Waking Rose: A Fairy Tale Retold (5 page)

“What is that?” the most aggravating man in the world inquired, starting the car as though none of the past conversation had occurred.

“Could you drive me home so I can change, then drive me to the Kovach’s? There’s a party going on there. You can come if you like. You can meet the other Kovachs.”

“I’d be happy to chauffeur you there, but I’m not sure if I’m up for a party,” he said, stifling a yawn as they drove from the parking lot. “I’ve got to get an early start tomorrow.”

“Do you have to get back for summer classes?” she asked.

“As always.”

Rose stared dismally out the window. As wretched as it was, she preferred being with him to being without him. Now that the wedding was over, it would be at least three months until she saw him again. Oh, stupid, stupid person that she was, to set her heart on such a man.

“Fish?” she asked hesitantly.

“Hm?”

“Can we still be friends?”

“Certainly.”

“You’ll come visit me at college?”

“Of course.”

“You won’t be embarrassed?”

He glanced over at her momentarily as he drove. “Rose, I’m never embarrassed to be around you. Frustrated and exasperated, yes, but not embarrassed. You’re a charming girl.”

“Oh shut up, or I’ll hit you,” she said fiercely, rubbing a grass stain on her pink skirt. “No wonder people keep beating you up, Mr. Fish. You bring it on yourself.”

“That’s probably true,” he said, with his characteristic crooked smile.

When they reached her home, she ran inside, avoiding the relatives talking in the kitchen, and mounted the stairs to her bedroom. Shutting the door, she dragged the wish box out from beneath her bed, took off the lid, and looked inside.

She gazed at the letters from Fish, the various mementos from him. A book of poetry he had given her as a birthday present, by T. S. Eliot, whom she normally detested as the man responsible for the ugliness of modern poetry.

Up until that moment, she had intended to pitch the whole box into the trashcan, or at very least the letters. But now, in the light of his promise to continue being her friend, she couldn’t. Momentarily she toyed with solemnly bringing the letters down and handing them back to him, like some kind of modern Ophelia. “Their perfume lost, I give them back.”

But Fish would only laugh at her. She couldn’t bear that thought. And she had certainly put him through enough dramatics tonight.

What was the use of keeping these things? Wasn’t she merely harboring a vain desire that would never be? Wasn’t it unhealthy, or delusional, or even sinful to hold onto them?

But he had saved her life. And she had saved his life. At the very least, they would always be friends.

Fingering the letters, she pictured him married, maybe to a handsome Indian woman, with several interracial children, coming for a token visit at Blanche and Bear’s house while she was there. He would greet her cordially, and they would exchange pleasantries. His wife would be charming. Rose would like her. They would all talk together. And maybe Rose would have a husband of her own by then, someone tall and devastatingly handsome, who could easily beat Fish at arm wrestling. By the time of their conversation, she would have forgotten all about her disturbing passion. Maybe she and Fish would even laugh about it as her trivial adolescent phase.

All of this smarted in her imagination. Then she pictured herself as an old maid, sitting in a parlor, clutching this box to her chest and rambling on about the one true love of her life. For some reason, she preferred the latter picture to the more civilized and realistic first scenario.

“I shall have twenty cats and talk to them all,” she said, picking up the volume of poetry. “My cats and I shall have
fish
every day for dinner.” Her imagination taking flight, she finished, dropping the book in the box, “And I shall memorize every line in this book and paint it in calligraphy on my living room walls.”

Giggling at her ridiculousness, she replaced the lid of the box and shoved it back under the bed. There were a few precious moments left of her otherwise meaningless life to spend with Fish, just the two of them together. He was out there waiting in the car, probably wondering what the devil was taking her so long.

With a sigh that was disappointment and resignation all at once, she stood, deciding not to change out of her bridesmaids dress after all. The celebration was still on, and she should go and celebrate. She could go to the Kovachs, and tell Kateri all about it, and cry and laugh over it. And Fish, if he guessed anything, would probably think she was silly. As usual.

3
…and they prepared a great feast in honor of their daughter’s christening, to which they invited the wise women…

His

Soon after the wedding, Fish started classes at the University of Pittsburgh. He had been taking summer classes ever since he had gotten the chance to go back to school. It wasn’t so much that he enjoyed the classes as that he was anxious to squeeze as much learning into as short a time span as possible. He preferred going to school in the summer—there were fewer students, less going on around campus, less distractions. And nights in his apartment were quieter. It was probably the closest that a modern university came to approaching a monastic school. Engrossed in his work, he barely noticed the summer slipping by.

In August, he made a trip back East before fall classes started. He stopped in to see Bear and Blanche and admire their new (old) farmhouse, which they were busy renovating. Rose had already gone off to her first semester at Mercy College, so Blanche informed him.

“Why did she pick Mercy College?” Fish asked as they sat in the mostly stripped-to-the-studs living room on canvas-covered chairs, drinking tea. He was vaguely suspicious that Rose had picked the college merely because of the proximity to his school, but doubted that even Rose would be that silly.  “I’ve never heard of it.”

 “That’s where my parents went to college. They met and married there,” Blanche said.

“Seriously? I didn’t know that.” 

“Yes. My mom was a nursing student, and my dad was majoring in English. He was two years ahead of her. They married during my mom’s sophomore year, and then he got a job working for the local paper and they lived with his parents while she finished her degree. My mom had me her junior year and dropped down to part-time. She finished school right around the time she had Rose, and then they moved to New Jersey.”

“I see,” Fish said. “So Mercy College is sort of the family tradition.”

“Actually, my dad always discouraged me from going there,” Blanche said reflectively, pushing back her dark hair with one hand. “I guess he didn’t think much of the place. But my mom loved it. And our friends the Kovachs have sent almost all their kids there. It’s a very Catholic school, and has become more so since my parents went there. I hear that most of the students there are pretty intense about putting their faith into action.”

“Hmph,” Fish said. As a teenage convert, he had never been around many devout Catholics his own age. After his experience at secular universities, he couldn’t imagine what an intensely Catholic school would be like. He suspected a fishbowl removed from real life.

Blanche added, “That reminds me. Rose has some furniture here that we couldn’t fit into the car when she moved. If it fits in your car, would you consider bringing it up with you? I guess you’ll pass by Mercy College on your way back to Pittsburgh. It’s right off of the turnpike.”

“Sure,” Fish shrugged, “What do you have?”

“Just an old armchair and a small bookcase.”

“Well, we can see if they fit,” Fish said.

Surprisingly, the furniture did fit into Fish’s compact car, so he brought the chair and bookshelf back with him, and stopped off in the small municipality of Meyerstown to drop them off at Mercy College.

Mercy College was a small, squat college tucked away in a rather depressed former steel mill town. It had been built in the 1950s by a most unimaginative set of architects, who apparently considered brick warehouses really neat buildings. The most colorful part of the school was the student body, who were quite an assortment. Fish was rather surprised—and pleased—to see a generous sprinkling of different skin tones and dress styles among the students walking the sidewalks of the campus. He had thought such a backwater place would have more middle-class homogeneity, but he was wrong.

Blanche had called Rose to tell her he would be passing through, so Rose met him outside of her dorm, a drab brick rectangle of a building that was reminiscent of a small high school. She was dressed all in black, with an aqua blue scarf around her neck. With her red hair flaming in the autumn light, it was easy to pick her out among the crowds of other college students. He could see college hadn’t changed her dress style.

And she seemed to be completely at ease. “This is the chair I got from my mom’s mother. It used to be in her living room when I was growing up, and she said I could have it when I got older. I love it. Isn’t it such a nice shade of blue?”

Fish agreed that it was, as he struggled to get it out of the car. He offered to bring the chair inside for her, and she picked up the small bookcase and ushered him in, telling him that the college had strict rules about their single-sex dorms, but that, since it was open dorm hours, he could actually come and see her room.

A far cry from U of Pitt with their co-ed dorms
, he thought to himself, balancing the chair on his shoulders as he walked down the narrow hallway. Even without her guidance, Fish could have recognized Rose’s room immediately as it was stamped with her particular brand of taste. There were scarves draped around the window to serve as curtains, a tall shelf of books and knickknacks, colorful quilts on the bunk beds, and a china tea set on a small table in the center of the room.

Fish eased the chair around the tea table into the waiting vacant corner, and Rose set down the bookshelf. “These will really make the room feel like home,” she said. “Thank you so much! Would you care for some tea?”

“Sure,” Fish said, sitting down in the chair he had just carried in and suppressing a smile. He knew by now that Briers had to offer tea to anyone who walked in the door. 

Rose checked to make sure that the door to her room was propped open, explaining that residence hall rules required it. “Sorry I can’t get water to boil on this hot plate,” she said regretfully. “But it’s very warm.”  She poured the water into a rose-painted teapot and added two tea bags. “Do you still take sugar in it?”

“But of course.”

Making a mild face at him, she rummaged in a crate stowed in her closet and pulled out a bag of sugar, and took a clean teaspoon out of a jar of pencils on the bookshelf. “One tablespoon or two?”

“Two, thank you,” he said.

“You still insist on drowning the fine flavor of tea leaves in processed sugar, alas,” she said regretfully, as she added it for him and handed him the cup.

“My one remaining vice,” he said, and changed the subject. “Blanche tells me your parents went here.”

Rose dropped her affected manner as she settled cross-legged on the bed with her own cup. “Yes, Dad’s family is actually from here. Some of his cousins still live in the area. The family farm my parents lived on isn’t far from here.”

“Interesting,” Fish said. Driving through, he had mostly seen run-down farms and small stores. He wondered what Rose and Blanche’s lives would have been like if their family had stayed here.
They never would have met my brother and me, for starters
, he reflected.

“My grandmother had Alzheimer’s disease and so dad was living with her and taking care of her until she died.”

“And when your mom graduated, they moved away?”

“Yes. My mom’s mom lived in Warwick, and my Dad got a job up there as a reference librarian.”

“And so history was made,” Fish said, stretching. “So what are you doing this semester outside of classes?”

“I tried out for the play,” Rose said, and her eyes lit up. “They’re doing Shakespeare, instead of one of those horrid modern plays.
King Lear
. AND they’re going to do it in period dress.”

“Amazing,” he said. “That’s rare. Last semester they did a Shakespeare at the University.
The Tempest
. It was set on a space ship traveling to Mars.”

Rose made a noise of distaste. “Why is it that every time people do Shakespeare they have to dress the actors in black suits or plastic helmets or Mafia outfits? It’s so tiresome. But our director said he wants to set the play during the time it actually was supposed to have happened. Everyone’s going to be in Celtic costume. Before the auditions, I asked him what the costumes would be like—I just had to know. After all, a Celtic princess carries herself very differently than a corporate CEO, doesn’t she?”

“Most likely,” Fish agreed. “How do you think you did?”

“I’m not sure, but it was fun. Some of the other students were very good. There was this other girl there—she’d been in professional theatre before. She was tall and thin and had this sort of highborn air. I thought she would make a wonderful Cordelia—that’s the third princess, the good one who gets killed in the end—but I guess it’s up to the director. I suppose I was more lighthearted with my portrayal—guess that’s to be expected, isn’t it? It being me?”