Rosie (10 page)

“I'm throwing myself at you. I'm pleading for mercy.”

“I don't think you're funny.”

Elizabeth had moved into a more controlled phase of her anger; icy, condescending.

“There's nothing I can say or do to make things better?”

Elizabeth shook her head. Rae reached her arm around and deftly unlaced a side pocket of her pack, from which she extracted the flask of rum. She stopped. Elizabeth continued a few feet and then stopped too, turning to face Rae.

Rae unscrewed the silver top. “This is all the alcohol we have. It is eight ounces of one-fifty-one rum. We will be perfectly high after we finish it. All our troubles will disappear. Imagine that first sip tonight, Elizabeth, how strong it's going to taste, how warm in your stomach.” She tilted the flask slightly. Elizabeth watched, disbelieving. “But if you're going to hate me all night, four ounces isn't going to make a dent in how badly I feel. So I am prepared to pour it out.”

“Stop it.”

“I have nothing to lose. I have been forced to resort to coercion. Either you forgive me or I pour it out.” She looked at Elizabeth searchingly. Elizabeth glared.

Rae raised the flask to her nose, inhaled appreciatively, then lowered and slowly tipped it.

“Stop!”

“Do you forgive me?”

“This isn't funny, Rae.”

“You keep saying that.” Rae tilted the flask until one drop trickled out.

“Give me that!” She stepped and reached toward Rae, both hands out.

“Get away from me,” Rae screamed, jumping back, holding the flask as if it were a Molotov cocktail. “I'm just crazy enough to do it!”

She made her eyes look wide and crazy, made her hand shake visibly.

Elizabeth stopped. This is nuts, she thought.

Rae began tipping the bottle again.

“Stop
it,” Elizabeth said. She held her palms open, close to her body. “If you pour that out, I'm going to kill you with my bare hands.”

“No, you won't. Say you forgive me.”

“But I don't.” Rae poured an almost imperceptible amount out. “All right, I do.”

“You promise?”

“Yes.”

“You're not just saying that?”

Elizabeth shook her head.

“Okay then.” Rae screwed the top back on and clutched the flask to her. Then she beamed at Elizabeth.

An hour later, they reached the meadow, a vast expanse of green dotted with flowers alongside the Pretty Boy River, full and rushing, pale icy green in some parts, turquoise in others, whitewater crashing onto rocks on the shore. They were greeted by a hysterical fist-sized bird which dashed to within ten feet of them and then, in a staggering, ground-level flight, dashed twenty feet to the right.

“It's a killdeer,” Rae whispered. “See the black and white stripes on its neck?”

“I know killdeer.”

The bird was flapping and fluttering and screaming as if in great agony.

“It's the mama—it means the babies are somewhere close. It's trying to distract us.” The poor bird seemed to be going out of its mind. Rae tiptoed forward. “Look!” she said in an urgent whisper. Elizabeth crept forward and looked down to where Rae pointed. Two tiny, fuzzy baby killdeer were flopping around in the grass, while over to one side the mother screamed and gyrated. “She thinks we're monsters. Aren't they adorable?” The babies peeped and flopped, and Elizabeth looked at them, in awe, and then over at the mother.

“Come on,” she said. “The mom's freaking out.”

“You ladies here for the night?” a man behind them asked.

“Rosie, my darling, we're so happy to have you. Come in, come in.”

Rosie shuffled despondently behind Sybil Thackery to the kitchen, where Sharon sat at the table eating blueberry pancakes. She waved her fork in greeting, and Rosie instantly forgot her mother's impending death, smiled, and sat down at the place that had been set for her, where a marshmallow was melting on top of some cocoa in a blue Wedgwood teacup. Mrs. Thackery, at the stove, flipped pancakes with the graceful wrists of the former ballerina she was, looking as if she were on the verge of a sweeping plié.

“I hope you're hungry.”

“Starving to death.” Earlier Rosie had eaten two bowls of Irish oatmeal, but there was a hole in her that needed to be filled, and in a moment a stack of pancakes studded with bright blueberries was placed before her on a floral-etched Wedgwood plate, while Sharon passed her matching pitchers of hot butter and syrup which she poured liberally over the pancakes. Sweet buttery steam and the elegance of the place setting; this must be
sort of what Heaven is like, but one bite later Rosie began to mourn the eventual end of breakfast.

“I don't have to go to my violin lesson today, because my teacher's gone to San Diego,” Sharon announced. “Mommy? Can we go to the zoo today?”

“No, not today. I'll take you to the pool later. I'm just not feeling up to much. I have—my period.”

Oh, God, oh, God. Rosie got a look in her eyes such as a cat gets before a fit, and both girls gobbled their pancakes. She has the Curse. Rosie and Sharon had vowed that they would never do it, have it. The girls had pored over Elizabeth's Tampax instructions, furtively, as if the diagrams were scientific pornography; essentially Rosie viewed the Curse as some sort of recurrent voodoo infirmity rather than a biological function.

“Will you have some more pancakes?” Mrs. Thackery swiftly changed the subject.

“Yeah.”

“Not me,” said Sharon.

Rosie could see that it pleased Mrs. Thackery to feed her, and she felt moved to making her feel good. “These are the best pancakes I've ever eaten.”

Mrs. Thackery sat down with them and ate one pancake, with only the tiniest bit of syrup, and then sat with her plump, pink hands on her rounded belly, which pushed out against her striped shirtdress.

Hyped up on sugar, the girls tore through the house, unable to settle, chattering dervishes who managed to get underfoot even after Mrs. Thackery had sunk into a chair as if her backbone were made of rubber. Her eyes, small and brown, did not quite focus.

“Please, will you play outside?”

“We could make you some tea,” said Sharon.

“Yeah!”

“No, thank you. I'll be just fine.”

“Can we come back for lunch?”

“Yes, of course. And then we'll go to the pool. Give me a kiss, darlings. Now run along.”

They tied one end of Sharon's jump rope to the garage door handle and took turns jumping—“Twenty-four robbers came knocking at my door”—until they grew bored.

“I got two bucks,” said Rosie. “Let's go to town.”

“I don't have any.”

“You can have one of my dollars.”

“God. Thanks.”

“But you know what we could get if we had three dollars?”

“What.”

“Mystic Mints,
and
potato chips,
and
Cokes, and candy lipsticks.”

“Yeah, I know, but I don't have
any.”

“Too bad your dad's gone. If he was here, there'd be a fortune in his easy chair.”

“And the seat of his car.”

“Wull, what about on the dresser?”

“Are you crazy?” Her father's bedroom and study were irrevocably off-limits in their coin searches. If he had not gone so far as to actually rig the rooms with explosives, he had hinted darkly on a number of occasions that it would be mortally inadvisable for the girls to enter his territory.

In town, with Rosie's money, they each bought fifty cents' worth of candy corn from Mavis Lee at the dime store, and took their little white bags outside to the curb, where they ate them one by one, section by section, white tip, orange center, yellow butt, whispering and giggling. Rosie made sure that hers lasted a minute longer than Sharon's. She couldn't stand it when Sharon still had candies left when hers were all gone; on several occasions she had bamboozled Sharon into eating her candies quickly—“Let's see who can finish first”—just to make Sharon wish for what Rosie had, which was—more. But while Sharon hardly seemed to notice, Rosie felt glee and guilt; the original sinner.

“You want to go to the railroad tracks?”

“Let's go to the post office and spy on people.”

“Rosie, we could go to the lagoon fort and watch the carpenters.”

“They don't work on Saturdays. You know what I'd like to do? You know that old oak tree behind the fire station, I mean way back behind it? Wull. I'd like to make a tree house,
exactly
like the one in
Swiss Family Robinson.
First we'd just make a floor, put wood across over the branches, but then we'd build stairs, and put in windows, and a bed....”

Rosie's head was filled with the eventual details of their palatial treehouse—curtains, running water, refrigeration—and they walked in the direction of the firehouse but found, carved into the trunk of a pepper tree, FUCK. They spent the morning playing detective. Who had done it? A man. How tall was he? The word was written a foot higher than Sharon could reach her arm, so it was a tall man. How strong was he? Strong, very strong, the word was cut deep into the wood.

It was only at Elizabeth's urging that Sharon had learned to swim last year. Rosie had taken to the water at an early age, but at seven Sharon could not even do the dead man's float.

“You see,” Sybil Thackery had explained to Elizabeth, “all the women in my family lack the buoyancy mineral; yes, that's right, there's a mineral responsible for buoyancy, and both my mother and I were tested for it when I was young and unable to swim. And the doctor took our blood, and found it lacking in that mineral, so I'm afraid Sharon's lacking in it too.”

Elizabeth had not been able to believe her ears. Room-temperature IQ, she thought. “Uh. Listen. I think that Sharon really ought to learn to swim—and I'm sure I could teach her. Let me at least give it a try.”

One year later, Sharon was almost as good a swimmer as Rosie. In the water they were as sleek and silly as sea otters. Mrs. Thackery viewed her daughter's aquatic prowess with stunned pride, as if Sharon had had to triumph over muscular dystrophy.

Today, she sat on a chaise longue sipping a diet orange soda by the side of the pool, nervously observing the little girls swimming the width of the pool underwater on only one breath.
Chlorine, salt, the buttery coppery lanolin smell of sun lotions, steaming bodies on cement bleachers, cries, giggles, and the red slaps of bellyflops.

The girls disappeared for a moment. Mrs. Thackery sprang to her feet, located them sitting cross-legged on the floor of the shallow end where, pinkies extended, they sipped from teacups.

Rosie in her red tank suit, all skin and bones, a baby flamingo, every rib clearly defined, glossy black hair uncurled by the water, climbed out, dove back in, and did not surface until she had crossed the pool.

Back at the Thackery house, Chutes and Ladders. Rosie's marker, on space 37, was a red plastic girl, well ahead of Sharon's blue boy.

“I know how to make boobs,” Rosie announced, as Sharon rolled a five, just missing a ladder. Phew.

“You do?”

“Uh huh.” Rosie rolled a six and advanced up a ladder.

“How?” Sharon rolled, hit a ladder, moved ahead of Rosie, who decided not to tell her how. “Come on.”

Rosie rolled and advanced four steps. “Wull, see. You get this glass of milk. Then you pull on your
nipple
and drink milk at the same time, and the boob fills up with milk.”

Sharon just stared at Rosie.

“Come on, your move.”

“Are you kidding? You pull on your nipple and drink milk?”

Yep.

“Who told you?”

“This scientist.”

Sharon looked at her skeptically.

“Don't worry. I know how to undo them, too.”

They sat on Sharon's carpeted floor, considering the prospects. A movie played in Rosie's mind, where her own boobs filled up while Sharon's remained flat. And then, in the movie, only
one
of Rosie's boobs filled up, to gigantic proportions, and the whole world laughed...

“Rosie?”

“Yeah?” Rosie blinked, back on earth.

“I don't want to make boobs.”

“Okay. What do you want to do?”

“Slide down the hill, on cardboard.”

“All
right.”

“Dinner in an hour, girls. So don't be gone long.”

Sliding was fun, dinner was fantastic: tuna noodle casserole, with crumpled potato chips on top to make it crunchy. Rosie ate two huge helpings, to Mrs. Thackery's delight. Tuna noodle, oh, God, the food here was so much better than at home, where her mother was apt to have made some disgusting gourmet slop, like curry or dolmas, pate, ratatouille, pasta with cheese and anchovies, and once—oh, God—
tongue.
Tongue!

“This is so wonderful.”

“Oh, Rosie. It's the easiest thing in the world.”

“It's the best thing I've ever tasted.”

Life was fine again: lime sherbet and Toll House cookies for dessert; then
R Thousand Clowns
on the tube. All of them loved the movie and each other, and soon it was time for bed.

“‘Bon voyage, Charlie, have a wonderful time.”'

“‘Bon
voyage,
Charlie, have a wonderful time.”'

“Remember Bubbles....”

“Okay, girls. That's enough. It's getting late. Come on, my darlings, into bed.”

“When will Daddy be home?”

“Late. His plane arrives at midnight.”

Mrs. Thackery gently smoothed down the bed as her daughter lay looking intently up into her face, brown braids on the pink pillow. Rosie watched them put their arms around each other's necks, watched them kiss, and waited for her turn, filled with pangs of jealousy. When Mrs. Thackery came to Rosie's bed and bent to put her arms around her, Rosie inhaled the Ivory soap on her neck, the hint of lemon on her breath, and wanted,
wanted more than anything, for this to be her mother, instead of the woman who lay down beside her every night and smelled like wine.

“Are you sleepy?” Rosie asked when the lights were out.

“Yeah.” Faintly. “Are you?”

“Totally,” she replied, wide awake.

“Well, good night.”

Rosie yawned noisily. “Good night.”

She was awake for the next several hours, and in the darkened pink princess room the Chamber of Horrors show began.

The fingernail moon outside the window made terrible shadows, turning shoes and socks into snakes and rats. Faces of men appeared at the window, psycho killers, a cyclops who would gobble her down like a cashew, leering one-eyed through the window. Under the bed was the living dead man, Dracula was in the closet, the mummy with the three diamond eyes was outside the door, and there was just enough moonlight to see the beady red eyes of the tarantulas who were marching toward her bed.

“Sharon?” she whispered, but heard only soft, muffled snoring and the tapping of bloody red fingernails on the windowpane. The light switch by the door was ten feet away, but to get up meant almost certain death; if the cobras and rats didn't get her, something else would.... She peered down at the floor beside her, stood and walked the length of the bed, jumped down softly, and saw—
truly
saw—and just barely escaped from the long, bony, phosphorous-white arm whose fingers were reaching for her ankles. Flicking on the light, she stood staring at socks and shoes, at branches that touched the window above Sharon's bed. Sharon murmured in her sleep. Rosie looked around, huddled against the wall, and tiptoed to the closet: took a deep breath, threw open the door, and saw small dresses, skirts, and blouses. She turned off the light, dashed for the foot of her bed, and jumped back in.

She heard Mrs. Thackery go into her bedroom and close the door. She lay dying, soon to be the only person awake in the house, except for the men under her bed and outside the window.

Dear God: Hello, please let me fall asleep. Let Mama be alive
still; God bless her and Rae and don't let anything happen to them. Please let me fall asleep, I won't ever cheat again, or lie—this time I really mean it.

She gasped each time the old house creaked, settling down for the night. Mrs. Thackery must be asleep. This must be what Hell is like. Please God, let it be morning.

Finally she dozed, and dreamed. She and her mother were in the checkout line at the supermarket, their shopping cart filled with bananas and wine. Something came over Rosie, anger at the wine maybe, and she punched her mother on the arm, and her mother turned into a fat old woman who didn't seem to recognize her.... She awoke, sweating, footsteps on the stairs, creaking toward her.

Ohgodohgodohgodohgod, it's a man with a gun, or a pirate, she knows it. The steps are louder, closer—wait. It's Mr. Thackery, she's almost sure,
please
let it be Mr. Thackery. Just in case, though, she stops breathing and pretends to be dead so if it's a killer he won't have to bother with her. The footsteps have reached the top of the stairs, are approaching Sharon's room, but they pass, and she hears the bathroom door open and close, water running. Surely a killer wouldn't use the bathroom first. The bathroom door opens and the footsteps approach again. The door opens slowly, with a quiet squeak and the strong smell of man, by the shadowy moonlight she sees Mr. Thackery in his bathrobe.

He walked softly to Sharon's bed, his smell strong and soothing, an old, warm, salty smell. She ached for a father.