Imperfect Birds Read online

  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!”

  “Hey, I like that in a girl. Look, if you don’t have a bad attitude and lots of things wrong with you, no serious person is going to be interested. If you feel scared, outraged, confused most of the time, come on over. Have a seat.”

  That people like Rae and James and Lank adored and needed her, three people of the highest possible quality, who could have anyone they wanted, was all Elizabeth had to go on most days, and unless she was in a depression, it was enough.

  She looked over at James sitting beside her on the steps of the Parkade. Any woman in her right mind would love to be married to such a kind and hilarious man, but he had chosen her, and then stayed. It kind of boggled the mind.

  He started to stand but abruptly reached for the notebook in his back pocket, sat down, and began scribbling.

  Surprised by the stay of execution, Elizabeth looked even harder for Rosie. They had been in Landsdale a year, after selling Andrew’s house in Bayview and buying a much cheaper one here, where the zip code was not as desirable. It was a pretty, almost rural town of three thousand generally ordinary, educated, outdoorsy Bay Area citizens, but with more than its share of tie-dye and vegans. Bumper stickers proclaimed it May-berry on acid. The women here owned more horses and had had much less cosmetic surgery than women in the wealthier parts of Marin, and many let their hair go slowly gray, as Elizabeth had begun to do a few years ago. (Still, she got her hair cut at a slightly upscale salon in Sausalito, pricey for their budget, but necessary—she insisted—for her emotional well-being.) She and James had made a profit on the sale of the Bayview house, even after capital gains, which they would use to live on—James had not broken out as a writer and had gotten only a small advance for his second book, which had taken him two and a half years to write so far. Rosie would be going to college in a year, and while there was some money soc
ked away from Andrew’s trust fund, they had dipped into it over time for urgent home repairs and for psychiatric expenses after Elizabeth’s various crises. It had been necessary and helpful for her finally to deal with the catastrophe of Andrew’s death, but it had cost them financial security. They had mediocre health insurance, and she needed expensive antidepressants, and nonaddictive antianxiety meds that did not threaten her sobriety. She sometimes wanted to get a job in a bookstore or a gallery, but there was so much to do around the house, keeping their lives and schedules in some semblance of order, that she had never seriously pursued it. She planned to, though, after Rosie left for school.

  Leaving Bayview had meant moving ten miles from Rae, who still lived in her great studio with the massive loom in its center, and it meant Rosie’s leaving behind her old friends and going to a new school for her last four semesters of high school. But it also meant they could make ends meet if they were careful.

  Elizabeth had started going to AA meetings in Landsdale after they moved. The alkies at the meetings in Bayview had helped her get well after her little breakdown on the trampoline and her slip, even though she had not let anyone there know her well. And while she did not agree with Rae that a pulsing seed of God was inside each person waiting to bloom, she had stopped seeing the people in recovery as a bunch of fundamentalist bowling-alley types. She practiced the slogan “Live and let live” as well as she could, even when it came to their higher powers, which seemed to range from celestial butlers to schizophrenic voices to her personal favorite, that of a New Age mother who described God as a giant beanbag chair into which she could sink and whose loving arms wrapped around her in comfort as she rested.

  Elizabeth saw that James had stopped scribbling, and she looked around the Parkade for something to distract him and buy more time. “Oh my God,” she said. “Look at Lisa Morton.” James nodded at the emaciated woman with the yoga mat coming out of the general store, who had a son in Rosie’s math class. Once, when James had become convinced she was dying of cancer, he had asked her if she was okay, and she’d replied, smugly, “Yoga.”

  “Look—that will be us someday,” Elizabeth continued, pointing at an old couple coming out of the health food store. She recognized them from the few times she had attended Rae’s church, which was nearby. They were raising their grandchild, who was one of Rae’s church-school kids. The child’s mother lived on the streets in San Rafael, between stints in county rehab. The grandmother sported what looked like goggles you’d wear on glaciers, through which she kept looking around like a little bird. Maybe you didn’t see well anymore, Elizabeth thought, but you wanted to see as much as you possibly could for as long as you could, and you wanted to be seen. The couple were dressed in flowing linen pants and shirts, down vests, and thin bright knit caps with ear flaps, like off-duty Sherpas.

  “Go give them a hand,” said Elizabeth. The grandfather’s canvas bag was heavy with food, pulling his right shoulder several inches lower than the left. James got to his feet and walked toward them. Rae’s church was called Sixth Day Prez, although it was not Presbyterian. It was not anything in particular. Rae and the founding minister, the formerly Very Reverend Anthony Small, had liked the sound of it when they first considered the idea of breaking away from the old church, after he had had an awful rift with the governing board over, of all things, God’s omniscience. Anthony had begun to waffle on the precept after his scholarly young son was shot in a drive-by on New Year’s morning in San Francisco two years before. He was nineteen, no longer on Anthony’s family medical plan, and his care at County Hospital in Oakland had been barely passable, so that when he recovered, he had a severe limp and hearing loss.

  The theme of the old church was that God had a perfect plan for everyone, but Anthony had come to believe that God was nowhere near done with the job of creation: this was why everything seemed so tragic and inadequate. He or She and we were still all on the sixth day, together. You weren’t going to understand much while on earth, except that God was present with us in the whole catastrophe. Anthony had not formulated this belief; it had been part of an ongoing rabbinical conversation for centuries. But he had added his own progressive convictions—that those who could must help take care of those flattened by the wheel of the System. The thing was, the church responded, this didn’t really work for them anymore.

  Rae, on the other hand, old Berkeley activist that she was, heard the words “the System” and signed on as part-time office manager and lay minister at the cabin in a redwood grove that Anthony rented in the town next to Landsdale. She loved it, and the small salary and good benefits helped during lean times for her as a weaver.

  The formerly Very Reverend Small was light brown, half Haitian, tall with funky teeth and a hat rack that he festooned with African caps and scarves, which he wore instead of ties. Rosie had gone to hear him preach several times, and while she did not exactly believe in God, she loved the scarves, the caps, and the fact that he did not make you call him Reverend Anthony. “Anthony” was fine, although Rosie called him Anferny, after a character in her favorite teenage movie. He told her she resembled his Black Irish mother, with her long black curls and cerulean eyes. She had worked beside him and Elizabeth to set up an organic community garden in the poorest part of San Rafael, and had gone with him and the four kids in the Sixth Day Prez youth group to help clean up after oil spills in San Francisco Bay, and after floods from the late-winter rains.

  Rae was Rosie’s authority on all things spiritual, because her beliefs were so simple and kind. You were loved because God loves, period. God loved you, and everyone, not because you believed certain things, but because you were a mess, and lonely, and His or Her child. God loved you no matter how crazy you felt on the inside, no matter what a fake you were; always, even in your current condition, even before coffee. God loves you crazily, like I love you, Rae said, like a slightly overweight auntie, who sees only your marvelousness and need.

  Elizabeth turned to look over her shoulders at a commotion across the Parkade by the bus kiosk. A group of young people had gathered, passing a joint and sniggering, shoving, sharing: it was ridiculous, like a last-chance preschool. Some were older kids who had already graduated from high school but stayed around, who had dropped out of college or been kicked out, or who had forgotten to move out of their parents’ houses. There were men in their mid-twenties, too. A couple of them were known to be dealers. You didn’t ever see them dealing, but you did see them with sexy stoned adoring girls.

  She glanced around for Rosie. James had gone off with the old couple, but he should be back in a few minutes. There would be no more stalling in the hopes that Rosie would appear. Cars drove in at the western edge of the Parkade, and exited to the east, across from the movie theater, near the other set of stairs. People were parking and getting out of cars, or walking to check out library books, or buy hardware, or order muffins at the KerryDas Café. They bumped into one another, checked in briefly, and Elizabeth eavesdropped:

  “Where’s Chelsea for the summer?”

  “Habitat for Humanity, in Georgia.” That might be a good plan for Rosie next summer, come to think of it.

  “Hi, April—long time! Did you get your tomatoes in yet?”

  “How about those Giants? Look to you like the fire sale’s about to begin?”

  “Hey, Smitty—why weren’t you at soccer Saturday morning?”

  “Special Olympics, remember?”

  “Oh, yeah. Did Hannah have a good time?”

  “Yes, but this year she got stuck next to the pincher.” Elizabeth smiled and made a note to tell James. They went to the Special Olympics every couple of years, and knew the pincher.

  James came into sight, on his return from helping out the old folks. She hung her head. The jig was up and she walked toward him. Someone had put new geraniums in the flower boxes that lined the steps. Bees and white butterflies flew above the pink flowers. She reflexively nipped off the dead heads.

  “I’m g
oing to go put this in the recycling,” he called to her, holding up his paper and changing course. She watched him pass a group of teenagers, lowering his eyes like a spy, then glancing back over his shoulder. He constantly pumped Rosie for details of the lives of the people who hung around at the Parkade, for the novel he was working on. One of them in particular interested him: a handsome surfer type in his mid-twenties named Fenn, who wore wire-rimmed glasses and always seemed to have a young beauty in tow. James had pointed him out to Rosie. “There’s a guy in my book like him. The same great looks and flat confidence. As if he has an internal story he doesn’t have to explain to anyone. Or maybe a kind of predatory patience.”

  Rosie had rolled her eyes. “Oh, for God’s sake, James, it’s all in your head. Remember how panicky you guys were over Luther?” Luther was the old wino who’d started watching Rosie play tennis the year she turned fourteen, her last year on the courts. The year she and her partner Simone were ranked number one in the state for fourteen-and-under doubles. The year Simone got pregnant and moved to Ukiah. When Rosie was still fretful and shy and skinny, before the breasts and contempt. Luther, darker than shadows, terrorized the parents of girls on the tennis circuit, who thought he was a pedophile. “And remember what dastardly deed he ended up doing to me?” Rosie glared. “He helped me with my serve, for God’s sake.”

  This was her new phrase, said with clipped disbelief at your stupidity—for God’s sake. And, This is the reason I want to move out. And, You are so lame.

  Still, she provided James with great stuff for his writing. She told him about teenage chatter and slang, the dope, and the kids who had been in rehab. She described how they all clustered together to make themselves a village in which a few rare people seemed to have knowledge and power.