Meeting Rozzy Halfway

by Caroline Leavitt

  He took four different shots. “This will make a super card,” he said.

  “If you like monkeys.”

  He stood up, retrieving the cloth chimp, and laughed. “I love them. I have a whole collection of them. You don’t believe me, do you?”

  “Would you?”

  “I’ll bet you,” he said; “nothing dramatic—an ice cream cone.” He stashed the chimp in his hag. “Come on, just think how you can make fun of me afterward to all of your friends.”

  We walked to his apartment. He had a fairly old place and you had to walk up five flights of dirty brown stairs to get there. “One more sec,” he said, jiggling his key in the lock, and then he opened the door.

  His place was painted dark green and there were plants growing lushly out of every surface, out of the fireplace, suspended from the ceiling, around the chairs. “Wait, wait,” he said, snapping on the lights. Rubber apes dangled from lamps and plant pots, cloth monkeys sat in the chairs, and there were two wind-up chimps ready to clang metal cymbals together. An entire wall was covered with framed color photographs of baboons in the wild, their mouths exposing jagged yellow teeth. “I didn’t take those,” he said. “I told you I was a rotten photographer. I could never get shots like those.”

  “Look at this,” he said. He pulled back a brown corduroy spread on the bed that doubled as a couch. The sheets were printed with gorillas and bananas. “Aren’t they super?”

  I stood there, feeling foolish. “Yeah,” I said, “I guess they are.”

  I began seeing David, maybe because he startled me. We’d take the subway out to the zoo and then he would refuse to see any of the animals, not even the huge brown bears that lolled lazily around waiting for people to throw them marshmallows. The bears wouldn’t even make an effort for their food; they’d just wait until a careful aim hit their mouths. David didn’t even glance at them, but rushed me past to the monkey house and to his apes.

  He knew all about monkey facial expressions, the meanings in every hoot, the nuances in each grimace. “You never stare a monkey in the face,” he said. “Watch this. I’ll do it just once to show you why and then never again.” He looked into the cage and then pointed out a dust brown spider monkey who was industriously picking fleas from his back fur. David stared. The monkey snapped his head forward, his mouth ovaled, and his head began bobbing. David kept staring until the monkey screeched, and then David averted his glance. “I gave in,” he said. “Let’s go see the gorilla.”

  David got me permission to come to one of his special ape classes at Boston University. I sat on the sidelines in his primatology lab, breathing in the queasy formaldehyde smell. There were three silvery trash cans and in each one was a chimpanzee as big as myself, and as heavy. It took two people to lift one of the plastic-wrapped apes up onto the smooth lab table. “Look at this, Bess,” said David, his face shining. I stood unsteadily, leaning my palms on the table. The ape still had expression to its face, its fur seemed alive. I looked once at David and then I went outside and sat in the courtyard until David came bursting out an hour later, jittery with excitement, smelling of monkey death, of monkey life.

  I liked David. He was shy, the only son of strict Mormon parents who, from the time he was twelve, had made him get up at five each morning to attend mandatory church school. “If I wasn’t up with that alarm, I’d hear about it all day from my father,” he said, “and from all the other Mormons in Ohio, too, it seemed. The pressure was far from subtle.” He shook his head. “My folks refuse to believe that I’m going to study apes in Africa. They think evolution is part of the devil’s plan to ruin everything. I was supposed to take a whole year off after high school to go on this special crusade converting people. Can’t you just see me? Going from house to house, politely invading living room after living room, spouting off about how my religion was the only truth. My whole senior year, my parents tried to get me ready. My father censored things that came into the house. I remember being furious with him because he threw out a magazine that had a picture of a girl in a bathing suit in it.”

  “You didn’t rebel?”

  He looked sheepish. “What do you want from me? I was stuck in the middle of Ohio, there weren’t exactly thousands of role models of rebellion for me to emulate, you know. I wasn’t stupid. I knew my life didn’t feel right, I just wasn’t sure what was wrong. Not yet, anyway.”

  “What about your friends, what were they like?”

  He shrugged. “I was ashamed to have them to the house. I don’t suppose you’ve ever felt that way, but my house was so different, so crazy. In the basement we had a year’s supply of canned goods. A whole fucking year. We had to. Mormon law, in case of famine. Every time someone came over, I could see him looking at all those cans, and I could tell what he was thinking. I could take that feeling right up inside of me, and it made me sick. I never had anyone over for dinner, especially not on Wednesdays. Family night. Oh God, family night. My father read from this special book, intoning on and on about morality and faith, and I couldn’t even daydream because there would be questions afterward. Guys I went to school with would be out sloshing down beer, chasing girls, and there I was, sitting at the table, answering my father’s questions. It was so terrible.”

  David stretched. “No soft drinks for me. No cigarettes. Mormon law. And dating was serious. Mormons marry young, in the temple at Utah, and both of you had better be virgins. I never liked the girls in my church. I had one Mormon girl friend who said out of the blue that she knew her breasts were small, but she didn’t care. I sat there beside her, starting to move my hand toward her, then she said she didn’t really care, though, because they were the breasts that would feed our children.

  “I escaped. I came east, I worked, and then I applied to schools. My parents were shocked. My mother thinks I’ll grow out of it; she says she has visions from God that I’ll return.”

  “Visions?” I said.

  “A sign from God, she tells me. It’s a sign that God knows she has faith when he gives her a vision. Lots of people believe that. She thinks I’ll have my visions, too, one day. If you ask me, she should see a good shrink.”

  I pulled at a strand of hair, pulling, pulling, until it gave a little szit and came free from my scalp.

  “Families,” I said, a little weary.

  “Yup,” he agreed.

  I never met his parents. But I could always tell when they called. He’d be itchy. He’d prowl through his rooms, touching his monkeys, walking back and forth. His phone had an extra long extension cord, green like a Tarzan vine, and as he talked, he wound it round his arm. He was silent when he hung up.

  He had a picture of his parents in his desk. I found it one day when he was showering. His mother was very beautiful, very young and blond, laughing into the face of a tall blond man. Neither of them looked like David. When David came out, dripping, wearing a green towel about his waist, the photo gave him a start. “How young they are in that,” he said, “My father, God. He was one of the original communist-haters. He even started to build a bomb shelter out of the land on the side of our house. He insisted on building it himself, not trusting anyone else, fearing that even the workmen he had known for years and years still might harbor some Red Russian blood and might make the shelter weak. He wanted his shelter big enough for the elders of the church, but it took so long. By the time it was only half finished, the Red scare had died out. So it became a driveway instead.” He laughed.

  David wrote his parents every week. “Do you mention me?” I kept asking.

  “Are you crazy? Do you want five sets of Tupperware to appear on your doorstep, along with numerous books on becoming a Mormon?” He grinned. “And anyway, now it’s your turn. Tell me about your folks, about your life.”

  Bea was always delighted to cook for someone, and so I brought David. Rozzy was still away and all David knew about her was that she was my sister. She would be the last secret I would share. As soon as David stepped into my house, Bea began fus
sing over him, taking his coat, ruffling his hair. Ben was aloof, suspicious. He treated dinner like any ordinary dinner. He got up from the table and came back without explanation or excuse. He used whatever fork he wanted, and he reached for the dishes of steaming food before David had his share. He didn’t talk, and when he was finished bolting his food, he got up and left the table. “Nice to meet you,” David called after him, and Ben’s retreating back stopped long enough for Ben to say that he had work to do.

  David couldn’t get over all the food that Bea had prepared, the Greek wines, the sauces. “You eat like this all the time?” he wondered. “I grew up on canned stuff, canned vegetables, tinned meats, canned juices.” He made a wry face.

  “Have more,” said Bea, pushing the dishes toward him. “Bess tells me you love monkeys.”

  “I can’t wait to get to Africa.”

  “So go. You like all that heat?”

  “To tell the truth, I don’t sweat. I can’t tolerate heat all that well.”

  I looked at him, grinning. Another surprise.

  He was embarrassed and he fiddled with his fork. “Really. I have a problem cooling myself down. When I was in the sixth grade, I had this lung infection and they had to finally give me this test where they take samples of your sweat and test it for certain chemicals that are indicative of diseases like cystic fibrosis. I had to strip right down and hug myself so they could wrap me up in this Saran Wrap mummy suit. Hot towels, heavy blankets. I was flat on my back for an hour with no one to talk to. The nurse had left the TV on for me, but it was a game show and it really annoyed me. I would have given anything to be able to turn that thing off. I remember the cleaning man walked by me and said that wasn’t I the lucky one, and he turned it off for me. I couldn’t stretch, I couldn’t scratch any of the places that itched me so terribly. After an hour, the nurse wandered back in and took the wrappings off and scraped me down with a slide. It felt funny. Raw. But she had this queer look on her face. ‘Don’t you sweat?’ she asked. ‘Don’t you ever ruin a shirt?’ They had to do the damned test all over again, for another hour. I didn’t sweat during the next hour, either. But they didn’t do it again.”

  “You don’t have cystic fibrosis, do you?” said Bea.

  “Nope. My mother thinks it’s because she came to my bed and prayed. She felt guilty about my being sick, as if it were her fault.”

  “I don’t ever feel guilty about anything,” said Bea.

  “Good for you, then,” I said sharply, and she started, tipping over her glass.

  We stayed until ten and then we left. Bea made David promise to come back for dinner.

  That night, David and I became lovers. If I made any sound that seemed like a cry, he would lift himself up and ask if I wanted to stop, was he hurting me, moving too fast, too slow. He kept stopping periodically, anyway, breaking the rhythm to simply hold me as if he were about to drift into sleep, before picking up the pace and the passion once again.

  When we were finished, lying lazily in a tangle of monkey sheets, I told him about Rozzy. He was very quiet the whole time, and he kept running his fingers along the length of my arm as I spoke. “Do you want me to disappear when she comes in?” he said. “I will, if you want.”

  “I don’t know yet,” I said, and I felt his hand stop moving. “Let’s go to sleep.”

  I came home with David’s phone number and the house key Bea had given me since she had changed the lock. Bea and Ben had left on vacation already, but Bea had frozen several dishes for Rozzy and me to eat, and had left numerous notes seeded around the house, motherly reminders mostly, about shutting off lights, taking our hair out of the bathtub drain, and an emergency number at the ski lodge.

  I was watching TV when I heard Rozzy outside, shouting something to the cab driver. I was unprepared for her entrance. She immediately began talking, dominating the house. Then she fished out three bottles from her purse and slapped them on the table. “Lithium, Valium, aspirin,” she grinned. “The Father, the Son, and the Holiest of Ghosts. Meet my religion.”

  We didn’t unfreeze any of Bea’s dinners, but instead called up a Chicken Delight and had a greasy bucket of chicken delivered along with several cans of root beer. The skin peeled away from the chicken like wallpaper and the root beer was flat, but we were ravenous, and it tasted delicious. We were finishing up when David called, and glancing at Rozzy, I told him I would see him if we could double-date. “She’s devastating,” I said, “so you should have no problems finding someone.”

  “I’ll get Hank,” he said. “Hank’s good.”

  “Oh, fuck,” said Rozzy, when I told her. “Why’d you do that for? They won’t like me. It will be horrible.”

  “It will not. And if it is, you and I can just leave.”

  “Really?” She looked at me. “You mean just walk out, wherever we are?”

  “Why not?”

  So David showed up at our door, Hank in tow, both of them relaxed and laughing and in jeans, both with the same clean shaggy hair, the smell of soap. David had on a new pair of peacock blue suspenders and he clutched a single yellow daisy.

  We went to a Woody Allen movie and Rozzy swung her thin booted legs up over the seat in front of her and sat silently through the movie, never changing position or laughing or anything. A few times I saw Hank whisper something to her, but she never answered. After the film, we all went to Zorba’s, a Greek restaurant in Central Square. Rozzy ordered coffee and kept sipping it, never looking at anyone. Hank clearly liked her, and he kept grabbing at her sleeve to get her attention, kept winking at her, trying to get her to smile. When she got up to go to the bathroom, he grinned at David. “You were right, friend,” he said, “she sure is gorgeous, but shy. Too shy.”

  “She’ll melt,” said David.

  When Rozzy came back, her hair looked wet.

  “Rozzy?” I said, but she ignored me.

  Hank was talking about his studies, about art history. He teased Rozzy, comparing her to a Toulouse-Lautrec, but her face was blank.

  As we were getting up, Hank tried to help Rozzy into her coat, but she tore away from him, her face flushed and damp. “What’s this, do-Rozzy-a-favor week?” She twisted around to me. “You, too. What the hell do I need your favors for either? Haven’t you done enough for me?” She spun around and stormed out, jumping into a yellow cab that was prowling around the street corner.

  Hank was angry, the enchantment was gone. “What the fuck is her problem?”

  “You shut your mouth,” said David.

  I reached over and shyly took David’s hand. He looked friendly and cheerful, despite what had happened.

  “Let’s get you home,” he said. “She’ll want to talk to you.”

  “Look—” I started, but David stopped me, placing his fingers across my lips. “You don’t have to explain anything,” he said.

  “I’ d like an explanation,” said Hank. “What am I, some kind of monster?”

  I must have looked as if I were about to cry. “Later,” David told him. We walked to the car, Hank following us, muttering to himself, kicking at the Pepsi cans rolling in the gutters.

  When I came into the house, Rozzy was sitting at the window, staring into the night. She jumped up. “It’s OK,” I said.

  “I’m so thick and stupid,” she said, waving her hands, “I just felt kind of controlled, like a puppet.”

  “Rozzy,” I said, and she managed a smile.

  Rozzy stayed only three days. She said she felt itchy. We spent most of the time inside, watching TV and making fun of the game shows and the movies. Sometimes Rozzy could be coaxed out, to a movie usually, or a play, but she was uncomfortable around people; then she changed. She wouldn’t talk and she’d bite her nails or fiddle with her hair.

  Rozzy never answered the phone the entire time she was home with me. David kept calling, but he accepted not seeing me. “Tell Rozzy I liked her,” he kept saying. He was a funny kind of person. I had never met anyone quite so accommodating, so kin
d.

  “David liked you,” I told Rozzy, but she wouldn’t be serious. “Enough to marry me?” she said.

  When Bea called, Rozzy got on the extension and listened. Bea was spending most of her time on the bunny slopes while Ben skied the top. They saw one another at night, but by then they were too exhausted to do anything save tumble into bed.

  “Is Rozzy OK?” asked Bea.

  “Rozzy is ducky,” said Rozzy.

  “Rozzy, I didn’t know you were on the line.”

  “Ben there?” said Rozzy.

  “No, darling, he’s still at the lodge. Shall I tell him to call you?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  There was a sharp click as Rozzy hung up, but Bea continued to chatter. When I got off the phone, I found Rozzy in the living room, hunched over her knees, playing with one long thread of hair.

  “They didn’t care that I came home for the holidays either,” I said.

  Rozzy looked up at me. “It’s not the same thing at all, Bess,” she said, “you and me. It’s just not the same thing. We’re like Beauty and the Beast.”

  “I’ve felt that,” I said. I crouched down beside her, resting my head on her shoulder. “I used to get so sick of always being the Beast. Rozzy—” I started stuttering, blurting out words like bullets. “Rozzy, I wanted you to go to that special school. I wanted them to lock you up and keep you away.” I started crying, parting my tears with my fingertips. “I just wanted a chance to see what it felt like to be Beauty for a change.”

  Rozzy turned to face me, astounded. “But Bess,” she said quietly, “I’m the Beast.” She put both arms around my shoulders, trying to still them. “I’ve always been the Beast.”

  She stroked my face, the skin of her hands absorbing my tears. “Shush,” she said. “Don’t cry. I’m right here.”