Crooked Little Heart (19 page)

Luther, dark and clear, lit by the morning sun, stood on the other side of the fence and smiled. Then his eyes met hers and held. Her heart lurched. She whipped around to face Deb, who was peering around her, trying to see Rosie’s baseline.

“Really?” Deb said, friendly as could be. “It was out?”

Rosie nodded sympathetically.

“I couldn’t see it,” said Deb, “because it was between you and the fence.”

Rosie held up her fingers and thumb to indicate that the ball had landed an inch past the line. Deb scowled down at the ground and talked to herself silently and with great animation for a moment. Then her shoulders slumped. Rosie let her brood. She almost asked if Deb wanted to play the point over, but the relief was too sweet. She could breathe again. When Deb finally got into position to return serve, Rosie pushed Luther out from the inside of her head, so she could feel his darkness become part of the ace she served, and went on like Rommel to conquer the space before her.

S
HE
’
S
the daughter of the devil,” said James with disgust the next morning after a bad breakfast with Rosie. Upstairs now and since eight o’clock this morning, rap music had been blaring, with the bass turned up and Rosie screaming the words. It was so incongruous, coming from someone who could go into that trance of quiet concentration on the tennis court. At breakfast she’d sat at the table with a look of such wild unhappiness and judgment that all James and Elizabeth could do was stare at each other. Screaming rap music lyrics seemed to be how she medicated herself.

Elizabeth got up from the table, as Rosie wailed upstairs. “I think I’ll take her for a drive. She doesn’t have a lesson till early this evening.” When Rosie was like this, hard and angry, and Elizabeth found herself missing her, she’d take her somewhere, up on the mountain, out to the shore. Often Rosie would revert and for a few hours be her old self again. This morning—against all odds—Rosie, still full of hostility and disdain, consented to go for a drive.

“James, do you want to come with us? I think we might go see the Meyers’ goats. The Meyers won’t even be there, we don’t have to be social.”

“Lozenge-eyed, yellow-eyed goats,” James said rather dreamily.

“Is that from a poem?”

“I don’t think so. I think I just made it up.”

“Do you want to come with us, then?”

“No, I hate goats.”

Elizabeth smiled. “Why?”

“They’re repulsive is why. If they had the body of an African lion, or the grace of a running gazelle, or the rotund beauty of a hippo …”

“I would have sworn you liked them.”

“No, I hate them. I don’t mind sheep so much, in the proper setting. Which is to say, distant. But I hate how goats waddle around with those distended bellies, looking like a bunch of bigoted old Finnish peasants. I prefer the sight of a bunch of manly, dangerous-looking bulls wandering around small crowds of heifers. It’s sort of—stimulating.”

“James!”

“You two go without me.”

T
HEY
took the old Saab up past the Petaluma River—still a working river, filled with barges and dredgers—past Black Point and over the old road to Sonoma. They stared out opposite windows at low, flat, deeply green hills, at horse pastures, trees, tractors, cows, sheep. When they rolled down their windows, the smells of manure, of summer, of grass no longer new filled their nostrils. Elizabeth loved the groves of oak, solid as citadels, and the lines of eucalyptus and poplar, sinewy and protective as old longhaired warriors, still with their long swords, still in command. Rosie saw mostly electrical poles and wires, saw them as huge corrals holding in giant animals you couldn’t see. She sighed with such annoyance that an observer turning on the channel right then might have thought he’d just missed an argument.

“What is it, darling?”

Rosie did not respond right away. She stared out the window. Finally she sighed again. “Nothing,” she said.

“Tell me.”

“No.”

“Are you worried about something?”

“I’m worried about James coming to watch me play next week.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s embarrassing, he’s such a terrible dresser. He looks like a poor drug addict. Everyone will stare at us.”

“What if I make sure he wears Levi’s, and a T-shirt?”

“He’ll wear zoris, with socks. One sock will have holes. His baby toe will be sticking out. Like he should be by the side of the road with a sign that says he just lost his job.”

“Maybe someone will give us money, and we can go out for dinner.”

“It’s not even funny.”

Elizabeth shook her head.

T
HE
huge field where the Meyers’ goats grazed was emerald green, dotted with wild buttercups, tiny purple wildflowers, and dandelions. It smelled of feta, and mint, and a faint hint of goat manure, tiny turds everywhere but so mild and clean; Elizabeth always said that a goat field was the ultimate case for vegetarianism. Fifty goats milled around, in clusters and alone, balancing on fallen logs, rushing up to Rosie and her mother—billy goats, mothers with their young, white goats, black goats, black-and-white goats, two-tone brown goats, male goats with stubby rounds where their horns had been removed, some bloody from recent fights. Some had little hairy tufts hanging tonsil-like from their necks, and the littlest ones bounded around with their front feet together, like deer. All of them cried their goaty cries except for the younger ones, who crowed like roosters as they swarmed around Rosie and Elizabeth.

“We were here when you were little,” said Elizabeth. “With your daddy. It must have been in the spring, because some of the goats were pregnant. It was … the spring when you were four, not long before he died. None of the mothers had had their babies yet. Only me.”

A
NDREW
and Rosie sit by the creek, Rosie in Andrew’s lap. Elizabeth sits on the other side, smelling the sour goat-milk smell of feta, mint, wet grasses. She watches Andrew hand Rosie twigs and pebbles and grasses to toss into the current. He buries his face in his daughter’s black hair, closes his eyes, smiles. Rosie has just turned four. She’d said to her dad on the drive here, “When I grow up, and we get married, where will Mommy go live?” Andrew teases Elizabeth all afternoon, bending over to whisper, “Vermont is nice,” when they first get out of the car and start walking into the field. He slipped his arm through hers as Rosie ran ahead and whispered the names of other places where Elizabeth might be happy one day. They’d walked slowly, languidly, to the barn, into which Rosie had raced; there it turns out all the dozens of goats are milling, and for a terrible moment they can’t find Rosie. They separate to look for her and find her by her sudden laughter;
she is barely visible, surrounded by goats, like Ulysses escaping the Cyclops’s cave, hidden in sheep.

“T
HAT’S
pretty funny, what I said to Daddy. Did he tease you with it all day?”

“Oh, for a week. One morning when you crawled in bed with us, he was holding you, and you were asleep, and he said to me, trying to be very helpful, ‘Tomales Bay is lovely. Ross, I think, is a little steep.’ Elizabeth smiled shyly at the memory.

“Tell me more about him.”

“Your daddy loved goats’ goatness,” said Elizabeth. “He said they had a great attitude.”

“Yeah?”

Elizabeth nodded.

“He said they take humans as their equals—other animals dominate or have to be dominated. But not goats.”

“He did?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Our whole lives would have turned out differently if he hadn’t taken that trip. Wouldn’t they?”

“Yes,” said Elizabeth. Rosie put her hands on top of her head and then folded her elbows down around her face, like a bat. She looked very sad, but her mind was only partly on her father. Memories of cheating kept popping up, and she could force them away by thinking of great rallies played fairly, rallies lasting three and four minutes, which she won; and then another memory would surface, like a Whack-a-Mole arcade game, scenes just kept popping up, of cheating Marisa and Deb, of Luther gazing at her. How had this, the cheating, these dangerous feelings, started? It was as if she’d been plodding along in the tennis world, everything bouncy and smooth, and then it suddenly felt like what she had been walking on had shifted entirely. Shame came in waves now. After a minute she began to walk toward the creek that ran down the hill from the top of the property to a pond.

She was wearing ratty jeans and a huge old black T-shirt of James’s. She looked so much older than she had in the spring, less like a child, more like an angry teenage boy.

Elizabeth followed some distance behind her. They went to different spots along the creek, twenty feet apart, squatted in identical stances down close to the water. There was silence, except for the cries of the goats.

Elizabeth watched the water cascade past her, looked upstream a few feet to where it ran through flattened grasses, heard random noises for a while. Then she heard the individual voices in the water, the muted sound one ribbon of water made as it ran through the flattened grass above, the low roaring undervoice a few feet downstream where it fell half a foot, a small waterfall of creek that landed in a pool on rocks and twigs, grasses, bugs. She listened, oblivious to the goats, and the breeze, and her daughter dropping tiny twigs into the creek above her, letting the current carry them down as messages to her mother—oblivious to everything now but the voice of the creek where she was closest to it, tinkling as it hit tiny pebbles in a shallow shoal before her.

J
AMES
and Rosie went to visit Charles. He was lying in bed dozing when they arrived, pale as could be, as if the vampire of life had sucked out all his blood. It made his hair appear darker than usual. James pointed to a chair near the bed for Rosie and pulled up the wheelchair for himself. These quiet sounds woke Charles, and he stared off into the distance before noticing he had company. “Hello,” he said, soft as light.

Rosie looked on the verge of sneezing, and she tried to smile and to imagine what her mother would do.

“Hey, handsome,” she said, pigeon-toed, chewing on her baby finger.

“Rosie. You should be outside on a day like this, not cooped up inside with a sick old man.”

“This was Rosie’s idea,” said James.

“Mommy’s going to meet us here,” said Rosie, braiding her bangs.

Charles closed his eyes. Please, Mommy, prayed Rosie, please come right now. All she could smell was too much soap over the smell of something going bad in the refrigerator. She remembered swimming with him so many times, his trim old washboard body in navy blue shorts, him taking her to his club, throwing her into the Russian River when she was small. She remembered clamoring onto his back in the river, holding on like a drowning cat, holding her breath as he dove underneath the surface and swam around like a dolphin. She vaguely remembered nearly drowning once, but that was with her daddy, and she was only three or so, and what she remembered was being under the water, and the sun trickling through so that it all shone, and she remembered closing her eyes, and then opening them with her daddy blowing air into her, his mouth almost
completely covering her face, and how her chest had felt it would burst, and how he’d cried when she opened her eyes. And she remembered hiking all those times with Charles, up on the mountain, how he always brought salami, how sometimes Grace used to come along and slow them down but made him so happy, and sometimes it was just Rosie and Charles, and maybe sometimes Elizabeth, but not always. And how he brought himself one beer to drink when they stopped for lunch, and one Coke for her. And he always had awful cookies, fig bars or perforated raisin flats, but sometimes he brought beef jerky, which she loved, and beer nuts. He was so patient, so calm.

And sitting there listening to James discuss his work, Elizabeth’s garden, whatever, so much sadness welled up in Rosie because Charles was going to die soon that she felt her heart collapse inward. She tried to keep the tears from spilling over by widening her eyes alarmingly, while the men kept talking, blah blah blah, and her face was burning and she blinked like mad and tried to get old tennis matches to play in her head, but even though her eyes were as wide open as they would go, the tears pooled and dripped down onto her face. She got up, smiling like mad, like a crazy person. In a silent vacuum she saw James and Charles staring at her, but no one made a move. She escaped, hurrying down the hall like a hamster, into the bathroom.