The Hare

by Melanie Finn

  Inside the store, Rosie edged along the aisles until she spied him perusing the cheese. He had once brought home a Wisconsin gruyere “in a pique of optimism.” But it had tasted like the sole of a new sneaker — of nothing but bland, white chewiness. Here he was picking up the plastic-encased slabs of American Swiss and discount parmesan as if, genie-like, he might transform them into the delicacies available at Balducci’s in Greenwich Village. Why was he buying cheese? Why was he now looking for wine — the top shelf with the more expensive labels?

  Items in hand, he headed to the checkout. Rosie, sliding behind the newspaper rack, heard the cashier call out the fantastic tally of thirty-three, seventy-two. Drafting out the door amid a pod of teenagers, she hustled back across the parking lot. She realized she was muttering to herself. The money Bennett was spending on cheese! The way she used rags instead of tampons, the cheapest soap that never lathered! And she accepted, accepted it! And here’s Bennett buying thirty-three-dollar cheese!

  A police cruiser was parked perpendicular to Billy’s truck, and as Rosie approached she saw the male officer, Miranda inside — her furious shrieking only just audible.

  “Is this your car, ma’am, your baby?”

  “Yes,” Rosie stammered. “I just needed to run in and get some diapers.”

  He cocked his head. Obviously she wasn’t carrying anything. “You know it’s illegal to leave your child unattended in the car.”

  “I was just a couple of minutes.”

  “At least 15, ma’am.”

  “I just went in —”

  “We got the call at 10:23, and it’s now 10:45.”

  “But she’s fine, she can’t get — the door was locked —”

  Rosie unlocked the door and pulled Miranda close; almost instantly the shrieks subsided. Other shoppers were peering as they wheeled their carts past. Rosie felt the sting of their gazes. She hoped the officer didn’t ask for her driver’s license.

  “Do you have a car seat, ma’am?”

  Bennett drove past, he did not even see them — a police car with flashing lights, his own girlfriend and child — oh, no, Bennett was gazing ahead, already at his destination, that higher ground, where he was eating the Northeast Kingdom’s very finest cheese and drinking wine with a cork.

  “Do you know what happens to a child when it hits the windshield?” the policeman was saying.

  “I just needed — I borrowed the truck from a friend —” Suddenly Rosie was crying, aware that her tears were partly fake, partly real, reflecting the tension she felt between the live wire of anger within her and her sense of how quickly and badly the situation could go wrong. Either way, she was at the mercy of this law man, this cop. He could take Billy’s truck, he could take her child. “I’m just doing my best,” she murmured, head down. Was this contrition sufficient? She kept her eyes on his heavy black shoes. He could make her do anything. “I’m so sorry, officer, I won’t do it again.”

  He nodded in agreement, then stepped back. He dealt with messy people all day long, they spilled their lives like sticky drinks. “Just go,” he told her and she went, slowly, orderly, intending to turn left. But as she checked right for on-coming traffic, she saw Bennett’s BMW creeping away from her. He was obeying the speed limit as he headed for the southbound entrance to the interstate.

  Tailing him was tricky because drivers on the highway simply overtook him, leaving her exposed. Even though he had no idea she could drive, she kept back as far as she could. Three exits down, he got off, merged toward Barnet. She let distance accrue, glimpsing him on the straighter stretches, but then, around two corners, she realized he wasn’t ahead of her. Doubling back less than quarter of a mile, she pulled into the only alternative: the Shady Lawn Motel. Bennett’s BMW was parked around the back.

  Rosie turned off the engine. For a long moment, she simply sat in the warm sun, the leafy quiet. She could simply drive home. If she pretended she knew nothing, she would actually know nothing. But, of course, she would know something. Pretending not to know is willful self-deceit. The choice, then, was whether or not to be complicit in whatever elaborate lie Bennett was going to tell. You’ve got it all wrong, Rosie, Rosie, this isn’t an assignation. This is Matilda. Matilda is my old friend, Andy Warhol’s daughter.

  When another car pulled in beside the BMW, Rosie ducked down. What would she look like, Rosie wondered, Bennett’s cheese-and-wine-loving lover. Matilda. Or perhaps Celia, his never-before-mentioned cousin from Bermuda. Perhaps a student. Some off-campus tutoring. An enamored, silly young girl. Perhaps a little on the plain side, a poor dresser who looked better naked.

  She heard the motel door open, muted voices, the door close again, and she sat up.

  For a long moment, Rosie stared at the motel. Even denial has consequences. She got out, hitched Miranda onto her hip, and walked around the front of the motel. The old woman at reception was hooked up to an oxygen tank. Rosie told her that her husband had accidentally locked the key to room #23 inside.

  “Dint know he hadda woife,” the woman wheezed. “Nora a choild.” Not much surprised her after seventy years on this side of the counter; she knew exactly who was in the room with Bennett. She gave Rosie the key.

  It made a jaunty sound in her hand as she walked, and she slipped it into the lock and turned, the door opened. The wine was on the table, the cheese not yet un-wrapped. Bennett sat on the bed, Wheezie in a chair. What Bennett referred to as a tete-a-tete.

  He turned, regarded Rosie and Miranda briefly, then refocused on the cheese.

  “Come on in, Rosie,” Wheezie said at last.

  But she did not move.

  Were they lovers?

  “Rosie,” Wheezie repeated, standing now, gesturing to a chair. “Have a seat.”

  He offered her a chair, gave Miranda a little smile and a wave.

  Rosie stood on the threshold, failing to understand.

  In the winter, snowshoeing with Miranda on her back, she’d found herself lost in the woods. She’d kept the Kirby Mountain ridge to her left, thinking that if she continued to bear right, she’d eventually come onto the mountain road. But it was difficult to see the mountain through the tall trees, and she’d thought to tell direction by their shadows, but the clouds moved in. At last, gratefully, she came across another set of snowshoe tracks. She’d thought they must belong to a trapper — who else would be up here? All she had to do was follow these back, and she’d come out somewhere. For the next hour, she dutifully backtracked, and then came upon a second set that joined this first. These were clearly all her own tracks, and instead of bearing right, she’d made a huge circle to the left. There was no trapper — just her. She had a small baby on her back, she was lost and alone in the woods: she understood this intellectually. But physically, she had felt dizzy, as if someone had spun her around and around. Her internal compass had jammed.

  She glanced at Bennett. He’s gay, she thought.

  The red compass arrow kept jamming at this point.

  Didn’t gay men want a certain kind of sex?

  And he’d never

  never tried

  the other

  hole.

  She was lost in the woods, the trees were tall and dark. She’d thought she could count on the mountain staying still, but the mountain was liquid, the mountain tilted and drained from one side of her vision to the other, she could see it sliding through the vertical lines of the trees as the earth shifted off its axis, and she felt a terrible vertigo. The snow was deep, she might die in the woods, for no one knew she was here with her child. She had read that dying from cold was easy, you grew sleepy, you submitted to sleep with relief, you slept. And such a tiredness had been upon her, the tiredness went both backward and forward in time — the exhaustion of her past and the fear of the future, how uncertain the way. She could not trust her own tracks to lead her out, she had to make new ones through fresh snow across uneven terrain.

  She saw a glass pipe of some kind on the table between the
men, and the air of the room held a low smell of burning plastic. Bennett lifted the pipe, lit whatever was in the bowl and inhaled. He held his breath like a diver, then exhaled slowly.

  “Ooooofffff, maaaan.”

  “Join us, Rosie.” Wheezie smiled, though his doll eyes frightened her or reminded her of a certain fear like white gloves so she turned, her arm tight around her child, and ran away.

  The hills folded into valleys, richly embroidered in green, braided with sparkling rivers, a marvelous summer tapestry, the road threading through. What if she imagined a different life? What if she simply left? Took Billy’s truck and just kept driving, her own Manifest Destiny. California, Arizona, New Mexico. She’d become Georgia O’Keeffe, live in an adobe casita on the edge of sagebrush with north light for the studio. She’d look through bones at the blue sky. Somewhere else, the life, her own life, and she’d slip into it like a green silk dress.

  Yet today she found her way to the elite fine arts college, the entrance under an avenue of maples. Being July, the campus was quiet, though Rosie could imagine the scholars in pleated skirts and penny loafers inhabiting the lawns and pathways, the elegant brick buildings and white clapboard dormitories. Discreet signs provided direction: Calvin Morgan Library; Mildred Crawford Evans Memorial Auditorium; William Forsythe III Gymnasium. Rosie held Miranda’s hand, and they toddled together toward Administration. Miranda announced, “Buggy wants moon.”

  The office was cool and dim, the walls lined with cabinets displaying awards, trophies, photographs. Briefly, Rosie studied these — the bright faces of students, clever, athletic, white, rich. Wealthy. Old money. Where were they now? In the Senate, on Wall Street, touring the Amalfi Coast in a red Fiat convertible. This adorable pensione just east of Naples.

  “Can I help you?”

  Rosie already knew. But she asked anyway, about a professor Bennett Kinney.

  The receptionist tilted her head to the unfamiliar name. “Kenny?”

  “Kinney.”

  “What does he teach?”

  The whole Potemkin village, shoddily erected. He’d made so little effort — just cardboard and poster paint, a card trick that would fool a child, a coin taken from behind an ear. There she’d been, standing in MoMA, alone on a Sunday morning, not pretty, not clever; a bumpkin.

  “Literature,” Rosie said.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t have a record of him.” The receptionist was flipping through the filing cabinet. “What years was he working here?”

  “May I use your bathroom, please?” Because Miranda’s diaper hung down, fully loaded with two hours of urine.

  “Just down the hall, on the left.”

  In the bathroom, Rosie regarded the floral print wallpaper. Who designed such dreck? Was the artist instructed: take a living flower, provider of nectar to countless bees, and reduce it to decorative banality?

  Miranda resisted the diaper change, scampering away half naked. “No! No!”

  “You have to. You can’t just pee all over yourself and Billy’s truck.”

  “Bees fuck!” she gurgled, and made a vrooming sound.

  “Truck.”

  “Fuck!”

  Wrapping one expert arm around her child, Rosie fixed the diaper in place even as Miranda struggled.

  “Liar. Can you say ‘liar,’ my love?”

  “Liyah.”

  “Liyah,” repeated Rosie, hissing the word through iron teeth.

  “No!” Miranda told her.

  Rosie’s hands were too tight on Miranda’s arm. “Don’t you dare defend him.” She quickly let go, stepped back. She turned on the tap and splashed her face with water.

  “It’s where the wealthy send their less palatable children,” he’d said.

  Miranda was looking up at her. “Mumma?”

  The receptionist fretted that she hadn’t found any record of Professor Kinney. Rosie mumbled her own apology, it must have been Middlebury or Bennington where he worked. Then, as if casually walking out, she glanced at the awards’ cabinet, the photographs, black and white, the shaggy ’60s ’dos and sideburns. Lacrosse, she recalled. A large silver trophy. Regional Champions, 1969. She read the team’s names: Tucker, Forsythe, Forbes, Biddle, Harriman, Hartley, Wallace, Bentley, Tollemache, Carrington, Worth, Whitley-Burns, Kreitler. Kreitler. And there, beside Willie Kreitler, in the back row, with his broad shoulders and confident smile, was Bennett Kinney. He would have been about her age — 20. His thick, tousled hair fell across his forehead, his arm rested on Willie’s shoulder.

  There was an ease about all these young men, Rosie observed, not just their physical strength and obvious health. They had money, they had good teeth, they had summer homes on Martha’s Vineyard and winter ski cabins in Stratton. Their years ahead would be charted among family connections — whatever they wanted or needed, jobs, marriages, cocktails, Christmas in Aruba, and, eventually, obituaries in The New York Times. “I see that Skippy Pierce is dead,” Bennett would say, reading the Sunday paper. “My mother used to hunt with him in Old Chatham.”

  Hunt. Not bears. Rather: foxes, with horses, to hounds.

  Peering through the glass, Rosie compared this Bennett to the current Bennett, and could see not simply his aging, but an interior degeneration. Perhaps she should have some sympathy. Somewhere, somehow, between then and now — within that arc of blue time, within the assurance of his entitled trajectory — he had stalled. In that silent, gravity-less moment of suspension, he had looked down and seen the Icarus-swallowing sea.

  Billy was at the door, a chicken of the woods fungus in her hands. She only came when Bennett’s BMW was gone, and she would never enter the house.

  “He stayin away this toime?” Billy spat her chew to the side.

  Rosie shrugged. Bennett always came back.

  “Ya wanta practice targit?”

  They walked through the gauntlet of dogs, only one of whom had accepted Rosie, an older bitch with one eye — beah tookit, hookt her claw n poptit lika fuckin grape — who lifted her nose to gently sniff Miranda on Rosie’s hip. Billy had no shortage of bottles and cans. The fragments and shards gleamed in a pile perhaps two feet deep under the wooden beam she’d set up against the berm behind her house.

  “Ya wanta breathe, keep soft.”

  Rosie held the rifle, the rigidity of it still felt unfamiliar in her hands, she still anticipated the bang and the kick, and Billy wanted this to become second nature, for her body to take the movement as routine, no more than turning on a tap or lifting a cup to drink.

  The problem with target practice was you didn’t learn how to account for movement. With an animal, Billy said, “Ya gotta know tha animal, wheresit movin,’ howsit movin, straight or zigzag, left, roit? Shootin’ birds ya gotta aim down to flushit then up to gedit, boom-boom.”

  On Billy’s command, Rosie fired. She was a lousy shot. “Good, good,” Billy said, “Ya gettin it, ya gettin it.” Then Billy scooched her chew to the other side. Spat. “May be a turnuv e-vents, ya gotta be prepared.”

  Rosie lowered the gun until it drooped over her forearm. She glanced at Billy, questioning. Turnuv e-vents? Turn of events.

  Billy wanted Rosie to have a gun in the house; she worried about e-vents.

  “Ya cant count on tha cops ta do nothin but scorn ya.”

  Billy went to set up another round, Rosie watched her — the way she moved with her shoulders like a man and hid her breasts and hips so deliberately. Billy Beetle, Rosie thought, burrowing into an invisible life out here on a dead-end road. No one comes to visit.

  “Feel ya belly, make shuah it’s soft’n loight, yar not holdin.”

  Rosie lifted the gun, sighted, softened her belly.

  “Events turn, men turn ’em.”

  Rosie looked at the beer cans, lined up on the beam.

  “Cops’ll come out quicka for a roadkilled deah than they will forah woman with a fistin her face. Breathe, Rosie, fuck’s sake, ya can’t neva shoota gun if yur not breathin, can’t do a fuckin t
hing if yur not breathin.”

  Rosie came back from a walk with Miranda. She was heavy to carry now, and restless, so Rosie’s walks were shorter, less satisfying. Wheezie and Bennett were cozy at the kitchen table.

  “Well, well.” Wheezie was smiling. “What can we do about this trés awkward shituation?”

  Bennett laughed warmly. “It’s really not a problem, my man. We don’t have to talk about this now.”

  Wheezie’s hair was slicked back, he was slightly damp with sweat. His smell was sawdusty.

  “You remember Wheezie,” Bennett at last noticed her standing there. “He’s just stopped by about a business matter.”

  Wheezie’s Wayfarers hid his eyes, his clip-on, taxidermy eyes, which perhaps are not there today, only holes, Rosie thought.

  “A business matter,” she said, flatly.

  “I’ll have it for you on Monday, my man.”

  “You have said that for four Mondays.”

  “A minor liquidity problem, I’m having words with my banker?”

  And how is he, Rosie said to herself. How is your banker? Gorham-Chase, IV? We haven’t seen them since the croquet match in Montauk.

  Crossing his narrow legs, Wheezie scratched his chin. Bennett plunged on, “I just don’t understand how we got so far behind, Wheezie, my man. It seems like we were giving you stuff on a regular basis. Treasures, items of quality.”

  We? Rosie pondered. Treasures?

  “Bennett, my man, that was always on contingent of sale. I can’t move that kind of upscale schwag around here. Boston, New York, Montreal, my man, I’ve had to travel. I’ve had to use my own funds.”

  “But more than two grand?”

  Wheezie gave a low laugh, “This isn’t an accounting issue.”

  “What about the dress? Rosie, go get the green dress. It’s Lanvin. Worn only a couple of times, still worth a hundred at the very least.”

  A couple of times? Rosie had worn it once. Who else then?

  Leaning in, Wheezie fingered Bennett’s shirt. “This is quality but it is your costume only.”