Rose Madder (11 page)

Rosie lifted a pile of fresh washcloths stacked on the end of the trolley, exposing a banana. She took it, walked back across the room to the overstuffed chair by 624's window, and sat down. She peeled the piece of fruit and began to eat it slowly, looking out at the lake, which glimmered like a mirror on this still, rainy afternoon in May. Her heart and mind were filled with a huge, simple emotion—gratitude. Her life wasn't perfect, at least not yet, but it was better than she ever would have believed on that day in mid-April when she had stood on the porch of Daughters and Sisters, looking at the intercom box and the keyhole that had been filled with metal. At that moment, she had seen nothing in the future but darkness and misery. Now her kidneys hurt, and her feet hurt, and she was very aware that she did not want to spend the rest of her life as an off-the-books chambermaid in the Whitestone Hotel, but the banana tasted good and the chair felt wonderful beneath her. At that moment she would not have traded her place in the scheme of things for anyone's. In the weeks since she had left Norman, Rosie had become exquisitely aware of small pleasures: reading for half an hour before bed, talking with some of the other women about movies or TV shows as they did the supper dishes together, or taking five minutes off to sit down and eat a banana.

It was also wonderful
to know what was coming next,
and to feel sure it wasn't going to include something sudden and
painful. To know, for instance, that there were only two more rooms to go, and then she and Pam could go down in the service elevator and out the back door. On the way to the bus stop (she was now able to differentiate easily between Orange, Red, and Blue Line buses) they would probably pop into the Hot Pot for coffee. Simple things. Simple pleasures. The world could be good. She supposed she had known that as a child, but she had forgotten. Now she was learning it over again, and it was a sweet lesson. She didn't have all she wanted, not by any means, but she had enough for now . . . especially since she didn't know what the rest might be. That would have to wait until she was out of Daughters and Sisters, but she had a feeling she would be moving soon, probably the next time a room turned up vacant on what the residents at D & S called Anna's List.

A shadow fell across the open hotel doorway, and before she could even think where she might hide her half-eaten banana, let alone get to her feet, Pam poked her head in. “Peek, baby,” she said, and giggled when Rosie jumped.

“Don't
ever
do that, Pammy! You almost gave me a heart attack.”

“Aww, they'd never fire you for sitting down and eating a banana,” Pam said. “You should see some of the stuff that goes on in this place. What have you got left, Twenty-two and Twenty?”

“Yes.”

“Want some help?”

“Oh, you don't have to—”

“I don't mind,” Pam said. “Really. With two of us on the case, we can turn those two rooms in fifteen minutes. What do you say?”

“I say yes,” Rosie told her gratefully. “And I'm buying at the Hot Pot after work—pie as well as coffee, if you want.”

Pam grinned. “If they've got any of that chocolate cream, I want, believe me.”

G
ood days—four weeks of good days, give or take.

That night, as she lay on her cot with her hands laced behind her head, looking into the darkness and listening to the
woman who had come in the previous evening sobbing quietly two or three cots down on her left, Rosie thought that the days were mostly good for a negative reason: there was no Norman in them. She sensed, however, that it would soon take more than his absence to satisfy and fulfill her.

Not quite yet, though,
she thought, and closed her eyes.
For now, what I've got is still plenty. These simple days of work, food, sleep . . . and no Norman Daniels.

She began to drift, to come untethered from her conscious mind, and in her head Carole King once again started to sing the lullaby that sent her off to sleep most nights:
I'm really Rosie . . . and I'm Rosie Real . . . you better believe me . . . I'm a great big deal . . .

Then there was darkness, and a night—they were becoming more frequent—when there were no bad dreams.

W
hen Rosie and Pam Haverford came down in the service elevator after work on the following Wednesday, Pam looked pale and unwell. “It's my period,” she said when Rosie expressed concern. “I'm having cramps like a bastard.”

“Do you want to stop for a coffee?”

Pam thought about it, then shook her head. “You go on without me. All I want to do right now is go back to D and S and find an empty bedroom before everyone shows up from work and starts yakking. Gobble some Midol and sleep for a couple of hours. If I do that, maybe I'll feel like a human being again.”

“I'll come with you,” Rosie said as the elevator doors opened and they stepped out.

Pam shook her head. “No you don't,” she said, and her face lit in a brief smile. “I can make it on my own just fine, and you're old enough to have a cup of coffee without a chaperone. Who knows—you might even meet someone interesting.”

Rosie sighed. To Pam,
someone interesting
always meant a man, usually the kind with muscles that stood out under their form-fitting tee-shirts like geological landmarks, and as far as Rosie was concerned, she could do without that kind of man for the rest of her life.

Besides, she was married.

She glanced down at her wedding band and diamond engagement ring inside it as they stepped out onto the street. How much that glance had to do with what happened a short time later was something of which she was never sure, but it did place the engagement ring, which in the ordinary course of things she hardly ever thought of at all, somewhere toward the front of her mind. It was a little over a carat, by far the most expensive thing her husband had ever given her, and until that day the idea that it belonged to
her,
and she could dispose of it if she wanted to (and in any way she wanted to), had never crossed her mind.

Rosie waited at the bus stop around the corner from the hotel with Pam in spite of Pam's protestations that it was totally
unnecessary. She really didn't like the way Pam looked, with all the color gone from her cheeks and dark smudges under her eyes and little pain-lines running down from the corners of her mouth. Besides, it felt good to be looking out for someone else, instead of the other way around. She actually came quite close to getting on the bus with Pam just to make sure she got back all right, but in the end, the call of fresh hot coffee (and maybe a piece of pie) was just too strong.

She stood on the curb and waved at Pam when Pam sat down beside one of the bus windows. Pam waved back as the bus pulled away. Rosie stood where she was for a moment, then turned and started walking down Hitchens Boulevard toward the Hot Pot. Her mind turned, naturally enough, back to her first walk in this city. She couldn't recall very much of those hours—what she remembered most was being afraid and disoriented—but at least two figures stood out like rocks in a billowing mist: the pregnant woman and the man with the David Crosby moustache. Him, particularly. Leaning in the tavern doorway with a beer-stein in his hand and looking at her. Talking

(hey baby hey baby)

to her. Or at her. These recollections possessed her mind wholly for a little while, as only our worst recollections can—memories of times when we have felt lost and helpless, utterly unable to exert any control over our own lives—and she walked past the Hot Pot without even seeing it, her heedless eyes blank and full of dismay. She was still thinking about the man in the tavern doorway, thinking about how much he had frightened her and how much he had reminded her of Norman. It wasn't anything in his face; mostly it had been a matter of posture. The way he'd stood there, as if every muscle was ready to flex and leap, and it would take only a single glance of acknowledgement from her to set him off—

A hand seized her upper arm and Rosie nearly shrieked. She looked around, expecting either Norman or the man with the dark red moustache. Instead she saw a young fellow in a conservative summer-weight suit. “Sorry if I startled you,” he said, “but for a second there I was sure you were going to step right out into the traffic.”

She looked around and saw that she was standing on the corner of Hitchens and Watertower Drive, one of the busiest
intersections in the city and at least three full blocks past the Hot Pot, maybe four. Traffic raced by like a metal river. It suddenly occurred to her that the young man beside her might have saved her life.

“Th-Thank you. A lot.”

“Not a problem,” he said, and on the far side of Watertower,
WALK
flashed out in white letters. The young man gave Rosie a final curious glance and then stepped off the curb and into the crosswalk with the rest of the pedestrians and was borne away.

Rosie stayed where she was, feeling the momentary dislocation and deep relief of someone who wakes from a really bad dream.
And that's exactly what I was having,
she thought.
I was awake and walking down the street, but I was still having a bad dream. Or a flashback.
She looked down and saw she was holding her purse clamped tightly against her midsection in both hands, as she had held it during that long, bewildering tramp in search of Durham Avenue five weeks ago. She slipped the strap over her shoulder, turned around, and began retracing her steps.

The city's fashionable shopping section started beyond Watertower Drive; the area she was now passing through as she left Watertower behind consisted of much smaller shops. Many of them looked a little seedy, a trifle desperate around the edges. Rosie walked slowly, looking in the windows of secondhand clothing stores trying to pass themselves off as grunge boutiques, shoe stores with signs reading
BUY AMERICAN
and
CLEARANCE SALE
in the windows, a discount place called No More Than 5, its window heaped with dollbabies made in Mexico or Manila, a leathergoods place called Motorcycle Mama, and a store called Avec Plaisir with a startling array of goods—dildos, handcuffs, and crotchless underwear—displayed on black velvet. She looked in here for quite awhile, marvelling at this stuff which had been put out for anyone passing to see, and at last crossed the street. Half a block farther up she could see the Hot Pot, but she had decided to forgo the coffee and pie, after all; she would simply catch the bus and go on back to D & S. Enough adventures for one day.

Except that wasn't what happened. On the far corner of the intersection she had just crossed was a nondescript storefront with a neon sign in the window reading
PAWNS LOANS FINE JEWELRY BOUGHT AND SOLD
. It was the last service
which caught Rosie's attention. She looked down at her engagement ring again, and remembered something Norman had told her not long before they were married—
If you wear that on the street, wear it with the stone turned in toward your palm, Rose. That's a helluva big rock and you're just a little girl.

She had asked him once (this was before he had begun teaching her that it was safer not to ask questions) how much it had cost. He had answered with a headshake and a small indulgent smile—the smile of a parent whose child wants to know why the sky is blue or how much snow there is at the North Pole.
Never mind,
he said.
Content yourself with knowing it was either the rock or a new Buick. I decided on the rock. Because I love you, Rose.

Now, standing here on this streetcorner, she could still remember how that had made her feel—afraid, because you
had
to be afraid of a man capable of such extravagance, a man who could choose a ring over a new car, but a little breathless and sexy, too. Because it was romantic. He had bought her a diamond so big that it wasn't safe to flash it on the street. A diamond as big as the Ritz.
Because I love you, Rose.

And perhaps he had . . . but that had been fourteen years ago, and the girl he'd loved had possessed clear eyes and high breasts and a flat stomach and long, strong thighs. There had been no blood in that girl's urine when she went to the bathroom.

Rosie stood on the corner near the storefront with the neon in the window and looked down at her diamond engagement ring. She waited to see what she would feel—an echo of fear or perhaps even romance—and when she felt nothing at all, she turned toward the pawnshop's door She would be leaving Daughters and Sisters soon, and if there was someone inside this place who would give her a reasonable sum of money for her ring, she could leave clean, owing nothing for her room and board, and maybe even with a few hundred dollars left over.

Or maybe I just want to be rid of it,
she thought.
Maybe I don't want to spend even another day carting around the Buick he never bought.

The sign on the door read
LIBERTY CITY LOAN & PAWN.
That struck her as momentarily strange—she had heard several nicknames for this city, but all of them had to do either
with the lake or the weather. Then she dismissed the thought, opened the door, and went inside.

S
he had expected it to be dark, and it
was
dark, but it was also unexpectedly golden inside the Liberty City Loan & Pawn. The sun was low in the sky now, shining straight down Hitchens, and it fell through the pawnshop's west-facing windows in long, warm beams. One of them turned a hanging saxophone into an instrument which looked as if it were made of fire.

That's not accidental, either,
Rose thought.
Someone hung that sax there on purpose. Someone smart.
Probably true, but she still felt a little enchanted. Even the smell of the place added to that sense of enchantment—a smell of dust and age and secrets. Very faintly, off to her left, she could hear many clocks ticking softly.