The Bubble Reputation Read online

  In the kitchen, Rosemary washed her hands and then went in search of her houseguests. In the den, she found Philip and Charles, each with a cocktail, each staring at the other from opposite sides of the room, pugilists waiting for the bell. Rosemary assumed that these were not the first drinks.

  “Gentlemen,” she acknowledged them both, and fairly.

  “Hello, Rosie,” said Charles.

  “Rosemary.” Philip nodded. Then silence and more glaring.

  “And how has the day been?” she asked. All she really wanted to know was if there’d been any new slandering and philandering. Maybe she was taking up William’s old job, now that he’d abandoned it. She had cautioned him many times, hadn’t she? “You get to know people, know their innermost thoughts, just so you can paint them. Once you have them on canvas, William, you leave them behind. Your art transcends the human being.”

  “It started off fine,” said Philip. “Before it turned into Three’s Company.” He was nervous, sweaty about the temples, not the same cavalier lover of yesterday. All that traipsing about the backyard had apparently been for naught. Or was it the booze? Philip got up to pour another scotch from Rosemary’s meager bar supply. The bar itself was small but the limited contents could accommodate most uncomplicated drinks, especially if one didn’t forget the bottle of sweet vermouth, and the bottle of dry vermouth. Rosemary always forgot one or the other.

  “Any lawyer worth his salt would know the ramifications of this little love nest,” Charles said. He still had the same booming resonance in his voice and sure-footedness in his words that had won him so many medals in the debate club. He had put on fifteen extra pounds during his executive years with General Motors, and now the threat of a middle-age bulge peeped above his belt. But he was still the good-looking Charles, with a few traces of gray sprouting along his temples. The light brown hair was still closely cropped, and the bluish gray eyes were still lined with those dark, almost girlish lashes.

  “A lawyer worth half his salt would know about a certain female doctor back in Portland,” Philip answered. Charles crossed his legs angrily but Rosemary had caught a quick flash of pain in his eyes. He knew now that Lizzie had told about the female doctor. Perhaps this telling, this verbal cheating, was more hurtful than the physical.

  “She started first,” Charles said.

  “Do you have proof as to when the relationship between Lizzie and me started?” asked Philip. He paced the den as though he were in court. Charles squirmed in the armchair, which had suddenly become the witness stand.

  “I prefer to think of it as an affair, not a relationship,” he said.

  “Do you have any evidence at all?” Philip continued. “A motel receipt, perhaps? A registered name? A witness?” Philip was good. He was on fire with facts and legalese. He could quote cases. “Hester Prynne versus Arthur Dimmesdale!” Rosemary wished he would shout loudly. Charles looked hopefully at her, as if for an objection. She simply raised her eyebrows and then poured herself a glass of wine.

  “There’s one thing you’ve forgotten, Barrister,” Charles said, and he drew himself upward. Rosemary recognized this body talk from college. Charles had found what he considered the most excellent loophole. “Lizzie.”

  “And what do you mean by that?” Philip seemed a little tipsy. Lizzie had mentioned that he was a social drinker. Perhaps by social she did not mean the occasion of Philip drinking with her husband Charles. Speaking of Lizzie, when was she coming down? Rosemary knew this little scene might be draining for her now, but it was the kind of legendary event they would sit over beers, years away, and talk about.

  “What about Lizzie?” Philip asked.

  “It’s quite simple,” Charles said. “Lizzie won’t lie.”

  Rosemary remembered Lizzie’s words, two weeks earlier. “I’ve got another what else,” Lizzie had said sadly over champagne as she sat on the front porch. “I was the first one to fall by the wayside.” Charles was right. Lizzie wouldn’t lie.

  “The only thing Elizabeth is dishonest about is her feelings for you. And that’s because she’s out of touch with her emotions.” Let Lizzie hear Charles say that. He’d see some emotions.

  “I doubt she would’ve married you in the first place,” said Philip, “if you hadn’t knocked her up.”

  Rosemary winced. Impregnated was a more civil word.

  “Why, you SOB,” said Charles. More verbal cheating by Lizzie, this pregnant-before-marriage fact.

  “Gentlemen,” Rosemary said for the second time that evening, but with much less conviction. “Please.”

  “Who’s the SOB?” Philip was also spelling. He pointed a lawyer’s index finger at Charles. “Is it me? Am I the SOB?”

  Your honor, he’s leading the witness. Rosemary put her glass of wine down and moved quietly toward the stairs.

  “Sit down, for Chrissakes,” Charles said to Philip. “You’re irrational.”

  “I’m irrational?” asked Philip. Rosemary paused at the foot of the stairs.

  “Charles, please,” she appealed to the more sober man. “This is childish and silly.”

  “Yes, you,” Charles said to Philip. “You’re irrational.”

  “A man who has a Freudian obsession with toy trains tells me that I’m irrational.”

  Rosemary flinched. Lizzie must have spoken of her husband’s favorite hobby. Model trains. Wasn’t anything sacred? Charles seemed ready to attack.

  “I need to listen to this from an ambulance chaser?” he asked Philip. He also represents men who have the hots for Shetland ponies, Rosemary wanted to add. Philip immediately began rolling up his sleeves. This was the first time Rosemary had seen a wrinkle befall any of his shirts. Charles stepped down from the witness stand and put his drink on the coffee table. He began undoing the buttons on his cuffs. Why did men do that? Rosemary wondered. Do sleeves really get in the way? She turned and raced up the fifteen steps and down the hall to Lizzie’s door. Mother opened her own door as Rosemary flew past.

  “No running in school!” Mother warned.

  “Lizzie!” Rosemary banged on the door. The radio was playing soft music inside. No wonder Lizzie was oblivious to the bullfight she had created. She was situated safely above the heads of the two angry men down below, like a goddess, listening to the cherubic music of Barry Manilow.

  “Goddamn it, Lizzie, open up!”

  Lizzie flung the door open wide and stood before Rosemary in a fuzzy maroon bathrobe. She’d been doing her nails and still held the polish brush in one hand.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked. Her enamel wand was propped in midair.

  “There’s a territorial fight going on downstairs,” Rosemary announced.

  “You mean like dogs have?” Lizzie asked. She blew on the wet nails.

  Rosemary nodded. “If you think of yourself as a fire hydrant,” she told Lizzie, “they’re arguing over who peed on you first.”

  Down in the den, Rosemary and Lizzie found things quite in order. Charles was back in the witness stand and Philip was sitting, neatly collected, on the sofa. Mother was shaking one of her piano-loving fingers into Philip’s face. She was wearing a dazzling blue nightgown of a silkish fabric that was wet with perspiration from her sleep. It clung to her hips and allowed her breasts to expose themselves from within each circle of the sleeve holes.

  “And I mean that,” Mother was saying, her yellow curls unfurling. “There will be no fighting in this schoolhouse!”

  Rosemary took Mother back to bed. She was happy now and smiled at her daughter. She had just exerted, downstairs, the power of being crazy, and had been obeyed for it. The two men had blatantly ignored Rosemary’s plea for them to stop. But nobody argues with a crazy person. People, at least civilized people, are supposed to know better. Charles and Philip had both cowered before this whirling dervish and now Mother was beaming. Power, no matter how atta
ined, is a sweet feeling in the pit of the stomach.

  Rosemary pushed some ringlets back behind Mother’s ear. The wrinkles had long ago traveled from Mother’s eyes, a brush fire spreading, and now they traced all the laugh lines around her mouth. Here’s what you get for laughing, the lines said.

  “Boys shouldn’t fight,” Mother whispered, then giggled happily. Rosemary had rarely seen her so pleased. It was the same girlishness that had swept her about the old-memory kitchen, singing “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze,” while Father smiled and breakfast cooked. Flirtatious even, this insanity.

  “Go back to sleep, love,” she said, and kissed Mother’s damp forehead. Then she snapped off the bedside lamp.

  ***

  Out in the garage, Rosemary draped the towel back over the box that housed the injured robin. It had turned around in the nest of grass and twigs so that its other eye stared out, beaded and black. She then rolled her Free Spirit bike out to the backyard, and checked to make sure the headlight was still functioning. She might not use it on the quick ride down Old Airport Road to Bixley, but she would surely need it on the dark ride home.

  A speeding car roared down the road toward town, bouncing over the bumps, thoughtless of the animals and humans who lived there. Rosemary shook a fist and shouted, “Slow down!” but the automobile kept up its frantic speed and soon disappeared.

  Out on the road, she flipped up the kickstand, then situated herself comfortably on the seat and pushed off. The June breeze was soft as it hit her, full-faced, then caught her hair up in a rush of wind that caused the ponytail to bob. The evening shadows were already billowing in, taking away the last of the yellow tinge the sun had left behind. As she rounded the turn that brought her quickly upon the summit of Russell Hill, she braked and sat on the bike, steadying it with both feet as she gazed down on the spectacle of Bixley. It lay like a beached spaceship, tossed out of the ocean of time, wiggling its lights as though they were little antennae in the darkness.

  She pushed off again, her breath caught in her chest as she cascaded down for the half-mile glide into town. Reaching the field that stretched across her end of Bixley, she cut off into the clover and hay to follow the shortcut that bicycling kids still liked to take. Maybe it was true that some things never change. At least while the planet was still in one piece and functioning, at least while the old field held on to its own real estate, there would be a shortcut there. But Bixley was growing, thanks to the Miriams on the planet whose calling was to gobble up the disappearing land for money. Rosemary knew the day would come when she would recognize little of her old hometown. She had seen, in the library book, how much the place had changed in fifty years, and now there was a new technology to speed up change. She imagined herself, one day, wandering aimlessly up and down mysterious streets, past the unfamiliar stores and businesses, trying to stumble upon one little clue in a burgeoning city of strangers. What had she promised herself about growing old? “I’ll let my hair go wild and gray. I’ll be a crazy old woman, wearing five or six dresses at a time.” There was a power in being crazy. That was a little secret that Mother already knew. Maybe Mother was waiting, in one of those bizarre rooms in her mind, wearing her flouncing skirts of old, singing about lithe young men who fly through the air, dusting everything off for her daughter.

  The fireflies parted and shooed like tiny sparks as Rosemary careened through the hay, past Indian paintbrushes that were now colorless outlines in the dusk, out of the hay and onto the hot blacktop that brought her pedaling easily down Library Street. She rode to the end, circled the small cul-de-sac, and coasted back up to the front of Mrs. Abernathy’s house. There was always a light burning late at Mrs. Abernathy’s house, now that Mr. Abernathy had passed away. “I’m staying up later and later now that he’s gone,” Mrs. Abernathy had once admitted. Rosemary walked the bike down the concrete drive. It followed like an obedient deer being led by its antlers. Mrs. Abernathy answered on the third ring. She undid the chain and opened the door only after she was certain that it was not Rosemary’s uncle Bishop out there on the steps, but the niece herself.

  Rosemary was struck with how Mrs. Abernathy was aging daily. Her skin was cindery, almost to the point where it might be covered with a gray makeup. But this pallor was the work of nature and not Max Factor. Mrs. Abernathy’s cheeks had fallen in as if perhaps, during one restless night, the bones had finally collapsed with the weight of the skin, the way a barn dies when it’s left to the wind and snow. Prehistoric art. She remembered William telling her about The Chinese Horse, and the artists in primitive caves. “They may have created art centuries before, Rosie,” he’d said. “A temporary art, left outside and ruined by the elements. Or drawn on hides. Biodegradable.” Here, then, was the sad canvas of Mrs. Abernathy’s face, going the way of all art. Rosemary felt guilt in seeing Mrs. Abernathy being so mercilessly sluiced through the floodgates of time. She scooted past the old woman and into the parlor, which was bulging with porcelain birds, handpainted by Mr. Roger Tory Peterson, Master Birder. These were birds immune to disease, these shiny sculptures newly flown from the Franklin Mint nesting grounds. These were birds who were oblivious to the gruesome winter statistics.

  “Are you okay, Mrs. Abernathy?” Rosemary ran a finger down the back of a handpainted indigo bunting. An oily film of dust came away, soft as peach fuzz, gray as the mustache above Mrs. Abernathy’s upper lip. It was most unlike Clara Abernathy to live in harmony with dust and its ilk. Rosemary could not ever recall, since childhood, seeing Mrs. Abernathy’s front yard look so anxious to be put in order. Long grassy weeds had pushed up around the planted flowers, and the fake grass was scattered with dead leaves. An assortment of lilac bush droppings, those small, lavender bouquets, lay next to crumpled candy bar wrappers that had blown in from the street. Mrs. Abernathy would never have stood for such a flagrant disregard of orderliness just days ago. “She vacuums her goddamn grass,” Uncle Bishop had said many times. Now here was the parlor, as well, looking as if someone no longer cared that it was being painted over by the layer of forgetfulness that besets the elderly.

  Mrs. Abernathy moved several pages of the Bixley Times from off the sofa so that Rosemary could sit upon it. Rosemary noticed that the pages were all her weekly columns, perhaps from the past month, with her usual trademark of a black-capped chickadee, Maine’s state bird, adorning the upper right-hand side of the column. It had wrapped its wiry feet around an apple tree branch and was staring, with literariness, out at the reader.

  “How have you been doing?” Rosemary asked, noticing this time how strained Mrs. Abernathy’s movements had become, like a wind-up toy nearing the end of its strut. Her bones seemed to be locking up all their joints and tossing out the keys.

  “I’m as well as can be expected,” Mrs. Abernathy answered.

  Rosemary recognized this as the ultimate truth. She was, this old woman approaching her octogenarian years, as well as could be expected.

  “The old ticker only has so many beats in it and then kaput!” said Mrs. Abernathy. “At least that’s what Mr. Abernathy was fond of saying.” Rosemary looked at the fake mantelpiece where sat the picture of Horace Abernathy, taken under the Abernathys’ cherry tree, probably the last time a camera’s eye closed to capture Horace’s own dark orbs. Rosemary sat quietly in the dustiness of Mrs. Abernathy’s bird-filled, cagelike parlor and heard the old woman whisper a second time, “As well, I guess, as can be expected.”

  Rosemary made a silent promise that she would look in on Mrs. Abernathy often. And she would call the county nurse the next day to inquire about the Bixley group designed to visit and care for the elderly who were too fragile for the heavy demands of everyday living.

  “Your column last week about predator birds that come to feeders was, in my opinion, your very best,” Rosemary said.

  “Yes, well, thank you,” said Mrs. Abernathy. “They’re a nasty bunch.” She clicked her teeth,
but Rosemary was only half listening. She was remembering those sweet days of youth, those oppressive August days when Mrs. Abernathy would lure the neighborhood children into the parlor with Kool-Aid and a plate of fudge brownies. One day stood out most, a day more than twenty years earlier, when the rain had come like bullets pelting down the street at her heels, and Mrs. Abernathy had waved her in from the storm, wrapped her in a fat bath towel, and toweled her dry. There had been a cup of cocoa, hadn’t there? And something red. An apple maybe. And the incessant rain, that eternal dripping. What was it William had told her? “When the earth’s crust first cooled down, Rosie, it rained for sixty thousand years without stopping.” So what was a childhood rain against the wash of time?

  “Speaking of predators,” Mrs. Abernathy said. She folded her last column into a paper handkerchief on her lap and then nodded toward Uncle Bishop’s beige-and-chocolate house. “Where is that awful uncle of yours?”

  ***

  Outside in Mrs. Abernathy’s front yard, Rosemary waited until the old lady locked herself safely inside the house before she pointed her bike at the street. It was well past dusk but Mrs. Abernathy’s porch light was on, and Rosemary could see a large dark shape moving across the backyard. She slipped in closer for a better view and saw that it was Ralph, now lying flat on his stomach and sleek as a kamikaze, two round, beady eyes under the rose of Sharon. Why was he even there? She watched as Ralph strolled up to a standing feeder, examined it closely, turned his back on it, and raised his tail. Then he pedaled his hind legs, as though he were on a unicycle, and urinated squarely on the feeder. He turned around and examined his signature proudly. “Mine,” Ralph was saying. “All mine.” Rosemary surmised what Ralph’s mission might be. When dawn finally came with its rosiness, he would be there at his station while the feathery and unsuspicious munched upon chunks of apple, apricot, millet, and cracked corn. And then, when they dared think of it, an idea so abstract they had only dreamed vaguely of it at night as they twitched and scratched in their nests, waiting for daylight: the Toll House cookie.