Crooked Little Heart (18 page)

“Men,” she said to Rosie.

Rosie rolled her eyes. “Should me and you do it?” she asked.

Elizabeth considered this. “You and I,” she said. “Let’s not let him off the hook so easily. Besides, it’s too dark in here to do it now.”

“Then how will he do it when he gets home?”

“That’s not our problem. Our problems are blood sugar and world peace.”

They were both tired and hungry and yet so wanted to continue the sweetness of the day that they set about good-naturedly in the dimness to make themselves a simple meal. They sat down together at the table to leftover soup and bread and cheese and ate by candlelight.

“Mama? Do you mind if I read my new magazine while we eat?”

“By what, flashlight?”

Rosie shrugged and nodded.

And so they ended up together, Rosie with her
Seventeen
, Elizabeth with a book, reading in silence with flashlights. The only sound was the turning of pages, like waves lapping the shore. Elizabeth looked up
from time to time to study her strange silky daughter in the candlelight, staring solemnly at page after page of emaciated beauty, with the baby finger of her free hand hooked over her bottom lip just as she had when she had read fairy tales at eight in the window seat, horse stories at ten, Nancy Drew mysteries at eleven, and now advice on weight control and boys.

A
MOMENT
later, there was a horrible sizzle and stink; Rosie, slumping, had gotten a bit of hair singed in the candle flame. There was a sudden pinch in Elizabeth’s solar plexus, a sinking feeling, a rage at James. He must have assumed that she was going to change the bulb herself; he must see her as his mother, his nag of a mother. It was all hopeless. It meant that there was something really wrong with the relationship.

Elizabeth opened a can of mandarin oranges for dessert and knew that the syrup was spilling down the side of the can and onto the counter, as she tried by flashlight to spoon some into two bowls. It would be sticky soon and bring on ants, and all she wanted was to clean everything up and go to bed. She had lost her bearings in the dark. The kitchen was her territory, and it was supposed to be appetizing. But because of James’s dereliction, it was a mess. She found herself lurching here and there, tripping, knocking things over, smoldering with resentment.

“Mommy? Why don’t you sit down?”

T
HEY
read their magazines and ate their mandarin oranges by flashlight and candles, a parody of an elegant dinner party. Good cheer and improvisation were burbling again in the visible world, but a roiling feeling had begun in her gut. She felt tired and short in her chair, as if she and Rosie were hunkered down in a cave.

They carried their dishes to the sink. Rosie, in bare feet, could feel crumbs and stickiness.

“How pathetic,” she said to Elizabeth. “Men can be such slobs.” And she wandered off to the ruins of her room.

•  •  •

A
FTER
a while Elizabeth went upstairs to read but found herself back in the kitchen two hours later, still waiting for James to come home. Rosie was up in bed with her latest teenage gothic. Elizabeth peered down into the nearly empty can of mandarin oranges, holding a flashlight on them with one hand, spearing segments one by one with a fork in the other. She hated leaving a mess for the morning; it always felt like part of you was still outside your body. Besides the threat of a bug invasion, there was the fear that the mess, the stickiness and crumbs and dirty dishes, could grow by themselves in the dark. Smells, growths, moss and mold, furry mold like troll hair, fuzz with fur on it. It could start composting. A miasma of smells would rise.

She shuffled around the house, went back to the dark sink, where she closed her eyes in the dark, and then went back upstairs, where she sat miserably for a while on the toilet. She could feel the seat embossing her butt. It was one of the stations of despair.

J
AMES
was still not home at ten, by which time she was livid. She got in bed and read for a while, and eventually turned off the light. A little while later, she heard him tiptoe in.

“Are you awake?” he whispered in the dark. She grunted softly. “I want to hear about your day; I want to tell you about mine. It was so great. Please don’t be asleep.” But she lay there like a smoldering log as he took off his clothes and dropped them softly on a chair. She heard him yawn, heard and felt him crawl into bed.

“Are you really asleep?” he asked. She yawned, made the smallest possible sound. He put his knees in the crook of her knees, and where there was usually a yielding, she was stiff. Straightening her knees would be too overt. He flung his arm over her, as he did every night in the presleep position, in that fitting together, the key in the hole. But she pretended to be asleep, breathing as shallowly as possible, trying to breathe out as little as possible; otherwise, who knew what might burst out—tears, invective, molten fury. If he didn’t offer anything, she wasn’t about to. “You always …,” she wanted to cry out. “You never …” You don’t listen to me, you don’t care—you only care about yourself. She felt like she was in a bunker, and she listened to him sigh, clearly now getting that she was annoyed, punishing him, but he didn’t want to blow his day or his sleep.

And when he was asleep, Elizabeth lay in the dark for two hours, her eyeballs as rigid as her body, listening to his soft snore; then she got up and read in the living room until nearly four in the morning, and finally, finally she fell asleep.

J
AMES
was reading the paper and drinking coffee when she got up at nine. “Hi!” he said.

She could barely look at him. There were crumbs and snail tracks of stickiness on the table. He had not bothered to wipe it all up before sitting down to read.

“What is it, Elizabeth?”

“Remember the lightbulb?”

“Ah!” He smote his forehead, gripped his head as if being pierced with migraine, beat the table. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” he implored. “Sit down; let me get you some coffee.”

“Just change the fucking lightbulb.”

“Do you want me to do it now?” he asked, surprised. She nodded. “I will. But have some coffee, let me finish mine.”

“No.”

“No, you don’t want any, or no, I can’t finish mine.”

“No, you can’t finish yours.”

James stood there, as sullen as one of the teenage boys on the tennis tour. Elizabeth cleaned off the table, poured her own coffee, and sat down with the paper. There was always that feeling in her soul that the bottom could drop out of their marriage. There were so many areas where things could go irreparably wrong. And the jacket was always waiting in the closet, the jacket of being a martyr and a bitch, the jacket she was now wearing.

J
AMES
worked with great concentration, as if changing the dressing on a burn instead of a lightbulb, and when he was done, he walked to the wall switch and turned it on. The kitchen was flooded with golden light. “Watson,” he cried, “come quickly. I need you.” Elizabeth glowered at the paper. James turned the light off. She gawked at him. He turned it back on with a flourish, and then off. Elizabeth looked away. He turned the light back on with a gasp, a happy intake of air, like a
child playing peekaboo. And then he turned it off. Elizabeth buried her face in her hands. The light went on again, and then, a moment later, off. Finally she smiled, and he turned the light on and left it.

T
HAT
night when he bent his knees into the crook of hers, she yielded, melting into him, and they made love. Life was normal again, life was good—Bosnia to Paris in twenty-four hours.

He turned over with a big schlumpy male plop, now out of the presleep position and getting ready to drift off. He rearranged himself like a gull, shimmying his ruffled feathers back into place after landing.

C
HEATING
was much easier the next time.

It was at a tournament only twenty minutes from home. She arrived in a great mood, having driven over with her mother and Rae for a ten o’clock first-round match. She was slated to play Deb Hall, who was unseeded in singles, although a frequent and ferocious rival in doubles. And after studying the draw, she realized there was a good chance that she could actually win one of the singles trophies, either the one for first place, which was a marble desk set with a fountain pen, or the runner-up trophy, a tall garish figurine mounted on fake marble, which looked just like the Statue of Liberty about to hit a forehand volley.

Rae bought her a Coke and they sat with Elizabeth waiting for Rosie’s name to be called. Rae always made such a fuss over her whenever she came along to a tournament, making sure Rosie was warm or cool enough and that she had eaten just long enough before so that the food would not cause stomach cramps, ogling Rosie’s name on the posted list of seeded players. It was sort of embarrassing. Rae didn’t believe that Rosie was really just one of the pack on the junior tournament circuit. Still, when the tournament director called her name and that of her opponent, Rosie stood up, feeling for the moment like a championship thoroughbred, long-legged and muscular, raring to run.

L
UTHER
was sitting behind two ten-year-old girls, watching their loopy rallies. Rosie, walking behind him with Deb, smelled slightly sour BO. She turned once to look back over her shoulder at him with a slight sneer, and he smiled at her and winked.

“God,” she said out loud and shivered.

A dizzying number of balls were going back and forth across the
nets as she and Deb walked to their court. She had breasts that bounced a little when she ran, and Rosie could not take her eyes off them. Deb never put one away, and she didn’t take any practice shots at the net, but by the same token, she didn’t miss very often either. She chased down everything, patted each ball back, and before they had even practiced their serves, Rosie had psyched herself out.

Her breathing changed. She could hear her pulse. Movies were playing in her mind where she saw herself leave the court in disgrace, losing to this bouncing girl, no ranking, no seed. Rosie took a dozen practice serves, made about half of them, felt a crick in her elbow. Deb took only two practice serves, hard and flat, both well in.

“I’m guess I’m ready,” she said.

Rosie had won the toss and had chosen to serve first, which to her amazement she did well. She won the first game. But after the change of sides, she found herself patting Deb’s serves back; she panicked that she was hitting so many out, and after several long patty-cake rallies, she somehow managed to lose the game. Her pulse raced as she headed back to the baseline, one ball tucked inside her panties, one ball gripped too hard in her talons.

Breathe, she heard Peter say, use your
head
. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply, shook her head, opened her eyes, and served an ace. But on the backhand side, her first serve missed by an inch, and the panic returned. When she went to toss the ball for her second serve, her left hand jerked up like the claw of a ball machine, and she actually tossed the ball two feet behind her. She had to chase it down. Hysterics mounted. The next toss was just as jerky and went only a foot or so above her head; the panic made her swing at it anyway, and she hit herself on the top of her head with the racket. But the ball somehow went in, and the two of them pushed it back and forth until finally Deb tapped it into the net.

Rosie felt unhinged. Breathe, she ordered herself.
Hit
. She watched the ball come off her strings and tried to will it across the court, but it hit the top of the net and dropped back on her side. She gulped some air, quavering. Twenty minutes later, the score was tied at four games all, Rosie serving at deuce. Unable to concentrate on her toss or on the destination of her serve, her head throbbed with excuses and explanations to her mother as to why she had lost so badly to such an average singles player. She squinted back tears of disbelief and embarrassment.
Deb hit a drop shot and brought Rosie up to the net, and Rosie ran her heart out and got to the ball on one bounce, scraping her racket along the court and digging the ball up and over a split second before it would have bounced again, and Deb lobbed the ball over her, and Rosie took off like a terrified jackrabbit for the ball, as it soared slowly overhead. She raced toward the baseline, but the ball was going too fast to retrieve, and then, miraculously, it seemed that it might go out.

If it went out, the score would be ad in, a huge advantage. If it went in, she would be doomed.
Doomed
.

She dashed toward it, running straight back toward the fence so that inadvertently her body was blocking the ball from Deb’s view, and she watched the ball land and, to her horror, catch the line by maybe half an inch, maybe even less, by so little it wasn’t fair, you should get to call a ball like that out, the ball was meant to go out. Rosie was a foot away from where it landed, and in a swirl of fear and disappointment, she shouted, “Out!” before she fully knew what she was doing. “Out,” she said again calmly. She stopped to catch her breath, and heard the ball hit against the back fence, and looked up at the sound.