Rosie (6 page)

See, Elizabeth, see? That you are kind, too?

But her mother continues to haunt her tonight. Easter, thirty years ago, her father had promised to buy Easter egg dyes on his way home from the office, but didn't come home until six in the morning, by which time her mother had painted hardboiled eggs by wetting jelly beans, etching faint watery pictures on the white shells, but only the red and the black beans showed up well. Upon seeing them, it was her mother whom Elizabeth hated that Easter Sunday. Not her father.

Her eyes burn, the back of her throat burns, the space behind her eyes burns.

Morning is barely breaking, and she finds she has fallen through into the dreamy burrow just above true sleep, fading, floating. Finally she sleeps.

The alarm went off an hour later. She felt as though she had been asleep for five minutes, her exhaustion such that she was pinned to the bed by centrifugal force; there was no point in trying to raise her right arm to quiet the alarm because her arm would be slammed back to her side. There would be no energy this morning, there would only be the killing of an entire day, the
waiting for it to be over, a nothingness. The alarm wore down. She would read the paper, weed, maybe do some laundry.

Rosie opened the bedroom door, already dressed in worn blue jean overalls, sneakers, and a purple T-shirt.

“Hi, Mama.” Elizabeth could barely keep her eyes open and felt like a woman who had barely lived to regret it: bloated, bleary, sad. “God!” said her daughter and stomped off, slamming the door. Elizabeth exhaled loudly.

She went to the bathroom, splashed freezing water on her face, studied the flatness, bags, wrinkles in and around her hazel eyes. She went downstairs to make breakfast for her daughter, who was pouring a half-full bottle of Remy Martin down the sink. Elizabeth rubbed her face and eyes and slumped down at the table.

“I didn't drink that much, Rosie. I just never fell asleep.”

“You got so drunk you fell asleep on the couch.”

“But I didn't have much more after you went to bed.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“You swear on a stack of Bibles?”

Elizabeth nodded.

Rosie stalked out of the kitchen and up the stairs to her mother's room, retrieved the incriminating snifter from the night table, and returned to the kitchen, glaring. Elizabeth looked back at her levelly.

“What do you have to say about this?” Rosie asked.

Elizabeth did not hear her own voice: She heard the tone of her mother's. “Come here.”

Rosie shook her head, looked away.

“I promise you. On my honor. I didn't get drunker after you went to bed. I had a short glass of brandy while I was reading in bed, and I stayed awake all night, just tossing and turning.”

“How come?”

“Because I have insomnia. I'm not a good sleeper. It's just part of my nature. I can't seem to change it; like I can't change the color of my eyes.”

Rosie looked at the ground, scowling, tracing letters on the linoleum with the toe of her shoe.

“Come
here,
baby. I just want to hold you.”

Rosie continued to look at the floor. Her bottom lip was trembling, and the rich blue eyes were wet. Elizabeth could have died with love for that scrawny body, for the tiny succulent bottom, for that person.

“Rosie.” I swear to you, things will be different...

“Mama. What is to become of us?”

Oh,
Rosie.

Elizabeth spent the morning swathed not in gauze but in cotton batting. The front page was filled with disastrous news—Israel had been bombing its neighbors again, and the superpowers were in yet another nervous frenzy (boys in the kerosene-filled basement), and it gave her a thrill she would have admitted to no one. Maybe this time all hell was going to break loose. All her life, all hell—nuclear war—had threatened to break out. But suppose, say,
Russia
dropped a nice conventional bomb on Israel; it would put life into a state of suspended animation, would legitimize hanging out all day waiting to see where the chips would fall, would justify spending all day overeating, drinking, watching movies, playing with Rae, making love. It would get her off many hooks. And it would give her and Rae, who followed and discussed major international difficulties with the involvement and enthusiasm with which other people followed
Dallas,
great comic-tragic material.

“We do not leave the world to our children,” she read on page five, in an interview with a world-renowned pacifist. “We borrow it from them.”

But Elizabeth, with all the free time in the world, couldn't bring herself to work for pacific groups; the world was too far gone, too ghastly and demented, almost fictional, almost boring. And the people in town fighting the great good fights drove her up the wall:

She had attended one antinuclear meeting and spent the entire time waiting for it to be over. The man seated beside Elizabeth had tapped the shoulder of the equally white woman in front of him and asked, “I've seen you somewhere—aren't you a
Nicaragua person?” Elizabeth had hardly been able to wait to tell Rae, who sent peace and women's groups money.

Forget it. The thing was to take care of your children and the people you loved and your life. Personal grooviness
űiberalles

She made poached eggs and toast for breakfast but, with too much coffee and too little sleep, and having survived a night that felt like a nervous breakdown, she found that the food was unable to find a foothold anywhere in her stomach or intestines.

Back at the kitchen table, reading the Help Wanteds, infused with the desire to change her life on every level, in every way—to get moving, forward—she idly lifted a bottle of nail polish and, with a forlorn look on her face and a gaping, heavy hole in her chest, spent the next half hour slowly tipping the bottle back and forth, watching the swaths cut in the polish by the silver stir beads, the silvery etchings in crimson.

Miss Lacey, the second-grade teacher, was tall and thin, with a long red nose and an abounding interest in the genius and struggles of Rosie Ferguson. She had arranged for Rosie to study reading and arithmetic with the third-graders, gave her fourth-grade grammar workbooks and a blank notebook in which to keep a journal. She comforted her with hugs the day in music class when, upon hearing midway through “Aunt Rhody” that the goslings were crying because the old gray goose was dead, Rosie wept inconsolably. And she prefaced almost all her phone calls to Elizabeth by saying that it wasn't that she didn't treasure having Rosie in her class, but...

She had called when Rosie brought Elizabeth's checkbook to Show-and-Tell, when Rosie sold a blackish-green penny to David Harper several weeks later for a quarter, claiming it was worth three hundred dollars, and again when Rosie interrupted art class with an impression of Mrs. Brewster, the obese and loudly allergic principal.

“Hello, Elizabeth,” Miss Lacey said over the phone one afternoon.

Oh, Christ. What now? “Hello, Eileen.”

Eileen Lacey exhaled loudly.

“This morning, for Show-and-Tell, Rosie brought in a big black rock and claimed it was a chunk of a star that fell into your garden the other night.”

“Well, she's got an active imagination—”

“Elizabeth, she said that the star fell onto your boyfriend and killed him.”

“Oh.”

“In your garden. And the garbage-men took his body away this morning.”

“I see. Can you hang on a moment, please? I've left the water running.”

Elizabeth had been waiting all afternoon for it to be late enough for a beer. In a fit of resolve following her white night, she had poured all the hard liquor out and now drank only beer and wine.

She returned to the phone with a Mickey's Big Mouth ale.

“I'll talk to her when she gets home. I appreciate your calling me.”

“She has
such
a great mind, Elizabeth. I think it's so important that she learn to tell only the truth.”

“I couldn't agree more.”

“Doesn't she like your boyfriend?”

“I thought she did. Maybe she's jealous of him.” Elizabeth rolled her eyes.

“That's probably it. You'll talk to her about it though, won't you?”.

“Yes, of course.”

Rae called half an hour later to announce an impending collapse, brought on by Brian's not having called for three days.

“Oh, Rae. The guy's an asshole. Drop him.”

“But I'm in love with him.”

“Spare me the details.”

“But—”

“His behavior is continually bad.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Are you crying?”

“Yeah, but it's just because I'm so tired.”

“Ah.”

“I stayed up until five this morning.”

“Coke?”

“I wish.”

“Speed?”

“Mice. I swear to God, Elizabeth, they're driving me nuts; they're in the cupboards, the eaves, and the kitchen. As soon as I turn off the lights, they begin scritching away—
just
to push me over the edge. They go
scritch, scritch,
then they put their hands over their mouths to stifle their titters; I swear to God, they're snickering into their chests. While I pace around till all hours. About three this morning I made the mistake of looking in a mirror, and I had this eerie, wasted look on my face, like the guy in ‘The Tell-Tale Heart.'”

“Get a cat.”

“I don't like cats,” she said mournfully. “They're too
hairy.”

“Then set traps. Or poison them.”

“I did. I put d-Con wherever ... I suspected mouse encampments, then I swept it all back up. Don't laugh at me. I couldn't deal with opening a cupboard in the morning and finding all those mousey little corpses, the mamas clutching their babies like a little mouse Jonestown.”

“Oh, for Christ's sake, Rae.”

“I don't think I can get through the day—”

“Weave. And then come eat dinner with us.”

“Nah—”

“Goddammit, Rae, you won't leave the house because
he
might call, right? You could be over here with the woman who rejoices in being your best friend, with your adopted niece who always makes you happy, eating some wondrous dinner, listening to music, laughing, but you can't say yes because
he
might call and invite you to go on a dump run with him. Rae, he has the emotional range and expressiveness of a mean, well-trained dog.”

There was a long silence.

“Now I want you to get your voluptuous self over here at five.”

“Okay. Thanks.”

Poor Rae, thought Elizabeth. Despite my own grave faults, self-centeredness, laziness, aloofness, at
least
I've gotten over the dump-run syndrome, at
least
I've learned to learn to stop letting men jerk my leash.

Rae, with a heart that filled her entire chest cavity, loved Brian with a blind, selfless obsession. She made the common and devastating mistake of interpreting excellent lovemaking for love, of confusing sexual chemistry with loving. She sat around waiting for Brian to call, and when he didn't, she played records to summon him through telepathy, playing them loudly so he'd hear three miles away: “Love and Affection,” “Desperado,” “All of Me,” “If I Could Only Win Your Love.”

“You're kidding me,” said Elizabeth, when Rae told her. “Is it like ‘This song goes out to Brian from Rae:
Please
call'?”

“Exactly.”

“Jesus.”

Rosie and Sharon went into town after school, first to the post office, where they studied the Wanted posters in the glass display case, casting anxious eyes on the male customers who came and went. They stopped by the dime store to leer at the bras. They ran to the bakery, burst into the sweet yeasty room, and waited patiently for old Gio to give them a hot butter cookie, which he did. Then they crept stealthily to the boardwalk outside, tiptoeing past store windows, whispering in pig Latin, whirling around from time to time to see who might be on their trail.

They combed the dirt recess underneath the boardwalk for coins that inevitably fell through the slats, paced the dark earthy corridor, dimly lit by thin ribs of sunshine which filtered down along with the sounds of footsteps and voices, their eyes as sharp as hawks for flashes in the dirt. Three nickels, a dime, and a penny. They went back to the dime-store, bought twenty-six cents' worth of chocolate stars, and consumed them, one by one,
on the curb, with their feet in the gutter, chins on their knees, eyes peering upward at the passing parade.

“This is like looking out of a crib,” said Sharon.

“Rutty.”

“There's that retarded guy.”

“Mongo-brain.”

“They all look like brothers and sisters,” said Sharon.

“I wonder if they know they're retarded, or if they're too retarded to know.”

A third-grader rode past on a dirt bike, sneering
“Curly
girl” at Rosie.

“Oh, smell off,” she shouted at him, stung almost to the point of tears, the hot blood rushing to her face.

“That guy's a total dog dick,” said Sharon.

They giggled hysterically for a moment.

“Look, Rosie! There's a nun!”

“She's coming right at us.”

“Yoiks!”

“Raaaaaaid!”

They got up and tore, giggling, to the beach. They pried starfish off the wet boulders, threw them into the surf, caught and freed a dozen black-red crabs, skipped flat stones across the water.

“I'm starving to death,” said Rosie.

“Me too,” said Sharon.

Let's go to your house and raid the refrigerator, let's go to your house and raid the cupboards, let's go play with your mother, your trolls—

“Wull, we can't go to my house because my mother isn't there,” Rosie lied.

“We can't go to my house either. My dad's working there alone.”

“So who said I wanted to, stupid?” Rats. “You want to go to the lagoon fort?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“We can think of ways to get money.”

They left the beach, cut through the railroad yard, and headed for the lagoon where, months ago, they had found a hollow in the
dense brush near the shore on a deserted lot. They had borrowed planks, nails, bricks, and cardboard boxes from the construction site on an adjacent lot and made a fort with wooden and brick benches into which they occasionally pounded a nail, using a rock as a hammer. Rosie sat on a canvas bag of cement mix which they planned to use to cover the wooden frame of the fort once they got around to constructing the wooden frame, after which they would begin work on the moat and the drawbridge.

They had had to abandon the lagoon fort for a month recently. A big carp had washed up on shore, which they determined by mysterious means to be a boy. They christened him Fred and buried him in a shallow grave right outside the entrance to the clearing. Fred was their mascot. Within two days the fort was unapproachable, the stench having beckoned flies from miles around to a luau of decomposing carp.

It was good to be back. When they got bored sitting in the fort—which is to say, when they found themselves in the fort without candy—they went to watch the carpenters hammer and measure and pour concrete.

“How we gonna get some money?” Sharon asked, sitting on a bench made of a plank and two bricks.

“Let me think.”

Half an hour later the girls were standing outside Safeway, sorrowfully explaining to adult passersby that they were collecting money because their puppy needed an operation for leukemia, and their parents were going to put it to sleep if they didn't come up with the money soon. The puppy's name, Rosie sadly confided to each grown-up, was Little Maggie.

Within ten minutes they had enough money to buy two bottles of Coke and two small bags of ruffled dip chips. They opened the twist-off caps and tore the foil bags with their teeth, which served them in as many ways as Swiss Army knives: scissors, bottle openers, pliers.

“Hi, Mama.”

“Hi, baby.”

“What's for dinner?”

“Macaroni and cheese.”

“Oh, thrills.”

“Rae's coming over in a few minutes.”

“Good!”

“Miss Lacey called again.”

Rosie looked off into space and bit her lip.

“Any idea what she might have called about?”

Rosie closed one eye, thought hard, shrugged.

“None at all?”

Rosie pushed back in her chair so that it was on a two-legged diagonal.

“Straighten up.”

Rosie slowly lowered the front legs to the ground. “Was it about Andrea Kinkaid?”

“No. Why? What did you do to Andrea Kinkaid?”

“Nothing. She's just a total crybaby.”

Elizabeth looked exasperated.

“Miss Lacey called about the falling star you took to Show-and-Tell.” Rosie nodded glumly. “And the dead man in our garden.” Nod, nod. “Is this ringing a bell?” Nod, nod,
eyes
averted. “Care to comment?”

“Well, I had to bring something.”

“But you didn't have to lie.”

Rosie looked bored.

“See how stupid you feel when you get caught? That's one good reason not to lie. And for another thing, if you tell the truth, you don't have to keep track of what you said. It gives you a lot more freedom. And for another thing, it doesn't reflect well on me—”

“Wull,
you
lie.”

“Like when?”

“Like when you tell someone on the phone you have to hang up because there's something on the stove when THERE ISN'T ANYTHING ON THE STOVE AT ALL.” Rosie, fierce, continued. “Or you tell some guy you can't go out with him because you already have plans, and then we just hang out here all night reading.”

“Good. Good point.”

“I mean,” said Rosie, “what sort of example do you think that sets for me?”

Oh, Rosie. You're becoming a scapegoater, like me. “See, sometimes I think it's all right to lie if the truth would hurt someone's feelings about something that they've already done—like if someone gets a terrible haircut, or an expensive and ugly dress. Or, say, if some perfectly nice man wants to be with me and I'm not interested, I think it's better to lie to save his face, instead of saying, ‘I don't want to hang out with you because you're so fucking boring it sets my teeth on edge!' But! When you lie to make yourself look more impressive, or you have betrayed someone's trust or broken a promise, or if someone else is going to have to take the blame for something
you
did—”

“But, but—”

“Let me finish. I know you didn't hurt anyone by lying to the class, but maybe they won't believe you next time, when you're telling the truth. And I know you lied because you wanted your life to seem more exciting than theirs....”

“Noooo. I did it ‘cause people bring the stupidest, most boringest stuff, and you have to listen to them for about an
hour
talk about some stupid
acorn
or something, or some stupid
sea
gull feathers.”

Elizabeth smiled. “Yeah, I know, I know how you feel, but there's funny stuff in your room you could take—that fake blood Rae gave you, or—”

“I brought that in two
weeks
ago.”

Elizabeth exhaled, looked intently at her daughter. “Look, I really just want you to tell the truth—I want
me
to tell the truth—as much as possible.”

“Okay.”

“Rosie?”

“Ah-yeh?”

“Did the star kill Gordon?”

“Yep.”

“Don't you like him?”

“Not very much. He thinks he's so big. Do
you?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes I like him all right.”

“Mama, but you know what? Sometimes when you tell Rae a
story about something we did, it didn't really
happen
that way. I mean, it mostly did, but when you tell the story, there's all this extra stuff.”