She glanced back; the package of Tsarist jewels was no longer there. Possibly, last night hadn’t even happened. She knew the way memory could feel spongy underfoot — a marshy uncertainty.
Then they were out in the blazing summer morning and she wondered why Bennett had brought her with him, he could have left her at the boathouse as he often did with a pile of Penguin Classics to read and her art materials. Did he want her to know the car was clean, they wouldn’t have to worry about a problem with the police, just, say, if there was one? Or, better: that there was nothing to worry about in the first place, as they’d done nothing wrong?
“Are you hungry?” he turned onto the Post Road. “I’m starving.”
Maybe, after all, he just wanted to take her to breakfast and give the car a quick wash on the way there. She put her hand on his large thigh, and he covered it with his, lifted it, kissed her fingertips. She felt the thrill of being chosen.
Rosie had been five when the clock had stopped and a neighbor collected her from kindergarten. The neighbor would not explain, but drove her to Gran’s house, and she’d walked alone up the cracked cement path toward Gran, who waited at her front door. Gran’s eyes like bruised plums had frightened her, her mouth opened, she said, “You’ll live with me now.” She did not say, There’s been a terrible accident. Your mother and father are dead. Gran did not bend to comfort, but she’d made up the bed, put out a clean towel. Gran could not herself speak the words, so it took Rosie some time to understand her parents were not alive anymore. Even after the funeral, it was a year before she grasped the deadness of death. The full stop with nothing after it. Gran had refused to explain the manner of their dying, other than a car crash. Gran said details were maudlin, satisfying curiosity, and curiosity was a kind of greed. It was as if Rosie’s parents had walked into a tunnel and had never come out, and no one went to look for them, no one even mentioned their names ever again. Yet Rosie stood alone at the hot, roaring entrance, peering into the darkness.
Her dead parents’ life insurance money had been put aside to pay for her college education. There wasn’t much, she’d have to go to a community college, work nights and weekends. Gran had told her: “Your father wanted you to learn a solid trade and marry a solid man.” Rosie had wondered. Because she had been a small child when her parents died, and it seemed unlikely that they’d started to worry about her career and romantic prospects.
Parsons School of Design, then, was not what Gran had had in mind. Rosie had known this, and did not tell Gran she was applying. Instead, Gran witnessed her filling out applications for Worcester Poly and UMass. Parsons was a joke, a fantasy, because Rosie knew she’d never get in. The idea of studying art was wildly extravagant, like wearing velvet or hats with tall feathers. Gran wanted Rosie to study nursing or become a teacher. The aptitude test Rosie had taken on Career Day showed ambiguous results: carpenter, architect, sanitation worker. Yet when she put pencil to paper in art class, she understood lines, shading, shape, how to bend them, butter them, stiffen them — the process of taking something from inside her head and making it external was rudimentary. Easy. So much else — the peopled world — was intimidating, sometimes incoherent.
Was she stupid? Was there something wrong with her brain? The way ideas in math would seem clear and she’d be excited, but then try to apply what she thought she’d learned and find herself in the middle of an equation with absolutely no idea how x might = y. The equation broke apart in her hands like fragile china, and she’d feel panicked and hot and she could smell her own sweat. Or conversations began, someone finally decided to talk to her, and then she’d forget what she was saying, her sentence would halt, dead air
— Like that. As if whatever she’d begun to say wasn’t important enough, the words themselves had run out of interest with her tongue, dried up, curled up, gone to sleep, run off, who knew where, and people would just turn away thinking she was a weirdo. Sometimes, walking home, she’d realize she had gone past her Gran’s house, several blocks, or she’d turned too early and was in another neighborhood entirely.
Though there was Chris, a slim, nervous geek. They kissed and did minor sex things, first base, second base, and, from time to time, with a sense more of obligation than lust, he tried for third. They were together because no one else would have them. Each to the other offered a kind of protection, just as wearing a coat on a cold day was better than no coat. The coat of Chris had been warm and comfortable.
Gran hated New York City — she always used the entire name, New York City. New York City was an affront to her careful living, her fear of color and loud noises and garish behavior, her equal terror of greed and of poverty. New York City was full of vulgar people like Leona Helmsley and Donald Trump as well as criminals, discos, and homosexuals. Gran’s frugality was the post-Depression variety: she put the car in neutral when going downhill to save fuel — even though the area around Lowell was relatively flat.
Her frugality of love had deeper roots that went generations back on her mother’s side, into the mean soil of Scotland and the mean lives it barely sustained. Life had proved Gran’s distrust of love correct: she’d loved Jim Monroe, and he’d died. She’d loved their son, also Jim Monroe, and he’d first abandoned her for a woman and then died. Gran was not, therefore, going to make the same mistake with her granddaughter.
Rosie’s art made manifest this frugality: for her Parsons application she’d melted down all the wax crayons she’d ever had — because Gran assiduously kept every single one and they were the sale-price colors no one wanted anyway — and from the resulting vomit-colored blob, carved a tiny, exquisitely accurate sculpture of herself. She’d titled it: “This could be useful one day.” The sophisticates of Parsons could not appreciate Rosie’s complete lack of irony; they thought the piece a brilliant statement on the nihilistic angst of teenagers in suburban Massachusetts, and offered her a full scholarship including a stipend.
As a child used to playing by herself in a quiet house with few toys, Rosie had a talent for the make-shift and a skill for replication. Once at Parsons, she had struggled to be bold and grand, she infuriated her teachers who gave her gold leaf and pig’s blood and broken crockery and glue. Sometimes, she felt there was grandness in her — a burning sun of creativity, and if she could reach in under her ribcage she’d find the buttons and undo them one by one, and out would come another girl entirely, who looked and acted more like Cyndi Lauper and she’d create the kind of daring works the school expected by dipping her entire head in buckets of paint and shaking it over canvas. In the meantime, she was a dull girl in the back of the class, studious and intent; she took careful bites of the raucous city, up to the Midtown museums, a walk through Central Park where she might buy a pretzel with mustard, and once, she took the bus all the way to The Cloisters to see the unicorn tapestries.
There, in the solemn stone hall, she had stared at the breathless animal surrounded by men and their dogs who wanted it for wanting’s sake — not meat or fur. She understood the unicorn as a symbol of purity, but the men didn’t even want to keep it, didn’t want to put it in a cage to marvel at or try to tame, domesticate. No: they killed it with dogs and spears. The hunters were propelled by some dark, unquestioned instinct. Rosie felt the tapestries physically. Her mouth filled with saliva and her blood seemed to move from her head to her stomach. Was this revulsion? She stared at the tapestries for a long time but the feeling didn’t abate; it shifted to her ribs, a dull ache, as if she was winded. The unicorn didn’t really have an expression. Maybe this was the limit of the medium. Or maybe the artist had made a choice to portray supplication, acceptance. The unicorn understood its duty to men.