Meeting Rozzy Halfway

by Caroline Leavitt

  Ben encouraged her museum. One evening he came home with a large brown box housing a microscope, and he spent days teaching her how to prepare slides of her cheek cells, how to look at her hair and her nails. They poked at the insides of their mouths with yellow toothpicks, arranging the cells on the slides. I sat and watched. Once I saw Rozzy stop fooling with a slide to lick at her hands. She had bitten her nails until her fingers were bleeding, and she secretively wiped them on her skirt, staining it.

  Her museum was never finished. Every dish was labeled and she gave tours to Bea and Ben on Sundays. She was always adding new things, insisting that a museum, like a person, had to grow, had to have a sense of history and of change. She dated her artifacts. There were two kinds of teeth—baby teeth and the adult teeth that were pulled for her braces—and she took new hair and nail samples every month. She was as precise and meticulous as any scientist.

  If Rozzy was so much Ben’s child, you would think that I was Bea’s. That wasn’t exactly true. Bea did give me attention. She twisted my red hair into curls and spirals after my bath, and she gave me large yellow sheets of paper to scribble on. She hugged me and took me places, but she didn’t give me the same kind of devotion that Ben gave Rozzy. She just couldn’t. She would play Clue or Scrabble with me evenings before Ben came home, and I would deliberately misspell a word so she would reach across the board and affectionately ruffle my hair, teasing me into the proper spelling. But as soon as she heard Ben’s key jiggling in the lock, she would leap up to wrap her arms about him and lead him into the kitchen to talk to her while she fixed the salad. I finished the game by myself, playing both parts, letting myself win. It never felt like any sort of victory. books under my bed. She borrowed some pretty glass pastry dishes from Bea and positioned them carefully on the shelves. She filled them up with what she called “artifacts of her existence,” with nail clippings and red scabs she purposefully picked from her knees with a pocketknife, and even with her baby teeth (she ignored the tooth fairy, although I never ceased to be amazed and delighted with the shiny new quarters I always found tucked under my pillow in exchange for my tooth). Rozzy was always picking at herself. She bit her nails and chewed the chapped pale skin from her lips. She pulled out her eyelashes and peeled the hard skin from the soles of her feet. She even started to chew her hair, collecting some of the ends she bit off, ingesting the rest. Bea looked askance. “Rozzy,” she said, “don’t you know about the poor little girl down the block?”

  “What little girl?” said Rozzy suspiciously.

  “The little girl who had to be rushed to the hospital because she was always eating her hair. They had to cut her right open, and do you know what they found?”

  Rozzy looked at Bea. “Disease?” she said.

  “Unhunh.” Bea looked triumphant. “A hair ball,” she said. “A hair ball that stayed inside her stomach because she couldn’t digest it, and it tangled up her insides but good.”

  Rozzy continued to be doubtful though. Whenever we saw cats outside, Bea would watch for one that was coughing, and then she would prod Rozzy. “That poor kitty has hair balls in its tummy. It ingests its own fur when it cleans itself. Do you want to go through life hacking like a cat? Someone might just keep you as a pet, make you eat smelly tuna and liver mixtures, put you out at night.” But Rozzy took to the idea of being a cat. She experimentally tried licking herself clean, ignoring her bath full of bubbles and hot water and waiting to see if Bea would notice the difference. She even tried to lick a large gray tomcat that wandered into our backyard, before Bea caught her and whisked her away into the house, where Rozzy was made to gargle with Listerine. When Bea told Ben, he laughed and said Rozzy was developing a fine sense of logic.

  Ben encouraged her museum. One evening he came home with a large brown box housing a microscope, and he spent days teaching her how to prepare slides of her cheek cells, how to look at her hair and her nails. They poked at the insides of their mouths with yellow toothpicks, arranging the cells on the slides. I sat and watched. Once I saw Rozzy stop fooling with a slide to lick at her hands. She had bitten her nails until her fingers were bleeding, and she secretively wiped them on her skirt, staining it.

  Her museum was never finished. Every dish was labeled and she gave tours to Bea and Ben on Sundays. She was always adding new things, insisting that a museum, like a person, had to grow, had to have a sense of history and of change. She dated her artifacts. There were two kinds of teeth—baby teeth and the adult teeth that were pulled for her braces—and she took new hair and nail samples every month. She was as precise and meticulous as any scientist.

  If Rozzy was so much Ben’s child, you would think that I was Bea’s. That wasn’t exactly true. Bea did give me attention. She twisted my red hair into curls and spirals after my bath, and she gave me large yellow sheets of paper to scribble on. She hugged me and took me places, but she didn’t give me the same kind of devotion that Ben gave Rozzy. She just couldn’t. She would play Clue or Scrabble with me evenings before Ben came home, and I would deliberately misspell a word so she would reach across the board and affectionately ruffle my hair, teasing me into the proper spelling. But as soon as she heard Ben’s key jiggling in the lock, she would leap up to wrap her arms about him and lead him into the kitchen to talk to her while she fixed the salad. I finished the game by myself, playing both parts, letting myself win. It never felt like any sort of victory.

  I began to draw, to paint. It was a thing that Rozzy couldn’t do, a thing that left her tense and frustrated. At night, I carried my sketch pad under the sheets with me and propped up a small flashlight. I drew in school, and at the supper table until Ben reminded me that there was a place for everything. Bea took the best drawings and framed them and hung them about the house. I decided that I was going to be famous, that I would lead an artist’s life, and I clamored for art classes at one of the museums. “When you’re older,” Bea said, and to pacify me, she bought me a set of pastels that I soon smudged over paper, on my clothing, on the walls.

  Neither Rozzy nor I really made friends in the neighborhood. I had Hilly, but Rozzy had only me. Rozzy and I made our toys challenges. We cut the strings on our puppets in hopes they might come to life like the Pinocchio we had seen on television the night before. We shaved the hair on our dolls so that we might watch it grow back in. When one of my dolls died (a casualty from a toss into the air and onto the cement) we staged an elaborate funeral, gathering all of our dolls. I wept copiously and choked out a few words over the broken doll. We carted the dead out to the backyard, to the garden for burial, pushing her in my red wagon. I wailed, clutching at Rozzy, begging her to bring the doll back to life. Rozzy handed me a blue beach shovel. “Dig,” she said. I was crying so hard that Bea came out and took me into her lap, soothing me, stroking my hair. “No more of this game,” Bea said, but later, in the evening, Rozzy and I crept outside and finished burying the doll, putting a small red stone over the grave to mark it.

  Rozzy and I liked to roam in the wood beyond our house and capture insects in glass jars. We tormented butterflies by plucking off their wings; we let scores of grasshoppers loose in the house.

  We were noisy, raucous; we misbehaved. Bea always smacked us and sent us to our rooms to think. But Ben never punished us so clearly. Instead he simply acted as if we weren’t there. He sat. He became silent. I would stand flush against him, waiting for him to glance up and see me. He took his time. He rustled his paper, he hummed, he checked the laces on his shoes, and if he did look up, it was always at a point directly over my head, it was never at me. Sometimes we didn’t even know what it was that we had done to make him ignore us. We’d run to Bea, who didn’t know either. She’d confront Ben, exasperated, but he said that we were aware of our bad conduct. It was one of the few things Ben did that enraged Bea, and they fought about it.

  Rozzy was as stubborn as Ben. She played his game right back to him, talking animatedly to Bea and to me at dinner, pointedly ignoring Ben. But I
never could stand the silence, the refusal. I apologized for everything I could think of, standing in front of Ben, muttering that I was sorry I had eaten all the candy that Bea had been saving, that I was sorry I had shouted that I hated him, I was sorry I hadn’t cleaned up my paints. Sometimes I hit it right, and then Ben would soften and hold out his arms.

  “Why do you do that?” Rozzy would growl. “How can you grovel around like that?”

  Ben’s silences always stopped eventually, often as suddenly as they had started. We never asked him what he had forgiven us for, or why. It was enough to be free of the quiet.

  When we walked to school together, I had Rozzy all to myself. She always had interesting things to say and she treated me as her equal. She told me how hard it was becoming to control her body, that it threatened to get up and walk away from her unless she watched it every second as if it were a naughty child. I thought she was teasing.

  We were in different grades, but we went to the same school, and we kept our link by dressing alike. Bea would take the subway to Filene’s basement and come back with matching outfits for us. She laid them out across our twin beds. Rozzy and I would race home from school to examine our booty. Sometimes we didn’t like the dresses and Bea would get angry. “Good, wear ratty old T-shirts and jeans, then,” she said, scooping up the dresses and rebagging them before we could reconsider. But usually the clothes were wonderful. We had green plaid Scottish togs just like Shirley Temple wore in that movie where she played a Highlands girl. We had pink skirts with white poodles stitched across the hem and white eyelet blouses and Poll Parrot red patent leather shoes with T straps. I always felt shy and happy when I spotted my own dress flouncing down the hall on Rozzy, when I saw how she looked in it; and looking down at my own dress, not seeing my own face, I could imagine my body to be Rozzy’s—my face, hers.

  I liked school. I drew on everything, on my arithmetic papers, on covers for book reports, and. I told anyone who would listen that I was destined to be famous. We had to learn how to swim for gym class, and it was then that I discovered my second passion—the water. At home, I would fill up the tub with cold water and put on my stretchy black tank suit and climb in. Once I broke a piece of my front tooth when I slipped against the edge of the tub. I told Bea it happened at school, in the playground.

  The first incident happened when Rozzy was in the fifth grade. She abruptly got up from a test, complaining that the numbers were scooting off the page. The teacher, fresh out of college, told Rozzy to go to the girls room and splash a little cool water on her face, she would feel better. “There’s nothing to be nervous about, honey,” said the teacher, smiling. “It’s only a test.” Rozzy went into the bathroom and sat down on the smeary gray tiles and let her body do whatever it wanted. A sixth-grade girl, sneaking into the bathroom for a quick smoke, found Rozzy sitting dumbly in her own urine.

  Bea had to come to school to fetch Rozzy, and she slapped her right in front of the nurse. I sat up with Rozzy that night. “I didn’t cry,” said Rozzy, and because I didn’t make fun of her, she told me I could wear her string of red glass beads the next day.

  Ben refused to believe it had happened. He called Rozzy over to him and had a long talk with her and gave her a silver dollar. “She’s not eating right,” he said, and drove out to Haymarket Square by himself, coming home with forty dollars’ worth of grapes and dark green peppers, which Rozzy loved and ate like apples.

  I thought about what had happened to Rozzy. I began to practice. We had two school bathroom breaks, one at ten, and one right after lunch, around one. There were only four stalls for three classes of thirty girls, but everyone lined up. If you really had a stomachache, you could ask the teacher for special permission, but then she would write your name on the blackboard and everyone would know you had an upset stomach. It was just the same as if the whole class was standing there in the bathroom watching. I never worried about wetting my pants until Rozzy had her incident.

  I began to prepare myself. I tried holding in my urine for as long as I could, until I thought my bladder would burst. At first I could only last until lunch. While everyone pushed to the bathrooms at ten, I stayed in the room and did my before-school work or dallied at the drinking fountain, afraid to actually imbibe any liquid, but moistening my lips. When lunch came, I rushed for the bathroom, my bladder aching. I found that if I concentrated on something else, if I dug my nails into my thighs, I could hold it even longer. Gradually, I worked up to an entire day. I was really proud of myself. I was quite careful about the whole matter. I didn’t laugh much in school or jounce around with the other kids; I kept myself erect and still and serious. I remember much later, with my first lover, Jay, that I would spend entire days at his house without using his bathroom. I held it in, even during our lovemaking, wincing when his penis jabbed at my bladder. He thought I was having an orgasm. One day, though, he looked at me in exasperation. “What’s the matter with you?” he demanded. “Don’t you have normal body functions? All I do is pee and you never go at all.” I blushed and hotly denied being abnormal, but I couldn’t break the habit I had nurtured in grade school, I held it in until I got home.

  There was suddenly more to worry about with Rozzy than her having wet her pants. She began talking out of turn in class, disrupting lessons by suddenly singing or asking questions that had nothing to do with anything and asking them so seriously that the entire class stared at her instead of tittering. At first, because Rozzy was so smart, the teacher ignored it. She thought Rozzy was simply bored with the work, that it was too easy, so she gave Rozzy special sixth-grade readers and workbooks. It didn’t matter. Rozzy was being Rozzy. She turned the pages and talked to herself, slapping at imaginary birds flying around her, pecking in her hair for bread crumbs. When it began happening more and more, the principal was called, then Bea and Ben, and Rozzy began seeing a doctor, a child psychologist.

  Ben cried. He slumped in his favorite brown chair, his head dipping into his hands. Bea soothed him.

  “Ben,” I said, tapping on his knee until he looked at me.

  “Leave Ben alone right now,” said Bea wearily.

  Ben drove Rozzy to the doctor. Every Thursday at two, he stopped work for the day and picked Rozzy up at school. He was convinced his baby would soon be well and brilliant once again. She was only ten; everything was ahead of her, waiting for her. The doctor was a woman, Emma Zondike, and Ben had thoroughly checked her credentials. She wouldn’t let him sit in on the sessions, and because Rozzy asked her not to, she wouldn’t tell Ben what went on in the sessions. I thought he would be miffed that Rozzy didn’t offer him the information herself, but instead, he seemed almost relieved not to have that knowledge, that burden.

  Ben and Rozzy got home around dinner time. I would help Bea set the table, listening for the car, peering out the window for the first shiny glimpse of fender. Rozzy was sullen and angry when she came in. She kept her lips tightly pressed together, opening them only as much as she needed to fork food in.

  Rozzy wouldn’t talk to anyone about her doctor. Ben would try to joke her out of her black mood, but as the sessions stretched across the months, pulling time tight like stitches on a knitting needle, Ben became as tense as Rozzy. The two of them crept silently into the house, faces glum and stormy. He arranged to talk to the doctor. She told him she thought Rozzy was somewhat psychotic, that she might get better, she might get worse, no one really knew about these things. She wasn’t sure of the cause, and there was no definitive treatment. Rozzy was still very young. For now, there were the weekly sessions and Rozzy could start on Valium to calm her down.

  Ben stopped driving Rozzy to the doctor, leaving it up to Bea. He stopped bringing home books and records for Rozzy and he never asked to see an exam of hers anymore. It hurt Rozzy a great deal. She tried to crawl into his lap, but he pushed her away. “You’re too big a girl for that,” he told her.

  “I’m four foot two,” said Rozzy. “That’s not so big.”

 
I watched Rozzy listlessly go outside, saw her sit on the front porch and hunch over her knees. Sometimes I’d go and sit beside her, not talking, but placing one hand on her back just to let her know I was there. I didn’t understand what was happening to her, but I kept wondering how we were still alike, how we differed, all the time hungering to crawl up inside her skin and know

  “Do you love me?” I asked Ben.

  “That’s a very stupid question. You know the answer to that.”

  “I need to go to the doctor’s, too,” I said abruptly, watching his face, and he slapped me.

  “That’s not funny,” he said, and my cheek smarted for days afterward.

  Bea had a conference with the doctor, too. I wouldn’t find out until much later just how upset she really was, how she had numbly walked up and down Newbury Street for a full hour before coming home. There was a metallic stickiness riding on her tongue. She flagged down a cab and rode home, one hand over the other.

  When she got home and into the house, Rozzy glared at her. “Where were you?” she sulked. Bea touched Rozzy. “I’m sorry, honey,” she said, shucking off her coat, going in to pay the sitter.

  I saw how Bea began studying Rozzy, how she kept looking for problems that she could catch and stop. She worried about everything, talking out loud to herself. Why did Rozzy hole up in her room like that? Why was she now tearing so frantically up and down the hill?

  “Rozz-zee—” she cried, holding open the back screen door, letting in the buzzing flies. That small girl, only ten, raced over to her, crunching red sneakers down on the small stones on the patio. Bea put her hand on her daughter’s forehead. “What were you doing, baby? You looked pretty busy.”