The Bubble Reputation (5 page)

“How have your birds been?” she asked, and leaned the bicycle on its kickstand.

“They put in a hard winter,” Mrs. Abernathy answered. “There's an eighty percent mortality rate, you know. But the ones who have survived are really enjoying this mild weather.” She waved a hand about her head, emphasizing.

Rosemary sat on Mrs. Abernathy's steps, where she could stretch her legs.

“Do you still have the stray kitten?” Mrs. Abernathy asked, and Rosemary remembered in a flash the rainy morning of the homeless kitten, covered with fleas and starving. How soft it was after food and a thorough cleaning. How soft William's skin was that thunderous morning when she had crawled back into the warm bed beside him, with the kitten rejuvenated and running its padded feet up and down William's back. “A stray?” he'd asked as he rubbed his eyes. And the yellow-eyed kitten had curled into a safe ball, as though it were a huge caterpillar, next to William's pillow.

“It's a big cat now,” Rosemary said, thinking of how quickly Mugs had grown, remembering in bits and clips that morning of the summer storm, when she and William made love early, Rosemary having been awakened by the scratching at the back door, by the tiny, desperate meows.

“That's nice,” Mrs. Abernathy said. “Cats are okay if they're well behaved.” As she hovered over her morning glories, inspecting each blossom, Rosemary realized how birdlike the old woman had become. Her little white head dipped and bobbed as she spoke. The eyes seemed to see at all angles. There was something almost feathery in the fine hairs that grew above her lip. She was tiny, nervous as a bird, flitting almost as she arranged flowerpots near the steps and tugged at the sweater resting on her shoulders.

“Your flowers are very pretty,” said Rosemary.

Mrs. Abernathy's toes seemed to curl in their sandals, perhaps in search of a twig on which to perch. In search, perhaps, of the careless earthworm.

“They are lovely, aren't they?” she agreed, straightening a potted geranium. A door slammed sharply over in Uncle Bishop's yard, and Rosemary glanced up to see a small man on the front steps. He dropped a suitcase down on the porch, and then disappeared back inside the house.

Jason
, thought Rosemary. Mrs. Abernathy looked up, too, and then frowned. With Uncle Bishop and Jason living in the beige house with chocolate shutters, it wasn't exactly
Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood
.

“The noise is sometimes deafening,” said Mrs. Abernathy. “I've never known a
normal
couple to fight that much. Mr. Abernathy would be up in arms, I tell you, if he were still with us.”

Lightning bugs came and went above the fake grass, probably confused, maybe even embarrassed, until they found the real grass beyond the trees, beyond the so-many-dollars-a-foot turf. Mrs. Abernathy's seashell chimes clinked and clanked from where they hung near the door, bragging of an ocean they'd never see again. Two neighborhood boys biked by, rearing their bicycles up in the air as if they rode wild horses. One swerved precariously close to the other, nearly c
ausing a s
pill.

“Bailey, you fucker! Watch where you're goin'!”

“Get your ass out of my way,” Bailey warned.

“These children nowadays,” said Mrs. Abernathy sadly. “I didn't know anyone in my generation who would speak like that. Even the wild ones were polite.” The chimes sang ag
ain, agre
eing.

“They get to me, too,” said Rosemary, “and not long ago, I had a whole classroom of them.”

A mourning dove was singing far off in the tangles of a thicket. Mrs. Abernathy cocked her head, as though interpreting.

“He's been mate-singing all day long,” she said. “He'll sing until he finds one. It pains me to hear him.”

“He'll find a mate,” Rosemary assured her, and wondered if maybe
she
should perch atop a TV antenna and sing all day. The simple truth was that even if she were ready to find a
nice
man, just a man to eat dinner with, see an occasional movie, there was no one in Bixley like William, with his head full of wonderful notions and swirling brainstorms. At least no one she had met.

A clamor started up on the front porch of Uncle Bishop's house. Rosemary saw that Jason was back with a large box in his arms, Uncle Bishop at his heels.

“I know what's in that box!” Uncle Bishop shouted. He grabbed at the box as Jason jerked it away. “That vase belonged to my mother!”

“You never
had
a mother!” the little man who was Jason shouted back. “They found you floating in the reeds in a basket. A very
big
basket, might I add.” He put the box down.

“You can steal what you want, but not that vase!” Uncle Bishop was now rummaging through the box of clothing, which appeared to be feminine, until a mass of apparel lay scattered about the steps and on the lawn.

“Are you satisfied, you big barn?” Jason asked, picking up his things and folding them in an effort to repack the box.

“You gave it to
her
, didn't you?” Uncle Bishop demanded.

Rosemary could tell that he was not just angry. He was feeling emotional pain, a genre she knew well. She'd just never brought herself to unpack boxes and strew clothing about her front lawn. The lover's pain.

“You broke that vase in a drunken stupor,” Jason cried. “This jealousy of yours is what has finally ended this relationship.” He twirled on his heel and disappeared back into the house. Uncle Bishop threw what looked like a splendid black pump out across the lawn. It bounced off his mailbox and skipped across the road like a flat stone on water. Then he went back into the house behind Jason and slammed the door.

“Two men ranting about a vase,” Mrs. Abernathy whispered from her front steps, where she was now sitting. “This world expects us senior citizens to take every abnormality it hurls at us with a grain of salt. Without so much as a howdy do.” Rosemary had not realized that the relationship between Uncle Bishop and his latest lover was such a boiling one. She sympathized with Mrs. Abernathy, but there was nothing she could do. If Uncle Bishop's neighbors decided to report him to the police, so be it. She would try to raise bail money, as a good niece should.

“Good night, Mrs. Abernathy,” Rosemary said, and patted her arm. “Don't worry about the dove. He'll be fine. And I'll be looking forward to your column this Sunday.”

Mrs. Abernathy brightened. She churned inside her sweater, dabbing at the arms of it, as though it were something most rare, something she could moisten and twist and bend into a nest for herself. To avoid the mortality rate. Eighty percent a year. Such horribly dim odds. “The cedar waxwing,” Mrs. Abernathy said. “And his fondness for mountain ash berries. Be sure you read it.”

“I wouldn't miss it,” said Rosemary.

Out on the road, she stopped to pick up the black pump. It was a large shoe, compared to the size she herself wore, but it was small for a man, and slightly scratched from wear. A delicate blue bow was attached to the side, insectlike, a butterfly just arrived for its first brood. Rosemary turned the shoe over in her hand, expecting the bow to fly off at any minute, and thought about its mate. It was like the one remaining garnet earring she had in her jewelry box, that little gift from William. There was a sadness in seeing what was really just
part
of
a
whole
, something nonfunctioning alone. The rejoining of such a pair of shoes had whisked Cinderella out of the ashes and into the castle. But
one
shoe? What good was it? Rosemary imagined Uncle Bishop desperately trying to fit it on pinkish male feet all over Bixley, seeking out his prince, years after Jason had gone, growing pale and old, until the shoe itself lost its string, like a rotten tooth, and fell apart.

We've been taught to think in pairs
, Rosemary thought, as she stood in front of Uncle Bishop's house. “We've been taught that we're no good alone.”

She tossed the leather pump back across the yard and watched as the blue butterfly settled right side up by the front steps, where Jason would surely discover it. Now the shoe was back as close to its mate as possible. Rosemary had done her part, if only symbolically, to help reunite that most unusual prince and princess who lived unhappily, once upon a time, behind shutters as chocolate as any witch could whip up, in the gingerbread house on the edge of Mrs. Abernathy's enchanted grass.

It's Noah who's responsible for all this pair shit
, Rosemary thought.

She pedaled home, away from the serenade of the mourning dove, its
coo
coo
coo,
rolling in from the darkness. The night was alive with tapping sounds, the tiny beat of June bugs hitting their drum bodies against the windows with lights in them. Rosemary went home to turn down her grandmother's quilt of memories, to make ready the room that would soon have Elizabeth's blouses and belts scattered to and fro and used Kleenex with makeup on them lolling about like dusty snowballs.

At one thirty, an hour into a troubling sleep about canvases and oils spilling about on Grandmother's quilt, the phone rang sharply with its discordant urgency. It rang the way it had a few months earlier, to bring the news about William, and Rosemary had so casually answered it, thinking it surely another “Children's Hour.” She finally collected herself enough to let William and his canvases and colors sink back into her subconscious. The situation was finally clear to her. She had even suspected earlier that unless Uncle Bishop and Jason made up, he would call. It wasn't just a strange-but-true book that precipitated “The Children's Hour.” She reached out and caught the phone in the middle of its sixth barrage. He would never give up. The apparatus would still be ringing at dawn.

“He's gone,” Uncle Bishop said sadly, and there was a trembling behind his words, and a stillness in the house around him. This was a huge transformation from the earlier clanging and banging, shaking and breaking. Rosemary knew such stillness. “He's gone for good.”

“Ralph?” she asked, but Uncle Bishop didn't laugh.

“Don't be a smart-ass,” he said.

Then, Uncle Bishop was gone, too, off in the house somewhere. The line lay quiet until he did whatever he did at those times: go to the bathroom, pour more scotch, feed Ralph, start an ant farm. Rosemary had learned that if he wasn't back in ten minutes to hang up. He'd forgotten. But she knew he felt better just knowing the line was open. “That telephone line is like an umbilical cord to him,” Miriam had said once, in Uncle Bishop's presence. “What's this?” Uncle Bishop had asked incredulously. “Miriam stumbles upon a metaphor? Did it hurt, Miriam?” But he was back in a minute. Jason's leaving was too sharp an ache, this “Children's Hour” more painful than Alger Hiss being framed by Nixon's lying pumpkin, or Bruno Hauptmann's innocence.

“Where did Jason go?” Rosemary asked. Outside, the moon was shining brightly. No more rain. Maybe there would even be sun for Lizzie's arrival. Rosemary flicked on the bedside lamp and the moonlight disappeared in the hundred-watt flash. She could never tell Uncle Bishop
another
time
even though there were nights when she'd have liked to. He was the one who had come to the school plays, who had paid for the prom dresses, who had encouraged her in calculus, even studied for exams with her.

“Back to his ex-wife,” he said finally. “She knows he's a transvestite but she's taking him back anyway. What is
wrong
with some people?”

Rosemary smiled. “It'll be okay,” she said.

“This is a typical case of denial. This is just another fags-to-bitches story.”

“I see,” said Rosemary. What else could she say?

“I just needed to hear someone's voice.”

“I know.”

“You're an ace,” Uncle Bishop said.

“And this from a
queen
?” Rosemary asked, and put the receiver back on its cradle.

***

She slept late, unable to curl into a deep sleep after the panicky phone call from Uncle Bishop, and mostly because of the unsettling montage of broken dreams about William. When she finally opened her eyes at eleven thirty, she heard a horn blaring away in the front yard. It was the same incessant bleat as back in college, when Lizzie came home with sacks of groceries or baskets of laundry and needed Rosemary's help in dragging it all up the stairs and into their apartment. Rosemary lifted a curtain panel and looked down the slope of the veranda to where Lizzie's car squatted in the drive. She half expected to see the same old college campus off in the distance, the Saint John River traipsing among the birches, Mr. Nadeau's tiny grocery, and Lizzie's orange Rabbit parked on the street below. She half wished she could reel in the years, as though they were trout from that same old river, leave them flopping on the banks beneath those magnificent birches.

Only in Hollywood
, Rosemary thought, when she saw the shiny black New Yorker and Lizzie's dark head bobbing out from behind the wheel.

Lizzie had been in Bixley for a week before she told Rosemary the truth about her visit. They had spent the nights drinking wine, retelling the old college stories, playing records from Rosemary's towering stack of forty-fives, records that skipped so much a spool of thread had to be tied to the arm so that the needle wouldn't jump. This would have made William cringe, this haywire job on the needle. But, because of it, Joan Baez sang “George Jackson” over and over. Steppenwolf told potheads they were
born
to
be
wild
. The Doors, with handsome Jim Morrison, dead in his bones, invited groupies everywhere to light his fire. And Creedence Clearwater Revival, good ole CCR, could still see that bad moon, forever rising.

They were on the front porch with cold glasses of cheap champagne, toasting each other, toasting the memories, when Lizzie leveled with her about the visit.

“It's all come crashing down,” she said, and Rosemary looked at her friend's face, knowing how easy it was to read Lizzie. But her face was older than the storytelling face of the coed and, veiled, it said nothing.

“London Bridge?” Rosemary asked, and looked away from Lizzie's hushed-up face and off into the wild apple trees in the field across the road. The trees were no longer a burst of flowery dots as they had been that spring, but now held a scattering of tiny, sour apples, still growing.

“I wish it were,” said Lizzie. “However, it's my marriage.”

“In a million years I wouldn't have guessed,” said Rosemary. “I thought you and Charles were indecently happy.”

“Some of us who are unhappy become masters of the fake smile.” Lizzie unloosed her long, brown legs, which seemed to shoot out of her cutoff jeans. She pushed her bangs back. Her mouth was small as ever, pouty, and the oval eyes were still large and green. She picked up the bottle of champagne and refilled her glass. “We get so good at pretense,” Lizzie added, “we start to believe the myth ourselves.”

Rosemary listened to the muffled noises of the frogs camouflaged among the grasses of the little creek that ran through its culvert under the road in front of her house. She waited for Lizzie's confession to unfold. A car roared down Old Airport Road. Jan Ferguson, the driver, tooted and waved. Rosemary waved back. Lizzie drank more champagne, but her eyes were suddenly red and watery.

“Charles has found himself a little diversion,” she said. She took a pink tissue out of her sweater pocket and blew her nose.

“Damn, I'm sorry to hear that,” Rosemary said, and put a hand on Lizzie's arm.

“A goddamn doctor. What would you do about that? He cheated me out of my script. Can you hear me shouting, ‘What? You're leaving me for a lowly neurosurgeon?'”

Rosemary nodded sympathetically. “How did he meet her?” she asked.

“She's actually a dermatologist,” said Lizzie. “He developed a little thing on his lip, and then a bigger thing for her. I believe she was successful, however, in removing the mole. And you know what else, Rosie?”

“There's a
what
else
?”

“I've found someone, too.” Rosemary filled her own glass back up with champagne. You just couldn't count on anything anymore. Lizzie and Charles, the immortal wedding couple, the perpetually happy pair, unraveling like old socks.

“And I've got another
what
else
,” Lizzie went on. “I was the first one to fall by the wayside. Charles taking up with his skin doctor—and don't you love that,
skin
doctor—was just his reaction to having no one. Would you have guessed that? That it was me who pulled out the first nail? Now there's no nails left. I don't know what's held us together for the past year.”

“A year?” Rosemary was shocked. “This has been going on for a full year and you never told me?” She thought of the mistletoed lie that had arrived that past December on its Christmas stationery. Even the snowmen were lying.

“I didn't want to destroy your illusions.” Lizzie laughed, and slapped Rosemary's ponytail. She pulled her long legs in again, brought them up in a graceful arch, and rested her chin on her knees. “I think I was just trying to get Charles's attention is why I did it in the first place.”

“It amazes me, Lizzie. I had no idea.”

“You've always thought of Charles and me as so happily married,” Lizzie said. “Yet all that time I was thinking that
you
were the blissful one. Your letters about life with William were so exciting. I was reading Dr. Spock, and Charles was honing his executive skills at General Motors.”

Rosemary hadn't spoken of William yet. She hadn't decided if her old college friend was someone she could pour it all out to, sort over the mess. Robbie had phoned Lizzie with the awful news and she had wanted to come to the funeral. But Rosemary convinced her over the phone that it would be more burdensome than helpful. “The next time I see your face, I want to be back together again as a human being,” she had told her. “Because right now, Lizzie, I'm all loose ends. I want it to be happiness that brings us together again, and not this.” So sadness had brought them together after all.

“It isn't out of misery that I've come,” said Lizzie, with her old talent for reading Rosemary's thoughts. “If that were the case, I would have roared into your yard a year ago. I'm all over the teary-pillow stage. I just need to think about what I should do. The truth is, I've missed you. And I know how you must miss William.”

Rosemary smoothed her hair back, twirled the ponytail around her finger.
William
. How just the mention of his name could elicit such a quiet panic in her, could start a trembling, an emotional earthquake with sharp tremors.

“Do you want to talk about him?” asked the telepathic Lizzie. Rosemary shook her head.

“Not yet,” she said.

The orange sun was dipping down behind the apple trees, about to disappear in clouds and horizon. A red-winged blackbird, its epaulets flashing a blood red, flew away from the cattails growing across the road. Orange. Red. The green leaves of the apple trees. Even colors pained her now, knowing how William understood them, broke them down into components, admired them. Above the sinking sun was the lonely trace where a jet had been and gone, a ghostlike trail, a mere memory, as William's life was now becoming. And even her memory of William was shaken. It had occurred to her during her three-month hiatus in the old house that perhaps she didn't know him well at all. Why hadn't he confided in her if his pain had grown to proportions large enough for him to commit suicide? This was the terrible knowledge nagging at her, trailing her about. After eight years,
she
did
not
know
him
well
at
all.
She had had no inkling of the catastrophe ahead, she who was closest to him. And so his wrists had opened up in a flowering red, his veins cut like telephone lines. “No communication anymore with the people around him,” Michael had said, when he phoned with the news, and Rosemary had shouted, “Why?” over the phone, via the busy satellite, slow enough to miss a word or two in his answer, which was no answer at all. No communication. All the lines cut. Severed. “The vena amoris,” William had said to her once, “leads directly to the heart. The Greeks believed that, anyway. That's why we put a ring on the fourth digit of the left hand when we marry.” But William had done away with the vena amoris.

Rosemary looked at the mailbox, fading into the shadows by the edge of the road, and tried to think of other things than William and paints and suicide. She was afraid she might cry.

“Speaking of destroying someone's illusions,” she said, “does your mother know about you and Charles?”

“Are you absolutely unwound in the brain?” Lizzie asked, astonished. “I might be an adulteress, but I'm not stupid.”

“I guessed she'd be the last person to know.”

“Did I ever tell you how she studied my freckles when I was a child?”

“A thousand times, Lizzie, you've told me.”

“She called them
pigmentary
disturbances
,” Lizzie said.

“And she made you brush your teeth in the shower to save water,” Rosemary added.

“Oh, well, that's just common sense,” Lizzie said. “My kids do that, too.”

Night was emerging now, out of the trees, out of the meadows, casting dark shapes upon the road.

“Do you remember the nightmare last night?” Lizzie asked. Rosemary wished Lizzie had forgotten it herself. It wasn't a nightmare, really, but just another of the William dreams she'd been having since his death. She'd gone down to clean the basement, a task she'd dreaded and delayed for months, and there, among the forgotten junk and bottled cranberries, she'd found William dead in a puddle of scarlet blood. And then the bottles of cranberries dropped one by one from the shelf and crashed to the cement below, each one hitting with a deadening
splat!
They were as loud as guns going off.
Splat! Splat!
Each bottle spilled its contents out across the floor in bloody spurts, the last of the wild cranberries she and William had picked the summer before and bottled for winter. Foolish work, she realized now. You can never prepare for a winter. “They'll cry to get out,” William had teased her, the day they set about canning up the berries. “They'll burst the jars, these poor things. Don't you see them as little wild creatures?” And then Lizzie was shaking her, cradling her and saying, “There, there, sweetie, it's all right.” Rosemary had come wide-awake in the handcrafted cherry bed. Dear Lizzie. How many times had she done this for her children? The dream, as they all seemed to be since the suicide, was pure color, all deep, billowing, cranberry red. Blood red and basement gray. Colors William would love.

“It's all canned nowadays, Lizzie,” Rosemary had whispered in the darkness. “The memories. Even the laughter. All bottled up.”

Lizzie had held her closer. “I know, sweetie,” she had whispered, when she really hadn't the slightest idea what Rosemary meant, hadn't journeyed into the horrible dream that had been swirling around in Rosemary's head while she slept.

“Yes, I remember it,” said Rosemary. It seemed silly to her now, as nightmares can the day following their terror.

“You were crying,” Lizzie said.

“Was I?” Rosemary asked.

The evening grew darker around them, but Rosemary made no move to get up and flick the porch light on. That would be an extended invitation to every early summer bug within a mile. More cars passed on the road, but no one waved or tooted their horn because they couldn't see the two women sitting on the steps with silence between them. Finally, Lizzie spoke. She was emptying the last of the champagne into their glasses, dividing it up between them.

“I was thinking earlier, you know,” Lizzie said, “when we were talking about my marriage, and a little about William, how funny it is.”

“What is?”

“Well, it's just that after years of not seeing each other, here we are still talking about boys like the old days. I'll grant you the talk has become much more serious, but nonetheless we're talking about boy troubles.”

“Let's go in,” said Rosemary. “I'm tired of talking about boys.”

In the den, they sprawled on each end of the sofa, as though it were the flowered eyesore in the University of Maine lounge. Lizzie hadn't mentioned a day she'd be leaving, and Rosemary didn't ask for one. It was such a pleasure to have company again in the big house, to have a spare room cluttered with suitcases, tennis shoes, and paperback novels, just as Lizzie's room had looked back in college.

At ten thirty the phone rang and a man asked to speak, please, to Elizabeth Vanier.

“It isn't Charles,” Rosemary told her.

“In that case,” Lizzie said, and winked, “I'll take it upstairs.”

While Lizzie was on the phone, Rosemary refilled her champagne glass and flopped down on the sofa. She opened
Harrowsmith
magazine to an article she'd begun earlier, advice on how to turn a small acreage into a habitat for wildlife. She liked the idea of animals roaming freely about the fields and woods behind her house. But after reading the same paragraph over and over again, she closed the magazine. The dream was still haunting her with its muted noises and fuzzy images. William, it seemed, had become even more elusive in death than he had been while he lived and loved and painted in the house, a house with an abundance of light beating in through all the windows.

“Can you still be trusted with secrets?” Lizzie asked, peeking around the den's door. Rosemary tossed the magazine aside and sat up.

“Try me,” she said, as Lizzie danced into the den and executed a shaky pirouette.

“Philip is coming to Bixley!” she shouted, and then did a quick cheerleader's jump into the air. “Can he stay here, Rosemary?”

“So, he's a Philip, is he?” Rosemary asked. The idea of more company than Lizzie was not appealing to her. She wasn't ready for strangers. “He doesn't throw shoes, does he?” Lizzie widened her eyes at this, but Rosemary waved the comment away.

“Listen,” Lizzie said, and kissed the top of Rosemary's head. “I'll tell you all about this tomorrow. Right now I'm going upstairs to curl up in bed and think about Philip and practice kissing the back of my hand.” Rosemary smiled. Maybe Philip would decide not to come after all. “Actually,” Lizzie added. She was picking at a red lump just above her knee that looked like a mosquito bite. “I need to go up to bed, turn out the light, and think about how I'm going to handle this mess.”

“Sweet dreams,” Rosemary told her, and hoped that when she herself fell asleep, her own dreams would be a bit sweeter.