Meeting Rozzy Halfway

by Caroline Leavitt

  Rozzy gave the baby’s body to the medical school, to the medical students to cut into and wonder over. No one said anything to her about it. When Leffler came in to talk to her, she clamped her mouth shut. He sat there beside her bed, leaning against a hard-backed chair, waiting for her to open up. Sometimes he asked her questions, but she remained mute as stone.

  Rozzy was in her private room for three days. Bea and I both went to see her. Rozzy slept as much as she could. When she was awake, she panicked, she would immediately squeeze her eyes shut again, blotting everything out.

  Bea fiddled with her hands and peered at the other faces that passed by Rozzy’s door. Sometimes she got up and wandered around, asking questions of the other people: who were their doctors, what were their problems? She gave sympathy, she offered advice, but when anyone asked about her, she gave a helpless smile and averted her face. She phoned Ben, pleading with him to come and see Rozzy, and when she got off the phone, she wouldn’t meet my eyes. She fished out rolls of Life Savers, chewing gum, anything sweet. She was always sucking on something, trying to make it last.

  I picked Rozzy up from the hospital when she was ready to come home. She didn’t want to see Bea and she didn’t want to go back to that house, so we cabbed back to her apartment. She looked listlessly around her and said she wanted to shower and then rest. “You won’t go, will you?” she said.

  “No, I won’t go.”

  She was in the bathroom for so long that I went after her. She was sitting in the tub, her head resting on the rim, letting the water massage her, her eyes open and staring. She let me help her up, let me wrap a towel around her and get her into bed, and almost immediately she slept. I called Bea to tell her Rozzy was home and better and that it would be a while before she might want to talk to anyone or see anyone, and then I called David and told him I was staying with Rozzy for a while.

  The baby crib was still in the apartment, but when I tried to haul it down the stairs and put it out with the trash, Rozzy balked. “I want it,” she said fiercely. “You leave it right where it is.”

  “But Rozzy—” I began, but the look on her face stopped me.

  “I just want it here,” she said quietly. “I can’t explain why.”

  Rozzy went to see Leffler every day, and gradually, he reduced her medication even more. One day, she came home with two Siamese cats, one tucked under each arm. “I couldn’t resist,” she said sheepishly. “This girl had them in a brown box on Newbury Street and I just bent down and scooped the last two of them up in my arms and brought them back.”

  Rozzy loved those cats. She named them Litter and Box, interchanging the names at will. I photographed them for her and blew the pictures up into poster-sized prints, which she hung on her wall. She dragged the two of them into bed with her at night, rubbing them into submission. They were not really friendly cats; when I bent to pat one, it bit me and then hissed, arching its back. Rozzy never bothered to buy cat food, but let them eat the remains from her own plate, feeding them Chinese food and Italian food, making them international animals. The only time I ever saw her get angry with the cats was when they both got into the baby crib. Their cries were human. Rozzy grabbed them by the scruff of their necks and flung them to the floor, where the cats indifferently washed their paws and stretched. “They have no right to sound like that,” said Rozzy, “no damn right at all.”

  Rozzy sometimes just listlessly sat in her apartment, staring. “You know what?” she said, sputtering suddenly, starting to laugh. “I should go back and ask for that fetus, for that clot of blood and life, and put it in my old museum.” She rubbed at her eyes, starting to cry. “How’s that for an artifact of existence?” She bunched over, hiding her face. “That’s really funny, isn’t it?” she said.

  She picked up Litter and buried her face in the cat’s fur. Litter yowled, and pounced down on the floor, zipping into another room, ignoring Rozzy’s baleful yearning.

  The more Rozzy brooded over what had happened to her, the more she began to dislike the cats. She plunked them deliberately into the baby crib to keep them in one place. It bothered her when she didn’t know where they were. She began imagining that they were going to jump on her face at night and smother her, and she began to dread going to sleep, putting it off until her eyes were lidded with iron and drooping despite her. Rozzy got so obsessive that any kind of fur began to bother her. We went shopping one day and Rozzy let the saleslady, a pushy middle-aged woman with stiff yellow hair, talk her into trying on a mink coat. As soon as she felt that fur on her skin, she panicked. She let the coat slide right off her shoulders onto the dirty floor and then she was running out of Bonwit’s, swinging her purse, banging it against her thighs as she ran.

  I got rid of the cats for her, the same way she had found them. Everyone liked Siamese cats and they were easy to dispose of. I sat in the park and waited and, soon enough, two young kids ambled by, holding hands, and took the cats.

  Rozzy thought about Stewey again. She even tried to call him. “His line is disconnected,” she told me, painting her toenails with bright red polish. She shook her head, concentrating on her big toe, licking it with red, like blood. “He could be anywhere,” she said. “He could even have another woman friend. But he’ll have to contact me when he wants a formal divorce, won’t he? I’ll get to talk with him then.” She was very calm, and I sat down and watched her meticulously daubing at her toenails with Q-tips, swiping up the excess polish. She looked up at me. “Who wants him anyway?” she said. She reached forward and suddenly flung the bottle of polish across the room, spilling red globules of shimmering scarlet on the wall across from her. I jerked up, but she thrust out her hand. “Don’t. Don’t you dare clean it,” she said. “I want it that way.”

  She stood, half her toenails bright red. “I want you to go. I want to stay here by myself.”

  “I’m staying.”

  Her shoulders tilted forward. “No, I’ll call you if I need you. I promise. Now, please, please, just go.”

  So I left. But it was lonely without Rozzy, without Stewey’s phone calls marking out the time for me, and I began to cling to David a little. “Oh God,” said Rozzy when I told her I spent most of my time with David.

  “I could move back with you,” I said, but she shook her head. I made Rozzy a big blue sign with David’s phone number scribbled on it in white paint and had her tape it by her phone, telling her to call anytime she wanted me.

  She did call, at all hours, jangling us awake at dawn, at midnight, nine seconds before the alarm at eight. Sometimes she was having nightmares, other times she just wanted to talk. A few times she was so hysterical I would have to get up and have David drive me to her place. He held my hand in the car, claiming a kiss for himself before I leaped up, before I gave myself up to Rozzy. There was never that much terribly wrong. Rozzy was lonely; she wanted someone to share hot chocolate with. I couldn’t be angry with her for long, not when those really were the best times, when we could giggle and talk and loosen up like when we were kids.

  Rozzy phoned me at David’s more and more. She would never speak with David himself, except to curtly spit out my name. If I wasn’t there, she would snap down the receiver, cutting him off. She disliked him so much that when I was at her place and she answered her own phone, she would wait, silently, until a voice identified itself. If it was David, she handed the phone to me, still mute. David tried with her. He’d blurt out on the phone, “Why don’t you like me? What did I ever do to you?” but she simply hung up on him.

  “Can’t you be civil?” I pleaded with Rozzy. “I really like him.”

  “I don’t,” said Rozzy.

  “But why not?”

  She shrugged.

  “You could at least be polite,” I said, but she bent over, humming some pop tune under her breath.

  I spoke with Bea a few times. She never discussed Ben, but she did want to see Rozzy. “Can’t I take the two of you to lunch, my treat? You talk to your sister, she won�
��t listen to me.”

  When I spoke to Rozzy, she balked. “Why should I have lunch with her?”

  “She loves you.”

  “Oh, come on,” said Rozzy bitterly.

  “Please. Just do it. Get it over with, otherwise you know she’s just going to nag and nag and never let up. Please.”

  Rozzy set the phone in my lap. “You call,” she said, “but I don’t want to go out. We can eat here. I’ll dump something together.”

  Bea came for lunch two days later, dressed in a bright green suit, carrying a bunch of red roses wrapped in a blue wax cone. “What a nice place,” she said. She handed me the flowers and a brown bag of groceries she had bought, despite my insisting that we were handling lunch. “Oh, you can always use extras,” said Bea mildly. She hugged Rozzy, one hand trying to lean Rozzy’s head onto her shoulder, but Rozzy jerked back from her.

  We ate in the living room, facing the windows, all the food on paper plates because Rozzy refused to do dishes. “Everything tastes marvelous,” said Bea brightly.

  “It’s just mushroom quiche and it’s no big deal.”

  “Well, it is to me,” said Bea, “so there.” She kept up a shiny patter of conversation, never mentioning the baby or Ben, but encouraging Rozzy to think about going back to school.

  Bea got up and served us more food, until Rozzy had to cover her plate with her hands. Bea fussed and took the plates and dumped them in the trash, and while she bustled, Rozzy and I exchanged glances. Bea called out that she was going to “look around,” and she was silent for so long that I got up to drag her back in. She wasn’t in the kitchen, but was in the bedroom, staring at the white baby crib, her hands planted on its sides. She looked helplessly at me. “Come on, Bea,” I said. “Rozzy’s waiting.” I pivoted, listening for her footsteps following me.

  Bea didn’t stay long after that. There wasn’t much to do. She didn’t like sitting around, she kept perching by the window sills and looking out. Conversation dwindled until the three of us were lost in our own hazy dreams. “Well,” said Bea, glancing at her watch, “I’d best be getting home and seeing to Ben.”

  “How is he?” I said, ignoring Rozzy’s darting glance.

  “Oh, you know,” she said. “Next time, lunch is on me, darlings.”

  When she left, Rozzy stood by the window and looked down at her, at the green fleck getting into the car, moving away and disappearing. “That ought to hold her,” she said.

  It was a week later that Rozzy made her decision. She would go back to school, in Texas, and she began applying. Occasionally, when she was plowing through catalogs that had come through the mail, she would look up at me and ask wistfully about Stewey. “He loved me, don’t you think?” she said.

  My junior year began, and Rozzy began coming to classes with me. She was bored with sitting around the apartment. We left everything up to chance. If she came to a class, she came, if she didn’t, she didn’t, but she was almost always there, settled into a seat, holding a place for me. She copied my schedule and tacked it to her wall and learned where the buildings were located. She always sat in the front and she became angry when kids talked. She’d turn right around and shush them, she’d grab cigarettes from lazy hands, take a puff and put the cigarette back, ignoring the aghast looks. The professors loved her. She was alert, she asked questions, she shamed everyone with her restless mind. She led discussions, and no one, except for me and for Rozzy, knew she was not a student.

  She not only did the reading, but she did the papers, too. I’d put my papers off, spending afternoons at David’s, reading his magazines while he studied. “I can’t work with you about, it’s too distracting,” I’d tell him. Meanwhile, Rozzy would be furiously typing on a rented machine, the windows in her apartment thrown open, catapulting the jammering sound out into the street. She wanted grades. “Can’t you put your name to it?” she said. “No, I guess you can’t. Would they grade it if I asked?”

  She went around to all my professors. One coldly told her she was freeloading and he didn’t want to see her in his class again. She had to bite her lip to stop from crying, and it tore, bleeding, staining her chin. Only two professors agreed to grade her papers, and they were delighted by such initiative. I felt humbled. In my lecture classes, where I was one of two hundred, the professors knew Rozzy by name.

  It surprised me when Rozzy started applying to technical schools. “God, you’re so bright, go to regular college,” I told her.

  “There’s too much pressure,” she said.

  “What do you think you’re coping with now?”

  “This is different,” she said. “You never saw me the way I was at school.”

  “What way, how were you?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” she said.

  Rozzy always came to class. On the day of an exam, she would set her alarm and race to class. One day, David’s alarm broke and I woke up late. I flung a dress over my head and ran barefooted to the car. I stumbled into the class an hour late and grabbed an exam. It wasn’t until the exam was over that I noticed the angry stinging burn of my feet, the terrified stare Rozzy was giving me. I walked back to the car leaning on her shoulders. When I got home, David rubbed my feet and set them in a pan of cool water while I wept in self-pity and pain.

  In addition to her schoolwork, Rozzy went through a book a day. She prowled the bookshops, there was nothing she wouldn’t read—a cereal box, a TV listing, a novel. She carried paperbacks with her, and when she finished with a book, she left it on mailboxes, on doorsteps in Beacon Hill, in an empty shopping cart at the supermarket. “Someone else will pick it up and read it now,” she said, “someone who might not have ever thought to buy it.” She used to revisit the places where she left her books. If the books were still there, she would move them to another place, but usually they were gone, and that always put her in a good mood for the rest of the day. In fact, she was in a good mood more and more now, and for a while I thought everything was fine.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Bea began calling me. At first, she never mentioned Ben. She simply nagged at me about why I never came home. “You and that sister of yours,” she said, “you always do just what you damn please. So independent. You’ve always been a problem.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Isn’t that nice, two daughters less than ten minutes away, and I have to make an appointment to see them.”

  “Bea, come on, what’s the big deal? It’s not as if I’m forty miles away.”

  “Forty miles, four seconds, what’s the difference, you were always unreachable.”

  “OK, I’m hanging up.”

  “Wait,” said Bea, “it’s Ben.”

  She unwove the story. Ben hadn’t said much when Rozzy gave her baby away to the medical school, but it did something to him, it changed him. He began narrowing his life, closing up his outlets; and at the same time his mind was shrinking, his flesh was expanding. It was suddenly as if he had never been a gourmet, had never been health-conscious. Prevention magazine slapped uselessly into the house, his stockpile of vitamins grew stale and impotent on the shelves. He never checked labels on cans anymore. He’d come home from shopping balancing four heavy bags in his arms and would set them down on the table for Bea to sort.

  She said she couldn’t stand it. He had boxes of cheese crisps, cans of Spam and deviled chicken, packets of soup and bags of frozen peas. At breakfast she would find him teasing his omelet with a fork, giving it up to eat Fruit Loops straight out of the box. “What is it?” she begged him, but he just glanced at her and went back to his cereal.

  He wouldn’t mention Rozzy at all. “Let’s go visit,” she kept saying to him, but he always had work, he always had to be in court, he never once said simply that no, he didn’t want to go.

  “I could have gone to see Rozzy by myself,” said Bea, “I know that, but there was something about Ben that scared me. I was afraid to leave him alone in the house, afraid he might need me. Even
ings I knitted in the living room, some tasteless ragged-looking sweater I would probably never even wear. I didn’t have the patience to knit well, and when I dropped a stitch, I clumsily knitted it back up. I kept hearing music from Ben’s study—Bach—but his door was shut against me. One evening I knitted for an hour and then went into Ben’s study to ask him if he’d like to see a film. His desk was clean of work, and he was asleep, snuffling into a pillow on the couch.” She had shut the door, a shiver of irritation running through her. She sat up by herself very late that night, looking out of the picture window at the suburbs and idly rubbing one finger against her wedding band.

  She said she began watching him, waiting for him to speak to her. He stopped reading and came home with a little Sony TV, no bigger than a hat box, and every single night he propped it onto his stomach and watched whatever was flickering on. “I hear the worst kind of drivel from that set,” Bea told me, “the talk shows, the movies, and he never shows any response at all, not a laugh or a snort or a burp out of him, and at twelve, he snaps it off.”

  She wanted the old Ben back. She saw him disappearing, swallowed up by pounds, as invisible as Jonah in the belly of his whale. But she wasn’t sure how to go about getting him back. One day, she ran around Boston buying fresh basil from a little Italian store in the North End, dodging the little old women in their shapeless black dresses. She bought pesto from someone who yammered Italian at her, and she peered into a live lobster tank and pointed a finger at a green one scuttling toward the back.