There were many things about Elizabeth Ferguson that the people of Bayview disliked. They thought her tall, too thin, too aloof. Her neck was too long and her breasts were too big. The men, who could have lived with the size of her breasts, found her unwilling to flirt and labeled her cold. The women were jealous of how well her clothes hung on her, and that she managed to look elegant in outfits that would have made them look like the bag ladies of late autumn. She said little in town unless spoken to, in which case she had the gall to be civil and clever. They distrusted her because her husband and parents were dead and because she called herself Elizabeth instead of Lisa or Betsy or Liz. In a town where the sole taxi driver delivered pints at breakfast to a dozen people, a town where alcohol was the cornerstone of all civic and social endeavor, they did not like that she could drink so much at the bar without becoming sloppy or degenerate. They found it alarming when, in the market or the bookstore and for no apparent reason, she burst out laughing; she might have just remembered the eccentric horse in the Saki story who has what its owner called “the swerving sickness,” but the people of Bayview could not guess this and took these abrupt outbursts to indicate that she was slowly going mad. They resented that Andrew Ferguson had left her a comfortable trust, and they blamed her for his death; however she had managed to cause him to crash, while drunk, 3,000 miles away, they knew she had done so for the money. And what they especially didn’t like was that, a week after he died, a man had left the Ferguson house at seven in the morning. Old Mrs. Haas, in the breakfast nook of her Victorian across the street, had watched through binoculars as the man left and had had to suppress her gleeful outrage until nine, when she began making phone calls.
Rosie Ferguson was four when her father died. As she sat on her mother’s lap at the crowded Episcopal service, she knew that her father was dead but kept waiting for him to join them in the first pew, wondering what he would bring her: a book maybe, or taffy. She hoped for the cinnamon kind, the prettiest, pink with a glassy red stripe. Several days before he had left for the East Coast, she had cut off the legs of all his suit pants at the knees, but she had forgotten this by the day of the service. She stared at the stained glass, the crucifix, the candles, the flowers, the man on stage in a black dress; spellbound, she bit her bottom lip and appeared to be getting a feel for it all before doing some interior decorating.
Elizabeth held Rosie on her lap, dimly aware that her daughter was trying to take care of her—Rosie kept patting her and smiling bravely—but Elizabeth couldn’t concentrate on what was happening. It was too surreal: Andrew’s now permanent absence, her presence in church for the first time in years, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want”; over the minister’s voice she heard Andrew reading to Rosie the night before he left, “James James Morrison Morrison Weather by George Dupree,” saw Rosie in the closet with the scissors, black curls flattened on one side after a nap, Siamese blue eyes squinted in concentration, cutting up the pants. “For Thou art with me,” the minister said, as an abrupt, hard laugh escaped from behind Elizabeth’s nose.
Rosie whipped her head around and gave her mother a stern look. Elizabeth bowed her head. “...Lord for ever.” Elizabeth was racked with waves of silent laughter, until another cramped laugh burst out of her nose and she pretended to sob, but Rosie, not fooled, crossed her arms and glared. Behind them, skeptical looks were exchanged. The choir began singing “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” and Elizabeth, hugging her child tightly, shook with suppressed giggles and emitted staccato nasal scraping noises into her daughter’s black hair, until tears for the man who had given her Rosie ran down her face.
The people of Bayview, a small town in the San Francisco Bay area, thought that she was too handsome to have suffered sufficiently in her life, to have suffered as much as they had. They knew almost nothing of her past and resented how easy it had always seemed for her.
But Elizabeth had few happy memories of childhood. Both her parents had been alcoholics. Her father, who was dashing and funny, left her mother when Elizabeth was ten, after which Elizabeth stopped bringing friends home from school because her mother was apt to have passed out on the couch.
In seventh grade Elizabeth was taller and more buxom than her teacher and had inherited her father’s eyebrow, one long black line of hair that spanned both eyes like a mustache, and her mother was too undone to help Elizabeth pluck a clearing in the brow. Elizabeth was the shyest and most frequently teased girl in school. She often read alone, at lunchtime and stayed up half the night reading, because on top of—or because of—it all, she was an insomniac.
At sixteen she was five-foot-ten and striking in the way of the young Charlie Chaplin. Her thick black eyebrows, plucked by now, were awesome, and her breasts were magnificent. She had her first affair, with a man in his mid-twenties. It lasted two years. He was wildly funny, and she thought they would marry but he fell in love with someone else, “Somebody less moody,” he said.
She went east for college, majored in literature, minored in math, dabbled in philosophy, marched for peace and human rights, wondered what on earth she would do with her life after college, and had a series of affairs with witty bookworms, each more passionate and disastrous than the last, each having begun so happily. What is wrong with you, Elizabeth?
It seemed to her that in essential ways she had not changed much since seventh grade. Her moods were as volatile as the weather. She was riddled with anxiety, prone to depression, constantly terrified of losing her mind or life, sometimes so much so that she couldn’t leave her bedroom.
She got almost all A’s in college, could hardly have cared less. In the audience at a concert, her mind sometimes wandered so far away that when it finally returned to where her body sat, she wasn’t absolutely sure that she hadn’t just screamed at the top of her lungs, wasn’t sure that the stunned observers were only pretending that nothing had happened. There was something uniquely wrong with her; she was the stranger in the strange land; her skin didn’t fit correctly.
The most popular professors fell in love with her—one of them described her as diabolically brilliant and witty—but she came to doubt that she was the sort of woman who could have a long-term relationship with a man. She grew more aloof after each affair ended, came to think that being in love was like having an infection, swore that never again would she wait by the phone for a man to call, swore that she would be more selective about the men to whom she gave her heart and soul because each time the love died it nearly killed her, swore all sorts of things and then went on to repeat the same mistakes. She grew bored with hearing the same old tapes playing in her mind, grew bored by how easy it was to get men and A’s, grew bored with her friends’ melodramatic, obsessed love affairs, grew bored with the smartest people’s stupidity when it came to love, and came to believe that people sought to recapture those senses of failure and rejection which had so dazzled them. She grew bored with demonstrations for peace and human rights, grew insanely bored with her boredom, and with her anxieties of winding up an insane alcoholic like her mother. Boredom is the root of all evil, she read in Either-Or: evil, the source of sorrow and distress; evil thoughts of men and her mother had been lurking in her mind almost all her life; what was she going to do with it all, what would she do with her life?
She read, studied, went to movies, discarded lovers when they became too clingy, smoked, had long talks with other women about men and mothers, drank on occasion, and graduated with honors in both English and math. Neither of her parents came east for graduation. Elizabeth did not seem to care.
The day after graduation, lanky and self-righteous, she participated in a March of Dimes Walk-a-Thon: walked fifteen miles of the twenty-mile course and then developed fierce shin splints. She sat down by the side of the road waiting for one of the trucks which periodically drove by collecting exhausted walkers. She was massaging her legs, daydreaming of a hot bath, when a young legless man on a wooden dolly passed by where she sat, pulling himself along with his gloved hands. And, by God, Elizabeth got up and walked the last five miles. Three days later, when she was able to walk again, she flew back to San Francisco.
Five years, six jobs, and three affairs later, she met and fell in love with Andrew Ferguson. He had three things Elizabeth wanted—playfulness, money, and a kind of faith. He was a truly kind man, who loved to read. By now, they had between them one living parent, his mother, who flew to San Francisco for their wedding.
Being married to Andrew did not feel real to Elizabeth, but—or so—it felt wonderful, so wonderful that Elizabeth expected him to die or kick her out of the house he had bought in Bayview with part of his considerable inheritance; the closer and more comfortable they became, the more apprehensive Elizabeth grew, feeling that it would all be snatched away.
Neither of them worked for the first months of their marriage: side by side they lay in bed reading, side by side they created a magnificent garden of flowers and rosebushes; made dinner, plans, love; went to movies, operas, the San Francisco Symphony, museums, libraries, bookstores, an occasional party: needing only each other, they did it all up royally in their elegant, well-worn clothes.
Then Andrew decided to become a carpenter for the exercise and camaraderie, and Elizabeth was left alone. Boredom and panic set in the day he began his first job. She spent the next six months tending the garden and the house, reading, killing time, waiting for him to come home to play with her again, and slowly going mad.
“Well, what kind of work do you want to do?”
She shrugged.
“Wouldn’t you like to do something in the book world?”
“I worked for that publisher, remember? All I did was type.”
“You know that publicist you worked for? Could you do pro motion again?”
“No.”
“Why?”
She shrugged.
“Now don’t go into a brood on my account. I’m trying to help.”
“See, with the publicist, I thought I’d be—I don’t know, promoting good books that the world wouldn’t know about otherwise, strengthening the literary gene pool—but all I did was type, for a pimp.”
“How about teaching? English? At a private school? I don’t think you’d need a teaching certificate.”
“I don’t like kids.”
“But we’ll have kids someday, won’t we?”
“I don’t know. Yes, sure we’ll have a kid someday. But I don’t want to teach.”
“What do you want to do? You’re a great cook and love it—”
“I don’t know!” she yelled at him. “If I knew, I’d go look for a job.”
“What’s it going to be that helps you figure out what you want to be?”
“I don’t know!”
“I think you’re going to go crazy if you don’t find something to do; you’re so goddamn smart, and funny, and literate—do you want to write? Do you have any compulsions to write a book? Or a screenplay? Book reviews?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know.”
She still didn’t know a year later, or a year after that. She panicked frequently at how quickly the time flew and yet how every day loomed before her like a dragon, waiting to be slain. Looking in the mirror she saw how quickly she was aging, saw herself as Dave the Spaceman at the end of 2001; laugh lines had turned to crow’s-feet. She slept late, spent an hour at the breakfast table mechanically reading the Chronicle, cleaned up the kitchen, went around the house picking up Andrew’s carpenter’s stuff, clothes, shoes, apple cores, and books. Then it was time for lunch. She read while eating, often ending up in the living room reading just one more chapter, and then just one more chapter. Then she might pore over the Help Wanted listings in the paper, maybe reread the entire front section. An hour or two in the garden, and then a mile walk into town for the exercise and to shop ... and eventually Andrew would return from his happy work, and they would have cocktails and dinner and funny talks and read or go to a show, and then it would be time for bed, for sex and sleep. Unless she had insomnia. And most of this was done swathed in the gauze of loneliness and boredom and anxiety.
One day she would get around to writing a book, a comic treatment of a good marriage to an easygoing and interesting man. About insomnia, and depression, and idiosyncrasies. About her mood swings; about how infuriating an easygoing person can be. About the things that drove her crazy with impatience or irritation: no “Briefly Noted” fiction in The New Yorker, or Herb Caen’s vacations from the Chronicle, Andrew’s exuberant dental flossing which left flecks of food on the bathroom mirror; how the sound of him crunching away on an apple or celery could send her into an in articulated rage, how it would remind her of how much she’d hated— hated—the sound of her mother eating bacon, how she would begin to think it would make her lose her mind. One day she would write a book about the love and patience that bind one person to another after all the glinty romantic stuff has worn off.
And, in the meantime, waiting-waiting to figure out what it was that she was waiting for, waiting for the revelation of her professional destiny, waiting to find labor that was its own reward, something that would benefit others at the same time—she remained somewhat surprised that fame was evading her.
She became pregnant at thirty—an accident of laziness and—planned to have an abortion. A child would postpone her finding her true calling. Other people’s babies made her, at best, nervous, made her fingers twitch. She slept poorly enough as it was, a baby screaming at dawn to be fed or changed would...
“What? You’re thinking of killing our baby?”
“Andrew. It’s not a baby. It’s an inadvertently fertilized egg, a blob of embryonic tissue with a yolk sac.”
Andrew went to the library and checked out a book on human fetuses. Seven weeks pregnant, she was carrying an embryo whose arms and legs were budding, whose mouth and eyes were appearing. It had ridges on its kidneys that would become sex organs; it had fingers and a vestigial tail.
“I rest my case.”
“Andrew, I don’t want a baby yet. I think I’d abuse it.”
“No, you wouldn’t. A baby would be lucky to have you for a mother and me for a father.”
“I’m too selfish. I’m antisocial. I need too much privacy.”
“You piss and moan about how bored you are....”
“Not very often. And the news is so awful. What sort of world is this to bring a baby into?”
“Same old world it’s always been, beautiful and cruel.”
“No, it’s much worse; it hovers on the brink of destruction.”
“Elizabeth. Living on earth has always been a dangerous way to spend your time. Before the Bomb there were Huns, plagues, beasts. There has always been war; mothers have always worried. Mothers used to have to worry about polio, and before that, chariot accidents, and before that ... you’ve just got to have faith.”
“But I don’t.”
“But I have a lot.”
“What if it’s retarded? What if it grows up and kills people? What if—what if it’s as neurotic as I am?”
“You’re my favorite person in the world.”
“I’m an insomniac. I’m prone to depression. I probably drink too much. I’m too scared to have a baby right now.”
But she reconsidered. She had nothing to show for thirty years except an increasing amount of knowledge not yet applied to anything and a great garden. A child would give her something to do with her time; she was watching the clock too much. It would give her a sense of purpose, relatedness, an excuse not to have to come up with something to do with her life; maybe it would give her that elusive and craved carrot, peace of mind.
Oh, what the hell.
“What shall we name it?” Andrew asked, holding her.
“Demo,” she said.
They named their baby girl Rosie and watched her grow. Elizabeth loved the first two years: her days were full, her nights were full, and nursing was the purest, simplest communication she had ever known. Rosie was quiet, content, funny, and responsive, a bright little animal who considered Elizabeth to be the most wonderful thing in the universe. Elizabeth marveled that she had given birth to such a creature, and Andrew, changing diapers or rocking her to sleep at dawn, had never been so happy. Elizabeth smoked less, drank less, smiled more often, and only rarely felt like throwing the tiny body at a wall.
Rosie cried very little and had eyes as blue as Andrew’s, eyes as blue as a Siamese cat’s, and soft black curls. She was tiny, too thin perhaps, but had an already beautiful triangular face.
One sunny day Elizabeth was planting sweet williams, with Rosie beside her in a red sunsuit, playing with a trowel, both of them peaceful and in their own worlds, when Rosie suddenly flung a handful of dirt into her mother’s face. Elizabeth yelped, eyes stinging and wet, grabbed her daughter’s hand, and slapped it, hard. Rosie lost her balance and fell face down into the dirt, bawling until her terrified mother picked her up, wiped away the muddy drool, and carried her inside. In the rocking chair she nursed her baby, whose eyes never left Elizabeth’s face, and they sat sadly for a long time, rocking, nursing.
At two, Rosie had become a proud, willful, irrational, demanding, and fast little person, who had yet to say her first word of English but made it clear that she now considered her mother to be the only fly in her ointment. Andrew and Rosie were in love, while Elizabeth was a jealous, moody stranger to them both. Andrew began to do carpentry again, this time sheerly for the fun of it and—thought Elizabeth—to get away from her.
The house felt like a cage, and Elizabeth had occasional fantasies of running away forever, but by then Rosie was so much a part of herself that she could never have done it. She kept remembering the old cartoon in which two men are manacled to the wall of a windowless prison cell, two feet above the ground, with snakes crawling on the floor, one man saying to the other, “Okay. Here’s my plan.” But this stage of the relationship passed, and mother and child were close again, mutually needed and amused.
At two and a half, Rosie finally spoke. Andrew said that she’d been taking notes until then. She was on his lap, watching television, when Elizabeth, in the kitchen, turned on an electric mixer which shattered the picture on the tube into undulating lines of static with a steady white blip swimming back and forth across the screen. Rosie studied it for a moment, turned to look up into her father’s face, and said, “Fush.”
After that she wouldn’t shut up. “Me do it!” was her battle cry. She was incompetent at practically everything but insisted on trying, threw tantrums unless she got a shot at tying her shoes or washing her mud-caked face or pouring juice into a glass, even though she knew that her mother knew that she knew she couldn’t do it. She was developing dignity, and once again Elizabeth began to worry about going crazy, began to understand how her own mother had grown into a dipso. Eager once again to please Elizabeth, Rosie took everything so seriously—stepping into her tiny underpants, brushing her teeth, pasting twenty dollars’ worth of postage stamps to a wall—that Elizabeth heard Thus Spake Zarathustra playing constantly as the soundtrack of Rosie’s life.
They took her to the zoo, the planetarium, the park, the library. They got rid of the television and Andrew read her fairy tales, Bible stories, and poetry, and Elizabeth patiently helped her learn to read before she was four. She’d filled out a first-grade workbook soon after: 1 cat, 2 dogs, 3 piggies. She understood the difference between “up” and “north”; Heaven was up, Mendocino was north. She asked endless questions: Why was water wet? And the sun so hot, and the night so dark?
“Because that is their nature; that is the nature of water, sun, night.”
“Why does the moon follow us when we walk at night?”
“It just seems to. It just looks that way.”
The three Fergusons flew back east to visit Andrew’s mother when Rosie was three. And Nana flew out for Rosie’s fourth Christmas. Elizabeth had bought her a tea set, a pot and cups of white enamel with tiny violets, but didn’t tell Rosie about it. Rosie found the parcel under the tree, begged, cried, and was obviously going to die unless she knew what the present to Nana was.
“You’ll find out on Christmas. It’s a secret.”
“Pleeeeeeze.”
“I don’t want you to tell her. It’s a secret.”
“I won’t tell her, I promise. Pleeeeeeze,” and so on until finally Elizabeth said that it was a tea set.
“You promise not to tell?”
Rosie nodded, determined.
When Andrew returned from the airport with Nana, Elizabeth and Rosie went down the stairs of the porch to greet her, Rosie wearing a blue velvet jumper the same color as her eyes, tiny white blouse and socks, crying at the top of her lungs, “Naaaaaana, we got you a teeeeee set.”
When she was four and a half, she asked vague questions about what Elizabeth and Andrew did in bed, which she sometimes overheard.
Elizabeth explained the mechanics of lovemaking, and that it was also called “fucking” or “screwing,” words Rosie had by then heard countless times, and that two people did it if they wanted to have a baby, and because it felt so good.
One day she told Elizabeth, “I’ll never get married.”
“Why?”
“Oh, you know,” she said, and then whispered. “All that fucking.”
Her first best friend, Mukie Conga, rarely left her side until he was killed by pirates and went to Heaven. His successor was the little boy next door. She learned to feel jealousy, learned to feel greed, and learned to feel the pleasures of giving. They gave Elizabeth and Andrew jars and jars filled with sow bugs, or tadpoles, or ladybugs, and presents wrapped in miles of Scotch tape—a leaf or a bluebellied lizard’s tail.
He let her touch his penis.
She told Elizabeth.
“Did you like it?”
“No. It was all squiggly.”
Pain, fear. Rosie was attacked and badly bitten by hornets after dropping a rock onto their nest; fell from the branches of trees and bounced; went through early childhood with scabs on her knees and elbows; experienced—again and again—the cruel, chilling pain of stubbed toes; burned her bottom and thighs on blazing slides in the park; fell off a ten-foot wall and bounced, bloody and stunned.
Life was perfect on top of her father’s shoulders, with his hands around her ankles and her mother beside them. Life was worst alone in bed, in the dark, when a pile of snakes began to writhe, or she awoke from a dream and saw the amber eyes of a tiger looking into her window. If she screamed, her father would come in, hold her, show her in the light that the pile of snakes was really a pile of clothes.
She ran out into the street once and was barely missed by a car; swallowed a bottle of baby aspirin and threw them all up on the way to the hospital; nearly drowned in the Russian River, blue by the time Andrew brought her up to the surface. Still, the inadvertently fertilized blob of embryonic tissue had survived to grow into a brilliant and consumed little person with dignity, humor, and frequently poor judgment.
Meanwhile, Elizabeth tried to figure out what she would do with herself once kindergarten started, swore that she wouldn’t lapse back into the wasteful, gauzy days she had lived out-killed, rather—before Rosie was born. Was there a niche for her out there? If only she had ... more time, more pressure, more inclination, more contacts. It was her if-only-I-had- more-this- or-more-that carrots that kept her from giving up the future completely. She thought of all the things she could have been, thought of all the unsatisfying things she had been, and pretended with a grudge that she would have had the discipline and talent to become a success somewhere, if only it hadn’t been for her mother, or for the curse of Andrew’s money, which allowed her not to have to try very hard. Frustration, born of ennui, fueled by inertia and the escalating speed of time’s passage, welled up inside her and made her palpitate. She came to think of herself as a thwarted workaholic while she spent each day waiting for it to be over.
Andrew was her ally and only close friend. They had grown closer, more familiar, because of Rosie and-for the same reason-less needy, so that he became for Elizabeth everything she had wanted in a man, someone she could keep at arm’s length and still keep around. In bed, pressing up against and into him, with his arms around her, she was peaceful.
She had several casual women friends, no one special. She kept in touch, by mail, with two roommates from college. There were people in town she liked to bump into at the library or nursery: clever, crazy people who read a lot and were therefore good for a short conversation, but she found that, following such a conversation, they would try to crowd her and make unreasonable demands on her time, like wanting to get together for a meal every few months, and she would feel the walls close in and shun their advances tactfully—usually lying—until they gave up. And then this private and lonely woman could look forward to bumping into them again at the bookstore or the market.
She longed for and feared the day that Rosie, her pride and joy, would start school. With a polished gift now of blocking out almost anything she couldn’t stand—which was to say anything even remotely unpleasant, especially the pangs of bad conscience that plagued her—she waited for her destiny to reveal itself.
Andrew answered Rosie’s questions about death, usually when they came upon wrecks or flattened animals on the highway. When something’s body got too old or sick or banged up, it stopped working, like when a flashlight’s batteries ran out, or if you smashed the flashlight with a hammer; but the soul, which was the light that lived within your heart, flew up to Heaven to live with God and the Angels. The Angels were spirits with wings, friendly ghosts, who took care of everyone. Rosie imagined them as stewardesses: beautiful, smiling blondes with haloes and trays of soft drinks.
Neither Rosie nor her mother cried much immediately after Andrew died; there was too much taking care of the other to do. Rosie, on the one hand, clung to her imperious religious faith: Daddy was in Heaven now with God and the Angels and smiling down on her; on the other, she kept expecting him to show up, as if his death had been a game of hide-and-seek.
Elizabeth remembered the earth-shattering fear of having seen her own mother cry when she had been a small girl, and so held back most of her tears. At first she thought of him constantly, every other second, but then only several times a minute, and eventually only several dozens an hour, like when, not long after, she quit smoking. Each new stage, each decreased level of obsession, felt like the best she could hope for-the new me, and a relief at that—but then a week later the preoccupation would have grown even dimmer.
They missed his kindness and teasing and hugs and smell and his reading out loud to them, but of course life went on.
James James said to his mother, “Mother,” he said, said he: “You must never go down to the end of the town without consulting me.”
Rosie took care of her mother by teasing her and hugging her. She insisted on being read to, insisted that they walk together on the beach, learned how to make Elizabeth laugh when she was in the doldrums, chastised her when she drank too much whiskey. Andrew lived on in Rosie.
Rosie’s first comedy routines were impersonations. She could do old Mrs. Haas, she could do actors in television commercials she had seen at a friend’s house—Mr. Big Fig, the Raisin Bran raisins, an uncanny Ricardo Montalban—she could do the Munchkins, Louis Armstrong, and the freakishly buxom woman who lived next door, who eased her breasts onto her dining room table as if she’d been holding two big bags of groceries. And she learned to love to make her mother laugh.
By the time she started kindergarten, she’d been published in the Chronicle, in a letter to the pet doctor.
“Dear Mr. Miller,” she dictated to Elizabeth. “These friends of ours, names Grace and Charles, had two cats. This one named Bert who is orange ran away. Mama says it found a new home. Do you think its new owner is nice?” (signed, in her own hand) “Rosie Ferguson.”
“Dear Rosie,” he answered in his column. “Yes.”
Rosie was the star of kindergarten, loved every minute of it, was the only child who could read, had attention lavished upon her by the teacher and the children. She was the only child with a dead father and seemed rather proud of it. There was only one bad day in those nine months of finger painting, stories, naps, snacks, and playing with her friends. When she was proudly reading Little Black Sambo to the class, bile came up into her throat. She fought it back, kept reading, but soon she was on the verge of throwing up and began to cry-with her mouth closed. While being held and comforted by her adored teacher, Rosie threw up all over her, an event she would never forget.
Elizabeth reasoned that she couldn’t very well find a job, since she had to be—wanted to be—home at noon, when an ecstatic Rosie returned. She was worried that Rosie was so sensitive, cried at the drop of a hat, cried upon hearing “The Streets of Laredo,” cried upon hearing “The Titanic” (although she was momentarily cheered upon learning that it was little kiddies, not kitties, who had wept and cried as the water poured over the side), cried when her mother was noticeably drunk. She cried when she thought about orphans, and blind people, and dead puppies, and old dogs at the pound. She cried when she thought of poor little lambs who had lost their way, she cried about the Little Match Girl, she cried on those rare occasions when Elizabeth cried, and she cried about war. She cried because Abraham Lincoln had been shot, mostly cried for little Tad, and cried with terror late at night when she thought she heard the mice gnawing through the electrical wires-sure to set the house on fire. And she cried with an unquenchable homesickness for her father.
A year had passed since his death. One Saturday, Elizabeth sat reading on the porch while her skinny child sat in the lowest branches of the plum tree, chucking the hard green plums at various targets—cars, for instance, which drove down the narrow, rustic street on which they lived.
“Be careful, sweetheart. Those branches are thin.” Get down out of that tree before you fall and break your neck, says her mother’s voice, inside.
“I’m being careful, Mama.”
Elizabeth returned to the book, Rabbit, Run, which she was reading for the second time: “Sun and moon, sun and moon, time goes.” In the tree, Rosie stopped throwing plums when Mrs. Haas emerged from her house and crossed the street to the picket gate outside the Ferguson house.
“Your roses look lovely,” she called to Elizabeth.
“Thanks.”
“Rosie, darling, you’re not eating those nasty green plums, are you?” Even from the porch, Elizabeth could see her blinking her nose like a rabbit, had to bear down on a laugh as she remembered Rosie’s impersonation: Rosie could do a better Mrs. Haas than Mrs. Haas.
Rosie shook her head—the heavy black curls.
“Because if you do, you’ll get the trotties.”
Rosie looked back at her mother, checking in.
“And another thing,” said Mrs. Haas, puckering her mouth and brow like young Shirley Temple at her most nobly indignant. “If you eat the little plummies now, they won’t have a chance to grow up and ripen.”
Rosie, with a roll of her eyes, a horrified mouth, and a sarcasm impressive in one so small, said, “Ohhhh, pooooor plummies!”
Elizabeth smiled.