Rosie was three, so all she has is a shadowy memory of her mother’s blond hair and flowery perfume, the feel of a lingering touch on her forehead once when she had a fever, and a couple of lullabies weaving in and out of her sleepiness, songs she’s pretty sure Soapie never sang to her. Had there also been a plastic kiddie pool they splashed in, and a time her mother had read her a story about ducklings? Did these things really happen, or are they simply snippets from old TV shows?
As for her father, she never had the pleasure. According to Soapie, he married Serena and got her pregnant on purpose, thinking it would improve his chances of avoiding the draft. But then he headed for Canada anyway, leaving Serena waiting for him. Soapie’s lips always clamped shut when she told this part; her whole face changed, and a person could see how the photo-destroying rampage might have sprung from a mood this deep and dark.
But then her grandmother would get that grim look on her face and switch the story back. Nope. No blaming other people. Serena had been a capable, educated adult, and no one forced her to be with David. It had been her stupid-headed belief in romance and melodrama, her sheer foolish girlishness. And that, young lady, comes with consequences: unintended babies, early marriage, and motherhood.
And maybe even early death if you happen to be walking next to an unstable building.
For Soapie, her daughter’s death meant she was plunged into another round of child rearing. Instead of the art-filled, easier middle-age years that Rosie knew she had planned for herself, Soapie left New York City and bought a four-bedroom colonial in North Haven, Connecticut, a place where no one knew them or the tragedy that trailed behind them like a bad smell. And why not start over in a whole new place? She’d tried her best with Serena, but there was no use in pretending that things had gone well. There had been lies and fights and rebellions and mistakes, drugs, bad boyfriends, the occasional arrest—everything the sixties had to offer. And then Serena was dead, and there was a child to raise.
Luckily for Soapie, Rosie thinks, she was a well-behaved, nervous child, aware at some deep level that she’d been entrusted to someone who might not be totally able to withstand the full force of a normal American childhood. For the first years, she sat cuddled close to her grandmother on the brown couch in the den, quiet and watchful, as the cigarettes burned down in the ashtray, and the ice cubes melted in the vodka glass. Even then, she remembers knowing that this New England family dream house Soapie had bought was the wrong house for them. It was as though the house itself—with its black shutters and flagstone front walk, six-foot windows, a rose garden, a terrace, and hundred-year-old maples that arched over the lawn—expected to turn the two of them into a family, and held it against them when it didn’t work out.
But life has a way of moving forward, and Rosie learned how to heat up the TV dinners without burning herself, how to answer the phone by saying politely, “Baldwin-Kelley residence, Rosie speaking,” and how to soothe her grandmother by going over and wrapping her arms around her. There were hard times, times when Soapie was almost unrecognizable in her grief. One time she picked Rosie up by the shoulders and mashed their faces together and screamed, “You will not turn into your mother! I will not have it!” And another time, when Rosie didn’t load the dishwasher correctly, Soapie pulled out all the plates and smashed them one by one on the floor in front of her.
Who could blame her, though? Rosie remembers feeling more sorry for her grandmother than scared of her. Sometimes she felt like she was the one in charge, the one who had to figure out the right things to say and do to keep things smooth. Years later, a therapist pointed out that it was ironic that even though Rosie was the orphan who had lost both parents, Soapie was devoured by such a big sadness that it left no room for Rosie’s grief.
But—and Rosie insists on this view of things—there were plenty of good things that balanced out the bad: the times Soapie read the Little House on the Prairie books, every night, one after the other, and then started again, and how, on summer evenings they’d go out for ice cream, driving in Soapie’s Mustang convertible down to the shoreline. Those were the times when she would talk to Rosie as if she were a confidante, forgetting she was a child. “We’re going to talk human-to-human here,” she’d say and then explain her philosophy of life in great detail. Rosie absorbed it all: politics (Soapie was a feminist liberal who felt the world was doomed), religion (agnostic for the most part, with a nod to the Church of Unflinching Honesty and Living with Consequences), and sex (more trouble than it was worth). And don’t even mention romance. That was for idiots who’d been brainwashed by Hollywood.
She said that Rosie was going to turn out tough and strong like her, and that people can get through anything if they put their minds to it, if they just goddamned well face things honestly and stop trying to sugarcoat everything. Life was hard, and what was needed—the only thing that was needed, in fact—was developing self-reliance so that you never had to ask other people for help.
And for God’s sake, the human race had got to stop its wallowing.
“Don’t talk about your mother to people,” she said. “If you even bring her up, they’ll always think of you as a pitiful orphan for the rest of your life.”
But maybe that little speech had come after she’d risen from the couch and transformed herself into the Dustcloth Diva, after she had set up her IBM Selectric typewriter in the office off the laundry room and made housework look almost miraculously amusing—so much so that she was on all the morning television shows, waving her feather duster and winking at the cameras. She took to throwing fabulous parties on the terrace and wearing designer clothes. She was a celebrity.
There would be no more wallowing, she said, no more talk of how sad they’d been, no more talk of Serena. And that was that.
Well. But there was other stuff going on.
At school, in ways Rosie never tried to explain to her grandmother, being an orphan was far from pitiful. In fact, as the only motherless kid in the whole school, she had rock star status. Teachers let her help in the office, brought her treats, and allowed her to be first in line. She not only ruled several social clubs in the playground, but she had a whole posse of girlfriends who invited her for sleepovers and whose mothers viewed her grandmother as something of a glamorous, eccentric woman who, poor thing, clearly knew nothing about how to raise a happy child. At friends’ homes, she was treated to birthday cakes with pink icing and taken to the kind of Disney movies her grandmother did not see as good for children.
Rosie and her best friend, Greta, spent hours writing dramatic stories about her dead mother. They knew that Serena, beautiful and angelic, would have been nothing like the real, down-to-earth, practical mothers around them—the Barbs and the Patties and the Carols, energetic mothers who insisted on homework getting done and bedtime being eight thirty. No, she would have been above all that, sharing her makeup and jewelry, letting them stay up late and dress in fancy chiffon gowns.
They sobbed as they created and acted out the imaginary scenes of Serena’s life. On most days, they took out the Serena Box, the secret collection of things that Rosie felt that her mother had once touched. There was a painted china cup that Soapie once said was the last cup her mother had drunk from before she left home that morning to go into the city; a turquoise silk scarf; and a fuzzy photograph of Serena as a child with the sun behind her head shining so brightly that it looked as though her hair might be on fire. Rosie also has a hair clasp with some possible Serena hairs still in it, and the most valuable thing of all, an old cassette tape with Serena’s voice on it, singing in a raspy, laughing voice, “Piece of My Heart,” a song that years later stopped her in her tracks when she heard Janis Joplin do an almost identical version.
On bad nights, when she was alone, Rosie would lock her bedroom door and take these things out, fingering each one of them and calling out for her mother, who never once showed up.
By the time Rosie was in high school, she had lost interest in telling the
story or capitalizing on the panache it afforded her. She had gone through all the stages of thinking about Serena. She had idealized her, worshipped her, pitied her, been furious with her, hated her, and forgiven her over and over again, and she had had enough. She put the Serena Box away and didn’t take it out for years.
By the time she met Jonathan, she didn’t think about her mother at all. She was okay, going unmothered. He was teaching a pottery class she signed up for, and just about everybody in the class developed crushes on him, mesmerized by his wide grin and the joy that seemed to burst out of him when he was handling the clay. She recognized his type: a shy man who became a wizard when he was doing what he loved, a god who could take wet mud spinning around and guide it into becoming bowls and pots and sculptures.
She fell for those large hands, his curly hair, the way his eyes would squint when he’d throw back his head and laugh—and most importantly, the fact that, out of everybody in the class, he seemed to choose her. What was it that he saw there in her clumsiness? He put his wet, muddy hands over hers and moved her toward her own creativity.
And then one evening—soon after they’d started going out, when it was already clear they were going to be lovers for a while—they were lying in bed together at her apartment. It was dusk and they had finished making love, and were saying those things you murmur, like oh this was the best, the very best, you are amazing. And then she heard herself say, “My mother died when I was three.”
She hadn’t told the story for many years, but it was all there, waiting to be brought out and unpacked again: the crumbling building, and the friend her mother had been meeting for a Coke, the grandmother who became the Dustcloth Diva. She told him that things had basically worked out okay, probably the way they were meant to. She realized as she was saying it that somehow she really had survived it, all of it: her mother, her father, her grandmother, all her early romances, and the confusion that comes from feeling you belong nowhere.
He didn’t say anything for what felt like a long time, but his eyes looked full of knowing, like he could see both the pain of it and the freedom of it and not judge either one. His fingertips started making soft little circles along her jaw, and then he kissed the length of her arm down to her hand, and when he got to her fingertips, he whispered, “So what do you have of her? What do you hold on to inside when you lose your mother at three?”
That was a question nobody had ever asked her before. She got down off the bed and got the Serena Box, dusty from being in the back of the closet. He picked up and caressed each object with his long, long, pottery-making fingers, and his face was as serious as she could want. She realized she was holding her breath to keep from bursting into tears.
Then for a long time he looked at the teacup, the last teacup Serena had drunk from, a little china thing with a chipped handle and a painted-on spray of violets tied with a pink ribbon, turning it back and forth and running his fingers along the gold leaf stripe around the rim, studying it as though he needed to learn all of its secrets for himself.
“So this was her last drink of anything—from this?” he said.
“I don’t think they really know,” she told him. “Not for sure anyway.” She laughed. “She may have had that Coke in New York, you know.”
“No,” he said. “She didn’t. This was the last.”
He put it up to his mouth and pretended to take a tiny sip from it, and, seeing him do that little gesture, a thing that she and Greta had done a million times in their Serena games, something in her snapped—all that feeling, unbound.
She threw herself into his arms and knocked him over, kissing him like crazy.
“Whoa! Whoa!” he said. The cup left his fingers and flew into the air and smashed into a million pieces all over the floor.
And that was that. Out of some kind of mysterious alchemy, she knew she had let go of her mother and now belonged to Jonathan. She moved in with him the next week.
As simple—and right—as that.
[five]
Greta screams with joy and then bursts into tears on the phone when she hears the news. She needs to hear every detail, making Rosie tell her again and again about the scene in the diner, laughing each time at the idea of Jonathan turning pink and discovering the joy of being an extrovert. Then, because she’s Greta and is impeccably organized, she easily shifts gears into wedding planning and dress selection, and from there, it’s just a small detour into questions about Soapie’s care, the résumé of Andres Schultz, and the whole rest of Rosie’s life.
Luckily, before Rosie has to explain that she actually has no plan, Greta gets called away by one of her four kids; the baseball team has a game. “We’ll shop for a dress!” she says as she hangs up. “I’ve been waiting for this day for—well, for forever.”
It’s the same with her adult ed students on Monday: they all nearly lose their minds.
“You really get married? You and Yonatan … married!” yells Goldie.
“Well, we’re not married yet,” she says, feeling shy. Then, she adds, because this is, after all, an English class: “The way to say that, when it’s in the future is, ‘Are you really getting married?’ or you could say, ‘Are you really going to marry Jonathan?’ ”
“You are! You are!” Goldie says, and comes barreling into Rosie. She’s a heavyset woman in her sixties, with startlingly white hair and black eyes that are like onyx beads, and she’s famous for hugs so enthusiastic they’re more like body slams.
And since Goldie is the ringleader, she’s followed, of course, by Leena and Karenna and Carmen, who come charging around the desks to the front table, where Rosie has plopped down her bag of books and blurted out the news. For a moment she’s engulfed in their mingled perfume, which is the scent of spices and flowers and lovely things from their kitchens.
Then Tomas comes in, and they break away to tell him. He looks concerned and baffled by the news, and it’s not until Leo gets there and the announcement gets told once again that Tomas finally breaks into a smile.
“Oh, I see now! I think before you mean Jonathan not marry you but someone else. I think you crying.” Tomas is young and sentimental, working as a bartender and seeking a wife. The group thinks he’ll eventually meet somebody, but he says the women in the clubs are all too rude. Pantomiming with his thumbs, he shows how they text even while they flirt with him.
“Jonathan is not crazy. Of course he marry Rosie.” This is from Mara, Goldie’s best friend and sidekick. “It take him time, yes, but he do right thing. Finally.”
Goldie winks at Rosie. “Yonatan is a man who know his own time, and Rosie let him.”
“Rosie should get award for patience,” says Leo, an elderly gentleman with rheumy eyes. He smells of aftershave and hair gel. “Might we see the ring for admiration purposes?”
So she explains that there is no ring, that she and Jonathan are too old and settled for anything foolish like an engagement ring. Mercy.
“No, hell no!” says Karenna. “Nobody too old. You need ring.”
By then, everybody else has filed in. They have fourteen students today, which is pretty typical. Some, like Goldie and Mara, the matriarchs, have been coming for years, while the others come in and out as they get jobs. This class is her guilty pleasure, taught through adult ed instead of the community college, and although she gets the students to write papers and practice their grammar, mostly they’ve all become good friends, working on language problems as they come up in everyday life: filling out forms, negotiating rental agreements, outlining talks they need to have with their significant others and relatives, whatever needs doing. She’s gotten people out of bad relationships and into better ones, helped Tomas buy a used car, taken Mara’s soccer-playing grandson to physical therapy when he got injured, helped Goldie when her father needed to go into full-time nursing care, coached Carmen through the exam to get a home daycare license.
In return, they mother and spoil her, bring her food and recipes, knit her socks and hats, in
vite her over to their houses for tea and spicy coffee, introduce her to their grandchildren.
“Wait. You get marry, and then you still come here?” asks Goldie suddenly. “Or you move away?”
Rosie closes her eyes. She has to tell them, then, about the museum. They know about the teacup problem already; she’s made a story out of it more than once.
They’re quiet, staring at her when she finishes. She expects them to look upset that she’s leaving, but instead she can see from their expressions that all this time they’ve been feeling sorry for her, and that they’ve always quietly wondered if she was being stupid, living for so long with a man who clearly has some kind of decision-making disorder. There’s a certain relief that he’s turned out to be a real man, someone with plans they can understand.
“Well,” says Mara. “It just a disappointingness that he not do this back in time. So late for all of life to come.”
“Babies, you mean,” says Goldie. She smiles and shrugs at Rosie and then leans over and pats Mara on the arm. “Yonatan and Rosie have whole life together already before now. Maybe they choose no babies long ago.”
“Chose,” Rosie says, “and that’s right. No babies. The timing here is just right. It’s perfect.”
After the class is over, Rosie walks to her car in the parking lot, already punching in the cell phone number of Mrs. Cynthia Lamb.
“Hi!” she says with a great show of cheer when Mrs. Cynthia Lamb answers. “How are things over there?”
“Well, it’s quite an odd sort of situation now, isn’t it?” Mrs. Lamb says in her clipped British accent. “If I didn’t have proof, I would almost think you gave me the wrong address. Your grandmum is nothing like I expected.”
Rosie laughs with relief. This has to be a good sign. “Really? And how is that?”
“Well, she’s quite a character, that one. A charmer. Even though she didn’t seem to have any idea that I was coming, they were very gracious, both she and her gentleman friend. He even made me some breakfast.”
The Opposite of Maybe: A Novel Page 4