Crooked Little Heart (20 page)

She sat on the toilet for a while.

After some time she washed her face with cold water and tried to go back down the hall, but the tears started again, and she ducked back into the bathroom. She sobbed in absolute silence. Then she sat for a while and replayed long and specific rallies in her head, imagining her father watching her, marveling at her skill, Andrew with his wonderful long legs and beautiful quiet eyes, silently cheering her on, and then in his place she saw James on the sidelines, leaping up to go check his message machine, her mother staring off into space as if hearing distant melodies, her pro on the East Coast with the boys who were national champions. Leaning against the wall of Charles’s bathroom, staring at the screen in her mind, Luther the only adult around really paying attention, sitting there on the sidelines like a dirty skeleton but almost handsome, too, in a dark, bloodshot way, like a medicine man, like some yogi. Like he knew things. She saw him give her long sideways glances, she saw that he knew who she really was, she watched
him watch her cheat, watched him smile his smile of love. She covered her eyes with one hand until she stopped crying. But she remained on the toilet, small with fear, like a girl of five looking around for her parents, suddenly gone, and then, without actually planning to, she stood up and went to the medicine chest.

There were dozens of bottles of pills, but Rosie stared at a big bottle of aspirin. She saw herself taking them one by one, using the little aqua glass in the toothbrush holder, saw herself crumple to the floor. She closed the door of the medicine chest, studied her ugly, swollen red face, opened the chest again, stared at the aspirin. She couldn’t go back into Charles’s bedroom looking like this, and she couldn’t leave the house on her own. She might as well kill herself. Near the aspirin was a box of Doan’s pills, for backache. There was a girl named Sandy in her homeroom, who already (everyone said) slept with boys, who bragged about getting high on Doan’s pills, Doan’s pills and glue that she’d poured into one of her mother’s boyfriend’s socks and sniffed and sniffed until, she proclaimed, she passed out and woke up a few minutes later, floating and spinning through space, through jewels, through time.

Oh, it sounded like heaven. Heaven.

Rosie found herself wondering where Charles kept the glue. And what kind of glue were you supposed to use, anyway, she wondered. Surely not white glue. Wouldn’t it soak through the sock and drip all over everything? Not Crazy Glue. Maybe rubber cement. There was probably rubber cement in Charles’s great old desk in the study. But what about a sock—how could she sneak one of his socks out of his bedroom without his noticing? She could use her own sock. But she was wearing a Ped, a half-sock that only went to her ankles. Could you use a Ped for a glue-sniffing sock? Fill up the toe area and then clamp the whole thing over your nose, like a gas mask? She closed her eyes and imagined swooning, imagined coming to, swimming through space, through a light show of tropical colors, smiling weakly.

And then there was a voice. “Rosie?” Elizabeth was outside the bathroom. Her mother had finally come.

“What?”

“Are you okay in there?”

“Yes! God!”

She quietly closed the medicine chest, caught a glimpse of her reflection. Her face was still red and blotchy. Then slowly the bathroom door opened, and her mother stepped in, so tall and gentle, smiling sadly.

They sat on the toilet together for twenty minutes, Rosie on Elizabeth’s lap, crying quietly. Elizabeth held her, amazed by her new weight, nuzzled her daughter’s neck with her lips, blowing soft warm air on her skin through her nose, staring off into space.

J
AMES
had given Elizabeth his spot in the wheelchair and gone off to make them all tea and, Elizabeth surmised, to check his messages. Rosie had gone with him. Charles whispered to Elizabeth that he was distressed to see how unhappy Rosie was to be here, and Elizabeth nodded and tried to explain that of course it was painful for Rosie, and that it was important, and that it was right.

Charles had on his face the look of terrified age, of eyes that will never close. His lips, in the days since Elizabeth had seen him, had fallen into his mouth, and his mouth had all but disappeared into a thin pursed line, choking back expletives and sorrow. His face was exquisitely asymmetrical. Everything on the left side was bigger—the eye, the ear filled with hair—as if when age strikes, everything we’ve hidden with animation gets exposed. It’s all
sanpakku
, Elizabeth thought; when things were totally screwed up, out of alignment, hopeless, James always said they were
sanpakku
. And when the whites of your eyes show below the iris, and they hadn’t before, you were definitely all
sanpakku
—all fucked up.

They held hands and talked of nothing in particular, Elizabeth breathing slowly and calmly, filled with grief, with terror, with a sense of there being no comfort.

“Is someone coming in to touch up your hair these days?” she asked, and he smiled. Then they were silent for a while. There was an extraordinary and chaotic vigor to his eyebrows, but it was clear that he had lost a great deal of ground. You could tell that he had always worn glasses and that now he couldn’t see her very well. James and Rosie were gone a long time. Charles’s stark flat gaze seemed to stare at a wall that was coming at him. Elizabeth felt that his eyes were not looking out at the external world but rather at this wall of his life coming to an
end. His thin hair was combed so touchingly, neatly framing his face. But Elizabeth had the sense that his mind had begun to fall to pieces, that his time now was full of trying to remember, that Charles’s amazingly agile mind was now a moth trapped in a jar, and every time it tried something vigorous, more powder fell off.

O
NE
day at the beginning of June, when it was so hot that the only things moving outside were the crickets and the anorexics, Elizabeth drove Rosie and Simone and Rae out through the valley past a number of tiny rural towns, dairy farms, and hippie campgrounds, between low golden hills and pastures, under the redwoods beside the long winding creek, to Samuel P. Taylor Park. It was so beautiful here, under a canopy of trees so airy and rich that you felt almost inside a cave of green. The park was five miles inland, five miles away from the fog and tumultuous surf of the coast, and it was a momentous day: at the age of nearly thirty-six, Rae was wearing her first pair of shorts out in public.

She had always described her legs as if people would scream upon seeing them. On hot days she had always worn gauzy pants or skirts. Elizabeth had never actually seen Rae’s legs, and they had been best friends now for seven years. As it turned out, they were chubby but quite presentable—not too long or firm, but not, as Rae had suggested, stumpy and cadaverous.

Rosie and Simone walked around in the creek, studying water skeeters whose shadows on the water looked like mouseketeer ears or boxing gloves. The stream made everyone more monkeylike; you couldn’t stride through the streambed purposefully, like a human. You needed to grip with your toes, duck away from low branches. There must be thousands of such beautiful streams in the country, Elizabeth thought, with huge trees, dappled light, big rocks, but this was theirs. The sunlight shone down through the canopy of trees on them all, sparkly with pollens and seedpods, held as if in the glass ball of memory, a snow dome in summer. Rosie’s legs were like pipe cleaners, brown as walnuts, not so changed from last year when
she played in the water by herself. She was not yet wearing the glasses of puberty that would allow her to see all the flaws; she was still able occasionally to get lost in what was right in front of her. Simone’s legs were pinker, fleshier, sexy, in tiny shorts out of which the cheeks of her rear end showed. But, Elizabeth thought, she did not look as sassy as usual.

Elizabeth looked over at Rae, who appeared to be sleeping. “With us, the sassiness is mostly gone, isn’t it? But in its place, in the place of a young girl still looking for a mate, your beauty, for instance, has to do with having gotten comfortable at being so skilled at something. And there’s a lot of grace in comfort.”

Elizabeth found Rae’s legs lovely, womanly, even though she was aware that her own were so long and tapered—what legs were supposed to look like according to all the current standards set by movies and magazines. “The world’s sense of beauty is so destructive to women, Rae. Your legs are great. All these years you should have been wearing shorts when it was hot.”

Elizabeth, watching the two girls in the stream, saw Simone suddenly grip Rosie’s arm in the frigid water, as if she were about to lose her balance, and joy filled Simone’s face, and relief. She looked down over her shoulder, down toward her butt, and then over at Elizabeth and Rae, on the riverbank. Something very secretive was going on. Elizabeth looked away, then surreptitiously back again. Now Rosie was examining Simone’s butt and shaking her head. Simone appeared crestfallen.

“Something’s going on with Simone,” said Elizabeth.

“Yeah?” said Rae, not opening her eyes. “What do you think it is?”

“No idea.”

“Maybe it’s hard to be that beautiful. I bet the boys are all over her at school. Do you think she’s had sex yet?”

“No. I’m sure not. She’s only fourteen.”

“Elizabeth. Fourteen is not what it used to be.”

Elizabeth opened her eyes to all the green light pouring off the trees. “You know, I was thirty before I knew that a person just being herself is beautiful, that contentment is beautiful.”

Rae rolled over on her side and stared at Elizabeth.

“What started all this—this thinky thinking?”

“I don’t know. Here we are, four females, no one else around. You
in shorts for the first time, and Simone looking like Lolita, and Rosie … well, to me of course, Rosie is as beautiful as Simone.”

“Please. It goes without saying. Rosie is an orchid.”

“But to almost any man in this country, Simone is the beauty, right? Look at her over there by the tree stump, fixated on herself, unhappy. James gets around her for a few minutes, and it’s all he can do not to start talking baby talk. Now look at Rosie, walking around like a puppy looking at things in the water. Rosie is so much younger inside. She’s all caught up in the river, the guppies, the current. She looks like a little kid.”

“I’m falling asleep,” said Rae. “Will you tell me all these interesting things later? I really love hearing them.”

Rae was so beautiful to her, her smooth face in repose, the soft brown skin with pink in the cheeks, the full pink lips. But she knew this face, which she so loved, was not considered desirable by most men. Elizabeth sometimes wondered if Rae would have been as gifted and successful an artist if she had been. She looked again at the girls, their young bodies, so different and so exquisite. Simone would have an easier life than Rosie, she thought. Beauty is a form of radiance that sets up a shield so people can’t get in. Did Rosie know this yet? Rosie already knew how badly you can be hurt and betrayed. Simone didn’t seem to. Looking at the two girls in the river, Elizabeth realized that it was going to be years before Rosie became aware of what she did have, instead of obsessing about what she didn’t. It was going to be years before she saw that she was not the universal disaster she’d been assuming she was these last two years.

“D
O
you feel sad that no one is talking to you?” Rae asked, opening her eyes and turning her head to look at Elizabeth.

“No. I brought everyone here for a spa day. Everyone gets to do what they feel like.”

“I’m going to wake up in a few more minutes.”

“Okay, honey.”

S
HE
propped herself up on her elbows to study the river. Downstream, in the folds and convolutions of the water, young people
waded, some carrying each other, some alone, and the stream accepted them all, swept them along. There was room for everyone in the gentle force of the water, room for the teenagers, babies, children, room for Simone, so perfect, so fresh and voluptuous, who now sat on the far bank of the stream, sobbing, and Rosie, who watched in shock, as if Simone were melting before her very eyes.

A
FTER
dropping Simone off at Veronica’s salon, they drove along bucolic streets to Charles’s little Spanish-style house, white stucco with soft green trim, all arches, old roses, camellias. Rae turned off the engine, and they looked toward Charles’s front door, as if waiting for him to come out and join them.

“It’s so scary for Charles to be dying,” said Rosie. She was in the front seat with Rae. “It would be for me. It would be the worst thing in the world for me, because I really don’t like the dark. It would be like everything going dark on you and you’d be all alone in it. Like all alone in a black sack. And everyone would cry for about one day.”

“I would cry for the rest of my life if you died, Rosie,” said Elizabeth.

“There’s just nothing good about it. It’s not like your good news, bad news story, Rae.”