The Bubble Reputation (20 page)

She fumbled in a kitchen drawer for a Magic Marker and found a black one. Her houseguests held themselves respectfully back, quiet as pallbearers. She left them in the lighted windows, peering out into the black night to see what she was up to. She selected a large rock from the pile near the grave site, rocks from the previous spring that William promised would become an outdoor fireplace. More idle promises. Rosemary printed CAT CROSSING on the flattest rock she could find. Then she threw the marker off into the night, toward the field of grasses. It arched against the black sky like a small rocket and landed soundlessly somewhere in the grass. “No one knows why early man created cave art,” William had once told her. “It may have occurred even earlier than twenty thousand years ago, because people created outside art, on animal hides and large rocks, but it was temporary and lost itself to exposure from the elements.” Here, then, was Mugs's artistic statement, his greatest work, the rock that registered his life on the planet. “We're all temporary, William,” Rosemary had replied, that night the two of them had lain before the fire, awash in its orange light. “We're all pebbles caught up in the stream.” She positioned the rock snugly, a cobblestone effect, into the mound of earth, Mugs's own cave. She shone the light one final time in order to read the inscription, and then she left Mugs alone, on his first night's journey back to the mother ship.

On the road in front of the house, she put down the second wine bottle, still nearly full. It was unlikely cars would pass that late at night, almost eleven, now that the tiny airport had buzzed to a halt. She shone the light steadily, back and forth across the road, studying, surveying. She took large sips from the wine bottle in between the mental architecture. A movement caught her eye and she looked quickly at the house. Three heads bobbed back from the window. And then the lights went out. She was not supposed to know that she was being watched.

She decided that, although the road's gravel was packed and solid, a spade, a chisel, and plenty of patience would suffice. She began with the spot of blood that had seeped like an oil spill into the gravel, taking her time, chiseling, spading, tossing the dirt aside, picking up the flashlight to inspect the job. Occasionally she squatted down to drink from the bottle and peer heavenward as Bootes pushed high in the sky. Arcturus, its brightest star, hung at the southern end of the formation. Corona Borealis was rising, and Coma Berenices was descending in the west. Faded, ancient cycles. Ursa Minor's light came from below Draco the Dragon, in the north. Rosemary found Serpens, its tail in the east, head as high in the southern sky as Arcturus. They were old friends, these herdsmen and their flocks. These heavenly creatures. In a few hours they would be gone and in their place would be Aquila the Eagle, setting tail-first into the west. And Pegasus, with his Great Square where Andromeda is chained to her galaxy, nearly three million light-years away. Aquarius, Rosemary's birth sign, would be low in the southern sky. Cygnus and Lyra would be descending in the west come three o'clock, taking with them their greatest treasures, Deneb and Vega, those two stars that never set to Alaskans. Very old friends, acquaintances, compadres, these trusted, luminescent faces.

She decided she may never use the new telescope. Maybe she would sell it. She could advertise for a buyer in Bixley's weekly paper. She would file the telescope away with the other idle notions she'd had in her life. The telescope would only remind her that she was earthbound, and she didn't enjoy that thought, not while William and Mugs were all weightlessness. “I want to go on the space shuttle, William,” she had told him, once. She had told William a lot of things. Who would she tell things to now? “I want to go just so that I can look back. I want my chance, William, to dally among the constellations.” William had been on another artistic binge, this time to New York, when the shuttle blew apart and came cascading down like money, like all the silver coins collected by NASA, falling. Space travel tickets, fluttering. “Were the astronauts afraid, William? Was Icarus afraid? Did the Great Wallenda cry out?”
I
knew
this
would
happen
, William wrote about the awful explosion in a letter.
It's just another feeble attempt of man's to marry the cosmos. The notion's been around forever.

It was almost 2:00 a.m. when she finished. The wine was a swallow away from being gone. She drank the last mouthful and then shone her flashlight with pride at her job, a foot-wide trench, six inches deep. It spanned the road like a lurking gash, a sinister smile. Let the bastards hit
that
at sixty miles an hour. Let their axles weather the blow, and their necks grow limp with whiplash. A trench, all by herself.

“What do you think, Muggser?” Rosemary asked. She felt as though she had built a tunnel through a mountain, except this one was aboveground. The yellow canary could go in here and breathe from one end to the other, then wing its way back to tell of it.

Rosemary scattered handfuls of small pebbles into the ditch's bottom so that it would assume the same color as the rest of the road. She wanted no one to be forewarned. She wanted no one to have the opportunity to slow down, much less stop. Mugs had been given no head starts.

By two thirty she had collapsed inside the tent. She vaguely remembered Lizzie and Uncle Bishop pushing aside the flap to check on her.

“Leave me alone,” she said. There would be no bathroom ritual at eight thirty. Mugs had relieved himself for the last time back on the steel table of the Bixley Veterinary Clinic. “Mars was in Sagittarius, William, when Muggser died, and Jupiter was in Pisces with all thirteen moons. Millions and millions of miles from the pain, William.” Anger, which Rosemary had never suspected during the long, hurtful weeks since she'd received the fatal word, flared up inside her. Anger at William. His had been the most cruel, the worst kind of desertion.

“You chicken shit,” Rosemary whispered.

From two thirty until she fell asleep an hour later, drunk with wine and physically exhausted, Rosemary cursed the man with whom she had spent eight years of her life.

Death is ringing me.

Death is stealing from me.

Death is dancing me ragged
.

—Bushman song

Rosemary had been awake since eight thirty. Her built-in clock, the same one that told her when the leaves were about to change color, had done its silent ringing to let her know that Mugs needed to pee. She hadn't bothered to open the flap and look out. Nothing out there interested her anymore.

Maybe it's time for me to do it, too
, she thought.
Maybe it's time for me to cash in all the chips.
Perhaps that was the secret William had known. Should she take sleeping pills, hordes of them, enough to put an army out for the night? She would leave legions of suicide notes. Everyone would grieve for her endlessly.

At nine o'clock she heard the first speeder hit her trap, the loud bouncing of the car on its frame, as though the whole contraption were really a trampoline and not a car. All this was followed by a car door slamming and a long trail of swear words. Or were they only
chips
and
chups
and
swee-ditchities,
these words? Language, as she perceived it now, was meaningless. Her eyes were plums, their lids swollen and salty from the tears. She touched them gently with an index finger and was amazed that they did not burst, purplish bubbles, to the touch. Her tongue was still thick with wine. And her temples buzzed with the effects of a hangover. She decided to lie there all day, on her hilltop, until she sorted out her fate. Perhaps she would drink herself to death, drown in Louis Jadot, a purple bloated corpse at the end. At ten thirty she heard movement outside the tent and what sounded like a cup clinking on a saucer.

“Rosie?” It was Uncle Bishop. She turned on her side, remembering the times Mugs had fitted himself into the curve of her stomach, like an embryo, and they had slept together, a bizarre Madonna and child. And she remembered how she and William had slept, snug as spoons.

“Rosie, four people have hit your trap already,” Uncle Bishop said happily. She knew. She had heard the commotion. “Lizzie and Miriam are at the window cheering. Lizzie has a pad and she's keeping track for you. You'd swear she was at a hockey game.” It must have been an uncomfortable walk for him, up through the frighteningly long grass. “I brought you some coffee,” he said. She heard clinking again, this time just outside the flap. And then he went back down the hill.

Rosemary postponed her suicide in order to drink the coffee. She couldn't plan her final exit with a hangover. But perhaps, after a stimulating brew, she could visualize a rope being tied securely about a girder beneath the Bixley bridge, and then around her neck. She would drop, like Icarus, out of a blue sky and down into blue water. But as soon as she finished the cup, she felt a pressure on her bladder, a need to urinate. She couldn't make definite plans until after a visit to the bathroom. Her hand shook so on the downhill walk that she expected the cup to bounce off the saucer. In the kitchen everyone said hello.

“Good morning,” Rosemary answered, treating them as a single entity. They weren't to blame, after all. In the shower she shampooed her hair, dusty from the road work. She dug dirt out from under her fingernails and then let the hot water beat at her aching muscles. This graveyard work, this shoveling, was strenuous work.

“Rosie?” It was Lizzie tapping with her fingernails on the bathroom door. Rosemary slipped into her terry cloth robe. She wrapped her hair in a towel.

“The door is unlocked,” she said. Lizzie came inside to give her a hug and Rosemary accepted it. With Mugs now also gone she had nothing to touch anymore. Nothing to touch her back when she ached for William.

“Honey, I was planning on leaving tomorrow, but I'll stay a bit longer if you'd like for me to.”

“No, Lizzie, please. It's okay.” Rosemary unwrapped her hair and began toweling it dry.

“Charles can pick up the kids.”

“Honestly, Lizzie. I'm not used to a lot of people. I'd like to be alone.”

“Are you sure?” Lizzie bit at a nail. Her blue-green eyes were large with concern.

“In a few months, maybe when the leaves turn pretty, come back and visit me for a couple days.”

“I'll worry about you,” Lizzie said, and gave Rosemary a final hug. “But I'll come back for the leaves. I remember autumns up here, you know.” She was trying to smile. Rosemary thought of that afternoon, at Madawaska Lake, with William, with autumn raging about their heads. “Scientists understand the life and death process of a leaf, Rosie,” he had told her, “but no one knows what causes them to burst into such magnificent colors.”

“Lizzie, this may sound rude, but could we say good-bye now? I'll probably go off on my bike, or read in the tent, and I'll be half asleep when you leave in the morning.”

“Well, I thought of that, too,” said Lizzie. “You know, that you'd want to be alone and I'd probably only spend another night with Miriam and Uncle Bishop. I can drive down to Bangor tonight and pick the kids up tomorrow.”

“That sounds like a good plan.”

“You should never pick up the kiddies without lots of rest, Rosie.”

Rosemary smiled at her. They hugged again. True, they would miss each other, but their lives had expanded since college, the way trees expand, branching and leafing and, in Lizzie's case,
acorning
.

***

Rosemary pedaled aimlessly up and down Old Airport Road. She took occasional excursions onto grassy tracks leading into the woods, tracks that were once wagon roads, before the automobile.
The
automobile
, that destroyer of pathways and, sometimes, pets. Now the woods were strung with magnificently spliced fences that had turned emerald with moss and rotted where they stood. The corpses of them wound in and around trees and marked the old wagon roads, which were themselves going back to nature, their surface padding thick and bouncy. Warblers of all kinds intertwined their songs in the branches, and bayberries grew in small orange clumps among the wild violets.
Pigeon
berries
, they had called them as children. Rosemary picked a handful and popped them into her mouth. She followed a small brook a few yards down to where it joined the Bixley River. On the bank there, she found a cluster of furbish louseworts, named for a Miss Kate Furbish, and once thought to be extinct until they were rediscovered in northern Maine. The fences, running like louseworts in among the spruce and pine, following a now-extinct pathway, had not been so lucky. She didn't want to think of things extinct, gone, vanished. It magnified the reason she was out carelessly biking. It reminded her that Father and William and Mugs all had gone the way of the old fences. What would she do without William and Mugs? A sadness swept over her, but there were no tears. She felt instead an anguish that Mugs's last moments on earth, what he took with him to meet the poison of the needle, was a remembrance of the gray car looming, the braking sounds, the gravel that stuck in his eye, and a searing pain he had never realized existed. Considering that, it would seem all the happy moments had been for nothing.

Now Rosemary was forced to realize the same about the years she'd spent with William. What had he remembered in those last moments? The many picnics, the Saturdays in bed with old movies on TV, the candlelight dinners for two beneath the painting of
The Chinese Hors
e
? Probably not. Maybe those eight years had been nothing at all to him. How could he think of her in those last minutes? She was only Rosemary O'Neal, after all, a high school teacher from northern Maine, competing with Death, the ultimate blind date. She sat quietly by the old fence rails, near her leaning bike, near the surviving louseworts. In a few days, she would get seeds for wild grasses and sprinkle them on Mugs's grave so that a bitter harvest could come of it. Her eyes filled with tears. He had been such a good and loyal friend, Mugs had. But, hard as she tried, there seemed to be no more tears for William.

As she walked her bike into the driveway, she noticed that the big New Yorker was gone.
Good-bye, Lizzie.

Out of exhaustion, Rosemary lay back on her sleeping bag to rest. Two hours later the rude sound of a horn woke her. She peeled back the flap and looked out to see the Datsun coming up the driveway in great jerking bounds. Uncle Bishop bounced in the passenger seat as Miriam fought to control the steering wheel. It looked as though she was learning to drive again, with Uncle Bishop as instructor. What had brought this on? No one else to play with but each other, no doubt. No one there to appreciate their constant barbs. The passenger door flew open quickly and Uncle Bishop lurched out.

“Oh blessed earth!” he cried. He knelt and kissed the gravel in Rosemary's driveway. Miriam slammed her own door, adjusted the pyramid of fiery hair, and put one hand on her hip.

“What state had the audacity to give
you
a driver's license?” she asked.

“Does the word
brake
have any meaning to you?” Uncle Bishop shouted. “Where is the logic in shooting ten feet past a stop sign, saying
oops
, and then backing up? Monkeys—and trust me, Miriam, because I've read about them—could learn to drive better than you.”

“Aren't you ashamed of yourself?” Miriam asked, and then disappeared into the house.

“Precious land,” Uncle Bishop said now, and then lay flat on his back.

***

Rosemary was having a sandwich, eating it in small, tasteless bites. She needed something in her stomach. Already the absence of Mugs's personality was being felt. There was a loud bang in all the silences, the fridge door opening without a battery of meows, no under-the-table begging for her sandwich, the bowl of Cat Chow near the kitchen door holding the same amount as it had the previous day, the water bowl untouched. Uncle Bishop came up and put his arms, heavy as girders, around her. Uncle Bishop's fatherly, motherly arms, big enough to hold a family. She felt the warmth in them, within this circle of security, and now the tears came again for Mugs, for William, for Father, for everything sorrowful that life has to offer. When the crying subsided to small sobs, then was gone, Uncle Bishop turned her around so that he could look into her eyes.

“Do you still want Miriam and me to leave you alone?” he asked, and Rosemary nodded. “You'd feel better if we were gone?” She nodded a second time.

“Please don't make me nod again,” she said.

“Okay, then,” Uncle Bishop told her. “Move back into your house. But you have to promise me that I can check on you often.” He flipped her ponytail and then gave her a hug. Miriam's head appeared from out of nowhere.

“I couldn't help hearing,” she said.

“Of course not,” said Uncle Bishop. “It's difficult when you're eavesdropping.”

“The minute you want company, Rosemary,” Miriam promised, “you call me at Helene Cantor's and I'll have her whisk me over here before you can say diddly-squat.” She gave Uncle Bishop one of her piercing stares. “I'll never ride in that space shuttle of yours again. There are dips in the road where one experiences weightlessness.”

“Get a horse and wagon,” Uncle Bishop said. “You've taken your last ride with me.”

“That's a relief,” said Miriam. “Maybe I'll live to see my next birthday.”

Rosemary left them there in the kitchen. In her bedroom, she put on the same running shorts from yesterday and the nylon top. She laced her shoes slowly. She didn't want to run but figured it would help with the anxiety she was feeling. Maybe it would shake her heart up and down enough to numb it. In the kitchen she let them both hug her again. She promised to be brave, and phone often, and get another cat, as Miriam would get another husband.

On the last mile home, running a lazy pace, she saw the Datsun coming toward her. It flew by in a blue flash. Miriam waved and Uncle Bishop tooted. That was all.
Good-bye.

***

Rosemary decided to stay in the tent. She wanted to be near the trees and grasses and bird sounds. She wanted to stay close to the sacred spot where Mugs was slowly becoming earth. She wanted firsthand information about the stars, without the safe glare of a windowpane between them. For two days she watched the constellations pull themselves into patterns, listened to the rattling of the leaves, fed herself and the birds the way one does chores, and imagined Mugs sinking farther down, settling in. Maybe it wasn't so bad, this going back to nature. Maybe it
was
better to take one's destiny into one's own hands. Perhaps she could start up the dusty car one bright morning, stoke up the old carbon monoxide. Taking the first step seemed to be the ticket. Maybe that's what William had learned. Maybe that's why he had shopped so diligently for razors.

On the third day, Uncle Bishop came to visit and was quite surprised at the reception he got.

“You lied to me,” he protested, as a BB zinged through the grass at his feet. In the afternoon, he returned with Miriam. Rosemary watched cautiously as they climbed the hill. She fired a BB into the grass at Miriam's feet with a fierce
plop!
She jacked the gun and aimed again.
Plop!

“Jesus F. McGillicutty!” Miriam shouted. “You're not serious, are you, Rosemary?”

“I'm a survivalist now, Miriam. I'm unbelievably serious.”

“You used to be a pacifist,” said Uncle Bishop. He sounded disappointed. The bottoms of his pants were rolled up for the trek up through the longer grass.

“And why don't you mow this lawn?” Miriam asked. “It's nothing but a brothel for snakes.”

“This is pure civil defense going on here,” said Rosemary.

“You wouldn't shoot at a man's scrotum, would you, Rosie?” Uncle Bishop was poking at the grass with a long stick he'd brought with him.