The Bubble Reputation Read online

  When she got home, the baby robin was dead, its eye frozen open like a black drop of blood, its head bent forward upon its chest, in the middle of its last dream of flying.

  THE CUT-OUT STARS

  Lizzie and company were gone when Rosemary awoke. Downstairs she discovered that someone, most probably Lizzie, had given Mother a breakfast of cereal, toast, and orange juice. Mother was drawing on her magic slate. Someone had written a note, pinned by a strawberry magnet to the refrigerator. It said, Back this evening. Will have dinner in Thomasville, if anyone has the stomach to eat. Lizzie. So they were going to approach this like adults, after all, over bread breaking.

  Rosemary gave Mother a quick kiss. In between munching on her toast, which was now cold and crusted with stiff pats of butter, Mother was creating an assortment of lighthouses on her magic slate. Some were tall and skinny, others short and bulging, all casting out radiating black lines of light to warn of the needlelike rocks and sunken reefs.

  “They’re very nice,” Rosemary praised the lopsided structures as she peered over Mother’s shoulder. Mother glanced up in terror, as though she’d just been caught breaking and entering into lighthouses that did not belong to her, the private property of the sane world. In an instant, she reached out her hand and flipped up the overlay sheet, erasing the artwork, as if a huge thick wave had just rushed in and swept all the lighthouses out to sea.

  “What a shame,” Rosemary said, and patted Mother’s shoulder.

  “More Rorschach pictures?” Miriam asked from the kitchen doorway. She’d let herself in again without knocking. “Lighthouses, right? Out in the middle of the ocean?”

  Rosemary nodded. “Uncle Bishop says she perceives us all as sharks,” she said. Miriam was supposed to come by at one o’clock to babysit Mother during her nap and allow Rosemary to escape for a few errands she needed to run. Rosemary watched as the car with Bixley Cab Company on its door disappeared back down the gravel road. She could almost hear Uncle Bishop. “How do you explain taking a cab to Presto Pizza as a business deduction, Miriam?”

  Miriam was searching out a cigarette in her bottomless purse. Her face seemed stretched on its bones and she wore no makeup. It was well known among family members that on the day of Miriam’s now mythical car accident, when she rammed the ice-cream truck, she had sat up in the speeding Bixley ambulance and applied a fresh layer of pink lipstick to her trembling lips. “LOA,” Uncle Bishop liked to remember the incident. “Lipstick on arrival.”

  “Is everything all right?” Rosemary passed her a book of matches.

  “Why do you ask?” Miriam lit the cigarette. The usual thick swab of green eye shadow was missing from her upper lids. Someone had decided long ago that red hair was best exhibited and enhanced by shades of green, and Miriam readily endorsed this philosophy. She had even tried to get the Bixley furrier to dye her mink coat green, but he had refused. “You’ve missed the point,” he told her. “Mink are not green by nature.”

  Miriam was also wearing no lipstick, that cosmetic paste without which she had refused to go off into death. Rosemary imagined her beseeching Charon to hold his ferry steady in the fast-moving waters of the Styx until she could set her lips in order. And Charon himself, getting his fingers all gooey with lipstick as he fetched his well-earned coin from out of her painted mouth.

  “I ask because you don’t look yourself,” Rosemary said. Miriam had been bemoaning her fortieth birthday, two days away, so Rosemary had suggested a dinner party to Uncle Bishop, hoping it might cheer Miriam up. “No thanks,” Uncle Bishop had declined. “I don’t look upon Miriam’s birth as cause to celebrate.”

  “I don’t think I’ve seen you without mascara since grammar school,” Rosemary said. “I wondered if it meant anything.”

  “Well, it doesn’t,” Miriam said. “I just didn’t have time.”

  Rosemary was incredulous of this statement from a woman who had found the seconds needed to apply lipstick in a shrieking, careening ambulance, a woman with a broken arm, and, worse yet, with that very arm!

  “Where’s Raymond?” she asked.

  “I’m here to babysit your mother,” said Miriam, “and not to answer questions about my private life.” So things were amiss in her current wedded bliss, albeit the fourth bliss. There was definitely trouble in condo heaven.

  “Don’t forget to bring my ladder back,” Mother warned. She shook her finger at Miriam, peering at her with squinty eyes.

  “Jesus,” said Miriam. “What ladder? I didn’t take your ladder.”

  “Yes you did,” said Mother.

  “No I didn’t,” said Miriam. “You’re batty, is your problem.”

  “I don’t like bats!” Mother said, her curls damp on her forehead.

  “Don’t tease her,” Rosemary warned. She was reluctant to leave Mother, but she did have those errands.

  “Did you bring me any chocolates?” Mother asked Miriam, who made a sour face and then looked with disinterest out at the dining birds.

  “I’ll be back soon,” Rosemary said. She carried the picnic basket she’d packed earlier with sandwiches, pickles, soda, and a blanket to spread on the grass. She’d fasten it safely on the rear carrier of her bike, strap it down with stretch cords.

  ***

  The road to the airport was alive with June. Devil’s darning needles darted in and out of the sloping fields of hay like little helicopters. Evening grosbeaks munched on seeds near the sides of the road and a telltale caw caw from off in the distance told Rosemary some crow was keeping good watch for the entire flock. The sky was an old blue, faded from so many mornings and afternoons. An occasional shoelace of cloud moved aimlessly across the measureless expanse. A groundhog slipped cautiously out from under a hay rake that had been left behind to rust, its workdays over, the iron of its tusks useless against modern equipment. It stood on its hind legs to catch a glimpse of the mounted creature that was gliding down the road, part human, part chrome, before it dived into the damp earth of its home and disappeared.

  It used to be that Rosemary and William hated the swirling dust that rose up behind each car as it passed on Old Airport Road. But two years earlier, when the new highway brought potential fliers to the airport from the north side, most of the traffic on the road had died away. But there were still the rare travelers who preferred Old Airport Road, which was a shortcut, and it was because of these strangers and their mindless speeding that Rosemary had been obliged to erect Mugs’s now famous CAT CROSSINGsign. A reporter and a photographer from Bixley had even come out one sunny afternoon, perfect for a picture, and immortalized Mugs and the sign, at least for the Sunday that the picture appeared. Rosemary had brushed Mugs until he snapped with static electricity, and he moved with cautious steps as he crossed the road for the camera.

  At the airport Rosemary pushed her bike inside the gate and left it leaning on its kickstand. She looked across the small runway and scanned the puny planes. There was no sign of the ultralight, no bright flash of red and yellow, so she went in through the main door of the building. A coffee machine and a machine half-filled with crusty, stale sandwiches was as close as the Bixley airport came to a restaurant. She dug down into her cutoff jeans for two quarters, dropped them into the slot. The coffee tasted moldy. A woman was busy behind the one and only departure counter, which also handled arrivals. A few men drifted in and out of doors. One seemed to be in charge of the others, an unmistakable top dog.

  “Can I help you?” he asked, as Rosemary approached.

  “I’m interested in ultralights,” she explained. “I’ve seen one several times in the past few days soaring over my house and I think it looks like fun. I’d like to take some lessons.” Oh, what tangled webs, she thought.

  “Sweetheart, take my advice. When it comes to an ultralight, keep both of your pretty little feet on the ground. Those things are like riding on the backs of mosquitoes. You’ll kill yo
urself.” He wiped his hands on a towel, then tossed it behind the counter. So, the ultralight man was a daring young man.

  “My name is Rosemary O’Neal,” Rosemary said. He could take his sweetheart and shove it. “I live just three miles down on Old Airport Road. I’m interested in at least taking a look at the machine to see how it operates.”

  “Honey,” the man said. There he goes again. “I think your best bet is to take regular flying lessons. That little Cessna sitting out there would be a good place to start. We don’t even have any ultralights here.” He took a cigarette out of his shirt pocket and lit it.

  “Rosemary,” she said.

  “Rosemary, I’d be happy to have someone talk to you about the Cessna.”

  “But who owns the ultralight?” She had suddenly felt a chill that even the dull-tasting coffee could not shake. Had she imagined the daring young man? “Pterodactyl,” she had said, upon seeing him for the first time, a primitive fear rising up in her chest at the unusual combination of man and bird. “The Greeks could not accept man-on-horseback as a literal concept, so they invented the centaur,” she remembered telling her literature class. Had she invented her own concept of man-as-bird?

  “That’s some joker from out of state who won’t live to see any gray hairs,” he said. “You just missed him.”

  “I finished the check, Jake,” one of his workers came inside to tell him.

  Jake shook ashes from his cigarette onto the shiny tiles of the airport floor. “He’s staying at one of Fraser’s Sporting Camps,” he said. “But as far as I know, he don’t give lessons. It’s a hobby. But you take my advice and try the Cessna.”

  ***

  On the cool ride back home, Rosemary watched the sky for a sign of him coming back. Religiously, she scoured the sleek line of horizon, looked among the taller trees, kept a watch behind her shoulder. It was a kind of religious thing, this peering anxiously into the heavens for a glimpse of a man, whether it was one from out of state or one who’d been dead for two thousand years. But there was no ultralight man to be seen anywhere in the skies over Bixley. She passed her own house on Old Airport Road and kept on toward the heart of town. She thought about her car sitting idle in the garage since William’s death. She wasn’t sure what it was about the car that kept her away from it. William had picked it out because Rosemary was uninterested as to the touted exploits of various makes. “As long as it’s blue and makes that noise when I turn the key,” she told William, who went off to the car dealer in Caribou and came back with a new blue car that did, indeed, make that noise. But the car was certainly no more representative of William than the polished cherry bed, or the painting of The Chinese Horse, or the old house itself, and Rosemary had embraced these other things since his disappearance. She had not banished them as she seemed to have done the car. Perhaps it was because of the very noise she mentioned to William the day he bought the car. The quiet bicycle fit more keenly into her new notion of life. She would let the car sit until it was a colossal ball of dust lolling beneath a network of spiderwebs. Maybe she would drive it into the creek and let it rust there on its haunches. Maybe she would give it to the mailman. No, no reason. I just wanted you to have it.

  The elm trees along the road shimmered in the wind and turned their silvery leaves bottoms up, like minnows flapping. The bike was a wonderful freedom, faster than running, like some sleek, futuristic horse. A rabbit raced across the road and disappeared into the field of hay, its long ears like periscopes separating the grasses.

  Rosemary left her bike on the sidewalk in front of Max’s Camera and Supply Shop. There was no need to chain-lock it. No one stole bicycles in Bixley. Inside, Max was busy over the ancient body of an old Brownie camera someone had brought in to be resurrected.

  “It’s wonderful to still see one of these,” he told Rosemary. “They took marvelous pictures. John Deardorf is trying to bring the Deardorf back, you know. What a quality.”

  “Don’t keep me dangling, Max,” Rosemary said, and flipped through the scrapbook he left lying on the counter to subtly teach his customers the proper way to take a photograph. Rosemary stopped at a photo of a small girl with her arms around the neck of a graceful collie. The light was perfect. The composition correct. The child and her dog were sweetly frozen in time. Max was wise to choose this photo for his crash-course scrapbook. Now if his customers could only find such a blond child and such an ingratiating dog. To hell with natural light. You could buy light at Max’s Camera and Supply Shop, if you had the money.

  “Come on, Max,” said Rosemary.

  “This is a goner,” Max said, and put the old Brownie back into its box where it could, finally, settle down to sleep, to dream of flappers, and Model T’s, and small children who had already grown old and died. The camera was a graveyard, full of ghostly angles, and lines, and compositions of people and houses and landscapes that have disappeared.

  “Max, I’m waiting,” said Rosemary, trying to ignore the dead body of the Brownie.

  “Well, in that case.” He looked at her finally. “Guess what? It’s here.”

  “Oh, Max, is it?”

  “Just last night, before I closed, the UPS truck brought it,” said Max. “I called to leave a message for you a few minutes ago but your sister said you’d be by.” He made his way to a large box in the corner of the room. It said MEADE 6-INCH REFLECTING TELESCOPE on the outside.

  “I’ll get Uncle Bishop to come get it in his pickup,” Rosemary said. She ran one hand over the cardboard box, imagining the round, tubular wonder within, suspecting what William would have said of this day, remembering how many times they had rocked well past midnight on the porch swing, with glasses of wine, and stared at the numberless pinpoints flickering like small, faraway campfires. And they had wondered aloud about the stellar secrets that had exploded and collapsed, the news of which had not yet reached the earth. They imagined the galaxies that had spiraled and swirled millions of years before William met Rosemary, before the planet earth and its one meager moon had taken its place in the universe of time.

  “No, no,” Max was saying. Rosemary had almost forgotten him there beside her, so strong was the sensation of William. She could almost smell his body sweat after an afternoon of painting, sweat and acrylics and the faint bouquet of the wild apple trees, or the small creek breeze if he had opened the window to a spring day. All smell and color and all sound, this William, who had exploded one rainy night in London, a supernova of emotion. “When a star collapses, Rosie,” he had said to her one night on the swing as they sat staring at the heavens, “it’s like a great balloon deflating. It crushes itself at the center.”

  “No,” she heard Max say again. “My boy is going to deliver it for you. It’s no problem. He likes to drive the new truck. And he’s young, remember, with nothing better to do.” Could she spy upon the innocent stars without William there beside her, on the night lawn, all the windows of the house black as insect eyes? Could she, like some solo space pioneer, get closer to Andromeda galaxy, that vaginal spiral they had found so many times with the naked eye? A birthing place, this heavenly slit. Maybe the very birth canal of the gods. Did she dare see it more clearly? “Remember,” William would say, his arm aloft, silhouetted, as he pointed at some speck. “The stars are so far away that if you had Mount Palomar in your backyard, it wouldn’t make them bigger.” Perhaps this was the major secret of the stars, that—telescope or not—they would remain sparkling secrets. Mere stardust.

  “Are you sure you’re okay?” she heard Max ask.

  Rosemary and Max had already agreed upon a monthly payment, so she left him looking out at her, with concern, from his storefront window. She would cancel her picnic alone, that long-planned outing to find the childhood spring, to look for Father’s mossy, fossilized footsteps. The stunning realization of having lost one man overwhelmed her. She would deal with Father’s disappearance at another time, when the smell
and touch of William faded slightly, like the dead images in the old Brownie. And now here was the telescope to throw things off-kilter. Teleskopos. Greek for seeing at a distance. What was William’s artistic word for such? Pointillism, those little luminescent dots of painty stars best observed at a distance. Someday, she knew, the meaning of William’s ghosthood, of the relationship that was obviously foundering long before he left for London, would be revealed to her. At some time in the future. Teleskopos. At some distance from the pain, she would study the two of them the way historians study wars. In the meantime, the telescope gave her none of the excitement and comfort she imagined it would. This was new territory, this telescopio notion of Galileo’s. She would be treading down highways alone. She would be going ahead without William.

  On the jolting ride back up Old Airport Road to home, the picnic basket bounced and made clinking noises with its bottles, the diet Coke and the pickles talking. She would eat the lunch on the patio with Mother, later, when she felt like food again. Food was for the sustenance of the body. Now Rosemary needed a sustenance for the soul. She remembered a passage of Romeo and Juliet she had recited many times for William.