Imperfect Birds (6 page)

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.

T
he 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?

A figure appeared in the sand, walking toward them, and someone dropped the joint into the surf to be extinguished, and Ethan, the only smoker, whipped his cigarette behind his back, so Rosie turned, thinking it must be the police, but it was her physics teacher, holding a child by the hand. Robert Tobias, her favorite teacher, here, in real life, on the beach.

“It’s okay, Ethan,” he said, smiling. Maybe the cigarette smoke covered the pot. He had another child in a backpack, who was wearing a knit cap with stars all over it. Both children had gigantic martian eyes. Robert was pretty handsome for his age, probably mid-thirties. Feeling shy, she ducked her head, but he said her name. “Rosie! You get your grades yet?” She shook her head.

“No one has. They’re late this year. Did I . . . ?” she began. He shrugged, and held out his hands in a gesture of
Who knows?
But she knew it meant she had aced the class. God! She was so pumped. It was weird to be so good at this one thing, this and writing. She was pretty sure she was one of his favorite students; someone had called her the teacher’s pet once. He ran his fingers through his cropped sworly brown hair, and said hello to the crowd as a whole. “Hi, Mr. Tobias,” they replied in unison. His eyes were big, like his children’s, and ringed with thick, dark lashes. Amazingly, he had five-o’clock shadow; he must not have been shaving on summer vacation. Rosie wondered whether his wife liked it rough and stubbly like that. She would run it by Alice and Jody. This was one of their big topics, the teachers, what their wives and husbands were like, and what they were all like in bed—who gave head, who didn’t, who came fast, who could last. Rosie imagined reaching forward to touch his stubble, and how it would prick her hands.