Meeting Rozzy Halfway

by Caroline Leavitt

  When Rozzy was fourteen, she insisted on going to the doctor by herself. She let me come with her only once. I sat in the waiting room, fiddling with the magazines, and when the nurse got up to check something outside, I went to the door and listened. Rozzy was shouting something. I couldn’t make out the words exactly, something about witch doctors and no one knowing anything, but the tone of her voice caught at me. It got tangled up inside, making me feel giddy with illness. I had never seen the doctor, but I heard her voice, raspy, as if she smoked too much. I didn’t want to be in the office anymore, so I went outside and into the street, waiting.

  Rozzy came out in about ten minutes. “I thought you had gone home,” she said. She hunched into her black fake-fur coat. “Let’s go to the movies,” she said. “I can’t go home yet.”

  We saw two sets of movies that day, one right after the other. We ate candy bars until the heady shock of all that sugar gave me a headache. By the time we got home, Rozzy was laughing and forgetful.

  It was the mid-sixties. Rozzy was fifteen, I was thirteen, and we still dressed alike, in flowery tank tops, our hair braided. Every Sunday we took two buses to Harvard Square. There were free concerts in the summer in the park, and everyone came dressed in costume, in velvet and fur, carrying kittens on their shoulders, waggling silver goblets for spare change. Rozzy climbed right into the crowd, making up stories to anyone who would listen. She was a painter from California, I was a dancer, we both worked as camel trainers. Sometimes people believed us, their eyes glassy with drugs, with LSD fog spiriting their reason away. Anything became possible. We stayed in the park until the sun started cooling, then we wandered over to Holyoke Center and sat down against the hot buildings and waited for someone interesting to come by and try to pick us up. Someone always smiled at Rozzy.

  Rozzy suddenly became moody and silent. She ignored me, accusing me of copying her. She wouldn’t go into Harvard Square with me anymore, saying she was too old to toy around with babies like me. “So who needs you?” I said. One Sunday I put on an old red silk dress I had bought for a dollar in a thrift shop and cajoled Hilly to come with me. “This is dumb,” Hilly said. She didn’t like the people milling around Cambridge, and the smell of the dope made her nose pucker and itch. We left early. No one interesting had said anything to us, and I had the wilting suspicion that they were all with Rozzy, who was somewhere in the crowd.

  So Hilly and I began spending our weekends sitting on her porch, pricking the names of boys that we liked into our skin with rose thorns, waiting for the names to scar. We’d try on makeup at the stores; we would draw, Hilly leaning over my sketches, telling me how famous an artist I would be one day. Evenings, Hilly’s father would sometimes drive us to the club where he had a membership and we would swim. When I came back home, the lulling rhythm of the water a memory, my hair smelling of chlorine, I would want nothing more than sleep. I didn’t need Rozzy.

  Something else began happening, something scary. I heard things about Rozzy in school, about how strange she was, how she could disrupt a class just by humming loudly. Whenever I saw a group of people giggling, I tensed, afraid they were mocking Rozzy. And deep within me, I was fearful that the ridicule was catching.

  “Why don’t you act right?” I screamed at her. “No one will come to the house because of you, no one will be my friend.”

  Rozzy turned away, her face burning, talking to herself in a low reassuring voice.

  “I hate my house,” I told Hilly. “Let’s go someplace else.” Hilly, who was not big on her home either, was indifferent. But we were planning on a movie and I hadn’t any money with me. “We can stop at your house. It’s on the way,” said Hilly.

  “Can’t you give me a loan? God, it’s only afternoon price.”

  Hilly dug into her jeans and shrugged. “I have bus money and candy money and movie money and that’s it.”

  No one was home and the house was silent and clean and smelled of lemons. “Wait,” I said, but Hilly trailed me into the room I shared with Rozzy. I grabbed some bills crumpled on my dresser, but Hilly was peering at Rozzy’s museum. Rozzy hadn’t touched her museum in a few years, but she still liked having it in the room and she refused to consider dismantling it. “Jesus,” said Hilly, whistling through her teeth, “these things aren’t what I think they are, are they?”

  “Come on, let’s go.” I tugged at her sleeve.

  Hilly held up one of Rozzy’s baby teeth and then let it drop to the floor, as if it had been a spider crawling along her leg. “It is a tooth,” she accused.

  I picked it up and put it back in the dish. “You’ve been here before,” I said. “You’ve seen this. It’s Rozzy’s.”

  “I never noticed it before,” said Hilly.

  I couldn’t concentrate on the movie we saw.

  “You have to be patient,” Bea kept telling me, stroking my hair. “Rozzy isn’t like most people, and after all, she is your sister.” Patient. When Hilly called, Rozzy sometimes got on the extension and made strange throaty noises, and for the first time in my life I hated Rozzy, I wished her out of my existence.

  Rozzy was probably the first hippie. She wore her hair in two thick black braids and draped herself with wooden beads and feathers, with leathers and laces. She could sing every single song Joan Baez ever recorded, but when I bought a Baez record for myself, she grabbed it and snapped it to pieces. “I discovered Baez,” she said calmly. “Find someone else to listen to. Baez is taken.”

  Nothing was fair. Rozzy went to the doctor every week and came home sulky. She wouldn’t tell anyone what the doctor said, and the doctor wouldn’t say anything either, because Rozzy was her patient and Rozzy had asked her not to.

  “Talk to me,” I said to Rozzy. “You used to tell me everything.”

  Rozzy snorted in derision. “Come on,” she said, shaking her head. She left her appointment cards, her Valiums, right there on the kitchen counter where everyone could see. I kept putting the cards in her purse, tucking the medication in the bathroom, hiding it behind the aspirin and the cold tablets.

  There were reprieves in her behavior toward me though. When her life was going well, she wouldn’t stiffen against me. She would become generous with herself, and all my hostility would melt.

  Ben remarked one day that Rozzy was beginning to look very much like Bea had when he first met her. As soon as he finished speaking, he ignored her, but Rozzy squirmed and looked pleased.

  “She looks like herself,” I said, but Bea, peering into that closed pale face, nodded. “You’re a regular time machine, Rozzy,” she said.

  Rozzy went and pulled out the old albums, leafing through the yellowing snapshots, doubtfully fingering each picture. “You think I look like that?” she said, pointing one bitten nail at a small picture of Bea in a short white dress. “Really? You do?” She shook her head. “I don’t know.” She let the album flop onto the floor and went into our room and sprawled on the bed, staring at the ceiling. I sat Indian-style on the floor, glancing at the dust balls drifting under the bed. “We should maybe buy some of those little gold stars and stick them right up on the ceiling just like a constellation,” she said. “When one unsticks and flutters down, it could be a shooting star and we could make wishes on it.” Rozzy stretched languidly. “I’m tired. I want to just sleep,” she said, “maybe even forever.”

  The next morning was a Saturday and Rozzy jiggled me awake. “I just remembered it’s almost Bea’s birthday, and if we chip in we can get her something halfway decent.” I hated shopping, but it had been a long time since Rozzy had asked me to do anything with her, and I had endless strings of sentences to say to her.

  Once in Boston, though, she was preoccupied. She was dreamy, distant. She kept stopping in front of the shop windows. She never went into any of the stores. She never even asked if I thought Bea might like any of the things she was so fervently staring at. She stopped in front of a toy store. “Oh, come on,” I said. Rozzy was still, and then she stood a bit taller
and spread her hair across her back, tied her scarf tighter about her throat, and then leaned forward toward the window. When I finally got her inside the stores, she would dally in front of the mirrors positioned on the counters, turning her face this way and that, studying it. Rozzy even grabbed some poor young kid who was wearing mirrored sunglasses and asked him where the shoe department was, all the while scrunching herself down an inch or two so she could see herself in his frames.

  We didn’t buy a gift for Bea that day. “We can order roses,” said Rozzy. “Let’s go home. It’s dark now.” As we walked across town to the subway, Rozzy’s eyes kept flickering from window to window, but everything was now badly angled against the street lights, and the glass had become blank and innocent.

  Rozzy began spending hours in front of the full-length mirror in our room, changing poses as carefully as a model. She trailed Bea, muttering phrases Bea was fond of, and she began borrowing Bea’s clothes. Rozzy slid the expensive silk shirts off the hangers and onto her smooth back. She pulled on the velvet jeans and the leather boots, and then she would sit in the living room and wait. Ben came in at seven, a newspaper tucked under his arm. “Vulture,” he said, when I rushed for the paper. He looked at Rozzy. “Well, don’t you look nice,” he said.

  Every evening Rozzy would wait for him, a bait. Bea, eyes bright, would remind Rozzy of how the daughter had balked at being anything like the mother. “This is different,” said Rozzy. Ben was not always in a pleasant mood when he came home. Sometimes it seemed as if he didn’t even see Rozzy; he was busy yelling at Bea for taking up too much space in the drive.

  Rozzy was careless. At dinner one night, she dribbled red wine onto a white silk shirt. “God damn,” said Bea, hopping up, dipping her cloth napkin into the water glass. She daubed at Rozzy’s chest. “I can do it,” said Rozzy, taking the napkin from her. “A ninety-dollar shirt,” said Bea. “That’s just wonderful. I think I liked you better when you dressed like something out of Harvard Square. Go change. The cleaner will take care of it.” Rozzy got up from the table uncertainly, but when she came back, she was wearing Bea’s white linen skirt and a black silk shirt.

  “I give up,” said Bea. “You know you could buy yourself some clothes. And you—” she looked over at me. “Now you really look like a little ragamuffin. Black is much too hard a color for redheads, you need a color that sings— blue or maybe a nice bright green. And God, look at that hair. People with curly hair should clip it short. Look at—oh, what’s her name, the one you like—Joan Baez—she had long curly hair and she cut it.” She shook her head. “Do something with yourself. Look in those fashion magazines you buy. No one I’ve ever seen looks the way you do.”

  “I hate Joan Baez,” I said.

  “Oh, you do not.”

  “Rozzy likes her, not me.”

  “You smell of chlorine. And half your clothes have paint smeared on them.”

  “I’m going to be famous,” I said.

  “Fine, but be famous in your old clothes, can’t you?”

  Bea never told Rozzy not to wear her clothing though. She did criticize. “You going to the ballet?” she’d ask Rozzy, as Rozzy swished past her in a chiffon skirt, in pearls. I never tried to copy Rozzy’s style of dress. I had one pair of ripped bell-bottom blue jeans that I wore every day. When they ripped out their knees completely, I sewed on different bird patches from an old Indian purse I had. I owned five different black T-shirts, a black sweater, and six bathing suits. I thought it was a good, workable wardrobe.

  That night at dinner Ben asked Bea if she would like to go rock climbing in Colorado.

  “Rock climbing,” she said, teasing her peas with the prongs of her fork. “Didn’t we try that once already?”

  “You were just a little unsure, that’s all,” he said, reaching for the wine. “Come on, this time you’ll love it. We could go now or in the spring. It’s beautiful out there.”

  “Colorado,” said Rozzy. She had on Bea’s peach-colored robe, her hair was coiled on top of her head.

  “What do you say?” said Ben.

  “You really want to go?”

  “Sure.”

  I brightened a little. I was fourteen, halfway through my freshman year of high school; Rozzy was sixteen, a junior. We wouldn’t need a sitter. We could take care of each other. I glanced over at Rozzy, but she was frowning.

  “Why can’t we go on any of the trips you take?” she said. “Why can’t we be like other families? We’re your kids, for God’s sake.”

  “That’s precisely why,” said Ben.

  “Oh Ben—” said Bea, but Rozzy was up. I followed her, and she was already in our room, scrounging through the closet, dropping all of Bea’s clothing into a messy pile, separating out the few things that were hers. Her arms were filled with a slithery rustling, with colors and sounds, and she carried all of it back to Bea’s closet and just jammed it all in there. Some of the shirts slipped off the hangers, a few hems caught. Rozzy went back to our room and put on some old jeans and a peasant blouse.

  Bea never said anything about her clothing being smothered back into her closet like that, and Rozzy went back to dressing in the cottony kinds of things you could pick up at the Harvard Coop for ten dollars. Whenever she was with Bea, she was careful to spread her hair across her back, fanning it outward like a veil, the way Bea hated.

  Bea and Ben left for vacation the next week.

  Rozzy barely said good-bye to them, and she wasn’t really speaking to me either. Being in the same room with her was suffocating. We always ended up listening to her records, and she even went out and bought a cheap set of headphones, shutting out the sound to me. When I got to the stereo before she did, she wouldn’t let me use the headphones, but would make faces at my music, grimacing. “How can you listen to the Beatles?” She’d mimic them, singing along in a gritty kind of voice, slurring the sounds. If I was studying, she would be noisy, and if I was nosing around the room, she would sigh. We lived on TV dinners, but we never ate together. At night, I sometimes went over to Hilly’s, slapping out the door, not telling Rozzy where I was going. If Rozzy wanted to be alone, if she wanted to shut me out, I could shut her out as well.

  Bea and Ben came home six days later, and I immediately approached Bea. She had huge purple bruises traveling along her legs, and when she fixed dinner that night, she tottered. I made a face at the braised lamb and she swiped at me with the towel. I could hear the small TV in the den playing Dennis the Menace. Lately, when Rozzy came back from the doctor’s, she would sit and watch TV for hours, never bothering to change the channel. I sat on the kitchen stool and watched Bea. She was humming, her black hair tumbling to her waist.

  “Why couldn’t I move into the den?” I said. “No one uses it much except for Rozzy, and then only when she watches TV.” I sucked in a breath and held it. “If I had my own room, she could take the TV into her room and then everyone would be happy.”

  Bea smeared some sauce from her hands onto a blue towel that said “Kiss the Cook.” “The den?” she said. “I guess it would be OK. I don’t see why not. You’re certainly old enough to have a room of your own, and maybe it would be good for Rozzy, too.”

  I jumped up, itchy to move, but Bea pushed me right back down again, slapping my bottom onto the chair. “After dinner, please,” she said. “How about shelling these peas for me?”

  Rozzy never said anything about the move. I did all the moving, pushing my twin bed into the den, dragging the TV into Rozzy’s room. I gathered up my clothes and books, took down posters, ripping them off the wall, not caring when strips of blue paint came away with the tape. Rozzy sat reading on her bed, not looking up, not moving. Every once in a while, a page would deliberately turn.

  I spent weeks fixing up my room. Ben bought me a reading lamp so I could read in bed and told me that having a room of my own meant more responsibility—whether the room was clean or dirty, livable or unlivable was totally up to me. Bea let me paint the room. It took me a few
days. I sang as I painted, slipping on the newspapers I had lined the floor with, dribbling paint on my hands and in my hair. The fumes annoyed Ben, and as soon as he set foot in the house, he clicked on the air conditioner. I waxed the wood floor and bought a new Indian print bedspread and red curtains. I framed a poster of the Beatles and hung it over the bed until I began worrying that the nail might not hold and the poster might fall onto my head at night and kill me. I took it down and hung it on a far wall. I had some money saved up and I bought a tinny-sounding portable record player. It had no speakers and sometimes it ran backward, but I didn’t care. I raced home from school to be in that room. I could bring Hilly home with me, and the two of us could shut ourselves off, could close the door and prop up books against it. I could paint, and listen to the Beatles, I could dream.

  Rozzy kept her door shut. She liked slamming it. When she and Ben fought at dinner, she would dash down her napkin and rush to her room, banging the door as loudly as she could. “That girl,” Ben would mutter, getting up to yank her door open again. “It isn’t your room,” he would shout at her, “not when you bang doors like that. Have some respect for property.”

  The school year was ending, and the summer started to yawn out ahead of me. Without Rozzy’s friendship, without school to fill the time, I had nothing to look forward to. I began moping until Ben suggested I look for a job. “Now’s the time,” he said, “right now while you still have an allowance. Your money stops the same day school does, you know.”

  I made a few phone calls, half hoping no one would want me, and I ended up with a job as a junior counselor at Blue Skies Day Camp, which was ten minutes away. I had no desire to work away my summer, but I had even less desire to stay at home with Rozzy in a silence that would only be punctuated with the slam of her door.