Rose Looney

Here I sit at my kitchen table, watching my coffee grow cold, knowing with every pore of my body that when Charlie comes home tonight he’s going to want to touch me. And what will I say? What will I do? Will I giggle like I did on our wedding night and feel like his touch is setting me free? Will I do what I’ve done for sixteen years of marriage: let his smile and sweet-talking apologies melt away any resistance, any anger? I have no idea. The only thing I’m sure of is how different this last fight was from all the rest. The rules had been changed. The stakes had been raised higher than I ever dreamed possible. Now even the sunlight that splashes into what I once thought of as my cozy kitchen seems brutal. I spent last night at Eudora’s, but I can’t stand that again. So what do I do tonight after suffering through a wordless meal and an hour or two of TV racket? Once the covers are turned down and the bedroom light is switched off and he gropes at me with hands I once adored, will I say, “Get the hell away from me, you son of a bitch,” and do so confidently, not wavering, knowing that his touch isn’t freedom but sweet poison?

I actually could do a lot with my day. I could pick up the broken water glass that I threw at Charlie two nights ago. It didn’t hit him. Instead it hit just beyond his head, shattering against my yellow walls, leaving a shadowy whiskey stain that only a new coat of paint will hide. When I was first married I chose yellow for my kitchen, because I was so young and naive. I told the man at the paint store, “I’m going to paint my walls with sunshine.” What a joke.

Or I could get off my dead butt and mop the floor, or put the broom that Emory had threatened Charlie with back in the closet. Or I could even go in and straighten the living room. I could empty the crumpled cigarette packs and the ashes and the half-smoked Salems from my kidney-bean ashtrays — the ones with all the tiny mosaic tiles that I glued in myself. I could straighten the lampshade with the picture of the fighting bulls on it. Charlie knocked it cockeyed after Emory punched him. Or I could walk in there and do something harmless like dust. I could dust the family pictures I have set out so proudly on the TV console. I could straighten the oil painting—a seascape — that I bought at Woolworth’s three years ago. It looks just like the Atlantic Ocean with gulls and sea oats and sand dunes and everything. But two nights ago, when I put my hands to my ears to block out not the shouting — that was already over — but I guess the memory of the shouting, I accidentally hit it with my elbow. And it crashed to the floor but nobody heard it. Yesterday it was back on the wall, crooked. I don’t know who did that.

Then again, I could just sit here and try to imagine my living room with its beautiful white stucco. That’s what I liked most about this house when we bought it thirteen years ago. We’d scrimped and saved for three years. I’d even held out grocery money—unbeknownst to Charlie — so that we could stop living in cramped, noisy apartments. This was the fourth house we looked at, and the minute I stepped inside I fell in love with it. It didn’t have paneling like most of the other small two-bedroom houses we could afford. No. Somebody had bothered to stucco the living room and both bedrooms. The pure, clean whiteness of those rooms made me feel better off than we really were. But now when I think about my lovely living room, the walls are splattered with blood. Not much. Just a little. Like sea spray. And I don’t know whose blood. Maybe mine, maybe one of theirs. But mostly Charlie’s.

Of course if my life was still normal what I might be doing is humming around the kitchen baking Emory’s favorite: sugar cookies. Even though he was growing up as tall and handsome as his daddy, he still wasn’t too grown-up for an after-school snack. But there wouldn’t be any Emory walking through that kitchen door. There wouldn’t be my son —who was now taller than me — tossing his books on the kitchen counter and heading straight for the refrigerator to drink the milk from the carton even though he knew I’d tell him to get a glass.

 

Emory was my only baby. After he was born I said, That’s it. One is enough. I’m not like a lot of women — I remembered the pain of labor long after it was over, like it was branded into my soul. So my diaphragm became my talisman, my little charm that would ward against any more kids. But it didn’t work. I got pregnant again anyway. Years later. And despite the memory of my first labor, I wanted that child. Once I became pregnant the thought of a baby crawling around my kitchen floor made any labor pain well worth it. But in a horrible, sinister kind of way the talisman was potent after all. Because I miscarried, and that pain was far worse than childbirth.

I need to get a handle on this. I need to understand what really happened in this house between my child and my husband. I’m sipping cold coffee. The afternoon sun is beating through the kitchen window without any wind to stir it. I like sitting here because all I can see is the yard, and not that damn penitentiary across the street. But I’m in the full sun and I’m sweating and I know heat rash has probably started to turn the inside of my arm a spotty crimson. But I refuse to check. Instead, I stare at my dust-covered pot of plastic daisies that sits in the center of my kitchen table. I know that if they weren’t plastic they’d be long dead. I have a funny urge to sniff them— as if they might actually give off a scent. But I know all I’d get is a nose full of dust. So I refrain.

Instead, I touch a harsh, faded plastic petal and consider the possibility that I should have trusted Charlie. Maybe after I’d found lipstick on his shirt for the umpteenth time — deep plum is a color I never wear — I should have just ignored it. Maybe after he phoned and said he’d be working late again and after I drove past the car lot and saw it was empty, I should have just said, That’s a man for you. Maybe I should have just eaten all my pride and ignored the fact that Mary Sue O’Connor sidled her grocery cart up to mine at the A&P right as I was choosing a baking hen for dinner and said, “Rose, I don’t mean to gossip, but Tom was at the car lot yesterday delivering the new lavender business cards Pauline DuPree ordered and he said your husband and Miss DuPree were on awfully friendly terms.’’

And I said to her, “Why, Mary Sue, what should be so remarkable about my husband being on friendly terms with his boss? Perhaps wandering minds see only what they want to see.”

But deep in my soul I knew she was right. I got home and started putting two and two together. Again, I saw through all of Charlie’s excuses. I even imagined him heading over to Pauline’s for a quickie every time he said he was going out for a quart of milk. I figured it started even before I lost my baby girl. It wasn’t the fact that I hadn’t been able to bring his baby to full term. I figured he’d been cheating before that.

After one full water glass of Jack Daniel’s I decided that from the very day we got married he had been untrue. And after two full water glasses, I decided the only thing left for me to do was get him to admit to me that he was a no-good, cheating bastard. And if he didn’t admit it maybe I’d kill him. And if he did admit it maybe I’d still kill him.

I was horribly worked up.

So when he finally did walk in the back door, the kitchen door, wearing his jaunty hat and his beautiful charcoal-gray business suit, I didn’t say how do you do or kiss my butt. I threw my third glass of JD at him. Which, of course, he ducked, so that it hit my nice yellow wall, thus the whiskey stain. And then he straightened up — his six-foot frame filling my vision — and started to laugh.

Then he took off his hat, removed his coat, and loosened his tie and said, “Rose, how the hell are you.”

I’m not sure what all I said to him. But I gave it to him full blast. The shouting was horrible. And with Charlie and me it’s always been easy transition between shouting and shoving. In fact, it’s like time speeds up into one furious, barbed ball. So before I knew it I’d ripped his new white shirt. And it seemed like just seconds had passed when I found myself being shaken so hard I thought my spine would snap. “Shut your mouth, Rose Looney, slam it shut right now!” Charlie was screaming.

That’s when Emory came out of his room and pulled the broom out of the closet. He swung it twice — warning swings — and told Charlie to take his “goddamned hands off my mother.” Which he did. So I ran into the living room, but Charlie ran after me. And I think it was then that I shouted at him, “Now I know why your mother abandoned you. Now I know why she walked out the first chance she got. Because you’re bad seed.”

That’s when he backhanded me. Busted my lip. And that’s when Emory jumped over the back of my blue upholstered couch and stepped in between Charlie and me. And he didn’t give Charlie a chance to back down or to get in the first punch. He hit his father full and square in the face. Blood spewed and I was afraid Charlie’s nose was broken. And I screamed, “Oh my God, Emory, go get some ice.” Charlie stood there looking amazed—not angry, more like shock. He didn’t put his hands to his face. He stood very still and let the blood flow. And Emory slumped down on the couch, put his head in his hands, and bawled.

So I went in and got the ice and put it on Charlie’s face. He winced and walked away, down the hall. I put the ice to my own lip and then touched Emory’s curly blond hair, but he waved me away. The silence was as violent as the shouting had been. I didn’t know what to do so I did something dumb. I went into the kitchen and started a pot of coffee. But right as I set the pot on the burner somebody spoke. It was Charlie, in a very calm voice, calling, “Emory, I want to see you in your room. Now.” I wanted to run in there, separate the two of them. Make it all okay again. But I couldn’t move. My legs were like crumbling concrete. Scared, petrified. I just stood there watching the coffee percolate like it was my own blood, because I was convinced that the fighting would start again. That Charlie would raise his fist to Emory.

But what happened was worse than that. They were in Emory’s room all of fifteen minutes. And then I hear Charlie in the living room. He has switched on the TV. I hear Rob telling Laura he can’t possibly accept a raise if Buddy and Sally don’t get one too. And then Emory walks into the kitchen. He doesn’t look like a boy blossoming into manhood anymore. Instead he looks scared, like the little kid who would fight back the tears after skinning his knees. But he says, his eyes peeled to the floor, “He said I should be the one to tell you. He’s going to call Uncle J.W. We think it would be a good idea if I went down to Lake Okeechobee, spent some time with him. I’ll just sugar-cane it for a while.”

I said, “No, Emory, you can’t leave me.”

But he just turned his back on me. He just turned away and went to his room.

So at that moment I’m no longer thinking about being cheated on. My fury has now turned on the prospect of losing my son. I go in to Charlie. He’s laying on the couch. No more blood. His nose is swollen but it’s all right. And I say to him, “Please, Charlie, don’t send our boy away. He’s sorry. I know he is. He won’t do it again.”

Charlie put his hand on my hair and stroked it. He gently touched my lip. He said, “Now Rosie, the boy and me have decided. It’s for the best. He needs to know what working for a living is before he comes back in this house and raises a fist at me.” He said it kindly, so reasonably, like he was explaining why he wanted black car mats instead of white.

I shook my head. “No, Charlie, I won’t allow it.”

Charlie sat up, grinned. “Rose, you’re not involved. The boy who thinks he’s a man has decided.” And then Charlie got up and went to bed.

 

So two days later I just sit here in my empty house, without a son, knowing that Charlie will be home tonight. Knowing that I put my son on a Greyhound bus headed for Lake Okeechobee and some god-awful sugar-cane farm yesterday. All because I stood up to Charlie about the wrong things. I stood up to him about his cheating when I really didn’t have a shred of evidence. But I was too weak to stand up to him about my son. A speck of anger starts to break through my numbness and I think that come hell or high water I’ll get the evidence against Charlie. I’ll prove to myself and him that he was lying to me. That he was cheating. And how do I know this so well? I think I ’ve always known it. I’ve never trusted him. I close my eyes and a picture of my mother comes to mind. I’m eight years old and Mama is beautiful even though she’s so sick with fever, so close to dead. She whispers in my ear, “Your daddy did this to me.”

It wasn’t until ten years later that I discovered what she meant, that I learned what syphilis was. I was living in Richmond, having run away from our Grundy home three years prior, due to Daddy’s horrible temper. When he got drunk he liked to beat me. So I found myself getting a job as a countergirl at the drugstore’s soda fountain. Uncle Mason sent a notice to me. In a short note he spelled it out. Your daddy is dead. Syphilis. You probably know it had been eating him away for years.

Finally I knew what Mama had meant. Daddy really had killed her. Injected her with death as they were making love.

I never let anybody get close to me after that. I just stayed stony. Alone. Afraid of night and day and everything in between.

But then I met Charlie. I’d come down to Florida thinking a single woman would be able to survive better in a gentler climate. I was sitting on a bench in St. Augustine, looking out at the bay, when this motorcycle racket started behind me. I turned around. And there he was. Atop this monster cycle. Charlie Looney the cop, in his knee-high black leather boots and his sharp, close-fitting uniform. He whipped off his helmet and flashed me that drop-dead grin. Above the rumble of the cycle he drawled, “Howdy, miss, I hope you’re having a wonderful day.” And then he sped off. But I saw him again, and again, and again. And soon I didn’t have any other thoughts except for those that involved the strong, gentle, kind Charlie Looney. He seemed my haven, my salvation, my knight riding a roaring cycle who would take me in his arms and keep away all the pain.

I get up from my kitchen table and glance at my red-rooster clock that ticks so loud you can hardly ever forget it’s there. It is just past four. Charlie hates that clock. He keeps asking why don’t I throw it away and get a new one. I say because I like it. I glance at the broken glass in the corner. My impulse is to go ahead and sweep it up. To put my house back in order. I know if I do this Charlie will know I’ve started to forgive him. But I don’t know what else to do. Where else do I go? So I walk over and pick up my broom. I look around at my yellow walls, my sunshine walls, and it hits me that I’m in a prison. I laugh out loud. Yes, that’s exactly it — my house is a prison. But as I go over and clean up the glass, I realize I don’t know who built its stifling walls — me or Charlie.