Imperfect Birds (5 page)

“And you, Alice,” he now said. Rosie watched him turn to threaten Alice. “Are you an alcoholic, Alice?
Huh, Alice?
” She gave James a look of wounded and amused scorn, and Rosie smiled. Alice drank, but preferred weed and mushrooms. Moony, dewy Alice, with long reddish-blond hair and pale blue eyes, looked so innocent, her face an angelic foil to the tight camisoles and baby-doll tops she favored. She was the most sexually active of the three girls, and had been since she was thirteen. She usually wore jean skirts no longer than Rosie’s tennis dresses, torn tights, rakish caps, scarves, and always perfect earrings. “Cool duds, dude,” Alice told James. “Very Mr. Rogers.” Rosie smiled as Alice looked him over, holding her palms out in wordless appreciation of the magnificence of his madras shorts. He polished his nails on his gray cardigan.

“Have you decided whether or not to apply to Parsons, Alice?” James asked. Rosie loved this about him, the way he remembered details from your life, like names, or what you were reading. Alice shook her head. James offered her his fist for the special handshake.

Rosie would not have admitted to anyone that she loved Jody more than Alice. Alice had come with Jody; they were a set when Rosie started school here last year. There were lots of girls like Alice at school, sexy and fun, giddy, the life of the party. James said that having her to dinner was like inviting a bubble bath to join you. And Rosie loved her, but she’d never met anyone quite like Jody, who had some sort of quiet power. Jody looked like she’d stepped out of the first Mozart opera Rosie had seen—very restrained, but like she might flick her crop and all the horses would rush right at you.

“I’ll need you all to do a Breathalyzer when you get back,” James continued, and everyone knew he was teasing. He shook his finger at them. “Urine tests, lie detector, stool samples . . .”

Elizabeth swatted at him. She and Rosie exchanged put-upon glances, but in fact, Rosie’s parents had never tested her for drugs or alcohol. She had successfully weaned herself off cocaine without Elizabeth’s having known that she’d even tried it, let alone done it every weekend for months. Let alone stolen twenties from Elizabeth’s purse, and from the family emergency fund, which she hated about herself. But her parents were so fixated on Elizabeth’s reclaimed sobriety that they did not particularly worry about whether Rosie was drinking or not. She was discreet about it. If she smoked dope or drank, she had a tiny kit in her purse, with Visine, breath mints, and towelettes with a strong scent.

They were so clueless about Rosie’s private life that the first time James had confided in her about Elizabeth’s slip, two years ago, Rosie was coming down off Ecstasy, trying not to grind her teeth into paste as she listened. He wanted to share his belief that in the long run, the slip had been a blessing in disguise. Rosie nodded, paying extra attention so James wouldn’t notice how tweaked she was: Okay, blessing in disguise, what ev, as Alice said. He wanted her to go to his Al-Anon meetings now, for the families of alcoholics, or Alateen, but so far she had evaded him. He told her stuff about the meetings, hoping she would glean kernels of understanding or amusement the way he did, such as that people there said that AA was for problem drinkers, and Al-Anon for problem thinkers, spouses and parents of alcoholics, who hid out in their rooms, secretly thinking alone, having good ideas on how to rescue and fix the drinker. She pretended to listen. He always came back in a better mood after meetings.

He had made Rosie go to a psychologist with him after Elizabeth’s slip. They were still in the old house and Rosie was finishing her freshman year. The therapist had said a few very cool things that Rosie remembered, like that they had not caused Elizabeth to start drinking again, which was good, and that they couldn’t keep her from drinking if she decided to, which was bad. Rosie had not understood why they couldn’t keep her mother from drinking, and James had tried to explain that addiction was like dancing with an eight-hundred-pound gorilla: you were done dancing when the gorilla was done. Wow, the drinker thinks at first, the music is great, and what a wonderful dancer! But then when you get tired and want to sit, the gorilla wants to do the merengue, and you have to keep going. You feel sick, you hate yourself, you want to stop, but now the gorilla wants to waltz.

“So what do we do?” Rosie asked when James told her all this.

“You stay out of the gorilla cage. You don’t even go in to clean it.”

“What about when it needs it? Like when she gets very down?”

“You don’t clean it, just for today. Because after you freshened it up, if she was still sad, you’d think it made sense to get between her and the gorilla.”

“But what’s the worse that could happen?”

“Well. It could tear your arms off.”

“Sometimes I want to push her down the stairs for starting to drink again,” Rosie admitted.

“Just for today, you don’t push anyone down the stairs. Okay? Maybe tomorrow.”

The next morning when Rosie woke, she found a sign James had taped by her desk that said, “Tomorrow.” Elizabeth saw this, loved it, made her own sign, and taped it to her mirror. She shared it with Rae, and now there was a sign in Rae’s house, too, taped to a kitchen cabinet, “Tomorrow.” And Elizabeth had not had a drink since.

But in Jody’s aging Camry, a campaign button on the dashboard insisted on the opposite—“
^¡
Ahora!”
Now! It was from a recent rally for immigrant rights in San Francisco that she, Rosie, and Alice had gone to with Rae and Elizabeth. There were feathers stuck into the stereo speaker on the dashboard, and a small plastic Mary standing on top, although Jody did not believe in God. Rosie believed in something, some sort of energy field or force, like a cross between the oceans and their cat, Rascal. More on the Rascal side. No, more on the ocean side—force, beauty, vastness, sheer rhythmic being: her physics teacher, Mr. Tobias, was helping her with a paper for her college applications that said you could prove this with quantum theory.

The girls drove along the windy road in the dark, past all their favorite places: low hills, talkative creeks, redwood groves. Björk sang from the speakers in the car, all weird emotional beauty and snowy purity, and Alice passed out Adderall to help them stay awake for the long night ahead.

J
ames and Elizabeth sprawled in the living room all night and read with Beethoven on the stereo. They were not celebrating Memorial Day, although Rae and Lank had invited them to a jazz concert in Napa. Every so often Elizabeth looked up and asked whether James thought Rosie was dead in a fiery car crash, and James said jeez, he hoped not.

They gave Rosie a lot of independence, partly because she seemed to have such a good head on her shoulders, had never gotten into any real trouble, but mostly because she did so well at school: the three girls had gotten almost all A’s, even when Jody was going down the tubes, even in honors classes, and for Rosie even in physics. She was a good writer, but not like Jody, and arty, but not like Alice, who was like a hip-hop Coco Chanel. Alice was the one who would put Landsdale on the map, with awards in fashion design. It was the physics that made Rosie unusual among Landsdale students. Andrew had had a gift for physics and math, and had almost gone into engineering, and he always insisted that Rosie had inherited the genes: before she could walk, she’d begun tinkering with strollers, her own and those parked nearby. She would crawl underneath to have a look. Once, at two years old, before she was talking, she had started Andrew’s car. It seemed a philosophical thing, or instinctive hardwiring, that she could see relationships between things, a scientific version of what James had—the noticing genes necessary to be a good writer. Rosie’s mind liked to do things with its hands. She liked to imagine things that you could not see, like black holes and the far side of a pyramid. She was at home in the abstract realm of witnessing and synthesizing.

Elizabeth watched James read. Looking up at him from the window seat, she remembered the first years after Andrew’s death, drinking so hard, flailing, all those sexual encounters one shouldn’t have had. It was unbearable that he was gone, gone-gone, as if a Hoover had vacuumed him up.

“James?”

He put his book down, looked over the top of his glasses. “Do you think we should worry more about Rosie? The odds of her being an alcoholic are way better than average. And her two best friends, Jody with her history of abuse, and Alice such a party girl, even though she’s so accomplished—”

James interrupted her. “We know she’s gotten drunk a few times with them. And we know they smoke a little pot. But first of all, you can’t worry yourself into serenity. We keep our eyes open. And secondly, Rosie is her own person now.” Though he said it in the spirit of reassurance, this insight had the opposite effect. Elizabeth clutched at her throat and breathed like a dying asthmatic to make him laugh, but then panic and sadness rose inside her like a swamp monster, and tried to pull her down.

R
osie stayed on the outskirts of the party, feeling like her usual loser self, shadowy as a frond. There were greetings and friendly confusion around her, Jody’s relatives pouring in from all over Northern California. Rosie knew some pretty squalid details of the family—alcoholism, infidelity, and even incest, although the incest guy in the family was not here, and two of the alcoholism people held cans of Diet Coke. Jody’s oldest uncle had come down from Santa Rosa, looking unchanged since Rosie had last seen him, while his wife looked older; all the wives here looked like their husbands’ big sisters, watching out for baby brother. This completely freaked her out.

Jody’s mother, Sarah, was medium tall, with frosted hair, a perfect nose, and a nice sense of humor. She worked as a copywriter for an advertising firm in San Francisco and had a no-nonsense way about her. Rosie liked her for her strength—she seemed like the kind of mother who never panicked, who stayed calm by drawing on reserves of inner strength; the sort of mother who would be able to lift a car off her child, unlike Elizabeth. Alice liked her for her normalcy and casseroles, as her own mother ate mostly raw food and some sort of vegan seed disks, like you’d attach inside a bird’s cage for it to peck at. Jody’s mother dressed like a relaxed woman with style and money, lots of fitted fancy third-world blouses. Alice’s mother was only thirty-six, and a Sufi teacher. She thought of Alice as her roommate or little sister, and rarely came home before midnight. Alice had met her father only a few times over the years, which was fine. He was sixty-five and had many young children with many young women.

Jody’s grandmother Marion sat in a safari chair with a cup holder. She was ninety, weighed about forty pounds, and looked like polished bone. Rosie had met her a few times with Jody, and a couple of times at Rae’s church. She was across the patio, under the trees, and Rosie signaled to her that she would join her in a minute. She always tried to hang out with the oldest people because otherwise they got ignored. Old people seemed to like her. Also, she was good with kids. Great: old people and kids; why couldn’t she be good with guys?

Alice came over to show Rosie the bottle of wine she had just stolen from the pantry, and tucked it into her backpack to share on the beach later. They hung out for a while: Alice kept looping her fingers through Rosie’s hair, combing it, and gathering hanks of it, to coil around her hand.

Jody really couldn’t hang out with the two of them, she had to schmooze with the relatives, so when Alice wandered off, Rosie went over to talk to Jody’s grandmother.

Grandma Marion grasped Rosie’s hands with her papery moth fingers like something from the grave, and begged to hear about James; women of all ages loved James. That’s one thing Rosie appreciated about her mother—that she’d gotten a guy all the other women in town wanted, even though he was short. And that her mother had managed to get him to stay, and to adore her.

Rosie shook her head at Marion with hopelessness—where did you even start? James was a treasure trove of silly behavior. Like he might point to a tall middle-aged black man and say in a hushed tone, “Oh my God, is that O. J. Simpson?” Once he’d stopped in his tracks and gasped at a scrawny old gypsy woman, and said, “Is that Keith Richards?” But she didn’t know whether this was Grandma Marion’s kind of humor.