The Rose Thieves

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  Operas, Kate thought, everything. What a lush world! When a flock of blackbirds scattered and regrouped overhead, she felt sure they were hearing Haydn too.

  * * *

  Without furniture the living room had a brute, medieval look: the beams were tree trunks again, and the fireplace was big enough to roast a foe. The piano, a concert grand that had materialized after Pop made a killing in July wheat and Ma made a breakfast of Moët & Chandon, stood alone on the blue rug as if it had set off to sea. Kate started the sonata again. Then again. And another time. This was dedication, a rational art and a noble one. She sat back to think how noble, and pictured a conservatory: the slim, pointed window of the practice room, the weary delirium after hours of work, toast and tea and Lives of the Composers back at the dorm. This was expression: playing the music, you could feel the life of the composer. You saw the women walking under his window, heard their laughter and guessed their hearts, too.

  Ma had shooed them all out of the kitchen so she could talk to Pop. They had so many catastrophes! Last week the washing machine had overflowed: back they had stumbled as the sudsy flood advanced, bearing brassieres like bloated corpses on its crest. There had been no clean clothes, not a rag, until the girls, wrapped in tablecloths like saris, had waded into the brook and pounded the laundry on stones. They were equal to any disaster, Ma told them. She told Pop he had left them at the mercy of the tides.

  “Gasket must have gone,” Pop said. “I didn’t realize it was that old.”

  “Of course not,” Ma said. Her voice was turning, and Kate at the piano girded herself as a passenger will press an imaginary brake. “You weren’t here.”

  “I can’t be two places at once,” he said, petulant as Chucky.

  “So hide your head in mommy’s apron,” Ma said, “or under it.”

  “Don’t be vulgar, Lila.”

  “Vulgar?” She sounded as if he’d named her place of birth. “Why not? Vulgar, that’s what I am, vile and stinking with no clean clothes, unlike the Great Mother Vanderwald, Our Lady of the Suburbs with her ice-blue eyes and her crystal cunt.”

  Here was a word Kate had never heard her mother speak, and she closed the piano lid and escaped upstairs. If she were braver, she knew, she would have gone to her parents’ aid. “Now you’ve lost track of the problem,” she’d say, pulling out chairs so they could sit and listen. “The problem is she misses you, Pop. She’s afraid you don’t love her.” She’d be very stern with him: “You cannot substitute facts for truths,” she’d tell Pop. “Nobody’s asking you to be in two places at once.” And she would remind Ma that Pop was afraid of her and she ought to be nicer to him.

  “’Tis I,” she said, vamping in the doorway of her parents’ bedroom, where Audie and Chuck were watching TV, “the lovely one.” She plunked herself down with them on the quilt.

  “Having a little talk down there, are they?” Audie said, but as they turned their smiles together, they heard Ma coming up.

  “You were delivered with ice tongs! The world’s first test-tube baby, bloodless product of Vanderwald Laboratories…” She went past them to the mirror and tore the pins from her hair while Pop stayed at the door. “The vulgar Lila Corrigan, not worthy of the likes of you, you self-righteous-petit-bourgeois-son-of-a-bitch, with your ancestors and your—”

  “Shut up,” Pop said, as if desperate to stop a leak. “Just shut up,” he said again, although she was silent. “It’s a wonder I come here at all.” The same rage that freed Ma’s tongue bound his; he stood still for a moment in confusion and went back down the stairs.

  “—and your pearls,” she yelled after him. The diva had reached her great moment, her audience rapt, in pajamas. With one wrenching twist the pearls were everywhere, skittering along the floor, hopping in the rug.

  “They’re secretions, vulgar secretions, you know,” she called down the stairs, and sank sobbing on the bed.

  “Do you think I’m vulgar?” she asked Audie, who was hugging her, rocking her by the shoulders back and forth.

  “No, Ma, I think you’re beautiful” (and I think she’s bananas, she’d tell Kate tomorrow).

  “Me too,” Chucky said, and she drew him in.

  Kate rolled a pearl between her fingers. “He only said it,” she said, “because you made that … crack … about Grandma.” Dear God, she hadn’t meant to, but she was speaking with cold rage. Ma looked up incredulous from Audie’s shoulder.

  “Who do you think you are?” she said. “Get out of here. You’re just like the rest of them.”

  Kate stood, dumb, defiant.

  “Get out!” Ma said. Kate went.

  The keys to the VW were on a hook by the front door. On the porch swing, in the dark, Pop sat with bent head. He didn’t look up when she passed.

  * * *

  Other times she had gone to Bobby’s, to tremble in his kitchen while his hearty mother fried a steak for her cats. But seeing the lamp in his window, lit against thieves, while the family was away, she felt lonely only for a minute. Then it seemed just another slash against whatever ropes held her down on the earth, as an angry new confidence tugged her away. When you had expression, you were safe at any speed, anywhere; you could turn pain to understanding like straw into gold.

  Knowing this, and Elayne’s schedule at the hospital, she went to see Amir. He was standing in the lighted doorway when she drove up. Listening to the katydids, she supposed. He had an eager, child’s heart, she could see.

  “Hi,” she said. “My parents had a fight.”

  “A fi-ight?” Amir found the English language infinitely amusing. He made a boxing feint and planted his hand on the door frame over her shoulder, smiling.

  “I think they’re crazy,” she said, looking down.

  He lifted her chin with a finger. “Cray-zee,” he said, rolling his eyes. She didn’t like his closeness so much now, but went in with him anyway, not wanting to be timid. The house was all pink and ruffles, and she had to push some pillows off the couch just to sit down. Amir set his beer on the television, where Joan Crawford, without volume, was adjusting her hat.

  “It’s so sad,” Kate said. “They do love each other, you know, but they…”

  He kissed her, interrupting. He would be hurt if she went on talking about herself and didn’t respond. And his country was nearly at war. She put her arms around his neck. He turned the light off with one hand and reached under her sweatshirt with the other.

  “Pillows,” he said, “too much pillows.”

  She twisted to pull the heart-shaped one out from underneath. Amir’s face in the TV light had lost all its warm color, but she tried to smile.

  “What are you thinking?” she asked.

  “Thinking?” He was struggling with her belt buckle, and she reached to help. She believed in passion.

  “Zipper?”

  Kate unzipped. In Turkey they wouldn’t violate the sanctity of love with words. The couch was too short, so Amir got stranded atop her as he tried to reach into her jeans, then bumped his head on Elayne’s doily-covered end table. Wasn’t this the way of all life? The sight of him, mute, helpless, full of want, filled Kate’s heart to overflowing.

  “I love you,” she said, and held him so tightly he couldn’t move at all.

  Over the insects she heard a car approach.

  “Amir, a car,” she said.

  “I too,” he said, laughing uncomfortably before the translation formed. “A car!” he said, and leapt to his feet, swearing in Turkish.

  They were zipped and sitting by the time Pop knocked. As Amir went to the door, he turned up the TV.

  “Your mother sent me,” Pop apologized. Hardly a threat, but when he held his hand out to Amir, Amir flinched. Pop looked at his own hand and withdrew it.

  “I’m pleased to meet you,” he said. “Come on, Kate.”

  “American television,” Amir explained.

  * * *

  “Don’t they shake hands over there?” Pop asked when they got home. �
�I think he thought I was going to hit him.” Moths were collecting at the yellow porch light over his head.

  “I don’t know,” Kate said, “we never shook hands.”

  “I suppose I should speak to you, Kate,” Pop said, “but I don’t know what to say.” She listened to the aimless sound of the brook behind him, waiting for him to go on, but that was all.

  “We were only watching TV,” she said.

  “I’d never doubt you, Kate,” Pop said. “You know that.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I do.” He pushed the door open for her, turned the light off, and sat back on the swing.

  A page turned. Ma was reading, and the light from her half-closed door fell the length of the hall. Kate walked through it to the bathroom. Shame and self-pity flashed over her, in alternate waves, and she rinsed her face over and over until she could see it in the mirror rosy and courageous again. When she stood up, dripping, Ma was behind her.

  “You don’t come in to say good night, now,” she said.

  “I thought you were asleep.”

  “Katie Vanderwald,” Ma said, full of scorn. “Katie the Proud lies again. And just like her grandmother, so cool.”

  “Please,” Kate said, so disdainful she startled even herself. Some new authority had blazed up in her in the last few hours, maybe the last few minutes. She turned to shine it straight in Ma’s eyes.

  Ma smacked her, a blind strike that knocked her against the shower, which gave a resounding, metallic thunder-roll but cushioned the blow.

  “My God, Ma!” Kate said. Ma didn’t even believe in spanking!

  “Don’t look at me like that,” Ma said. “That didn’t hurt you. Get downstairs and do the dishes, you … you…” Kate started down. “Slut,” her mother finished under her breath at the top of the stairs.

  There were no dishes, of course. Ma always did them. Children were not household slaves, she said—they should be out soaking up sun and fresh air, dreaming and storing their strength for later on. Laugh, don’t do the dishes! Kate sat at the piano in the dark, pretending to organize her music, until Audie came down and folded her in her protective arms.

  Ma was two steps behind her. “Don’t you make an ogre out of me!” she cried, swooping at them, batlike, slapping the tops of their bent heads, until Pop came in from the porch, rubbing his eyes.

  “My God, are you hitting them?” he asked, and she told him not to dare be reasonable with her and sent them to bed, saying not to wake Chucky and for God’s sake not to turn this into a scene.

  So up they all went, except Pop, who stayed on the porch until time for the early train.

  * * *

  “No, like this,” Mrs. Schnippers said. Her hands were bunches of carrots, but she played softly, sharply. “Might as well go back to the beginning, we’re not that far in.”

  Kate went back. In half an hour she had played half a page, with a mistake in every measure, every time. The notes sat before her as useless as an assortment of old screws. Timid, painstaking, she began again.

  “Molto vivace, remember?” Mrs. Schnippers prompted, very, very gently. “That’s good, that’s on the right track.”

  It wasn’t good. Just because she couldn’t play the piano didn’t mean Kate couldn’t hear her own noise. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I can’t.” Pure will kept her from slamming her full arm down on the keys. The damned notes kept her from the music as surely as her body kept her out of the sky! She labored at the piano for grim hours every day, always too slow or too fast, too weak or too loud. She put her head against her music now and willed herself not to cry.

  “It’s my fault,” Mrs. Schnippers said. “I should have let you play it through.”

  “No, something’s wrong.”

  Mrs. Schnippers’ laugh forgave all. “Yes, something is wrong,” she said. “You don’t know how to play the piano yet. You will, though. Have you been practicing?”

  “All the time,” Kate said.

  Music ought to be like diving: you should make a wide arc over it, let it swallow you, and emerge triumphant, clean. It was so long since Ma had taught her to dive that she didn’t remember the lessons, only the skill.

  And she had lost Ma absolutely—Ma seemed to despise her now. The month at home had been hot and silent, with only one visit from Pop. Ma and Kate talked about what needed to be done in the house and why Kate had done it wrong. When the toaster went up in flames, Kate was making toast for her gluttonous self, in midafternoon. When Chucky got stung by a wasp, it was during Kate’s turn to watch him. What was the matter with her? Next Ma would come home and find he’d been squashed in the road.

  “She’s nuts, that’s all,” Audie reminded her. In the afternoons they sat on the flat stones in the brook, watching the water striders skim by. Audie looked so lucky, her head a neat blond cap bent over her pink toes, the bottle of polish balanced within reach on the bank. She was having the pearls restrung as a surprise for Ma. Chucky was the favorite now, having slept through the wars, and Ma was teaching him to use a rod and reel. He sat with his line, miming patience, or ran back to the island and made fish out of leaves.

  Kate was alone with her new knowledge: nothing can be made right. Doubts came thick as fleas; she pinched one, only to be stung by another, with never a chance to look up. Amir had gone back to Ankara without even a phone call goodbye. Kate lay on the grassy bank and watched the clouds make their rapid transformations overhead. Like all her ideas, dreams, and plans, they floated free, far above the confusion below.

  Then, last night, Ma had apologized.

  “Kate,” she said, on her way upstairs, “you forgot to feed the sheep again.”

  “I did, right before dinner.”

  “I can hear them bleating,” Ma said. “Is that what it’s come to? You don’t even care if they starve?”

  Kate shut the piano and went up to the shed. One fat ewe rested her head on the fence rail, then lifted it to babble. Kate knelt and hugged her between the rails. She and Audie had bottle-fed the lambs when the mothers balked, and one touch calmed them now.

  “What’s the matter, dopey? Are you trying to bay at the moon?” Probably it had eaten a poisonous plant, as sheep in their stupid hunger were wont to do.

  “Are you sick?” she asked it. “Are you sad?”

  “Kate?” Ma had followed her out. Kate’s heart, opened to the ewe, clenched again.

  “I’m sorry,” Ma said stiffly. Why now? But why anything? The world had lost its order; all its peaceful symmetries were gone. It was too dark to see Ma’s face, but the sky above her was full of stars.

  “I’m sorry too,” Kate lied.

  “Thank you,” Ma said. She turned and went in. Kate watched her pass through the kitchen, the living room, up by the stairwell window, saw the hall light go off and the bedroom light go on. When she took a breath, it felt like her first, and when the ewe in its wretched softness gave another bleat, she cried.

  * * *

  “Maybe you’re working too hard,” Mrs. Schnippers said. “Be patient and listen. You’ll be surprised.” Her orange hair bristled as if she had often been surprised.

  Desperate for wisdom, Kate could only hear the words. Listen, she wondered as Mrs. Schnippers went on, how listen? The tomato sauce Mrs. Schnippers was canning could be heard a-bubble on the stove.

  Summertime and the livin’ is easy,

  Fish are jumpin’, and the cotton is high.

  Oh your daddy’s rich, and your ma is good lookin’,

  So hush, little baby, don’ yo’ cry.

  Kate was home from her lesson, before Ma. Her voice sounded low and thrilling when she was alone and sang just as she felt. Fortified, she turned a stern eye on the counterful of vegetables. Green and yellow squash, tomatoes, corn—the produce of a garden gone mad would have to organize itself into a casserole. The peaches were so ripe now, they glowed like lanterns on the tree.

  Audie came in with a pail of beans.

  “Minestrone,” she said. “You cho
p.”

  The knives were never sharp enough. The tomatoes squished out of her grasp and spurted their seeds on her sleeve. Finally Kate ripped them open with her fingers, admiring their rich red.

  “Look,” Chucky said, through the screen door. He was carrying a real fish, albeit a small one, cupped between his hands.

  “Did you take the hook out yourself?” Audie asked.

  “I used the butterfly net,” he admitted.

  “Ah, well, it’s a fish, isn’t it?” Kate said, opening the door for him. It swam in the mixing bowl until Ma got home.

  “Do you mean to say that after you children were nearly raised in that brook, not one of you knows how to clean a fish?” She shook her head and beheaded the fish, gutted and fried it, and gave everyone a bite.

  Then she turned to Kate and with some effort asked if she’d had a good day.

  “Nothing special,” Kate said, stubborn. Now she didn’t spend all day phrasing and rephrasing the march of events for Ma, they didn’t seem to be events at all.

  “How was the lesson?” Ma seemed determined to reconcile. Forgive her, Kate thought, rise above this. But how forgive a mother?

  “I can’t play the piano,” she said finally, as an excuse, “so I’m in a slough of despair.”

  “Slough of despond,” Ma said.

  “Depths of despond,” Kate told her.

  “Depths of despair, slough of despond,” Ma said. “Trust me, this is one thing I understand. And don’t be absurd. Of course you can play the piano. With your strength of spirit? Hah!” She waved a hand. “Believe me, if you want to, you’ll play the piano. Katie Vanderwald,” she said, as if announcing a visiting queen, “you have a history of getting what you want, after all.” She raised an eyebrow, and the old accusation became praise.

  “If you say so,” Kate said. “You seem to be objective.”

  Then she decided to believe her. When the world spins as it does, what is there to do but grab hold? To Audie, smiling at Ma’s words now with the familiar shy pride, Kate would always be venerable.

  So she would have to do well. After dinner Chuck and Audie raced out to turn cartwheels over the lawn, as they had all three used to do. Then Kate went back to the piano. She played the first page with her whole heart and a thousand errors, then flat and lifeless with every note exact. Then the first three measures, ten times over. Outside, Ma laughed with the children, whose cries had got the sheep bleating and startled a goose out of the brook. Haydn gave order to everything if only you played him right. Kate began again.