Rosie O'Dell

by Bill Rowe

  “Nothing like those two.”

  “What are you doing yourself this summer, Tom? The park thing?”

  Dad and Mom had signed me up for some sort of a national park camp, a junior intern program, in Terra Nova National Park or the newly established Gros Morne National Park, learning all the services and the trails and safety procedures, and giving visitors information and help on hiking, canoeing, kayaking, climbing. It was an ideal way to spend six weeks of the summer for a fourteen-year-old. Gros Morne had been their choice because I loved it, and Mom had relatives in the region that I knew and liked from earlier summer jaunts there as a little boy. Still, until this moment I’d been trying to figure out how to say no to Mom and Dad. But now that it looked like Rosie, as well as Brent, was going away, and she hadn’t even bothered to tell me, I made up my mind right there. “Yes,” I said to Suzy, “I’m really looking forward to it.”

  When the report cards were handed out the day school ended, I was back in second place, and Brent was third. We went over to Rosie and congratulated her on coming first. She thanked us and said, “You guys did great. Plus you had a social life, which I didn’t.”

  I said, “How much more encouragement did you need?” But Rosie was turning to Suzy who had come up to us, beaming.

  “And look at the great leap forward that Suzy took,” said Rosie, putting her arms around her.

  “From the bottom of the pack all the way up to the middle,” said Suzy. “And I’m some frigging happy.”

  The four of us said goodbye to each other, parting on talk about how Brent, Suzy, and I would be going to the same high school in September, but because Rosie’s new home was in another school zone she’d be at a different one. Both Rosie and Suzy made faces of consternation about that at Brent and me.

  Walking away with Brent, I looked back. Suzy was already heading for their door out and I was surprised that Rosie was still standing there looking at us. She gave a little wave and I flicked my hand in a way that I hoped conveyed nonchalance. She said, “Tom, wait a sec,” and jogged up to me. “I wish I was staying in Newfoundland. We had such great times last summer.” Brent walked a few feet away and waited for me. “I wish I was going to Gros Morne for the summer like you.” She went on. “That would be so good. But I’ve got to go to this tennis school to see if I’m really any good or not. I don’t think I am, but at least then I’ll know.”

  “Well, of course you’ve got to go, Rosie. You are really good and you need more competition to get even better.”

  “We’ll see. I’m sorry I didn’t talk to you about going before, but I knew I probably wouldn’t go if I did. Listen, I’ve been planning to write you care of the park headquarters when I get there to let you know what it’s like. Promise me you’ll write back.”

  I nodded and she embraced me for five seconds with her cheek pressed to mine.

  When I rejoined Brent, he said, “That one loves you big time, b’y.”

  “Funny shagging way of showing it. Between me and you and the wall, there’s something weird about how she acts all the time, like she’s passive-aggressive or something.”

  “Don’t sweat it. It’s like my old man said to my mother one time when she told him he had no idea about a woman’s needs—he said: A man trying to figure out a woman is like a shitfly trying to figure out a cow’s anus. He has no idea how to make it work, so he can only buzz around it thinking he’s making a big impression and just be ready for when a nice warm tasty turd drops out.”

  “Tell your father, thanks. That sets everything straight for me. I’m going to miss your old man’s bullshit in Twillingate this summer.”

  “Yeah, me too,” Brent sniggered. “It’s awful to think I’m going to be two thousand miles away from the prick.”

  At home that evening, my father looked through my report card and said, “Very impressive, Tom. Who came first?”

  “Rosie.”

  “She’s right back on her feet, eh?”

  “Yes, and she deserved it. She’s the smartest kid in the whole class and she worked very hard.”

  “Umm. Well, I’m very proud of you. You did well in your studies and you did well in your swimming and you had some fun. I like this part.” He read the teacher’s remarks: “‘Tom is a balanced and very well-rounded and popular student.’”

  Later that evening from my listening post in my room, I heard Dad say quietly to Mom in the living room, “She did well, yes, but that line between near-genius and near-lunacy is a very fine one. Give me ‘bright-normal’ like Tom any day of the week.”

  Naturally, I felt like going down and bellowing, “Shut up, you stupid old bastard.” But I mastered the urge. I didn’t want to give it away that the acoustics of the house wafted even quiet talk to my room. And also, to be frank with myself, something about his remark on Rosie rang true.

  TRUE TO HER WORD, Rosie wrote me a letter the second week I was in Gros Morne Park. It was not full of news. There was a limit, she said, on what you could say of interest about tennis strokes. She was on the court or watching films or listening to lectures all day, and at night, after maybe a barbecue and a little TV, everyone dragged their weary asses off to bed by nine o’clock. The school was co-ed, okay, “but as one girl from Montreal said, ‘Can you believe the lousy luck? Just eyeball that hunk over there, and here we are with more chaperones on site than coaches.’” They were miles north of Toronto, but the head guy promised a day trip to the city next weekend to do some shopping. “At which intelligence, we all danced and yelled, ‘Yippee, free at last.’ Now that’s pathetic.” She begged me to liven up her life by writing in detail about what I was doing. She missed us all a lot, she said.

  I did as she asked and wrote page after page. There wasn’t much else to do at night in the bunkhouse except for my two other faithful activities which were too private to recount to her. And when she replied to my reports she went over in detail my daily exploits: climbing the geological marvel of the Tablelands and spotting up on that plateau a herd of imperturbable caribou grazing; guiding a feisty elderly couple up over Gros Morne Mountain, sunny when we left, brief wet snow in July at the top, then warm and sunny again, with a mother ptarmigan leading her brood of chicks ahead of us as we crossed to come down; boating through the landlocked fjord of Western Brook Gorge, with its sheer two-thousand-foot cliffs, disappearing waterfalls, and hanging valleys; canoeing and kayaking around the shoreline of lovely Bonne Bay where pairs of magnificent bald eagles anxiously followed our intruding progress; driving up the coast to the tip of the Great Northern Peninsula to visit L’Anse aux Meadows and the ruins and artifacts of the only proven landfall of the Vikings in North America—I’d written that I’d shouted out “Gudrid” there but got no answer—and she wrote that if I were to try it in St. John’s in September, I might have better luck. I read that sentence a dozen times.

  She said that her constant thought when she wasn’t hammering balls was that one day she would explore all those beautiful spots too. Three summers ago, she and her family had been planning to visit the region after their canoe trip to the Main River on the other side of the peninsula, but that had been forestalled by her father’s death. She hoped I would perhaps consider acting as her guide for a couple of weeks there some summer. I wrote back that I would be pleased to, that I had the same feeling about that idea as I’d had when I’d visited London: all the beautiful and fascinating things would be so much more so when someone you really liked could be there to see them with you. I also wrote that we’d have to visit the places on the Great Northern Peninsula where her Gram Payne O’Dell had grown up. I’d had a tremendous flood of emotion, I told her, when I’d dropped in at Gram’s hometown on my way to L’Anse aux Meadows, because it had brought back a memory of the grief and hope and caring Rosie and I had shared after her father’s death.

  Rosie wrote back that her father had been planning to take Gram and Mom and Pagan and herself on a driving trip of the Great Northern Peninsula and the Labrador Straits
the next summer, and that as she sat there examining her blackening tennis toenail, she yearned to take the trip with me. That letter had some stains on it, as if she’d flicked a few drops of water on the pages while washing her hands. It was only later in the evening that I realized the stains might have been teardrops.

  The next day, bright and calm and beautiful, I faked a minor muscle pull in my back to get out of hiking from Trout River gorge through Green Gardens—though it was a hike I loved—and when everyone was gone I told the housekeeper I was going for a long easy walk to test my back. Then I hitched a ride to the base of Gros Morne Mountain and climbed to the top by myself and gazed out over the glistening wooded hills and the sparkling arms of the bay, and resolved from that height to make Rosie O’Dell mine and mine alone once more, and this time forever.

  IN THE NIGHTTIME, MY two activities that I did not detail in my letters to Rosie were, in this order, measuring my penis and masturbating. There were six of us boys in the bunkhouse, all fourteen or fifteen. No girls had joined the summer’s intern program over here. The head man had lectured us on our good conduct and his expectation that we do nothing in any of the communities to bring discredit on this brand new national park. Unless there was a special event, we were generally free in the evenings to roam around, as long as we got back to the bunkhouse by dark, about nine o’clock. Despite the boss’s constraints, the other five boys set out earnestly every evening in search of girls to “get a piece of tail off of.” That quest entailed walking the roads of Rocky Harbour or hitchhiking to Norris Point or taking the ferry across to Woody Point. I went with them a couple of times, but those hours of hanging around juke joints or leaning up against the outside walls of community centres brushing off blackflies and pretending to ignore the groups of teenage girls who were whispering and tittering about us made me stay back at the bunkhouse reading, out of pure tedium at the pursuit. Maybe I would have persisted if my abiding thoughts about Rosie had not eclipsed all interest in any other girl.

  Many nights, after the girls had evidently managed to break the gender ice, the boys would chide me on their return about what I was missing. One reported that he had scored big time that night, another that he hit the jackpot. I noticed, though, that they were all visiting the bathroom with the same frequency as before, carrying the girlie magazine one of them kept secreted far under his mattress, a regular habit that did not signify their sexual satisfaction among the village maidens. I was the only one who didn’t use the magazine images as a prop. When they asked me why not, I pointed to the staple in the centrefold’s navel and told them that I didn’t want to reach the point where I got a hard-on every time I saw a stapler. They laughed, but my lack of fond attachment to the magazine in the bathroom was further clear evidence to them that I was somehow not quite a normal guy.

  In fact, I needed no glossy, retouched images of pneumatic nakedness. I could masturbate quite satisfactorily by thinking of Rosie stroking my penis outside my clothes. That the stroking was accidental and unconscious on her part was irrelevant because my imagination easily led from there to multiple consensual depravities.

  A function I had performed every night since her first and only touch last winter was to lay my pocket measuring tape alongside my erect penis before climax. It was common scientific knowledge among my male acquaintances that your cock had to be six inches long. So much was this the case that the description was sacrosanct, to the point where adjective and noun often became a unity: “You should give her a taste of your sixinch-cock.” Sometimes the noun itself was entirely superfluous: “All she needs is a good six inches.”

  Ever since that night months ago with Rosie, my need to know how it had felt to her revolved around how big it felt. When I measured it the next day, I had the anxiety-producing epiphany that it was five and one half inches long. And that was a stretch, because I could push the end of the tape into my pelvis all I wanted—the fact remained that I could not make the tip of my dick reach the six-inch mark without excruciating pain from the steel edge digging into the bone. Now, how I expected “Goody Two Shoes” Rosie O’Dell, who at thirteen had certainly never examined or handled a penis, to spot my crucially missing half-inch, did not emerge as a subject of analysis in my mind. All I knew was that I was aware of the terrible truth about my inadequacy. And thus my dismal condition had persisted unchanged for four months leading up to my fourteenth birthday and into the two summer months beyond. Then, as the middle of August approached and my parents arrived for a visit to the park, I discovered that one miracle of length had occurred.

  It revealed itself when my mother first spotted me coming out of headquarters as they were going in for their park permit. “My heavens, Tom, how tall you’ve grown,” she said by way of greeting. “Joe, just stand next to him. Look at that. Tom is getting taller than you.”

  “Yeah, with his hiking boots on,” said Dad, seizing me by the hand and shaking man to man, while Mom vised my head between her palms and kissed my cheek. They invited me to dinner that night with Mom’s cousin in Winter House Brook and left, agreeing to pick me up at the bunkhouse at five-thirty.

  “I never seen a girl smooching you all summer, so I’m guessing that was your mother,” said one of my colleagues.

  “Too bad, too,” said another. “Because she’s a fox.”

  “What?” said another. “She must be pushing forty.”

  “Oh, that’s good, coming from a guy who’d screw a pile of rocks if he thought there was a corpse under it.”

  They all looked at me for a scathing comeback. But I was too preoccupied to say anything. I was thinking that being as tall as Dad meant that, according to his own height reckoning, I was now “approximately five foot nine and a quarter.” I was three or four inches taller than Rosie. Life was sweet. Well, bittersweet. The last time I’d checked, alas, I was still a phallically challenged five and a half inches.

  “Sorry, Tom,” said one of the boys. “That was way over the line.” The others chimed in with their apologies. I think they thought my preoccupied silence showed I’d taken offence at their references to my mother.

  I was gracious. “That’s okay,” I said gravely. “No sweat. Forget it.”

  That night after I got back to the bunkhouse from dinner, I had to go through my routine and see if it was possible that miracles came in twos: ensure measuring tape was in pocket; nonchalantly enter bathroom; lock door; out with tape; pants down; sit on toilet seat; instant erection—Jesus, those were the days—apply end of tape to pelvis at base of penis; prepare for distress. Not so fast. What was this peeping out over my thumb? My heart beat faster. A surge of elation went from the soles of my feet to the scalp on my head. It got so hard down there it threatened to explode. Even without the metal digging into the bone, my recalcitrant member was starting to turn, seemingly overnight, into my pride and joy. It nearly reached the magic mark. Pushing the end of the tape, not hard but only slightly, into my pelvis I could actually make it reach the six-inch point. Yes, there was an intelligent designer of the universe and he was running the damn thing brilliantly.

  At last, I was approaching readiness. Not that I expected to put it to use for years to come. Rosie and I were only fourteen, after all, and there was no way she’d consent to hanky-panky with anyone, even someone she might love dearly, until she was much older. I figured seventeen to eighteen years old. That was my target age. Meanwhile, the feeling that I was all but prepared now, and certainly would be by then, for any bestial demand or challenge was sweet.

  A COUPLE OF WEEKS before I left Gros Morne to fly back to St. John’s, Rosie gave me a scare. She wrote that the coaches wanted her to talk to her parents about sending her to school in Florida this winter so that she could carry on with her tennis education. A space was being kept open for her in Sarasota. The coaches seemed to think that, with optimal training and practice, she could become one of the best female players in Canada, and perhaps even beyond. Rosie said she had her doubts about all that, herself. But th
e idea was tempting for a year just to find out, if nothing else. What did I think?

  I thought that this was a looming calamity. Florida for a whole school year! Christ, what was the point of even having a nearly six-inch dick anymore? I replied that I was certain she could excel nationally and internationally if she put her mind to it. I had that degree of faith in her ability. Therefore, as a friend who had her best interests at heart, I told her she should do it. Go to Florida for the winter and train. But writing just as a guy who loved her dearly, I said, I had to be honest: I hoped she would come back home and go to school here. This absence from her over the summer had proved how much I wanted to be with her. I prepared myself for seeing her for a few days before school started, then maybe at Christmas, and again during the Easter vacation that I had already planned in my mind for Florida. But I had no idea of the effect of my frank profession of love on undermining the brilliant tennis career of my lonely, psychically wounded Rosie.

  She wrote back to me detailing her argument with herself: Say she spent a year busting her ass at the tennis down there day in and day out to the exclusion of all else, and after that year her future, according to the coaches, still looked “pretty good.” That would lead to another year, and then another year. And all for what? To maybe be the best in Canada? And then what? With that status, would she be able to compete professionally at the international level in a way that satisfied herself? She needed to ask herself that brutally frank question. Now assuming, as I had kindly said, that she could rise to the very top in the world professionally—even if that were to come true, would the few years at the top be worth the years of deprivation to achieve it? Or did she feel she wanted to play for recreation and satisfaction at a high amateur level and have other good things in her life? She had decided that she was going to play hard to win tournaments, but she was also going to darn well enjoy herself and have a life. She thanked me for helping her open her eyes to reality. She had turned down the offer to train in Florida and she was coming home for the school year.