Meeting Rozzy Halfway

by Caroline Leavitt

  “Dinner that night took me five hours to prepare,” Bea said. She cringed when she took the lobster out of the paper carton they had boxed it in. It was still alive, and although its claws were pegged shut, she was afraid. She set it on the table, fearful it would slide off, and went to fetch a pot. She didn’t have a pot big enough, wide enough, she couldn’t find anything in which to boil this poor sea creature alive. She flipped through her Julia Child. You could slice them, she found, could sever the spinal cord in one neat move for a quick and easy death. The book even said it was more humane to do it that way, and at least she wouldn’t have to hear the creature rattling against the sides of the pot as it boiled. Bea went and got her butcher knife that Ben had specially ordered for her one year, and with one hand she carefully positioned the lobster on its back on the table. She felt as if she were officiating at some sacrifice. She sliced, and the lobster moved. But it didn’t die. She looked at the knife. Bea had to slice that lobster four times before it died, bludgeoning it, murdering it. She got it into a baking dish and into the oven, but she had lost all her taste for eating it.

  Bea made a stew with the pesto, a salad with a mustard dressing, small green onion tarts, and for dessert a chocolate mousse spiked with brandy. She set the table with her best linen cloth and her silver that she almost never used and the carved wooden animal napkin holders from Africa. There was even candlelight.

  That evening, though, Ben ate silently, using his fork as a shovel, dripping lemon butter sauce from the lobster onto the tablecloth. When he was through, he put the flat of his hand on the table and pushed himself up, and with a start, Bea saw him, saw how he was. His hair was graying and pulling away from his skull, his belly protruded against his shirt, and his eyes focused on nothing.

  “I told him to talk to me,” said Bea, “to wait, not to go. He only patted me on the shoulder and said he had some work to do. He went into the den and I could hear that damn Sony clicking on, that damn brackish canned laughter assaulting me.”

  Mornings, she got up and ran, hoping to shame him, but he stayed in bed, and by the time she got back, exhausted, her hair damp and slick against her back, he was gone. She continued to plot. One evening, for his dinner, she bought the cheapest kind of TV dinner she could find, roaming up and down the frozen foods section of the supermarket. She had always avoided these aisles, and her cart began to look just like the carts of the women she and Ben used to mock and pity, women with pink sponge rollers twisted in their hair, women with tight doubleknit red pants pulling at the seams over their spreading rears. Well, if this was the stuff Ben chose to snack on, she reasoned, let him have a feast of it, a whole dinner, see how he liked it then. She bought a loaf of soft white bread and a three-course spaghetti dinner with peas and tomato soup, and apple crisp for dessert. She bought one stick of white oleomargarine. She felt vaguely embarrassed at the checkout stand, and kept looking around for people who might know her. Bea dipped her head. She wanted to apologize to the girl ringing up her order.

  “I couldn’t bear to cook the stuff,” Bea told me. “I turned my face away and breathed through my mouth when I had to peel off the foil to pop the TV dinner into the oven.” She knew the spaghetti would look like white worms, that the peas would have a faint perfumy odor, a gangrenous color. She certainly didn’t intend to eat this stuff herself, so she made a salade Nigoise, cut up some cheese, and uncorked some wine, setting it out to breathe.

  Ben sat down to dinner without even looking at her. She handed him a plate with two soft white slices of bread, smeared with oily margarine. At his place was a can of iced tea. She put the TV dinner out in front of him, still in its compartmentalized tin. Ben never even noticed that he wasn’t eating what she was; she sipped good wine instead of sweetened tea. He polished everything off in ten minutes, then he got up and went into Rozzy’s old room to watch TV. She got up and followed him, leaning in the doorway.

  “He didn’t even hear me say his name,” Bea told me. “I had to repeat it, and when he finally looked up, I asked him if we could take a vacation, go to France. ‘What for?’ he said. I asked him if he would like to go riding—and you know I hate riding, hate the smell of the horses, the way the damn leather saddle rubs me raw. He said he didn’t want to go riding, and then he very politely asked me to shut the door when I left. The worst is,” she said, sighing, “that today at work, he collapsed. They took him to the hospital and when I got there, some young punk doctor was yelling at Ben about high blood pressure and diet. I swear you wouldn’t know your father anymore. He’s ballooned right up there and apparently he’s taken his blood pressure right along with him.” She was very quiet for a minute and then she asked me if I could get home for the weekend.

  “He won’t want to see me,” I said.

  “It’s not for him.”

  “I don’t think Rozzy will come.”

  “That’s OK,” she said. “That would make it worse.”

  When I told Rozzy, she said, “So Ben’s sick, probably a vitamin thing, or just in his mind.”

  “Don’t be mean,” I said. “If you need to get me, you can call. Or if you feel uncomfortable, call David and he’ll call me.”

  “I can take care of myself,” she said coldly. “What time are you leaving?”

  When I got home, Bea was in the front yard, crouched down, pruning the low green bushes by the side of the house. It would be snowing in a month or two, and the green would be powdered white until it disappeared altogether. Seeing her gave me a queer fishy feeling. She had cut her hair short, had styled it into two stiff wings on either side of her head, making her look as if she might take flight any moment. When she saw me, she fingered her hair defensively. “Does it look funny?” she said. “I had it done today.” She stood up and hugged me. “Why don’t you come home more often? What’s the matter with you?”

  “Why did you cut it?” I couldn’t get used to how she looked. Her eyes were smaller, her face more lined. She suddenly seemed like someone else’s mother, a little used.

  “It was Elizabeth Arden who cut it, not me,” she said. “I wanted a drastic change, and they kept thrusting pictures at me of all these gorgeous young models with short hair.”

  “But you’ve always had long hair.”

  She dusted some dirt from her hands onto her jeans. She had on an old flannel shirt of Ben’s with one fraying sleeve, and she wore no makeup. “Actually, baby, it was for Ben, to shake him up. I sat in that chair and I cried when they clipped it. I wouldn’t let any of it touch their floor. They had to line the whole area around me with tissue paper, and then they had to wrap up all the hair they cut and give it to me to take home. My head feels so funny now, so light.” She shook it for a moment. “Ben didn’t say anything. He just looked at me and then at the tail of hair in my hands and said that whatever I did was fine by him.” She fingered her hair. “It feels so odd,” she said. She stared off into space, teasing the wisps with her fingers. “I want it back,” she said suddenly.

  “I love you,” I said.

  “Why, baby,” she laughed, “I love you, too. Let’s go inside and see Ben.” She turned around again. “I look fine, don’t I?”

  “You don’t look like Rozzy anymore.”

  She laughed. “Why should I?” she said.

  Seeing Ben was even more of a shock. He was bloated, shuffling, stopping in the hallway to lean one leaden foot heavily in front of the other. “Bess,” he said, patting my shoulder. I leaned forward to kiss him. His cheek was papery and dry.

  We all sat in the living room. Ben began chain smoking, not even half finishing a cigarette before he stabbed it out and lighted another. “When did you start smoking?” I asked him, but he only shrugged. Bea kept removing the ashtrays, setting them up high on the mantel, and when he lighted yet another cigarette, she snatched it from his hand and tossed it out the door. While she was throwing it out, he flicked the ashes from a new cigarette behind the couch. He took the raisins from the candy dish and dumped them on
the table, and used the dish as his new ashtray. “Jesus, Ben,” said Bea, coming back in, but he looked at her as if she were addressing someone else, someone he didn’t know.

  It wasn’t funny. I knew it wasn’t funny, but sometimes it’s those unfunny things that get you going. I had struck a laughing vein and I began nervously giggling. It was like all those times at the dinner table when Rozzy and I were young and for no reason at all one of us would erupt into giggles and start the other one off. Our sides would stitch up, we couldn’t eat without spattering our food on the tablecloth. Ben used to send us away from the table, banishing us to our room. He was looking at me now, as I stuttered over my laughter, but he wasn’t enraged as he once would have been, he was merely disinterested.

  “How’s Rozzy, the poor thing?” said Bea.

  Ben stubbed out his cigarette and lighted another.

  I choked on a snort of laughter. “In the spring, she wants to go off to school.”

  “I wish she’d take up with Stewey again,” sighed Bea. “He loved her, didn’t he? I always liked him.” She squinted at me. “What on earth is the matter with you? Is there something funny that I should know about?”

  Ben suddenly straightened up. “And what are your plans, Bess, what are you going to do with your life?”

  The laughter stopped, frozen inside of me. “I like taking photographs,” I said slowly. “I want to be a photographer.”

  “That’s a hobby, not a vocation,” he said evenly. “What am I paying all this money for? First it was art, now it’s something else. If you want to be a photographer, fine, be one. I’m not paying for grad school in something like that. I’m responsible only until you finish being an undergraduate.” His face was bruised with blood. Bea got up and put a hand on his shoulder.

  “I’m going to bed,” he said abruptly. “I have court tomorrow.” He left the room. Bea looked curiously at her hands. “I used to have such nice hands,” she said. “Now look at them, my skin is so cracked and lined. I remember my mother’s hands looking like this.”

  We didn’t stay up very long. Bea was suddenly silent and the only other thing to do besides watching television was to go to sleep. It felt funny being in my old room, sleeping in my old bed. It didn’t feel like it belonged to me anymore. It didn’t even smell like it used to, the old familiar combination of inexpensive perfume and the dimestore makeup that used to rub off on the sheets. I lay in bed and looked around the room, but I couldn’t sleep.

  The house was silent. I blinked at the darkness, for a moment drifting into the past, when Rozzy was in the room beside me, when the thought of her could comfort me to sleep. I threw off the covers and pulled on a robe, and went into the kitchen for a piece of ice to cool my thoughts.

  Ben was straddling a chair, eating an enormous chicken sandwich, sloppy slices of red tomato oozing out of the sides. Beside him, on the kitchen table, was a carton of vanilla ice cream with a spoon jabbed into it. Ben gave me a sharp look. “Go back to bed,” he said, spooning some ice cream into a dish. I got myself a clean glass and filled it with water and sat down beside him. “You’ll have nightmares eating that,” I told him, but he simply nodded at me, and picked up his ice cream and his sandwich and padded out of the kitchen. I sat sipping my water until I had drained the glass, and then I went back to bed, passing by Rozzy’s old room, where Ben was sprawled on the couch, an old yellow army blanket thrown over him, his feet sticking out, bare and enormous. He didn’t notice me and continued sucking the ice cream from his spoon.

  In the morning, though, Ben was sleeping on the living room couch, the same tatty army blanket tossed over him. I showered and when I came out, Bea was whirring something in the blender and Ben was gone. “Don’t ask me where he went,” said Bea, “but I have to be out of here in an hour to go and get something done to my hair.”

  “I thought you just had it cut yesterday,” I said. “What’s wrong with it?”

  Bea fussed with the feathery ends. “I don’t know. Something.” She put out two glasses and poured me some orange liquid. “Orange juice and strawberries,” she said, sitting down beside me. “You know, I think it really threw your father having you sleeping in your old room like that. Usually it’s one of his nightly stops. Don’t look so surprised. He sleeps in at least four different places each night.” She heaved a sigh. “God,” she said, “God, God.

  “You know, he wouldn’t even see a doctor at first. I had to threaten him with divorce; I even had to contact a lawyer, one of his associates, in fact, so he’d know I was serious. So he went to a doctor and got this special diet, but what good does it do? Just look in his pockets—candy wrappers, pretzels, cigarettes. If I scream that he’s killing himself, that he’s killing me, he’s still untouched. He goes to work and he comes home and he eats.”

  Bea began to bustle, getting ready to leave. “You want to come? Get a pretty new haircut?”

  The front door slapped shut. “Ben,” she said.

  “I think I’ll hang around,” I said.

  I heard the TV snap on, the blur of voices. “I’ll be back in about two hours or so, depending on what they do.” “Don’t come back a blond,” I said.

  “Now, that’s an idea,” she said, rushing out the back door.

  I waited a bit and then I went and changed into cut-offs and a sweatshirt. It was warm enough to go running. I followed the murmur of voices until I threaded my way to Ben.

  “Come run with me,” I said, kicking off the TV with a sneakered foot.

  “I don’t run anymore. Turn that back on.”

  “So we’ll walk. Come on. Please.”

  He looked up at me.

  “I want to do something with you,” I said.

  Ben stretched, then he stood up and rummaged around in the closet for his old expensive running shoes. He had once been able to bend straight from the waist and tie his shoes, but now he had to sit down, a movement that had neither grace nor style.

  He was cheerful at first. We walked, and I was jittery with energy. I wanted to sprint ahead and race until I was out of breath, but instead I slowed my steps to match my father’s. We held the kind of pace lovers keep, even and steady and long, or maybe it was more the pace of old people. We didn’t talk and by the third block, Ben began to pant. His feet stuttered on the small stones seeded along the walk. “This is ridiculous,” he said.

  “One more block and then we’ll turn,” I said, but Ben started to cough, a sharp hacking ripping from his chest, and he waved me back. He hunched into his coat and then turned back to the house. He stopped coughing, and stood a little straighter, but he continued homeward.

  I ran. As fast as I could, away from Ben, away from the house, eating up the curving blocks with each step of my feet, retracing the routes Rozzy and I used to prowl, sweating and panting. A collie dog bounded out of his grassy yard and nipped at my heels, keeping pace with me for a few more blocks before another dog claimed his interest.

  I was dripping with sweat when I started back and my thighs hurt, my feet burned. The first thing I heard when I got back into the house was the TV. Ben was in the room, staring at the blinking images in front of him, his running shoes thrown back into the greedy mouth of the closet. He didn’t look up.

  I showered again, and then read magazines until Bea came home, her hair a bit shorter, the wings gone. “Better?” she said self-consciously.

  “Better,” I said.

  Ben stayed in that room watching the TV all evening, and when it was dinner time Bea brought him in a tray. Every few minutes I looked up at the clock, wading through the hours until I could go back to school. Bea and I ate in the dining room, a quiche she made and some red wine, and she chattered about the weather, about the freaky high and low temperatures, the sudden dips. “It makes people funny,” she said. “One minute they’re smiling, loosening up their collars, shedding jackets, lolling on the streets—the next, they’re ready to bite your neck in two.”

  We both went to bed early. I didn’t nigh
t-walk. I could hear Ben padding around the house, opening and closing the freezer. I could see the thin slice of light from the kitchen. I lay in bed and wished on one of those stars Rozzy had always wanted to paste up on the ceiling.

  I was the last one up the next morning. Ben was already out of the house and Bea was taking chocolate cookies out of the oven. “I thought you’d like some to take back with you,” she said. She had a streak of flour on her neck. “I got up at five to make these.”

  “You didn’t have to do that.”

  “Couldn’t sleep,” she said apologetically.

  I waited around for Ben, to say my good-byes, to tell him that I hoped he felt better, that I was glad to have seen him, but he didn’t return. “He might not come back until midnight,” said Bea. “He gets that way. There’s nothing you can do about it. I can tell him good-bye for you.”

  Bea drove me home around six. “Do you think Rozzy would ever come home to visit?” she said.

  “Maybe.”

  Bea swerved around a stone in the road. “At least you didn’t say never,” she said, attempting a smile.

  I phoned Rozzy that night and told her about Ben, about Bea. “They were always that way,” she said slowly, “forever dying like that. I always noticed it. Only you didn’t see.”

  It was Monday again, and class, and I had three minutes to get to the lecture hall. It was a five-minute walk that wound all the way around several buildings, a walk made even longer by the snaking crush of students. I hated being late, so I decided to skip class and hang around the student union. I had a friend who worked the information desk there; she gave out student phone numbers and addresses, whiling away the boredom by knitting scarves for almost everyone she knew. When I walked into the union, she waved at me and called that there was someone looking for me, that she had given my number.

  “Male or female?” I said, pulling up a chair. “Female, I bet.”

  “Unhunh. This one was male.”

  “What did he look like?”