Authors: Bill Rowe
Rosie told me that a friend of hers from their summer tennis school near
Toronto of two years before had called in great excitement from Vancouver where
she lived. “Are you really moving to BC?” her friend asked. “My God, that would
be great.”
“No,” Rosie replied. “What makes you think that?”
“Well, as you know, my mother is a doctor and she heard through the grapevine
that a physician from out east was applying to the College of Physicians for a
licence to practise here in British Columbia, and his name, Dr. Rothesay, rang a
bell with her from when I was talking about you and your family. I was hoping it
was the same person.”
“It must be someone else,” said Rosie and continued the conversation with
small talk, though dazed and shocked. Then she confronted her mother and asked
if she and her husband were separating.
“Not that I know of,” said Nina, “but I wouldn’t be surprised if he wanted
to—not after Pagan, and the way he’s treated like a dog around here by his other
stepdaughter.”
“Why don’t you ask
him
if he applied in BC?” I asked Rosie and, to my
irritation, received no real reply.
The next day, Rosie was absent from school. And so was Suzy. She hadn’t told me
she would be, and I figured they must have come down with something together.
When I called her home, her mother said she was staying at Suzy’s, and when I
called Suzy’s, there was no answer the first three times, and then Suzy’s mother
answered and said neither of them could come to the phone right now, but, no,
they were not sick, and Rosie would get back to me soon.
Rosie called me that night. She was sorry for going incommunicado,
she said, but she had too much to think about. She and Suzy
would not be at school tomorrow either, but could I come over to Suzy’s after
school? Mrs. Martin was working four to midnight, so we’d have the place to
ourselves. I didn’t hear the usual tryst-planning smile in her voice, and as she
went on, she sounded strangely indistinct, as if she was exhausted. We had to
have a serious discussion about something, she concluded, almost mumbling into
the phone. I told her I’d be over right after classes.
ROSIE MET ME AT
the door with a quick cheek-to-cheek hug
and words: “I have a serious problem about something very personal and
confidential. Normally, I wouldn’t burden you with it, but Suzy and I have been
talking about it for two solid days and we both believe I have to force the
issue somehow and that first I must tell you.”
I followed her into the kitchen, where Suzy was sitting at the table gazing out
the window at the Narrows of St. John’s harbour and smoking one of her mother’s
cigarettes. “Yeah, I know I quit,” she said to me, blowing out a billow. “But
this is one of those days where I feel like taking a boat out through those
Narrows to the ocean and disappearing over the horizon for good, let alone
having a few drags.”
“What is going on?” I asked. “Wouldn’t burden me with what, Rosie? What’s the
big mystery?”
“Anyone want a Coke?” said Rosie, going to the fridge. “Okay, let’s all sit
down. Suzy, why don’t you give Tom the background, like we talked about, first?
That’ll make it easier for me, too.”
“Okay,” Suzy answered. “No point beating about the bush, Tom. This is going to
hurt before we’re finished. But we don’t think we have any choice, even if it
means Rosie is afraid she’ll lose your love.”
“What?” I squawked. I swallowed a couple of times and tried to speak normally.
“What are you talking about, lose my love?”
Rosie looked at Suzy, who said, “She’ll speak for herself when the time comes,
but right now I’m going to tell you some things about myself that only a few
people have any idea about, and that only Rosie knows
all
about. She has
always trusted you, ever since you were kids, and so I trust you too to keep
everything absolutely confidential.”
Nodding solemnly, I lifted my Coke bottle towards my lips with an air of
confidence. My hand was shaking so much I had to put it back on the table before
I knocked my front teeth out.
“I’m making you nervous,” said Suzy. “I don’t blame you.”
“What, me nervous? No-o-o. Scared shitless is more like it.” I
felt myself flushing: they so serious and I such a flippant clown.
The tension in both their faces changed to fleeting grins. Rosie glanced at me,
but her eye contact didn’t linger.
“Rosie has never really told you how she and I became good buddies.”
“No, it seems so normal now, but I used to wonder about it a bit at
Smearies.”
“Yeah—from mortal enemies to deathless friends in one ‘foul’ swoop. It turned
out that we had enough in common to keep each other from destroying ourselves.”
While I was unsuccessfully trying to untangle that one, Suzy looked down at the
floor for a few seconds and then out the window and said, “Jesus, this is harder
than I thought.”
“You should stop,” said Rosie. “You don’t have to go on. It’s not a good
idea.”
Suzy smiled. “Yes, it’s a good idea.” She sat up straight in her chair. “Tom.
What’s your very first memory of life?”
“Ah, I think it would be eating cotton candy at the Quidi Vidi Regatta when I
was three or four. Or maybe someone just told me about it.”
“And mine is also from when I was three or four,” said Suzy. “And I can
guarantee that no one told me about it. My first memory is the smell of my
grandfather’s semen. And the feel of it—the feel of Grandpa’s come all over my
face.”
From my normal slouch, I shot up perpendicular in my chair. My mouth opened of
its own accord, but nothing came out.
“Grandpa started so early with me as a child that I cannot remember a time when
he did not sexually abuse me. He kept me quiet for years with a combination of
threats and bribes. If I told anyone, he would kill me. To give me an idea of
what it would be like to be killed, when I was three or four, he pressed his
thumbs into my windpipe until I nearly went unconscious. To this day I have
nightmares in which I wake up strangling to death. He was a lay preacher in
church and he told me no one would believe someone as evil and sinful as me
anyway. God hated evil and sinful kids who did the dirty, filthy things I was
doing, and God would see to it that no one would believe me, and that when I
died I would burn forever in hell. And he was forever showering money on
me.
“My mother, his daughter, would complain to him about it, but he asked her to
humour an old man’s love for his first and favourite granddaughter. I had money
for everything and if I told anyone, the money would stop.
Till
I was eleven I was a little walking pustule of fear, guilt, and greed. Then when
I was eleven, I was rushed to the hospital in Gander hemorrhaging. I was
pregnant. But because my body was so immature, I had a miscarriage. They put me
on painkillers and sedatives at the hospital, and in my stupor a nurse wormed
out of me who had done it.
“A big police investigation was launched against Grandpa, but he denied
everything. He was seventy-three at the time, and I could see that everyone knew
a nice, gentle, religious old guy like him could not be the culprit. Yet they
couldn’t bury the fact that
someone
had made me pregnant. The police
grilled me unmercifully to discover, as one policeman put it, if I was
protecting someone else. My father came under suspicion, and my oldest brother,
who was fifteen—they were both given the third degree by the police day after
day. They even questioned my little brother to see what he knew.
“Finally, my mother, the more she thought about the details of time and place
I’d given—all the drives in the car, the walks in the woods to his cabin—and God
knows what was in her own background with him, the more it all started to click
in her head. She went down the road to Grandpa’s and told him in front of his
wife, her own mother, that she believed me. Then she went to the police and told
them she could corroborate material parts of my story. Charges were laid against
him, and the same day he confessed it all and agreed to plead guilty. They
sentenced him to two years less a day so that at his advanced age he could serve
his time at the prison farm in Salmonier instead of a federal prison on the
mainland. He spent eight months there and they released him on parole and sent
him back home.”
Suzy stopped and closed her eyes for a moment. Then she turned to the window,
stared out at the glowering sky, and remained silent. I looked at Rosie. Her
hands were folded so tightly on the table her fingers were going purple. Her
eyes were riveted on her friend’s face. Suzy stayed quiet so long, I wondered if
she was finished. But there had to be more. How did Rosie fit into the picture
as—what? Keeping each other from destroying themselves? I shifted in my chair
and my hand went to my face of its own accord and covered it. An ugly feeling,
an emotional nausea over what was to come, had risen in me.
My movements seemed to bring Suzy out of her trance. She looked at Rosie and
began again. “Neither my name nor his was ever released publicly, in order to
protect my identity. But of course, because of the investigation and his court
appearance and the news coverage of the case, word of
who it was
got around. Everyone knew in school, girl guides, church. The worst of it was
how I felt about myself under the constant staring of everyone else. I felt I
was on the same par as a piece of used toilet paper. I got some counselling from
a well-meaning social worker, but as time went on I felt worse, not better,
about myself. I got so low—skipped school, ran away from home a couple of times,
attracted boys who thought they could do anything to me they wanted, a suicide
attempt—that my mother decided to move to St. John’s for, quote, unquote, a
fresh start. My father had already up and left with my brothers. I don’t believe
he ever quite lost the idea I had somehow implicated him and my brother and
caused the false suspicions.”
Suzy got up and went to the shelf where a pack of du Maurier Light cigarettes
and matches lay. She lit up another one. “This is really stupid, I know, to
start this smoking crap again, but just because you’re a survivor of sexual
abuse doesn’t mean you’re perfect.” Rosie made a silent little chuckle at her
friend, forcing me into a grin that felt pretty wan.
Suzy sat down. “At Smearies I was pretty popular among the older boys. I always
had the smokes, never put up much resistance if one of them wanted to cop a feel
behind the curtain in the auditorium. Mom tried to be supportive, but by the
time I was thirteen I was only looking for the least excuse to take off for
Toronto or Vancouver and end up, without a doubt, on the street turning tricks
and mainlining heroin. Looking back now, I simply wanted to destroy this sack of
shit that I knew I was composed of. I also knew that all the top girl students
in the school thought I was a worthless slut. And the top student of all was the
ice maiden, her highness Rosie Gudrid O’Dell, the all-Canadian virgin queen.
Gudrid. Goodie. Goody-goody.
“The first time I set eyes on her, I loathed the sight of this proper,
straight-A’s, precious, tennis champ, volleyball and basketball star bitch, and
my admiration went down from there. She was the complete opposite of me in every
respect: she was admired, I was despised. I always had the feeling she was
looking at me behind my back—in disgust, I thought. Whenever I tried to catch
her at it so that I could go over and beat the face off her, she always managed
to look away in time. I was the one who put all the names on her, and mocked her
and made fun of her: ‘That’s not boobs on the Bitch of Buckingham Mews, that’s
bergy bits.’ And remember the wall in the girls’ washroom, Rosie? ‘The guy who
finally takes R. O’D’s cherry will need an icicle for a tool.’”
“Mm,” said Rosie.
“Then, one day that year, Tom, Rosie O’Dell saved my worthless
life.” Suzy stopped and got up for another smoke. I noticed that she used this
break to commune with Rosie, raising her eyebrows at her and staring straight at
her as she lit her cigarette. Rosie put her head down and closed her eyes. There
was an aura of anxiety about her. Suzy stayed by the stove saying nothing. Rosie
raised her head and gazed at me for a few seconds. Fear welled up in me. I
didn’t want to hear any more of this. I reached out and took her hand. She
squeezed mine and turned to Suzy and gave another little nod.
Suzy came back to the table and sat down. “One day after school,” she said
from a pillar of smoke, “I was in the washroom by myself. I’d just come out of a
half-hour of detention and there wasn’t another soul around, so I decided to
grab a quick smoke before going outside in the rain. I no sooner had my fag lit
when the door opens, and in waltzes Rosie the goody-goody herself, the head
prefect. ‘The head
per
fect, ’ I used to call her. It was all over for me
now. She would have to report me, even if she didn’t have it in for me. This
would be the fourth time since school started that I’d been caught smoking in
the john. I’d already been suspended for two days after the third time. Could
expulsion be far behind? I remember resigning myself to it: ‘Great, I’m out of
here finally.’
“With the cigarette hanging out of my mouth, I casually washed my hands in the
sink, ignoring her. She came over to the sink next to me and started to wash her
own hands without saying a word. I could feel her eyes on me in the mirror, and
every now and then she’d look to the side at me, but I wouldn’t give her the
satisfaction of noticing her. Then Rosie said in a low voice but very clear,
‘It’s never going to wash away.’ I didn’t even know if she was talking to me or
to herself, but after hearing that I couldn’t help looking at her in the mirror.
Her eyes were boring right into me, into my filthy secret soul. She moved
closer—I could feel her arm touching mine— and she spoke those two little words
that saved my life. ‘You too, ’ she said.”