Free Crooked Little Heart by Anne Lamott

lay back in bed and cuddled, and she smiled at herself, at how crazy her mind could be all alone in the dark, and after a while she began to doze. When she woke again an hour later, the girls were tearing around, trying to get ready for their tournament. She joined in their preparations, drinking some of the rich coffee James had made, and somehow found herself, just an hour later, driving along on the Golden Gate Bridge.
    She had almost no memory of having gotten in the car, of having driven for twenty minutes on 101. She simply came to on the bridge. She was daydreaming about her courtship with James, how strange it had felt at first to have fallen in love with a man who was several inches shorter than she was, with a chipped front tooth and terrible clothes, so unlike Andrew on the surface. In a way Rosie had accepted him first. She’d looked past the package to what lay underneath. He was funny and he was deeply loyal, except … She looked around at the sun breaking through the fog on the bay, a tugboat pulling a freighter out to sea.
    Except there was a memory like a faint headache pressing in on her, of calling him late one night in the early days of their romance; he had been saying he loved her for a while, and she had finally called to sayshe loved him too. It was midnight, her heart was full of love and acceptance, and she couldn’t wait to tell him. But a woman with an English accent had answered his phone. She felt an internal lurch even now, on the bridge, and she closed her eyes for a second to close the drapes on the memory, then looked off in the distance at the red cast on the hills, on the skyscape, on the sea.
    A NDREW is walking beside her on the beach at Aptos, in the middle of Monterey Bay, and the water, the waves, are red with plankton, salmon red. The beach is called Potbelly Beach because of the stoves in the tiny houses up past the sand, up past the emerald ice plant dotted with spiky purple flowers. Andrew and Elizabeth have been married eight months now. They are both tall, young, shy, tan from their days in the water here, hugging and holding in the water, silky as seals. They are walking along the sandy beach at dusk, they have had two martinis each in paper-thin glasses and are holding hands, looking in wonder at the redness of the water, the otters bobbing out a ways, past the breakers. Elizabeth sneaks secret glances at her new husband’s face and feels like they are kids, best friends, playing house. He has the bluest eyes anyone has ever seen. They are so happy that they stop to talk to other people who are walking along the beach, discussing the plankton that floats and drifts so intensely red on the tide, and everyone is smiling as they speak, everyone is watching the red water. There is a breeze coming off the sea, and Elizabeth’s hair, which is still long, flowing several inches past her shoulders, whips around her face. Andrew does all the talking to the other people walking on the beach, and as he talks, he nonchalantly tries to hold her hair back, brushing it off her forehead although it blows back right away. She feels like a child he is tending to, and it feels so lovely, so loving, so sexy, for this big patrician man to be trying to hold the hair out of her face so she can see, so she can be seen. Her long dark hair is getting into her mouth, and he pulls it out and it is wet from her mouth. Cliffs made of fossils loom above them like churches, beyond the ice plant, beyond the tiny houses with the potbellied stoves and the potbellied owners, and she looks at her husband’s big wide inviting young face, serious blue eyes, the salt in his brows. When he smiles shyly at the people with whom they stop to talk, he presses his lips together so that the corners turn down slightly in amusement. Theykeep on walking, they’ve been walking nearly an hour, and the breeze keeps whipping her hair around, and finally he stops and stands behind her, gathering it up and away from her