The Rose Variations, page 11
If even then, Rose thought later, Lila had turned and embraced her, she might have been able to get past her dread and discover a new self, a self that loved women, that loved Lila like everything else on earth, a self that loved its own body enough to love another like it. But maybe love of self was nothing like love of another, two separate things, like breathing and eating. Breathing, one did without thinking. To eat, one needed the prompt of appetite.
She turned her head aside to avoid Lila’s odor. It reminded her of insecticide, or burnt plastic, or the emission of a paper pulp factory. She thought of the people living in the neighborhood of such a factory, how they acclimated themselves till they no longer noticed the stench. Lila lay gently beside her. Rose’s head hurt her horribly. She was going to cry.
“You know something,” she said, “I’m awfully tired,” and succeeded in moving her hand from Lila’s thigh.
“Well,” said Lila wistfully, “we did do tomatoes all day.”
Rose pulled herself up to look at the clock on the bedside table. “Just past three.”
“Yeah,” Lila said, her voice flat.
She knows, Rose thought. Hugely relieved, she sagged against the bed-post and closed her eyes.
“Couldn’t you just sleep here beside me?” Lila asked.
Rose opened her eyes and nodded. The least she could do was to stay the night. Lila stretched out beside her, holding herself still, as if to avoid disturbing Rose. Rose accommodated her by pretending to sleep till morning.
When Lila got up to go to the outhouse, Rose escaped to her room, grabbed her overalls, went out and flung herself down in the tall grass by the beehives at the far corner of the orchard. She woke to a dark shape looming between her and the sun—Wilma in a head net.
“Well, well,” she said. “How’s the baby lesbian?”
“What?” said Rose.
“Lila. It’s unbelievable. She’s on air. What’s the matter?”
Noah came trailing along with his smoke equipment, and Rose stag-gered up and fled to the swimming hole, stripped and washed herself, put her clothes back on, smoothed her hair, and marched to the house. As she approached, she heard Lila’s cello, playing Rose’s music, strong, ardent, more than certain, a simple lyric line rising into an anthem.
Chapter TEN
Two days later, a Sunday, or First Day, as the Quakers called it, Rose sat in Quaker Meeting in Litchfield, thirty miles from the farm. She knew of the Quakers from her years in Philadelphia and wanted to sit in silence. She needed a plan, a fresh start, her own Quakerly First Day, although she knew the purpose of Quaker silence was not for making plans. You sat still, you cleared your mind, and you waited for your soul to speak. There was no leader. If someone preached, it wasn’t from a prepared text, and, mercifully, no one was required to respond. Even so, she hoped to hear no preaching that morning. She wished merely to sit in silence among strangers, as one might sit at a train station where newspapers and coffee were not offered and where trains never came.
She made herself still and closed her eyes, but the room was busy with sound. It was a dusty old room in a disused union hall. From the twenty-odd souls in the circle of folding chairs came sighing, throat-clearing, coughing, and sneezing. Fabric rubbed on metal, shoe leather rubbed on wood, weight shifted noisily, and her thoughts sped back again and again to the scene of the accident or, rather, the crime.
She couldn’t call it bad luck. She’d brought down the misery on herself and on Lila and on the whole household. And she’d been warned. Hadn’t Alan told her plainly not to try it, and shown her what would happen, taking her to bed when he didn’t want her? She recalled the aftermath, how abandoned in her skin she’d felt. And she hadn’t even been in love with him. Lila, because she was in love, had it much worse, and with Lila Rose hadn’t even followed through. At least Alan had committed his body to her, however briefly. But Rose hadn’t even given Lila that much. She hadn’t even given her some real act to regret.
When she’d marched back to Lila in the house, following the cello music to its source, she’d passed through the kitchen where, amidst the dregs of tomatoes, Dinah and Peggy had beamed approval, pleased with her, or so they thought. She’d nodded grimly and, glancing at the mirror over the sink, noted her red-rimmed eyes and her crazily parted hair. Frances, once again, had been right—Rose had let herself go. But she couldn’t tidy up then. She marched on to Lila, who paused, mid-phrase, and looked up shyly.
“Rose.”
“We’ve got a misunderstanding. It’s not happening. It’s not going to happen.” It was labor for Rose to get the words out.
“It’s not,” said Lila.
“I can’t do it with you.”
“You can’t,” said Lila.
“No, I can’t, and please don’t repeat everything I say.”
“But the thing is, you did, a little. Last night.”
“No, I didn’t. Not really. That was just—oh, Lila, I was being polite.”
“But you came to me of your own accord.”
“I made a terrible mistake.”
“But you said you needed to learn.”
“I was mistaken.”
“Well. You could just sleep beside me. Just sleep.”
“No, I can’t even do that. I didn’t sleep.”
“Well, so? I didn’t sleep either. Big deal.”
Rose took a breath through her mouth. She couldn’t stand Lila’s smell. If this was the odor of fear, however, Lila now had new reason to be afraid, thanks to Rose. Lila now had reason to be afraid of the affections of her own heart.
In the circle of Quakers, Rose opened her eyes on an older woman across the room whose white hair fell straight to her shoulders and whose prominent brow and nose seemed sculpted—Justice with Her Scales. The woman sat at ease, forearms on thighs, hands deeply creased, dirt showing under the cuticles. This was how Rose’s hands might look in forty years if she went on gardening. But she’d lost her garden. She’d been thrown— she had thrown herself out of Paradise.
At least she’d known better than to leave room for doubt—she’d done enough damage. “I’m not going to be your lover,” she’d told Lila. “It’s not in me.”
Lila’s eyes had widened. She’d put her hand over her mouth.
“It’s not in me,” Rose had concluded, “and I don’t want to.”
Somewhere in the past, she could hear a voice, a teacher or her mother, going up the scale in fury: You don’t want to? That’s your reason? Because you don’t want to?
It didn’t seem like much of a reason. Why couldn’t she love Lila all the ways Lila loved her? Did she, deep down, think herself superior?—too good for Lila, better than Lila because she had neither mustache nor beard nor funny smell?
A whining buzz in her head focused into a fly that landed on her wrist. She opened her eyes again to the Quaker Meeting and shook the fly off. Sunlight poured through banks of dusty windows onto the plank floor in grainy streams. The Quakers around her sprawled or perched upright, some with eyes closed, some vaguely gazing. Two seats over, a little girl toyed with a shoestring beside her mother who sat with arms folded, chin sunk on chest. A dark man in a summer suit had fallen asleep, his arm thrown back and his mouth agape. A blond teenager in denim cutoffs, hair tied back with a leather thong, stretched his legs. The faces in repose seemed fatigued and sunken, the bodies burdens to be carried. Even the ponytailed young man, now leaning forward into a dusty sun ray, his eye-lashes golden and his eyes perfect ovals, seemed to suffer his life restlessly. His gaze met hers and moved on. No one seemed to know anyone else, not even the mother and her little girl. In silence souls might speak, but they spoke only to themselves. Each sat alone, suffering the others, merely pretending any relation, a handful of people flung randomly together in a time and place. That’s all we are, Rose thought; that’s all we ever are. She could barely breathe.
And what was love? Lust-driven and hypnotic, a way to stay busy, nothing more, even if the lovers never let themselves realize, even if they contrived to extend their delusion over a lifetime. Her “luck” in love was nothing to be proud of but, rather, marked her as a troublemaker, someone who, drawing other people in, brought an increase of confusion and grief. And friendship was make-believe as well, though at least its claims were fewer.
She could hear her mother’s voice: this was dealing with realities. Why should Marion need friends when she had painting? Why need daughters? Even motherly love was a burden, and to pretend otherwise would only prevent her daughters from learning to stand on their own. Two seats over, the little girl caught Rose’s eye and splayed her fingers, laced with shoe-string, and neatly inverted them: cat’s cradle. Smiling shyly, tender with expectation, she waited for Rose’s approval. Rose nearly groaned aloud.
“You don’t want me,” Lila had said, putting her cello aside, nearly dropping it.
“I should maybe pack up and go,” Rose had replied.
“Don’t insult me,” cried Lila. “There’s more to our life here than what I might desire.”
“There’s a great deal to our life here,” Rose had quavered.
“Don’t you leave me over this,” said Lila.
Rose jumped. Had she gasped or cried out? The Quaker nearest her had touched her elbow, and the white haired woman across the circle had got up and was extending her hand. Rose looked into clear, gray eyes beneath the straight brow. Everyone was shaking hands. Rose blushed, returning the handshake, recognizing the traditional signal of the end of Quaker Meeting. The room filled with talk. The mother pulled her little girl to her and kissed her. The boy with the ponytail leaned over and put the sleeping man into a headlock. These people did know each other, of course. It was only Rose who was a stranger.
“Emma Williams,” the white-haired woman said, still shaking Rose’s hand.
Rose nodded, got up, and hurried out. She sat a moment behind her steering wheel and then pointed her station wagon back to the farm.
It didn’t seem right to leave, not abruptly. It seemed wrong to stay, but just as wrong to go with the harvest at its height and more tasks than hands to do them. There was corn to slice from the cob and freeze, leaves to strip from the cornstalks for the goats, sunflower heads to hang to dry, carrots and rutabagas to dig up and bury in sand vats in the root cellar, sauerkraut to render from the overflow of cabbages. An excess of zucchini lay in a putrid dump by the compost pile, in need of layering with straw. Nobody spoke any more of each one doing as she wished. The seeds they’d sown in the spring now entrapped them. Rose had to stay till the harvest was done.
Alongside the others, she hauled, stacked, dug, raked, and attempted to keep up conversation as though all were well, as though this were still her home. The others were friendly enough, and Wilma still seemed to like her. If Rose had wanted to learn to love a woman, why hadn’t she gone for Wilma, someone easygoing and pretty and sweet-smelling, someone resilient who would move right on if things went wrong? Or Ursula? What a match they’d make, they always said, if one of them had been a man. But they hadn’t meant it. There’d been no catch in the breath saying so, no heat, no flash of the eye. Ursula liked men. As did Rose. Exclusively? Now she’d never know. One experiment of that sort was enough for a lifetime.
She could work all day and not think, but then evening would come on. She no longer slept in the house—not with Lila just across the hall. She bunked in the barn in a hammock lined with flannel sleeping bags, a visitor again. From deep in her swaddling, she gazed up at nails she her-self had pounded in, framing the new windows. She inhaled the fragrance of straw bales she’d helped stack for winter mulch. She’d never see the straw released again. She slept there then, but by the time the straw was unloosed on the snowy garden, she’d be gone.
If Rose was miserable, however, Lila was like a wounded bear. She joined the others each day in field and kitchen, refusing the relief a walk alone might give her. Music was forgotten. Perhaps Lila had never cared for Rose’s music but had only wanted her in her bed? At meals, Lila sat gruffly staring at her food, sighing repeatedly, each sigh a stifled moan.
“Lila?” Josie whispered one night after she had moaned for ten minutes straight over her soup bowl. She looked up, startled. She hadn’t realized the others could hear her.
Next morning, she sent word through Josie that she wished Rose to resume their afternoon music sessions and, doggedly, they managed it, distant and formal and focused to task.
Rose was not reassured. The short walk out to the gazebo proved dif-ficult enough, even with the distraction of music still ahead. But coming back in was excruciating. Rose wanted to fall behind but felt constrained to keep step with Lila. Should Rose arrive at the house first, she had to check the impulse to open the door for Lila, which Lila would not allow, insisting, instead, that Rose precede her. Then she’d have to pass as Lila stood facing her, gripping the door knob, the only moment Lila looked directly at her any more, the gaze heated and bereft.
Sundays, Rose returned to Quaker Meeting. Ursula would’ve had a good horselaugh if she could have seen Rose with hands folded and eyes downcast. They’d indulged in a certain amount of satire of Philadelphia Quakers, a certain amount of theeing and thouing. But now Rose sat, and in the silence her eyes frequently filled with tears. She had no idea where she was going. She longed for Ursula, who was her friend but unsenti-mental, who perhaps also recognized the lie of friendship, the fraudulence of thee and thou.
Even now, when she knew better, Rose noticed herself lurching toward warmth, every week seeking the empty chair beside the woman with straight white hair, Emma—Emma Williams, who, one Sunday when Rose was again in tears, reached and laid a hand briefly on her arm. Rose imagined herself in Emma’s eyes, a lost soul. She was twenty-six years old—too old to be a lost soul.
An ivy vine climbing up the yard light turned crimson. Sumac flamed. The pippins and crabs ripened and then the Paula Reds and the Wealthies, bringing a round of paring and coring and canning. When the apples were done, Rose would leave the farm.
Then, on a night in late September, sometime past midnight, the phone rang in the house. Rose was awake in the barn and heard it. A moment later,Wilma summoned her in.
Natalie stood in a phone booth a block from their mother’s house, crying so hard she could barely speak. “I’m pregnant again, if you want to know.”
“Again?”
“Yes, again. I’m handling it myself. By myself.”
“Okay. All right. Breathe,” said Rose.
“Mom’s trying to get me another abortion, but there’s this official waiting period and they make you talk to the hospital chaplain—it’s the law or something. He’s a guy from school, Rose—the chaplain—Mr. Goshen, you know, our old algebra teacher.”
“Oh. Uh-huh. Take a breath, Natalie.”
“He flunked me, if you remember. I’ve got to get out of here. Say something.”
“Poor Natalie.”
“Right,” she sobbed.
“You want to come here,” Rose guessed.
“I understood I was invited.” Natalie sobbed harder.
She was right. Rose had invited her any number of times in the letters she’d written.
“Natalie, now, let me just think a minute.”
While Natalie plugged in quarters, Rose felt her spirits lift. Her little sister’s predicament stirred in her a feeling of elation, so completely did it change the subject from how she’d spoiled things at the farm. She might be of use again. She might be of use to Natalie.
“Now, look, Natalie. I’ve got to think this through and call you back.”
“Think what through?”
“There are other people to consider. I don’t live alone here, you know.”
“Can’t you ask them now?”
“It’s the middle of the night.”
“I know that. It’s the middle of my night too.”
“Everybody’s asleep,” Rose said, but it wasn’t so. The household was rousing. Wilma handed Rose a cup of tea. Dinah staggered out, followed by Peggy. Josie peeked in.
Rose pressed the receiver to her chest. “It’s my sister. She’s pregnant and needs an abortion. There’s some sort of waiting period.”
“Some state laws are medieval. New Hampshire’s one of the bad ones,” offered Josie.
“Natural cycles is all it is,” said Wilma. “Conceive and carry or cast aside—the earth is always shedding things.”
“Zucchini,” said Peggy ruefully. Rose stuttered out a laugh. Peggy smiled at her.
“Barbaric, what they think they can do to a woman’s body,” said Dinah, warming to the subject, “constrain her and interrogate her.”
“Natalie, sweetheart,” said Rose,“I’m going now. Call me back tomorrow?”
“Don’t hang up,” said Josie. Lila loomed on the stairs.
Noah stumbled in. “What’s going on?”
“Rose’s sister is coming for a visit,” said Dinah.
“She’s pregnant,” said Wilma, hoisting him to her hip.
“I want a brother,” said Noah.
“Lila?” said Josie.
“Have her come,” said Lila. “She’ll be safe here. I know a doctor in Litchfield. I don’t think she’ll be made to wait.”
Rose was stunned. When her own welcome at the farm seemed about used up, she could not fathom why they’d shelter Natalie as well. But Lila had spoken.
Two days later, Rose and Wilma drove over to the bus station in Litchfield. As Natalie stepped down from the bus, the shirt she was wearing billowed out. Spotting Rose, she dropped her duffel bag and opened her arms, revealing her enormous belly.
Whatever quarrel she’d had with their mother about the hospital chap-lain had long since expired. It was months too late for an abortion.
She wanted to see the swimming hole first. She threw off her clothes and ran whooping into the river, then lay down on her skirt to sun her-self, full breasts sagging either side of her domed belly. She was eight months gone. Rose sat a little way off, dangling her feet in the water.
