Rose Madder (27 page)

Pam kept telling her that she couldn't
believe
it, simply couldn't
beleeeve
it, a remark Rosie might have been tempted to chalk up to flattery, except for the way Pam's eyes kept moving from her face to her hair, as if she was trying to get the truth of it straight in her mind.

“It makes you look five years younger,” she said. “Hell, Rosie, it makes you look like jailbait!”

“For fifty dollars, it ought to make me look like Marilyn Monroe,” Rosie replied, smiling . . . but since her talk with Rhoda, she felt a lot easier in her mind about the amount she'd spent on her hair.

“Where did you—” Pam began, then stopped. “It's the picture you bought, isn't it? You had your hair done the same as the woman in the picture.”

Rosie thought she would blush at this, but no blush came. She simply nodded. “I loved that style, so I thought I'd try it.” She hesitated, then added: “As for changing the color, I still can't believe I did it. It's the first time in my whole life that I've changed the color of my hair.”

“The first—! I don't believe it!”

“It's true.”

Pam leaned across the table, and when she spoke it was in a throaty, conspiratorial whisper: “It's happened, hasn't it?”

“What are you talking about? What's happened?”

“You've met
someone interesting!”

Rosie opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again without the slightest idea of what she intended to say. It turned out to be nothing; what came out instead of words was laughter. She laughed until she cried, and before she was done, Pam had joined in.

R
osie didn't need her key to open the street door at 897 Trenton Street—that one was left unlocked until eight or so on weeknights—but she needed the small one to open her mailbox (R. McCLENDON taped to the front of it, boldly asserting that she belonged here, yes she did), which was empty except for a Wal-Mart circular. As she started up the stairs to the second floor, she shook out another key. This one opened the door to her room, and except for the building super, she had the only one. Like the mailbox, it was hers. Her feet were tired—she had walked the entire three miles from downtown, feeling too restless and too happy to sit on a bus, also wanting more time than a bus would give her to think and dream. She was hungry in spite of two Hot Pot
pastries, but her stomach's low growling added rather than detracted from her happiness. Had she ever in her life felt such gladness? She thought not. It had spilled over from her mind into her entire body, and although her feet were tired, they still felt light. And her kidneys didn't hurt a bit, in spite of the long walk.

Now, letting herself into her room (and remembering to lock the door behind her this time), Rosie began to giggle again. Pam had her
someone interestings.
She had been forced to admit a few things—she was, after all, planning to bring Bill to the Indigo Girls concert on Saturday night and the women from D & S would meet him then—but when she protested that she hadn't colored her hair and plaited it simply on Bill's account (this felt true to her, actually), she got only comically rolling eyeballs and a burlesque wink from Pam. It was irritating . . . but also rather sweet.

She opened the window, letting in the mild late-spring air and the sounds of the park, then crossed to her small kitchen table, where a paperback lay beside the flowers Bill had brought her on Monday night. The flowers were fading now, but she didn't think she could bring herself to throw them out. Not, at least, until after Saturday. Last night she had dreamed of him, had dreamed of riding behind him on his motorcycle. He kept driving faster and faster, and at some point a terrible, wonderful word had occurred to her. A magic word. She couldn't remember exactly what it had been now, something nonsensical like
deffle
or
feffle,
but in the dream it had seemed like a beautiful word . . . powerful, too.
Don't say it unless you really, really mean it,
she remembered thinking as they flashed along some country highway with hills on the left and the lake winking blue and gold sunflashes through the firs on their right. Up ahead was an overgrown hill, and she knew that there was a ruined temple on the far side of it.
Don't say it unless you mean to commit yourself, body and soul.

She had said the word; it came out of her mouth like a bolt of electricity. The wheels of Bill's Harley had left the road—for just a moment she had seen the front one, still spinning but now six inches above the pavement—and she had seen their shadow not beside them but somehow
beneath
them. Bill had twisted the hand-throttle and suddenly they were bolting up toward the bright blue sky, emerging from the lane the road made in the trees like a submarine
coming to the surface of the ocean, and she had awakened in her bed with the covers balled up all around her, shivering and yet gasping in the hold of some deep heat which seemed hidden in the center of her, unseen but powerful, like the sun in eclipse.

She doubted very much if they would fly like that no matter how many magic words she tried, but she thought she would keep the flowers awhile longer, anyway. Perhaps even press a couple of them between the pages of this very book.

She had bought the book in Elaine's Dreams, the place where she had gotten her hair done. The title was
Simple but Elegant: Ten Hairstyles You Can Do at Home.
“These are good,” Elaine had told her. “Of course you should always get your hair done by a professional, that's my view, but if you can't afford it every week, timewise or moneywise, and the thought of actually dialing the 800 number and ordering the Topsy Tail makes you feel like shooting yourself, this is a decent compromise. Just for Jesus' sake promise me that if some guy invites you to a country club dance in Westwood, you'll come see me first.”

Rosie sat down and turned to Style #3, the Classic Plait . . . which, the opening paragraph informed her, was also known as the Classic French Braid. She went through the black-and-white photographs which showed a woman first separating and then plaiting her hair, and when she reached the end, she began to work her way backward, undoing the plait. Unmaking it in the evening turned out to be a lot simpler than making it in the morning; it had taken her forty-five minutes and one good round of cursing to get it looking more or less the way it had when she'd left Elaine's Dreams the night before. It had been worth it, however; Pam's unabashed shriek of amazement in the Hot Pot was worth all of that and more.

As she finished her work, her mind turned to Bill Steiner (it had never been very far away from him), and she wondered if he would like her hair plaited. If he would like her hair
blonde.
Or if he would, in fact, notice either of these changes at all. She wondered if she would be unhappy if he didn't notice, then sighed and wrinkled her nose. Of course she would be. On the other hand, what if he not only noticed but reacted as Pam had (minus the squeal, of course)? He might even sweep her into his arms, as they said in the romance novels . . .

She was reaching for her purse, wanting the comb inside, and beginning to slide into a harmless little fantasy of Saturday morning—of Bill tying the end of the plait with a piece of velvet ribbon, in fact (why he would happen to have a piece of velvet ribbon on his person could go completely unexplained; that was the nice thing about kitchen table daydreams)—when her thoughts were interrupted by a small sound from the far side of the room.

Reep. Reep-reep.

A cricket. The sound wasn't coming through the open window from Bryant Park, either. It was a lot closer than that.

Reep-reep. Reep-reep.

She swept her eyes along the baseboard and saw something jump. She got up, opened the cupboard to the left of the sink, and took down a glass mixing bowl. She walked across the room, pausing to pluck the Wal-Mart circular from the seat of the chair in the living-room area. Then she knelt by the insect, which had made its way almost into the unadorned south corner where she supposed she would put her TV, if she actually got around to buying one before moving out of here. After today, moving to a bigger place—and soon—seemed like more than just a daydream.

It
was
a cricket. How it had gotten up here to the second floor was a bit of a mystery, but it was definitely a cricket. Then the answer occurred to her, and it included the reason why she'd heard it when she was falling asleep. The cricket must have come up with Bill, probably in the cuff of his pants. A little extra present to go along with the flowers.

You didn't hear just
one
cricket the other night,
Practical-Sensible spoke up suddenly. That particular voice hadn't gotten much use lately. It sounded rusty and a little hoarse.
You heard a whole
fieldful
of crickets. Or a whole parkful.

Bullshit,
she replied comfortably as she lowered the bowl over the insect and then slid the advertising circular under the lip, poking the bug with the corner of it until he hopped, letting her slide the paper entirely over the inverted mouth of the bowl.
My mind just turned one cricket into a chorus, that's all. I was going to sleep, remember. I was probably half in a dream already.

She picked the bowl up and turned it over, holding the circular over the top so the cricket couldn't escape before she was ready for it to. It jumped energetically up and down
meanwhile, its armored back ticking off a picture of the new John Grisham novel, which could be purchased at Wal-Mart for only sixteen dollars, plus tax. Humming “When You Wish Upon a Star,” Rosie took the cricket over to the open window, removed the circular, and held the bowl out into space. Insects could fall from much greater heights than this and walk away unhurt (hop away, her mind amended) when they landed. She was sure she had read that somewhere, or perhaps seen it on some TV nature program.

“Go on, Jiminy,” she said. “Be a good boy and hop. See the park over there? Tall grass, plenty of dew to drink, lots of girl crick—”

She broke off. The bug hadn't come upstairs in Bill's cuffs, because he'd been wearing jeans on Monday night, when he'd taken her out to dinner. She questioned her memory on that, wanting to be sure, and the same information came back quickly, and with no shade of doubt. Oxford shirt and Levi's with no cuffs. She remembered being comforted by his clothes; they were insurance that he wasn't going to try taking her to some fancy place where she would be stared at.

Bluejeans, no cuffs.

So where had Jiminy come from?

What did it matter? If the cricket hadn't come upstairs in one of Bill's pantscuffs, it had probably come up in someone else's, that was all, hopping out on the second-floor landing when it got a little restless—hey, t'anks for the ride, bud. Then it had simply slipped under her door, and what of that? She could think of less pleasant uninvited guests.

As if to express agreement with this, the cricket suddenly sprang out of the bowl and took the plunge.

“Have a nice day,” Rosie said. “Stop by anytime. Really.”

As she brought the bowl back inside, a minor gust of wind blew the Wal-Mart circular out from beneath her thumb and sent it seesawing lazily to the floor. She bent over to pick it up, then froze with her outstretched fingers still an inch-away from it. Two more crickets, both dead, lay against the baseboard, one on its side and the other on its back with its little legs sticking up.

One cricket she could understand and accept, but three? In a second-floor room? How, exactly, did you explain that?

Now Rosie saw something else, something lying in the
crack between two boards close to the dead crickets. She knelt, fished it out of the crack, and held it up to her eyes.

It was a clover flower. A tiny pink clover flower.

She looked down at the crack from which she had plucked it; she looked again at the pair of dead crickets; then she let her eyes climb slowly up the cream-colored wall . . . to her picture, hanging there by the window. To Rose Madder (it was as good a name as any) standing on her hill, with the newly discovered pony cropping grass behind her.

Conscious of her heartbeat—a big slow muffled drum in her ears—Rosie leaned forward toward the picture, toward the pony's snout, watching the image dissolve into layered shades of old paint, beginning to see the brush-strokes. Below the muzzle were the forest-green and olive-green hues of the grass, which appeared to have been done in quick, layered downstrokes of the artist's brush. Dotted among them were small pink blobs. Clover.

Rosie looked at the tiny pink flower in the palm of her hand, then held it out to the painting. The color matched exactly. Suddenly, and with no forethought at all, she raised her hand to the level of her lips and puffed the tiny flower toward the picture. She half-expected (no, it was more than that, actually; for a moment she was utterly positive) the tiny pink ball would float through the surface of the painting and enter that world which had been created by some unknown artist sixty, eighty, perhaps even a hundred years ago.

It didn't happen, of course. The pink flower struck the glass covering the painting (unusual for an oil to be covered with glass, Robbie had said on the day she met him), bounced off, and fluttered to the floor like a tiny shred of balled-up tissue-paper. Maybe the painting was magic, but the glass covering it clearly wasn't.

Then how did the crickets get out? You
do
think that's what happened, don't you? That the crickets and the clover flower somehow got out of the painting?

God help her, that
was
what she thought. She had an idea that when she was out of this room and with other people, the notion would seem ridiculous or fade away completely, but for now that was what she thought: the crickets had hopped out of the grass under the feet of the blonde woman in the rose madder chiton. They had somehow hopped from the world of Rose Madder and into that of Rosie McClendon.