Imperfect Birds (8 page)

Elizabeth left the theater and walked onto the blacktop of the market. She bought a bottle of icy water from the man who’d been selling his flavored honey straws when Elizabeth and Andrew first stopped by, a hundred years ago, when they had to drive twenty minutes from Bayview to get here. Rosie had been four when they had discovered the weekly market. Most of the plastic straws’ worth of honey would end up on her clothes or in her hair, and all over Elizabeth, too, blueberry honey in dark navy straws, root beer float, orange cream, lime.

Now when Rosie and her friends ate here, it was figs, mild California pistachios, cheeses wrapped in stinging nettle leaves.

Elizabeth realized she would not be able to stay here—there were too many people and way too many smells: barbecued chicken wings, soy-and-tomatillo tamales, bouquets of local flowers, ripe strawberries, a hippie B.O. cloud of patchouli, weed, the brine of feta from Olema, and the sweet glue of honeycomb and sticky children. She turned to walk home, frustrated with Rae and herself and even with the poor innocent farmers’ market. There was something self-congratulatory about the whole thing, and a Loehmann’s quality, everyone so intent on getting huge amounts of the choice produce. Elizabeth never needed things in quantity, but on weeks when she didn’t buy a lot of stuff, she felt like a piker, wondering to herself why she was not overloaded with joy like everyone else.

She hurried across the street to the steps of the Parkade, where a few teenage and slightly older males blocked her entrance to the ancient concrete steps. They were smoking, bored, sullen, superior, and like most teenagers everywhere, since all eternity, waiting for something to happen. One young man already had the aggressively tattooed neck you saw on middle-aged junkies in AA. She wanted to shake him—“What the
fuck
are you thinking? Is anyone ever going to hire a guy who has Jesus and a rattlesnake duking it out in front of a wrinkled sunrise?”

Just then, Rae called out her name. She turned to glower at her friend, who stood across the street in front of the theater, but caught a rangy peripheral blur, more familiar to her than the various old women she saw in mirrors: brown limbs and long black curls. Holding up a finger to Rae, she called out, “Rosie!”

Rosie was coming out of the bus kiosk, two hundred feet away, toward the group of boys sprawled on the steps now behind Elizabeth. “Rosie!” Elizabeth called again, as if it had been weeks since they’d last spoken, and they walked toward each other. Rosie took a few steps to the right, so that she could gesture to the teenagers on the steps, a gesture of exasperated, masculine apology—I’ll be right there, guys, the little lady needs me first.

Rosie lowered her gaze to size up Elizabeth’s outfit, khaki shorts that were now perhaps a size too small, and a frayed floral blouse with an admittedly funny collar, with such shock and hurt that a stranger might have thought that Elizabeth stood there in snorkel flippers and a thong.

“Mommy,” Rosie admonished. “I thought we had talked about that shirt. It really just will not do.”

“But the color is good for me, right?” Cream, with soft orange flowers and pale olive leaves. Rosie rolled her eyes, and stepped into her mother’s arms for a quick hug. “May I please have some money? Like ten or so, for tamales?”

Money was the way to Rosie’s heart, a five here, a ten there, a shopping spree every so often. Rosie and Elizabeth got high on shopping sprees like stylish crackheads, and the high could last the night. Otherwise, Rosie’s most frequent addictive need was to get out of the house and hang out with her friends, Elizabeth’s to see that Rosie was happy—both experienced the anxiety of withdrawal when these needs could not be met. Tonight Elizabeth bargained with her: she got to smell Rosie’s neck for a moment, and then she’d give her dinner money. Rosie paid stoically, standing straight and long-suffering, like someone at the tailor’s, while her mother burrowed under Rosie’s chin.

“Narm, narm, narm,” Rosie joked now, the sound she had made up as a child to imitate a giant gnawing on a leg of lamb. “Don’t eat me! I’m young and have my whole life ahead of me!” Elizabeth laughed gently and fished a ten-dollar bill out of the pocket of her shorts.

Rosie grabbed the bill from Elizabeth’s hand, cried out, “Thank you, I love you,” and without a backward glance raced off to the stairs.

Elizabeth watched her go. It had been lovely to have a moment of public affection instead of the minimal grunt. Full-frontal time with Rosie was getting rare. Her energy at home was either complete exhaustion or racing to leave, muffled galumph or black-hole silence. She always seemed to be either on her last legs or just passing through on her way to real life, fueling up, needing money, always in hustle or flop. Leaning against the rail, towering above the tattooed boys, Rosie looked like an orchid. Elizabeth’s heart skittered at her youth and beauty; the devil is drawn to the light, being an angel himself.
Get away from her,
Elizabeth commanded him, although she did not believe in the devil, or angels, or for that matter, God. Yet an old saying fluttered like a ribbon in the catacombs of her mind,
There is no devil, there is no hell, he assures them as he lulls them down his path.

R
ae was no longer standing outside the theater, but Elizabeth soon found her among the market booths, sitting on a wooden table made of a cable spool, watching the old lady who played the saw set up her boom box. Elizabeth glared at her watch.

“I’m so sorry, baby. Something came up. Are you mad?” Rae asked.

“No. I hate you, though, and you’re not my friend anymore. Plus I’m starving, and my hip hurts like an old dog, and I have to pee.”

“So go pee at the theater. I’ll spring for tamales when you get back.”

By the time Elizabeth returned, Rae had persuaded the old lady who played the saw to attend Vacation Bible School, and was drawing her a map to the church.

“I thought you said you’d get Rosie some work there,” Elizabeth reproached.

“I did and I can. It doesn’t start for four more days. Plus, we need a special-events coordinator for the summer, one night a week, at fifteen dollars an hour.”

“Oh my God, that’s great. Does she have to do toilets or floors?”

“We have a janitor for that. So you forgive me?” Rae handed her a plate of tamales in red sauce, and Elizabeth nodded.

The old lady plugged her boom box into the power strip that ran into the theater, and sat down on another cable spool. White fluffy hair, craggy face with a sweet, shy smile, she rosined her cello bow, arranged the saw between her legs, pushed a button on the boom box, and waited.

An instrumental version of “Edelweiss” began to play, and she bent forward lovingly, eyes closed, a faint smile, Yo-Yo Ma on the saw. A crowd quickly gathered. It was so damn strange, like getting radio transmissions through your fillings. “Somewhere over the Rainbow” followed, then “San Antonio Rose.” Rae and Elizabeth stayed for the whole set. The notes were not going through your ears, but through the holes in you, the cavities. Chinese opera affected her in the same way, beautiful yet so improbable, exultant in the off-pitch. The tone was awful, horrible, and yet breathtakingly beautiful, almost more than Elizabeth could bear, and she could not figure out why she was so vulnerable to it, as the old lady worked away, creating vibrations that took you to places you hadn’t planned or agreed to go, an artist stripping away the jolly tune so you could see anguish, yearning, elation. The tone of the saw was so awful, and yet this woman was playing and loving it, and everyone loved it together, in actual wonder, with no bones to pick, no grades or cars or problems to compare, people so excited that an old lady in the age of synthesizers could get into all the old empty rumpled places in their bodies, where perfect pitch couldn’t take them.

F
rom her first morning at Vacation Bible School, Rosie loved working with Rae. Rae always brought her baked treats, or dollar bracelets from Cost Plus, and before class they’d cuddle on the extra-wide easy chair in the space Rae used for an office. They’d share stories about James and Lank, and how hilarious the two men were, or how something one of them had said was just so great or infuriating. On Rosie’s first day there, Rae told her a story she’d never forget, about a girl who was very close to her grandmother. Once a week, the girl and her grandmother walked from their house to the beach, where a lot of starfish would always wash up onshore. The grandmother had taught the girl that if a starfish was flexible, it was alive, and so you should throw it back into the ocean. If it was stiff, you could take it home.

The day after the grandmother died, the girl was in such deep grief that she could not bear hanging out with her relatives at the grandmother’s house, crying, reminiscing, eating, offering up prayers. So she walked down the road to the ocean by herself, and started lifting starfish off the sand, to see if they were alive. She was still crying, but she felt better. Then someone in her family came to find her, and said, “Honey, you need to be with your relatives now. We have to stick together. What you’re doing here is just not really significant.”

And the girl replied, “It’s significant to the starfish.”

Rae said the whole Vacation Bible School was about this theme: that you were tended to, by tending to.

Rosie thought for a moment. “The girl was the starfish she was throwing back,” she said. Rae nodded.

They went to welcome the kids for their first lesson. Grown-ups would be meeting with Anthony in his office, for Bible study, faith walks, sacred Taizé chanting, prayer-shawl knitting, and voter registration in town.

Children had always flocked to Rosie; for some reason, they could sense she had a knack for silly patience with kids, and this group was no different. They clung to her like she was a rock star, wanting to be lifted, noticed, and she saw how helpless and vulnerable they were. Rae had told her that some of their parents were really sick—part of the church’s outpatient ministry to drug addicts. One six-year-old didn’t have any parents, just a guardian named Sue; her single mother had died of AIDS, and she had a little sister who was only three and in with the nursery kids. A couple of little kids were shy as turtles, and you had to coax and trick them into trying out your games or snacks. The thing they loved best was when she threw a few of them at a time into a big plastic bucket with rope handles, which must have been used as a toy box, and dragged them all over the church grounds, up and down steps, over rocks, as they screamed with laughter.

She called the whole gang of them her bucket kids; she also did arts and crafts with them, and read them stories. She held them on her lap when they fell or got their feelings hurt, and she made sure always to pay the same amount of attention to each child, even though she liked two of them the most. And the money was so great, fifteen dollars an hour, four hours at a time.

Sometimes she and Alice lifted a pair of jeans or a camisole from shops in Sausalito or the Haight, and now she could tell her mother she’d spent her own hard-earned money.

Jody didn’t go to the city with them very often, because they always ended up doing stuff that she couldn’t risk getting caught doing. Like the last time Rosie and Alice had been in Golden Gate Park, freezing to death in a sea of fog, they had ended up smoking dope under a tree with some homeless guy. It turned out not to have been a good idea, there was something besides weed in the joint and Rosie was tripping mildly and having scary thoughts, especially one where she saw herself trap a couple of the bucket kids underneath the dome of plastic, to scare them, and to have power over them; she saw herself pound on the sides of the bucket and not answer when they called her name. What was so awful was that she kept having these thoughts well after that day in the park; maybe she’d had it before, too, this bad mind. It just came into her head from time to time, to trap and scare the kids so that they would know how she felt a lot of the time, since you couldn’t very well trap adults under buckets.