Trading Rosemary (6 page)

“She will have the experience of the love you felt in those moments,” said the factor. “A memory that shows her the capacity that she too has for love.”

“Are you hoping that will jog her back to a more normal life?” said Rosemary.

“I would settle for being able to share her bed without weeping,” said the factor. He carefully did not look at Rosemary. “We are married, you see. Or were, before this all took hold of her.”

“I’m sorry,” said Rosemary, meaning it.

“I told her I didn’t care,” said the factor. “That children were not everything, that what we had was enough. She doesn’t trust either of us enough to believe it.”

“Do you believe it?” asked Rosemary, curious.

“I want to believe,” said the factor.

“Then believe,” said Rosemary. “Look at me. I had a child and look how that turned out.”

“You’re sacrificing your past for her future,” said the factor. “You must love her.”

“Do I?” said Rosemary. “I do the best I can for her. I always will. She is my responsibility and I have a duty to her wellbeing and happiness. But that is not love.

“My daughter,” she said, “is not a loveable person.”

“How do you feel?” said the factor.

(horses and carrots and green inedible vegetables, sleepless nights and teething and sneaking out, climbing the library shelves like a monkey and chewing on a coins of bowls and boats, the fights and the fish and the resentment, the ties and tensions and old tenderness)

(and in the space between feeling her daughter kick—nothing, a great white peace)

“I don’t believe,” said Rosemary, “that I feel any different.”

She was almost disappointed.

Rosemary wasn’t particularly fond of jam. She disliked the way the pips clung to her teeth like crows on carrion, and as she grew the sweet stickiness of it struck her as mawkish, artificial.

It wasn’t a family trait. Her grandmother’s pantry had always had jam in it, and she had allowed the child Rosemary to spread it about without criticizing her table manners, though Rosemary had often felt secretly guilty at her mess-making, had always tried to brush the crumbs neatly whenever her grandmother had looked away, smoothing the tablecloth covered in musical notes and covering up the places where she had smeared jam into the patterns.

Grandmother always ignored her own mess.

Rosemary found a strange comfort in the memory of her toddler self, the golden amber of the jam and the swept piles of crumbs, the perfect ring they made when her plate was taken away. The crumbs were more important than the jam—she had, after all, eaten that more to please another than herself.

The morning after the season ended, and the last week of her school holidays, Rosemary scraped the congealed remnants of a jar of feijoa jam onto her toast. It had the consistency of a rubber band, sticky and stringy, but at least she had managed to finish the pot this time. As a small child, she had made the mistake of being a little too polite about her grandmother’s jam, and ever since a new jar had been waiting for her every time she visited. The previous one had fallen prey to mold and rubbish bin in less than quick succession, for Rosemary’s grandmother was a better musician than housekeeper, and as she aged Rosemary grew better at finding excuses not to eat the stuff.

(It’s full of sugar, Nana, don’t you know what it does to your teeth?)

(I’m on a diet. There’s a dance next week and I’ve got a new dress I need to fit into.)

(Look, I’ve made us scrambled eggs for breakfast. Could you please pass the salt?)

When her grandmother came down, she had up-ended the jar and shaken out the last few gobbets. Lately, as the reality of weeks without early morning practice started to sink in, the older woman had begun to feel wistful for feijoa jam. Rosemary expected this; it happened every year. The problem was that the more she ate it, the less impressed she was with it.

“I’ve bought the same jam from the same shop for years, and you know what, darling? I don’t like it much at all. It’s very distressing. I think nostalgia has blunted my taste buds. To think of all the years I’ve shoveled it down! It’s criminal! You would never know that it had fruit in it—at least not the real, live fruit I used to steal out of the garden when I was your age.” She shot her granddaughter an arch look. “Don’t ever get old, Rose. Nothing’s what it used to be. You become such a terrible cynic when you get old, and everything tastes wrong. This jam used to taste of summer when I was your age. Now it’s a little jellied graveyard.”

Rosemary rolled her eyes. “It’s just jam, Nana.”

“Nothing’s
just
anything,” said her grandmother. “There’s no reason to settle for
just.
No, I’ve decided. We’re at a fairly loose end now, and our time is our own. If we’re going to have Jam, it might as well be Good Jam.”

“Oh,” said Rosemary. “Goody.” But she said it under her breath, knowing that her grandmother was trying to share something with her beyond the music that Rosemary had no true feeling for.

Desperation drove them to the local health food store, Rosemary reasoning that they were least likely to add anything to jam that a fussy old person might object to. The two of them skirted the door distrustfully, trying to slide in without being noticed, as if they were after pornographic coins rather than breakfast. The shop was filled with tubs of what smelled distressingly like rabbit pellets but it also had jars of what looked like homemade jam. They were in little glass pots with handwritten labels and a checked blue and white hat, and some were feijoa. Rosemary held one up to the light and the warm golden glow got her grandmother’s happy approval, but she had to cringe in teenaged embarrassment when the woman asked for some rashers of fatty bacon to go with it.

“We don’t sell meat here,” said the young man at the counter, his face alight with the enthusiasm of a zealot. “Pigs have feelings too, you know!”

“Not when they’re dead they don’t, dear. And besides, they ought to be glad that they’re giving such enjoyment after they’re gone.” She grinned at him, retreating into a little old lady innocence that would have fooled no one at the conservatory. “Wouldn’t you be?”

The jam proved to be runny and sour. There was hardly any sweetness to it—unsurprising, considering where it came from. Sugar made life a lot sweeter, so naturally it and the happiness it gave were out. Surprisingly, Rosemary had actually enjoyed it, dragging bread soldiers through the sticky surface and leaving them to crumble on her plate. She was deliberately untidy, as she had been as a child, knowing that her grandmother approved of her making a mess because she felt it was good for her.

“It reminds me a bit of marmalade,” Rosemary had said, and her grandmother sighed. “I
like
marmalade,” she said, defensively.

“You would. In my opinion, darling, you’re too drawn to the bitter. I remember when you were a very little girl, I tried tempting you with raspberry jam, with blackberry preserves, but watching you try to pick pips off your toast with a needle before eating it was far too depressing. Red streaks everywhere! Not that I minded, but it was like you were trying to disembowel your breakfast. Most disconcerting.”

When she dragged Rosemary back to the shop to complain about the lack of sugar, the assistant had offered her some organic honey instead. They had politely refused, and stood poking through the kelp extracts, cheerily snacking on bacon rolls. Rosemary’s cheeks were red as apples throughout, but her grandmother thoroughly enjoyed herself. The rolls were a trifle squashed from being in her handbag, but she enjoyed making the point.

They kept the jam. What else to do? Rosemary’s only consolation was that it would never thicken enough to go rubbery. Even the cat wouldn’t touch it, and considering the animal was a waddling garbage disposal unit, that was something. Her grandmother had always kept cats, always fed them tidbits from her table. It kept them from going after the birds, she said, and what was a little fur in her food now and then? Better that than feathers, lonely and curled up at the edges, or clumped in the corner connected by smears of hard dried blood, and the cat sitting smugly with red tinted claws.

In the end, they resigned themselves to making their own, spending an entire day in the carriage, roaming the orchards of Golden Bay, where dusty leaves of the fruit trees devoured the sunshine, leaving only patches to fall to ground like crumbs. The faintly furry feijoas fit snugly into Rosemary’s palm, their bright skin taut almost to bursting. She ate some of them immediately, tearing the skins open with her fingers and sucking the flesh from them, juice dripping down her chin and disinterring memories of her childhood.

She had been three years old. Her parents had been viewing a house—one they would eventually buy—and at the bottom of the garden were three feijoa trees, dusty sentinels in a line of cool green shadows, slouched in the warm sunlight. With her younger sister waddling beside her, Rosemary had pressed into the trunk of the first tree. The fruit hung down temptingly, squat and bulbous. Careful to keep the thick foliage between herself and her parents, she had squeezed and squelched at one fruit after another. Poached as they were in the afternoon air, the taste had struck her, acrid and furry, the taste of possums fighting on a corrugated iron roof at night. The taste was as vivid as sound; she could almost hear the scratching.

Her sister stood blinking in the sun, rounded eyes watching, strangely greedless. Standing in the sun and watching Rosemary like a dazed owl in daylight, drawing attention to them both, to Rosemary’s petty thievery. She wouldn’t hide behind the trunk of the tree, wouldn’t blend into the shade and lick the sweet fruit. It was beyond her to be unobtrusive. Rosemary had wanted to hit her.

Since then, feijoas had been a touchstone, present if not acknowledged. A half-eaten pot of jam was always in the pantry, a reminder more than anything else, a possibility that didn’t come in a case. Coins were all very well but you couldn’t eat them, and the smell alone was accurate enough to drive her wild and slavering, even if the taste almost always ended up being a disappointment. Rosemary didn’t eat the jam often (it was usually reserved for the mornings when she needed to go shopping) but she found comfort in knowing that it was there, in the reminder of the summer holidays spent at her grandmother’s.

Her grandmother didn’t buy feijoas anymore; bought fruit trees instead and planted them in wet earth that clung to her fingers like pulp and pectin, planted them and waited.

It was a long wait but she was patient; it was what made her a good musician. Years passed before she tried to make jam again. Years before the seedlings in her garden were mature enough to bear fruit, but while the trees grew strong her grandmother’s body was fading. Her gait became hitched and halting; it was harder for her hands to grip the instruments and Rosemary had to help her on the stairs and with the music shelves in the library. When once it had taken ten paces to walk from her back door to the nearest tree, it now took twenty. It rained enough so that when she forgot to water them, the trees would survive until her knees remembered to make the trip, until the sun stopped the rain-ache in her joints long enough to make the effort. Or until her granddaughter visited, to be chivvied into the garden to do it for her.

“You should let me hire you a gardener,” said Rosemary, but her grandmother refused.

“Those will be your trees when I’m gone,” she said. “You can look after them. Better yet, hollow one out and bury me in it, or float it out to sea burning, like they did with the Vikings.”

“That hardly makes me want to cooperate,” said Rosemary.

“Tough,” said her grandmother. “Besides, the fresh air will do you good. You’re spending too much time in that library. It’s turning you pale.”

The trees were overburdened with fruit when her grandmother died, and Rosemary carefully stripped them off the trees and gave them away; had cut down the trees and used their wood for funeral burning, for coffins and cremation. The funeral had had to be delayed while the wood dried, but Rosemary was firm. She had her instructions. Her grandmother had left her strings of scented wood along with those instructions, strings reminiscent of bubbling pots and pectin-fingers, and Rosemary hung them over her kitchen window, wove her fingers through them at night when she couldn’t sleep and breathed in the smell of warm fruit on toast.

She kept some rough discs from the wooden off-cuts, carved them into coins, and used them to the hold memories of music. The crumbs and the bright red needles and bacon she kept to herself—for a while.

Rosemary traded her memories to a sweet-toothed vintner with no space for anything but grapes. Afterwards, on a whim, she visited the nearest feijoa orchard. It took her four hours to drive there and then back home, When she returned to her own kitchen, her clarity of purpose had faded almost as much as the feijoas. They fitted into her palm, plump and unblemished. Their color was as it should be, but Rosemary could not escape the feeling the feijoas had somehow paled, and that their bodies, once quick with golden glow, had faded in upon themselves. They seemed dusty, and try as she might, Rosemary could resurrect no life or memory from their taste.

She didn’t try to preserve them, but threw them away, and took down the strings cluttering her window. Some memories were better left undisturbed, and some were better off not being made. She felt more peaceful with them gone.

The scent of the fruit lingered in the kitchen, a sweet green-yellow. Rosemary scrubbed out her cupboards with sugar soap, and when she had finished her hands were wrinkled and clean and she couldn’t smell fruit in her house anymore.

The fifth coin had gone to a jewelry collector who lived in the far south of the archipelago, one who specialized in coins that were slightly warped and just round enough to give the illusion of beads. Rosemary paid for its return with a necklace of shimmery coins she made herself, aboard a private sailboat she had hired to quicken the journey to Dunedin. She spent several days wearing her own necklace, feeling the flashes of pleasure, of fragmented memory and flickering emotion, feeling the way they intertwined when brushing against her skin. It was a highly sensuous experience, lying on deck, playing with her necklace and smiling at the crew—especially the cook, who cooked her gurnard he caught fresh, and told her stories of the places he had visited.