4.

My father liked to say, approvingly, that Rose was a real pistol. My mother liked to say, approvingly, that Rose had her head screwed on straight.

Rose’s mother, the day she met me, stood on the stoop of their house as we approached the front door with her arms stretched wide as her smile and said Let me give you a hug! Dressed like Rose at rest: a big men’s shirt over leggings, only with much fancier flip-flops. Her deep red pedicure and a life’s worth of gold rings shone in the sun. Ann Marie.

My mother, the day she met Rose, sent her back on the train with a grocery bag filled with a jar of homemade dill pickles, half of the pound cake she’d made for dessert, and a newspaper cone full of hydrangeas from the backyard. And a large bag of Herr’s potato chips, because Rose, having met them, would not stop eating them.

Rose’s house was warm, neat, filled with framed pictures, plants, pillows, and Yankee candles. It was the house Rose had been born in, a house that was spotless but still nest-like, despite new carpets and highly polished old furniture. Like a place you could sink down into in the middle of the forest—or maybe that was just the wood paneling in the kitchen, full of potted plants, giving me that impression.

Said Rose of my home, which was also spotless, but with newer furniture and far fewer knickknacks: There is a serious draft in there and I am speaking metaphorically.

Rose and I reading a week’s worth of the Inquirer together on my parents’ couch while it rained one Saturday afternoon, Rose falling asleep in the corner of the couch and my mother arranging an afghan over her, wordlessly, before moving on to some other task. My mother, later that evening, as Rose and I sat at our kitchen table, photo albums spread out before us, bending down to kiss the top of Rose’s head, too, and saying, Goodnight, girls. My mother: her short frosted blond hair, her tanned freckled hands, her tiny gold hoops, her polo shirts and pleated khaki shorts, her tanned knees. My mother: brisk when she was not at rest, and when she was at rest impervious.

That first summer Rose and I became friends, we spent as much time as we could at the beaches where we’d grown up, spent as much time introducing the other to the slice of the Atlantic that we’d loved. When she came to Somers Point, Rose got the Jersey Shore experience that she’d spent her childhood longing for: roller coasters, bumper cars, iron-on T-shirts, boardwalk flirtation, funnel cake, pizza, water ice, soft serve. Rose loved walking the boardwalk slowly, the two of us being at the zoo and of the zoo at once, making up stories about all the faces we passed.

Rose loved flirting with the teenage boys who served us slices of pizza and large lemonades on the boardwalk. Take a number, I said one afternoon, when one of them asked what we were doing later, and Rose laughed, loudly. Take a number, she said, as we walked away. Repeated it as we walked and ate our soft serve, walked the boardwalk and let the light and the haze wrap us in an almost immobilizing gauze. Look at this one, she’d say, as a sweet tiny pumpkin of a face came toddling into our vision. Look at this one, she’d say, as a dog waddled or trotted toward us. Or: This guy, if she saw a man whose self-regard clearly outstripped the objective rationale for it.

My mother taught Rose how to use her wrist to reliably, unerringly flick a Skee-Ball into the fifty-point ring—taught her the same way she’d taught me, standing on Rose’s left side, kneeling slightly, her right hand braceleting Rose’s left wrist with her fingers, my mother narrowing her eyes and adjusting, just so, as if she were cracking a safe. You and your mother have the same exact face when you’re pitching a Skee-Ball, Rose said, during one visit. And then she did an impression: mouth shut, screwed up, brows furrowed, a gaze that could perform laser surgery.

You’re kidding me, I said. Because I was sure that my mother and I were nothing alike.

You and your mother both tap your finger on the table in the same exact way when you want to make a point, I said to Rose during a visit.

I’ve never noticed, Rose said, but I knew she was lying.

I loved going to Jones Beach with Rose and her mother and drinking spiked iced tea from a thermos and eating the antipasto her mother had packed that morning. Sitting in chairs or lying on blankets while reading Newsday and the Daily News and talking trash about Rudy Giuliani and people’s ill-behaved children. You’re too nice, said Rose’s mother, laughing, when she noticed I was reluctant to talk trash about people’s ill-fitting bathing suits. Rose’s mother, in the evenings, teaching me how—or as she said, teaching me the right way—to make sauce with fresh tomatoes and basil while Rose sat outside on top of a picnic table listening to a Mets game on the radio and smoking, using a Diet Coke can for an ashtray. Rose Angelica my love, said her mother, either you put that out or I’ll put it out for you. Sitting with Rose’s mother on the couch on those evenings, watching old movies, Rose’s mother impressed by my knowledge of the actresses and actors who had peopled the films of her and my mother’s youth.

In these contexts, it was difficult to picture Ann Marie shouting so loud Rose saw the spittle or throwing plates and knives at the wall, as she was said to have done when Rose was fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen and intent on escaping the house, intent on dressing in weird, unfeminine ways that angered Ann Marie, who could not see the Doc Martens and Manic Panic for the phase that they were, could not see that there might be things other than mothers making Rose angry, could only think that all of it meant she was going to lose Rose forever the way she lost her husband forever, and so raged at Rose so much it turned, said Rose, my heart into an empty freezer.

Rose’s mother, not unlike her daughter, liked to do things her way. During visits I’d ask if she could show me how to make gnocchi or biscotti, items I was pretty sure I’d spend my whole life only ordering in restaurants, and while we would start out in tandem, side by side with utensils and aprons, after a half hour I’d be elbowed—nicely!—out of the picture. She’d take a knife or a pile of dough away from me—nicely!—to show me one thing, and my hands would never touch that knife or dough again. She could not give up control of a task, and so I’d always end up leaning against the counter, drinking a cup of coffee, learning by watching, and asking questions about their family.

Rose and I spent hours lying together on our respective beaches talking and staring at the ocean as if it were television. At some point, if the water allowed, I would go for a long swim. At other points, Rose would fall asleep, or I would fall asleep, one or the other always awake keeping watch on the water.

We also loved to sit at our respective kitchen tables, after our parents had gone to bed, with family albums and shoeboxes full of photos, a bowl of popcorn, and a bottle of wine between us, listening to whatever records were available to play on the stereo. Earth, Wind & Fire’s Spirit at Rose’s house and Ella in Berlin at mine. Rose and I discovered that we shared an inexhaustible appetite for scrutinizing photographic records of the clothes that other people’s grandmothers wore, of the Christmas gifts that people attacked, unwrapped, and then abandoned, of poses in scantly vegetated and obviously freezing front yards. Figures trapped by style, sealed definitively off from the present. Staring at the past in order to commune with it, to try to know its contours through its uncomfortable shoes and elaborate hairstyles, to learn how to salute it, forgive it, and be on guard against it all at once.

To this day, if you showed me pictures of Rose’s aunts Mary, Gina, and Teresa, I could tell you which was which, and who their first loves were, and Rose could tell a Peggy (my mother) from a Linda from a Suzanne from a Carolyn (my aunts), and which Beatle they preferred. I could still tell you the name of the streets her grandmother and mother grew up on—Ridgewood Avenue and Keswick Place—and she could I’m sure still tell you the name of my father’s first girlfriend and the priest who coached his football team. Father Anton.

I don’t think I’ll ever have another friend who was as sincerely interested in my family and their vicissitudes as Rose. That kind of interest in another’s family, no matter how unremarkable the gene pool, is the mark of someone who has been wounded, stymied, beloved, beguiled, betrayed, and stonewalled by their own. The mark of writers and historians. They’re the first facts we have to gather; the first gaps we have to fill with our imaginations. The primary instance of primary resources and the failure thereof to tell the whole story. And that kind of attention to—reverence for?—another person’s first facts is a form of love.

On Labor Day weekend that first summer we were friends, we pulled up to Rose’s house and found a man sunning himself on a chaise lounge atop her carport roof. A man, tanned, muscled, and no doubt baby-oiled, wearing bright red swim trunks with a nautical-looking rope tied in a bow at his waist, holding a reflector, proudly but effortlessly, under his very Roman nose. Slicked-back black hair, highly visible black eyebrows. Ray-Ban aviators. Boxer’s or swimmer’s build and tortured, prominent features.

Oh no, said Rose, as we pulled up to the house.

Did your mother get herself a boyfriend? I said, leaning forward in the passenger seat to get a better look.

I’ll explain this later, she said, as she put the car in park.

Later as in twenty minutes from now, or twenty years from now?

I love you because of your quick wit but please be quiet so he doesn’t hear us, she said.

Ma! she shouted, as we entered the house. Ma! No answer. Her mother had already left for the weekend. A church retreat. Oh no, said Rose again. You stay here, she said, and headed outside. I stood at the window nearest the carport to watch.

Uncle Jimmy? she said. Glass and distance muffling her voice. One hand on her hip; the other, still holding on to keys, shielding her eyes as she looked up to the roof. It’s Rosie. Why aren’t you at the beach?

Too freakin’ crowded, I heard him say. Wanna come up?

I got a friend here. Rose, slipping into dialect. We’re going to the beach. Does my mother know you’re here?

No answer. Then his voice: You bring a guy to the house?

When Rose came back inside every muscle, from her face to her feet, seemed to be inhabited by what I’d call a full-body grimace, and she held herself in that traction for the next few hours. Even at the beach. The sun could not fire her ice, and I stared out at the water and waited for her to talk.

Okay. So. He’s my father’s brother.

What? Rose!

I know.

You never, ever mentioned him.

I know. She paused. Why would I mention I have an uncle Jimmy? I might as well legally change my name to Angela Red Sauce.

Her uncle, after high school, stole money from the pizza place he was working at because he’d gotten a girl pregnant and wanted to help her get an abortion, but she performed one herself and then died. He kept stealing money, enough to get himself caught and sentenced to one year in prison. After he got out, during which time his father, too, had died, and his mother—his mother, Rose and Ann Marie thought, died because her youngest son had been sentenced to prison—he thought about going to school for forestry, Rose couldn’t remember, but it didn’t stick. Rose’s mother let him live with them that year, the year he got out, because she remembered the boy not the man, the boy who used to pick her up forty-fives from Sam Goody, disco and soul forty-fives that he knew his brother never would, the boy who used to watch the Mets while letting Rose fall asleep on his chest, and once her mother came into the living room and found Rose on his lap, face up like a tiny bug, having slipped from his arms onto his knees and not to the floor, thank God, the boy who used to fix his mother’s radios and his mother’s blenders out in the mad scientist’s laboratory that was his mother’s second kitchen, used to play guitar, at least for one summer, in his mother’s second kitchen, and then Rose’s mother kicked him out when she found him having sex with some girl on her brand-new couch, the couch Rose and I and her mother sat on to watch From Here to Eternity and Days of Wine and Roses. To this day, said Rose, I don’t know whether my mother was royally pissed because this was a sin against God or a sin against her living room. He found a job driving a UPS truck, moved out. There was a marriage, a drinking problem, an anger problem, a divorce, a UPS truck crashed into the window of a 7-Eleven. A girl pregnant somewhere, maybe Florida, but they never met the girl or the child. Now he lived in an apartment at the top of an old friend’s house in Bay Ridge, working as a baker at a Polish wholesale bakery in Williamsburg. Her mother refused to let him into the house. It killed her, but she refused to let him into the house.

Occasionally Jimmy would drive out to Long Island and sun himself on the carport the way he did before he went to prison, the way he did before Rose came along. In the summer, Rose said, usually. And because he did not technically set foot in the house, her mother turned a blind eye. Mostly.

You know when you go to Williamsburg and you see those drunk Italian guys shouting outside that Irish bar, the one with the stained-glass panel over the transom, the one that’s all the way down by the river? That’s my uncle.

I had seen those men, and Rose’s ache became an ache in me.

I wish I didn’t love him, she said.

On the way home from the beach we stopped to get veal and ricotta because Rose had decided to make her uncle some rollatini. I’m telling myself it’s for you, she said.

I get it, I said.

Did I see Jimmy on the roof of your mother’s carport on the way to work or was I still hungover? said the man weighing the veal.

You were hungover.

Gotcha. The man smiled. I noticed he piled more veal on her order after he turned off the electric scale.

I sound exactly like an Angela Red Sauce, said Rose, starting up the car. Why are you friends with me?

Because you sound like somebody upholding the virtues of the northeastern middle class.

And that sounds like what exactly?

Like somebody constitutionally averse to bullshit and performance.

Rose laughed, loudly. Let us go with that. Thank you. Then, as she swung into traffic: I’m putting him on an eight ten train.

Her uncle, when Rose introduced him to me, reached out his hand and said, Well fuck me if you’re not the second coming of Eileen Healy, class of 1981. He had topped his bare chest, bare feet, and swim trunks with a straw fedora, and despite this peacock feather of an accessory, his grip—on both my hand and his short, sharp, tightly wound masculinity—instantly, mortifyingly made me want to get in the back seat of a car with him and make out. While also thinking I wanted to call the police and tell them somebody’s stray, cross-eyed pit bull was pissing all over my lawn. I could only imagine what Rose was thinking.

For Christ’s sake, said Rose. She’s my best friend. Which I did not know until that very moment. We did not use those terms for each other, finding them too redolent of the playground.

While Rose and I cooked dinner, Jimmy went out to the driveway and shot baskets. Should we put aprons on to complete this retrograde charade? I said. She laughed.

Who played basketball? I asked as we chopped.

My dad did, she said. We used to play horse out there with Jimmy. The metal backboard sounded as if it were taking a beating; it sounded like most of the shots were going in. I looked up and stared at her uncle’s back and shoulders. I poured myself a glass of wine and downed it too quickly.

That’s a good idea, said Rose, and did the same.

After we’d set the table, Rose stood, one hand on the frame of the back door, the other pushing the screen door open and out, one foot behind the other, and said: Dinner’s ready. I knew without being told that her mother had probably held that pose and said those words in just the same way, because whenever I stood at a kitchen sink for longer than two minutes, or set food down in front of my father, I became similarly, instantly possessed by my mother’s posture and inflections.

At dinner, despite having put on a brand-new-seeming Hawaiian shirt for the occasion, Jimmy did not present like someone who’d crash a UPS truck into a convenience store and steal from your register. He opened the wine, poured us glasses, served the two of us before serving himself, said he’d do the dishes afterward. It was as if he knew his job was to tend the warming fire that Rose and I had created by making the meal—knew that was his job, and was enjoying it. He had excellent table manners—although, shame on me for assuming he wouldn’t. He asked questions about how Rose and I met, where I’d grown up, asked Rose what she was up to in New York, if she’d found a boyfriend yet.

Good, he said, when she told him no. No one’s good enough for you. We’re all a bunch of fucking assholes.

How ’bout you? he said, turning to me. As if ready to fight, or to flirt. You got a boyfriend? I blushed and stared.

If you were any quieter, he said, I’d have to organize a search party for your tongue.

In response, I stuck out my tongue, and he laughed. Rose laughed, too.

I like this one, he said to Rose.

Rose asked him what he’d put in his freezer this winter.

He hunts deer, she said to me by way of explanation, and used to try to figure out ways to make it so I’d finally eat it.

The closest I ever came was venison sausage, he said. On a grandma pie.

You hunt deer? I said. With too much surprise in my voice.

What, you think I’m too much of a mook to like trees? Sitting back as if ready to judge or be judged. To fight and to flirt.

Actually, yes, I said.

She’s not the first, said Rose. Don’t act surprised.

You college girls know jack shit. But he was grinning.

That’s true, if we’re talking about life in prison, she said.

All right all right, and he put one hand up to stop her from going further.

But not even then, I said. We read the paper.

Oh you do, said Jimmy.

So comeoncomeoncomeon, said Rose, grabbing him by the knee and tugging it back and forth, tell us what you caught this winter and what you did with it. And she was grinning, too.

Like Rose, her uncle knew how to tell a story. About Orange County and the collision, one November weekend, at a rest stop off the Palisades Parkway, of the out-of-control wild turkey population, obese and clueless Star Wars reenactors, incompetent cops (Although consider the source, said Rose when he reached that point in the story), and a Range Rover full of what he called cider-donut hunters from the city, who’d pulled into the rest stop to breastfeed their toddlers. Like Rose, her uncle knew how to time a joke, how to throw a voice, how to skewer self-importance. Like Rose, like her mother, her uncle liked to hear himself talk, but never went on in a way that made you want him to stop talking—the flow of words never swelled over the banks into pointless digression. And as I listened I realized that I might be able to marry someone who’d never gone to college, as long as they knew how to tell a story at a table; as long as their words could become electric with verbal intelligence. As we sat and talked I thought Rose would probably say she too could fall victim to the same, and I worried a little for both of us.

Tell Jimmy, said Rose to me, about the deer you ran over in high school and how that Piney woman with an eye patch ran out of the woods, bow and arrow in her hands, and told you and your friends that you were going to help her skin that deer right there on the side of the road unless you paid her a hundred bucks because she’d been after it all morning and what you’d done was poached her dinner.

You told the whole freakin’ story, Rose! said Jimmy. What the hell kind of friend are you?

We continued laughing and talking until Rose left the table to get us more water and while her back was turned and my eyes sought the time from the clock over the sink—10:15—Jimmy put his hand on my knee.

The hand was a tongue that licked at my ear while a ringing inside my ears grew louder. I wanted: his fingers to move closer, his fingers inside me. Wanted him to come inside me while I lay on my back on the concrete outside. I jumped up from the table, which made Rose turn around, and all the plates and glasses clattered and wobbled. A wine glass dropped to the floor and burst into pieces. Jimmy, still seated, took a sip out of his as if it were sunset on the deck of a Cunard liner passing Antarctica.

I’m driving you to the train, she told him. Now.

You asshole, I said to Jimmy, but I didn’t really mean it, and he knew it. He took one more drink, stood up, and smiled at me on his way out of the kitchen.

Go! said Rose, slamming her hands on his shoulders and heaving him into the living room.

I cleaned up the glass and then headed upstairs to shower. When I came out of the bathroom I heard the refrigerator open and close, and when I reached the bottom of the stairs I saw Rose sitting at the kitchen table, staring into the distance, two full glasses of wine in front of her.

She raised her face to mine. It was tired and sad. She pushed one of the glasses toward me.

I’m sorry, she said.

Please.

A person should never think they know better than their mother, she said.

Then let’s kill ourselves right now, I said.

Will you tell me something?

My face burned again. I nodded.

Would you have let him—

I nodded.

We’re all doomed.

Shut up, I said.

You’re not the first friend he’s swooped in on like that.

I sat down at the table.

I don’t want to share you.

You won’t have to. I promise.

Don’t ever leave me, she said.

It had become our version of I love you. Don’t ever leave me or I hate everyone except you or What is wrong with everyone? or You’re the only person I can stand to talk to right now.

Why don’t we go see my parents tomorrow? I said.

Set your alarm and get me up, she said.

In the car, somewhere on the Long Island Expressway, I began a sentence with the word Why and Rose said Later, I promise.

That Sunday, I asked my father to take us clamming, because I thought Rose might need some time on the open seas with someone of the male persuasion who was given to saying very little when very little seemed exactly what was required. Someone to block our view of the Jimmys and make us realize how puny were the Karls. Someone to make us feel that we were talking behind the backs of all the women with babies, with husbands, with money to make or houses to clean. If only for an afternoon.

You two are quiet, said my father, once we’d reached a spot on the bay that he’d deemed suitable. You guys are usually going off like a couple of firecrackers.

The water lapped at the side of the boat.

Big city getting you down? said my father.

Give her the rake, I told him.

I had never before seen Rose in the act of trying and failing, but it seemed that watching her try to drag the bullrake through the sand to drag up the clams might qualify. I almost had to turn away. It was strange to watch my friend, who moved through the city with five thousand flourishes, confront some physical limitations out in what you might call nature. But she kept plunging and maneuvering and grunting.

Rose has a hard time giving up, I said to my father, who’d sat down next to me after showing her the ropes.

That’s why you two are friends, he said.

On the way back to shore we passed a boat with the words Scared Money Never Wins painted along the craft’s backside. Two people sat in the hole: a woman whose sunglass lenses were as big and black as Jackie O’s and a man in a captain’s hat with no shirt.

I’ll bet you anything that guy’s scared crapless one hundred and ten percent of the time, said my father.

Rose laughed for the first time that day. Too hard and too long, probably, but I understood why, and I felt a great deal of love for my father just then.

I like you two, he said, as we ate burgers and drank beers at the oldest bar in town, the wood of the booths dark and soft, scarred by pens and knives and boredom and drunkenness, while a Phillies game droned in the background on three separate screens.

Rose excused herself very quickly to go to the bathroom. After about two minutes I went to check on her, and when I opened the door to the ladies’ room I heard sniffling, heard a blowing of the nose. I turned back around and headed out.

She okay? said my father.

There was a line.

There are five people total in here, he said, giving me a look.

I shrugged.

My father took a bite of his burger, I took a bite of my burger, and we watched the baseball game.

Then my father said: I’ve had friends, but I never had a friend like Rose. I couldn’t open up to people. He did not seem to be speaking out of regret.

I think she’s grateful for you, I said. Instead of saying what I wanted to say, which was: I’m grateful for you.

Settle down, said my father.

Rose let me drive us back to the city in her grandmother’s Buick. We didn’t talk much but instead ruthlessly searched the dial for the perfect hit of well-known sound.

You know what it is, about your father? said Rose, when traffic had rolled to a stop just outside Elizabeth. To our right, beyond her rolled-down window, beyond the refineries, the city stood shrouded in a pink and tangerine haze. He treats you like a worthy opponent.

We sat a while in silence. The sun contracted to a tiny glowing dot. We were no closer to the exit.

Said Rose: Did you ever drive by the house of a guy you liked, just to see if they were there? Just to be where they might be?

Never, I said.

You’re Charlotte and I’m Emily, she said. Brontë, I mean.

Who else would you have meant? And you’re Laverne and I’m Shirley. But just to be clear: This doesn’t mean you’re privileging your wild tempestuous nature over my plodding realism, right?

Rose laughed. Sometimes her laugh was as rapid and prolific as gunfire, as rapid and prolific as her typing. No, no! It’s just—you’re a little more pragmatic. I wish I were.

I hope one day I’m not pragmatic at all.

That’s what I’m hanging around for, she said.