All New People by Anne Lamott

Author:Anne Lamott
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781619028852
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2016-08-02T04:00:00+00:00

I felt rashy with jealousy watching Natalie cradle and talk to Lucy, who gurgled and smiled all blond and rosy with wonderfully squinty blue eyes, while I lumped around, teary, skittish, dark, homesick. Natalie must have noticed, because she arranged for a girl to come baby-sit in the afternoon when it was time for Lucy’s nap.

We walked into town and did a couple of errands and then went to Nellie’s coffee shop for hot fudge sundaes, even though Natalie was on a diet. Nellie brought me a silver blender canister with somebody’s leftover strawberry milkshake and poured it into a Coke glass for me, and I sat there eating and drinking while the women talked. Both of them had beehive hairdos. Nellie said so-and-so’s husband had left, and Natalie’s mouth dropped open. I didn’t know the family. They didn’t have any kids in Casey’s grade or mine.

Natalie was stroking my head while I ate.

“Nanny’s father says they’re leaving because of the Chicken Rice Roger. That that’s why they’re all jumping ship.”

Nellie beamed at me as I ate. Adults, if they weren’t your parents, always beamed at you when you ate, beamed like you were successfully using a fork for the first time. She fished around in her apron pocket for her pack of cigarettes, took one out, lit it. “That’ll put a little meat on your bones; skinniest little girl in town. Don’t you worry, I was skinny too, no boobies at all either.”

“I’m only eight,” I implored.

Nellie had huge bosoms and also dark blue squiggly lines near the tip of her nose, scars from a car accident. The first time my father came in here, and Nellie had brought him a cheeseburger and a glass of ice water, my father dipped his handkerchief into his water and wiped at the tip of her nose. She just stood there. He thought it was ink.

After leaving the coffee shop, Natalie and I went to the railroad yard and sat Indian-style in the dirt beside the tracks in the shadow of a kingly black locomotive. There were two hobos asleep underneath the caboose, safely asleep since the trains didn’t run on Sundays. They were not much older than my father. I had peered down to stare in at them until Natalie dragged me away. I made a joke. I said to Natalie that maybe they had left their homes because of the Chicken Rice Roger. Natalie kissed the air in my direction. And then we sat down by the old locomotive.

The hot summer air was filled with smells of steel and dirt and grease and diesel, with the coconut lotion Natalie always wore and with smoke from the forest fires up north. Natalie fished a bottle of nail polish out of her purse, shook it for a long time, then began to paint her nails red.

“I thought maybe you wanted to talk about when your father left.” I looked up at the black locomotive and shrugged. She didn’t see me. “Hmmm?” she asked, and I looked over my shoulder at the mountain, shrugging again.

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