by Bill Rowe
“Mom—”
“I’m finished talking to you for a long time, Tom.” She walked on.
“Mom, Rosie and I really, really love each other. I didn’t mean to hurt anyone, but it’s hard to stop when you have that feeling all the time.”
She turned around at the door and looked at me. She opened her mouth to say something, but closed her eyes and shook her head. Her expression looked like a mixture of love, pity, and contempt, and she walked out and back to her bedroom. I sat on the bed, listening. What was she waiting for? Was she just standing there looking in that toilet? At least five minutes went by before I heard the flush. She’d held off like that simply to torture me.
I closed my door and picked Rosie’s pubic hairs off my bed, ignoring my own—they were rightfully there—and I lay down. I tried to formulate the words for telling Rosie why we couldn’t have sex anymore, or at least not until we were a couple of years older. The harder my explanation became to express in my mind, the more my guilt subsided, replaced by chagrin, and then by towering outrage. Who the fuck did she think she was, banging me across the face like that? That was no slap of token displeasure, either, like you saw some slip of a girl delivering to the hulking hero’s kisser in the movies. It fucking hurt. She was lucky I didn’t haul off and clobber her back. Let the old man have to explain that one when she went around saying she got the black eye by walking into a door. What was she talking about, “that poor girl,” no, “that poor girl’s vulnerability,” for Christ’s sake? Rosie? A girl who was smarter and stronger, and more mature than she was herself, the famous feminist out there now saying that a girl was weak and vulnerable and exploited by a boy her same age when it came to deciding of your own free will if you wanted to screw your own hole off or not. Oh, everything was all right when she thought Brent and I were a couple of queers riding the chocolate highway—then she was all understanding and empathy and tolerance for our sexual orientation. But let a normal male and a normal female have a normal piece of tail? Oh my Jesus no. That was right out! That got you beaten up about the head and ostracized for the rest of your fucking life.
I leaped off my bed. No way was I going to cut Rosie and myself off when it came to expressing our love. I wasn’t even going to tell her about this fiasco with my mother. We would carry on as if we were normal, exactly as before—goddammit, it was our lives—and I’d just be a little more careful about making sure stuff disappeared when I flushed toilets and about picking pubic hairs off my sheets, and that was it!
AND THAT WAS EXACTLY what Rosie and I did—carry on as if we were normal. And it was absolutely blissful. I wouldn’t say that Mom warmed up to me a lot over the next month, but she communicated courteously with me, and with Rosie whenever she came to my place, about all the essentials. Then at the end of the school year the marks came out.
Suzy did better than last year and gained a couple of places in her standing. “No wonder,” she said to Rosie and me. “I was so bored all year with you two cooing, mooning, snuggling, and spooning night and day that I had no choice but to study.”
Brent didn’t do quite as well as before. During the year, a scout had told him and his dad that if he continued to develop in the future as he’d done in the past, he’d be a good candidate for professional hockey, the new World Hockey Association, certainly, and with the expansion, even the NHL. As a result, he’d been all hockey all the time—practices, shooting pucks for hours in his father’s specially reinforced basement, tapes and films of games and techniques. His marks suffered, but Brent said he didn’t give a shit. He wasn’t going to be a lawyer or a doctor like me, he said, he was going to play professional hockey, and when that was over he’d go into business for himself. And at least he hadn’t wasted his time in a lovey-dovey daydream all year, like some people who would remain nameless. He laughed, but somehow it sounded a bit resentful, and if I didn’t know Brent better, even jealous.
Mom and Dad were frankly shocked when I finally let them wheedle my marks out of me. I showed them, especially Mom, my report card with an insufferable air of false modesty combined with cocksureness. My results were even better than last year. And I was ready when Mom asked how Rosie had done. I threw out casually that of course she had excelled last year’s grades as well. Then I glowered at her as if to demand, “How come you’re not slapping me across the face now?”
“Is this right?” asked Mom, looking at my report card. “Your position in class—number one. You came first?”
“Yes,” I said, squelching my pride to be as saucy as I could, “what it says there in black and white is absolutely right. You don’t have to be so doubtful. You can believe it.”
Dad looked from my face to hers. He’d been throwing up his hands lately at the unexplained strained coolness between mother and son. “That is great, Tom,” he said. “At a new school, too. That’s really fantastic.”
Mom was looking at him, unsmiling, waiting for him to finish his gush before turning back to me: “Where did Rosie place?”
“She came second, but it was very close.”
“Second. Not first, as she usually does. I wonder what happened to make her fall back like that?” Mom’s eyes bored into mine as she got up to leave the room, reducing my brain to a molten blob that could not form a response.
“You shouldn’t be sarcastic with your mother,” said Dad. “It only makes her mad. But listen. Well done. I’m sure she’s delighted.”
Now it came to me, as she went up the stairs, what I should have said to her: “Hey, I’ve got an idea, Queen Victoria. Let teenagers screw like they are designed by nature to do, and—surprise—just watch them excel in everything else as a result of their satisfaction and contentment.” Well… not quite snappy enough. But on the right track. I’d fling something like that out at her yet.
What I should have been doing, instead of trying to be defensively clever, was drawing a fulfilling moral for the rest of my life from my mother’s reaction: once violate a woman’s trust, and it’s well-nigh impossible ever to get it back. If that applied to a son’s own tolerant mother, how much more would it apply to a faithful, trusting lover?
Besides, Suzy’s appraisal of our scholarly success was probably closer to the mark than my sexually blissed-out teenager scenario. “I’m astounded,” she said. “When the two of you were holed up all by yourselves, avoiding all social contact, saying you were ‘doing assignments, ’ you were actually doing assignments. My God, who knew?”
Rosie laughed and called it “our educational bycatch.” Like fishermen who caught other fish unintentionally in addition to their targeted fish, she and I had sat around reading and writing and discussing school work, unintentionally sucking up the learning, while all we were waiting for was clear opportunities to do the priority, targeted activity: screw.
Rosie told me that she had deliberately let me come first this year. That was because she had read somewhere, she said, that the fragile male ego required that in a relationship the man had to be a little taller and a little older and a little smarter than the woman. Otherwise, the man would feel inadequate and their sex life would suffer. Therefore, Rosie had contrived in the exams to make her average two-tenths of one per cent less than mine so as to make me feel a little smarter than her. The alternative, she said, was unthinkable.
And that was the way it went for the next six months, laughing and making love and pursuing our sports, and studying. Every morning a surge of joy woke me up. During the summer, Rosie stayed home in spite of my insincere entreaties that she go back to tennis school in Ontario, and she played and practised at Riverdale and any other court, outdoor or indoor, that her coaches dragged her to. Suzy became a camp instructor for a month back in central Newfoundland where she stayed with her reconciled father. Brent went away to hockey school for most of the summer, and I became an assistant lifeguard with the city at one of the municipal pools, where I could do laps early in the morning before the public were allowed in. Pagan was home for the summer, but I
didn’t see her much. Rosie told me that sometimes she socialized with some of her old friends from school here, but mostly she spent her time reading in her room. She had a real academic bent, said Rosie. Already she’d decided to be a professor at a university.
One evening at their house when Pagan came down to the kitchen, I got her to agree to come to Rosie’s game at the tennis tournament the next afternoon. She did come and enjoyed herself cheering for Rosie along with me for the first couple of games, but faltered as Rosie barged on to win two sets without her opponent winning a game. I had to agree inwardly with Pagan, when she declined to come to Rosie’s next match, that her sister was so good her games were kind of boring to watch.
One Saturday morning when Rosie had a practice, Pagan accompanied me, at her mother’s and Rothesay’s urging, on a ride on our bikes around St. John’s. She wanted to go out as far as beautiful Outer Cove on the Marine Drive. She stayed ahead of me all the way out and arrived without working up a sweat. She seemed to be in pretty good shape, especially for a girl whom I’d never heard of being involved in sports. In Outer Cove she said something strange. She told me that Heathcliff was going to build a house out here in about ten years, and she was really looking forward to it, because she’d love to live out here. I said that she’d be twenty-three in ten years and probably living in Malibu. Pagan actually looked a little embarrassed after I said that. She started to pedal her bike again, saying, “I meant it would be a nice place to come home to, on visits.”
Pagan surprised me in July when I mentioned that I was going to run in the Tely Ten road race this year for the first time. She said she wanted to go in it too. I told her it was a gruelling ten miles on the hard, hot pavement if the sun was out, and worse on a warm muggy day. Was she sure? Yes, she had done some running at school and a good few mornings here, and she wanted to try it. She was fitter than she looked, she said with a smile.
Rosie couldn’t go in the race because she was playing in a challenging tennis final the next day. Her opponent was a girl from Vermont who was here visiting her Newfoundland mother for the summer. Rosie said she was really good. She had won the statewide championship in her age group last year. There was some dispute over whether she could play in this Newfoundland tournament. She had grown up in the States with her father, who had been stationed at Fort Pepperrell American Air Force Base in St. John’s during the fifties, where he’d met her mother. She’d been born here before moving as an infant to the States, where her father and mother had separated. Parents of some players argued strenuously against allowing her, an American citizen, to play in this purely provincial tournament as presenting unfair competition. Rosie led the girls in arguing in favour of allowing her, with her strong Newfoundland connection, to enter, and at last they prevailed. “Out here on this remote rock in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean,” they wrote in their letter to the organizers, “we need all the good competition we can get.” Some disgruntled parents blamed Rosie.
“One mother confronted the president of the club,” Rosie told me, “and said, ‘That O’Dell girl has got all the men on the committee gone gaga-eyed and thinking her shit is ice cream.’” Rosie shook her head with a rueful grin. “Oh my.”
Pagan and I rode out to Octagon Pond on the runners’ bus and started the race together. I hadn’t done much fast running, restricting myself to a semi-weekly five-kilometre brisk jog. But I was in good aerobic shape from the all the laps and sprints in the pools and was aiming, improbably, to break seventy minutes on this first try. I asked Pagan if she would mind if we got separated during the race. No, she said with a smile, if I didn’t mind. I only found out what she meant at the end of the race at Bannerman Park when she was the one who broke seventy by a minute and I was three minutes behind her.
“My God, Pagan, you are a super athlete for thirteen years old. What sports do you play at school?”
“None, really. I do a little cross-country running. Didn’t Rosie tell you? I broke a school record in my age group last fall. The coach called me a second Doris Brown.” Pagan blushed with embarrassment while I wondered who Doris Brown was and how come Rosie hadn’t told me about Pagan. “But I’m not very competitive, not like Rosie. I could never feel a killer instinct over playing that American girl tomorrow, like Rosie does. I just want to enjoy the gentler things of life, and give love and receive it in return.”
I had to smile at her, she was so cute. “You know, Pagan, the killer instinct and love are not necessarily mutually exclusive.”
She gave me a big smile back. “If you say so, Tommy-o.”
“And, speaking of competitive killer instinct, I noticed you didn’t mind beating me in that Tely Ten.”
“Yeah, but that wasn’t competitive—I wasn’t even trying.” She laughed and gave me a big slap on the back. God, what a heartbreaker that gorgeous little girl was going to be.
The next day, Sunday, at Rosie’s tennis final, her family and I sat together on the benches to watch. On the outside sat Dr. Rothesay, then Nina and Pagan and me. When they met at the net, the American girl’s five foot ten towered over Rosie’s five six. The first set was a marathon. It went on and on, game after game after game until the American finally eked out a win by two games.
Before they started the second set, Pagan said to me, “Just look at Rosie. Look at the face on her. She would rather die than lose this match.”
“You’ve got that right. That’s what makes her so good.”
“Oh, is it? I thought it was her high ass.” She giggled when I looked at her in mock reproof. Then she asked, “Do you think she’d rather die than lose your love?”
Pagan was speaking loudly enough that it was slightly embarrassing to me. Nina’s head remained straight ahead, but Rothesay’s turned towards her.
“God, no. She’s way too smart for that,” I said, sharply. “Okay. Rosie’s about to serve.”
“I would,” she said at the same high volume. “I’d rather die than lose the love of someone I loved.” This was getting a touch weird for the middle of a vicious tennis match. I turned silently to her to dismiss such conversation with a sombre uninterested look. Nina, in her sunglasses, was still staring straight ahead. Rothesay removed his sunglasses and stared down at his shoes. By the look of him, I wasn’t the only one embarrassed.
The second set was long and exhausting too. Rosie won it by the same close margin that her opponent had won the first. In the third set, with equal skill, Rosie swapped games with the American in the first four, and then she ran away with the set. She had worn her opponent down with pure resolve and stamina. At the net they hugged each other’s sweaty bodies for several seconds. “Rosie, you are really great,” said the American. “The best.”
I’d liked being around Pagan until that match. Now I mostly avoided her, begging off on bicycle rides and morning runs. In my adolescent arrogance, I didn’t want to hear any more morbid pubescent fairy tales proclaimed of bereft love and broken-hearted death. I even started to resent her presence around her own house because it cut into the opportunities Rosie and I used to have all the time in the entertainment room and sometimes in Rosie’s bedroom to, as we’d come to describe our activities in the absence of school assignments, “have a little cuddle.”
Rosie, Suzy, Rothesay, and I went to the airport at the end of the summer vacation to see Pagan off to her school in Ontario. Nina was accompanying her back, mainly, laughed Pagan, for the extra suitcase of clothes. Pagan came up to me before security and said quietly, “I hope I didn’t put you off too much with my comments at Rosie’s tennis game. I was going through a strange mood at the time, but all that’s behind me now. Thanks for being such great company while I was home, Tom.” She gave me a tight hug before saying goodbye to the others and walking away with her mother. What a beautiful little figure she made in the distance, and what a striking woman she was on the verge of becoming. That thought, combined with my memory of her despondency at the match, suddenly made my heart sink, and a terrib
le sadness swept through me for no precise reason. It left me at once, though, when Rosie came over and took my hand.
On our way back to the car, Rothesay said, “I think Pagan still has more than a vestige of that crush on you, Tom, which was so obvious when she was a little girl.”
That was a bizarre comment in front of my girlfriend, Pagan’s own sister. I looked at Rosie. She and Suzy were exchanging blank glances. “Oh, I don’t think so,” I said, at a loss. “She’s getting much too mature for that.”
“Thanks a lot, Tom,” said Rosie. “I’m glad to have your true feelings about my mental age.” The girls and I laughed. Rothesay joined in with some chuckles too, but they ignored him completely.
At the car, I held open the front passenger door for Rosie, but she motioned me in and jumped in the back seat with Suzy. The first five minutes of the drive back were silent. I never heard Rosie say a word to Rothesay these days. If I didn’t know better from her earlier days with him, I might even conclude she didn’t like him at all. Maybe they had a fight about something. I made a mental note again to mention it to her. I’d been meaning to ask her about it before, but somehow I always got diverted and it never seemed important enough to go back to.