Rosie O'Dell (24 page)

Before they started the second set, Pagan said to me, “Just look at Rosie. Look
at the face on her. She would rather die than lose this match.”

“You’ve got that right. That’s what makes her so good.”

“Oh, is it? I thought it was her high ass.” She giggled when I looked at her in
mock reproof. Then she asked, “Do you think she’d rather die than lose your
love?”

Pagan was speaking loudly enough that it was slightly embarrassing to me.
Nina’s head remained straight ahead, but Rothesay’s turned towards her.

“God, no. She’s way too smart for that,” I said, sharply. “Okay. Rosie’s about
to serve.”

“I would,” she said at the same high volume. “I’d rather die than lose the
love of someone I loved.” This was getting a touch weird for the middle of a
vicious tennis match. I turned silently to her to dismiss such conversation with
a sombre uninterested look. Nina, in her sunglasses, was still staring straight
ahead. Rothesay removed his sunglasses and stared down at his shoes. By the look
of him, I wasn’t the only one embarrassed.

The second set was long and exhausting too. Rosie won it by the same close
margin that her opponent had won the first. In the third set, with equal skill,
Rosie swapped games with the American in the first four, and then she ran away
with the set. She had worn her opponent down with pure resolve and stamina. At
the net they hugged each other’s sweaty bodies for several seconds. “Rosie, you
are really great,” said the American. “The best.”

I’d liked being around Pagan until that match. Now I mostly avoided her,
begging off on bicycle rides and morning runs. In my adolescent arrogance, I
didn’t want to hear any more morbid pubescent fairy tales proclaimed of bereft
love and broken-hearted death. I even started to resent her presence around her
own house because it cut into the opportunities Rosie and I used to have all the
time in the entertainment room and sometimes in Rosie’s bedroom to, as we’d come
to describe our activities in the absence of school assignments, “have a little
cuddle.”

Rosie, Suzy, Rothesay, and I went to the airport at the end of
the summer vacation to see Pagan off to her school in Ontario. Nina was
accompanying her back, mainly, laughed Pagan, for the extra suitcase of clothes.
Pagan came up to me before security and said quietly, “I hope I didn’t put you
off too much with my comments at Rosie’s tennis game. I was going through a
strange mood at the time, but all that’s behind me now. Thanks for being such
great company while I was home, Tom.” She gave me a tight hug before saying
goodbye to the others and walking away with her mother. What a beautiful little
figure she made in the distance, and what a striking woman she was on the verge
of becoming. That thought, combined with my memory of her despondency at the
match, suddenly made my heart sink, and a terrible sadness swept through me for
no precise reason. It left me at once, though, when Rosie came over and took my
hand.

On our way back to the car, Rothesay said, “I think Pagan still has more than a
vestige of that crush on you, Tom, which was so obvious when she was a little
girl.”

That was a bizarre comment in front of my girlfriend, Pagan’s own sister. I
looked at Rosie. She and Suzy were exchanging blank glances. “Oh, I don’t think
so,” I said, at a loss. “She’s getting much too mature for that.”

“Thanks a lot, Tom,” said Rosie. “I’m glad to have your true feelings about
my
mental age.” The girls and I laughed. Rothesay joined in with some
chuckles too, but they ignored him completely.

At the car, I held open the front passenger door for Rosie, but she motioned me
in and jumped in the back seat with Suzy. The first five minutes of the drive
back were silent. I never heard Rosie say a word to Rothesay these days. If I
didn’t know better from her earlier days with him, I might even conclude she
didn’t like him at all. Maybe they had a fight about something. I made a mental
note again to mention it to her. I’d been meaning to ask her about it before,
but somehow I always got diverted and it never seemed important enough to go
back to.

“How’s your swimming coming along, old chap,” asked Rothesay.

“I only swam recreationally this summer. The competitive swimming will start
again this fall.”

“You have a real talent for that. I saw your times in the sports section of the
paper last year. I hope you keep it up. I’ll be watching for great
things.”

“There’s only a small pool of serious swimmers here my age—no pun intended,” I
said.

Rothesay looked at me and chortled at my silly pun.

“So there’s not a lot of competition. This year we’ll be trying
to get in on some swim meets on the mainland, so that will be better—if the team
can raise the money for travel costs.”

“Count me in for a donation. You’ll do well up there. Your times in freestyle
for your age group are already among the best.”

“Thank you, sir,” I said. What was there not to love about this guy?

That night in the entertainment room alone with Rosie, to estimate the possible
extent of our grappling over the following hour, I asked if there was any risk
of Rothesay coming down. None whatsoever, she said with a kiss. He knew better
than that. He was as happy as a pig in poop up there in his study with his book
on Nietzsche and his glass full of single-malt scotch.

“How come you’re so pissed off with him all the time? Did you and he have a
fight or something? The two of you don’t seem to communicate much these
days.”

She paused, with a look on her face indicating that she didn’t really want to
talk about this. Then she resigned herself to replying and said, “I wouldn’t
say, fight, as such. I told him to get it out of his effin’ head that he was my
lord and effin’ master.”

“Jesus. How old were you when you said that?”

Rosie removed my arm from around her shoulders and got up to change the
channel, apparently forgetting about the newfangled remote control on the coffee
table. “Oh, I don’t know. I said it to him three or four times. Thirteen, I
suppose.”

“Thirteen when you kept telling your stepfather to eff off. Wild guess here,
but that might explain the slight strain.” I smiled.

Rosie showed no sign of amusement. She fiddled with the channel changer for a
minute, and when she came back she sat down a foot from me and said, “Can we
watch this for a while?” It was an oft-repeated
Bonanza
rerun.

In ten minutes, though, she shuffled over close to me, draped her arms around
me, and said, “I-love-you,” voicing the words fast and close together as usual,
as if she was afraid she might lose one. She had on a light, billowy, long
skirt. I reached inside and caressed her bare lower legs, on which there was
noticeable stubble. “Sorry about that,” she said. “Shave day is
tomorrow.”

“Well, I’ll just have to go further up.”

“Yes, that might be best.” Further up, it was hard not to notice that
again she had no panties on. She took her mouth off mine and
said, “Why waste time putting them on when they’re coming right off again?”
Putting her hand inside my underwear, she went on, “You know, with the Momrisk
gone, we can have a ‘full cuddle’ down here tonight. Oh, frig.” She sat up. “I
forgot the safes.”

She bounced off the sofa and bounded up the stairs in her bare feet with no
effort to quiet her steps. I didn’t hear any words exchanged on the floor above
as she was going up or as she flew back down. “That was a good little warm-up,”
she said, tossing one condom on the coffee table, handing me the other, and
dropping her long skirt to the floor, which she then knelt on.

“I love you, Rosie,” I said, after a minute.

She took my penis out of her mouth, held it against her cheek, and looked up at
me and asked, “Yes, but are you happy?”

My laugh came out in a snort. “I think so,” I said. “Yes, I do believe I
am.”

She rose and rolled the opened condom on me with alacrity, climbed onto my lap,
and slowly sat down with her eyes closed and a heartbreaking smile on her lips.
“Same here,” she whispered.

LATE IN THE FALL
, I was leafing through the sports
section of the big Saturday edition of the St. John’s
Evening Telegram
when I saw a picture of Rosie and one of me on the very same page. She was
headlined at the top for her winning ways at tennis and was touted by coaches
here and in Ontario as a potential Canadian champion in a matter of years, if,
said the Ontarian, “she arranges again to compete against the best girls that
North America has to offer. Rosie’s height is not a negative factor. At five
foot six, she’s the same height as the brilliant American Chris Evert.”

I was featured in a brief story at the bottom for winning the
one-hun-dred-metre freestyle at a local high school swimming competition. My
coach thought I was going places.

Both articles contained pictures. Rosie’s was large and showed her seated in
the front row of an official group at an award ceremony, gazing directly at the
camera, but smiling unassumingly, almost shyly. Her lower legs and feet, pressed
together below her skirt, were perfect. I thought I must write Margaret Mead and
ask her to investigate my theory that the aesthetic form and proportions of a
woman’s calves, ankles, and feet anywhere in the world were all you needed to
assess the evolutionary excellence of any human female. Rosie’s unruly hair,
barely tamed for the occa
sion, framing her fresh-faced,
appealing looks, stabbed at my heart. This girl was my love and I was her love.
It started to well up in me that such blessedness had to end. I beat that down
quick and looked at my photo near the bottom of the page.

It was small and showed only my face glancing to the side with the look of
good-natured humour that Rosie often said made her want to tousle my hair or
buddy-punch me in the arm. I wondered what feelings would go through her when
she looked at this little snap, though, poked way down there at the bottom of
the page. Would she remark to herself the contrast in our athletic
prowess?

When I figured my parents had finished the newspaper, I cut out both stories
and slipped them between the pages of the book I’d bought in a second-hand
bookstore last month for thirty cents and kept in the drawer of my bedside
table,
Paradoxes of Passion
by Joyce O’Dell.

“Nice story on you in the sports section today,” Mom said to me in the kitchen
before supper. “Do you know where the paper is? I wanted to clip it out for the
scrapbook.”

“I already cut it out myself. I can get it for you if you want.”

“No, you keep it.” She smiled. “I have to go to the drugstore anyway tonight,
and I’ll buy another paper there. It must be unusual for three classmates to be
on the front page of the sports section on the same day.”

“Three classmates?” I looked at her.

“You and Rosie and Brent?”

Brent? On the same page? I hadn’t even noticed a story on Brent, so preoccupied
had I been with Rosie’s and my own. “Oh yeah, sorry, I wasn’t thinking.” As soon
as Mom was out of the kitchen I dug the remnants of the paper out of the garbage
and, sure enough, there it was, a picture and an article next to Rosie’s
featuring Brent Anstey’s citation as Most Valuable Player in his league last
year and detailing the attempt to allow him to play in the age group above his
own this year because of his strength and skills and ice-smarts.

It was a good thing Mom had mentioned that article on Brent in the paper. How
embarrassed would I have been to talk to him this weekend and not mention it to
him, and find out afterwards? I phoned his house. His father answered. Brent
wasn’t home, so I told his dad that I was calling to congratulate him on the
piece in the
Evening Telegram
. “Yeah, he’s starting to come along,
finally,” said his father. “I see you won another swimming tournament. That was
good.”

“Thanks, Mr. Anstey, but it was only one race. Could you
ask—”

“I see where the little one O’Dell is thriving at her tennis.”

“Yes, Rosie is really good at it. Could you—”

“She’s the smart one too, isn’t she? She certainly looks like she could teach a
guy a thing or two.”

“Could you ask Brent to call me, please?” I couldn’t help trying to be
sarcastic as a result of his remark about Rosie. “He’s probably at a hockey
practice right now, is he, trying to learn how to play?”

“You think? Is a bear Catholic? Does the Pope shit in the woods?”

As usual I had to laugh at the obnoxious bastard before hanging up. I sat there
unsettled for a few minutes before calling Rosie to arrange a get-together
tonight. Then Pagan came into my mind, perhaps because all the sports page
attention to us reminded me of her running. I got out my big book of sports
statistics and looked up Doris Brown, to whom her coach had compared her: first
woman (1966) to run the indoor mile under five minutes (at 4: 52); had held
every women’s national and world record from 440 yards through one mile; five
victories in the International Cross Country Championships (1967-1971); had
represented the U. S. at the Olympics games (1968 and 1972). I was stunned. What
a comparison. Little Pagan. I had no idea. I’d find out all about it from Rosie
tonight.

At Rosie’s house, she told me that, although Rothesay was in Ottawa at a
medical association meeting, her mother was upstairs and wandering around. We’d
have to be content with a partial cuddle tonight. She kissed me and whispered in
my ear, “How does a blow job sound?”