The Bubble Reputation (10 page)

Mother looked at Rosemary with new interest, the way one looks at a pen pal one has been writing to for years and finally gets to meet. “He'd better bring me some chocolates,” Mother said.

Rosemary closed her eyes and imagined them both ageless, two women in their prime, scouring the sands of a blazing beach, holding seashells to their ears and listening to the songs of the sirens, the beautiful music of womanhood before the moon-pulled tides swept in to wash them both away.

Rosemary set her alarm clock for seven thirty, early for her but late for Mother, who was usually, as Aunt Rachel warned, up at daylight. “She has an uncanny sense of time,” Aunt Rachel said. “She comes every hour to stand in front of my cuckoo clock just a second or two before it sounds. Yet, she wears no watch.” Miriam would have loved hearing this little timely tidbit about Mother. “She's totally cuckoo, Rosemary, you may as well admit it.”

Mother was sitting in the den watching the birds. Rosemary had locked all the doors the evening before, hoping this would at least deter an escape. She hated to think of Mother loose in Bixley.

“Did you sleep well, Mom?” Rosemary asked. Mother looked at her, perplexed. “Please don't call her Mother or Mom,” Aunt Rachel had warned. “It seems to only confuse and upset her. Try not to call her any name at all.”

Mother's yellow head bobbed first one way and then the other, canting as she watched the numerous early morning feeders.

“Cuckoo!” Mother said loudly. Rosemary realized she must be associating these living birds with Aunt Rachel's clock. She was glad Miriam had missed this, too. Miriam wanted badly to put Mother in a nursing home, much to the protests of the other family members. But Rosemary thought of those places as giant nurseries full of unblinking, wildly staring dolls whose batteries have run down, whose arthritic joints have melded from nonbending, whose mouths are frozen open, oval as spoons in the withering faces. Mother belonged with her family, even if she no longer knew who they were.

Rosemary noticed that Betsy Kathleen, her Cabbage Patch half sister, was wearing sweatpants, sweatshirt, and what resembled honest-to-God tennis shoes.

She's looking more and more like me every day
, she thought.

***

For lunch Rosemary unfolded the legs of her card table and set it up on the small cement patio with two of the matching chairs. She covered it with a linen tablecloth, a soft peach color, and arranged the table with linen and crystal, her best china and silver. She cut a handful of African daisies that had finally come to life in the wooden boxes she kept near the back fence, and now they sat on the table in a glass vase. She poured champagne into two hollow-stemmed glasses and then brought the platters she'd prepared in the kitchen out to the table. One held an arrangement of cheeses, rye bread, and nuts. The other platter held fresh fruits, chunks of apple, honeydew melon, and cantaloupe. Mother was pleased with the little outdoor table and let Rosemary arrange her napkin on her lap and fill her plate with goodies. They sat like old friends who have finally made plans to meet far away from the bustle of the city, at some obscure inn, where the birds are plentiful, where the cats are peaceful and snoozing. Rosemary tossed an occasional piece of bread out toward the feeders and watched as house sparrows hopped courageously toward it in little half spirals.

The champagne was cold and delicious, bubbling. It reminded her of a natural spring she and her father had discovered once, in the woods behind her childhood home, the one that had disappeared in fire and smoke. Rosemary missed that house almost as much as she missed her father. And she could remember, easily, the day it went up in flames. She had been paying old Mr. Fletcher a dime for a cone of vanilla ice cream when the fire truck rushed screaming through town with a chicklike procession of cars following. And so she and a handful of other Bixley kids had pedaled the half mile out of town, toward the blankety cloud of smoke that rose into the October air like a misplaced tornado. Her heart had begun to pound when she saw where it was coming from, the house, the childhood womb. She had thought it would always be there, a place for Father's ghost to live, a marker for the frosty little spring. Now there was fire in her bedroom window. She could almost hear the teddy bears and dolls shrieking, all the toys dying. And then the stairs crumbled like dominoes. The walls turned to ashes. All the memories were loosed and floating, all her childhood, cinders. There was no place left for Father's spirit to hang around. That was the day, aged eleven, she knew he was really dead, the day of the house disappearing. But perhaps the little spring was still there, pumping life out of the earth. She remembered they had been following a Canada warbler on the day they discovered it. Father wanted her to hear its
chip, chupety, swee-ditchety
. They rushed, that day of exploration, through the thickly rooted spruce, and pine, and shimmering elms, stepped on the tiny mushroom bombs that bloomed beneath the trees, did not wait to watch them explode soundlessly beneath their feet, like small Hiroshimas and Nagasakis, flowering, cascading down upon the disturbed worlds below them. Instead of the Canada warbler, they stumbled upon the delicious little spring bubbling like champagne out of the earth,
where
Alp
the
sacred
river
ran, in caverns measureless to man.
They had drunk from it like wild horses, their lips soft as petals on the surface, their nostrils flaring wildly from the run. The spring was proof that Father had indeed, once, been here, before his ghostly profession. “What does your father do?” children had asked her over the years. “He's dead,” Rosemary would say. “He doesn't do anything.”

Rosemary had brought the champagne bottle out to the patio in a brass ice bucket, and she poured from it until the two glasses were full again. Mother drank the second glass of champagne down so easily it might have been a thimble full of water. Rosemary left her there amid the cheese and fruit to go back inside the house. She'd heard a noise and assumed Lizzie and Philip must be finished with their showers and dressing to go off for their usual lunch in Thomasville. Rosemary intended to ask Lizzie to stop by Laker's for the suet they saved for her, from around the kidneys, for her gourmet woodpeckers. The noise again. But it was not coming from inside the house. Someone was gently rapping on the front door.
A salesman
, thought Rosemary,
tapping at my chamber door. Fuller Brush and nothing more
. She had learned over the years to recognize the approaches her infrequent visitors used at her door. Uncle Bishop pounded loudly as a carpenter. Robbie gave a
shave
and
a
haircut, two bits
knock, seven medium-sized raps. Miriam never knocked unless the door was locked. She liked to creep in. “The door was unlocked so I let myself in,” she'd say, hoping she might find Rosemary and William fastened like dogs in some embarrassing position. But before Rosemary could open the door, Lizzie and Philip came down the stairs.

“Who's that?” Lizzie asked, as she tucked an army-green T-shirt inside khaki shorts. Lizzie would perpetually remind Rosemary of a Girl Scout off to sell cookies.

“I don't know,” Rosemary said. “I'm not expecting anyone.” She was anxious to get back out on the patio to keep watch on the bottle of champagne. If left alone, Mother would surely empty it. With a curious Lizzie behind her, Rosemary opened the door and looked into a face she hadn't seen in some time, a face that was still handsome but now had tiny lines edging the eyes, and a tired worldliness in the eyes themselves that had not been there in college, where he'd been her fiercest competition in the debate club. Lizzie's husband, and now
Philip's
competition. Charles Vanier Sr.

All Rosemary could do, really, was hug him and then step back to let him in. He kept his hands in his pockets as he looked from Lizzie's shocked face to Philip's. No one said anything for what seemed too long a time, and then the accusals began, with Charles and Lizzie pointing angry fingers at each other. Philip stepped back as if to survey the case at a distance.
Flagrante delicto
, Rosemary thought, remembering the Christmas party she'd imagined in Uncle Bishop's dollhouse.
Caught with his hands full of red satin
.

“I knew this person must have been up here when you never called once,” Charles said. He was not shouting, but he was furious in a clenched-teeth sort of way. “You were supposed to give yourself some time away from us both, to think things out, or so you said, and look at the little nest I've stumbled upon.”

“What little nest have you stumbled
out
of
to come and visit my little nest?” Lizzie, on the other hand,
was
shouting, very unbefitting a Girl Scout. “I'm surprised you found the time to drive—no,
sneak
—up here.”

“Don't you go casting aspersions,” Charles said, and Lizzie gave her signature laugh. It was her
I'm so incredibly above this
laugh. She'd perfected it in college, during the passage of a cross-country skiing course, which, to everyone's amazement, she flunked. Rosemary could still hear her, fifty feet behind the other skiers, cold, snowy, and laughing.

“Aspersions?” Lizzie asked. Philip was inching away. Rosemary had moved back against the foyer wall and stood there helplessly watching, the way a referee might in a boxing match. Lizzie raised her arms to put her hands on her hips. Rosemary recognized the meaning. She'd seen birds raise their contour feathers during territorial encounters.

“Excuse me,” said Philip, “but I believe this is personal.” Lizzie stared at his back as he disappeared up the stairs. His footfalls padded down the long hallway to the room where she had put his suitcases, for respectability. A door shut softly and then all was quiet.

“Abandonment?” asked Charles. “And he hasn't even met our dog, not to mention the children.” Lizzie glared at him.

“Listen, I need to get back to Mother,” said Rosemary. “Charles, for what it's worth, it's good to see you again.” She gave him another hug.

“You too, Rosie,” he said. He was still pleased at Philip's exit, at Lizzie's blushed face. Rosemary felt a twinge of sadness. Had it been so many years ago that this was all
before
them, waiting to happen, these twisted mistakes they'd make? She remembered Lizzie and Charles on their wedding day, so soon after graduating, Lizzie beginning to swell just slightly with Charles Vanier Jr. And Rosemary in her chafing maid of honor gown, so sure Lizzie was making a mistake.

“The least you could have done was crawl out of bed long enough to visit your children each weekend,” Charles said.

“You will not instill that sort of guilt in me,” said Lizzie. She'd calmed down a bit now that Philip had quit the scene. His presence had probably caused her to overreact, and surprise was a vicious weapon. “I take excellent care of my children all year long. They're at camp enjoying themselves. A phone call every few days is sufficient. Besides, what do you do for your children besides tuck them into bed each night?”

Rosemary remembered a day she'd come into the old college library, stomping snow from her boots and looking for Lizzie. She had found her in among the rows of quiet shelves, locked in a wet kiss with Charles, two innocent college students with their assumed knowledge of life. And they were in the child psychology section. “The last place I thought to look for you two,” she'd told them that sunny day of the snow-filled campus, and the exhilarating promise of thaw after a long winter. When life was still all titillation. When futures were dangling ahead of everyone, shiny as icicles. Rosemary left Lizzie and Charles, as emotionally charged as that feverish day in the library among the shelves of books, and went back out to the patio to find Mother.

***

After lunch, Rosemary took Mother upstairs and helped her get comfortable for the afternoon nap she was fond of taking. The idea appealed to Rosemary, too, so she went to her own room, kicked her Nikes off, and stretched out on the bed. It was a surprise to her when she awoke and saw by the clock that she'd been asleep for almost two hours. Rarely did her mind quit racing long enough to let her sleep soundly in the afternoon. Even at night, desperately tired, thoughts about William, questions about those last minutes, did acrobatic maneuvers in her head. And when she did fall asleep, those thoughts got all dressed up in symbolic costumes and paraded themselves before her as dreams.

Mother was still sleeping, her small shoulders heaving up and down, as though she were a doll being inflated, the mouth painted much too red by some overzealous factory worker, the yellow hair glued haphazardly onto the scalp. Rosemary went back to her bedroom and looked out to see what birds would be arriving for the late feeding. Lizzie and Charles were walking slowly about the backyard, their hands gesticulating and circling, two hearing people engaged in sign language.

On an impulse, she tried Uncle Bishop's number but there was no answer, just loud, long rings that must be echoing around the empty rooms of the beige-and-chocolate house, bouncing off the walls. She hoped he was okay. He'd been riding a high emotional crest lately, what with Jason's leaving. Putting Uncle Bishop aside, she opened up her college paperback copy of
The
Scarlet
Letter
, which she'd just begun to reread. A half hour passed with Hester and Arthur before she looked out to see if the goldfinches had yet discovered the new niger feeder she had hung from the cherry tree. It was then that a movement caught her eyes, figures walking from left to right across the range of her vision, as if in a film, Lizzie and Philip. Lizzie was looking terribly diplomatic. It was obvious that a great summit meeting was taking pl
ace in Bixley.

Rosemary tried Uncle Bishop's number again, and again, no answer. With the peace talks still going on in the backyard, she walked her bicycle quietly out to the road and headed for Uncle Bishop's little house. She saw the Datsun first, a snarl on its lip, backed ass end into the garage. A small commotion of some sort was going on in the backyard. Rosemary could hear Uncle Bishop's large voice, on the shrill edge of excitement. She parked the bike in the front yard, by Mrs. Abernathy's spreading lilac bush, and headed around the house. Uncle Bishop was kneeling by the porch steps, his huge white buttocks peeping, like rising loaves of bread, out of his gray sweatpants.