Five Roses

by Alice Zorn

  “Isn’t it just melted?”

  “More than melted. The foam gets skimmed off, you let the butter cook a while, then you strain it. That gets rid of the milk solids. You’re left with …” She swirled the bowl of clear yellow liquid. “Pure butter.”

  She grabbed a pastry brush off a rack of spatulas, whisks, and ladles, took a rolling pin from a drawer, set a canister of flour on the counter. She poured ghee into a dish, sprinkled flour on the counter, scooped one of Maddy’s balls from under the cloth.

  “What did you call the balls?”

  “Loyas.”

  Channa, aloo, loyas, tawah. She’d forgotten the word for eggplant. Maybe when they ate, Yushi would say it again.

  Yushi had rolled the dough into a circle. She nodded at the dish of clarified butter. “Take the pastry brush. Cover this. Don’t skimp. The ghee is what makes the layers.”

  Maddy squinted to catch the reflection of wetness on the dough, trying not to miss anywhere, especially with Yushi watching. Then Yushi said, “You know, you don’t have to go to the doctor. You can get glasses at a pharmacy.”

  “I can see. It’s just hard to tell where I’ve already brushed.”

  Yushi smirked. “My mum used to squint like that. I got her glasses at the pharmacy — with leopard print frames. They were cool.”

  “Do I …” Maddy wasn’t sure she wanted to ask.

  “Act like you need glasses? Yes. The other day you had to ask Geneviève to read a bill for you.”

  “No, I wondered if … I’m probably the same age as your mother was. Do I remind you of her?”

  “My mum?” Yushi’s voice rose in surprise. “You’re not at all like my mum! Except that you’re as vain about not needing glasses when you obviously do.”

  Vain? Maddy nodded. She would stop at the pharmacy and buy a pair of glasses.

  Yushi touched the tip of a knife to the centre of the dough circle and sliced a radius. “Now we roll it up.” She lifted one cut edge and began to roll it around the circle, forming a cone. “The ghee keeps the layers separate. It’s the same principle as puff pastry — when you make croissants.” She tucked the tips of the cut edges inside both ends of the cone, flattened the top, and slipped it under the towel.

  “Want to make one?” She held up the next loya.

  “I’ll stick to this.” Maddy lifted the pastry brush. She wouldn’t be able to handle the dough as deftly as Yushi. She was glad she’d asked if she reminded Yushi of her mother. If it didn’t matter to Yushi that she was the same age as her mother, why should it to her?

  From down the hallway she heard the outside door open and close. It must be Rose, the roommate with the studio and the loom.

  Rose’s steps neared the kitchen, then stopped. Maddy had turned to say hello, but didn’t when she saw how blankly Rose stared at her.

  Yushi said, “Hey.”

  “Hi.” Very quiet.

  “You remember Maddy?”

  No answer. As if she hadn’t heard or didn’t understand the words.

  Yushi seemed not to notice. “I hope you didn’t eat. I’ve got a feast on the go here. It’ll be ready in about an hour.”

  “I’m going to lie down for a while.” Rose slipped away and Maddy heard a door close. When she and Yushi visited Rose’s studio, she’d noticed how low Rose’s voice was. A mezzo register — but without any trace of song.

  “Is she …” Maddy began. She didn’t want to sound rude. When she’d first met Yushi, she’d found her behaviour strange, too. Except that she’d felt curious about Yushi. She didn’t feel curious about Rose.

  “She grew up in the country — in the woods in a cabin. She doesn’t always feel comfortable with people. She’s a bit shy.”

  More than just shy, Maddy thought.

  Yushi stepped away from the counter and held out the rolling pin. “You’re going to make one now. And remember, it’s not a cabbage roll. It’s a buss-up-shut.”

  Rose

  Rose had left her trolley at the nursing station since there was only one Styrofoam container to carry to the kitchen. Ahead of her an orderly was pushing a woman in a wheelchair. She was complaining because the test had taken so long and her intravenous hurt. Did the nurses remember to order a meal so she could eat now? Probably not. They starved you in this place.

  As the orderly turned into the room, he raised his eyebrows at Rose. Once again she was glad she hadn’t gotten a job working with patients. They were too peevish in illness. Cranky and demanding. The woman in the wheelchair didn’t even look sick.

  Maman’s face had been pale, her cheeks wan. Her breath had kept failing so she had to stop and sit. Yet never once had she complained. Rose pressed her lips tight with pride. She would be stoic like that, too. Not make a nuisance of herself.

  Then Rose had a thought, so sudden and surprising it made her steps slow. Maman might still be alive if she had complained. If she had told a doctor — or Rose — how her heart stumbled and bounded. Her heart could have been fixed with an operation. The coroner had said so. Of all Maman’s symptoms, the most dangerous had been her silence.

  With one hand Rose tapped the shuttle across the taut span of threads. With the other she swung the beater toward her to tamp down the yarn. She was weaving a vein of crimson bouclé into zigzags of brown to echo the glint of red in the warp. Secret accents made the cloth richer, gave it depth.

  She snipped the red bouclé and reached for a spool of gold. Already the cloth stretched over the breast beam. Even though she had executed each workaday step — preparing the warp, winding it, dressing the loom, tying up the treadles — it still felt like magic to see the hundreds of threads meld into a pattern and become cloth.

  She slid her feet from treadle to treadle. Held her arms wide to catch the shuttle. Through the open panes of the window she could hear the tap of the sculptor’s mallet followed by the clang of the chisel on stone. Thuds punctuated by scrapes and pauses.

  Yesterday she’d had to rush off to work at the hospital, and the day before she’d had a dentist appointment. Today she had the whole wonderful day to herself and could stay through the afternoon and into the evening. She’d stopped at the market and bought a piece of cheddar, two tomatoes, a cucumber, a baguette. A feast! Yushi would have added a more exotic flavour — spiced Moroccan olives or a jar of baba ghanouj — but Rose looked forward to the simple farm vegetables. She would sit outside on the grass by the canal to eat her supper.

  She was so hypnotized by the dance of hands and arms, the glide of her feet from treadle to treadle, that she was startled when the end of the yarn flipped from the shuttle. Already time for more.

  She dropped a bobbin onto the winder she’d braced on the edge of the work table. As she cranked the handle, she gazed out the window at the grass, the bike path, the trees on the other side of the canal. A cyclist in red spandex and a gleaming insect-head helmet careened past. An Asian man shuffled along, pulling a metal shopping cart. Earlier in the summer she’d seen him crouched to the ground, picking dandelion leaves he collected in a small burlap sack.

  Then a young man with hair to his shoulders ambled past with his head turned to her window. An instant later he ambled by again from the other direction, still staring. Rose drew her elbows in, instantly alert — until she recognized the long twists of hair. She’d wondered if she might see Leo again, but had expected it would be outside, by the canal like last time.

  What was he doing, parading back and forth in front of her window? Now that he saw she’d noticed him, he stopped, smiling broadly.

  Four of her bottom windowpanes were open. As she crossed the room, he scuffed toward the chain-link fence. “Hey,” he called. “What’s that contraption?”

  “A loom!”

  “What’s that?”

  Did no one in the city know what a loom was? “Wait.” She walked out of her studio down t
he hall to the loading dock. The sculptor was crouched at the bottom of the ramp, scraping a rasp across an indentation in the marble. He’d told her the shape wasn’t supposed to be anything, but her mind still grasped for a similarity that made sense. A fat fish upright on its tail. A misshapen vase.

  She waved for Leo to come up the ramp. The sculptor acted as if he didn’t notice, but she caught his smirk. He was as much a gossip as the self-righteous women of Rivière-des-Pins.

  Leo played along, sneaking through the weeds on tiptoe past the sculptor and up the ramp. In the hallway he said, “You really concentrate. I’ve been waiting for you to notice me.”

  The coils of his hair looked fluffier than she remembered. “How did you know which window was mine?”

  “I’ve been watching you since you were up on a ladder, washing the walls. I made sure you didn’t fall.” He grinned, showing off his chipped tooth. “I’ve got powers, you know.”

  Her hand was on the doorknob, but she didn’t turn it. His words nudged a memory she didn’t like. “You were spying on me.”

  His grin fading, he said, “No. Not spying.” His eyes were serious. “Anybody could have seen me standing right there. The sculptor saw me. All you had to do was turn your head and look. Like today.”

  It was true that when she was weaving, she completely forgot to look out the window. She wasn’t sure why, but she decided to believe him.

  She opened the door and let Leo walk in. He walked right up to her loom, peered into the shaft, then down at the treadles and the brake. He took soft steps around the wooden geometry of angles and beams, the heddles and reed that held the threads in place. He was curious, more curious than anyone else had been. “I’m guessing you’ve got to know what you’re doing,” he said.

  “My mother taught me.”

  “But you do it because you like it.”

  “I love weaving.” In the bare room the simple words sounded like a vow.

  “Do you sell what you weave?”

  “This piece? No.”

  “You could.”

  “I know. My mother and I, we used to sell.” She stopped. She didn’t want to explain about Maman. Not right now. “I’m making this for a friend.” The bravado of the claim surprised her. Was she a person who had friends? “My roommate,” she added, as if that sounded more proper.

  “You live around here?”

  “No.”

  “Too bad. I could see you more often.” He smiled.

  She felt herself smiling back. Mirror effect. The pleasure, too, of hearing that he wanted to see her again.

  He noticed the baguette and tomatoes on the dresser. “Are you expecting company?”

  “Are you hungry?”

  He shrugged. “I could eat. All I had for breakfast was an apple.”

  She dropped the vegetables that she’d washed and dried into her cloth shopping bag, tucked the baguette under her arm, and grabbed a small serrated knife. “Will you get water?”

  He reached for two of the three mugs she’d bought at the dollar store in case Yushi or Kenny visited. A third guest was more than she could imagine just yet, but some hopeful instinct had made her buy a third mug. She felt giddy with the surprise of hosting a lunch.

  Leo walked ahead, balancing the mugs of water he’d filled to the brim. Following him down the hallway to the loading ramp, she looked at his body more closely than she had yet. His narrow shoulders. The loose hang of his jeans.

  “This way.” She led them away from the sculptor’s curiosity toward a tree that cast shade and partly hid them from view.

  She sat on the grass, emptied the bag of vegetables and cheese, and spread it between them. Leo set the mugs at opposite corners. He took the knife and cut pieces of cheese, sliced the cucumber in chunks, sawed through the baguette. He sat close enough that she could smell him. It wasn’t a dirty or a sweaty smell, but as if he’d just woken from sleep and hadn’t washed yet.

  He asked how she’d met her roommate and if they got along. He wondered what kind of name Yushi was. Rose said it was Indian and short for Ayushi. He told her that he sometimes worked in a garage in St-Henri. The job wasn’t regular but they were teaching him. He began explaining how a carburetor worked. Rose listened, happy to have him talking to her, watching the play of interest on his face.

  They’d finished all the food except the cheese, and had sat so long that the shade from the tree had moved and Leo had to squint against the sun when he looked at her. Rose shook the crumbs off their ad hoc tablecloth and put the cheese in the bag. Still they sat in the grass next to each other. Leo hummed a song, mumbling words she couldn’t follow. He broke off and lifted his hand toward her face. Without touching her, he traced a curl in the air. “Your hair,” he said.

  She curved her hair behind her ear. Was that what he wanted?

  “Your ears are pretty.”

  She lowered her eyes, happy yet embarrassed. No one had ever said her ears were pretty.

  “You should wear earrings.”

  Yushi had earrings — a porcelain dish of gleaming lozenges, crescents, drops, and hooks, all tangled together. Maybe she would let Rose borrow a pair.

  Leo had lain back in the grass, hands crossed on his chest. “What’s the deal with you? You show up first thing in the morning. You take off after lunch. Today you’re hanging around. I can’t keep track of you.”

  “I don’t have to go to work today.”

  He squirmed his head to look at her. “You’ve got a job — like a real place where you go and punch in?”

  “I’ve got a schedule, yeah.”

  “Okay. So I need to find out when your next day off is.”

  She felt herself blushing and didn’t know whether to look out at the canal or at Leo. She wanted to see him again, too, but hadn’t expected that they could simply plan to get together. Well, why not? He wasn’t a married man, years older than her, who had to sneak through the woods.

  And bravely, despite the flush on her cheeks, she said, “I’m off every second weekend, and when I work weekends, I get Monday and Thursday off.”

  He rolled on his side to face her, crooking an arm under his head to pillow it. “You’ll be here again Thursday.”

  She nodded, daring herself not to look away.

  Rose rinsed the saucepan she’d scrubbed, and dried it. In her mind she was still by the canal with Leo. She had wondered if he would move closer. Though she hardly knew him, she wished he would. Another part of her marvelled at his lazy appreciation of time. How he assumed there would be more days like this in the grass under the trees with the sun on the water — that they had time to get to know each other. Leo had finally yawned and said he had to go to the garage to see if they wanted him tomorrow morning. ’Cause I don’t have a phone, he explained. Rose thought everyone in the city had a phone. She and Yushi had one, though it rarely rang.

  From Yushi’s room came the choreographed dialogue of a TV show. Rose flapped out the tea towel and hung it on the back of a chair. In the doorway to Yushi’s room she asked, “Do you want a drink?” Their latest favourite cooler was cranberry juice spritzed with club soda.

  Yushi, who lay propped on her bed, sat upright and aimed the remote at the TV to shut it off. “Bunch of dumb shows.”

  Rose glanced at the dish heaped with jewellery on Yushi’s dresser. “I wanted to ask you,” she began, but stopped when she saw how Yushi was watching her.

  “Am I supposed to guess?” Yushi asked. “Is it about food? About clothes?”

  “Earrings. Will you let me borrow a pair?”

  “Just like that? You’ve decided to wear earrings?”

  Rose didn’t answer. Yushi would probably figure it out soon enough, but until Rose knew more about Leo, she wasn’t telling. She peeked at the earrings again. Yushi hardly ever wore them, though she kept her bracelet on all the time, even to sl
eep.

  Yushi slid forward off the bed and, with no warning, reached up to pinch Rose’s earlobes. “You don’t have holes.”

  Rose didn’t know what she meant.

  Yushi snatched an earring from the dish and waggled the hook at Rose. “Look.” She pulled at her earlobe, where Rose saw a slashed pucker in the flesh. “We’ve got to make holes. Then you can wear as many of these as you want.”

  “I didn’t know …” Did everyone who wore earrings have holes in their ears?

  “It’s easy. I saw my mom do it for my little sister. I was a baby when mine were done.” Yushi had opened the top drawer of her dresser and was rummaging through underwear and socks. From the very back of the drawer, she fished out a small box. Inside, on quilted cloth, nestled two tiny hanging bells in rich yellow gold. “These were my mom’s.”

  Rose drew back her shoulders. “Don’t give me your mom’s.”

  “It’s the only gold I have and you need gold at the start so your holes stay clean.”

  Yushi strode past her to the kitchen. Still unsure, but hearing the freezer door slam and a drawer being rattled open, Rose followed. The ice cube tray was on the counter. Yushi was filling the kettle. “Get a sewing needle,” she said.

  A sewing needle and boiling water. Ice on the earlobe to freeze it. It didn’t hurt when Yushi stabbed her with the needle and pushed the earrings through, though later that night her ears felt sore when pressed against her pillow.

  But that was okay, Rose thought, because now she could wear earrings.

  As Rose pushed her cart down the hallway, she heard how each movement made the tiny gold bells that dangled from the earrings tinkle.

  That morning, when she arrived at the studio and drew back the curtains, she found a yellow page, folded and tucked against one of the windowpanes. It wasn’t a pane she could open, and she’d had to go back down the hallway and outside through the weeds. She was curious about the paper, half-guessing, half-suspicious. She hadn’t forgotten Kenny’s tale about squatters.