Rosalind (2 page)

Rosalind looked around the counter.

"Momma, there ain't no—"

"Goddamn
it Rosa, I'm trying to sleep! Momma needs some rest." Baby Jared, startled by his screaming mother, started wailing. "Cover your baby brother," she moaned.

Henrietta fell asleep a few minutes later,
despite Jared's screaming. Rosalind looked at her mother on the couch and then at her brother in the tomato crate that had been turned into a bed and didn't so much as sigh.

A few pats on the back calmed him and he fell asleep. As soon as she was convinced he was out, she went to the freezer and pulled out a package of chicken to thaw.
Her father would be home in a few hours, so she filled the sink half full of lukewarm water and placed the chicken face down in it. He would want some potatoes, so she grabbed four big ones from below the sink and peeled them, cut them into slices and put them in a bowl, throwing pepper and salt on them before she put them in the frying pan. As the heat rose from the pan, her forehead began to bead with sweat. She wiped it away with her forearm and dropped the slices of potatoes into the crackling oil.

She looked down at the
frying pan. If she would have known that life could be better than what it was, she would have cried.

***

"Where's dinner?" asked her father
. He and Henrietta sat on the couch, smoking something from a metal pipe that Rosalind had seen them with on many occasions. It didn't smell anything like the tobacco he sometimes rolled in cigarette papers, but he'd told her once to 'shut up about it, it's medicine.' When they were done passing it back and forth, her father grabbed a small paper bag from his pocket and dumped out two pills: one for Henrietta and one for him. He handed hers to her and watched with a grin as she swallowed it.

Rosalind watche
d as the baby stuck his arms out of the crate, grabbing at something only he could see or imagine. Rosalind didn't know it was and she didn't care. She didn't hate him and she didn't love him and she felt guilty for her ambiguity. But she also felt that if it wasn't for her, Jared would lay in his crate, shitting himself and starving to death.

He'd be better off
, she thought.

She fixed her
father a plate. He liked to be served first because, after all, he was the one working and providing for the family and, while they didn't have much, what they did have was all thanks to him.

She handed the plate to him. He took it and waved her away, staring at the fuzzy picture on the television. She handed her mother her plate, and she dreamily took it and placed it on her lap.

The milk that was on the stove was warm, perhaps too warm. She fanned the steam from the top of it and then poured it into the glass baby bottle, hoping it wouldn't burn through. She put the baby bottle to her lips and determined it was too hot, so she put the bottle in the window sill to let it cool. After it was cool enough, she took it over to Jared and shoved it in his mouth, propping it between the afghan and the side of the crate.

Everyone looked happy
(or at least content) except Rosalind, but Rosalind was the only one in the house who took notice of that. She made a small plate for herself and sat on the floor next to her father. After swallowing a few bites, she put her fork down on the plate and cleared her throat.

"Momma?"

"What is it?" she said.

"
I ain't been feelin' good lately. And I—" Rosalind stopped. She was entering a zone where children rarely went with their parents, but she had to know. It was her body, after all.

"I ain't got all day, Rosa," her mother said.

"I been feelin' sick. Most time's in the mornin'. And I don't get my monthly no more."

"Oh, goddamn
it, Henrietta! I work all day long and I gotta come home and listen to my daughter talkin' about her hole? Are you kidding me?" he slurred.

"I'll talk to you about it later, Rosa. You know goddamn better than to talk about that sh
it around your father. Now, be quiet and let him watch his fuckin' shows," she said. Rosa took a few more bites and then excused herself to clean the kitchen. She went back to grab her father's plate and get him seconds(he always had an appetite, something Rosalind knew about all too well) and brought it back to him. Her mother's plate was rearranged a bit, only missing a few bites of chicken and one French fry. Once, she had dumped her mother's leftovers onto his plate and tried to pass that off as seconds, but her father saw her do it and slapped her so hard he knocked a tooth out.

But she learned.

She poured her mother's leftovers into the skillet and put all of it onto a new plate and covered it in aluminum foil for her father's lunch tomorrow.

She walked through the living room to her room, convinced that no one even noticed her pass by. She closed the door to her bedroom but knew that it was just a lie.
Doors were meant to protect, to provide privacy, but hers would no more protect her from her father than would throwing a pillow at a North Korean.

She knew the drill.

Her mother would pass out an hour after dinner (high on the pills or the weed, Rosalind didn't know) like she always did. Rosalind would go into the living room and change Jared with a fresh cloth diaper, like
she
always did. She'd sit there and rock him to sleep with a new bottle of milk. Her father would turn off the television and sit there in the quiet living room with her, staring at her like a frog does to a fly, and work himself up, rubbing his crotch, and once he was ready, she'd put the demon down to bed, go to her room, and get ready for him.

She knew the drill
.

A
nd about a week after it first started, she learned that while he was on top of her, she didn't have to be there at all; it was a trick that let her escape somewhere else while it happened. She fell down on her mattress and reached underneath it, pulling out a folded up page from a J.C. Penny catalog that had long since been burned, page by page, to keep the fires burning at Casa de Stump.

Rosalind unfolded
it and held it up to the light. Her eyes strained at first because the sun had gone down and she didn't have a lamp in her bedroom, but they quickly adjusted. Most of the image she could see from memory. She was a beautiful, blond-haired woman who encompassed the entire page; her elbows sticking out in perfect symmetry; her delicate, porcelain hands on her hips; her snow-white teeth shining at Rosalind. She drug her dirty fingers over the dress that the woman was wearing and smiled. If only she could wear this dress and look this beautiful, then her family would gasp and say that she was too high class for this town, that she ought to go up north to Louisville and become a model. No, not Louisville. New York. That's where the models went. Or Paris.

She lay on her back and stared at the woman. Yes, she would go to New York tonight, and walk around on the avenues
with tall buildings on each side of the streets. She would walk with a handsome man who wore a sharp, black suit with a bow-tie and his shoes would be shiny. And the people would stop whatever they were doing when they walked by. They would admire Rosalind. Because she was beautiful.

She unbuttoned her blouse and pulled down her skirt
and underwear. And she waited. She waited for her father to take her to New York.

He climbed off of her and got dressed. She went to the bathroom to pee and then came back to her room and curled up on her bed.

Rosalind star
ed out of the window at the midnight sky. It was littered with stars and she wished that she was one of them. She knew that they were far away and that to be with them she would have to travel a long way, but she didn't care, and now that it was over, the pain and uncertainty that always followed came rushing in to bring her back to that bedroom; back to the stained mattress on the floor. She rubbed her belly. Her father opened the door and went back to the living room.

When she heard the television in the living room resume its usual mixture of chatter and static, s
he turned over and reached under the bed for the picture. When her fingers had found it, she pulled it out and held it to the light of the stars. It was too dark to see the details and the silhouette of the woman was only an shape on the page, but her memory filled in the rest. She folded it up and put it back under her bed.

The next morning, she awoke to Jared screaming in the living room. Shortly after
her eyes adjusted to the morning light, her mother started screaming for Rosalind to make it stop. Rosalind put on the same clothes she had worn the day before, and did as her mother asked.

After fixing Jared a bottle, she grabbed her stomach. She felt sick. She ran to the bathroom and expelled what little she ate into the toilet. Something
was
wrong. She knew it, but didn't know exactly what. She had no education to speak of—wasn't allowed to attend school like other kids her age—but she knew deep down that
something
was wrong. She flushed the toilet and went into the living room where her mother was smoking something from the metal pipe.

"Don't pace back and forth, Rosa. Speak what's on
your mind."

"I feel sick, momma. Was
n't I supposed to get my monthly?" she asked.

"Rosa, I'm a busy woman
. I can't keep up with your cycles." Henrietta sighed and then looked her daughter over. "When's the last time you got it?"

"I dunno, momma. It's been a while. Maybe a moon ago."

"A moon ago? Honey what the hell are you talking about? You tellin' time by the moon now? You always was kinda dumb."

"I'm sorry, momma," Rosalind said quietly.

"I'm sorry, momma," her mother said in a mocking tone. "I'll add it up for you. Ain't hard!" Henrietta sat there counting her fingers on one hand, and then the other. Then she closed them and started counting on a new set of fingers. And again and again, until she was done.

"Tha
t's forty days ago," Henrietta finally said. "I told you it ain't hard."

"
Is there forty days in a month?" Rosalind asked.

"
I dunno. No. God damn, Rosalind. You're just late. It happens."

"
Has it ever happened to you?"

She sighed again, feeling the effects of the weed slamming into her addled brain.
"Yeah Rosa but trust me, you ain't got what I had."

"What did you
get?" she asked.

Henrietta laughed. She didn't hear her mother laugh that often, but when she did,
it filled her with a mixture of elation and fear, because sometimes Henrietta Stump would start laughing and then go two shades of Kentucky-crazy, throwing things all over the house and knocking the shit out of whoever or whatever was in the way.

She calmed down and took another hit from the metal pipe. "I had
your daddy's pecker in me." Rosalind looked at her mother, confused. Henrietta rolled her eyes. "You ain't never heard it called that? His penis, dummy." Rosalind just looked at her. "You know? That swinger between his legs?"

Yep, s
he knew what that meant, and when her face turned beet red, her mother also knew that she knew. In her dulled brain, Henrietta started forming a thought. That thought turned into muddied coherence and soon after that it turned into understanding. She dropped the pipe and rose from the couch in a motion too elegant for her clumsy, robust frame. Her eyes seethed and her lips turned from fat sausages into thin, razor-like slits.

"Rosalind
Ann Stump. You goddamn better tell me the truth right now! Have you been fuckin' that Colson boy down the road?"

"No, momma
," she said.

"Liar!
You don't lie to me, now. I want the goddamn truth!" Henrietta made a slow motion around the coffee table and approached Rosalind, ready to sink her teeth and claws into her.

"Momma, I swear,
" she said. Henrietta stopped. Her daughter
was
a dummy, and a dirty ugly one at that, but she was not a liar. And if there was one thing Henrietta Stump prided herself on, it was her excellent judge of character. She took a deep breath and slowly backed away from Rosalind. She believed her about the Colson boy (he was kind of a retard, as she would often call him), but that still didn't explain why Rosalind wasn't getting her visitor this month. She tried a different approach.

"Okay, sh
ush," she said, putting her arms around Rosalind and leading her to the couch. "Momma's sorry, now. Just sit down and we'll figure this out."

In her entire life, she had never heard her mother speak so kindly to her, or place so gentle a hand on her body, and for the first time in her life she felt that her mother really, truly
cared about her. She stopped crying and sniffed back the snot.

"Okay, Rosa. Just tell momma what happened. Was it someone else? Did someone
put their hands on you? Cause if they did, your father will take care of them proper. You're his little girl, and he won't take no man puttin' hands on his little girl." She put her fingers underneath Rosalind's chin and turned it towards her. "You know your father loves you, right?"