Meeting Rozzy Halfway

by Caroline Leavitt

  “I’m a horse today,” said Rozzy. “I have to gallop.”

  “Oh, a horse,” said Bea, “but you’re still Rozzy, aren’t you, still my girl?”

  “Not right now,” said Rozzy, sprinting ahead, flashing up along the swelling grassy hill, her hair flying out behind her, a horse’s mane. Bea shut the door, then put her hands to her temples, rubbing. “Don’t you feel good?” I asked, looking up from my drawings scattered across the kitchen table. Bea smiled weakly and sat down beside me, leafing through my pictures. “This one’s nice,” she said.

  “Bess,” she said, “does Rozzy ever play, oh, mermaid when we go to the beach, or do you kids ever go in the woods, pretend there’s a gingerbread house?”

  I poked around my crayon box for a purple crayon. “Gee, I don’t think so.”

  She paused. “It’s fun to pretend, isn’t it? But you know, don’t you, that you can’t really breathe underwater, that you can get lost in the woods.” Her voice trailed off. “Never mind, baby,” she said. “Go and color some more.”

  Bea began changing when she was around Rozzy. She tried to forge bonds of sameness, as if that would tie Rozzy safely to herself. “We’re both dark,” she told Rozzy, making the child stand by her, both of them facing their mirror images. “I looked exactly like you when I was your age.” Rozzy pulled away.

  “We’re alike, don’t you think?” Bea persisted.

  “No,” said Rozzy calmly, “no, we’re not.”

  “We both have stubby fingers,” said Bea sharply. She saw Rozzy’s stubborn face suddenly darken, saw the way Rozzy surreptitiously studied her hands, and saw that for a whole week, Rozzy was ashamed to hold a fork, to take a glass of water from anyone. But Bea couldn’t stop herself. “Look,” she’d say, “isn’t it funny how you’re developing the same pot belly I have? There’s nothing you can do about it. You think those pullover tops you wear hide it?” Later, when Rozzy was in her teens, I would see Bea do it without even thinking, automatically. When Rozzy began pushing out of that prison of a house, Bea would stop her, edging her way into Rozzy’s consciousness, reminding Rozzy to keep her skirt over her knees so she wouldn’t show the same blue veins Bea had, the same knobby structure.

  Bea worried that Rozzy had no friends. “There are plenty of kids your age kicking about. You should be out with them.”

  “They don’t play the games I like,” said Rozzy.

  “What games?”

  “Just games. No one plays them any good except for Bess.”

  Bea started. She began a new watch. In the middle of the week, she phoned my third-grade teacher and asked to see her. My teacher had had Rozzy, had fallen in love with that bright darkness. She didn’t know much about me, about my quiet dreaminess. I did the work, she told Bea, I got A’s, and I was a talented artist. Bea told me the teacher started laughing about a class project I had handed in, a carefully detailed set of paper dolls with the genitals inked in.

  Bea went home, took off her coat, and told me she had seen my teacher. “Why? How come?” I demanded. Conferences were always for Rozzy, not me.

  “Oh, I just wanted to see how you were doing.”

  “That’s not why,” I said angrily. “You could have just asked me if that was why.”

  “It is why,” said Bea, stroking my hair. When I pulled away, she went into the bedroom and shut the door. I could hear her dialing the phone, speaking in a low voice, but I didn’t want to hear, I didn’t want to know who was on the other end, so I went to find my paints.

  One day after school, Bea hired a sitter for Rozzy, a high school girl with a Beatle haircut. “The Beatles are the newest thing,” the girl told me, “the face of the sixties.” I struggled out of my dress, but Bea stopped me. “Don’t change,” she said. Rozzy was reading, curled up on the sofa. “It’s just the two of us today,” Bea said to me. “There’s a friend of mine who wants to meet you. Hurry up now.”

  “Who? Who wants to meet me?”

  “A lady. Her name is Ellen Goodman. Now come on.”

  We took the subway into Brookline, crowded in among the people. I couldn’t see Bea, but I kept a damp hand clasped about the silver pole. It was only a ten-minute ride and then Bea’s voice wound its way through the people and caught me. “This stop, Bess. Out.”

  We didn’t have far to walk. Bea took me to a brick building.

  “Hey, this is a doctor’s office,” I accused.

  “She’s a doctor, so what. Everyone has jobs. She’s busy, so we came during her working hours.”

  “I don’t believe you. Why do you want me to see a doctor?” I felt the tears trembling behind my lids.

  “Bess, please.” She pushed open a door and led me into a waiting room. “Sit,” she ordered.

  “Is she a doctor like Rozzy’s?”

  “She just wants to talk to you.”

  “Is she Rozzy’s doctor?”

  “No, honey, she isn’t.”

  We weren’t sitting out there very long. A woman with white hair came out and smiled at me, and Bea motioned me to follow. “I’ll be in in a minute,” Bea said. “I want to finish this magazine.”

  I was prepared to hate Ellen Goodman, but she gave me paper and asked me to draw three different pictures with different members of my family, and then one whole picture of all four of us together. I didn’t want to stop drawing. I forgot everything, I relaxed, and I was annoyed when she took the drawings away. While she studied them, she asked me to talk about Rozzy. I answered in vague halfsentences, and then she said I could go out and tell Bea to come in.

  It was my turn to wait outside. Bea wasn’t in there for very long and when she came out, I stood up, dragging my coat on, ready to get out of there. “How come I had to talk about Rozzy?” I demanded. Bea fiddled in her purse. “How come, how come?”

  “Why, that lady is just a friend of mine,” said Bea. “She wanted to know all about you.”

  I stared at Bea. Even then, I could always pick out the lies associated with Rozzy. I could see them before they even left anyone’s lips. I hadn’t said anything to the doctor that I knew Rozzy wouldn’t want anyone to know. I had kept all our secrets. “Do I go back?” I asked.

  Bea shook her head.

  “Good. I wouldn’t go back anyhow.”

  We didn’t catch the subway back. Bea swiveled around and led me to a Brigham’s, where we sat at the counter and she ordered two dripping hot fudge sundaes. I had never eaten one before. Ben thought sugar was poison. I didn’t even want to eat it at first. I just hunched protectively over it and breathed in the chocolatey steam that rippled up over the ice cream. I bent down so low that I got a spot of ice cream on my nose. The waitress, a bored young girl, kept frisking by, dropping fresh glasses of water before us. Bea sipped each glass as if it were wine.

  “My God,” said the waitress, when I started spooning down the sundae. “Look at that child eat.”

  “I’ve never had one of these before,” I said, looking up at her.

  “Oh, now, go on,” she said, grinning.

  When I lifted myself off the red whirling stool, my face smeared with chocolate, Bea bent and kissed me.

  “You have chocolate on your face,” I told her, pointing out the spot.

  She took a clean white paper napkin and dipped the edge in her water, dabbing her cheek clean. “Thank you, angel,” she said.

  “Where did you go?” asked Rozzy when we came back. Bea looked carefully at me.

  “Oh, nowhere,” I said, thinking only of the sundae.

  Bea cooked a special dinner for Ben that night, a stuffed fish, marinated vegetables, a mustard salad, and mousse for dessert. She shuffled us off to bed. I got up an hour or so later and wandered into the kitchen for some water. I drank half of it and then I poured the other half over my hands, enjoying the sensation. On my way back to bed, I passed my parents’ bedroom and paused at the door, pressing my ear against it and listening.

  “You think I cooked a good dinner?”

 
“I told you that you did.”

  “One more question and then I’ll shut up, OK?”

  “Shoot.”

  “Do you still think I’m beautiful, that I look like an angel?”

  He laughed and then she told him that she had seen Rozzy’s doctor, that Rozzy’s problem couldn’t be labeled, but that it might disappear, or it might stretch across their lives like a silky spider web.

  “She was such a beautiful baby, wasn’t she?” Ben said quietly. “No one was formed the way she was, skin all the same even shade, like she was cut from one single piece. So gorgeous, so smart, speaking, walking, doing everything so quickly, so soon, so perfectly.”

  “She may grow out of this,” Bea said.

  “She was so smart.”

  “She’s still smart.”

  “She was so—” he fumbled. “She was miraculous.”

  “I had Bess tested,” said Bea, her voice gone hard. I stiffened against the door. “Rozzy’s doctor wouldn’t see another member of the family, but she gave me the name of this other doctor. She’s normal.”

  “Normal,” said Ben.

  “Just like any kid on the block.”

  I heard Ben’s heavy steps, heard the bathroom door opening and shutting, the shower hissing on, and then Bea weeping. I stood outside the door for a long time, and when I left, the shower was still running, was still gently stinging the air with sound, branding it.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Ben never blamed Bea, no more than he blamed himself. It was always something in Rozzy, in her metabolism, her diet, things that could be controlled. He and Bea had done everything, he said. When Rozzy wandered over to him, whining that she didn’t feel right, that the Valium she took mornings made her groggy, he would snap at her to behave. When she brought home her test papers, decorated with odd squiggles, the big shaming F waiting for his signature, he would refuse to sign them unless she admitted that she hadn’t tried, that she could have received an A. Rozzy’s face would contort bitterly, but she would never say what he wanted to hear, and Bea always ended up signing the test the next morning before Rozzy dashed off to school.

  Bea would get depressed, would have terrifying headaches attacking her all day. Ben catered to her. Rozzy and I watched huge baskets of fruit appearing at our door, bunches of flowers tied with ribbon. I saw the look on Rozzy’s face, and I took a few of the flowers and spread them out on Rozzy’s dresser, on my dresser, too, where everyone could see. When Bea took them and put them in the vase with the others, I pulled some of the petals off, I left a defiant trail on the rug. I wanted Ben to find the petals that way, but Bea always quietly swept them up, without comment.

  Rozzy sensed things were changing. She was home alone more and more often. When Rozzy ran into kids she knew on the street, they would suddenly remember dentist’s appointments. Rozzy would stand stolidly and watch them make their way into the distance. She stood there until they became pinpoints. When Rozzy decided she wanted an eleventh birthday party, Bea was enthusiastic. They spent a whole afternoon buying paper plates, matching cups, name tags. Rozzy licked all the stamps for the invitations and put them in the mail. She had invited everyone she knew; some of them had never said more than a few words to her, but she didn’t mind. “Everyone’s coming,” she said emphatically. Bea made a cake with burned chocolate frosting. The day of the party Rozzy remembered she had forgotten potato chips and made Bea drive her to the Thrift-T-Mart, leaving me to watch the Saturday morning cartoons. They were only gone for half an hour, but by the time they bumped up the hill, four of the seven girls Rozzy had invited had called to cancel. They were sick, relatives were visiting, they had to go to the doctor’s. When I told Rozzy, she went to the phone and immediately called the others. “There’s no party,” she said. “It was a mistake.” She hung up after the last call and sat down at the kitchen table.

  “Let’s all go to a movie,” said Bea brightly, watching Rozzy.

  “No, thank you,” said Rozzy politely. “I’ll be fine here. I’d rather watch TV all day anyway.” She carefully carried her cake and two bottles of cherry soda into the den. She didn’t come out until dinner.

  I bounded out of the house, looking for those girls. I wanted them to say something to me so I could coldly and deliberately turn my back. But there was no one outside other than a few of the rougher neighborhood dogs, and I slowly went back home.

  That summer Bea made us climb the hill to the school playground, where they had hired two college kids to teach us punchball and the art of making gimp lariats which we could hang uselessly about our necks. We never went. Rozzy would shoot up the hill and then lead me back down around the outskirts of our neighborhood. We were on the prowl. We sang tunes from the hit parade, rang doorbells and ran before people could jerk their doors open and catch us, and played stealing games at the Thrift-T-Mart. Rozzy liked to steal small things like soap or wrapping paper, but she never kept anything; the fun of it was putting it back. She always had the store detective completely baffled. He’d follow us as soon as we took a step into the store; he’d watch Rozzy as she fingered the tissue paper, the magazines, as she stuck a wad of envelopes into her pockets. But always, just as he seemed ready to pounce, Rozzy would calmly replace every single object she had taken. We stayed at the Thrift-T-Mart until it became dusky and cool, and then walked home, making up stories about what we had done at the playground to satisfy Bea.

  I was nine that summer, and for the first time Rozzy was my babysitter on the humid evenings that Bea and Ben went out. We would make phone calls. We sent fifteen taxis to the lady across the street. We dispatched cesspool cleaners and diaper services to the old people. We’d pretend we were giving away thousands of dollars if people could just answer one simple question: what did “Zabadaba” mean? No matter what people said, even if it was “I don’t know,” Rozzy would scream into the phone that oh, my dear God, they had won.

  I adored her. On Halloween we stuffed empty candy wrappers with tissue paper and ate the candy ourselves, our fingers sticky with chocolate and greed. Rozzy spooned dollops of chocolate pudding into paper towels and hand-tied the whole sloppy mess with blue satin ribbon. She grandly handed these out to each trick-or-treater as if they were money.

  We both worried about the same things: remembering when to blink, how often to breathe. I was convinced that if I didn’t consciously push air in and push it out again, I would end up gasping like a fish on land. I couldn’t concentrate on what people said to me, my schoolwork suffered. I was panicking, juggling breathing and blinking until every breath, every blink, became a droplet in a Chinese water torture. When I stopped worrying about that, as abruptly as I had started and with as much reason, Rozzy and I began experimenting with our hands, wondering and worrying about how far we could stretch our fingers apart before they ripped.

  I gradually stopped these habits. They got in the way. But Rozzy continued. We were in the movies one day, waiting for the lights to dim, when abruptly Rozzy turned around in her seat. She jerked her head as far around as she could, straining, until a small throbbing blue vein pulsated on her forehead. “Rozzy, cut it out,” I said, and she turned around again. “What were you doing?” I hissed. “I don’t know,” she said, staring down at her hands. “I couldn’t help it.” She began doing it at school, she later told me. Once I had to deliver a note to her teacher. I saw Rozzy slumped in the back of the room, dreaming, but beside her, a boy was mimicking her, twisting around fiercely in his seat, making faces. When he saw me staring at him, he scowled.

  Ben would yell at her when he saw her twisting around in a chair at home, when the vein popped out. I heard him talking to Bea about what they should do, and he began locking himself away in his study, poring over medical journals. He stopped Rozzy on her way to the kitchen. “Stick out that tongue,” he ordered. He traced a B-vitamin deficiency sprouting along the grooves and buds of her tongue, making the surface textured, the color more raw than normal. “Maybe your whole problem is vitamins,”
he said. He was suddenly excited, and so cheerful that Rozzy kept quiet. There were more health publications around, and Ben began ordering them, letting them slap through our mail slot and pile up on the floor until he could study them. He kept them filed away in his study, and before long, he was sure he had the answer.

  Once he ordered vitamins from the back of the magazines, and he made up special supplements for all of us, tying them up in Baggies and leaving them on our breakfast plates. Rozzy had more vitamins than anyone, twenty-three different pills of different shapes and sizes. He watched Rozzy swallow every single pill. “It’s all chemical,” he said. But a half-hour later, Rozzy threw up all of the pills onto her bedspread.

  It depressed Ben, but he didn’t give up. He pored over his health magazines, he bought books on hypnosis. “We’ll let you heal yourself,” he told her. “I’ll just give you a suggestion.” He made her sit in his brown chair with her back very stiff and straight. I crouched by the window, watching. Rozzy was very strong-willed though. She couldn’t let go enough to be put into a trance. “Rozzy,” Ben snapped. “I’m not doing this for me, you know. Now relax.” He tried all sorts of little tricks to relax her, making her think her hand was made of feathers so it would float on the air, telling her she was out in the blistering heat so she would take on more color. But when it came to the crucial point, she would blink and jerk herself awake. He was furious, so annoyed that he didn’t see how my own lids were dropping, heavy as iron.

  “Well, then let’s just forget it,” he told Rozzy in disgust.

  Rozzy foundered. “Maybe you could try again,” she offered, but he turned away from her and she left the room with her head down, quivering.

  I was in a hazy half-dream. I was weightless, weaving in and out of the air. Ben said something, moving his face so close to me that I could see the places where he had nicked himself shaving. He snapped his fingers, a sudden violent clicking that hurt deep inside of me. I started, and woke. “You feel all right now?” he said. He gave me an odd smile and cupped my face in his hands. I nodded at him. “Go and play,” he said. All that day, I felt his hands on my face. I kept reaching up to touch my skin.