Crooked Little Heart (39 page)

J
AMES
had hoped that this was a three- or four-day process, this business of Elizabeth having a little breakdown or whatever she was doing, going to a lot of meetings but not paying any attention, crying a lot in between. But as it went on and on, it began to wear him down.

Rosie was worn out also and bored with it all. But she was watching quite carefully. Her mother seemed surrounded by cotton batting, the kind parkas were lined with; she was focused in on herself. Rosie watched her mother disappear into the bedroom and put sad folk songs on the tape player—too much Judy Collins. She was annoyed with her mother for not snapping out of it but also annoyed with James. She could see that he was still thinking he was at center stage. He was trying to get Elizabeth to react to him with his tiny acts of kindness. Rosie saw him as a mime that no one was watching—acting understanding, and then amused, and then annoyed, just dancing around, day after day, looking guilty and then mad, like first he was thinking, It’s my fault, then, It’s her fault, then, under his breath, “Women,” then to Lank on the phone, “
Mar
riage.” But none of it got through to Elizabeth.

It was so hard for Rosie to watch. She tried to describe to Rae one afternoon how offended James was that Elizabeth was lying down so much, how frustrated he often acted. “Women are so much better at hiding despair, aren’t they?” asked Rae. “Biting their nails, getting fat.” Rosie nodded gravely.

A
N
old poem began to play in her head, a poem her daddy used to read to her:
James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George Dupree, took
great care of his mother, though he was only three. James James, said to his mother, “Mother,” he said, said he: “you must never go down to the end of the town if you don’t go down with me.”

But her mother had gone to the end of the town.

One day James was so quietly loving and tender that Rosie’s heart was stirred with gratitude. And then the next day he picked a fight. He kept working into the evening, even though he said he was going to make dinner, so he was too hungry by the time he finally got a salad Niçoise made. Then he brought it up on a plate to Elizabeth, with whom Rosie was lying in bed, reading separate books. But when he put the tray over her lap, he jiggled it and the glass of iced tea fell over into the plate of salad, and he shouted swear words as he lifted the tray back up.

“Why can’t you just get out of bed and eat at the table with us?”

“I wasn’t hungry,” she said.

“Well, you have to eat.”

“Why don’t you leave?” she said, and then she started crying because he did.

Rosie stayed behind, scowling contemptuously at James. “Oh, Rosie,” her mother asked after a while. “Can you leave me alone for ten minutes? I just need to get myself together.”

The house was a mess, and Rosie walked around looking at the chaos as if she had herself spent all morning cleaning it.

She stood in the doorway looking stern and disgusted.

“James was a jerk,” she said. “You’ll be fine. He’ll be back.” She went and got a little washcloth from the bathroom, wet it, wrung it out and dabbed Elizabeth’s eyes.

He called from town, full of remorse and love. “I’ll come home if you want,” he said. She wanted him to come home, and he did. He arrived with French fries and strawberry shakes. The three of them lay in bed—it was still light out—and ate their fries, dipped in ketchup.

Elizabeth had folk music on the bedroom boom box. “Doesn’t this music make you sad?” James implored.

“It’s what I feel like hearing,” said Elizabeth.

“I know, baby, but—”

“Would you stop nagging at her, James? What do you want, for her to listen to your Village People tapes?”

After a moment James smiled.

Two days later Rosie got home early from Simone’s to find Elizabeth and James in their bedroom with the door closed, arguing again. School started in a few days. She didn’t need this. She needed her mother to get better—soon. She got some cookies and went to her room, where she lay on the unmade bed above the chaos on the floor. After a while she heard her mother’s voice rising and looked toward the sound. She lay there thinking about the look on Luther’s face right before he told her his great secret, before he taught her how to frame things—his medicine-man face. She sat up on the bed so that her back was against the wall, and she framed the picture of her dad that was on the wall by her bed, and she framed two tiny yellow tea roses in a bud vase her mother had left on her desk, just like the roses she’d given Charles before he died. But at the same time she was straining so hard to hear her parents that she looked like a child with an ear infection.

“Because that is what the truth is,” her mother wept.

“You’re talking about something that happened five years ago. Something that didn’t mean anything to me.”

“But why have you lied all this time about it? It meant something to me. That you slept with other women when you were seeing me.”

“But even if there were,” said James, “it was five years ago! We were dating. You wouldn’t say you loved me. Why is this coming up now?”

“Because I finally got around to it. And are you saying you fucked other women because I wouldn’t say I
loved
you?” her mother shouted. “I was shy! I was recently widowed.”

“Recently widowed? It had been four years! And why did you suck it down? Why didn’t you get angry a long time ago?”

“Because then you might have left us.”

“But now it’s so old, I can’t even respond to it … I’m sorry! I’m fucking sorry to death! Okay?”

Suddenly her mother bellowed, and Rosie bolted off the bed, sure that James was killing her, choking her—no, then she couldn’t shout so loud—and then she heard loud muffled thuds, as if he had begun to pummel her, and Rosie ran toward her mother’s room and burst in. Elizabeth was on her knees by the bed, pounding the mattress with her fists, and James was standing a few feet away, gripping a handful of hair on either side of his head as if he were trying to pull it out, and they both turned toward the sound of their door opening and the wrath of God shining on Rosie’s face.

“What is going on here?” Rosie demanded. “Get off the floor, Mom.”

“Get out of my room,” Elizabeth said.

“I thought he was
hurting
you!” She slammed the door behind her and stormed down the stairs.

E
LIZABETH
and James didn’t speak for the rest of the day. Rosie stayed over at Rae’s, and James slept on the couch.

All night Elizabeth, in the dark alone, heard a poem playing in her head, as if on a radio whose signal she was suddenly beginning to receive.
James James said to his mother, “Mother,” he said, said he: “you must never go down to the end of the town if you don’t go down with me.”
She remembered listening from the doorway when Andrew, holding Rosie on his lap, read it to her. She remembered the exact sound of his voice, low in timbre, soft and kind, and she remembered hearing the poem again after Andrew died, before she met James. Now she kept turning her head up toward the sound of the poem playing, and then she would realize that it was playing somewhere inside her, but far away.

R
AE
had come to get Rosie when she called. Driving back to her cottage, though, she disclosed that Lank had stopped over that night and would still be there when they got back. Rosie said, “
Lank
is at your house?” It was such a strange concept, as if Rae had casually announced that Veronica had dropped by.

He’d never been by for a visit before, she said, although they spoke on the phone quite frequently now, like friends, and then tonight she’d been weaving when she heard someone outside call her name. Looking out her front window, she discovered Lank in her garden on an ancient rusty black one-speed bike like the one Einstein tooled around town on. And so she had invited him in for tea.

Rosie felt her eyes squint with disappointment. “What what what?” Rae demanded.

“I was going to ask if it was okay if I spend the night.”

“Of course you can spend the night. I want you to. Lank wasn’t going to, honey.”

Lank’s old bike was indeed leaning against the wall by the front
door of Rae’s house, but Rosie didn’t see him when she stepped inside. The smell of the fibers was always so strong when you first walked into Rae’s cottage. Sometimes, like tonight, they smelled like grains; they smelled like oatmeal.

Lank banged his head on the top of the bathroom door as he came out a moment later, and everyone gasped at the soft thud. He held up one hand like a traffic cop to stop Rosie and Rae from their worry, and covered his forehead with the other, his brow so broad that his hand did not entirely cover it. “I’m fine,” he said, blinking as if he had just woken from a nap, slightly dazed, looking as wise as babies sometimes do.

He was very quiet company. He said that he knew Elizabeth and James were having a bad time because he talked to James every day, but he knew also that it would pass. The three of them sat around and they talked about things for a while—nothing in particular, movies, books, food. There was a Bible on the pillow in the window seat. Rosie looked around the room. There was something new on the loom, much lighter, birds in rich blue and shimmery yellows, cotton and silk, no wool. The colors bounced off the silk and came to meet you.

“What are you making?”

“A shawl for your mother. Fall will be here soon.”

“What is the secret you wove in this one?”

“A dried petal from one of her roses. It’s a little scratchy; you can get up and feel it if you want.” Rosie went to the weaving, held up a hand, and looked to Rae for directions. “There, underneath that first yellow bird. Feel it?” Rosie nodded. “ ‘The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.’ I came upon that in Jeremiah the day I started this weaving. It’s a line I read to your mom once that she seemed to like, and I thought, Let’s weave in a little sorrow. It seemed like that would make it more healing than just a whole lot of happy colors.”

Rosie kept fingering the rose petal. She could feel its crisp edge; it felt like a scab. There was a beautiful clay wall hanging over the loom, of a young Madonna, her head wrapped in an indigo scarf that draped down to her chest to shield the little baby. Mary was only a teenager. How old was she when she had Jesus? Rosie wondered. She looked up into Mary’s downcast eyes, crossed her own slightly to blur the vision, to see Simone in the indigo scarf. She felt all this lust inside her. She
felt gooey and greasy from longing and confusion. Simone must have too, out there on the boat; she must have known the boy didn’t love her, she’d hardly ever even really talked to him before. How much greasier could you feel than to be drunk and have a guy put his penis in you? A phrase came to her: the fruits of sin. Rae never talked like that, but Rosie knew that phrase, the fruits of sin. All of a sudden here’s a slut and a beautiful baby, so now the mother looks like a saint, even if she’s a slut mother—not that Simone is a slut, because Simone was her best friend and a really sweet person, maybe a little dumb even though she couldn’t help it, but still, all she meant was that it was like having all that lust that you’re so afraid of, and all of a sudden it’s on display, and then you get to be a mother. Out of your sluttiness comes a beautiful baby. It was like what Rae said was the whole point of making beautiful cloth—taking some yarn that everyone thought was so ugly and weaving it into a sweet piece of your picture. Rosie came out of the daydream to look back over to where Lank and Rae were sitting.

Lank was starting to tease Rae a little, and she was teasing back, kind of cranky in a light way, and Lank sounded just like James, this friendly complaining banter, and Rae was doing it back, but Rosie could feel the edginess of it, the scab of the petal hidden beneath the silk bird, and Rosie turned to them and said in this tiny voice like Tweety Bird, this little voice that shamed her, “I need you not to fight,” and just like that, just like that, they stopped.

T
HE
next morning, James came into their room early. Sun poured in shiny and white through the windows from behind the leafy branches of their trees. Elizabeth opened her eyes. This was the part she hated, the moments of first waking up, of having to come to. The room was so tidy though, and that made her feel safe, and she realized before she saw him that he had been taking care of the house, straightening up, keeping things together.

He looked like hell, so tired. There were more crow’s-feet around his eyes. When had that happened? she wondered.

“I miss you,” he said. “I feel like something is slipping away from us, and you seem unable to help me stop it. I want us to make up and have a good marriage and be best friends, but I have to tell you something.” His words came out fast, as if there were just a moment in
which to say them, and he was sitting so close to her that she could feel his breath on the side of her face. “You know, sometimes I feel like I’m married to both you and Andrew—it’s as if Andrew is hidden underneath the house in a thick canvas body bag. All of a sudden, sometime this year, I felt like he came back to live with us. And you—
you
won’t let anything take the body bag away. And I’m fucked up about having done something wrong—not because I slept with someone else five years ago, when you and I were
dating
, for Chrissakes. To me it wasn’t a big deal. It didn’t mean anything. But I know I was a total shit to keep on lying about it. It must have felt like
Gaslight
to you; it must have made you feel like you were crazy.” He looked up at her for a moment, seeking her eyes, but then he lowered his own. “I did do it. I did it, and I know that it messed with you. I do. And maybe that little secret, that lie, is something in me I had to hold on to, that I couldn’t give up. I don’t know why. But I don’t have it in me right now to do a deep archaeological dig with you. And I can’t do the digging all by myself. And I am
definitely
not the person you’re going to allow to take that body bag out of this house. I know that, and I don’t know what to do. And I’m so tired. I just want you back.” He lay down beside her, so they were facing each other, and he put his knees against hers; the soft skin and sharp bones of their legs formed a sort of bridge.