Imperfect Birds

  “What is with you tonight, Rosie?” James asked.

  “Nothing, just that I’m sitting here staring at what was once a living, sentient being. Like Rascal.”

  “A halibut?” James shouted. “You’re comparing Rascal to a halibut?”

  She leapt up from her seat. “I’m losing weight because I can’t stand to sit at this table watching you pick at dead beings!” She stomped off toward her room, turning just before she disappeared. “It’s so disgusting to me. It’s evil! I can’t live here anymore! I want to be emancipated.”

  James reached for Elizabeth’s hand. “It’s a delicious dead being, darling.”

  He took her hand here at the lagoon today, too, placing it back on her knee only to jot down notes. Low tide had revealed meals for every appetite, crabs, clams, mussels, fish, algae, seaweed, poultry, frogs, slime. Sometimes there were seals, hauled out in the mud, resting. This was their nursery, their bedroom. No one could swim all the time.

  “She’s doing better since she’s been with Fenn,” Elizabeth said out of nowhere. Birds hovered, swooped for food, flew in mysterious patterns; who knew what led birds where they went? James nodded.

  But within days of Elizabeth’s saying this, Rosie appeared to have taken up smoking.

  At first the smell was just in her hair and clothes, which she explained by saying she had been in a room with smokers, including Fenn and kids at the young people’s AA. Then Elizabeth caught a whiff on her breath, not that she and Rosie were often within breathing distance of each other, and when she asked, Rosie said, “God! I had like two puffs off Fenn’s cigarette. I’ve given up everything! So leave me alone.”

  There were already so many things on the table that Elizabeth let it go, and did not even mention it to James. He was so busy all the time. But a few days later she found some of Rosie’s socks mixed in with her own clean laundry, and when she took them to Rosie’s room, she found her window open and the air heavy with lemony freshener spray over a hint of cigarettes.

  She asked James what they should do—bribes, threats, graphics, tough love, more groundings?

  “What a great idea. I’m sure that will really make her want to quit.”

  “Shouldn’t we at least punish her? Or offer an incentive not to smoke?”

  “Elizabeth. Did your parents’ threats or bribes get you to not smoke when you were a teen?”

  She shook her head. “Are you kidding? They were always bumming them from me. But the thought of Rosie smoking freaks me out. The black lungs, wrinkly mouth—plus it makes people’s breath smell like cat boxes.”

  “Be sure to tell her that.”

  “Should we ask Rae to intervene? Or ask her to have the Sixth Day elders pray for Rosie? It couldn’t hurt, right?”

  “The only connection with a higher power that can help Rosie is Rosie’s own. She’s madly in love for the first time, and her boyfriend smokes. But he seems to be helping her stay clean—they’re going to meetings, right? That is a total lowercase miracle. Let’s back off the cigarettes for now.”

  That night Elizabeth began keeping a new secret from James.

  After dinner, Fenn had come to pick Rosie up for the young people’s meeting. He shook James’s and Elizabeth’s hands, and pretended to strangle Rascal on the sideboard. Elizabeth walked them out, on the pretext of heading to a women’s meeting in Ross. She followed them in her car from way behind, through town to his apartment. She sat in the car awhile but they didn’t come out. She noticed the binoculars from the trip to the lagoon, and would have used them to spy on Rosie and Fenn, if it hadn’t made her look crazy, especially to herself. The big fish would have had a field day with her: “Elizabeth is whacked.” She left a few minutes later.

  Elizabeth cruised slowly past the Parkade on her way to her meeting. There were only a few parked cars. Several older kids were near enough so she could see their piercings and tattoos, but not close enough for her to tell what the designs were, each unique, of course, to say that there was something different about each of them, something beautiful. In ragged jeans, ethnic shirts, frayed knit caps, and even one cape, they might have been the children of gypsies, from communal families who slept and wept and danced and sang together, instead of from nice suburban homes. Where else could they express all those inchoate feelings about their gypsy yearnings and the embedded sadness of life but here at the Parkade? They were smoking cigarettes, she could smell them through her partly opened window. She drove on. A block away, across from the movie theater, another group of kids had gathered, to smoke and yearn and sneer, mostly young women in scarves, coral and turquoise jewelry, torn lingerie. Elizabeth drove to her meeting, partly for cover, partly because her mind buckled with anxiety.

  The speaker at the meeting, a blonde woman in a fine tailored suit, shared how alcoholism had stolen her own childhood, and had now come back for her kid. She had tried everything she could think of to save him—giving him endless freedom, but mostly giving him endless consequences and no freedom, but neither had worked, and now he lived in his car. So she went to meetings, did not drink, swept her own side of the street, and released him to his higher power. He was a child of God, too. She said, “God does not have grandchildren.”

  Elizabeth smote her own forehead—she’d forgotten again that she was not Rosie’s higher power. The speaker noticed, and they exchanged smiles. Elizabeth went up afterward and thanked the woman for that line.

  She called Lank later. He was her expert in mutant teenage behavior. More than anyone she knew, Lank had seen the result of parents’ not setting clear boundaries—gifted teenagers going down the tubes, parents’ lives and hearts destroyed.

  “What do I do?” she asked. “Do I give her freedom and a long leash, wait for her to blow it in a big enough way for me to use heavy artillery? Pray that she survive? Or do I try to rein her in and hope she finally stops?”

  As usual, he did not answer right away, but she felt him draw close. She shut her eyes and leaned over as if their shoulders could touch. Finally he said, “You’re doing the right thing, Elizabeth, asking people with experience to help you find your way. Rae swears by Anthony’s counseling, for the kid and the parents. My experience with kids who are into drugs and alcohol is that they will get high, until the consequences become intolerable. So the parent can create consequences, by taking everything away—freedom, computers, and so on—but then you have to endure the kid’s hatred of you. And besides, kids will find a way to score anyway. They’re like trapped rats.”

  “I know you mean that nicely,” Elizabeth said. They laughed quietly and returned to shared silence. She listened to his light breath, pictured his monk’s strawberry tonsure, the rainforest-mammal brown eyes. “When I was a teenager,” she said, “and I went out to drink with my friends, it was like we were slot cars on predetermined courses. We’d walk in the same old ruts and grooves every time, like it was preset, and they always led us to the same messes. But did it stop us? No way.”

  “It’s like a board game,” he replied, “the teenage doper equivalent of Chutes and Ladders, or Candy Land. Only they land on Whirly Head, or Grutty Bedroom, or Pool of Puke.”

  She laughed. “That’s great, Lank. Can I give it to James?”

  “Of course.”

  She sighed, and ran her hand through her hair. “But some kids land in the morgue or jail. And Rosie’s not going to fold up her board—she loves the game. She lives for it. And even when she puts a week or so together of clean time, that whole milieu, the Parkade, it’s like Velcro.”

  “But if she doesn’t pull out on her own, you may have to fold up the board for her.”

  “You mean by sending her away? I don’t think James and I could do that.”

  Lank was silent again, and this time she could not hear his breath. Then he said, “James could.” She knew Lank was right, and it angered her, and it was her one ace in the hole.

  At bedtime, she set a trap for Rosie. “Sweetheart,” she asked, undercover again, th
is time as a masseuse, “how was the meeting?”

  “We didn’t go. We went last night, but tonight we changed our minds at the last minute, made a fire at Fenn’s and read—I read a book of his while he paid bills. Berryman’s Dream Songs—he had it, can you believe it? James has the same book in his study.” She held up a tattered copy as proof. Elizabeth had loved those poems so much. She and Andrew had read them out loud to each other in bed exactly one lifetime ago. He would have adored this daughter of theirs.

  The next morning Rosie was so churlish at breakfast that Elizabeth wanted to scream.

  “I can’t believe you think it’s okay to eat like that,” Rosie said to James, sneering, as she walked past the table where he sat wolfing down his cereal.

  “I always eat this way, Rosie. Way too fast, like a rat, okay?”

  “It makes me sick,” she replied, pouring herself a cup of coffee. Elizabeth had wrapped an English muffin with peanut butter and jam in a paper towel for Rosie to eat on the way to school, and she stuffed this into her jacket pocket. “My mother hates it, too,” she sniped at James from the door, as if suddenly possessed. “It reminds her of her mother, eating bacon. She told me that once, when you first started going out.”

  “Jesus, Rosie,” said Elizabeth, looking contritely at James. It was true, it used to drive her crazy, and still could, but he waved it away.

  “That’s amazing you remember that from ten years ago, missy, since you can’t seem to remember to flush various products out of sight.”

  “That’s disgusting, James.”

  “It’s true. You’re almost eighteen and you didn’t flush last night.”

  “How do you know it wasn’t Mom?”

  “Because Mom flushes,” he replied. “Everything that has ever been inside her, except pee.”

  “You’re a pig, James.” She turned in fury to the counter, picked up a vegetarian sausage Elizabeth had made for breakfast, and flung it at James. “You hate life.”

  In a split second, James, with an oily bullet hole on his T-shirt, leapt up and grabbed her by the wrists, but she was bigger than he was, and just as strong, and she twisted away.

  “Eat your animal flesh, James. Go ahead. You’re like the trappers in San Francisco Bay, who picked off all the otters last century.”

  “I didn’t kill any otters,” Elizabeth offered weakly.

  “Yes you did, darling, remember?” James said. “That one time. Remember?”

  “Don’t mock me!” Rosie thundered. “Your whole selfish generation has helped kill off this planet!” She stormed out the door.

  “Come home after school, you’re grounded,” James shouted, but the door had already slammed. It was doubtful she’d heard. Then the door opened again, and she shouted, “It was easy to kill otters, because they trusted humans! How does that make you feel?” Then the door slammed again.

  He came to sit beside his wife at the table. “God almighty, Bertha,” he said.

  “Jesus. She’s gone nuts again. Just like that.” She snapped her fingers.

  “We need help,” he said.

  She sat with her chin on her chest, eyes closed. James sighed, shook his head, and lifted her chin with one finger. “It’s good that we’re getting the otter thing out in the open, baby. If you don’t get it out, you can’t let it go.”

  They sat holding hands at the table. Rascal came in, yowling for food. James got up to feed him. “Look at poor innocent me,” he told the cat. “I was eating muesli!”

  Several days later, Elizabeth and Lank drove out to the lagoon. They sat on the bank where she and James had hiked a week before, not far from Lank’s favorite barbecued-oyster joint. James was going to meet them here and treat them to lunch, in exchange for letting him steal their observations. Lank and Rae were on a new diet, mostly seafood, vegetables, and fruit. His face, shaded by a Giants cap, was wider than when she’d last seen him, fat, fair, and open as the man in the moon’s.

  “Lank?” Elizabeth said. “Do you believe in evil?”

  The tide was high today. A thousand birds flew overhead squalling, gulls and terns tracing the shape of the sky, the dome, the globe, swooping for food, frogs and crustaceans and worms.

  “You mean outside of our addictions, puritan guilt, projections, domination, and generally despicable behavior? You mean like a force? The Big Bad? You mean like Henry Kissinger?”

  “Yeah. Like a grim force loose in the world.”

  Lank thought this over. “You mean besides the depravity of human will?” Elizabeth nodded. “Some sort of dark intelligence that’s pitted against God, and goodness?” She nodded again. Lank handed her the binoculars. “You mean like—” Elizabeth laughed and jabbed him with an elbow. “Nah. Not really. If I say Rae does, will you think she’s a wing-nut, like Oral Roberts, and get a new best friend?” Elizabeth nodded.

  “I know she thinks the drug trade is evil,” he said. “But we haven’t lost her entirely. She’s not about sulfur and rats, or Al Pacino as Satan. Yet.”

  “But you don’t believe.”

  “No. I believe in extremely sick people. I believe in extreme childhood abuse that leads to sociopathic adults. I believe in loose screws.”

  “I feel that dark forces are around the kids now, in this town and in their minds, and in the world. Lank, did you know Rosie smokes?”

  “God, I hope you haven’t said anything to her about it,” Lank said.

  “Why?”

  “Look, I’m a high school teacher. And rule one is, Any idea which comes from the parents must be resisted.”

  “I keep forgetting that.”

  “Oh, sure. My parents used to send me helpful things from Reader’s Digest like ‘I Am Joe’s Lung.’ That alone added seven years to my smoking.”

  The lagoon smelled so much sweeter at high tide, less gucky and fecund, less like frogs. It smelled of fresh nutrients, a salad bar for crustaceans.

  Later James scribbled down everything they said on his paper placemat at the Oyster Corral. Lank said, “The fish travel in clumps, the birds fly overhead in clumps—as above, so below.” Elizabeth gazed at Lank’s peaceful face as James scrawled away. Lank had taken off his cap, and the sun poured through the window above the beach directly onto his head. His thin red hair caught the light, like saffron threads in glass, just as it must have when he was a baby.

  They had all been heavy smokers once, and all considered quitting to be the hardest thing they’d ever done. James and Lank agreed that the more parents tried to get their kids to quit, the longer the kids would smoke. Elizabeth thought about all the ways she could try to persuade Rosie to quit, and started to offer her ideas, but James interrupted. “No, darling, Lank is around teenagers all the time. Listen to what he says.”

  “I think I’m right about this, Elizabeth. Helpful parents get in the way almost all the time, even when they’re right—especially when they are right.”

  “I wonder what Rae would say.” Elizabeth sounded mournful.

  “I already know the answer,” Lank said. “I actually asked her once what Jesus would do about my students who smoke, because at one of the reunions at my school, there was a woman who had early-stage emphysema. Rae said he would have held his tongue. That Mary had one very stressful encounter with him when he was an adolescent. It’s when he gets lost one day, for a long time, and she and Joseph finally find him in the temple. They do not beat him senseless. Mary just gives him the stink-eye, and asks, quietly, ‘What the fuck?’ ”

  “Rae didn’t say that!”

  “She did!” Lank replied. “Then Mary gets him back home asap.” James wrote this on his placemat. “Seriously. She doesn’t order him to never return to the temple, or he would have snuck back the first chance he got.”

  “Let’s enforce the drug laws at our house, Elizabeth. And release her to her own higher power when it comes to smoking, grades, and so on.”

  “But if someone had stopped that high school girl from smoking, she wouldn’t have emphysema no
w.” Still, she wondered whether the men were right.

  Lunch was lovely—calm, fun, delicious, the best she had felt in a while. But half an hour after she got home, she left a message for Robert Tobias on his answering machine.

  He called back after dinner, and Elizabeth heard Rosie pick up the extension. “Rosie, hang up,” Elizabeth told her. “Hi, Robert.” She heard a click, and then silence. “Thanks for returning my call.” And then Rosie burst in on the phone.

  “My mother called you?” she shouted. “You traitor, Mom. Mata Hari.”

  “Hang up, God damn it.” Rosie hung up loudly. Elizabeth shook her head: he must think they were crazy. “Sorry, Robert.”

  “That’s okay,” he said, but he sounded skeptical, as if expecting gunfire to ring out.

  “I called because I’m a bit worried about Rosie, and wanted to make sure she’s doing okay in chemistry.”

  “To tell you the truth, she isn’t the pistol she was last semester. Her work is definitely off. How much detail do you want? She does fine with the warm-up problems most days, but doesn’t join in the review of the content we’ve been studying in the textbook, or the current event in science we’re discussing. Her lab partner is carrying more than his share of the work. She seems distracted, and vaguely annoyed.”

  “That’s what I was afraid of.”

  “She’s a brilliant girl, but she’s been late a few times with her homework.”

  Elizabeth hesitated before asking, “Can she still get an A, though?”

  “She can get a B-plus for the quarter if and only if she aces the big test next week.”

  “God. What a difference a summer makes.”

  “It’s probably senioritis. Tell her to get her butt in gear. A B-plus shouldn’t hurt her on her college apps.”

  “Okay.”

  “Is there anything else?”

  She almost told him about Rosie’s crush, but she had already done enough damage. Rosie would be livid. “No,” Elizabeth said. “That’s all.” After she hung up, she knocked on her own forehead. Then she went down the hall and knocked on Rosie’s door. Silence. Then a long-drawn-out “God,” followed by a sharp “What?” Elizabeth gingerly let herself in.