The Hare Page 10
Rosie did not like how she felt, disembodied and flushed and uncertain. “Just fifty for the wood. That’s all I need.” The phone was heavy, the plastic slightly sticky. “I love him. We’re happy.” She imagined the mouthpiece smeared with germs and despair from all the others who’d stood right here imploring into the punctured mouthpiece, whatever their needs — a ride, money, love. Who else uses the phone at Dunkin’ Donuts? The needy, the drunk, the abandoned, those with error-filled lives.
Gran said: “What makes you think I have money to spare?”
This was all about money. The money Bennett mysteriously had, his magic tricks. Hobie buying paintings. Gran: Gran hunched over the kitchen table, the calculator in her hand, envelopes, bills, stamps, and the lodgers who came and went with their dog smells and dirty sheets, Gran knocking softly on a door, saying a name, making a demand that was more like an apology.
The memories were an abacus, and Rosie could align them in their rows, she could draw out a certain sense or story, and she suddenly understood the cold grey food Gran had brought home from the cafeteria, not out of spite or laziness, but imperative. And on the row of counting beads was The Giggle Man. Rosie felt him, then, his gloved hands upon her ribcage. Do you like it when I do this. He gave her money, rolled tight as a cigarette. For your Grandmother, he’d say. Good girl, there’s a good girl.
“Did he pay you?” Rosie challenged.
“Who?”
“The Gig — the lodger. He wore white gloves.”
“There were many lodgers. Dozens.”
Something about how Gran had answered that too readily, how she hadn’t even paused to flick through her memories. “You knew about him! You knew what we was doing and you did nothing. You did nothing to stop it. Maybe you even let him, maybe he paid you for me, too, so when I ask you for fifty maybe you owe me because of what I did, you sent me up the stairs —”
“Who?” Gran’s voice was rushed and shrill. “Who are you talking about? What did he do —”
But Rosie hung up the phone. Miranda started grizzling, her teeth were bothering her. “There, there, my sweet,” Rosie said. “There, there.”
The Giggle Man. Her name for him because he tickled her and she giggled. That’s what he did. He tickled her and tickled her until she ached and sobbed with laughter.
But she kept laughing, she kept giggling, and he kept tickling her.
Do you like it when I do this.
It was dusk by the time she returned home — if she must call it home, the destination she’d found herself at the end of a road halfway up a mountain mid-November. Bennett had gone back to bed, he’d let the fire die down and the house was bitterly cold. Rosie heard his somnolent breathing and had the urge to poke him, a bear through the cage.
She unclipped the bottle opener from the BMWs key ring — there’d be time to make an excuse; she could say, for instance, that it must have fallen off when he went into the ditch. Miranda was restless after the hours in the backpack, so Rosie started back outside quickly.
Billy’s dogs set up their insane alarm, though it was insufficient to invoke their owner. Rosie banged on the door, again and again, until at last it flew open. “WATHAFUCKYAWAN?”
“I need good firewood,” she said.
The dogs were howling, Miranda screaming. Billy frowned, confused by the cheap bourbon of which she stank, the noise of her half-starved dogs, the improbability of a girl with a baby coming to her home after dark.
Rosie held out the bottle opener. “This is from Himmler’s private bar. It must be worth something. You can trade it.”
Billy squinted at the opener. “Ya wanta trade a bottle opena for fiyawood?”
“Himmler’s bottle opener. A genuine Nazi artifact.”
“Looksa reglar bottle opena ta me. Fifty cents downna tha redemption centa.”
“This one’s worth a lot of money.”
“Is tha roight?”
“Hundreds,” Rosie stated. “Bennett is a dealer in art and antiques. He sells this kind of thing for hundreds, three-four hundred, to collectors.”
“Reckin yull be lookin’ for a collecta, then.”
Billy stepped back, she began to shut the door. Rosie grabbed the handle. “Please.” Then softer, leaner: “Please.”
The next day, Billy helped Rosie stack the wood, showing her how to brace with crosspieces. Billy told her about dry wood, seasoned wood, green wood, shit wood, pisswet wood and goodfa fuck all wood, and how you had to know your stove, which wood to start with, which to fuel the heat, and which to last the night on a slower, cooler burn. She told Rosie about kindling. Without good kindlin’, a fiyas nevah gonta start. She showed Rosie how to split wood with an awl. When Rosie asked her in, she refused. “No, thankya koindly.”
In the kitchen, the kettle was whistling madly as Bennett stood at the sink watching Billy’s truck depart. “Will we be having him round for evenings of cribbage and fine Spanish port?”
Rosie almost corrected the gender. Instead she took off her sock-mitten, her warm boots. Bennett had let the fire die down so she stoked it. The kettle shrieked on.
“Look at this sofa,” he sneered. “It’s put me off chintz for life.”
And Miranda had taken the lid off the jar of flour, she had flung flour in Kandinsky-like arcs, she had stuffed it in her mouth. Rosie squatted down and began to clean.
“Not an arabica bean fora hundred miles.”
The kettle blared and steamed inches from his hand. He seemed not to notice. He was wearing three cashmere sweaters and two pairs of wool trousers. On her knees with the sponge and the flour, Rosie glanced up from the floured floor and the floured child.
“I heard wolves circling the car. It was a Hemingway moment. Like the hyenas in The Green Hills of Africa. Death was right there, right there!” He had to raise his voice over the kettle. “The college has offered me a room during the week so I don’t have to risk the drive.”
She heard the lie and stood and turned off the kettle.
Over the winter, Bennett came back on the weekends and they went into town to do the shopping and the laundry, he paid for everything from his money clip, those crisp lettuce bills, wherever they came from. They ate what they could buy at the supermarket — “Alas, no brocollini, I fear the locals would think it deformed broccoli, unaccustomed as they are to anything not wrapped in plastic. And I thought this was a farming community.”
Bennett complained that the house was too cold, she could never get it warm enough. He always fucked her from behind now. She wanted tenderness, she wanted love like rain in the desert, she wanted Gran to kiss her goodnight and tuck her into bed, she wanted her mother and her father and time to rewind, undo, do over. But she had, instead, this threadbare lust. Bennett moved his fingers around her, inside her, and she wondered who had taught him, a Parisienne call girl, his family’s maid, the Duchess of Devonshire? And then on Sunday afternoon he would leave and she’d wonder at the stopped-clock silence and the way time would begin again with the drip of the tap or the whine of Billy’s chain saw across the white fields or Miranda’s chiming laugh. Then relief, like a scullery maid off duty at last in the large house of a rich man, alone with her own soft hours.
In the middle of the night, when Rosie got up to feed the stove, the house was still and timeless and cold. It was never really warm, unless she sat right by the stove, practically embracing it. She had moved the bed downstairs and into the dining room, and she took to sleeping in her clothes so she wouldn’t have to dress and undress. The upstairs was horrifically frigid — Miranda’s old diapers were frozen in the pail in the morning, and a pipe burst in the shower. Billy had told her she’d better shut off the water entirely up there and gave her directions for how to do this.
Sometimes after stoking the stove in the night, Rosie sat in its proximity and sketched it. In one version, the stove loomed ominously, black and solid: the compression of shadow. In another, the stove glowed with life-warmth, with magical power. She
wondered who else it had warmed in its lifetime. Simply by shifting the perspective, she could change its moods.
Outside the night was still or restless. There were clear nights, diamond-sharp and diamond-cold and in the morning the snow squeaked underfoot. Storms slammed down from the north or stampeded from the west, all the way from the Central Plains and the Great Lakes. Sometimes they slithered up from the south, warm and sloppy, spattering the windows with a batter of snow and ice. She had never thought about weather in Lowell or New York or Southport, the weather was merely more or less convenient, more or less comfortable. Here, it changed everything — the landscape transformed with a storm, the dark pines huddled in the wind and the freezing rain or illuminated under the fierce touch of an ice storm, the glittering branches tinkling in the wind.
She was aware, her eyes were opening, she gained a new quality of sight, and in the days, she walked into the winter world with Miranda on her back. Billy had given her an old pair of snowshoes, and now she left the road, plunged into the fields and woods. The walking in deep snow kept her warm, she could feel and hear her heart, and had a distinct sense of her anatomy — tendons, sinew, muscle, bone within the firm package of her skin. She was strong.
Winter laid bare structure — the rocky granite bones of a hill, the limber skeleton of a tree. She loved the red spike of bramble against white snow and painted this in her mind because she had no paints, they’d been left behind, and sometimes she wondered who’d thrown her things away, maybe Selena, crumpling up the glove sketches. The winter light this far north was low-angled, casting sharp shadows, and upon the snow, she saw a new geometry.
The snow itself was never white, not when she really looked at it, but dappled with blue and violet or tinted umber, gold, rose. In the moonlight, it turned navy, aubergine. Upon the snow, she found the tracks of creatures, and took to sketching these. One day, she and Miranda had walked into town to the library, and she’d checked out a tracking guide. She had then learned the spoor of bobcat, coyote, weasel, squirrel, turkey, crow, deer mice, chipmunk. When the snow was firm and fresh, she could read their stories, their itineraries, and she wondered at their business, so much went on, unseen.
On this day, she turned into the woods on an old logging track, wanting to see if she could connect beyond the beaver pond to the snowmobile trail, and then loop back homeward. After several hours walking, she sat down on a log and took out a snack for herself and Miranda. The sun, gathering strength in March, fell upon them in the clearing, so warm Rosie took off their jackets. Snow melted from the trees, the sound of the dripping in the otherwise stillness had an almost metallic precision, and Rosie felt the gift: this was hers, she would carry it within her, no matter what happened, she’d have this moment in the sun. Some things could not be stripped from you. A crow chided her from a spruce, and Rosie chided back. Back and forth they went, the gentle cah-cah, cah-caahhh arguing about which had the better position, the log or the tree. At last the crow lifted her obsidian wings in three beats, into the air, But I can do this! And Rosie laughed, calling after her, “All right, you win!”
Coming back along the road, she was surprised to see Bennett’s car in the drive. It was mid-week. Stamping the snow from her boots, she entered. The house was chilly from hours without warmth.
He was sitting in the chair by the stove. She walked past him and tended the fire in brusque movements. “Can’t you at least keep the fire going?”
Even with her back to him, she felt the dissonance of him. Turning, she saw that he had not slept, his eyes were deep within his sockets, yet his pupils were bright and hard as brass thumb tacks. His hair was lank, and she became aware of his sour smell. Miranda crawled to him, swarmed up his legs. He buried his face for a moment in his child’s body.
“You like walking,” he said.
“Yes.” Rosie was trying to calculate this new tone, this strange mood.
“Who gave you the snowshoes?”
“I found them in the basement.”
“No, you didn’t.”
It was a flat disavowal, like a slap. Rosie looked out the window. If she was to paint the snow at this time of day, she’d use hues of orange. “Billy —” she began.
“Billy,” Bennett said savagely. “Does Billy even know who Ezra Pound is?”
And yet the house was warm because of Billy, Bennett was alive because of Billy.
Bennett sighed, he was out of cigarettes. “Where is my bottle opener?”
“Your bottle opener?”
“My father’s bottle opener.”
“Why would I know what happened to your bottle opener?”
“Maybe Billy does. He had the perfect opportunity.”
“Billy drinks from cans.”
Bennett smiled. “Not bad, Rosie. I must give you credit. But you have a lot to learn.”
She watched him: he was standing still; yet, within him — that off-stage man — she sensed movement, erratic, chaotic. She felt frightened. For now he stood, Miranda at his hip, and moved toward Rosie, he very gently kissed her, and with a low voice that was the opposite of the gentle kisses, he said: “This is how you do it, Rosie, this is how you lie.” His hand went down into her trousers, into her underpants, his fingers into her vagina. She tried to back away but he hooked her, and he leaned in close: “The college, Rosie, the college has awarded me a fellowship in Paris. My work with Sartre and the other existentialists and how I’m synthesizing their philosophies with those of the Civil Rights Movement. It’s an incredible opportunity, I’ll be gone for at least a fortnight.”
Letting her go, he put thirty dollars on the table beside her. “Here’s some money.” Then he started toward the door, Miranda still firmly on his hip. Rosie grabbed his sleeve, she heard herself utter little, bouncing No’s: no no no no. He was taking her baby. With all her weight she tried to counter him, but he pulled and she was on her knees, and he was dragging her. Miranda, alert to the anxiety in her mother’s voice, began to cry. Thus Bennett edged toward the door, the screaming baby, the crying woman. Instinctively, he tried to fling Rosie off, but she was stronger and quicker now and she held on and Miranda screamed and flailed about; unforgivably, she was reaching for her mother.
“Shut up, shut up!” Bennett shouted at Miranda, holding her in both hands Shut up shut the fuck up he had come undone, Rosie saw he was without restraint and she saw into the future, the fractional seconds ahead, in which he would shake their child, her head upon her narrow neck battering back and forth in the terrible wind of his rage.
A new voice came forth, a low growl: “Bennett.”
He was still far away, his muscles were already beginning to tense, his hands tightened their grip and the neurons in his brain were already beginning to shake his child.
“Bennett,” Rosie uttered, placing her hands firmly on top of his. His eyes lifted to hers, and she wondered if this stranger was the real man, at last he was here. Then she felt him soften, retract, he stepped back, leaving the weight of Miranda in her hands, and he turned and ran out the door.
Cheddar cheese 1.76
Bread .55
Can of tuna .59
Can of tuna .59
Can of tomatoes .69
Campbell’s soup 3 for 1.00
Potatoes 5lb 1.23
3 boxes of spaghetti 1.28
Milk 1.59
Dozen eggs .80
Ground beef 1.47
Frozen green beans .29
Frozen spinach .29
Bag of oranges 2.31
Butter 1.59
Peanut butter 1.49
Coffee 2.13
Shredded Wheat 1.29
4 jars baby carrots 4 for 1.00
4 jars baby barley and beef 4 for 4.00
4 jars baby banana and strawberry 4 for 1.00
Tampons 3.69
Frozen chicken drumsticks 2.34
Vegetable oil 2.59
Rosie arrived at the checkout, slid the items onto the conveyor belt. She’d made a rough
estimate in her head, yet the cashier told her “$35.85.” She felt herself scroll inward, tighter and tighter, and she suddenly had an intimate connection to her stomach, could feel its dimensions, its rubbery exterior and the pooling yellow acid welling within. “I don’t have enough,” she mumbled.
The cashier regarded the 30 dollars in Rosie’s hand. She was not unkind, just matter-of-fact, there were three people waiting. “What you wanta put back, hon?”
Rosie didn’t know.
A large man in dirty sweat pants emblazoned with the NASA logo stood behind her. Breathing.
The cashier handed Rosie a coupon flier. “Somma this’ll help ya.”
Apologetically, Rosie shoveled all the items back into her cart as the NASA scientist shuffled forward in his flip-flops. His terrible feet were the color of plums, mottled and peeling and he smelled of dampness, of folded skin. Such were the denizens of the supermarket; they had rotting feet and missing teeth, they were over-weight — they moved like sailors carrying heavy cargo on an unsteady boat: legs wide taking timid steps, their hips tilting back to counterbalance the volume of their torsos. Their diet was mostly the extra-large size of anything nutritionally useless. The food of the poor is not the food of the rich, it is sweeter, saltier, creamier, cheesier, softer, brighter, it has rainbow sprinkles and pink frosting, it has the visual subtlety of cheap greeting cards or free calendars from the bank. How Bennett recoiled from what he saw in this market, sneering at bread labeled “French baguette,” marveling at the giant people buying giant bottles of soda. “How do they wipe their own asses?”
Yet as Rosie saw them today — a few were even familiar, the woman with the dyed red hair and arm tattoos, for instance, the baby in her cart eating Oreos — she thought: this is what you have to comfort you instead of fine art, instead of the Paris Opera, instead of winter in Aruba. You have marshmallows, you have white bread. Beauty is not made for the poor. The poor don’t have money for dentistry, podiatry, dermatology. Billy, for instance, had explained her lack of teeth, Givin me trouble, couldna pay tha bills, fuckin doc takin them out one atta toime, loike drillin holes in chahk tha doc says so we figured best to do is take-em-all out in one go.