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Authors: Jane Rule

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BOOK: Against the Season
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“I think I’ve found you a job, Agate,” Rosemary said, sitting behind the office desk and looking down at papers.

“What do I want with a job?” Agate asked.

“For one thing,” Rosemary said, “you have to have some place to go when you’re thrown out of here.”

“Who’s going to throw me out?” Agate asked, amused.

“Ultimately, I am.”

“Why?”

Rosemary watched Agate, who lounged back in a wooden chair, one sneakered foot pressing against the center panel of the desk so that Rosemary, on the other side, could feel the pressure. She was a good-looking girl with, as Ida Setworth had supposed, remarkable eyes, which could be a kind of tawny yellow or spring green, tropical, light-struck, but rarely warm. She was long-thighed, deep-breasted, entirely generous-bodied, more the sort of girl fantasy would put here than the sort that usually arrived.

“What kind of an answer would you like?” Rosemary asked finally in return. “I could simply say you’re a troublemaker, and we could play the game of ‘prove it.’ Or I could describe to you how you’ll feel if you stay here for another month with the novelty of trouble wearing thin. I could entertain you with attempts at reform. What would you like?”

“I think you’ve got the wrong impression entirely,” Agate said, tipping forward with a jolt. “I’ve done nothing but work at raising the morale of this place ever since I arrived. You should be thanking me. You probably should even be paying me for the job I’m doing here.”

“I was under the impression that you
had
been making money at it,” Rosemary said.

“Well… nothing but what you might call commissions for certain services,” Agate said.

“Some drugs, Agate, are particularly dangerous for pregnant women, and nearly all drugs are dangerous for these particular pregnant women, you included,” Rosemary said carefully and watched Agate’s face close. “Why didn’t you get an abortion in the first place?”

“It’s illegal,” Agate said with a broad, bright smile.

“Not in Mexico. Not in Japan.”

“I wasn’t in the mood for that kind of trip.”

“You felt more like four months in a church-run hostel. Or maybe you’re interested in participating in the experiment to see if LSD really does change the chromosomal balance.”

“There isn’t any of that stuff around here,” Agate said sharply.

“My point is that there shouldn’t be any kind of any stuff around here, and that’s why I’m going to throw you out unless you give me your word that there won’t be any more of it.”

“My ‘word’? You’re a real girl scout, you know that?”

“How good is your cooking?”

Agate didn’t answer.

“I said, how good…”

“I refuse to answer on the ground that it might incriminate me.”

“A good cook,” Rosemary said. “How good are you at dealing with old people?”

“Old people?”

“A lame old woman, physically independent, as bright—brighter—than you are, kind. She’s willing to take you. Room and board, a hundred dollars a month, for cooking for her and her young cousin, Cole Westaway. And she has a good many people for dinner, particularly if your cooking is good.”

“What did you tell her about me?”

“That you’d like each other, that you needed her, that you wouldn’t last here.”

“That I needed her?” Agate repeated.

“Yes, Agate,” Rosemary said. “Will you come out with me and meet her anyway?”

“Do I have any choice?”

“Yes, you have a lot to lose if you don’t,” Rosemary said, and she smiled.

“All right,” Agate said. “When do we go?”

“Sometime in the week. I’ll let you know. Meanwhile, I suggest you clean your room—thoroughly.”

“The books, too?”

“The books, too,” Rosemary said.

When Agate had left, Rosemary packed up her briefcase and purse. She had a meeting with two other social workers and a psychiatrist in half an hour on the other side of town. The quickest way was straight across on F Street, and it was ridiculous of her to consider any other route; therefore, driving past George’s would have to become part of the discipline she was designing for herself, just as not driving past George’s had been part of the discipline for the last three days.

Rosemary had known, from the moment she left Dina with Cole, that there would be no telephone calls unless Rosemary made them, that there would be no further encounters unless Rosemary presented herself for that purpose. And, even if she did, she was not sure that Dina would be so hospitable again. Why had Rosemary told Dina she loved her? If she hadn’t said that, or if she hadn’t said later, “I want you like that,” if she had been as silent as Dina herself, she could make some sense of what she might do now.

“I don’t love her,” Rosemary said aloud, driving steadily along F Street. “I don’t even particularly want her… like that.”

That wasn’t exactly true. Rosemary simply didn’t imagine making love to Dina or couldn’t imagine it and, with that limitation, believed she could survive without it. But not without Dina, whose sexual authority obsessed her in a way that falling in love had never done. The gentle fantasies, harmful only in that they had prepared her for the real encounter, were as remote to her now as her adolescence. Now she simply relived what Dina had done to her, not only in the privacy of her own night or early morning but without defense in the middle of the working day as she was filling out forms, even as she was talking on the phone.

“Having a hot flash?” her even more aging secretary had asked in a kindly tone. “I’ll open a window.”

It was bitterly funny and a relief to know that such sweating, shaking appetite could be ordinarily diagnosed. Glands. And suddenly every memory of a well-padded or bone-brittle woman—a teacher she had had in college, Maud Montgomery at her mother’s bridge table, her cleaning woman, even the haughty Beatrice at the dinner table, quickly reaching for a handkerchief, more urgent and embarrassed than in any need to sneeze—became transformed for Rosemary into horrified hilarity. Menopause as pure lechery. No wonder then the sudden hysterics, the glooming depressions, the paranoid jealousies if the terrible truth was that each of these ludicrous bodies was suffering its first, and only, experience of pure appetite, obsessed by who knew what object: everything from the proverbial milkman (egg lady?) to the unprepared and certainly unwilling husband (best friend at the church bazaar? sister?). A kept secret only because for most it was too preposterous to accept and act upon? For most the body was already chained and shamed by childbearing or operations, by years of intimately indifferent companions or singleness, by a morality that could hide all vanity? Or did Maud Montgomery suddenly present herself to her slowly deteriorating husband, Beatrice to her lumbering, beloved sister, her mother to… heaven knew whom?

“I am out of my mind,” Rosemary said, the sweat beginning, and she violently turned off F Street just two blocks before she would have to pass George’s.

She therefore did not see the sign that occasionally hung at the door, saying
OUT TO LUNCH
. And she would not have recognized Grace Hill’s car parked indiscreetly in front of Ries’s drugstore.

Instead she was saying to herself, “I’ve got to keep myself busy, very busy.” For she only wished that she could not imagine herself, having said what she had said, phoning Dina, going to Dina, pounding down the door to say, “I don’t love you. I don’t even know you. I don’t care how little interest you have in me. I don’t care how aloof you stay from me. Just take me.” Rosemary Hopwood, who had always been pursued, who had always been circumspect, “socially and emotionally impeccable!” a lover had once shouted against her pride and self-control, had to stop imagining herself capable of what she had already done.

She was very grateful to know that she would be having dinner with Ida that evening, for, if anyone could have a calming effect on her, it was Ida, who had served Rosemary as a model of self-sufficiency all her life.

The drive out to Ida’s was always peaceful, and now in late May it was light enough to see the deepening green fields through fences tangled with wild climbing roses. But the graves were not, this evening, like grazing sheep, not the Setworths’ easy companions, not the finally silenced rancor of dead parents, not even the mortality Rosemary might be said to be struggling against or toward. Dull punctuation, that was all, but that would have to be distraction enough for now. At the top of the hill would be the positive relief of Ida, who had never at any age or any season been troubled by the bitter comedies of flesh that visited everyone else.

If Rosemary had not been a more than normally tactful person, she would have commented on Ida’s appearance at once. She looked, in ways hard to account for together, dreadful. Her eyes had faded to nearly no color, as if the blue had drained into her cheeks, and she was wearing a gash of lipstick which, instead of brightening her face, made it the more cadaverous. Ida usually wore the kinds of clothes no one noticed beyond the impression of neat, soft freshness, like her voice in ordinary conversation. This evening she had on a strong, busy print, splotched with red.

“Is that a new dress?” Rosemary asked, intending kindness.

“I suppose it is,” Ida said, looking down at it as if to make sure.

There was no slur in her speech, and she moved about the room with characteristic frail efficiency, but Rosemary couldn’t dismiss the fear that Ida had had a small stroke.

“Do you think I’m getting too old to live out here by myself?” Ida suddenly asked.

“Do you think so?”

“No,” Ida said.

“Then who does? Haven’t you been feeling well?”

“Well enough for seventy-eight,” Ida said.

“I suppose it must feel isolated sometimes,” Rosemary offered carefully.

“I’m used to that. More often than not I like it.”

“Yes, I’ve always thought you did.”

“But you think it would be sensible if I moved into town, at my age,” Ida said, in a tone that implied it was Rosemary’s suggestion in the first place.

“If you want to,” Rosemary said. “If you’d be more comfortable.”

I can’t imagine that I would be. I’ve lived in this house for seventy-one years.”

“Then why are you thinking about it, Ida? What’s worrying you?”

“Am I worried?”

“Well, I don’t know,” Rosemary said.

“I miss Beatrice,” Ida said.

“Yes, I’m sure you do. In ways it must be as hard for you as it is for Amelia,” Rosemary said. “Were you thinking that, perhaps, you might go to Amelia?”

“To Amelia? Heavens no. I can’t talk to Amelia. I don’t even want to. Do you mean to live?”

“I just wondered…”

“With Amelia and Cole and a light-struck girl? What an idea, Rosemary!”

“I didn’t mean to say I thought it was a good one.”

“I must put on the vegetables,” Ida said.

Rosemary picked up the volume of Yeats that was always by Ida’s chair and opened it to:

But Love has pitched his mansion in

The place of excrement;

turned pages quickly and saw:

Only the dead can be forgiven;

But token I think of that my tongue’s a stone.

glanced down the page to:

What matter if I live it all once more?

Endure that toil of growing up;

The ignominy of boyhood; the distress

Of boyhood changing into man;

The unfinished man and his pain

Brought face to face with his own clumsiness;

and stopped.

“I don’t know how you go on reading him, year after year,” she said to Ida as she came back into the room.

“He’s an honest companion,” Ida said.

“Give me a happy liar then.”

“The remarkable thing about poetry is that you always think you understand it until you understand it differently and realize you didn’t.”

“What do you mean?” Rosemary asked.

“I suppose simply that a good poem tells you what you need to know at the time, or what you can take. Aunt Setworth used to say no one under seventy could have any idea what Yeats meant, but I thought I did.”

“And didn’t you?”

“No better than you do,” Ida said. “If you want another drink, you had better fix it for yourself. Dinner’s nearly ready.”

“I think I won’t, thanks.”

“You look tired,” Ida said.

“I suppose I am. I probably ought to think about taking a vacation.”

“Did you have dinner with Dina Pyros last Saturday?”

“Yes, I did,” Rosemary answered, trying to sound unguarded.

“That must have pleased her.”

“Why do you say that?”

“She seems to me an intelligent young woman. She must get bored with the number of young delinquents who take up her time… and the neurotics like Grace Hill.”

“Do you know Grace Hill?”

“Only enough to know she makes a nuisance of herself. Feller Hill would have gone a long way in politics by now if he hadn’t been tied to her.”

“Where did he find her anyway?”

“In the wicked city,” Ida said. “Some people haven’t the sense not to bring them home.”

“That sounds more like Beatrice than it does like you.”

“It is Beatrice,” Ida said. “What is most tiresome about the dead is having to keep up both sides of the conversation. Is that what’s the matter with me, I wonder.”

“What is the matter, Ida?”

“I’m too old to be struck by lightning,” Ida said. “Come. Let’s have our supper.”

They ate and then tidied the kitchen together in quiet amiability of the sort they had shared for a number of years rather like mother and daughter but much more like friends. Settled again in the living room, Ida was looking better, and Rosemary had relaxed.

“If you don’t want to go on living alone,” Rosemary said. “Why don’t you come and live with me?”

“You sensibly escaped your own mother’s old age. There’s no reason for you to deal with mine.”

“I didn’t love my mother,” Rosemary said. “You know, it might be a very happy arrangement for both of us.”

“Why is it suddenly that everyone wants me to move into town?” Ida demanded.

“Everyone?”

“Rosemary, how old are you?”

BOOK: Against the Season
2.06Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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