One

The world outside the window was in flames. The leaves on the
pistachio trees shone fire-red and orange. Mattie studied the
early-morning light. She was lying on the side of the bed where her
husband should have been sleeping. Those trees were one reason
she'd moved back into her parents' old home after leaving Nicholas,
these trees and the sloping grassy hillside behind the house. Also,
there was no mortgage: her parents had paid it off during the
course of their marriage. She and her brother, Al, had grown up
playing on the hill and in the buckeyes with their low, broad
branches; her six-year-old, Harry, played there now, and her
daughter, Ella, two, would also climb one day soon. The leaves of
the delicate Japanese maple between Mattie's window and the wobbly
fence were still green, but elsewhere in the garden were russets
and butterscotch-oranges, other trees giddy with color, almost
garish, like gypsy dresses. When she strained to listen, she could
imagine them saying, We gave you shade, and now we'll give you a
little kick-ass beauty before we die. A choir of chickadees and
finches sang above the sounds of a quiet neighborhood waking up,
the cars of people heading to work and school, the clatter and
thumps of the recycling truck, a dog barking, leaves rustling in a
gentle wind, silence. A moment later she heard the rats in the
walls begin to stir.

Her mother, Isa (it rhymed with "Lisa"), who still owned the house,
had failed to mention that there were rats in the walls. Rats, and
the green rug in the master bedroom that for many years had been
peed on by Isa's cats. A faint odor of urine clung to it despite
Mattie's every effort at eradication. Isa had been planning to sell
the house as a fixer-upper in the wildly inflated San Francisco Bay
area real estate market, but a month after she'd reached the top of
the waiting list for The Sequoias, a retirement community where she
hoped to grow old, she'd moved out. She had some money socked away
from her husband Alfred's small life insurance policy, which,
coupled with Social Security, was enough to pay for her expenses in
the new apartment.

Her unwanted stuff was still on the shelves, and in the garage and
attic. The house looked much as it always had, or at least for the
nearly twenty years Isa had lived there alone, after Mattie and Al
had moved out and Alfred had died. Isa had taken one couch with her
to the new apartment, a few chairs, a dresser, and Al's old twin
bed, and had sent the rest of her furniture to the dump or
Goodwill. There were mirrors in every room of the house. Isa had
always liked to look at herself, striking movie star poses. Mattie
avoided the mirrors whenever possible. What she saw when she did
glance at her reflection was chestnut-brown hair, which she usually
wore in a braid; tired eyes, so dark that the pupils didn't show;
fair English skin and a broad snub nose from her mother; black
lashes and brows from her dad, as well as his big teeth; and full
lips, set off nicely by a white ring of scar on her chin from a
rock Al had thrown at her when they were young.

Isa had left her house vacant for six months at Mattie's request,
while Mattie got up the nerve to leave her husband. She'd been
planning to break away from Nicky in spring, because she'd had it
with his mammoth inconsistency-his hilarious and brilliant
conversations, interspersed with brooding narcissism; his charming
and amiable contributions to the business of raising children
together, wedged in between immobilization and depression, for
which he would not seek help; his inexhaustible interest in her
thoughts about the world, progressive politics, and the arts,
marbled into the slow, cold gaze with which he looked up from his
secret phone calls when she entered his study; the silent, wounding
way he stopped making love to her for weeks at a time, right after
nights of hot, tender sex. Then, in March, when the world was wild
and green, full of blossom and fragrance and mud, Mattie's best
friend, Angela, had told her gently that she was moving to Los
Angeles, to live with Julie, the woman she'd recently fallen
for.

"But you're my only real friend!" Mattie wept, and Angela had cried
too. They had been talking in different kitchens for years now,
ever since the night they met over a stranger's stove during a
party for Nicky, when the College of Marin made him an assistant
professor of literature. Minutes after meeting, the two women broke
off entirely from the others. They sat on the kitchen floor and
talked like teenagers about their mothers and their bodies and God,
to whom they were both devoted, and their pets, to whom they were
also devoted, and Nicky, about whom they were both ambivalent.
Angela worked with him at the college, where she read and graded
papers for the entire English department, and while she enjoyed his
sense of humor, she disliked his elitism. He liked to discuss books
and politics; he had no patience for stories of real people trying
to get through the day. Angela and Mattie started getting together
several times a week, to hike or cook or help each other around the
house. Nicky accused Mattie of being in love, of going gay. At the
same time, he had dropped hints that he didn't think Angela was a
real lesbian: she just hadn't met the right man yet, it was a
phase, and would pass. And a few years ago, Angela noticed that
Nicky had taken off after classes with of one of his students, a
beautiful twenty-two-year-old black woman. Mattie was six months
pregnant with Ella at the time. Several years before, he had had an
affair that nearly ended the marriage, although he had never given
Mattie further cause to doubt his fidelity. But one day after she
and Mattie had become inseparable friends, Angela followed Nicky
and the young woman to the Tamalpais Motel, and then she told
Mattie. Mattie confronted Nicky, and he broke off the affair, and
while Mattie eventually forgave him, without forgetting, Nicky
never forgave Angela, and Angela never forgave Nicky.

Angela sometimes wore her short honey-colored hair in two vertical
tufts, like velvet giraffe horns. Her wide eyes were steel-blue.
She was Jewish, expansive and yeasty and uncontained, as if she had
a birthright for outrageousness. She knew things. Mattie couldn't
live without her.

The smell of wet soil, blossoms, and grass wafted through the
kitchen window as Mattie heard Angela's news. "But you're not going
to have to live without me," Angela said, crying. "We'll talk every
day, and I'll come up every chance I can."

Mattie went back into therapy to deal with the devastation of
losing Angela. The therapist pointed out gently that some of her
grief must be related to her deteriorating marriage. In some ways,
losing Angela was harder. It was like the death some years before
of Mattie's old cat, who had loved her the way her parents were
supposed to have loved her: purely, without conditions. In any
case, for a few months Mattie didn't have the strength to bear both
her friend's departure and the end of her marriage. And then one
day, she did.

When the leaves began to blaze and the days grew shorter, she
brought her children and their things to the house she had grown up
in. She brought some furniture, their dog, two cats, a couple of
porno movies stolen from Nicky, and his bottle of Valium. He did
not ask her about them. It was assumed that the children would live
with her, and visit him on the weekends. He adored them but would
not have been willing or able to share custody, even if Mattie had
been willing. As it was, he took them most weekends, often late
Saturday morning, then dropped them off Sunday nights with an air
of weary heroism, like a firefighter returning the engine to the
firehouse after a particularly difficult outing. The children were
grief-stricken that he did not live with them anymore. Mattie
prayed with them every night, then prayed separately for their
hearts to heal, even prayed for Nicky's happiness and half meant
it. After a month of weekend visits with Nicky, the children's
distress lessened.

Mattie hadn't worried so much about Ella, who had ways of
comforting herself and a generally sunny disposition. But Harry was
sad and concerned. He was erratic, like Nicky: sometimes he acted
so mean to Mattie and Ella that Mattie wanted to strike him, and at
other times he could be utterly charming, especially with his
sister. He'd carry her around from room to room as if she were an
animated grocery sack, making faces and wisecracks to amuse her.
Mattie saw how much he wanted Ella to disappear sometimes, but that
he also listened for her when she was in her crib. He put his face
right into hers to make her laugh, and she chortled, pleased that
something was so grabbably close. Then he'd pinch her and make her
cry. He took things from her, and she wailed, while he looked blank
and innocent. He hugged her too tightly, he loved her too much, he
hated all the same things he loved about her-her ineptitude, her
cuteness, her messiness, her smells.

Mattie stopped seeing the therapist, and paid for Harry to go
instead.

It helped; time's passing helped. Nothing really helped. And the
house-it had been a mistake to move back in. It was falling apart,
revealing mold and memories and ghosts. Mattie's beloved father had
died of a heart attack in the laundry room, twenty years before. He
was fifty-one and had never looked better than in the moments
before his death. He had looked a lot like Mattie's brother Al did
now, but trimmer, tall, with thicker brown hair, and the huge teeth
that hardly fit in his mouth. Everyone had loved her father,
including, about half the time, Isa. Still, it had been a miserable
marriage, a shifting, malignant lava-lamp of a marriage, although
it always looked great from the outside, two tall handsome parents
well-known in the town for their willingness to serve on the city
council, the school board, liberals who agitated for the poor, who
had an air of being with it, hikers in the days when knapsacks were
avant-garde. They were people to whom others turned for advice. But
inside the house, which they had bought for $20,000 in 1963,
slammed doors and loud silences filled the spaces between exquisite
meals and good California wine.

Mattie had thought she was getting such a great deal when she moved
back in-free rent on a house with a bedroom for each of her
children. But it didn't take long to notice the secrets and
memories tiptoeing around, holding their highballs, debonair and
amused at first, then hissing in the master bedroom as her mother
had when her father returned from his monthly trips to Washington,
D.C. Harry was now sleeping in the bedroom where Al had grown up,
where at fifteen he had started doing drugs while Isa and Alfred
pretended he was doing homework; Ella slept in Mattie's old room,
the one with the slanted ceiling and eaves, behind which all manner
of nightmares had waited quietly.

The laundry room where her father had died looked almost exactly
the same as before, with its old washer-dryer from Sears, lots of
sunlight and trees outside the window, and space to move around.
Isa had spent hours here, pawing through her husband's clothes,
looking for clues to his absences, searching her teenage son's
pockets. What did she think she would find-needles, bindles, a
treasure map? She'd searched her daughter's clothes here too, for
cigarettes and birth control pills, which she'd found and seized
like a customs inspector.

Why, in the current crisis of divorce and bottomless loss, had
Mattie run back to the past, to her parents' home, her husband's
side of the bed? She hadn't known where else to go. It was free and
it was familiar.

"Where else can I go? Nicky owned that house before we got married.
It's his. Otherwise, he doesn't have much money, I don't make much.
He'll help us, but I can't afford to rent anything as nice as this.
With a yard."

When Mattie moved in, Angela, who called herself a Newj, for New
Age Jew, flew up to perform an exorcism, a deep-smoke smudge with
Native American herbs that made the house smell for days as if the
Grateful Dead had been practicing in the garage.

After the first autumn rains, Mattie discovered just how much
damage her mother had been disguising over the years with paint and
caulking and cabinets. Isa had evidently installed cabinets
wherever rot or cracks or mold had appeared. So there were cabinets
everywhere, which was great for storage. But if you removed even
one section, you discovered that behind the shelves were moldy
patches of Sheetrock, exposed live wires in broken sockets, ugly
swatches of bore beetle infestation. Mattie shuddered to think what
was behind the cabinets in the damper areas-the garage and laundry
room.

The rats' scratching grew louder. She asked her mother to pay for
an exterminator. Mattie was barely getting by with child support
and a little extra from Nicky and the money she made as a fit model
for Sears: she was a perfect size 12. But she had forgotten to get
an education.

"Oh, for Chrissakes," Isa had said when Mattie asked her for the
money. "What is it with you? Why don't you count your blessings for
a change?" Mattie did count her blessings, all the time. She always
had. She'd always believed in a freelance God, but kept it to
herself, as her parents and brother were devout atheists. A few
years into her marriage, she'd found a church nearby, where she
staggered like Monsieur Hulot into a relationship with Jesus. And
she had come out of the closet as a believer. Her brother referred
to it as her blind spot. Her mother refused to discuss it, as if
Mattie believed in pyramid power. Mattie didn't care. She thanked
God several times a day for what she had, and trusted Him for what
she needed. She thanked Him for two healthy children, for her
church, for a house with a yard. She thanked God for helping her
finally get out of her marriage, and for helping her more or less
survive the pain of Angela's leaving. She even thanked God for
giving her such a difficult mother, because she believed that while
it had been nearly life-threatening to survive Isa's mothering, the
price she and Al had paid was exactly what it cost to become who
they were. She thanked God, and her mother, for giving her Al. And
she prayed to accept and believe that she had everything she
needed. But she also had rats.

Ella lay in her crib one afternoon playing with her belly button,
in the room where Mattie had grown up. Ella had just woken from the
nap she took every day after a vigorous morning at day care. Mattie
couldn't take her eyes off Ella-her blond hair, pudgy limbs, sweet
and self-sufficient character. When Ella was born, she'd been
colicky and had to suckle all the time; when she wasn't nursing,
she'd needed to suck on Mattie's fingers. She'd graduated to a
pacifier for a while, then found her thumb. The discovery of her
belly button at a year and a half had marked the start of a new
relationship, one of pleasure and comfort.

Whenever her shirt and pants gaped open, she'd put her finger
inside. She twiddled the belly button, played it as if thumping the
twangy connection between her and her mother, her belly a
guitar.

Her belly button was an extra sense organ: if something had a nice
texture, if it was slippery, say, or warm, she put it against her
tummy; her voice would grow thick and furry, and she would say
clearly, as if there could be any mistake, "My belly." Mattie had
to make sure she had access through her clothes so she could find
it. When she did, her whole body went soft and she let out a
sigh.

Mattie reached down in the crib and lifted Ella out. "Let's go make
something with blocks. Harry will be home soon, and we'll have
grilled cheese sandwiches." Both of them missed Harry when he was
at school-he had just started first grade-but life was much more
peaceful in the hours when he was gone. Harry was busy, and loud,
and lived in movement. He took life by the throat and shook it. He
had his father's temper, his gift for instilling fear in others.
He'd made an instant friend of the boy who lived next door, right
after they'd arrived in the house. While she walked one afternoon
with Ella and Harry, Mattie had noticed a towheaded boy, a year or
so younger than Harry, in costume chain mail, a wooden sword
dangling from his belt, in the yard next door. He'd been watering a
hydrangea bush, as his blonde mother watched from the back step
with a dish towel draped over her shoulder. Mattie stopped and
waved to the mother, and the boy had whipped around, still holding
the hose, so that Ella and Mattie had been sprayed. The mother had
come running, with everyone laughing but Ella. Mattie wiped Ella's
face with her T-shirt while Ella tried to decide whether to cry,
and the boy's mother handed Mattie the dish towel. The two boys
faced off, staring at each other as if seeing themselves in a
mirror.

The mother's name was Margrethe. She was from Denmark, but had only
a faint accent. The boy was named Stefan, and he only whispered. He
could hardly contain himself; he had something marvelous hidden in
his fist behind his back. His mother urged him to share it.

"No, no, is my little itty tro," he said with great pleased
worry.

"Show Harry your itty tro," said the mother. Mattie was alarmed to
see the agitation on Harry's face. He seemed to be in a battle to
restrain himself from knocking the boy over, as if he was about to
say, "I'm going to shoot it out of your hand, boy."

Stefan peered into the opening of his fist.

"Is my itty tro," he chirped. "My little itty tro."

"But what is it?" asked Harry. "What do you do with it?"

Stefan moved his fist through the air like a toy plane. "Zah!
Zah!"

Mattie reached for Harry, who was breathing hard now. She felt heat
spreading through his T-shirt, and his heart pounding beneath her
hand.

"What is his little itty tro?" Mattie asked as nicely as
possible.

"I don't know, this is the first I've heard of it," said the
mother.

"Is my itty tro!" Stefan proclaimed, and flew his fist through the
air. "Zah zah zah!"

Harry studied Stefan in a hard, bored way. Then he said, quietly,
too quietly, "Give me the itty tro."

Stefan looked at him, worried as a kitten, and took one step
back.

"Give me the itty tro!" Harry said. Stefan made a quiet strangled
sound, like the sound a hurt deer might make. Harry raised his
fist, and Stefan opened his own hand to reveal a feather.

Somehow they ended up best friends. They played together nearly
every day.

Mattie now held Ella in her arms. The rats in the walls were
squeaking. God, they had gotten so loud. The scratching had been
bad enough, but the squeaks sounded like a mob was assembling back
there, lighting torches. Beams and rafters were being nibbled into
battering rams. Mattie scurried out, carrying Ella, and went to
call her mother.

Isa answered right away, but as usual she was running out the door.
"I'll call you later, darling," she said.

"No, Mom. We've waited long enough. The rats are getting worse and
worse, and I really need you to pay for an exterminator."

"Oh, for Chrissakes, this can't wait till I get home? Two
hours?"

Mattie sighed. Of course it could wait two hours, but with Isa, two
hours could turn into two months or two years. "Call me later,"
Mattie said, and hung up. "Ees go?" Ella asked. Mattie nodded: Isa
go, always go, going, going, gone. She was in her prime at
seventy-one, an inspiration to everyone in town, beautiful like an
aging model in a vitamin commercial, elegant, lively, opinionated.
Mattie was in awe of her energy and drive. Her sharp corners had
been sanded over the years, and she'd mellowed slightly along the
way, was gentler now, sometimes even able to listen.

Mattie wondered, looking at Ella, how different she herself would
have been if Isa had been this way thirty years before, instead of
so anxious and critical. Mattie could see that Angela's best
qualities-her spiritual thirst, her soulfulness, her equal capacity
for playfulness and grief-were the direct result of having had a
tense and neglectful mother like Isa. Angela had suggested that
Isa's gift had been as a foil: looking at her charming unhappiness
all those years, Mattie could see exactly who she didn't want to be
when she grew up. Either you became like that, as Mattie and Angela
hadn't, or you became the antidote for the mother's poison. What
you needed you invented, and then gave away, so there would be some
of it in your world. What would Ella decide to become-or not?
Mattie saw herself and Angela as the trees that grew out of cliffs
and boulders above the ocean near Monterey-evergreen creatures,
windswept, magnificent, twisty, gnarled pines growing out of the
layers of rock, where maybe there had once been some nutrition,
maybe there had once been soil from which the trees had sprung, but
then the soil had blown away, and they still grew.

Mattie and Ella sat on the floor in front of the fireplace, eating
crackers, building a castle, still waiting for Harry. Their aging
Cavalier King Charles spaniel, Marjorie, lay beside them. She had
soulful brown eyes and a creamy white coat dappled with
reddish-brown. She was old and sick. "Marjorie," Mattie said, "will
you pay for an exterminator?" Like the Little Red Hen trying to get
someone to help her with the wheat.

Excerpted from BLUE SHOE © Copyright 2002 by Anne Lamott.
Reprinted with permission by Riverhead Books, a member of Penguin
Putnam, Inc. All rights reserved.