Authors: Jill McCorkle
“We bonded over
a FryDaddy,” Rosemary liked to tell. “Your dad is such a healthy eater otherwise, so I felt like the devil of temptation. And I wondered, did he come to see me or did he come to eat deep-fried sweet batter?” She put a hot ceramic crock of chili on the table and then did a funny little dance, moving her hips and pointing to the chili like she had magically made it appear. She was wearing a T-shirt that said,
I CAN’T BELIEVE I ATE THE WHOLE THING
, like the Alka-Seltzer commercial. Their dad grabbed Rosemary’s hand and did a little dance himself, looking like an offbeat turkey in corduroy, and Ann felt both embarrassed and thrilled, like the time she dove into the lake and her suit bottom slid right off her ankles. It made her want to jump up and dance with them, beside and between,
with
, but Jimmy gave her a look that let her know that was not a good idea.
Their dad laughed at everything Rosemary Looney said and did. He laughed in a way that they had never even heard and that they didn’t hear again in all the years left of his life once she was gone.
Rosemary Looney sewed
the letters of Jimmy’s name on the back of his junior high football uniform and hemmed and fixed Ann’s dance costumes, attaching the golden leaves to her leotard when she was a magic tree and adjusting her Polichinelle clown suit for
The Nutcracker
. Rosemary went to all three performances and then delighted in Ann’s tales about how bad it smelled up under Big Mother Ginger’s skirt —feet and butt smells —and on top of that Mother Ginger was a man. Rosemary said that Mother Ginger ate at the restaurant all the time and that he didn’t smell good then, either, not even that one time he asked her for a date. Rosemary held her nose and crossed her eyes as she told it, then leaned forward and whispered in Ann’s ear, “I told him I have a boyfriend.” The words, the secret, Rosemary’s warm hand on her
cheek made Ann’s chest pound with the fast beat of the music on the stereo and filled her with a giddiness that left her no choice but to run and jump on the sofa, then from chair to chair, singing along with Rosemary at the top of her lungs, “Come on-a my house, my house, I’m gonna give you everything.”
Rosemary had a youthful face when you got right up close, something Ann liked to do more and more often. Rosemary’s eyes often teared up in laughter when Ann told her what had happened at school or some corny joke —
Do your feet smell? Does your nose run? You’re built upside down!
Rosemary knew lots of jokes like that from her own son. He was already in college, which she said was the reason she worked as many hours as she did. That and because she loved to cook. “You know,” she told Ann one day after showing a photo of the boy —shoulder-length curly hair and love beads —“I was way too young to have a baby when I did, not but sixteen, but I wouldn’t take anything under the sun for him. Best thing I ever did.”
Ann wanted to love her, but Jimmy was determined to break it up. He told Rosemary how their mom had made a threat against any woman who ever tried to take her place. “It’s a curse,” he said. “You can pass through but you can’t stay.”
“I don’t believe in such,” she said and glanced over at Ann, maybe in hopes of some help Ann wasn’t able to give. She was having to concentrate hard to keep her face without a feeling. “I’m gonna ask your dad what he thinks.”
“He doesn’t know. Because see, the bad stuff will happen to him, so it’s not like you’ll get
your
head sliced off in a wreck or get shot. You’ll just make it all happen to him.” There had been a time when Jimmy was obsessed with Jayne Mansfield’s death, the details of her decapitation in the car wreck. Jimmy had found many deaths far more horrific than their mother’s slow skeletal disappearance to fixate on —heads severed but hearts still beating, a man conscious while lions ate his legs and arms, the man who woke up in a crocodile den surrounded by decomposing bodies and had a heart attack while trying to swim away. He knew of drownings and fires, falls from high buildings and elevator shafts, and slit throats. Jimmy had taken Ann through the big trailer up at Crown Shopping Center that housed the car Bonnie and Clyde were killed in. It cost a quarter a look, and they had looked twelve times, each time getting lost in the bullet holes and rusty-colored blood stains, the place where they said Bonnie’s head lay when all the shooting was over. Ann had memorized much of that song “The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde” —“People let me tell you they were the devil’s children” —but after seeing the real blood it made her sick to think of them. Bonnie didn’t look anything like Faye Dunaway and Clyde didn’t favor Warren Beatty at all.
“At least Mom isn’t all bloody,” Jimmy had said. Ann tried to hold onto his arm but he wouldn’t let her. Some of his friends had come along and there was a girl he liked waiting to go on the
Tilt-A-Whirl, which along with Bonnie and Clyde’s car, a Ferris wheel, and a pony ring with three very old and tired ponies, constituted the whole carnival.
“Here are the signs to watch for,” Jimmy told Rosemary and then listed things their dad had always done, mainly things that got on their mother’s nerves. The way he studied and picked at his fingernails or jiggled a finger in his ear when he was nervous, the way he stroked his nose while thinking, the way sometimes you would talk to him and he wouldn’t have heard a single word you said because —he always said —he was rethinking what someone else with a problem had said earlier in the day.
“I’ve seen all that,” Rosemary said and laughed. “I actually like all that about him. Shows he’s human.”
“But he’s cursed,” Jimmy said. “And he’ll die if you stay with him. He’ll die
because
of you.”
“He’s human,” she said, “and you really need to think about what you’re saying before you say it.” She didn’t smile as she usually did. She knocked wood and crossed herself and then ran a nervous hand up and through her hair as Ann had seen her do the day their dad got a surprise visit from one of their mom’s old friends, who was all dressed up and smelling like she was on her way to someplace fancy. Their dad’s favorite kind of pie, a lemon chess, was cradled in her long thin arms and she handed it and some cut flowers to Rosemary like she was a maid and asked her to take care of them, maybe make a pot of coffee while she
visited. She was one of those women with perfect posture and talked without moving her mouth much. Rosemary’s face was as blotched red that day as it was while she stood there staring back at Jimmy like they were doing a blink contest. He stomped out and slammed the door and Ann waited a little too long before following. She didn’t want to leave at all, Rosemary was looking at her, and the large mixing bowl of pound cake batter she’d promised Ann she could lick there on the counter. By the time Ann got outside where Jimmy was pounding a tennis ball up against the garage door, he was calling her
traitor
,
Judas
,
pussy
, and that same night he took her Chatty Cathy doll and pulled her head off, said she looked too much like Talking Tina and he was afraid she’d murder their father if Rosemary didn’t do it first.
Ann cried and threatened to tell. She said it was just a stupid show like the stupid show that made him
cry
over an old woman put together like a robot. “It wasn’t even real,” she said, “but you cried like a little tiny baby.” She knew as soon as she said it that she shouldn’t have, and she immediately begged his forgiveness, begged him to please not be angry at her. He said he would forgive her if she did everything he told her to do, including ignore Rosemary Looney. So she did. The most frightening thing he made her do was to venture down into the basement to get the dog food. He let her get all the way down and then she heard the door shut and the lock click into place. “Jimmy?” she called with the click, but he didn’t answer. Then he turned out the light.
She froze waiting for him to help her and then she panicked. She screamed his name but got no response and then all the images were there, the talking doll and the child lost through the watery wall and flocks of birds smothering and pecking people to death. She saw them carry her mother from the house, a big green bag zipped up on a stretcher. She wanted to see her one more time but all her mind could conjure was a skeleton. She was crying then, feeling her way up the dirty splintered steps to pound on the door, pulling on the knob and begging. She thought of her mother closed up in darkness and of the maniac under the bed stabbing Bingo and licking her hand. She pictured Bonnie’s bloody body and the psycho man dressed up like his mother. She screamed until she couldn’t breathe and then he pushed the door open and she lost her balance, bumping and tumbling down the rough steps, a crack of pain up her arm as she hit the concrete floor and rolled into a stack of old magazines and papers. Then the light was back on, everything grainy in the brightness, and Jimmy was beside her, already making light of it all, what a baby she was to think he’d leave her there, she was okay, it was a joke, just a joke. They stared in amazement at her bone piercing the pale skin of her forearm. At first it hurt too much to cry and Jimmy looked and sounded so far away, and then she was screaming. All she remembered was screaming and then Jimmy running for help. The next thing she remembered, Rosemary was there and had her in the car. Rosemary wasn’t singing and she never
even turned the radio on. She just kept telling Ann that it would be okay, everything would be okay.
All the way to the hospital, Jimmy told how Ann had gone into the basement even though he told her not to, that Ann told him to turn out the lights so she could pretend she was the girl in
The Twilight Zone
episode. Rosemary Looney looked over at Ann, eyebrows raised in question. Ann had confided her fear of the dark one night, weeks before, just the two of them in the car while her dad cleaned the windshield and checked the oil. Rosemary and her dad had a dinner date and at the last minute no choice but to take Ann with them because the sitter canceled. She remembered Rosemary saying, “That’s okay. It’ll be fine.” And it felt so good there in the car with her, the Mobil sign glowing in the window of the small cinder-block service station. Ann stared at the winged horse while she told Rosemary how the stories and movies scared her more than they used to, how some nights she couldn’t sleep at all for thinking about all the bad things that could happen. It made her cry to think of Bonnie and Clyde gone so wrong —“the devil’s children” —their bodies twitching and flinching with bullet spray. “The basement is worst of all,” she whispered. She told how it reminded her of a grave, her mother’s grave, and what it must be like for her in the dark dampness. She watched the winged horse, gone filmy, hooves raised and pawing the air, and she felt Rosemary’s hand on her own, warm and firm in its hold and squeeze. Rosemary
didn’t tell her that she was being silly or that there was nothing to be afraid of. She said, “Sometimes our fears are there to protect us.” She said, “What we can’t afford to let them do is cripple us.” She told Ann it felt good to talk, that she had really missed her lately, and Ann just nodded and leaned in as close as she could, no need to hide the relief she was feeling. “I hope you’ll always feel you can talk to me.”
“Ann?” she asked. They were almost at the hospital and Ann could feel Jimmy’s gaze on her. “You did that, honey? You wanted to be in the basement without the light on?”
“Trying to beat her fears away,” Jimmy said. “So she won’t be
crippled
by them.” The word on his tongue was ugly and harsh and Ann was sorry she had told him about the night in the car with Rosemary. How when her dad got back in, the three of them laughed and sang “Aba Daba Honeymoon” and then went and got hotdogs at the E&R and then ice cream at the Dairy Queen. They even rode out to see where the new Holiday Inn was being built on the interstate. It was going to have a pool twice the size of Howard Johnson’s, and Rosemary knew somebody who worked there and could get them in to swim. “We’ll all go swimming, right?” Rosemary asked and her dad reached and touched Rosemary’s cheek. He said, “Yes.” His hand dropped to her neck and pulled her closer. He said, “We will
all
go swimming.” Ann told Jimmy everything, because she wanted him to like Rosemary, too. He loved swimming and he loved hotdogs. There was no reason
not
to want Rosemary to be their new mother and stay forever. The robot grandmother had done that. She stayed until Larry Tate’s children were all grown up and had learned how to love.
“I’m so sorry, honey,” Rosemary kept saying as she pulled into the hospital lot. “It’s going to be okay.”
It was in the emergency room that something else happened. When Rosemary went to the pay phone to call their father, Jimmy allowed the doctor to think that someone might have done this
to
Ann. Locked her in the basement or grabbed and twisted her skinny white arm, pushed her down those dark stairs. Jimmy stammered and paced as he told how he came home to find his sister that way and that Rosemary was in the kitchen. He said he didn’t know how to tell their dad, their dad would be so hurt. He acted afraid and stopped talking when Rosemary reentered the room. She was wearing what she called her “work clothes” —old dirty white Keds, gray sweatpants, one of their dad’s old shirts with an ink stain on the pocket too bad for him to wear to work.
“What?” she asked. She was reaching for Ann when the young doctor asked her to wait at the door. “What is it?” she asked. Jimmy had told Ann in the brief second the doctor took a phone call to flinch and cry when she saw Rosemary. “She’s the devil’s child,” he said. “The goblin, the maniac under the bed.” And though Ann knew it wasn’t true, she couldn’t help but sob when she saw her. She couldn’t look at Rosemary’s face so she looked at her father’s stained shirt instead and then at Rosemary’s silver
necklace against her flushed throat and chest. “It’s Egyptian for life and water and all kinds of good things,” she had said that same day they danced all around the living room, throwing pillows and accidentally breaking a vase. “It’s kinda like a cross but a lot softer.”