Rosie

  “And then you sit there smirking because I’m mad.”

  “There are no words, Elizabeth, for how infuriating it is to deal with women sometimes. I know it is equally infuriating to deal with men. But I can’t stand how much attention women need, how much reassurance—”

  “You’re an asshole.”

  “That’s on the rune stones too.”

  He took his notebook out of his back pocket, located, after some effort, the pencil tucked between his ear and hair, and scribbled for a minute, then replaced the pad and pencil with nods of scholarly interest.

  “I’ll tell you something,” he said after several minutes of a sad, hostile silence from Elizabeth. “I’m not an asshole. I have many frustrating things on my mind, like money, and whether some publisher will buy my book—I’m feeling a lot of pressures right now, and I spend an enormous amount of time with you, which ought to indicate how important you are, and I don’t want a hard time if I’m late occasionally.”

  “Okay, okay,” said Elizabeth. “Good. Let’s drop it.”

  “No, let’s keep talking about it; you’re still mad.”

  “No, I’m not. I just want you to call.”

  “I will promise to try to call.”

  “Okay, good. Fine. Finished.” She raised her glass halfheartedly to him.

  “Listen,” he said, “let’s just keep talking, let’s keep clearing the air.”

  “You know what you are, James?”

  He shook his head.

  “You’re a Communicator. Like Rae.” He nodded, beaming. “It’s a sickness,” she said. He nodded happily.

  “I know. It’s also one of the best things about me.”

  “Mama?”

  They smiled at each other, somewhat embarrassed.

  “Mama?”

  “Come down here if you want to talk to me.”

  Rosie appeared in the living room in a minute and flopped over into the easy chair.

  “Take your legs off the armrest.”

  “Yes, Miss Mother.”

  “Now.”

  “Right away, Miss Mother.”

  Elizabeth sighed deeply. James and Rosie immediately sighed just as loudly, and Elizabeth smiled.

  “I came down for dessert,” said Rosie. “We have ice cream, James, here at our house.”

  “Peach.”

  “Oh,” he moaned. “It’s peach season. And we’re going to have peach ice cream, right now, right here.” From the look on his face and the rolling motion of his shoulders and face, it seemed to be almost more than he could bear.

  They sat on the darkened porch with Japanese bowls full of peach ice cream; the crescent of moon was just short of half way, platinum yellow; the points shone most brightly, and it seemed to Elizabeth that there had never been more stars in the sky. “Remember, Mama, when Mary Poppins pasted stars onto the sky?” Elizabeth nodded. She had poured herself and James a snifter of brandy as a chaser for the creamy peach. It was all so good. James sang “Would You Like to Swing on a Star?” Elizabeth silently rehashed their conversation. The two hours before he arrived had caused exactly those feelings in her which made her suspicious of love: sick, angry, hurt, hateful thoughts.

  “James?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Is Heaven in our solar system?”

  James lifted his brandy glass and looked down into it contemplatively. “Yes,” he said. “I think so.”

  When the Fergusons had gone to Boston to visit Nana, when Rosie was three and a half, they had flown above the clouds but hadn’t seen Heaven, no Emerald City where the sun was always shining.

  “Where is it?” she had asked Andrew, about to cry.

  “Higher up.”

  “How far?”

  “About ten miles.”

  “Oh.”

  While Rosie and James continued their discussion of Heaven’s situation, Elizabeth’s mind raced with old, odd, sad memories of men. A perfect summer night: fragrant, warm, starry.

  Rosie was positive, positive, that she could see Voyager II hovering alongside Saturn that night. They could hear faraway crickets, a chorus of frogs, an owl, the faint rustle of leaves. Rosie climbed lightly into her lap, and Elizabeth finally came back.

  There were days when Rosie quite obviously wasn’t getting enough from Elizabeth, who sometimes resented her child’s presence when she would have preferred to be alone to savor her obsession with James, to rehearse or rehash dialogues and scenes of their life together so far. Rosie knew that her mother didn’t want her around and sometimes got even by being as underfoot and demanding as possible. Other times she performed small retaliatory acts, like stuffing wads of newspaper into the toes of Elizabeth’s shoes, shaking up the beer bottles, burying dishes deep in the garbage bag that she deemed simply too disgusting to wash.

  Then she lied. “ I didn’t do it.”

  “Did the mice do it then?”

  “How should I know?”

  “Stop lying to me.”

  “Maybe James did it.”

  “Goddammit, Rosie.”

  “Goddammit, Rosie.”

  “Don’t you fucking start that repeating bullshit on me.”

  “Don’t you fucking start—” Elizabeth whacked her on the bottom, hard.

  When James and Elizabeth had been seeing each other very steadily but not every night for a month and a half, they would walk in on one another in the bathroom and make jokes. And, as Elizabeth periodically smelled a. just-removed Tampax for (among other reasons) indications of yeast or infection, it was inevitable that one day, without knocking, James entered as Elizabeth was dangling a bloody tampon by the string in front of her nose, sniffing.

  “Oh, my God,” he said. “Are you going to eat that?”

  “Tell me a secret,” James asked one morning in bed. “I’ve told you most of my best ones.”

  He had told her that he had frequently cheated in school until college, had slept with a man once, had sent away for a bottle of Growing Pills when he was a teenager, had lied about having read Augie March, had listened with a glass at the door to his parents’ lovemaking; that his greatest fear was of imprisonment, that on his fifth Easter he had run outside to search for eggs, had stepped on a broken milk bottle, and had hidden in the bath-room, bleeding profusely, filled with guilt and the fear of punishment, cowering. He showed her the long thin scar on the bottom of his left foot. He had told that at six he had inadvertently killed a dog. She did not tell him—had never told anyone—that when she was four she put a kitten in the dryer because the kitten was rain-wet and the dryer was warm and that her mother had thrown in a load of wet clothes and the kitten had been dried to death. Elizabeth was in a trance when he told her about the dog; the movie played in her mind when her mother appeared holding the dead kitten, blaming herself, and Elizabeth could remember exactly how horrified she had felt at four because she felt it again for seconds, remembering; it knocked the wind out of her.

  “Please, Elizabeth, please tell me a secret, please.”

  They lay looking at each other, wrapped around each other. “What do you want to know?”

  “I want to know how you secretly feel about men.”

  “Okay.... Part of me hates them and is afraid of them. They have caused enormous pain in my life, and in the lives of my friends over the years, women and men friends. And I am frequently embarrassed for and by them because they’re such self-parodies, strutting their stuff, being so fucking predictable. Are you using this for material?”

  “Yes. Go on.”

  “Sometimes I’ve felt so revolted by a man, usually one I’ve had sex with, and so afraid of them fucking with my soul, that I think I must have been molested as a baby by a male relative.”

  “God.”

  “And then, see, I was raised to think men were dangerous, that any man my parents didn’t know extremely well was a threat, a killer or molester or kidnapper. I was raised to be afraid of being touched by men. And then at the same time it was made clear to me
that the great good approval would always come from a man, and that men were the ones to impress. And then I’m prepubescent and the emphasis is on how pretty and flirty girls are supposed to be—I mean, advertising, conditioning—you boys got off easy, advertising-wise. And then I’m eleven, and these breasts start growing like mad—you know, it was like the instant-pudding scene in Sleeper—and the boys go nuts and tease me in what felt like a vicious way, and my mother, who’s pushing the nice be-pretty stuff, is freaked out about me and boys; it was causing her to go crazy, I think. I spent years getting these Fast Girl pep talks from her. Her voice would get all furtive and whispery-indignant—she’d put her face up close to mine and she’d feel all tingly, in a bad way. And it would be one word: fastgirl: ‘Don’t wear lipstick, people will think you’re a fastgirl; do you know that awful Kerry Burns, her poor mother, the girl’s a tramp, a fastgirl, bleaches her hair and hangs out with the trampy girl with the eyeliner, Marsha Crawford....”

  James was laughing steadily.

  “I bring home my eighth-grade yearbook picture; she makes a fuss about how pretty I look and then she’s in such a frenzy about my sexuality that she’s running a finger all over the page like she’s looking in the Yellow Pages, it’s like ‘Can you find the Six Fastgirls in This Picture?’ Mostly they were the popular girls. And in the ensuing twenty-five years my most excruciating pains have been caused by men.”

  “You’re heterosexual, so it’s men. If you were gay, the pain would have been from women.”

  “Maybe.”

  “You’re very cynical about love, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’re so secretive—it was such good stuff you told me; it makes me able to understand more, you, and women, and me.”

  “Good.”

  “But see, the thing is, Elizabeth, we all know by now that it’s all there is. And the world is in such danger and madness, and we have no leaders! We only have the people we’re close to, and it’s time we learned to love and trust one another-better, I mean, people in general.”

  “You’re raving.”

  “No, I’m not. I think you can learn to have a loving attitude, like you learn a sport or an instrument. And it’s time....”

  “Are you going to do the last scene from The Great Dictator?”

  Hangovers. She had hangovers nearly every morning, although of course she didn’t admit it. They left her lethargic, but wired and paranoid. Was James simply using her and Rosie for material? He was always jotting things down in his notebook. Was he using them because, in a few more months, he would have depleted his savings and would have to get a job ... unless he moved in and sponged off her? What would he do if he knew how much she drank, all the extra shots and sips she took behind his back? There were times when, glancing at his face after she dropped a glass or walked unsteadily, she could tell he knew what he was buying into. Sometimes he watched her drink at dinner with a certain apprehension, as if he had slipped her a Mickey Finn, but he never said a word. If he really loved her, wouldn’t he want to help her drink less? Unless he needed a progressively alcoholic woman in his novel—stop, stop! Stop being so distrustful, defensive, restrained.

  But as much as he poured himself into her, and as much as she loved it, and loved pouring herself into him insofar as possible, she couldn’t surrender and could only feel the absence of a thin shield of emotional Plexiglas when they were drunk and making love.

  “I love you,” he said often.

  “Thank you.” You’re wonderful. You’re great. Rosie adores you. I adore you. If you really knew me, knew my worst secrets, you wouldn’t. “Oh, James.”

  “What.”

  “I am so fucked up.”

  “So am I. So is Rae. So is Jonathan Winters.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Why are you so doleful? I love you.”

  She took his hand, kissed his fingernails. “I know you do.”

  If Elizabeth got out of bed when James did, he helped her make the bed without being asked, nonchalantly, as if by second nature, as a woman friend would.

  But as often as not, Elizabeth slept in, claiming that insomnia had kept her up until all hours, when in fact she had drunk too much again.

  “I’m getting a stranglehold on Part Two,” he said one morning. “I’m going to write all night.”

  “Okay.”

  She missed him all day, couldn’t get him out of her mind, missed him at dinner, wished he could taste the trout she’d cooked, wished he could see Rosie in her new overalls.

  “Look out for bones, baby.”

  “Don’t you miss James?”

  “A little. It’s nice to be alone with you, though. All to my-self.”

  “Are you going to marry him?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve only known him a little while.”

  “But he sleeps here all the time. And he’s in love with you.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because he looks at you all—googily.”

  “Yeah?”

  “So do you love him?”

  “He makes me feel happy all the time, just to think of him....”

  “So why don’t you just say you’re in love with him?”

  “God. I don’t know.”

  They lay reading in the window seat that evening, separately. Rosie snuggled up beside her, absorbed in Stuart Little, and Elizabeth was trying to concentrate on an article in Esquire. Every so often she looked into her child’s face, at the expression of quizzical nobility, at the baby finger crooked over her bottom lip; sometimes a look passed over Rosie’s face, as if she were tasting something rare and delicious.

  James was second on Rosie’s God Bless list that night.

  After tucking her in, Elizabeth returned to the window seat, resumed her reading, and found, in an article about high school, an answer to her unvoiced question: why she was so afraid to fall in love. A class of seniors were studying Beowulf in English, and the teacher could not get a discussion off the ground. All the kids were bored. Finally, a boy asked the question which was the answer to Elizabeth’s. If Grendel was going to the mead hall all the time and devouring a bunch of men, why did men keep going back to the mead hall?

  Elizabeth stared, smiling, at the ceiling.

  Rae said, Be brave, be kind. Rae kept going back to the mead hall because it was there, and she needed it, and it was fun. Elizabeth sat upright. She would call James. James was wonderful. She liked him, loved him, trusted him, and wanted him. She was going to tell him now, tonight; she was going to throw her hat into the ring.

  She walked, smiling, to the telephone, and dialed his number.

  A woman with an English accent answered. “Hello?”

  Elizabeth, bug-eyed, hung up. What? No! Yes. Her stomach buckled, and her knees grew weak, and she stormed the kitchen, electrified with jealousy and rage. She slooshed scotch in and out of a glass, lifted it to her mouth with shaking hands. Goddamn fucking asshole, I was right: Short Man syndrome, general male shittiness—why didn’t you trust your intuition? He was all wrong from the start, it wasn’t the smoking and shirts and the dog and the quotes that had put her off; it was an intuitive knowledge that he was not acceptable to her. Close call. Thank God she had never said I love you. Good riddance.

  The phone rang, and she let it ring ten times. Finally she answered. “Yes?”

  “Hi, sweetheart,” he said. “Did you just call?”

  “Yeah. As a matter of fact.”

  “Why did you hang up?”

  “Guess.”

  “Because a woman answered, and you thought it was someone I was schtupping, right? You’re jealous, aren’t you! Great! That means you love me. Lank and his girl friend are here tonight.”

  Elizabeth didn’t say anything, only suddenly felt foolish and distrustful.

  “On my honor,” he said. She could tell he was smirking. Neither said anything for a moment. She heard a door close. “You was jeal-ous.” She smiled. “Oh,” he said, “I’
m so happy. My heart soars like an eagle. You love me, don’t you? Admit it.”

  “Yes.”

  “Can I come over and play?”

  “Yes. James?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You swear to God that was Lank’s girl friend? You didn’t mention that she was English.”

  “It slipped my mind.”

  “But do you swear to God?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you weren’t fucking her?”

  “No. I wasn’t fucking her.”

  “And Lank is there?”

  “Do you want to talk to him?”

  “No. I trust you.”

  “Good. I’ll be there in an hour.” An angry blonde, ten years younger than Elizabeth, was glaring at him. He turned his palms upward, tried not to smile too broadly. “Elizabeth?”

  “Jeez, I’m sorry, James,” she said. And sighed. “I just wanted to know.”

  CHAPTER 13

  James arrived one drizzly evening with an envelope in the pocket of his jeans. “I got rejected at Putnam’s,” he said when she opened the door. He was brooding; she looked consolingly at him, felt as she did when Rosie suffered—it made her so sad—but a small voice in her was relieved, glad he had been rejected. She led him to the living room and felt so sad for him that she even found his green zip-up sportshirt endearing.

  “The editor there said it was stupid and badly written and boring and he hoped I would die.”

  “Let me see.”

  James scowled and retrieved the envelope huffily. He thrust it at her, as if daring her to read it. The letter read: “Thank you for letting me take a look at your work. I’m afraid it’s not right for us at this time, as we already have two autobiographical novels by men on our upcoming list. My main problem with your writing is that the humor is overdone, it’s too show-offy. But please let me see your next book, and good luck. You have a lot of talent.”

  “Where’s the part where he hopes you die?”

  “You have to read between the lines.”

  “I bet it’s a wonderful book.”

  “It’s a piece of shit.”

  “Do you want a drink?”

  “Yeah.”

  Elizabeth went to the kitchen. There was a half-empty bottle of J&B in the cupboard, from which she poured two stiff shots (one was an inch stiffer until she took a big bracing sip). She carried them to the living room, sipping on hers as soon as he could see her; the sip legitimized the whiskey on her breath.