The Bubble Reputation (18 page)

***

At seven o'clock, Rosemary left the tent and found Lizzie upstairs in her bedroom, still attempting to finish the same paperback she'd brought with her three weeks earlier.

“Can I borrow your car for a couple of hours?” Rosemary asked. “I don't think mine has any gas in it.” She had a strange urge to see Mother and Aunt Rachel again, but her legs were sore from bicycling to the airport.

“I'll be holding court in the den this evening,” Lizzie said. “So help yourself.”

For the second time in months, Rosemary drove down the road toward Bixley. There was freedom behind the wheel. Now that her mode of transportation was mainly biking, she could sense the power of the machine, so smooth and quiet that one mistakenly imagined that it was one's own power.

Aunt Rachel was haggard and bony. Mother was still crazy. Rosemary declined the offer of a sandwich and iced tea, and opted instead to sit out on the wide front porch with Mother. She had no reason for this need. It was an unexplainable urge. She was reminded of the eels that swim back across a rugged, hostile ocean to return to the spot of their parents' breeding grounds. Was she back on Aunt Rachel's front porch, the original home where Mother had been born and raised, because of some inexplicable genetic longing? Was this the spawning grounds of her parents? Had Father pressed Mother back against the swing, where the hollyhocks leaned in with blossoms hovering like hummingbirds, and had he lifted the flared skirt, pushed up the little silk blouse as if it were nothing more than tissue? Had all the genetic coding that would make Rosemary a human being come together that night on the porch, the cells lining up like small universes?

“Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America, and all the ships at sea,” Mother said. She smiled, pleased with herself. Rosemary smiled back, thinking of the wonderful museum that was housed in Mother's head. And she was the sole curator. Who could but envy her for that? They sat in rocking chairs, rocking out of sync, two genetically linked women. They were tongues in a pair of mismatched shoes, with nothing more to wag about. It occurred to Rosemary that her early memories of those summer mornings in the kitchen with her mother no longer existed but in
her
own mind. For Mother, they had simply gone away.

“You got any candy?” Mother asked.

Rosemary leaned over and kissed the warm forehead, touched the yellow curls. She needed to leave before the sadness arrived full force. She shouted a good night in to Aunt Rachel. But instead of sending a reply out through the screens of the house, Aunt Rachel turned the classical music down on her radio, put a sweater around her shoulders, and came out to the front porch.

“I wanted to give you this,” she said, and put a small sack rattling with bottles of homemade mustard pickles in Rosemary's hand. “I'll walk you out to the car.”

Rosemary took the sack and held the bottles tightly against her chest to silence them. There was a solemnity in Aunt Rachel's tone that deserved this. Mother stopped her rocking.

“You bring the car back before midnight!” she warned.

Instinctively, Rosemary responded. She had even turned to face Mother with a promise.

“Looks like she got you.” Aunt Rachel laughed.

“For a second there,” Rosemary admitted, “I was at the Bixley Drive-In with Cole McPherson and it was past midnight.”

“I remember Cole McPherson,” said Aunt Rachel. “He was a handsome boy, that black hair, those dark eyes.”

“If he hadn't been drafted, I probably would have married him,” Rosemary said, and opened her door.

“I'm worried about you, dear,” Aunt Rachel said, her voice a soft whisper compared to Mother's shrillness.

“I'm worried about
you
,” Rosemary confessed, too quickly to retract, and then she was glad that she said it. She
was
worried. Cancer was such a cowardly disease.

“I'm a nurse,” Aunt Rachel reminded her. “I know what's going to happen to
me.
I want to know about you.” Rosemary stalled. What does one say to a woman who is quietly dying?

“Thank you for the pickles,” she said. There was nothing else she need say, not to Aunt Rachel. After Father's death, Aunt Rachel had been the nurturing element. Rosemary's bicycle was always in her yard after school. There was a safety in her aunt's house, not to mention the mustard pickles. And there had been a camaraderie between them. They had been Girl Scouts, determining together how to tie up the loose ends of their lives, and what knot would best do it. Aunt Rachel always listened to the problems that Rosemary had at school, why she was upset about a test grade, a spat with a girlfriend. Then Cole McPherson came into the picture for a few months during her senior year, and Rosemary never asked Aunt Rachel about anything again. Now she was embarrassed about that. Youth had misguided her. Cole had grown inward as a mole in the grease pits of Bixley's largest garage, turning flabby around his middle, turning gray young, thin black smiles of grease beneath his fingernails. Cole McPherson, her first love, disappeared into a body she barely recognized.

Aunt Rachel stood like a ghost in her driveway and watched as Rosemary backed slowly toward the street. She waved feebly, one white hand cutting an arc in the blue-black night, the hand of a drowning woman. The headlights then swept across Mother's face, like yellow strands of a lighthouse. What was she doing there in the dark of the porch? Rosemary put the passenger window down and listened. The song was lilting and fragile, the way Mother always sang on those mornings in the kitchen on Norris Road.

“Once I was happy but now I'm forlorn. Like an old coat that's tattered and torn. His movements were graceful, all the girls he could please. The daring young man on the flying trapeze.”

***

In the kitchen, Rosemary ate a sandwich. Miriam and Uncle Bishop were talking in raised voices in the den. No one else was about. She uncorked a bottle of Louis Jadot and selected one of her most expensive wineglasses. Then she hurried back outside, not wanting interaction with her houseguests, although she already surmised that they had come out of their powwow with the collective decision to leave her alone.
Until
she
gets
over
this
little
conniption
, she could almost hear Miriam saying.

With the aid of her pocket flashlight, she found her way back up the hill to her tent. She balanced the flashlight between her knees while she struck a match and then held its quick flare to the Coleman. The match caught the turned-up filament and it hissed into a blue-white light. She poured a glass of red wine. It was purple in the light of the Coleman, as purple as the mother grape. She swirled it gently. The glass trapped the ruby red color as it cascaded down its side, violet as a bruise. She let the bouquet fill her nostrils. Here was more pure nature. Here were tannins and acids dissipating even as they breathed their first breaths, as they loosed old memories of the French countryside, of the mother vine, of the warm womb of the bottle. Here were memories of the ocean they crossed like slaves in the holds of ships. The sacrifice of the wine was warm to the palate. This was a wonderful moment, this sitting in a tent, with the magic of lantern light and the beginning song of the whip-poor-will. Rosemary raised her glass.

“Here's to you, Vickie,” she said. “I hope Quebec City agrees with you.” Mugs meowed at the flap and Rosemary let him in. Then she left the flap open, allowing some of that old starlight to take part in this ceremony, in this cave above ground, in this modern alchemy. She slid a hand over Mugs's dewy back as he flopped down happily onto the sleeping bag. Lights had come on in the house below. From her spot on the hill the house appeared as a large dark ship suspended on the crest of an ocean wave. The
Titanic,
perhaps, with orchestra music wafting over the rails and the occasional couple strolling on deck for a breath of air. Rosemary saw people moving past the windows, but they were not Uncle Bishop, or Miriam, or Lizzie, these moving figures, not hazy pointillistic dots, but sharply cut waiters and deckhands, and some millionaire's thin daughter who had grown pale and bored in Philadelphia. And up ahead, unbeknownst to everyone on board, the looming iceberg.

“Shit happens,” Rosemary said, and poured another glass of wine. At least she and Mugs were safe on the hill.

Late, late yestreen, I saw the new moon

with the old moon in her arms;

And I fear, I fear my Master dear!

We shall have a deadly storm.

—Anonymous, “Ballad of Sir Patrick Spence”

At dawn Rosemary woke slowly, the Louis Jadot bottle on the floor of the tent holding only a half inch of unconsumed wine.

“Two of them are leaving today, Muggser,” she said as she peered down upon the cars in her yard. The lights of the house were not yet on. It lay like a beached whale, turning grayish as spoiled meat, big and tall to the light that finally came and identified it:
a
house.
Rosemary saw this take place, this early naming of parts. She watched as licks of sunlight crept in and lit up heretofore shadowy, undefined objects. Lilac bushes ceased to be billowing parachutes. The soldier, stiff and solid by the road, grew into the mailbox and turned silver in the light. The house flopped and spouted mist from its chimney—or was it the wind that shook it?—and then lay back on its foundations, all the angles precise, the windows sharp, the chimney rising out of the rest of the architecture like a periscope. It was just a house again, the house Rosemary bought fresh out of college, a year before she met William, that day he substituted at Bixley High School. To the bedrooms of the house she had brought wallpaper with roses small as puffs of breath. And violets grew on the paper along the staircase and throughout the hallways. On the wallpaper in the kitchen, the flowers were small daisies. And outside the house, wild roses straggled the banks of the creek and burned up the hillside. Red clover was rampant in the fields, scattered among the hawkweed and dandelions. In the front yard, cascading along the porch and up to the three front steps, were the lilacs that sometimes ended their blossoming careers in antique pitchers that sat on tables in both the upstairs and downstairs hallways. Rosemary looked down on the house of flowers and imagined the humans asleep in their beds, like the dolls in Uncle Bishop's dollhouse, their eyes filled with the residue of dreams.

It was almost noon before she felt Mugs on her legs, trying to make himself a bed between them. Half asleep, Rosemary reached out a hand for her running watch. It announced the time in large digits, the seconds blinking in urgency. Time could pester and blink all it wanted. Rosemary was learning to be timeless.
Shit
happens
anyway.

The yard wasn't bulging with cars as it had been early that morning. Philip's Mercedes and Charles's General Motors special—whatever it was—were both gone. Rosemary had missed the departure, but she had no doubt that one man would not leave before the other. They had probably tailgated each other all the way back to Portland. Uncle Bishop was still around. The Datsun seemed serene, sunning itself like a sleek blue lizard in the overhead sun of a hot day. Rosemary walked past Lizzie's New Yorker, which dominated the yard. The back window was scattered with items—a belt, some letters, a fingernail file reflecting the sun, and a
Newsweek
already faded and probably dated weeks ago. Winston meowed at her from the garage doorway and then went off, his tail jerking in stiff wags, to find a square of shade. Once stray and somewhat wild, Winston had never warmed to being as sociable as Mugs, and preferred to sleep in the garage, rather than the house.

In the kitchen Uncle Bishop's coffee seemed still fresh in the percolator, so Rosemary poured herself a cup. She closed cupboard and refrigerator doors softly, hoping to avoid detection.

“Is that you, Squeaky Fromme?” Uncle Bishop bellowed from the den. “And if so, are you armed?” Rosemary let the spoon fall in the sink with a heavy thud. No need to soft-shoe it now. A covered pot simmered on the stove and spices hung in the air. Uncle Bishop appeared in the doorway. He was wearing a T-shirt Rosemary had not seen before, the material stretched to its limits. The letters were large and black, the kind of block letters that are pressed on quickly in mall shops and then come off during a second machine washing. Rosemary leaned forward to read the walking billboard. PLEASE FREE SACCO AND VANZETTI. Sacco and Vanzetti!

“Uncle Bishop, where on earth did you get that?” she asked.

“At Jeans and Things,” he said. “I got it last week.”

“Why do I believe that no one at Jeans and Things has ever heard of Sacco and Vanzetti?”

“They haven't.”

“Then this is indeed custom made?”

“At first it read ‘Taco and Vanzetti' until I had the kid redo it.” He peered down at the letters on his chest. His huge belly looked like a pail of water beneath the stretched material.

“Is there a reason that these two men just happened to surface last week on your T-shirt?”

“They were framed,” he said. “Wrongly executed.”

“Agreed, but may I assume that this month's selection from your Strange But True Book Club has arrived?”

“No, there's no book. Can't you give me enough credit to care about social ills long past without some stupid book?”

“What's the name of it?”

“Our Country's Silent Martyrs,”
he said. “You got a second T-shirt done free for the price of one,” he added, as if to prove that there are
some
social justices in a world of unfairness.

“What does the second one say?” She
had
to ask.

“‘Let the Rosenbergs Go,'” Uncle Bishop said. He was fingering the
V
in
Vanzetti,
which was already coming loose in the heat of June and in the steam from the pot of soup.

Rosemary uncovered the pot and sniffed the rising vapor. It smelled good and spicy.

“It's only minestrone,” Uncle Bishop said. “So stop acting like one of the witches in
Macbeth
.” She put the cover back. Could she stand the indoor humans long enough to suffer through a bowl of minestrone?

“Is this ready to eat?”

“So, you've left your weaponry on the hill, have you?” Uncle Bishop made a face at the way in which Rosemary replaced the lid. He dabbed at it with a pot holder until it moved securely onto its pot. He shook a warning finger. “Now leave this alone. It has no ditali yet.”

“Where did you find ditali in my cupboards?” Rosemary asked. “Or in Bixley, for that matter?” This reminded her of Miriam's suspicions of Uncle Bishop's warlock capacity to conjure things up. “Where does he get that white sand that's always on the floor of the Datsun?” Miriam wanted to know. “This is northern Maine!”

“When I need ditali, I
think
ditali.” Uncle Bishop waved a spoon over his head as though it were a wand. “I picture all of Bixley swarming with ditali and voilà!” He pointed to a sack on the counter. “Ditali.”

“You're crazy,” Rosemary told him.

“Speaking of crazy.” Uncle Bishop had a small dash of spit on his bottom lip. “Did you lay down your arms or are you simply out of bullets? Is that it? Are you making an ammo run to Bixley?”

Rosemary took an apple from the wicker basket she kept in the refrigerator to hold fruit. Someone had piled it high with fresh fruit. Nectarines, pears, and bananas had been added to the apples. Someone guilty, no doubt, for imposing on her privacy. Uncle Bishop. Let the great war generals think in terms of cannons, soldiers, and attacks at dawn. When it came to capturing the enemy's attention, Uncle Bishop believed in attacks at
breakfast
,
lunch
, and
dinner
. The minestrone, Rosemary's favorite soup, was simmering on her kitchen stove for a purpose. The spiced smell of bribery was in the air.

“The Brothers Grimm are gone,” Uncle Bishop said. He was pouring her a glass of lemonade.

“What about Uncle Grimm?” Rosemary asked, and let the refrigerator door close on its own accord. The basket of fruit went back into darkness, an unappreciated still life. “An artist should study each pear, each apple as if it's a human face,” William had told her, “and if he does, his still life comes alive.” Rosemary imagined all the faces in the trapped basket inside getting colder and colder, like children sliding on wicker sleds.

“Do you plan to come off your hill soon?” Uncle Bishop asked. “You need to get your life back in order. Do you intend to teach this fall?” Rosemary thought about that. In fact, she had been thinking a great deal about what her future vocation would be. Would she go back to teaching, back to the blackboard of her old classroom to turn chalky with age until a fine layer of limestone covered her? “Do you know what chalk is made of, class?” was how she started each new school year, thinking it poetic enough to capture those blank-slate minds. “It's made of fossilized sea creatures.” Perhaps, if she went back, she would become fossilized herself, the roar and the pressure of some primordial sea rushing through her bones. And then one day, just before retirement, just before they gave her a gold-plated letter opener and shoved her out the gymnasium door, maybe she would go berserk. “Here before you I hold small pulverized seashells!” she would scream, waving the chalk above her head. Or she would hold it to her ear and whisper, “Listen, you little bastards! There is some of the sea in this!” She could visualize their blank eyes as they watched her. In those eyes she would see the reflections of fire whispering across cave walls, the heavy outlines of bison billowing their muscles, memories of those days when chalk was already asleep and tired in its bed, waiting for the blackboard, the
chalk
talk
, as it gathered up sea creatures and sucked them out of their homes forever.

“What spice do I smell?” Rosemary asked.

“That's not spice,” Uncle Bishop said. “You forget that Miriam perceives herself as single again. She's emitting enough pheromones to beckon unmated men as far away as Bangor. And that's not to mention the confusion she's causing among the neighborhood dogs.” Rosemary refused to smile. She did not want Uncle Bishop to read this as a positive sign in regard to his eviction notice. After all her efforts, she would hate to find herself entrapped by the earthly aroma of minestrone soup and what Miriam referred to as
homosexual
humor.

Uncle Bishop unlidded the pot and the aroma rose again in a misty puff to join the rest of the spice-filled kitchen. A house with something cooking in it. There was nothing better.

“Maybe Miriam isn't looking for a new husband this time,” said Rosemary. “Maybe she'll end up back with Raymond.” All through Miriam's third wedding—and for each one she had a large ceremony because she vowed it was the last, the very last—Uncle Bishop had referred to the wedding car as
the
hearse
.

“I tell you, the woman is leaving a wide stream of pheromones in her wake,” he said. “I expect the moths tonight.”

Rosemary went up and changed into her running clothes. She laced her Nikes and then stretched her leg muscles. Lizzie was running shower water in the bathroom. Rosemary wondered if she was, at that moment, brushing her teeth. A twinge of guilt for avoiding Lizzie came over her, then left immediately.

My problems are as large as Lizzie's, if not larger
, Rosemary thought.
At least Philip and Charles are still flesh and blood
. Besides, she and Lizzie had spent many days together before Philip and Charles—Uncle Bishop had begun calling them Chang and Eng—had arrived.

She pushed the button that made her watch turn from a time-of-the-day watch into a stopwatch. All the digits flashed to zeroes in the face. If only she could make the houseguests disappear so quietly and quickly. She threw her sweaty headband from the past few runs into her laundry basket and went down to the tiny laundry room for a clean one. In the den, something stopped her, something looming. It was huge and metallic and said LIFE STYLER in large red letters across its side.

“Uncle Bishop, come here please!”

“Should someone cover me?” he asked, peering around the doorway. “I'm surprised you haven't found a way to Velcro that BB gun to your running shorts.”

“What is that?”

“Miriam's treadmill.”

“Why is it here?”

“That's what I've been telling you, Rosie. She's trying to walk off the unmarriageable flab. You can hear her
treading
all night long. She sounds like a hamster.”

“How'd it get here?”

“It got here by means of my Datsun,” he said. “She pestered me to death. You know how she can be. Remember how the chief of police, that Conrad person, finally had a heart attack over Miriam's UFO report?”

“I have a headache,” Rosemary said, and pressed two fingers against her left temple. It had begun to throb, a small pressure valve, such as the lid on Uncle Bishop's pot, waiting to blow.

“At least we can be thankful that Helene Cantor is going to babysit the Chihuahua,” Uncle Bishop said helpfully. “Miriam doesn't trust your cats. What is it she calls that pink-eyed weasel. Broderick Crawford?”

“Miriam doesn't trust my cats with Oddkins Bodkins?” Rosemary felt her other temple flare up. “You mean, that's the only reason I don't have her dog, too!” But Uncle Bishop wasn't listening.

“Remember how upset she was the night of her big UFO sighting?” he asked. “She thought aliens were going to kidnap her and that animated rat. If
I
were the chief of police, I'd sue.”

“Miriam is leaving her dog with Helene Cantor because she doesn't
trust
my
cats
?” Rosemary said it again. It begged repeating. Whose house
was
this?

“I don't need to leave Ralphie with a babysitter. He's very independent. I just went by to check up on him. Mrs. Abernathy was out inspecting her flowers with a magnifying glass. We're lucky she hasn't burned Bixley to the ground, considering how sunny it's been lately.”