Rosie O'Dell

by Bill Rowe

  Suzy whispered into my ear, “Everyone kind of knows that, Tom.”

  Brent said to me later on our ride back home, “Hold back on the drowning tragedies for a while and get into mining disasters or something for variety.”

  It stung because I knew his sarcasm was right. So I lashed out. “You’re starting to sound just like your old man.”

  It worked. “Fu-uck,” said Brent, and shut up. But I still knew he was right.

  I pedalled my bike over next to Rosie’s to see what kind of a moron I was in her eyes. She said to me, “This was a lovely day, Tommy. We should come out here again soon, whenever you’re free.”

  Our next time at Bowring Park, the day was sunny and warm and calm—the one absolutely glorious day a year that our ancestors must have encountered the day they arrived, my father always said on a dozen similar days a year, or else they never would have stayed. We four had our picnic on the grass beside the flower beds in front of the Bungalow. Rosie said to me as we finished up, “You must be working out on weights for your swimming, are you? You look like you’re in pretty good shape.”

  “A little,” I said, and, without a word, Rosie moved in front of me and lay on her stomach facing me and rested her right elbow on the grass, forearm up to arm wrestle. I was practically shaking with fear of defeat as I clasped her hand. It didn’t help that Suzy and Brent exchanged a grin of pleasure at the coming spectacle. We went at it. Rosie’s face turned pink from our hard and earnest struggle as I gradually forced her arm to the side until finally her hand touched the grass and she spun over on her back and lay there quietly. I sat back on my haunches.

  “You do realize that that was my right hand,” she spoke up into the air, “and that I’m left-handed. So I bet I can still beat you at a real wrestle, just like when we were eight.” Suddenly she was on her knees, grasping my upper arms and twisting, trying to tip me over onto my back. I grabbed her shoulders and lunged forward, pushing her onto her back with her feet still under her. I moved my hands up her arms and grasped her hands, held them down beside her head and straddled her, sitting on her stomach. She moved her feet out and straightened her legs and pushed against my hands strenuously for ten seconds. Unsuccessfully. Then she relaxed completely and looked up at me. The shy little smile on her lovely face, her eyes holding mine, her hands tranquil in my grasp, she looked as if she was actually joyful to be lying under me, had chosen to surrender herself to me, as if she was saying, “I am yours, my love.” I would not have been able to describe to save my life the novel current of blissful pleasure that flowed through my entire thirteen-year-old body. I had never experienced anything remotely like the sensation before. It would be months later when I had completed puberty that I would be able to describe it to myself as the melding of absolute love and intense physical desire for one person.

  Quickly I moved off Rosie, hearing her say as I did so, “I think we were wrong, Suzy: he might not be a ninety-seven-pound weakling after all.”

  Suzy replied, “Be good, Rosie. We never said any such thing.”

  “Just joking. Tom, you’re some strong. You should take up gymnastics or wrestling or something, along with your swimming.”

  “You think I’m strong,” I said. “You should see Brent when he gets going.”

  “I’m not all that strong,” said Brent, modestly. “That’s only the hockey.” I noticed that his T-shirt was tight enough to accentuate every obscure ripple in his torso.

  For the rest of the day, as we strolled around the paths of Bowring Park, Rosie and I stayed close enough to each other that sometimes the sides of our hands would touch. We didn’t let on that we knew it was happening, but I liked it a lot when it did. Brent and Suzy stayed apart, though, never walking side by side as Rosie and I did whenever the path allowed, but always moving single file. Suzy was very attractive, just as pretty as Rosie, and her body was far more developed than Rosie’s at this point, rather voluptuous, in fact, but there seemed to be no chemistry between her and Brent, at least not from Brent’s side. He was usually the one who kept the distance between them.

  “Where’s Pagan all the time?” I asked Rosie. “Why doesn’t she come with us sometimes on our rides?’

  “She’s not exactly the outdoorsy type these days,” said Rosie. “I asked her to, but she’d rather stay home. Sometimes she has a friend or two over.”

  “Does she like the idea of going to school on the mainland?”

  “Seems to. Hard to get much out of her. She seems to be happy enough. Pagan is in a world of her own.”

  This wonderful day in the park turned out to be the last time Rosie and I saw each other that summer. The next two days were rainy and unseasonably cold. No rides on our bikes. I called Rosie’s home and Pagan answered. We exchanged our hi’s but not much else. Yes, she was fine and school away looked great when they visited—she couldn’t wait to go there in September, really—and how was I getting on? Great, great. No, Rosie wasn’t home. She was at her friend’s house. No, Pagan didn’t have the number. Hang on for a sec, maybe Mom did. No, Mom didn’t seem to have it either. Yes, she’d give Rosie my message I’d called.

  The next day Rosie telephoned to wish me a good trip to London. She was glad she hadn’t missed me before I left.

  “Didn’t Pagan give you the message I called yesterday?”

  “No, I haven’t seen Pagan since. I stayed at Suzy’s last night. When do you leave?”

  “The day after tomorrow, from Gander. We should—”

  “I envy you.”

  “You should get Dr. Rothesay and your mother to take you over sometime,” I said, forgetting for the moment Rothesay’s pledge never to set foot back there again. “He could show you all the sights.”

  “How long did you say you’ll be gone?” she replied.

  “Nearly three weeks. I wish you were coming.”

  “School will just about be starting when you get back. I’ll miss our bike rides.”

  “Why don’t you come over to my place tonight, Rosie? Or I could go over to your house if that’s better for you. We could—”

  “I wish I could, Tommy. But Suzy and I have a project we’re working on. I’ll see you when you get back. Bye.”

  I kept from my parents my desire not to leave. The day of the flight over, I thought of pretending I’d come down with something and was too sick to fly. It would astonish me in later years, thinking back, what I was prepared to resort to, how thoughtless I could be about ruining Mom’s pleasure and Dad’s pride, in order to be near Rosie. Fortunately, even back then, I occasionally showed a small pick of sense, and I made myself stop that nonsense, and I feigned excitement about the trip.

  It was my second day in London before I decided that Dr. Rothesay was nuts. The first morning as we walked around its streets for a couple of hours because we’d arrived too early in the day for our room to be ready, I thought his negative comments to Dad earlier were dead-on, finding the noise and stifling stench of traffic, the dirt, and the summer crowds that practically forced us off the sidewalks, appalling. But that had been my exhaustion, after flying from St. John’s to Gander in the afternoon, hanging around that airport for hours, then flying the Atlantic overnight to Prestwick, Scotland, and taking an early morning flight to Heathrow, yielding only two or three hours for naps. Dad railed against the petty politics on both ends that forced the use of regional airports and needless hours of waiting and flying rather than a direct flight of just a few hours from St. John’s to Heathrow.

  The international firm Dad was associated with had put us up at the Savoy Hotel. The next morning, after my solid night’s sleep on a fancy camp cot in our room, everything looked different, as Winston Churchill used to say about the effect of a snooze. He had been a familiar sight at the Savoy, according to Dad. I loved London thereafter.

  This was a business trip for Dad and he had to spend a lot of time at the offices, but Mom and I beat around the metropolis non-stop. She had spent a year at a hospital here on her nur
sing training before she married Dad, and she knew the place intimately. Constantly in my mind as we visited all the sights was the thought that one day Rosie and I would relive all this together and, as good as it was now, it would be a hundred times better then. Mom even said that one of these days I would enjoy guiding a special person about these streets myself.

  One night at dinner in the Savoy Grill, Dad said. “My God, there’s Ed Sullivan.”

  “So it is,” said Mom, half standing for a better look at a neckless zombie coming in the door.

  My parents had watched his show religiously every Sunday night before it recently went off the air, but no one cool in my age group had watched. That choir of angels latterly heard belting out “ED SULLIVAN” at the top of their lungs in the TV promotions, as if the name was equivalent to “Lord God Almighty,” added to our ridicule, so I affected nonchalance tonight. His entourage went by our table. My father said, “Good evening, Mr. Sullivan. We all miss you. We’re looking forward to your anniversary special.”

  “Thank you,” said Sullivan, walking by without a smile, a face chipped out of granite, a chin reposing on his chest. Then he saw me and stopped. “And what about you, young man? Do you miss me, too?”

  “I certainly do,” I said. “I wish you were back on TV for good.” I felt my parents’ surprise.

  A crescent moon opened at the bottom of his face somewhere around shoulder level, and strangely prominent top teeth dominated his smile. The whole composite of head and trunk became the closest thing to a grinning sack that I had ever seen. He twisted his body around from the knees and said delightedly to his group, “And they told me that I wasn’t attracting the youngsters.” He turned back to me like a cardboard cut-out: “Where are you from, young man? Your accent is not English.”

  “Canada.”

  “Then you would know Wayne and Shuster. I had them on my shew sixty-seven times. Give them my best wishes when you see them.”

  “I will, sir.” I couldn’t stand the blatant slapstick and buffoonery of most of their so-called humour, but I replied, “You really put them on the map. They’re great.”

  He gave my hair a boxer’s jab, saying to my parents, “A fine, decent, smart young man,” and went on his way to his table.

  “Those were really nice things to say to him,” said my mother.

  “I didn’t think you liked his show,” whispered my father.

  “I didn’t,” I said. “And if he was still on, riding high and polluting the airways, I would have told him so. But now that he’s gone, what’s the harm in telling him how good he was?”

  Mom and Dad looked at each other. They didn’t quite know what to make of my methodology. “Offend the high and mighty with the blunt truth, and flatter the powerless and useless with lies,” said Dad. He didn’t go on to ask where that would get me in life except nowhere. He did seem perplexed, though, even alarmed. “We’ll have to talk about that heavy subject one of these days when you’re not on a holiday,” he added. “In the meantime, consider this. In either case, sometimes, it may be the moral thing to do, and best for all concerned, including yourself, just to restrict yourself to a pleasantry or two.”

  I thought that, in my thirteen years of developing a profound philosophy of life, this attitude of Dad’s was the usual lily-livered bullshit. But I let it go rather than get his back up on this great trip. Instead we talked about London. Mom suggested that as I went through high school I should give some thought to going to university over here when I graduated. I figured that was a good plan, but wouldn’t it be very expensive with board and lodging on top of tuition fees? Dad replied that he and Mom were contributing to an educational trust fund for just such a purpose. I was delighted. The only problem in my mind was how Rosie and I would contrive to overcome Dr. Rothesay’s prejudice against the place to send her over here at the same time.

  After dinner, I told Mom and Dad I wanted to buy a book in the shop while they went up to the room. I went in and saw immediately a paperback copy of The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth and bought it. Then I headed to the elevator just as the door closed on my parents. I took the next one and walked down the corridor to see them going into the room. As I approached the room, they had not yet closed the door. I heard Mom saying, “The General Medical Council person said they had no record of a Heathcliff Rothesay registered with them as a medical practitioner.” I held back and listened.

  Closing the door, Dad said, “Maybe they missed it or maybe he’s there under a different variation of the name. There are tens of thousands of doctors in this country.”

  I knocked on the door. Going in, I asked Mom, “Did I just hear you say Dr. Rothesay is not a real doctor or something?”

  “My goodness, no, Tom, I said no such thing.”

  “What were you checking up on him for, anyway?”

  “I wasn’t checking up on him. He told us he had family here in London, and on a whim yesterday when you and Dad visited the office, I thought I’d try to find out what his last address over here was and perhaps make contact with one of them just to say hello as someone who knows him in Canada, that’s all.”

  “Sure, you’re not even friends with them anymore.”

  “Well, no, not like we used to be, but that can change.”

  Dad turned on the television and Mom went in the bathroom. I’d say it was a good thing they loved me so much because otherwise, going by the looks on their faces, they would have cheerfully taken turns killing me. And I had no idea why.

  The next day at the London Zoo, Mom and I gawked at the massive, fearsome-looking Guy the Gorilla. What I found most eerie about him was that sometimes, though his face was turned slightly away, you would suddenly realize that his eyes were swivelled to peer right into yours all the time. When I first noticed this, it actually made me jump back in startled surprise. It half-reminded me of Brent’s father. Then a small bird flew into Guy’s cage and landed on the ground beside him. He quietly reached his long arm out, took the bird into his hand, and brought it close to his face to examine it gently and tenderly.

  “By the way, Tom,” said Mom, “it’s not a big deal, but there’s no need to mention to Rosie or Dr. Rothesay or anyone else that I was inquiring about him over here. It was an innocent attempt at contact on my part, but, out of context, it might be subject to misunderstanding, as happened to you.”

  “I won’t mention it to anyone, Mom. I never see him anyway. I haven’t even been in their new house.”

  “Haven’t you? Even with all the bicycling with Rosie this summer?” She looked away for a few seconds and I saw a very slight shake of her head before she smiled at me and said, “Let’s go look at William Blake’s ‘Tyger, Tyger, burning bright.’”

  Chapter 5

  NEAR THE END OF last school year, I’d heard our teacher Miss Pretty say that Principal Curly Abbott had described Rosie as a butterfly. From the start of grade eight, that would not have been my take on her. I would have called her a hornet. She seemed to be hell-bent to make up for the time she’d lost to last winter’s melancholic funk. In the first weeks, she became editor of the student newspaper, president of the student council, and head prefect. On top of her editorials, popular among the students ( “Let’s Start Grading the Teachers”), she also wrote earnest articles for the newspaper in her own name on human rights and abuse of power, abstract pieces that no one except Suzy and me and, I was surprised to learn, Brent, ever seemed to finish reading, but which some teachers, perhaps in anticipation of a teacher-grading system, called so insightful, so cutting-edge, for anyone to write, let alone a girl her age. By Christmas not one of her marks on tests was less than an A plus. And she was playing volleyball and basketball and indoor tennis.

  I was Rosie’s best male friend, which was not saying much, because apart from Brent on the fringes, who spent most of his time at hockey, I was her only male friend. And any time I spent with her was usually associated with some activity at school—student council, prefects, newspaper
—that I was also involved in. Two or three times I went to important inter-school games she was playing in and cheered along with Suzy from the gallery. And every now and then Rosie and Suzy would come to a swimming meet and cheer loudly for me. It kept alive in my mind that Rosie and I were still special to each other, but somewhat below her relationship with Suzy, which reminded me sometimes of the warmth and closeness that we’d possessed when we were exclusive best friends and innocently budding lovers at eleven years old.

  Boys in grade eight were forever asking Rosie to parties and school dances and she always declined. The boys’ failure to sway her with their charms, and the slight edge she showed in her personal contacts with them, her somewhat icy distance, turned the thirteen- and fourteen-year-old lads into Freudians. Some opined that she was “frigid” and that the real tragedy of her refusal to go out with them was that they had the gear and knowhow to cure what ailed her. Others diagnosed her as a closet “nympho,” hiding her urges behind her stuck-up mask for fear of opening up those floodgates of lust if she ever got close to them. The rest of the barely pubescent Lotharios dismissed Rosie’s otherwise incomprehensible failure to fall for them by lumping her and Suzy together: “Where’s the big mystery? A couple of lesbos.”

  I asked her only once to go with me to something and she replied, “Not this time, Tommy, if you don’t mind. I’m not into that stuff these days. But if I was, I’d want to go with you.”

  I discussed my dilemma with Brent the following Saturday night during commercial breaks in the Leafs and Habs game. On the one hand, I really wanted Rosie, who was playing hard to get, while apparently teasing me with a forlorn hope, but on the other hand, there were three other cute chicks who were giving me the eye, two in our school and another at the last three hockey games I’d watched Brent playing in.