The Bubble Reputation (11 page)

“Hey,” Rosemary called out. “What've you been up to?” But Uncle Bishop had no time for cordials.

“Look,” he said, pointing, “at what that old crone has done now.” He was aiming a finger at Ralph the cat, who was flopped out flat on his side, his two ears flattened in displeasure. But other than this feline signal of disapproval, Rosemary could see no evidence of anything wrong. Ralph had always been a dramatic cat.

“What's the matter with him?” she asked. She moved closer, bending over for a better look. Ralph lifted his lip, the way Elvis used to, showing off a couple of formidable-looking canines.

“This!” said Uncle Bishop, and held up a bell for Rosemary to see. It was dangling from a brown leather cat collar. “She belled Ralph, against my permission. This is now a full-scale war.” Rosemary sighed. Poor Mrs. Abernathy, to be a bird columnist
and
the next-door neighbor of Uncle Bishop and Ralph. Uncle Bishop had hated birds ever since a college zoology professor told him they would eventually inherit the earth.

“So, what's the big deal?” Rosemary asked, reaching out to stroke the enormous cat. Ralph did his Elvis impression again, and Rosemary decided to withhold the affection.

“A
cow
would collapse under the weight of this thing!” Uncle Bishop said, holding the bell and collar above his head. He turned to face Mrs. Abernathy's yard, so the words would drift in the right direction. “My cat has whiplash, you old biddy!” Ralph yawned dramatically and then rolled over on his other side. He looked fine. Better shape than Elvis had been.

“Other than the birds making fun of him,” said Rosemary, “there's no harm done.”

“This bell is the size of a Ping-Pong ball, Rosie,” Uncle Bishop persisted. Ralph was now calmly licking his paws, tossing a spitty one behind his ear now and then for a little cleaning back there.

“You keep that cat home,” a tiny voice said from beyond the picket fence, and Rosemary saw Mrs. Abernathy's white head bobbing about between the narrow cracks.

“You'll spend the rest of your days in the Bixley clink for this!” Uncle Bishop shouted. “His neck is so swollen he can't eat,” he told Rosemary. She was glad she had left
The
Scarlet
Letter
behind on her nightstand. Mrs. Abernathy going to prison for
belling
Ralph was far more interesting than Hester Prynne
balling
Arthur Dimmesdale. Mrs. Abernathy's backyard, full of delicate birds, was far more exotic than the grim streets of Puritan Boston.

“He can't eat because he just came into my yard and ate a cardinal,” Mrs. Abernathy added. Ralph made a noise that sounded like a burp.

“I don't care if he ate an archbishop!” Uncle Bishop screamed.

“He looks okay to me,” said Rosemary. She suspected Uncle Bishop's lashing out was in part meant for Jason. And it was a pity that Ralph seemed to be, indeed, his old self. He really was a mean-spirited cat, bullying even the neighborhood dogs, not to mention his chronic assault upon the birds.

“It was so pathetic,” Uncle Bishop was now saying. His eyes had watered sufficiently for the moment. “I could hear this ringing but I couldn't figure out where it was coming from. I thought the goddamned Avon lady was on my porch.” He paused theatrically, his eyes searching out some distant, Hollywood horizon.

“You're ranting again,” Rosemary said. Usually, Uncle Bishop preferred Bixley's small veterinary clinic to partake in his Greek tragedies, insisting that Ralph was suffering from any assortment of diseases. Only after he and the massive cat had been laughed out of several clinics in northern Maine did Uncle Bishop finally admit that perhaps only dogs contracted heartworms. “But I hear something crawling around in there, chewing up muscle,” he would tell the startled veterinarians, his ear pressed against Ralph's well-padded rib cage.

“If that cat comes back in this yard,” the small voice announced through the cracks, “I'm going to give him a nice plate of strychnine.” A threat of death was all Uncle Bishop needed to hear. The collar in hand, its bell tinkling happily, he lunged at the five-foot-high fence.

“No, Uncle Bishop!” Rosemary said. She heard Mrs. Abernathy scream from her yard. Uncle Bishop was trying to pull himself up, his heavy arms flailing over the top of the fence.

“I'm gonna bell
you
, you old bat!” he yelled. “And I'm gonna get a handful of that blue hair while I'm at it!” Rosemary grabbed his ankles and held on. A red broom handle appeared over the fence and thwacked Uncle Bishop's arm.

“Ouch!” he moaned. “Stop that, goddamn it!” He pulled himself farther up. Rosemary yanked on his ankles. She heard something tear and hoped it wasn't cartilage. The broom handle attacked again,
thwack
thwack
. It caught Uncle Bishop on one of his hands.

“Stop that!” he shouted. Then, “Let go of me, Rosie!”

“You let go of the fence first,” Rosemary said. How could she be this winded? She was a runner, wasn't she? Where was Uncle Bishop getting his strength? She got a better grip on his ankles and pulled again.

“My arm!” Uncle Bishop cried. “I think I'm stuck on a nail!” Ralph had come to the edge of the yard and was watching the commotion with green eyes. The broom was back again, this time the yellow straw part. Mrs. Abernathy decided to go for the head, a vulnerable area, what with the eyes and nose being there.
Thwomp. Thwomp. Thwomp.
Material ripped loudly, a long, dramatic tear.

“Let go of the fence!” Rosemary insisted.

“Even if Ralph
could
eat,” Uncle Bishop whimpered, “I'll be too crippled to open a can of cat food.” Bored with the commotion, Ralph disappeared into a hole beneath Mrs. Abernathy's fence, most likely in time for the evening feeding. Uncle Bishop finally got an arm extended over the fence. He waved his sausage fingers about.

“I'm gonna pull you right through the cracks, Mrs. Abernathy,” he threatened. “Just let me get my hands on that pug.”

“Rape!” Mrs. Abernathy's voice rose up, most unlike the mourning dove as it calls for a mate. “Raaaaaaape!” Uncle Bishop stopped struggling. Skewered on the pointy top of Mrs. Abernathy's fence, he took the time to think about this.

“Mrs. Abernathy,” he said. He was cautiously eyeing the white bun, just below his reach on the other side of the fence. “Let's say, for the sake of argument, that you're sixteen years old and a virgin. I'm
still
gay
.” Mrs. Abernathy had apparently changed her mind as to which part of the broom packed a greater wallop. The wooden handle appeared once more.
Thwack. Thwack. Thwack. Thwack.
All on Uncle Bishop's knuckles. Then she went inside her house and slammed the door.

It was after her run around Bixley that Rosemary found the baby robin beneath one of the wild apple trees across the road, near Mugs's cat crossing. Winston, the outdoor cat, disappeared guiltily into the hay as she approached.
Flagrante
delicto. Caught with his mouth full of feathers.
Rosemary lifted the baby bird, gently. It seemed to be okay, but when her hand came away from its breast, there was blood smeared lightly about it. The baby robin was in trouble. Rosemary knew that a cat's wounds may not be large and noticeable, but the claws go deep and are sharper than needles. She could see no tree with a nest that might have held the fledgling. And she couldn't leave the tiny bird on the ground, where Winston would surely find it later, a little dessert, light as meringue. To hell with natural selection. That was a fine notion on paper, but when one is staring the
weak
straight in the eye, it's difficult to toss them back to the
fittest
. She carried the baby robin across the road and into the garage. The thing now was to put it in a dark, quiet box and hope that the shock wouldn't kill it.

At seven thirty, Mother rubbed her eyes, yawned, and was in bed asleep by nine. Rosemary still hadn't made face-to-face contact with Lizzie, Charles, or Philip. All three cars were jammed into the front yard, side by side, but the drivers were in their respective corners, apparently waiting for the next round. Wondering what was up with the houseguests, she stretched her leg muscles, something she had not been able to do right after her run, and went out to check on the baby robin. It was surprisingly alert and hungry. She had mashed up a few tablespoons of Cat Chow into a paste to feed the bird. If it lived a day or two, she would see about getting some mealworms from the feed store where she bought her birdseed. She hated this idea, but it was the robin or the mealworms, and natural selection came easier with worms. The robin opened its beak quickly and ate a good bit of the paste from the dropper she dangled over its head. She also fed it several drops of water before it crouched down among the leaves and twigs and shut the one staring eye that looked out at her. She covered the box with an old tablecloth. All she could do now was hope for the best.

In the kitchen, Rosemary washed her hands and then went in search of her houseguests. In the den, she found Philip and Charles, each with a cocktail, each staring at the other from opposite sides of the room, pugilists waiting for the bell. Rosemary assumed that these were not the first drinks.

“Gentlemen,” she acknowledged them both, and fairly.

“Hello, Rosie,” said Charles.

“Rosemary.” Philip nodded. Then silence and more glaring.

“And how has the day been?” she asked. All she really wanted to know was if there'd been any new slandering and philandering. Maybe she was taking up William's old job, now that he'd abandoned it. She had cautioned him many times, hadn't she? “You get to know people, know their innermost thoughts, just so you can paint them. Once you have them on canvas, William, you leave them behind. Your art transcends the human being.”

“It started off fine,” said Philip. “Before it turned into
Three's Company
.” He was nervous, sweaty about the temples, not the same cavalier lover of yesterday. All that traipsing about the backyard had apparently been for naught. Or was it the booze? Philip got up to pour another scotch from Rosemary's meager bar supply. The bar itself was small but the limited contents could accommodate most uncomplicated drinks, especially if one didn't forget the bottle of sweet vermouth, and the bottle of dry vermouth. Rosemary always forgot one or the other.

“Any lawyer worth his salt would know the ramifications of this little love nest,” Charles said. He still had the same booming resonance in his voice and sure-footedness in his words that had won him so many medals in the debate club. He had put on fifteen extra pounds during his executive years with General Motors, and now the threat of a middle-age bulge peeped above his belt. But he was still the good-looking Charles, with a few traces of gray sprouting along his temples. The light brown hair was still closely cropped, and the bluish gray eyes were still lined with those dark, almost girlish lashes.

“A lawyer worth
half
his salt would know about a certain female doctor back in Portland,” Philip answered. Charles crossed his legs angrily but Rosemary had caught a quick flash of pain in his eyes. He knew now that Lizzie had told about the female doctor. Perhaps this telling, this
verbal
cheating, was more hurtful than the physical.

“She started first,” Charles said.

“Do you have proof as to when the relationship between Lizzie and me started?” asked Philip. He paced the den as though he were in court. Charles squirmed in the armchair, which had suddenly become the witness stand.

“I prefer to think of it as an affair, not a relationship,” he said.

“Do you have any evidence at all?” Philip continued. “A motel receipt, perhaps? A registered name? A witness?” Philip was good. He was on fire with facts and legalese. He could quote cases. “Hester Prynne versus Arthur Dimmesdale!” Rosemary wished he would shout loudly. Charles looked hopefully at her, as if for an objection. She simply raised her eyebrows and then poured herself a glass of wine.

“There's one thing you've forgotten, Barrister,” Charles said, and he drew himself upward. Rosemary recognized this body talk from college. Charles had found what he considered the most excellent loophole. “Lizzie.”

“And what do you mean by that?” Philip seemed a little tipsy. Lizzie had mentioned that he was a social drinker. Perhaps by
social
she did not mean the occasion of Philip drinking with her husband Charles. Speaking of Lizzie, when was she coming down? Rosemary knew this little scene might be draining for her now, but it was the kind of legendary event they would sit over beers, years away, and talk about.

“What about Lizzie?” Philip asked.

“It's quite simple,” Charles said. “Lizzie won't lie.”

Rosemary remembered Lizzie's words, two weeks earlier. “I've got another
what
else
,” Lizzie had said sadly over champagne as she sat on the front porch. “I was the first one to fall by the wayside.” Charles was right. Lizzie wouldn't lie.

“The only thing Elizabeth is dishonest about is her feelings for you. And that's because she's out of touch with her emotions.” Let Lizzie hear Charles say that. He'd see some emotions.

“I doubt she would've married you in the first place,” said Philip, “if you hadn't knocked her up.”

Rosemary winced.
Impregnated
was a more civil word.

“Why, you SOB,” said Charles. More verbal cheating by Lizzie, this pregnant-before-marriage fact.

“Gentlemen,” Rosemary said for the second time that evening, but with much less conviction. “Please.”

“Who's the SOB?” Philip was also spelling. He pointed a lawyer's index finger at Charles. “Is it me? Am I the SOB?”

Your
honor, he's leading the witness.
Rosemary put her glass of wine down and moved quietly toward the stairs.

“Sit down, for Chrissakes,” Charles said to Philip. “You're irrational.”

“I'm
irrational
?” asked Philip. Rosemary paused at the foot of the stairs.

“Charles, please,” she appealed to the more sober man. “This is childish and silly.”

“Yes, you,” Charles said to Philip. “You're irrational.”

“A man who has a Freudian obsession with toy trains tells
me
that
I'm
irrational.”

Rosemary flinched. Lizzie must have spoken of her husband's favorite hobby. Model trains. Wasn't anything sacred? Charles seemed ready to attack.

“I need to listen to this from an ambulance chaser?” he asked Philip.
He
also
represents
men
who
have
the
hots
for
Shetland
ponies,
Rosemary wanted to add. Philip immediately began rolling up his sleeves. This was the first time Rosemary had seen a wrinkle befall any of his shirts. Charles stepped down from the witness stand and put his drink on the coffee table. He began undoing the buttons on his cuffs. Why did men do that? Rosemary wondered. Do sleeves really get in the way? She turned and raced up the fifteen steps and down the hall to Lizzie's door. Mother opened her own door as Rosemary flew past.

“No running in school!” Mother warned.

“Lizzie!” Rosemary banged on the door. The radio was playing soft music inside. No wonder Lizzie was oblivious to the bullfight she had created. She was situated safely above the heads of the two angry men down below, like a goddess, listening to the cherubic music of Barry Manilow.

“Goddamn it, Lizzie, open up!”

Lizzie flung the door open wide and stood before Rosemary in a fuzzy maroon bathrobe. She'd been doing her nails and still held the polish brush in one hand.

“What's the matter?” she asked. Her enamel wand was propped in midair.

“There's a territorial fight going on downstairs,” Rosemary announced.

“You mean like dogs have?” Lizzie asked. She blew on the wet nails.

Rosemary nodded. “If you think of yourself as a fire hydrant,” she told Lizzie, “they're arguing over who peed on you first.”

Down in the den, Rosemary and Lizzie found things quite in order. Charles was back in the witness stand and Philip was sitting, neatly collected, on the sofa. Mother was shaking one of her piano-loving fingers into Philip's face. She was wearing a dazzling blue nightgown of a silkish fabric that was wet with perspiration from her sleep. It clung to her hips and allowed her breasts to expose themselves from within each circle of the sleeve holes.

“And I mean that,” Mother was saying, her yellow curls unfurling. “There will be no fighting in this schoolhouse!”

Rosemary took Mother back to bed. She was happy now and smiled at her daughter. She had just exerted, downstairs, the power of being crazy, and had been obeyed for it. The two men had blatantly ignored Rosemary's plea for them to stop. But nobody argues with a crazy person. People, at least civilized people, are supposed to know better. Charles and Philip had both cowered before this whirling dervish and now Mother was beaming. Power, no matter how attained, is a sweet feeling in the pit of the stomach.

Rosemary pushed some ringlets back behind Mother's ear. The wrinkles had long ago traveled from Mother's eyes, a brush fire spreading, and now they traced all the laugh lines around her mouth.
Here's what you get for laughing
, the lines said.

“Boys shouldn't fight,” Mother whispered, then giggled happily. Rosemary had rarely seen her so pleased. It was the same girlishness that had swept her about the old-memory kitchen, singing “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze,” while Father smiled and breakfast cooked. Flirtatious even, this insanity.

“Go back to sleep, love,” she said, and kissed Mother's damp forehead. Then she snapped off the bedside lamp.

***

Out in the garage, Rosemary draped the towel back over the box that housed the injured robin. It had turned around in the nest of grass and twigs so that its other eye stared out, beaded and black. She then rolled her Free Spirit bike out to the backyard, and checked to make sure the headlight was still functioning. She might not use it on the quick ride down Old Airport Road to Bixley, but she would surely need it on the dark ride home.

A speeding car roared down the road toward town, bouncing over the bumps, thoughtless of the animals and humans who lived there. Rosemary shook a fist and shouted, “Slow down!” but the automobile kept up its frantic speed and soon disappeared.

Out on the road, she flipped up the kickstand, then situated herself comfortably on the seat and pushed off. The June breeze was soft as it hit her, full-faced, then caught her hair up in a rush of wind that caused the ponytail to bob. The evening shadows were already billowing in, taking away the last of the yellow tinge the sun had left behind. As she rounded the turn that brought her quickly upon the summit of Russell Hill, she braked and sat on the bike, steadying it with both feet as she gazed down on the spectacle of Bixley. It lay like a beached spaceship, tossed out of the ocean of time, wiggling its lights as though they were little antennae in the darkness.

She pushed off again, her breath caught in her chest as she cascaded down for the half-mile glide into town. Reaching the field that stretched across her end of Bixley, she cut off into the clover and hay to follow the shortcut that bicycling kids still liked to take. Maybe it was true that some things never change. At least while the planet was still in one piece and functioning, at least while the old field held on to its own real estate, there would be a shortcut there. But Bixley was growing, thanks to the Miriams on the planet whose calling was to gobble up the disappearing land for money. Rosemary knew the day would come when she would recognize little of her old hometown. She had seen, in the library book, how much the place had changed in fifty years, and now there was a new technology to speed up change. She imagined herself, one day, wandering aimlessly up and down mysterious streets, past the unfamiliar stores and businesses, trying to stumble upon one little clue in a burgeoning city of strangers. What had she promised herself about growing old? “I'll let my hair go wild and gray. I'll be a crazy old woman, wearing five or six dresses at a time.” There was a power in being crazy. That was a little secret that Mother already knew. Maybe Mother was waiting, in one of those bizarre rooms in her mind, wearing her flouncing skirts of old, singing about lithe young men who fly through the air, dusting everything off for her daughter.