Imperfect Birds Page 3

  “Oh, baby,” James told her, “it’s always been the same.” His novel took place in the years when Reagan was governor, when his generation was still walking around the Haight with girlfriends and boyfriends, accepting what came along, giving away what they had to share whether it was a burrito, a bouquet, drugs, a dollar—it had all felt so heady, delicious, and right. Then as now, young people liked spectacle, especially musical, but also watching the random bust, as long as it was people you didn’t like. Then as now in the Parkade, talismanic amulets hung from their necks, strange caps kept them warm and said how different they were, especially when it was a hundred degrees out. And how, at the same time, all that mattered was fitting in. There was fitting in, somehow, anywhere, and there was the Abyss.

  The last time Elizabeth and Rosie had gone on a hike together, Elizabeth had brought up the friends-with-benefits business, not for the first time. “Tell me again—help me understand—what’s in it for the girls?”

  At first Rosie said, “I told you. It is so exaggerated, just something the moms are obsessed with. And there’s nothing I can say to help you understand.” Then she allowed that maybe some skeevy girls did it too much, like without even having affection for the guy. Or guys. But mostly, it was just . . . friendly. And it meant that you were desirable.

  “Plus,” Rosie said, “the guys are so grateful.”

  “Well, yeah, I guess,” said Elizabeth. “But do the guys ever go down on the girls?”

  “Mom! Stop.”

  “But what’s in it for the girl? It’s like the women’s movement never happened.”

  “It’s nice for the girl. It’s like kissing. It makes you feel really close to the guy. I mean, you know, for that night. And it makes the girls feel powerful.”

  Just then a Steller’s jay had squawked rustily from a manzanita branch, bright blue against the maroon wood, and Rosie had cried out in imitation, “Oil can! Oil can!” They both laughed in the sun and let the conversation slide. Elizabeth pointed out a red-tailed hawk on solemn patrol overhead against the blue May sky. There were cactus impersonators on the trail beside them—spiky-looking flowers that were soft and fuzzy if you stopped to touch them, which they did. Rosie cried, “Ouch,” as if the fluffy flowers had thorns, and gripped her fingers in pain, to make her mother laugh. Oh, Rosie. The sun beat down and the air smelled like toast. The rattlesnake grass that covered the hills was dark gold, the color you spray-painted pine cones at Christmas.

  “I’m leaving,” James announced as he caught up to Elizabeth at the foot of the steps. “I want a divorce. You can keep the children. I don’t know how long I am going to live, but I do not choose to spend whatever remains with your passive-aggressive daughter. It’s not like we’re dragging her off to the dentist. We want to spend money on her, and still she blows us off. We have to leave now, Elizabeth, trust me. If we stay, it injures her character. You must not reward brattiness or flake.”

  Elizabeth knew he was right. You want so desperately for your child to be a great kid, just like you, mature, conscious, and cool—you in another body. At the very least, you want your child to have good manners. Maybe that was considered reactionary now, but this was how she had raised Rosie. The worst humans on earth kept you waiting. And James had been in such a good mood when they woke: he had gotten laid, there was toasted brioche for breakfast, roses from the garden on the table. Now he was shoving his notebook into the back pocket of his khakis, fuming. Elizabeth exhaled loudly and held her head as if it ached. Just yesterday, he had been singing Rosie’s praises, about a journal entry she’d written and shown him. It was about her two best friends, Jody and Alice:

  “You don’t always like the same guys or movies or books, but you share the knowledge that most of ‘life’ is just people faking it, trying to stay busy so they feel important and not afraid of their shadows. But my friends and I know that this busyness is like collecting Franklin Mint plates and you have to fight for meaning in your life, for truth and goodness and authenticity.”

  James had been astonished. “Can I have this?” he asked her, handing back the journal, and she laughed. “Oh, for God’s sake, James.”

  At one point during the recent walk with Rosie, the day of the rattlesnake grass, they’d been catching their breath at the clearing on the trail where you could see Alcatraz, Angel Island, the Berkeley hills, and the Bay Bridge. They stood beside a posted sign of a mountain lion that looked just like an animal cracker. They could see the entire East Bay, on which the morning sun usually slanted in fingers or in dappled splatters of white on the mirror of water. But this time, a solidly frothy tunnel of light transected the whole bay from Alcatraz to Richmond in the east. They stared as if at an ancient churchyard.

  “How would you describe that?” Elizabeth asked Rosie when they started walking again.

  After a moment: “I’d say it was a surfer’s perfect tube of foamy light.”

  “Can I have that for James?” Elizabeth asked, to make her daughter laugh. Rosie smiled. She had a pretty smile, with one funny snaggly tooth to the side, definitely not the shining straight white teeth that seemed the norm among teenagers now, at least the ones whose parents could afford braces.

  Elizabeth slipped her arm through James’s and they headed toward the car, but just then she heard, from across the street, “Mama, Mama! James!”

  There she was, smiling, waving, walking toward them, tall and broad-shouldered after a childhood of being so thin, her black hair piled on her head, the way Rae wore hers, too, like hippie girls, secured with pencils, silver clasps, porcelain chopsticks. Her breasts were nearly as big as Elizabeth’s now. Everyone, men and women alike, checked them out; even children checked them out, with memory and fear and desperation. She wore short shredded cut-offs and a white gypsy shirt over the spandex tank top that contained the sprawl, dangling earrings she’d borrowed from Elizabeth, red Converse All Stars. She and Alice and Jody bought most of their clothes at secondhand stores, except for shoes and their hundred-dollar jeans. Elizabeth made eye contact with James, to convey solidarity, her refusal to forgive fully, but a moment later, she stepped into Rosie’s hug, relieved and happy as a devotee or a golden retriever. Rosie smelled of the vanilla extract she wore as perfume, with the faint smoky odor of incense and campfires and the rare cigarette, and the foundation with which she, like Alice and Jody, was spackled.

  Elizabeth stepped back and touched Rosie’s smooth fair skin with the backs of her fingers, avoiding the scattered pimples. You could hardly notice them except right before her periods, and of course, unless you were Rosie, to whom they might as well have been carbuncles. She had not picked them today. Elizabeth pushed a tendril of hair out of Rosie’s deep blue eyes, noting as she did so the pterygium on her left eye, the raised and wedge-shaped growth of sun damage from all those years of light reflecting off tennis courts. She had not picked up a racket in more than two years, but it had not gone away. James called it her terrigenous pterygium: it looked like a blob of underwater sediment trying to sneak across her cornea. It did not affect her sight, and she could have it surgically removed someday if she chose.

  Rosie peered at James, as if looking around a corner. He scrutinized his watch. “I’m sorry, James. I swear I’ll make it up to you.”

  “I hate waiting!”

  “Well then, next time, just leave.”

  “I’m going to.”

  “Why aren’t you wearing sunglasses?” Elizabeth interrupted. Rosie shrugged, but Elizabeth persisted. “This is important—it’s your only real protection from more damage.” And was that concealer under her eyes? “Did you get a good sleep?” she continued, worried, studying the faint blue crescents she now saw under Rosie’s eyes. “I didn’t hear you come in last night. Have you eaten? Did you at least eat some fruit before you came? Let’s get you a muffin before we go shopping.”

  “God, Mama!” Rosie said. “Stop! I’m not a child.”

  James started to say something, but Rosie made a fa
ce of exasperation, and reached forward with a burlesque flourish to choke him, and in spite of himself, he smiled. Then he ambushed her with a wrestling move, his famous ninja tango hammerlock. She easily slid out of his grasp: each of them knew all the other one’s moves.

  “God,” she said, “you are so loked.”

  It rhymed with “stoked” and meant crazy, out of control, about to beat somebody up. James leered at her as lokily as he could, and she countered with a karate chop to the neck. He took three steps back and went into the one yoga pose he knew, Downward Facing Dog.

  Elizabeth and Rosie exchanged a look—he was such an idiot. When he got up, the three of them set off together down the street.

  TWO

  Memorial Day

  At sunset a few days later, a parade of small clouds lined up low over the westernmost hills of Landsdale, perfectly spaced and aligned. James and Elizabeth sat in a rasping wicker porch swing that the sellers had left behind in the trashed garden of the rickety and voracious house, overpriced until you factored in the sunset. The sky was soft pink; the night was cool. When the clouds crashed and stumbled forward one into another, James gathered up the tea tray and they went inside.

  Rosie had not eaten with them that evening, as she was heading out soon to a party with Jody and Alice in Stinson Beach, forty-five minutes away. She was in her bathroom, reapplying foundation. She was actually going to two parties, although her parents knew only about the first.

  Rosie had told them about the one at Jody’s aunt Vivian’s house. She said they were spending the night there, which was true if you substituted “evening” for “night.” But none of the girls knew yet where they would sleep. After the party, a bunch of kids from Landsdale, Bolinas, and Stinson were meeting on the beach. The girls would figure out where to crash later, depending on who else showed up, who was holding, and how things in general shook down.

  Aunt Vivian’s party was to celebrate Jody’s return from three months at a rehab in the mountains of Santa Cruz. She had been home a month already, but this was the first Saturday that worked for everyone in the family. Her parents had sent her off because she did too much alcohol and cocaine—she had ended up at the ER one night around Christmas, having overdosed on both, and Alice and Rosie were relieved that her parents had stepped in, although having her kidnapped at three a.m. by morbidly obese Samoans seemed a little extreme. What sucked, though, was that she was now expected to stay off marijuana, too—as if that had been part of the problem. At the rehab, she had received enough credits in independent study to finish out the current semester, plus had earned a whole semester’s worth of credit toward her senior year. So she had only one more semester to go before graduation. She had stayed clean nearly a week after her return, and was still off alcohol, coke, and weed. The other stuff, which she used mostly on weekends, was legal, like Alice’s Adderall for ADD, her parents’ sedatives, the family cough syrup, and salvia which you could buy in variable strengths at any head shop. Nothing that would show up in the urine tests or on a Breathalyzer. So if Rosie wanted to do Ecstasy, say, or mushrooms, she and Alice did them when Jody wasn’t around.

  James and Elizabeth greeted them after they barged in. They wore camisoles over tank tops, and jeans. Alice, who had already been assured by the dean of the San Francisco Fashion Institute of Design that she would be accepted next year, wore a silver sweater that seemed to be made of spiderweb and bugle beads, cropped at the armpits, and a pale orange silk scarf.

  “Oh my God,” said Elizabeth. “You’ll freeze to death.”

  Rosie appeared in the hallway. “Mom, please don’t mom everyone to death and wreck this for us.”

  “It’s okay, Elizabeth,” Alice said. “We have down jackets in the car.”

  James advanced in his most menacing way toward the girls. “Look me in the eye, Jody.” He seemed ridiculous: she towered over him, like a tree, taller even than Elizabeth. He wagged a finger in her face.

  “You are totally loked,” Jody said, and smiled. Rosie felt half in love with Jody, because she was so smart and cool and beautiful, even with that straggly hair that required expensive cuts to look barely okay, after a great deal of mousse and fussing. Tonight she had punked it out with plastic barrettes gathering up the thin sheaves. Jody thought of herself as a freak, a giraffe, but Rosie found her exquisite. She had written a poem about her in English class, about her soft brown eyes, and about how in her company you felt that there was a shimmery barrier around her, or a channel to a higher realm, of spring weather, the clouds and breezes, the shifts in the air. Maybe Elizabeth had given off that same sense once when she was younger, of being a conduit—tall, slightly alien, stately, reserved, and lovely, hard as this was to believe.

  Like, would it kill her mother to dye the gray streaks in her hair?

  James shook his fist at Jody like an old man angry with the weather: “You don’t drink anymore, right, Jody? Still off the sauce, Jody? That’s all behind us now, right, Jody? Right, Jody?” he shouted.

  “Right, Jody,” Jody said. They gave each other a smile, and touched fists in a gang handshake James had invented, roe-sham-beau, that segued into gobbledygook sign language.

  “Okay, then, sweetheart,” James asked, “how is your writing coming along?” Jody gave him two thumbs up. Rosie had shown him some of Jody’s stories and poems, and he’d told everyone that she had a gift, like duh, hello, she’d only been winning prizes since third grade. A number of times, he had edited her stories while she paced like an expectant father in Rosie’s room, and he lent her books that she had to read if she wanted to be a writer: lending meant a future discussion. It was great to have a stepfather who could genuinely help your friends.

  “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 wa
s 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.