Rosie had no idea what he meant.
“That,” he pointed out, “is my point.”
They took the beers down to the sea. The water moved slickly over the brick slipway, the daintiest tugging of the tides. Rosie had been to York Beach in Maine as a little girl, she’d gone with another family who’d wanted to be generous. The sea there had humped and smacked the sand, and Rosie was a fearful swimmer. While the others screeched and dove, she’d paddled only knee deep and they had jeered her from beyond the breaking waves. Now Bennett struck out, a fine, strong stroke, he barely made a ripple on the water’s smooth surface.
“Come on,” he urged.
Rosie was again knee deep. She felt a sudden surge of anger at not being good at anything; she was undefined, like a giant amoeba in the shape of a 19-year-old girl. Why did Bennett even love her? She wasn’t beautiful or funny or interesting. He believed she was an artist, but she wasn’t. She imagined his other lovers, blond and golden and bold — WASPs who sailed and skied and wore lime green and bright pink and certainly didn’t get pregnant. He hadn’t had to teach them how to give head or how to sit astride him that’s it, that’s right, just liiikke thaaat moving back and forth. They’d be out there swimming with him, stroke for stroke.
Bennett swam far out. He didn’t worry about sharks or undertows. Rosie drank her beer — she shouldn’t be drinking if she was pregnant, which she was, but hardly pregnant. She didn’t need to be pregnant, she didn’t even need to tell Bennett and she’d get unpregnant.
Small birds bobbed about in the frill of surf, pecking and skittering. “I envy the bird at home in his garden” — a line, a poem from one of Bennett’s books, he was so well read, he’d studied at Oxford. Modern Literature. Or was it History? She wasn’t envious of the birds, for they were small and flew through wild storms; but she yearned for their sense of purpose, their ergonomic design. The loose, gelatinous shell of her wobbled around her narrower, psychic self. She had no idea even how to occupy her own body, and now a little, polyp thing was burrowing into her flesh, nesting.
Bennett had turned toward the shore, his arms arcing in perfect rhythm. He was an excellent swimmer, the muscles on his sun-freckled shoulders bunched and released. He suddenly reared out of the water and ran at her and caught her, she screamed as he dragged her into the sea. The cold water surged around her, she clung to him in terror. He did not hear her terror, only her excitement, and this urged him on, he plunged her and tossed her, ravishing her like Neptune. Finally, she bit him hard on the shoulder and he let her go — he threw her aside. “What the fuck, Rosie?”
“I can’t swim, I can’t swim.” Her voice at a strange high pitch.
His face contorted, he took a step back. “Everyone can swim.”
“I’m sorry —”
He rubbed the teeth marks on his shoulder.
She was shaking. He watched her, repelled by her. She turned and ran up the stairs, she shut the bathroom door behind her. Of course she could swim, she could swim, just not very well. She’d bitten him! He would send her back, he would send her back like a dog from the pound. Rosie put the toilet lid down, sat. Her teeth chattered as if she was cold. Bennett had turned on music — Dire Straits. She heard the screen door as he moved out onto the deck to drink another beer. Money for nothing and your kicks for free. What was wrong with her? She was demented, faulty. She must go back to Gran of her own accord, she would take a bus, she would walk the streets, the lefts and rights until she was there, she would bow her head and knock on the door. Gran waited therein, with her crossword and her one glass of sherry. Oh, she’d always been waiting, she’d always known Rosie would come back, unwanted by the outer world.
Bennett knocked on the bathroom door. “What’s going on, Rosie?”
She leaned against the door, her hand encircling the handle.
“Open the door.”
Gran wouldn’t even look up, Rosie would walk past her and up the stairs. Not her bedroom on the right. But the one at the end of the hall. The lodger’s room.
“Rosie?” Bennett persisted. He knocked louder.
Now she back-tracked to the toilet, sat down again. The tone of his voice was becoming angry, he was battering the door with the flat of his hands, “Rosie! Goddamn it, Rosie, open the fucking door.”
Briefly, she regarded the window, but it was too small and dropped 20 feet. So she sat and watched the door as it thumped, rattled.
Minutes like ants, marching on tiny tiny feet.
The clock downstairs was ticking and Rosie was half-remembering the white gloves, the feeling came upon her now like a pressing weight on her ribs, the half-remembering wasn’t forgetting but more like the lurking, squatting of some dark, living toady thing, and the long hallway in Gran’s house and the man at the end of it.
The framing around the door began to tear from the wall and then the door itself flew open. Bennett hurtled in, screaming, “What is wrong with you, what the fuck is wrong with you?” And she waited for him to seize her, she shut her eyes, and it was silent and blank, his hands would fall on her, he wore the gloves because she was dirty, she had no fear at all, only the pause the —
Sunday light — Sparrow song outside, the clock downstairs, Do you like it when I do this.
Gran always went out, her handbag over her forearm.
And he grabbed her and lifted her and she was lightest bones, and the white gloves and he was saying Rosie-Rosie-Rosie and then at last, at last, she understood Bennett.
Bennett was sobbing. “I thought you were dead I thought you were killing yourself.”
His body covered hers, arced over her, her face buried in the meaty part of his shoulder so she returned to the smell of his skin, his deodorant, the sea salt. “Thank God, thank God, thank God.” His face was tears, wet with snot-slime, he now held her face in his big hands. “My mother, my mother,” he wept, “killed herself, cut her wrists in the bathroom and I thought I thought —”
“Oh,” Rosie whispered, she stroked his big head, her fingers in his thick hair. “Oh.”
On his knees, his head falling to her lap, his arms around her thighs: “I found her, I found her, Rosie, Rosie, don’t ever do that don’t ever do that again —”
“No, no,” she murmured, soothing. “Never, never, I love you, I love you.” Rosie pictured the small boy and his mother’s lily hands out-stretched on the bathroom floor, her life unfurling, unspooling, and he’d tried to gather up the satin red ribbons of her blood.
Rosie wanted to tell him that she understood, she understood about the bewilderment that followed and the loneliness. But instead she held her man, her lover, kissed him and soothed him, and in this moment she loved him with a red, swelling heart, the feeling was almost violent in its force, and the love was woven through with the desire to protect him and the idea that she knew him, maybe not in every way, but deep down in the shadowy well of the man. He had chosen to share with her this secret — to open his hands to her like a child showing a small injured animal that must be placed carefully in a box with water and food and bedding. Rosie loved him, and the love and the desire to protect him made her feel like a grown-up woman.
“You must never leave me, my girl,” Bennett was whispering. “I need you to promise that you will never leave me.”