Meeting Rozzy Halfway

by Caroline Leavitt

  You can’t go by what the papers said. They all had stones about Rozzy. The evening news even had a film clip. I don’t know how they get around so quickly, how they film things; but even film can lie, and you couldn’t see all that much in the clip anyway, except for the crowds and the smart young reporter. Some of the papers hinted that it wasn’t an accident, that she had been pushed. The prose got a little purple, the accusations absurd. People even began getting panicky about taking the subway. Bea told me that for months afterward, no one would go near the white warning line, no one would approach a train at all until it had moaned to a complete stop. People eyed one another suspiciously. Everyone was suspect. There were stories about people being pushed in front of trains by packs of kids, but the newspapers were silent. The stories continued to seed themselves.

  There were things I do remember, that I’m sure of, though. The whine of the ambulance. The men rushing into the subway with a stretcher. The crowds, the confusion, the eyes feeding on me, vampirish. A cop asked me something over and over, but my mouth wouldn’t open, my mind wouldn’t work. The cop took Rozzy’s purse from me, unclenching my fingers, one by one, and he took my purse from my other hand, and looped them both over his arm. He kept one arm linked through mine while he fiddled in both purses. “Which one is yours?” he asked, but I couldn’t answer. I let him lead me up into the street, while the crowd gazed at me. We rode in the ambulance with Rozzy to the hospital. I tried to ride in the back with her, but the cop wouldn’t let me. He kept patting my arm.

  And then I remember the hospital, how blindingly white it seemed, as sudden and white as the snow, as unnatural. The cop sat me down and was gone. Rozzy was gone. Bea later told me the cop had phoned them, but he didn’t know who was alive and who was dead, he read her both ID cards, mine and Rozzy’s, and told her the name of the hospital. Bea said for a while she thought both of us were dead. Maybe that accounted for the look on Stewey’s face when he rushed into the hospital. Stewey’s eyes banged into me. His body shook. He was flagged by Bea and Ben. There were hands, faces close to me, arms pulling me up, words. Throughout the ride home, I kept touching one of my hands with the other, pinching myself, forcing myself to feel, making every cell in my body recognize the life that moved within.

  The three of us were there, sitting in a church. Rozzy had done it again, had thrown us together because of her. Only Stewey seemed a little apart. But for him Rozzy had died so many times that I don’t think he needed any ceremony to make it final.

  I couldn’t look at him. I was afraid of how he might feel seeing me against the backdrop of Rozzy’s coffin. I was afraid of reading something in his face. He was in a black suit and he flinched when Bea tried to hold him. He moved back as if burned.

  I didn’t cry. I didn’t feel. It was Ben who said, “Oh Rozzy—” who made her name an anguish, and who tried to throw himself onto her coffin, tried to wrap it protectively in his arms. Bea had to get up and pull him back to his seat, hold him to her, her arms retainers. She kept whispering to him, wiping his face with her white lacy handkerchief. Her mascara was smeared down her face, twin black stains.

  There weren’t many people, mostly friends of Bea’s, Dr. Leffler, David. He didn’t belong there. Rozzy never liked him.

  I didn’t see Rozzy buried. I was there, but I didn’t see any of it. I wasn’t standing in the cold getting slush in my shoes watching my sister be buried. I was in a haze, in the kind of half-dream before you shake awake, when your mind is there before your body. When Bea took my arm to lead me back into the dark mouth of the limousine, I opened my eyes only enough so I wouldn’t stumble. I never focused; edges blurred.

  People came to our house all week. We were never alone. Bea made up a special room for Stewey, and I stayed in my old room. “You’re in no condition to go to Madison, yet,” she told him. She even called his parents for him and told them about Rozzy. She said later that they were very nice, that his mother had even started crying and had said that Rozzy had been a beautiful girl, a lovely wife. I sat in the kitchen and listened. Stewey’s mother spoke very loudly. You could hear her voice climb right through the wires. Stewey wouldn’t get on the phone. He sat in the room that Bea had made up for him and kept the door closed, not talking to anyone, not acknowledging the hesitant knocks of people who came to the house, who wanted to tell him how sorry they were. Stewey and I hadn’t really looked at each other once since leaving the hospital.

  Bea and Ben popped tranquilizers like party nuts. They were joined to each other by a held hand. Our house that never invited people because Ben was so antisocial was now crowded with relatives I hadn’t seen in years. An Uncle Jason, fat in checkered jacket, raced toward me, telling me I was a little doll even as he clapped me against him. “Such red hair,” he said. “Where’s the fire?” A friend of my mother’s came over and told me I looked anorexic. “We brought all this wonderful food—honey cakes, pies, meats—and you don’t eat. I get hungry just thinking about it.” My cousin Trina, married and heavier, lifted up the hem of my skirt to check the label, muttering to herself. Women told me about their sons. “It’s terrible, isn’t it,” said Trina, “that such an occasion should finally bring us all together like a family.”

  There it was, what Ben had feared when we were babies, why he hadn’t wanted relatives visiting. People taking on the parts of your life that were yours and no one else’s, people digging up your past and making it their own. No one said much, but people suddenly seemed to know what our lives had been like. I heard them discussing Rozzy, comparing her to friends of friends who had been institutionalized, who were worse off now, who got sleep therapy, water therapy, shock therapy.

  “No wonder your father didn’t want people to the house,” said Trina, “the poor man.”

  I got up and went into the kitchen, running cool water over my hands, spotting my blouse. It was silk and it would be ruined. People were nibbling at the cakes, the molds. I wandered around. David was sitting patiently in the living room, although I had asked him not to come. He was talking pleasantly to someone, and when he saw me, he got up and came over. I averted my face, and he touched my shoulder. “Later then,” he said gently.

  Ben was listening to Trina’s husband talk about his new job at a lab. Stewey appeared and sat beside David, who handed him his own cup of hot coffee. Stewey’s eyes were tiny red stars in his face, dying. Instantly, people approached him, but he looked through them, he made them uncomfortable, and they flickered away.

  “What an accident,” said Trina, “and poor Bess was there.”

  “It wasn’t an accident,” I said.

  “Baby,” said Bea, “you were in shock, you don’t remember. You said yourself you didn’t remember.”

  “I was there. She handed me her purse.”

  Ben was watching me, his face changing. I looked over at him, lifting my chin up.

  “You can’t be sure,” said Bea, taking Ben’s hand, rubbing it. “In a crowd, people push.”

  “Jesus,” said Trina. “Holy Jesus.”

  I didn’t know half the people in the room. They were faces, looking at me. Only Stewey didn’t seem surprised. He hadn’t changed posture and when I looked at him, he gave me a faint, bitter smile. I got up and walked out of that house, ignoring Bea’s chanting call. I walked up and down the blocks, taking the routes Rozzy and I used to follow when we were kids. I walked until the cold had become part of me, and when I came back into the house, everyone became silent. David had his hands in his lap, like dead dull fish. “You OK?” Trina said, touching my shoulder. Bea was harshly weeping against Ben. “I used to check her pills,” she cried. “I hid the knives, the scissors. You ask anyone.”

  I went to find Stewey, brushing aside the hands that were fluttering at me like moths. Before I reached his room, someone tapped me. It was Betty West, an old friend of my mother’s who lived a block away. She once babysat for Rozzy and me at her house, making us canned soup and jelly sandwiches, treats we never had at home. S
he hugged me. “It’s been a long time,” she said. “What, you’re off to college, living away from home? Your mother tells me you have a talent for picture taking. You’ve grown into quite a beauty.” She looked toward the kitchen. “Come sit down. Talk to me for a minute.”

  We both sat at the table, propping our elbows up. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “It’s so terrible that such a thing could happen. I always liked Rozzy. When I think about that girl, so young and beautiful—” She paused, shaking her head. “But really, who knows what would have happened to her? Maybe it’s better that the pain is over right now.” She glanced out our back window. “Pretty garden,” she said, and then she turned back to me. “It was a terrible drain on all of you. I know it sounds awful, but it’s better this way. Really.”

  I wrenched up from the table. “Get away from me. Why don’t you go home? Who wants you here, you and your stupid, thieving opinions?”

  Her features froze. “It’s all right,” she said evenly. “You don’t have to apologize.”

  I went into the living room and took David’s hand, yanking him up, pulling him outside. “What is it?” he said.

  “Drive me somewhere, please,” I said, “please.”

  He wrapped his arms about me and sat me in his car. We drove along the black stretch of highway, not talking, not even touching, and the silence calmed me. “This is what I needed,” I said.

  “Would you like to stay with me for a while?” he said. “You don’t have to come back for this. I’ll even leave, let you have the place to yourself, if that’s what you want.”

  “No,” I said, “it would still be your place.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  I touched his arm. “I know you don’t.”

  “Would you like to take a trip? Go camping?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “You can call me anytime, you know. Or just show up. You don’t even have to talk. I’ll soothe you. I’m very good at that.” He sighed. “I feel so useless, but I love you, Bess. Does that help?”

  I leaned back against the seat, closing my eyes. “It’s OK, David,” I said.

  Gradually, people stopped coming to the house. The phone calls petered out, dwindling to a few static rings, a few spurts of sympathy, of curiosity. Bea still had her hands full with Ben. She whispered to him, she fed him words. She kissed and touched him, making him real because of her. And he hung on her like a suit of clothing. No one even noticed when Stewey and I slipped out the front door, each of us carrying one of the plastic garbage bags full of Rozzy’s things. We packed them into the car and went to clean out Rozzy’s apartment. We huddled in the car with the bags.

  Stewey walked into Rozzy’s apartment first, loaded down with white garbage bags. Six brown boxes were banged up against the wall, all clumsily taped, Rozzy’s scrawl identifying the contents.

  “I’m not unpacking anything,” said Stewey. “I’m going to throw everything into the fucking incinerator.”

  “Will it fit?” I said, dumping down one of the bags, leaning against the wall to rest.

  “We’ll make it fit. Help me carry this.”

  We picked up the boxes, Stewey at one end, me at the other, struggling, cursing, never meeting each other’s eyes. The incinerator was at the far end of the hall, set up high so you had to stretch up and hoist whatever it was you wanted burned. Not all of the boxes did fit. Those cumbersome ones we ripped open just enough to flutter some of the contents in, and then mashed down the rest with our feet so they, too, would fit. Everything made a resounding whack as it hit the bottom of the chute. Stewey even went and got Rozzy’s red bathroom scale and tossed it down. I could hear the glass on the dial breaking.

  Stewey cleaned out the refrigerator, gathering the vegetables that had grown furry coats of mold, the sour milk, the butter. All that went down the chute. “No one’s ever going to use Rozzy’s things,” Stewey said fiercely, “no one.” He took the baby crib and kicked at one of the sides until the fragile wood splintered. Then Stewey took his buck knife and slashed up the bed. He tore the sheets apart with his bare hands, leaving ribbons of cloth trailing listlessly on the dusty wood floor. “We’ll have to sleep on the floor,” he said. “The trash truck will cart this away if we drag it outside.”

  We pulled the stuff outside and pushed it way in the back of the other trash bags and boxes in the alley. Then we came back upstairs and Stewey went in to take a shower. I sat on the floor of the living room, empty except for myself. I remembered when I was a little girl and an aunt had died. Everyone had wept, but I had gone into our kitchen and looked out the sunny bright window at the sky. I had thought that was a dramatic thing to do. The sky was where people went to live when they died. I had tried to feel sad, to feel terrible, but nothing had really changed for me, my life was the same. The only thing I felt was a flicker of guilt, and then resentment, and I threw those things off when I went outside to play, my heart beating youth and life within me. I looked out of Rozzy’s window now and saw the smudged fingerprints where we had both leaned into the glass and made breath pictures. 1 got up and went into the kitchen.

  I hunched over the sink and held on, waiting for the sudden sharp tang of nausea to subside. It reeled and shivered within me, and then I was dry-heaving into the sink, being twisted inside out. I sucked in a gulp of air against that queasy current, and then Stewey was out of the shower, holding my head for me as I choked and gagged into the clean white sink.

  Stewey and I were probably supposed to hold each other while we wept, to wipe away each other’s tears, to make love—that old cliché about affirming life in the midst of death—but none of that happened. Not with us. We were dry-eyed. Sleepwalkers. The only conversation we had was small talk, about there being no soap to shower with, about the chill outside. We undressed at night and lay on our jackets, pressing our bodies together for warmth, waiting out the night and its shadows. There was nothing in our flesh, no energy or passion; it was simply flesh, as unmovable and unpliable as stone. Stewey didn’t sleep. Every time I jerked awake from a bad dream, he was sitting up. He would listlessly pat my shoulder until I calmed.

  In the morning Stewey got together the few things in the apartment that were his and had never been used or worn by Rozzy, and packed them in a spare box. “If I could do without it, I’d ruin the car,” he said. “I can’t stay in Madison. I’ll go someplace else.” We didn’t make plans; we didn’t talk. Really, what difference would it make if we wrote or called or ever did anything?

  “Do you want me to drop you off?” he said. I shook my head. I could walk to the bus stop, and I wanted to be by myself. We walked downstairs to the car, and Stewey opened the door. I took his hand, ignoring the flinching movement of his body. “It wasn’t because of you,” I said suddenly. “She loved you.”

  He bent and kissed the top of my head. “I’m not going to think about that anymore. I won’t believe it.” He got into the car. “I’ll see you, Bess Nelson,” he said.

  I never heard from Stewey after that. I didn’t write him or call him or contact his parents. Bea seemed to take his abrupt departure as natural, and she said nothing. Sometimes I imagined that he had another girl, that he was happy. Other times I wondered if he would eventually slash at himself, doing away with the last vestiges of Rozzy, the last memories that were himself.

  EPILOGUE

  People began getting on with their lives again. I sleepwalked through Christmas break, through the rest of my junior year. At first I waited to hear from Stewey, but then anticipation was transformed into dreamy wakefulness, into resignation. We were all playing a waiting game.

  David said nothing when I applied to schools in California, in Oregon, in Europe. He put off his trip to Africa and began talking about taking a year off, but he didn’t see how nervous that made me, how I pulled back.

  Everyone kept yelling at me. “Put your past behind you,” Bea said, “live your life.” She didn’t understand how my life could feel all lived out alr
eady, that everything was just repetition. Now I know what Rozzy meant that day in the Pewter Pot when she spoke about dread.

  Bea and Ben adjusted quickly. He lost a great deal of weight and she got him to run with her. She said they were going on a cruise soon. I was home one afternoon when the mail came. I picked up a rectangular envelope postmarked Kansas, with Walt’s name in the corner, and when I handed Bea the mail, I gave her that one first. She looked at it for a moment and then glanced up at me. She riffled through the other letters and then said quickly, “All junk mail. Throw it out, would you?” She ripped the stack in half and handed the pieces to me.

  I never went to Rozzy’s grave. Bea and Ben went. In between their traveling. My room was dotted with their cards, but you couldn’t tell anything about the places from their hasty scribbles, not the way you could with Rozzy’s.

  I had lunch with Bea one day. Her hair had grown out, spurting down past her shoulders. We had a good lunch, although we didn’t talk very much, but then we never really had. Bea kept asking if I’d like to go on vacation with them. “You’re too damned independent for your own good,” she said. “We’ve always had that problem with you.”

  “What?” I looked up from my iced tea. “What are you talking about?”

  “Call your father,” she said. “He’d be so pleased if you would call the house and ask for him.”

  I looked helpless. “What would I say?”

  “He’s your father. Say hello, how are you?”

  “He told you he wants me to call?”

  Bea smiled. “Things are different,” she said. “Call him.”

  Bea ordered lemon pie while I fiddled with my tea. “You still see David? I always liked him.” She wiped some lemon filling off her mouth with the edge of the paper napkin. She never asked about Stewey.