“Did you tell her where the front door key is?”
Yep.
“Good.” Elizabeth could smell stale cognac reflecting off Rosie’s head and wished she had brushed her teeth.
“Do you want me to listen to your prayers?”
Andrew had taught his daughter to pray, Andrew who believed in God. Rosie’s prayers could last for fifteen minutes, because anybody left off of her God Bless list was in danger, might be dead in the morning, and it would be Rosie’s fault. She prayed as if dictating a letter: Dear God, Thank you very much for the very nice day; I am trying to be good; say hello to Daddy for me and God bless Mama...
But tonight she had already said her prayers by the time Elizabeth came to her room: she had first asked God to smite her mother, and then panicked and begged him to keep her alive.
Rosie closed her eyes, pretending to fall asleep. Elizabeth lay beside her, nuzzling the soft black curls. “I sure love you,” she said.
Rosie snored. Elizabeth smiled.
She returned to the living room couch, read at Middlemarch, sipped brandy until she could hardly keep her eyes open, then went upstairs to wash her face and rub cold cream around her eyes and mouth, on her neck, into her hands, yawning again and again. Dragged herself down the hall to her bedroom, removed and draped her clothes over the back of a chair, barely had the strength to pull back the comforter and crawl into bed. She turned off the lamp, yawned, stretched out, and closed her eyes. Goddammit, had she remembered to turn off the oven? Had she locked the front door? Had she put the screen in front of the fireplace? Her mind raced with small anxieties. Her eyes popped open.
Shit. It was going to be one of those nights.
If only she had a man beside her. Even Gordon, who had begun to get on her nerves, with his “marvelous”es, his racist riddles, his constant references to the European cities he had visited. If only Rosie were at Sharon’s, so that she could go to the bar in town for a nightcap and find a male body to bring home. She would have to call out for one.
She recited the List of Reasons why she wanted to drop Gordon ... but he was a terrific lover. She turned on the light, picked up the receiver by her bed, hung it up, frustrated, sad, empty, horny, wired: mad Uncle Theo high in the branches of a monstrous oak crying “I want a woooooman” until the dwarf nun climbed a ladder and led him down. She nuzzled her shoulder with pouted lips and clapped her eyes shut.
Moments later, eyes open, unrequited: Who do I think I’m kidding?
She climbed out of bed, wrapped herself in her white kimono, and went downstairs to see if the living room was in flames. It wasn’t. The front door was unlocked. Goddammit, Elizabeth! She locked the door, fiercely. The oven was off, and in the living room the fire was low, the screen in place. She poured some more cognac into the snifter, picked Middlemarch up off the floor, and went upstairs to her bedroom. And then wondered: Are you absolutely positive that the fire was safe and the oven all the way off? Relax. Read.
Propped up on pillows, naked, she read; Fred Vincy had gone to see Mrs. Garth, the mother of the girl he wanted to marry, who was rolling out pastry in the kitchen.
Looking at the mother, you might hope that the daughter would become like her, which is a prospective advantage equal to a dowry—the mother too often standing behind the daughter like a malignant prophecy—“Such as I am, she will shortly be.”
Jesus. Relax. Keep reading.
She took a gulp of cognac and read until her eyes itched, read until she was almost too tired to switch off the lamp, but the effort roused her, and she exhaled deeply. It was one fifteen by the luminous clock; if she fell asleep soon she could still get almost six hours’ sleep before she had to get Rosie up for school.
If you fall asleep right now, you can still get five and a half hours. She turned the light back on, picked up the book, but couldn’t concentrate.
If you fall asleep now, you can still get five ... shit.
“A malignant prophecy.” There, in the projector of her mind, was her mother, beautiful and ambitious in her youth, in a bed at the St. Helena detox hospital, needing a “hummer” every four hours, needing an ounce and a half of whiskey to avoid delirium tremens: dead at forty.
You have got to stop drinking so much. Tomorrow. If you fall asleep right now, you can still get four hours and forty minutes of sleep.
The pillow was hot and scratchy, and she turned it over, resting her face on the cool cotton. The sheets itched, felt as sandy as her eyes, and she flopped around the bed. She hugged a pillow, one end between her legs: her teddy bear, her lover. Four hours would be fine.
But no, her mind races with images of her mother and Rosie, of more malignant prophecies. What is Rosie learning by example? On the one hand, she is learning the art of amusing conversation and the pleasure and knowledge to be found in books. On the other, she is learning how to kill time, use men and drink; watching her mother who, when the pain or boredom or nostalgia gets too bad, anesthetizes herself; watching her mother be sneaky and critical and depressed. Rosie does not see examples of a mother’s commitment to romantic love and work, to change and growth. These she sees in crazy Rae, whom Rosie adores, Rae who shoots for the moon, works hard at her art, and drives herself crazy with obsession, madly in love with Brian the bartender, who keeps successfully conning her into kicking the football—Charlie Brown and Lucy—yet again.
But otherwise Rae is a great, loving, honest example. Elizabeth will change, in every way, will become more like Rae by osmosis. Intellectually, they’re so alike, but attitudinally couldn’t be more opposite. And Rae tells the truth—always, it seems; secrets and confessions. She cries sometimes, remembering a vast humiliation or foolishness, but more often has Elizabeth and herself weeping tears of laughter, while Elizabeth’s verbalized history is embellished, polished and rewritten so that she can hardly remember how it really was, and therefore who she really is.
Once Rae came over to borrow Elizabeth’s vacuum cleaner and confided, “I had a vacuum cleaner once. I’d sent away for these magic weight-loss shorts that you hooked up to a vacuum cleaner—only I didn’t have a vacuum cleaner. So I go to a secondhand appliance store and buy one.”
“I take it home, and my roommate is stunned. I mean, I was an even worse slob back then—I had a mattress on the floor that a stranger would have felt perfectly comfortable walking across with his or her shoes on—and here I’ve just shelled out fifty bucks for a vacuum cleaner.”
“But I take it upstairs to my bedroom and lock the door. I get my magic shorts from underneath the bed. They’re like elasticized pedal pushers—they’re plaid, and they’re made out of rubber, and they’ve got this opening at the hip, like an ostomy. So I put them on, read the instructions, plug in the vacuum cleaner, attach it to the opening, turn on the motor, and start running in place for fifteen minutes, holding the nozzle to my side while it sucks all the air out of my shorts, trying to run on tiptoes so my roommate won’t come up to investigate....” Elizabeth treasured the image, could summon it when she needed to laugh. Like now. She smiled.
Rae has such a simple, compassionate heart. They saw Hepburn on television recently: beautiful, but with those tremors. Elizabeth grew disconcerted; Rae grew sentimental. “Doesn’t she remind you of a little sparrow?” she asked.
And last year, at a gallery in the city, studying a print of Winslow Homer’s “Gulf Stream,” Rae pointed out the ghostly ship in the distant waves and thought that it was coming to save the nonchalant black sailor on the broken ship—around which sharks are swimming. “Jesus, Rae,” Elizabeth said, with some irritation. “That is one dead darkie.”
Oh, Rae.
Oh, Rosie, I swear it: I’m ready to change. I’m ready to grow up some more. I’ll be kinder, sober and strong, more like Rae and your dad. You’ll have happy memories of growing up with me.
I have lost my childhood. And I am losing my adulthood, it passes too quickly, but I won’t, won’t, won’t lose my child.
Is th
ere a biochemical flaw in me that is making me become my mother, increasingly boozy and insane? Relax, relax. If you fall asleep right now, you can still get three hours....
But she feels crazier and more scared as dawn approaches, the moments between night and day, the hour of the wolf, the hour of the black dogs. She will nearly die waiting for sunrise—and then will spend the day waiting for it to be time for bed.... God!
She travels back ten years, is sitting at the Boston airport having just attended her roommate’s wedding, desperate to be home with Andrew who had of all things German measles. Over the intercom Elizabeth hears the announcement that her flight has been delayed two hours, and she has a flash flood of panic, profoundly convinced that she cannot survive those two impossible hours, will lose her mind. She has to sit shock still, staring straight ahead the entire time; her mind is Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.” And this is how she feels now.
The projector in her mind now shows a clip from a New Year’s Eve party when she was roughly Rosie’s age, in a nightgown, unseen at the top of the stairs, where she sits and listens to the plastered grown-ups sing. Her mother is at the piano, playing songs from the Fireside Book of Folk Songs: “Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes,” “Annie Laurie,” “Cockles and Mussels.” Back in bed, she cries herself to sleep, waking just after dawn to hear a blood-chilling sound, a stage-whispered fight between her parents, which seeps through the wall into her bedroom: her mother hissing that he’d done something in the garden with Backen’s wife, her father denying it. Elizabeth can perfectly remember cringing with guilt and rage, her stomach flushed, the back of her throat hot and rashy, the back of her eyes hot and rashy too...
Relax. Try to stop flapping around so much. If you just wait it out long enough, it will be day; wait a few more hours, rest your eyes.
Right now, Rae would be lying wrapped around Brian; an emotional arsonist is better than nothing as the hour of the wolf approaches. Oh, God, I want a man here now. Grace and Charles Adderly, in their seventies, still lie together, holding one another as they sleep. Why don’t I get to have one, why do I have to keep waiting to find a good man? One with fire in his heart, to sleep with every night?
Because you don’t deserve one. Because you treat them badly, because you are weird and manipulative and selfish—selfish, selfish, her mother always telling her how selfish she was. All her loves, except for the miracle of Rosie, have been in vain, totally in vain—no, there is also Rae—and the Adderlys, but they don’t know how nasty she can be with men: if they could see the devious workings of her mind, they wouldn’t want her either. They think she is noble, an excellent mother, a devoted friend although she hardly ever makes the effort to see them. The last time Grace came for tea, Rosie made them laugh so hard that Grace, standing, had to cross her legs, and pee ran down them, forming a puddle on the floor, which made the three of them laugh even harder. Oh, God, in pain and compassion and embarrassment, Rosie was on the verge of tears. Grace said, “I’ve piddled.” And Elizabeth, touching her shoulder, went for paper towels and wiped it up as graciously, as nonchalantly as if a puppy—her own puppy—had peed.
See, Elizabeth, see? That you are kind, too?
But her mother continues to haunt her tonight. Easter, thirty years ago, her father had promised to buy Easter egg dyes on his way home from the office, but didn’t come home until six in the morning, by which time her mother had painted hardboiled eggs by wetting jelly beans, etching faint watery pictures on the white shells, but only the red and the black beans showed up well. Upon seeing them, it was her mother whom Elizabeth hated that Easter Sunday. Not her father.
Her eyes burn, the back of her throat burns, the space behind her eyes burns.
Morning is barely breaking, and she finds she has fallen through into the dreamy burrow just above true sleep, fading, floating. Finally she sleeps.
The alarm went off an hour later. She felt as though she had been asleep for five minutes, her exhaustion such that she was pinned to the bed by centrifugal force; there was no point in trying to raise her right arm to quiet the alarm because her arm would be slammed back to her side. There would be no energy this morning, there would only be the killing of an entire day, the waiting for it to be over, a nothingness. The alarm wore down. She would read the paper, weed, maybe do some laundry.
Rosie opened the bedroom door, already dressed in worn blue jean overalls, sneakers, and a purple T-shirt.
“Hi, Mama.” Elizabeth could barely keep her eyes open and felt like a woman who had barely lived to regret it: bloated, bleary, sad. “God!” said her daughter and stomped off, slamming the door. Elizabeth exhaled loudly.
She went to the bathroom, splashed freezing water on her face, studied the flatness, bags, wrinkles in and around her hazel eyes. She went downstairs to make breakfast for her daughter, who was pouring a half-full bottle of Remy Martin down the sink. Elizabeth rubbed her face and eyes and slumped down at the table.
“I didn’t drink that much, Rosie. I just never fell asleep.”
“You got so drunk you fell asleep on the couch.”
“But I didn’t have much more after you went to bed.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“You swear on a stack of Bibles?”
Elizabeth nodded.
Rosie stalked out of the kitchen and up the stairs to her mother’s room, retrieved the incriminating snifter from the night table, and returned to the kitchen, glaring. Elizabeth looked back at her levelly.
“What do you have to say about this?” Rosie asked.
Elizabeth did not hear her own voice: She heard the tone of her mother’s. “Come here.”
Rosie shook her head, looked away.
“I promise you. On my honor. I didn’t get drunker after you went to bed. I had a short glass of brandy while I was reading in bed, and I stayed awake all night, just tossing and turning.”
“How come?”
“Because I have insomnia. I’m not a good sleeper. It’s just part of my nature. I can’t seem to change it; like I can’t change the color of my eyes.”
Rosie looked at the ground, scowling, tracing letters on the linoleum with the toe of her shoe.
“Come here, baby. I just want to hold you.”
Rosie continued to look at the floor. Her bottom lip was trembling, and the rich blue eyes were wet. Elizabeth could have died with love for that scrawny body, for the tiny succulent bottom, for that person.
“Rosie.” I swear to you, things will be different...
“Mama. What is to become of us?”
Oh, Rosie.
Elizabeth spent the morning swathed not in gauze but in cotton batting. The front page was filled with disastrous news—Israel had been bombing its neighbors again, and the superpowers were in yet another nervous frenzy (boys in the kerosene-filled basement), and it gave her a thrill she would have admitted to no one. Maybe this time all hell was going to break loose. All her life, all hell—nuclear war—had threatened to break out. But suppose, say, Russia dropped a nice conventional bomb on Israel; it would put life into a state of suspended animation, would legitimize hanging out all day waiting to see where the chips would fall, would justify spending all day overeating, drinking, watching movies, playing with Rae, making love. It would get her off many hooks. And it would give her and Rae, who followed and discussed major international difficulties with the involvement and enthusiasm with which other people followed Dallas, great comic-tragic material.
“We do not leave the world to our children,” she read on page five, in an interview with a world-renowned pacifist. “We borrow it from them.”
But Elizabeth, with all the free time in the world, couldn’t bring herself to work for pacific groups; the world was too far gone, too ghastly and demented, almost fictional, almost boring. And the people in town fighting the great good fights drove her up the wall:
She had attended one antinuclear meeting and spent the entire time waiting for it to be over. The
man seated beside Elizabeth had tapped the shoulder of the equally white woman in front of him and asked, “I’ve seen you somewhere—aren’t you a Nicaragua person?” Elizabeth had hardly been able to wait to tell Rae, who sent peace and women’s groups money.
Forget it. The thing was to take care of your children and the people you loved and your life. Personal grooviness űiberalles
She made poached eggs and toast for breakfast but, with too much coffee and too little sleep, and having survived a night that felt like a nervous breakdown, she found that the food was unable to find a foothold anywhere in her stomach or intestines.
Back at the kitchen table, reading the Help Wanteds, infused with the desire to change her life on every level, in every way—to get moving, forward—she idly lifted a bottle of nail polish and, with a forlorn look on her face and a gaping, heavy hole in her chest, spent the next half hour slowly tipping the bottle back and forth, watching the swaths cut in the polish by the silver stir beads, the silvery etchings in crimson.
CHAPTER 4
Miss Lacey, the second-grade teacher, was tall and thin, with a long red nose and an abounding interest in the genius and struggles of Rosie Ferguson. She had arranged for Rosie to study reading and arithmetic with the third-graders, gave her fourth-grade grammar workbooks and a blank notebook in which to keep a journal. She comforted her with hugs the day in music class when, upon hearing midway through “Aunt Rhody” that the goslings were crying because the old gray goose was dead, Rosie wept inconsolably. And she prefaced almost all her phone calls to Elizabeth by saying that it wasn’t that she didn’t treasure having Rosie in her class, but...
She had called when Rosie brought Elizabeth’s checkbook to Show-and-Tell, when Rosie sold a blackish-green penny to David Harper several weeks later for a quarter, claiming it was worth three hundred dollars, and again when Rosie interrupted art class with an impression of Mrs. Brewster, the obese and loudly allergic principal.
“Hello, Elizabeth,” Miss Lacey said over the phone one afternoon.