Imperfect Birds (25 page)

The grass had just been cut the last time they played before she was grounded, and it had stained her shorts and smelled as strong as lacquer. It turned her on even to remember it. This feeling, of love, was so much greater than the few times she’d had sex, when you felt like you and the guy were meat machines with various levers. All that slapping flesh and spit and grotesque rearrangements; plus things going numb. But she and Robert were like a beautiful movie, or like the part after you’re done in bed, when you get to lie in that bubble wrap of closeness. It was your souls touching.

T
he next morning, Elizabeth was on her knees weeding near in the flower bed near Rosie’s window, impatiens and columbine. Rosie discovered this when she threw her window open, her room already hot and bright with sunshine. She said hello to her mother, and her mother answered, “Hello, darling. What are your plans for today?”

Jeez, Rosie thought, it was like living with a secret agent. She shrugged.

They were only five or six feet apart, separated by an open window, so Elizabeth heard the phone ring, and saw Rosie race for it. “Hey, cuz, wha’ up?” Rosie said, without enthusiasm. “No. I’m fine.”

She must have a crush on someone, Elizabeth realized, and went back to weeding. Then she heard the beeps of Rosie’s dialing, and then a moment later heard her hang up. Rosie dialed again, and hung up again. Ten minutes later Elizabeth saw her near the window, on the phone, heard her leaving someone a message in her smallest voice, high in her throat, trying to sound casual as she asked the person to please call her back.

Elizabeth fluffed the soil around a flower, straining to hear. A few minutes later, she listened to Rosie dialing again, heard a soothing male voice. She pretended to be fully engaged when Rosie opened the window wider.

“God,” Rosie screamed through the opening. “Are you
spying
on me?”

Elizabeth rolled her eyes with disdain and went back to weeding. But later in the day, when Rosie was in the shower, Elizabeth hit the redial button, waited for the connection, and frowned when she heard the distinct voice of Robert Tobias on his answering machine.

R
ae picked Elizabeth up early the next morning, as the sun was coming up, for the field trip Elizabeth had agreed to show up for, come hell or high water. They drove along Highway 1 listening to the classical station and eating pumpkin scones, and it was sweet. Not until they passed Bodega Bay and entered Sonoma County did Rae reveal their destination: she had signed them up for a women’s sweat lodge.

Elizabeth felt sure Rae was joking. Signing her up for a sweat lodge was like signing Richard Nixon up for Sufi dancing. She laughed at the very idea, even as far as Jenner. They discussed real things, like why it was taking Elizabeth so long to tell James the secret—she even promised Rae she would tell him tonight. But when Elizabeth wanted to stop at the Kruse rhododendron reserve, and Rae shook her head, and said they were in a hurry, Elizabeth’s heart sank. “I wasn’t kidding, hon,” Rae said. Elizabeth passed rapidly through the first four stages of grief—denial, as this could not be happening; anger and swearing, the way she had reacted when Rae took her on that backpacking trip years ago, during which they met James and Lank; bargaining, I will give you anything, plus two chits for alternate field trips, if we turn around; and depression, eyes staring, wide, dead.

She did not ever get to acceptance. They drove to the banks of the Gualala River, on the border of Mendocino.

There were six women waiting for them. Two were beauties, one blonde and tall, the other tiny and dark with voluptuous lips. One woman was plain, in early middle age, with the light brown skin of a child. One was at least seventy, with fluffy, feathery white hair and a huge black mole on her cheek that looked like a licorice gumdrop. One was black, average size and Elizabeth’s age, with a friendly face. Her partner was black, homely, quiet, fierce. She looked as if she had been dragged along, like Elizabeth.

“What brought you here?” the friendly black woman asked Rae.

“Our church may start offering members sweat lodge as a spiritual tool—so we’ll have more to offer than talking and worship. I wanted to see what it was like. But mainly, it’s a chance to spend the whole day with Elizabeth.” Rae turned to beam at her. “She’s the angel God sent to me when I was at my lowest.”

Elizabeth shook her head. “I’m not even speaking to you, Rae.”

“I came because I’m sluggish and toxic,” said the elderly woman. “My mother was big on Adele Davis and taught me that when the skin excretes toxins, it’s like the soul excretes all this shit, too.”

They were standing near a round hut about ten feet in diameter, four feet tall, covered with blue plastic tarps and army blankets, that looked like a Volkswagen Bug-sized wigwam. The leader, Bonnie, a tall, solid woman with braids, in a shift, attended to the nearby fire, on which small rocks heated.

Bonnie told them briefly about the sweat lodge tradition among Native American tribes, and then had them strip to their underwear, which they did shyly, not looking at one another’s bodies. She then held the tarps open so each woman could bend low to crawl inside the lodge. They seated themselves clockwise, as instructed, east to west like the sun. Rae was the plumpest, but her fat was firm, with only a few dimples. Flattened cardboard boxes served as seats. Inside, the unsightly hut was a hemisphere created by bending willow branches into a dome, connecting them, and covering them with more sticks. In the center was a hole, into which Bonnie soon placed the hot rocks.

It was like a sauna in a cave made of trees. Elizabeth was glad she did not have to sit next to Rae, who was on the other side of the hole. Bonnie handed a bucket of water to the woman nearest the opening, and came inside, pulling the tarps down, and sat.

Elizabeth felt for a few moments that her mind might snap. This reminded her of the bamboo cages in
The Deer Hunter
, like rats might swim by. But then curiosity settled into her, and she started taking notes for James in her head, only partly to stay calm. It was pitch black. In the darkness, you felt like one organism, she told him, enclosed in the membrane of willow.

“It’s going to get very hot,” Bonnie said. “We’ll do four rounds. I think you will be pretty uncomfortable, and want to bolt. You can do that if you need to, or you can tough it out. If you breathe in the heat and steam, they will center you.”

Someone nickered in the dark, like a pony. Elizabeth did not think she had made the sound.

Bonnie spoke. “First, try to release the lies the world has told you about yourself, okay? See if you can connect with the person you were, before the lies.”

The rocks in the center sizzled and hissed when Bonnie poured a cup of water over them. Terror flushed through Elizabeth. It was shocking, so hot and elemental. But she breathed, and remembered being croupy as a little girl, how her mother created a steam room in the bathroom with scalding water from the shower pouring against the porcelain tub, and held Elizabeth on her lap as the steam burned its way through Elizabeth’s nose, throat, and chest, and how after a while mucus jiggled loose from her lungs and she stopped barking like a seal.

Elizabeth felt like she was in the bottom of the earth; guck jiggled free from her lungs. That was satisfying. She savored it, then moved into a tumbled oceanic nonbreathing panic, and then into neutral spacelessness. In and out of the feeling of being faceless, nameless, unconnected. When the hiss of the steam subsided, she whispered across the rocks, “Rae, are you there?”

“I’m right here, darling. Right across from you.”

In the darkness, and closeness, she imagined telling James that she had felt like a marine mammal voluntarily on a rotisserie. Stuff continued to loosen from her lungs. Bonnie called out prayers to the east, prayers to the west, and Elizabeth felt her soft, ploppy body pour off sweat. At the second round, though, when Bonnie poured more water on the rocks, the blast of heat was unbelievable, and Elizabeth felt like she was trapped in the trunk of a car next to a fire; the smoke and the mist stupefied her like a huge fish. It was hell. She hugged her knees to her sweaty, rubbery chest, and somehow the twig that was jammed into her ass helped her breathe, like Andrew gripping her hand too hard through a contraction. She heard someone get to her feet, and then a voice in the dark saying, “That’s it for me, I have to get out.”

“Okay,” said Bonnie. The tarp opened as one of the black women left, and flapped shut. The women gasped for the cool air that came in. Bonnie crooned, “We are
here
, to heal the damage, for the next generation. We are here, on the earth, in darkness, to heal the damage, in ourselves, for the next generation.”

Elizabeth heard Rae say, “I can’t breathe, I have to get some air,” and Elizabeth called across to her, “It’s okay, you can do it,” and Rae said, “No, I need to get outside for a second. I’m claustrophobic.” Elizabeth almost got up, too; anyone would have understood. She heard the rustles and shuffle and slap of Rae getting up and heading out. Elizabeth couldn’t see anything except the burning rocks, and the rocks weren’t giving off light. The flap opened. She saw Rae briefly as she wiggled out on her stomach, her heavy thighs illuminated by the sunlight now flooding into the hut along with cool, clean air.

She was surprised to find that she was okay with Rae gone—free, and strangely less alone. Beings of some sort seemed to hover nearby, banging a teakettle softly, saying, Pay attention to us.

She took long breaths, still holding her knees to her chest, breathing in the steam, and it was the only thing she had felt since Rosie’s birth that might qualify as dilation. Through this, something in her slipped lower, or deeper, or something, to a place where she did not feel the burden of her wrinkled, aching bones. She felt as if nesting dolls surrounded her, Andrew, her parents, lovely and much older than when they had died, aunts and uncles, old friends. She felt more contained and larger inside the willow dome than she had ever felt in her life, except for the times she had taken acid or mushrooms, so many years ago. The heat was terrible. She felt miserable and ecstatic, listening to invisible voices in the silence, and for once she could hear them above her own human whir, anxiety, manners, biography, armor, distractions; she shed these all like a virus, and found a speck of light inside that was not her at all, a fleck of gold in the sandy streambed soil within.

L
ater, having survived a fourth round of steam, Elizabeth and the other two survivors—the oldest woman, plus Bonnie—stepped out into the sunlight. They cheered themselves. “This is probably the single greatest achievement of my life,” Elizabeth said, and when the other two women laughed, she said, “You don’t understand. I’m not kidding.” They toasted themselves with cold water, and stretched. Later she found Rae in the river, sitting in the shoals, deep in conversation with two other women. Rae turned to Elizabeth and said, “My warrior.” Elizabeth managed a small smile as she stepped into the river and splashed around. The water was freezing; it forced her to snuggle with Rae.