Crooked Little Heart (3 page)

Rosie and Simone won, as expected. Elizabeth and James clapped loudly, proudly. The sun shone in the bright blue sky. So you would have thought, watching Rosie bask in the applause, in the glow of the on-court presentation of their trophies, that she was still a black-haired golden child, the child of last year who had played in ecstasy, in joy of
motion, so fulfilled and happy moving that she could barely stand it, as if her inner camera were for the moment fully focused.

And there were times, like right now, when she still felt that joy, when she still felt wild. But in the last six months her body had begun trundling her into tortured, self-conscious adolescence. She felt she was on the wrong planet. She feared that all the other kids were drawn into life in a way that she wasn’t; she observed the grown-ups and saw in their lives a lack of vitality and joy, saw a flatness in their faces. It gripped her with fear. She sometimes decided that she had been put on the earth among all these earthlings so that scientists might study her. She was afraid she would never have a boyfriend, breasts, periods. She was afraid because four years before, Mr. Thackery, the father of her best friend Sharon, had shown her his penis, made her see it, hard and purple, when she was only nine, and she was afraid that seeing it had infected her insides, had tainted her. She was afraid she would never forget. She was afraid of dying in either a nuclear catastrophe or a drive-by shooting, she was afraid that curious, staring Luther would find her and rape her, she was afraid she would end up poorly ranked, but more than anything else, she was afraid that her mother would die.

Her daddy had already died, nine years ago. Pictures of him hung on the walls of her bedroom, and so every day she remembered how tall and good-looking he’d been, with thick wavy brown hair and blue eyes, a shy smile, and a long nose that was almost too long but instead looked aristocratic. She remembered riding around town on his shoulders, and how he held onto her ankles with his large beautiful hands, how everyone said he had beautiful hands, and how safe she felt sitting on top of him, like they were one long person, a totem pole.

Sometimes when she could not fall asleep, her mind would lock onto the image of her mother drowning, those last few moments of suffocating underwater, looking up in panic through the frigid water of San Francisco Bay into the bright sunlight where her screaming daughter stood, unable to save her.

J
AMES
always took her and Elizabeth out for dinner when he came to watch her play. If she had played well and won, or played beautifully in losing to someone ranked higher than she, she found him funny and forgave him his terrible clothes. If she was disappointed, she listened
to his jokes and sarcastic commentary with thinly veiled disgust. This time they ended up at a small Korean restaurant near home. There were big dreamy landscapes painted on the wall, bamboo mats and kitschy gewgaws everywhere. They were the only customers. They ordered sodas and studied the menu.

“Girl, you played so beautifully today,” said James. Rosie squirmed, and Elizabeth smiled at her husband’s soft touch, her daughter’s look of dazed naïveté. He went back to reading the menu. He wore Ben Franklin–style reading glasses now, which he bought at Thrifty. “I suppose it’s required that I get the octopus,” he said. “You always make me get the octopus, Elizabeth.”

“I’ve never made you get octopus, darling.”

“Well, it turns out that I
desire
octopus tonight. That’s what victory does for a man. In fact, I’m going to order both the octopus and the squid and stage an underwater fight.”

Rosie was shaking her head. She was used to this and traded a look with her mother.

“James,” she said. “Why would you order things you don’t want?”

It was wonderful food, light and bright, hot and sweet, full of garlic, ginger, chilies, sugar. “I like that,” said James. “I like a cuisine where they add sugar to everything.”

“Better, of course, if they also add heavy cream,” said Elizabeth. All of a sudden Rosie was blinking back tears as she stared miserably at the food on her plate.

“Oh, darling,” Elizabeth murmured in surprise.

“Why can’t anything ever be fine just the way it is?” Rosie said. “Why do you two always have to find fault with everything?”

James and Elizabeth looked at each other wearily.

“But I love this food, honey,” said Elizabeth.

“You’d love it more with cream.”

They ate in silence. From time to time Elizabeth glanced up and studied James while he ate. I love you, she thought, I do.

She reached out and rubbed Rosie’s forehead. Rosie’s eyes were closed. After a minute, two tears trickled out, which Elizabeth rubbed away. Rosie squirmed. “Okay?” said Elizabeth. Rosie nodded.

Elizabeth felt a wave of peace, of reconciliation. And when, for no particular reason, one of James’s cheap wooden chopsticks suddenly broke in half, the sound made everyone smile. He looked around as if
something awful had happened, then held out both broken parts to their waiter, who was hurrying toward them with two more courses.

“Do you have any wood glue?” James implored.

T
HERE
were days and moments now when Rosie was as sweet and attentive and interesting as one could hope for in a thirteen-year-old girl, and there were times when, physically and emotionally, she was frozen, hard, full of blame and something bordering on hate. Five years had passed since the Thackerys moved away, Elvin—free and apparently unbothered by what he’d done—promoted at his company and moved out of the county. Now Simone, whom Rosie had known almost her whole life, was Rosie’s best friend, but Rosie still grieved Sharon’s departure. They had not spoken by phone or mail since the Thackerys moved, and Elizabeth felt sometimes, when Rosie froze up with derision and judgment, that she was secretly armoring herself against any more hurt, any more lost friends, any more lost dads. Rosie sometimes seemed to believe that if she didn’t cause the lost connection, it would be done to her anyway, and so if anything more was going to be snatched away, she herself would do the snatching.

Tonight’s small moments of connection, Rosie’s pleasure in their company, filled Elizabeth with quiet relief.

T
HEN
the next morning Rosie was so openly hostile at breakfast that James got up and left. Elizabeth looked at her sad fierce child, then tilted her head and studied her like a painting.

“Is it anything you can talk about, Rosie?” Rosie shook her head, staring into her bowl of cereal, as if on a phone call full of bad news where no one else could even see the receiver. Sun poured in on them, on Rosie’s skinny little shoulders, brown stick arms, that face full of resignation, anxiety, questioning. She looked as if the angel of death were appearing to her. “Honey?” said Elizabeth, and Rosie glanced up with a now familiar look, a look that James characterized as saying, If you knew how tough it is for me, you’d realize why you make me so sick. The sun smelled warm, like laundry in the dryer, like melting yellow crayons.

I
N
the last couple of months, since turning thirteen, Rosie had undergone what her mother called a sea change and what Elizabeth’s best friend Rae called the changeover from dog to cat, from friendly and engaged and doggishly attentive to mysterious and aloof. Elizabeth knew something had changed, that Rosie had crossed some sort of threshold, when Rosie stopped looking at her. Elizabeth frequently felt as if she were being looked past, and she found it deeply disconcerting, even more so because when she first began to notice it, she heard herself say one of the things her mother had said to her when she was young, something she’d sworn she’d never say: “I want you to
look
at me when I’m talking.”

Then Rosie would suddenly, maliciously lock onto Elizabeth’s gaze like a cat watching someone eat a tuna fish sandwich. So Elizabeth didn’t say it anymore. She remembered avoiding eye contact with her own mother when she was Rosie’s age. It was partly, she thought, because her mother might read her mind, and her mind was so seditious, plotting her mother’s overthrow. She also remembered having had the superstitious belief at thirteen, twenty-nine years ago, that if she didn’t look at her mother, drunk and dramatic, or out like a light at midday, or sick and shaky, her mother might just go ahead and disappear.

Also, she had been profoundly ashamed of herself, so big and busty and heavily eyebrowed, so huge and clumsy. Elizabeth knew that Rosie was ashamed of being small and undeveloped. Elizabeth had been so ashamed of her drunken disheveled mother, and even though she, Elizabeth, had now been sober four years, Rosie was still ashamed to have a mother who used to get drunk and bring men home from the bar, and who now had to go to her endless meetings. She did not understand why her mother could not control her drinking, enjoy a beer
or two on a hot summer’s day, like her friend Hallie’s mother, like most regular people. She didn’t understand why her mother couldn’t act more normal, why she needed so much solitude, why she couldn’t have a lot of friends and a job, and throw lots of fun parties, smile, wave to more people. Her mother was a little like a wolf, an outsider, strange somehow, like Luther. She was ashamed to think that, but it was true.

She was also scornful of her mother’s clothes and her refusal to wear makeup. “Would it really kill you to wear a little lipstick?” Rosie cried when Elizabeth showed up at school to pick her up one day. And then, three weeks later, when Elizabeth did show up wearing a little foundation and some blusher, Rosie all but rolled her eyes. “Don’t even bother, Mom,” she’d said.

R
OSIE
was aware that the things she said hurt her mother, but why did her mother have to be so annoying, so weird? For instance, Elizabeth had a pair of ratty black loafers she was practically living in these days, as if the family didn’t have enough money to buy her a new pair. From Rosie’s perspective, those shoes might as well have been bloody rags, strapped to Elizabeth’s feet with adhesive tape, advertising to the whole world that the family wasn’t doing very well. Elizabeth promised not to wear them when she picked Rosie up at school or the courts, but then just last week she’d forgotten, and Rosie, spotting the shoes on her mother’s feet, felt stung with betrayal. She had staggered to the car with humiliation.

“Darling, what is it?” Elizabeth asked as they rounded the corner toward home.

Rosie was scowling. “This will not do,” she muttered.

S
CHOOL
was so confusing, seventh grade. The “campus” was very pretty, covered with trees that were now in full bloom and a huge green playing field, all the trappings of an upper-middle-class school for mostly white kids. Rosie belonged to the larger group of forty or fifty kids who got to think of themselves as the popular crowd. But within that group there were the top ten girls, the cutest, foxiest girls, a little more rebellious than the others, who smoked pot and spiked their drinks at dances and parties, who made out with boys and always had
boyfriends. Rosie liked a number of the less-popular popular girls, girls in the second echelon of popularity, and sometimes went along with them to the mall or to their parties. She was included in gossip and parties because she was funny and famous for being a tennis star. Mostly, though, after school and on weekends, she and Simone were on a tennis court somewhere. Rosie found most of the really popular girls spoiled and sarcastic without being funny. The boys were not at all interested in her, and this was very painful. She remembered a dance last year, held right after school in the gym, where she’d felt so wild, so desperate to be a part of one of the happy dancing couples, that she’d leapt away from the sidelines and thrown herself at a couple who were slow dancing, as if she could be in the middle of all that affection, a part of it, or maybe bump the girl away like a billiard ball and take up dancing the girl part. They had looked at her as if a monkey had just tried to cut in.

Besides this, she didn’t like some of her teachers. She sometimes had the feeling that they didn’t really know or care about the subject they were teaching, as if instead they had just read up on it the night before. Mr. Allen, her science teacher, was funny, though, and seemed genuinely to love science and want his students to be excited too. Rosie looked forward to his class more than any other. English right now was terrible. She had always liked English a lot, because she was good at it, good at the verbs, the nouns, the pronouns, and of course she loved reading so much and writing little stories, but right now the class was reading
The Diary of Anne Frank
, and most of the class was really bored, because it went so slowly. Rosie thought it might be the best book she had ever read. The most popular girls were all passing notes back and forth to each other, and Rosie got into it too, she did not want to seem different, like she thought she was better than everyone else. But the class would be reading these entries that were so incredibly sad and hard, and the girls would be whispering, Does my hair look good? Do you have any lip gloss? I
hate
this jacket, I
hate
how my makeup looks. Even worse, the boys would be cracking up every time Anne mentioned breasts or bras or periods.