Imperfect Birds Read online

  “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.

  James 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.

  Rosie 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.

  So she told her about how he’d stumble across a funny line and then run it into the ground, and for some reason, it just kept making you
laugh. Not that long ago, he’d discovered Old Bay seasoning, and he’d say it like Walter Brennan, he’d go, “I’m going to add me a shake of Ollld Bay.” Then he’d find a way to work it into every other sentence, about anything. He’d say, “When summer approaches, there’s nothing better than the lingering taste of Ollld Bay.”

  Marion clapped and laughed, so Rosie continued. “Then there was the old-Indian-saying stage, where you could be talking about anything, and he would get a far-off look on his face and say solemnly, ‘That reminds me of an old Indian saying,’ and he would say, ‘What goes around comes around,’ or once, ‘With time, even a bear can learn to dance,’ which was Yiddish, for God’s sake. And the Indian-name stage, where he would announce that his Indian name was Bucky, or Lemonhead.” Marion laughed like a whale clearing its throat, a clicking whistly moan.

  When she ran out of James stories, Rosie asked Marion about when she was young, until Marion needed to get up to use the bathroom. It took a while to get her to her feet—you’d think you could lift her up easily like a feather, but because of her arthritis, even though Rosie tried to lift her as carefully as possible so nothing got yanked, she kept folding up like a card table. Rosie thought of Amish people lifting the wall of a barn they had finished but that had started to come apart. Finally Jody’s father noticed what was happening, and arrived at his mother’s side. Together they got Marion up and in balance, and she walked off on his arm like a marionette.

  Rosie went upstairs to the aunt’s bathroom for a little recon. There was a half-full prescription bottle of Valium, and she shook a bunch into her hand, a few for tonight, a few just to have. If you washed one down with wine or whatever, along with an Adderall, you were pretty animated, but calmer than you would have been. She tucked them into the watch pocket of her jeans for later.

  She liked being a fly on the wall here. She felt welcome and trusted. She could tell that Jody’s parents liked her. Rosie thought it was because she was kind, excelled in school, and had been a tennis champion: if any of the three girls seemed a bad influence, it was Alice, who dressed wild and had been sexually active for so long, and whose mother was home so rarely. And Rosie liked watching Jody’s family because you could see that they cared about one another. They had pulled together for Jody, like a web around her. She felt a pang of jealousy, because she had such a tiny pathetic family herself, but she was relieved that the parents had stepped in. The relatives kept sneaking peeks at Jody, holding their breath with worry, but also trying to give her as much room and slack as possible. Jody had been on perilous ground before, doing so much cocaine, blowing guys to get some of their stash, and she could have died one night in a car crash that killed the girl in the front seat. So now she was back and people wanted her to be safe and well, and maybe they felt like if they were toxic and fake around her, she would get sick again. So they reflected their very best at her and she was reflecting it back.

  There was not a single guy at the party to flirt with, let alone hook up with later, except for one cute football player Alice sort of had dibs on. None of them were virgins anymore, Jody and Alice not by a long shot. Rosie had had sex three times, but not yet with anyone she loved. She obsessed about it all the time, about how next time she wanted it to be romantic and meaningful, so you could cuddle, instead of just having to get it over with or get back into the cocaine. Romantic meant you had been gazing into each other’s eyes for at least a couple of weeks, and the first, slow kiss with him was not the night you went all the way; more like in a beautiful romantic movie. The first time was very nice, actually, at some older girl’s apartment on Blithedale who didn’t even go to junior college yet, who would probably not even ever leave town. Rosie and a senior had gotten to use the girl’s bedroom, and the senior was actually the perfect person to lose her virginity to, and afterward, for a few days, every bump in the road that she drove over triggered her, reawakened the erotic feelings she had had. Everything did, as if a lava lamp of being fully alive and soft would bloom in her crotch and rise up through her. Then the next two times, once with the senior at his house, and once with another guy in his car, she’d hated it.

  She went to find Alice. The food on the grill smelled like it was ready, and Rosie wanted to leave as soon as they ate. Jody would have to stay until the party was over, but she and Alice could go early to the beach. Alice was totally male bait, and you could usually get something going with a guy if you were with her at a party, and in the mood. A lot of guys had used their hands on Rosie when they hooked up and she gave them all oral, but only a couple of the boys she’d been with, friends with privileges, had ever gone down on her. It was great and she had come, but maybe because it was so rare it was almost too intense, so crossing an inside line.

  The smell of barbecue mingled with the scent of the pumpkin spice candles on tables under the plum and apple trees, and blended with the smell of charred ribs and salmon, plus people’s various body products, and the smell was too strong, like the Old Testament, like meat at the altar, like people being grilled. It made her think of cannibals. She considered taking a Valium. She used to have nightmares of being boiled in a cannibal stockpot. Cannibals, quicksand, dinosaurs, and murderers, those were her hugest childhood fears, but more than anything she’d been afraid of her mother dying.

  She still had an obsessive fear of Elizabeth’s dying, which was weird because she hated her half the time. Her mother could be so lovely and regal, but also self-centered and self-destructive. It made Rosie sick. Now her mom was so intent on keeping everyone around her calm, so desperate for everyone to love and forgive her and be happy and trust her that sometimes she vibrated with it, like brass wires.

  Rosie hated herself for being so afraid. That’s why she made herself do so many things that seared her. She couldn’t decide on her looks, whether she was pretty or hideous. Or plain. The last time she took acid, with Alice at a rave in Richmond, she had already taken a couple of tabs of Ecstasy, because she could no longer get off on just one. The acid was an afterthought—it was supposed to be very mild, this cute purple candy dot—but she’d sort of lost it. She’d had to go into the bathroom to pull herself together, things had gone from shimmer and rainbow to stark, the sky from kaleidoscope to shifting electromagnetic sand beneath her, expanding out to the bad kind of infinity. Her face in the mirror looked like a sweaty terrified old woman’s, with wrinkles from too much sun, and the ugly globby pterygium on her iris like her eye was rotting from the inside out. She looked and felt insane, like some schizo you’d see at the bus stop at the Parkade at two in the morning, catching the last bus to San Francisco. Quavering, she whisper-sang all the words to “Let It Be,” and after a while started tripping out on the sweater she was holding, pretending for a few seconds that Rascal was in her arms, hiding his big orange head between her chin and chest like he always did, and this calmed her. She washed her hands and sat on the floor, and the smell of the Ivory soap also calmed her; it smelled like Rae’s neck.

  She couldn’t help noticing that the men at Jody’s party were sneaking glances at her breasts. All men did, and all boys, even little guys. She didn’t mind. She was glad tits had come along later in life, instead of earlier; there had been an older girl named Jeannette who was one of the great singles players at twelve but at thirteen had had to adjust her backhand so that her backswing went high enough up to avoid the voluminous breasts that had sprung up. And that was it for old Jeannette. At least Rosie had gone out on a high note, ranked number one in fourteen-and-under doubles with Simone.

  Rosie found Alice out on the front porch with one of Jody’s older cousins.

  “Dude!” Alice exulted when Rosie stepped into view. Rosie ducked her head shyly like a mother bird, exactly like her mother did, and she hated this but couldn’t help herself. The cousin looked like Jody, only smaller, pretty but too thin, in a skanked-out way. The way her bones jutted out gave Rosie the creeps, like those cornucopia paintings with fruit, candles, flowers, all kinds of beautiful
things, and amid it all, a skull. Terror rippled through her. She was afraid of getting old. She took the Valium out of her pocket, and displayed the pills in her hand. Alice studied them before selecting one, as if Rosie were offering a variety of chocolates. All three girls washed down a Valium with Alice’s Sprite, but because she could not have Alice to herself, Rosie felt very alone. She craved a moment with her mother, on the couch at home, doing nothing together, letting her mom comb her hair with those mothering fingers.

  The sky on the beach was huger than all creation, and the sand so reflective. She hadn’t noticed the full moon until she’d gotten stoned on the beach. Here the moonlight played on the surface of the sand. It was so incredible, not like the sun, which you couldn’t even look at.

  She and Alice staggered around with rubber legs. They hung out with some friends at the campfire, and then by themselves at the surf line for a while. Alice thought she saw a shooting star, and they talked about this for quite a while, and about songs they loved that were about stars. Rosie had to keep closing her eyes here with Alice because everything was so beautiful. She wasn’t very stoned, they’d had only a couple of hits of weed so far. Everyone was waiting for a bunch of kids to arrive who had been to the Parkade and connected with Fenn or Michael Marks, who always had totally bubonic weed. She felt like her old self again, and had an idea for a poem, about how the sun was so male, how it came up glaring and went across the sky and dropped down out of sight abruptly, but the moon was like her and her friends, introspective and stunning and changeable, taking its female time.

  She wondered whether anyone had ever used the words “The moon weeps long soft tears of light.” Probably. Everything was pretty much used up by now; even the earth. The planet was pretty much shot. She turned to study the dunes behind them. They were so womanly, too, like the moon, voluptuous, like women’s hips, reclining. She had been here a thousand times with her mother and Rae and James when she was young, sitting in the sand, watching people cross the channel to Stinson Beach at low tide. She remembered standing here once in wild surf, letting it smash against her, and then it swept her off her feet into the channel, where she tumbled like clothes in a dryer and James had to fish her out. Her father had fished her out of the Russian River when she was four. Her mother had told this story lots of times, maybe because they had a limited number of memories of him. “Blue by the time he finally got to her,” her mother always said, emphasis on “blue,” instead of “finally,” like what kind of incompetent parents would take their eyes off a toddler in the river long enough for her to turn blue?