The Bubble Reputation Read online

  “I miss him, too,” Robbie said. The evening had gathered in around them as they watched the fat cats climb up and down the rick of firewood stacked along the back fence. “But it’s time you came back to us.”

  And so she pulled down most of what she had put up. It was as easy as that, after three long, hard months.

  “The birds are still alive,” Rosemary said, as she had on the day of William’s funeral. “We’re still alive.” And it was the first time she realized it herself, that for whatever reason, no matter how just or unjust, there was a small, round organ inside her, receiving blood from the veins and pumping it through the arteries. Dilating and contracting. And there was a mass of nerve tissue in her cranium receiving sensory impulses and transmitting motor impulses. She was alive. So she and Robbie went, an arm around the other’s waist, into her big rambling house with the wide, airy rooms and full windows that took in all the light. “Levels of consciousness,” William had said of that light. Robbie and Rosemary went up the back steps where the bowls of food and water had been set out for the cats. They went inside and left the last of the dusk feeders moving quietly among the scattered seeds and doughnut scraps.

  There would be a dinner the very next evening. It would represent her coming out and back into the society of the family. She would be a debutante, stripping away her black mourning clothes to discover that gossamer wings had sprouted beneath. Robbie would inform the family. He would tell Uncle Bishop, the family’s sense of humor. He would escort Mother, their insanity rolled into one person. He would alert Miriam, all the blunders a family could make. Robbie, the baby of the family, would let them know that there would be a spaghetti-and-wine dinner the next evening in Rosemary’s big mushroom of a house. And Rosemary, the family’s glue, the old adhesive Rosemary, would officiate. She would abandon her plans to grow old alone while feeding countless stray cats and wild birds, while letting the gray come rapidly into her hair and then letting the hair itself go wild. She would not, after all, become a crazy old woman, wearing five or six dresses at a time, chanting remedies and searching for herbs along the crags and barren hedges. She would not become a dangerous woman, full of secrets, full of early reasons for her craziness. Rosemary would put aside the image of William lying dead in a rented room in London, a suicide among the paints and canvases, his blood spread out on the floor as though it were a new color he was experimenting with. There would be a family dinner, and Rosemary would put all these pictures and questions neatly away in order to make the salad.

  THE CHILDREN’S HOUR

  When she heard Uncle Bishop’s familiar thumping on the door, Rosemary flicked on the porch light. He was standing on the front steps and shouting out into the rainy night at Miriam, who had, he was informing her, bummed her last ride from him. Rosemary opened the screen door and waited.

  “Get yourself a bicycle!” Uncle Bishop yelled. Miriam was still in the pickup, searching in her purse for a rain scarf. “Get a goddamn horse, as the kids say!”

  “I see some things haven’t changed,” said Rosemary. Uncle Bishop shook rain from his umbrella. He hung it from the coatrack inside the door and then stretched a big arm out to circle her neck. “What are you two fighting about now?”

  “Medusa wanted to get under my umbrella,” he said. “She’s afraid of getting her snakes wet. But there was just room enough for me and this.” He nodded at the pot of homemade spaghetti sauce in the crook of his arm.

  “I’ve missed that sauce of yours,” said Rosemary.

  “It’s good to see you like this again,” Uncle Bishop said. In among the strands of his thinning hair, rain sparkled in little drops. He had worn his usual drawstring pants, tied tightly about his heavy belly, and an extra-large sweatshirt, which was still too small. As he pulled off his galoshes, Rosemary saw that all he was wearing inside them were some woolly socks, which were supposed to be white but were more a yellowish gray.

  “Don’t ask where his shoes are,” said Miriam, scaling the top step of the porch, her red hair flattened beneath a plastic scarf. She eased past Rosemary and then kicked her shoes off on the inside rug. “It’s a long and overly sordid story, even for him.” She checked her cigarettes and, assured that they were still dry, gave Rosemary her coat.

  “You might start by saying hello,” Rosemary said.

  “I can’t believe you finally asked us over,” said Miriam. “Bishop has been referring to this place as the Gulag Archipelago. Weren’t you, Bishop?” Uncle Bishop—Miriam never referred to him as Uncle—ignored her as she tapped a cigarette out of its pack, put it into her mouth, and then rummaged one hand in her purse.

  “Robbie and Mother are already here,” Rosemary told them. “Robbie’s building us a fire.”

  “I know I’ve got matches in here somewhere,” Miriam said. She quit rummaging.

  “I’ll get you some from the kitchen,” Rosemary offered, and Miriam followed her out into the hall. Uncle Bishop disappeared into the den.

  “He’s getting worse,” Miriam whispered. “You should see the little boyfriend he’s got now. They have shoe fights. That’s why he’s not wearing any. He’s thrown them all.” Then, for Uncle Bishop’s benefit, she said loudly, “It is good to see you looking so well.”

  “I heard that, Miriam,” Uncle Bishop shouted from the den.

  Rosemary smiled. Uncle Bishop knew from experience, as they all did, that when Miriam raised her voice unnaturally to say something positive, it’s because she had previously lowered it to gossip.

  “She reminds me of a dolphin when she raises that voice of hers,” Rosemary heard Uncle Bishop telling Robbie. “She’s not as smart as a dolphin. She just sounds like one.”

  “Homosexual shoe fights,” Miriam whispered. She accepted a book of matches from Rosemary. “What will he do next?”

  It had been a long time since Rosemary had seen so many people in her house. William had been present for the last family gathering and now he was conspicuously absent. Only Mother wouldn’t notice.

  “Doesn’t she look good?” Rosemary asked, and patted Mother’s hand. Robbie had driven her over from Aunt Rachel’s and now she sat in her rocker and rocked back and forth, the blond curls on her head bobbing up and down like daffodils. The rocker had made the trip in the backseat of the car. Mother would rock in no other chair but her own.

  “She can’t tell night from day,” Miriam said, a halo of smoke now above her head. She was watching Mother closely. “How the hell does she know which is her rocker?”

  “She knows,” said Rosemary.

  “And why doesn’t Aunt Rachel just hide her makeup?” Miriam asked. “She’s even got lipstick on her teeth.”

  Mother stopped rocking to eye Miriam with a vague curiosity. Her cheeks were red circles of rouge, and under a thick layer of lipstick, her mouth appeared rubbery. “You’ll wonder where the yellow went,” Mother said, “when you brush your teeth with Pepsodent.”

  “If you ask me,” Miriam continued, “Aunt Rachel is almost as batty.”

  Rosemary encouraged Mother’s rocker to begin again, slowly, its steady rock. Rocking always calmed her. “We’ve been lucky to have Aunt Rachel,” said Rosemary.

  It was true. Aunt Rachel had never married, and after a long career at Bixley’s hospital as a nurse, she had retired early to look after Mother. By that time, Mother’s illness had progressed to stages where nonprofessionals were helpless. So Aunt Rachel moved Mother into her home, the old family homestead, and was taking excellent care of her.

  “You didn’t forget my box of chocolates, did you?” Mother asked Robbie. She no longer knew their names. Like the dolls she had once owned and loved and named in childhood, Mother had forgotten her children. The rocking chair stopped abruptly until Robbie assured her that there would soon be chocolates. Then Mother went back to her rocking.

  “Good!” she said, scolding. “I like soft chocolates with my
tea.”

  “Talk about soft,” whispered Uncle Bishop. “If brains were marshmallow.”

  “Now, if I said that,” Miriam told Rosemary, “you’d have a conniption. But it’s okay for Bishop to say what he likes.”

  “I’m her baby brother,” said Bishop. And so he was, the little brother by fourteen years.

  “Baby?” asked Miriam. “You’re forty-eight years old and weigh three hundred pounds.”

  Rosemary watched as Mother canted forward, suspended, rocked backward, and then canted again. The family had grown into Mother’s illness the way one grows into all of life’s surprises, at first with denial, and then with bleak acceptance. Only Miriam still found the gaping hole between Mother and reality an unfathomable one. Sometimes, Rosemary almost envied Mother’s neat world, where dimensions were bent to one’s own specifications, where laws of nature were changed at a whim.

  Mother rocked on. Uncle Bishop tugged at Robbie’s earlobe and said, “You get better looking every day, kid.” Robbie went into a mock boxing stance, fists up to cover his face. He battered Uncle Bishop about the stomach and temples with pretend lefts and rights and uppercuts.

  “I’ll have none of that in my house!” Mother shouted. She stood up from her chair, the daffodil curls bouncing.

  “There,” said Rosemary, her hand lightly on Mother’s shoulder, easing her back into the rocker. “They’re only playing.” Miriam opened a new pack of cigarettes.

  “I need another book of matches,” she said. “The one you gave me had only two in it.”

  “We were hoping you’d smoke only two cigarettes,” Uncle Bishop said. “Instead of two packs.”

  Rosemary went up the narrow stairway, down the hall, and finally found a book of matches in the drawer of William’s desk. She smiled when she read BAMBI’S DINE-IN OR TAKEAWAY printed neatly on the cover. Leave it to William to find the tiniest, greasiest, out-of-the-way places. But after he’d dragged her down there to meet the proprietor—always with a name like Bambi or Prince or Miss Tootsie—it was usually Rosemary who kept going back. “I think you just like the newness of people and places,” she had often told him. “I think you get to know people so that you can paint them, William. Once you have their soul on canvas, you no longer care. The art transcends the human being.”

  With the matches in her hand, with another sharp memory of William rushing through her, Rosemary stood outside the door to the den and listened. She hadn’t been sure that she was ready to take the family on alone, without William there for balance. As a group, they were like a big wallowing mutt, an Old English sheepdog, its head and paws too large for a small room, uncontrollable in its leaps and bounds. Things could easily get broken. But William had loved her family, studied them, rejoiced in them, painted them. “Van Gogh would’ve adored those yellow ringlets,” he had said of Mother’s curls. “They look just like the stars in Starry Night. I’ve never met people so proud to be crazy.”

  “When is Father getting here?” Mother asked. Rosemary passed the book of matches to Miriam and found a seat on the sofa next to Uncle Bishop. Robbie flopped into the recliner and dangled a leg over the side. He had cut his short hair even shorter, and now the white of his scalp gleamed along the hairline. Good, clean-cut looks, back in style now. He was twenty-six, well muscled from the weights he lifted, a runner who logged thirty miles a week. The new breed.

  “I said when is Father getting here?” Mother slapped the arm of her rocker. No one answered, hoping she would forget she had asked the question and eventually go on, into one of the other disheveled rooms of her mind. But Mother had stuck to the thought, had caught it by the wings as though it were a bug, and held on. “I want to know!” she shouted.

  “In twenty minutes,” said Rosemary. “He just called.”

  “That’s more like it,” Mother said. She rubbed her nose, getting a little of the lipstick on her sweater sleeve.

  “Doesn’t she look like the cutest little doll?” Uncle Bishop asked lovingly. “What do you suppose she thinks of all day long?” He had propped both woolly feet up on Rosemary’s coffee table and was staring at Mother the way one stares at an interesting pet.

  “Why don’t you bleach those socks, Bishop?” asked Miriam. She had not yet recovered, or so she whispered to Rosemary, from the hair-raising ride over in the Datsun. “That pickup is deranged. It’s like one of those cars on The Twilight Zone. He rarely bothers to steer.”

  “I don’t bleach my socks, Miriam,” said Uncle Bishop, “because I assume that all of the bleach in the free world has gone onto your hair.”

  “Please,” said Rosemary. “Don’t the two of you start.” Years before, Miriam had developed a mental block about the true color of her hair.

  “I do not bleach my hair!” Miriam shouted.

  “You were a brunette at your high school graduation,” said Uncle Bishop, and then loosened the drawstring on his pants. Rosemary smiled. No matter how childish, how petty, how crazy the family was, it was wonderful to see them all again, all under one roof.

  “I’m glad we’re together again,” she said.

  “I don’t have the gums for hard chocolates,” Mother announced.

  Uncle Bishop went off into the kitchen to put his sauce on to simmer. Rosemary had the dining room table ready with her best china and silver. All the linen napkins were fluffed in their rings. The tapered candles were a rose color, to match the roses in the centerpiece. Robbie had picked up the flowers at Bixley’s only floral shop. Rosemary hated buying them. In less than a month, her backyard would be ablaze with blooms of all kinds.

  Uncle Bishop stood in the kitchen doorway and banged a wooden spoon against the casing to rally the diners before him.

  “And Julia Child has the audacity to call that slop she serves food? Come, children. Tomorrow the headlines will read: Bishop Makes Julia Weep.” Uncle Bishop loved sputtering about with a messy spoon, in some ghastly apron splattered with colorful blotches, some of which had nothing at all to do with food. Rosemary was thankful that the sauce had been prepared on his own stove and not hers. She imagined the little daisies on his kitchen wallpaper bespattered that very minute with tomato puree.

  They gathered around the big rectangular table in the dining room, another auction treasure. It was the first time Rosemary had eaten in the huge room, upon the shiny oak table, since the news of William. It was just too immense. She felt as though she were a child, trying to pull a heavy chair up to a giant’s table. On the wall hung a painting William had done a few years before. It was a work Rosemary loved, a reproduction of The Chinese Horse, a cave painting found deep in the Lascaux caves in France. During dinners with William the candlelight had touched upon the delicate, simple horse, and it wavered across the canvas, causing those primitive muscles to ripple.

  “I’ll say it again,” said Miriam, as the family took their places around the table. “That’s the worst horse I’ve ever seen. A child could do better than that.” Uncle Bishop spooned sauce over the plates of spaghetti, which Robbie placed before them.

  “Miriam prefers paint-by-number things,” he explained, as Rosemary brought the garlic bread to the table. “She understands composition better when dealing with clowns and the enlarged heads of cocker spaniels.”

  “At least I don’t throw shoes at members of the same sex,” said Miriam. She squashed her cigarette into the ashtray.

  “Shoes?” asked Robbie. Rosemary gave him a fast look.

  “Has your wine breathed enough, Robbie?” she asked. He forgot about shoes and went out to the kitchen for the wine.

  “If I know Robbie,” said Uncle Bishop, “once his wine has breathed, it will want to eat.”

  “Where’s Father?” Mother shouted. Like an unhappy prisoner, she banged her fork on the table.

  “I can’t believe she’s back to Father,” Rosemary said, taking the fork before any damage was done to th
e oak. “She’s getting better and better at retaining a thought.” She placed the fork in Mother’s spaghetti, encouraged her to hold it, hoping something new would take possession of her mind, a different swarm of bugs. It worked. Mother smiled and said, “I’m very hungry.”

  “She’s brilliant all right,” said Miriam. Robbie poured the wine.

  “Here’s to the family,” he said, and raised his glass for a toast. The others did the same, all except for Mother. Robbie put the wineglass in her hand and closed her fingers around the stem.

  “Here’s to the family,” said Rosemary.

  “The family,” said Uncle Bishop. Miriam drank along with the toasts, but did not propose one herself. The family was a society she rejoiced in only if she needed it. In the candlelight, her hair gleamed as red as Mother’s did yellow.

  “They look like pansies, don’t they?” Uncle Bishop leaned over and whispered to Rosemary.

  “I just don’t like hard chocolates,” Mother said. She had already finished her glass of wine. She smiled at Rosemary, a stranger sitting next to her at the table.

  Rosemary felt the panic rising up again, that urge to wish Mother normal. She stared instead at The Chinese Horse, fought the panic off. If she didn’t, when the panic went away, it would leave remorse behind. Rosemary had lived through it all many times before.

  The problem with Mother began long ago. Nine years. Ten years. She’d been cleaning the outside kitchen window and had fallen from the stepladder. What was lost when she came to, days later, was her ability to retain new memory. And she remembered only hit-and-miss sketches of the past. All life became new to her, over and over again. New happiness. New loss. Perpetually. To tell her that Father, her husband, had died twenty-some years earlier was to no advantage. She merely resuffered the pain and then, a short time later, could no longer remember he was dead. Miriam had much less patience with her than Rosemary, who tried to sidetrack her with candy, a television program, a magazine, until Mother at last forgot that she had even asked the question about Father.