The Bubble Reputation

by Cathie Pelletier

  “Must two animals die this year?” she asked.

  “I can’t wait for Robbie to get here,” Uncle Bishop said, ignoring her question, as he did every year. He took a generous sip from his eggnog.

  “I expect to see his car in the yard when I get home,” Rosemary said. “I left a key for him under the mat. It’ll be good to have some company for a few days.” Was it she who had actually spoken these words? Wasn’t it only four months earlier that she vowed no one would darken her guest room again? Life is strange, isn’t it, Rosie? Lizzie had written. Even Lizzie could tell William some things about Life as Usual.

  Rosemary stopped to check on Mother, who only pushed her hand away and went back to the television program that had engrossed her. Betsy Kathleen, the Cabbage Patch Kid, sat on Mother’s bed in stiff denim jeans and a cute little sweater with a large B on the pocket.

  “Your mother’s a little cranky today,” the nurse said. “She didn’t sleep well last night, but she’ll be fine tomorrow. She’ll have a nice sleeping pill at bedtime.” The nurse patted Mother’s hand and Mother sank back in comfort to finish out the drama of the show.

  “I wish we didn’t have to take her out but could have dinner here instead,” Rosemary said. She reached over to touch Mother’s arm again, then decided against it. “But you can see how tiny Uncle Bishop’s dining room and kitchen are.”

  “She’ll be just fine,” the nurse said. “I’ll be with her.” Then she went back to her crossword puzzle.

  “Uncle Bishop,” Rosemary said, “I was thinking that, since we’ll have room, why don’t we invite Mrs. Abernathy to dinner? My table sits ten, and she must be lonely on holidays.”

  Uncle Bishop was in a festive tizzy, banging pots and pans, tasting things, reading recipes.

  “Come to think of it, I haven’t seen Mrs. Abernathy for days,” he said. “And from here it looks like no one has been shoveling her walk.” He and Rosemary peered out of the kitchen window at Mrs. Abernathy’s house. “She used to get Bradley Simon, two houses down, that little macho asshole, to come with his shovel.”

  What surprised Rosemary most was not just the walk, brimming over with snow, but the feeders in the birdless backyard, some hanging, some standing, all empty. How many times had Mrs. Abernathy cautioned her readers, in her birder’s column, to remember the birds each winter?

  Rosemary waded in knee-deep snow up Mrs. Abernathy’s walk and peeked through the glass of the front door. It was quiet and forlorn, the house and its belongings. Had the relatives finally come for her? Was she so happily surrounded by human beings that she had forsaken the birds? Forgotten the mortality rates? Skipped town with the chimney swifts?

  Back at Uncle Bishop’s house Rosemary called Senior Sunshine, the Bixley civic group she had contacted earlier in the summer about looking after Mrs. Abernathy. An extension of the group that took meals around to shut-ins, Senior Sunshine also brought them companionship.

  “A terrible stroke two weeks ago,” Mildred Buchannon told Rosemary, over a roar of background noise at the tiny community center where the meals were being prepared and readied for delivery. A busy time, Thanksgiving. “She’s at the Bixley Nursing Home.”

  ***

  The Datsun spun its tires on the packed snow as they headed in the direction of Bixley’s nursing home, Uncle Bishop driving and Rosemary in the passenger seat. A soft snow that had begun to fall was now accumulating on the windshield in not-one-alike snowflakes that were licked away by the wipers.

  “I hope Robbie beats this home,” Uncle Bishop said. He was leaning in close to the steering wheel, peering out at the white road ahead.

  “I won’t be long,” Rosemary said, as Uncle Bishop put the truck in park and leaned back against the seat to wait. They had already discussed this. Seeing his face standing next to her bed might be too much for Mrs. Abernathy.

  Rosemary followed the nursing home director down a hallway that reminded her of grammar school, an institutional green reeking of fresh paint.

  “We haven’t had her with us long,” the director was saying, as Rosemary walked past the weathered faces that sat in doorways or peered out at her from their beds, like cats in a humane society, all wanting a good home for Thanksgiving Day. The director left Rosemary in Mrs. Abernathy’s room.

  Rosemary was shocked, stunned to see Mrs. Clara Abernathy stretched out immobile and helpless, her eyes tightly shut. Across the hallway a television was tuned in to Wheel of Fortune. Two nurses sat on desk corners, their backs to Rosemary, and watched in anticipation as one of the contestants bought a vowel, purchased a few seconds of time.

  “Come on, you idiot,” one nurse cheered the player on. “It’s ‘A stitch in time saves nine.’ I wonder where they find some of these contestants.” The second nurse was smoking a cigarette and watching the squares being turned through squinted eyes.

  “Does she speak any at all?” Rosemary asked, and they both jumped. The smoking nurse quickly extinguished her cigarette in an ashtray on the desk and then crossed the hall to Mrs. Abernathy’s room. Rosemary smelled the scent of cigarette she brought with her.

  “No, I’m sorry,” the nurse said. “Not a word. But she’s only been here a short time, so she may yet.” She added this as encouragement, but it sounded memorized, as if maybe she had told many family members the same thing about their loved ones. “Is she your grandmother?”

  Rosemary looked down at Mrs. Abernathy’s soft curls that lay in blue-gray lumps on her head, little waves.

  “I’m one of her biggest fans,” she said.

  “Really? Who was she?” Who was she? No wonder the words of encouragement sounded fake. It’s all canned nowadays, Lizzie. The nurse, for one, had given Mrs. Abernathy up for dead.

  “A columnist,” Rosemary said. “She was very well-known.”

  “Really?” asked the nurse. “That’s nice. I’ve got to turn her.” Rosemary stepped back as the nurse resituated Mrs. Abernathy’s tiny form. Her eyes were now open, but they stared only at what lay before them, patterns on the ceiling, perhaps, that might stand out like a wedge of Canada geese on their way to a warmer clime.

  “Chafing and pressure,” said the nurse, “can cause sores in a bedridden person. Unhealthy tissue breaks down if it’s subjected for too long to more than one and a half to two pounds per square inch.” Lovely facts! How Mrs. Abernathy had lived for facts. What a pity she would miss these last ones about her own body.

  Out of Mrs. Abernathy’s throat came a soft whimpering sound, an inland murmur. A smell of pee and death ran together in the room, a smell Mrs. Abernathy, in her heyday, would demand go elsewhere to hover. Her body structure had begun to arrange itself into a question mark.

  So near to all the answers, Rosemary thought. Why a question now? But Clara Abernathy’s frame was twisting into a perfect quizzical form. The gown fell open in back as the nurse quickly turned the body, and Rosemary saw tiny sores running along the spine, the geese formation far off now, flying away, over the useless mountain of bones.

  What kind of work was this? Was this Nature on the unemployment line? Was this Nature amusing herself until some real work could be found?

  “Why linger?” Rosemary whispered, as she stared down upon the ravaging of what she knew was once a vivacious girl. She thought of the old pictures she had seen in the Pictorial History of Bixley, and she imagined Clara Abernathy running through the dirt streets of town, hand in hand with Horace Abernathy, on the heels of the fire horses, maybe, during the great fire of 1929. But even Shakespeare had known what was in store for the girl that had been Mrs. Abernathy. What was it the Bard had predicted, in William’s old college book, for that last terrible age? “Second childishness and mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.” Mrs. Abernathy gurgled again, like a little bird. Twi-do. Clep. Cher. The nurse checked the intravenous tubing near the bed, with its seconds dripping d
own, one by one, with its silent ticking. Liquid oranges now, and liquid toast and tea, this food keeping her alive. Not the hearty breakfast Mrs. Abernathy would have eaten in her prime. Rosemary remembered remnants from Mrs. Abernathy’s many columns. Dear Birder: The shape of a bird’s bill will indicate the kind of food it prefers, and do feed the birds. Winter is the cruelest season. The starling has brought down airplanes. The chickadee weighs as much as four pennies. The hummingbird’s nest is the size of a fifty-cent piece. Birds cannot, I repeat, cannot smell. Dear Birder. Dear Birder. Dear Birder. Mrs. Abernathy, Rosemary knew, was alive with bird facts. Her foggy dreams were full of beaks, and feathers, and wing bars, and other helpful information.

  “I guess I’ll be going now,” Rosemary said to the nurse.

  ***

  Outside, Uncle Bishop said nothing as he drove her over the glistening streets of town. Snow was still falling lightly. Rosemary imagined Orion somewhere overhead, unseen for the gray sheet of flakes that covered the night sky. She thought of Rigel, the glorious star which is his foot, a star born before Columbus was born, behind the snow, still there, still functioning. And Betelgeuse would be there, holding up Orion’s tired shoulder, and the fuzzy nebulae in the sword, three hundred light-years away, a hazy gas cloud ten thousand times greater than our sun. All this was there, beyond the gray snow falling, beyond the breakdown of Mrs. Abernathy’s bones, falling down like dominos, and the slow death of brain cells in all the earthlings. Beyond the mythology, beyond the lovers, beyond mothers and fathers and aunts, beyond the houses and the house pets, the stars were still weaving their patterns. And even they would one day burn out, tired of the script, sick of the job.

  “Tell Robbie I said hello,” Uncle Bishop reminded her.

  “He’s bringing his new girlfriend with him,” said Rosemary. “Did I mention that? I think he’s really serious this time.” She kissed Uncle Bishop good night on the stubble of new growth across his cheek, which would, like the spring buds, soon sprout a beard.

  Rosemary drove her own car through the snow filtering down on Old Airport Road. At home, Robbie’s truck was in the driveway, already asleep beneath a half inch of snow. A warm light was on in the kitchen and one in the den. There was nothing better than a house on a snowy, starless night, with a warm light in its kitchen. She looked around her yard and then down the white, shapeless road. How quickly snow covered the old mistakes, filled up the holes, whitened the oil spills, the blood spills, corrected the dips. A slow-moving car slid along Old Airport Road, inching its way home. It looked like the Fergusons. The falling snow quickly ate up the red taillights and soon the sound of the engine, too, fell away. Rosemary put her hands in her jacket pockets, warming them. There was now so much snow on the hill by the wild cherries that her tent would only be half visible if it were still there. The willows beyond the cherries were barren now, but in the spring the catkins would burst to life before the leaves came, all velvety and furry, pussy willows all over the tree, Mugs on every branch. Now, Mugs’s grave was lost in the white of the field, beneath a foot of snow.

  Rosemary watched the smoke of her breath rising in the night, like signals. When they were children—she and Miriam and Robbie—they pretended to be smokers on nights this cold, and they stopped between slides down the hill to share an invisible cigarette, take a deep puff. The snow snapped beneath her boots and the sounds echoed in the yard. Did she still want the same things, these months after William’s death, as she had wanted in those early spring evenings? I want to grow crazy as I grow old, William, she had lain awake and told his ghost. I want the gray to come to my hair slowly and the hair itself to go wild. I want time to come together at the last, so that it seems like one long, lazy day that is passing and not my life.

  “Rosie?” There was a voice coming out of the garage doorway. A voice in the night could be any voice. William’s. Aunt Rachel’s. A voice that comes out of the snow itself could be Father’s voice, or maybe even Mrs. Abernathy’s own, on its way out.

  “Rosie?” It was Robbie, and Rosemary felt a sudden surge of love rise up in her. She wanted to tell him what Father had told her, via Aunt Rachel. She wanted to say, “Oh, Robbie, life is such a sweet thing. Life is all sugar.”

  “Over here,” she said, from her spot in the shadows, where she could better see the snow ricocheting off the porch light. He came to her, shivering without his coat, so they could hug. Snowflakes flew like soft white moths around them. The trees and bushes and firewood, all usual landmarks, were buried beneath snow.

  “Come inside. I’m freezing to death out here,” Robbie said, rubbing his arms. “And yes. I have Carol with me.”

  Carol? Rosemary thought. Oh, Robbie, life is all sugar. There are Carols at every turn in the road.

  “What are you thinking?” he asked, and pulled her by the sleeve of her jacket closer to the garage door.

  “I have eight white hairs now,” Rosemary said, and swept the snow off her shoulders, arranged the ponytail in an orderly fashion for her first introduction to Carol. “Soon it will be all white,” she added.

  THE RECEDING ICE

  And in the winter,

  extra blankets for the cold

  Fix the heater, getting old

  I am wiser now, you know

  —Janis Ian, “In the Winter”

  It had been almost a year since William’s suicide. January would mark not just the new year but the anniversary of his death. A cycle had spun its way through the spring, summer, and fall, and was now back again, full circle.

  On Thanksgiving Day the gods bombarded the house with a foot of snow. Uncle Bishop brought Mother, her rocking chair, and the nurse easily up Old Airport Road in the Datsun, the chains biting into the snow all the way. Miriam and her recent boyfriend, whom everyone had yet to meet, were not so lucky. Sliding and swerving precariously close to ditches, they came into Rosemary’s house pounding snow from their boots, with Miriam relating in excited tones how death had pursued them at every turn in the road, in every branch that hung low with ice.

  “This is it,” Uncle Bishop said, unzipping the abnormally large parka and rubbing his plump hands together. “This is my last winter in Bixley. Mark my words. Humans beings are crazy to subject themselves to this torture.” As every man in Miriam’s life was the last, the very last, so was every winter Uncle Bishop suffered through in northern Maine.

  Robbie took their coats and introduced them to Carol, a tall, thin girl, quiet and intelligent. Neither Robbie nor Rosemary had prepared her as to the phenomenon that would occur once the family got together. She would discover that on her own soon enough. Mother, it appeared, felt even more like she was in a room full of rowdy strangers. But this pleased her more than struggling with remnants, those montages in her brain of babies she had once birthed but couldn’t quite recall. Better she think herself in a friendly pub full of polite revelers for the holiday. Uncle Bishop convinced the nurse that a glass of wine, in honor of the holiday, would help Mother better accept her circumstances, and soon her little cheeks were blushed. She grasped Carol’s slender hand.

  “Good night, Mrs. Calabash,” Mother said, “wherever you are.” So tonight it was Jimmy Durante? What an amazing cast of mostly forgotten people now lived in Mother’s mind. Rosemary wished it was a place she could actually visit.

  Robbie built a boisterous fire in the Schrader fireplace, and the den was soon full of the sound and the warmth of it. He and Rosemary made sure that everyone had a glass of wine. Everyone, that is, but Lloyd, the new man in Miriam’s life. To their surprise, he didn’t drink. Miriam had introduced him—gaunt and fortyish—to the family, and now she was most intent on their liking him.

  “Oh, Rosemary,” she whispered, while Lloyd went to the bathroom to wash his hands. “He even brings me flowers. The only time I got a rose from Raymond was when a Moonie shook one in his face at the car wash.”

  “And what do you
do for a living?” Uncle Bishop asked Lloyd when he reappeared. He and Miriam exchanged warning glances.

  “You might say I deal with the fragility of human souls,” Lloyd said. He let loose a cryptic laugh. His eyebrows were bushy, and Rosemary noticed a bald spot flowering on his head.

  “Are you with the IRS?” asked Uncle Bishop. Rosemary could already tell he didn’t like Lloyd, which was not surprising. Raymond had been the most bearable of the lot so far, but he had already moved from Bixley. Miriam was divorcing again and liked to tell her friends that business divergences had taken her future ex-husband from the area. The truth was that doors had opened to Raymond in the portable toilet business, and he was busy closing them on Johnny-on-the-spots all over New England.

  “I’m a minister,” said Lloyd. “A man of the cloth.”

  “What?” Robbie and Uncle Bishop and Rosemary all seemed to ask at once. Miriam with a minister!

  “Is the cloth green, by any chance?” Uncle Bishop wondered.

  “Tell them, Lloyd honey,” Miriam said, “what it is you want to do. Listen to this, Rosie,” she said, and nudged the minister’s arm.

  “Well,” said Lloyd. He cleaned teeth that looked to be false with a quick swipe of his tongue, something he’d done several times since he entered the house. “Quite frankly, I’d like to put a capital B back in Bible,” he said.

  “Isn’t that absolutely adorable?” Miriam asked, grinning. “I just love that.”

  Rosemary was still grappling with man of the cloth. Where would Miriam go shopping next when it came to husbands?

  “Tell them what your hobby is, Lloyd.” Miriam wasn’t finished showing him off. “This will interest you, Rosie. You and Lloyd have a lot in common.” Something in common with Lloyd? When would the universe stop playing tricks on her?

  “I happen to love old films,” Lloyd said.

  “Just like you do, Rosemary,” said Miriam. “And he knows the names of all those old stars.” She drank some wine, her eyes peering over the top of the glass at Rosemary, as if she were expecting a medal for this information.