Rosie (5 page)

“I could read when I was four,” Sharon said to Rosie after the lunch bell rang.

“Big deal. I could read when I was three.”

“Liar.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“You can ask my mother.” They sat at their desks, taking Saran-wrapped food out of their lunch boxes. Rosie's exuded a
faint air of rust, banana, musty sweet decay, and a hint of grapes. Sharon's was new. Her mother had cut her sandwich the right way, so that the halves were triangles. Sharon's apple looked like Snow White's. Rosie's had been cut into fourths and the meat was brown. Sharon had—oh, God, Rosie could hardly stand it—Hostess cupcakes, while
she
had these totally gross perforated raisin bars, flat and dry.

“You wanna trade?” Sharon asked her, holding up a cupcake, eyeing the raisin bars. Rosie couldn't believe her ears. What's the catch?

Rosie looked at the chocolate cupcake, iced, with whipped cream inside, shrugged her shoulders, and said, “I guess.”

She gave Sharon two raisin bars. The cupcake was the best thing she had eaten in her life. She asked Sharon if she wanted to play outside when they finished their lunches. Sharon did.

Boys were playing basketball, P-I-G, and Around the World; girls hung and spun on the rings and bars, played jacks, hopscotch, jump rope; mixed groups of children played Red Light Green Light, tag, Mother May I, four-square, two-square, dodge ball. Red rubber balls boinging on the blacktop. Scalloped and missing teeth, scabby elbows, new clothes, shrieking, laughter, tears, the shrill whistles of authority. Some kids too shy to talk or play with anyone tried to blend into walls or hid in the johns. Rosie and Sharon jumped rope.

Rosie got to thirty-one doctors. Holding her breath, she watched, growing subtly but visibly agitated when Sharon got as far as twenty—please God please don't let her do better—up and down, up and down, twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-sev—Sharon's sneaker caught the rope, brought it down. Rosie didn't crack a smile.

“Too bad,” she said kindly.

Sharon invited her home after school. Rosie couldn't wait to have a shot at her kitchen. She lived a block away, in a two-story mansion with hedges, lawn, fruit trees, all carefully tended. The house, outside and in, was picture perfect. When they stepped inside, Rosie nearly swooned at the chandeliers, Persian rugs, Chinese vases, velvet chairs, and the perfect mother who greeted them at the door, Timmy's mother on
Lassie,
a picture-perfect mother whose voice is so nice it sounds like she's crying, and she's so happy to meet Rosie, she says; come on into the kitchen.

Oreos and milk. Rosie had to pinch herself.

Rosie fell in love—with the house, the mother (nylons, perfume, lipstick)—wanted to play here with Sharon every day for the rest of her life.

The girls played with troll dolls all afternoon in Sharon's pink princess bedroom, dressing and undressing them, brushing and braiding the comical hair. The bedroom was so perfect, so enviable—pink gingham curtains and bedspreads, a vanity covered with bottles of toilet water and Barrettes and hair ribbons, plastic lipsticks, a jewelry box that played music when you opened it: inside, a ballerina spun on a pedestal surrounded by rubies, emeralds, pearls; porcelain geisha dolls under glass boxes,
clean
stuffed animals—it was almost more than Rosie could take. Giggling with Sharon, blissed out, excited, she imagined smashing the geisha dolls' heads off with a hammer, stealing the jewels, a lipstick, the ribbons. Pangs of bad conscience skittered through her mind, but mostly she was very, very happy.

At four they watched
Creature Features
in the den: a roaring dinosaur was advancing upon a pretty woman in a leopard-skin bathing suit.

And now, along with everything else she is afraid of at six years old, Rosie will live in terror of dinosaurs. She is afraid of falling through outer space forever, of going blind, of being bitten on the bottom by a poisonous snake when she sits on the toilet, of a man coming into her room to kill her (her plan is to lie still without breathing and pretend she is already dead), of turning into a black person, of going bald, of falling out the window
of her dentist's fourteenth-story office, of the long, cold, bony white arm that will reach out from under the bed and grab her ankle if she gets up; and now, on top of all this: dinosaurs.

At six, when Mrs. Thackery said kindly that Sharon's daddy was on his way home and that Rosie must be going, she called her mother to ask for a ride.

“Oh, honey, I don't think I ought to drive. I've-uh, been having a drink with a new neighbor who dropped in today....”

“God!” Rosie was stung with humiliation.

“Is it far?”

“No. Can't you even drive to
Hilton?”

“You're on Hilton? Baby, that's only about ten blocks away. And it's still light out.”

“Goodbye.”

Rosie hung up, fighting back tears unsuccessfully.

“She can't come get me, because she's sick.”

“She'll
be all right,” said Mrs. Thackery tenderly.
“Don't
worry.”

“Her dad's dead!” Sharon announced in alarm.

Now tears were streaming down Rosie's face, and she was turning red.

“I'd drive you home but my car's in the shop. And Daddy will be too tired.” Mrs. Thackery's weepy voice and sweetness made Rosie all the more miserable and ashamed and jealous.

“It's not very far,” Rosie said bravely, sniffling, needing to be alone. “It's only over on Willow.” But Rosie did not believe that she would make it home alive. “I better go. Thank you for a very nice time.”

“We
loved
having you, dear.”

“See you tomorrow,” said Sharon anxiously.

“Yeah. See you in school.”

“Goodbye.”

“Goodbye.”

“Goodbye.”

She ran for her life, scanning the hillside beyond the row of houses, the hillside where she walked with her mother, where they collected wildflowers and looked for robins' nests in the cypress trees, and the cypress trees were moving, were not really
cypresses but camouflaged dinosaurs, and the stream which ran downhill through cypress and oaks, a stream full of guppies and frogs and water skeeters, was filled with blood, and behind the boulders were leering, slavering, huge reptiles, waiting for it to be dark enough to go hunting for little girls; please God please God, save me, save me. Finally she arrived on Willow and tore through the white lattice gate out of breath, eyes shining, up the porch steps two at a time, burst through the front door, slammed it, locked it, and stood panting against it, home.

She took a deep breath, looked around. Where was her mother?

“Mama? Mama? I'm home.”

And Elizabeth walked unsteadily out from the warm aromatic kitchen to hug her child, to hear the details of her day.

One starry night a year later, Elizabeth was reading
Huckleberry Finn
to her daughter on the blue velvet couch in the fire-warmed living room. Rosie held her mother's feet in her lap, rubbing them lazily, laughing when her mother laughed, frowning when Elizabeth stopped to sip cognac from a Waterford snifter.

Elizabeth closed the book. “Time for bed, sweetheart.”

“Noooooooo.”

Rosie rubbed the feet more determinedly and Elizabeth purred. Her mind traveled back in time to nights when she had massaged her father's bony white feet, after removing the wingtips, the garters, and the thin black socks; massaged them, honored, while her mother did the dishes or sat in the armchair reading. And now she lay, an aging young woman with a seven-year-old girl pressing tiny strong thumbs into her falling arches.

“I'm going to close my eyes for a moment. Will you keep rubbing my feet? And then I'll tuck you in.”

Rosie nodded. Her mother's breathing grew soft, and Rosie rubbed more gently.

“Mama?”

No answer but the faintest snore.

“Psssst. Mama?”

She resumed the foot-rub, looked around the room, out the window where a white crescent moon hung, then up at the ceiling, down and sideways to the empty crystal snifter, into her mother's peaceful face, down into her lap, at the gypsy-red toenails. She began tapping rhythms with her forefingers on her mother's toes, as if they were a keyboard, whispering “Deedle deedle deedle” to a melody she heard in her head. After a while, she said again, “Mama?”

“Uh.”

“Let's go tuck me in.”

Elizabeth opened one eye, closed it, nodded her head.

“Why don't you go put on your nightie. I'll come up in a minute and listen to your prayers. Okay?”

Rosie squinted her eyes and mouth at Elizabeth (whose eyes remained closed), stuck out her tongue, lifted her mother's feet, and slid out from under them.

Twenty minutes later Elizabeth went upstairs to Rosie's room and found her child glowering out from under the covers, her face hard and sleepy.

“Hi, sweetie.”

“Hi.”

“Sorry I fell asleep.”

“Tssss.”

“Don't be mad at me.”

“I'm not.”

“Good.” Elizabeth walked to the bed and sat down.

“I would be, if you were my real mother.”

“Oh.”

Elizabeth nodded her head; she stroked Rosie's back and bottom.

“Can I stretch out with you for a minute?”

“Okay.” Rosie slid over, and Elizabeth lay down. “But my mother will be coming to get me tonight.”

“Did you tell her where the front door key is?”

Yep.

“Good.” Elizabeth could smell stale cognac reflecting off Rosie's head and wished she had brushed her teeth.

“Do you want me to listen to your prayers?”

Andrew had taught his daughter to pray, Andrew who believed in God. Rosie's prayers could last for fifteen minutes, because anybody left off of her God Bless list was in danger, might be dead in the morning, and it would be Rosie's fault. She prayed as if dictating a letter: Dear God, Thank you very much for the very nice day; I am trying to be good; say hello to Daddy for me and God bless Mama...

But tonight she had already said her prayers by the time Elizabeth came to her room: she had first asked God to smite her mother, and then panicked and begged him to keep her alive.

Rosie closed her eyes, pretending to fall asleep. Elizabeth lay beside her, nuzzling the soft black curls. “I sure love you,” she said.

Rosie snored. Elizabeth smiled.

She returned to the living room couch, read at
Middlemarch,
sipped brandy until she could hardly keep her eyes open, then went upstairs to wash her face and rub cold cream around her eyes and mouth, on her neck, into her hands, yawning again and again. Dragged herself down the hall to her bedroom, removed and draped her clothes over the back of a chair, barely had the strength to pull back the comforter and crawl into bed. She turned off the lamp, yawned, stretched out, and closed her eyes. Goddammit, had she remembered to turn off the oven? Had she locked the front door? Had she put the screen in front of the fireplace? Her mind raced with small anxieties. Her eyes popped open.

Shit. It was going to be one of those nights.

If only she had a man beside her. Even Gordon, who had begun to get on her nerves, with his “marvelous”es, his racist riddles, his constant references to the European cities he had visited. If only Rosie were at Sharon's, so that she could go to the bar in town for a nightcap and find a male body to bring home. She would have to call out for one.

She recited the List of Reasons why she wanted to drop Gordon ... but he
was a
terrific lover. She turned on the light, picked up the receiver by her bed, hung it up, frustrated, sad, empty, horny, wired: mad Uncle Theo high in the branches of a monstrous oak crying “I want a woooooman” until the dwarf nun climbed a ladder and led him down. She nuzzled her shoulder with pouted lips and clapped her eyes shut.

Moments later, eyes open, unrequited: Who do I think I'm kidding?

She climbed out of bed, wrapped herself in her white kimono, and went downstairs to see if the living room was in flames. It wasn't. The front door was unlocked. Goddammit, Elizabeth! She locked the door, fiercely. The oven was off, and in the living room the fire was low, the screen in place. She poured some more cognac into the snifter, picked
Middlemarch
up off the floor, and went upstairs to her bedroom. And then wondered: Are you absolutely positive that the fire was safe and the oven
all
the way off? Relax. Read.

Propped up on pillows, naked, she read; Fred Vincy had gone to see Mrs. Garth, the mother of the girl he wanted to marry, who was rolling out pastry in the kitchen.

Jesus. Relax. Keep reading.

She took a gulp of cognac and read until her eyes itched, read until she was almost too tired to switch off the lamp, but the effort roused her, and she exhaled deeply. It was one fifteen by the luminous clock; if she fell asleep soon she could still get almost six hours' sleep before she had to get Rosie up for school.

If you fall asleep right now, you can still get five and a half hours. She turned the light back on, picked up the book, but couldn't concentrate.

If you fall asleep
now,
you can still get five ... shit.

“A malignant prophecy.” There, in the projector of her mind, was her mother, beautiful and ambitious in her youth, in a bed at the St. Helena detox hospital, needing a “hummer” every four hours, needing an ounce and a half of whiskey to avoid delirium tremens: dead at forty.

You have got to stop drinking so much. Tomorrow. If you fall asleep right now, you can still get four hours and forty minutes of sleep.

The pillow was hot and scratchy, and she turned it over, resting her face on the cool cotton. The sheets itched, felt as sandy as her eyes, and she flopped around the bed. She hugged a pillow, one end between her legs: her teddy bear, her lover. Four hours would be fine.

But no, her mind races with images of her mother and Rosie, of more malignant prophecies. What is Rosie learning by example? On the one hand, she is learning the art of amusing conversation and the pleasure and knowledge to be found in books. On the other, she is learning how to kill time, use men and drink; watching her mother who, when the pain or boredom or nostalgia gets too bad, anesthetizes herself; watching her mother be sneaky and critical and depressed. Rosie does not see examples of a mother's commitment to romantic love and work, to change and growth. These she sees in crazy Rae, whom Rosie adores, Rae who shoots for the moon, works hard at her art, and drives herself crazy with obsession, madly in love with Brian the bartender, who keeps successfully conning her into kicking the football—Charlie Brown and Lucy—yet again.

But otherwise Rae is a great, loving, honest example. Elizabeth will change, in every way, will become more like Rae by osmosis. Intellectually, they're so alike, but attitudinally couldn't be more opposite. And Rae tells the truth—always, it seems; secrets and confessions. She cries sometimes, remembering a vast humiliation or foolishness, but more often has Elizabeth and herself weeping tears of laughter, while Elizabeth's verbalized history is embellished, polished and rewritten so that she can hardly remember how it really was, and therefore who she really is.

Once Rae came over to borrow Elizabeth's vacuum cleaner and confided, “I had a vacuum cleaner once. I'd sent away for
these magic weight-loss shorts that you hooked up to a vacuum cleaner—only I didn't
have a
vacuum cleaner. So I go to a secondhand appliance store and buy one.”

“I take it home, and my roommate is stunned. I mean, I was an even worse slob back then—I had a mattress on the floor that a stranger would have felt perfectly comfortable walking across with his or her shoes on—and here I've just shelled out fifty bucks for a vacuum cleaner.”

“But I take it upstairs to my bedroom and lock the door. I get my magic shorts from underneath the bed. They're like elasticized pedal pushers—they're plaid, and they're made out of rubber, and they've got this opening at the hip, like an ostomy. So I put them on, read the instructions, plug in the vacuum cleaner, attach it to the opening, turn on the motor, and start running in place for fifteen minutes, holding the nozzle to my side while it sucks all the air out of my shorts, trying to run on tiptoes so my roommate won't come up to investigate....” Elizabeth treasured the image, could summon it when she needed to laugh. Like now. She smiled.

Rae has such a simple, compassionate heart. They saw Hepburn on television recently: beautiful, but with those tremors. Elizabeth grew disconcerted; Rae grew sentimental. “Doesn't she remind you of a little sparrow?” she asked.

And last year, at a gallery in the city, studying a print of Winslow Homer's “Gulf Stream,” Rae pointed out the ghostly ship in the distant waves and thought that it was coming to save the nonchalant black sailor on the broken ship—around which sharks are swimming. “Jesus, Rae,” Elizabeth said, with some irritation. “That is one dead darkie.”

Oh, Rae.

Oh, Rosie, I swear it: I'm ready to change. I'm ready to grow up some more. I'll be kinder, sober and strong, more like Rae and your dad. You'll have happy memories of growing up with me.

I have lost my childhood. And I am losing my adulthood, it passes too quickly, but I won't, won't, won't lose my child.

Is there a biochemical flaw in me that is making me become my mother, increasingly boozy and insane? Relax, relax. If you fall asleep right now, you can still get three hours....

But she feels crazier and more scared as dawn approaches, the moments between night and day, the hour of the wolf, the hour of the black dogs. She will nearly die waiting for sunrise—and then will spend the day waiting for it to be time for bed.... God!

She travels back ten years, is sitting at the Boston airport having just attended her roommate's wedding, desperate to be home with Andrew who had of all things German measles. Over the intercom Elizabeth hears the announcement that her flight has been delayed two hours, and she has a flash flood of panic, profoundly convinced that she cannot survive those two impossible hours, will lose her mind. She has to sit shock still, staring straight ahead the entire time; her mind is Edvard Munch's “The Scream.” And this is how she feels now.

The projector in her mind now shows a clip from a New Year's Eve party when she was roughly Rosie's age, in a nightgown, unseen at the top of the stairs, where she sits and listens to the plastered grown-ups sing. Her mother is at the piano, playing songs from the
Fireside Book of Folk Songs:
“Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes,” “Annie Laurie,” “Cockles and Mussels.” Back in bed, she cries herself to sleep, waking just after dawn to hear a blood-chilling sound, a stage-whispered fight between her parents, which seeps through the wall into her bedroom: her mother hissing that he'd done something in the garden with Backen's wife, her father denying it. Elizabeth can perfectly remember cringing with guilt and rage, her stomach flushed, the back of her throat hot and rashy, the back of her eyes hot and rashy too...

Relax. Try to stop flapping around so much. If you just wait it out long enough, it will be day; wait a few more hours, rest your eyes.

Right now, Rae would be lying wrapped around Brian; an emotional arsonist is better than nothing as the hour of the wolf approaches. Oh, God, I want a man here now. Grace and Charles Adderly, in their seventies, still lie together, holding one another as they sleep. Why don't I get to have one, why do I have to keep waiting to find a good man? One with fire in his heart, to sleep with every night?

Because you don't deserve one. Because you treat them badly,
because you are weird and manipulative and selfish—selfish, selfish, her mother always telling her how selfish she was. All her loves, except for the miracle of Rosie, have been in vain, totally in vain—no, there is also Rae—and the Adderlys, but they don't know how nasty she can be with men: if they could see the devious workings of her mind, they wouldn't want her either. They think she is noble, an excellent mother, a devoted friend although she hardly ever makes the effort to see them. The last time Grace came for tea, Rosie made them laugh so hard that Grace, standing, had to cross her legs, and pee ran down them, forming a puddle on the floor, which made the three of them laugh even harder. Oh, God, in pain and compassion and embarrassment, Rosie was on the verge of tears. Grace said, “I've piddled.” And Elizabeth, touching her shoulder, went for paper towels and wiped it up as graciously, as nonchalantly as if a puppy—her own puppy—had peed.