Crooked Little Heart by Anne Lamott Read Free Book Online Page B

to the circus, to the rodeo. The car and her nose were so stuffy. She looked around the parking lot wildly, looked around at the eerie golden spaceship light the street lamps cast. Where was her mother? Why was it taking so long? Please, please, God, she prayed, don’t let my mother get cancer; please, I’ll try to believe in you. I’ll try not to be so mean to her. She rolled down the window and stuck out her head, like an Irish setter. The cold wet air bathed her face.
    R AE had visited Charles a lot since his diagnosis, but even more so in the last few weeks, since she had broken up with Mike. “It gets me out of myself,” she said, but sometimes she called her machine from Charles’s, hoping Mike had called and had changed his character. But he never did. Sometimes Elizabeth came with her, but though she loved Charles so very much, she couldn’t help him like Rae could. Rae was not afraid of dying people. She had moved in with her mother when she lay dying three years ago of heart trouble, and she had helped Charles take care of Grace when she was dying. Now she would show up just to hang out with Charles, sitting silently sometimes, rubbing his feet, being alive together.
    “The more often you visit Charles, the better your life will be,” Rae had told Rosie when he’d first gotten sick. “It will be hard, but it will be worth it.” But when Rosie visited him now that he was bedridden at home, she felt awful. She hated his smells, she hated how hard it was to think of things to say, how phony she felt saying them.
    Charles’s nurse, a big boring blonde named Arlene, usually left his visitors alone once her fierceness and fussiness had made it clear that he was hers, her prize rosebush or show dog: clean, fresh, fed, combed. Elizabeth, so much taller than Rae or James or Rosie, always bent down low to him, peered into his fine handsome face, smelled the hint of decay that no amount of sponge baths and bedside tooth brushing and lemon glycerin swabs could cover.
    Rosie had had a strange thought come to her the last time she’d visited Charles, the first weekend in March. He’d been sitting up that day in his wheelchair in the living room, in a broad band of sunlight that accentuated his paleness. Despite his emaciation, he looked like thepictures of the Buddha Rosie had seen in some of Rae’s books: so peaceful and yet also so focused. Rosie burbled on about her exploits on the tennis court and, during silences, picked at her cuticles, and while Rae or Elizabeth spoke to Charles, she studied him. Later in the car, with Rae driving and Elizabeth in the backseat, she said to no one in particular, “He’s like orange juice concentrate now. Like all the water is gone.”
    Rae searched in her rearview mirror and met Elizabeth’s eyes.
    “Why do you think that is, Rae?” asked Rosie, her head tilted back against the headrest of the car seat.
    “Well. We’re in these watery, confused states so much of the time …”
    “Maybe it’s our way of swimming through life,” Elizabeth offered.
    “Yeah,” said Rae. “But Charles is starting the plummet. So he’s stripped everything down, because there’s enormous specific gravity in that. If you see what I mean.”
    “Well, I don’t,” said Rosie.
    “Think about swimming, about diving from a high dive. When you do a dive, to protect yourself and to be economical, you pull everything in: you curve yourself. You concentrate, you don’t leave parts sticking out. And you don’t let your attention wander, because it could be fatal.”
    Rosie thought about this. She had her tennis racket with her, a Wilson graphite that cost over two hundred dollars. She needed two of them when she went off to tournaments, in case the strings broke on the one she was using. The strings cost seventy-five dollars. She got her rackets strung very tight, like the boys, like the men.
    Sitting in the back seat with her mother and Rae in the front, she pushed the strings around as