Also, in ecstasy, Eve cries out for God and Jim.
‘Oh — God! Oh — Jim — God!’
Rosaline doesn’t want to think badly of this other woman, doesn’t want to think of her at all. Still less does she want to think badly of the father of her children. Yet she has to wonder at their ruthlessness; in her own home, her children’s home, right above her head.
She has to wonder: do they want her gone, or merely to keep her in her place?
The pain of easing her neck from the orthopedic pillow makes Rosaline whimper, yet her whimper is only a ghost of Eve’s cries. Her pain is only a ghost of their pleasure, inching to unstrap the brace from her back, the traction weights from her ankles. Her feet thud against the floorboards, like proverbial trees falling alone in the woods. Her spine sears and then numbs as the adrenaline overtakes her, and it’s not hard to imagine how it is for all those sisters on Sundays, cheating age and illness to the cheers of the congregation.
‘Jim — Oh God — Jim —’
Rosaline hobbles into the hall, past the framed cherubim of her children’s faces. Outdoors. The harsh midmorning sun blinds her, afterimages exploding like gunshots. She closes her eyes and imagines her insides in those same vivid red tones, vertebra grinding vertebra. A dragonfly flits past and she opens to the clear blue, the evergreen hills.
A beautiful morning, despite everything.
In the early days, when she was just a trainee nurse and Jim a dirt-poor schoolkid working nights as an orderly, Rosaline believed he’d heal people someday. Not a faith healer, but a man of medicine, with whom she’d travel to poor brown-skinned nations. It was the way he saw the preciousness of imperfect bodies: bodies that stank, coughed, gurgled, only a weak pulse away from being corpses. It was the way he was unashamed to shed tears over an unwed mother’s stillborn baby. Maybe, looking at his gold-hued hands, she’d even allowed herself to imagine his touch curing her of all her ills: her freckled face, her rabbit teeth, her wallflower personality, the rheumatism that made her old at nineteen.
I can’t help you, Ro’, if you don’t wanna be helped. Fool my ass, married to a martyr when I could have anyone.
The sweet smell of roses wafts from below as Rosaline climbs down the same way Eve had come up, every step a reminder that she shouldn’t be walking. It hadn’t been this bad last summer, had it? Fine summer days, lying in the shade, slathered in sunscreen, as Jim and the boys romped in the lake. Eve no more than a speck on the opposite shore.
The boys are still at war, their scuffs and shouts echoing from around the corner. ‘You fucker!’ yells one of them — Martin Luther, she’s sure, at Jimmy Jr., she’s sure of that, too. As the sun hits her back, bones, marrow, Rosaline is glad of their rough noise, their boyish obliviousness to all rivalries but their own.
Eve comes out of the parsonage in that white minidress, smoothing the fabric over her slim belly. A snail-like sheen to her thigh. A look on her face that’s almost queasy, like a drunken partygoer about to throw up in the bushes. She closes the door and starts toward the stairs, a mermaid on dry land. She spies Rosaline.
Her face changes.
An ugly look. Ugly in a naked way, which makes Rosaline feel just as ugly. A dozen platitudes dry up in Rosaline’s mouth: oh hi there, good morning, whatlovelyweathermyLord. She averts her eyes before Eve can.
‘Excuse me,’ Eve murmurs coolly as she descends.
Then she slips past Rosaline, the feline tang of her mingling with the roses, that dark knot of hair blazing so bright, it’s painful to see.
2.
‘Tell Mother what you did today.’
It is the blue of evening, a fortnight after Eve’s intrusion, when Jim’s voice drifts up the porch through the racket of slamming car doors, chirping cicadas, crackling citronella candles. Rosaline’s ears prick at her sons’ whines of protest; a familiar weariness settles in her chest. What’ve they done now? She sits forward in her cushioned rattan chair, causing Chitters the tabbycat to plonk down, tail thrashing.
‘G’on, tell her.’
‘But Daddd—’
They get louder as they advance up the porch. Chitters peeks down at them, then flees under a chair. Rosaline plucks the glasses from her nose, bookmarks her page, looks up as the boys crowd onto the porch: salty-haired and dressed in swimming trunks, Jim at their tail.
‘Well, what’ve you got to say for yourselves?’ She smiles feebly.
‘Hi Mom,’ Martin Luther mumbles.
‘Hi Mom.’ Jin-sun and Paolo hang their heads.
‘Mommy,’ Jimmy Jr. chirps.
‘Tell Mother what you did today,’ Jim repeats. ‘Junior?’
Jimmy Jr. sucks his lower lip, a habit he got from Jim. ‘We went to Bodega Bay!’
‘Bodega Bay? That’s some way aways.’
‘Yeah.’
‘And what’d you do there?’
‘Swimming.’
‘Oh yeah?’ She looks to Martin Luther, Jin-sun, Paolo, and dutifully they play along: we climbed some big rocks, we ate crab rolls, we fed seagulls. Rosaline has the urge to draw them onto her lap and enfold their lanky, sun-warmed limbs. But nine, ten, eleven, twelve: they’re getting too big for all that. ‘Sure sounds like you guys had a busy day!’
‘You forgot to tell her the best part,’ Jim cuts in, before the boys can finish bobbing their heads. ‘Tell Mother who came with us.’
He’s wearing a lime-green cabana shirt from when they lived in Rio, his olive skin darker than she’s seen it in a long time. She’s reminded of those first impressions of him around the hospital; how in that lily-white setting he could’ve been Mexican, mulatto, anything, and how it had scared her.
Junior pipes up. ‘Su-mi’s French teacher came.’
His words perfectly soft, angelic, and looking at her with those chocolate-button eyes that stole her heart at the Indianapolis orphanage nine years ago.
‘Her name’s Evelyn,’ Martin Luther hisses. But correcting his brother doesn’t seem to give the usual joy; it’s like he’s just spat poison, his head shrinking turtle-like into his skinny shoulders.
‘Sister Evelyn,’ Paolo offers with a shrug.
Jin-sun crouches, pinches together his fingertips and clicks, ‘Chit-chit-chitters.’
Jim smiles down at Rosaline; not a mocking smile, but placid, what-can-I-do? She feels her face grow slack with this newest hurt; knows the only place to hide is inside herself. Pressing her spine against the cushion, she concentrates on the citronella flames, not letting them blur. But Jim is watching her through his sunglasses, evaluating every weakness.
‘Well, I hope you guys were on your best behavior.’ Rosaline wrests her eyes from the firelight, looks square at Jim. ‘And I sure hope your dad didn’t let you fill up on junk.’
None of the boys mention Eve’s name again. Not at the dinner table, farting their chairs and giggling between mouthfuls of five-bean casserole, nor feeding the cats and dogs, nor dripping half-naked from bath to bed. Jim hangs around just long enough to eat, exchange a few words about his blood pressure, and put on a pair of slacks, before moseying down to the Temple where the young people are having a sing-along. The boys are tucked in, and Rosaline wrapping chicken gizzards with just the cats for company, when Su-mi comes home, all prettied up from a meeting of the brides-to-be at the Luces’ place. ‘Do you have to do that?’ Su-mi scrunches her nose at the gizzards, and shame pushes up inside Rosaline like weeds in dirt. Su-mi must sense the shame since she starts helping, despite Rosaline’s protests, and asking after Rosaline’s back, and complaining about that bimbo Sister Terra suggesting she get married in go-go boots and a big sunhat like Yoko Ono. Once the gizzards are packed in the icebox, Su-mi asks, ‘Is Dad home?’ and, at Rosaline’s head-shake, gives a bat-like look of disgust. But, no, it’s not like that, Rosaline objects; he’s at the sing-along, he spent all day with your broth
ers, don’t be so hard on him. Defending Jim until the shame turns righteous and Su-mi drops the subject.
It’s a good thing, Su-mi marrying, Rosaline thinks, once she’s closed herself back inside her room. Even if eighteen is too young. Even if she could do better than Dwight Mueller, the District Attorney’s homely son. Even if the marriage was all Jim’s idea. To send her out of the house, away from the craziness, it’s about the best she can do as a mother these days.
But the shame. It pushes back up, scratches at her, flames her cheeks as she brushes her pale flyaway hair in the soft lamplight. Shame about Su-mi and the eight years she’s been her mother without caring for her as she does the boys. About the gizzards Jim will slip into some poor old sister’s mouth tomorrow, to be choked up and passed off as cancers. Most of all about Eve, the outrage every time she thinks of her.
Rosaline doesn’t expect to hear Jim return while she’s still setting her hair in rollers. His tentative tread in the hall, his voice calling her, ‘Ro’?’, as you’d call a sleeping child. She stays quiet as his shadow appears beneath her door. He raps softly; nudges it open.
‘There you are.’ He smiles. ‘Quiet as a mouse.’
It’s the nervous sixteen-year-old boy he most resembles, standing hands-in-pockets in the foyer of her parents’ clapboard house, the one he thought was a mansion because it had an indoor toilet and a fireplace. ‘New girl, Flora Armstrong, you heard her sing yet? Seventeen and voice like Nina Simone.’ He looks at the can of hairspray on her vanity. ‘I gotta make some phone calls. Just wanted to, uh, see if you were up.’
They aren’t in the habit of wishing each other goodnight unless the children are around; haven’t been since he made a more regular habit of going to Eve’s at night. Rosaline tries to blank the irritation from her face as she turns to him. ‘I’m about to turn in.’ Jim sees the irritation and, more important, the effort to pretend it’s not there. ‘You should, too.’
At this, he slackens, sighs. ‘Antonia Bud’s in hysterics. That drunk-ass husband of hers wants to take ’em all up to Chicago. Damn crime, with how well them kids are doin’ here.’ He shakes his head woefully. ‘And there’s Isaiah sayin’ Minnie’s got cold feet. Nothin’ some counseling won’t fix, but god-damn; those kids’ve been engaged since they were knee-high, and I’m hearing this now?’
Rosaline, like all the original Indiana folks, had been overjoyed when Roger Luce, eldest son of one of their first white families, became engaged to Minnie Bellows, eldest daughter of their first black family. ‘But Minnie adores Roger.’
‘Ain’t Minnie’s fault. Roger’s been overcompensating. Every time some new young thing bats her eyes at him, he forgets his responsibilities.’ If Jim is aware of the irony of his words, he doesn’t show it. ‘Latent homosexual, same as his daddy.’
Though Rosaline doesn’t doubt he’s right about Gene Luce, she’s skeptical about Roger. Ignoring Jim, she peers at her insipid reflection.
‘These headaches, Ro’ … It’s like wire cutting into my skull …’
He’s sensed the drift of her attention, is tugging her back like a child at her sleeve. Agitated, Rosaline gives her rollers a pat and keys open the drawer of her vanity. He lists closer as she rattles around inside and shakes a pair of green-and-gold capsules onto her palm. ‘Don’t take these too close to dawn or you’ll get groggy.’
‘Thank you, Mother.’
Jim bends to scrape the pills from her palm and plant a chaste kiss on her cheek. A moment later, he’s murmuring, ‘G’night,’ and creeping away in his worn-out loafers. Once the door closes behind him, Rosaline feels the sting.
He believes things are fine between them.
She’s allowed him to believe what he’s doing to her, to their family, is fine.
Rosaline welcomes the prospect of turning off the lamp, slipping under her covers. Another man would’ve offered excuses. Another man would’ve kept quiet, done all he could to keep those parts of his life separate. But Jim isn’t like other men. It’s his genius and his cruelty, that he doesn’t follow other men’s rules; makes up his own rules. Rosaline recognizes this is exactly what he’s doing by bringing Eve into their lives; that there’s no way to condemn the gesture without condemning other things — his inclusiveness, his generosity, his honesty.
Unable to condemn or accept, she sleeps.
She sleeps, and wakes to a tension, like a ringing in her ears. Like the phantom cries that used to get her out of bed, months after Martin Luther and Junior learned to sleep through the night. Matching blue onesies. Twins in different skins. She listens for the source of tension; a whining that seems to come not only from her head, but from the walls. Inside the walls.
The plumbing?
The bright sliver beneath the bathroom door is visible from the hall. Wrapped in her pale-lemon robe, Rosaline shuffles to the light. Through the door, she hears a rush of taps, a patter of small feet. She presses her ear to the wood. Muffled yet distinct, there it is:
Sobbing.
‘Sweetie?’ Rosaline calls, knocking softly.
The sobs stop. The taps keep streaming. She knocks again.
‘Is everything …’ Her voice falters ‘… Everything okay?’
It’s a long moment before the water ceases; even longer before a chink appears and Martin Luther’s damp eyes stare out at her. Her eyes but also Jim’s, like the sensitive face with its cleft chin and olive skin. Not for the first time, Rosaline marvels at that cocktail of genes.
‘Mom,’ Martin Luther says, voice wet as the tiles he’s opened out to, and it only takes a heartbeat for her to understand: the soggy sheet, the brimming bathtub, the smell of urine from his alligator pajamas. ‘Can you help me?’
‘Oh, sweetie, sure.’ Rosaline steps in, clicks shut the door, and squeezes Martin Luther’s shoulder. ‘Oh. Y’know, you coulda woke me?’
‘Sorry Mom.’
‘Shhh. Don’t you go apologizing. Accidents happen.’
Rosaline is aware of Martin Luther keeping his distance, glossy dark head hung, swaying like a sleepy soldier. She frowns at the overfull tub, then winces as she bends to pull the plug. They both cringe as the drainage splats like diarrhea.
‘Sorry Mom.’
‘I thought there was a baby alligator in here, when I heard all that splashing.’ Rosaline again touches Martin Luther’s spindly shoulder. He doesn’t crack a smile. ‘Let’s take these down to the laundry, huh? I’m sure we can find you some clean jammies …’
They move downstairs like refugees by night. The laundry is yellow-lit, cluttered with scraps of boyswear. Rosaline finds something clean, dry, blue-striped, Martin Luther’s size. She hands it to him, stripes waving before her tired eyes. Martin Luther is too old to undress in front of her without shame; she knows this, but also it can’t be the only reason he’s sniffling.
‘Marjy. Hey.’
An early childhood name, from when he was ‘Martin James’ instead of ‘Martin Luther’; ‘Martin’ for her maiden name, ‘James’ for ‘Jim’. She knows he hates being called it around the other boys, but she suspects he still likes it, between them.
‘Mom.’ A strangulated cry. ‘I saw—’ His face crumples and hides among the blue stripes. ‘I’m sorry. I saw Dad kissing Evelyn.’
Rosaline’s first instinct is to hide her face, too. She drops her eyes, covers her mouth as if for a tiny belch. ‘Oh?’
‘He kissed her on the beach when we were climbing the rocks and again in front of the lighthouse and when he drove her home,’ he reels off. ‘He kissed her on the mouth.’
Having reached the end of his catalog of sins, Martin Luther clams up. Rosaline feels the silence between them as something solid, malign. A cancer to be spat up.
‘Well. Your dad and Eve, they’ve got a special friendship,’ she says breathlessly, lifting the lid of the washing machine. ‘Sometimes they might hug or
kiss. That’s how it is.’
‘But he’s married to you.’
It’s only child’s logic, but the simplicity of it is a blow. Rosaline bends to stuff the sheets inside the metal burrow. ‘Married people can’t always do those things together, Marjy. It’s complicated.’ The odor rises to her nostrils. ‘It’s not easy for your dad when I’m sick. I’m not such good company.’
Rosaline watches his eyes narrow to slits, his lashes flutter with the effort to understand. He looks just like Jim in this moment: dark, wounded, calculating.
‘You mean … Dad kisses her because you’re sick,’ Martin Luther asks, without inflection. ‘If you weren’t sick, you’d come to the beach and he’d kiss you instead of — her.’
‘Maybe. Like I said, sweetie, it’s … complicated.’
‘If you weren’t sick,’ he repeats, ‘he wouldn’t kiss her.’ He rocks on his feet. ‘So why won’t you just let him heal you?’
It isn’t the first time that Martin Luther, that any of the boys, has asked this. It isn’t the first time she has had to make excuses for Jim. Her annoyance flares: first at Martin Luther for his difficult question, then herself for not being able to answer it, then the ceiling and everything above it for staying silent. It should be you, she thinks. It should be you explaining yourself, not me.
‘We’ve talked about this, Marjy. Your dad, he’s got so many depending on him. He’s gotta put them first. It’s not easy, but that’s the sacrifice we make — Dad makes …’
Rosaline’s voice catches. She’s seeing Eve kissing her husband: on a rocky beach, in front of a lighthouse, in the car with the boys looking on. Eve in white. Eve by the roses.
‘Don’t cry, Mom. I’m sor-ry.’ Martin’s voice cracks, jerked out of the solipsism of his own grief. ‘Please. Just stop crying.’
But she can’t, and neither can he. Wiping his nose on her belt, nudging his face against her belly, as if it might somehow open up and let him back in. She thinks of foolish things: bleating lambs; eggs in nests; how scared she’d been when once, just the once, not knowing his strength, Jim knocked her to the floor while she was pregnant and a little blood came out.
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