Crooked Little Heart (8 page)

James had left the bathroom to go back to work, and Elizabeth had stayed a minute longer to run a comb through her hair. She looked all
right for forty-two, she thought, good enough for now at any rate. There were times when she fretted about having married a younger man, who looked younger than she did, who’d had a taste for pretty young women before they married; there had been two or three lapses during their courtship—or at least, she believed there had. She mostly tried not to think about it now. That had been so long ago. Today she looked in the mirror and could see the worried beauty of both the girl she had been and the marvelous crone—God willing—she would become one day.

She used to love looking at Grace’s aged face before she got so sick, the wrinkled skin like crevices and landscape, land whose weathered bones Elizabeth could see. Grace had shone with a wonderful rude health in her midseventies, the life force that was still in there shoving past all the outdated need to look pretty. Elizabeth especially admired Grace’s steady gaze, the look of someone who had lost so much over the years—her youth, best friends, her health. She saw that in many ways Grace was off the hook of yearning. She had had a good look at the impermanence of things and so was not clutching at much. There was beauty—beauty and freedom—in that.

Elizabeth longed for this freedom from fear, but lived with a constant low-grade anxiety that she would somehow lose Rosie. Images of Rosie came to her all day: Rosie on the court, Luther watching, Rosie at school, Rosie in her room, Rosie dead or dying. Ever since Rosie’s birth, Elizabeth had been half-expecting her to die. Visions floated into her head of the ax falling. She pictured herself holding Rosie’s lifeless body and screaming in white-hot silence. She loved her with desperation, with heartsickness, with a kind of lust, and she saw how vulnerable Rosie was, her skin so soft and thin, her bones so rubbery. And she saw the meanness of the world, saw the world aquiver with menace. Elizabeth always fell in love with her daughter all over again on vacations or one-day trips out to the ocean or up to the mountain. There she got to watch other people fall in love with her child, too, her shy but engaging daughter, away from the inbred day-to-dayness of the house, away from the mother’s boredom of spending so much time alone with a kid. She hated herself for this boredom, imagined she was the only mother who did not thrill constantly to her child’s long, involved monologues, the pelting of questions, the lagging behind on walks, the tedium of playing Crazy Eights. So she loved to watch her
daughter dazzle other people with her shy beauty and quick mind. She loved to be away from the exasperation of daily life, Rosie’s provocations, the tension she felt as a result, her voice spiraling out of control, her hand itching to strike.

Over the years she had watched Rosie splash in the waves out at Stinson Beach, joyful among the pelicans and gulls and sandpipers on that long rural stretch of sand. But with her mind’s eye Elizabeth could see rogue waves sweeping her away, and when they hiked on mountain trails, she could imagine Rosie losing her footing, toppling off a cliff or tumbling down the hillside. Almost anything could set off a projection of Rosie dying or dead. In the wrong mood, mention of dinosaurs could trigger a movie in Elizabeth’s head of Rosie being torn apart by raptors. Sometimes Elizabeth retreated to the image of a perfectly sterile environment, a luxuriously appointed laboratory, with locks on the doors and security guards, where she cradled Rosie in her arms, safe from killers, snakes, cars, white water, cliffs, airplanes, pedophiles, pit bulls, burning houses, trains, eddies, sharks, fallen electrical wires—only to watch as her angular, sturdy daughter, draped over her arms like an infant, grew wasted and blue with leukemia.

“Honey,” Charles Adderly had told her the day after Rosie was born, “you’ll never draw another calm breath as long as you live. That blissful amniotic unconcerned state of people without children is a thing of the past.”

“Why is that?” she’d asked, looking at the baby girl sound asleep on the bed beside her.

“Because you’re a monkey,” he answered. “And monkeys care.”

I
T
rained the entire first two weeks of March, and Elizabeth began to feel both anxious and melancholic. She started waking up in the middle of the night for no particular reason and found herself staring at the walls, the shadows, her sleeping husband, her stomach taut with a nebulous tension, unable to fall back to sleep. In this strange twilight time, her thoughts spun with images of Charles, Luther, Andrew, Thackery. She would get up, and crawl into bed with Rosie, and lie in the dark listening to her daughter’s quiet breathing; after a while she would go downstairs, where she sat in the window seat with a cup of warm milk, reading, a blanket wrapped around her.

One night when Simone had slept over, Elizabeth stayed up until three in the morning. She finally dozed, but bolted awake from a dream about her garden, a violent frightening dream where the garden looked like a jungle, where snails were eating everything and cats were stalking birds, and a twenty-foot python lay sleeping in the overgrowth. The house was in deep stillness. The night was so dark and she felt so alone, sad and scared like she used to feel as a little girl when she’d wake up in the middle of the night and not be able to fall back to sleep, haunted by shadows, by the insistent silence of dark forces; she used to sneak into her parents’ room just before dawn, and lie on the wood floor beside their bed, and sleep there until it was time to get up for school. She was not allowed to sleep with them; if they discovered her in bed with them, they would make her go back to her own room, and so she lay on their floor, covered with whatever clothes her father had left on the chair when he’d undressed that night, and she’d always be cold and afraid of whatever snakes or spiders or men might be waiting
for her under the bed. But alone in her own room in the middle of all that silence was worse.

She started to recite a poem she knew by heart, which Andrew used to read to Rosie at bedtime, “James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George Dupree.” She tried to meditate, she tried to slow down her heartbeat. But she heard this terrible sound, a descending tone deep inside her, thin, high, and empty, all of the wetness squeezed out of the sound, like a last gasp of long skinny sorrow. God! Maybe she was going crazy, maybe there was something wrong with her mind, maybe it was broken. She got up, wrapped the blanket around her shoulders, and went back upstairs to bed.

James woke up when she crawled back in between the sheets. “Oh, honey,” he said tenderly, laying his head down on her chest. “My sleepy wife.”

After a while, she sighed. “James?” she asked. “Do I seem different in the last few days?”

“Different how?”

She thought for a moment. “I get up now before I used to go to bed.” They lay back in bed and cuddled, and she smiled at herself, at how crazy her mind could be all alone in the dark, and after a while she began to doze. When she woke again an hour later, the girls were tearing around, trying to get ready for their tournament. She joined in their preparations, drinking some of the rich coffee James had made, and somehow found herself, just an hour later, driving along on the Golden Gate Bridge.

She had almost no memory of having gotten in the car, of having driven for twenty minutes on 101. She simply came to on the bridge. She was daydreaming about her courtship with James, how strange it had felt at first to have fallen in love with a man who was several inches shorter than she was, with a chipped front tooth and terrible clothes, so unlike Andrew on the surface. In a way Rosie had accepted him first. She’d looked past the package to what lay underneath. He was funny and he was deeply loyal, except … She looked around at the sun breaking through the fog on the bay, a tugboat pulling a freighter out to sea.

Except there was a memory like a faint headache pressing in on her, of calling him late one night in the early days of their romance; he had been saying he loved her for a while, and she had finally called to say
she loved him too. It was midnight, her heart was full of love and acceptance, and she couldn’t wait to tell him. But a woman with an English accent had answered his phone. She felt an internal lurch even now, on the bridge, and she closed her eyes for a second to close the drapes on the memory, then looked off in the distance at the red cast on the hills, on the skyscape, on the sea.

A
NDREW
is walking beside her on the beach at Aptos, in the middle of Monterey Bay, and the water, the waves, are red with plankton, salmon red. The beach is called Potbelly Beach because of the stoves in the tiny houses up past the sand, up past the emerald ice plant dotted with spiky purple flowers. Andrew and Elizabeth have been married eight months now. They are both tall, young, shy, tan from their days in the water here, hugging and holding in the water, silky as seals. They are walking along the sandy beach at dusk, they have had two martinis each in paper-thin glasses and are holding hands, looking in wonder at the redness of the water, the otters bobbing out a ways, past the breakers. Elizabeth sneaks secret glances at her new husband’s face and feels like they are kids, best friends, playing house. He has the bluest eyes anyone has ever seen. They are so happy that they stop to talk to other people who are walking along the beach, discussing the plankton that floats and drifts so intensely red on the tide, and everyone is smiling as they speak, everyone is watching the red water. There is a breeze coming off the sea, and Elizabeth’s hair, which is still long, flowing several inches past her shoulders, whips around her face. Andrew does all the talking to the other people walking on the beach, and as he talks, he nonchalantly tries to hold her hair back, brushing it off her forehead although it blows back right away. She feels like a child he is tending to, and it feels so lovely, so loving, so sexy, for this big patrician man to be trying to hold the hair out of her face so she can see, so she can be seen. Her long dark hair is getting into her mouth, and he pulls it out and it is wet from her mouth. Cliffs made of fossils loom above them like churches, beyond the ice plant, beyond the tiny houses with the potbellied stoves and the potbellied owners, and she looks at her husband’s big wide inviting young face, serious blue eyes, the salt in his brows. When he smiles shyly at the people with whom they stop to talk, he presses his lips together so that the corners turn down slightly in amusement. They
keep on walking, they’ve been walking nearly an hour, and the breeze keeps whipping her hair around, and finally he stops and stands behind her, gathering it up and away from her face, weaving it into a braid that he holds on to. Then they start to walk again, Andrew holding onto her rope of hair, and she can’t stop smiling. At first she believes he is doing this because it is so strangely amusing, but his eyes search the wet beach as they walk, as if he’s looking for precious metals, and his eyes don’t meet hers for the longest time, and this somehow feels like a deeper form of looking at her than if he were staring right into her eyes. After a while, he finds a long strand of beach grass and tries to use it to tie her braid, but it doesn’t work. Finally he finds a piece of tattered kite string half-buried in the sand. He bends down low to pick it up and pulls her down with him so he won’t have to let go of her braid. The string is about a foot long, unraveling and dirty, and he uses it to tie the end of her braid, tightly and then in a bow, as if it is a length of satin. She lets go of his hand so she can reach out and stroke the golden hair on his carpenter arms, the sparkles of silver sand on his skin, and she feels she could die right then and there, climb up the reddish copper cliffs, the seashell-embedded cliffs, hold hands and fly off together so she can live with him forever.

T
HE
memory stopped playing in her head at the toll plaza, and she had to ask Rosie twice to get the money out of her purse, which was on the floor in the backseat at Rosie’s feet, and you would have thought from Rosie’s annoyance that Elizabeth had asked her to run back home to Bayview for Elizabeth’s wallet.

T
HE
girls won their match that day and, eventually, the trophy for the girls’ fourteen-and-under doubles. There was almost no room on Rosie’s bookshelves for any more trophies. There were already fifty or so, and she was only thirteen. Simone, nearly a year older, had just as many, maybe more. Rosie talked Simone into giving these latest trophies to Rae. “We don’t need them,” said Rosie. “And Rae is very sad.” Simone hadn’t thought twice before saying okay. Kids at school whispered behind her back that Simone was stupid, but Rosie thought she was just extremely innocent, even though she was also so boy crazy.
Another thing besides her kindness that Rosie loved about Simone was that she didn’t care about material stuff, not like some of the girls in school who only cared about things like their hair and their clothes. But practically all Simone ever thought about was boys, boys, boys—oh, he’s so cute, oh, he’s such a fox, oh, he’d be a good boyfriend for you, Rosie—like all the movie-star boys in their class were going to fall in love with a skinny, ratty little tennis jock. But Simone was incredibly generous. She was like a big goofy dog with huge paws and eyes full of longing. So when Rosie explained that Rae was sad about breaking up with a man, Simone thought it was a great idea for them to give her their new trophies. They rode their bikes over to Rae’s as the sun fell slowly to earth, and they peered in the windows of her wonderful fairy-tale cottage, but Rae wasn’t home.