Rose Madder (70 page)

“I can't look at her!”
he screams in his sleep.
“She doesn't care who she kills! She doesn't care who she kills! Oh please, can't you make him stop
SCREAMING
?
”
And then, in a lower voice, trailing off: “What's in your mouth? What are those threads?”

They are in a New York hotel, staying over on their way to St. Thomas, where they will honeymoon for two weeks,
but although she left the little blue packet behind, still at the bottom of the purse she carried with her out of Egypt, she has brought the ceramic bottle. Some instinct—woman's intuition will do as well as any other name in this case, she reckons—has told her to. She has used it on two other occasions following nightmares like this one, and the next morning, while Bill is shaving, she tips the last drop into his coffee.

It'll have to do,
she thinks later as she tosses the tiny bottle into the toilet and flushes it down.
And if it doesn't, it'll have to do, anyway.

The honeymoon is perfect—lots of sun, lots of good sex, and no bad dreams for either of them.

I
n January, on a day when billows of wind-driven snow come driving across the plains and over the city, Rosie Steiner's home pregnancy kit tells her what she already knows, that she is going to have a baby. She knows something more, something the kit can't tell her: it will be a girl.

Caroline is finally coming.

All accounts balance,
she thinks in a voice not her own as she stands at the window of their new apartment, looking out at the snow. It reminds her of the fog that night in Bryant Park, when they came home to discover Norman waiting.

Yeah, yeah, yeah,
she thinks, almost bored with this idea by now; it comes almost with the frequency of a nagging tune that won't quite leave your head.
They balance as long as I remember the tree, right?

No,
the madwoman replies, in a voice so deadly clear that Rosie whirls on her heels, heart thudding sickly all the way up in the middle of her forehead, momentarily convinced that Rose Madder is in this room with her. But although the voice is still there, the room is empty.
No . . . as long as you keep your temper. As long as you can do that. But both things come to the same, don't they?

“Get out,” she tells the empty room, and her hoarse voice trembles. “Get out, you bitch. Stay away from me. Stay out of my life.”

H
er baby girl weighs in at eight pounds, nine ounces. And although Caroline is and always will be her secret name, the one that goes on the birth certificate is Pamela Gertrude. At first Rosie objects, saying that, with their last name added to the second, the child's name becomes a kind of literary pun. She holds out, with no great enthusiasm, for Pamela Anna.

“Oh, please,” Bill says, “that sounds like a fruit dessert in a snooty California restaurant.”

“But—”

“And don't worry about Pamela Gertrude. First of all, she's never going to let even her best friend know that her middle name is Gert. You can count on it. And second, the writer you're talking about is the one who said a rose is a rose is a rose. I can't think of a better reason to stick with a name.”

So they do.

N
ot long before Pammy turns two, her parents decide to buy a home in the suburbs. By then they can well afford it; both have prospered in their jobs. They begin with stacks of brochures, and slowly winnow them down to a dozen possibles, then six, then four, then two. And this is where they run into trouble. Rose wants one; Bill prefers the other. Discussion becomes debate as their positions polarize, and debate escalates into argument—unfortunate, but hardly unheard-of; even the sweetest and most harmonious marriage is not immune from a tiff every now and then . . . or the occasional shouting-match, for that matter.

At the end of this one, Rosie stalks out into the kitchen and begins to put supper together, first sticking a chicken in the oven and then putting water on for the corn on the cob she has picked up fresh at a roadside stand. A little while later, while she is scrubbing a couple of potatoes at the counter beside the stove, Bill comes out of the living room,
where he has been looking at photographs of the two houses which have caused this unaccustomed dissension between them . . . except what he has really been doing is brooding over the argument. She does not turn at his approaching step as she usually does, nor does she when he bends and kisses the nape of her neck.

“I'm sorry I yelled at you about the house,” he said quietly. “I still think the one in Windsor is better for us, but I'm truly sorry I raised my voice.”

He waits for her reply, and when she makes none, he turns and trudges sorrowfully out, probably thinking she is still angry. She is not, however; anger in no way describes her current state of mind. She is in a black rage, almost a killing rage, and her silence has not been something as childish as “giving him the cold shoulder,” but rather an almost frantic effort to

(remember the tree)

keep from seizing the pot of boiling water on the stove, turning with it in her hands, and throwing it into his face. The vivid picture she sees in her mind is both sickening and blackly compelling: Bill staggering back, screaming, as his skin goes a color she still sometimes sees in her dreams. Bill, clawing at his cheeks as the first blisters begin to push out of his smoking skin.

Her left hand has actually twitched toward the handle of the pot, and that night, as she lies sleepless in her bed, two words play themselves over and over in her mind: I
repay.

I
n the days which follow, she begins to look obsessively at her hands and her arms and her face . . . but mostly at her hands, because that is where it will start.

Where what will start? She doesn't know, exactly . . . but she knows she will recognize

(the tree)

it when she sees it.

She discovers a place called Elmo's Batting Cages on the west side of the city and begins to go there regularly. Most of the clientele are men in early middle age trying to keep their college figures or high-school boys willing to spend
five dollars or so for the privilege of pretending for a little while that they are Ken Griffey, Jr., or the Big Hurt. Every now and then a girlfriend will hit a few, but mostly they are ornamental, standing outside the batting cages or the slightly more expensive Major League Batting Tunnel and watching. There are few women in their mid-thirties stroking grounders and line drives. Few? None, really, except for this lady with the short brown hair and the pale, solemn face. So the boys joke and snigger and elbow each other and turn their caps around backward to show how bad they are, and she ignores them completely, both their laughter and their careful inventory of her body, which has bounced back nicely from the baby. Nicely? For a chick who is clearly getting up there (they tell each other), she is a knockout, a stone fox.

And after awhile, they stop laughing. They stop because the lady in the sleeveless tee-shirts and loose gray pants, after her initial clumsiness and foul ticks (several times she is even hit by the dense rubber balls the machine serves up), begins to make first good contact and then
great
contact.

“She drivin' that beauty,” one of them says one day after Rosie, panting and flushed, her hair drawn back against her head in a damp helmet, screams three line drives, one after the other, the length of the mesh-walled batting tunnel. Each time she connects she voices a high, unearthly cry, like Monica Seles serving an ace. It sounds as if the ball has done something to offend her.

“Got that machine cranked, too,” says a second as the pitching machine hulking in the center of the tunnel coughs out an eighty-mile-an-hour fastball. Rosie gives her indrawn cry of effort, her head down almost against her shoulder, and pops her hips. The ball goes the other way, fast. It hits the mesh two hundred feet away down the tunnel, still rising, making the green fabric bell out before dropping to join the others which she has already hit.

“Aw, she ain't hittin that hard,” scoffs a third. He takes out a cigarette, pokes it in his mouth, takes out a book of matches, and strikes one. “She just gettin some—”

This time Rosie
does
scream—a cry like the shriek of some hungry bird—and the ball streaks back down the tunnel in a flat white line. It hits the mesh . . . and goes through. The hole it leaves behind looks like something which might have been made by a shotgun fired at close range.

Cigarette Boy stands as if frozen, the lit match burning down in his fingers.

“You were sayin, bro?” the first boy asks softly.

A
month later, just after the batting cages close for the season, Rhoda Simons suddenly breaks into Rosie's reading of the new Gloria Naylor and tells her to call it a day. Rosie protests that it's early. Rhoda agrees, but tells her she is losing her expression; better to give it a rest until tomorrow, she says.

“Yeah, well, I want to finish today,” Rosie says, “It's only another twenty pages. I want to
finish
the damned thing, Rho.”

“Anything you do now will just have to be done over,” Rhoda says with finality. “I don't know how late Pamelacita kept you up last night, but you just don't have it anymore today.”

R
osie gets up and goes through the door, yanking it so hard she nearly tears it off its fat silent hinges. Then, in the control room, she seizes the suddenly terrified Rhoda Simons by the collar of her goddamned Norma Kamali blouse, and slams her facedown into the control board. A toggle switch impales her patrician nose like the tine of a barbecue fork. Blood sprays everywhere, beading on the glass of the studio window and running down it in ugly rose madder streaks.

“Rosie, no!” Curt Hamilton shrieks. “My God, what are you doing?”

Rosie hooks her nails into Rhoda's throbbing throat and tears it open, shoving her face into the hot spew of blood, wanting to bathe in it, wanting to baptize this new life which she has been so stupidly struggling against. And there is no need to answer Curt; she knows perfectly well what she is doing, she is
repaying,
that's what,
repaying,
and God help anyone on the wrong side of her account books. God help—

“R
osie?” Rhoda calls through the intercom, rousing her from this horrid yet deeply compelling daydream. “Are you okay?”

Keep your temper, little Rosie.

Keep your temper and remember the tree.

She looks down and sees the pencil she has been holding is now in two pieces. She stares at them for several seconds, breathing deeply, trying to get her racing heart under control. When she feels she can speak in a more or less even tone of voice, she says: “Yeah, I'm okay. But you're right, the kiddo kept me up late and I'm tired. Let's rack it in.”

“Smart girl,” Rhoda says, and the woman on the other side of the glass—the woman who is taking off the headphones, with hands that only shake a little—thinks,
No. Not smart. Angry.
Angry
girl.

I repay,
a voice deep in her mind whispers.
Sooner or later, little Rosie, I repay. Whether you want it or not, I repay.

S
he expects to lie awake all that night, but she sleeps briefly after midnight and dreams. It is a tree she dreams of,
the
tree, and when she wakes she thinks:
No wonder it's been so hard for me to understand. No wonder. All this time I was thinking of the wrong one.

She lies back next to Bill, looking up at the ceiling and thinking of the dream. In it she heard the sound of gulls over the lake, crying and crying, and Bill's voice.
They'll be all right if they keep normal,
Bill was saying.
If they keep normal and remember the tree.

She knows what she must do.

T
he next day she calls Rhoda and says she won't be in. A touch of the flu, she says. Then she goes back out Route 27 to Shoreland, this time by herself. On the seat next to her is her old purse, the one she carried out of Egypt. She has the picnic area to herself at this time of the day and year. She takes her shoes off, puts them under a picnic table, and walks north through the shallow water at the edge of the lake, as she did with Bill when he brought her out here the first time. She thinks she may have trouble finding the overgrown path leading up the bank, but she does not. As she goes up it, digging into the gritty sand with her bare toes, she wonders how many unremembered dreams have taken her out here since the rages started. There is no way of telling, of course, nor does it really matter.

At the top of the path is the ragged clearing, and in the clearing is the fallen tree—the one she has finally remembered. She has never forgotten the things which happened to her in the world of the picture, and she sees now, with no iota of surprise, that this tree and the one which had fallen across the path leading to Dorcas's “pomegranate tree” are identical.

She can see the foxes' earth beneath the dusty bouquet of roots at the far left end of the tree, but it is empty, and looks old. She walks to it anyway, then kneels—she is not sure her trembling legs would have supported her much farther, anyway. She opens her old purse and pours out the remains of her old life on the leafy, mulchy ground. Among crumpled laundry lists and receipts years out of date, below a shopping list with the words