The Bubble Reputation Page 7

  “It’s good to see you again,” Marvin said, and squeezed her hand. “You take care.”

  It was good to see him, but Rosemary was glad he had said his particulars and moved on. She wanted to meet the man on the other side of the bar before the lights were turned up full blast. But when she spun back around on her stool he was gone. Robert was just picking up his empty glass and dunking it into the bin of dishwater behind the bar. Rosemary looked quickly to the door and saw his back as he was leaving, his jacket a bright red and yellow, made of what looked like a nonflammable material.

  “Pterodactyl,” she said again. It had been the unusual red and yellow of the jacket that had triggered familiarity to her. So colorful that he was like a large, escaped parrot, cavorting about the Maine countryside in his buzzing little ultralight. He would fly through the air, with the greatest of ease, this daring young man on the flying trapeze.

  The door had already closed, but he was probably still unlocking his car in the parking lot. She could leave the money for her tab on the bar. If she went out into the parking lot now, he would surely see her out there and attempt to say hello. He had left the bar, hadn’t he, because it looked like she and Marvin were pairing up. She really had intended to leave in a minute or two, anyway. It wasn’t as if she was running after him.

  “I can sneak you one more beer before we pick them up,” Robert leaned over the bar and offered. “If you’re interested.”

  “That sounds good,” Rosemary told him, and settled back onto her bar stool. It wasn’t as if they were strangers. He had waved to her, and she had waved back. There was an interaction. An introduction. They were now acquaintances.

  “Who was that guy at the end of the bar?” she asked, and pointed to the empty stool.

  “The one in the Superman suit?” Rosemary nodded. “I’ve never seen him in here before. And he didn’t say much.”

  ***

  On the drive home she hummed along with a song on the radio, but as she pulled out of the congested part of Bixley and turned up Old Airport Road, she clicked the radio button off and began to sing, softly, with the same lilting voice her mother used to have. And Rosemary remembered, suddenly, those Sunday mornings with Mother cooking breakfast and Father sitting at the kitchen table, waiting, teasing. Father, before the other woman. Mother, before the insanity. Rosemary, before the age of six or seven. Miriam would still be in bed, a late sleeper even as a youngster, and not there to spoil the magical effect. Robbie not yet born. And Mother’s voice would fill the airy kitchen as though it were an opera house. It would echo through all the rooms, mix with the sounds of eggs snapping in the frying pan, and coffee perking like a little percussionist to Mother’s beat. Father, untying Mother’s apron strings. “She’s only got a few strings tied now, Rosemary,” Miriam had said. “She’s almost completely crazy. You might as well admit it.” Rosemary remembered Mother twirling her apron strings in the kitchen, around and around, with Father laughing his gutsy laugh, with Rosemary clapping her hands. “She was always a little bit crazy,” said Uncle Bishop, when Rosemary had asked him. “Even as a girl. But it was rather charming then.” Rosemary remembered Mother pirouetting like a doll across the shiny kitchen floor, all her dreams attached to the main boat, all her anchors still keeping her afloat. “I guess she’s just a little dinghy,” Robbie had said, because he could remember her no other way. And Rosemary saw Mother again, spinning across the floor, out the door. “Crazy as a loon,” a school friend once commented, and Rosemary had decked her for it. “A little dinghy.” And so Mother was, a thing adrift, all her anchors up, all the lines to the big boat cut, all her loved ones standing on shore, waving. People disappearing.

  On the black drive up Old Airport Road, Rosemary tried her best to remember the childhood house, the way it had been in those early years, with Mother singing at the stove, Father at the kitchen table. But she could not pull up a single image of it. Hadn’t it been white, with black shutters? It was gone now from her mind. It had burned to the ground before her eyes and yet she could not remember it. Not even Aunt Rachel had a photo of it. All the memories had curled up and disappeared in smoke.

  On the drive up Old Airport Road, Rosemary sang Mother’s kitchen song. Tears filled her eyes as the past crept back to find her. His movements were graceful, all the girls he could please, and my love he purloined away.

  THE BUTTERSCOTCH UNIVERSE

  At eleven fifteen Rosemary and Lizzie sat at the kitchen table, drinking coffee that Lizzie had made.

  “It’s awfully strong,” Rosemary told her.

  “I dumped what looked like the right amount of grounds into the strainer,” Lizzie said, defending herself.

  “Where is Uncle Bishop’s coffee when I really need it?” Rosemary asked. She had taken three aspirins and a vitamin C at Lizzie’s suggestion.

  “Beer drinkers pee away all their vitamin C,” Lizzie said. Rosemary ignored her. She was trying, through her headache, to watch the activity at the bird feeders. Several evening grosbeaks were in a frenzy over the sunflower seeds. Rosemary saw Mugs and Winston, paws curled under them, watching the birds from their perches atop the rick of firewood. They had long since given in to the burden of the bells they had worn around their necks, had ceased to take part in the hunt, thanks to the jingling intervention of mankind. Rosemary took the bells off two years ago, worried that if the cats became lost, the ringing would be their downfall in the wilds. The habit had already set in, she was thankful to learn. They sat atop the firewood and surveyed the birds as though they still wore their cumbersome collars.

  “I’ve got to go to the library this afternoon,” Rosemary said. She had opened her briefcase and was searching through it. “Can I use your car? Mine is low on gas.”

  “Why the library?” asked Lizzie.

  “There are some things I want to look up.” Rosemary unwrapped a stick of Trident gum that she found hiding inside the little pocket that was meant to house the briefcase key. It was rock hard and probably a leftover from her teaching days, something to look forward to in the teacher’s room. She gave Lizzie a quick hug and moved past her to take the keys to the New Yorker off the wooden key holder near the back door.

  “What am I supposed to do while you’re gone?” Lizzie asked.

  “Finish reading that novel you brought with you two weeks ago,” Rosemary said. “It’s still opened to the first page on the back of the commode, where you left it.”

  “I put it there in case we run out of toilet paper,” Lizzie said.

  ***

  At the library Mrs. Waddell smiled and exposed her gums to Rosemary. They were orange in color. As a child, Rosemary had believed what Sarah Prescott told her about Mrs. Waddell’s teeth, that they had been ordered from the Sears and Roebuck catalog for $9.95. Her gums were orange back then, the creamy color of butterscotch pudding.

  Mrs. Waddell dragged books, lovingly, down from shelves, unlocked others from their prisons away from natural light and the sweaty hands of careless readers. Then she suggested a dozen or more once Rosemary was finished with the mountain that towered on the table. The table was the same one from childhood that Rosemary had always selected, in the north corner, overlooking the loping Bixley River, where the tiny park lay. It was here she first discovered The Wizard of Oz, Kim, and Little Women.

  “We lived in a house on Norris Road,” Rosemary had told Mrs. Waddell when she first arrived at the library. “We lived there until I was eleven years old, until it burned down, and now I have no pictures of it. No one in the family has a picture of it. It’s the house my father lived in until he died. Do you think books on the early architecture of Bixley would have a picture? It was an old house when we moved in.” Mrs. Waddell was excited with the mission. She had waited among the dusty spines and yellowing library cards a lifetime for this, for someone to come into her little cubicle of books and old newspapers, seeking the knowledge she’d be
en safeguarding. She smiled a wide smile, the way a book might if you imagined its covers as lips and its compressed pages teeth.

  “Fire doesn’t just destroy the older homes,” Mrs. Waddell whispered, as though it were a secret. “It destroys so many important documents, too. If I were you, I’d look through some of the family histories compiled by the Bixley Historical Society. You find wonderful photos in those, things you never knew existed.” And so she began dragging books out of their hiding places for Rosemary to peruse.

  “After the big fire of 1929,” Mrs. Waddell said, “the architecture of Bixley changed drastically. I was just a little girl but, my oh my, I can still see those flames.” She had, really, waited a lifetime, kept an eye glued to the street, listened for the right footfalls, the best ears, the proper moment, when her little floodgate of memories could open. I knew you would come, the books whispered as Rosemary opened them. We’ve been waiting for you, all the strange faces lost to time said with their eyes.

  “At five thirty I take my supper break, Rosemary,” Mrs. Waddell said. “I’ll tell you about the big fire of 1929.” And for the rest of the afternoon, when Rosemary looked up from her books and notes, she caught Mrs. Waddell keeping an even watch on her. We mustn’t let this one go, the rows of books whispered. Keep her, said all the names, long forgotten, in the rusty cabinets full of old library cards in the basement. People who have disappeared.

  At seven o’clock Rosemary loaded her briefcase into Lizzie’s car. She had checked out only one title, A Pictorial History of Bixley. She wanted to study the old buildings a bit longer, the early architecture of the town her mother and father had grown up in, had fallen in love in, buildings they knew well in an age that had come and gone without Rosemary being aware that it had ever existed. “What is eight years,” William had asked her, just before he left for good, “when pitted against the course of time?” But she knew now that it was much worse than that. William’s Time Chart proved it. It wasn’t just a matter of eight little years. It was a matter of all time. “What is a trifling twenty thousand years?” she could now ask William, if he were there to answer her, because it had been that long ago when man began his silly quest to create art, on the walls of dark underground caves. It had been that long, at least, that man had wanted to do more than make love and eat and find protection from the blustery winds and roving packs of animals. For some unexplained reason, man wanted to do more than live just to die. And then came his need to write words down, when the Sumerians began scratching cuneiform things on clay tablets. And what had it all been for? Now she saw the larger truth. “What is the human race, William”—that’s what she’d say to him now—“when it’s pitted against the wash of time?” She was beginning to understand his abrupt departure. What he left behind was only a meaningless swirl of activities, none more important than the rest.

  “From outer space the oceans look like pudding,” Uncle Bishop told her once, during an especially hectic “Children’s Hour.” It was Chariots of the Gods he’d been reading. It was too much Glenlivet he’d been drinking. “In the Bible, Ezekiel described the waters of the earth beneath him as looking like porridge,” Uncle Bishop had said, his words coming with their customary slur. “And he could only know it looked that way if he had been taken up in a spaceship. Even a scientist at NASA says Ezekiel is the first recorded extraterrestrial ride.”

  Rosemary thought of poor Ezekiel, one minute minding his business on the dusty plains of the Old Testament, the next being whizzed through the cosmos like the unwilling tail of a comet. A little joke on the planet earth and the terrified earthling. Rosemary could imagine a whole spacecraft of large-headed, brainy kidnappers guffawing as they disappeared among the glittery stars at the speed of light. Maybe some people did have the answers to the whole earthly experiment. She had read about a woman, Spaceship Sally, who had grown brown and withered as a berry on some hilltop in California, out among the night stars and meteorites, windblown and crazy, waiting for a spacecraft to come out of the galaxies of time and take her home. “When I grow old, I want to grow crazy as well,” Rosemary once told William. “I want to be so obsessed with some one thing that I don’t notice the wrinkles. I won’t even notice time anymore, so that after a while, it becomes like one long, stretched-out, lazy day that is passing, instead of my life.”

  As Rosemary drove through Bixley, on her way back to Old Airport Road, she thought of the universe as being nothing more than an endless cloud of butterscotch pudding, the color of Mrs. Waddell’s gums. She drove slowly. She wanted to get a new look at Main Street, to acknowledge where all those old buildings in the library pictures had once stood so proudly, promised to stand forever. And she wanted to imagine the streets full of the faces that she had pored over all day, that sea of people who had quietly vanished from the wooden sidewalks of town. She wanted to find the Bixley her parents had known and loved in their youth. It was the best she could do, especially since she and Mrs. Waddell had come to the conclusion that there were no longer any pictures of the childhood home on Norris Road. Only in Rosemary’s mind was a blurred picture still hanging, placed there by an eleven-year-old child.

  ***

  After her three-mile run, Rosemary perused the library book until two o’clock before she finally went up to bed. That night there were more troublesome dreams. There were Gregor Samsa dreams that night. This time the predominant figure in her nighttime drama was not William. Instead, Mrs. Waddell soared up and down the library aisles in a red-and-yellow ultralight, lovingly dusting each book, the tiny sound of her engine as smooth and quiet as Mugs’s rhythmic purring. But when she spotted Rosemary over in her corner window, Mrs. Waddell bore down like the Red Baron. She focused her sights on Rosemary, who had no option but to run. And there was the terror of the dream: Rosemary tripping through a graying maze of old buildings, ancient residences and stores and theaters she had seen in the library book, so real to her now that she felt she had grown up in that Bixley. “What is a life when pitted against the rivers of time?” And yet she lost her way. Sidewalks ran out. Streets shifted beneath her. Signs turned their faces away as she tried to read their names. And all the while Mrs. Waddell, a cackling red-and-yellow dragonfly, was closing in, beating the tiny wings of her ultralight, laughing her spinsterish, old-woman laugh.

  THE FIFTEEN STEPS

  When Rosemary awoke at eleven the next morning, there were voices from the front yard seeping in through the screen under her window. And so was the approaching noon heat of a summery day. She thumped her leg beneath the sheet covering. Her left shin was sore. She had pushed too hard on her run the night before. A panicky kind of running. Once, she thought she’d heard the voices of a milling crowd behind her as she left the town limits of Bixley to begin the run back up Old Airport Road and home. But she knew what distant sounds were creeping up on her. They were the voices of the dead, Bixley’s old guard, wafting faintly from around the ghostly architecture.

  The living voices were now in the kitchen, Lizzie’s excited and hovering above the other, a quiet, manly bass. No doubt Philip had arrived. Rosemary chose to lie in bed and watch the cluster of white-throated sparrows that had gathered in the top of the maple tree. Something had disturbed them on the ground, perhaps Winston, the outdoor cat, who occasionally crawled up into the waist-high feeder and fell asleep.

  She wished she had a cup of tea without having to go down to the kitchen for it. She was not ready to meet Lizzie’s new paramour. Another car sped down Old Airport Road, much too fast. Rosemary could see the wake of dust as a brownish cloud rose up to her window and then drifted off over the fields. Maybe she could find a sign that said RADAR CHECK! and pound it into the earth near the CAT CROSSING sign. The latter had been Rosemary’s idea, but William had painted the perfect letters on it. It stood by the road, near the culvert, where Mugs occasionally crossed over to get to the wide open fields.

  Rosemary heard Lizzie on the steep stairs, with Philip, th
e bang of luggage as it caught each step, and shopping sacks crinkling. The rustling and whispering went on down the hall to the spare bedroom across from Lizzie’s room. There were five bedrooms, counting Rosemary’s, in the big upstairs. Only her room and two others were fully furnished with antiques and odds and ends that William was forever finding at auctions. The last two bedrooms had only beds, which Rosemary kept neatly made, although she never expected to entertain that much company at once. William’s having no family, other than a sister who lived downstate, precluded an onslaught of relatives arriving from his side of the genetic tree. Because Rosemary’s family lived nearby in their own homes, it was only on special occasions or if Uncle Bishop had too much to drink that they slept over in one of the more furnished bedrooms.

  Rosemary assumed Lizzie was putting Philip in his own room for appearances only.

  The phone rang but she ignored it. On the third bleat it stopped.

  “Hey!” Lizzie said, and rapped on the bedroom door. “You awake?” Rosemary said nothing. Instead, she watched a robin bounce along the top branch of the maple, causing an uprising of discouragement from the sparrows. “Uncle Bishop wants to know if you’ll go swimming with him,” Lizzie added, her voice full of the excitement of Philip’s arrival. “He’s on the phone, waiting for an answer.” Rosemary thought about this. The primordial sea. That’s what Uncle Bishop called the Bixley swimming pool, insisting that it held beneath its murky waters angry crustaceans and all sorts of slithering missing links.