The Bubble Reputation Page 9

  “Miriam’s into real estate, Rosie,” Uncle Bishop said. “I wouldn’t be surprised but what all her male friends wear red-and-yellow suits.”

  Rosemary hugged him good-bye. In her arms he felt soft and movable as jelly. She watched him drive off down the dusty road until he was out of sight.

  ***

  At ten thirty she was already asleep. The dreams were back again and vivid in color: Renoir’s little girl, with her blue, satiny dress and shiny watering can, watering all the plastic flowers in Uncle Bishop’s dollhouse until, the can empty, she pressed her face with its tiny eyes against the churchlike windows of the house, ignored the cries of the starving cat, ignored the guests who came and went, waited, the blond in her hair turning to brown, then gray. Like an old plant in the window, orphaned, dead at the roots, she was trapped in the house, forever.

  THE MOON-PULLED WOMEN

  Philip Sheppard was quiet, as houseguests go. The few times that he and Lizzie crossed paths with Rosemary, he was always polite, well mannered. And Rosemary had yet to see him in jeans and a casual shirt. Instead, he wore Versace jackets, slacks, and a colored array of Italian shoes. This was in complete opposition to Lizzie’s disarray. She usually had her long blackish hair pinned up in a scarf that matched a pink or blue sweatshirt, and Levi Strauss or Wrangler jeans. Seeing Lizzie and Philip together was a statement of their situation: they looked like they belonged with other people, Lizzie with Charles, Philip with someone else.

  “Will Philip be here this weekend when Mother arrives?” Rosemary asked Lizzie, when Philip went out to his car for a parcel he had forgotten to bring in.

  “I think so. That’s if you don’t mind.” Lizzie was looking tired. She’d been in Bixley for two weeks and instead of being rested and peaceful without Charles, the children, or the untrained dog, she appeared haggard. Rosemary was making tomato, cucumber, and lettuce sandwiches for the three of them. Lizzie took potato salad out of the refrigerator and sniffed it.

  “Sniffing is not really a scientific test for salmonella,” said Rosemary. She and Lizzie had had this argument many times before, in college. Lizzie put the salad on the table. It had obviously passed.

  “It’s test enough for me,” she said.

  “How will Philip react to Mother?” Rosemary asked. Mugs rubbed against her leg, then reached up a paw to touch her. “You don’t like cucumber, Mugs.”

  “Philip’s a lawyer, remember,” Lizzie said. “He’s seen much worse than your mother. Did I ever tell you about the man from Portland who fell in love with a Shetland pony and sued Portland Riding Stables for visitation rights?”

  “Don’t,” said Rosemary.

  “Besides,” Lizzie continued. “It’s not your mother’s fault she fell off that ladder and hit her head.”

  “I think the whole family agrees on one thing,” said Rosemary. “That Mother’s problem was only enhanced by the fall.” It had always bothered her, this visual image of Mother tumbling from the ladder and onto her head. It was the comic notion of insanity. Did someone give you a whack on the head? You must have been dropped on your head as a child. When Rosemary received the phone call from Aunt Rachel that Mother had taken a wicked fall, and that it was most serious, maybe even fatal, she had thought of the Great Wallenda, falling from his tightrope. Aunt Rachel was giving her details, and instead of listening, all Rosemary could see was Carl Wallenda falling down, down, with plenty of time to think. The Great Wallenda, watching the film of his life being rerun beneath his lids, while on the street below, the pulsing crowd pushed forward like a giant mouth, waiting to swallow him up. What was it William had said of a mountain climber, that rainy night in front of the fire? “No one forces him to climb. He goes of his own free will.”

  Philip came into the kitchen and scooped Mugs up in an armful of black-and-white fur and round, yellow eyes.

  “If Philip is no problem for you,” Lizzie whispered in Rosemary’s ear, “Mother is no problem for us.”

  “Secrets?” Philip asked. His clothes, Rosemary noticed, never seemed to wrinkle, even after sitting about all day.

  “We were just talking girl talk,” said Lizzie. “That’s all.”

  “I see.” Philip nodded. “You told her about the pony fucker.”

  ***

  It was early in the evening, on Friday, when Aunt Rachel drove up Rosemary’s drive with Mother bouncing in the front seat. The air was warm and thick, like the air after a house fire, an ashy, cinder-filled air. Lightning bugs came and went among the fields of hay across the road, and crickets rubbed their tireless legs. Mother brought with her a little suitcase that looked more like a picnic basket. Rosemary imagined good things to eat inside, rather than to wear.

  “I’m visiting friends in Old Orchard Beach,” Aunt Rachel said, when Rosemary inquired about the vacation week. “A few walks on the beach, a few seashells, a few good chats, that sort of thing.” Her face was a grayish pale, her cheekbones more prominent than ever. The family had learned, just weeks before, that Aunt Rachel was battling cancer. Rosemary and Uncle Bishop had insisted again on taking turns housing and caring for Mother, but Aunt Rachel would hear nothing of it. “It takes a professional,” was all she’d say. “And what would I do alone in that big old house? Your mother is good company. We have an order to our lives.” So Uncle Bishop and Rosemary continued to handle the financial burden, Uncle Bishop with the lion’s share. Even Robbie, who was now out of college and working in construction until he decided his future, pitched in. Only Miriam never contributed. Instead, she wanted to know how Uncle Bishop was able to do so, and so generously. Two hundred dollars a week. “Where does he get his money?” Miriam ranted. “He’s got to be involved in some homo-porno ring.”

  Mother didn’t want to stay. She clung to Aunt Rachel’s arm, crying and mumbling. But Aunt Rachel talked to her gently, soothed her flouncing blond curls, and assured her there were worse things on the planet than spending a week with this stranger. Uncle Bishop had brought Mother’s rocker over earlier in the day, so Rosemary took her by the hand and led her into the den. When Mother saw the rocker, she quickly grabbed at it.

  “My chair!” she cried. “Mr. Talbot fixed it!” Robbie, Miriam, Uncle Bishop, Rosemary, all strangers to her. Yet Mr. Talbot—who was formerly of Talbot Hardware in Bixley and had moved away when Rosemary was in her early teens—still surfaced now and then in the theater of Mother’s mind. And she never forgot her rocking chair. Aunt Rachel was the one person Mother never failed to recognize. There was a most unusual umbilical cord stretching between the two sisters that Rosemary had never understood. They didn’t seem to have a lot in common. Aunt Rachel enjoyed classical music, sitting sometimes in the dark and listening to the melancholy notes of Mozart. Mother was all lights and the popular, raucous tunes of her girlhood. A little something by Sinatra or the Harry James Orchestra, yes, but never The Magic Flute. Aunt Rachel was a good bottle of wine. Mother had been gin and tonic in her day. Aunt Rachel was always dressed primly in button-down blouses and sensible skirts. A serious dress. Rosemary had seen the old pictures of Mother in elegant Hollywood hairdos copied from magazines, and sweeping patterns she’d made by hand. She remembered Mother in velvet dresses, and silk skirts that moved about her hips like water. Even on wash days Mother wore makeup, a bluish tint to the upper lids, a trace of pinkish red to the lips, combs in her hair, a perfumy, musky smell about her bosom and neck. Aunt Rachel would never dance around the kitchen singing about daring young men who swing from woman to woman as though they were trapezes. Yet, even suffering from recurring cancer, Aunt Rachel refused to let anyone take Mother away.

  Rosemary brought Mother a cup of tea and a slice of banana bread. She ate in little bites, breaking the pieces away with her fingers. Rosemary found the crocheted slippers that Aunt Rachel had said were in the suitcase, and she put them on Mother’s feet.

  “Thank you, dearie,” said Mother, and she
sipped her tea. Rosemary turned the television set on, but Mother paid no attention to the screen. Entertaining her was akin to babysitting. She couldn’t be left alone for very long. And she was a tiny stranger in Rosemary’s huge house.

  Rosemary unpacked a few of the things Aunt Rachel had sent: a magic slate, a toy xylophone, and a Cabbage Patch doll. The doll had annoyed Miriam. “Aunt Rachel spoils her,” Miriam had said. “Our mother owns a Cabbage Patch Kid called Betsy Kathleen. Is that or is that not reason to move to Siberia?” Seeing her unpacked, Mother reached for Betsy Kathleen. Except for the braids, the doll looked startlingly like Andy Rooney. As Rosemary watched, Mother undressed it and then changed its diaper. It unnerved Rosemary to see this. How many times had Mother performed this self-same task on her? On Miriam and Robbie? Somewhere in her mind, was Mother raising her family all over again? Rosemary stared at the doll as it was dressed again in its denim jumpsuit. Its hair was the brownish wheat color of her own. Its eyes were as blue. Mother patted Betsy Kathleen’s bottom to say good girl, and then wrapped her in a baby blanket. Rosemary felt short of breath, too warm, as if a blanket were smothering her, as if Mother were clutching her too tightly. Perspiration formed on her forehead.

  Rosemary left Mother alone with her new baby, her fourth child if anyone was counting, and went outside where the swing hung empty. She could see Mother through the glass door, could keep an eye on her antics. Mother with her doll. Uncle Bishop with his dollhouse. Rosemary thought of her father, dead for twenty-two years, a ghost to her, almost. His memory was kept alive and tied to her by the sense of smell: his Old Spice aftershave and his white cotton T-shirt that had been all day on the clothesline, in the river breeze. Before falling asleep, Rosemary would go into his room and crawl into bed beside him. He would be half asleep, half awake enough to unfold one of his massive arms and take her in close. And there, next to the heat of his body, with the Old Spice lingering amidst the cool river breeze of the T-shirt, she could almost see the blue Yankee clipper ship on the bottle bob gently up and down on the white T-shirt, then sail away, taking her with it.

  Mother was putting her sleeping baby to bed on the couch. She covered it with the same pastel blanket and then, as mysteriously as it had appeared, this mother concern was gone. Off Mother went, into some other room of the house, where Rosemary would need to check up on her in ten minutes. “She’s forgotten us the way little girls grow up and forget the dolls of their childhood,” Rosemary told Robbie one night. “The way animals forget their litters.” And it occurred to her that she was feeling jealousy. It was almost laughably unimaginable, but it was true. Jealous of a Cabbage Patch Kid! What would Miriam say of this? But Rosemary knew that she had been cheated out of a ritual. She would never partake in the mother-daughter ceremony, in that little dance between two women on a stage that is bare but charged with emotion. An electric stage, as daughters become their mothers.

  There was a tickling breeze about, a cat’s-paw breeze. The fuzzy lights from the little airport created a Milky Way sky overhead. But after ten o’clock, even these lights would go out, leaving the sky over Old Airport Road dark as pitch. Leaving Rosemary alone below the constellations where she silently named each of them, remembered the mythologies behind them: the Big Dipper. Cassiopeia. Little Dipper. Cepheus. Draco. The circumpolar constellations. She would check again to see if the six-inch reflecting telescope she had finally broken down and ordered from the camera shop in Bixley had arrived. It would be an expensive hobby, crippling her nest egg but, quite frankly, she was tiring of life on earth, of finding no answers there. Maybe it was time to look into the sky, as the early ancestors themselves had done. Out there would be even earlier connections for man had been born of the stars. His flesh and bone had risen out of cosmic explosions, and now the planet was loaded with billions of people, twinkling with them. Stellar sparks. Before she went in search of Mother, Rosemary sat on the swing, her eyes closed, and thought of all the people on earth who threw on their porch lights for the astronauts, who blinked in starlike unison, lighting up the United States of America as though it were a huge pinball machine.

  ***

  Mother was huddled on one side of the bed in Rosemary’s bedroom, looking perplexed and holding something in her hand as though it were gold. And that’s because it was. Rosemary unfurled the hand to see that it was her own wedding band that Mother held. Had she, for some reason, taken it off and now it confused her? It had no beginning and no end, a little infinity, unlike most weddings. It was more like the measureless universe. Mother played with the ring frantically until Rosemary took it from her and slipped it back onto the bony finger. Mother’s hands had always been slender, with long, piano-playing fingers. Back in place, the wedding band caught the light and Mother smiled at this. Had the doll baby downstairs reminded her that, once upon a time, there had been real babies, with a man who had given her that ring? Twenty-two years had come and gone since the man who put it on her finger went back into the earth, or went out to dance among the life-giving stars, wherever the listless, uninterested dead go. Rosemary sat on the bed and put an arm around Mother’s thin shoulders. A screen was beneath the window and the curtains lifted in the breeze, reached out to touch the women.

  “Someone who loved you very much gave you that ring,” Rosemary said, and pushed a yellow ringlet from Mother’s forehead. When she was good, she was very, very good. When she was bad, she was crazy. She remembered the wedding picture. She had stared as a child at the porcelain beauty with the honey blond waves of hair, the snowy dress, the baby’s breath and wild violets looking fresh enough in the bouquet to last forever. Mother half shook her head as memories and impulses bumped into each other like bumper cars.

  “Jonathan,” Mother said quickly, more to him than to his daughter, her voice raspy as a whisper. Rosemary smiled. She hugged Mother’s little ship of bones, that malfunctioning universe.

  “Yes,” said Rosemary. “His name was Jonathan O’Neal, and we both loved him very much.”

  Mother looked at Rosemary with new interest, the way one looks at a pen pal one has been writing to for years and finally gets to meet. “He’d better bring me some chocolates,” Mother said.

  Rosemary closed her eyes and imagined them both ageless, two women in their prime, scouring the sands of a blazing beach, holding seashells to their ears and listening to the songs of the sirens, the beautiful music of womanhood before the moon-pulled tides swept in to wash them both away.

  THE CLASS REUNION

  Rosemary set her alarm clock for seven thirty, early for her but late for Mother, who was usually, as Aunt Rachel warned, up at daylight. “She has an uncanny sense of time,” Aunt Rachel said. “She comes every hour to stand in front of my cuckoo clock just a second or two before it sounds. Yet, she wears no watch.” Miriam would have loved hearing this little timely tidbit about Mother. “She’s totally cuckoo, Rosemary, you may as well admit it.”

  Mother was sitting in the den watching the birds. Rosemary had locked all the doors the evening before, hoping this would at least deter an escape. She hated to think of Mother loose in Bixley.

  “Did you sleep well, Mom?” Rosemary asked. Mother looked at her, perplexed. “Please don’t call her Mother or Mom,” Aunt Rachel had warned. “It seems to only confuse and upset her. Try not to call her any name at all.”

  Mother’s yellow head bobbed first one way and then the other, canting as she watched the numerous early morning feeders.

  “Cuckoo!” Mother said loudly. Rosemary realized she must be associating these living birds with Aunt Rachel’s clock. She was glad Miriam had missed this, too. Miriam wanted badly to put Mother in a nursing home, much to the protests of the other family members. But Rosemary thought of those places as giant nurseries full of unblinking, wildly staring dolls whose batteries have run down, whose arthritic joints have melded from nonbending, whose mouths are frozen open, oval as spoons in the withering faces. Mother belon
ged with her family, even if she no longer knew who they were.

  Rosemary noticed that Betsy Kathleen, her Cabbage Patch half sister, was wearing sweatpants, sweatshirt, and what resembled honest-to-God tennis shoes.

  She’s looking more and more like me every day, she thought.

  ***

  For lunch Rosemary unfolded the legs of her card table and set it up on the small cement patio with two of the matching chairs. She covered it with a linen tablecloth, a soft peach color, and arranged the table with linen and crystal, her best china and silver. She cut a handful of African daisies that had finally come to life in the wooden boxes she kept near the back fence, and now they sat on the table in a glass vase. She poured champagne into two hollow-stemmed glasses and then brought the platters she’d prepared in the kitchen out to the table. One held an arrangement of cheeses, rye bread, and nuts. The other platter held fresh fruits, chunks of apple, honeydew melon, and cantaloupe. Mother was pleased with the little outdoor table and let Rosemary arrange her napkin on her lap and fill her plate with goodies. They sat like old friends who have finally made plans to meet far away from the bustle of the city, at some obscure inn, where the birds are plentiful, where the cats are peaceful and snoozing. Rosemary tossed an occasional piece of bread out toward the feeders and watched as house sparrows hopped courageously toward it in little half spirals.

  The champagne was cold and delicious, bubbling. It reminded her of a natural spring she and her father had discovered once, in the woods behind her childhood home, the one that had disappeared in fire and smoke. Rosemary missed that house almost as much as she missed her father. And she could remember, easily, the day it went up in flames. She had been paying old Mr. Fletcher a dime for a cone of vanilla ice cream when the fire truck rushed screaming through town with a chicklike procession of cars following. And so she and a handful of other Bixley kids had pedaled the half mile out of town, toward the blankety cloud of smoke that rose into the October air like a misplaced tornado. Her heart had begun to pound when she saw where it was coming from, the house, the childhood womb. She had thought it would always be there, a place for Father’s ghost to live, a marker for the frosty little spring. Now there was fire in her bedroom window. She could almost hear the teddy bears and dolls shrieking, all the toys dying. And then the stairs crumbled like dominoes. The walls turned to ashes. All the memories were loosed and floating, all her childhood, cinders. There was no place left for Father’s spirit to hang around. That was the day, aged eleven, she knew he was really dead, the day of the house disappearing. But perhaps the little spring was still there, pumping life out of the earth. She remembered they had been following a Canada warbler on the day they discovered it. Father wanted her to hear its chip, chupety, swee-ditchety. They rushed, that day of exploration, through the thickly rooted spruce, and pine, and shimmering elms, stepped on the tiny mushroom bombs that bloomed beneath the trees, did not wait to watch them explode soundlessly beneath their feet, like small Hiroshimas and Nagasakis, flowering, cascading down upon the disturbed worlds below them. Instead of the Canada warbler, they stumbled upon the delicious little spring bubbling like champagne out of the earth, where Alp the sacred river ran, in caverns measureless to man. They had drunk from it like wild horses, their lips soft as petals on the surface, their nostrils flaring wildly from the run. The spring was proof that Father had indeed, once, been here, before his ghostly profession. “What does your father do?” children had asked her over the years. “He’s dead,” Rosemary would say. “He doesn’t do anything.”