The Bubble Reputation (21 page)

“I've never actually thought of you as
having
a scrotum,” said Miriam. “I mean, what would you need one for?”

“I'm warning you both for the last time,” Rosemary said, and fired two more BBs, this time over their heads. She would need to pick up a new supply. She was averaging about ten per visitor. The interlopers finally retreated. Rosemary watched and listened as they pampered their way back down the hill, reluctant to run into menacing potato bugs or log-sized caterpillars.

“She always did take after Mother,” Miriam was saying.

***

On the fourth day, Robbie appeared in the Datsun. Uncle Bishop had obviously gone for reinforcements. Rosemary watched her brother climb the hill with his long, athletic stride, deerlike, youth at its best working form, its apex. Sweet Robbie. “I miss William, too,” he had told her earlier that spring. “But it's time you came back to us.” Well, now it was different. Now she was entitled to her own breakdown. Robbie handed her a sheet of paper.

“From Uncle Bishop,” he said. Rosemary unfolded it and read:
The
schizophrenic
may
resort
to
unusual
habits
,
minimize
his
or
her
needs, resort sometimes to a single room. In this case, a tent.
She smiled. He must have phoned Arthur, the psychiatrist with whom he'd had a brief affair. Good. At least they were speaking again. She leaned the gun against the tent and hugged Robbie. In just a month he appeared to have grown older, more confident.

“Does construction do that for you?” Rosemary asked.

“I'm done with construction,” Robbie said. He handed her a cold beer and then opened another for himself. “Even if Uncle Bishop hadn't called, I was coming home in a day or two.”

“For good?” Rosemary fingered the gold hairs on his knuckles that she loved so, Rumpelstiltskin gold, those hairs.

“No, I'm going back to school,” he said. “I'm going to find a room, or maybe a small apartment in Orono, and then go for the old master's.”

“Oh, Robbie, good for you.” College reminded her of the apartment she had shared with Lizzie, where the wind chimes rattled loudly, where the gangling notions of life were still new, where the campus sprawled like a grassy womb. “Good for you,” she said again. “A master's in biology. You'll put Mendel to shame.”

“William was quite a guy, all right,” Robbie said. Rosemary felt a quick pain in her chest. Just the mention of his name could still catch her unawares.

“This is the terror of loving something, Robbie,” she
didn't
say. “Unless you take it from yourself, it can be taken from you later, when giving it up is unthinkable.” She said nothing. Instead, she nodded.

“And Mugs was quite a cat,” he added. Rosemary smiled. “Do you want me around for a few days until I leave?”

“Come visit,” she said. “But, no. I like the house at night with its lights off. I like to look down on it when it's quiet.” She knew Robbie wouldn't question this. He would understand.

“I'll stay with Uncle Bishop, then. I think he was planning on it anyway. He's cooking.”

Twenty minutes later, Robbie was only taillights going down Old Airport Road.

***

Rosemary stayed on in the tent, unable to take herself back into the big house, once made smaller by William and Mugs, a museum now, the house. When the evening light crept in, it turned from beige to brown, like the hard shell of a weathered nut. She did go inside long enough to use the bathroom, to shower, to cook herself light, easy meals. She kept up the running. Sitting out on the hill at night with wine, she was able to keep track of the stars, battered as moth wings. She slept so late into the day that sometimes it was the mailman's truck at one or two in the afternoon that roused her. She felt, in the tiny tent, that she herself was slowly going back to nature.

Robbie came by for a few short visits. He left little advice with her. He knew she wanted none. And she gave little advice for him to take along to Orono and his master's degree. She knew he needed none. That was the lucky way she and Robbie were with each other. So she lolled away the evenings camped out in the backyard. She learned many things besides new bird sounds. “The single most important step man took was when he turned to an agricultural existence and gave up his nomadic wanderings,” Uncle Bishop had said once, during one of his food lectures. So she became nomadic again. She imagined herself pitching her tent night after night on a different hilltop, lugging the wine along with her, covering mile after mile, but always with the same ragged stars shining overhead. Some things you cannot outrun. She gave a great deal of thought to suicide. It became familiar to her at the last. No longer terrifying, it became lighthearted, a sitcom, vaudeville. The ultimate slip on the old banana peel. She considered writing down her last thoughts, that perhaps they would be of interest to someone, someday. Maybe Uncle Bishop would cease fighting with Miriam long enough to read selected passages at her funeral. But, sadly for posterity, the only things she had to say were to Sacco and Vanzetti. And maybe she would leave a little note for the Rosenbergs.
Dear
Sacco
and
Vanzetti. Dear Rosenbergs. Shit happens.

Rosemary spent eight days on the hill, in the canvas dinghy, eight days swallowing the grisly news about Mugs and her anger at William. She could have stayed in the tent forever, she was sure, pondering her fate, drinking her wine, had it not been for Aunt Rachel's frail appearance. She came out of the evening shadows at the corner of the house, out of the lilacs themselves. Rosemary had not even heard the sound of a car engine, or a slamming door, or even her footfalls. Yet there she was in her pale cotton dress and beige cotton sweater, a ghost climbing the hill, clothes too big for the frame, clothes hanging on bones. Aunt Rachel was a clothes rack now, climbing.

“Rosemary, dear.” Her voice was the wind that came out of the lilacs.

“Aunt Rachel,” Rosemary whispered, as though they were identifying each other so that there could be no mistake. As though they hadn't seen each other in years. Rosemary had not noticed, just two weeks before, how physically abused Aunt Rachel had become from the cancer. Now she realized why. Aunt Rachel was being secretive about dying. She was being greedy about the pain, keeping it to herself as though it were the last slice of bread.

“Rosemary?” A bird's voice, wind filled and downy, a feather rising in the wind and falling.

“Aunt Rachel, I'm here,” Rosemary said, and stood up on the hillside. Now she could see Aunt Rachel's eyes in the uneven dusk, sunk back like walnuts into her face, large and dark and dying.

“Just that short climb and I'm exhausted,” she said. A hand resembling a hand fell against her chest, a hand
impersonating
a hand.

“I didn't realize,” Rosemary said to her. “I didn't know it was like this.”

“It's fast, Rosie, is all. Speeded up, like everything else nowadays.”
It's all canned, Lizzie.
Aunt Rachel spread her cotton sweater on the grass, then carefully lowered herself to sit on it.

“Good heavens,” she said. “There's a job in everything nowadays.” Fireflies came out of the grass, their tiny beacons transmitting silent messages of urgency and love.

“I'm taking Mother,” Rosemary said. “This is not fair to you.”

“Oh no. Your mother's not my problem. Your mother is, in many ways, my salvation.”

“I've never understood that,” Rosemary said, as she poured some wine. She handed Aunt Rachel the glass and, to her surprise, Aunt Rachel accepted it.

“It was never your job to understand,” Aunt Rachel said.

“But she's my mother.”

“She was my sister before that,” Aunt Rachel reminded her. “But she's caused you some embarrassment by being your mother, hasn't she?” Rosemary watched Winston's silhouette as it snaked through the dark grass, in pursuit of some evening prey.

“Yes,” she finally said, what she could never say to Miriam. “Yes, she
has
embarrassed me.” And she was relieved to offer this admission to Aunt Rachel.

“That's all right, dear,” Aunt Rachel said. “That's only human nature at work.” Rosemary said nothing. More fireflies ignited among the elms and the cherry trees and the stiff Indian paintbrushes. She could hear the whispery action of small planes at the Bixley airport, and the occasional
whoosh
of a car on Old Airport Road. The highway department had, days ago, filled and packed the trench. They'd knocked on her door for an explanation. She had watched them with her binoculars from the safe distance of the tent and, finally, they went away. But four days of speeders had experienced a harsh reality in front of Rosemary's looming house.

“I've decided,” Rosemary said carefully, “that Mother is dead.” She stared up into the evening sky and saw Corona Borealis, the Northern Crown, the little tiara of the heavens, making its way across the beaten path. Hercules, large and dim, followed. She could faintly make out, thanks to northern Maine's unpolluted skies, what looked like a fragile, hazy star near the head. The Great Cluster of Hercules, thousands of stars, and thousands of light-years away. There were tricks everywhere.

“She was a delightful, vibrant girl,” Aunt Rachel said. “I'm sorry that you don't remember her that way. Do you know that in those first months of her illness, she always did her very best to maintain.”
Maintenance.
A June bug did a series of plops against the black windows of the house, longing for the yellow lights again. Rosemary tried not to cry. There had been so much of it lately, and now here was the long-awaited portion for Mother,
her
pound of tears.

“Do you think she chose this?” Aunt Rachel continued, and even the fireflies blinked
no, of course not
, and the June bug flew away from the question and into the billowing night. “You once felt people treated you differently because of William's death. Well, guess how they treat your mother. Guess how they treat you when you're dying yourself.” Aunt Rachel touched the glass to her lips. Night had moved in around them. The moon now lighted the buildings, the landscapes, the way for the night animals that Rosemary knew must be moving in the fields, beneath the trees, along the weedy roadsides. Early evening in northern Maine, with a moon on the rise, with two women talking quietly on a hill, their words passing between them like fireflies. Aunt Rachel ran a finger around the rim of her glass and the crystal cried out softly, a funeral hymn being played on the hillside, near Mugs's resting place.

“Are you afraid to die?” Rosemary said the words she'd been thinking. She felt she must say something, that it was important. They had been so close, after all, in her growing-up years. Aunt Rachel put her head back and looked up at the stars. Her throat curved white in the moonlight, like a swan's neck. Her cheekbones were radiant, sleek and mysterious, white as moonflowers. Gone were the black circles and ashen pallor. The moonlight had rejuvenated her. Or had it been a few helpful sips of wine?

“I'm not
afraid
to die,” Aunt Rachel answered finally. “I'm just
reluctant
.” Her brown hair fell back, away from her face, exposing one white ear as though it were a delicate seashell. Rosemary knew that if she put her ear against Aunt Rachel's to listen, she would hear blood pulsing and not the sea. She would hear dilating and contracting, not ebbing and flowing. “And I'm sad for those of you I'm leaving behind.”

Rosemary could hear a common nighthawk now, hunting overhead for mosquitoes and moths
.
The night was a choir of animals and insects. The wild apple trees in the field across the road, black, rounded shapes, moved in a breeze from the river, one that was not received up on the hill.

“I'm sad that the rest of you will have to listen to your mother ask where I am every single day until the cows come home.” Aunt Rachel laughed then, a girlish laugh, and Rosemary, who had been paralyzed with the honesty of her aunt's revelations, found herself relaxed, peaceful.

“Aunt Rachel better bring me some chocolates,” she mimicked, in Mother's shrill voice. She heard Aunt Rachel's laughter rise again, a wonderful harmony to add to the night choir.

“Oh, Rosemary,” Aunt Rachel said. “Life is such a sweet thing. Your father used to say that. ‘Rachel, honey, life is all sugar,' he'd say.” She stopped abruptly, her words still hovering in the air. Quickly, she said, “Isn't the moon lovely tonight?”

But Rosemary had frozen next to her. Something was coming to the surface of her adult mind, something from her child's mind, facts that had been stored, piled up like toys in a chest for the day when it would all be explained.

The child she had been had remembered some important information, some whispers, some gestures, some nuances from the adults in her early life. Now she was an adult herself and could solve the years-long riddle. And she had spent a lot of years wondering about Father's other woman.

“Oh my God,” Rosemary said. It was like finding the last simple piece of puzzle, the final chunk that would finish the clown's face. And all these years she'd been looking for it.

“I'm so sorry,” Aunt Rachel whispered. A few more moments and fireflies passed between them before Rosemary spoke.

“Well,
I'm
not sorry,” she said finally. Spika, the grain, the brightest star in the Virgin, hung in the southwest. Orange-colored Arcturus had begun its steep climb to overhead. Many lovers, legal and illegal, had been upon the earth and gone back to it since Arcturus began lighting them the way. So many answers flew in the night, like bugs. Why hadn't she realized before? Father and Aunt Rachel. It made perfect sense that they would appreciate the things about each other that Rosemary had loved in them both.