Rosie O'Dell (12 page)

For two fitful nights and three sombre days I saw visions of
myself, my bald head in one of those wool caps, slowly fading off the face of
the earth, my tragedy mitigated only by the images of Rosie’s face full of love
for me because I was suffering and dying. Then an evening phone call came to Mom
from Rosie’s mother.

I happened to answer the hall phone and Nina’s familiar voice at the other end
asked, with none of the usual pleasantries, “May I speak to Mrs. Sharpe,
please?” like a stranger.

I called out to Mom. She emerged from the back porch dressed for outside with
her running shoes in her hands, motioned me towards her mutely, and whispered,
“Who is it?” She was anxious in a way I’d never seen before.

“I think it’s Auntie Nina. But she asked for Mrs. Sharpe.”

This brought a frown into her face. “I’ll take it upstairs,” she murmured, and
walked thoughtfully, rather than with her usual lope, up the steps. I heard
“Hello?” from my receiver as I hung up and then an animated “Oh hi, Nina,” from
upstairs before the door to her bedroom closed. I could not remember my mother
and Nina O’Dell Rothesay talking on the phone during the past week or longer.
For years, before Nina’s marriage to Dr. Rothesay, the two women talked nearly
every night. After the marriage, the frequency dropped, but they still chatted
often, perhaps a couple of times a week, enough that Dad’s gentle joshing over
Mom’s twenty minutes of gabbing and laughing with Nina on the phone in the
kitchen had continued.

She wasn’t on the phone twenty minutes this time, though. Within one minute I
heard from the kitchen her door opening upstairs. She walked slowly back down
and said something to Dad in the living room, too low for me to hear. I moved to
the kitchen door to listen. I heard her saying, “… and then she hung up on
me.”

There was a long silence while I waited for Dad to respond. Finally he
muttered, “You did what you felt you had to do, Gladys. Now you can only let the
chips fall where they may.”

Later that same week relations between Mom and Dad became turbulent again. The
last time I heard my father go into extreme ranting mode like this was when I’d
left my bike half under the car on the passenger side in the driveway and he
backed over it. It didn’t bother him so much that he had crushed my bike to
smithereens but that for a few seconds he had feared he’d run over a
neighbourhood child. That eruption had been directed at me. This one was
directed at Mom.

It took place in Dad’s study downstairs with the door closed.
For a few minutes, Mom must have been telling him something. I could hear her
murmuring but could not make out the words. Then I heard the roars from Dad,
meaningless to me because I had no context, but still extremely frightening: “I
told you I never wanted anything to do with any of them. I told you they were
crazy and dangerous.” “You do not have anything, Gladys, not a shred. We are
opening ourselves up to disaster.” “I know I said let the goddamned chips fall
where they may. That was before we faced this shit.” “Drop it, Gladys. For the
love of Christ, drop it. You know how these things work. Drop it, drop it, drop
it, before they hand us our fucking heads.”

I had no idea what he was bawling about in there, beyond a feeling it had
something to do with Rosie’s family. But I would have found out, if I had not
made a big mistake. Instead of waiting and listening and gathering more that
night or in days to come from overhearing bits of their conversations, my
intolerable anxiety tonight over Dad’s bellowing at Mom made me walk downstairs
from my bedroom, bang on the door of my father’s study, and shout out to them
that I wanted to know right now what was going on in there.

Absolute silence prevailed inside for thirty seconds. Then the door opened and
Mom looked at me with startled eyes in a pale and stricken face as Dad’s
colouring mellowed from deep purple to bright pink. They were realizing for the
first time that I’d been overhearing them. Dad said quietly, “There’s nothing
going on, my man. Absolutely nothing. I’ve just been making a mountain out of a
molehill. I’m sorry if I worried you with my shouting and yelling.”

After that confrontation, I never heard my parents discussing the taboo
subject, whatever the hell it was, again. If they did continue, it was out of my
hearing. Therefore I did not then find out what had driven my father to the edge
of panic, and I would not find out for three years. This would become in my mind
the blunder of my life. If I hadn’t, by my intrusion when I was twelve years
old, stopped my father and mother from arguing about it, if I’d simply shut up
and eavesdropped as usual, I would surely have discovered enough to burst it
wide open in my naive forthrightness, and prevent, not the evil already done,
but the tragedy that was yet to come. It would scarcely bear my thinking back,
when I was older, to what had been and what did not have to be.

Meanwhile, the week after my confrontation, word went throughout the students
of Smearies school that Rosie O’Dell’s mother and stepfather
had
been forced to come in to see Curly Abbott about her medical condition.
Speculation among the kids on what she might be afflicted with ran from that new
disease, anorexia, to that other new disease, premenstrual syndrome, to that old
disease, manic depression, with the new name, bipolar disorder. Students agreed
with each other that it was a darn good thing Rosie’s new father was a
doctor.

One morning during this spring in grade seven I left the classroom to use the
toilet and by coincidence met ten-year-old Pagan O’Dell in the corridor on her
way to the washroom too.

“Hi ya, Tom,” she said brightly with none of the shyness or blushing she used
to show whenever we came close in school.

As we walked along the empty corridor, I asked, “What’s wrong with Rosie all
the time? Is she sick or something?”

“There’s nothing wrong with Rosie,” said Pagan, “except that she thinks she’s
Sarah Bernhardt.”

“Thinks she’s who?”

“That’s what Mom calls someone who’s always putting on a big act all the time.
Moping and mooning and pining. I half expect to see her swooning into Heathcliff
’s arms next. Hey, Tom, you can’t come in here. This is the Girls’.”

“Jeez. I wasn’t watching where I was going.”

“See ya, Tom,” said poor little beautiful Pagan with the big bright
smile.

Back in the classroom, I looked over at Rosie. Someone who was putting on a big
act, I thought, showed off. Whatever Rosie was doing, shrivelled into herself,
her face devoid of animation, seemed to be the exact opposite of that. She never
even noticed me these days, as she often used to with a smile or wave, when I
looked at her in class. I didn’t exist. But, then, no one else did either.

I came first in grade seven. I’d regained the title by default. Mom looked at
my report card with no reaction on her face and, instead of congratulating me,
asked where Rosie had come.

“Third,” I said, and because I took no pleasure from my comeback, I continued,
“Which shows how smart she is, because she seemed to be in a daze in all her
classes ever since Christmas.”

“But she was starting to feel better before the end of the school year, wasn’t
she?”

“I suppose,” I said. “But how would you know? You haven’t even seen her. How
come you and her mother are bad friends?”

She answered my second question. “Personal differences happen
between friends going through life, Tom.”

In fact, she was right about Rosie’s condition. Towards summer holidays, Rosie
certainly had changed again, and students at Smearies commented on it as part of
their opinion that Rosie O’Dell’s stepfather was the best doctor in town. That
judgment sprang from three pieces of intelligence. One: he and his family had
just moved into a big new house in the exclusive Buckingham Mews subdivision.
Two: Pagan O’Dell would not be coming back to Smearies next year because she was
going to attend a private girls’ school in Ontario. Three: the trickle-down talk
from teachers was that Dr. Rothesay had been absolutely right this spring in
forecasting to the principal Rosie’s early recovery from those miserable days
she’d been going through. Her condition had turned out to be, thank God, none of
those awful diseases everyone had been speculating about, but a “delayed
reaction” to her beloved father’s horrific accidental death, combined with
emotional stress caused by her mother’s remarriage. The reliability of Dr.
Rothesay’s diagnosis and prognosis was evident from the fact that he shouldered
blame himself, having volunteered to the principal that her condition was
largely his fault, because he should have mastered his love and waited longer
before asking for her mother’s hand in matrimony. Girls’ eyes misted over in the
corridors as they talked of the tension between bliss and pain when it came to
true love.

One day, bending over the water fountain near the staff room on a warm June
day, I’d heard through the half-open door, our grade seven teacher, Miss Pretty,
mimicking to another teacher our principal Curly Abbott: “‘You must now agree,
Ms. Pretty, that well within the time frame of Dr. Rothesay’s prognosis during
his frank and forthright discussion of young Rosie’s crisis in my office, she
has emerged like a chrysalis from her cocoon to fly again like a butterfly in
the sun.’” Miss Pretty’s mocking impression of Curly’s pomposity did not sound
to me like hearty agreement with his view.

The strange relationship that had recently developed between Rosie and Suzy
Martin, the school’s female tough, added to the general analysis. Suzy Martin
had joined the class at the beginning of the grade seven year after her family
had moved to St. John’s from somewhere in central Newfoundland. From the day she
arrived at Smearies school, rumours swirled, ranging from talk among the
students that her father, now an absentee husband, used to be a minister in one
of those sex cults, to whispers that
Suzy’s so-called little
brother who lived with her father rather than her mother, which was itself
weird, was really her own child. This latter surmise was possible, students
claimed, because she displayed enough physical maturity that some of the boys
had given her the nickname “Headlights.”

From her first week last fall, Suzy Martin was Rosie O’Dell’s enemy. They were
opposites in every respect. Where Suzy’s background was financially modest,
Rosie’s was deemed prosperous. If Suzy was rough, Rosie was relatively genteel.
When Rosie aced every test and assignment, Suzy’s papers usually sported an
“unsatisfactory.” Where Rosie participated in positive extracurricular
activities, Suzy smoked and swore and, some said, drank. Where Rosie seemed
prissy and straightlaced, Suzy was regarded by boys in the class as experienced
enough in sex to be called behind her back “the human pincushion.”

Suzy did not hide her dislike of Rosie and her high and mighty and righteous
manner. She expressed her contempt with names like Ice Queen and Dragon Lady,
and, after it became known that Rosie was going to move house, the Bitch of
Buckingham Mews. Rosie ignored her, despite these verbal and some near physical
provocations in the corridors. Many of the boys lived in daily hope that
violence would break out between them. That would be some cat fight, they told
each other: Rosie was strong and athletic, but Suzy was a hard mean street
fighter; while Rosie would be sure of winning by the Queensberry rules, Suzy
would be clawing the eyes out of her head. But Rosie never deigned to pay the
least attention to her. If Suzy tried to confront her by blocking her way in the
corridor, Rosie walked around her with no more concern than if she’d been a bag
of trash. Once, just before Christmas, when Suzy actually took a flick with her
pointy fingernails at Rosie’s face, Brent, who had witnessed it, reported to me
that Rosie casually moved her head out of the way with outstanding reflex
action, looked at Suzy as if surprised she existed, sadly shook her head a
couple of times, and walked on.

During the winter, there didn’t seem to be any encounters at all between the
two girls, at least none that I saw. Brent conjectured that Suzy must have
realized Rosie was way too fast for her, and if it came down to a scrap, “Rosie
would give her a good shit-knocking.” A few times after the start of Rosie’s bad
period, in classes I shared with the two girls, I caught Suzy, as she slumped on
her desk, gazing furtively from under her eyelashes at Rosie. I tried to make
out the expression on her face. It didn’t look
like hatred, more
like puzzlement. Then, after Easter of grade seven, Rosie and this same
hardcase, Suzy Martin, mystified everyone. Overnight, with no evident transition
period, they became fast inseparable friends. For the rest of the school year
they never seemed to be out of each other’s sight.

I HAD A BIG
summer ahead. A week or so after school closing
I was going to Twillingate for a fortnight with Brent and his parents. I was
looking forward to that. Brent’s father fascinated me. I found him both amusing
and frightening at the same time. And I was not to be disappointed this trip.
After Twillingate, I was to have three weeks in St. John’s, with Brent staying
at my house for most of it, during which time I hoped to weasel my way into
Rosie’s company somehow. And then I was flying to London, England, with Dad and
Mom, for, as Dad kept saying, pretending to mock the ads of similar tone on the
radio, “the dream trip of a lifetime.”

The first thing I noticed when I arrived at the house in Twillingate was the
absence of the old dog. When I wondered about him, Brent’s dad said in a
whining, boyish voice as if he were quoting from the movie, “Don’t make me shoot
Old Yeller, Pa.” And he smiled at me benignly.