The Bubble Reputation

by Cathie Pelletier

  “Assholes,” Lizzie whispered, then rolled her eyes at Philip and Charles. Philip sat in the chair next to Charles. He gazed up at the ceiling fan so as to avoid Miriam’s wild glances. Rosemary seated Mother at Philip’s right, at the place setting closest to her own. That way she could see to Mother’s needs. Uncle Bishop had scuttled to Rosemary’s right, on the other side of the table. To his great disappointment, Miriam ended up in the empty chair next to him, midtable on that side, and directly across from the brooding Philip. The faint smell of a cigarette was still lingering about her and there was a craziness in her eyes. Rosemary was worried about this. This was Miriam at her lowest stance. And, judging by the looks of Raymond, who had managed to get the chair to Miriam’s right but Lizzie’s left, the stance might get even lower. He seemed enamored of Lizzie who appeared uncomfortable that Raymond had headquartered himself at her left elbow. But then, Charles was at her right elbow, and she didn’t seem too thrilled by that either. Rosemary glanced around the table at her guests. They sat stiffly, an austere gathering, looking very much like the characters in some Clue game. Lizzie. Charles. Philip. Mother. Rosemary. Uncle Bishop. Miriam. Raymond. Mr. Green, in the Ballroom, with the Lead Pipe. Uncle Bishop had loaded plates with spaghetti and sauce for Lizzie and Rosemary to carry to the table, and now the diners sat staring down at them. All except for Mother, who was ogling The Chinese Horse.

  “Where’s Robbie?” asked Lizzie.

  “Too busy for his sister’s fortieth birthday party,” Miriam said.

  “He’s gone camping downstate with friends,” Rosemary told Lizzie. “They made plans months ago.”

  “I was lucky to get a card,” Miriam announced.

  “You were lucky the card wasn’t ticking,” Uncle Bishop muttered.

  “So, let’s eat,” said Rosemary. She cut Mother’s spaghetti into short pieces. Charles poured wine from one of the two open bottles on the table. The gathering looked like a drinking crowd straight out of some battered USO club during the worst moments of the war. Miriam hiccupped, and then there was more awkward silence before everyone began eating, enjoying the garlic bread, the salad, praising the sauce. Rosemary had remembered to get several bottles of wine at Laker’s. It would take many, she knew, to get them all past Miriam’s fortieth birthday. Most of Miriam’s birthdays had been dramatic showcases, the sixteenth, the twenty-first, the thirtieth coming quickly to Rosemary’s mind. Now here was the big four-zero.

  “The world is generally mistaken about the origins of spaghetti,” Uncle Bishop lectured, pleased that tonight his crowd was larger and more cosmopolitan.

  “What about the origins?” asked Philip, and Uncle Bishop smiled.

  “Well,” he said, “the Indians and the Arabians had noodles fifty years before Marco Polo came back from China.”

  “Really?” asked Lizzie.

  “The Arabians had a different word for it than the Indians did, but both words meant thread.” Uncle Bishop beamed at Lizzie.

  “How interesting,” said Lizzie.

  “It is interesting,” said Charles.

  “Yes,” said Philip, not wanting to be left out, especially if Charles had been included. Mother merely stared at Miriam, who was returning from the kitchen with the bottle of Bacardi.

  “To hell with decorum,” Miriam said. “It is my birthday.” She set the bottle down on the table.

  “Then the Italians, those big thinkers of the Mediterranean, those early Perry Comos and Frank Sinatras, come along and call it spaghetti,” Uncle Bishop continued. “Which comes from a word that means string.” He was very pleased with his culinary classroom. He paused—Rosemary knew these pauses—just in case there were questions.

  “Why don’t you take some of that string and sew up your big fat lips?” Miriam asked. She filled her glass with straight Bacardi. Uncle Bishop stared at her. This was not the kind of question he had anticipated from his class. And anticipate he did, for he had all the colorful answers ready. The Indians called it sevika, and the Arabians called it rishta. And the Italians derived it from spago, or string. Rosemary had heard it all, many times, at spaghetti dinners in the past.

  “When is Father getting here?” Mother asked.

  “Any minute now,” Rosemary assured her. She noticed that Uncle Bishop was still staring at Miriam, fury in his eyes. “Lizzie, would you pass me the salt, please?” Rosemary asked. She didn’t use much salt, but Uncle Bishop craved it. He called it poor man’s cocaine. Rosemary would get him salt, quickly, and encourage him to cover his food with it. It might not be healthy, but it would distract him. This plan, however, only served to further embroil the situation by bringing out into the open exactly who was furious with whom. Lizzie picked up the shaker, looked to her right at Charles, then passed it to her left, to Raymond, who accepted it as though it were a lover’s glove tossed down. But all too soon he realized the trap. It was only salt and he would have to pass it on. The logical choice was Miriam, not necessarily because she was his life’s partner, but because she sat to his immediate left.

  “Shit,” Raymond said, and shoved the shaker of salt across the table to Charles. Charles took it and, without even considering Philip, at his right, passed it back across the table to Miriam. In Miriam’s hands it became a sexual talisman. She stared across the table at Philip.

  “Pheromone alert!” Uncle Bishop announced. Miriam had no intention of relinquishing this shaker to him. Instead, it went back across the table to Philip, who was forced to accept it while avoiding Miriam’s caresses on his knuckles.

  “Here, for crying out loud,” said Philip, as he slid the salt shaker in front of Mother.

  “He’d better not forget my chocolates,” Mother said, looking down at the salt as if to suggest that Father was playing some joke on her.

  “He won’t,” Rosemary said, and took the salt from Mother’s hand. She set it loudly in front of Uncle Bishop’s plate.

  “Now salt your damn thread,” Rosemary said. She imagined this same angry crew at an old-fashioned bucket brigade, while behind them a house full of screaming occupants burned to the ground.

  While the others ate, Rosemary kept her eyes on The Chinese Horse as it flexed its muscles in the light that flickered up from the candles, an old campfire light of branches gathered twenty thousand years ago by prehistoric hands. The artwork now seemed appropriate. They were no more than Cro-Magnons sitting around a shank of mammoth. And she wondered if this was what William was longing for in the dream. “I miss the human things,” he had said. Well, here she was still alive, still surrounded by human things. He wasn’t missing much. Maybe he was even better off wherever he now was.

  “I suppose you might as well be told,” Miriam said, dropping her fork onto her plate with a clatter. Raymond grimaced in anticipation. “Raymond and I are splitting up.” She said this as though she expected shock to ripple through her listeners.

  “You must have ring burn,” Uncle Bishop said.

  “A divorce is the only answer,” Miriam added.

  “You both have to work to keep a marriage together,” said Charles. Lizzie pretended not to hear this.

  “Let me tell you what my husband is planning this time.” Miriam uncapped the Bacardi bottle and filled her glass again. “He’s leaving real estate and going into the Port-O-Let business. Shit houses on wheels. Is that or is that not reason to move to Japan?”

  “You’ll like Japan,” Uncle Bishop said. He was still eating his spaghetti. So was Mother. The others seemed to have had enough. “In Japan, Miriam, you can take rickshaws instead of cabs.”

  “I could have gone into selling vibrators.” Raymond was quickly indignant. “I’ve had enough experience with Miriam’s own personal collection to be familiar with the line.”

  “Tell the truth,” Uncle Bishop said. “Was Miriam the cause of that blackout Bixley had last fall? Maybe she should have her own generator.”r />
  “Come on, everyone!” Rosemary said. Again, she sounded like the perpetual high school teacher, and hated it. “We’re in the middle of a birthday celebration.”

  Lizzie excused herself and, therefore, so did Charles and Philip. They rose from their chairs like three paper dolls, cut out and hooked miserably together.

  “Maybe we’ll have cake later?” Rosemary asked. So much for the celebration.

  “This is the last time I give my heart to a man,” Miriam was crying now.

  “Try to visualize the tattered shape of that heart,” Uncle Bishop said. He made another stab at his spaghetti by rolling it around on his fork until it formed a ball.

  “This celebration is officially over,” Rosemary said, and stood up. Uncle Bishop protested.

  “But I was just beginning to like Raymond,” he said. “And you know how I never like her husbands.” Raymond grinned appreciatively.

  “I never liked you before, either,” he admitted.

  Mother’s attention had gone back to The Chinese Horse.

  “Where’s Mr. Ed?” she asked.

  “On a farm in Michigan,” Uncle Bishop whispered, and Mother smiled.

  “Take her down to the den and give her the toy xylophone,” Rosemary told him. “I’ll bring her some cake in a minute.”

  “Can I stay for a few days, Rosie, until I’m back on my feet?” Miriam’s eyes were moist. Rosie. Even as children it was Rosie only if she wanted something.

  “I don’t know, Miriam,” Rosemary said, stalling. “As you can see, I have a full house as it is.”

  “She’s not coming home with me,” Raymond assured the group. “And someone better come get that goddamn Chihuahua.”

  “Come on,” Rosemary told Miriam. “I’ll find you a bed.”

  ***

  When Rosemary settled into bed herself, an hour after Miriam had finally passed out, after Raymond’s taillights had disappeared down Old Airport Road, just behind his good friend who was driving the Datsun, an hour after Mother finally fell asleep, Rosemary was no longer weary of the onslaught of nightmares. Let them come and take her off, a ride through terror, the manes of all the demon mares stinging her face. It would be a welcomed relief from the daymares of Miriam turning forty, of Mother crazy, of Uncle Bishop and the shoe fairy. She drifted off, almost wishing to meet up with William again out there in the subconscious darkness, when the ringing sounded. At first Rosemary thought it was a fire alarm until she realized it was the telephone. One thirty. Uncle Bishop. “The Children’s Hour.”

  “Rosie, do you have any idea how Hollywood treated all those little Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz?”

  Come on, nightmares, Rosemary thought. Come unbridled and frothing at the mouth. Come with your evil nostrils flaring. Anything is better than this.

  She placed the phone beside the clock on the bedside table. Let Uncle Bishop, like a puppy on its first night away from home, hear the continual ticking, the reassurance of a mother’s heartbeat. Let him talk on and on into the night while the luminous numbers on the clock’s face listened, happily as a friend to what he had to say. Rosemary’s own face turned itself away from the clock, away from the tinny voice seeping out of the receiver, and went off to sleep.

  THE JAUNTY SKELETON

  When Rosemary awoke the next morning, she thought at first she had dreamed the gothic birthday party of the previous evening. It had all the macabre dimensions of dream. But she knew she hadn’t. Lately, there was more reality filtering into her in the dreams of night than there was in the waking moments she shared with her family. “I used to think of you as that normal girl on The Munsters,” Lizzie had said.

  She twisted in her bed to catch a glimpse of the numbers on the clock. Nine thirty. She had slept in an old T-shirt, instead of pajamas, and now she slipped it off and reached for her bathrobe. She peered out of her doorway to see if the bathroom was occupied. Mugs followed her into the hallway, grabbing at the hem of the terry cloth robe and wondering why his eight thirty outing had been postponed. Time was going crazy.

  Downstairs, coffee had been made by one of the household denizens and Rosemary tasted a cup quickly to test its freshness. It had begun to turn stale but it was not so stale as to prompt her to make a fresh pot. Mother and Miriam were out on the swing, swinging together in harmony. Mother seemed rested, peaceful. Miriam, on the other hand, had eyes that were swollen as old fruit, the lids bluish as grapes. Her countenance told Rosemary much, after years of dealing with Miriam: hung over and overly apologetic. Hoping they hadn’t noticed her movement, Rosemary inched her way back from the window, stepping on the tip of Mugs’s tail. He caterwauled, causing her to slosh hot coffee on her wrist.

  “Sorry,” she whispered, and leaned down to pat the furry head. Then she opened the front door and Mugs slipped around her legs—as well as the sturdy legs standing on the front steps—and was gone beneath the lilac bushes. Rosemary looked up to see Uncle Bishop, a suitcase clutched in one hand. She recognized it immediately. It was Miriam green.

  “Raymond dropped this off at my house,” Uncle Bishop said. “Miriam will have something green to wear until he gets the rest of her shit packed. He’s not as naive as the others. The house is in his name.” He thumped Miriam’s suitcase onto the floor of the foyer before Rosemary could protest.

  “But I can’t take in any more boarders, especially Miriam,” she insisted.

  “Well, you’ll have to tell Raymond that.”

  “Where the hell is Raymond?” Rosemary pushed the suitcase to one side with her foot.

  “He must be home. I suppose he didn’t come himself because he doesn’t want to be subjected to another one of Miriam’s Gregorian chants.” Uncle Bishop was fidgeting with something outside on the steps. He fetched it into the foyer and Rosemary saw that it was another suitcase, this one brown and masculine, certainly not of the same set as Miriam’s olive green.

  “What’s that?” Rosemary asked.

  “What?”

  “That brown suitcase that has a decal of the Arc de Triomphe pasted to its side.”

  “That’s my suitcase,” said Uncle Bishop.

  “Why is it sitting on my steps rather than at some French airport?” She wrapped her robe tighter.

  “I’d like to join all of you for a couple of days,” Uncle Bishop said airily.

  “Join us?” Rosemary was incredulous. “What do you think this is? A club? At first Lizzie acts like it’s a sorority house where she’s sneaked in two guys. Then it became a mental institution when Mother arrived. Now Miriam is convalescing on my swing right this minute as if it’s some kind of halfway house. I know my front yard resembles a used-car lot, but to me this is my home. Now, what would you like this place to be, Uncle Bishop?”

  “A home away from home, I guess,” he said, and looked over his shoulder at the mailbox to avoid her stare.

  “And why do you need a home?”

  “Well, let me rephrase that,” Uncle Bishop said, and adjusted the crotch of a pair of baby-blue shorts that were covered with small pink teddy bears. “Let’s just say I need a home away from Mrs. Abernathy’s home.”

  “Uncle Bishop, I told you to leave that old woman alone.” Rosemary was not pleased with him, and he knew it.

  “She’s having me arrested,” he said. “Or so she claims.”

  “What for?” Rosemary had been wrong when she thought nothing Uncle Bishop said anymore could surprise her.

  “For trespassing and mental cruelty,” he said. He peered at her thoughtfully. “Doesn’t one have to be married before one can be sued for mental cruelty? I need to talk to Philip about that.”

  “What did you do to her, Uncle Bishop?” Rosemary could not remember being so angry at him.

  “I put something in her yard,” he said boyishly, his eyes staring at his brown sandals with the red toes painted on their tips.
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  “What was it?” She pronounced each word evenly so that he would not miss her displeasure. It was her schoolteacher’s voice.

  “Well, I put it on the top of her hedge, to be exact,” he said. “Overlooking her tray feeders.”

  Rosemary waited. Uncle Bishop sighed a large sigh befitting the body that bore it, and then he knelt on one knee to turn the brown suitcase over on its side. He zippered it open.

  “This,” he said, holding up a large stuffed bird, which she immediately recognized as a great horned owl, its ear tufts reaching heavenward, its blank eyes peering out of its flattened face.

  “Where did you get that thing?” Rosemary asked. It would frighten the daylights out of Mrs. Abernathy. What was it she had said in her column, just that Sunday, about such birds? Even God makes mistakes, Dear Birders, and the bird of prey is a fine example of this.

  “At the flea market,” Uncle Bishop said. “It was a toss-up between this and a stuffed lynx. But the lynx cost too much.” He put the huge bird in Rosemary’s outstretched arms. Pterodactyl. Imagining it perched on Mrs. Abernathy’s hedge, she tried not to think of what commotion it caused inside the old woman’s heart. What was it Mr. Abernathy himself had said? “The old ticker has only so many beats in it and then kaput.”

  “It was only twenty-five dollars,” Uncle Bishop continued. “That’s because it’s got just one leg. See?” Rosemary tipped the magnificent bird on its side. It was true. The poor creature was, indeed, one-legged. A gaping hole remained where there had once been a leg, a hooked claw, a feathered foot. Some human being had paid a taxidermist good money, one fine day, to have this animal mounted. Someone who couldn’t exist without a stuffed owl.

  “I ran over and took it down after she phoned to say that the cops had been alerted,” Uncle Bishop said. “Most cops don’t have a sense of humor.” He was having a good time remembering. Rosemary stared at the bird’s splendidly hooked bill and thought about the flight of those glorious creatures, noiseless, swooping down upon their dinner with just a slight swoosh of wind.