Crooked Little Heart (9 page)

They left their trophies in the mailbox, on top of the day’s mail.

“Maybe she’ll think her boyfriend left them.”

Rosie’s shoulders sagged. “Why would she think her boyfriend would leave two girls’ tennis trophies? I mean,
God
, Simone.”

E
ARLY
in the school year, in a development bordering on the miraculous, one of the popular girls had asked Rosie to eat lunch with them. In Rosie’s eyes, this girl, Hallie Randall, was perfect, with long straight chestnut hair, dimples, a pretty white smile, and a huge trampoline in her back yard. At lunch, the girls talked mostly about the models they hated the most, and the music they loved the most. Rosie craved their company like Elizabeth used to crave Jack Daniels. Elizabeth, picking her up one day after school, found her waiting with them on the steps of the office building, attached to them like a barnacle. She watched Rosie, with downcast eyes, say something, at which everybody laughed. Then they looked over her head at each other, like amused royalty, and Elizabeth was filled with distress at the sight of Rosie’s transparency.

Hallie invited her back for lunch the next day. But after that it was on and off and on again, and Rosie never knew what to expect. Then she called and invited Rosie to come over after school and play on the trampoline. Elizabeth wanted to forbid this but did not see how she could. Her own mother had had a fear of trampolines that bordered on the pathological. The family across the street from the house in which Elizabeth grew up had owned the town’s first trampoline, and
this was the most popular house in the neighborhood. All the kids played there, waiting their turn to jump—all except Elizabeth, whose drunken mother never let her go. She had read an article in
Life
about a valiant young girl who was learning to live a full life in a wheelchair, after having broken her neck while doing a back flip on a trampoline, and from then on Elizabeth’s mother viewed the apparatus as a springboard to paraplegia. Her father was not around enough to stand up and fight for Elizabeth’s rights. And when Elizabeth, who had one long black eyebrow spanning both eyes and was lonely as a manatee, begged to join in, the mother looked at her with scorn, as if, at eight, Elizabeth wanted to borrow the car.

S
O
Elizabeth gave Rosie permission to play at Hallie’s, and then found herself holding her breath off and on until Rosie came home again, whole and mobile.

So it went all year, with Rosie praying for inclusion with the popular girls. Sometimes she was invited, sometimes they just waved gaily and passed her by. Then one day in February Hallie had brought Rosie to the table for lunch, and conversation stopped.

The girls looked worriedly at one another until Hallie began to chatter about how awful their gym teacher was, who had a huge mole under one of her arms that made them all sick to their stomachs.

“But there’s something happening, I just know it,” Rosie had confided miserably to her mother that day after school.

“What do you think was going on?” Elizabeth asked, who remembered the same girls—the exact same batch but with slightly different hairstyles—from twenty-five years before.

Rosie looked around jerkily, as if the answer were flitting about the room like a moth. Her nostrils flared. She shrugged.

“It’s probably nothing,” said Elizabeth. “You’ll see.”

But it turned out to be something big. One of the girls was throwing a Valentine’s Day party at her house, catered by her mother, a sit-down dinner for the six girls and their boyfriends or dates. Hallie explained apologetically that the only reason Rosie was not being invited was because it was for couples. Rosie came home and went to her room, slamming the door. Elizabeth went upstairs to investigate. Rosie wouldn’t let her in, but two hours later, when Elizabeth encountered
her in the hallway, her eyes were nearly swollen shut with crying. Rosie let her mother hug her, hold her, in the hallway, but wouldn’t explain the source of her grief. Finally she told Elizabeth and James at dinner.

“Oh, that’s hateful,” said Elizabeth.

“They’re despicable,” said James.

“Hallie’s really nice,” said Rosie.

“Fuck Hallie,” said James. “I wouldn’t even watch her commit suicide.”

Rosie hung her head. She felt like she might be about to black out. The pain inside her mind had a sound to it, but it was so sharp you could hardly discern it, like a dog whistle, pitched that high.

S
O
she ended up back with Simone. They practiced together almost every day after school, spent countless hours in each other’s rooms, speaking in a private language somewhere between pig Latin and the “Name Game” about boys, their weight, their mothers, the dogs they would have one day. Elizabeth rarely came to pick Rosie up at Simone’s anymore, since the girls lived within six blocks of each other and were big enough now to walk home, even at night. But a few times a year, she came by and always exchanged a few friendly words with Veronica, although most frequently they were just firming up arrangements about which one of them would drive the girls to their next tournament.

Elizabeth and Veronica had thought about being friends when the girls had first begun to play at the park together, over nine years ago now. Elizabeth had been widowed six months earlier. She had been drinking at the time and had come inside one afternoon to pick up Rosie after a play date. The two mothers had ended up having a couple of beers in the kitchen as they compared notes about the raising of daughters. Veronica had only been eighteen when she gave birth to Simone five years before, against the ferocious wishes of Simone’s father, who was happily married. Rae had asked once, “Why would a
happily
married man sleep with Veronica?” Elizabeth thought the answer was obvious: she had a certain 1920s beauty, an arrogant sauciness, a waterfall of thick black curls, and a round, succulent bottom.

Veronica had made them both coffee, and into their second cup they each poured a healthy slug of brandy. The girls ended up having
cereal, popcorn, and tomato soup for dinner in front of the television, while the women moved on to sangria, and then on to more brandy.

Veronica was intense and earnest. Elizabeth knew by dinnertime that there was no real basis for friendship, yet she kept pouring herself another drink. While Simone practiced ballet leaps around the kitchen, Rosie watched the mothers out of the corner of her eye and finally gave her own a look of flat sternness, a face such as you might encounter in an aged and deeply religious Dane. Elizabeth rolled her eyes and poured herself another Drambuie. The girls were put to bed in Veronica’s room, and the women stayed up well past midnight, talking.

Simone’s anonymous father had given Veronica a lump sum to leave him alone, and she had used it to open the first facial and nail salon in Bayview. Women, especially married women, loved her ditzy maternal attentiveness, the soothing New Age tapes that always played while she and her girls worked, the candles, the incense, the cooing sympathy. Her business thrived. Men, especially married men, loved the intensity of those round black eyes, loved her tiny clothes, and she was forever flying off with Simone and her beaus to places like Vail and Cancún.

Elizabeth did not remember driving home that night, although in the morning her car was parked perfectly in front of the curb. She had even turned the lights off and locked the doors, which she discovered when she went outside, squinty and stiff, unbalanced by seasickness and a pulsarlike headache, to investigate: Was anything unpleasant embedded in the grille or dangling from the fenders—antlers, for instance, or worse?

Over the next few months, Elizabeth had wiggled her way out of any more social evenings with Veronica, but she was always grateful and relieved for Veronica’s hospitality toward Rosie. Among other things, she couldn’t imagine being friends with someone who collected mystical New Age chotchkes—stars, moons, whales—made of clay and metal and glass. There were always lots of angels represented, as well as candles so artistic you would never think to burn one: candle stars, candle angels, candle women dancing in a circle.

Elizabeth was always amazed by the amount of stuff in other people’s lives. On their shelves, tables, counters, on every smooth shiny space in their homes, little artifacts sat, passively protective. Even Rae’s home was filled with religious kitsch. Elizabeth understood the need
for fairy tales and happy endings, but she also suspected that everyone was trying to fill up and decorate the white space out of fear that the white space was the abyss. James said that Veronica, with her crystal star charms, her dancing women candles, and—as he put it—all those fucking angels, was practicing a form of idolatry and that this worship saved her the pain of being responsible, of being aware and alive and grounded.

Lank and Veronica went out a few times, and even to bed, but Lank, with his pre-Mayan figures, and Veronica, with her God’s-eyes and wind chimes, did not have much to talk about.

“She’s kind of a—I don’t really know the word,” Lank confessed.

“Mindless twit?” said James.

Lank nodded gravely. “She’s got those crazy black Rasputin eyes. They made little Lank very tense.”

Veronica gave Elizabeth a petulant little angel paperweight after their one long night all those years ago. Elizabeth had guiltily thrown it away. Several months later, when Elizabeth stopped in at Veronica’s one morning to pick up Rosie, she’d seen the same angel paperweight on Veronica’s little altar by the front door. Veronica was upstairs helping Rosie get her school gear together. There was usually New Age music playing, or disco exercise tapes blaring from the den, but that day the only sound had been Simone’s little cat batting a pushpin around on the hardwood floors. Elizabeth, who had a mild hangover, found the sound annoying. She felt like she was inside a bowling alley. She wondered if Veronica had been going through her trash or if she bought them in bulk, to give as door prizes. At any rate, Veronica was now using the angel to hold down an eagle feather on a scrap of sky-blue silk, so neither would blow away.

E
ASTER
was early that year, the third Sunday of March. Rae had made Rosie a small woven picture for Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, the day when Jesus was baptized by John in the river Jordan. The picture was of the river, blue and green with golden satin threads to show the shimmer, and with a smear of ashes on it, real ashes from her wood-burning stove—ashes to remind us, as Rae said, that this is all a passing show.

Rae had become a Christian two years before, which was a source of great consternation to everyone. It was one thing when she had believed in God in a general, ecumenical kind of way, another when she began making space in her chair so that Jesus might sit down beside her. They all hoped it would pass, like a cold, but it showed no signs of doing so. She also remained a left-wing activist, but now she went to church every Sunday, began every morning with prayer and Scripture, and tried to see Jesus in everyone—even Luther, even Republicans. She had not yet begun referring to God as “the Lord,” but Lank had said bitterly just the other day that this was right around the corner.

Rosie went to church with Rae on Ash Wednesday. She was expecting this big gospel choir, because Rae always talked about this beautiful choir at her church, with all these black people singing, and Rosie knew that black folks had something special because the few black girls at her school were always the first to start off the dancing at the school dances and they were so
so
much better than the white girls, so much bigger in their dancing. She didn’t really know how to describe the difference, because a lot of the popular girls were technically very good dancers. But that day at Rae’s church, the guy who played piano was terrible; even Rosie could pick out all the wrong
notes he was playing, mistakes that threw the choir off. And instead of bleachers onstage filled with swaying singers in choir robes that Rosie had been half-expecting, there were only eight people, singing, “Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior.” This one black woman was crying even as she sang: “Hear my humble cry,” she was singing, “while on others you are calling, do not pass me by,” crying, crying, so it came out as kind of a warble, and the pianist was playing notes that didn’t even sound like they were part of the same song, and Rosie felt very uncomfortable with the lack of competence. Then she noticed Rae swaying slightly in her seat, listening, her eyes closed in this way that made you think she was seeing some huge vista inside her head, a view she was trying to memorize so she could use it in a weaving someday.

R
OSIE
hung Rae’s small unframed piece above her bed between a photo of her dad and a photo of Peter Billings with one muscular bronze arm around her and one around Simone; they had been at the indoor courts in San Rafael, fifteen minutes from Bayview, practicing at night. Peter held a membership there that allowed him to bring a van full of students at night whenever it rained. Rosie didn’t like playing there very much. The club reminded her of an airplane hangar, eerie with purplish light from long tubes that hung from the ceiling and that swayed when hit by a lob. Each light was like an elongated sun, and every time you looked up, you had to squint or be blinded. And the smell was mucky, like hot wet dirty shoes. She liked being with the boys, though, the older boys, who teased her and laughed at her jokes. She remembered the night the photo was taken, during Christmas vacation last year. Now she was already at least an inch taller. In the photo she and Simone both looked like silly kids. Simone’s breasts were much smaller in the picture, but Rosie remembered that Peter made a little joke when he gave Simone a dollar for a soda; he said to please get him change in nipples and dimes and then he pretended not to have done it on purpose.