Imperfect Birds (28 page)

She looked up slowly at Adelle, in time to see the pout. She tried to clear her mind, smiled to indicate her embarrassed return; but Adelle was staring at her.
“Où es-tu aujourd’hui? Nous te perdons. Reviens, reviens.”
Where are you today? We are losing you. Come back, come back.

Second period was boring, civics with an androgynous troll who’d been teaching here since the year Kennedy was elected president, so the class was mostly on the greatness of JFK. And inorganic chemistry was a nightmare.

She might as well have been invisible, or anyone. She did not cry during Robert’s class. She went up to his desk, once the other fifteen mostly nerdy kids had filed out, but he got up and passed her by and did not stop until he got to the door. Turning back, he asked quizzically, “Is everything okay?” She cocked her head at him, and he said, “I need to be somewhere.”

And that was it. He was gone. She pushed past kids in the hallway and burst into the girls’ bathroom, into the hornets’ nest of primping girls. The buzzing stopped and she locked the door of her stall closed, and when the buzzing resumed, she started crying.

A
re you stoned?” Alice asked her when they met up for lunch. “Your eyes are so red. What happened? Here—here—have my Ding Dongs. Here’s a napkin.” Rosie reached for the napkin, and tried to dry her eyes without smearing her mascara and kohl. Alice enveloped her in a hug. Rosie said she was getting her period, was PMS’ing like crazy, that was why she’d been crying, why she couldn’t concentrate.

“Oh! Do you want an Adderall?” Alice clucked with concern.

Rosie shook her head. All she wanted was dope. She felt for the pouch in her pocket, full of eye drops, mints, and towelettes. Sighing, she scanned the crowded blacktop until she saw a cute guy who always had good dope, who waved when he saw her, and beckoned her over. The three of them walked around to the back parking lot and got high.

The rest of the day she walked around feeling like a bird that had flown into a plate-glass window. The weed didn’t help at all, and in fact she was glad when it wore off. She didn’t eat all day, and couldn’t eat that night, either, and she kept starting to cry, and of course her parents tried to pry it out of her, and Alice called and tried to pry it out of her, too. She kept saying she was having really bad PMS and was going crazy.

She retreated to her bedroom and tried unsuccessfully to study. How could she even go back to school? She couldn’t believe she was still stuck there. It was literally a nightmare, a Kafka novel. God! She couldn’t believe she had to see him every day for the rest of the year. She was so miserable in her own skin, an ugly unwanted fraud. This was the story of her whole life. She was a too-tall, dead-father girl. She leaned forward and lowered her head all the way to her desk, and hid in her own arms.

E
lizabeth had kept Rosie’s secret from James for so long that the substance no longer held much meaning—it must have passed the statute of limitations—but it had inserted a slight reserve between her and James, and they had let this distance slide. She found herself picking at everyone—picking at James for gobbling his food, picking at Rosie for picking at her face.

Finally, when they were doing dishes one night, when Rosie was locked in her room doing homework, Elizabeth managed to say, “There’s something I wish I’d told you a few weeks ago.”

James dried the salad bowl with a flourish and put it on the counter. “Shoot.”

“Oh, I don’t know, it sounds silly now.”

He turned to look at her, worried. “What?”

She turned off the water and shook her head, and told him a brief version of what had happened: How Claude was leaving, how Jody had been distraught, how she and Alice had sneaked over to their house that night, how Rosie had sneaked out. She had hoped against hope that James would wave it away, but he tilted his head, his face contracted and dark. “What?” he said. “How could you? We’re supposed to be in this together.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, genuinely, and tried to take his hands, but he pulled away.

“God, what else haven’t you told me?”

“I’m trying to find a balance between you being my whole life and Rosie being my whole life, too. Trying to celebrate times when we all get along—and screwing everything up.”

He looked at her with hostile disbelief, put down the dish towel, and trudged out of the kitchen.

“Stop,” she called out when he stepped through the doorway. She stood facing him, penitent and bristly and teary. He stared back at her. Tears ran down her face. She hoped they might soften his heart. Her tears had on occasion washed the motes out of both their eyes, obstructions from the stream. But not this time, or at any rate, not right away.

“ ‘We are each our own devil,’ Elizabeth. ‘And we make this world our hell.’ ” He vanished down the hall.

She heard his office door close. She went and stood outside but didn’t knock. “Can’t you forgive me this one time?” Silence. She did not know where to start. Rebuilding trust was the hardest work, hopeless at first. You felt like Humpty-Dumpty. She stood at James’s door until Rosie’s opened.

“What are you doing out there, Mommy?”

“Can I come into your room?” Elizabeth asked miserably. Rosie sighed, and held the door open so her mother could come in. They sat at the foot of the bed.

“Your dad’s mad at me for keeping the secret about you sneaking out.”

“A, he’s not my dad. B, that was days ago—like, get a life, James. C, he’s always mad about something, because he’s short, and now he’s losing his hair.”

“You can’t really believe that,” Elizabeth said defensively. “That’s such bullshit. Don’t you think it may have to do with you sneaking out—or me lying?”

“I don’t know. It’s not my problem, Mama! Can’t you see how unhappy I’ve been? I can’t study. I’m not eating. I’m picking at my face. Look at my skin!” There was a scattering of pimples at her hairline, red and sore.

“Darling, why? Tell me what’s going on.”

“Hello? Jody is not coming back? She’s my best friend. And I hate school this year, it’s like prison. I can’t believe I’m stuck there with all those outcasts and snots and infants. And Robert’s class sucks this year—he’s changed. He’s an asshole now.”

“Just since school started, honey?” Rosie nodded. “Can I ask you something? Without you getting mad?” Rosie nodded again, touching her forehead until Elizabeth drew her hand away. “Was something going on between you two this summer?”

“How stupid are you? You’re a joke. Why would you even think that?”

Elizabeth studied Rosie’s face, full of scorn and fury, and knew in a flash she was lying. “I don’t know. You seem to have this great rapport. And closeness.”

“Stop spying on me! You’re the one going crazy—call your shrink.” And it was the disgusted sneer more than the words that made Elizabeth erupt.

“How dare you! I’m not a liar, or cruel! You’re a spoiled little shit!” She got to her feet, hating herself and her child. How could they say such hateful things?

She locked herself in the bathroom and cried silently until she was raw. Desperate, she tried to pray, until she remembered she didn’t believe in god—but she had felt that shard of something deep inside that she could only call not me, so she cried out in silence to the speck of light,
Help me! I’m begging.
She felt the wet pounding of her heart in her stuffed-up head. She hit the bathroom rug so hard that her fist hurt, and she cradled it like an injured bird.

Eventually, James came knocking.

“Honey?” he asked. “What are you doing?”

After a while, she said, “I’m praying.”

There was a long silence. Then, astonished, “You are?”

“Go away. I hate everyone. Rosie made me promise not to tell you, so I didn’t, and then when I did, you blow up, and she hates me. Everyone is horrible to me, and I hate me.”

She heard his footsteps going away, down the hall. She wiped her nose on the top of her T-shirt, waiting. After a while, she heard him return.

“Do you even hate Rascal?” he asked.

“James? Why do you make me choose between you and my child? I can’t.”

He poked something into the lock, and after a minute it popped open. The door opened a few inches, and Rascal dropped to the floor inside. “Leave me the fuck alone!” she shouted. Rascal lumbered to Elizabeth’s side, tasted her blurry wet face, and butted his huge orange head against her until she took him into her lap.

S
he finally came out, and went to James’s office and sat on the carpet by his desk. He got out of his chair and sat facing her. Then they both sat on the rug, like children at a tea party on the floor of a pool. She felt disgusting, red and unstable.

“That was so hitting below the belt,” she said. “To bring Rascal into it.”

“To begin with, you need to tell me all of your unsaids, Elizabeth. They’re killing us. You’ve been using your sincereness in counterfeit ways.”

“I’m so sorry,” she said, sick to her stomach. She did not point out that the word was “sincerity.” Her mouth tasted like matches. She looked away, at the darkening night through his window, the branches of the kumquat tree. She wondered whether there was such a word as “sincereness.” They sat unspeaking until her tears and misery wore him down.

“Tears give you such an unfair advantage.” He shook his head. “I’ve always hated to see women come undone.” He hit the carpet with his fist, hard, and it startled her. “Okay,” he said after a moment, coming to a decision. “We start over.” He scooched closer to her, and they held each other on the bottom of the pool.

T
hey clung to each other in bed that night, and he rubbed her neck in sympathy. “She’s an awful child,” he whispered. “We must be saints, the both of us.” She smiled in the dark, against his skin. “Let’s get rid of her,” he whispered. “Let’s kill her.”

“We could drop her off in a basket at the convent,” Elizabeth whispered back.

He was spooning her when she woke, still patting her with sympathy, and the pats turned to love.