Meeting Rozzy Halfway

by Caroline Leavitt

  “This house will seem so empty when you go back to school,” said Bea. “Sometimes I really hate time.”

  Bea bought Rozzy a bright purple electric blanket as a wedding present. I had told her to buy another sunlamp, but she was livid on that subject. Bea dug up some old papers of Ben’s and spent two days practicing his signature, scribbling over every surface of clean white paper, forging each letter of his name over and over until it was perfect. She even borrowed his favorite fountain pen, which she hated to use because it was so thick and clumsy in her hand. She bought a card and signed both heir names to it, and then she held it at arm’s length and gave it careful study. Rozzy didn’t have an address yet, so Bea wrapped the package up with the card and tucked it away into the closet.

  “You know, Ben might have signed that card himself,” I said. “Didn’t you even ask him?”

  “It’s better to just leave these things alone,” said Bea.

  I moved back to school, to the same dorm room, the same sudden loneliness. My whole first year had been taken up with David, with Rozzy, and I hadn’t made friends, the connections others seemed to have. I didn’t really know how to go about making friends, I didn’t understand. I dawdled in the bathroom with the other girls, trading lip glosses and gossip, I made study dates with people in my classes, but nothing took. I wanted a closeness immediately; I couldn’t wade through the preliminaries.

  The art classes I took were disastrous. Techniques were taught; you were supposed to paint a certain way, and because I balked, I was in danger of flunking. The art history courses were no better. I was called upon all the time in one class; the professor liked me—until the day he propositioned me and I refused, and then I became a nonentity, an invisible waving hand in class. I began to think of another career, another route to fame.

  I called David. We piled into his car and drove out to the Cape to walk on the beach, and we swam. It was chilly and gray and the sand felt gritty under my feet. David leaned against me, pulling a bottle of wine out of his pocket and uncorking it. He spilled a little bit of it on the sand, staining it red. “For the gods,” he said.

  “Rozzy left,” I said abruptly. “She and Stewey married, went to Madison. I don’t even have an address.”

  David handed me the bottle of wine. “Have some,” he said gently, “it’s really very good wine.”

  I spent that night, and a few others, at David’s, but it didn’t make me feel less alone. I think he sensed it. I would jerk awake to find him sitting in a chair by the bed, just watching me, his eyes dull, and when I asked him what was wrong, he insisted everything was fine.

  We did some of the things I had done with Rozzy and Stewey, even eating at the same restaurant where Stewey had fed me energy through his hand, but it wasn’t the same. How could it be?

  Finally I got a postcard from Rozzy. After that they began coming, one each day. She found a new favorite card, a colored picture of the college mascot, Bucky Badger, a human-looking badger wearing earmuffs and a sweater and a big ferocious grin. “They even name hamburgers out here after him,” Rozzy wrote, “and Bucky Burgers taste just as greasy as other burgers do.” She wrote that they had a clock in the shape of a badger, and there were badgers printed on the wax milk cartons. She and Stewey went to the zoo to see them, but Rozzy said they were so skinny and ferrety they looked evil, and she wanted to leave.

  They had found a place to live on Mifflin Street, the hip student district, and Rozzy began settling in. They had the whole top floor of a house, with a private entrance, and although the wood floors were badly scuffed and the plaster had a few holes punched out, there were no bugs, and the sun came in the windows in the mornings. Rozzy celebrated her twenty-first birthday in that house, and Stewey teased her about being a baby because she was five years younger than he. Stewey had phoned his parents to tell them he was married. He had written them that summer about Rozzy, and his mother immediately wanted to have the two of them come and visit. “We’re just three hours away,” she said. Both of Stewey’s parents wanted to talk to Rozzy, but she was flushed and embarrassed and made Stewey tell them she was in the shower.

  Rozzy found a part-time job working at a student-run pharmacy. The pharmacist had just graduated himself. He allowed Rozzy to give out the prescriptions and ring them up. Madison had a law that said you couldn’t dispense condoms to anyone who wasn’t married, and so Rozzy learned to feed the appropriate response to the flushing faces in front of her.

  She couldn’t cook. She couldn’t even shop without coming home with boxes of exotic Oriental dinners, with Spanish hot sauces and cookies, but never bread and salad greens. She didn’t clean either, but the clutter never bothered Stewey. They ate pizza almost every night, and then walked up and down the streets, wandering in the tiny shops, parading with the other students.

  An uncle of Stewey’s died, leaving the two of them enough money for Rozzy to go to school. She couldn’t decide what to study. Rozzy spent hours plumbing the catalogs, sitting in on classes. She read, she sat out in the sunny library mall and struck up friendships with a few drifters, giving them names like the Opium Eater, the Dog, Miss Messy Hair. She showed up outside Stewey’s classes with ice cream cones for them to lick. She unwrapped her scarf and they both wore it. She never sat in on any of his classes, though, feeling too shy. On Thursdays, they went to a function called “Donuts with the Dean,” and while Stewey bantered with the faculty, Rozzy sampled all the filled donuts and got tipsy on wine.

  They waited awhile and then went to visit Stewey’s parents. “What did you tell them about me?” said Rozzy.

  “Oh, only that you’re brilliant and beautiful.”

  “Is that enough?”

  Rozzy wrote me a ten-page letter about that trip. They drove up to northern Wisconsin one weekend in Stewey’s battered Chevy. The whole ride up, Rozzy sang along with the radio, beating out the time on Stewey’s knee, her nails bitten and ragged. He grinned at her, teasing her to take the wheel, lifting up his hands so the car shimmied and swayed. Rozzy, lips set, would grip the wheel with white knuckles, making the car glide into a straight path again. They got to the town, Adam’s Friendship, around midnight, and Rozzy insisted that she couldn’t see anyone without a proper shower and a night’s sleep. She made Stewey prowl around that sleepy town until he found a motel. The first place they found seemed to be empty. There was a sign-up sheet posted to some corkboard behind a desk, and a box of keys. Rozzy fished around in the box for a key and they signed Harry and Suzie Sussman on the sheet. There was no shower in the room, but there was an old claw-footed tub streaked with rust stains. Rozzy wouldn’t sit in it, sure she would contract VD, but she crouched in the tepid water. Stewey came in and sat on the toilet and watched her, and when she asked, he scrubbed her back for her with a soapy cloth.

  The bed wasn’t bad, although some of the springs had worked themselves loose and poked up through the mattress. In the middle of the night, someone started knocking, shaking their doorknob, and Rozzy bolted up, shivering, waiting for something to happen. The knocking stopped, but neither of them could get back to sleep. They shared a candy bar Rozzy had in her purse, and then dressed, sneaking out of the motel, leaving the key and a five-dollar bill. It was still early morning and they found an all-night diner where Rozzy slumped over a hot chocolate and played the Rolling Stones on the jukebox.

  “Adam’s Friendship,” Rozzy declared, “is a stomach cramp of a town.” She tensed up during the ride to the town where Stewey’s parents lived. Stewey was from a huge family, five brothers, four sisters, a pack of mewing furry cats, and two big dogs. His brothers were all younger than he, and so different that Stewey’s mother affectionately told Stewey that he must have been left on her doorstep instead of born.

  Stewey told Rozzy that his brothers clamored around the TV set and yelled at the sports announcers. They went out for sports, worked on cars, and wondered about which girls would let you finger-fuck them and which wouldn’t. “Lovely,” said Roz
zy, rolling up her window and then rolling it down again, coaxing an imitation of a breeze into the car. His sisters, he said, were scattered in age, and they either fussed over him or worshiped him. They were all really happy living in a big house, content with small-town life, with everyone knowing everyone else and no one dreaming of leaving. It was only Stewey who felt smothered, who ached for buildings more than a story high.

  “There was nothing in my house that wasn’t touched by someone else,” he told Rozzy, “and everything was covered with dander, with dog hair, so that I sneezed my way to manhood.” As soon as he could, he had gone off to college, to the city. The boy who was supposed to have been his roommate had had a heart atack, right in the room, before Stewey ever even met him. It was the dorm counselor who found the tall thin boy, lying half on the bed, half off, his skin glassy. So Stewey was left to himself, for the first time in his life, and he spent whole evenings in that boxy little room, breathing in the silence and grinning like a fool.

  “We’re here,” Stewey said, and Rozzy began fishing in her purse for a lipstick, a comb, some Kleenex. It looked like any other small town, the small white houses, the messy lawns, the gravel and the gritty stones on the sidewalk.

  “I’m scared,” said Rozzy.

  She was crazy to worry. Stewey later told me that she charmed everyone. His brothers all fell in love with her, and kept mooning around her, dogging her steps and making her blush. The youngest pulled up a clump of yellow flowers from the garden in the back and presented them to her, clumsily tied with a blue ribbon. His sisters decided to grow their hair and took turns brushing out that black sheet of hair of Rozzy’s. Stewey’s father, a doctor, coaxed her into playing Clue with him and was delighted when she let him win. “You’ve got yourself quite a girl,” he told Stewey, who beamed.

  They didn’t do very much on that visit. Everyone sat outside in the leafy backyard while Stewey’s father barbecued steaks on the grill and baked potatoes in shiny silver foil. They played football, and when Rozzy hesitated, Stewey grabbed her by the hand and had her play right beside him, the two of them kicking the ball toward a makeshift goal. Before they left, Stewey’s mother, a faded blond, took Rozzy aside and handed her a thick heavy quilt that she had made. “Every marriage needs warmth,” she said, and gave Rozzy a hug. Rozzy inhaled the washed scent of soap, and started crying. Stewey’s mother patted her on the back. “Goodness, it’s nothing,” she said to Rozzy, “you’re family now, like one of my own.”

  The whole family stood outside on the curb, waving at them when they left. “Come back,” called Stewey’s father. Rozzy twisted around and waved and waved until they were pinpoints.

  But later, Rozzy said she would never go back there, would never repeat that visit.

  “But why?” said Stewey, dumbfounded. “You had a great time, and they loved you.”

  “I was lucky that time,” she said, “just lucky.”

  I wrote Rozzy voluminous letters, knowing full well that they were Stewey’s letters as well. I never admitted the terrible loneliness, the feeling of being cut off, and I never mentioned David.

  I would have moved in with David into his monkey apartment if it wasn’t for the phone calls. The first Madison purchase Rozzy and Stewey made was a phone extension, and every night at eight, the two of them would call, joining themselves to me by a phone wire, a black umbilical cord. I didn’t want anyone sharing that with me. I had a single, my own phone, and for the first time I loved the sense of isolation. Always before, I would see all those rows of dorm doors as barriers, shutting me out, intensifying my separateness—but now, it was I who was doing the shutting out, the isolating. With my door shut, I was in a womb. At eight, no other world existed. If I saw David, it was always for a late movie or an early swim, and if he minded, he said nothing.

  The phone calls were not profound. We never said all that much, but simply ate away at Stewey’s money with aimless chatter, a rambling kind of phone play. We got drunk on opposite ends of the phone, we ate grilled cheese sandwiches together (I wrapped bread and swiss cheese in tin foil and then pressed the sandwich into completion with a contraband GE iron). We talked about all the usual day-to-day things people do, to make us feel as if we were still living our lives twined together. As soon as I hung up that phone, I had to leave that room, that dorm; I fled. It was at these times that I was most manic about David. I hung on his arm, I prodded him into bed with me.

  Eventually, Rozzy and Stewey each called on their own. Rozzy would call for a ten-second talk on her way to meet Stewey; Stewey would call me just before jetting off to class. Rozzy was happy. Madison was still sultry and hot, alive with insects. It was warm enough to swim in one of the lakes bordering the campus, the water frothing with detergent suds and rotting grasses. Rozzy told me that there were bats by the capitol, that if you walked down there you could see them fluttering and dying in the street, their fur matted, their teeth yellow and pointy. Once a bat flew into their place.

  “I made Stewey bash it with the broom,” said Rozzy. “He stunned it and then took it outside. I made him throw out the broom, too.” She said they had ants, too, scattered like ice cream jimmies on their sunny front porch, their private entrance. Rozzy couldn’t bear to stamp them into oblivion, so she kept putting sugar out for them, each day moving it further and further away from the porch, until finally the sugar was on the dirt. The sugar drew all the ants in Madison, or so Rozzy thought, and seeing that heaving black mass wriggling and alive made her ill. She had to retch on the walk and gag up her breakfast. Then she went inside and put the copper kettle on to boil, and came out again to scald the ant mass, washing them into the dirt, kicking the earth over them. She never put sugar out again, and the ants never returned.

  Stewey got her another doctor, for maintenance, this time a woman. The days started to chill and the winds began whipping around campus. Rozzy brought out her winter clothing, although everyone was still in cut-off jeans and brightly colored T-shirts. She hunted for clothing in the thrift shops, buying herself a mothy-looking fur coat that she liked to snuggle into at night while she read.

  Rozzy never phoned Bea or Ben, and Stewey called only when he remembered, and only when Rozzy was out, so as not to upset her. Rozzy did send Bea postcards, which pleased Bea, and Bea inked in Ben’s name in the address and showed off the cards to him. David and I started coming to dinner on Saturdays.

  They had cleaned out Rozzy’s room, boxing and labeling all her things and stashing them in the basement. Bea seemed a little edgy, but I didn’t think anything was wrong. Not yet. That was a story Bea herself would have to tell me; I would have to live it through her, as I did so many other stories.

  It was this way.

  Rozzy’s marriage, her leaving, her being so happy, set something off in Bea. Bea would lie awake at night imagining their life, seeing how Stewey took care of Rozzy. She would remember the two of them, how they were together, the way Rozzy became brilliant and excited when she was with Stewey, dejected and sulky when she was alone.

  And then, every once in a while, something would remind Bea of Walt. The sudden sharp tang of memory, the surprise of feelings she thought had long died, scared her. She’d be marking down dental appointments when she would forget what year it was, her stomach folded and twisted. Dates swam across her mind, numbers rising to the surface, smells erupting, sensations. Later, it grew even more subtly, even more confusing. She would be standing in the bakery, waiting for Ben, hanging on to the string-tied white box of whole wheat rolls, and then suddenly her head would be suffused with the smell of those apricot-filled cookies Walt used to love. She could taste them in her mouth, feel the buttery crumbs sticking on her tongue, and she would remember how she and Walt would get sluggish from the shock of all that sugar. She would touch Ben’s sleeve, and the feel of the material, familiar and real, would catapult her back into the present. She began to be sick and dizzy with her past.

  She began calling me more and more, pumping me for i
nformation about Rozzy. “You think they’ll stay together?” she said. “Even with Rozzy sick like that?”

  “She’s not sick now, she hasn’t been sick in a while.”

  “They seem like they’re meant to be together, don’t they?” she said. “You think passion like that can last?”

  “I don’t know. I have to go,” I said.

  Bea tried to get reoriented. If she was home, she called Ben, feeding on his voice. If she was with him, she pulled him toward her, making sure that some part of him was always in contact with her. She surprised him with roses, with cards that said she loved him. She did things she knew he liked. She baked bread, forgetting the dough sometimes so that it overrose and stuck in a yeasty mound to the stove, taking her all afternoon to scrape it off with a bread knife.

  She would later tell me that it was at this point that she started sending cards to Walt. She didn’t even know where he was anymore, but she sent everything to his old address. She never wrote a return address, so she never knew if he received her letters. When the mail came, she always felt tense and panicky, as if she might be forced to re-examine her life. Sometimes when she felt particularly blue and loathsome to herself, she would write him long and deeply felt letters. Walt became her priest, a man hidden from her and yet acutely there. She didn’t want answers, at least she didn’t think so.

  The fall slid toward winter. I had an uneventful Christmas break, staying in the dorm and studying, seeing David. When classes started up again, I tried to concentrate, but I ended up writing letters to Rozzy, neglecting the notes scribbled on the board in front of me. When I was with David, all I wanted to do was see movies, double feature after double feature, and when the film was over, I didn’t want to talk, I wanted to make love and fall asleep. I was barely passing my subjects, and my advisor gave me a frowning admonishment, which David seconded. One night I baited David until we argued and then I went home and called Rozzy.