The Bubble Reputation (4 page)

“Yes,” said Rosemary, “the accumulation.” She knew very well that it was an accumulation of ice in Uncle Bishop's scotch glass that had brought on the current panic.

“It's been going on for a long time,” he said. “Up there at the North Pole. Up at old Santa's place. And when that baby tips, we're gonna go ass-end. They'll find washing machines from Detroit out in Santa Monica.” He dropped something. Rosemary heard a thump. It was the receiver, but soon he was back.

“Is there anything we can do to save ourselves?” she asked. The rain had stopped. Large beads of water clung to the window, yellow with light from the yard.

“Thanks to gravitational force,” Uncle Bishop said, slurring his words now, “there's four safe spots on the earth. But only the Freemasons know where they are.”

“How much time do we have?” Rosemary asked, suppressing a yawn. She would never let Uncle Bishop think that these panics, which occurred each time he sat down with a new book from his Strange But True Book Club and a bottle of Glenlivet, were trifles.

“Until May fifth, in the year 2000,” he said. “That's when all the planets in the solar system line up. It's all recorded in the Great Pyramid, Rosie. And then kaput. No more earth as we know it. No more people. Except for four goddamn gaggles of Freemasons. I never trusted those smug little bastards, with their rings and their secrets.”

“Try to get some sleep,” Rosemary said, soothing him. “Try not to think about it. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Good night then.”

“Wait!”

“What now?”

“For Chrissakes, don't say a word about those four safe spots to Miriam. She'll be down there erecting condos and throwing an Ice Accumulation Party.”

“I won't say a word,” said Rosemary.

“She's selling the state of Maine, you know,” Uncle Bishop warned.

***

Before going up to bed, Rosemary went down to the den to check the fireplace one more time. The room was intensely quiet; the fire died away, the rain done outside. She could see Winston, the outdoor cat, lounging on the patio, a cat who had never warmed to humans. Inside, on the shelves, hundreds of quiet books stared down at her, books she and William had collected from bookstore sales, garage sales, and the countless times they broke down and paid full price. Shelves of books. Millions of words. Things people wanted to say. Things they
had
to say. She reached for the worn copy of Shakespeare's collected works, one of William's prized books from college, and opened it.

“‘All the world's a stage,'” Rosemary read. “‘And all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts.'” Her part now seemed to be nothing more than dealing with William's
exit.
She stepped back so that she could look at the colors of the spines. It was a room full of books. And spring was coming to the land around the house of words. Rebirth was coming to Bixley, Maine. The warm rain would take away the last remnants of snow along the edge of the woods. It had been a long winter and now it was over. The slush would soon let the fields and roads and driveways turn dry again. During the day, she had heard the far-off murmur of softball teams being organized at the ballpark. April was turning into May, and soon there would be buds everywhere, and shoots coming up out of the ground with the promise of new grasses and silky petals. And the migrant birds would return, their heads full of broken images of faraway places most of Rosemary's neighbors had never been. Places
she
had never been. The birds had been there and back, to cities and towns in the South where the magnolia and dogwood had burst into flowers weeks before. Now it was Maine's turn. And spring
was
coming. Rosemary could sense it lying in wait for her. And she could sense something else waiting, too. She could feel change rising up inside her. She had some questions she needed answered, not just about William, but also questions about herself. She had a skin to shed, and that would not be easy.

June followed May into Bixley, Maine, bringing with it the last of the shoots, and buds, and a card that came in the afternoon mail. Rosemary had gone outside to check on the new plants, which already had tiny flowers on them. The afternoon was perfectly June. The land had finally dried from the aftermath of winter. A few birds fluttered about the feeder that hung in the front yard. The cats lounged in furry balls on the steps, jingling the tags on their collars when they stretched and keeping a lazy eye on the birds. When she remembered the mail, she left her gardening gloves on the front steps and walked down to the box. It was a small card, the kind that comes ten to a packet, with seashells on the front. It was postmarked Portland and Rosemary smiled, knowing it was from Elizabeth, her best college chum whom she hadn't seen in years.

As Rosemary closed the door to the mailbox, she heard a faint buzzing, as if a distant lawn mower was cutting someone's grass farther down Old Airport Road. Her house sat one mile out on this road. Most traffic used New Airport Road, which came into the tiny airport on its other side. A few families lived along Rosemary's road, and some folks still used it to get out to the airport. But the business done there was conducted on a small scale, with five or six Cessnas and Piper Cubs a day scheduled for flights to Bangor, Portland, and Boston. The occasional takeoff of a small plane over Rosemary's house was certainly no sound pollution, no window-shaking, Congress-petitioning noise. The planes were already up fairly high and merely purring by the time they passed overhead. But this droning sound was different.

Rosemary looked above the row of birches and pines that lined the field beyond the house and saw a birdlike creature skirting the tops of the trees, buzzing faintly. Caught by surprise, she felt a sudden jolt of fear. Her mind raced for a word of description.

“Pterodactyl,” she said aloud. It was all she could think of until the apparatus swerved into a graceful arc and came back toward her, casting an earthbound shadow on her field.

“Pterodactyl,” Rosemary said again, as the man in the ultralight soared over her head, close enough that she could see his goggles and the red glove of his hand as he waved down to her. Then he was gone, over the tops of the trees, and down the slope of the hill. Maybe into extinction. He had waved. And she had waved back. There had been an interaction between strangers, as though they were in a busy New York airport, and not the sparsely populated town of Bixley where the horizon, like some uncharted graveyard, had risen up to swallow him. A flying man, in a red-and-yellow suit, birdlike, in and out of her life almost as quickly as William. “What is eight years when pitted against the course of time?” William had asked her, one night before he left for London, and she only supposed he was right. That time made no difference. Time was more coincidence than importance. Rosemary remembered his Time Chart, a huge, long thing he had ordered from the History Book Club. It began by charting those murky eons after the earth's crust formed, when the chemical soup of the oceans held only the seaweeds and the soft little creatures without backbones. “Rosie, did you know that after the earth cooled down and formed its crust, it rained for sixty thousand years?” William asked. This had been just a year ago, a summer's night when they stood with their arms around each other's waist and watched a shower of light rain beat its way up Old Airport Road. “The clouds were high-banked and the rain was a continual downpour. Three thousand million years ago, it finally stopped. This little drizzle is nothing, Rosie, nothing at all.” And he had taken her by the hand over to the massive Time Chart, the history of the ages encapsulated. He ran a finger past the coming of the reptiles and mammals, the Old Stone Age, the introduction of farming, the Metal Age. He scuttled past Mesopotamia and Egypt and Greece. He skipped over Byzantium and Russia and China. The Aztecs and the Mayans. He crept to the Western Civilizations and followed his finger up through the ages, to the Atomic Age and Man on the Moon. Then he wrote in gentle, artistic strokes:
William
Meets
Rosemary, 1983 A.D. Love at First Sight.
What had happened to that chart? She should find it and unroll its full length. She should put it up in the den. There were some truths there to be learned. “This little drizzle, Rosemary, is nothing at all. There's no downpour nowadays. Nowadays, even the gods are lazy.”

With the birdman gone, Rosemary brought the mail into the kitchen. She had raised the window earlier to put a portable screen beneath it and now a puff of breeze came through to ruffle the curtains. She filled her copper water kettle and put it on the stove to heat. Then she got the pot ready and measured out some Earl Grey leaves. While the tea was steeping, Rosemary stepped in and out of the shower quickly, then came back to the kitchen wrapped in a fuzzy blue bathrobe to pour herself a cup of tea. She sat at the table, the little card before her. The tea and the shower had been a means of savoring the anticipation. She always did this with personal mail since it was so rare. Without William's occasional cards now, it was, in fact, nearly nonexistent. The most personal mail she'd received in months, since the last prophetic postcard from Brussels, was from a book club that had referred to her as
Miss
O'Neal
instead of the usual
Dear
Member.
Rosemary hoped Elizabeth's card was not just a quick note but full of the news of her life. Aside from a couple phone calls a year, the friendship was not maintaining the constancy they swore it would, at their college graduation party. Lizzie usually filled her in on family news each December when her Christmas card included a sheet of holiday stationery, their lives decked out with holly and small snowmen holding shovels. But to hear from Lizzie in June was most unusual.

The message was brief and not at all what Rosemary had expected. Lizzie was dropping the kids off at a camp downstate for the summer. She needed a few days to get shed of a husband and a cute puppy that was turning into a large dog and still not housebroken. She was driving on up to Bixley. Would arrive Saturday afternoon. Please forgive her the short notice.
Saturday
afternoon!

Day after tomorrow, Rosemary thought, and wished she had more time to get things in order. But then it was, after all, Lizzie. Lizzie wouldn't notice if there were cobwebs in every corner or dust mice the size of baseballs beneath the bed. Lizzie, who had once been her college roommate at the University of Maine at Fort Kent, had come seven hours north from Portland to go to school. “I want to find out what it's like to live among you Eskimos up here in northern Maine,” she had told Rosemary at their first meeting. Lizzie, who brushed her teeth while in the shower because her mother had always hated for any of the children to waste water. Lizzie, who had taken motherhood and done wonderful things with it, who had turned marriage into what appeared to be an extended honeymoon. Lizzie, with her long legs, lazy movements, and lilting voice, had married Charles Vanier, another college classmate, and had settled down peacefully with him and their two children back in Portland.

Rosemary watched the evening inch in and with it a distant clap of thunder. She would need to gather the towels from her clothesline. On balmy summer days she couldn't bring herself to start up the clothes dryer. There was something in the smell of a towel that has flapped all afternoon in the outdoors. There was something in the sound of a sheet snapping sweetly that she was addicted to. These were the smells and sounds of childhood, wrapped up with the memory of Mother, only flirtatiously crazy, pushing a plastic basket of wet clothes across the ground with her foot, one clothespin at a time in her mouth, as she moved down the line. Then, in the mornings, if there were screens beneath the windows to let in the breeze, noises came in, too, and Rosemary would waken to what sounded like the flapping of giant, prehistoric wings. One meager clothesline was all that she had strung in the backyard, from the corner of the house to the fence. But it was at least
something
attached to the past, connecting her to the old way.

“The screens,” she told Mugs, as she heard the thunder again. “I need to take out all the screens before the rain hits.” But she sat instead and drank another cup of tea before it grew cold and smiled at the little card with the brownish seashells on the front. Elizabeth was coming to the big house, Elizabeth of the college-girl world of young, foolish dreams. Rosemary would need to ready the guest room with the wide pumpkin-pine boards and delicate rose wallpaper. She would need to take the handmade quilt, a treasure from her grandmother O'Leary, out of its plastic protector and let it sprawl and breathe again. She would let all the designs burst forth, designs made of clothing scraps, articles that had belonged to Grandmother and her family. The pink was from a dress that Mother wore one Easter, a dress saved all year round and ordered out of the Almighty Catalog, the seams let out each year until there was nothing more to give. The quilt's blue was from Grandfather's wedding suit. The green had been from an old tablecloth belonging to some ancestor back in Ireland. It had been a treasure to Grandmother, this patch of green, as though it were the blessed field of shamrocks her own grandmother had longed to dally in once again before she died. Now the green was quietly in the quilt, little Irish hills here and there among the memories. It upset Rosemary, this notion of one's most precious belongings in a lifetime falling into such disrepair, falling
behind
new fashions to become a kind of museum. A shrine to the old days. Sleeping beneath the quilt at night, she felt pressed down, smothered with forgotten wishes. The very
earth
of the old country, burying her alive. Elizabeth, however, would go hog wild over the quilt.

After the light rain came and went, Rosemary did the stretching exercises that Robbie had taught her. He had finally talked her into running, if not for the exercise, at least for a release of tension. Now she had, in two months, built up to a two-mile run, which took her down to Bixley, around its circumference, and home again. “You'll be in a marathon before long,” Robbie had teased her.

“I'm already in one,” Rosemary reminded him. “It's called life, and it's hell on the home stretch.” But running did calm her.

At Uncle Bishop's, Rosemary spotted the baby-blue Datsun. It was driven furiously up to the front steps, its grilled face pinched and angry.
It does look like one of those cars in
The Twilight Zone, she thought, as she ran past the yard. She heard angry voices rise up from inside the beige house with brown shutters, the house that was home to Uncle Bishop and the elusive Jason, whom Rosemary still had not met. She kept her stride and passed the house. Next door, Mrs. Abernathy, who wrote a column about birds for the local paper, was in her front yard inspecting one of her purple martin houses.

“They fight constantly now!” she shouted to Rosemary. “The town should do something about them!”

When Rosemary saw Mr. Cobb in his front yard, listening hard to hear what Mrs. Abernathy had said, she felt suddenly like a relay runner, carrying gossip instead of a baton. Perhaps she should shout to Mr. Cobb, “They're at it again!” and let him run to the next yard and pass on the news. But Rosemary quickened her pace and left the drama behind her.

Back at the house, she soaked in a hot bath and read sections from the latest
Newsweek.
Then she crawled into a fresh pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt and poured a glass of wine. She settled into the armchair in the den and dialed Uncle Bishop's number. It rang four times before he picked it up and shouted, “What?” into the receiver. In the background, a man was screaming hysterically.

“Uncle Bishop, is this a bad time for me to call?” Rosemary asked. She heard the sound of glass shattering.

“No, no,” Uncle Bishop insisted. “It's just Ralph. He's refusing to eat his cat food again.” There was a loud crescendo of what sounded like drum cymbals. Uncle Bishop was suddenly no longer on the phone. Rosemary waited.

“
Ralph
is making that noise?” she asked, when he finally returned.

“You haven't seen him lately, Rosie.” He sounded out of breath. “He's really grown.”

Rosemary said good-bye, knowing Uncle Bishop would call back when he felt the time was right.

***

It was early evening when Rosemary backed her bicycle out of the garage and dusted off the seat. Running had preoccupied most of her exercise time, but now she would bicycle innocently past Uncle Bishop's house to see if all had quieted down behind the chocolate shutters. As she turned on Uncle Bishop's street, things seemed peaceful enough. Even the Datsun appeared more relaxed. It seemed to have given up its snarl. Rosemary swerved her bike into a graceful arc, as the man in the ultralight had done earlier in the sky, and was about to pedal back down College Street when she spotted Mrs. Abernathy, still busily moving about her front yard, dusting and polishing, as if the yard were an extension of her living room. Mrs. Abernathy's front lawn was a carpet of fake grass that she had had Gauvin's Landscaping install for her the very year Mr. Abernathy died. “To discourage insects and their ilk,” Mrs. Abernathy had told Rosemary. “The backyard I leave to my birds so they can find their juicy snacks. But the front yard is mine.”

Rosemary understood this, but Uncle Bishop was not so charitable. “She vacuums her goddamn grass,” he said, after an afternoon spat with Mrs. Abernathy. “She hooks a big orange extension cord to her Hoover.”

Mrs. Abernathy waved, so there was little Rosemary could do but clasp the hand brake and walk her bike into the driveway.

“You've missed my morning glories closing up,” Mrs. Abernathy said loudly enough to
waken
those flowers. Rosemary imagined them lifting their puzzled heads, like confused children who have heard their mother shout, unreasonably, in the middle of the night.