Crooked Little Heart (4 page)

Even though these boys were so immature, she felt badly that none of them wanted to go steady with her. She kept waiting for one of her friends, like Hallie maybe or one of the other popular girls, to hand her a note that said, “Do you like so and so?” and if she said sort of, they’d
write back, “Well, you better. Because he’s going to ask you out.” And then he would take her to the mall or a movie, be with her somewhere private like his house or hers, and kiss her. It would be a miracle, though—no one had ever asked her out on a date. She didn’t look like the beautiful girls. She was a little stick figure. Simone was beautiful and had had boyfriends and sometimes this made Rosie incredibly sad. But then when Simone was in hysterics because maybe the boy didn’t like her anymore, Rosie would feel old, and safe.

A
FTER
another solid week of rain, the sun finally came out and dried the courts. Peter had arranged for Rosie and Simone to play one afternoon with two sixteen-year-old girls at a nearby public park.

Riding their bikes to the court, Rosie and Simone passed a horse pasture and an old sawmill. Under the redwoods next to the bikepath, birds sang, squirrels darted out chattering onto the telephone wires, and the creek, swollen with the recent rains, burbled a wet drumbeat. The court lay in the dappled afternoon sunlight, and it smelled just as Rosie remembered it from the one other time she had played here—mucky, slightly mildewy because of the shade of the trees and the wetness of the creek. Under the redwoods, huge knotted tangles of roots hung like baskets over the water. She remembered the smell, a little like dirty socks, in a good way, salty, yeasty, breeding life.

Rosie lived in a world of smells. She always seemed to be sniffing things for information. All these things in her life filled her with confusion—her body, boys, how impatient she felt with her parents, her constant fear that her mother would die, thoughts of her future, memories—but smells, smells were clear, like a powerful radio station.

Simone did not go around sniffing things. She went around tossing her chest about, watching its effect on boys and grown men. She was already fourteen, so pretty and voluptuous, with shoulder-length blonde hair that looked great when it hung down, framing her face, her pretty full lips, charcoal gray eyes, and small straight nose, and it also looked great pulled back into a sloppy ponytail, with wavy little wisps and tendrils breaking free. Rosie already knew that beauty could save and protect you, that if you looked beautiful, people wouldn’t poke around and go in too deep—if you looked the way they hoped and expected, they wouldn’t look further into the dark parts that she read
about in her creepy teenage horror novels. If you were pretty, the secret of your essential un-okayness would remain a secret.

The court under the redwoods alongside the swollen creek was hard and fast, like Rosie liked it, and both she and Simone served with utter confidence; they pounded back impossibly angled ground strokes, moving in together at the net to put away volleys or, with a flick of the wrist, to send over a tricky spinning little drop shot that the older, heavier girls simply had to give up on. Rosie could have played all day. She really wanted to be ranked number one again. She pretended they were playing in the finals at the state championships, the bleachers full of spectators, Peter watching proudly. Sometimes she liked when Luther watched her play, or she liked to pretend that he was watching; her edge, her focus grew tauter, like a string inside of her tightening, and she scrambled. She imagined him now in the shade of the redwoods, stepping out from behind the trunk, heavy-lidded and watchful as she skimmed over the hard court like a water skeeter. She got to everything that day, chased down the toughest shots and got most of them back, with no one really watching and nothing to lose. It was just a long hard game of doubles under the trees, in the crisp dappled sunlight of a late spring afternoon.

T
HEY
pedaled home just as night began to fall.

Riding her bike made Rosie think of Charles Adderly, her mother and father’s great friend. Years ago, he had kind of tricked her into learning to ride a bike; she hadn’t wanted to learn at all, had only wanted to be able to
do
it. She was quite afraid of falling at the time. She had just turned seven and her dad had been dead a few years and maybe that made her more afraid. But Charles and Grace gave her a red two-wheeler for her birthday, with a rack on the back that you could clip things onto, hold your books with, and it had pink and magenta streamers pouring forth from the plastic grips of the handlebars, and one day right after her birthday, Charles said he would teach her to ride. He said, I’ll hold on to the rack in the back and walk along beside you. Just pedal and steer; I won’t let you fall. That’s all he kept saying—just pedal and steer, I won’t let you fall.

The next day, he came over after breakfast. He was tall and stooped and had gray hair that was receding at the temples, and he was handsome in the same way her father would have been if her father had
lived long enough to grow old. Even though he had gotten too much sun over the years, hiking, sailing, bicycling with his wife Grace when she was still alive, Rosie thought he was very handsome for an old man. He looked like a retired astronaut.

They went out on the sunlit sidewalk together. She got on the new red bike and put her feet on the pedals, and he took hold of the rack and she started pedaling down the sidewalk. She felt so tight that her elbows were locked and even her knees were locked as much as they could be since she still had to try and pedal. She didn’t really trust him, but he kept walking alongside her while she wobbled down the sidewalk. “You’re doing fine,” he kept saying, “I won’t let go. I won’t let you fall.” They went all the way to the end of the block, turned around, and pedaled back home. She kept checking to make sure he was there behind her, and he was.

“Let’s do it again tomorrow, Rosini,” he said when they were back in front of her house. She didn’t really want to. She thought maybe taking a few days off in between lessons would be a good idea, but he was there the next morning when she got up; he was in the kitchen with her mother, drinking coffee, reading the paper, waiting for her. He smelled of powder, like the medicine powder you might sprinkle between your toes, and he smelled like clothes in the dryer. He always wore the same things, khaki or corduroy trousers, worn plaid shirts, moccasins. She went over and leaned into him at the kitchen table while he told her mother how beautifully she had done on the bike the day before.

This time they went four blocks, two blocks away from home and then back. He held on to the rack, and she was still terrified. He kept saying, “Just pedal and steer. I won’t let you go. I won’t let you fall.”

The third day he was in the kitchen again with her mother when Rosie woke up. He was wearing a red plaid shirt. They went outside, and she got on the bike and started pedaling. He took hold of the rack. She was feeling more confident, a little looser, and she picked up the pace a little, smiling finally, and he had to walk very quickly, almost trotting, to keep up with her. Then she started pedaling really fast, and after a minute she risked the quickest look over her shoulder to check in with him since he must have nearly been running, but he was gone, and she looked way back, and he was a whole block away, so far away that his shirt looked pink, and he was waving to her.

Now, pedaling home as the sky darkened, she remembered how
much fun Charles had always been before he got sick. These days he would just open his eyes and smile at her from his bed when they went to visit him. “Is Charles dying?” she’d asked Elizabeth the last time they’d been there.

“Oh, honey. Yes; yes he is.”

E
LIZABETH
was standing at the kitchen window when Rosie and Simone pulled up on their bikes. She opened the window and called out a greeting, but Rosie either didn’t hear or was choosing to ignore her. Simone smiled and waved. Elizabeth waved back. Finally Rosie deigned to look up at her and jutted out her chin in greeting. Then she looked away. Elizabeth sighed, shook her head, and closed the window. Having a teenage daughter was one’s punishment for having been a teenage daughter. She went back to making dinner—chicken enchiladas and salad.

It grieved her to have given someone life who was now going to have to endure being a teenager. Some girls hit thirteen with gusto, filled with confidence, bursting through the door saying, “Here I am!” But not Rosie. Rosie was destined, just as Elizabeth had been, to edge through the back door with slouched, rounded shoulders, arms held in front of her chest. The heartbreak was huge, the sorrow of moving from the land of childhood, where life smelled like grass and earth and sap and berry pies—pies made from berries you and your best friend, scratched and stained, have gathered—to the steely metallic world of puberty, where everything smells like pennies, like sheared copper, and you still have friends but you all know now that you’re really just trading cards: you have a certain worth and dispensability. A year ago Rosie still smelled like a child, of clean dirt and salt and shampoo and sweets. Now, mingled with the clean soapy smell of shampoo, came the sharp whiff of medication, dabbed on her skin every morning to prevent breakouts, and of a flowery spray deodorant that smelled like week-old leis. The scent of a locker room hung in her bedroom now, too, for Rosie’s huge feet in the last year had begun smelling as gamey as James’s, like salt and dirt and fur, like a moose’s might.

Elizabeth remembered the sense of hopelessness she had felt at that age: the conviction that life was so tense and disgusting and false that she wondered how she’d ever survive. The deep disappointment
of realizing at thirteen that although she’d survived childhood, the rewards she’d hoped for—respect, autonomy, romance, thrills, belonging—were still out of reach. She remembered feeling glamorous and aloof, like a twenty-six-year-old inside who was still stuck among all these children. The boys around her were all absurdly tiny, and she was alone, an outsider. She hung out with another misfit, named Jessie, and they’d barricaded themselves in Jessie’s room, talking conspiratorially, trashing the in crowd as conformists, shallow featherheads with no compassion. That she had to go home every night was a nightmare. Her room, which had been a refuge all those years, was suddenly too small. And everything was too real; life at twelve and thirteen, she remembered now, stopped feeling so cartoonish and instead started feeling steely and unpleasant. You couldn’t use toys anymore to shift the world through your imagination. Looking at her daughter, sad or sullen at the dinner table, Elizabeth remembered that feeling—that half the time the world was just there, life was just there, like a long dull irritating play, and the other half of the time it was fraught with danger.

When Rosie was six, smart as a poodle, and had just mastered tic-tac-toe, the two of them sat playing in the kitchen one day. Rosie hated to lose, as Andrew had hated to lose, and Elizabeth watched her daughter’s fierce competitiveness with some amusement. Rosie announced that the person who went first got to go twice in a row and that she in fact would go first. And that she would be
O
’s. A few minutes later, she drew a larger grid than usual and drew an
O
with wavy lines radiating out from it, like the sun. “That,” she said, “is a fireball.” Then she took a penny, slid it under the paper, and made an
O
with a pencil rubbing of Abe Lincoln’s head, unrecognizable and evil. “That is the devil warrior,” she announced. Then she handed her mother the pencil. “Your turn,” she said.

Elizabeth looked all over the paper for some place to put her mark.

“Where can I go to be safe?” she asked. Her daughter, looking at her with some pity, said softly, “There are no safe places for you, Mommy.”

T
HE
girls were so luscious. Elizabeth had been watching them all morning at a weekend tournament in San Francisco: out on the court, where they both lost their first singles matches; milling around waiting
to play a doubles match; huddled together on a bench whispering their secret thoughts and language. Rosie wore a sweet little dress with lace trim around the neckline that Simone had grown out of over the winter. Now Simone wore women’s tennis skirts and tight white scooped-neck T-shirts. Elizabeth glanced at her round sunny cleavage, the pale blonde milkmaid face. It was sometimes hard to take your eyes off Simone for her blossoming vanilla beauty, or Rosie, for that matter, so much smaller, but beautiful, raven haired, strong featured, like a fair-skinned gypsy, marvelously physical. Here at the tournament, Elizabeth observed their mix of unself-consciousness and hyperconsciousness. And she watched spooky Luther watch Rosie, feasting on her, getting juice from that wonderful nubility of flesh, female with no traces of age, seamless and dewy.

Elizabeth sat as far away from Luther as she could but close enough so he would know a mother bear was watching. She kept glancing at him out of the corner of her eye, taking in the worn windbreaker, dark bristly crew cut, the wolf eyes watchful and patient. She imagined him stalking Rosie, talking to Rosie softly, hypnotizing her. Once she had begged Peter Billings to get him arrested somehow, to for God’s sakes do something, and he had looked at her like she was a nervous case. He said Luther was actually a pretty smart guy, harmless, sad, maybe not so good to look at but certainly of no danger to anyone. She had seen Peter and Luther sitting together in the bleachers at the Golden Gate Park courts last summer, the sun glinting off Peter’s Hollywood blond head, Luther in a tattered jacket on a warm summer’s day, the two men—one so light, one so dark—watching Rosie play. Peter said Luther knew more about tennis than he did and that he just liked to watch the girls play. But was that all? she wondered.

She loved to watch the girls play, too. She loved their innocence but couldn’t remember having felt it herself, doing something so full of joy that she completely forgot about the watcher. Especially the self-watcher who judges and finds fault. She watched the girls get lost in the game and saw with a rush of anxiety that they didn’t stop to cover themselves. They were so naked.