Imperfect Birds (21 page)

T
he meeting hit the spot. Nothing was more important than Elizabeth’s staying sober. Everything good that could happen for Rosie depended on Elizabeth’s not drinking. Leo, the speaker, had done some time at Napa State Hospital after having taken too many trips on LSD. He’d been released too early the last time, and spent most of his second day studying a large fish in an aquarium at a pet store, convinced that it was trying to speak to him. The fish had opened and closed its lips, mouthing, “Leo is God.” When he started talking back to it, sincerely—“No, no, it’s just that I’m so big—
all
of us out here are”—the authorities had come for him. He was adorable.

Some women invited her to coffee afterward, and she almost went. But instead she went to her favorite bookstore. She got an espresso, chocolate-dipped biscotti, and a copy of
The New Yorker
, sat at one of the window tables alone, and read away the day—about as close to heaven as she was going to get, what with this mortal coil. Every so often she imagined the big fish swimming out to center stage in her mind. The first time he mouthed to her, imploring, “Elizabeth is God,” the second time, beseeching, “Elizabeth is loved.” Then “Elizabeth must be crazy to listen to a big fish.”

B
oth courts were busy when Rosie arrived, and there was no sign of

Robert, so she sat and read the book she’d brought in her racket cover. She had to write a paper on it as summer homework for AP English when school started.
The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel
, by Kazantzakis. James had owned a copy. It was one of the greatest books she had ever read, although she was only a few pages in.
O Sun, great Oriental, my proud mind’s golden cap, I love to wear you cocked askew
.

She struck a pose, legs outstretched like a 1950s bathing beauty, baby finger hooked over her bottom lip, like a girl in a window seat, and immersed herself in the poetry:
Freedom, my lads, is neither wine nor a sweet maid, not goods stacked in vast cellars, no, nor sons in cradles; it’s but a scornful, lonely song the wind has taken
. . . .

Robert sneaked up behind her. She wasn’t aware of him until he was ten feet away. Even so, she pretended to be immersed in her book until he reached over her shoulders and grabbed it out of her hands. “Hey!” he exclaimed, like she was his very best friend. “Can I borrow this?”

“Hey, yourself.” She looked down into her lap, mock disgruntled, and then up at him. He was only a few feet away. He’d shaved, and the skin there was paler, and God, his lashes were so long and black that his eyes were like caterpillars. He got to his feet and bent down to pull her up. Her heart raced.

“How are you?” he asked. “Getting ready for school?” She groaned. “Oh, senior year’s a breeze—junior year is the killer. And I’ll help you with your college apps.” He took a ball out of the pocket of his khaki shorts, bounced it menacingly on the court. “You ready? I’ve been practicing my toss at home.”

She found herself dipping and ducking with such shyness, wondering whether or not he had heard about the bust. Probably not. “We need to warm up for a while, first,” she said, turning around. “Otherwise, an old guy like you might get injured.” She was so glad to see him. She felt genuinely happy for the first time since the party—more like herself, but older.

“Ow,” he cried. “That’s hitting below the belt.” But he was smiling. It made her think of what was below his belt. She walked back to the baseline.

When she turned to face him, he was squinting at her like now she was in real trouble, and he whacked a ball that nearly hit her. She hit it back, and they rallied, low, hard shots, until he missed. He had gotten better so fast, and she told him this when they met at the net to gather the balls. She took her sunglasses off and used them to sweep back her hair. “Look at you,” she said in the voice of encouragement she used with her kids at church. “You’re doing great.”

“Thank you,” he drawled. He looked into her face for a moment, her eyes, as if searching for something. “Hey—I hope you don’t mind my asking, but what is that thing on your eye—that thickening?”

Her heart sank. She’d thought he was going to ask her out, she really had, no matter how crazy that was. “Oh, you never noticed it before?” she said. “It’s called a pterygium. It’s a sun injury to my eye, from all those years I played on the junior circuit. I can get surgery on it if I ever care enough.” He was studying her, like an eye doctor. She was terribly embarrassed.

“Can I ask
you
something?” she countered. He nodded. Her heart knocked in her chest like a woodpecker—what was she doing? She didn’t even have a question to ask him. She pulled a ball against her shoe with her racket, and expertly jerked it so it dropped and bounced; with one hit, she caught it on the strings of her racket and froze it, in rapid succession like a top. She panned the court behind him until she knew he was looking at her, and she looked at him, and then smiled like the world’s biggest jerk. Quick, think of something!

“Okay—you know that line of Walt Whitman’s, ‘You are so much sunshine to the square inch’?” He nodded. “Well, in terms of physics, is it true?”

He laughed, and looked off, thinking. “Well. Sunshine is energy, and life is energy, so you are energy, and energy is all linked by what Einstein called ‘spooky action at a distance.’ Other physicists have called it ‘nonlocal connections’—you remember Bell’s theorem, of course. So we are all energy, and connected, and will remain so. There’s a man named Gary Schwartz at the University of Arizona who calls that energy ‘love,’ as Tolstoy does, and since there’s plenty of sunshine in Tucson, Schwartz ought to know.”

God, it was so great, he talked to her like a grown-up, like a colleague. She listened to her heart, to the
thwok thwok
of people playing on the other court, to the squeak of rubber-soled footsteps on the grass beside their court. He dropped his voice, and spoke like a gangster, surreptitiously, out of one side of his mouth. “Your friends just arrived,” he said, holding her gaze.

“Okay,” she said, looking back at him.

She popped the ball up and down on her strings, then made it freeze, and stuffed it in her pocket.

She looked over at Jody and Alice, who were sitting in the grass, watching. She waved, then looked at her watch, and flashed her hand at them twice—ten minutes. She and Robert rallied until one, the best they’d ever played, smiling secret smiles. But she never once looked into his face. Instead, she looked at her two best friends, who were leaning against each other, Jody’s arm tucked into Alice’s, lolling together like her mother and she did sometimes, or like lesbians.

When she and Robert were done for the day, they thanked each other formally. She felt like when you were listening to great music and the bass got inside your body.

A
lice and Jody both looked as if they were close to tears when she walked over to join them. Four arms reached out to her, desperate as widows for her touch. Jody with her great posture and neat, sharp features looked like a secretary in an old movie, like she might whip out her pad and take shorthand, except for her chipped black nail polish and jaggedly sprouting hair. Alice shone as fair as the moon, all curves and curls, cheeks that looked like some auntie had just pinched them lightly, rose-pink blurs. There was a dusting of powder over the freckles on her nose, but in general she was wearing less makeup now, since she’d fallen in love again.

Rosie plopped down in the small space between them, and they folded themselves around her in a sprawl. “I missed you guys!”

What was it like being at the police department, they wanted to know. Was she in a cell, were there other kids with her, did she get arrested? She shook her head and smiled, trying to reassure them that she was really all right. How long was she grounded for, and when would she get her phone back? This had been such a nightmare! They acted like she’d been in isolation in a Turkish jail. It made her almost cry with self-pity.

“Did your moms find out?” she asked them, and they shook their heads.

She told them how cold it was in the police office, how she wasn’t in a cell, how two drunk men were brought in separately. She told them about how tweaked Elizabeth had been, as if Rosie had been busted with a pound of heroin and some syringes instead of just having two puffs of weed and some beer at a party. And what an asshole James was, how mean he was being to Elizabeth the last few days, but how her mother was totally on her side now, and that they were all made up. She was grounded a few more days, which was okay because she had so much work to do for English before school started.

She felt Alice stretch out over her back, and dig that small cleft chin against her shoulder blade. “It will all be back to how it was,” Rosie assured them. “No biggie.” Then as one, they all shifted to the left, rearranged themselves as if they were trying to get comfortable sharing a berth, instead of lying on a huge green lawn.

Rosie immersed herself in their smells and familiar bodies. Her love for Jody was the reason Rosie was able to keep it together at all these days, it was like a crush where you didn’t want to have sex—just kiss maybe—but then Jody asked, “And what on earth was that all about on the court?” in her bad clipped voice. Rosie drew back to look at her, askance.

“What?” she asked, playing dumb, but secretly thrilled.

“Like, hello?” said Jody. “He’s totally into you.”

“That is all in your head,” Rosie insisted.

Alice made her Kewpie-doll face of concern. “I know, I’m going to ask my guy friends if they know anybody good for you.”

“Don’t you dare. I’ll never forgive you. Anyway, all the guys we know from around here are biohazard.” This made them all laugh. “I mean, except Claude.” The three of them shifted again, and wriggled together in a shimmy, like a bird composing itself on a piling. Rosie had her face burrowed into Alice’s warm neck, smelling of Nivea and weed, and Jody, on the far side, smelled salty clean like a girl just out of the sea.

Jody stretched her arm all the way across Rosie to hold on to Alice’s arm. Out of her squished left eye Rosie could see the court where not long ago she and Robert had stood. Something had happened, like they’d exchanged a kind of rain check. She let herself be enveloped in the softness and heat of her girls.

That night, she had a pleasant vegetarian dinner with her parents. Rosie read in her room all night with the door closed, James worked on his new story, Elizabeth puttered. Things were better.