Meeting Rozzy Halfway Read online

  Jay had a Physician’s Desk Reference, a big red book that had pictures of different kinds of pills and told what they did. When Jay walked around on the streets, he always kept his eyes down, searching for pills people might have dropped. “Drugstores are really the best places to look,” he told me. “People always open their stupid bottles to check and make sure they got the right medication, and usually they drop a few.” When he spotted a tiny circle of color, he’d pounce. He’d take it home and match it up against his book. Even if he didn’t know what it was, he would take it, reveling in its effects.

  “You know,” he once told me, snickering, bumpy on speed, “people will never believe you don’t do drugs, being with me and all.” He patted my thigh. “It’s OK, though. You do whatever you like.”

  A large part of the money Jay earned from selling drugs went into gifts. He was always presenting me with leatherbound books of poetry and fiction, with blocks of expensive paper and watercolors in tubes. He’d wrap everything up in Museum of Art wrapping paper, with bows and tags and considerable élan. Sometimes he surprised me with a handful of poppies or a recording of Bach. I was afraid to take these gifts home with me. They all seemed alive with Jay, and I couldn’t risk detection. I kept everything at Jay’s, in his little room, which that summer had really become mine as well. He even cleared a space on his shelf for me, an area in his closet.

  “It won’t always be like this,” he said apologetically.

  I looked at him in surprise. “I like it like this. It’s secluded, no one has any piece of it except for us.”

  It was when the summer began cooling that I told Jay about Rozzy. It was hard for me to talk about her being sick like that; I didn’t like hearing the words and I stammered a lot. “She slams her door against me,” I said. “It’s horrible, for everyone, not just Rozzy.”

  “God,” he said, “she sounds like she’s tripping, but without the acid. I can kind of relate to that, I think. I always feel like my body’s getting away from me, that I can’t control it, when I trip.” He gave a short laugh. “It might be nice to feel that without having to take LSD.”

  “That’s a stupid thing to say.”

  “You just don’t know how to deal with it,” he said.

  I thrashed away the sheets and stood up, pulling on my jeans, my rumpled T-shirt.

  “Oh-oh, someone’s mad,” he said, grinning.

  I tugged at my zipper.

  “Be mad then.”

  “I will.” I slammed out of his house, knowing I would be back the next morning, and hating him for knowing it, too.

  The days weren’t peaceful anymore. Jay suddenly became irritable, changed. “Why do I have to change my whole lifestyle for you?” he said. “And even if I don’t, what fun is it for me to trip with you sitting there straight as my mother?”

  “I love you,” I said, standing quietly against his door, feeling the knob pressing into my back.

  “Oh, yeah, love,” he snorted. “I’ve heard that baloney so many times from all kinds of girls.”

  “We’ll go out,” I said. “You just feel closed in.”

  “Yeah, and what if we run into your parents?”

  “I’ll risk it.”

  “Forget it. That’s not the problem.”

  “What is?”

  “We’ll talk about it later,” he said. “Let’s go make cheese sandwiches.”

  Later never came, though; he never wanted to talk. One morning I came by to find his front door locked. I walked up and down his street, then I made my way to a pay phone and dialed his number, letting it ring and ring, the noise jangling in my ear. I finally went back to his house, panic growing within me. An hour later, he rambled toward me, carrying his flute, whistling. I stood up. “Where were you?”

  “Out,” he said, easily, reaching for his key.

  “Out.”

  “Do you want to come in or do you want to stay outside and sulk?”

  I followed him up to his small blue bed.

  It began happening more and more. If I caught him on his way out, he would hunch into his jean jacket and ignore me, snap at me, make me uncomfortable enough to leave. I called Hilly and begged her to be my friend and to trail him, just for one day. In exchange, I would give her my new black silk shirt. Hilly came over a day later for the shirt. “He didn’t go out at all,” she said. “No one came in. I sat in front of his house the whole day. I don’t know what I would have done if he had seen me. Probably lied, said I had a crush on him.”

  I slumped on the couch, punching the pillows down and fluffing them up again. “You should have rung his bell and asked him out. He would have gone.”

  Hilly sighed. “School’s starting up soon. We should go into town and shop.”

  I picked at the pillow fringe. “Yeah. I guess.”

  “Maybe there’ll be some cute guys this year.”

  “Maybe.”

  Hilly didn’t stay long, and Jay didn’t call me that night. I didn’t go to his house the next day or the next, waiting for him to panic and call me. I was at camp working for the whole last week. None of the little kids in my unit knew who I was. They wouldn’t listen to me; they clamored for the other counselors, straying from my touch, my unsteady voice.

  I didn’t have to think at camp. Everything was organized for the kids. They were shuttled from art to swimming to the pony rides, and I trailed listlessly after them, thinking about Jay. Every once in a while, someone would ask if I was feeling all right, would say that I still looked a little peaked.

  The day after camp ended, I called Jay from a pay phone, my throat closing. I started crying on the phone, pleading with him to tell me what was wrong, why he suddenly hated me.

  “I don’t hate you, Bess,” he said. He was calm, rational, and it made me weep even harder. “Are you going to speak, Bess, or are you just going to cry on the phone? I can’t just sit here and listen to you crying.”

  “You didn’t call,” I said, my nose running.

  “So I didn’t call. Do I have to report in every single day? Do we have to be together every single minute? Look, there isn’t anyone else; I’m not interested in another girl. I just need time to be by myself again.”

  “You can do that with me,” I sobbed.

  “Bess, I can’t,” he said.

  I hung up. I leaned against the glass of the booth, not wanting anything, wanting everything, weeping until I had to catch my breath. I dug out more dimes from my jeans and began calling him. When his voice sounded, I told him I loved him, I pleaded to see him, but it only made him angry, he told me to stop.

  “I don’t know how I feel about anything,” he said. “I just want to be by myself now.”

  I hung up the phone again. I didn’t know where to go, so I walked until my legs started hurting, then I turned around and walked home. Camp was over and school would be starting in a week. Each day I got up, dressed, and walked into town and back, six miles each day, not thinking, just moving, just getting from one place to another. I couldn’t draw and I didn’t swim. Hilly came over every evening and the two of us would shut ourselves up in my room and talk.

  Bea knew something was wrong. She tried to get me to talk, but I froze her out. It was Rozzy who heard me sobbing one night. She came into my room and wrapped me up in her arms and let me cry. She wouldn’t let me say anything, and she didn’t ask questions. She simply rocked me until I fell asleep. When I woke up, she was gone.

  I was glad for school, for something to fill up the hollow spaces in my day. I didn’t see much of Jay and I was careful to avoid the routes I thought he might take. It was difficult, hellish. Sometimes in class I’d hear his name, and I’d have to get up and go to the girls room. I’d pass the insolent stares of the girls who were teasing their hair in front of the mirror, applying eye liner, smoking. I’d go into one of the gray stalls and flush the toilet over and over, the sound masking my weeping. When I came out, my eyes raw, I ignored them.

  I wanted people to ask what was w
rong, though; I wanted people to know that Jay had been in love with me once. A few people knew, Hilly told me, but a few didn’t believe it. She promised to spread the story. “Be sure to say I won’t talk about it,” I warned Hilly. “I want them to know, but I don’t want to have to think about it anymore.”

  Evenings I did my homework or talked to Hilly on the phone. Rozzy wandered in and out of the house, sometimes staying out late at night, cabbing home. I’d hear Bea yell at her, ground her, but the next evening Rozzy was off again. I wondered about Rozzy. She would never understand Jay. She had never had anything like that. At least I didn’t think she had.

  It wasn’t that boys weren’t attracted to Rozzy. She could have had anyone. When she walked down the street I could hear the hearts fluttering from sheer wanting. Men would always twist their mouths into smiles for her. When she fumbled with her change, spilling pennies and dimes in a shiny confusion of coins, there would always be some man stooping gallantly to retrieve her money. At the movies she could always find a palm with that extra quarter she was missing. Waiters always gave her extra whipped cream, another splash of sherry. Even our paper boy, a pimpled fleshy blond, had a crush on her and he would sometimes leave us three papers in his baffled lust for her.

  She was beautiful. There wasn’t a moment that I didn’t bleed to look like her. But she was different, too, and there was something a little unsettling and ominous about that, something no boy wanted to risk taking on. They couldn’t feel comfortable around her. But they could dream. Jay had told me he saw Rozzy’s name on the bathroom wall on a list of girls that “we’d most like to fuck.” “What number was she?” I asked. “One,” said Jay. I asked Jay to erase it, but he gave me a hard look.

  “It’s kind of an honor for her,” he said. “You don’t want to totally isolate her, do you?”

  “Was my name on the list?” I said.

  Jay had rolled me over on the bed, one hand unzipping my jeans. “No one’s going to know about you but me.”

  When Rozzy was out at night, I sometimes prowled in her room, careful that Bea didn’t catch me. I snooped, sliding open drawers, peeking into the closet. I found her diary in her top desk drawer. It was unlocked. I kept thinking that if I didn’t move it much, she would never know I had been dipping into it. Besides that, I reasoned, she usually hid it quite well. If it was this easy to find, she probably wanted me to read it.

  A lot of her diary was garbled comments, things that never jelled into any sort of sense. A few times she mentioned things about me, ordinary things—how I had looked at dinner, a new dress I had that she liked. There was no mention of the night I was sobbing and she had comforted me.

  But then she began writing about men. Men on the fringes, in their fifties, married. She was answering ads in the personal section of Boston After Dark, letting these men buy her dinner and wine her and sometimes seduce her. “I don’t see what the fuss is about,” she wrote, “but at least I have the experience now.” I shut the book. I could see those men in my mind, all lined up in their plaid jackets, balding, paunchy, and there was Rozzy with a gun, aiming, shooting them down, one by one, a clean shot every time.

  I waited up for Rozzy that night, until Bea was through scolding, and then I went into Rozzy’s room. “You OK?” I asked.

  “Sure,” she said, pulling her dress over her head.

  “Rozzy,” I said, biting my lips where they were chapped. “I don’t think you should go out nights anymore.”

  “You, too,” she sighed. “Isn’t Bea bad enough?”

  “I read your diary.”

  Rozzy stiffened, and then she sat on her bed and faced me, resigned.

  “It was unlocked,” she said.

  “There’s a difference between fucking and making love,” I said.

  Rozzy laughed. “Listen to the expert. How the hell would you know? I know, and there’s no damned difference at all.”

  “I’ve made love,” I said abruptly, “with Jay Keller.”

  Rozzy’s face changed. “You have not,” she said uncertainly.

  “I have. All summer. No one knew. I didn’t have to advertise it the way you do. It was different than what you do. Better.” I was boiling over with anger. “We loved, each other.”

  “I don’t believe you,” said Rozzy. “I want to go to sleep. Get out of my room.”

  We were angry with each other for days. She would avert her face at the dinner table. I was worried she might tell Bea about Jay, but it wouldn’t have mattered. Jay was over now. And then Rozzy’s anger twitched into depression. She couldn’t sleep and she had to have special pills that made her groggy in the morning.

  She didn’t go out evenings anymore, and her diary disappeared. I thought she had stopped writing in it, but she wore a tiny gold key around her neck on a piece of yarn. Knowing Rozzy, though, maybe it didn’t unlock one damned thing at all. Maybe she just wore it.

  I really didn’t see much of Rozzy at school. She didn’t take the bus the way I did. Instead, she rode her white tenspeed to school every day, even in the winter when the streets were cracked blue ice. A few times her bike was stolen from the school parking lot, cleanly lifted off the tree she chained it to, but she always managed to find it again, usually tossed on its side in the neighboring woods. I stared out the smeary bus window mornings, spotting Rozzy’s flash of hair, a blot of ink against the sky.

  I had my first-period study hall in the old boys’ gym. It wasn’t a bad place for a study hall. No one studied; no one even expected that you would. Everyone sprawled along the wood bleachers, scattering themselves across the rows. I liked to sit way up high, in the very top row where no one else was behind me, where I could see everyone. Kids passed out sticks of gum, scenting the air with sweet fruit, or Lifesavers. They would poke the tips of their tongues through the holes, forcing the candy open, making sexual jokes. A few kids tried to sneak a smoke or two before the study hall teacher would yell and flash her pad of pink detention slips.

  The boys’ gym was partitioned off from the girls’ gym by a large gray flexicurtain. Sometimes the curtain wasn’t drawn, whether in carelessness or by intention was never clear. The gym teachers never made any move to close it. You could watch the gym class that was going on. I always hated that; in fact, I dreaded gym days, fearing that yawning open space, those spectators snickering from the bleachers. I was terrible in gym. The one activity I could do was swim, and that had stopped in junior high school. I would have been more than willing to swim away my gym class at the Y, to earn my credits with side strokes and frog kicks, but the school would have none of it. I had to play different kinds of ball games and climb ropes and march along with everyone else. The uniform, with its long white bloomers and tank top, humiliated me. Without pockets, I never knew what to do with my dangling hands.

  The curtain was gone today, and I stiffened in surprise. Rozzy’s class was slowly filing in, talking among themselves, shuffling their sneakers along the polished wood floor. Rozzy stood out because she was so pretty. She had one long braid snaking across her uniform. She had rolled the bottoms of her bloomers up to her thighs, and she was the only one wearing bright red sneakers. Her feet flashed red against all that white. All the girls were lagging behind, poking at one another and whispering, glancing at the study hall. Rozzy stood very straight and apart from everyone.

  “OK, girls, let’s go,” shouted the teacher. Miss Yin was a small Chinese woman in her thirties, and she loved anyone who tried. I never got along with her. When we had to play Softball, outside in the green spongy grass, I hid behind an oak tree. My team wanted to win, so they pretended I didn’t exist; they helped shield me. Miss Yin wasn’t fooled. The last day of class she made me stand up alone in front of everyone while she tossed hard white balls for me to bat at. All the time she was smiling, her eyes hard and shiny. There were rumors about her, too; when we had to take showers after class, she would stand on a box and look in on us. “Just making sure you get wet,” she told us, but there was no
way you couldn’t get wet in those cramped little cubicles, with the water pressure so tight and hard it felt like gunshot.

  Miss Yin slapped her hands together. “Well, come on,” she urged, leading the class over to two flat gray mats. Suspended over the mats were two limp-looking ropes. “One at a time. You’ve had climbing before.” One girl after another gave a silly grin and then clutched at a single rope, flailing her white legs uselessly. The boys in my study hall hooted and jeered until the study teacher hauled them off the bleachers and made them sit by her on the floor. The boys sulked and punched one another in the ribs.

  Miss Yin patted each girl on the back as the girl approached the rope, and frowned in disgust when the girl, failing, slunk back into line. Rozzy kept lagging at the back, hands playing deep in her braid, not looking at anything. When it was her turn, she walked to the rope and leaped up, catching it, wrapping her legs around it. She climbed effortlessly.

  “Good girl! That’s the way!” cried Miss Yin, giving a little jump up. “Try for the top!” Rozzy continued to climb. There was a real grace to her movements, a stride. She moved up on the rope, controlling it, making it support her. She was almost to the top when she stopped and remained motionless. “Look up, honey,” called Miss Yin. “It’s not really that high up, and you won’t fall.” Rozzy glanced down at her and then reached across for the other rope. “Rozzy, don’t make it harder,” called Miss Yin. “You haven’t learned how to work two ropes yet.” Rozzy repositioned her grip; for a moment it looked as if she were going to drop the second rope, but then she executed an awkward somersault, struggling to retain her balance. Everyone in the gym and the study hall quieted. I could hear my own breathing. Around me, conversation began to slither and hiss.