Rose Madder

Epilogue. THE FOX-WOMAN

In October, Bill takes her out to the Shoreland picnic area again. This time they go in his car; it’s a pretty fall day, but too chilly for the motorcycle. Once they’re there, with a picnic spread before them and the woods around them flaming with fall color, he asks her what she has known for some time that he means to ask her.

“Yes,” she says.

“As soon as the decree comes through.” He hugs her, kisses her, and as she tightens her arms around his neck and closes her eyes, she hears the voice of Rose Madder deep in her head: AH accounts now balance… and if you remember the tree, it will never matter, anyway. What tree, though? Tree of Life? Tree of Death? Tree of Knowledge? Tree of Good and Evil? Rosie shudders and hugs her husband-to-be even tighter, and when he cups her left breast in his hand, he marvels at the feel of her heart pounding away so rapidly beneath it. What tree?

They’re married in a civil ceremony which takes place midway between Thanksgiving and Christmas, ten days after Rosie’s decree of non-responsive divorce from Norman Daniels becomes final. On her first night as Rosie Steiner, she wakes to her husband’s screams.

“I can’t look at her!” he screams in his sleep. “she doesn’t care who she kills! She doesn’t care who she kills! Oh please, can’t you make him stop SCREAMING?” And then, in a lower voice, trailing off:

“What’s in your mouth? What are those threads?” They are in a New York hotel, staying over on their way to St Thomas, where they will honeymoon for two weeks, but although she left the little blue packet behind, still at the bottom of the bag she carried with her out of Egypt, she has brought the ceramic bottle. Some instinct-woman’s intuition will do as well as any other name in this case, she reckons-has told her to. She has used it on two other occasions following nightmares like this one, and the next morning, while Bill is shaving, she tips the last drop into his coffee. It’ll have to do, she thinks later as she tosses the tiny bottle into the toilet and flushes it down. And if it doesn’t, it’ll have to do, anyway. The honeymoon is perfect-lots of sun, lots of good sex, and no bad dreams for either of them.

In January, on a day when billows of wind-driven snow come driving across the plains and over the city, Rosie Steiner’s home pregnancy kit tells her what she already knows, that she is going to have a baby. She knows something more, something the kit can’t tell her: it will be a girl. Caroline is finally coming. All accounts balance, she thinks in a voice not her own as she stands at the window of their new apartment, looking out at the snow. It reminds her of the fog that night in Bryant Park, when they came home to discover Norman waiting. Yeah, yeah, yeah, she thinks, almost bored with this idea by now; it comes almost with the frequency of a nagging tune that won’t quite leave your head. They balance as long as I remember the tree, right? No, the madwoman replies, in a voice so deadly clear that Rosie whirls on her heels, heart thudding sickly all the way up in the middle of her forehead, momentarily convinced that Rose Madder is in this room with her. But although the voice is still there, the room is empty. No… as long as you keep your temper. As long as you can do that. But both things come to the same, don’t they?

“Get out,” she tells the empty room, and her hoarse voice trembles.

“Get out, you bitch. Stay away from me. Stay out of my life.”

Her baby girl weighs in at eight pounds, nine ounces. And although Caroline is and always will be her secret name, the one that goes on the birth certificate is Pamela Gertrude. At first Rosie objects, saying that, with their last name added to the second, the child’s name becomes a kind of literary pun. She holds out, with no great enthusiasm, for Pamela Anna.

“Oh, please,” Bill says, “that sounds like a fruit dessert in a snooty California restaurant.”

“But-”

“And don’t worry about Pamela Gertrude. First of all, she’s never going to let even her best friend know that her middle name is Gert. You can count on it. And second, the writer you’re talking about is the one who said a rose is a rose is a rose. I can’t think of a better reason to stick with a name.” So they do.

Not long before Pammy turns two, her parents decide to buy a home in the suburbs. By then they can well afford it; both have prospered in their jobs. They begin with stacks of brochures, and slowly winnow them down to a dozen possibles, then six, then four, then two. And this is where they run into trouble. Rose wants one; Bill prefers the other. Discussion becomes debate as their positions polarize, and debate escalates into argument-unfortunate, but hardly unheard-of; even the sweetest and most harmonious marriage is not immune from a tiff every now and then… or the occasional shouting-match, for that matter. At the end of this one, Rosie stalks out into the kitchen and begins to put supper together, first sticking a chicken in the oven and then putting water on for the corn on the cob she has picked up fresh at a roadside stand. A little while later, while she is scrubbing a couple of potatoes at the counter beside the stove, Bill comes out of the living room, where he has been looking at photographs of the two houses which have caused this unaccustomed (dissension between them… except what he has really been doing is brooding over the argument. She does not turn at his approaching step as she usually does, nor does she when he bends and kisses the nape of her neck.

“I’m sorry I yelled at you about the house,” he said quietly.

“I still think the one in Windsor is better for us, but I’m truly sorry I raised my voice.” He waits for her reply, and when she makes none, he turns and trudges sorrowfully out, probably thinking she is still angry. She is not, however; anger in no way describes her current state of mind. She is in a black rage, almost a killing rage, and her silence has not been something as childish as “giving him the cold shoulder,” but rather an almost frantic effort to (remember the tree) keep from seizing the pot of boiling water on the stove, turning with it in her hands, and throwing it into his face. The vivid picture she sees in her mind is both sickening and blackly compelling: Bill staggering back, screaming, as his skin goes a color she still sometimes sees in her dreams. Bill, clawing at his cheeks as the first blisters begin to push out of his smoking skin. Her left hand has actually twitched toward the handle of the pot, and that night, as she lies sleepless in her bed, two words play themselves over and over in her mind: I repay.

In the days which follow, she begins to look obsessively at her hands and her arms and her face… but mostly at her hands, because that is where it will start. Where what will start? She doesn’t know, exactly… but she knows she will recognize (the tree) it when she sees it. She discovers a place called Elmo’s Batting Cages on the west side of the city and begins to go there regularly. Most of the clientele are men in early middle age trying to keep their college figures or high-school boys willing to spend five dollars or so for the privilege of pretending for a little while that they are Ken Griffey, Jr or the Big Hurt. Every now and then a girlfriend will hit a few, but mostly they are ornamental, standing outside the batting cages or the slightly more expensive Major League Batting Tunnel and watching. There are few women in their mid-thirties stroking grounders and line drives. Few? None, really, except for this lady with the short brown hair and the pale, solemn face. So the boys joke and snigger and elbow each other and turn their caps around backward to show how bad they are, and she ignores them completely, both their laughter and their careful inventory of her body, which has bounced back nicely from the baby. Nicely? For a chick who is clearly getting up there (they tell each other), she is a knockout, a stone fox. And after awhile, they stop laughing. They stop because the lady in the sleeveless tee-shirts and loose gray pants, after her initial clumsiness and foul ticks (several times she is even hit by the dense rubber balls the machine serves up), begins to make first good contact and then great contact. “she drivin that beauty,” one of them says one day after Rosie, panting and flushed, her hair drawn back against her head in a damp helmet, screams three line drives, one after the other, the length of the mesh-walled batting tunnel. Each time she connects she voices a high, unearthly cry, like Monica Seles serving an ace. It sounds as if the ball has done something to offend her.

“Got that machine cranked, too,” says a second as the pitching machine hulking in the center of the tunnel coughs out an eighty-mile-an-hour fastball. Rosie gives her indrawn cry of effort, her head down almost against her shoulder, and pops her hips. The ball goes the other way, fast. It hits the mesh two hundred feet away down the tunnel, still rising, making the green fabric bell out before dropping to join the others which she has already hit.

“Aw, she ain’t hittin that hard,” scoffs a third. He takes out a cigarette, pokes it in his mouth, takes out a book of matches, and strikes one. “she just gettin some-” This time Rosie does scream-a cry like the shriek of some hungry bird-and the ball streaks back down the tunnel in a flat white line. It hits the mesh… and goes through. The hole it leaves behind looks like something which might have been made by a shotgun fired at close range. Cigarette Boy stands as if frozen, the lit match burning down in his fingers.

“You were sayin, bro?” the first boy asks softly.

A month later, just after the batting cages close for the season, Rhoda Simons suddenly breaks into Rosie’s reading of the new Gloria Naylor and tells her to call it a day. Rosie protests that it’s early. Rhoda agrees, but tells her she is losing her expression; better to give it a rest until tomorrow, she says.

“Yeah, well, I want to finish today,” Rosie says.

“It’s only another twenty pages. I want to finish the damned thing, Rho.”

“Anything you do now will just have to be done over,” Rhoda says with finality.

“I don’t know how late Pamelacita kept you up last night, but you just don’t have it anymore today.”

Rosie gets up and goes through the door, yanking it so hard she nearly tears it off its fat silent hinges. Then, in the control room, she seizes the suddenly terrified Rhoda Simons by the collar of her goddamned Norma Kamali blouse, and slams her facedown into the control board. A toggle switch impales her patrician nose like the tine of a barbecue fork. Blood sprays everywhere, beading on the glass of the studio window and running down it in ugly rose madder streaks.

“Rosie, no!” Curt Hamilton shrieks.

“My God, what are you doing?” Rosie hooks her nails into Rhoda’s throbbing throat and tears it open, shoving her face into the hot spew of blood, wanting to bathe in it, wanting to baptize this new life which she has been so stupidly struggling against. And there is no need to answer Curt; she knows perfectly well what she is doing, she is repaying, that’s what, repaying, and God help anyone on the wrong side of her account books. God help -

“Rosie?” Rhoda calls through the intercom, rousing her from this horrid yet deeply compelling daydream.

“Are you okay?” Keep your temper, little Rosie. Keep your temper and remember the tree. She looks down and sees the pencil she has been holding is now in two pieces. She stares at them for several seconds, breathing deeply, trying to get her racing heart under control. When she feels she can speak in a more or less even tone of voice, she says:

“Yeah, I’m okay. But you’re right, the kiddo kept me up late and I’m tired. Let’s rack it in.” “smart girl,” Rhoda says, and the woman on the other side of the glass-the woman who is taking off the headphones with hands that only shake a little-thinks, No. Not smart. Angry. Angry girl. I repay, a voice deep in her mind whispers. Sooner or later, little Rosie, I repay. Whether you want it or not, I repay.

She expects to lie awake all that night, but she sleeps briefly after midnight and dreams. It is a tree she dreams of, the tree, and when she wakes she thinks: No wonder it’s been so hard for me to understand. No wonder. All this time I was thinking of the wrong one. She lies back next to Bill, looking up at the ceiling and thinking of the dream. In it she heard the sound of gulls over the lake, crying and crying, and Bill’s voice. They’ll be all right if they keep normal, Bill was saying. If they keep normal and remember the tree. She knows what she must do.

The next day she calls Rhoda and says she won’t be in. A touch of the flu, she says. Then she goes back out Route 27 to Shoreland, this time by herself. On the seat next to her is her old bag, the one she carried out of Egypt. She has the picnic area to herself at this time of the day and year. She takes her shoes off, puts them under a picnic table, and walks north through the shallow water at the edge of the lake, as she did with Bill when he brought her out here the first time. She thinks she may have trouble finding the overgrown path leading up the bank, but she does not. As she goes up it, digging into the gritty sand with her bare toes, she wonders how many unremembered dreams have taken her out here since the rages started. There is no way of telling, of course, nor does it really matter. At the top of the path is the ragged clearing, and in the clearing is the fallen tree-the one she has finally remembered. She has never forgotten the things which happened to her in the world of the picture, and she sees now, with no iota of surprise, that this tree and the one which had fallen across the path leading to Dorcas’s “pomegranate tree” are identical. She can see the foxes” earth beneath the dusty bouquet of roots at the far left end of the tree, but it is empty, and looks old. She walks to it anyway, then kneels-she is not sure her trembling legs would have supported her much farther, anyway. She opens her old bag and pours out the remains of her old life on the leafy, mulchy ground. Among crumpled laundry lists and receipts years out of date, below a shopping list with the words

at the top, underlined, capitalized, and exclamation-pointed (pork chops were always Norman’s favorite), is the blue packet with the spatter of red-purple drops running across it. Trembling, beginning to cry-partly because the scraps of her old, hurt life make her so sad and partly because she is so afraid that the new one is in danger-she scoops a hole in the earth at the base of the fallen tree. When it is about eight inches deep, she puts the packet down beside it and opens it. The seed is still there, surrounded by the gold circle of her first husband’s ring. She puts the seed in the hole (and the seed has kept its magic; her fingers go numb the instant they touch it) and then places the ring around it again.

“Please,” she says, not knowing if she prays, or for whom the prayer is intended if she does. In any case, she is answered, after a fashion. There is a short, sharp bark. There’s no pity in it, no compassion, no gentleness. It is impatient. Don’t fuck with me, it says. Rosie looks up and sees the vixen on the far side of the clearing, standing motionless and looking at her. Her brush is up. It flames like a torch against the dull gray sky overhead.

“Please,” she says again in a low, troubled voice.

“Please don’t let me be what I’m afraid of. Please… just please help me keep my temper and remember the tree.” There is nothing she can interpret as an answer, not even another of those impatient barks. The vixen only stands there. Its tongue is out now, and it is panting. To Rosie it appears to be grinning. She looks down once more at the ring circling the seed, then she covers it over with the fragrant, mulchy dirt. One for my mistress, she thinks, and one for my dame, and one for the little girl who lives down the lane. One for Rosie. She backs to the edge of the clearing, to the head of the path which will take her back down to the lakeshore. When she is there, the vixen trots quickly to the fallen tree, sniffs the spot where Rosie buried the ring and the seed, and then lies down there. Still she pants, and still she grins (Rosie is now sure she is grinning), still she looks at Rosie with her black eyes. The cubs are gone, those eyes say, and the dog that got them on me is gone, as well. But I, Rosie… I bide. And, if needs must, I repay. Rosie looks for madness or sanity in those eyes… and sees both. Then the vixen lowers her pretty muzzle to her pretty brush, closes her eyes, and appears to go to sleep.

“Please,” Rosie whispers, one final time, and then she leaves. And as she drives the Skyway, on her way back to what she hopes is her life, she throws the last piece of her old life-the bag she brought with her out of Egypt-out the driver’s-side window and into Coori Bay.

The rages have departed. The child, Pamela, is far from grown, but she is old enough to have her own friends, to have developed applebud breasts, to have begun her monthly courses. Old enough so she and her mother have started to argue about clothes and nights out and nights in and what she may do and whom she may see and for how long. The hurricane season of Pam’s adolescence has not fully started yet, but Rosie knows it is coming. She views it with equanimity, however, because the rages have departed. Bill’s hair has gone mostly gray and started to recede. Rosie’s is still brown. She wears it simply, around her shoulders. She sometimes puts it up, but never plaits it. It is years since they have picnicked out at Shoreland, on State Highway 27; Bill seems to have forgotten about it when he sold his Harley-Davidson, and he sold the Harley because, he said, “My reflexes are too slow, Rosie. When your pleasures become risks, it’s time to cut them out.” She doesn’t argue this idea, but it seems to her that Bill has sold a huge batch of memories along with his scoot, and she mourns these. It is as if much of his youth was tucked into its saddlebags, and he forgot to check and take it out before the nice young man from Evanston drove the motorcycle away. They don’t picnic there anymore, but once a year, always in the spring, Rosie goes out by herself. She has watched the new tree grow in the shadow of the old fallen one from a sprig to a twig to a sturdy young growth with a smooth, straight trunk and confident branches. She has watched it raise itself, year by year, in the clearing where no fox-cubs now gambol. She sits before it silently, sometimes for as long as an hour, with her hands folded neatly in her lap. She does not come here to worship or to pray, but she has a sense of tightness and ritual about being here, a sense of duty fulfilled, of some unstated covenant’s renewal. And if being here helps keep her from hurting anyone-Bill, Pammy, Rhoda, Curt (Rob Lefferts is not a worry; the year Pammy turned five, he died quietly of a heart attack)-then it is time well-spent. How perfectly this tree grows! Already its young branches are densely dressed in narrow leaves of a dark green hue, and in the last two years she has seen hard flashes of color deep within those leaves-blossoms which will, in this tree’s later years, become fruit. If someone were to happen by this clearing and eat of that fruit, Rosie is sure the result would be death, and a hideous death, at that. She worries about it, from time to time, but until she sees signs that other people have been there, she doesn’t worry overmuch. So far she has seen no such sign, not so much as a single beercan, cigarette pack, or gum wrapper. Now it is enough simply to come here, and to fold her clear, unblemished hands in her lap, and look at the tree of her rage and the hard splashes of rose madder that will become, in later years, the numb-sweet fruit of death. Sometimes as she sits before this little tree, she sings.

“I’m really Rosie,” she sings, “and I’m Rosie Real… you better believe me… I’m a great big deal…” She isn’t a big deal, of course, except to the people who matter in her life, but since these are the only ones she cares about, that’s fine. All accounts balance, as the woman in the zat might have said. She has reached safe harbor, and on these spring mornings near the lake, sitting in the overgrown, silent clearing which has never changed over all the years (it is very like a picture, that way-the sort of humdrum painting one might find in an old curio shop, or a pawn-and-loan), her legs folded beneath her, she sometimes feels a gratitude so full that she thinks her heart can hold no more, ever. It is this gratitude that makes her sing. She must sing. There is no other choice. And sometimes the vixen-old now, her own years of bearing long behind her, her brilliant brush streaked with wiry threads of gray-comes to the edge of the clearing, and stands, and seems to listen to Rosie sing. Her black eyes as she stands there communicate no clear thought to Rosie, but it is impossible to mistake the essential sanity of the old and clever brain behind them.

June 10, 1993-November 17, 1994