Imperfect Birds (31 page)

After that she thought about him every minute, every hour all day every day. In chemistry she thought about the soft yellow streaks in his hair, the downy blond fuzz right below his belly button, his large hand on her hip bone. Thoughts floated like fish through her mind as she tried to concentrate on what Robert was saying. Now she thought of Robert only when she was in class, even when he bent over her to look at her calculations. Fenn had saved her. The smell of Robert’s aftershave now made her sick, the smell of someone in decay. She and Fenn were the beauty of youth being adults together. He smelled like the ocean, like a carpenter, like nails and wood, like the field of hot grasses where they lay after school. She knew the smell of his warm brown thighs. He kept his room clean, scented with candles, he always had bud, enough to lay some routinely on Alice. Couples weren’t allowed to crash in his room at parties anymore; it was reserved only for the two of them these days—the one of them.

He understood how afraid her parents were now that she was growing away from them, and he kept on baking her brownies with hash oil so she wouldn’t smell of weed. They laughed about how it was almost an act of charity. He also had a source for pure Ecstasy, with no meth at all in it, nothing to fuck up her mind or drug tests, and it reminded her of what it had been like her first few times and why they called it Ecstasy. He made her come over and over with his mouth. Alice thought she was exaggerating, but if anything, she downplayed it because Alice’s Evan didn’t love oral like Fenn did. Anyway, that wasn’t even the great part. The great part was after in his arms, under the covers, in his room, in their hippie town, near San Francisco Bay, on the great big wide quilted earth.

He was polite and shyly conversational with her parents when he came to pick her up for meetings.

That’s what he and she called it when he came to get her during the week. They had concocted a story about attending the young people’s meetings nearby that they’d found listed on Elizabeth’s AA directory, and they went to one meeting a week so they could regale James and Elizabeth with stories. They pretended to be at meetings twice a week on school nights, so at least they could be together briefly. The druggie kids at the young people’s meeting were old friends from the Parkade, way cooler than the general prison population at Rosie’s high school. On weekends, she and Fenn hiked, read out loud in his bed, drank, made love and vegan meals. She admitted to her mother and James that they were sexually active, which was the phrase you used with parents. Her mother hugged herself and hung her head like an old Latvian widow, and James went off to his study to kill himself, he said. She promised her mother that they were using condoms, even though they weren’t, and not too much more was made of this. What were they supposed to do, say, “You cannot sleep with him, Rosie?” Right.

The parental units had imposed a twenty-eight-day trial period to see if Rosie could stay clean for a month, go without weed or anything else they were able to test for with their little Captain Midnight decoder-ring urine tests. They’d felt powerful and in charge when they’d changed the curfew to eleven for those twenty-eight days. Rosie had gone ballistic initially, but it was actually working out fine. She was getting her homework done, mostly, stabilizing the parents, and living the life she had dreamed of and despaired of never having. She was happier than a person had any right to be. And the funny thing was, her parents really liked Fenn. They naturally thought he was too old for her, but Elizabeth understood why she loved him, and James just threw his hands up and said it was all hopeless, and they’d never think anyone was good enough for her and blah blah blah. He seemed resigned to Fenn, and even sort of liked that Fenn had read the same books he and Elizabeth had, and that he had a full-time job with his uncle Joe. Fenn even came up with a thought for James—that life at the Parkade was not unlike life at the Bolinas lagoon, in the ebb and flow and symbiosis and beautiful strangeness of its inhabitants, if only you had eyes to see beyond the asphalt and cars.

James and Elizabeth had been so inspired by this that one morning in October, they had gotten up early and driven to West Marin to sit on the banks of the lagoon with rain boots, a notepad, binoculars, and no agenda. You had to do things early in the day now, as Indian summer had descended a week ago, with all the tumult of heat and bugs, lurid sunsets, red as when you’ve been lying in the sun and it has begun to burn your lids.

Elizabeth always found Indian summer to be a stolen and peculiar time, nature compressed. It was confusing after a couple of weeks of milder days, with hints at the edge of coldness, but not enough mild comfort to rest into. Fall was her favorite season, a season for grown-ups, the wild, bright colors of flame, and when your insides tightened in the cold, you felt more present and on guard than in the balmy softening days of summer. The fall said, Get cracking. Indian summer said, Oh, stay with me just a little bit longer.

The beauty of early morning at low tide in the mucky tidal flats, crisscrossed with ribbons of channels like arteries and veins, made them both whisper in awe.

The last time they had been here, the tide had been high, and the water looked like an ocean that humans could splash in alongside the ruddy ducks and mallards, a big soup bowl filled with cattails, weeds, flotsam. “Duck soup,” she said. “Yum yum.”

“Oh my God, I am so going to tell Rosie you said that!” They laughed, because Fenn was a vegetarian and so now Rosie was entirely vegetarian, too. When they forced her to sit at the table for dinner, she stared at the roast chicken as if they’d served up one of her bucket children on a platter, piled high with potatoes and carrots on the side. Elizabeth made her brown rice and beans, and she ate the big salads they had every night from Elizabeth’s garden, but Rosie must have lost close to ten pounds in the last six weeks. Five nights a week Elizabeth and James ate vegetarian, too—pasta, tofu, beans, cheese—but one night she and James happened to be eating a whole poached halibut with a spicy Thai ginger sauce. Rosie eyed it in despair.

“What is with you tonight, Rosie?” James asked.

“Nothing, just that I’m sitting here staring at what was once a living, sentient being. Like Rascal.”

“A halibut?” James shouted. “You’re comparing Rascal to a
halibut
?”

She leapt up from her seat. “I’m losing weight because I can’t stand to sit at this table watching you pick at dead beings!” She stomped off toward her room, turning just before she disappeared. “It’s so disgusting to me. It’s evil! I can’t live here anymore! I want to be emancipated.”

James reached for Elizabeth’s hand. “It’s a delicious dead being, darling.”

He took her hand here at the lagoon today, too, placing it back on her knee only to jot down notes. Low tide had revealed meals for every appetite, crabs, clams, mussels, fish, algae, seaweed, poultry, frogs, slime. Sometimes there were seals, hauled out in the mud, resting. This was their nursery, their bedroom. No one could swim all the time.

“She’s doing better since she’s been with Fenn,” Elizabeth said out of nowhere. Birds hovered, swooped for food, flew in mysterious patterns; who knew what led birds where they went? James nodded.

But within days of Elizabeth’s saying this, Rosie appeared to have taken up smoking.

At first the smell was just in her hair and clothes, which she explained by saying she had been in a room with smokers, including Fenn and kids at the young people’s AA. Then Elizabeth caught a whiff on her breath, not that she and Rosie were often within breathing distance of each other, and when she asked, Rosie said, “God! I had like two puffs off Fenn’s cigarette. I’ve given up everything! So leave me alone.”

There were already so many things on the table that Elizabeth let it go, and did not even mention it to James. He was so busy all the time. But a few days later she found some of Rosie’s socks mixed in with her own clean laundry, and when she took them to Rosie’s room, she found her window open and the air heavy with lemony freshener spray over a hint of cigarettes.

She asked James what they should do—bribes, threats, graphics, tough love, more groundings?

“What a great idea. I’m sure that will really make her want to quit.”

“Shouldn’t we at least punish her? Or offer an incentive not to smoke?”

“Elizabeth. Did your parents’ threats or bribes get you to not smoke when you were a teen?”

She shook her head. “Are you kidding? They were always bumming them from me. But the thought of Rosie smoking freaks me out. The black lungs, wrinkly mouth—plus it makes people’s breath smell like cat boxes.”

“Be sure to tell her that.”

“Should we ask Rae to intervene? Or ask her to have the Sixth Day elders pray for Rosie? It couldn’t hurt, right?”

“The only connection with a higher power that can help Rosie is Rosie’s own. She’s madly in love for the first time, and her boyfriend smokes. But he seems to be helping her stay clean—they’re going to meetings, right? That is a total lowercase miracle. Let’s back off the cigarettes for now.”

That night Elizabeth began keeping a new secret from James.

After dinner, Fenn had come to pick Rosie up for the young people’s meeting. He shook James’s and Elizabeth’s hands, and pretended to strangle Rascal on the sideboard. Elizabeth walked them out, on the pretext of heading to a women’s meeting in Ross. She followed them in her car from way behind, through town to his apartment. She sat in the car awhile but they didn’t come out. She noticed the binoculars from the trip to the lagoon, and would have used them to spy on Rosie and Fenn, if it hadn’t made her look crazy, especially to herself. The big fish would have had a field day with her: “Elizabeth is whacked.” She left a few minutes later.

Elizabeth cruised slowly past the Parkade on her way to her meeting. There were only a few parked cars. Several older kids were near enough so she could see their piercings and tattoos, but not close enough for her to tell what the designs were, each unique, of course, to say that there was something different about each of them, something beautiful. In ragged jeans, ethnic shirts, frayed knit caps, and even one cape, they might have been the children of gypsies, from communal families who slept and wept and danced and sang together, instead of from nice suburban homes. Where else could they express all those inchoate feelings about their gypsy yearnings and the embedded sadness of life but here at the Parkade? They were smoking cigarettes, she could smell them through her partly opened window. She drove on. A block away, across from the movie theater, another group of kids had gathered, to smoke and yearn and sneer, mostly young women in scarves, coral and turquoise jewelry, torn lingerie. Elizabeth drove to her meeting, partly for cover, partly because her mind buckled with anxiety.

The speaker at the meeting, a blonde woman in a fine tailored suit, shared how alcoholism had stolen her own childhood, and had now come back for her kid. She had tried everything she could think of to save him—giving him endless freedom, but mostly giving him endless consequences and no freedom, but neither had worked, and now he lived in his car. So she went to meetings, did not drink, swept her own side of the street, and released him to his higher power. He was a child of God, too. She said, “God does not have grandchildren.”

Elizabeth smote her own forehead—she’d forgotten again that she was not Rosie’s higher power. The speaker noticed, and they exchanged smiles. Elizabeth went up afterward and thanked the woman for that line.

She called Lank later. He was her expert in mutant teenage behavior. More than anyone she knew, Lank had seen the result of parents’ not setting clear boundaries—gifted teenagers going down the tubes, parents’ lives and hearts destroyed.

“What do I do?” she asked. “Do I give her freedom and a long leash, wait for her to blow it in a big enough way for me to use heavy artillery? Pray that she survive? Or do I try to rein her in and hope she finally stops?”

As usual, he did not answer right away, but she felt him draw close. She shut her eyes and leaned over as if their shoulders could touch. Finally he said, “You’re doing the right thing, Elizabeth, asking people with experience to help you find your way. Rae swears by Anthony’s counseling, for the kid and the parents. My experience with kids who are into drugs and alcohol is that they will get high, until the consequences become intolerable. So the parent can create consequences, by taking everything away—freedom, computers, and so on—but then you have to endure the kid’s hatred of you. And besides, kids will find a way to score anyway. They’re like trapped rats.”

“I know you mean that nicely,” Elizabeth said. They laughed quietly and returned to shared silence. She listened to his light breath, pictured his monk’s strawberry tonsure, the rainforest-mammal brown eyes. “When I was a teenager,” she said, “and I went out to drink with my friends, it was like we were slot cars on predetermined courses. We’d walk in the same old ruts and grooves every time, like it was preset, and they always led us to the same messes. But did it stop us? No way.”

“It’s like a board game,” he replied, “the teenage doper equivalent of Chutes and Ladders, or Candy Land. Only they land on Whirly Head, or Grutty Bedroom, or Pool of Puke.”

She laughed. “That’s great, Lank. Can I give it to James?”

“Of course.”

She sighed, and ran her hand through her hair. “But some kids land in the morgue or jail. And Rosie’s not going to fold up her board—she loves the game. She lives for it. And even when she puts a week or so together of clean time, that whole milieu, the Parkade, it’s like Velcro.”

“But if she doesn’t pull out on her own, you may have to fold up the board for her.”

“You mean by sending her away? I don’t think James and I could do that.”

Lank was silent again, and this time she could not hear his breath. Then he said, “James could.” She knew Lank was right, and it angered her, and it was her one ace in the hole.