Rosie O'Dell

by Bill Rowe

  FROM THEN TILL CHRISTMAS, our conversations in school took the form of short insubstantial exchanges between an awkward-feeling, often jittery, me, and an extraordinarily happy, self-contained, self-sufficient Rosie, who manifested never a moment of doubt or sadness or gloom. Three times she invited me over to her house to watch a movie on television or to listen to records. And twice I went. We didn’t talk much, and though apparently glad to see me, she did not pay much attention to me, compared to lovely little Pagan, or even Dr. Rothesay. Compared to Dr. Rothesay, especially, in fact. Both times, after the movie, he would sit by me on the sofa and talk. They were building a new house in Buckingham Close or Mews—there was a debate going on among property owners there, he chuckled, over what sounded fancier with Buckingham. “Here, have a gawp at the blueprints. Eighty-five hundred square feet. A bleeding mausoleum. But when one has grown up in a two-room council flat with eleven other family members, it’s damned difficult to have too much space as an adult.” He and Nina and the girls were all going to Barbados over the Christmas holidays. How was my competitive swimming coming along? He was hearing marvellous things about it from Nina through my mum.

  When Rosie and Pagan were out of the room, he would talk about how Rosie needed a good male friend like me. If he were my age, he would certainly try to make Rosie his girlfriend. I felt so awkward on hearing this, I neglected to ask him how he would go about doing that. Rosie didn’t pay as much overt attention to him now as before, certainly not nearly as much as Pagan did. But, once, when I was standing in front of the door out to the backyard patio, looking through the panes of glass at an early fall of wet snow, I saw a reflection of Rosie coming silently into the living room behind me in her oversized socks, pass by the back of Dr. Rothesay’s chair, and run her fingers along the short hairs at the nape of his neck before walking out again without a word. Rothesay did not move or look at her. I turned around and asked if Auntie Nina was out—I hadn’t seen her either of the times I was there. No, he said, she was upstairs with another meegraine, one of her sick headaches, regrettably. I’d never heard of Nina having a migraine before.

  When I was in the porch about to leave, he had to call Rosie out of the kitchen to say goodbye to me. She all but danced out the door with a big smile and an elaborate wave from down the hall: “See you in the groves of academe.” She turned around and went back in. Pagan walked down to the porch to see me out. The third time Rosie invited me over, a week or so before Christmas, I said I couldn’t come because I had to do something. She didn’t ask what and she didn’t seem disappointed. I stayed home and read an old Hardy Boys book.

  PERHAPS BECAUSE OUR BIOLOGY class was then learning how genetic mutations caused an organism either to thrive or wither, I would date from about February of this new year the beginning of Rosie’s withering mutation.

  After the first couple of weeks of school following their southern Christmas holiday, an impression came to me that Rosie’s face was darkening. She still had a slight tan and a few freckles from the sun, but that wasn’t what I was seeing. Her face was going dark, not in colour but in brightness. The light around her head seemed to be fading like one of Mom’s candles guttering in the gloom. And I could not shake the thought that compared to before Christmas her whole person had physically shrunk.

  Nobody else but Brent noticed much of a change in her at first. She was still greeting everyone with a cheery “hi,” but I could see that when she went about school, more and more by herself now, she hugged the walls and looked as if she was making her body take up the smallest possible space, and Brent said to me early on that every time he saw Rosie now she almost looked like she was trying to disappear.

  Soon, others remarked the change in her. She began to turn her head away from anyone approaching and failed to speak unless the other person greeted her first. Then she would respond barely audibly, without looking at the person. And in class, instead of playing her normal role of human encyclopedia, now she began to murmur, whenever a teacher asked her a question, “I don’t know.” Soon she was slipping into class like a phantom to sit silently unless prompted by a teacher and then responding only in low monosyllables.

  In sports, newspaper, student council, drama, all the extracurricular activities she used to thrive on, her participation dropped off. She would never hang around school for a minute after the final bell. She left like someone heading somewhere secretly and urgently. When I tried to chat with her in school I got nowhere, so I called her at home a couple of times before supper. Nina answered that she wasn’t home from school yet. Whenever I called at night, Pagan would reply, “She’s up there in the bathroom again. I’ll be some glad when we get that new house with three full bathrooms.”

  By Easter, I learned that, to every request, suggestion or invitation from classmates, she was replying, “I can’t.” One afternoon, I asked her if I could walk home with her and she murmured, “No.” Then, as if as an afterthought, she turned and said, “Thank you, Tom.” A few days later I followed her at a distance to see what she did and where she went. What she did was walk around the streets of St. John’s, moving in a decided way, as if she had an important destination. Where she went was no place. After miles of walking she never stopped or arrived anywhere but at the door of her own home. Then I discovered that she was no longer getting a drive to school in the Land Rover with Pagan in the mornings. She was walking. Rain or shine. By herself. Without me.

  “DO YOU AND ROSIE see much of each other at school?” Mom asked me when just the two of us were in the television room.

  “Mom, we’re in the same class.”

  “I know that, Tom. I was wondering if you’re still friends in school. I haven’t seen her around the house here this year.”

  “You make it sound as if that’s something new all of a sudden. She wasn’t around much last year either.”

  “No, perhaps not. But I used to hear you on the phone with her sometimes, and you used to go to her house sometimes before Christmas.”

  “Well, I guess we have different interests or something now.” I turned pointedly back to the television where an old Gilligan’s Island repeat was on that I’d already seen or changed the channel on a dozen times.

  Mom rose, saying, “You’ll both be thirteen in a couple of months. You’ll soon be a young man, and she’ll soon be a young woman.” She started to leave.

  I suddenly felt a desperate need for help from my mother. I muttered, “There’s something wrong with her.”

  “What do you mean? Do you think she’s sick?” She moved back fast and sat down beside me.

  “I don’t know if it’s sick or what. You’re at her house sometimes. Don’t you think there’s something wrong with her?”

  “That’s really why I was asking. I’m not there that often these days, and even when I am I never lay eyes on Rosie. Nina says she’s barricaded in her room all the time. She never comes down to say hello like she always used to. Pagan still does. What do you think it is?”

  “I haven’t got a clue. Why don’t you ask her mother what’s wrong with her?”

  Mom stayed quiet for a moment. Then she said, “I’ve got an idea. Why don’t you call her right now and ask her over here to supper tomorrow night?”

  “Mom, I’m trying to watch this.”

  Soon after that, I started to hear muffled conversations between my parents behind closed doors. They were hardly ever together at home without shutting the door to whatever room they were in and going at it for a few minutes. Usually I couldn’t hear anything but the sound of their voices. But sometimes, a voice would be raised, usually Mom’s, and I could make out the words. Once, from behind the closed door of Dad’s den: “I’m going to do something, Joe, I know that.” Another time, her near shout from their bedroom: “Please stop saying that. I can’t just do nothing.” After Mom came out of these sessions her face would often be red, and sometimes she stayed pensive, oblivious of everything, even my presence, for a good ten minutes.

 
; Naturally, I concluded my parents were getting a divorce. It made my stomach flutter uncomfortably. How could I ever decide which one I would live with? The thought of having to hurt either parent’s feelings because I’d been forced to choose one over the other turned my stomach-flutters to pain.

  One afternoon during school hours, Brent, who sat near me in class, came back from the washroom and whispered as he sat down, “How come you didn’t tell me you were in deep shit?”

  “Why, what are you talking about?”

  “I just saw your old lady going in Curly’s office.”

  I could only shrug and shake my head. Mom hadn’t mentioned any forthcoming visit to the principal. After school I was going to tell Brent I thought my parents were separating and that that must have been the reason for Mom seeing Curly. But then I thought I’d better make sure. So, as soon as I saw Mom that evening I asked her why she’d been to see Mr. Abbott this afternoon. She replied without looking up that it was a confidential matter. Then she glanced at my face and added that, as I was aware, she was on the board of the parent-teacher association. I had taken her by surprise and it was clear she was hiding something.

  In bed for the next three nights, reflecting that Mom and Dad were as affectionate with each other as ever outside those closed-door talks, and showed no sign of breaking up, I searched in the dark for the real truth. It dawned on me. No wonder their secret talks were so tense and argumentative. The truth was so horrible they could not decide how to tell me. Mom’s secret visit to Curly Abbott’s office had been to prepare principal and staff for the horrors to come. Yes, my parents had covertly received the results from that medical examination I’d undergone this winter when I had that heavy chest congestion, and the diagnosis was clear. I had leukemia.

  For two fitful nights and three sombre days I saw visions of myself, my bald head in one of those wool caps, slowly fading off the face of the earth, my tragedy mitigated only by the images of Rosie’s face full of love for me because I was suffering and dying. Then an evening phone call came to Mom from Rosie’s mother.

  I happened to answer the hall phone and Nina’s familiar voice at the other end asked, with none of the usual pleasantries, “May I speak to Mrs. Sharpe, please?” like a stranger.

  I called out to Mom. She emerged from the back porch dressed for outside with her running shoes in her hands, motioned me towards her mutely, and whispered, “Who is it?” She was anxious in a way I’d never seen before.

  “I think it’s Auntie Nina. But she asked for Mrs. Sharpe.”

  This brought a frown into her face. “I’ll take it upstairs,” she murmured, and walked thoughtfully, rather than with her usual lope, up the steps. I heard “Hello?” from my receiver as I hung up and then an animated “Oh hi, Nina,” from upstairs before the door to her bedroom closed. I could not remember my mother and Nina O’Dell Rothesay talking on the phone during the past week or longer. For years, before Nina’s marriage to Dr. Rothesay, the two women talked nearly every night. After the marriage, the frequency dropped, but they still chatted often, perhaps a couple of times a week, enough that Dad’s gentle joshing over Mom’s twenty minutes of gabbing and laughing with Nina on the phone in the kitchen had continued.

  She wasn’t on the phone twenty minutes this time, though. Within one minute I heard from the kitchen her door opening upstairs. She walked slowly back down and said something to Dad in the living room, too low for me to hear. I moved to the kitchen door to listen. I heard her saying, “… and then she hung up on me.”

  There was a long silence while I waited for Dad to respond. Finally he muttered, “You did what you felt you had to do, Gladys. Now you can only let the chips fall where they may.”

  Later that same week relations between Mom and Dad became turbulent again. The last time I heard my father go into extreme ranting mode like this was when I’d left my bike half under the car on the passenger side in the driveway and he backed over it. It didn’t bother him so much that he had crushed my bike to smithereens but that for a few seconds he had feared he’d run over a neighbourhood child. That eruption had been directed at me. This one was directed at Mom.

  It took place in Dad’s study downstairs with the door closed. For a few minutes, Mom must have been telling him something. I could hear her murmuring but could not make out the words. Then I heard the roars from Dad, meaningless to me because I had no context, but still extremely frightening: “I told you I never wanted anything to do with any of them. I told you they were crazy and dangerous.” “You do not have anything, Gladys, not a shred. We are opening ourselves up to disaster.” “I know I said let the goddamned chips fall where they may. That was before we faced this shit.” “Drop it, Gladys. For the love of Christ, drop it. You know how these things work. Drop it, drop it, drop it, before they hand us our fucking heads.”

  I had no idea what he was bawling about in there, beyond a feeling it had something to do with Rosie’s family. But I would have found out, if I had not made a big mistake. Instead of waiting and listening and gathering more that night or in days to come from overhearing bits of their conversations, my intolerable anxiety tonight over Dad’s bellowing at Mom made me walk downstairs from my bedroom, bang on the door of my father’s study, and shout out to them that I wanted to know right now what was going on in there.

  Absolute silence prevailed inside for thirty seconds. Then the door opened and Mom looked at me with startled eyes in a pale and stricken face as Dad’s colouring mellowed from deep purple to bright pink. They were realizing for the first time that I’d been overhearing them. Dad said quietly, “There’s nothing going on, my man. Absolutely nothing. I’ve just been making a mountain out of a molehill. I’m sorry if I worried you with my shouting and yelling.”

  After that confrontation, I never heard my parents discussing the taboo subject, whatever the hell it was, again. If they did continue, it was out of my hearing. Therefore I did not then find out what had driven my father to the edge of panic, and I would not find out for three years. This would become in my mind the blunder of my life. If I hadn’t, by my intrusion when I was twelve years old, stopped my father and mother from arguing about it, if I’d simply shut up and eavesdropped as usual, I would surely have discovered enough to burst it wide open in my naive forthrightness, and prevent, not the evil already done, but the tragedy that was yet to come. It would scarcely bear my thinking back, when I was older, to what had been and what did not have to be.

  Meanwhile, the week after my confrontation, word went throughout the students of Smearies school that Rosie O’Dell’s mother and stepfather had been forced to come in to see Curly Abbott about her medical condition. Speculation among the kids on what she might be afflicted with ran from that new disease, anorexia, to that other new disease, premenstrual syndrome, to that old disease, manic depression, with the new name, bipolar disorder. Students agreed with each other that it was a darn good thing Rosie’s new father was a doctor.

  One morning during this spring in grade seven I left the classroom to use the toilet and by coincidence met ten-year-old Pagan O’Dell in the corridor on her way to the washroom too.

  “Hi ya, Tom,” she said brightly with none of the shyness or blushing she used to show whenever we came close in school.

  As we walked along the empty corridor, I asked, “What’s wrong with Rosie all the time? Is she sick or something?”

  “There’s nothing wrong with Rosie,” said Pagan, “except that she thinks she’s Sarah Bernhardt.”

  “Thinks she’s who?”

  “That’s what Mom calls someone who’s always putting on a big act all the time. Moping and mooning and pining. I half expect to see her swooning into Heathcliff ’s arms next. Hey, Tom, you can’t come in here. This is the Girls’.”

  “Jeez. I wasn’t watching where I was going.”

  “See ya, Tom,” said poor little beautiful Pagan with the big bright smile.

  Back in the classroom, I looked over at Rosie. Someone who was pu
tting on a big act, I thought, showed off. Whatever Rosie was doing, shrivelled into herself, her face devoid of animation, seemed to be the exact opposite of that. She never even noticed me these days, as she often used to with a smile or wave, when I looked at her in class. I didn’t exist. But, then, no one else did either.

  I came first in grade seven. I’d regained the title by default. Mom looked at my report card with no reaction on her face and, instead of congratulating me, asked where Rosie had come.

  “Third,” I said, and because I took no pleasure from my comeback, I continued, “Which shows how smart she is, because she seemed to be in a daze in all her classes ever since Christmas.”

  “But she was starting to feel better before the end of the school year, wasn’t she?”

  “I suppose,” I said. “But how would you know? You haven’t even seen her. How come you and her mother are bad friends?”

  She answered my second question. “Personal differences happen between friends going through life, Tom.”

  In fact, she was right about Rosie’s condition. Towards summer holidays, Rosie certainly had changed again, and students at Smearies commented on it as part of their opinion that Rosie O’Dell’s stepfather was the best doctor in town. That judgment sprang from three pieces of intelligence. One: he and his family had just moved into a big new house in the exclusive Buckingham Mews subdivision. Two: Pagan O’Dell would not be coming back to Smearies next year because she was going to attend a private girls’ school in Ontario. Three: the trickle-down talk from teachers was that Dr. Rothesay had been absolutely right this spring in forecasting to the principal Rosie’s early recovery from those miserable days she’d been going through. Her condition had turned out to be, thank God, none of those awful diseases everyone had been speculating about, but a “delayed reaction” to her beloved father’s horrific accidental death, combined with emotional stress caused by her mother’s remarriage. The reliability of Dr. Rothesay’s diagnosis and prognosis was evident from the fact that he shouldered blame himself, having volunteered to the principal that her condition was largely his fault, because he should have mastered his love and waited longer before asking for her mother’s hand in matrimony. Girls’ eyes misted over in the corridors as they talked of the tension between bliss and pain when it came to true love.