Imperfect Birds (10 page)

Elizabeth reached out and touched her daughter’s cheek with her fingertips, and they looked quietly into each other’s eyes, like friends.

R
osie tried to get out of dinner with Lank and Rae the next night. Elizabeth was arranging flowers from her garden in a heavy glass vase, yellow roses of three shades, light pink tea roses, purple Mexican sage.

“Oh my God, I see her almost every damn day!” Rosie said.

“You see Alice and Jody, too,” James pointed out. “You don’t see so much of Lank. He’s my best friend. You’re having dinner with us. End of story.”

“Mom!”

“Stay for the first course, darling. Okay? It’s something you like. Those big lemony seared scallops. And I need you to set the table.”

Rosie looked at her, doubtful and pessimistic. “Yeah, but realistically, how many will each person get? Two or three, right?”

Elizabeth wanted to throw the vase at her head, but it was one of the few left of her mother’s. She looked at the flowers lying on her cutting board, and then cut them slowly with the bread knife, with menacing pleasure, like Sweeney Todd. James smiled.

“God, don’t mock me!” Rosie whined. “That’s all I get from you these days.”

“Don’t come,” said Elizabeth. “It’s fine. We’ll divvy up your one microscopic scallop.”

“No, Elizabeth—I already told her she’s staying. And that’s final.” Rosie made a clicking sound of derision and Elizabeth started to protest, as she no longer wanted Rosie to join them, but James held up one finger. “Stop,” he told Elizabeth. “Don’t do that. We agreed.” Then he left.

Rosie clicked with disdain on her way to the silverware drawer.

S
he stayed for the first course, questioning Lank about summer school, teasing Rae, flirting with them both, more or less ignoring her parents. She and James were both wearing tight Grateful Dead shirts, his stretched taut over his chubby belly, hers cropped above her navel. She cut up the two big scallops on her saucer, and savored each lemony, buttery bite, but Elizabeth believed she was doing this as an act of aggression.

She picked up her plate when she was done, got up from the table, nibbled on Rae’s temple, kissed Lank’s soft, fuzzy bald spot, and saluted her parents good-bye. Elizabeth looked around at the company at her table. No one spoke.

“It’s so wonderful to have you all here,” she said finally. “To be with people who aren’t mean to me. Who don’t make clicking noises at me.”

“Is she being awful?” Rae asked.

“She’s a pill. I spoiled her.”

“We’re thinking of letting her go,” said James. “Do you want her?”

“Hell, no,” said Lank. “I’m a high school teacher. I get that all day. If it’s any consolation, Elizabeth, this is what they’re all like with their parents. They can be perfectly lovely with other adults. It’s par for the course. In fact, you’ve gotten off easy. I’ve got kids in my class right now who’ve already done time in rehab and juvie. I have parents sobbing in my office, scared to fucking death. She’s really a beautiful person—with everyone but you.”

Elizabeth shook her head. “It’s as if she can seal herself off from me, like in a zip-lock bag.”

Rae reached over to stroke Lank’s pale cheeks. Looking into his face, she said, “Those are such lucky kids, though, to have you. Think of having had teachers like you.”

“I did have teachers like me. That’s why I wanted to become one myself. And what has it gotten me? Hair loss, weight gain. No savings. And instead of having an inner child, like other people, I have an inner little old man. All teachers do.”

James concurred. “I have an inner old man, too, now that I think about it. Tired a lot, quietly appalled every time he goes out in public.”

“Exactly. The incompetence is killing him, and the rudeness. He tries to be a good sport, but I think he sort of misses Eisenhower.” James nodded and reached for the salad. It looked unadorned and boring, but there were surprises in every bite—crunchy jicama, candied nuts, peppery sprouts.

“Lank,” Elizabeth said. “Knowing what you do about teenagers, what would you do if you were Rosie’s parents?”

“Consequences, consequences, consequences! Pay attention. Snoop around. Take in what is what, no matter how it scares you. You know when you were a kid, and you had to pretend not to see what was going on right beneath your nose? Because if you did, you would see that your parents were crazy as rats, right—and that no one was in charge? So you unconsciously agreed not to notice, in order to survive? Well, that was then. Notice now. Notice good.”

E
lizabeth had one of those nights of shining metallic insomnia that she used to have every other night, before she started taking sleep medication. She had taken a pill at midnight—James had already been asleep beside her for an hour—but was still awake at one. She had had to put down her book because her eyes were so dry and sandy with wakefulness, and let herself rest with her eyes closed. Sometimes she would doze, but was up every forty-five minutes with a new bad dream: Rosie dead or dying, in all of her nightmares’ greatest hits—car crashes, leukemia—James with his other wife, whom Elizabeth was supposed to be a good sport about, and his little towheaded toddlers on swings, instead of the brooding and angry clubfoot of a teenager he was helping her raise. These were the hours of the black dogs, and she saw them watching her like jackals, cool and patient from the dark corner. At four she got up to pee again, out of wired boredom and exhaustion, and sat on the toilet, hanging her head like someone in a confessional. Then she went to snuggle beside Rosie.

Even with Rosie beside her, she felt utterly alone in the dark, the space in her head stretched as tight as the silence between the notes of the old lady’s saw. Then Rosie flopped over loudly and nestled her butt against Elizabeth’s, and after a while Elizabeth fell asleep. It was five-thirty by Rosie’s bedside clock when Elizabeth woke. She padded down the hall and crawled in beside her quietly snoring husband and cat, and eventually fell back to sleep.

S
he woke in the morning filled with details of everything wrong with her, a deconstruction of her life since the high-water mark of college, her fraudulence, her long-term lack of employment—a life wasted in a ping-pong game of narcissism versus self-loathing, punctuated by sloth and depression. Otherwise, the night had gone swimmingly. Besides, what were you going to do? She went back to sleep.

J
ames brought her coffee, juice, a toasted bagel, and
The New York Times
on a tray, and after she ate, hungover with lack of sleep, she closed her eyes again and slept until noon. She walked down the hall to James’s office, and poked her head in to say good morning. He told her he’d come find her as soon as he was done. She stopped at Rosie’s room, on the other side of the office, but Rosie was gone. Her bed was made, and there was a note in the kitchen that she was at Sixth Day Prez. James took a break from his work, sat with her near the new roses, made sympathetic noises, and helped her plan a day that would wear out the clock with a minimum of misery. The garden could use a hand, and he would load the van with boxes of clothes they’d saved for Goodwill.

E
lizabeth’s first thought when she found Rosie’s lost jeans jammed under the front seat of the beat-up old van they shared was how happy this would make Rosie, and what a hero she herself would be for at least a few hours when Rosie got home from VBS. Sand fell like tinsel from the pockets. Elizabeth stood outside the van and held them upside down, while sand spilled out. What, had she been planning to build a sand castle in her bedroom when she got home? And when had she even been to the beach? The party for Jody had been weeks ago. Elizabeth shook her head to clear it. Rosie had a secret life now, was putting together her own tribe, finding her identity there, and it was great to see, and it hurt like hell. She walked toward the garage to throw the jeans in the washer. She would surprise Rosie by having them clean and folded on her bed when she got home. Maybe she would enclose them in a band like the ones James’s dry-cleaned shirts came wrapped in. Hers would say “Pulling Out All the Stops for Our Cherished Customers.” She reached into the watch pocket, checking for coins. Her finger hit against something that was soft and hard at the same time. There were a few of them, and she rolled them out. Blue; light blue pills, Valium, with rounded V’s punched out at the centers, to emulate tiny hearts, like the yellow ones she had taken for a few days after the breakdown.