Crooked Little Heart (5 page)

Luther was, to Elizabeth, all that was wrong with the real world, all that was dirty and drunk and mysterious, all that was random and cryptic. She sneaked another look at him. He was ragged, a tree that the weather had whipped away at for too long. He was so dark, and he
loved to watch her curly-haired girl in the tiny white dress. She watched her child deliberately avoid his gaze, almost meanly, seemingly not afraid, and the thought crossed her mind, Who is stalking whom? Did Rosie miss his dark attentions when he didn’t show up? Her daughter was now playing out of her head, hard, focused, inflamed. Elizabeth, looking from Rosie to Luther and back to her daughter’s bright body again, felt suddenly how thin the membrane was between order and chaos, how thin but there, real enough to palpate, like a fontanel.

R
OSIE
looked at herself in the mirror all the time now, half to see how she looked, half to make sure she was really there. She saw in the mirror the world’s saddest person. When she was eleven, she used to look in the mirror and imagine herself in the movies. Now, at thirteen, she saw herself all of a sudden as she imagined others saw her. Late at night, very late, when she explored the dark dangerous existential place where sleeplessness took her, she’d traipse down the hall to the bathroom, and look at her weird sick face in the medicine chest mirror. Under the awful humming lights she could see how
other
she was, could see the wrinkles and bumps and pores.

She had insomnia. Maybe it was hereditary; her mother had it too. The fear of not sleeping kept her awake until the early hours. Just last night she’d still been awake at midnight, and at one o’clock, and two—up and down, up and down, in and out of bed, to the bathroom, the kitchen for a bowl of cereal, finally to the TV room. She made a little rabbit bed for herself on the couch, with the pillow from her bed in its Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy pillowcase, and a quilt. It felt safer here than in her room. After a while her mother came downstairs and sat beside her in the dark. They were both vaporish with fatigue.

“What’s bothering you, darling?”

“I can’t sleep.”

“Are you reading something scary?”

“No,” Rosie lied. The truth was that she was always reading dark, scary books. Sometimes they were sort of racy and turned her on, although the only really dirty book she had ever read was
Candy
, which Simone had found in Veronica’s room. They had read it in Simone’s bed, in the dark, under the covers, with a flashlight, and Rosie had felt
half crazy with fear and excitement. But most of the books she read involved young girls and women who were taken over by various dead beings. Some days when she was gawky and tense and weepy, it was all Rosie felt good for—to be a vessel for powerful dark spirits, a gravy boat for ghostly sluts. An empty keyhole limpet shell that a wayfaring psychic snail might decide to inhabit in a tide pool. She read lines like “Taken over and ridden as she felt by the sudden dark forces of sex, Adriana wondered if her enthrallment to Jasper’s Ouija board was a way of not having to feel responsible for the sudden onslaught of evil sexual impulses and thoughts,” and she underlined them, read them again and again, voraciously. They whispered a dark edgy truth to her. She had in fact just finished rereading her favorite for the fifth or sixth time, a sort of gothic teenage version of
The Group
, where five or so girls at a private high school fell under the spell of a new and charismatic teacher. At first it just looked like these were schoolgirl crushes. But then they were completely taken over by her, and hideous fates befell them all—all, of course, but one. And the one, the chosen, knew by the end of the book that one day she’d grow up to be a teacher too, at a private girls’ school, and get to choose her own first batch of girls …

“Let’s go to your room. I’ll lie down with you,” her mother said.

“It won’t help.”

But it did. Elizabeth lay down beside Rosie in the dark and told her stories until finally around three o’clock, Rosie fell asleep.

J
AMES
woke up when she finally crawled back into bed with him.

“Rosie couldn’t sleep,” she told him. He yawned, burrowed up against her.

“Do you need me to be awake with you?”

“Would you? For just a few minutes?”

“Okay. Do you want to talk about anything in particular?”

“Tell me what you were like when you were thirteen.”

He didn’t say anything for a minute.

“This is something you really want to talk about now?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Okay.” He half sat up in bed, rubbed his face, yawned, shook his head, sat thinking. “I remember being politically insane. I dabbled in right-wing politics. I was in grief.”

“Over what?

“I was in grief because I was turning out small. That was incredibly defeating. And then another huge myth died around then, the one about my father. I’d thought he was perfect and knew everything, until I was thirteen, and then it turned out he was a total fuckup—that is, he was an ordinary person. And I always held it against him after that.”

“Were you as sullen as Rosie is?”

“Yes. Worse. And I was terrible in school.”

“Why?”

“Everything was so heinous to begin with, and then at thirteen I started getting hard-ons every morning, every single morning in class right between third and fourth period. I’d have to get up and walk out of the classroom with my binder held in front of me and try to be nonchalant about it, but I might as well have had a blue spotlight on my dick.”

“Why did you get so many hard-ons?”

“Because that’s the nature of being a boy. You’re woozy with hormones. At thirteen, girls start giving off mysterious hormonal smells from their scalps—this is just my theory—and they wash their hair all the time. Don’t they? Rosie washes her hair all the time. It’s her life. That is my strongest memory of being thirteen. The smell of girls’ hair and the smell of cherry lipstick. The girl I was kissing at the time wore lipstick that smelled like cherries, and her hair smelled of Prell and hormones. That smell really threw me off. Up until then, up until thirteen, I had a mind. And then I do not remember having a clear thought for the next fifteen years.”

H
E
and Lank first became best friends in second grade. Twenty-seven years later, five years ago, they had gone backpacking to Pretty Boy Meadow on the same weekend that Elizabeth’s friend Rae had managed to convince a deeply skeptical Elizabeth to come along for her first outing. The four of them had met that night under the stars at adjoining campsites. Lank, who was now an elementary school teacher but who had once aspired to a professional singing career, sang them “Stranger in Paradise” under the almost-full moon. Elizabeth, who had earlier claimed that given a choice, she would rather spend a weekend having her gums scraped than go backpacking, had wept. Lank was
family now. He came over a couple of times a week for dinner or to drop James off after basketball. He was the sort of man who at first seemed soft and bearish, with a broad forehead and big bald spot and slight double chin, a broad nose and a small mouth. But when people loved him, like Rosie loved him, he became very handsome; then they saw his kind old blue eyes that stayed on you when you were talking, that never looked away, and lovely soft fair English skin, roses in the cheeks. His heart was huge; he had raised his big mutt from a six-week-old puppy, and Bruno was so sweet and calm and eager to please that this couldn’t help but reflect well on Lank. He spoke of the children in his elementary school classroom with tenderness, humor. They called him at home sometimes, sad or confused. His answering machine said, “Operator, I accept all collect calls from children.”

He was not lucky or wise in love, though.

Neither was Rae. Hilarious, kind, ten pounds heavier than big-boned and ample, with brown almond eyes and thick chestnut hair that was always piled on top of her head like an off-duty Gibson girl, Rae lived in a world filled with light and color and religion and distressing relationships. People paid thousands of dollars for her big earthy weavings, mostly in shades of bricks and browns—black browns, soft bear browns, terra-cotta, the soft tawny brown of a lion’s fur, the amber of its eyes. But she took men the way Elizabeth used to take drinks, obsessively, sneakily, and usually showing bad judgment. She had been in love off and on for two years with a therapist named Mike, who was very tall and tan, with a plump face. If pressed to describe him in two words, Elizabeth might have suggested “supercilious” and “obsequious,” which made for a particularly unpleasant combination of fawning, groveling arrogance. Rae had told her things that made Elizabeth’s stomach ache for her friend. He didn’t like to come during sex, for instance, believing that it robbed him of strength. He’d gone away at one point to Colorado for a month, six months ago, left her one phone message the whole time, and brought her back an odd little hippie candy ball of nuts and honey and God knew what; it looked, as Rosie pointed out, like a little round golf ball of poo.

“That’s very touching, Rae,” Rosie had said, who loved Rae like a second mother. She studied it from all angles, holding it up to the light. “I hope when I grow up I have a boyfriend who brings me nice things like this.”

“Do you like him at all?” Rae asked Elizabeth the next day over the phone.

“Well, I like that he’s so bright.”

Rae snorted. “Of course, so was Hitler.” Elizabeth smiled. She was staring at the weaving that covered most of the living room wall; Rae had given it to them on their first anniversary. Her eyes always traveled to it, relaxing in the coarse wools and yarns, the lumps and holes; it was muscular with browns and mossy greens, a patch of indigo blue. “And so was Roy Cohn,” Rae continued.

“What?”

“You were saying you thought Mike was smart, right? And I was saying, Well, so was Roy Cohn. But do you think Mike’s good-looking?”

“Yes, I do,” she said, although she didn’t. The plumpness of his face bothered her. It suggested someone who couldn’t forbid himself anything. Also, she suspected that he dyed his glossy black hair.

“But what is your overall impression?”

“Honey, I don’t know. He mentions his Ph.D. quite a lot, doesn’t he? I guess I’m never going to think there’s anyone out there who’s good enough for you.”

There was a silence. Then Rae said, “You hate him.”

“No, I don’t,” said Elizabeth, although she did. “I just love you so much.”

“But you don’t even know him,” said Rae.

“You’ve told me some terrible things about him.”

“I shouldn’t have told you, then.”

“But they would have still happened, even if you’d kept them a secret.”

R
AE
wove secrets into her designs. In the living room weaving, she had hidden a bit of a twig from a cherry tree, which you could feel with your fingers if directed to the spot above the brown mountain’s sloping breast. She had let Rosie in on the secret a year before she told Elizabeth. “The cherry twig,” she said, “was from the countryside in France. Once, a hundred years ago, or so the story goes, some schoolchildren playing in a grove of trees in the dead of winter saw an apparition of Mary, the mother of Jesus. But when they told their parents, they were punished for lying. Some were beaten. So they returned
to the barren cherry trees, called out their plight to the cold winter air. Suddenly, they heard voices in the wind, telling them that they must go home and return the next day with their parents. And when they did, leading their skeptical parents up the hillside to the grove, they saw the cherry trees glistening and pink in the sunlight—they were in full bloom.”

Rosie was ten when Rae had told her this story and shown her where to put her finger in order to feel the bit of twig. Rosie at ten still believed a cherry tree might bloom in winter. Now she knew better. Now, at thirteen, she seemed to feel that if the miracle really occurred, if you came up that hill and looked too closely at those flowering fruit trees, you might discover that their pits were full of poison, their branches full of worms.

F
ROM
time to time Rae would break up with, or try to break up with, Mike. Recently, on Groundhog Day, she had broken up with him again. “No shadow, no Mike,” she had announced over the phone. Elizabeth had the feeling Rae might really pull it off this time. Mike had phoned once, and asked her to call him back, which she hadn’t. Instead, she had called Rosie and asked her to come over for dinner and a video.

There was nothing Rosie liked more than visiting Rae on her own. There was just the one big room filled with antiques, and then a bright, spare bathroom. It felt very private, on its own little piece of land, surrounded by trees, mostly pine with a few redwoods and a couple of pear trees. One side looked out across an empty meadow to a ridge. Rosie loved this cottage so much. There were windows in every direction so you got all sorts of light at all times. The big bed was the centerpiece, even more so than the loom, smack in the middle of one wall, with everything important within reach, so you could lie in bed and look at the fire in the woodstove during winter, buds on the trees in the spring, the light on the ridge whenever you wanted. The wood-burning stove was a black iron box on legs, set in front of a convex copper heat shield, which sent out heat when the fire was lit, glowed like soft flames when it wasn’t. There were little containers everywhere, tiny glass jars, framed photographs, handmade paper boxes holding more little secrets: a folded-up poem, a rock from the beach, a tiny ceramic house that Rae thought might once have been a hash pipe.