Imperfect Birds (13 page)

The checker waved her arm to stop the woman from putting things away. “It’s fine,” she said.

James stared blankly at the packed cart. But right then, the young woman behind James reached around Elizabeth and said, “I recognize your voice! You’re James Atterbury, aren’t you, from KQED?” James smiled and nodded quickly, turning back toward the register, clearly not wanting to start a dialogue. “I love your stuff, Mr. Atterbury—your stories, essays, whatever they are. We all do.”

He nodded his thanks again and smiled tightly, and Elizabeth noticed several people in their line and the next paying attention to him now. She heard the checker’s chirpy voice reassuring the matron, “Really! It’s fine. I’ll do you really fast.” The redheaded woman laid some items back on the conveyor belt, and turned to smile with great satisfaction at the people in line, like a triumphant child.

But then she leered at James. “Well,” she said smugly, “I’ve been told by management that I can
stay
in this line, even though I guess you’re a famous movie star.” James visibly recoiled. The woman was staring at him like prey as she now blindly placed more and more things on the belt. She raised her white eyebrows with amusement, bovine, unblinking, like an aggressive Swiss cow. James actually shrank back from her.

“Please don’t talk to me,” he said.

The woman turned to mug for the people in the line. “I guess we’re lucky to have a celebrity with us tonight—even one in such a hurry . . .”

“Please don’t talk to me or look at me,” James said.

“Lady,
stop
,” said James’s admirer. “Lighten the fuck up.” James shot her a grateful look.

“You don’t get to tell me what to do,” the red-haired woman said happily, and smirked.

James flung his items onto the conveyor belt, grabbed Elizabeth’s hand, and dragged her past the matron.

“Come on, lighten up, buddy,” said the woman next in line, and people murmured their agreement. The redhead looked as if she’d just stepped into her own surprise party.

Elizabeth dragged a stunned James out the door, hot fluorescents lighting their way outside. Inside, people were explaining their positions—the clerk, the admirer, the other customers—while the red-haired lady spoke baby talk.

“God almighty,” James thundered, sweating in the passenger seat of the car, wiping at his brow. “I just got abused! And I didn’t even get my milk. What did I do wrong? I try to be a person of goodwill, and reason, and modesty—and I was just standing there!”

“She was batshit, hon. Let it go.”

“I hate that place. I’m never going back. It’s like some faceless Soviet system.”

“Is it possible you’re mad about something else? Like, say, hypothetically, Rosie?”

“No. We were getting honest food, and something to keep it fresh. We weren’t buying caustic substances that eat the earth.” They sat in silence. He looked up. “Do you think I need to go in and apologize? Or am I just nuts?”

“Maybe both,” she said. James sighed, thought for a moment, and got out. She shook her head with affection, watching him go. She couldn’t wait for him to come back. All these years together, and she still felt like a lovingly anxious dog around him, thrusting its nose into its person’s thigh.

He was hanging his head sheepishly when he returned ten minutes later, holding a shopping bag and a gallon of milk. “I apologized to the checker,” he said, getting into the car. “Now she’s my new best friend.” He put the grocery bag on the floor, shimmied into the driver’s seat, snapped on the seat belt. “I am not a psychiatrist, but that woman was a sadomasochistic death-dog. I say that without judgment. But I over-reacted because she made me feel the way Rosie does—abused and totally powerless. I want to say out loud that you were right, I am furious at Rosie, for her snottiness, her lies, the way she sneaks around and plays us, her bland derision towards us, the way she talks to you sometimes. The bullshit about those pills you found in her jeans, and the whole contemptuous lie machine of Rosie. Okay? There. I’ve said it.”

She patted him. His outburst calmed her, made her feel useful and sort of elegant: it was nice not to be the crazy one all the time. James started up the car, put it in gear, and together they headed home.

I
t took James all day to write a three-page story of the treachery of everyday life. It was called “Ducks in a Row.” Elizabeth thought up the title. It was amazing what a smart, charming piece he had made from the insanity. He had turned it into an allegory about how when you think you’ve finally got your ducks lined up, they turn and peck you to death. How life and time were a conveyor belt moving you along, and blessing came when you realized it wasn’t your conveyor belt. And that no matter how protected and noble you felt, how much in control, we were all being conveyed, all the time, borne astride the Möbius strip of time.

“You’re a genius,” she told him, handing back the essay with a few typos circled. She stood behind him at his computer and pointed out last-minute typos, which he corrected.

“You helped me so much with it. You’re my Alice B. Toklas, my muse, and my beloved.”

Their rift was healed, not by the ordeal, stupid and exquisite, nor by the alchemy that gave him this essay, but by what was revealed: the depth of their fearful stress, the gag snake coiled inside the peanut brittle can, and how much they needed each other.

He went into the city on Thursday night to record it, after making Rae and Lank listen over the phone. Lank said, “You’re a better man than I. I would have gotten in my car and driven through the front windows of the store.”

Rae said, “What an experience. You got humility out of it, James. And you got to experience your self-repair mechanism.”

“Humility is so overrated, if you ask me,” said Lank.

“I agree,” said Rae. “But it’s like a stone in the gizzard that helps us digest the indigestible stuff of our lives.”

“Whoa, Rae, that is so incredible,” said Lank. “Can James use that?”

T
here was no way out of seeing
The Seventh Seal
with her mother. She’d promised to be there on time. Rosie met Alice at Pali Park after Bible school, and they’d eaten some dope banana bread someone was passing out, hiked around Bon Tempe Lake in the heat, gone for a swim, although that was illegal, because Bon Tempe was part of the watershed, fallen asleep in the shade of a laurel grove, gone back to Pali Park and nibbled at banana bread crumbs. They tripped out under the redwoods, let their friends spritz them with spray bottles, used Visine, and then walked arm and arm into town.

They made plans to meet later. Sighing wearily, Rosie stepped inside the theater and found her mother in the lobby, waiting in line for popcorn. Almost everyone there was old—Elizabeth’s age or older. They said hello to each other in a sort of hushed way, like they were at church or in the presence of a baby. Two people said how much they loved James’s work on NPR. She and her mother got popcorn, Diet Pepsis, peanut M&M’s to share.

Rosie felt loopy, mildly disoriented, probably not the perfect space in which to see
The Seventh Seal
. She started eating M&M’s to stabilize herself, then caught her mother shoveling popcorn in like one of the Coneheads eating mass quantities. It made her lose her appetite.

The movie started. A seriously bummed knight and his squire were sitting on the rocks at the beach. Mist and smoke—so far so good. But then Death arrives on the beach. Death, for God’s sakes. This was going to be a long movie. Even the squirrel on the fallen log looked like the end was near. The knight challenges Death to a game of chess, and says he wants to meet the Devil, because the Devil knows God. The squire was all yawns and belches, and then terrible ugly drinking songs.

Rosie watched as well as she could, closing her eyes whenever she needed to escape. She imagined Robert beside her, the hair on their arms glowing like it had in the sun. She saw herself trace the outside of his lips with her fingertips.

“Pretty amazing, right?” Elizabeth whispered, and Rosie wanted to cry out, “You dragged me from Bon Tempe for this? For corpses and filth, plagues and bugs?” She held her tongue, but, in her mind started telling Alice how smack this movie was, how out there—and she realized that telling it as a story made the bad stuff watchable. As soon as she turned it into a story to tell Alice and Jo, or Robert, she got her humor back.

So she paid attention, and started telling Robert what she saw: “So let’s see, it gets festive all of a sudden, because Death decides to mingle more—he pays a visit to a woman who’s dying of plague, in a rotting house. But he’s a
bad
houseguest. . . .” Finally the dope started wearing down a little, thank God. “Oh, now what’s this?” Rosie told Robert in silence. “Here’s a sweet little family, all spirit and light and bounce. The dad is a happy-go-lucky entertainer. Boy, is he in the wrong movie. But I don’t have a good feeling about this. Why would you make a movie like this?” Why, on the other hand, would she and Alice take the poisoned Quaaludes a second time? Go figure. “Oh, darn,” she said to Robert: “The nice family is gone, and now the guy who talked the knight into joining the Crusades is stealing a bracelet off a plague corpse. Don’t you hate it when people do stuff like that?”

Talk about a buzz-kill. This movie was the exact opposite of everything she loved about life. Like a great rave, for instance, the highest thing on earth. All the great energy, the scene, decorated to glow and inspire under black light. The Hard Candy one in Oakland was great, with cut-outs of lollipops covering the walls, and during Easter vacation, the Trip and Dicular one, which Rosie never quite got the concept of, but which was so totally incredible, lots of people wearing white, which was totally the most beautiful look under black light. It was totally PLUR—peace, love, unity, respect. Like the complete total opposite of this movie. Except for their fashion thing was kind of hooker
Seventh Seal
: Rosie and Alice both wore corsets, torn black fishnet stockings they’d bought at a lingerie store in the Haight, with money Alice got from selling her ADD meds, plus a tiny theft she had done with Ryan, a fancy set of harmonicas. Rosie always stashed her rave clothes at Alice’s; her mother did not obsess about Alice’s private life.

Rosie looked around in the dark at all the attentive old people in the theater. She closed her eyes and tried to doze to the fluty Swedish voices as a backdrop. She was definitely coming down now, and it must not be too much longer. She ate a handful of M&M’s.

Back on the Swedish beach, the light was all wrong and the silence was way too silent. Even the nice old moon was bad, like a vapor lock into another world. Then, in a church, the knight confesses to Death accidentally and gives away his strategy. The place where the knight is supposed to come clean and have prayer turns out to be the place of betrayal. Oops.

Then the family appears again, on a beautiful hillside, like Landsdale in the spring, and the earth is providing for them and their little guy, their little bucket kid: the sweetness of strawberries, the milk, like the earth is giving them communion after all this flesh and blood. She wished like mad that the movie would end this way. Would that have killed the guy who made it? Because for a few minutes there it was actually like the energy at a rave, all love and kindhearted community, all the good parts—obviously not when the thugs showed up and hung out in their red bandanas, staring down hot girls, selling whatever they had that night, probably E, or GHB, or Valium to come down with. That was the only bad part; that, and the whole day after, when you pretty much wanted to kill yourself.

But things in the movie were okay; the knight seems to be with his wife. He has come home. He gets to see her again before he dies. And he is okay in a certain way, in a plaguey dying kind of tragic way, because there’s light in his face. She’s feeding the fire, and is not startled to see him. She says to him, lovingly as can be, “I see the boy you were before you left,” and that pleases him. Who would have thought he could ever feel this again? So that is kind of a trip.