Imperfect Birds (11 page)

Her stomach dropped as if she had just driven over a hill in the city. The yellow ones had been very strong, five milligrams each, all but knocking her out, and hard to get off. But the blue ones were the strongest, ten milligrams. She had had to be weaned off the fives slowly, over two weeks, by her psychiatrist, to the white ones, which were only two milligrams. She felt around the watch pocket until four pills sat in the palm of her hand, like breath mints. She thought of throwing them down the hatch all at once with one fell swoop. James was in the city recording an essay at KQED. Rae was at VBS. So she put the pills in her own watch pocket, put Rosie’s jeans and some towels in the washer, and started the load. She had no idea what to do next. She made herself take deep breaths. Maybe there was a reasonable explanation, she told herself, but something deep inside flickered.

O
h, God,” Rosie said with amusement and contempt when Elizabeth showed her the pills. “They are not even mine! They’re Alice’s, she takes them sometimes for migraine. Remember? God, I’m sorry you got so worried, but Mommy, you actually knew this. You’re having a senior moment.”

And even though Elizabeth didn’t remember this, she was flooded with the narcotic of relief. “I thought they were yours,” she said in a little voice. But after thinking it over, she squinted one eye and asked, “Then why doesn’t her shrink give her five-milligram ones?”

“He does. But she ran out on a Friday, the night we went to the party at Jody’s aunt’s, and Alice got a total migraine, and Jody’s aunt gave her some of these, but they’re ten milligrams, so she told her to split them in half.”

“But why did she give her so many?”

“Because the pharmacy was closed for the three-day weekend, remember? It was Memorial Day.”

Elizabeth thought this over. “You swear?” Rosie nodded. “You’re not in any trouble with drugs?”

“I told you, I have smoked dope. But it is totally no big deal to me. I got all A’s last term. I’m holding down two jobs. I’m a good kid, Mom.”

Elizabeth stepped back, amazed to feel her old self again.

Rosie’s face was soft and magnanimous. “Poor Mommy. Call Jody’s aunt if you need to double-check. I’d understand. I won’t be mad. I won’t think it means you’re spying.”

Elizabeth shook her head emphatically, as if this was the most ridiculous thing she’d heard all day. She took her daughter’s hand, and brushed the back of it with her lips, gallantly, like a knight.

Rosie took Elizabeth’s hand, turned it over like a palm reader, studied the network of creases, wrinkles, and age spots, then raised it forward to kiss with slightly chapped and very gentle lips.

B
y the time
The Seventh Seal
came to town, the summer’s heat bore down like a fever. It was hard to be arrogant these days when you felt like a panting dog in a steam bath, but you could still be cranky. Hardly anyone was happy about the weather, except for the little kids splashing in the creek at the park, and Rosie’s bucket kids, whom she spritzed with water during lessons, and the teenagers horsing around at the picnic tables under the shade of the redwoods. Rosie was jealous because Jody had fallen in love—with a soldier, for God’s sake, who was five years older than she. Alice was unhappy because her boyfriend, Ryan, was turning out to be a dick. Rosie’s parents were unhappy, because James’s job at KQED meant he spent less time at home. Robert was unhappy because something had come up at home and he could take only one tennis lesson most weeks now, and Rosie was unhappy about losing that extra money and that lovely time alone with him.

Yet everyone’s solution seemed to include making plans to see
The Seventh Seal
. It was like the circus had come to town, the Death ’n’ Decay Cabaret: Alice’s mother had gone opening night, Jody’s grandmother Marion was going tonight with a grandson. Rosie and her parents were going tomorrow, Rae and Lank were going the day after. It was ludicrous. Adults didn’t have the sense of the little kids splashing around in the creek in their Batman underpants. There were many things that made it hard to respect them. A, they had destroyed the planet. And B, it was so easy to pull the wool over their eyes. All Rosie had to do to put her parents’ minds at ease was to say she was giving a tennis lesson that afternoon after VBS and she didn’t have to check back in with them for hours. Then she would call and breathlessly recount how far Robert had come this summer. Then she could say she and Alice were stopping by the Sustainability Center to see if the people there needed help. She would feed them details to make it sound more authentic, like tonight, for instance. She’d told them that now there was a sign out in front of the building that said, “If you are here and we aren’t, we’d love you to come inside and take this shift.” James had laughed over the phone and said to be home by curfew, midnight during the summer. She and Alice had only passed the sign on their way to the Parkade. They had bought Quaaludes from a guy who’d just been to Florida, ten dollars a tab, which was a rip, but she’d make twenty during her lesson with Robert the next day, so she treated Alice. Someone on the street had given them each a lager, and the ’ludes started coming on fast, so she called to say they had passed out leaflets on the street for the Sustainability Center and she was going to stay at Alice’s.

Her mother asked if she could volunteer, too, someday, and Rosie said, oh, sure, the center needed all the help it could get. Not that she and Alice had ever actually gone inside.

They had a great night, perfectly stoned with a bunch of other teenagers on the open-air expanse of grass at Pali Park, surrounded by redwoods. Older people came by and played guitar, and they sang and floated and flirted and drank only a few sips of strawberry wine that a cute hippie mother offered them. Then they went to Alice’s and listened to rap because her mother still wasn’t home, and they tried on combinations of textured scarves and filmy tops to wear over their camisoles and cut-offs—wild color combinations, lots of orange. Alice said, “Everything goes with orange,” and she had impeccable taste. Apricot, coral, persimmon, and tenne, which was tawny orange-brown tinged with gold.

She felt groggy the next morning at VBS, even though she’d stopped for a double latte on her way from Alice’s to the church. It didn’t matter, though, Rae was unusually distracted, and the kids were easy and funny. Rosie read them the story of Moses in the bulrushes, and when their attention flagged, she spritzed them with the misting sprayer people used for houseplants. But when she tried to review what she had read to them, not one of the kids remembered a thing about Moses. “What’s with you guys today?” she asked, although it was she who was not with it. “Just tell me about baby Moses.” The kids could see that she was discouraged, and one boy finally raised his hand. “Okay,” he said, with a look of grim concentration, “wasn’t he the little guy with the monkey?”

She still felt strange and trippy in the afternoon on the tennis court, and when Robert asked if she felt okay, she said she hadn’t slept well. His strokes had improved greatly, although when he served he still looked like someone fending off a cloud of bats. Even through the foggy Quaalude hangover, she took pride in his improvement, in what they had managed together, and when they sat down with Cokes in the grass after the lesson, she felt a real closeness with him.

They were a foot apart, but their arms, resting on bent knees, were nearer, and she could feel a vibration between the dark hair on her long arms and the golden hair on his. The closer they got without actually touching, the more she could feel it, hear it, like a tuning fork, or some phantom instrument you’d play to make spirit music at a séance.

“ ‘Love is life,’ ” he said all of a sudden. Oh my God: they’d been discussing his serve. “ ‘All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source.’ ” Oh my God—was he proclaiming his love for her? She couldn’t think of what on earth to do in response, so she squinted at him skeptically.

“Leo Tolstoy,” he said.

She smiled. “Will you write that down for me?”

“Beside it being all we need to know most of the time, it is
not
incompatible with quantum physics—especially the field theory. Only mistake he made is that he is not a particle, he’s a wave.”

Rosie nodded. He fished around in the cover of his tennis racket until he found a pen and a scrap of paper, and began writing. She was going to memorize it, recite it to her parents that night, and the part about Tolstoy being a wave. But not say that he had told her. Just while passing the salad, whip it out.

He was studying her with a slightly worried look.

“What?” she demanded.

“You okay?” he asked. “Should I be worried about you?”

“Yeah,” she said. He looked at her sideways, amused. She yawned expansively and got to her feet. “The heat is really getting to me. I’m going home to take a nap.”

“See that you do,” he said. He worried about his students. Last year a girl in honors physics had slit her wrists on her bedroom floor and died, was dead in there all night because her parents didn’t find her until their alarm rang, and the van from Aftermath Crime Cleaners came to remove the rug, and paint over the blood splatters on the walls, and somehow get rid of the smell. Other gifted students of his were big stoners by senior year, failing and even sometimes dropping out. She was his star, though. She gave him nothing to worry about. Just heat prostration.

Robert smiled at her and said good-bye, and the funny thing was, she actually did go home, although she’d told Jody she’d go to her house after tennis and meet her soldier, Claude. She called instead and said she didn’t feel well. Jody was hurt that Alice and Rosie had done Quaaludes without her, since those didn’t show up in urine tests, plus now they’d both blown off meeting Claude.

Rosie felt queasy driving home. She found her mother weeding in the garden, and said she felt funny. It must have been the sun, she said. She was going to lie down for a while. When she got up, her parents had already had dinner, but her mother heated up some pumpkin ravioli with pesto, and served her in the living room. James had made a salad from the garden, and was playing Bach concertos. The three of them ended up in the living room, reading, listening to Bach, and it was not awful. Rosie felt that disembodied séance feeling again a few times, but it passed; it was sort of nice, once you stopped fighting it and no one noticed.

S
he met up with Alice, Jody, and Claude in Alice’s bedroom the next afternoon. Alice’s room was so great. There was not one inch of empty wall space or ceiling. Her mother was cool and had even let Alice shellac the posters, photos, artwork, mementos, so that they didn’t fade and shred like some of Rosie’s best pieces. James’s rules amounted to censorship. Your room was supposed to be your own goddamn world.