“You’re still not angry with me about Walt, are you?” Bea said suddenly. “Is that why you act this way?” She fumbled with her fork. “Oh, never mind,” she said, and then she grinned. “We might buy a summer place on the Cape. Won’t that be lovely?”
“I thought you hated the beach.”
“That was before.” She finished her pie. “Bess, are you going to be OK?”
“Why not?” I said.
I let David make love to me. I didn’t participate, but he was so involved with his own passion, I don’t think he noticed, or maybe he thought he could pull me along with him. That night, I dreamed I was being strangled. I jolted awake, coughing, scraping sound from the tubes of my throat. David woke up and shook me. “Can you speak?” he demanded. I nodded and he went to get me a glass of water. “What’s wrong?” he said. “I knew you couldn’t really be choking by the sounds you were making. You’re really suggestible.” He touched my neck and then rubbed it. “You need to cry,” he said gently. “You’ll feel better.”
“Just like that. You want me to cry.”
“I want you to do what you want,” he said. “Do you believe I love you?”
“Let’s go back to sleep,” I said.
I was twenty-one, listlessly edging my way through my senior year, when Ben and Bea sold the house and moved to Wayland. I kept thinking about what Rozzy used to say about how we would one day come back and find our home repeopled, repeating our whole cycle of events. We would feel tugs of recognition. I went back to that house. A family was living there, but they had three scrappy little boys who threw stones at me when I came toward their walk, a big sheep dog, and no daughters at all.
I had no idea what I was going to do with my life. I was accepted to grad school in Oregon. I could become a photographer, still images, freezing time so it never moved forward, so it never got a chance to rot and spoil. Ben now said he would pay for any schooling I might want. He wanted to see me. He wanted me to come to dinner more often. When I told him I flunked an exam, he said to do better. He was encouraging.
Ben and Bea took me out to dinner once, but every dish, every spice, made me think of Rozzy. “Rozzy loved aspic,” I said, ignoring Bea’s harsh glance. “Look at the sweater on that girl over there,” I said, “it looks like one of Rozzy’s.” I saw what it did to Ben’s face, but I couldn’t help it.
When the fall came, I didn’t know what else to do, so I left for Oregon. David went a little crazy those last few weeks. He trailed me everywhere, his face a canvas of panic, and finally he became bitter, he wanted to hurt me. He accused me of abandoning Rozzy, he reminded me where her grave was. Then he said that maybe Rozzy wasn’t the only unstable one in the Nelson family. Still, he was at the airport, standing beside Bea and Ben, his face pained and white as my plane rose into the sky. He wrote me for a few months, and then the letters stopped. I thought it was because I never answered, but then Bea sent me a clipping from the Globe announcing his marriage. There was a picture of the bride, a blond who had a degree in special education from BU. The article said they were honeymooning in Africa, where David was doing research on gorillas. Across the bottom of the picture, Bea had sprightly printed, “This could have been you.” She was rabid on romance. She and Ben were planning their own second honeymoon, and she continually asked if I was seeing men.
There were men. There still are, but no one close. I sleep with men only so I won’t wake up and realize how alone I am, so I’ll hear other sounds besides the thud of my own heart.
I became a photographer for a small public television station. It’s four years later and I’m still there. It’s a job, that’s all, and I’ll stay until my restlessness propels me elsewhere. I am not famous.
I saw identical twins on the train the other day. I studied them. They didn’t seem to mind being stared at. They were about sixteen, with short curling dark hair, and they both wore these big sunny yellow tent dresses. The one on the left smiled pleasantly at me, and then she turned to her sister and kissed her on the cheek. They say that when one identical twin dies, the other soon follows. I was so jealously intent on watching the twins that I missed my stop. It didn’t matter. There was no place to go. I watched them get off the train, stepping out into the crowd with an awkward kind of grace. I shut my eyes, not seeing anything anymore, letting the train mindlessly carry me.
It’s difficult. I can’t walk through a crowd without springing forward when I spot a flash of black hair, a heavy wool coat in the sticky summer heat. I once elbowed my way off a jammed bus to follow a girl with hair like ink spilling down her back. I raced after her for three blocks, and when I was two feet away, panting, my face wet, she pivoted and frowned. ‘“You want something?” she said. Her teeth were bad, her eyes dull. “You know me?” she said. When I turned away from her, apologizing, a headache was twisting behind my eyes.
The last time Bea saw me, my eyes were stained by circles, my color was ashen. It made Bea angry; she told me to stop dwelling on Rozzy, that she was dead, and better off, too, that she had never been happy living, “not that one.” For Rozzy, she said, living was one agony after another, punctuated by brief spurts of joy.
Bea didn’t understand, any more than Ben did, gardening in the backyard, trim and tan again, unpossessed of his demons. Bea has it wrong. I’m not so benevolent. I’ve always known I was selfish. It was always I who was desperate for the other’s half, for the missing pieces. It was always I who needed Rozzy’s needs in order to exist. It was I all the time.
Lately, I’ve been having these dreams, yearnings that cling into my waking hours. I’m always part of a huge faceless crowd, and everyone is moving very slowly, except for me. I spiral through them, my glance fluttering like crazy trapped wings against each face, and then I’m searching, forever, endlessly searching for the only thing that can complete me, for Rozzy.
Meeting Rozzy Halfway Page 28
