Meeting Rozzy Halfway

by Caroline Leavitt

  “No, I didn’t mean—” said Ben, standing. “Where is she? What’s she doing?”

  “She’s talking. In the bathroom.”

  We all went to find Rozzy, but she didn’t even turn around. Her ears were picking up other sounds. “Rozzy, honey,” said Ben, touching her, and she turned, giving him a loose, dreamy smile.

  “I never heard voices,” said Bea, softly, angrily. “You told me to listen, too, don’t you remember? How you used to sit there and rub my belly and talk right into it just like it was some damned telephone. I never heard one damned thing. I just said I thought I was communicating with the fetus to please you. Because it was so important to you. Because it meant so damn much.” She spat out the words.

  Ben looked at her, and then at Rozzy, and then left the room. “That’s right, leave,” said Bea, but he was slipping out the front door. We took Rozzy into her old room and put her to bed. “Can you sleep?” I asked her, and she drooped her lids shut, obedient. Bea stood at the door, her hand braced against the wall, slowing her breathing, trying

  to match Rozzy’s. “She’s seeing Leffler tomorrow,” said Bea, “if I have to take her myself.”

  I slept in the room with Rozzy, on a cot by her bed. It wasn’t until very late that I heard Ben come back in.

  When I woke up, Rozzy’s bed was empty, the covers thrown back. I stumbled into the kitchen, finding her sitting at breakfast, lazily spooning dry corn flakes into her mouth, Ben across from her, studying her. He told her to put some milk on the flakes, that she needed the calcium.

  “You feeling better?” I said, slumping into a chair.

  Rozzy dipped her head. “I feel ashamed,” she said, “and kind of dopey, too. I’m not going to hear anything anymore, I’m not.”

  Ben drew back a little when I looked at him. “She called Leffler,” he said. “He can give her something that won’t harm the child.”

  “Where’s Bea?”

  “I was up before her,” said Rozzy. “She kept watching me, staring, until I said something, and I guess because it was coherent, she figured she could communicate. She told me about last night, though I remember it, told me she was calling Leffler, and I told her I already had. I don’t know where she is now, but she left the car, said for you to drive me, Bess.”

  “I can take you,” said Ben.

  “Let Bess.”

  Rozzy was silent during the ride into Boston, and she wouldn’t let me come into Leffler’s office, so I drove around, aimlessly picking out pathways for myself until it was time to go pick up Rozzy again. She bounced out and hopped into the car.

  “OK?” I said. “Does he want to see you again?” “I’m perfect,” she said. “Ben was right. It was just nerves. He gave me a prescription to fill. And an appointment.” She wouldn’t let me stop at a drugstore, but insisted on driving home to tell Ben. Her easy smile pulled Ben and Bea into a truce. When Ben asked to see the medication so he could look it up in his Physician’s Desk Reference, Rozzy balked. She said she hadn’t filled it yet, and anyway, she wasn’t a child, what medication she took was as personal a matter as what she said to her doctor. “That’s absurd,” said Ben, but Rozzy was silent.

  Rozzy developed a slight stutter, and sometimes she seemed a little hazy, her movements slowed, but she said it was simply a side effect of the medication, and it really didn’t bother her in the least. Ben kept urging her to take less of a dosage than Leffler put on the label and to drink more of his special vitamin drink, but Rozzy merely smiled. She was sometimes very tired now, and she wanted to be alone in her apartment more and more.

  I was there one night, leafing through an old magazine and talking to her. She was lying on the bed smoking. “You shouldn’t be doing that,” I said. “Bad for the baby, and it’s disgusting.”

  I was reading, sucked into the deep hynotic pool of words, when I smelled something burning. I looked over. Her cigarette was still lit, burning her shirt, forming a growing jagged black hole. I lunged at Rozzy, clapping my hands down on her chest, over and over, brushing the cigarette off, the ashes. She had a tiny burn over her left breast, and she looked up at me curiously. “Is Stewey here?” she said, detached.

  “I’ll be right back, don’t move,” I said. “I’ll just be in the kitchen.” Rozzy flopped gracelessly onto her side. I clutched at her purse, thrown into a corner, and went into the kitchen and dialed information for Leffler’s number. But when I was put through, the nurse curtly told me the doctor was busy. I didn’t care whether Rozzy heard or not, I was hysterical, incoherent, so much so that the nurse must have thought I was one of the patients on the verge of suicide, and so she put me through. I stammered out the story to Leffler.

  “What pills?” he said. “I haven’t seen her in months.”

  I fumbled in Rozzy’s purse, throwing the candy wrappers, the linty pieces of Kleenex, the untubed lipsticks onto the floor until I found two pill bottles. “But those are old prescriptions,” he said angrily. “Who the hell filled those for her? What’s the name of that damned drugstore? I’ll have them sued.” He sighed, exasperated. “How many pills did she take? Count them. Count from both bottles.”

  I counted, all the time clutching that phone as if it were an artery connecting me to life, to reason, to something safe that could direct me step by step. My fingers seemed dead, they plucked at the pills. I finally got a count.

  “Oh Lord,” said Leffler. “Why didn’t someone in your family call me?”

  “She said she was seeing you.”

  He sighed again. “She’s pregnant, too. Does she have an obstetrician—but never mind about that, she might not have seen him either. Well, she’ll see me now, she has no choice. Can you get her dressed and to St. Elizabeth’s in Brighton?”

  Questions hammered inside my head, but I was afraid to ask, fearful of knowing. I occupied myself with detail, with pulling Rozzy upright and into a fresh blouse, with calling a cab so I could sit in the back and hold on to her. She looked lazily around her, and when we got to the emergency room, she allowed me to hand her over to a nurse.

  I sat in the waiting room, not calling Ben or Bea or David, not knowing any longer how to move or what they might be doing to my sister. It was very late, and I stretched out across three plastic chairs and fell asleep.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  It was Leffler who told me that Rozzy’s baby was dead inside of her. He introduced himself to me with a frown, saying he had heard many things about me from Rozzy, and that it was a real shame that we had to meet like this, on such an occasion. They had done sonar scans, he said, which showed the fetus was dead, and he had given Rozzy some medication to calm her down, to stop the sounds racing through her head. He had also called Rozzy’s obstetrician, getting the name and number from a card in Rozzy’s purse, but the doctor said she had only seen Rozzy twice and then had assumed Rozzy had switched doctors. “It happens,” she had told Leffler.

  Leffler said that the sonar showed the baby was badly deformed. “She was taking powerful drugs,” he said. “They went right through the placenta to the fetus.” He said he thought that Rozzy’s medication had probably depressed the fetal respiration to such an extent that the fetus virtually smothered. “With those deformities, it’s a blessing in disguise,” he said.

  The terrible thing, said Leffler, was that labor would have to be induced. She couldn’t go around carrying a dead fetus inside of her. But he was afraid of what labor might do to her just now; he was more concerned with the things she was hearing. “It can wait three or four weeks,” he said. “I know of one case, documented in all the books, of this seventy-year-old woman who complained of stomach pains and when she had an X-ray it showed a calcified fetus inside of her. All that time. Imagine.” Leffler pulled out a prescription pad and scribbled something. “It doesn’t matter what medication she takes now. Someone’s going to have to make certain she takes all her medication, that she swallows it and doesn’t just stockpile it under her pillow or something. This stuff will mak
e her pretty dopey for a while. All she’ll want to do is sleep.”

  “She can go home then?”

  “I don’t want her in a hospital. I think it would make her worse. Hire a nurse if you have to, but she’ll get better faster in normal surroundings.”

  “What made her sick?”

  He looked at me. “It could have been anything. A chemical reaction in the brain. An event.”

  “Did you tell her about the baby? Should I?”

  “Let’s deal with those voices first. I’ll want to see her in a week, at my office. Cab her over. The obstetrician will want to see her. She isn’t aware right now. She probably won’t remember the sonar scan or anything else.”

  “Should I take her home now?”

  “I’d let her sleep out the rest of the night here. Come tomorrow.”

  Ben took the news very badly. “The baby should have been perfect,” he railed. He called Leffler up and then the obstetrician and demanded another explanation for what had happened; he even tried to threaten both of them with malpractice suits. The patient way Leffler buffeted his attack angered Ben, the complacent silence of the obstetrician made him bang down the phone in fury. Ben paced the house, he cursed, and after a while, he shifted the blame a bit, put it right back where it had always seemed to rest—on Rozzy.

  Bea wept a lot. “In a way,” she said, wiping her eyes, “it’s good this happened. What would she ever do with a child, a girl alone? Maybe now Stewey will take her back. Someone should contact him.” She refused to believe that Stewey had disappeared, that he didn’t want to be found. She called information and when they had no listing, she sat down and wrote him a letter in care of the university. When I brought Rozzy home from the hospital, her hair slack and dirty on her neck, her eyes drugged, Bea reached out and stroked Rozzy’s hair in a manner Rozzy never would have tolerated had she been aware of it.

  My sophomore year was over and I moved back home. I was in constant panicky motion, winding my way from David’s to Rozzy and back again. I couldn’t stop worrying about how Rozzy would react to her baby’s death. I tried to take up smoking, but the cigarettes always made me cough, so I began to simply suck on them, inhaling nothing more dangerous than air. It relaxed me.

  Rozzy was too ill to notice Ben’s absence, how infrequently he looked in on her. He didn’t want her in the house. “It’s a drain on you,” he told Bea, “and it’s not good for Rozzy, either. That girl should be in a hospital, with a nurse. It’s ridiculous. You have to siphon out her pills into little cups, you have to stand over her half the time and just watch her.”

  Bea was fixing up a tray for Rozzy, ladling onion soup into the prettiest bowl she could find, digging out her silver from one of the drawers, and even using a navy damask napkin. “She does not belong in a hospital,” said Bea. “Leffler said that would be the worst thing for her, that she’s better here.” Bea hesitated, and then she filled a wine goblet with orange juice. “He says she’s getting better. We may not notice it because she seems so drugged, but she is. He should know. Bess packs her in blankets and gets her there every week.”

  I was cracking the ice out of the ice cube tray, and I looked up when I heard my name.

  “Look at you,” said Ben. “Are you her maid? She needs a nurse.” He picked up the goblet. “Crystal. She won’t even notice. It could be a goddamned Dixie cup.”

  “Take the tray in to her.”

  “I’m going to the office.”

  Bea stopped and looked carefully at him. “She could have other babies someday,” she said quietly.

  “I used to think she could have anything,” said Ben. “I thought she had everything.” He ran his hand over his face and then straightened. “I won’t be home for dinner. I’m working right through it,” he said.

  Ben wouldn’t even step into Rozzy’s room. He’d stalk by it and carefully shut the door, and Bea, walking by, would jerk it right open again. Rozzy never knew the difference. When she saw him walking by and shutting her door like that, she assumed he had been sitting with her and was just now leaving. She sometimes thought he had been holding her hand, speaking, but she couldn’t remember what he said. Even when I took her to Leffler’s, leading her into that familiar brown office and waiting outside, Rozzy seemed to have no sense of time. She would suddenly seem to bolt awake. When Leffler led her back out to me, she would frown at him. “Did I say anything?” she’d demand. He’d take her back inside his office for a minute to tell her, but she’d always forget again.

  The whole house was so fragmented that I couldn’t wait to see David. As soon as I was in his overheated car, I’d push my hands inside his jacket, into his sweater neck, touching his flesh, feeding on its warmth. Sometimes I made him pull over on some deserted section of road, and we’d climb into the back seat and make love. I wept when I came. “I’m a good lover, aren’t I,” said David, pleased.

  I carried my Nikon everywhere. I would take quick shots when the light was bright enough to do without a flash, at dinner with David where we would swap the camera back and forth to capture each other’s image, and at home where the taking of pictures soothed some of the tension. Bea began carrying a tube of lipstick in her pocket and when she spotted me coming toward her, she would flash it out and paint her mouth. Even Rozzy was aware enough to primp a little, although she liked to study her pose in a mirror first before she would grant me permission to shoot. I never bothered developing these posed shots—it was only the candids that interested me.

  Rozzy quickly began to get better, began to emerge into the world. She still had no idea her baby was dead, and it was painful to watch her talking to it, patting her stomach and glancing out into space. “You’ll take the baby’s first pictures,” she told me. “Were you this big?” she asked Bea, and Bea fumbled with a dish towel. “You excited about being a grandpa?” she teased Ben, and when he stalked past her, she called after him that she was only kidding, she didn’t think he was old at all, not really.

  Leffler reduced Rozzy’s medication, and she began taking long walks around the neighborhood with me, bundling up in layers of wool and cotton, pulling on heavy boots to tramp down the snow.

  She made an appointment to see her obstetrician. I heard her explaining to someone over the phone why she hadn’t been in in so long. She had been traveling around the country, she said, and hadn’t thought regular visits were needed, and yes, she now realized how stupid she had been. Rozzy even began to see Leffler by herself.

  But then, abruptly, her mood changed. She wouldn’t get up in the mornings anymore, but lay in bed, her hands dead on her stomach, waiting for Bea to put orange juice into them. She called for Ben to come and talk with her, but he cut her off, and she would shrink down into the covers.

  “She needs Stewey,” said Bea, but Bea’s letters to the university kept boomeranging back, “address unknown” neatly stamped in the corner.

  Rozzy asked Ben what was wrong, why wasn’t he talking to her; she asked Bea, and she asked me. “Ben’s just Ben,” I said. It was on a Thursday, when we were walking in Boston, on our way to Leffler’s, that Rozzy blurted out, “It’s dead, isn’t it?”

  “What’s dead?”

  “It doesn’t kick inside of me anymore. It doesn’t move. When I went to the obstetrician, I saw how it was. All those young silly nurses teasing the mothers-to-be, patting their bellies, asking them if they wanted little boys or little girls, asking about names, giving all kinds of loony advice on things they probably know absolutely nothing about. The nurses don’t tease me. They don’t ask when it’s due or give me one of those baby magazines. The doctor just prods me and takes blood and says she’s in touch with Leffler. When I ask her about the baby, she says there’s plenty of time for questions later. And Leffler, that bastard, he wants to know everything I think about, and he never asks how I feel about mothering. He just says the baby is something we’ll have to talk about very soon.”

  I wrapped my scarf tighter around my neck.

 
“That’s why Ben hates me, isn’t it?” she said.

  “You want to sit down somewhere and talk?”

  Rozzy looked at me. “If you tell me I’ll have lots of other children, I’ll scream.”

  “Will you be OK?”

  “Can we take a bus the rest of the way?” she said. “Please?”

  We were crowded on the bus. An elderly woman with blued hair noticed Rozzy’s swelling stomach and touched her. “Have a seat, honey. You need it more than I do.” Rozzy sat down, her smile wobbling, and then she hid her face in her hands. I bent toward her, but the woman tapped me.

  “It’s always that way when you’re pregnant. You should have seen how I carried on. Don’t you worry. It’s all perfectly natural.”

  I reached out my hand and Rozzy convulsively clutched at it, holding tightly to me until we reached our stop, Leffler’s, and her truth.

  Rozzy accused Leffler of keeping information from her, of being in league with the obstetrician. I was sitting in the waiting room, leafing through a magazine, and I heard her shouting at him, screaming names and insults. When she barged out of his office, her face was gray. She wouldn’t talk on the way home, and when the obstetrician called and asked Rozzy to come in so she could explain the procedure of induced labor, Rozzy refused. “I don’t want to understand anything,” she said flatly, “ever.” Rozzy paraded past Ben at night, guzzling Coke from the bottle, eating Fritos.

  Rozzy had to check into the hospital a few days later. They gave her a private room, away from the maternity ward, because Leffler was afraid the other mothers, the babies being carted back and forth, would prod Rozzy back into illness. Leffler came in to see her, so did the obstetrician, but Rozzy kept her face stubbornly to the wall.

  She had an easy labor. When she came to, she placed her hand on her stomach. It was flat, alien territory instead of flesh.

  Rozzy wouldn’t allow the baby to be buried. She wouldn’t mourn and she wouldn’t listen to anyone who tried to talk to her about caskets and tombstones. She wouldn’t even give it a name and she didn’t want to know its sex. When a nurse, unthinkingly cruel, told Rozzy it had been a little girl and that downy black hair had already sprouted on its tiny head, and that she herself had always considered deformed children “special” children, Rozzy screamed and screamed until they had to give her a sedative. Two orderlies had to pin down Rozzy’s flailing arms so the nurse could jab in the shot.