Rosie O'Dell Page 6

  Mom said evenly, showing no gratitude for the magnanimity, “Save everyone the trouble of cleaning up before we leave.”

  “That’s what I meant.”

  “Dad, I’m not going back to Twillingate tomorrow.”

  “What? You have to. We’ve only got a one-room cabin. What are you talking about?”

  “I’m staying at Rosie’s house. She needs someone her own age to be with her and help her get through all this.”

  A hint of a smile played at the corners of my father’s lips. He looked at my mother. She glanced at him and turned to gaze upon me, her face a picture of the joy and anguish of motherly love. I could tell they were sharing this thought: How darned cute was this heartbreaker of a son of ours at all! They were really starting to piss me off. I stood up and walked angrily to the kitchen phone. “Anyway, it’s all decided. I’m calling Rosie to tell her I’m coming over.”

  “All decided? What the hell are you—? Wait now, wait now.” Dad turned to Mom. “Have you and Nina talked about this?”

  Mom shook her head, and asked me, “Where were you planning to sleep there?”

  “I’m bringing my sleeping bag over. There’s a couch in the downstairs den. We’ve got all that figured out, Mom.”

  “Let me call Nina and see what’s happening.”

  It was clear from the telephone conversation that Rosie had just told her mother of our plans too. After some palaver, Mom hung up and said to Dad, “Rosie’s best friend is at their cottage on the Terra Nova River. That’s a hundred and fifty miles away. And most of her other friends are scattered around everywhere. So we think their idea is a good one.” She looked at me. “I’ll call Brent’s mother, my sweet, and explain everything to her.”

  “No, Mom,” I said. “I’ll call them. It was me who decided this.” I dialled, feeling their worshipful eyes on me. Where, they were thinking, did they get this paragon? They couldn’t get it through their heads that it had nothing to do with them, that the last thing on my mind was impressing them. God! I couldn’t wait till Rosie and I grew up and moved away together.

  Brent was not pleased with my desertion. “I was really counting on you coming back. And so was Dad. He likes having you around more than me.”

  “No he doesn’t, Brent. And he’ll have more time with you now.”

  “Is this because you think that if that bear chased us I would have run faster than you and let her catch you instead of me? I wouldn’t have, Tom. I would have stayed and helped you fight her off.”

  “I know that, Brent.”

  “Then why? You told me you couldn’t stand that Rosie O’Dell. And now here you are moving in with her. My best friend frigging lied to me. You liked her all the time, Tom. I can’t even depend on my best friend’s word.” He almost sounded like he was about to cry.

  “Yes, you can, Brent. But this suddenly came up. She needs someone her own age. Anyway, we’ll be getting together again in just one week. Mom and Dad are picking you up on their way back. I’ll tell you everything then.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m not going back in there with them. Shag it now. You’ll only be hanging around with her all the time anyway.”

  I made a half-hearted attempt to change his mind, but was secretly glad when I didn’t succeed. I wanted to spend the weeks with Rosie, uninterrupted. I was a bit surprised at the vehemence of Brent’s reaction, though, and felt bad over my perceived betrayal. It would be decades before I realized that the little prick had had a covert love going for Rosie all during that time too. It was a good thing, I would surmise, that we hadn’t in fact gone to the dump that morning. My last sight would have been Brent’s arse and rocketing heels disappearing in his dust as I was being gnawed to death.

  AFTER BREAKFAST EVERY DAY during my week at the O’Dells’ house Rosie and I went up to the girls’ bedroom and gabbed a couple of hours away. Then we’d go for long walks and bicycle rides before returning to the bedroom for more engrossing chats. Pagan mostly stayed downstairs in the kitchen with her mother. Sometimes she would come up and we would try to bring her into the conversation. But our talk would turn esoteric on her and she would leave, often without our noticing, so deep would we plunge into each other’s thoughts. Before the week was out, Pagan was complaining she had no privacy in her own bedroom. So, when my parents came back, Rosie started visiting my house where we could talk undisturbed upstairs in my room, lying side by side on my bed.

  Most days, with Dad at the office and Mom at the hospital, we would have the house to ourselves, except for the elderly housekeeper downstairs whose supervision entailed calling out to us during the commercials in her favourite game shows and soaps to ask if we wanted milk or hot chocolate and brownies or date crumbles.

  “I really like your name,” Rosie said one morning. “Tom Sharpe. I like the way it sounds.”

  “Even though you said last year my name suited me because my head was pointy.”

  “I was only teasing you because you were bugging me about something. I’ve always loved it. It sounds like the hero in a novel, like someone who won a medal—the Victoria Cross—in a war.”

  “That reminds me of something I was thinking on the way back from Twillingate. Every single time you ever said something mean to me it was because I had already started it by saying something mean to you first. I’m sorry about that, Rosie.”

  “I always tried not to say mean stuff to you, but something would happen and next thing you know I was saying it. I’m sorry too, Tom.” Our faces were inches apart on the bed and we kissed for the first time on the lips.

  Often after that Rosie would turn over and put her arms around me and we would press our closed lips together in a chaste kiss, hugging each other for minutes on end. Rosie would murmur, “I love the feeling of this.”

  “I do too.”

  Rosie dwelt on her father. She would always think of her memories of him, she said, as “exquisite.” She’d taken the word from one of his poems entitled “Paradoxes of Passion,” which, at her age—she rolled her eyes—she was not even supposed to have read yet. We laughed at how stupid adults were, trying to hide from kids what kids knew more about than adults did anyway, and she recited for me the lines containing her favourite word: “Today’s exquisite memory of/ Tonight’s forgotten gush of love.”

  “Beautiful,” I said. “What do you figure it’s all about?”

  “Oh, sexual intercourse,” said Rosie.

  I concealed my shock and nodded gravely: “That’s what I was thinking.”

  “How the desire for sexual intercourse,” she went on, “is a more powerful emotion than sexual satisfaction itself, how memory of the feeling is forgotten after satisfaction and is remembered again only when desire for the feelings arises again. I think that’s it.”

  “That sounds right,” I said.

  “I heard Daddy and his friends saying that at a party at our house. That was the same night I heard one woman tell him that the sexual imagery in his poems was erotically powerful enough to make women swoon orgasmically at his public readings.”

  “Hmm,” I responded sagely. “Interesting.”

  “Very.” But getting back to the word “exquisite,” Rosie continued, what was important to her now were the years she’d had with her father when she had discovered from him the three exquisite things she would always treasure most in life: exquisite action to excite the body and brain, exquisite books to engross the mind and spirit, and exquisite love to swell the heart and soul.

  Her need for exciting action had come from being with her father in his canoe on a river, happily frightened out of her wits cascading from the mountains down to the sea.

  Her esteem for engrossing books had begun with her father’s bedtime readings to her and Pagan. He’d make them squirm with pleasure in their side-by-side beds by starting with, “All right then, ladies, let’s see if I can put you to sleep with this story, because if I can, that’s all the proof we’ll need that it’s a flop as literature.” He never put them to
sleep.

  Her fascination with love had formed during the months before his death, after she’d been secretly rummaging in the bookcase in her parents’ bedroom and came across a volume of his poetry. She used to lock herself in the bathroom every day and sit on the laundry hamper and read and reread and learn by heart another of his poems before peeping out to make sure no one was upstairs so that she could sneak the book back to its shelf. It was this third treasured exquisite thing of Rosie’s that occupied her thoughts most that summer, and would agitate me for years ahead.

  She told me she could not stop herself from imagining that she would be grief-stricken unto death unless she was saved by impassioned love. What I wanted to know was what did she mean by impassioned love? To take one example, I asked, did she think our love for each other was impassioned love? Our love was wonderful, she said, really, really great. It had saved her from going around the bend. But we did have to realize that so far in life we were just kids. So what was she talking about, I demanded— sex? No, no, she replied, it had nothing whatever to do with physical sex. Like me, she had long had an academic concept, of course, of physical mating between men and women learned from prescribed books at home and in school, augmented by dirty discussions and speculations with friends, but none of her knowledge in that area comprised what she meant by impassioned love now. In fact, all that physical stuff seemed to belong to a different race on a different planet that she had merely read about.

  Her mother had confirmed to her that when she entered puberty in months to come she would be experiencing novel feelings that she should talk to her about, but all that was irrelevant for the present, stored in a part of her mind separate from present reality, for the distant future when she and I would be grown up and married and living together with our children in a house of our own. I liked the sound of that, until she went on that she could not really say, at least not right now, what she actually meant by impassioned love. She only knew that she had a feeling inside her which identified it perfectly, but she did not understand it enough yet to put it into words. Well, I said, raising my voice and getting up from beside her, when she got around to putting it into words, would she mind letting me in on the big secret?

  Rosie jumped up herself and put her arms around me. “Don’t get mad, Tommy,” she said. “That’s just me—a weird feeling I have that’s got nothing to do with me and you. I love you more than anything in this world. Would you like to go for a ride to Bowring Park on the bikes?”

  ONE EVENING A FEW weeks after Joyce O’Dell’s death, I went to Rosie’s with the Janis Joplin album I’d bought as a present. I knew she loved “Me and Bobby McGee.” From the porch where she met me I saw a huge bouquet of flowers on the table in the hall. Rosie took the record with a distracted thank you and less delight than I’d anticipated. She seemed unsettled. Then, as if remembering something important, she left me in the porch abruptly and stalked down the hall to the kitchen. I heard her lighting into her mother, obviously continuing an interrupted argument. A quarrel between this mother and daughter was not rare enough to make me wonder much about it so, as the voices ranged back and forth, I wandered into the hall and admired the flowers. There must have been a dozen varieties: roses, yellow and pink; carnations, white and red; yellow mums; some sort of a delicate iris, white with a purplish tinge; and the rest, though familiar, I’d never learned the names of.

  Rosie flounced back out of the kitchen still carrying the record album. “Sorry about that,” she said, “but I had to get my point across to the poor thing. Want to go upstairs?”

  “Okay. Those flowers are some nice.”

  “Way too nice if you ask me. I was just telling dear Mother in there that it is very bizarre for her to accept them at this point: every flower known to humankind.” She reeled off names as we went up, including those I hadn’t known.

  “Why, who gave them to her?”

  “Oh the famous Dr. Heathcliff Godolphin Rothesay,” she said, almost spitting out the name. “They must have cost a hundred bucks. And for what purpose, you may ask, so soon after the funeral when the funeral notice said clearly, No flowers by request?”

  “He’s from England. Maybe they—”

  “It is creepy, I told the poor woman. He hardly even knew Daddy. Friendship with his family? Nearly three years he’s been here and he never came within a country mile of us until the funeral. What’s he trying to prove giving a grieving widow something like that right now out of the blue? It is absolutely bizarre.”

  In her bedroom she put the record on her player and I felt so uncomfortable, for a reason I could not fathom, from her over-the-top reaction to the flowers, that I changed the subject. Did she want to go to the Regatta with me down at Quidi Vidi Lake in a couple of days? I had to ask her twice before she came out of the thoughts absorbing her and nodded, but with scant enthusiasm for the delightful mob scene that heretofore she’d professed to love.

  When Rosie’s mother dropped in to see Mom a day or two later, I heard them in the kitchen from my room upstairs, talking about Dr. Heathcliff Rothesay. “He says he wants to be friends, Gladys, and that’s all,” said Nina. “And of course it goes without saying that’s all I’d be interested in from any man from now till the day I croak. I made all that clear enough to him. Rosie calls his attentions weird, bizarre, and creepy. What’s weird, bizarre, and creepy is the very thought in her head that it might be anything beyond pure friendship—acquaintanceship, really, because I don’t ever expect him to be my good friend, or want him to be, for that matter. ‘Look, Rosie, ’ I told her, ‘he’s a cultivated man who admired your deceased father’s widely acclaimed poetry and he’s interested in the friendship of his family. What do you find so damned strange about that?’ ‘Oh, Mother, Mother, Mother, ’ she says in that insufferable superior manner she can put on, ‘don’t try to play dumb with me.’ I think the girl is pathologically jealous.”

  “Jealous?” said Mom. “Of what?”

  “Everything, just about. Of Joyce’s memory, worried someone will replace him in my affections. Of me, any attention some man like Heathcliff may pay to me. Of Pagan, even, or more accurately, Pagan’s name.”

  “Jealous of Pagan’s name?”

  “Remember that first day at the funeral parlour when Heathcliff came in and talked to us all? Well, Pagan told us later at home that that nice man said she had a beautiful name.”

  “Yes, he did say it was a beautiful, imaginative, evocative name,” said Mom. “I was there with her and it struck me a bit funny that he would talk in such highfalutin language to a nine-year-old.”

  “He does seem unusual like that. Anyway, not long afterwards, when Rosie and I were having one of our arguments, she asks out of the blue, why did we give Pagan that name? Why didn’t we give Rosie the name ‘Pagan’ instead of the silly name we did give her? The beautiful, romantic name ‘Pagan, ’ she said, was wasted on someone as dull and ordinary as Pagan. I told her to stop being ridiculous and to never let me hear her say anything insulting like that about her sister again, and she stomped out of the room in what I could only call a jealous rage.”

  “Hmm,” said Mom. There was a silence before she went on. “She’s been through a lot, Nine. She was right there when it happened, remember. I’m glad she and Tom have become good friends. It seems to be a great help in getting her through this.”

  “Tom,” said Nina, “is a sweetheart. Rosie feels closer to Tom than anyone else in this world.”

  I stood up and went to my door. I wanted to hear more of this and to hear it better. But Mom asked Nina now what she was doing to fill in her time at home and she replied that she was mostly reading. She had just reread The Old Man and the Sea because Joyce loved Hemingway and there was the coincidence of the anniversary of Hemingway’s death with the day her husband died. But, short though the novel was, Nina said, she found it endlessly boring. Mom responded that when she had first read the book, after hearing it was what Hemingway had won his Nobel Prize for, she’d t
hought: Only a man could find catching a stupid old fish, and then towing home its shark-eaten remnants, interesting enough to fill a book as a transcendent experience. The two women laughed.

  “When I think of the contrast,” Nina said, “between my Joyce’s sensitive, insightful poetry and Hemingway’s macho, eye-glazing prose, I am at a loss to understand how anyone, let alone his own intelligent daughter, could believe for one minute that someone else might ever replace that lovely, lovely man in my heart or my mind!”

  I stopped listening and walked back to my chair, irked at my mother. She had deliberately moved Nina off how close Rosie felt to me and on to a total irrelevancy.

  ON A COOL BRIGHT afternoon in late August, Rosie said things that perplexed and disquieted me. We had climbed to the top of Ladies’ Lookout on Signal Hill, and with the wind light out of the northwest making distant objects look close enough to touch in the air’s crystal clarity, we were gazing across the Narrows past Fort Amherst to the lighthouse on Cape Spear, the last land in North America before the faraway British Isles, when she murmured, “Something my father said about me in the tent before he drowned has really started to bug me.”

  “I don’t remember you telling me he said anything bad about you.”

  “No, I didn’t tell you. It has only come back to me like that in the past little while. He quoted Yeats about how the best lack all conviction and the worst are filled with passionate intensity, and then he said, ‘But the best can have conviction and be full of passionate intensity too, Rosie, and that combination can be equally dangerous to a person. You are one of the very best, and you have conviction and you have passionate intensity, and you need to be careful, if I’m not around, my confident, brainy, passionate beauty.’ Calling me his ‘beauty’ is what really bugs me now when I think about it. To begin with, I’m not beautiful, not like Pagan is, or even Mom still. So by using the word ‘beauty’ he was really just calling me a girl. He wouldn’t have said it if I were a boy. It was as if he thought I was too smart and emotionally involved in life for my own good, for a girl. The more I’ve thought about it all, the more I find it insulting.”