The Bubble Reputation (12 page)

The fireflies parted and shooed like tiny sparks as Rosemary careened through the hay, past Indian paintbrushes that were now colorless outlines in the dusk, out of the hay and onto the hot blacktop that brought her pedaling easily down Library Street. She rode to the end, circled the small cul-de-sac, and coasted back up to the front of Mrs. Abernathy's house. There was always a light burning late at Mrs. Abernathy's house, now that Mr. Abernathy had passed away. “I'm staying up later and later now that he's gone,” Mrs. Abernathy had once admitted. Rosemary walked the bike down the concrete drive. It followed like an obedient deer being led by its antlers. Mrs. Abernathy answered on the third ring. She undid the chain and opened the door only after she was certain that it was not Rosemary's uncle Bishop out there on the steps, but the niece herself.

Rosemary was struck with how Mrs. Abernathy was aging daily. Her skin was cindery, almost to the point where it might be covered with a gray makeup. But this pallor was the work of nature and not Max Factor. Mrs. Abernathy's cheeks had fallen in as if perhaps, during one restless night, the bones had finally collapsed with the weight of the skin, the way a barn dies when it's left to the wind and snow. Prehistoric art. She remembered William telling her about
The Chinese Horse
, and the artists in primitive caves. “They may have created art centuries before, Rosie,” he'd said. “A temporary art, left outside and ruined by the elements. Or drawn on hides. Biodegradable.” Here, then, was the sad canvas of Mrs. Abernathy's face, going the way of all art. Rosemary felt guilt in seeing Mrs. Abernathy being so mercilessly sluiced through the floodgates of time. She scooted past the old woman and into the parlor, which was bulging with porcelain birds, handpainted by Mr. Roger Tory Peterson, Master Birder. These were birds immune to disease, these shiny sculptures newly flown from the Franklin Mint nesting grounds. These were birds who were oblivious to the gruesome winter statistics.

“Are you okay, Mrs. Abernathy?” Rosemary ran a finger down the back of a handpainted indigo bunting. An oily film of dust came away, soft as peach fuzz, gray as the mustache above Mrs. Abernathy's upper lip. It was most unlike Clara Abernathy to live in harmony with dust and its ilk. Rosemary could not ever recall, since childhood, seeing Mrs. Abernathy's front yard look so anxious to be put in order. Long grassy weeds had pushed up around the planted flowers, and the fake grass was scattered with dead leaves. An assortment of lilac bush droppings, those small, lavender bouquets, lay next to crumpled candy bar wrappers that had blown in from the street. Mrs. Abernathy would never have stood for such a flagrant disregard of orderliness just days ago. “She vacuums her goddamn grass,” Uncle Bishop had said many times. Now here was the parlor, as well, looking as if someone no longer cared that it was being painted over by the layer of forgetfulness that besets the elderly.

Mrs. Abernathy moved several pages of the
Bixley
Times
from off the sofa so that Rosemary could sit upon it. Rosemary noticed that the pages were all her weekly columns, perhaps from the past month, with her usual trademark of a black-capped chickadee, Maine's state bird, adorning the upper right-hand side of the column. It had wrapped its wiry feet around an apple tree branch and was staring, with literariness, out at the reader.

“How have you been doing?” Rosemary asked, noticing this time how strained Mrs. Abernathy's movements had become, like a wind-up toy nearing the end of its strut. Her bones seemed to be locking up all their joints and tossing out the keys.

“I'm as well as can be expected,” Mrs. Abernathy answered.

Rosemary recognized this as the ultimate truth. She was, this old woman approaching her octogenarian years,
as
well
as
could
be
expected.

“The old ticker only has so many beats in it and then kaput!” said Mrs. Abernathy. “At least that's what Mr. Abernathy was fond of saying.” Rosemary looked at the fake mantelpiece where sat the picture of Horace Abernathy, taken under the Abernathys' cherry tree, probably the last time a camera's eye closed to capture Horace's own dark orbs. Rosemary sat quietly in the dustiness of Mrs. Abernathy's bird-filled, cagelike parlor and heard the old woman whisper a second time, “As well, I guess, as can be expected.”

Rosemary made a silent promise that she would look in on Mrs. Abernathy often. And she would call the county nurse the next day to inquire about the Bixley group designed to visit and care for the elderly who were too fragile for the heavy demands of everyday living.

“Your column last week about predator birds that come to feeders was, in my opinion, your very best,” Rosemary said.

“Yes, well, thank you,” said Mrs. Abernathy. “They're a nasty bunch.” She clicked her teeth, but Rosemary was only half listening. She was remembering those sweet days of youth, those oppressive August days when Mrs. Abernathy would lure the neighborhood children into the parlor with Kool-Aid and a plate of fudge brownies. One day stood out most, a day more than twenty years earlier, when the rain had come like bullets pelting down the street at her heels, and Mrs. Abernathy had waved her in from the storm, wrapped her in a fat bath towel, and toweled her dry. There had been a cup of cocoa, hadn't there? And something red. An apple maybe. And the incessant rain, that eternal dripping. What was it William had told her? “When the earth's crust first cooled down, Rosie, it rained for sixty thousand years without stopping.” So what was a childhood rain against the wash of time?

“Speaking of predators,” Mrs. Abernathy said. She folded her last column into a paper handkerchief on her lap and then nodded toward Uncle Bishop's beige-and-chocolate house. “Where is that awful uncle of yours?”

***

Outside in Mrs. Abernathy's front yard, Rosemary waited until the old lady locked herself safely inside the house before she pointed her bike at the street. It was well past dusk but Mrs. Abernathy's porch light was on, and Rosemary could see a large dark shape moving across the backyard. She slipped in closer for a better view and saw that it was Ralph, now lying flat on his stomach and sleek as a kamikaze, two round, beady eyes under the rose of Sharon. Why was he even there? She watched as Ralph strolled up to a standing feeder, examined it closely, turned his back on it, and raised his tail. Then he pedaled his hind legs, as though he were on a unicycle, and urinated squarely on the feeder. He turned around and examined his signature proudly. “Mine,” Ralph was saying. “All mine.” Rosemary surmised what Ralph's mission might be. When dawn finally came with its rosiness, he would be there at his station while the feathery and unsuspicious munched upon chunks of apple, apricot, millet, and cracked corn. And then, when they dared think of it, an idea so abstract they had only dreamed vaguely of it at night as they twitched and scratched in their nests, waiting for daylight: the Toll House cookie.

When she got home, the baby robin was dead, its eye frozen open like a black drop of blood, its head bent forward upon its chest, in the middle of its last dream of flying.

Lizzie and company were gone when Rosemary awoke. Downstairs she discovered that someone, most probably Lizzie, had given Mother a breakfast of cereal, toast, and orange juice. Mother was drawing on her magic slate. Someone had written a note, pinned by a strawberry magnet to the refrigerator. It said,
Back
this
evening. Will have dinner in Thomasville, if anyone has the stomach to eat. Lizzie.
So they were going to approach this like adults, after all, over bread breaking.

Rosemary gave Mother a quick kiss. In between munching on her toast, which was now cold and crusted with stiff pats of butter, Mother was creating an assortment of lighthouses on her magic slate. Some were tall and skinny, others short and bulging, all casting out radiating black lines of light to warn of the needlelike rocks and sunken reefs.

“They're very nice,” Rosemary praised the lopsided structures as she peered over Mother's shoulder. Mother glanced up in terror, as though she'd just been caught breaking and entering into lighthouses that did not belong to her, the private property of the sane world. In an instant, she reached out her hand and flipped up the overlay sheet, erasing the artwork, as if a huge thick wave had just rushed in and swept all the lighthouses out to sea.

“What a shame,” Rosemary said, and patted Mother's shoulder.

“More Rorschach pictures?” Miriam asked from the kitchen doorway. She'd let herself in again without knocking. “Lighthouses, right? Out in the middle of the ocean?”

Rosemary nodded. “Uncle Bishop says she perceives us all as sharks,” she said. Miriam was supposed to come by at one o'clock to babysit Mother during her nap and allow Rosemary to escape for a few errands she needed to run. Rosemary watched as the car with Bixley Cab Company on its door disappeared back down the gravel road. She could almost hear Uncle Bishop. “How do you explain taking a cab to Presto Pizza as a business deduction, Miriam?”

Miriam was searching out a cigarette in her bottomless purse. Her face seemed stretched on its bones and she wore no makeup. It was well known among family members that on the day of Miriam's now mythical car accident, when she rammed the ice-cream truck, she had sat up in the speeding Bixley ambulance and applied a fresh layer of pink lipstick to her trembling lips. “LOA,” Uncle Bishop liked to remember the incident. “Lipstick on arrival.”

“Is everything all right?” Rosemary passed her a book of matches.

“Why do you ask?” Miriam lit the cigarette
.
The usual thick swab of green eye shadow was missing from her upper lids. Someone had decided long ago that red hair was best exhibited and enhanced by shades of green
,
and Miriam readily endorsed this philosophy. She had even tried to get the Bixley furrier to dye her mink coat green, but he had refused. “You've missed the point,” he told her. “Mink are not green by nature.”

Miriam was also wearing no lipstick, that cosmetic paste without which she had refused to go off into death. Rosemary imagined her beseeching Charon to hold his ferry steady in the fast-moving waters of the Styx until she could set her lips in order. And Charon himself, getting his fingers all gooey with lipstick as he fetched his well-earned coin from out of her painted mouth.

“I ask because you don't look yourself,” Rosemary said. Miriam had been bemoaning her fortieth birthday, two days away, so Rosemary had suggested a dinner party to Uncle Bishop, hoping it might cheer Miriam up. “No thanks,” Uncle Bishop had declined. “I don't look upon Miriam's birth as
cause to cele
brate.”

“I don't think I've seen you without mascara since grammar school,” Rosemary said. “I wondered if it meant anything.”

“Well, it
doesn't
,” Miriam said. “I just didn't have time.”

Rosemary was incredulous of this statement from a woman who had found the seconds needed to apply lipstick in a shrieking, careening ambulance, a woman with a broken arm, and, worse yet,
with
that
very
arm!

“Where's Raymond?” she asked.

“I'm here to babysit
your
mother,” said Miriam, “and not to answer questions about my private life.” So things were amiss in her current wedded bliss, albeit the fourth bliss. There was definitely trouble in condo heaven.

“Don't forget to bring my ladder back,” Mother warned. She shook her finger at Miriam, peering at her with squinty eyes.

“Jesus,” said Miriam. “What ladder? I didn't
take
your ladder.”

“Yes you did,” said Mother.

“No I didn't,” said Miriam. “You're batty, is your problem.”

“I don't like bats!” Mother said, her curls damp on her forehead.

“Don't tease her,” Rosemary warned. She was reluctant to leave Mother, but she did have those errands.

“Did you bring me any chocolates?” Mother asked Miriam, who made a sour face and then looked with disinterest out at the dining birds.

“I'll be back soon,” Rosemary said. She carried the picnic basket she'd packed earlier with sandwiches, pickles, soda, and a blanket to spread on the grass. She'd fasten it safely on the rear carrier of her bike, strap it down with stretch cords.

***

The road to the airport was alive with June. Devil's darning needles darted in and out of the sloping fields of hay like little helicopters. Evening grosbeaks munched on seeds near the sides of the road and a telltale
caw
caw
from off in the distance told Rosemary some crow was keeping good watch for the entire flock. The sky was an old blue, faded from so many mornings and afternoons. An occasional shoelace of cloud moved aimlessly across the measureless expanse. A groundhog slipped cautiously out from under a hay rake that had been left behind to rust, its workdays over, the iron of its tusks useless against modern equipment. It stood on its hind legs to catch a glimpse of the mounted creature that was gliding down the road, part human, part chrome, before it dived into the damp earth of its home and disappeared.

It used to be that Rosemary and William hated the swirling dust that rose up behind each car as it passed on Old Airport Road. But two years earlier, when the new highway brought potential fliers to the airport from the north side, most of the traffic on the road had died away. But there were still the rare travelers who preferred Old Airport Road, which was a shortcut, and it was because of these strangers and their mindless speeding that Rosemary had been obliged to erect Mugs's now famous CAT CROSSINGsign. A reporter and a photographer from Bixley had even come out one sunny afternoon, perfect for a picture, and immortalized Mugs and the sign, at least for the Sunday that the picture appeared. Rosemary had brushed Mugs until he snapped with static electricity, and he moved with cautious steps as he crossed the road for the camera.

At the airport Rosemary pushed her bike inside the gate and left it leaning on its kickstand. She looked across the small runway and scanned the puny planes. There was no sign of the ultralight, no bright flash of red and yellow, so she went in through the main door of the building. A coffee machine and a machine half-filled with crusty, stale sandwiches was as close as the Bixley airport came to a restaurant. She dug down into her cutoff jeans for two quarters, dropped them into the slot. The coffee tasted moldy. A woman was busy behind the one and only departure counter, which also handled arrivals. A few men drifted in and out of doors. One seemed to be in charge of the others, an unmistakable top dog.

“Can I help you?” he asked, as Rosemary approached.

“I'm interested in ultralights,” she explained. “I've seen one several times in the past few days soaring over my house and I think it looks like fun. I'd like to take some lessons.”
Oh, what tangled webs
, she thought.

“Sweetheart, take my advice. When it comes to an ultralight, keep both of your pretty little feet on the ground. Those things are like riding on the backs of mosquitoes. You'll kill yourself.” He wiped his hands on a towel, then tossed it behind the counter. So, the ultralight man
was
a daring young man.

“My name is Rosemary O'Neal,” Rosemary said. He could take his
sweetheart
and shove it. “I live just three miles down on Old Airport Road. I'm interested in at least taking a look at the machine to see how it operates.”

“Honey,” the man said.
There
he
goes
again.
“I think your best bet is to take regular flying lessons. That little Cessna sitting out there would be a good place to start. We don't even have any ultralights here.” He took a cigarette out of his shirt pocket and lit it.

“Rosemary,” she said.

“Rosemary, I'd be happy to have someone talk to you about the Cessna.”

“But who owns the ultralight?” She had suddenly felt a chill that even the dull-tasting coffee could not shake. Had she imagined the daring young man? “Pterodactyl,” she had said, upon seeing him for the first time, a primitive fear rising up in her chest at the unusual combination of man and bird. “The Greeks could not accept man-on-horseback as a literal concept, so they invented the centaur,” she remembered telling her literature class. Had she invented her own concept of man-as-bird?

“That's some joker from out of state who won't live to see any gray hairs,” he said. “You just missed him.”

“I finished the check, Jake,” one of his workers came inside to tell him.

Jake shook ashes from his cigarette onto the shiny tiles of the airport floor. “He's staying at one of Fraser's Sporting Camps,” he said. “But as far as I know, he don't give lessons. It's a hobby. But you take my advice and try the Cessna.”

***

On the cool ride back home, Rosemary watched the sky for a sign of
him
coming back. Religiously, she scoured the sleek line of horizon, looked among the taller trees, kept a watch behind her shoulder. It
was
a kind of religious thing, this peering anxiously into the heavens for a glimpse of a man, whether it was one from
out
of
state
or one who'd been dead for two thousand years. But there was no ultralight man to be seen anywhere in the skies over Bixley. She passed her own house on Old Airport Road and kept on toward the heart of town. She thought about her car sitting idle in the garage since William's death. She wasn't sure what it was about the car that kept her away from it. William had picked it out because Rosemary was uninterested as to the touted exploits of various makes. “As long as it's blue and makes that noise when I turn the key,” she told William, who went off to the car dealer in Caribou and came back with a new blue car that did, indeed,
make
that
noise.
But the car was certainly no more representative of William than the polished cherry bed, or the painting of
The Chinese Horse,
or the old house itself, and Rosemary had embraced these other things since his disappearance. She had not banished them as she seemed to have done the car. Perhaps it was because of the very
noise
she mentioned to William the day he bought the car. The quiet bicycle fit more keenly into her new notion of life. She would let the car sit until it was a colossal ball of dust lolling beneath a network of spiderwebs. Maybe she would drive it into the creek and let it rust there on its haunches. Maybe she would give it to the mailman.
No, no reason. I just wanted you to have it.

The elm trees along the road shimmered in the wind and turned their silvery leaves bottoms up, like minnows flapping. The bike was a wonderful freedom, faster than running, like some sleek, futuristic horse. A rabbit raced across the road and disappeared into the field of hay, its long ears like periscopes separating the grasses.

Rosemary left her bike on the sidewalk in front of Max's Camera and Supply Shop. There was no need to chain-lock it. No one stole bicycles in Bixley. Inside, Max was busy over the ancient body of an old Brownie camera someone had brought in to be resurrected.

“It's wonderful to still see one of these,” he told Rosemary. “They took marvelous pictures. John Deardorf is trying to bring the Deardorf back, you know. What a quality.”

“Don't keep me dangling, Max,” Rosemary said, and flipped through the scrapbook he left lying on the counter to subtly teach his customers the proper way to take a photograph. Rosemary stopped at a photo of a small girl with her arms around the neck of a graceful collie. The light
was
perfect. The composition correct. The child and her dog were sweetly frozen in time. Max was wise to choose this photo for his crash-course scrapbook. Now if his customers could only find such a blond child and such an ingratiating dog. To hell with natural light. You could
buy
light at Max's Camera and Supply Shop, if you had the money.

“Come on, Max,” said Rosemary.

“This is a goner,” Max said, and put the old Brownie back into its box where it could, finally, settle down to sleep, to dream of flappers, and Model T's, and small children who had already grown old and died. The camera was a graveyard, full of ghostly angles, and lines, and compositions of people and houses and landscapes that have disappeared.

“Max, I'm waiting,” said Rosemary, trying to ignore the dead body of the Brownie.

“Well, in that case.” He looked at her finally. “Guess what? It's here.”

“Oh, Max, is it?”

“Just last night, before I closed, the UPS truck brought it,” said Max. “I called to leave a message for you a few minutes ago but your sister said you'd be by.” He made his way to a large box in the corner of the room. It said MEADE 6-INCH REFLECTING TELESCOPE on the outside.