Imperfect Birds (12 page)

The layering and hodgepodge of Alice’s room was a cozy thrill. Alice, Jody, and Claude were lying on Alice’s bed when Rosie arrived, so she sat at the desk and tried not to stare at Claude. He was older than they were by several years but he seemed much older, and there was something about him with his buzz cut, long-lashed eyes, and big nose. He was handsomer the moment he spoke with his faint southern accent. Alice was telling them about their Quaalude night. Claude had to pass urine tests, too, at the Presidio, where he was stationed for the time being, so he couldn’t even smoke weed. “But I can drank,” he drawled, and pulled out a half-pint of Southern Comfort. Rosie had never had this before; he took a pull and handed it to her, and it went down both hot and smooth, like whiskey cough syrup.

Jody wasn’t drinking, but Alice took a swallow and handed it back. They peppered Claude with questions. He had already done basic training in North Carolina and was going away to an American base in Germany after a brief stint in San Diego. Then he was going somewhere secret, to fight in a peacekeeping mission.

“Isn’t that an oxymoron?” Rosie asked.

“Yeah, you want to know what oxymorons are?” he retorted. “Oxymorons are a couple of teenage gals who take drugs someone says are Quaaludes, which they don’t even make anymore. That could be full of lye, or GHB.”

Rosie sneaked a look at Alice. Her face was flirty and indignant.

“They make them in Africa,” she scolded. He rolled his eyes. “I saw it on the Internet.”

“Well, thanks for that, sugar. So you buy what someone tells you is a Quaalude from Africa, which could mean any old crazy chemical combo, even lye, that they use for crank. What if you girls accidentally took date-rape drugs? Huh?” He said it like a brother might. Jody looked both relaxed and royal in his arms, shimmery with love, longer and leaner than Claude—she had to bend her knees to intertwine her feet and legs with his—and more grown-up, even though her dark, wispy hair was garnished like a child’s with cranberry-colored clips.

Rosie approved. He even left them the rest of the bottle when he had to get back to base. Jody went with him, after hugging Rosie and Alice. The two of them lay on the bed like puppies, and every time Rosie started to drop off, Alice woke her with some fearful thought about what Claude had said. “I’m so tired I feel like I have leukemia,” she said. “Do you think there was African voodoo lye in the pills?”

“Nah,” Rosie told her. “They just make you tired the next day. Price of admission. What ev.”

“Maybe we should just sleep it off.”

Rosie threw her hands up. “Every time I drift off, you wake me to ask if we’ve been poisoned.” Alice laughed and promised not to talk. They lay back to back in the hot room. Their favorite hip-hop and rap stars were on the wall and the CD player, like people of their daydreams, tromping through their very own lives. There were mementos from when Alice was younger, like ribbons and backstage passes, from when stuff had been easier, and you weren’t pressured to death every living second. Everything was inside out and upside down in Alice’s bedroom, like she’d gotten to shake up a glorious container of all her favorite images, and spill it out onto the ceiling and walls. It was like a kaleidoscope.

This time Rosie was wide awake, while Alice snored softly beside her. Rae came into her mind, and Rosie breathed deeply, the way Rae had taught her. She let her eyes roam around the room. Half of this stuff was code—you knew what it signified, but a grown-up would think it was gibberish, like they used to think about the songs of humpback whales, that they didn’t mean anything, just because scientists couldn’t interpret them. There were pictures of whales and otters all over Alice’s walls. They used to thrive in San Francisco Bay, till the traders killed them all.

Rosie had to keep her room neat enough so James would not freak out, but not so neat that they could figure it all out, break the code, of who you truly were, what you were up to, your values, your truest parts. The code was all that you were made up of—the whole, not a neat little version for your parents to admire and trot out for their friends—you were layer upon layer of ideas and erasures and new ideas and soul and images.

She looked at the pictures, most of which Alice had downloaded from her computer—foreign cities, female hip-hop stars, oceans and sunsets and tide pools, rivers and creeks, and all the animals that swam and flew and clung to the seaweed, like the otters that the adults had killed off. Rosie was particularly troubled by what people had done to the otters. And to polar bears. It just freaked her out. She started to doze, and when she woke up, three hours had passed, and Alice was still asleep. Rosie shook her roughly. “It’s six!” she said.

“So what?” Alice asked groggily, sitting up, rubbing her eyes. “Do we have something we have to do?”

Elizabeth was in the middle of making dinner when Rosie called, but luckily it was two things Rosie hated—split pea soup and swordfish—and it was easy to ask if she could stay for dinner at Alice’s. “Her mother’s making paella,” Rosie announced, which made Alice clap in silent appreciation. “Oh, Mommy, I’m sorry, I forgot—can’t we go to the movie some other time? . . . Okay, then, I promise. It would be great if you could let me off the hook tonight . . . Yay. Thank you.”

She hung up the phone and raised her fists. “What movie are you going to see?” Alice asked.

“
Seventh Seal
. We were supposed to go tonight. It’s not a big deal, only now James can’t go with us. What should we do tonight?”

“I wonder if we could get more ’ludes.” Alice’s face was pensive, but Rosie didn’t respond, in case Alice was joking. “I’d do it again, would you?”

Rosie shrugged, noncommittally. The good parts had been great. The séance feeling afterward, the drugged exhaustion—not so great. Alice’s mother wasn’t home, so they left her a note saying that they would be eating at Rosie’s. They each took two of Alice’s Adderall, being so groggy and all, then headed to the Parkade to check out what was happening.

T
he next morning, Elizabeth and Rae walked up a trail halfway between their homes. The fog layer below was so thick it looked like you could walk to Japan on it. Even in the heat, which here managed to be dusty and steamy at the same time, this was a place of spectral beauty, white flashes blinking on and off in the sunlit bay, hills flocked with Renaissance golds and greens.

“How is my Rosie?”

“Doing fine. She’s having a great summer, working with you and Anthony, teaching tennis, hanging with her buds.”

“Not getting into trouble?”

Elizabeth shrugged. They walked along the dry brown trail.

“It’s always so beautiful up here. Even now, my least favorite time of year.”

“I know—it’s still so pretty in this horrible, dusty scorched heat. It’s like saying how beautiful a woman is when she’s in labor—just wait. Just wait until fall and winter.” Elizabeth nodded, and they walked along in silence.

“Rae, you know, I haven’t felt tempted to drink in a long time, but sometimes these days I would kill for a cigarette,” Elizabeth said after a while. “Just to take the edge off.”

“No, no,” Rae begged. “Smoking is disgusting, and kills innocent bystanders. But darling, how about chewing tobacco?” This made Elizabeth smile. “No, seriously—you could carry a lovely light blue glass cup as a container for spit.” Elizabeth jabbed her lightly with an elbow. “Is there something in particular that’s getting to you?”

“I have a bad feeling lately. Sometimes with Rosie I’m not sure she’s telling me the whole truth. She’s very up-front about smoking marijuana from time to time, and she’s told me the few times she was drinking at parties. But I get a grippy feeling in my guts sometimes, when other kids get busted or sent away, because their parents usually didn’t have a clue how deeply their kids were into drugs and secrecy. I think Jody is clean, but Alice seems like a player, like someone who’ll do anything for—and around—guys. Plus her mother isn’t home much. I don’t know, Rosie loves her so much. And she gets A’s. You see Rosie every day—do you think she’s okay?”

Rae nodded. “With me, she’s great. She’s the picture of health, tan, strong. The children adore her. She’s like a movie star to them. And she’s so patient, so empathetic.”

“Maybe it’s me I’m worried about, then. All my decisions are so tentative—it’s hard for me to say no to her if she wants to go out. I’m so afraid of her wrath that I cave. I’ve also been getting that grippy feeling with James lately. Not that I think he’d ever have an affair, but I’ve sort of lost him to the bitch seductress NPR. He’s gone much more, off to the city to record, or meet with his producer, or off on adventures that might lead to a radio piece. It’s like living with an addict—he gets high when he turns in a piece that they love, or when he goes in to record, and crazy high when they air it, and then he crashes, and needs me to pet him back to life. We don’t make love very often. I don’t know. He gets home late from the studio, after spur-of-the-moment dinners with the producers and other radioheads. He gets up at dawn. He’s never been happier.”

“Oh, baby.”

“I dreamed the other night that he was having an affair. It was hell. He’d given a woman a huge diamond ring, like those lollipop rings but real.”

“When I’ve had an upcoming show, and Lank is preparing for a new semester or grading finals or term papers, we get funky, too. The braid starts to unravel.”

“It’s just miserable. What makes it all sort of work again?”

Rae pursed her lips, mulling this over, pushing her way through a misty curtain of spiderwebs. Elizabeth followed. “Nothing magical. Hooking back into ordinary rhythms—getting up at the same time, letting down together at the end of the day, offerings of food.”

“Sitting together and reading at night, talking back and forth about what we’re reading. Talking about the people we know. Now I remember, and that’s what I crave.”

It wasn’t supposed to have turned out this way, that when a dream came true for James—a weekly gig on NPR—their marriage took a hit. Before, they’d been a couple in which the husband was a brilliant writer and the wife was his muse, his most astute reader and advisor. Their house had been organized around the novel he was working on, which she loved so much: he needed to be left alone and quiet, or needed to pump her for details, imagery, compliments; he needed her total invisible immersion in his work. They were outside the stream of time: artists. Now everything in their lives was either grist for the mill or of no interest. It was emotionally exhausting for both of them, the ups and downs, his stock in himself rising and falling according to external stimuli. A failure, a hero, a star, a goat, all within a couple of days, or even hours.

“What can we do about it, Rae?”

“In my experience, there’s not much you can do about it from the outside. You just live with the bad patches, with the held breath and held body, clamming up, withholding the twigs of connection, and then something comes along, maybe a coincidence, or something bizarre, or he’ll say something that’s both surprising and familiar, and you’ll say to yourself, Oh, my person is not gone.”

“But you have so much faith, and I have so little.”

“So fake it. Act as if you believe that this is all being sorted out for you, by God as Kelly girl or caseworker.”

T
hat night, Elizabeth and James stopped off at Safeway on the way home from the library for milk, muesli, and tinfoil. They went to stand in the express line. There were three people ahead of them, and four in the next line over. James noticed with a groan that the red-haired matron at the front of their line had a full shopping cart of items, which she had begun placing on the conveyor belt. He growled quietly to Elizabeth, who patted him.

“Excuse me,” he asked the checkout clerk, “isn’t this the express line?” Elizabeth shot him a look, but he ignored her. “Wait, maybe we got in the wrong line.”

“This
is
an express line.” The clerk pointed up to the sign, “Twelve Items or Less.” Now the matronly woman groaned and turned to glare at James. Then she started returning items to her shopping cart.