Crooked Little Heart (10 page)

That made her feel just the opposite of the way she felt with Rae in church that night, when she too finally closed her eyes, and she heard why Rae was having joy—because something was happening in spite of the incompetence of the pianist and the singers. Something was
happening in spite of how funky the surface of the music was, like spirit rising up through all the dreck of the world.

O
N
the night before Easter, Rae stretched out on the couch in the living room after dinner as if she were at her psychiatrist’s. James and Elizabeth sat in easy chairs beside her. Rosie was lying on the floor working halfheartedly on a report for social studies.

“Are you comfortable down there, Rosie?” Rae asked.

“Pretty much.”

“Because you could always try to shove a huge, foul, arthritic old woman over to one side of the couch.”

Rosie smiled at Rae affectionately. “It’s okay.”

“I’m missing Mike so badly this week. I can’t believe how I still feel after all this time—I mean, it’s been almost two months, right? I still feel like I’m in nicotine withdrawal. In fact, Rosie darling? I’ll do anything if you’ll run to the store and get me a pack of cigarettes.”

“Rae, you don’t smoke. Remember?”

“I don’t? Did I used to? Did I quit?”

“Uh-huh. A few years ago.”

“Do you think you will call him?” James asked.

“I don’t know,” said Rae. “Maybe. Probably.”

“He doesn’t have much to give, Rae,” said Elizabeth. “Meanness, and crumbs.”

“Well,” said Rae, “it’s better than nothing.” Elizabeth smiled gently. “I was so comfortable with Mike, because I’m so good at fending off sadism. It’s what I learned to do well as a child. And to thrive on turnip juice—emotionally, it was all my parents had to offer. It’s a little bitter perhaps, and dehydrating. But it tastes like love to me. And that’s what Mike has to offer. Turnip juice in a beautiful goblet.”

“Do you hear how crazy that is? To give your heart to someone like that?” Elizabeth said.

“Uh-huh,” said Rae.

“You want him to be tuned into you, and he keeps saying, ‘Hey, honey, turn on the radio and twiddle the dials.’ ”

“I know,” said Rae. She closed her eyes.

“He’s a narcissist in delusion,” said James.

“And what’s the delusion?”

“That’s he’s not a narcissist.”

T
HE
next day Rosie went over to Lank’s in the afternoon to work on her report, a five-page paper on any topic she pleased. She had chosen the history of women’s tennis, and so far her report, which Elizabeth had read over breakfast, began:

Rosie adored Lank. He was the first man she had loved in a romantic way, when she was ten and found him so sexy she could hardly breathe, with his cherubic face, that soft fair skin, and his big body like a friendly bear. He was so different from the other boys and men she knew—the tennis boys mostly, and Peter. He was the exact opposite of Peter, partly because he was so uncoordinated but also, he was so sweet and regular. Peter was like a movie star who happened to be a great tennis player. Her mother said one of the things she loved about Lank was that you could still see his baby self—the animal self, the dreaming self, the self that didn’t have language, the self that was fluid
and full of appetite and satiety and frustration, that could not cover its nakedness with motor control.

Lank was lacking in motor control.

He was one of the least coordinated men Elizabeth had ever seen. James, who played basketball with him and a few of their friends once a week, said that Lank was the Pee-Wee Herman of the sports world, simultaneously stiff and rubbery. And even Rosie, who watched him with basset-hound eyes, had to admit that he wasn’t much of an athlete. She had played tennis with him the summer before, because he’d said he played, and on the first shot he lifted his back leg like a garden statue and hit a backhand so stiffly, with his back leg still poised behind him, that it looked like a stream of water was about to spout from the top of his head.

But he knew how to be a friend, and he knew how to get kids to want to do well in school. Whenever Rosie had a report due, she’d take all of her notes and research over to Lank’s for an afternoon. He always made her describe the report in one or two sentences, “as if you were writing copy for the TV listings,” so she’d know exactly what she was and wasn’t writing about.

Now Rosie was bent over Lank’s cluttered kitchen table, trying to figure out what else she could say in the report. She cared passionately about her subject: she and Simone and all the other girls on the junior circuit talked about the history of women’s tennis the way Democrats used to talk about the civil rights movement. Just the other day at breakfast, Rosie had been discussing the women’s long march from the early days of Helen Wills Moody, Althea Gibson breaking the race barrier, to the great Maria Bueno, to Margaret Court and Rosie Casals and the pivotal moment when Billie Jean King whipped Bobby Riggs, “that froggy little butt,” as Rosie called him. Her eyes were flashing as she recounted the
miracle
of Chris Evert’s transformation from goody-goody to one of the leaders of the movement, like Martin Luther King, and when James volunteered gently that perhaps he wouldn’t go
quite
that far, Rosie stalked from the table and shouted down from the top of the stairs that James was a froggy little butt, too.

L
ANK
loved Rosie in much the same way Rae loved Rosie, in the unabashed and spoiling way of godparents. He loved her company, the
warm quality of the companionship she was able to show to people who made few demands on her, who took her as she was, unlike the bottomlessly annoying and judgmental way of her parents. They sat at his table today, side by side, Rosie writing her paper, Lank correcting homework and answering her questions. Bruno slept on the floor beneath the table as they worked, pressed against Rosie’s ankles like a warm furry log. She inhaled Lank’s smells, the saltiness, his maleness, like soil.

L
ANK
’
S
last girlfriend had been fifteen years younger than he; she spoke in a little Kewpie-doll voice.

“She’s a lot smarter than she looks,” he said when James and Elizabeth were rolling their eyes about her one day. “And she’s very sweet, and very honest.”

Dust motes danced in the flickering gleams of sunshine that streamed through the kitchen windows.

“Lank,” said Elizabeth. “Honesty does not mean telling a couple of strangers about your urinary tract infections over dinner.”

“First of all, you’re not strangers, you’re my best friends. And second of all, she was just explaining why she wasn’t having drinks that night—because of her medication.”

“She pronounced vagina ‘pagina,’ ” Elizabeth said. James smiled. Lank looked away.

“All right. Maybe she’s not Susan Sontag.” He rubbed his eyes, then turned to Elizabeth. “How did she work it into the conversation?”

“It was just some throwaway line. Some passing reference. To her cat’s pagina.”

Lank stared off into space for a moment, mulling this over. “So she wasn’t actually talking about her own, then. It could have been worse.”

James actually brayed with laughter. Elizabeth reached over and took Lank’s hand. “Lank,” she said sternly, “it was bad enough.”

“It’s so easy for you guys to make fun of me, because you have each other. But James, you had that girlfriend who pronounced spaghetti ‘basketti,’ ” said Lank.

“But the point is I have a brilliant, handsome grown-up now, a woman who—”

“Well, you lucked out,” said Lank. Elizabeth turned to James and nodded vigorously.

“But you could have Rae,” said James. “She’s pretty, she’s smart, she’s hilarious—she’s funnier than either of us.”

“But she’s fat. She needs to lose fifty pounds. And now she’s religious. So into Jesus. It makes me edgy. And anyway, she’s not interested in me.”

Elizabeth had to admit that this was true. Rae liked him as a best-friend-in-law, but she didn’t find him attractive. Also, as she confided to Elizabeth one night, she thought he was a tightwad.

“He’s not a tightwad, he’s a teacher. He doesn’t have that much money,” said Elizabeth.

“Besides, Rae,” added James, “you two could have the most beautiful children.”

“You guys never give up. And besides, I don’t think I like children.”

“But you adore Rosie.”

“Rosie,” said Rae, “is God.”

R
OSIE
did not sleep at all the night before the last big dance of the school year, the May Day dance, the most special one of all, when seventh and eighth graders danced till ten in the gym to music videos playing on a big screen onstage. Some of the kids would be sneaking beer, she knew; some of the kids would be smoking outside—the big kids, eighth graders, smoking in the shadows.

Rosie wore long black shorts and cowboy boots. Simone had outgrown the boots and had given them to Rosie, along with her training bra, which Rosie wore underneath a tiny white T-shirt. Elizabeth had nearly cried when she saw Rosie dressed for the dance. There were the smallest of all breasts pushing against the shirt, like beautiful gardenias, and those long legs widest at the knee, and those camel-colored cowboy boots that seemed three sizes too big. Rosie wore a little blusher and some lip gloss, her hair pulled back in barrettes. She appeared downstairs when she was ready to go, standing against the wall like a mouse, watching for her mother’s reaction.

“You look so beautiful, Rosie. Like a model in a magazine.”

Rosie scowled, pleased; she appeared to be grinding out a cigarette with the toe of one cowboy boot. She went out to the living room,
picked up a magazine, rifled through it, waiting for Simone, who finally showed up wearing a short white skirt, new cowboy boots, and a black tube top filled to bursting. Rosie looked at her with wonder and desolation.

“You look great,” Simone said. “Those shorts are totally cool.”

“You do, too.” Rosie’s voice was hollow, flat.

They sat a few feet apart on the couch, with their heads dropped all the way back so they could stare at the ceiling. When Elizabeth came in to offer them some juice before they left, both girls rolled their heads from one side of the couch to the center, rolled their vision across the ceiling, so that their eyes might meet.

T
HERE
were two strobe lights set up, and picnic tables with benches, the tables covered with black-and-red-checked paper tablecloths. Not all the lights were on, so it was dim enough to dance like real people, not like the little kids dancing midday under bright school lights. Watching the music videos gave your eyes something to do besides stare at how beautiful all the other girls were. Simone was talking to a group of boys and girls who were clustered around the screen, and Rosie stood there and listened to the rhythm and blues video blaring now. But it was too loud; she felt blanketed in its thrum, in its river of loudness, instead of being able to hear what was great about it. She could smell Simone’s horrible rose toilet water, like incense from Mexico that would be sold in a tube with a picture of Mary on it looking depressed. Being able to pick out her smell was like having a fishing line connecting them, and this relieved her. She started missing her mother. She stared off into space, hating herself because she was at a dance with music videos on a huge screen and strobe lights and all she could think of was needing to call her mother and make sure that she was okay; the fear was like Ajax cleanser sprinkled on her insides. The bejeweled flickering colors of the strobe light made her feel off balance, like when you spin too long, unwinding, on a rope swing.

The black girls started doing their dances, the Tootsie Roll, Butterfly, so fine in their movement and style that you wouldn’t be surprised to see them dancing in music videos someday. And then only a few guys had the nerve to ask a girl to dance, and these same five boys and the five girls they asked kept changing partners among themselves.
Simone was one of them, but Hallie wasn’t, and Hallie locked on to Rosie, and Rosie let her, trying not to think about that bad business with the party, and Hallie told her about who liked whom, who had gone how far with whom, and you had to shout to be heard. The crashing music and strobe lights enveloped her, but Rosie couldn’t discern a pulse in the music, just sound, like she was inside too much energy. She looked at the boys who were dancing, and she felt both desire and hopelessness; her pelvis tingled and tightened inside her. Simone was dancing like a stripper in a nightclub Rosie had seen on TV once, and Rosie could not take her eyes off her. She was dancing with an eighth-grade boy named Dylan, and after a couple of minutes he bent forward to whisper into Simone’s ear, and Simone stopped dancing and stood there not moving but somehow looking like she was about to shimmy. Then she and Dylan pushed past the other dancers and ducked through the open back door.

Rosie watched, hoping they’d pop right back in, but they didn’t. Simone had been letting boys feel her up practically since she first got breasts. She liked to kiss; she
loved
to kiss, but she told Rosie it wasn’t enough for boys. Boys liked the other things too. Her pelvis tightened again, like it was holding its breath, and she turned toward the stage to watch the music video. Now there was footage of seals, popping their heads out of the surf as if to the beat, cheerful and sad all at once. At first she thought they were the seals who lived in the bay, the ones you saw from the ferry or who sunned themselves on the piers of San Francisco or at the beach on the Hospital Cove side of Angel Island. In the video there was an old one sitting by himself on a rock above the water, and maybe it was his wet doggy eyes or the tatters in his coat, but he made Rosie think of Luther.