Rosie O'Dell (23 page)

“Mom—”

“I’m finished talking to you for a long time, Tom.” She walked on.

“Mom, Rosie and I really, really love each other. I didn’t mean to hurt anyone,
but it’s hard to stop when you have that feeling all the time.”

She turned around at the door and looked at me. She opened her mouth to say
something, but closed her eyes and shook her head. Her expression looked like a
mixture of love, pity, and contempt, and she walked out and back to her bedroom.
I sat on the bed, listening. What was she waiting for? Was she just standing
there looking in that toilet? At least five
minutes went by
before I heard the flush. She’d held off like that simply to torture me.

I closed my door and picked Rosie’s pubic hairs off my bed, ignoring my
own—they were rightfully there—and I lay down. I tried to formulate the words
for telling Rosie why we couldn’t have sex anymore, or at least not until we
were a couple of years older. The harder my explanation became to express in my
mind, the more my guilt subsided, replaced by chagrin, and then by towering
outrage. Who the fuck did she think she was, banging me across the face like
that? That was no slap of token displeasure, either, like you saw some slip of a
girl delivering to the hulking hero’s kisser in the movies. It fucking hurt. She
was lucky I didn’t haul off and clobber her back. Let the old man have to
explain that one when she went around saying she got the black eye by walking
into a door. What was she talking about, “that poor girl,” no, “that poor
girl’s vulnerability,” for Christ’s sake? Rosie? A girl who was smarter and
stronger, and more mature than she was herself, the famous feminist out there
now saying that a girl was weak and vulnerable and exploited by a boy her same
age when it came to deciding of your own free will if you wanted to screw your
own hole off or not. Oh, everything was all right when she thought Brent and I
were a couple of queers riding the chocolate highway—then she was all
understanding and empathy and tolerance for our sexual orientation. But let a
normal male and a normal female have a normal piece of tail? Oh my Jesus no.
That was right out! That got you beaten up about the head and ostracized for the
rest of your fucking life.

I leaped off my bed. No way was I going to cut Rosie and myself off when it
came to expressing our love. I wasn’t even going to tell her about this fiasco
with my mother. We would carry on as if we were normal, exactly as
before—goddammit, it was our lives—and I’d just be a little more careful about
making sure stuff disappeared when I flushed toilets and about picking pubic
hairs off my sheets, and that was it!

AND THAT WAS EXACTLY
what Rosie and I did—carry on as
if we were normal. And it was absolutely blissful. I wouldn’t say that Mom
warmed up to me a lot over the next month, but she communicated courteously with
me, and with Rosie whenever she came to my place, about all the essentials. Then
at the end of the school year the marks came out.

Suzy did better than last year and gained a couple of places in her standing.
“No wonder,” she said to Rosie and me. “I was so bored all year
with you two cooing, mooning, snuggling, and spooning night and day that I had
no choice but to study.”

Brent didn’t do quite as well as before. During the year, a scout had told him
and his dad that if he continued to develop in the future as he’d done in the
past, he’d be a good candidate for professional hockey, the new World Hockey
Association, certainly, and with the expansion, even the NHL. As a result, he’d
been all hockey all the time—practices, shooting pucks for hours in his father’s
specially reinforced basement, tapes and films of games and techniques. His
marks suffered, but Brent said he didn’t give a shit. He wasn’t going to be a
lawyer or a doctor like me, he said, he was going to play professional hockey,
and when that was over he’d go into business for himself. And at least he hadn’t
wasted his time in a lovey-dovey daydream all year, like some people who would
remain nameless. He laughed, but somehow it sounded a bit resentful, and if I
didn’t know Brent better, even jealous.

Mom and Dad were frankly shocked when I finally let them wheedle my marks out
of me. I showed them, especially Mom, my report card with an insufferable air of
false modesty combined with cocksureness. My results were even better than last
year. And I was ready when Mom asked how Rosie had done. I threw out casually
that of course she had excelled last year’s grades as well. Then I glowered at
her as if to demand, “How come you’re not slapping me across the face
now?”

“Is this right?” asked Mom, looking at my report card. “Your position in
class—number one. You came first?”

“Yes,” I said, squelching my pride to be as saucy as I could, “what it says
there in black and white is absolutely right. You don’t have to be so doubtful.
You can believe it.”

Dad looked from my face to hers. He’d been throwing up his hands lately at the
unexplained strained coolness between mother and son. “That is great, Tom,” he
said. “At a new school, too. That’s really fantastic.”

Mom was looking at him, unsmiling, waiting for him to finish his gush before
turning back to me: “Where did Rosie place?”

“She came second, but it was very close.”

“Second. Not first, as she usually does. I wonder what happened to make her
fall back like that?” Mom’s eyes bored into mine as she got up to leave the
room, reducing my brain to a molten blob that could not form a response.

“You shouldn’t be sarcastic with your mother,” said Dad. “It only makes her
mad. But listen. Well done. I’m sure she’s delighted.”

Now it came to me, as she went up the stairs, what I should
have said to her: “Hey, I’ve got an idea, Queen Victoria. Let teenagers screw
like they are designed by nature to do, and—surprise—just watch them excel in
everything else as a result of their satisfaction and contentment.” Well… not
quite snappy enough. But on the right track. I’d fling something like that out
at her yet.

What I should have been doing, instead of trying to be defensively clever, was
drawing a fulfilling moral for the rest of my life from my mother’s reaction:
once violate a woman’s trust, and it’s well-nigh impossible ever to get it back.
If that applied to a son’s own tolerant mother, how much more would it apply to
a faithful, trusting lover?

Besides, Suzy’s appraisal of our scholarly success was probably closer to the
mark than my sexually blissed-out teenager scenario. “I’m astounded,” she said.
“When the two of you were holed up all by yourselves, avoiding all social
contact, saying you were ‘doing assignments, ’ you were actually doing
assignments. My God, who knew?”

Rosie laughed and called it “our educational bycatch.” Like fishermen who
caught other fish unintentionally in addition to their targeted fish, she and I
had sat around reading and writing and discussing school work, unintentionally
sucking up the learning, while all we were waiting for was clear opportunities
to do the priority, targeted activity: screw.

Rosie told me that she had deliberately let me come first this year. That was
because she had read somewhere, she said, that the fragile male ego required
that in a relationship the man had to be a little taller and a little older and
a little smarter than the woman. Otherwise, the man would feel inadequate and
their sex life would suffer. Therefore, Rosie had contrived in the exams to make
her average two-tenths of one per cent less than mine so as to make me feel a
little smarter than her. The alternative, she said, was unthinkable.

And that was the way it went for the next six months, laughing and making love
and pursuing our sports, and studying. Every morning a surge of joy woke me up.
During the summer, Rosie stayed home in spite of my insincere entreaties that
she go back to tennis school in Ontario, and she played and practised at
Riverdale and any other court, outdoor or indoor, that her coaches dragged her
to. Suzy became a camp instructor for a month back in central Newfoundland where
she stayed with her reconciled father. Brent went away to hockey school for most
of the summer, and I became an assistant lifeguard with the city at one of the
municipal
pools, where I could do laps early in the morning
before the public were allowed in. Pagan was home for the summer, but I didn’t
see her much. Rosie told me that sometimes she socialized with some of her old
friends from school here, but mostly she spent her time reading in her room. She
had a real academic bent, said Rosie. Already she’d decided to be a professor at
a university.

One evening at their house when Pagan came down to the kitchen, I got her to
agree to come to Rosie’s game at the tennis tournament the next afternoon. She
did come and enjoyed herself cheering for Rosie along with me for the first
couple of games, but faltered as Rosie barged on to win two sets without her
opponent winning a game. I had to agree inwardly with Pagan, when she declined
to come to Rosie’s next match, that her sister was so good her games were kind
of boring to watch.

One Saturday morning when Rosie had a practice, Pagan accompanied me, at her
mother’s and Rothesay’s urging, on a ride on our bikes around St. John’s. She
wanted to go out as far as beautiful Outer Cove on the Marine Drive. She stayed
ahead of me all the way out and arrived without working up a sweat. She seemed
to be in pretty good shape, especially for a girl whom I’d never heard of being
involved in sports. In Outer Cove she said something strange. She told me that
Heathcliff was going to build a house out here in about ten years, and she was
really looking forward to it, because she’d love to live out here. I said that
she’d be twenty-three in ten years and probably living in Malibu. Pagan actually
looked a little embarrassed after I said that. She started to pedal her bike
again, saying, “I meant it would be a nice place to come home to, on
visits.”

Pagan surprised me in July when I mentioned that I was going to run in the Tely
Ten road race this year for the first time. She said she wanted to go in it too.
I told her it was a gruelling ten miles on the hard, hot pavement if the sun was
out, and worse on a warm muggy day. Was she sure? Yes, she had done some running
at school and a good few mornings here, and she wanted to try it. She was fitter
than she looked, she said with a smile.

Rosie couldn’t go in the race because she was playing in a challenging tennis
final the next day. Her opponent was a girl from Vermont who was here visiting
her Newfoundland mother for the summer. Rosie said she was really good. She had
won the statewide championship in her age group last year. There was some
dispute over whether she could play in this Newfoundland tournament. She had
grown up in the States with her father, who had been stationed at Fort
Pepperrell American Air Force Base
in St. John’s during the
fifties, where he’d met her mother. She’d been born here before moving as an
infant to the States, where her father and mother had separated. Parents of some
players argued strenuously against allowing her, an American citizen, to play in
this purely provincial tournament as presenting unfair competition. Rosie led
the girls in arguing in favour of allowing her, with her strong Newfoundland
connection, to enter, and at last they prevailed. “Out here on this remote rock
in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean,” they wrote in their letter to the
organizers, “we need all the good competition we can get.” Some disgruntled
parents blamed Rosie.

“One mother confronted the president of the club,” Rosie told me, “and said,
‘That O’Dell girl has got all the men on the committee gone gaga-eyed and
thinking her shit is ice cream.’” Rosie shook her head with a rueful grin. “Oh
my.”

Pagan and I rode out to Octagon Pond on the runners’ bus and started the race
together. I hadn’t done much fast running, restricting myself to a semi-weekly
five-kilometre brisk jog. But I was in good aerobic shape from the all the laps
and sprints in the pools and was aiming, improbably, to break seventy minutes on
this first try. I asked Pagan if she would mind if we got separated during the
race. No, she said with a smile, if I didn’t mind. I only found out what she
meant at the end of the race at Bannerman Park when she was the one who broke
seventy by a minute and I was three minutes behind her.

“My God, Pagan, you are a super athlete for thirteen years old. What sports do
you play at school?”

“None, really. I do a little cross-country running. Didn’t Rosie tell you? I
broke a school record in my age group last fall. The coach called me a second
Doris Brown.” Pagan blushed with embarrassment while I wondered who Doris Brown
was and how come Rosie hadn’t told me about Pagan. “But I’m not very
competitive, not like Rosie. I could never feel a killer instinct over playing
that American girl tomorrow, like Rosie does. I just want to enjoy the gentler
things of life, and give love and receive it in return.”

I had to smile at her, she was so cute. “You know, Pagan, the killer instinct
and love are not necessarily mutually exclusive.”

She gave me a big smile back. “If you say so, Tommy-o.”

“And, speaking of competitive killer instinct, I noticed you didn’t mind
beating me in that Tely Ten.”

“Yeah, but that wasn’t competitive—I wasn’t even trying.” She laughed
and gave me a big slap on the back. God, what a heartbreaker
that gorgeous little girl was going to be.

The next day, Sunday, at Rosie’s tennis final, her family and I sat together on
the benches to watch. On the outside sat Dr. Rothesay, then Nina and Pagan and
me. When they met at the net, the American girl’s five foot ten towered over
Rosie’s five six. The first set was a marathon. It went on and on, game after
game after game until the American finally eked out a win by two games.