Going Away Shoes (10 page)

The doctor said he needed to speak to Rosemary alone. A young nurse with bright orange hair took Ann to be x-rayed and then stayed with her the whole time. Open fracture and a greenstick fracture. The orange-haired nurse kept talking, keeping Ann’s face turned away from the doctor bending over her arm and giving explanations of it all. How the open break was a doozy, but of course would heal just fine. And little greensticks happened all the time to kids. “Get it? Like a green stick? A little twig? You can stop crying,” the orange-haired girl said. “It really will get better.”

“What were you doing, skydiving?” The doctor laughed and the orange-haired girl moved just enough that Ann couldn’t see her and then he didn’t say anything else except that he bet Ann had lots of friends who would be begging to sign the cast. By the time Ann was ready to leave, her dad was there waiting, one arm around Jimmy’s shoulder with a promise of E&R hotdogs and whatever she wanted for dessert. She looked around for Rosemary but she had already left.

. . .

“Anyone who needs
me gone this bad,” Rosemary said, pausing to swallow and take a deep breath, “deserves it, I guess.” She said this to the two of them when they got home from the hospital and found her in the dusk-lit kitchen, their father outside explaining to a neighbor what had happened. Her eyes were red and swollen. She had started wearing mascara not long after the fancy pie lady showed up, and now it was all smudged on her flushed cheeks. Her shoulders rounded as she opened the pantry without a sound to reclaim the big silver mixer she had left there, a gleaming promise of more cakes and bread and homemade pimento cheese. “I just hope you will tell your father the truth.” She walked to the door without looking back at either of them.

Late that night, Jimmy made Ann swear never to tell. “It’s a graveyard secret,” he said. “It goes with us down into the ground and we never mention it again.” He paused then, jaw clenched tight as he tried not to cry himself, the anger that always accompanied his weak moments there on the horizon. He had gone over the story of what happened so many times —
she locked you in the basement for punishment
—she was feeling confused. “If we do break the graveyard secret,” he said and reached as he normally would to clench and twist her arm but stopped just shy of her cast, “then it’s like saying you never loved Mom. It’s like hating Mom. And she’ll know. She’s listening right now and something really bad will happen to Dad.” Ann was crying then, half
listening to him, half wanting to run into their father’s room and beg him to never die. “Take the vow,” he said, and then she did, heavy promise poured and sealed in a concrete vault. And they never discussed it again, not even the times Ann wanted to, like whenever she thought of the way their dad and Rosemary had looked at each other or the way their dad had laughed during that little bit of time, a way she has yet to find in her own life, though God knows she has tried. She wanted to say something before their dad remarried, to speak, and not hold her peace when the minister made the request, but she wasn’t able. Later she put it off, ever distracted by her own struggle to find a friendship she could trust and believe in —the equivalent of stumbling along a dark corridor in search of a light —but it became a journey with its own momentum, a runaway train, incessant daily activities turning weeks to months and then years.

Still, she had thought of Rosemary Looney often, like anytime she saw George Clooney featured on the cover of a magazine or when the legendary singer died and Ann saw photos of her as a young woman, the same photos that had stared out from the albums
their
Rosemary brought into the house to play while she cooked. Sometimes one of the old melodies, “Hey There” or “In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening,” got stuck in her head for days on end. It had been easier to fight against memory when living in Oregon and then Chicago, far removed from the South, where she wouldn’t stand a prayer of running into anything deepfried
in that sweet calabash batter or waking to the suffocating humidity she associated with her mother’s illness. She could fill her mind with new foods and places and people in a way that blocked and scrambled everything that hurt, everything except an arm bone faithful as an obedient dog when it came to predicting damp weather.

The day after
her father’s funeral, Ann was desperate to get out of the house and away from the tension of her own marriage, alarmed by how even illness and death of a loved one could not buy a temporary reprieve from it all. She escaped by taking her five-year-old stepdaughter, Sally, to Chuck E. Cheese. Her marriage was over and yet she was dragging her feet for dread of losing Sally and the time she had with the child every other week. Sally was what kept Ann from feeling regret about the path her life had taken. And that was what was on her mind as she stood there beside a mechanical horse, the child bumping and laughing along, singing “Do Your Ears Hang Low” and begging Ann to sing along. She kept thinking of her dad’s life and how the last twenty years had been spent with a woman so similar to Ann’s mother that it was like on
Bewitched
when the new Darrin slipped right in and took the place of the old without making mention of how different his features were, the eyes, the voice. Her stepmother slept in their mother’s bed, sat at their mother’s vanity, even sat in the same chair in the TV room, the smaller
“hers” version of their dad’s recliner. One Christmas Ann had even been surprised to see her wearing a cashmere cardigan that had been their mother’s, the scent of White Shoulders deeply woven into the fabric. It was hard not to study it for a lingering strand of hair, her own DNA tangled in the fibers. It was easier that way.

Ann was thinking of that last day with her dad and how there were so many things she had always wanted to ask, preparing herself to do so if only he woke up one more time. And when she looked up, she saw someone who looked just like Rosemary Looney across the pizza-strewn kid-littered room, sitting with a toddler at one of the Formica booths, her hair almost completely gray but worn the same way. Ann thought of how Rosemary often sat on the arm of her dad’s chair, how they all laughed when her round bottom slid down into his lap and his arms quickly locked around and held her there. He said he was never ever going to let her go and continued holding tight even when she squirmed and laughed and said she needed to go check on dinner.

Ann never knew
exactly how the two ended it, only that it was never the same after she broke her arm. Then one night, Rosemary stopped by —not to stay, she stressed, when Jimmy opened the door —but to gather up the rest of her pots and pans. Their dad had spent many recent nights there with them, sometimes asking about their days and offering help with
homework, but usually just settling in with whatever they were watching on television. That night, Ann wandered out onto the back porch and saw him follow Rosemary to her car, heard Rosemary say, “Please, Bill.” Ann’s father’s name on her tongue sounded so personal and revealing, and he looked weak and helpless, like he might fade into nothing. “You
know
I would never do anything to hurt them,” she said. There was a long pause and then a gasp between sobs, something so inhuman and demeaning in the moment, not unlike the memory Ann had of her mother’s thin white legs struggling in attempt to raise herself onto a bedpan. “You know me. You know better.”

“But I can’t risk losing their trust,” he said. “What choice do I have?”

Ann strained to hear her answer if there was one. And at the end of so many relationships, she has thought that if only she knew the answer, if only she knew what Rosemary thought, then she might know the secret to finding something honest and lasting.

And now Ann
is ringing the doorbell, standing where Rosemary stood and took a long shaky breath before leaving that last time, where Ann’s mother had been many summer nights as she called them in to supper, no knowledge of the minute cancer cells coursing through her blood. The pink dogwood tree they planted when their mother died fills the side yard. And the sight of Jimmy is a shock, like seeing their dad. “Hey sis,” he says. “Look
at you.” His face is the same, just older, and when he hugs her close he feels so much like their father that she wants to let go and collapse into the tears and worries of a frightened eight-year-old, but then his wife is there, so easily wound up and slipped into the role of the lady of the house. He has done it all before. Three other times in fact. The old wife and two kids and dogs are across town. The one before her childless and in San Francisco. The one before that is rarely even mentioned, a few months post-college, a mutual mistake that should have just been a summer living together. And here is the new wife and new guinea pig – looking dog and the baby two months from being born.

“Come on in,” he says and steps back, the open door like a time machine, a portal she fears entering, but then everything seems so different, it’s a relief. Gone is the pale green carpet and formal Queen Anne furniture their mother loved, gone is the big braided rug in the family room, a horrible place to fall asleep for the weaves and marks left indented in your face. Now the living room is pale pink, and big cream leather sofa parts —ottomans and such and glass-topped tables —fill the space. An enormous entertainment center fills one whole wall. The only reminder of the past is the old free-standing radiator where Ann often huddled on winter mornings, her knees pulled up under a worn flannel gown, as she waited for Jimmy to come down to watch Shock Theatre. They are about to remove it and tear through the wall to build a Florida room.

“Perfect for watching the scary movies,” Ann says pointing at the big-screen television and all the equipment parts stacked on top of it.

“We hate scary,” Kaycie says and simulates a shudder, diamond-weighted hand pressed to her chest. “We’re such wimps.”

“Since when?”

“Always,” Kaycie says before Jimmy can speak. She says they’ve been watching
The Thorn Birds
on DVD, something she remembered watching as a little girl.

“Good old Dr. Kildare,” Ann says, but Kaycie is too young to remember the star in another form. She is too young to know Jimmy in another form, too.

Ann takes her shoes off and Kaycie watches her every move on that white carpet. For a moment it is as if their mother is there in the room about to reprimand but too weak to do so.

“James?” Kaycie calls. “Can you come help me, honey?” He smiles at Ann with the promise of a glass of wine and follows his young wife into the kitchen. This wife is a clone of the one before her, just a decade younger, with Jimmy starring in the same old role. Is there a missing piece of machinery that could, like switching a train track, throw him off in a new and different direction? Ann has often thought they jinxed themselves when they sabotaged Rosemary Looney, that Jimmy’s threat of a curse placed on their dad was actually placed on them.

“You know, Kaycie’s dad owns a Volvo dealership,” Jimmy says
when he returns. “He was a judge, really powerful guy and very well known all over the state. Retired early and now he’s all into safety features like kid locks and side-view mirrors that get rid of your blind spot. Kaycie’s an only kid so you can imagine how excited about this kid they are.”

“James?” Kaycie calls again from the kitchen but he pretends he doesn’t hear and keeps talking about cars and what he drives and what model Kaycie drives and why.

“When did you start going by James?” Ann asks, her tongue lengthening the name to feign British royalty, and he shrugs, tells her she can still just call him “master.” He had called himself Jim as soon as he went away to college but she had never heard anyone call him James, not even their parents or grandparents.

Ann looks around the room, everything perfectly arranged, coffee table art, house magazines fanned on the end table, candlesticks aligned on the mantle. “She’s so neat!” she says, but he thinks she means hip, groovy, cool and smiles proudly.

“How’s the divorce?” he asks.

“It sucks,” she says, thinking she can hit a familiar chord with what had been
his
answer to adultlike questions for years. “Why didn’t you tell me what it would cost? I might as well have taken everything I owned and poured kerosene on it and struck a match.” She hears herself speaking to him as she does everyone who asks, focusing on the money and the greedy lawyers and everything stereotypical and cliché about divorce so as not to
have to think about Sally and the ache she feels for what she will never have again, any damage or hurt she might have caused. She is too old to have a child of her own and has abandoned the one who didn’t really need her anyway. She was the surplus mother, the extra, the stand-in. “You’re like the stunt parent,” her husband had said in the beginning, delighted at how easily Sally adjusted to her, the way she sometimes got mixed up and called her “mama.” “I’ll let you do all the dangerous parts —diapers, runny noses, head lice.” There was a whole list they had created and laughed about. She would volunteer for things like troop leader and Disney movies and trips to the mall. She would handle acne and bras, buy the tampons, and answer questions about sex. Somehow in all the imagining, she was always thinking about Rosemary Looney; she wanted to be for Sally what Rosemary might have been for her.

“The lawyer spent all of my retirement on a weekend in Aruba,” she says and lifts her glass for a refill. “He said, ‘I spent all the money you’ll earn over the next three years on cocaine and a down payment on my summer home.’ ”

“He didn’t say that,” Kaycie calls from the kitchen. “My daddy is a lawyer so be nice.”

“He said it telepathically,” Ann says. “I read his mind.” Jimmy laughs, holds his hand up to his forehead like Johnny Carson as Carnac.

“Ben-Gay,” he says and points at Ann, punches and pushes her
shoulder until she asks the question: “Why didn’t Mrs. Franklin have any kids?”

“Bible Belt.”

“What holds up Oral Roberts’s pants?”

“Crabgrass.”

“What do crabs get high on?”