Meeting Rozzy Halfway

by Caroline Leavitt

  Stewey answered, his voice tight.

  “Something wrong?”

  “Oh,” he said, “it’s just Rozzy. I can’t find her. I don’t know where she is.” He sighed. “I guess it’s nothing. It’s pretty early still, sometimes she goes to classes, sits in. Look, I don’t want to tie up the line, in case she’s trying to get me or something. I’ll call you back.”

  Stewey didn’t call me back for another two weeks. I tried calling but there was no answer, and then finally, he jerked me awake at three A.M. one morning. Drugged with sleep, I staggered to the phone.

  “Something’s wrong,” he said. “I come home and Rozzy’s not there, and when I find her, she’s out at the bus stop with a suitcase, smiling at me, waiting for me to find her. Last night she stumbled in wearing someone else’s filthy jean jacket over this lovely cashmere sweater, and when I asked her where she got the jacket, she yelled at me, said it was none of my damned business. When I asked her if she was still seeing the doctor, she just laughed and said, ‘Poor Stewey, always hope, isn’t there?’”

  I held the phone close to my chest.

  “Where is she?” he said. “A million times a day it’s ‘Do you love me? Do you love me?’ She never believes that I do, that I’ll stay with her.”

  “Stewey, is she on medication, is she hearing voices?”

  “I don’t know. I tried to check her pill stash and she got furious. She hides them now. Sometimes at dinner, she’ll pretend to take them, and then when she sees me relax a little, she’ll give me this triumphant look and show me her hand, uncurling the fingers so I can see the pills resting right there in her palm.”

  I flexed my feet until they cramped. I didn’t have to think; all I had to do was move.

  “I have no one to talk to. I won’t call her doctor without her permission. Rozzy would never trust me again if I did. Oh, thank God for you, Bess.” There was a silence and then he said, “Sometimes I think I married the wrong sister.”

  I stopped flexing my feet. “Rozzy will turn up, things will be all right,” I said.

  “Did you hear what I said?”

  “Stewey, call me when Rozzy gets in.”

  Stewey began calling me more and more, always with some new horror story. I comforted him as best I could. I tried to call Rozzy myself, I sent her letters and cards, but there was never any response.

  I hated not hearing from her. Every time Bea asked me, “What have you heard from the kids?” it enraged me to have to lie, to have to utter all sorts of platitudes about new places and busy schedules, to have to see the look washing across her face.

  Stewey and I spent hours discussing Rozzy, picking apart the relationship. We worried about her together, we clung, we lifted each other’s spirits. A few times Stewey would insist that we weren’t going to talk about Rozzy at all, that we were just going to laugh and crack bad jokes and make fun of people. I’d hang up from those calls feeling all warm and good inside, and it wouldn’t be until I was half dreamy under my sheets that I would realize where I was and what was happening.

  In March Stewey called me, weeping into the phone, so incoherent that I had to ask him to repeat what he had said several times before I understood. Rozzy, he said, was pregnant, and she said the child wasn’t his.

  “But how do you know? How can she prove a thing like that? Is she even sure she’s pregnant? Did she see a doctor?”

  “She saw someone. She even called him to confirm it while I was there.”

  “But how do you know it isn’t yours?”

  “She said she had been sleeping with other men—” Here, Stewey’s voice cracked and it took him a hairbreadth pause to continue. “I said I didn’t believe her, that she was just saying that to torment me, but she said it was true, and that she knew the moment she conceived, she just had an intuitive knowledge of the event.

  “But then she had to show me, she had to prove she wasn’t lying. Last night I came home and Rozzy was in bed with this skinny kid with acne, and he was absolutely terrified when he saw me. He jumped out of bed, called me sir, and apologized. And Rozzy—she sat up and smiled. I let the kid rush past me, all the time still babbling some apology or another. I couldn’t move. I just stood there and looked at Rozzy and then she started to cry. She said she felt so lonely she couldn’t bear being inside her own skin. She said she knew the baby finished us. I told her I loved her. What else could I say? She said Bea had once sent her a ticket to Boston and she had never used it, but she was going to use it now, she was leaving.”

  “She loves you.”

  “What has that got to do with anything? She packed a knapsack and she left here an hour ago. Oh God, I wish you were here. I wish you could just be here and we could have things the way they were in Boston, at the beginning when it was so sweet and nice. I could help Rozzy then. She listened to me, she trusted me.”

  “I can take the next plane out there.”

  “Don’t you understand? She’s gone.”

  “What flight did she take?”

  “Shit,” said Stewey, “I don’t know.”

  I spilled out promises. I would find her, I would get to the Boston airport and figure out flights. My sophomore year was over next week, but I’d be going to summer school to make up the courses I had failed, I’d have a dorm room to house Rozzy.

  “You want me to call you when she gets in?”

  “If,” said Stewey dully, “if she gets in.”

  I dressed and took a cab to the airport. I had this queer panicky feeling that I was missing Rozzy even as the cab sped and dipped toward the planes. I might be two feet away from her, she could be in another cab traveling in the opposite direction.

  It was late and the airport was nearly empty. I searched the monitors for clues. I remembered what David had told me once when he had to get home for his father’s birthday and had no flight; no one would listen to him, they kept telling him to wait. He had slammed his suitcase down in the middle of the floor and had shouted that he was going mad, that he couldn’t take it. At first he was ignored, but when he shouted even louder, three stewardesses rushed toward him, all of them taking his arm. They took care of everything. They put him on a flight (in the smoking section, which made his nose quiver with allergies, and his eyes leak) and a stewardess brought him two aspirins and a glass of water.

  I couldn’t do that. I stood in the middle of the lobby and wept. There were a few people straggling in, businessmen, college kids, and they lowered their heads when they passed. A young girl with a horse face and a thick tail of hair approached me, but she turned out to be with the Krishna people and she wanted to convince me the money I might give her would go to start a drug program. When I refused, she squinted darkly at me. “Something’s wrong, isn’t it?” she said. “Krishna knows. He knows everything.” She reached out a hand and tried to touch me, but I stopped it in midair. “Look how nervous you are,” she said. “It could all stop”—here she clumsily snapped her fingers—“like that,” she said.

  Miraculously, a stewardess finally appeared.

  “I’m not doing anything,” said the girl, suddenly sulky, wandering away.

  I told the stewardess about Rozzy, feverish with panic. She furrowed her brow. She was young and blond and pretty. “OK,” she said, and suddenly she was wonderful. She took me to one of the desks and figured out the possible flights and then checked the passenger lists. She even got me to the correct gate. “Will you be OK now?” she said.

  There was a pay phone by the colored plastic seats and I called Bea and told her that Rozzy was pregnant, and coming home, that she had left Stewey, who was baffled, and that she was in a terrible state herself.

  “What? How could this happen?” said Bea. “It’s right out of the blue, isn’t it?”

  I rubbed at my temples, trying to press in a growing headache. “Rozzy will tell you what she wants you to know.”

  “Damn her,” said Bea, and then sighed. “Well, this is her home and she can stay here for as long as
she likes, until she decides what to do.”

  I heard Ben’s voice, muffled in the background, heard Bea say something, and then his angry undercurrent of sound.

  “You bastard,” said Bea, “she’s your daughter.”

  When Bea came back on the line to me, her voice was even. “You bring her here, and then we’ll see. And you call if you need me. When’s she due in?”

  “Half an hour,” I said, “if it’s on time.”

  Rozzy came in on time. She was all bundled up in a bright red coat and a black felt hat that flopped over her eyes. She looked lost and tired and there were big stains of sleeplessness smeared under her eyes. When she saw me, she smiled. “I knew you’d be here,” she said simply.

  “You did, huh,” I said, moving to her.

  She didn’t want to talk about anything. She said she had to sleep first. We cabbed back to my dorm and she threw herself down on my bed, still in her coat, and fell asleep. I sprawled out on the floor, on the rug, beside her.

  In the morning, she was still sleeping, so I scribbled her a note and went to breakfast, bringing back boxes of yellow raisins for her, some cereal, and a carton of juice. When I put my key in the lock, balancing her breakfast, Rozzy was up. She looked white and frightened.

  I sat on the bed while she ate. “I called home,” I said. “They want to see you.”

  “Forget it,” she said, stabbing a spoonful of dry cereal into her mouth. “No milk?” she said.

  “Bea will pay for a doctor, you can live there, have the baby.”

  “Can’t I stay with you? I won’t be any trouble.”

  “Of course you can. I can even move in with David and you could have this place for yourself,”

  “No, I can’t be alone. Please.”

  “OK, fine, but if we don’t go and see Bea, you know she’ll be calling and calling and maybe even showing up here. That would be worse, wouldn’t it?”

  She didn’t want to go, but she dressed and we took a cab, and the whole way over, she bit her nails and complained about her stomach hurting.

  Bea was waiting in the living room, reading a magazine, confident we’d be by. When she spotted Rozzy, she leaped up and hugged her. She kept touching Rozzy’s face, her trembling shoulders, the thick mane of black hair so like her own. “Come in, come in, honey,” said Bea. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

  “Of course it is,” said Rozzy coldly, pulling back, twisting around to catch my eye.

  She wouldn’t take off her red coat and she wouldn’t sit still. She paced, picking up the plants and putting them down, silent and uneasy. “You want to talk about it, any of it, baby?” said Bea gently.

  “No,” said Rozzy.

  “Ben’s here, should I go get him?”

  “You don’t have to,” said Rozzy, but Bea was gone.

  “Oh, shit,” said Rozzy, looking helplessly at me.

  “It’ll be over with soon.”

  Ben’s face changed when he saw Rozzy standing unsteadily in the room. He looked from her stomach to her face, to me and then Bea, and back to Rozzy again. Rozzy stood white and terrified by the fireplace, holding her hands over her stomach, pressing her back to the brick, waiting like some sort of trapped animal.

  “You’re going to have a baby?” he said. Rozzy nodded. “Do you want it? Are you going to raise it, you’re not going to abort?”

  “It’s mine,” said Rozzy, “I love what it is.”

  Ben sighed, then he held out his hands to her for the first time since she was little. She didn’t move. She was frozen. He walked right over to her, peeling her away from the fireplace, placing her in his embrace. She stiffened, and then she relaxed, weeping, taking gulps of air, trying to speak. Her words kept snagging into sobs, and soon she stopped trying to tell him anything.

  “It’ll be OK,” he said. “We’ll get you a good doctor, you can even go back to school, you always had a good mind.” He pried her face away from his shoulder and forced her to meet his eyes. “It will work. It’s different now.”

  Bea stood by the door. She watched Ben leading Rozzy into the kitchen, talking to her about herbal teas, about foot soaks. “I don’t believe it,” said Bea. “It’s all I could do to get him to even stay here when he knew she was coming home.”

  “Did you tell him she was pregnant?”

  Bea shook her head. “I thought one shock at a time was enough. At first, anyway. I told him about ten minutes before you arrived. He just got up and went into Rozzy’s old room and shut the door.

  “You’ll call Stewey,” she said.

  “What do you mean, I’ll call him. Why, what for?”

  “Bess, don’t you give me a hard time, too.”

  In the next hour, it was decided. Rozzy would stay at home where Ben could monitor her pregnancy. “I thought you wanted to stay with me,” I said to Rozzy. “What happened to that idea?” Rozzy gave me a blank, drugged look. “It’s different,” she said quietly.

  “Sure,” I said, looking at her, and then at Ben, who was digging out his old collection of Prevention health magazines, looking at all the old photographs of Rozzy when she was a baby, and smiling to himself.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I was glad I wasn’t living at home, that I had a place of my own at school. Being home made me feel fuzzy-headed, as if time had thickened and pushed me backward. I visited Rozzy on weekends. David had quickly decided that the best way to ensure seeing me was to drive me out there and then pick me up. He never came in because Rozzy disliked him, but he didn’t seem to mind. He seemed content to spend his time waiting for me, always waiting.

  Rozzy was always drinking something pastel and sludgy. She sipped, making faces, slapping the glass down on the table, dripping, speckling the cloth with liquid. Bea sniffed at it and took a tentative poke with her finger, touching it to her tongue. She grinned. “Why, this is what Ben made me drink when I was carrying you, honey.” I leaned forward for a taste, but Bea whisked the glass away, popping it into Rozzy’s limp unwilling hands.

  It was hard to have Rozzy all to myself. Ben was always taking her to the doctor’s, to the health food store, to the market. Sometimes, waiting in that lonely house, I called Stewey. He couldn’t believe Ben was doting on Rozzy. “She’ll never come back to me now,” he said. He was convinced that Ben was filling her head with lies about him, telling Rozzy that she was better off without him, that Madison was no place to raise a child. “He probably believes her when she says it’s not my child,” he said glumly.

  “I don’t think she told him that.”

  “She will,” he said.

  I never could speak long with Stewey, because Bea was always coming back in, and if I was forced to share Rozzy, I wouldn’t share Stewey.

  It wasn’t until another week had passed that I managed to get Rozzy all to myself. We walked up to the old school yard up in back of the house and sat on the swings. “What’s it like?” I said.

  Rozzy frowned.

  “Being pregnant,” I prodded.

  She bit off her thumbnail and then looked at me. “Well, it’s like having swallowed something. Like having eaten something that’s big and huge and alive, and having that thing stay right there in your stomach. It’s a little uncomfortable, like the whole digestive process has gone screwy and instead of you digesting it, it’s digesting you, taking your calcium and your blood, and your food.” She took my hand and placed it on her stomach. “It’ll kick soon, won’t it?”

  Rozzy threw out her legs, making the wind push the swing forward. “I’m three months, now,” she said, “and Stewey hates me. Don’t try to tell me he doesn’t. I know you talk with him, but you don’t know him. You haven’t lived with him, with his accusations.”

  “He loves you.”

  “How could he?” she said.

  “Maybe it somehow is his baby.”

  “It doesn’t even matter, does it?”

  We walked home and Ben’s car was in the drive. Rozzy brightened. “He said he was bringing
home special lemon grass for tea,” she said. “I love lemony things.”

  When I got home, I called David and told him I had a headache and wanted to sleep and then I called Stewey. But he was suddenly bitter, angry, hostile to me. He rampaged. He had been going through Rozzy’s things, setting them in order, when he found a journal of hers. When she was too shy to discuss something she would write it out in her journal and leave it around where he could find it. So he read. “Men,” he said, in disgust. “She had so many men. Every damned page was about a different one. Nights when she said she was too sick to come out and meet me while I studied all night in the library, days when she was supposed to be seeing her doctor.

  “Love,” he said bitterly. “Did you ever worry about coming home because you were afraid of what you might find there? I’d get nauseated wondering what she was doing.”

  “She needs you. It’s not good for her here, with Ben.”

  “You don’t understand, do you?” he said. “It has nothing to do with her being pregnant, don’t you see? Now it’s changed. It has to do with all the incidents, with all the things that were going on every single day that I didn’t even know about. I can’t go through life just giving support to her, even when she does the most heinous things imaginable, and never getting any support myself for my own fairly simple problems.” He paused. “No, you don’t understand. Why should you?”

  I lay flush against my bed, looking at the ceiling, wishing for those shooting stars Rozzy had once wanted to paste up there.

  “I understand, Stewey.”

  “No, you don’t. You’re her sister.”

  “I’m glad she left,” said Stewey abruptly. “I never want to see her again. I never want to hear about her again. I’ll give her money if she needs it, but that’s it.”

  “She doesn’t want money.”

  “You know, when I heard your voice, I thought it was Rozzy,” he said. “I’m getting an unlisted number. And don’t you write me because I won’t read any of it. Words, nothing but letters strung together.” He was crying, his words drowning. “What am I supposed to do, Bess?” he said, and then he hung up, the swift clean silence enveloping me like a shroud. I tried not to think much, to just breathe and sleep and have that day over with, transformed into memory, and forgettable.