In between avoiding her guests, Rosemary spent some time thinking about Father’s spring. Her spring. The childhood fountain. Was it still there? Could she find it? She had not been east of Bixley since the house burning. Not even with William could she make the descent down that cobwebby tunnel leading to her past. “Let’s go together and find it,” William had urged. “Someday,” Rosemary would tell him. “When the magic is right, we’ll go.” Now William himself had disappeared into that Bermuda Triangle of wishes and plans, a place smelling like the entrails of good intentions. “Someday, William, when the magic is right, I’ll untangle the old webs.”
***
The morning had begun cloudy, but by two o’clock the sky was clear, as though someone had dusted away those clouds. The birds sang in their different notes from the grasses, and trees, and telephone wires. Bluebells bent their necks, turning their mouths downward. If the magic wasn’t right, it was certainly workable. Rosemary, wearing her tight-legged jeans that wouldn’t catch in the chain, and tying her denim shirttails up into a hard knot, backed the bicycle out of its resting place and then glided down the driveway and out onto the bumpy surface of Old Airport Road.
A pickup truck came toward her, pulling behind it a parachute of dust. The driver tooted his horn. It was Jan Ferguson, who lived beyond Rosemary’s own house. Rosemary waved back, then lowered her head, eyes squinting until the wave of dust passed her. Old Airport Road’s only pollution was this occasional flare-up from the tires of passersby.
Sharon Masefield, Rosemary’s old school chum, now Sharon Masefield Greene, flew by in a shiny Ford Escort that would no longer be shiny when it reached its destination near the end of the road, the home Sharon had bought and renovated with her husband. Two small children floated like balloons on the backseat, suspended inside the moving car as though they were helium filled. Sharon honked her horn and waved. Rosemary wondered if Sharon looked into her rearview mirror, back into the wake of dust, and wished that all she had to do on such a glorious day was to go for a bicycle ride. She remembered Sharon’s high school hurry, sporting her newly styled shag hairdo, Sharon rushing in the halls, in the corridors, late for class, late for ball practice, or just missing the Bixley bus. The Escort went on inside its ball of dust, Sharon still in a hurry.
Rosemary braked for the incline into Bixley, which had its share of shoppers bustling in and out of the two dozen or so stores and businesses. It also had the little town architecture: two small banks, an insurance agency, two drugstores, Max’s Camera and Supply Shop, an IGA grocery, Bixley’s Grocery, Jim’s Chevrolet, Bolton’s Hardware, Handy’s Lumber Company, Sam’s Sporting Goods, JC Penney, Nora’s Clothing, two restaurants, a cafe, the post office, the library, Joy’s Magazines & Books, Larry’s Sunoco, the town office, the police station, the firehouse, Radio Shack, and the newly arrived McDonald’s. Human ideas, structured and architectural, arranged in a scheme, caught up in a design, nailed, sawed, plastered, and framed into a single thought: the small New England town.
Betty Gleason, another old high school classmate, smiled at Rosemary and waved from behind the naked mannequin she was dressing in the window of Betty’s Boutique. Marvin Casey leaned out of the United States post office and shouted hello. Rosemary waved back over her shoulder and left him smiling in her wake. As she rolled past the IGA, Bixley fell behind her, growing and groaning and swelling at its seams as much and as fast as a small town possibly can. Already on her right she saw the staked signs declaring the future site of Bixley’s new shopping mall.
Rosemary had not been to the Bixley Drive-In, on the outskirts of town, for years. She was surprised to see that it was closed, no longer functioning, a dinosaur looming over the modern trappings of electronic sundries. It saddened her to think of the big screen dying a slow death out among the elements and uninterested passersby. She was also shocked at the numerous upcroppings of subdivisions, what Uncle Bishop called baby factories, covering the hillsides on each side of the road. Miriam’s colleagues were probably responsible. The Manifest Destiny crowd of Bixley, Maine. But how had Bixley grown so without her noticing it?
The truth was that she had driven for years like a rat in a maze to her teaching job in Thomasville by means of New Airport Road and the new interstate that had finally inched its way up the state of Maine, to Bixley. She had come home from a long day of teaching, kicked off her shoes, and stayed within or near her comfortable house. Daily, she had seen the subdivisions mushroom to life along New Airport Road, all the way out northward to the new highway. It made sense that the same development was occurring along the peaceful edges of Norris Road, which also ran northeasterly to meet the new highway. But that was the childhood road. The bicycle’s path. The trail of magic that led, once, to a house now turned to ashes, to a man now gone to dust. It was inconceivable for Rosemary to admit that progress had come to the delicate elms, the teetering pines, the soft layer of duff that stretched like shag carpet beneath a child’s bare feet. But here progress was, towering above what used to be open fields of hay, now houses full of people planting different flowers in their front yards, struggling for individuality. Here and there a convenience store broke the monotony. But aside from the color of paint, aside from the pansies and zinnias, they were crackerjack boxes all in a row. Baby factories.
Where are these people coming from? Rosemary wondered. Are they extraterrestrials?
A half mile past the drive-in, Rosemary braked and stared ahead to the spot where the family homestead had once stood, the house where she had been given birth on a cold winter’s day. The road leading off Norris, which was once gravel, was now tarred and became, after five hundred yards or so, a cul-de-sac. Houses clung to it, the modern, paranoid kind, low to the ground, none of those rambling two- and three-story giants that spoke of the many children families used to have. New life and new blood had crept into the population of Bixley. But Rosemary was not ready for the disappearance of the only magic she had ever known in her life: childhood.
She pedaled to the end of the cul-de-sac and left the bike leaning on its kickstand. Making her way past the marigolds in someone’s front yard, she walked past the marigolds in their backyard with that boldness and familiarity that comes from having once owned a house and its land, as though it’s still yours through some kind of divine right. But when you own the memories, you own the land they were made on. What about that January birthday so bright and sunny? Or Father smelling of Old Spice and Rosemary sailing the clipper ship on the bottle as she lay near his sleeping body? Then there was the tiny Canada warbler and the Ponce de Leon spring out in the woods off Norris Road, where people rarely visited, let alone moved en masse. She strolled across this stranger’s backyard, where Mother had once stood on the porch in her summer dress, holding a pitcher of lemonade for the children. The yard had been leveled and now it sprouted bright green grass, the store-bought kind that one seeds and waters and clips. The original backyard had welcomed the dandelion, the occasional stray mustard, the sneaking crabgrass. And poles had risen out of the earth there to hold the clothesline where Mother hung wet things for the sun to dry, pushing the basket along with her foot. Mother humming her summer tunes. Rosemary’s eyes watered with memory. He would fly through the air with the greatest of ease.
A few feet past the backyard, she stopped in amazement. The entire hill and field of trees that had once housed a forest of animals, that had once been the old battleground for make-believe cowboys and Indians, was not as it used to be. Instead of scraggly pines, silvery willows, instead of clover clumps in the open meadow, there grew even rows of fir trees and spruce trees, all four feet to six feet in height. Everywhere, a well-trained army of trees swelling with appropriate fullness for their destiny. A large sign was posted at the entrance to the dirt road that led around this field. COLBY BROTHERS CHRISTMAS TREE FARM, it announced. In one of the rows, three men were squatting at the base of a tree, probably discussing some aspect of its trunk.
Maybe the Colby brothers themselves.
The trees, like the subdivision houses, stood without expression, without individuality. True, the tree farm might save other trees from city dwellers who sometimes drove to the country in order to trespass on private property in search of the ideal fir or spruce. But why did her piece of land and the tiny spring have to go the way of progress? She guessed that the spring was probably being pumped now to water these trees during the dry months, the dog days. And these trees would go to apartments and homes in New York City, in Boston, in Hartford, all grown out of the magic of the countryside, bottled magic now, pumped, packaged, and shipped. Rosemary felt a lightness wash over her, as though something ephemeral were passing through her, Father’s ghost maybe, lost and confused among the even, well-trained spruce. She turned away before the Colby brothers spotted her and inquired as to her business on their land. It was not the most appropriate setting. It was not the best magic, but Rosemary said good-bye to Father, walking again past the backyard where the old house sat, where the mailbox was now shiny and said THE NAYLORS. If she let Father go, maybe William would be next in line.
She bicycled sadly out of the cul-de-sac and paused up on Norris Road to look back for a minute. With the sun beginning its ascent into the west, the subdivision found itself beneath a golden sheath of light. All the Christmas trees were sheeny with it, as if they had been sprayed a magnificent yellow. Artificial sunlight, instead of artificial snow. It’s all canned nowadays, Lizzie. The cramped house, the Naylors’ statement of their lives, lurched up out of the earth to meet the filtering tint of the sun, and for a second, Rosemary saw the old house again, now new, with BOX 81 printed boldly on the mailbox, boldly enough to last a lifetime. And in the window were the same lace curtains with the diamond pattern, and lights in all the rooms warming the house, stating that everyone was home, not gone off into the world or away from the world, but safe, here and now.
Rosemary saw this, and behind the house she heard the ripple of the elm leaves, silver as dimes, and the rattling of the cones on all the lofty pines. She heard this. “Levels of consciousness,” William always said, “depend upon the light.” And the light shifted quickly. It shifted and grew dimmer. It could not hold its instant forever, Rosemary knew. It could not hold this instant on a June afternoon forever.
“You can’t depend on the light, William,” Rosemary whispered, and the light shimmered, as if a wind had flown through it, that ephemeral thing that had gone through Rosemary minutes earlier. It shifted and dimmed, and now the houses returned with their bleak statements about modern living, and the Christmas trees went back to simple green, without the eerie spray of sunlight. They went back to snowy dreams of the big city. Rosemary pedaled away, gliding down what was left of Norris Road, toward Bixley. Not as foolish as Lot’s nosy little wife, she did not turn around. Her pride was too great to acknowledge once more the strip mining that had been done to her fondest memories. She pedaled away. Good-bye, Father.
Putting the bicycle into its corner of the garage, she could hear the upraised voices in the kitchen, which meant Miriam and Uncle Bishop were at it again. Having finally buried Father, Rosemary was in no mood for the mortal goings-on in the kitchen. But before she could escape, the kitchen door was flung open. Mugs rushed out into the garage and disappeared into the backyard. It was too much for him, too. Uncle Bishop saw Rosemary hovering over her bicycle and threw both his hands up into the air.
“Miriam is thinking of opening a whorehouse in Bixley!” he said.
“A massage parlor,” Miriam corrected him.
“This entire family will be laughed out of town,” Uncle Bishop prophesied.
Rosemary was paying them no mind. If the family hadn’t been laughed out of Bixley by now, she knew they probably never would be. Instead, she went on digging past boxes of articles and items until she found what she was looking for. William’s pup tent. The shelter tent. Just what she needed. Shelter. She dragged the two sections of it out into the backyard and then up the hill to where the wild cherry trees were fluttering. As she tramped down the tall grass to make a site for the tent, Miriam and Uncle Bishop stood in the garage doorway to watch what looked like a military maneuver unfolding. It took her more than a half hour to get the tent up good and sturdy. Then she brushed past Miriam and Uncle Bishop, still framed in the doorway, and went down to where her office lay cluttered with papers and books. Taking her small desk lamp, she walked past the two again. They scooted obediently aside, as if in fear. But Rosemary knew, as did Mother the night she broke up the row between Philip and Charles, there is power in being crazy.
She found the long orange extension cord she used for plugging in the block heater of her car on those cold January mornings, and plugged it into the outdoor outlet. Then she unrolled the coil all the way up the hill until she reached the tent. Electricity for the lamp. Now she marched back down past the spectators, who by now had amassed to include Lizzie and Philip and Charles. Uncle Bishop had no doubt summoned them to add to the list of witnesses. Who would believe just two people, especially if one of them was Miriam? Rosemary picked up The Scarlet Letter and her old college paperback volume of Romantic poetry. She found her binoculars and strapped them around her neck. She took a pad of paper and a pen, in case she might need to communicate with the enemy. She also took with her the BB gun that William had had as a boy and kept as an adult to shoot the heads from dying dandelions. “Euthanasia,” he told Rosemary. She shook the gun. It rattled with a full load. She laid it crosswise on her folded sleeping bag. With Mugs at her heels, she trudged up the hill with her load and crawled into the pup tent. Then she zippered herself in, leaving out the gaping mouths in the faces at the bottom of the hill.
What struck her at first, as Mugs curled up kittenish beside her, was the tranquillity of it all. She could hear a song sparrow somewhere in the grass with its four crisp notes, sweet sweet sweet sweet. And then its call note, the blunt tchep. Then she heard the chipping sparrow that had frequented her tray feeders with its succinct, blunt chip. A wind was in the cherry tree leaves, and she heard the shimmer of the elms, and the firs bending along the fields, the pines leaning with their long weight. She tried to imagine what all the insects, millions of them, were doing in their societies around her. Society. Perhaps they would invite her, the large, shell-like newcomer, to a welcome tea. Welcome to nature. We are all parts of a great whole, the invitation would read.
She opened her old copy of the Romantic poets, ink-marked and dog-eared, and read, “‘Again I hear these waters, rolling from their mountain springs with a soft inland murmur.’” Rosemary knew about springs. She knew about murmurs. She had felt one rush through her body back at the Christmas tree farm, a tingle of electricity. She reached a hand down to tickle Mugs. He opened his red mouth, showing his teeth, and brought his hind paws up to kick at her hands. Then he began to purr, another kind of inland murmur. They were both happy in the tent, with the poems and the bird songs and the talkative leaves. She flipped over to “Intimations of Immortality.”
“‘Nothing can bring back the hour,’” she read to Mugs, “‘of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower.’”
“Natalie Wood.” It was Miriam’s voice outside the tent. Rosemary and Mugs both jumped at the intrusion. “I saw Splendor in the Grass four times,” Miriam added. “That’s when Natalie had that affair with Warren Beatty.” Rosemary pulled back the flap. Miriam was standing at the edge of the lawn, where the neatly mown grass ended. Uncle Bishop was with her. Rosemary shook the BBs in the gun and they rattled. She jacked it. She wasn’t too afraid of them coming closer. Miriam was frightened of snakes and Uncle Bishop was terrified of grass. She pointed the gun at the intruders.
“Stay back, Miriam, unless you want your kneecaps to look like pin cushions,” Rosemary warned. She took aim at Miriam’s chubby knees. “I needn’t tell you how this can sting.”
Miriam and Uncle Bishop put hands up to
their mouths to hide their words and spoke quietly for a few seconds. This was something new. Uncle Bishop conferring with Miriam. Rosemary kept the BB gun trained on them.
“This is aberrant behavior, Rosie,” Uncle Bishop finally shouted from the safety of the short grass. Rosemary thought about this statement, uttered by a large man who believed his dollhouses were real residences and who lived, not long ago, with another man who wore his wife’s shoes. Aberrant behavior.
“I’m warning you,” Rosemary said again. “I will find privacy at any cost.”
“Please,” Uncle Bishop pleaded. He moved forward, but the junglelike quality of the tall hay discouraged him, and he stepped back from it. “I’ve unplugged your electricity. Any self-respecting general wouldn’t depend on a food or water source in enemy territory.” Rosemary let fly a few gold BBs and smiled as Uncle Bishop and Miriam jumped like carnival ducks.
“Rosemary, for crying out loud!” Miriam shouted. “Even Mother isn’t this crazy!” She put one foot into the deep grass, then hesitated, perhaps at the thought of a snake being roused. But what caused her to withdraw the leg, however, was the crisp plop plop of two more BBs slicing into the grass by her foot. She and Uncle Bishop retreated. Rosemary watched as they weaved in and around the tray feeders.
“Who does she think she is?” Uncle Bishop asked. “Patty Hearst?”
“Is this or is this not,” Miriam wanted to know, “reason to move bag and baggage to Greenland?”
“You’d like Greenland,” Uncle Bishop said now. “There are no snakes there.”
The Bubble Reputation Page 16
