“So why are you painting the guest room?” he says.
Rosie speaks in a low voice. “I’m trying to get this place in order for when Soapie can’t live here anymore and we have to sell it. Her doctor said he’d like to see her in an assisted-living place sooner rather than later, because of the little strokes she’s having.”
“That’s wack,” he says. “She’s in there dancing, for God’s sake. She doesn’t need assisted living.”
“Well, I know it may seem that way to you right now, but the doctor’s point is that she could get used to it before she really needs all the services, and she could be in the independent-living part and then get increasing amounts of help as she needs it.”
He scowls. “She’s fine. The best place she can be is here with us. We’re assisting her with living.”
“Yeah, but who knows how long we’re staying?” she says. “As my fiancé points out, we need to be practical. And she doesn’t seem to want to take care of herself.”
He puts the plates on the bottom row of the dishwasher. “I hate this kind of talk. She just wants to have fun. Eat good food, do fun things, have a little romance, enjoy the neighbor’s peonies. I don’t see what’s so wrong with that.”
“Well, of course it’s fine for now,” she says. “It just won’t stay this way. She’s going downhill, in case you haven’t noticed.”
“But why should we rush it?” he says. He frowns as he wrestles the pots onto the top row of the dishwasher and closes the door, and Rosie can absolutely feel what he’s thinking about her right then: that she’s the type of person who would gladly put her grandmother in some kind of facility just so she can go out and join her noncommittal, teacup-loving boyfriend who doesn’t care enough about her to marry her, even when she had the celebration all arranged. And that she’s even too clueless to know that she’s pregnant. Which, by the way, she is not. He is clearly the bossiest, nosiest person she’s ever met, and he’s given her a headache.
“It’s not how you think it is,” she says to him, getting to her feet. “Things aren’t always the way they look, you know. That’s what you learn when you get older.”
She heads up the stairs to bed.
“If I were you, I’d go buy a test,” he calls after her.
She eats the steak dinner he makes for her the next night, and she has to admit it’s good, even if the sight of the mushrooms make her a little bit skeevy. All that slimy brownness. She eats them anyway, just so he won’t get on the pregnancy bandwagon again—telling her how food sensitivities are just more evidence. She’s armed tonight, though, with news she gleaned from the Internet: getting pregnant at age forty-four is pretty much considered a freaking miracle—and the odds of having gotten pregnant at that age in one accidental time of unprotected intercourse are practically incalculable. She very much hopes, though, that she will not start talking about her sex life with Tony Cavaletti.
Soapie and George go into the living room after dinner again; more slow dancing to Frank Sinatra. Rosie looks in on them, and she reports to Tony that what they call dancing looks more like standing in the middle of the room and swaying one inch in each direction.
“Dancing with the Stars, here they come,” he says. “Gotta love it.”
“It’s hugging to music,” she says. “I can’t get over it. The Dustcloth Diva Finally Falls in Love. Now that’s the book she ought to be writing.”
“Except she’s having too much fun to write it,” Tony says. “Say,” he says in an artificially bright voice, a change-the-subject voice. “I’ve kinda been wondering this. Why do you call her Soapie anyway? Is it because of those cleaning books? Because she’s so clean?”
“No. Hardly that. When I was three, I probably couldn’t pronounce Mrs. Baldwin-Kelley.”
He looks startled. “What? She didn’t want you to call—oh, you’re joking.”
“Well, not by much. I think she wanted me to call her Sophie, and I heard it wrong or something.”
“But why not Grandma? Or, I don’t know, Oompa or Nonnie or something.”
“Why, let’s go ask her why she didn’t want to be Grandma. This ought to be interesting,” she says, and she gets up and limps over to the door to the living room where Soapie and George are hanging on to each other, sidestepping to Frank Sinatra.
When the song ends, Rosie says, “Hey, Soapie! Tony here wants to know how come I call you by your name, and not Nonnie or Oompa or Meemaw or something.”
“I didn’t say that,” he protests from behind her.
“Okay, call me Oompa then,” Soapie says. She flings her hand out as George softly turns her in a spin. “In fact, call me anything you want.”
“But he wants to know why you didn’t want me to call you Grandma when you first got me.”
“Now why in the world would I have wanted that? I was forty-seven years old. I was still cute back then.” She smiles in that coquettish way she now has—the way she did when she was talking about George being ardent. The wisps of her hair have come loose from the clip, and she reaches up to capture them again.
“See?” says Rosie to Tony, smiling. “There you have it. She was too young and pretty to be my grandmother.”
“She may still be too young and pretty to be your grandmother,” says Tony.
“Oh,” says Soapie. “I just wish you could have seen me then. You’d know what I mean. I was still wearing miniskirts and black eyeliner. And, the real reason”—she laughs a little bit and wiggles her hips in a way that Rosie sees would once have been sexy—“well, there was a man, a man who was sort of in love with me at the time, but he got scared away by everything that was happening. I remember he called me Grandma once as a joke, and then I never saw him again. So I was damned if I was going to turn into that. Bad enough I had this toddler who cried all the time and clung to me.”
“Oh, well. Losing a mom can do that to a toddler,” says Rosie in a low voice.
The album has stopped, and Soapie makes her way over to the table, where George hands her a drink, which very nearly slips out of her hands.
“Oh, I knew why you were clingy,” she says, with the slightest hardening in the edge of her voice. “But I didn’t want a kid. And I guess I was dumb enough to think that if you didn’t call me Grandma, it wouldn’t be really true.” She laughs and takes a swig of her piña colada and staggers just the tiniest bit.
Rosie turns to Tony, whose eyes have widened. “So there you have it. That’s why.”
“Let’s put the music back on,” says George, smiling. “I want to keep dancing.” He goes over to the stereo and places the needle back at the beginning of the record. “The Way You Look Tonight” starts playing.
“But it didn’t make the slightest bit of difference,” Soapie says, too loudly, “because I couldn’t get away from being your grandmother. I tried, believe me. I admit it. There weren’t—”
“Sophie, darling, come on over here and dance with me again,” says George.
“—there weren’t any other takers showing up to claim you, is the truth of it,” she says, even louder, “and I certainly wasn’t going to put you in foster care. Some kid in the Bronx had just been killed by his foster mom, and it was in all the papers.”
Rosie sits down on the couch. “So at least you didn’t want me killed,” she says. “We had that going for us.”
“Come on, Sophie,” says George. “I knew you at the time. Don’t say this stuff. You were grief-stricken, and there was never any question that you were going to take Rosie. I remember it.” He winks at Rosie. “This is all embellished. Your grandmother has always adored you.”
Soapie laughs, and Rosie realizes now how drunk she really is. Her eyes somehow look both glittery and vague at the same time. “Don’t start with me on this love and adoration business. I am not going to apologize for what I did or did not feel at that time. I did my duty. And I did it without wallowing, and we survived, I’ll say that for us. We did it, didn’t we, baby?”
“Wi
thout Rosie, you wouldn’t have become the Dustcloth Diva,” says George. He looks like a big teddy bear, broad-shouldered and comforting, ready to embrace all their troubles away if need be. “You did a wonderful job raising Rosie. And Rosie appreciates—”
“Oh, she does. I know she does,” says Soapie, and she trips on the rug but catches herself. She makes her way over to the couch and sits down next to Rosie, and reaches over and pats her on the leg, a little bit harder than necessary. “And now Rosie is not going to end up writing about cleaning products just because it sells and can pay the bills. Rosie will have her choice of occupations, once she gets herself together.”
“But you loved being the Dustcloth Diva,” Rosie says, and she touches her grandmother’s hand. “You got to meet all those famous people, and be—”
“You do not know anything about it,” Soapie says. “Don’t tell me what I loved and didn’t love. I gave up a serious professional life to raise you, and writing that crap was the only thing I could do to make ends meet. To keep this huge house going! To keep you in My Little Ponies and math tutors and field hockey uniforms—”
“Sophie, you had a wonderful—” says George, but she turns on him, too. Rosie sees Tony leaning against the doorjamb, his arms folded, looking just the slightest bit shell-shocked. Good—let him see how Soapie can be. Other people’s old people, indeed.
“Don’t you start up, George. You remember that I was a journalist, so don’t you be chiming in with your platitudes about how at least I was still writing, because it’s not at all true, and you know it. I did it for Rosie, and now all I’m asking of her is that she give me back a promise to live her life with some passion to it. Why does everybody think that’s so bad?”
“Now let’s just turn down the volume on this, shall we?” says George. “It’s getting way out of proportion to the facts. There’s no point to this kind of talk. Come on, sweetheart.”
Soapie drinks the last bit of her piña colada and stares at Rosie. “Well, none of it matters anyway. At least we have our agreement. Don’t we, baby?”
“Our agreement?” says Rosie.
“Yes.” Soapie’s eyes are bright and glassy. “I told you months ago I was going to give you money to go to Europe and become a writer and do what you want, and you told me you were going to get married, and then you came to your senses and didn’t. So now you’ll go. Live out the dream for both of us.”
“Wait. That’s not why I didn’t get married.”
“It doesn’t matter why you broke up with—with whosits. The important point here is that you did. And for that, I’m giving you your freedom.” She flings her arms out and Rosie has to move out of the way to keep from being clobbered. “So take it! I want you to go to Paris and live like I would have done.” She laughs. “Knowing me, I probably would have become a wino, and would have had way more fun than you’re going to have, but that’s neither here nor there. You can go … you can write the good stuff. For me. For both of us.”
“What is this fantasy of yours about me and Paris?” says Rosie. George is signaling to her not to say anything. Even so, she says, “Soapie, I’m afraid that’s your dream. I have never once talked about going to a café in Paris to write.”
“No. I want you to do it! Me!” says Soapie.
“But why can’t I just stay and teach English to people, like I want to do? I shouldn’t have to live the life you wanted, just because you didn’t get to.”
“No, I think you owe me that. Why can’t you be grateful? This is a gift, damn you! Why can’t you just do what I want you to do? Just for once in your life, do it!”
“Now, Sophie,” says George.
“She owes me this. I’m going to live through her.”
“But you can’t live through people,” he says. “It wouldn’t count.”
“I say it would count.” Her voice starts to wobble a little, but she just gets louder. “Damn it, I had to lose my daughter, and now this is what I want to happen. None of you has any business telling me what would count and what wouldn’t count. I want Rosie to live up to her potential. I want her to goddamn live a little just for whatever time she has left. Not sit around here and dribble her whole life away.”
“Whatever time I have left?” says Rosie. “What are you talking about? I’m not dying—” she says, but then she stops. Nobody’s listening anyway. George has come over and pulled Soapie up from the couch and put his arms around her, and her head is on his shoulder, and Tony is quiet, probably planning his escape route if he’s smart.
And Rosie, just sitting there, is having the most blinding sort of epiphany, if that’s the word—maybe too pretentious, she thinks, to call it an epiphany when you realize for like the first time ever that your crazy, impetuous grandmother might be drunk and mean, but she’s also right about you. Really, what is she doing with her life? She has nothing. Nothing. She’s lived this quiet little tucked-in, halfway unsatisfying life, helping her students with their job applications, keeping her apartment clean, going out to breakfast on Saturday mornings, and sometimes babysitting her friends’ kids—but was any of it what she really wanted? Hell, the most interesting things she ever did happened when she was traveling with Jonathan to art shows—and that life’s been over for five years. If a film crew followed her around, what would they see? Nothing. She might as well be dying, for all she’s accomplished. She never had a family, she never owned a house, she never even bought a brand-new car, had a disastrous love affair with an inappropriate person, or even dyed her hair some ghastly shade of red. How does this happen, that you get to be forty-four and you don’t have anything—not even an ill-advised tattoo—to show for it?
And what if she is now in menopause—or worse yet, deathly ill?
She looks at Soapie, who is pulling away from George, and he’s reaching out his arms to catch her if he needs to. This whole night is so weird and strange, this group of people together like this, and Jonathan seems like her missing home planet, on the other side of the country now, not even in the same orbit. She’s lost, is the truth of it; she’s somewhere out bobbing around in the atmosphere where there isn’t enough air for her to breathe.
“Soapie,” she says, finding her voice again, “it’s you who wants to live for the time you have left, and you’re doing it. You are doing it. You’re amazing.”
“It all went by so fast,” says Soapie, and she looks at Rosie with eyes that are wide and frightened. “Life went by so quickly. Rosie, you can’t believe it. It just goes!” She starts to cry, and George wraps his arms around her again, and Rosie starts to cry, too—and Tony materializes beside her and pulls her toward George and Soapie, and for a minute they all stand together, awkward as hell. Rosie can see that George has tears in his eyes, and then Tony does, too, and in another couple of minutes it’s going to turn into a wailathon, but then thank God Soapie pushes them all away.
“Stop it! Just stop it!” she says. “This is maudlin and it’s sentimental, and we’re wallowing, and we’re not ever going to do this again.”
[eleven]
A week later, Greta says that Rosie simply has to come out to dinner with her friends. Just getting out of the house and going into a restaurant, in public, will probably do wonders for her. She’s been avoiding all her friends out of embarrassment over not going to California, fearing she’d have to hear about the chapter “How Rosie and Jonathan Cannot Even Move Together When They Start Over.” But now she doesn’t care anymore.
A funny thing has happened: it’s as though some huge unspoken weight got lifted since the night when Soapie had her meltdown. Maybe it’s just that it’s now so clear that none of the four of them really has a life right now—that they’re all pretty much wrecks, at least temporarily, waiting for the worst to happen and their lives to change—and there’s no reason to pretend otherwise anymore. Tony has taken to calling them the Gang of Four.
George is sad because, as he confided to Rosie one day when they were alone, he really does love his wife
who’s across town with Alzheimer’s, and he loves Soapie, too, and hates what is happening to her. Soapie is slipping more every day and forgetting everything. Rosie is a hormonal mess and unmoored from her life; and Tony—well, Tony is heartbroken over the loss of his son and maybe his marriage, too. Hard to tell because he’ll talk about everything but that, and that’s the worst kind of heartbreak there is, the kind you won’t talk about.
They really are all like mental hospital inmates, Rosie thinks, with Tony rallying himself to be their self-appointed recreation director/caseworker, the one who makes them dance and eat. And now he’s discovered that they can play Scrabble every night, so he hauls out the board and makes them play. He’s probably no more intact than the rest of them, but at least he tries. He bosses them around and talks loudly, pours their drinks, and makes them the foods his mother used to make him in childhood, lasagnas and pasta fagioli and manicotti (which he pronounces “monny-goat,” which he claims is the genuine Italian way). He says he knows the best way of preparing all foods.
Once the Scrabble game ends, usually by cutthroat Soapie losing and “accidentally” knocking over the board, they turn the music up too loud and sing along. Their favorite song, appropriately enough, is “Crazy,” by Patsy Cline, and Rosie has to admit, they make it sound quite convincing.
But even Rosie can see that she has to get out of the house and back to polite company.
“So start from the time we all left the restaurant,” Suzanne says once she, Greta, Lynn, and Rosie have settled into the gigantic round booth in the back of Bentara’s and ordered a bottle of red and a bottle of white. Rosie is sitting on the end so she can stick her bandaged foot out. Tucking it underneath her in one position makes it start throbbing again. She’s glad it’s kind of dark in there, so they can’t see the dark circles and bags under her eyes. “You walked into the parking lot and just broke up right then and there? Sent him packing, as it were?”
The Opposite of Maybe: A Novel Page 11
