaty terrified old woman’s, with wrinkles from too much sun, and the ugly globby pterygium on her iris like her eye was rotting from the inside out. She looked and felt insane, like some schizo you’d see at the bus stop at the Parkade at two in the morning, catching the last bus to San Francisco. Quavering, she whisper-sang all the words to “Let It Be,” and after a while started tripping out on the sweater she was holding, pretending for a few seconds that Rascal was in her arms, hiding his big orange head between her chin and chest like he always did, and this calmed her. She washed her hands and sat on the floor, and the smell of the Ivory soap also calmed her; it smelled like Rae’s neck. She couldn’t help noticing that the men at Jody’s party were sneaking glances at her breasts. All men did, and all boys, even little guys. She didn’t mind. She was glad tits had come along later in life, instead of earlier; there had been an older girl named Jeannette who was one of the great singles players at twelve but at thirteen had had to adjust her backhand so that her backswing went high enough up to avoid the voluminous breasts that had sprung up. And that was it for old Jeannette. At least Rosie had gone out on a high note, ranked number one in fourteen-and-under doubles with Simone. Rosie found Alice out on the front porch with one of Jody’s older cousins. “Dude!” Alice exulted when Rosie stepped into view. Rosie ducked her head shyly like a mother bird, exactly like her mother did, and she hated this but couldn’t help herself
. The cousin looked like Jody, only smaller, pretty but too thin, in a skanked-out way. The way her bones jutted out gave Rosie the creeps, like those cornucopia paintings with fruit, candles, flowers, all kinds of beautiful things, and amid it all, a skull. Terror rippled through her. She was afraid of getting old. She took the Valium out of her pocket, and displayed the pills in her hand. Alice studied them before selecting one, as if Rosie were offering a variety of chocolates. All three girls washed down a Valium with Alice’s Sprite, but because she could not have Alice to herself, Rosie felt very alone. She craved a moment with her mother, on the couch at home, doing nothing together, letting her mom comb her hair with those mothering fingers. The sky on the beach was huger than all creation, and the sand so reflective. She hadn’t noticed the full moon until she’d gotten stoned on the beach. Here the moonlight played on the surface of the sand. It was so incredible, not like the sun, which you couldn’t even look at. She and Alice staggered around with rubber legs. They hung out with some friends at the campfire, and then by themselves at the surf line for a while. Alice thought she saw a shooting star, and they talked about this for quite a while, and about songs they loved that were about stars. Rosie had to keep closing her eyes here with Alice because everything was so beautiful. She wasn’t very stoned, they’d had only a couple of hits of weed so far. Everyone was waiting for a bunch of kids to arrive who had been to the Parkade and connected with Fenn or Michael Marks, who always had totally bubonic weed. She felt like her old self again, and had an idea for a poem, about how the sun was so male, how it came up glaring and went across the sky and dropped down out of sight abruptly, but the moon was like her and her friends, introspective and stunning and changeable, taking its female time. She wondered whether anyone had ever used the words “The moon weeps long soft tears of light.” Probably. Everything was pretty much used up by now; even the earth. The planet was pretty much shot. She turned to study the dunes behind them. They were so womanly, too, like the moon, voluptuous, like women’s hips, reclining. She had been here a thousand times with her mother and Rae and James when she was young, sitting in the sand, watching people cross the channel to Stinson Beach at low tide. She remembered standing here once in wild surf, letting it smash against her, and then it swept her off her feet into the channel, where she tumbled like clothes in a dryer and James had to fish her out. Her father had fished her out of the Russian River when she was four. Her mother had told this story lots of times, maybe because they had a limited number of memories of him. “Blue by the time he finally got to her,” her mother always said, emphasis on “blue,” instead of “finally,” like what kind of incompetent parents would take their eyes off a toddler in the river long enough for her to turn blue? A figure appeared in the sand, walking toward them, and someone dropped the joint into the surf to be extinguished, and Ethan, the only smoker, whipped his cigarette behind his back, so Rosie turned, thinking it must be the police, but it was her physics teacher, holding a child by the hand. Robert Tobias, her favorite teacher, here, in real life, on the beach. “It’s okay, Ethan,” he said, smiling. Maybe the cigarette smoke covered the pot. He had another child in a backpack, who was wearing a knit cap with stars all over it. Both children had gigantic martian eyes. Robert was pretty handsome for his age, probably mid-thirties. Feeling shy, she ducked her head, but he said her name. “Rosie! You get your grades yet?” She shook her head. “No one has. They’re late this year. Did I . . . ?” she began. He shrugged, and held out his hands in a gesture of Who knows? But she knew it meant she had aced the class. God! She was so pumped. It was weird to be so good at this one thing, this and writing. She was pretty sure she was one of his favorite students; someone had called her the teacher’s pet once. He ran his fingers through his cropped sworly brown hair, and said hello to the crowd as a whole. “Hi, Mr. Tobias,” they replied in unison. His eyes were big, like his children’s, and ringed with thick, dark lashes. Amazingly, he had five-o’clock shadow; he must not have been shaving on summer vacation. Rosie wondered whether his wife liked it rough and stubbly like that. She would run it by Alice and Jody. This was one of their big topics, the teachers, what their wives and husbands were like, and what they were all like in bed—who gave head, who didn’t, who came fast, who could last. Rosie imagined reaching forward to touch his stubble, and how it would prick her hands. James and Elizabeth crawled into bed around ten. You could still hear voices and laughter from backyard barbecues. Their domestic machine involved early nights, even on holidays, although Elizabeth often stayed up for hours reading. She loved being in bed. She could spend her whole life in the cave of her bed, empty until her person climbed in beside her and pulled up the covers, Andrew, then Rosie, now James. It was so much lovelier than being in all that light and exposure, and warmer because you were skin to skin. There was a lot more holding these days, in their middle-aged years, less sex, and James often fell asleep in her arms. She loved to listen to him sleep, unless she was pissed off. She knew every single personal noise—how he groaned when he repositioned, or got up, the weird throat-clearing that lasted forever first thing in the morning, although also sometimes he did it while he slept. There were random peeps, grunts when a little cramp got relieved, quiet farts, a lovely faint snore. He had described her equivalent sounds as concerto for woman and wind instruments, and used the phrase in the novel he was working on. They still had sex once a week or so. She didn’t have much drive, partly from the new medication she’d been taking since her last slip, but she had always come easily with him, and it reinforced the idea that they were normal and sexy. It was workmanlike but comforting, their legs wrapped together like clasped fingers, making one person out of two. She had always dreamed of this, of the Other, maybe everyone did. It was so lonely on the inside all those years. After she lost Andrew, she had lost half of herself, the most trusting and the sexiest parts, and when James miraculously appeared at the campsite in the mountains all those years ago, there was not one full woman to meet him. There were parts of her, the rest made up of Andrew being gone. Parts of her had never come back, and so it was amazing, really almost a miracle, if she had believed in that sort of thing, that she could get so close to another person, who breathed when she did, turned when she turned. It was not always the sexy closeness she had signed up for—they had gotten older and tired much faster than she had expected—but it was a closeness that worked. The breathing was a mutual pact. You tuned your breath to your person because then the little cave vibrated differently, in harmony: no longer two anguished individuals. It was like when her mother lay beside her when she was very little, when a person’s skin was one whole piece of beauty, like something Rae had woven out of silk, and your mother had access to your skin, and you got to be part of a breathing, touching organism that might ease into sleep. Rosie’s friends said good-bye to Robert Tobias, and drifted away, but she hung back to talk. She tried to think of something to say. Did he like to talk about physics on his days off? She remembered the first progress report she’d gotten last fall, when he’d written to her parents that she had an amazing mind for physics, answering on one day alone three increasingly difficult questions. She could remember the first one now, how she thought he was joking that day in class because the answer came so easily to her. What was e = mc 2? Duh! The world was made up of energy that was frozen into matter. If you took matter and speeded it up, it was energy, like light, or radio waves. If you divided up energy, and slowed it down, it was matter. People, wood, raspberries—everything was slowed down energy. “Rosie!” he said to her, and she realized she had been spacing out. Could he tell she was stoned? She peered into his face. “I was asking you if you’d like to make some money this summer, and give me tennis lessons.” “Oh my God,” she said. “I’ll do it for free. It would be fun for me.” “I won’t let you. I’ll pay you twenty an hour, once or twice a week. We can play at Pali Park. How does that sound?” “I haven’t played in a few years,” she said. Twenty bucks! “I haven’t played since college,
and besides, I wasn’t very good.” They made plans to meet at the park one day that week at two; his wife got home from teaching summer school at one, and could take the kids. After he left, euphoria caught her up like the wave that had sent her tumbling that time; she wanted to run like a child, but she made herself walk slowly, elegant, head held tall, like her mother, like this sort of thing happened to her all the time, a teacher seeking her out socially. By the campfire, she could see Alice taking a sip from a bottle, maybe the wine she had stolen from the party. Not watching her feet in the sand, Rosie felt something thick and rubbery against her ankles, and saw that she was standing in a pile of dark green seaweed. She remembered all the snakes of seaweed they’d played with as children, she and Beatrice Thackery, she and Simone, the boa constrictors they’d wrap around their necks. Burying beach balls in deep holes so the wind wouldn’t blow them away, digging deeper, stopping from time to time to try out the ball and the hole for size. She started walking again. She could see bird tracks by the moonlight, jeep tracks, footprints, all sizes, hers. It had been a long time since she’d thought of Beatrice Thackery and her pervert dad. She meant to stay in touch with Simone, who had sent a framed picture of her three-year-old son, which Rosie kept on her dresser, next to all those trophies they had won over time. It was so long ago, tennis, Simone, Mr. Thackery. She quietly sang a stanza from a Prince song to knock the memory of him out of her thoughts. She had started wondering at thirteen whether she’d be able to enjoy being with boys after seeing Thackery’s woody when she was eight, but it turned out she liked it fine, about a third of the time so far, which was pretty much par for the course for girls. The wind picked up, but over in the dunes they would be protected. Out in the open, the sandy air was hard on your skin and eyes, not like the feathery dust that coated you out on the trails when the wind kicked in. She went to stand by the fire. A boy she didn’t know teased her about having a crush on Mr. Tobias, and she sort of liked this. The smoke took a convoluted and circular path up from the fire, rising on currents of air. She remembered when she and Simone were ten or so. They’d won a local tennis championship and there was a closing party out here that the tournament committee put on. They were the youngest kids, along with two dweeby boys they ditched right away. The adults were grilling hot dogs and hamburgers. It was unbelievably hot, but only she and Simone went into the water. They did it because the older boys hooted with appreciation; the Pacific was almost as cold as Lake Tahoe, which was snowmelt. She remembered Simone already had breast buds and wore a light blue gingham two-piece, and Rosie still had her horrible bleached-out Speedo with the flannel fish sewn badly by her mother in the bottom corner so she could swim in the deep end at the rec center; she was able to tread water for three minutes and save herself if the adults weren’t watching her closely enough. Unlike certain mothers she could name. After they’d gotten out of the water, she and Simone built monuments, castles of sand, with feathers and rocks and glass, and talked about the babies they would have one day, girl babies because they hated boys, although maybe Simone hated them a little bit less since the breast situation began. The beach that night was as big and white as a glacier field. Simone went off to use the smelly public bathroom, and turned to wave to Rosie like Marilyn Monroe. She was wearing seaweed draped around her neck, like a beautiful green scarf, like one Rae might have woven, with her usual secret tucked inside. Once, when Rosie was in sixth grade, at the closing party of another tournament, she hadn’t been asked to dance. She watched as Simone danced with her boyfriend, slowly, barely moving. Afterward Rosie was in a deep, weepy funk; she wouldn’t go outside, eat, or talk to her mother for days. Rae had whipped up a loose, airy mohair scarf to cheer Rosie, pale pink with a green secret inside. Rosie kept asking Rae, through tears, just to please tell her this one time what the secret was. She had never felt lower, skinnier, uglier, more deservedly alone. “Okay, okay,” said Rae. “Here it is.” She wrapped the scarf around Rosie’s shoulders, then leaned over to whisper in her ear: “You are pre-approved.” A calm sense of relief had filled Rosie’s chest, like stepping out of the cold into a warm car. She remembered the night of Simone and the seaweed scarf as a line of demarcation, the last time she still had a naive power, right before they became obsessed with boys and what they looked like; when she and Simone were inseparable, the only person the other one needed; when she had been number one for someone. She remembered looking up when a man called from the grill that dinner was ready, and how all the older boys leapt to their feet and raced over like dogs, while the older girls looked at each other and got up languidly; and that Simone was staggering across the dunes to get back to Rosie across the fathomless wasteland of sand that in her memory now looked like the moon.