Crooked Little Heart
Read Crooked Little Heart Online
Authors: Anne Lamott
Crooked Little Heart
“Humbert Humbert rhapsodized memorably about Lolita’s elegant, if ineffectual, tennis game; something about this beautiful, warbling novel feels like that unfortunate kid’s revenge … No nymphets here—just as much poetry as could possibly be extracted from a difficult adolescence. A.”
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Entertainment Weekly
“Armed with self-effacing humor and ruthless honesty—call it a lowercase approach to life’s Big Questions—Lamott converts potential op-ed boilerplate into enchantment.”
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Newsweek
“Lamott’s wry, self-deprecating style is instantly engaging … Lamott succeeds because she’s honest. She writes about what it’s like to have a wild and creative mind … with a cheery, nose-thumbing levity that gives the reader a sense of hope.”
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Chicago Sun-Times
“Wry and elegiac … a bittersweet testament to the family, wherever we might find it, and to finding grace in the commonplace.”
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Chicago Tribune
“Lamott writes so tellingly about sadness we can’t help but experience its exquisite profundity.”
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Detroit Free Press
“What strikes most about the novel is its emotional accuracy and its humor-filled recognition that not all problems can be solved.”
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Washington Post Book World
“Without being treacly, sentimental, or romantic, Lamott’s theme is the power of love … a delicate touch, gentle humor, and mature insights [are] hallmarks of her writing.”
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Philadelphia Inquirer
“Anne Lamott … has a wicked sense of humor, and a knack for making her readers feel as if they were chums with whom she is having an animated conversation … spirited and amusing, sparked by taut descriptions of tennis matches and many clever turns of phrase.”
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New York Newsday
also by anne lamott
HARD LAUGHTER
ROSIE
JOE JONES
ALL NEW PEOPLE
OPERATING INSTRUCTIONS
BIRD BY BIRD
First Anchor Books Edition, May 1998
Copyright
©
1997 by Anne Lamott
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1997. The Anchor Books edition is published by arrangement with Pantheon Books.
Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Dutton Children’s Books and Methuen Children’s Books:
“Disobedience” by A. A. Milne, from
When We Were Very Young
by A. A. Milne, Illustrations by E. H. Shepard. Copyright © 1924 by E. P. Dutton, copyright renewed 1952 by A. A. Milne. Rights in the United Kingdom administered by Methuen Children’s Books, London. Reprinted by permission of Dutton Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc., and Methuen Children’s Books.
Random House, Inc., and Faber and Faber Ltd.:
Excerpt from “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” by W. H. Auden from
W. H. Auden: Collected Poems
. Copyright © 1940, copyright renewed 1968 by W. H. Auden. Rights in the United Kingdom administered by Faber and Faber Ltd., London. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc., and Faber and Faber Ltd.
University Press of New England:
Excerpts from
Times Alone
by Anthony Machado. Copyright © 1983 by Wesleyan University Press. Reprinted by permission of University Press of New England.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lamott, Anne.
Crooked little heart / by Anne Lamott.—1st Anchor Books ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-80673-4
1. Family—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3562.A4645C7 1998
813’.54—dc21
97-39450
v3.1
This one is for the Smiths,
Bill, Emmy, Nell, Luisa,
and Sam, and for Leroy Lounibos
.
Last night, as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvellous error!—
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures.
—Antonio Machado,
from
Times Alone
R
OSIE
and her friends were blooming like spring, budding, lithe, agile as cats. They wore tiny dresses and skirts so short that their frilly satin tennis bloomers showed. Into their bloomers they tucked an extra tennis ball to extract when it was needed, as with sleight of hand, like pulling a rabbit out of a hat, a quarter from behind an ear. Their days were spent honing their games in lessons and practice, playing in tournaments, and in between matches, watching each other compete, killing time, hanging out, playing Ping-Pong and endless games of cards. They were brown as berries, with feet as white as the moon; the sock lines at their ankles were as sharply drawn as saddle shoes. Rosie and her partner Simone Duvall were good, ranked number one in the girls fourteen-and-under doubles in northern California. Cocky and devoted, they loved to be watched by almost everyone but their parents, loved to be watched by other kids, by their pros, by the other kids’ pros, and by members of the clubs at which they played—the weekend duffers who’d look at Rosie Ferguson, thirteen years old and seventy wiry pounds, hitting the ball as hard as almost any man they knew, thick black curls whipping, Siamese blue eyes steely, impassive, twenty bullets in a row, over the net and in, frowning almost imperceptibly if she missed.
The kids on this circuit could go to any club in the country, probably the world, and in simply rallying with one another draw a small crowd. Their parents sat in groups holding their children’s knapsacks and sweats, unconsciously dandling them in their laps when the tension rose. The parents—tight-faced, vigorous, vibrating—sat in silences so grave and tense that except for the rampant whiteness and signs of wealth, they might have been waiting for disappeared children in Central American plazas.
Each tournament was played by dozens of these tiny pros, all watching one another play, all aware of each other’s rank and seed. The girls would have loved to be watched by boys. For the most part, however, the girls watched the boys play but the boys rarely watched the girls. The boys were stronger, heavier, more aggressive, and most of the men preferred to watch them play—except for the girls’ fathers, sometimes their coaches, and Luther.
There was a man named Luther who had started following the girls from tournament to tournament last year, arriving in Sacramento or Palo Alto or Berkeley or Stockton, wherever that week’s tournament was. Luther came by bus with no suitcase, no gym bag, no nothing. He looked like one of the men who stood by the side of the road at intersections, holding up a sign saying they were hungry and homeless, had babies or AIDS, would work for food. One day in Modesto he just showed up and started watching some of the girls play. It quickly became clear that he had favorites—and that Rosie Ferguson was one of them.
People guessed that Luther was in his late forties, although he could have been much older or younger. He was white but sometimes dirty, and big, with rounded shoulders and a close crew cut. He may have been handsome once, with a good straight nose and rugged jawline. He wore old worn pants and jackets, black wing-tip shoes. His eyes were dark brown, often rimmed with red as though from drinking, although you never saw him with a bottle. His teeth were strong looking but the yellow of old linoleum. The slow smile was the worst part. When he was sitting on the lowest bench of the bleachers, as close as he could get, and he leaned in to watch when a girl had to bend low to the ground, and he smiled, a current of fear and excitement would run through the girls, a dark thrill like they felt at scary movies.