Meeting Rozzy Halfway Read online

  Rozzy was flying in on money Bea had sent her. Rozzy hadn’t wanted to come home, but her job ended with the summer, and her scholarship didn’t start up until the fall. She saw no alternative. I hadn’t planned on summering at the house either. I could find work, and David, who was taking a few summer monkey courses, would be more than delighted to share his place. What I was doing, I was doing for Rozzy. If she needed it, she could have all of my time.

  I had left most of my things at David’s, loosely jumbled into wicker baskets, spilling out of boxes. He offered to set everything up, to put my books into alphabetical order on his shelf, but the idea made me uneasy. I unpacked only what I thought I might need. The rest would be only ten minutes away at David’s. David wanted to drive me home, but when I first saw Rozzy, I wanted to see her alone. “You can come by later, when we’re settled,” I told him.

  I took the subway, one small suitcase in my hand. I had no idea what time Rozzy was due in. All her cards had told me was the day. I was captured in the five o’clock rush, jammed into a seat, my legroom eaten away by other legs, by standing legs, legs swaying in motion, legs nudging mine and trying to case suggestively in between them.

  The subway abruptly stopped and I went upstairs out into the street and flagged down a yellow cab that was scooting up the street. “Please hurry,” I told the driver. It was always strange coming home, coming back into that house again. Rozzy always used to say that no matter what happened, we would always see that house as ours, that we could come back for a visit long after Bea and Ben were dead, probably to find another family there, with two little girls, just as we had been, playing their games, burying their dead dolls in the backyard, hiding from a father who was shouting and waving his arms at them. I always wept and got sentimental, but Rozzy grinned, a Cheshire cat.

  She was already home when I put my key into the lock. She was curled up in the old brown chair by the fireplace, asleep on one arm. Her hair had feathered down to her chest bone, and she was wearing a brilliant green dress, but still she looked a little faded. “Rozzy—” I said, but Bea put out one hand.

  “Don’t,” she whispered, leaning forward to kiss me. “Let her sleep, she’s been dead on her feet since she got here, but she insisted on staying up, waiting for you.” Bea shook her head. “She looks like hell, doesn’t she? Who cut her hair like that, all uneven and straggling? Her speech was pretty slurry, too. I didn’t think she was on medication. But she must have some doctor out there, I suppose.” Bea sighed. “You want to unpack now, honey? There’s time before dinner. You can stay right in your old room. I put nice clean sheets on the bed.”

  I was almost finished putting away my things when Bea came in the room and started riffling through the bureau drawers.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  Bea turned, planting one arm on top of the dresser. She held up a fistful of knives, a pair of rusting scissors, some tangled wire. “I just want these where they aren’t quite so visible.”

  “Oh Christ.”

  “Don’t you ‘oh Christ’ me,” she said. “I cleaned out the medicine chest, too, so if you want an aspirin or something, you just come and ask me.”

  “When’s Ben coming home?”

  “Around dinner time,” she said, shoving the knives and scissors and wire toward the back of the drawer. She gave it a smart slam shut. “The whole bunch of us will be here. Won’t that be nice?”

  It had been a while since all four of us were at one table together. I was just about to go and wake Rozzy and tell her to come eat, when she appeared in the kitchen, drugged with sleep. Her dreamy stare snagged on everything, and when she saw me, she wandered over and hung her arms about my neck, pulling me down with the weight of her. “I missed you,” she said, turning her head and nuzzling me. We walked to the table, arms slung about each other, smiling.

  I saw Ben through the dining room window. He was still in his suit, stooping down in the vegetable garden. I hadn’t heard his car. When he came into the house, through the back, he was carrying carrots fresh from the ground, holding them away from his suit so the stringy clots of dirt wouldn’t ruin the expensive fabric. Rozzy stiffened when she heard his voice. She sat up very straight in her chair. Ben washed the carrots in the kitchen, talking in a low voice to Bea, and then they both came into the dining room.

  “Well, well,” said Ben, smiling. “The gang’s certainly all here.” But he didn’t come into the room to sit down—not yet. First he changed into a cheap cotton shirt and some old pants and then he slouched down into his place at the head of the table. “It’s nice you both are here,” he said, and then he called out for Bea because he said he had things he wanted to talk to her about.

  “What’s he saying?” whispered Rozzy. “What’s he talking about?” I shrugged. Nobody spoke much during dinner, although Bea tried to weave us together into a family by continually stopping in the middle of her stories to ask our opinions. Wasn’t such and such amusing? Did we remember Mary Hobart, that fat girl down the block? Wasn’t the summer our favorite season? The predominant sound was the clinking of forks, the crunch of carrots, and when dinner was through, Ben instantly got up from his chair and went to his study to work.

  “I’ll handle the dishes,” said Bea, starting to stack the smeary plates on top of one another. “You two girls go into the living room and talk. Relax some.”

  But Rozzy didn’t talk. We went into the living room and she fell asleep on the brown chair. In fact, she slept away her first two days home, emerging only to eat something light before stumbling back to sleep. I read magazines or talked to Bea until she began getting irritated with my being underfoot so often. She was always baking something intricate for Ben, getting flours and sauces on her apron and on the floor, filling the kitchen with odors. When she wasn’t cooking, she sifted through color folders of different vacation trips. Mountain-climbing resorts, horse ranches, rock-climbing expeditions. I picked up one of the folders and leafed through it. There was a picture of a young couple on a raft, set in the middle of swirling white rapids. They were both convulsively clutching the fragile-looking raft, big foolish grins on their faces, their knuckles white as the peaks on the water. “Wouldn’t you like to just go someplace boring and do nothing for a change?” I asked Bea.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. She began sucking at her baby finger, shutting her eyes. “Damned paper cut,” she said. “I keep getting them.”

  I began wishing for school to open again. I couldn’t seem to sketch anything that pleased me, and the pools closest to home were always clotted with screaming kids. I called David, but he was so exuberant, so willing to please, that something closed up within me, and I was short with him.

  Finally, one morning, Rozzy got dressed and started to take pills. She hid them in her pockets, and then, as she yawned, behind the safety of her hand, she gulped them down. She wouldn’t talk about the medication; when Bea asked her if she had a doctor, Rozzy became sullen and angry; she accused Bea of reminding her of the bad times, of forgetting the good.

  Actually, Rozzy wouldn’t answer any of Bea’s questions about anything. Bea could ask if Rozzy wanted clam sauce for her pasta at dinner and Rozzy would mumble darkly or simply get up and walk away. She didn’t even want to talk with me, which hurt me until I remembered that she had refused to go to bed when she first arrived because she insisted on waiting for me.

  Rozzy kept glancing around her as if she were disoriented at suddenly finding herself outside of Texas. She had grown used to the swelter of New Orleans, the shimmering humidity of Texas, and she had just tasted the promising heat wave starting up the summer before she had come north to Boston. She was always cold. She began spending hours in the bathroom, running hot water from the shower and the sink, sealing out the outside air by stuffing one of Bea’s good towels into the crack along the bottom of the door. She took showers four times a day, staying under the flood of water long after her skin had pruned. Sometimes she just perched on the edg
e of the tub, fully clothed, basking in all that humidity, that stuffy heat. The plants in the bathroom bloomed. It was always steamy in there, the mirror was always clouded, and everything always felt muggy in that room. When I showered, Rozzy would come in and sit on the toilet. “We can talk,” she’d say, but she always just sat, her face lifted up into the heat.

  “Why isn’t there any damn hot water in this house?” Ben would fume, emerging from the bathroom swaddled in his yellow robe. “Where the hell does it go?”

  Rozzy slept with three wool blankets and a quilt. The air conditioning made her nervous. “But all of Texas is airconditioned,” said Bea. “Don’t tell me it isn’t.”

  “No, it’s different,” Rozzy insisted.

  She began taking walks around the neighborhood with me. She wore wool scarfs and sweaters and big blond Frye boots. The two of us were mismatched—me in my skimpy black gauze dresses, she in wintry woolens, each of us making the other look as if she were trapped in the wrong season, in the wrong time. We exchanged wardrobes. Rozzy went down into the basement and dipped into the garment bags, zipping and unzipping the white plastic bags until she found the heaviest wools. She took great armfuls upstairs and hung them in her closet, never bothering to air them out, so she walked around smelling like a mothball. Bea wrinkled up her nose and grabbed hangers and clothing and hung them outside on the white line, but Rozzy took them right down again. “They don’t smell,” she said. I wore Rozzy’s Texas dresses, white flimsy things with lots of Mexican stitching all over them, bright flowers blooming on the bodice. No one I knew had dresses like that.

  Rozzy was always turning the heat up, snapping off the air conditioning, until Bea grabbed her by the shoulders.

  “But there’s a nice cool breeze outside,” said Rozzy innocently. “You don’t need the air conditioning.”

  Bea looked at Rozzy as if she had three heads. “It’s eighty-seven degrees outside, the pollution is just floating up there on the dead air, and you tell me about breezes.” Bea held up a long tail of her own hair, the ends sweating and curling. “Look, is that how hair behaves in a cool breeze?” she demanded.

  “It looks nice,” said Rozzy.

  Rozzy never got used to seeing people dressed in summer things, but she ignored them when they stared at her. “If I were in Texas, I could dress the way they do,” she said wistfully, “but not here, not in Boston. Boston is just a wrong city. Terribly, terribly wrong.”

  Rozzy never stopped complaining. She’d sit at dinner staring at Bea’s cold fruit soups, the glittering jellied salads. “There’s nothing to warm me up,” said Rozzy.

  Bea pushed out a breath. “Then cook your own meals.”

  “It’d do you good to learn cooking,” said Ben.

  So Rozzy began walking down to the Thrift-T-Mart, returning with two brown bags full of dried peas and beans and vegetables to make a stew. She simmered everything in a large cast-iron pot, heating up the kitchen for hours, pulling up a chair close to the stove and reading. When I looked over her shoulder, the steam made the words in her book dance.

  “You’re doing this on purpose,” said Bea, brushing back the damp hairs from her brow.

  When we ate chilled food and sipped iced drinks, Rozzy hunched over her soups, warming her hands against the bowl.

  Bea couldn’t stand it. She finally went out and came back with a sunlamp for Rozzy. “Now you have to promise me to be careful,” she said. Rozzy delightedly ripped apart the box, tossing the papery remains into the wastebasket. “I even got you a timer,” said Bea. Rozzy whooped and ran into her room with the lamp and the timer, shucking off her clothes and shivering, hugging herself as if her arms were a blanket. Her skin goosepimpled. “I’m going to be tan all over,” she bragged.

  “Pull the shade down.”

  “You want to tan, too?” Rozzy said, setting up the lamp, then laying a towel flat on the wood floor.

  “Redheads never tan,” I said. I had always hated the few times Bea had packed us off to the beach, to Cape Cod. Bea herself never cared for the ocean, but she thought it was something children needed to experience, so she left us at the waterside while she went into the motel and sat inside in the shade sipping frosty drinks and ruminating. The ocean was too choppy to do any real swimming, and there was nothing else except for the endless shifting sand. Rozzy would always lie flat on her back, right on the sand, insisting the towel isolated her from the heat of the beach. Even when she came out of the water, she would lie flush against the sand, not caring that she was breading herself with grit.

  Rozzy got brown. I slathered on creams and sticky lotions and stayed in the water until my lips blued, but I was always burning my skin right from my bones, turning it angry and red and painful. My eyes would be swollen shut and I’d shiver, sipping the cold drinks Bea brought me, letting her rub me with a cold cloth. “Oooch,” she said, “it’s painful just to look at you.” Rozzy would stand in the doorway, holding herself as if she were also in pain, and I would struggle to look up and see my reflection in the mirror. My whole body looked as if someone had washed over me with red watercolor, leaving me false and unnatural-looking. In three days the red skin would start peeling away like wallpaper, leaving the same milk-colored flesh.

  At first, Rozzy was very careful about the timer, but eventually she got lazy. She fell asleep one day, waking with a start. Everything hurt her; her skin felt bruised. She turned to flame and was ill for days. Bea took the sunlamp and disposed of it. “That was mine,” said Rozzy, trying painfully to sit up. “You can’t do that. You have no right.”

  “Well, obviously I can, because I just did. You want sunlamp treatments, then you can just go to one of those spas where they make sure you don’t stay under too long. They can be sued, so they get plenty damned careful.”

  Rozzy sulked, and when she was better she ransacked the house for that lamp, coming across the knives and the wire and the scissors, but so intent that she didn’t stop to puzzle over them. Rozzy begged me to find out where the lamp was, but Bea was mute. “Jesus,” Rozzy cried. She dressed in a white sweater and cords and called a cab. “Where are you going?” Bea said. Rozzy slapped the door shut.

  Rozzy went back to her boiling showers, her stews, and every few days she called a cab and disappeared. I thought about trailing her, but it always made me feel ashamed, and so I never did.

  David began coming by the house. Rozzy didn’t trust him, not since that thwarted double date with his friend Hank. David kept telling her funny stories, but her mouth was stubborn.

  “I hate the way he just shows up,” she told me. “You just go right out with him, too, like you’re his on demand.”

  “We don’t stay out late,” I said, “and you know you’re welcome to come with us. And anyway, I see you more than I do him.” That fact was something that bothered David, something he couldn’t really understand. I rarely saw him during the day because of Rozzy, and three evenings a week were eaten up by his monkey classes. “Stay over,” he said. “Spend the night with me. I feel like I’m sixteen again and dating, having a curfew.” The drive home was almost always silent. Sometimes David would apologize. “For what?” I said, leaning against him, wrapping his free arm about me. And sometimes, too, when I came into the house to find Rozzy sullenly ignoring me, I wouldn’t want to be home; I would ache for David.

  Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays were David’s days. He usually came by the house around four, and I would sit in the living room and wait for him. The afternoons stretched out with the heat, making things double, making images ghost. Rozzy wandered in one Thursday, her face dark. “I feel wretched,” she said. “Bea told me she got a special introductory offer to join this health spa or something. It’s really cheap and they have a sunroom. Want to go? They have a pool, too, for you.”

  I brightened at the thought of water. I could feel it pulsating against my skin. “It’s three-thirty,” I said, glancing at my watch. Rozzy put one hand over her face, hiding her eyes. “We won�
�t be gone very long,” she said. “You can leave David a nice note, tell him to wait for you. He likes Bea. He can talk to her. Just a lousy half-hour,” she pleaded. “We could even be back before he gets here if we leave right now.”

  So we took a cab and once we got to the spa and paid for introductory memberships, Rozzy headed for the sauna. “I’ll check out the sun room in a bit,” she said. I sat in the steamy solitude with her for ten minutes. She lay on her back on one of the redwood benches, silent, her arm over her face, and when I got up to explore the pool, she ignored me.

  1 moved and dipped in the cool blue water of the pool until my muscles ached, then I went to tell Rozzy we should be leaving. It felt natural and good to be wet, to be dripping water on the floor, to smell of chlorine again. Now that I was a member, I planned on coming every day. Rozzy propped herself up on her elbows when I opened the door to the sauna. “Ten more minutes,” she said.

  “I’ll call home. Say we’ll be a little late.”

  “No, no, that isn’t necessary. Ten minutes is nothing. I’ll come out and get you.”

  “I don’t have a dime anyway,” I said, and headed back for the pool. I floated on my back, shutting my eyes, letting the water lull me, wondering how angry David might be, wondering how late we were, when someone splashed me. I sputtered and treaded water, looking up. David was crouched on the wet tiles, grinning at me. He helped me out of the pool, draping me about him like a shawl, not caring that I was making damp imprints on his blue cotton shirt, that my skin was clammy.

  “Come on and I’ll buy you and Rozzy the best damned ice cream in town.”

  I found Rozzy dozing in the arid heat of the sauna, her skin red. “Five more minutes,” she said, lifting her head, “just five.”

  “David’s here for us,” I said. “He wants to buy us ice cream.”