Imperfect Birds (2 page)

So Rosie had given guys head, gotten laid, and done cocaine a few times: for God’s sake, what did Elizabeth expect? It was not ideal, but Rosie was seventeen and gorgeous and had been on the pill, for an overly heavy monthly flow and acne, since she turned fifteen. Her skin was under control now, with only small clusters of pimples, and she got much less crazy every month. The mention of cocaine upset Elizabeth, but it was apparently in the past, having not been mentioned again in the journal.

Rosie’s guys had smelled of marijuana the times Elizabeth had been close enough to sniff, and she had found a pack of rolling papers while snooping in Rosie’s purse a few months ago, but she rarely smelled weed on Rosie. They had apparently dodged a bullet when it came to drugs, knock wood.
Kinna hurra, kinna hurra,
as Jewish friends exclaimed, laughing while knocking wood or their own heads: no evil eye.

James glanced up from his paper again. He sighed heavily but got into people-watching with Elizabeth: yoga ladies with their baseball caps and rolled-up mats leaving the yoga studio; people in groups and couples and alone, shopping at the health food store or at Landsdale Hardware and Lumber, at the foot of where the mountain would usually be. It was missing today, but the fog was supposed to burn away by noon. She looked at James surreptitiously, with a sad and mooning face; she loved him so much. He was not the tall, handsome man her first husband had been, elegant and calm and amused. But he was her perfect companion much of the time, and she loved his looks: his crazy frizzy hair had been cropped and styled now. He had told his hairstylist to make him look like the gay scion to a great fortune, and she had. He’d also had his front teeth capped, so while he was never going to star in toothpaste commercials, he had the sweet pleasing smile of someone with a lifelong shyness about his teeth.

As they sat on the steps, James pointed out a tiny Ralph Steadman dog on a red leash. “It looks like an ink-blot test,” he whispered. “Like a little chemo dog.”

“It’s a soap-on-a-rope dog,” she replied. She laid her head against his shoulder while he scribbled this down in his notebook. He was the smartest person she had ever known, on literature, politics, psychology, and yet he could also be so dorky, with the silly Monty Python walks and weird voices that still made Rosie laugh, most of the time. On the wrong day, however, she might announce snidely that this or that behavior was the main reason she wanted to move out. For the ten-plus years since he’d entered their lives, James had been making the same dumb jokes. But people always laughed, which encouraged him. Passing diners at outdoor tables or in the park, he’d peer at their food and ask eagerly, “Are you going to finish that?” and everyone laughed. It had begun to embarrass Rosie a few years ago, but she always forgave him for being so corny. “Don’t pet the sweaty stuff,” he’d tell her friends when they seemed upset, a line he’d gotten from one of the many doctors he and Elizabeth now needed to tend to their deteriorating body parts.

They had problems now in areas where they hardly used to have areas. They both wore glasses. James had had two skin cancers removed from his widening bald spot. Elizabeth had a hammertoe and ensuing gigantic corns, which always grew back after removal. James’s best friend, Lank, had a bad rotator cuff. Rae, his wife and Elizabeth’s best friend, was getting carpal tunnel syndrome from the years at her loom, and wore a wrist brace. Both women leaked urine if they laughed or coughed too hard. Elizabeth had to wear napkins all the time now, and was not even fifty.

Everyone’s back ached except Rosie’s. But Rosie had a visible glob on one eye from sun damage, seven years on tennis courts for ten hours a day. Also, Lank had such terrible vision now that no one would drive with him at night, even though he wore glasses, which magnified his already big brown eyes to the size of a rainforest mammal’s. He had lost a lot of his hair except for a light red fringe that he kept short. Rae often stroked his head and cooed like a lap dancer about how soft and sexy it was. He had had a melanoma removed from his upper arm, probably the result of all the years he and James had backpacked together. They had met Rae and Elizabeth on a trip to Yosemite, coming up on eleven years ago, but they rarely camped anymore, because of bad backs, aching feet, and skin cancers.

But by their age, so many wonderful people in their lives had died or were going to die soon; and besides, they were all in relatively good health. So when the sun came up, you felt around for glasses, got out of bed, limped about on stiff feet, and slathered on sunscreen, grateful for the poignancy of daybreak.

James, who was usually so mellow, could be stern and pissed off at Rosie. She could make him lose his mind, especially when she was cruel to her mother. He periodically grounded her and took away her allowance, something Elizabeth did not always agree with, as she felt that Rosie, a year away from graduation, was too old to treat like a child. James, on the other hand, felt that if you didn’t use parental muscle and control, the homework didn’t get done, classes got skipped, grades would fall off, and Rosie would have to go to a junior college, and they’d be stuck living with her defensive moods and contempt for another year or two. He had become the primary disciplinarian around the time Rosie turned sixteen, when she began to plead for more and more independence, because unlike Elizabeth, he did not fear Rosie’s wrath or worry about being seen as the bad guy, all that stood between her and eternal joyful congress with her friends. In fact, he seemed to enjoy the role of enforcer.

On good days, when everyone got along, Elizabeth believed she’d die when Rosie left, keen forever like an Irish fisherman’s widow. On bad days, she felt like a prisoner at the Level 1 Reception Area in Pelican Bay, marking off days on the prison wall until Rosie’s graduation.

James had first called Rosie the angry clubfoot in the early weeks of his romance with Elizabeth, as they drunkenly listened to her clomp around upstairs in a bad mood, resentful that James was stealing away her mother. And she still fit the bill on a regular basis, although to judge from anecdotal evidence that Elizabeth culled from other mothers, Rosie was not nearly as awful as many of the town’s teenage girls, not by a long shot. She did not scream, hit, run away, or throw things. She had not gotten pregnant—Elizabeth knew of at least four girls who’d gotten abortions. Still, life with most teenagers was like having a low-grade bladder infection. It hurt, but you had to tough it out.

Lank, who taught high school in Petaluma, had responded to Elizabeth’s periodic misery by inventing a church just for her, called Seeing the Light Ministries. Not long ago, during an awful patch between Elizabeth and Rosie, Lank had, in his capacity as pastor, reminded Elizabeth of the doctrine against raising your kids as if they were precious equals. This seemed to be the current national parenting trend, but it was utterly misguided.

“You are the sun,” he told Elizabeth over the phone. “The child is merely a moon.
A
moon. She has no light of her own, no income, no car. She is a satellite. Her judgment is frequently poor, and she is mean. She is South Africa before the revolution, cruel and crazy. Divest! Divest!”

Elizabeth knew this was the path toward freedom, away from the tweaking and gnashing of teeth, but it was so hard not to hook into Rosie’s teenage bullshit; hard not to react when Rosie was arrogant or cutting or blinked at her like a lizard and walked away while Elizabeth was in mid-sentence. Lank provided Elizabeth with Seeing the Light responses to everyday demands, such as “Roise? The instructions are inside the lid of the washer.” He had an all-purpose response to any teenager trying to provoke a fight: the silent chanting of a mantra, which was WAIT, for “Why am I talking?” Parental non-engagement drove Rosie crazy and out of the room.

Elizabeth adored Lank: the two of them were the quieter ones in their marriages; James and Rae were the great conversationalists, the raconteurs, the stars. But when Lank couldn’t gently help Elizabeth with the pain of having such a mouthy and spoiled child, he’d turn the phone over to Rae.

Rae preferred the spiritual approach, which could either exasperate Elizabeth with its kindness and optimism or get her breathing again. “The love you have for Rosie is absolute, right?” Rae, Rosie’s chosen auntie, had asked a month ago, neutral as Switzerland.

“Not really, not anymore. I don’t actually like her half the time.” This was one of Elizabeth’s two darkest secrets, how many times over the years she had felt a sense of hopeless disgust at Rosie’s values and behavior. The other secret was how constantly, since Rosie’s birth, Elizabeth had lived in terror of losing her, from crib death, or a rogue wave, kidnapping, cancer, and now, teenage car accidents. It hadn’t helped when two kids in last year’s senior class had died in a post-party accident, or that one of Rosie’s friends had ended up in the emergency room getting her stomach pumped after overdosing on alcohol. One of Elizabeth’s antidepressants was for the obsession and anxiety that Rosie would die. The other helped control her rage.

“Would you love her less if she killed or molested someone?” Rae asked.

“Of course not.”

“Then by definition your love is absolute. Stand in that. The rest’ll pass.”

Elizabeth took long, deep breaths. “Why does she have to be so mean?”

“It’s the nature of teenagers. They’re like that. We probably were, too.”

“It’s true. I was mean to my mother. I mean evil mean.”

“So was I. So was Desmond Tutu, probably. And Dinah Shore. Remember in high school, when your teacher reads you a scathing diatribe on teenagers, and you think it’s Spiro Agnew? But it turns out to be Socrates?”

Still, there were times when nothing helped, and Elizabeth imagined digging into her daughter’s contemptuous face with her badly bitten nails. James was more patient than Elizabeth, until he snapped, after which he was more apt to ground Rosie or take away her allowance. A beam of good nature shone through him most of the time, through the crucible of adolescent explosion and experiments with drugs, and Rosie’s transformation into a tall and voluptuous beauty, and the subsequent parade of young men; and through Elizabeth’s menopause, depressions, and slips she had had around alcohol, the last only two years behind them. He loved them both like a good dog, a rescue dog, which is how he sometimes felt. At times he’d study them over a pleasant meal, and enthuse, almost in tears, “It doesn’t get much better than this.” He helped Rosie with her homework and picked up around the house without being asked. And the two best things: he loved to gossip, anybody doing anything with anyone else, anywhere, in the family or out in the world; and he loved to lie in bed or on the couch or beach or anywhere, and read.

But Rosie could push him over the edge into heavy peevishness, as now, by being late. He growled: “What time’d she say she’d meet us?”

“Noon.”

“If she’s not here in three minutes, we’re going.”

“When did you get to be so bossy?” But she knew the answer. He had become more anxious and vigilant in the last few years, since Elizabeth’s little breakdown on the trampoline, as they still referred to it. Three years ago, while bouncing with Rosie on a neighbor’s trampoline in Bayview, something had jiggled itself loose, all the suppressed loss and devastation she’d kept to herself after Andrew’s death, and it poured forth without ceasing. She had spent a month dazed or crying in bed, on new medication, seeing her psychiatrist every two days. Then, two years ago, she’d had that brief AA slip, which is to say she had started drinking again after many years clean and sober. James hadn’t a clue she’d been nipping at the bottle late at night for a week, until he’d found her that morning at dawn on the bathroom floor. She held up a bottle of prescription pain pills for his sciatica. “My back hurts,” she said, which it did, as she had slept crumpled up on the cold tiles after falling sometime during the night. She didn’t recall much of the previous evening, except that it had involved the last of the sake that James’s Japanese publisher had sent him three years before, when he got his book published in Japan. They’d kept the sake for the sheer beauty of the painting of rice fields at sunset on the white ceramic bottle.

His depression showed up as unpleasantness, grumbling self-pity, and running complaints about life. Normally this was their main amusement, good-natured comments about how ridiculous and hopeless everything was. Sometimes Elizabeth had to cross her legs to keep from peeing at his observations and outlandish lies. He’d say anything to make them both laugh and to lift his own spirits. Just the other day, he had told people in line at Macy’s that Elizabeth was a falconer. Another time, he had told people at a protest rally that she had won a silver medal in the Munich Olympics—in dressage, of all things. She had just nodded upon hearing this and tried to look more horsey.

But while his depressions were infrequent, hers were chronic, lifelong and deep. They required extensive medication and periodic therapy to keep at bay the thoughts of killing herself or starting to drink again or both.

“Oh, who doesn’t?” Rae had exclaimed when Elizabeth shared this with her recently. “Life on earth is a head-scratcher for anyone who’s paying attention. This place has been a bad match for me since I was four.”

“Really? But you’re so kind and positive.”

“Nah,” she said, pooh-poohing it. “I’m just happy around you.”

“So what are we supposed to do again, when we hate everything?”

“You stop pretending life is such fun or makes sense. It’s often messy and cruel and dull, and we do the best we can. It’s unfair, and jerks seem to win. But you fall in love with a few people. Like I love you, Elizabeth. You’re the angel God sent me.”

Rae said this fairly frequently. It was ludicrous; there was no one less angelic. Rae would tell this to perfect strangers at the movies or the health food store, pointing to Elizabeth. She used to protest. “But I’m so erratic and depressed!”