“Actually I would,” said Rosie.
“Let me go get you a can of your own. This is—fortified.” Rosie gulped. She couldn’t help it. The older kids laughed. Rosie felt faint.
“I’ve got a nine o’clock match,” she said, as if otherwise she’d be slamming down a few drinks with them right there on the spot.
“I guess Simone doesn’t, then,” said Natalie.
“Why?”
Natalie looked around to make sure no one could see her and then pantomimed taking a drink.
“Oh, man,” said Rosie. “This is great. We’ve got a doubles match at noon.”
“Well. She’s out there on one of the boats at the end of the dock. I’m not sure she’s in the mood for company right now, though.”
ROSIE trudged toward the water. Boards groaned beneath her; the water smelled like sweat and eucalyptus and gasoline. The mooring lines between the boats and their berths creaked, and a loose clamp on one boat banged against the mast. Foghorns mourned. “Simone?” Rosie called out in a half-whisper as she got to the last three boats. “Simone?” No one answered. Most of the boats were locked up and dark. In the second-to-last boat, a low light shone, and Rosie stood on the dock trying to decide what to do. “Simone?” she asked quietly. The hatch leading downstairs to the galley was open, the lock hanging in the darkness of the space above the stairs. “Simone?” She smelled the stench of dried-up old starfish on the pilings. Then she heard whispering, giggling, a boy and a girl, Simone. The boy said, “Oh, shit, you’re kidding.”
“Rosie?” Simone called out. “Is that you?”
Rosie glowered in the dark, now thoroughly exasperated.
“It’s time to go, Simone,” Rosie said, feeling like someone from the Old Testament. She poked her head down into the hold, saw shadowy shapes in the back, and once again the smells caught her, mixed her up. In one instant she smelled mildew, too much wet wood, paint and turpentine, faint smells of rotting food and old beer. She thought she smelled rat urine, she thought she smelled a place where people had once been sick to their stomachs, and it all smelled like the metallic edge of a toilet tank when people take off the lid to see why it isn’t working. She saw a flash of skin in the back of the boat.
“I’ll meet you there in a minute, okay?” said Simone.
“Okay,” said Rosie. She stood on the dock with her eyes closed, imagined herself in the arms of a boy, in the arms of Jason Drake, slow dancing, kissing him, being kissed, held, loved, and she opened her eyes to gaze at the stars, stood gripping her own shoulders against the cold, hearing a wind indicator whir from the top of a mast, seeing in the cold starlight the starfish on the pilings.
THE next morning, Simone played worse than Rosie could ever remember, swatting easy forehands out, whacking backhands into the net, serving either aces or double faults. Luckily their opponents were terrible. Simone looked like she hadn’t gotten any sleep. She yawned and snapped her gum as she walked petulantly around the court. There was no rapport between them. Rosie felt miserable, like an angry nagging mother, and on top of this she had to cover almost the whole court, running for shots that got past Simone at the net, keeping the ball in play at all costs. They won, but barely. When they walked to the net to shake hands, beginning with each other as always, Simone shook hands as if they had just had the most fun imaginable, and Rosie started to cry. She shook hands hastily with the girls they had just beaten and walked alone to the far edge of the club; there she sat on the side of an old oak where she couldn’t be seen.
There was a pine tree just a few feet away, and the needles smelled as fresh as Christmas. She picked up fallen acorns and thought about living out here, under her oak, on acorn mush. Everything felt green and growing, like leaves and seeds and grasses and flowers filling the early summer air, and she smelled like sweat and fear, and she hated herself and she hated Simone. God, Simone was so stupid—what had she done with that boy on the boat, how far had she gone? First base, for sure, the kissing, wet kissing, but second base? Maybe. She thought so. She felt like a little rashy stick-figure person whom no one loved and a few people felt sorry for so they were nice to her—people like Natalie. She leaned her face forward into her knees, which were drawn up to her chest, and tried not to cry. She heard the chorus of birds in the trees above her, and every so often one bird made a chirp like when the battery on a smoke alarm gets low. She heard footsteps in the grass coming toward her. She thought for a moment that it might be Luther. She saw herself look up the length of his body, past his knees, past his pelvis, up to his dark bloodshot eyes. She imagined him smothering her, strangling her with his dirty-fingernail hands, raping her. Then she smelled Simone’s cheap rose toilet water.
“Hey,” said Simone.
“Hey.”
Rosie slowly looked up from the ground where she sat with her back against the trunk of the oak. Simone stood there looking just like she did when she had to face the music with Veronica. Rosie’s heart hardened.
“At least we won, huh?” Simone sat down Indian style in the grass, facing her. Rosie shrugged. “I feel really terrible,” Simone continued, reaching for a big pine cone, and Rosie thought she meant because she’d played so badly, but then she whispered, “I drank with Jason. He wanted me to drink with him.” Rosie felt sirens go off inside her chest, and she looked into Simone’s face. Even hot and sweaty she was so pretty that you just wanted to stare at her. Wisps of fine blonde hair escaped from her ponytail and framed the heart-shaped face; there was a dusting of freckles across her small nose, and then those sleepy charcoal-gray eyes—Rosie had heard one of the men at their club call them bedroom eyes. Simone would not look at her. She picked a cigarette butt off the ground and tucked it into one woody scale of her pine cone, picked up a bit of green glass and tucked it higher up in the spiral of woody leaves; the cap of an acorn went into another slot, a bit of tin foil another. “We did things,” she said.
She took out her gum and put it like a star at the top of the cone.
Shame flooded Rosie, and fear. “What things?” she asked in a tiny little voice. She held her breath and studied Simone’s hands, gently draping grass over each scale, blade by blade.
“He didn’t exactly put it in me, if that’s what you mean. I mean, he didn’t put it in all the way. Sort of more around the outside.” Rosie’s heart pounded like a sewing machine.
“Sort of more around the outside?” she asked. Simone nodded.
“Well, a little bit in for a second,” she said. “One or two seconds.” They looked at each other and then closed their eyes. Oh, thank you, said Rosie silently to God. Simone had not crossed over, or had not crossed over entirely. It was like someone who is a few breaths away from being dead, who could go all the way over into stillness, but who at the last second gasps and comes back. Rosie felt like she was taking the first breath after you’ve had the wind knocked out of you. She wondered what things would be like now, now that Simone had done this thing with the boy—whatever that thing was—that was almost sex. The thing that was almost going all the way, which maybe Simone was saying she hadn’t exactly done. But how long could it last? She thought about the dreaminess on Simone’s face when she described this stuff, how she seemed to sway slightly and gaze off like she was under a spell. But maybe it was because she didn’t want to look at Rosie. Maybe, thought Rosie, she feels guilty. She imagined all the stuff Simone didn’t tell her, about what she had done last night, the parts she wasn’t ashamed of because you were supposed to be doing them now—the parts she might have, must have, loved. She wondered if they could still be best friends or if Simone needed older girls now who did this sort of thing too. But Simone said she hadn’t crossed that line, and this made things much less hideous than they could have been. Rosie sighed with relief; in that moment the air was warm and the birds were singing in the middle of all the silence, and Rosie felt a little like she’d been alone on a desert island for a while, and a bottle with a message had floated up, and even though you
might not know exactly where it came from, at least you knew that someone was out there.
three
ELIZABETH, standing at the kitchen sink, watched Rosie get out of the front seat of J. Peter Billings’s van one afternoon several days later. As he drove away, Rosie waved as gaily as a little kid watching a boat pull away from the dock, but as soon as the car had disappeared from sight, her entire bearing changed. Her shoulders caved in, and her head dropped almost to her chest. She came up the walkway looking like a depressed hunchback.
Peter was leaving, as he did every summer at this time, to accompany his two best boys to the nationals back east. Elizabeth watched Rosie whack a rock out of her way with the racket, the two-hundred-fifty-dollar racket. Then she stopped and looked around, as if someone had called to her, her face filled with resignation. Elizabeth rinsed the dish soap off her hands, dried them quickly, and smoothed some lotion into them as she walked to the front door to meet her child.
She paused with her hand on the inside doorknob. Something had been troubling Rosie lately, and Elizabeth had no idea what it might be. Was it Charles, growing weaker day by day? Was there a boy Rosie loved who didn’t love her back? Rosie had spun away from Elizabeth into a barren place of her own, and Elizabeth wondered for an instant if she was up to the task of helping her slog her way back. She stared at the closed door and heard the soft shuffle of footsteps on the pebbly walkway. Her daughter’s depression filled Elizabeth with bewilderment and despair. There’s no hope, she thought, slowly opening the front door. We’re all doomed, we’re all being ground down by slime. And the sun is burning out.
“Hi, honey,” she said brightly, opening the door.
Rosie stood on the doorstep with a searching look on her face, as if she were not sure this was the right address.
“How’d your lesson go?”
“Good.”
“Can I make you a little snack?” Rosie looked into her face with such an odd expression, as if the word snack was not ringing any bells. She yawned, and then sleepwalked smack into Elizabeth, like her mother was a wall against which she had come to rest.
ELIZABETH steered her toward the kitchen for a glass of orange juice. “I need you to help me plant some bulbs today,” Elizabeth said, “while there’s still sun.” Rosie shook her head wearily. “Please, honey. I really need you. You help me out, and I’ll give you your allowance early.”
“Mommy,” Rosie said with some exasperation, “I don’t get an allowance. You or James just gives me money when I need it.”
“We do?” Elizabeth exclaimed. Rosie rolled her eyes.
Lank gave them paper bags full of bulbs every year, dried-up balls with no visible life left in them. Last year she and Rosie had planted them—his daffodil bulbs—in pots, covered the dirt on top with rocks, and put the pots on a place mat in the middle of the kitchen table. In February they’d begun to poke their noses out. This is hope, she’d said to Rosie, this is life, poking its nose out through the dirt and rocks. It had worked then. Maybe it would work again.
They worked together side by side in the garden without talking much. Elizabeth felt less odd, less other, than she’d been feeling lately. She kept sneaking glances at her girl sitting beside her in the dirt with a trowel, sleek and brown and glossy as a mink, and she thought of her over the last thirteen years, sitting beside her in the rich soil of the garden. Rosie dug with ferocity at first, as if she were trying to save something before it smothered, and then in the silken gold afternoon light, she began to loosen, unbind. The furrows in her brow disappeared, and a dignified ease replaced the grim concentration. When she was finally able to look over at her mother, she smiled rather shyly.
They dug, added potting soil, buried the bulbs, covered them up, and watered. By the time they went inside to wash up, Rosie was asking if she could help with dinner and seemed disappointed when Elizabeth said it was made, that all she had to do was pop it in the oven for an hour. She even gave Elizabeth a quick hug before disappearing upstairs to her room. Through the kitchen window, she could see that the fog was coming in over the mountain, but the table was still dappled with sunlight.
“DARLING, will you please set the table?” Elizabeth asked Rosie that night. Rosie had stretched out on the couch with a book before dinner, but of course suddenly there were reasons she couldn’t do it right then. “Just a minute,” she said, “I have to finish this paragraph,” and then, “Wait, wait, I will, but I promised Simone I would check in with her before dinner.” But James was already on the phone with Lank, so Rosie stood beside him crossly as if he were tying up a pay phone. So Elizabeth waited a few more minutes, then shouted at everyone in general and no one in particular, and began to set the table herself. James tiptoed into the dining room and took the silverware out of her hands.
“Why do I always have to ask for help? I’m making the goddamn dinner.”
“Lank is sick.”
“Well, I’m sorry Lank is sick. But he’s not always sick, and I always have to ask you or Rosie to set the table.”
“No, you don’t, Elizabeth. I almost always set it.”
“But I have to ask half the time.”
“Because when you ask, I know it’s time for dinner. That’s how I know it’s time for me to set the table.”
“Why can’t—”
“Elizabeth? Just stop. Let’s choose our battles more carefully. Okay?” After a moment, Elizabeth nodded and sighed.
“God, Rosie can be such a pain in the butt.”
“Yes,” he said. “She can.”
Yet during dinner she was so friendly, so really interesting, that Elizabeth shook her head in wonder. And when Elizabeth got a headache that night out of the blue, it was Rosie, not James, who noticed first that she was not quite right. As usual Rosie was frustrated that this mother who was supposed to be taking care of her was such a mess, needed in fact to be cared for, but she came through with such maternal caring and sweetness that it left Elizabeth close to tears.
“Mommy, you need to lie down,” Rosie said. Elizabeth stretched out on the couch. Rosie wiped the sweat off her forehead with a napkin, took off the hated ratty black loafers without a word, and rubbed her feet. She brushed some stray hairs off Elizabeth’s face, was doggedly protective when the phone rang. She picked it up and listened for a moment. “No, I’m sorry, Rae,” she said into the mouthpiece, “she’s lying down right now. I’ll have to have her call you later. You can talk to James if you want, but not to my mom. Okay, then; she’ll call you later. Okay, okay, that’s very funny. I’ll tell her that,” she announced stiffly, and hung up.
“Rae says to tell you she saw a bumper sticker today that said, ‘Real women don’t have hot flashes; they have power surges.’ Are you having hot flashes, Mommy?” Elizabeth shook her head. Rosie was watching her with the concerned, proprietary look that Elizabeth recognized as her own. Her heart was stirred with tenderness and once again with a sense of Rosie’s wounded psyche, of the corrupt government inside her daughter’s head that accompanied and protected and condemned her, was stirred again by this most familiar of strangers.
SHE drove Rosie to a tournament over at a park in the East Bay several days later. Simone had the stomach flu. At the park, Elizabeth sat down on a folding chair near the closest court, while Rosie checked in at the tournament desk. Elizabeth watch Natalie Reynolds draw Rosie aside, confer intently for a moment. Rosie looked over, slid her eyes off Elizabeth twice. Elizabeth wondered if they were talking about her for some reason. She felt very old in the unforgiving sunlight and looked around for shade.
But Luther had seized the shade. He was sitting down on a folding chair at the other end of the court, in the shadow of an alder tree. Oh, God, she thought anxiously. She was frightened by the fact that he wore a black windbreaker on this hot summer day, by the sadness and tension in his vagabond face. He doffed his Giants cap at her when he noticed her watching him, and something inside her wobbled, like a gyroscope inside her had just tipped over
off its string.
Rosie came over to say hello on her way onto the court.
“You’re playing right here?” said Elizabeth. Rosie nodded. Her opponent, no one Elizabeth recognized, walked up from behind, and the two girls stepped onto the court.
Rosie moved about the court as seamlessly as a trout. Elizabeth watched Luther watch her. His dusty dark eyes were narrowed in pride. He looked over to the side suddenly, caught Elizabeth studying him, looked like he was about to wink. She glared at him. She didn’t mean to, but she glowered with reproach. You were there, weren’t you, she thought, across the street from our house. He looked at her kindly, and she was sure he shook his head. Yes, she thought, you were; you rolled in, like an unexploded bomb, and you rolled away. But how did you leave hoof marks in the grass? She glanced at his shoes, high top black sneakers, like shoes that a flasher would wear. I’m losing my mind, she thought. Maybe I have tumors. Maybe I’d better go call James.
“HI, he said when he picked up the phone. “Why aren’t you here?” She smiled. “Is everything okay?” he asked.
“I’m so afraid of Luther, James. It makes me feel crazy.”
“Oh, honey. He’s such a creep, but I actually think he’s harmless. You know, I think he functions like some desk organizer for all of your fears: your fear of Charles dying, of losing Rosie, of Rosie being a teenager. It’s like the way some little kids are afraid of dogs; all the terror and mystery of the world can be laid on anything with four legs and fur.”
Elizabeth thought this over for a minute. What he said made sense. She glanced over at where Luther had been sitting, but no one was under the alder tree now.
“Well, he’s gone again,” she said. “Maybe I like it better when I can at least keep an eye on him.” It was just that there were so many ways to lose your kid, so many threats, so much evil. She stood at the pay phone, slightly embarrassed, and James gave her a cool glass of affectionate small talk: there had been a deer in the garden, nibbling at her wisteria! And he had chased it off in the most manly possible way!