The Bubble Reputation

by Cathie Pelletier

  “Where does she find them?” Robbie asked, and pulled one mitten off with his teeth. His fingers beneath were brimming red.

  “Let’s go in,” Rosemary said. Even as children, she was the first one to end their play, noticing how red his cheeks had become, his eyes watering.

  “You’re still mothering me,” Robbie said.

  When they came back inside to warm themselves by the fire, Miriam was awake.

  “Let’s play charades,” Uncle Bishop begged, already past the unlucky circumstances of Doug Llewelyn’s dog bite.

  “Bishop, your entire life has been a charade,” said Miriam. “What with your impersonating a man and all.” She lit a cigarette. The nap had obviously rejuvenated her. She was back with a glass in her hand, another wine-rum. She was almost bubbly, perhaps even relieved to be rid of Lloyd. Sometimes even Miriam could see her own mistakes before they happened. And with Raymond now on the outs, she was in the midst of what Uncle Bishop referred to as her auditioning period. Between husbands, the family had seen many candidates worse than Lloyd. Uncle Bishop pulled Rosemary aside.

  “I’ve written a poem about Miriam’s husbands,” he told her excitedly. “It’s the same cadence as ‘The Night Before Christmas,’ when Santa calls out to Dasher and Dancer and the other reindeer. I was saving it for Christmas dinner, but I’ll tell you.” His eyes were bright with anticipation.

  “Let’s hear it,” Rosemary said. She leaned against the den wall and closed her eyes. Miriam and Uncle Bishop. Uncle Bishop and Miriam. They didn’t need anyone else in their lives.

  “There’s Peter the salesman, and Maynard and Bill, and Raymond and God knows they all got their fill. To the preacher in spring, to the lawyer in fall, now divorce them, divorce them, divorce them all.”

  Christmas would be the next family gathering. After that, they would probably assemble for Mother’s funeral, the only difference being, perhaps, that no one present would ask for chocolates.

  “How is Ralph?” Robbie asked Uncle Bishop, who was stroking Winston. Winston, in turn, was happily kneading the rug and appreciating the rub. The humans had their good sides, he had grown to realize.

  “Very healthy, knock on wood,” Uncle Bishop said, knocking on the small measure of wood in the sofa’s arm.

  “Speaking of Ralph,” said Miriam. She exhaled a stream of gray smoke that funneled up past her French curls. “Bishop bought him a baby seat and strapped it into the Datsun. Is that or is that not reason to institutionalize?”

  “And with Moses gone, how do you intend to part the snow long enough to get back to Bixley?” Uncle Bishop asked. “You call a cab, missy. And I’m not driving you and Broderick Crawford to the vet next week.”

  Carol had come back down from upstairs to join the group. She was pale but looked happy and contented to be where she was. A good sign. “Some of us are nomads, Rosie,” William once said. “We’re at home anywhere.”

  “Broderick Crawford?” asked Carol.

  “Don’t be surprised if you get up one morning and discover that Ralph has lost his balls,” Miriam warned. She made her fingers work like scissors, cutting the air. “Then there will be two eunuchs living in your house.”

  “I would’ve thought you already had your quota of male testicles,” said Uncle Bishop. “But if anything happens to Ralph, little Broderick Crawford will pray it’s only a spaceship chasing him.”

  “A spaceship chased Broderick Crawford?” Carol’s eyes widened. Robbie gave her a glass of wine. Mother rocked in her chair, in frantic jerks, and stared into the fire. Not much had changed, Rosemary realized, with William gone. Some habits were hard to break.

  “You’ve no idea,” Miriam said to Carol, “how much money Mother spent dry-cleaning Daddy’s suits until we gave them to Goodwill.”

  “Here’s a toast,” said Rosemary. She was feeling warm from the wine, from the splendid fire. Everyone raised their glasses and waited. Mother stopped rocking to peer at this stranger who was her daughter. The nurse poured a little of her own wine into Mother’s glass.

  “Here’s to our family,” Rosemary said.

  “To the family,” Uncle Bishop seconded. Rosemary caught his eye and winked at him, her uncle, her dear old, odd friend, her compatriot. They drank the toast.

  “You know,” Uncle Bishop said, sentimental now. “When I die, I want to be cremated. Please remember that, Rosie. Rob. And I want you to take my ashes and scatter them all over town.”

  “I doubt Bixley’s large enough to receive your ashes,” Miriam said. She patted another cigarette out of its pack. “It’d be like one of those Oklahoma dust storms. Certain species may even die out, like what happened to the dinosaurs.” She began fumbling in her purse for a book of matches.

  Rosemary smiled. It was true about the dinosaurs that, for whatever reason, they had vanished. They had been so huge and so strong, and yet they had disappeared. She thought of them often these days, when she stood outside at night to look up at the Pleiades, those seven stars that form the shoulder of the bull, Taurus. Rosemary had read about how these massive stars had been born before the dinosaurs had gone extinct. The stars were still babies, still surrounded by cosmic afterbirth, and destined to die young because they were so huge and magnificent. There were sacrifices in all things. And, destined to die young himself, maybe William knew that.

  “Please, let’s play charades,” Uncle Bishop pleaded again. He was cheery suddenly, with the warm Thanksgiving evolving around him in the form of fire, family, and potables.

  “In a minute,” Rosemary promised.

  The road was still filling up with snow when she flicked the porch light on to let Winston outside. In a half hour she would coax him back in. She hated for him to be out on blustery nights, dark and snowy. It was decided, owing to the weather, everyone would take advantage once again of the numerous guest rooms and not venture out into the storm. Rosemary could find nightgowns and pajamas for everyone but Uncle Bishop, who would have to sleep in his enormous underwear.

  She left the boisterous group around the fire in the den. She told them she was rounding up sheets and blankets. That was not true. Instead, she went up the long, steep stairs. How many steps, William? She ascended all fifteen steps and then followed the roses blooming on the wallpaper down the narrow hallway to William’s room, the one with the big church windows that brought in all the light. “The level of light exemplifies a field of consciousness, Rosemary,” he had said, so many times. “Yes, William,” she had answered him since his death, so many times, “but you cannot trust the light. It wavers. Like starlight, it sometimes appears to be bigger and brighter than it is just because it’s so close to us. Pointillism, William, remember? You should have just stood back, rather than lurching headfirst.”

  In William’s room, Rosemary flicked on the night lamp that still sat on his desk, sixty watts, dim and moody. No one downstairs heard the nail go into the wall. She pounded on it with the rock paperweight from the desk, and it quickly ate into the wood. Tomorrow, next week, she would do a more professional job. For now, this would suffice. On the nail she hung the painting, Rosie and Mugs: Life as Usual, and then straightened it. She stood back, her glass of wine in hand, to study it. Mugs was full, large, soft enough to touch. There he was, alive again on the wall. Rosemary thought about the magical powers that primitive hunters conjured up when they painted animals on cave walls. Did it really help them in the hunt, the kill, give them some kind of skill if they believed it would?

  She put her glass of wine on William’s desk and slid a folder that said CORRESPONDENCE out of the center drawer. In another drawer she found a wrinkled book of matches, half-full, that advertised RAPUNZEL’S HAIR SALON, another of William’s quaint finds. In the gray metallic wastepaper basket, she dropped his postcards, slowly, one by one, William’s words, set afire. They fell like burning snowflakes, snow falling inside the house, not one card al
ike. Amsterdam. Paris. Madrid. Cezannes. Van Goghs. Brueghels. Dear Rosemary. Hello, sweetie. Hi, honey. Today Brussels. Tomorrow? They piled up as though they were letters from all of the lovers in the world. Letters from mothers who did their best, their very best, the very best they could. Letters from sisters with many husbands, from unusual uncles, from loving brothers, from dead fathers and aunts, from the old friends who get lost in the shuffle of life and dance off to the wayside. The postcards caught the fire and burst up red and orange, caught up all the words in a hot, destructive swoop, and took them off. It was as if those words had seen the light some people see when dying, the light of the brain going off somewhere, a small beacon in the heart of the flames. The words curled in on themselves, broke apart into syllables and fragments, fell away from all syntax and semantics, and were gone. William’s words, the words of every unfortunate soul who has come and gone upon the earth, unsettled. As Rosemary was most surely unsettled. “I don’t know, Uncle Bishop,” she’d told him earlier. “Maybe I’ll join the Peace Corps.” And she had answered Robbie, too, as best she could. “I don’t know, Robbie, perhaps I’ll ask the Fergusons to take care of Winston. The birds will find other food. Maybe I’ll put the house up for sale. Go to Europe myself and gaze firsthand upon masterpieces.” Maybe she would go back to Bixley High School one day, if she had no place else to go. But, in the meantime, high school students would have to learn to hate Puritan literature without her. “I’ll find a man when I’m ready, Miriam. Until then, I leave them all to you and, no, regardless of what I do, I’ll probably never wear a bra, so please stop using them as stocking stuffers.”

  Rosemary stared, enchanted, at the dying flames in the gray metallic wastebasket. “Was Icarus afraid, William? The chickadee, Mrs. Abernathy, weighs one-third of an ounce.” She watched as the fire settled down to become embers, small glowing dots, like orange campsites spread across the nighttime savanna where the bones of old ancestors, millions of years old, still lie huddled.

  Outside, the handmade angels had already disappeared. A long, steady wind buffeted the house fiercely. The gods, angry and threatening, shook the house, and it heaved on its foundation in the force of the gale, the force of the old myths born in caves, in winter-whipped nightmares, in the lightning flash itself. The gods were doing their jobs. The sharp, clear voices of the mortals came up to her from below, little birds winging, filled with the treble of their ancestors’ first guttural grunts. The humans were doing their jobs. Rosemary looked one more time at William’s last work. Rosie and Mugs: Life as Usual.

  “Bullshit,” Rosemary said softly. What had she always told him? “You get to know people only so that you can paint them, William. The art transcends the human being.” But did he think that with pig hairs and colors he could nail her to a piece of canvas? What was it that Aunt Rachel had said of William? He wasn’t a very good soldier, Rosemary. And what was it Shakespeare had said of soldiers, in the very book that William had loved so, the book that he had left behind on her bookshelf? “Then a soldier seeking the bubble reputation even in the cannon’s mouth.” Rosemary raised her glass to the painting.

  “To you, dear heart,” she toasted him, his last work. She had come out of the fire scathed but three-dimensional. She had avoided the cannon’s cruel blast, and where was William? In what dimension did he hang his canvases these days?

  “Good-bye, William,” Rosemary said, and flicked out the light. She closed the door and left William’s idea of her hanging in the dark. She would always miss him dearly. But for whatever reason, no matter how just or unjust, there was a small, round organ inside her, receiving blood from the veins and pumping it through the arteries. Dilating and contracting. And there was a mass of nerve tissue in her cranium receiving sensory impulses and transmitting motor impulses. She was alive.

  At the top of the stairs, she stood and looked down the sharp decline. Fifteen steps. Fifteen wicked places to hit and bounce and bruise. “Was the Great Wallenda afraid, William? Did the astronauts cry out?”

  Wind and snow rocked the house. It was a house with something cooking in it, with warm yellow lights, and with human voices rising and falling like old water beating against cave walls. Today Bixley. Tomorrow? Her hand grasped the stair rail and for a moment she dreamed the old dream of falling, the cosmos tossing her back to earth in a melding of sea and sky.

  “Bullshit,” Rosemary said again, and took the dangerous steps two at a time.

  Thank you for reading!

  We hope you enjoyed The Bubble Reputation by Cathie Pelletier!

  The book you’ve just finished, The Bubble Reputation, is only one of many books by Cathie Pelletier. Her next book, A Marriage Made at Woodstock, will be available December 2014. Some of her other books are The Weight of Winter, A Wedding on the Banks, and A Year After Henry. If you’d like to find out about these books and more by Cathie Pelletier, check out our mailing list for updates on new releases and access to exclusive content.

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  Read on for an excerpt from

  A Year After Henry

  Available from Sourcebooks Landmark

  . 1 .

  THE SURVIVORS

  JEANIE

  Henry had been gone a year now, but Jeanie would never forget the moment he died, how the bed became lighter, his soul floating upward like a white balloon. She felt it, as though someone’s hand had pressed down on the mattress, indenting, then releasing it again. A guardian angel, maybe. But Henry didn’t believe in such stuff. “I believe in the IRS,” Henry liked to say. “And I believe in staying one foot ahead of the bastards.” Jeanie knew now that death was faster than the IRS because Henry Munroe had disappeared from the breakfast table, the supper table, the leather recliner, the bathroom, the workshop in the garage. He had disappeared forever.

  But that morning he died, maybe the very second it happened, Jeanie had felt a tremor of movement in their bed, a quick shudder. Henry’s heart! was her first thought. Henry having a heart attack had been a worry for months, ever since the doctor told him his cholesterol was dangerously high. But Henry had refused to change his diet of fast-food burgers and greasy fries. Jeanie could monitor what he ate at home, but each time he walked out the door Henry was a free man, responsible for his own behavior. And this had been his handicap.

  They’d been married for twenty-three years, and that was her next thought. Twenty-three years. She opened her eyes then and saw the thread of dawn uncurling along the windowsill. Without looking, her own heart fluttering, she reached a hand over and touched the side of Henry’s face. It was cool, damp almost, and beneath the skin there was a stiffness, as though boards were there holding up the frame of his body, the shell of his life. A fresh stubble of beard had grown during the night, his body still trying in its primitive way to protect his face from the elements. But his body itself had been the enemy, or at least it had turned into the enemy, storing all that cholesterol in its arteries. “Henry?” Jeanie had asked. “You okay?” When he didn’t answer, didn’t move, didn’t even breathe, she had reached for the lamp on her nightstand and snapped it on. Then she picked up the phone and quickly dialed 911. “My husband’s had a heart attack,” Jeanie told the distant voice who answered the call.

  And that’s when the truth washed over her, her eyes filling quickly with tears. All the time she gave directions to the house, gave her name and then Henry’s, she didn’t look at him once, there on his side of the bed, as if he might be sleeping in late as he often did on lazy Sundays. Jeanie thought that if she looked at Henry, especially when she said the words, “I think he’s dead,” that this would make it true. Would seal his fate. And she didn’t want to do that if there was still a chance. They could work miracles these days with all that fancy technology. That’s what she kept reminding herself as she wa
ited for the ambulance, as she listened to the kind voice on the other end of the line telling her, They’ll be there soon, Mrs. Munroe. Stay on the phone with me. Try to be calm now. They could even bring people back from long, winding tunnels, folks who had already clinically died. So maybe, maybe they could still save Henry.

  Jeanie had lain back on the bed, phone still to her ear, and put her head on Henry’s stiff arm. This was the way they used to sleep in those first, sexy years of marriage. It occurred to her that this might be the last time she would ever be able to do so. In those minutes before they took Henry Munroe away, she wanted to get all of him that she could. She wanted to imagine that their lives were just beginning, that those seconds left between them were little lifetimes. She tried to think of what Henry would say about this scene, if he could see it, if he were hovering up at the ceiling somewhere, looking down. Just the notion of it would make him laugh: Jeanie, of all people, being appointed by fate to find her dead husband first. Jeanie, who was afraid of spiders, and the dark, and of any suggestion to stray even slightly from the missionary style of lovemaking in all those years of their marriage.

  It would take time, Jeanie knew, that morning she lay next to her dead husband, warm tears spilling down the sides of her face and onto Henry’s cold arm. It would take time. She had given answers to all the questions she was being asked about her husband, questions that seemed so distant from the man himself—no pulse, no heartbeat—questions she answered without checking his cold wrist, without putting her ear to the silent drum of his heart. She knew the answers. And as much as she tried to stay there in the present, she couldn’t stop her mind from rushing ahead, from giving her a glimpse into the rest of her life. Yes, it would take time to get used to certain words and phrases: My husband died last month. Widow. My husband has been dead for five years. Beneficiary. But that’s how it was when they’d gotten married, back in 1980, the same year Ronald Reagan became the fortieth president of the United States, and Jimmy Carter took Rosalyn and went back to Georgia. Jeanie had said the new words and phrases then, learning them easily as the years began to unfold: We’ve been married just a month. Husband. We’re celebrating our fifth anniversary. Wife. The words and phrases of change. And that’s when it occurred to her that she would have to break the news to the kids. Lisa now lived down in Portland with her new husband. And Chad, poor Chad, was still only fifteen and worshipping every move Henry made.