Rosie

Anne Lamott is a columnist for online magazine
Salon.com
and a Guggenheim Fellow. Her life was documented in Freida Lee Mock's 1999 documentary
Bird by Bird with Annie: A Film Portrait of Writer Anne Lamott.
She is the author of the
New York Times
bestsellers
Grace (Eventually), Plan B, Traveling Mercies,
and
Operating Instructions. Imperfect Birds,
part of the Rosie trilogy, was published in 2010 and
Crooked Little Heart
will follow later in 2011.

This one is for Abby Luttinger, Warren Wallace, Mary Lowry, Pam Murray, and Leroy Lounibos, whose love and input were central to the writing of this book.

And for my brothers John and Steve, and my mother, and her family, and my father, and his family, and the Schleigers.

And for the people who let me live with them while I was writing this: Carol Adrienne in Petaluma, and her family, Gunther, Sigrid, and Charles. Pat Gomez, and her family, John, Margaret, Grammy Perrett, and Stephanie. Doris, Amelia, and Lucy Wallace in New York. Sharon Weld and Sally Wood in Cambridge. Someday I'm going to make it all up to them.

And for Lynn Atkison, Jack Erdmann, Don Sherwood, and Joanne Greenbaum, kind and gorgeous people.

And for Michael Fessier and Sylvie Pasche, my writer friends.

And for Cork Smith, Elizabeth McKee, and Ann Brebner.

And for Robert Filipini and Gordon Wallace and Larry Barnett, and Allan Ruder.

And for Norma Campbell, Dierdre Campbell, Zoe Barnett, and the Wetzells, who have made me smarter.

And for the gang at the Lakeville Marina-Phyllis, Leon, Linda, and Grace; and for Rosalie Wright, B.K. Moran, and Jon Carroll.

And for Megan and Betty and Lowell and Adele and Susan...

This one is for my friends, again.

There were many things about Elizabeth Ferguson that the people of Bayview disliked. They thought her tall, too thin, too aloof. Her neck was too long and her breasts were too big. The men, who could have lived with the size of her breasts, found her unwilling to flirt and labeled her cold. The women were jealous of how well her clothes hung on her, and that she managed to look elegant in outfits that would have made them look like the bag ladies of late autumn. She said little in town unless spoken to, in which case she had the gall to be civil and clever. They distrusted her because her husband and parents were dead and because she called herself Elizabeth instead of Lisa or Betsy or Liz. In a town where the sole taxi driver delivered pints at breakfast to a dozen people, a town where alcohol was the cornerstone of all civic and social endeavor, they did not like that she could drink so much at the bar without becoming sloppy or degenerate. They found it alarming when, in the market or the bookstore and for no apparent reason, she burst out laughing; she might have just remembered the eccentric horse in the Saki story who has what its owner called “the swerving sickness,” but the people
of Bayview could not guess this and took these abrupt outbursts to indicate that she was slowly going mad. They resented that Andrew Ferguson had left her a comfortable trust, and they blamed her for his death; however she had managed to cause him to crash, while drunk, 3,000 miles away, they knew she had done so for the money. And what they especially didn't like was that, a week after he died, a man had left the Ferguson house at seven in the morning. Old Mrs. Haas, in the breakfast nook of her Victorian across the street, had watched through binoculars as the man left and had had to suppress her gleeful outrage until nine, when she began making phone calls.

Rosie Ferguson was four when her father died. As she sat on her mother's lap at the crowded Episcopal service, she knew that her father was dead but kept waiting for him to join them in the first pew, wondering what he would bring her: a book maybe, or taffy. She hoped for the cinnamon kind, the prettiest, pink with a glassy red stripe. Several days before he had left for the East Coast, she had cut off the legs of all his suit pants at the knees, but she had forgotten this by the day of the service. She stared at the stained glass, the crucifix, the candles, the flowers, the man on stage in a black dress; spellbound, she bit her bottom lip and appeared to be getting a feel for it all before doing some interior decorating.

Elizabeth held Rosie on her lap, dimly aware that her daughter was trying to take care of her—Rosie kept patting her and smiling bravely—but Elizabeth couldn't concentrate on what was happening. It was too surreal: Andrew's now permanent absence, her presence in church for the first time in years, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want”; over the minister's voice she heard Andrew reading to Rosie the night before he left,
“James James Morrison Morrison Weather by George Dupree,”
saw Rosie in the closet with the scissors, black curls flattened on one side after a nap, Siamese blue eyes squinted in concentration, cutting up the pants. “For Thou art with me,” the minister said, as an abrupt, hard laugh escaped from behind Elizabeth's nose.

Rosie whipped her head around and gave her mother a stern look. Elizabeth bowed her head. “...Lord for ever.” Elizabeth was racked with waves of silent laughter, until another cramped
laugh burst out of her nose and she pretended to sob, but Rosie, not fooled, crossed her arms and glared. Behind them, skeptical looks were exchanged. The choir began singing “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” and Elizabeth, hugging her child tightly, shook with suppressed giggles and emitted staccato nasal scraping noises into her daughter's black hair, until tears for the man who had given her Rosie ran down her face.

The people of Bayview, a small town in the San Francisco Bay area, thought that she was too handsome to have suffered sufficiently in her life, to have suffered as much as they had. They knew almost nothing of her past and resented how easy it had always seemed for her.

But Elizabeth had few happy memories of childhood. Both her parents had been alcoholics. Her father, who was dashing and funny, left her mother when Elizabeth was ten, after which Elizabeth stopped bringing friends home from school because her mother was apt to have passed out on the couch.

In seventh grade Elizabeth was taller and more buxom than her teacher and had inherited her father's eyebrow, one long black line of hair that spanned both eyes like a mustache, and her mother was too undone to help Elizabeth pluck a clearing in the brow. Elizabeth was the shyest and most frequently teased girl in school. She often read alone, at lunchtime and stayed up half the night reading, because on top of—or because of—it all, she was an insomniac.

At sixteen she was five-foot-ten and striking in the way of the young Charlie Chaplin. Her thick black eyebrows, plucked by now, were awesome, and her breasts were magnificent. She had her first affair, with a man in his mid-twenties. It lasted two years. He was wildly funny, and she thought they would marry but he fell in love with someone else, “Somebody less moody,” he said.

She went east for college, majored in literature, minored in math, dabbled in philosophy, marched for peace and human rights, wondered what on earth she would do with her life after college, and had a series of affairs with witty bookworms, each
more passionate and disastrous than the last, each having begun so happily. What is wrong with you, Elizabeth?

It seemed to her that in essential ways she had not changed much since seventh grade. Her moods were as volatile as the weather. She was riddled with anxiety, prone to depression, constantly terrified of losing her mind or life, sometimes so much so that she couldn't leave her bedroom.

She got almost all A's in college, could hardly have cared less. In the audience at a concert, her mind sometimes wandered so far away that when it finally returned to where her body sat, she wasn't absolutely sure that she hadn't just screamed at the top of her lungs, wasn't sure that the stunned observers were only pretending that nothing had happened. There was something uniquely wrong with her; she was the stranger in the strange land; her skin didn't fit correctly.

The most popular professors fell in love with her—one of them described her as
diabolically
brilliant and witty—but she came to doubt that she was the sort of woman who could have a long-term relationship with a man. She grew more aloof after each affair ended, came to think that being in love was like having an infection, swore that never again would she wait by the phone for a man to call, swore that she would be more selective about the men to whom she gave her heart and soul because each time the love died it nearly killed her, swore all sorts of things and then went on to repeat the same mistakes. She grew bored with hearing the same old tapes playing in her mind, grew bored by how easy it was to get men and A's, grew bored with her friends' melodramatic, obsessed love affairs, grew bored with the smartest people's stupidity when it came to love, and came to believe that people sought to recapture those senses of failure and rejection which had so dazzled them. She grew bored with demonstrations for peace and human rights, grew
insanely
bored with her boredom, and with her anxieties of winding up an insane alcoholic like her mother. Boredom is the root of all evil, she read in
Either-Or:
evil, the source of sorrow and distress; evil thoughts of men and her mother had been lurking in her mind almost all her life; what was she going to do with it all, what would she do with her life?

She read, studied, went to movies, discarded lovers when they became too clingy, smoked, had long talks with other women about men and mothers, drank on occasion, and graduated with honors in both English and math. Neither of her parents came east for graduation. Elizabeth did not seem to care.

The day after graduation, lanky and self-righteous, she participated in a March of Dimes Walk-a-Thon: walked fifteen miles of the twenty-mile course and then developed fierce shin splints. She sat down by the side of the road waiting for one of the trucks which periodically drove by collecting exhausted walkers. She was massaging her legs, daydreaming of a hot bath, when a young legless man on a wooden dolly passed by where she sat, pulling himself along with his gloved hands. And, by God, Elizabeth got up and walked the last five miles. Three days later, when she was able to walk again, she flew back to San Francisco.

Five years, six jobs, and three affairs later, she met and fell in love with Andrew Ferguson. He had three things Elizabeth wanted—playfulness, money, and a kind of faith. He was a truly kind man, who loved to read. By now, they had between them one living parent, his mother, who flew to San Francisco for their wedding.

Being married to Andrew did not feel real to Elizabeth, but—or so—it felt wonderful, so wonderful that Elizabeth expected him to die or kick her out of the house he had bought in Bayview with part of his considerable inheritance; the closer and more comfortable they became, the more apprehensive Elizabeth grew, feeling that it would all be snatched away.

Neither of them worked for the first months of their marriage: side by side they lay in bed reading, side by side they created a magnificent garden of flowers and rosebushes; made dinner, plans, love; went to movies, operas, the San Francisco Symphony, museums, libraries, bookstores, an occasional party: needing only each other, they did it all up royally in their elegant, well-worn clothes.

Then Andrew decided to become a carpenter for the exercise
and camaraderie, and Elizabeth was left alone. Boredom and panic set in the day he began his first job. She spent the next six months tending the garden and the house, reading, killing time, waiting for him to come home to play with her again, and slowly going mad.

“Well, what kind of work do you want to do?”

She shrugged.

“Wouldn't you like to do something in the book world?”

“I worked for that publisher, remember? All I did was type.”

“You know that publicist you worked for? Could you do pro motion again?”

“No.”

“Why?”

She shrugged.

“Now don't go into a brood on my account. I'm trying to help.”

“See, with the publicist, I thought I'd be—I don't know, promoting good books that the world wouldn't know about otherwise, strengthening the literary gene pool—but all I did was type, for a pimp.”

“How about teaching? English? At a private school? I don't think you'd need a teaching certificate.”

“I don't like kids.”

“But we'll have kids someday, won't we?”

“I don't know. Yes, sure we'll have a kid someday. But I don't want to teach.”

“What
do
you want to do? You're a great cook and love it—”

“I don't know!” she yelled at him. “If I knew, I'd go look for a job.”

“What's it going to be that helps you figure out what you want to be?”

“I don't know!”

“I think you're going to go crazy if you don't find
something
to do; you're so goddamn smart, and funny, and literate—do you want to write? Do you have any compulsions to write a book? Or a screenplay? Book reviews?”

“I don't know. I don't know.”

She still didn't know a year later, or a year after that. She panicked frequently at how quickly the time flew and yet how every day loomed before her like a dragon, waiting to be slain. Looking in the mirror she saw how quickly she was aging, saw herself as Dave the Spaceman at the end of
2001;
laugh lines had turned to crow's-feet. She slept late, spent an hour at the breakfast table mechanically reading the
Chronicle,
cleaned up the kitchen, went around the house picking up Andrew's carpenter's stuff, clothes, shoes, apple cores, and books. Then it was time for lunch. She read while eating, often ending up in the living room reading just one more chapter, and then just one more chapter. Then she might pore over the Help Wanted listings in the paper, maybe reread the entire front section. An hour or two in the garden, and then a mile walk into town for the exercise and to shop ... and eventually Andrew would return from his happy work, and they would have cocktails and dinner and funny talks and read or go to a show, and then it would be time for bed, for sex and sleep. Unless she had insomnia. And most of this was done swathed in the gauze of loneliness and boredom and anxiety.

One day she would get around to writing a book, a comic treatment of a good marriage to an easygoing and interesting man. About insomnia, and depression, and idiosyncrasies. About her mood swings; about how infuriating an easygoing person can be. About the things that drove her crazy with impatience or irritation: no “Briefly Noted” fiction in
The New Yorker,
or Herb Caen's vacations from the
Chronicle,
Andrew's exuberant dental flossing which left flecks of food on the bathroom mirror; how the sound of him crunching away on an apple or celery could send her into an in articulated rage, how it would remind her of how much she'd hated—
hated
—the sound of her mother eating bacon, how she would begin to think it would make her lose her mind. One day she would write a book about the love and patience that bind one person to another after all the glinty romantic stuff has worn off.

And, in the meantime, waiting-waiting to figure out what it
was that she was waiting for, waiting for the revelation of her professional destiny, waiting to find labor that was its own reward, something that would benefit others at the same time—she remained somewhat surprised that fame was evading her.

She became pregnant at thirty—an accident of laziness and—planned to have an abortion. A child would postpone her finding her true calling. Other people's babies made her, at best, nervous, made her fingers twitch. She slept poorly enough as it was, a baby screaming at dawn to be fed or changed would...