Imperfect Birds (23 page)

“Then tell me, Elizabeth, honey—what is not being said that is causing the screaming inside you?”

Elizabeth stared off into the middle distance and shook her head. “So many things.”

“Oh baby, I’m going to meet Lank at the Target in Novato, he just got paid. Want to come with us?”

Elizabeth stifled a mewing sense of disappointment. “No. I only needed to hear your voice. I’m okay.”

“I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Give Anthony a call at the church, and make an appointment. He’s great with adolescents, and drugs, pretty good on marriage, and free.” Elizabeth filed away the recommendation about Anthony: the mood at the house had perhaps been better in the last three days. Rosie acted resigned to her fate, sleeping late but then pouring herself into books and assignments, James hard at work in his office. Elizabeth stuffed down her unease.

James insisted that Rosie cancel her tennis lessons. When she called to tell Robert she was grounded, for missing curfew, he made sounds both accusatory and sympathetic, and said it was actually fine, as he was buried in things to do before the start of school. He asked her how the paper on Kazantzakis was coming along, and she read to him from the epilogue of the book but hoped he thought she had memorized it:
“O sun, great Eastern Prince, your eyes have brimmed with tears, for all the world has darkened, all life swirls and spins, and now you’ve plunged down to your mother’s watery cellars.”

He said, “
Jeez,
Rosie, you’re only grounded a week!” and they laughed like friends.

In fact, she had read only thirty of the seven hundred seventy-four pages between the epilogue and the prologue, but that was because she had a gnarly project on Reconstruction due for AP history, in which she had to argue for the South, for its rightful rage and resistance to the North’s military occupation; and a paper in French on Simone de Beauvoir, of whom she did not approve because of her submission to the awful Jean-Paul Sartre.

“You’re a Soviet hard-liner, Ro,” James commented at dinner. “No margin of error for the weaknesses of two people who changed life for the good, forever?”

“Don’t hector the children,” Elizabeth said to James.

“And I’m not a child,” Rosie said crossly to her mother. But then everyone smiled.

T
hree dinners in a row were lovely, something that could not have been said any other time recently. But keeping the secret from James pained Elizabeth off and on. She had been cooking special dinners to compensate, and two nights ago they had made love. She was a bad person. Tonight she had made garlic eggplant, dragon prawns, brown rice, and as usual, salad from the garden. Also, she had bought everyone a cheap present at Landsdale’s variety store: socks for James, lip gloss for Rosie, a catnip Spiro Agnew for Rascal. It was like old times, Rosie jacking avocado off James’s plate, James responding with a droning air attack on Rosie’s last prawn.

W
hen Lank called later in the week, Elizabeth answered the phone. It turned out he was calling to talk to her, and a ray of gladness shone through and surprised her.

“Are you doing okay, Elizabeth? Rae told me you were struggling after the bust.”

“Maximumly.” She heard a quiet sniffle of laughter and a moment’s silence, the way Lank held space for you in case you wanted to continue, without crowding the words that might need a minute to form. She found herself desperate to ask him about the secret, but did not want to talk behind James’s back. “But we’ve had a few nice days in a row, and I’m trying to go with that.”

“I’d say go with the flow,” he replied, “except James says that the people who tell you that are usually the angriest people on earth. Who’d stab you if they had a fork.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard that riff.” She laughed. “I am grateful things are better, and at the same time, what comes most naturally to me is pretending everything is okay whenever I can, and that ends up making me nuts—my mom used to pretend I was okay when I was getting wasted as a teenager, and then she’d smoke three packs a day. So it’s a fine line.”

“I hear you. It’s about paying attention. When people ask me how I am these days, I say, ‘Better than I think,’ because it’s good to notice that my life is pretty great, even if my mind isn’t.”

“Exactly,” she said. “I think my inner groundskeeper drinks or does crack cocaine, probably both. But at least I’m starting to realize that this stuff with Rosie is something to get through, and not figure out. There is no figure. The only figuring I can do is work on my own equilibrium. So most days, or part of most days, I’m doing okay.”

“That’s good to hear, but at the same time, I’m worried for you, Elizabeth. I remember that phrase you used after you had your little breakdown, to describe your feeling of cluttered numbness. I remember because it was so beautiful, perfectly descriptive of most of us most of the time, but for you, it was overwhelming, and it knocked your equilibrium out from under you.”

Elizabeth caught her breath in the silence that followed. Then she smiled. “I love you, Lank,” she said. “I love that you reminded me of that. That’s exactly right.” She began to form the first words of the sentence she was so desperate to share—
I’ve been keeping a secret from James
—but Lank said he had papers to grade. Sigh: everyone else was so busy, James with his deadlines, Rae with her good deeds, Lank with papers to grade, Rosie with her lessons, her homework, her bucket kids, her all-consuming drive for independence.

But then he asked her, “Hey—you wouldn’t by any chance be willing to help a bunch of us clean up dog poop on the Sunnyside fire road, would you? We’re in danger of losing it as an off-leash trail.”

She paused. “Wait, what?” she then said. “You want me to help you pick up
dog
shit? What kind of crazy invitation is that? I don’t even have a dog.”

“I know, but I do, and this is the last place in Novato our dogs can run off leash. Look, I know it’s a long shot.”

“No, no,” she said, “I’ll do it.”

R
ae was perplexed. “You say no to my offer of a free noontime concert at Lake Merritt? To Schubert and Bach? But yes to this?”

“I haven’t told James, and it’s making me nuts.”

“So tell him when we get off the phone. Jeez. Did you call Anthony?”

“No. I didn’t want to rock the temporarily sweet boat. I have to betray either James, by keeping the secret, or Rosie, by telling, when I promised.”

“You are betraying you, is whom you are betraying.”

“It sounded therapeutic, to hang with Lank. And I’m on the side of the dogs.”

“Jeez, Elizabeth, you are not getting out enough.”

“Well, then, here’s my chance.”

I
t was definitely counterintuitive, to choose dog shit over a quiet talk with Anthony in that bright and aromatic office. But at any rate, she met up with Lank and six other middle-aged people a few days later. The weather had cooled down. Lank looked five years younger in the Giants cap that covered his bald spot; he had begun referring to what was left as his hair spot. He gave her the greatest hug, and she looked over his shoulders to the dry golden foothill, covered with oak and laurel, spreading out below them like a hoopskirt, all the way to the glistening bay.

It was heaven up here, sky unscrolling baby blue all the way to Berkeley and San Francisco, socked in with billows of gray fog to the west, on the way to the beaches. He handed her a wad of plastic bags, blue ones that had once held
The New York Times
, clear ones from the
Chronicle
.

They worked together, commenting on the more prodigious piles, comparing notes with others. An hour in, just as she was about to ask his advice, Lank pantomimed throwing a knotted sack at her, like a discus. They’d stopped to laugh, and it took another half-hour for her to say the words, “Lank? I need to tell you something.”

He sat her down on a log and took a seat beside her. She sighed, and began. She told him the secret she’d been keeping from James, of Rosie’s sneaking out while grounded, the lengthening list of Rosie’s lies and mistakes this summer, what a good father James was, but how unyielding he could be. And by the same token, how easily he caved when Rosie’s attitude improved; his wretched need for things to not trouble Elizabeth, for Rosie to be nice to them both. And how maybe, with James out of the loop and this incident behind them, there was a chance for the family to start afresh.

He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes, took off his hat and rubbed his head, looked old and squinty again. “Honey,” he said finally, “listen. I love Rosie almost like she’s my own. She’s everything cool in a person—she’s sharp, sensitive, funny, articulate. She’s got it all.” Elizabeth nodded, smiling, pleased. “But she’s also a lying suck.”

Elizabeth did a double take. “Jeez,” she said. “That’s a little harsh. And besides, she’s
my
lying suck.”

“I work with them every day, and even the good kids break your heart. They can be so wonderful, then just diabolical. They’ll all lie, even when the truth would work. And how much more evidence do you need that Rosie can’t be trusted? She’s trying to break free, to individuate. Like you are, from James, by keeping the secret. I know you feel too dependent on him. Rosie hates how dependent she is on you. Rosie feels cornered, and she thinks you and James are her problem. And she’ll do anything to win, to get away with more and more. But James—oh my God. Has there ever been a more loyal friend?” She shook her head slowly. “He’s a mensch, and he’ll stand by you through thick and thin. He’s your guy, hon, your beloved. Don’t let Rosie win this round. I say, or rather Rae says, Tell the truth and shame the devil.”