Crooked Little Heart (6 page)

Sometimes Rosie read Rae’s fashion magazines while Rae worked on deadline; she watched in awe as Rae, bent over the loom, took all that long skinny thread and yarn, which had no substance yet, and made things with which you could cover your walls or yourself. She sometimes crossed her eyes slightly so she could imagine Rae cave-painting, lost in those ancient rhythms. Rosie often got to help her make the dyes for her yarns. Sometimes they’d go out and pick things from fields or beside streams on the mountain and boil them: elderberries made lilac blue, prickly pear made a purplish pink, rabbitbrush made yellow. Sometimes what you plucked was a different color from the dye it produced: the red flowers didn’t necessarily make red wool. Beets made gold dye. Coffee beans made a dark yellow tan. But most of all, Rosie loved to hear the sounds of Rae’s deep rocking squatting labor, as she wove herself into the yarns, always weaving one tiny secret in between the threads.

E
LIZABETH
had believed for years that Rae and Lank would make a good couple, but there was one real hitch in her plan: neither of them was interested in the other. Lank pursued young beauties who loved his gentleness and sweet face and always left him for more dashing men. Rae did not care so much what her men looked like just as long as they possessed certain qualities, which Rae listed as intelligence, humor, soul, and a love of oral sex—and which, if you asked Elizabeth, meant tendencies toward inconsistency, passive aggression, and a charming, jovial ability to be sadistic and noncommittal.

“Don’t you
ever
entertain sexual feelings about Lank?” Elizabeth had asked a few days after the tournament in San Francisco. Elizabeth had become a Democratic precinct worker, and Rae had come over after lunch to walk around the neighborhood with her. They would go door to door like Girl Scouts, registering voters, soaking up sunshine, getting in some exercise.

“Look, honey,” Rae said. “On slow days I have sexual feelings for waxed fruit. But I don’t feel anything romantic toward him. He’s family. Besides—I’m dating a flock of Bedouin now. Many of them are very thoughtful.”

“Lank’s available,” said Elizabeth. “That’s why you’re not attracted.” They set out down the sidewalk. Bayview glowed, sun shining on all those greens—lawns and low hillsides, maple and pine and eucalyptus, the bay jade green in the distance. Rae turned to smile at her as they walked. A strip of bright green sour grass grew at the edge of the sidewalk, like a baseboard at the meeting of fence and sidewalk, a seven- or eight-foot stripe with brilliant yellow flowers, bent at the root after a wild wind the night before, lying forward on the pavement as if in
obeisance—an English crowd bowing low while the weary monarch passed.

T
HE
next morning, the last day of February, an unusually warm blue day, Charles Adderly came home from the hospital for good. His cancer, which had begun in his bones, had spread to a number of organs. He’d been admitted for an experimental course of chemotherapy but had been too sick to tolerate it. He was getting worse quickly and now had a full-time hospice nurse at home. One day not long ago he had been just fine, seventy-six years old but hale and animated, visiting friends, working on the house, driving to the library, bookstores, hardware stores, hiking with the Fergusons, resting every afternoon, swimming laps before dinner. Rosie felt that he was her real grandfather, and when they hiked and swam and browsed at the library, she acted like his granddaughter, basking in her closeness to such a distinguished and amiable old man. But then his stomach began to hurt, and he went to see his doctor, expecting a prescription for ulcer medicine. He gave some blood to the lab, and five days later was in surgery, “slit,” as he put it, “from gizzard to zatch.” The surgeon had closed him back up without taking anything out. There was cancer everywhere, cancer like little cauliflower buds. James had been with Charles in the hospital room two days after Thanksgiving when the doctor had said that there was nothing they could do, that Charles might live at most for a few more months. Rosie and Elizabeth had been at home reading together on the sofa when James called with the news. Rosie had answered the phone, and James said, “Hello, honey,” and Rosie could hear that he had been crying.

“What happened?” she said.

He did not answer right away. Then he said, “I’m with Charles.”

Well, they already knew that, she thought. Her head started to feel funny; Charles must be very sick. She waved for her mother to come to phone, scooping armfuls of air toward her with her free hand.

A
LL
the next day at school Rosie felt little lurches inside her, like when you fall asleep at the movies and suddenly pitch from your dream back into your seat.

She and her mother drove to San Francisco late the next afternoon; James had already spent all day and the previous night there, reading magazines while Charles dozed. It had been stormy in the morning, but the sun had shown up at the very end of the afternoon. Rosie cried for a while in the car, and on top of that she had a cold; her throat ached, and she could not get any air at all into her nose, and the only way she could disguise her bloodshot ugliness was with a pair of horrible harlequin dark glasses she’d found in the glove box, a set that Rae must have left behind. They actually had rhinestones framing the lenses.

Lost and sad and scared about Charles, Rosie obsessed instead about her red blotchy skin, about how ugly she was. It was five o’clock when they got to the Golden Gate Bridge. A low strand of clouds lay just over the water, lit by the sunset—small round gray clouds connected in a line like a baby elephant walk. Rosie lowered her dark glasses and looked in the mirror on the car’s sun visor. Her lips and eyes were red and swollen, and there were tiny pimples on her forehead. She put the harlequin glasses back on.

In the hospital parking lot, Elizabeth handed Rosie a pack of gum and some tissues and then got out of the car. “You okay, baby?”

“Uh-huh.” She wouldn’t take off the dark glasses even though she knew that they looked ridiculous. Ridiculous was better than hideous.

“I won’t be long.”

Rosie sat in the passenger seat chewing gum, noticing how stuck her breath was, staring out the window at sad people coming and going. Charles was going to die. It was too painful for words—even worse, much worse than when Grace had died three years ago of Alzheimer’s. Everyone had said how wonderful it was that she got sick with the disease and died within a year; oh, thank God, people said, but it was not wonderful at all. Charles sat by Grace every day and told her stories of their past together—alone with no children, just the two of them.

Under the light of the street lamps in the parking lot, Rosie thought now of Charles dying, and a sudden terrible glee filled her, that he was old and dying and she was young, practically a child, her whole life in front of her while his was about to end. His candle flame was about to be blown out, and she felt the vigor of her own, the heat and light she gave off. She felt a rush of something like ecstasy that she wasn’t dying.
But you couldn’t tell anyone this, this horrible meanness of yours, toward someone so kind, someone who always took you to the circus, to the rodeo. The car and her nose were so stuffy. She looked around the parking lot wildly, looked around at the eerie golden spaceship light the street lamps cast. Where was her mother? Why was it taking so long? Please, please, God, she prayed, don’t let my mother get cancer; please, I’ll try to believe in you. I’ll try not to be so mean to her. She rolled down the window and stuck out her head, like an Irish setter. The cold wet air bathed her face.

R
AE
had visited Charles a lot since his diagnosis, but even more so in the last few weeks, since she had broken up with Mike. “It gets me out of myself,” she said, but sometimes she called her machine from Charles’s, hoping Mike had called and had changed his character. But he never did. Sometimes Elizabeth came with her, but though she loved Charles so very much, she couldn’t help him like Rae could. Rae was not afraid of dying people. She had moved in with her mother when she lay dying three years ago of heart trouble, and she had helped Charles take care of Grace when she was dying. Now she would show up just to hang out with Charles, sitting silently sometimes, rubbing his feet, being alive together.

“The more often you visit Charles, the better your life will be,” Rae had told Rosie when he’d first gotten sick. “It will be hard, but it will be worth it.” But when Rosie visited him now that he was bedridden at home, she felt awful. She hated his smells, she hated how hard it was to think of things to say, how phony she felt saying them.

Charles’s nurse, a big boring blonde named Arlene, usually left his visitors alone once her fierceness and fussiness had made it clear that he was hers, her prize rosebush or show dog: clean, fresh, fed, combed. Elizabeth, so much taller than Rae or James or Rosie, always bent down low to him, peered into his fine handsome face, smelled the hint of decay that no amount of sponge baths and bedside tooth brushing and lemon glycerin swabs could cover.

Rosie had had a strange thought come to her the last time she’d visited Charles, the first weekend in March. He’d been sitting up that day in his wheelchair in the living room, in a broad band of sunlight that accentuated his paleness. Despite his emaciation, he looked like the
pictures of the Buddha Rosie had seen in some of Rae’s books: so peaceful and yet also so focused. Rosie burbled on about her exploits on the tennis court and, during silences, picked at her cuticles, and while Rae or Elizabeth spoke to Charles, she studied him. Later in the car, with Rae driving and Elizabeth in the backseat, she said to no one in particular, “He’s like orange juice concentrate now. Like all the water is gone.”

Rae searched in her rearview mirror and met Elizabeth’s eyes.

“Why do you think that is, Rae?” asked Rosie, her head tilted back against the headrest of the car seat.

“Well. We’re in these watery, confused states so much of the time …”

“Maybe it’s our way of swimming through life,” Elizabeth offered.

“Yeah,” said Rae. “But Charles is starting the plummet. So he’s stripped everything down, because there’s enormous specific gravity in that. If you see what I mean.”

“Well, I don’t,” said Rosie.

“Think about swimming, about diving from a high dive. When you do a dive, to protect yourself and to be economical, you pull everything in: you curve yourself. You concentrate, you don’t leave parts sticking out. And you don’t let your attention wander, because it could be fatal.”

Rosie thought about this. She had her tennis racket with her, a Wilson graphite that cost over two hundred dollars. She needed two of them when she went off to tournaments, in case the strings broke on the one she was using. The strings cost seventy-five dollars. She got her rackets strung very tight, like the boys, like the men.

Sitting in the back seat with her mother and Rae in the front, she pushed the strings around as much as they would go; they creaked. Passing a grove of redwoods, Rosie opened her window to peer up at them, breathe in their primeval scent, squint at the canopy of leaves so that they blurred into a great doily of green.

R
OSIE
and Simone got to play with two older boys at Golden Gate Park that afternoon. It was very foggy, as usual in San Francisco. Peter had arranged the match with the boys’ pro. He was going to meet them there after his lessons were over and watch them play. Veronica drove
them to the courts and then left to go shopping in the old Haight Ashbury district. One of the ex-tournament players who still hung out at the Golden Gate Park courts had told Rosie about what these courts were like in the sixties, when a constant parade of hippies passed by on their way to the Polo Grounds, where the Grateful Dead might be playing, or the Airplane. The women who played here as girls, some of northern California’s finest, said there used to be perverts just outside the gates of the carousel, sitting in the grass or on benches, bottles of Midnight Express in brown paper bags beside them, seeming to pet small birds or puppies that sat in their unzipped laps. Now these girls were women who played hard hot doubles with the men, hanging out all day on the court, in the clubhouse, like outlaws who played tennis.

Luther was a regular here, Golden Gate his home turf. Rosie imagined him out by the carousel gates, all those years ago, fondling himself, but the woman who told her about the sixties said no, no, Luther was just a spectator, just a burned-out old guy. He had not been there to watch them in those days, but the women here sat with him sometimes now and said that he had a great eye for tennis, that he loved the tennis of the public parks. He was never seen playing, but these people thought he used to from the insightful way he spoke about the game. The players waiting for a court here wore much rattier clothes than you saw at the clubs; there was a woman who looked like a hooker and who could beat any of the men at Rosie’s club, an old Asian man in chinos, great players who looked like bikers and maybe actually were, people smoking—smoking! Every time Rosie noticed Luther, for instance, he was smoking. People came over and sat with him or near him, hung out for a while, and then after a while pushed off and went elsewhere.