Crooked Little Heart (15 page)

T
HERE
was a part of Elizabeth that was relieved that the friendship with Hallie had suffered such a setback when Rosie was excluded from the dinner party, not because of the company Hallie kept—girls who were said to drink, girls who had dates with older boys—but because of the damn trampoline. It would be too much if after forty years of sneering at her mother’s fear, it swallowed up Rosie, the way the surface of a pool swallows a diver seamlessly. She lived in fear of ironic endings.

But early this morning, Simone had come by at breakfast to say she’d been invited over to Hallie’s to use the trampoline. There was no school: it was “staff development day,” whatever that meant. And the question was did Rosie want to come.

“You’re going to Hallie’s?” Rosie asked in disbelief.

“What’s so strange about me going to Hallie’s?”

“You’ve never been there before, right?”

“Well, I’m going to go there today. Is there something wrong with that?”

And Rosie said no, no thank you. She said with great dignity that she would see Simone the next night, when Veronica picked Rosie up for a dance at a nearby club, where the next big tournament began the following day. Then Simone insisted they go into Rosie’s room to talk privately. Elizabeth kept expecting the two of them to reemerge and leave together for Hallie’s, but Rosie, who had been acting distant and odd since the tournament in Fremont, prowled behind as Simone walked out the front door, waving good-bye as if forever. Elizabeth coaxed Rosie into the kitchen, where it was light and warm, but Rosie did not feel like talking. She sat looking bored and long-suffering, until
Elizabeth said she could go. Then she went upstairs to her dark smelly room and put on a rap cassette.

“I
STILL
want him to call so badly,” Rae said over the phone sometime later. “I mean, I know it’s like wanting Norman Bates to call. But I still do.”

“Of course you do,” Elizabeth said. “Look. The way you feel now—betrayed, strung out, abandoned? It will look like fucking
heaven
compared to what it would be like if he got into therapy and married you. He’d come home from his important work, and he’d be completely indifferent to you. There’d be nothing left for you. If you asked for any love and assurance from him at all, he’d look at you like you wanted him to go retile the bathroom that night.”

“Tell me what to do.”

“Just don’t. Don’t call. Then you get to not debase yourself. That’s a lot.”

Rae cried for a few minutes over the phone. Elizabeth listened quietly, breathing soft sounds of condolence from time to time. When she finally heard Rae sigh with exhaustion, she spoke. “The good news is, Rosie needs you,” she said. “Hallie and Simone are spending the morning together, and Rosie feels very left out. Can you take her to her tennis lesson this morning? And then maybe help her shop for something to wear to a tennis dance tomorrow tonight?”

“Of course I can,” said Rae. “And I am going to fill my house with votive candles, praying all morning for Jesus to slather those snotty little jerks who were mean to her with acne. And tsutsu gamushi for Hallie.”

“What’s tsutsu gamushi?”

“Dreaded Japanese river fever.”

E
LIZABETH
sat with her daughter on Rosie’s bed while they waited for Rae’s arrival. Rosie picked at the calluses on her palms with great annoyance. She was wearing the same huge black shorts she’d worn to the last school dance and a voluminous brown T-shirt of James’s. She looked as scrawny and bewildered as a wet cat.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Elizabeth asked delicately.

“What’s there to talk about?” asked Rosie. She stretched out on the unmade bed and shielded her eyes with one cupped hand. “Mom? Why did you even have me?”

Elizabeth stroked Rosie’s skinny shoulderblade. “I know exactly how you feel,” she said. “Honey, it’s horrible being a kid. Don’t let anyone tell you differently.”

“I thought these were supposed to be the best years of my life.”

“Whoever said that?”

“It’s something you hear.”

“Well, it’s the great palace lie. These are the hardest years. Sometimes you just have to find some great company and wait for a little time to pass. I felt like a total misfit, too. I used to feel all this homicidal envy and loathing for people who seemed to be doing so well, the beautiful popular people. My first year in college, I was so obsessed with the sororities—I hated them and felt completely wretched and rejected by the girls in them. I felt like I wanted to die when they didn’t pick me during pledge week.”

“How could they not want you?” Rosie asked.

Elizabeth shrugged. “I was an oddball. And I
hated
them—why would they choose someone who thought they were scum of the earth? But then it got better. And it’s gotten better ever since. Now maybe I’m still kind of a mess sometimes, but I have great company now. I have you, James, Rae, Lank, Simone.”

“Charles.”

“Charles. And this makes all the difference in the world.”

“I hate being an oddball. I hate that I don’t fit in. I hate that I’m kind of a loser.”

Oh, her mother wanted to say, you’re a lot of things, Rosie. We all are. You’re good and caring and accomplished, you’re ambitious and lazy, selfish and greedy, dark and light. And you’re more beautiful than anyone you compare yourself to. Just different—the worst thing at thirteen to be. And I look at you sometimes, and I feel like you’re also the bird who just flew by.

But what she said was “I know, baby.”

Elizabeth watched Rosie waiting out on the street for Rae to arrive, skinny little frame, stick arms. She longed to rush out and hold her but could see that what she needed was space to breathe and regain her dignity. James had said during a recent bad patch with Rosie that because
everything was such a big deal with her, it taught you that nothing really is. But what Elizabeth saw now was her daughter standing slumped and pressed, as if up against an invisible wall, her social life and self-esteem a wasteland, her neck as long and thin as a bird’s. She wanted to explain it all to Rosie—that we’re all yearning for something, for there to be a meadow somewhere, and that you can miss it by a mile or, even worse, discover that it’s not really there, but still not be destroyed. Hurt, shocked, even annoyed, but not destroyed.

She watched her through the window until Rae pulled up.

R
OSIE
spent the night with Rae. She started out in a sleeping bag on the floor, but in the moonlight the loom towered over her like a woolly monster. He stared at her, smiled. She tried to think of other things, things that didn’t scare her, but her mind turned to thoughts of hugeness. Charles had told her last year that the world weighed two hundred million million tons, and it was just too huge to think about when you only weighed eighty pounds yourself. Also, Rae was weaving a piece of cloth that had dragonflies in it, and Rosie remembered learning in fifth grade that the insects that spiders eat every year weigh more than the entire human population of the earth, and it disturbed her to death. She lay in the dark fearing the size of outer space. After a while she got up and tiptoed over to Rae’s bed and gently shook Rae awake.

“Rae,” she said softly. “Rae.”

Rae opened her eyes.

“What’s the matter, sweetheart?”

“I wondered if I could sleep here with you.”

“Of course you can. Here.” Rae pulled down the blanket and sheet next to her, and Rosie crawled in, feeling as shy as a deer.

“Better?

“Um-hmm.”

“Good night. I love you.”

“Love you, too.”

The bed was so warm, and it smelled like bread. She listened to Rae falling asleep, breathing slowly, quietly. The cloth with the dragonflies was for a rock star in San Francisco. A friend of Rae’s would sew it into a jacket for him, and they would sell it for a thousand dollars. She had watched Rae weaving for a while that night, taking thin air and some
yarns and making something you could wrap yourself in on a cold foggy day. The cloth Rae was weaving seemed almost alive, full of light, soft mossy green, camel-colored birds and the palest yellow dragonflies. It was like having a landscape inside, like a painting, but with fibers. Rosie had been here a few weeks ago when Rae was just beginning the piece, with all of her yarns on the floor, and Rosie and Rae had gotten down on all fours to move them around, feel the textures, and try out colors side by side. It was funny, how there could be colors you didn’t like very much, like the pale yellow, because you didn’t look good in it, and you put it side by side with something else, like the camel, the lion-colored yarn, and like Rae said, you made a marriage, a third color, and it made you like the first color for giving you the third.

Sometimes Rosie thought Rae was the most beautiful woman she had ever seen, with that thick auburn hair piled on top of her head and those rich warm almond-shaped eyes. She loved the little pinches at the end of Rae’s nose. They made her look like an English fashion model. When she was younger, she and Sharon Thackery used to call those little indents Rae’s proton nobulators. It was the best phrase they had ever invented. This made her smile to remember. She lay beside Rae and imagined the creaky little sound of the treadle, the mechanical, rhythmic thump of the beater, the murmur of the yarn, the whisper of Rae’s busy hands. Thinking of that rhythm, breathing in that warm smell of bread, she fell asleep.

V
ERONICA
picked Rosie up after dinner the next night and took the two girls to an oldies dance at the club. Simone was immediately asked to dance by one of the eighteen-year-olds. Rosie watched them dance to an Elvis song, and then another, and then slow dance to the Beatles. Her heart longed to slow dance. One boy she knew asked her to dance on the next song; she loved every moment, especially afterward when they stood together waiting to see whether they felt like dancing again. Rosie would have danced to the national anthem, but the boy deemed the next song too slow and walked off the dance floor. She followed along until he hooked up with some sixteen-year-old boys, who swallowed him up in a circle, leaving her outside. Her heart sank. She felt a little as if she were a runner in a relay race, passing him off to these new runners, standing there on the track watching them run the next lap.

She flushed, seeing herself through their eyes—skinny, flat, homely—and she tried to say good-bye to the boy with whom she’d been dancing, but he was talking to another boy. She went looking for Simone.

Some of the other thirteen- and fourteen-year-old girls were standing in a pack against the display case full of club trophies and plaques, looking over each other’s shoulders, pretending not to care. Most were chewing gum.

“Hey,” said Rosie, shouting over the noise of the band.

“Hey yourself,” said Deb Hall, one of the girls Rosie and Simone faced most often in doubles finals. “Want some gum?”

“Sure. You seen Simone?”

“She went off with Jason Drake.”

Rosie was shocked. He was eighteen, one of Peter’s best players, although
not one who was nationally ranked. Rosie thought back to that night when they’d all gone to the indoor courts together, when Simone and Jason had been all warm and squishy in the way back of the van. He was cute enough to be in the movies. A lot of the tennis girls had crushes on him. She remembered that once last summer he and his old doubles partner had drunk a bottle of peppermint schnapps behind the bushes of the clubhouse during a tournament dance in Sacramento, and when they came back inside Jason’s doubles partner had thrown up all over a candy machine near the dance floor. He had been expelled from that season’s tournaments and hadn’t been back.

“Where did they go?”

“Out that door,” said Deb.

Rosie studied the exit. She held up one finger, as if she needed a moment to think or was trying to figure out the direction of the wind. She burlesqued a look of befuddlement, at which everyone laughed, and then she left.

A bunch of juniors were milling around the lawn, talking about their matches, both the ones they’d played last week and the ones they would play tomorrow, and Rosie saw an older girl named Natalie, one of the best of the eighteen-year-olds, who’d always treated Rosie like a younger sister. She was totally cool, like a beautiful blonde hoodlum, someone you’d see on a street corner smoking cigarettes with guys on motorcycles. She had even given Rosie one of her old purses last year, the coolest imaginable purse, worn brown leather with fringe and a silver Indian button. Rosie loved it, although she did not really need a purse yet.

Natalie was standing around tonight with a mixed group of older teenagers, drinking Cokes from the can. She was so friendly that Rosie could hardly believe it.

“Hey,” said Natalie. “Why aren’t you dancing?”

“I was looking for Simone.”

“Yeah? She’s in one of those boats over there,” she said, pointing with her Coke can.

“With Jason Drake?” Rosie said, feigning nonchalance. She felt like a hummingbird vibrating next to a beautiful flower, suspended with nowhere to land. Natalie smiled. Her face was very soft when she looked at Rosie, almost maternal. She cocked her head when Rosie spoke, sensing her discomfort. And she nodded almost apologetically.