“Let’s go to your room. I’ll lie down with you,” her mother said.
“It won’t help.”
But it did. Elizabeth lay down beside Rosie in the dark and told her stories until finally around three o’clock, Rosie fell asleep.
JAMES woke up when she finally crawled back into bed with him.
“Rosie couldn’t sleep,” she told him. He yawned, burrowed up against her.
“Do you need me to be awake with you?”
“Would you? For just a few minutes?”
“Okay. Do you want to talk about anything in particular?”
“Tell me what you were like when you were thirteen.”
He didn’t say anything for a minute.
“This is something you really want to talk about now?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Okay.” He half sat up in bed, rubbed his face, yawned, shook his head, sat thinking. “I remember being politically insane. I dabbled in right-wing politics. I was in grief.”
“Over what?
“I was in grief because I was turning out small. That was incredibly defeating. And then another huge myth died around then, the one about my father. I’d thought he was perfect and knew everything, until I was thirteen, and then it turned out he was a total fuckup—that is, he was an ordinary person. And I always held it against him after that.”
“Were you as sullen as Rosie is?”
“Yes. Worse. And I was terrible in school.”
“Why?”
“Everything was so heinous to begin with, and then at thirteen I started getting hard-ons every morning, every single morning in class right between third and fourth period. I’d have to get up and walk out of the classroom with my binder held in front of me and try to be nonchalant about it, but I might as well have had a blue spotlight on my dick.”
“Why did you get so many hard-ons?”
“Because that’s the nature of being a boy. You’re woozy with hormones. At thirteen, girls start giving off mysterious hormonal smells from their scalps—this is just my theory—and they wash their hair all the time. Don’t they? Rosie washes her hair all the time. It’s her life. That is my strongest memory of being thirteen. The smell of girls’ hair and the smell of cherry lipstick. The girl I was kissing at the time wore lipstick that smelled like cherries, and her hair smelled of Prell and hormones. That smell really threw me off. Up until then, up until thirteen, I had a mind. And then I do not remember having a clear thought for the next fifteen years.”
HE and Lank first became best friends in second grade. Twenty-seven years later, five years ago, they had gone backpacking to Pretty Boy Meadow on the same weekend that Elizabeth’s friend Rae had managed to convince a deeply skeptical Elizabeth to come along for her first outing. The four of them had met that night under the stars at adjoining campsites. Lank, who was now an elementary school teacher but who had once aspired to a professional singing career, sang them “Stranger in Paradise” under the almost-full moon. Elizabeth, who had earlier claimed that given a choice, she would rather spend a weekend having her gums scraped than go backpacking, had wept. Lank was family now. He came over a couple of times a week for dinner or to drop James off after basketball. He was the sort of man who at first seemed soft and bearish, with a broad forehead and big bald spot and slight double chin, a broad nose and a small mouth. But when people loved him, like Rosie loved him, he became very handsome; then they saw his kind old blue eyes that stayed on you when you were talking, that never looked away, and lovely soft fair English skin, roses in the cheeks. His heart was huge; he had raised his big mutt from a six-week-old puppy, and Bruno was so sweet and calm and eager to please that this couldn’t help but reflect well on Lank. He spoke of the children in his elementary school classroom with tenderness, humor. They called him at home sometimes, sad or confused. His answering machine said, “Operator, I accept all collect calls from children.”
He was not lucky or wise in love, though.
Neither was Rae. Hilarious, kind, ten pounds heavier than big-boned and ample, with brown almond eyes and thick chestnut hair that was always piled on top of her head like an off-duty Gibson girl, Rae lived in a world filled with light and color and religion and distressing relationships. People paid thousands of dollars for her big earthy weavings, mostly in shades of bricks and browns—black browns, soft bear browns, terra-cotta, the soft tawny brown of a lion’s fur, the amber of its eyes. But she took men the way Elizabeth used to take drinks, obsessively, sneakily, and usually showing bad judgment. She had been in love off and on for two years with a therapist named Mike, who was very tall and tan, with a plump face. If pressed to describe him in two words, Elizabeth might have suggested “supercilious” and “obsequious,” which made for a particularly unpleasant combination of fawning, groveling arrogance. Rae had told her things that made Elizabeth’s stomach ache for her friend. He didn’t like to come during sex, for instance, believing that it robbed him of strength. He’d gone away at one point to Colorado for a month, six months ago, left her one phone message the whole time, and brought her back an odd little hippie candy ball of nuts and honey and God knew what; it looked, as Rosie pointed out, like a little round golf ball of poo.
“That’s very touching, Rae,” Rosie had said, who loved Rae like a second mother. She studied it from all angles, holding it up to the light. “I hope when I grow up I have a boyfriend who brings me nice things like this.”
“Do you like him at all?” Rae asked Elizabeth the next day over the phone.
“Well, I like that he’s so bright.”
Rae snorted. “Of course, so was Hitler.” Elizabeth smiled. She was staring at the weaving that covered most of the living room wall; Rae had given it to them on their first anniversary. Her eyes always traveled to it, relaxing in the coarse wools and yarns, the lumps and holes; it was muscular with browns and mossy greens, a patch of indigo blue. “And so was Roy Cohn,” Rae continued.
“What?”
“You were saying you thought Mike was smart, right? And I was saying, Well, so was Roy Cohn. But do you think Mike’s good-looking?”
“Yes, I do,” she said, although she didn’t. The plumpness of his face bothered her. It suggested someone who couldn’t forbid himself anything. Also, she suspected that he dyed his glossy black hair.
“But what is your overall impression?”
“Honey, I don’t know. He mentions his Ph.D. quite a lot, doesn’t he? I guess I’m never going to think there’s anyone out there who’s good enough for you.”
There was a silence. Then Rae said, “You hate him.”
“No, I don’t,” said Elizabeth, although she did. “I just love you so much.”
“But you don’t even know him,” said Rae.
“You’ve told me some terrible things about him.”
“I shouldn’t have told you, then.”
“But they would have still happened, even if you’d kept them a secret.”
RAE wove secrets into her designs. In the living room weaving, she had hidden a bit of a twig from a cherry tree, which you could feel with your fingers if directed to the spot above the brown mountain’s sloping breast. She had let Rosie in on the secret a year before she told Elizabeth. “The cherry twig,” she said, “was from the countryside in France. Once, a hundred years ago, or so the story goes, some schoolchildren playing in a grove of trees in the dead of winter saw an apparition of Mary, the mother of Jesus. But when they told their parents, they were punished for lying. Some were beaten. So they returned to the barren cherry trees, called out their plight to the cold winter air. Suddenly, they heard voices in the wind, telling them that they must go home and return the next day with their parents. And when they did, leading their skeptical parents up the hillside to the grove, they saw the cherry trees glistening and pink in the sunlight—they were in full bloom.”
Rosie was ten when Rae had told her this story and shown her where to put her finger in order to feel the bit of twig. Rosie at ten
still believed a cherry tree might bloom in winter. Now she knew better. Now, at thirteen, she seemed to feel that if the miracle really occurred, if you came up that hill and looked too closely at those flowering fruit trees, you might discover that their pits were full of poison, their branches full of worms.
FROM time to time Rae would break up with, or try to break up with, Mike. Recently, on Groundhog Day, she had broken up with him again. “No shadow, no Mike,” she had announced over the phone. Elizabeth had the feeling Rae might really pull it off this time. Mike had phoned once, and asked her to call him back, which she hadn’t. Instead, she had called Rosie and asked her to come over for dinner and a video.
There was nothing Rosie liked more than visiting Rae on her own. There was just the one big room filled with antiques, and then a bright, spare bathroom. It felt very private, on its own little piece of land, surrounded by trees, mostly pine with a few redwoods and a couple of pear trees. One side looked out across an empty meadow to a ridge. Rosie loved this cottage so much. There were windows in every direction so you got all sorts of light at all times. The big bed was the centerpiece, even more so than the loom, smack in the middle of one wall, with everything important within reach, so you could lie in bed and look at the fire in the woodstove during winter, buds on the trees in the spring, the light on the ridge whenever you wanted. The wood-burning stove was a black iron box on legs, set in front of a convex copper heat shield, which sent out heat when the fire was lit, glowed like soft flames when it wasn’t. There were little containers everywhere, tiny glass jars, framed photographs, handmade paper boxes holding more little secrets: a folded-up poem, a rock from the beach, a tiny ceramic house that Rae thought might once have been a hash pipe.
Sometimes Rosie read Rae’s fashion magazines while Rae worked on deadline; she watched in awe as Rae, bent over the loom, took all that long skinny thread and yarn, which had no substance yet, and made things with which you could cover your walls or yourself. She sometimes crossed her eyes slightly so she could imagine Rae cave-painting, lost in those ancient rhythms. Rosie often got to help her make the dyes for her yarns. Sometimes they’d go out and pick things from fields or beside streams on the mountain and boil them: elderberries made lilac blue, prickly pear made a purplish pink, rabbitbrush made yellow. Sometimes what you plucked was a different color from the dye it produced: the red flowers didn’t necessarily make red wool. Beets made gold dye. Coffee beans made a dark yellow tan. But most of all, Rosie loved to hear the sounds of Rae’s deep rocking squatting labor, as she wove herself into the yarns, always weaving one tiny secret in between the threads.
four
ELIZABETH had believed for years that Rae and Lank would make a good couple, but there was one real hitch in her plan: neither of them was interested in the other. Lank pursued young beauties who loved his gentleness and sweet face and always left him for more dashing men. Rae did not care so much what her men looked like just as long as they possessed certain qualities, which Rae listed as intelligence, humor, soul, and a love of oral sex—and which, if you asked Elizabeth, meant tendencies toward inconsistency, passive aggression, and a charming, jovial ability to be sadistic and noncommittal.
“Don’t you ever entertain sexual feelings about Lank?” Elizabeth had asked a few days after the tournament in San Francisco. Elizabeth had become a Democratic precinct worker, and Rae had come over after lunch to walk around the neighborhood with her. They would go door to door like Girl Scouts, registering voters, soaking up sunshine, getting in some exercise.
“Look, honey,” Rae said. “On slow days I have sexual feelings for waxed fruit. But I don’t feel anything romantic toward him. He’s family. Besides—I’m dating a flock of Bedouin now. Many of them are very thoughtful.”
“Lank’s available,” said Elizabeth. “That’s why you’re not attracted.” They set out down the sidewalk. Bayview glowed, sun shining on all those greens—lawns and low hillsides, maple and pine and eucalyptus, the bay jade green in the distance. Rae turned to smile at her as they walked. A strip of bright green sour grass grew at the edge of the sidewalk, like a baseboard at the meeting of fence and sidewalk, a seven- or eight-foot stripe with brilliant yellow flowers, bent at the root after a wild wind the night before, lying forward on the pavement as if in obeisance—an English crowd bowing low while the weary monarch passed.
THE next morning, the last day of February, an unusually warm blue day, Charles Adderly came home from the hospital for good. His cancer, which had begun in his bones, had spread to a number of organs. He’d been admitted for an experimental course of chemotherapy but had been too sick to tolerate it. He was getting worse quickly and now had a full-time hospice nurse at home. One day not long ago he had been just fine, seventy-six years old but hale and animated, visiting friends, working on the house, driving to the library, bookstores, hardware stores, hiking with the Fergusons, resting every afternoon, swimming laps before dinner. Rosie felt that he was her real grandfather, and when they hiked and swam and browsed at the library, she acted like his granddaughter, basking in her closeness to such a distinguished and amiable old man. But then his stomach began to hurt, and he went to see his doctor, expecting a prescription for ulcer medicine. He gave some blood to the lab, and five days later was in surgery, “slit,” as he put it, “from gizzard to zatch.” The surgeon had closed him back up without taking anything out. There was cancer everywhere, cancer like little cauliflower buds. James had been with Charles in the hospital room two days after Thanksgiving when the doctor had said that there was nothing they could do, that Charles might live at most for a few more months. Rosie and Elizabeth had been at home reading together on the sofa when James called with the news. Rosie had answered the phone, and James said, “Hello, honey,” and Rosie could hear that he had been crying.
“What happened?” she said.
He did not answer right away. Then he said, “I’m with Charles.”
Well, they already knew that, she thought. Her head started to feel funny; Charles must be very sick. She waved for her mother to come to phone, scooping armfuls of air toward her with her free hand.
ALL the next day at school Rosie felt little lurches inside her, like when you fall asleep at the movies and suddenly pitch from your dream back into your seat.
She and her mother drove to San Francisco late the next afternoon; James had already spent all day and the previous night there, reading magazines while Charles dozed. It had been stormy in the morning, but the sun had shown up at the very end of the afternoon. Rosie cried for a while in the car, and on top of that she had a cold; her throat ached, and she could not get any air at all into her nose, and the only way she could disguise her bloodshot ugliness was with a pair of horrible harlequin dark glasses she’d found in the glove box, a set that Rae must have left behind. They actually had rhinestones framing the lenses.
Lost and sad and scared about Charles, Rosie obsessed instead about her red blotchy skin, about how ugly she was. It was five o’clock when they got to the Golden Gate Bridge. A low strand of clouds lay just over the water, lit by the sunset—small round gray clouds connected in a line like a baby elephant walk. Rosie lowered her dark glasses and looked in the mirror on the car’s sun visor. Her lips and eyes were red and swollen, and there were tiny pimples on her forehead. She put the harlequin glasses back on.
In the hospital parking lot, Elizabeth handed Rosie a pack of gum and some tissues and then got out of the car. “You okay, baby?”
“Uh-huh.” She wouldn’t take off the dark glasses even though she knew that they looked ridiculous. Ridiculous was better than hideous.
“I won’t be long.”
Rosie sat in the passenger seat chewing gum, noticing how stuck her breath was, staring out the window at sad people coming and going. Charles was going to die. It was too painful for words—even worse, much worse than when Grace had died three years ago of Alzheimer’s. Everyone had said how wonderful it was that she got sick with the disease a
nd died within a year; oh, thank God, people said, but it was not wonderful at all. Charles sat by Grace every day and told her stories of their past together—alone with no children, just the two of them.
Under the light of the street lamps in the parking lot, Rosie thought now of Charles dying, and a sudden terrible glee filled her, that he was old and dying and she was young, practically a child, her whole life in front of her while his was about to end. His candle flame was about to be blown out, and she felt the vigor of her own, the heat and light she gave off. She felt a rush of something like ecstasy that she wasn’t dying. But you couldn’t tell anyone this, this horrible meanness of yours, toward someone so kind, someone who always took you to the circus, to the rodeo. The car and her nose were so stuffy. She looked around the parking lot wildly, looked around at the eerie golden spaceship light the street lamps cast. Where was her mother? Why was it taking so long? Please, please, God, she prayed, don’t let my mother get cancer; please, I’ll try to believe in you. I’ll try not to be so mean to her. She rolled down the window and stuck out her head, like an Irish setter. The cold wet air bathed her face.
RAE had visited Charles a lot since his diagnosis, but even more so in the last few weeks, since she had broken up with Mike. “It gets me out of myself,” she said, but sometimes she called her machine from Charles’s, hoping Mike had called and had changed his character. But he never did. Sometimes Elizabeth came with her, but though she loved Charles so very much, she couldn’t help him like Rae could. Rae was not afraid of dying people. She had moved in with her mother when she lay dying three years ago of heart trouble, and she had helped Charles take care of Grace when she was dying. Now she would show up just to hang out with Charles, sitting silently sometimes, rubbing his feet, being alive together.