The Bubble Reputation Read online

  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 mon
ths, 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.

  “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 causing a spill.

  “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 again, agreeing.

  “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.

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nbsp; 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.