Rosie Read online

  Oh, Christ. What now? “Hello, Eileen.”

  Eileen Lacey exhaled loudly.

  “This morning, for Show-and-Tell, Rosie brought in a big black rock and claimed it was a chunk of a star that fell into your garden the other night.”

  “Well, she’s got an active imagination—”

  “Elizabeth, she said that the star fell onto your boyfriend and killed him.”

  “Oh.”

  “In your garden. And the garbage-men took his body away this morning.”

  “I see. Can you hang on a moment, please? I’ve left the water running.”

  Elizabeth had been waiting all afternoon for it to be late enough for a beer. In a fit of resolve following her white night, she had poured all the hard liquor out and now drank only beer and wine.

  She returned to the phone with a Mickey’s Big Mouth ale.

  “I’ll talk to her when she gets home. I appreciate your calling me.”

  “She has such a great mind, Elizabeth. I think it’s so important that she learn to tell only the truth.”

  “I couldn’t agree more.”

  “Doesn’t she like your boyfriend?”

  “I thought she did. Maybe she’s jealous of him.” Elizabeth rolled her eyes.

  “That’s probably it. You’ll talk to her about it though, won’t you?”.

  “Yes, of course.”

  Rae called half an hour later to announce an impending collapse, brought on by Brian’s not having called for three days.

  “Oh, Rae. The guy’s an asshole. Drop him.”

  “But I’m in love with him.”

  “Spare me the details.”

  “But—”

  “His behavior is continually bad.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “Are you crying?”

  “Yeah, but it’s just because I’m so tired.”

  “Ah.”

  “I stayed up until five this morning.”

  “Coke?”

  “I wish.”

  “Speed?”

  “Mice. I swear to God, Elizabeth, they’re driving me nuts; they’re in the cupboards, the eaves, and the kitchen. As soon as I turn off the lights, they begin scritching away— just to push me over the edge. They go scritch, scritch, then they put their hands over their mouths to stifle their titters; I swear to God, they’re snickering into their chests. While I pace around till all hours. About three this morning I made the mistake of looking in a mirror, and I had this eerie, wasted look on my face, like the guy in ‘The Tell-Tale Heart.’”

  “Get a cat.”

  “I don’t like cats,” she said mournfully. “They’re too hairy.”

  “Then set traps. Or poison them.”

  “I did. I put d-Con wherever ... I suspected mouse encampments, then I swept it all back up. Don’t laugh at me. I couldn’t deal with opening a cupboard in the morning and finding all those mousey little corpses, the mamas clutching their babies like a little mouse Jonestown.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Rae.”

  “I don’t think I can get through the day—”

  “Weave. And then come eat dinner with us.”

  “Nah—”

  “Goddammit, Rae, you won’t leave the house because he might call, right? You could be over here with the woman who rejoices in being your best friend, with your adopted niece who always makes you happy, eating some wondrous dinner, listening to music, laughing, but you can’t say yes because he might call and invite you to go on a dump run with him. Rae, he has the emotional range and expressiveness of a mean, well-trained dog.”

  There was a long silence.

  “Now I want you to get your voluptuous self over here at five.”

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  Poor Rae, thought Elizabeth. Despite my own grave faults, self-centeredness, laziness, aloofness, at least I’ve gotten over the dump-run syndrome, at least I’ve learned to learn to stop letting men jerk my leash.

  Rae, with a heart that filled her entire chest cavity, loved Brian with a blind, selfless obsession. She made the common and devastating mistake of interpreting excellent lovemaking for love, of confusing sexual chemistry with loving. She sat around waiting for Brian to call, and when he didn’t, she played records to summon him through telepathy, playing them loudly so he’d hear three miles away: “Love and Affection,” “Desperado,” “All of Me,” “If I Could Only Win Your Love.”

  “You’re kidding me,” said Elizabeth, when Rae told her. “Is it like ‘This song goes out to Brian from Rae: Please call’?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Jesus.”

  Rosie and Sharon went into town after school, first to the post office, where they studied the Wanted posters in the glass display case, casting anxious eyes on the male customers who came and went. They stopped by the dime store to leer at the bras. They ran to the bakery, burst into the sweet yeasty room, and waited patiently for old Gio to give them a hot butter cookie, which he did. Then they crept stealthily to the boardwalk outside, tiptoeing past store windows, whispering in pig Latin, whirling around from time to time to see who might be on their trail.

  They combed the dirt recess underneath the boardwalk for coins that inevitably fell through the slats, paced the dark earthy corridor, dimly lit by thin ribs of sunshine which filtered down along with the sounds of footsteps and voices, their eyes as sharp as hawks for flashes in the dirt. Three nickels, a dime, and a penny. They went back to the dime-store, bought twenty-six cents’ worth of chocolate stars, and consumed them, one by one, on the curb, with their feet in the gutter, chins on their knees, eyes peering upward at the passing parade.

  “This is like looking out of a crib,” said Sharon.

  “Rutty.”

  “There’s that retarded guy.”

  “Mongo-brain.”

  “They all look like brothers and sisters,” said Sharon.

  “I wonder if they know they’re retarded, or if they’re too retarded to know.”

  A third-grader rode past on a dirt bike, sneering “Curly girl” at Rosie.

  “Oh, smell off,” she shouted at him, stung almost to the point of tears, the hot blood rushing to her face.

  “That guy’s a total dog dick,” said Sharon.

  They giggled hysterically for a moment.

  “Look, Rosie! There’s a nun!”

  “She’s coming right at us.”

  “Yoiks!”

  “Raaaaaaid!”

  They got up and tore, giggling, to the beach. They pried starfish off the wet boulders, threw them into the surf, caught and freed a dozen black-red crabs, skipped flat stones across the water.

  “I’m starving to death,” said Rosie.

  “Me too,” said Sharon.

  Let’s go to your house and raid the refrigerator, let’s go to your house and raid the cupboards, let’s go play with your mother, your trolls—

  “Wull, we can’t go to my house because my mother isn’t there,” Rosie lied.

  “We can’t go to my house either. My dad’s working there alone.”

  “So who said I wanted to, stupid?” Rats. “You want to go to the lagoon fort?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “We can think of ways to get money.”

  They left the beach, cut through the railroad yard, and headed for the lagoon where, months ago, they had found a hollow in the dense brush near the shore on a deserted lot. They had borrowed planks, nails, bricks, and cardboard boxes from the construction site on an adjacent lot and made a fort with wooden and brick benches into which they occasionally pounded a nail, using a rock as a hammer. Rosie sat on a canvas bag of cement mix which they planned to use to cover the wooden frame of the fort once they got around to constructing the wooden frame, after which they would begin work on the moat and the drawbridge.

  They had had to abandon the lagoon fort for a month recently. A big carp had washed up on shore, which they determined by mysterious means to be a boy. They christened hi
m Fred and buried him in a shallow grave right outside the entrance to the clearing. Fred was their mascot. Within two days the fort was unapproachable, the stench having beckoned flies from miles around to a luau of decomposing carp.

  It was good to be back. When they got bored sitting in the fort—which is to say, when they found themselves in the fort without candy—they went to watch the carpenters hammer and measure and pour concrete.

  “How we gonna get some money?” Sharon asked, sitting on a bench made of a plank and two bricks.

  “Let me think.”

  Half an hour later the girls were standing outside Safeway, sorrowfully explaining to adult passersby that they were collecting money because their puppy needed an operation for leukemia, and their parents were going to put it to sleep if they didn’t come up with the money soon. The puppy’s name, Rosie sadly confided to each grown-up, was Little Maggie.

  Within ten minutes they had enough money to buy two bottles of Coke and two small bags of ruffled dip chips. They opened the twist-off caps and tore the foil bags with their teeth, which served them in as many ways as Swiss Army knives: scissors, bottle openers, pliers.

  “Hi, Mama.”

  “Hi, baby.”

  “What’s for dinner?”

  “Macaroni and cheese.”

  “Oh, thrills.”

  “Rae’s coming over in a few minutes.”

  “Good!”

  “Miss Lacey called again.”

  Rosie looked off into space and bit her lip.

  “Any idea what she might have called about?”

  Rosie closed one eye, thought hard, shrugged.

  “None at all?”

  Rosie pushed back in her chair so that it was on a two-legged diagonal.

  “Straighten up.”

  Rosie slowly lowered the front legs to the ground. “Was it about Andrea Kinkaid?”

  “No. Why? What did you do to Andrea Kinkaid?”

  “Nothing. She’s just a total crybaby.”

  Elizabeth looked exasperated.

  “Miss Lacey called about the falling star you took to Show-and-Tell.” Rosie nodded glumly. “And the dead man in our garden.” Nod, nod. “Is this ringing a bell?” Nod, nod, eyes averted. “Care to comment?”

  “Well, I had to bring something.”

  “But you didn’t have to lie.”

  Rosie looked bored.

  “See how stupid you feel when you get caught? That’s one good reason not to lie. And for another thing, if you tell the truth, you don’t have to keep track of what you said. It gives you a lot more freedom. And for another thing, it doesn’t reflect well on me—”

  “Wull, you lie.”

  “Like when?”

  “Like when you tell someone on the phone you have to hang up because there’s something on the stove when THERE ISN’T ANYTHING ON THE STOVE AT ALL.” Rosie, fierce, continued. “Or you tell some guy you can’t go out with him because you already have plans, and then we just hang out here all night reading.”

  “Good. Good point.”

  “I mean,” said Rosie, “what sort of example do you think that sets for me?”

  Oh, Rosie. You’re becoming a scapegoater, like me. “See, sometimes I think it’s all right to lie if the truth would hurt someone’s feelings about something that they’ve already done—like if someone gets a terrible haircut, or an expensive and ugly dress. Or, say, if some perfectly nice man wants to be with me and I’m not interested, I think it’s better to lie to save his face, instead of saying, ‘I don’t want to hang out with you because you’re so fucking boring it sets my teeth on edge!’ But! When you lie to make yourself look more impressive, or you have betrayed someone’s trust or broken a promise, or if someone else is going to have to take the blame for something you did—”

  “But, but—”

  “Let me finish. I know you didn’t hurt anyone by lying to the class, but maybe they won’t believe you next time, when you’re telling the truth. And I know you lied because you wanted your life to seem more exciting than theirs....”

  “Noooo. I did it ‘cause people bring the stupidest, most boringest stuff, and you have to listen to them for about an hour talk about some stupid acorn or something, or some stupid sea gull feathers.”

  Elizabeth smiled. “Yeah, I know, I know how you feel, but there’s funny stuff in your room you could take—that fake blood Rae gave you, or—”

  “I brought that in two weeks ago.”

  Elizabeth exhaled, looked intently at her daughter. “Look, I really just want you to tell the truth—I want me to tell the truth—as much as possible.”

  “Okay.”

  “Rosie?”

  “Ah-yeh?”

  “Did the star kill Gordon?”

  “Yep.”

  “Don’t you like him?”

  “Not very much. He thinks he’s so big. Do you?”

  “Sometimes. Sometimes I like him all right.”

  “Mama, but you know what? Sometimes when you tell Rae a story about something we did, it didn’t really happen that way. I mean, it mostly did, but when you tell the story, there’s all this extra stuff.”

  “Yeah. You got me. It’s called embellishment, it’s sprucing up a story to make it more interesting, or funny, or vivid.” Embellishment is the story of my life, embellishment and revising, like I never tell anyone that my first love left me for someone less moody, I tell them we just grew tired of each other. And that I initiated the breakup.

  When Elizabeth turned her eyes and attention back to Rosie, Rosie smiled her rougish, lopsided, knowing smile.

  “Deal? We try not to lie? And we always keep our promises?”

  “Deal.”

  Elizabeth was drinking considerably less while Rosie was awake. Three or four glasses of wine, at most. Later, with Rosie asleep, two or three glasses more. That evening she waited for her first glass until Rae swept through the house, unexpectedly cheerful, Margaret Rutherford in Blithe Spirit again. Elizabeth attributed it to their phone conversation earlier in the day and felt herself glow within.

  “Hey, baby,” she said to Rae.

  “Hey, Mama.”

  Okay. You become more like me, proud; I’ll become more like you, great-hearted, jolly and honest.

  Rae taught Rosie to make macaroni and cheese, while Elizabeth prepared a salad with herbs she had grown herself.

  “Now everything’s ready to assemble,” said Rae, in her singsong Julia Child voice, “so we’ll just butter up the casserole dish before adding the noodles—now, we never use Saffola, it has to be butter. Saffola sticks to the bottom of pans, so think what it would do in your stomach.”

  Rosie giggled.

  “Now, pour in those noodles—there you go—and stir in the cheese and cream, till it’s all nestly and nice, and we’ll pop it into the oven.”

  Elizabeth watched them work and watched herself make salad, tall, thin, and regal. She was vaguely jealous of Rosie and Rae, who had been in love since the day they’d met. They were so alike in many ways. Hypersensitive and somewhat waifish: 99th percentile in the Walter Harrington Factor—he had been the four-eyed genius in Elizabeth’s elementary school classes who wore mismatched shoes (sometimes on the wrong feet) and returned from the boys’ bathroom with toilet-paper streamers hanging from his pants: a comical, earnest space puppy.

  Rosie and Rae were both prone to long verbal bouts of free-floating anxiety looking for a place to roost, while Elizabeth kept the bulk of her anxieties to herself. When Rosie and Rae were anxious, they were wired and teary, whereas Elizabeth did her Mount Rushmore pose. Rosie and Rae expressed their bouts with the clammy blind-dreads, which, coupled with their day-dreaming and accident proneness, made them worry about things like being somehow drawn to walk into oncoming traffic, or into climbing out the window of a skyscraper. Rae worried that a stranger might rush up to her on the street and poke a fork into her eyes; Rosie that, holding a fork, she might absentmindedly poke it through her hand. And they both be
lieved in God.

  “How’s Hanuman?”

  “The pride of Cucamonga? Back to being a cork on the river.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yep. This morning, before I talked to you, I was sitting in the sun, all bummed and woozy, and she comes home from a walk and asks what’s wrong, and I said, ‘I’m obsessively and morbidly in love with an asshole,’ and she says, and I quote, ‘The description is never the described.’”

  “‘The description is never the described’?”

  “Yes. And then she walked away muttering, ‘Sri ram jai ram.’”

  “Let’s eat.”

  “Why don’t you move?” asked Rosie.

  “Because I’m poor. And I’m sort of fond of her. Every so often she makes sense. She turned me on to Ram Dass, who’s good. And she’ll make good copy in my biography.”

  Elizabeth lit the candles on the living room table.

  “Mama? Can we say grace?”

  “I can’t say grace. Maybe Rae can.”

  Rae did.

  “Brahman is the ritual,

  Brahman is the offering,

  Brahman is she who offers

  To the fire that is Brahman.

  If a person sees Brahman

  In every action

  She will find Brahman. Amen.”

  “Amen,” said Rosie. “What’s Brahman?”

  “God.”

  “Red or white, Rae?”

  “Red. No, wait: white. No, wait: red.”

  Elizabeth poured her a glass of red wine and one for herself. Rosie blew bubbles into her milk.

  “Knock it off, honey.”

  “Yes, Miss Mother.”

  “Oh, my God, this is wonderful; Rosie, we’ve done it again.”

  They ate in silence for a minute, perfectly happy.

  “Rae? How come you have such crinkly-crunkly hair?”

  “Because my mother did.”

  “Did your mother have proton nobulators?”

  “Did she have what?”

  “Those pinches at the end of your nose?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did your father have?”

  “He was fat.”

  “Did he have—?”

  “Rosie, chew. You’re wolfing down your food.”