by Melanie Finn
Death and hungah. “Ya evah bin starvin?” Rosie had not — whatever Gran’s failings, there had been food. Growing up, Billy had endured lean winters, leaner springs, because by then the salted meat was done and nothing was growing yet, the root cellar empty, they were scraping the last of the berries from the preserve jar, and Billy did not believe a deer felt less worry than a child — the peculiar anxiety of chronic hunger, the pain in the belly and the way muscle disappeared, the shape of your own skeleton emerging beneath the skin. “Ya see ya own veins throbbin in ya feet and ya cant nevah get wahm.”
Billy knew how life slipped, snake-quick. Her father’d died of exposure, falling on the ice while going to feed the pigs, knocked himself out and no one realized until the morning. “I thought ita pilah rags, someone’d dropt tha laundry.” Billy also knew how to survive on residue, like some kind of Saharan antelope. Tuesday was when the thrift store in town put out the newest donations — the boots and good shoes and coats went fast. She knew the supermarket handed out expired food if ya go ta tha back doah, if ya ask fa Donnie. You could get oranges, bananas, meat and chicken, bread and milk. Billy refused to take state assistance because then “They” would know where she was, and who she was and that wasn’t anyone’s business but her own. The very poor don’t have many choices, and Billy didn’t want some nosey pakah from tha town comin up heah with a clipboard, pryin, tellin’ her her house weren’t upta code or why hadn’t she paid her taxes. Neither did Rosie.
After dividing the deer, Rosie slung a haunch across her shoulders and took the shortcut back across Billy’s fields. She remembered the first time Billy had given her a whole deer leg and she’d had no idea how to cut it up. She’d wrestled with the meat, thinking it should be sliced, perhaps like a pineapple, lengthways, and finally taken an axe to the joints. Now she knew how to filet and debone with the expertise of a butcher.
It was barely eight, the palest sun broaching the mountains. Now the cold came to her, her toes like stones, her hands aching. Her fingers fumbled the lock to the front door, and inside the latch for the dining room.
“Mama?”
Rosie swung open the door, reached down and pulled Miranda into her arms. Her child held tight, regardless of the deer blood. “You were a long time.”
THE CELLAR
1993
Rosie was almost out the door — Miranda already in the car with her backpack and coat. She did not recognize the number, it was local, she picked up. For a fraction of a second, she imagined that it was State Farm telling her she’d missed a payment on the car insurance.
“Rosie.”
Not a question.
If an elevator suddenly lost its traction and plummeted, the occupants must feel exactly like this. The squealing gravity, the falling almost too fast for fear.
“It’s me.”
No point in pretending, no point in asking Who?
“I’m at the Gulf station in town.”
She coiled the phone cord around her fingers, said the only thing she could think of: “Why?”
He made a soft laugh, weary perhaps. “You ask why, my girl?”
Rosie peered out the door. Miranda was looking back at her, pointing to a make-believe watch on her wrist and mouthing, “We’re late!”
“Come and pick me up,” Bennett said.
“Right now?”
“Yes, right now.”
Rosie said, “I need to be at work.” There was a pause. She heard him huff, as if of displeasure. “Tell them something came up.”
“It’s not that kind of job.”
“Tell them.”
“Yes, Bennett.” How odd his name on her tongue, the syllables dead-ending with the hard ‘t.’
“Where’s Miranda?”
“On a field trip.”
“For how long?”
The lie was smooth. “Three days. A nature center. In upstate New York.”
“I have ached in my bones for you.”
Rosie wound the phone cord tight around her wrist. “Give me an hour. Two hours.”
There was silence, as if he was considering what there may be to consider, the full array of options before him. “If that’s the best you can do.”
Rosie thought of calling Billy. Perhaps she could take Miranda away for a few days. But she didn’t want to put Billy in the middle.
At school, she parked rather than simply dropping Miranda at the front door. They walked together, Miranda’s warm hand in hers. Soon Miranda would tear away from her, veer into her group of friends.
“Bye, my love.” She kissed Miranda’s forehead, and her daughter embraced her.
“Love you, Mummy!” Away she flew.
Inside the school office, Rosie found Karina, the school secretary. “I don’t know if you can help. My grandmother died and I need to go to her funeral. It’s not a family-friendly event and so I’m hoping I can find someone for Miranda to stay with for a few days.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” Karina frowned. “But —”
“I just don’t know any of the other mothers,” Rosie rushed on. “I’m always working so I don’t get to meet them. Or I’d ask one of them.”
“I wish I could help —”
A woman’s voice from the hallway, “Miranda can come with me.”
Rosie turned, and the woman continued, “I know Miranda, she’s in Margo’s class. She can come home with me. She can stay the night. Two nights. Whatever you need.”
“Are you sure, Ginny?” Karina sounded relieved.
Ginny held out her hand to Rosie, “Ginny Benoit.”
Rosie exhaled. “Thank you.”
She arrived at the care home five minutes late. The job was minimum wage — bathing the elderly residents, changing their diapers, helping serve meals; but Mary, the owner, was teaching Rosie how to do the book-keeping. And as Rosie didn’t have a drug habit or a drink habit or a criminal record, Mary cut her some slack. She didn’t mind, if, on the odd snow day or sick day, her employees brought their kids to work, provided they didn’t get in the way. Mary had raised five boys on her own. Today, she fastened her lips over her fake teeth. “You’ve got three showers lined up this morning.”
“I wouldn’t ask you, if I could avoid it. Mary, please.”
Mary sighed, “Just do Roberta, then. She cooperates for you for some reason.”
The reason being that Rosie took care. She soaped the old backs, some smooth and white, others mottled with cancerous patches. She cleaned old feet, between their toes, the stinky cake of dead skin, she trimmed the yellow claw-like toenails, she wiped between the sagging buttocks the smears of shit and dried urine, she rinsed between the folds of exhausted skin. The bodies had neutrality, like butchered deer, they were parts that needed tending. Ball sacks, pendulous breasts, scars, creases, grooves, niches: Rosie felt no repulsion, though the decrepitude scared her, the inevitability of the body’s failure, the terrible loneliness and abandonment. Yet she couldn’t see herself in old age, the old were another species altogether.
Roberta sat curved forward, her knitting almost up to her face.
“Bath time,” Rosie began.
“I jes wanta die.”
Rosie said nothing, simply folded her arms across her chest and stood. She’d learned this from Big Sal, one of the nurses who’d grown up on a dairy farm. Big Sal was 5’2”, but she was used to moving cattle around. “You just stand n’ glower, don’t be noice or hava chat, then they see maybe you’re soft n’ they’ll make a run at you.”
Roberta was 94, she’d broken her back ten years before, though no one in her dysfunctional family had noticed. The spine had healed curved as a fiddlehead. Grumbling as she pushed her walker, head angling down from her back at 90 degrees, Roberta marked her progress to the bathroom according to the swirls on the carpet beneath her feet. “I want to die.”
“We’re nearly there,” Rosie replied.
“Why cant I jes die?”
“Watch the door. I’m sorry you’re so sad. Here we are, a fe
w more steps.”
In the bathroom, Rosie helped Roberta out of her clothes, exactly as she had once done for Miranda, taking of the pee-soaked diaper one leg at a time. Roberta smelled — body odor, urine, probably feces, certainly the foul stench of her rotting gut that roared up her throat and out her mouth, so Rosie made sure to evade Roberta’s face. Gently, she pulled her shirt over her head, and held her under her armpits to maneuver her into the shower stall. When Rosie turned on the water, Roberta began to cry. “They’re ol dead,” she whimpered. “I jes wanta join ’em.” Her son in a car crash, her husband of heart-failure, one granddaughter to cancer another to drugs, a great-grandchild to pneumonia. Life seemed a high tide that had taken the people she’d loved out beyond the reef, leaving Roberta on a lonely shore. Sometimes Rosie wondered that if she ever made it to 90, what might have happened to her. Sometimes she wondered about Gran’s grief, what it might have done to her — losing a husband and her only child.
She ran the warm water over Roberta’s body while she wept, for the shower stall was to Roberta a kind of chapel where she could express the grief she refused to otherwise show. When Rosie was done toweling down the arched back, Roberta sighed and sniffled. “What’s for lunch?”
“Tuna noodle casserole.”
“I hate tuna noodle casserole.”
“There might be some soup from yesterday.”
“I jes wanta die.”
After tucking Roberta into her chair by the window Rosie found Mary in the nurse’s station sorting prescriptions into paper cups. “I’ll be here tomorrow.”
“And this weekend?”
“This weekend?”
“I left you a message,” Mary said.
Rosie shook her head, there’d been no message. Miranda, perhaps, playing with the buttons. “When do you need me?”
“To cover for Doreen from six to midnight Friday and Saturday night. Her husband’s in the hospital, she can’t make the whole night shift. You can bring the kid.”
In the car, Rosie flipped down the visor and regarded herself. Touched up her mascara, softened her hair. Her eyes looked back, just that section of her face, like an Arab woman who showed only this part of herself to the world; her eyes were pretty, greeny-blue, the iris rimmed with a dark wheel, thick lashes, nicely arched brows. Suddenly, roughly, Rosie smeared off the mascara with saliva and the edge of her shirt, pulled her hair sternly back.
Bennett was sitting on the guard rail that separated the Gulf station from Trader Bill, who repaired chain saws, lawn mowers, and snowmobiles. Trader Bill had once asked Rosie out when she brought in her chain saw blade for sharpening. She’d politely rebuffed him, and when she went to use the blade it snapped and would have cut her face to hell if she hadn’t been wearing a visor. Bennett stood as he saw Rosie in her car. He was bulkier, his hair very much thinner, greyer. Was he buffed from muscle — or was the bulk merely fat and a cheap jacket? He was old, she realized, in his 50s.
When she pulled to a stop beside him, he walked over, looked down at her in her car. “Hello, my girl.”
Rosie had ignored this moment, she’d denied it. She’d imagined Bennett would be absorbed like a splinter into some dark corner of the world. Yet, here he was, the Universe had boomeranged him back. Stripped of his Harris Tweed, his Brooks Brothers French cuffs, he wore a grubby flannel shirt and ill-fitting stone-washed jeans, worn sneakers and the dirty jacket. Jail had coated him with seediness; he was now the kind of man who’d do his supermarket shopping in his pajamas and flip-flops.
Miranda thought he was dead, everyone did: he’d died in a car crash. It was a tragic and short story, and far better than Miranda being labeled a drug dealer’s daughter. Rosie had assumed that one day she’d have to tell the truth, or a savory version of it. She’d assumed she would do it on her terms. Miranda never asked about her father, she had no need of him, stuffed as she was with Rosie’s love. Sometimes, it had really seemed as if Bennett had gone from the world.
Yet here he was. Reincarnated. Evenly, Rosie said to Bennett, “Let’s go and get a cup of coffee.”
Bennett gave her a breezy smile, not one she recognized. He drummed his fingers on the hood of the car as he walked around, keeping his eyes on her. In the seat beside her, he touched her face. “You look good, Rosie.”
She snapped her head away. She wanted to say, “I don’t care what you think of how I look.” But she just started the car. He lodged himself into the passenger seat, ignoring the bleeping of the seatbelt alarm. “I want you to know I’ve changed.”
Her mouth was dry but she didn’t want him to see her licking her lips. She turned onto the road, toward the town’s diner. His seatbelt alarm bleated on. His voice was soft, generous. “Hey, it’s OK that you didn’t write. I understand, I do, you’re busy and I know what I put you through. I’ve had a lot of time to think. I want to make it up to you. So, we’re going to move to Maine, to my family’s summer home. It’s right on the ocean, so beautiful, so wild, Rosie, my girl, you won’t believe it. And we’ll take long walks on the beach and eat lobster and watch the sea in all its vagrant moods and, Rosie, the way the gulls move within the webs of air, and the storms will surround us on dark winter nights but we’ll be inside, you and me and Miranda, we’ll have the fire, we’ll have each other, we’ll be playing backgammon.”
Rosie found a parking spot, grabbed her bag, and opened her door before he could. He followed her across the lot, then pulled the entry door just before she got there.
“After you,” he said with a cheery flourish.
They sat in a booth by the window. Bennett immediately opened the menu, surveyed the options, most of which came with the kitchen’s thick, grey, oily gravy. He looked wolf-hungry. When the waitress came, Rosie ordered coffee.
“Get something,” Rosie said. She had part of her paycheck in her wallet, she was showing him how things were different now. “Whatever you want.”
“Tall stack with sausages and eggs. Sunny-side up, please. A side of bacon. And coffee. Thank you so much.” When the waitress left, he smiled at Rosie. “The food in prison, there’s something spiteful about what they do to it. It’s not tasteless. I could live with that. But what can you do to meatloaf that makes it taste like an old man’s leaky ass?”
The coffee came. The sipping gave their conversation a rhythm, the mugs kept their hands busy. They appeared a normal couple having a conversation. She nodded, she sipped, yet she felt the old exhaustion braided with new, raw anxiety. Her tone was scrupulously neutral, “How did you get here?”
“Hitched.”
“You hitch-hiked?”
He nodded. “Trucks mostly. St. J is a big depot. I got a ride all the way from Trenton.”
“Trenton?”
“I was transferred down to Pennsylvania a few years ago.” He cocked his head. “I sent you a letter.”
She looked back at him. “I threw them away.”
“Unread?”
She nodded.
“And the ones for Miranda?”
“Don’t pretend, Bennett, don’t pretend you wrote to her.”
The food came, and for a while they didn’t speak. Bennett focused completely on the food, mouthful upon mouthful, his manners still impeccable. He used the fork and knife correctly. His elbows were not on the table, his mouth was closed as he chewed. At last, he drew knife and fork carefully together in the center of his plate. “Famished! Haven’t eaten since yesterday!” Leaning in, he spoke in a stage whisper: “I stole a bag of groceries from a woman’s car as she was returning the cart.” Then, an unfamiliar, lilting laugh. “A jar of Fluff, two bags of Cheetos. My luck to rustle a culinary heathen.”
So here was this person, this Bennett, sliding in and out of focus, who stole food and hitched in trucks. His arm went into the air, his fingers elegantly rang an invisible servant’s bell. He ordered another coffee. Please could I, thank you so much, it’s wonderful coffee.
Rosie said: “Why are you here?”
�
��You’re my family — my wife, my child.”
“We’re not married.”
He seemed surprised, and so gave his warmest smile. “Then let’s get married! Marry me, marry me, Rosie.”
She began to push back her chair. He grabbed her wrist. Their eyes met. He’ll make a scene, she thought. She sat back down.
“Listen, listen, Rosie, Rosie. I know, I know. Unforgivable. I do not ever expect you to forgive me. But I love you, I love Miranda, she needs a father.”
“She hasn’t so far.”
“I am her father. I have a legal right to be her parent.”
“What will you do for a living?”
“I’m making decoys.”
Rosie laughed.
“Seriously. I have a talent. Don’t laugh, Rosie, my girl, don’t laugh. I make decoys — duck decoys — and sell them. I learned in prison.”
“What kind of ducks?”
“Eider. Harlequin. Whimbrels.”
“Whimbrels aren’t ducks.”
He glanced at her — and there it was, glinting, what had always been there but hidden from her, the way the light shifts on a vernal pool and there — there — is the quick, sly movement within the dark water.
Bennett’s smile twitched: “So, you’re a birder now?”
“A whimbrel isn’t a duck.”
“Decoys are the only truly American folk art. Did you know that?”
“No.”
“The Native Americans made them, and the settlers learned from them. Europeans didn’t make decoys.”
Rosie studied at his thin, lank hair. The loss of it must have pained him. “I don’t give a shit about decoys, Bennett.”
“Tell me about Miranda.”
How dare you, she thought, and she felt a fierce coveting. My child, my child. Mine, mine, mine, mine, mine. Bennett was looking at her over his cup of coffee. Rosie opened her mouth, moved her tongue: “She’s happy, she does well at school, she has friends.”
“And this field trip to Boston?”
He was trying to catch her out. “Plattsburg.”
“Plattsburg, that’s right. And, ah, what have you told her about me?”
“I didn’t want her to think you abandoned her.”