Rosie O'Dell (11 page)

We went ashore in St. Pierre, Brent and I still feeling woozy and half seasick
from the ferry ride over. Brent had told me his dad had instructed him not to
take any Gravol, no matter how rough the sea was, because he didn’t want him to
turn into a wimp. He’d never make the National Hockey League, his old man had
said, if he let a little dizziness and nausea get to him every time he was
knocked to the ice on his arse. Because Brent wouldn’t take any, I wouldn’t
either, and both of us spent most of the trip being held onto tightly by Mom and
Dad as we puked over the leeward side. All that was instantly forgotten on
shore, though.

The buzz among everyone, as we walked up the road to our hotel, was that today
there would be an unscheduled, unofficial, surprise visit to St. Pierre by Prime
Minister Pierre Trudeau and his new wife, Margaret. I couldn’t believe my ears.
I said to Brent, “This must be fate or something. Rosie loves the
Trudeaus.”

“Rosie is in California,” said Brent.

“I mean me being here. I can get their autograph for her.”

“Better you than me,” said Brent, looking up ahead to make sure Mom and Dad
were out of earshot. “I heard Dad saying to Mom when Trudeau became prime
minister: ‘If he comes around shaking hands looking for votes, don’t get too
close to those fingers or any other digit—that guy is a queer.’”

“A queer?” I said. “How can he be a queer? He just got married to Margaret
three or four months ago.”

“Dad says that’s only a front. Married life is bad enough when you marry
someone your own age. For a fifty-year-old man to marry a hippie broad thirty
years younger than him, he’s either got to be a moron or he’s secretly got no
interest in normal married life. Since Trudeau is supposed to be the smartest
man in Canada, work it out for yourself, he told Mom. She was some pissed off
with him. How come Rosie loves them so much?”

“She just likes the fairy-tale princess part of it, she said. A young girl
wooed and won by the mature Prince Charming of her dreams, a man of the world
who can give her what it takes for them to live happily ever after.”

“Sounds like she’s got the hots for her lover-boy doctor. He’s nearly as old as
Trudeau.”

“Don’t you be so fucking stupid,” I barked at Brent, enraged. “That’s her own
stepfather you’re talking about, and for your information he’s only
thirty-five or something. And he told me himself that Rosie
wanted to marry me when we grow up.”

“I was only joking, Tom, for shag’s sake,” said Brent, looking up at Mom and
Dad as they turned around at my raised voice. Then he quoted his own mother,
“Contain yourself, boy.”

We trudged along in silence for a moment until I asked, “Yeah, well, okay then,
are you going to help me get the autographs or not?”

“I suppose, boy. Jesus.”

In the hotel, Dad didn’t like what I proposed to do. “The gendarmes are liable
to shoot you if you try to get too close to Trudeau. They guillotined a guy over
here a few years back.”

“Dad, that was nearly a hundred years ago.”

“Yes, well, they’re a bit slow to change in these parts. Anyway, Tom, Trudeau
and his bouncing new bride are over here on a holiday. The last thing they want
is some Canadian bugging them for an autograph.”

“I read in your
Globe and Mail
that there’s going to be an election in a
year or so and that he’s going to need all the votes he can get, even with
Margaret’s popularity. He’ll be glad to give an autograph to a Canadian.”

“Oh, you’re going to vote this time around, are you?”

“Shut up, Dad. You know what I mean. Rosie will never forgive me if I have this
chance and don’t get it for her.” I looked at Mom.

Mom said, “Joe, can’t you go down with them and make sure everything is all
right? Tom, you and Brent pay attention to your father and do whatever he says.
I’ll come down too.”

Pierre and Margaret were strolling around the streets of St. Pierre like a pair
of college kids in heat. He had on some sort of sailor’s jersey—a nautical
T-shirt or something with horizontal stripes around it—and a neckerchief tied
around his neck with a jaunty knot. Brent whispered in my ear, “Jesus Christ,
look at the getup he’s got on. I told you he was a fruit.”

I was too preoccupied watching my chance with Trudeau to reply then, but some
time later, reminiscing about all this, I would ask Brent, “What was Margaret
wearing that day?” “I don’t remember,” he replied. And I said, “I don’t either,
and she’s a beautiful twenty-two-year-old woman, but we both clearly remember
Pierre’s outfit—so who do you figure the fruits are now?”

Today on St. Pierre as they passed, fingers intertwined, I squirmed away from
Dad’s restraining hand on my shoulder and lunged towards the
couple with my paper and ballpoint at the ready. Someone said, “
Non,
arret
.” I kept going and an arm caught me across the chest, knocking the
wind out of me, and the owner barked into my ear, “
Non, arret
!” at the
same time as I heard, “Tom, stop,” from Dad. Then I heard at once Trudeau’s
distinctive voice softly say something in French, and the arm dropped. Pierre
and Margaret stepped to the side towards me. “Would you like us to autograph
that for you?” he asked.

In reply, I thrust the paper and pen towards them. “What’s your name?” asked
Pierre.

“Make it out to Rosie,” I ordered. “With an i-e.”

“Is Rosie your girlfriend?” asked Margaret.

“She’s going to be after a little while,” I answered.

“That’s so sweet,” said Margaret.

“Sweet?” said Pierre. “You think? It sounds like what someone else was put
through.”

“And look at us today. Perfect bliss.”

“And what’s your own name,” asked Pierre again.

“Tommy. Tom.”

Pierre spoke the words as he wrote: “To Rosie, because Tom would not take
‘
non
’ for an answer, just like his friend Pierre Trudeau.” He passed
the paper to Margaret, who spoke the words as she wrote them: “which is lucky
for Tom’s friends Rosie and Margaret T.”

“Tom,” said Pierre, passing the paper and pen back, “Did you know there is a
‘Point Rosey’ on the east side of Fortune Bay?”

“Yes, sir, up by Garnish.”

“And the word ‘Rosey’ in the name is a corruption of the French word
‘
Enragée
.’ Enraged. Mad. So: ‘Rosey—
Enragée
.’ The real
meanings of things are not always what they seem, are they, Tom?”

“No, sometimes they are completely inside out and upside down and arse
foremost.” In my nervousness, I couldn’t find the words “contrary in meaning”
and was immediately embarrassed at having said “arse.”

“‘Arse foremost.’ I rather like that. Would you mind if I apply it to my
separatist friends in the future?”

My Jesus, what kind of a pickle was I putting the prime minister of the country
in now? “That’s kind of a swear word in English, sir.”

“Thank you for the heads-up, Tom. I’ll use it guardedly.” Pierre gave me three
pats on the back. “When you are ready to run for the House of Commons in a few
years, please give me a call.” Margaret kissed me on the
cheek.
Then they moved on hand in hand, smiling back at me and then at each other and
at the streetside gawkers.

Mom and Dad and Brent and a few strangers gathered around me to look at the
paper.

“What were you talking about so long?” asked Dad.

“Old stuff.” All I could think about was Rosie’s face of amazement and
gratitude when she saw the writing, and her telling me how important I really
was in her life.

ROSIE WAS THE CENTRE
of five girls walking along the
corridor. This was the first day of grade seven, the day I’d been waiting for. I
hadn’t seen her since the wedding. She and her family had returned from their
month-long honeymoon a week or so before school opened. When I’d called her the
next day to say I had a surprise for her, she said she would look forward to it,
but they were in the middle of an awful hassle trying to get ready this late for
the new school year. Could it wait until school started? That evening, Mom said
she was popping in to see Nina—did I want to come and give Rosie the autographs?
I declined: they seemed to be up to their eyes over there. I told her not to say
anything about the Trudeau encounter. I wanted it to be a bombshell when the
time came. Mom appraised me with a glance. She was kind enough not to say that
if I’d mentioned the autographs to Rosie she would have found time for me. When
Mom got back just twenty minutes later she said I was right about how busy they
were: mother and daughters had been heading out the door for the mall
again.

Now, a week later, in the school corridor, I caught up with her from behind and
said, “Hi, Rosie.”

She stopped on hearing my voice. “Tommy,” she said brightly and turned around.
Her face startled me. It looked angelic. The way her lips and eyes were smiling
made her seem to be in a state of rapture. “Oh, Tommy,” she practically sang,
“I’m so happy to see you well.” She leaned towards me and made the motion of a
kiss at my right cheek and then my left, an absurd six inches away. Then she
turned to walk on with the waiting girls.

“How was California?”

“Super,” she said in the English fashion, without the “r,” hardly turning her
head, and kept going. “It couldn’t have been more perfect.”

I followed her past my locker. “We saw Pierre and Maggie Trudeau in St.
Pierre.”

“Oh, did you? That must have been quite interesting for you. We must talk
soon.”

“I got their autographs for you.” All five girls stopped. “They made them out
to you, in your name.” All five girls turned around.

“Oh, your surprise,” said Rosie. She stepped back and took the piece of paper
from my hand, reading it. “Oh my God, Tommy, this is supah. You should have told
me you had this. I would have run right over.”

I know you would have, I said to myself.

“Thank you ever so much, Tommy. You are a real mate. We should really get
together, and sooner rawthah than later.”

“For sure,” I said, “See ya.”

“Cheerio.”

I watched her go. There seemed to be something different about her physically.
Different from earlier this summer and different from the other girls around.
Her hips were starting to flare and her developing breasts were sometimes
noticeable under the sweater, but that wasn’t it. Just about all the girls her
age had traits like those becoming evident. But now she was walking, carrying
herself, like a woman rather than a twelve-year-old in a still girlish body. I
found it weird and off-putting, and I wished she wouldn’t do it, especially when
she talked to me like an adult to a child. It didn’t make me love her less, but
it made me like her less. I was gratified, though, to be paired with her that
first week as the talk of the school focused on the Pierre and Margaret
autographs.

FROM THEN TILL CHRISTMAS
, our conversations in school took
the form of short insubstantial exchanges between an awkward-feeling, often
jittery, me, and an extraordinarily happy, self-contained, self-sufficient
Rosie, who manifested never a moment of doubt or sadness or gloom. Three times
she invited me over to her house to watch a movie on television or to listen to
records. And twice I went. We didn’t talk much, and though apparently glad to
see me, she did not pay much attention to me, compared to lovely little Pagan,
or even Dr. Rothesay. Compared to Dr. Rothesay, especially, in fact. Both times,
after the movie, he would
sit by me on the sofa and talk. They
were building a new house in Buckingham Close or Mews—there was a debate going
on among property owners there, he chuckled, over what sounded fancier with
Buckingham. “Here, have a gawp at the blueprints. Eighty-five hundred square
feet. A bleeding mausoleum. But when one has grown up in a two-room council flat
with eleven other family members, it’s damned difficult to have too much space
as an adult.” He and Nina and the girls were all going to Barbados over the
Christmas holidays. How was my competitive swimming coming along? He was hearing
marvellous things about it from Nina through my mum.

When Rosie and Pagan were out of the room, he would talk about how Rosie needed
a good male friend like me. If he were my age, he would certainly try to make
Rosie his girlfriend. I felt so awkward on hearing this, I neglected to ask him
how he would go about doing that. Rosie didn’t pay as much overt attention to
him now as before, certainly not nearly as much as Pagan did. But, once, when I
was standing in front of the door out to the backyard patio, looking through the
panes of glass at an early fall of wet snow, I saw a reflection of Rosie coming
silently into the living room behind me in her oversized socks, pass by the back
of Dr. Rothesay’s chair, and run her fingers along the short hairs at the nape
of his neck before walking out again without a word. Rothesay did not move or
look at her. I turned around and asked if Auntie Nina was out—I hadn’t seen her
either of the times I was there. No, he said, she was upstairs with another
m
ee
graine, one of her sick headaches, regrettably. I’d never heard of
Nina having a migraine before.

When I was in the porch about to leave, he had to call Rosie out of the kitchen
to say goodbye to me. She all but danced out the door with a big smile and an
elaborate wave from down the hall: “See you in the groves of academe.” She
turned around and went back in. Pagan walked down to the porch to see me out.
The third time Rosie invited me over, a week or so before Christmas, I said I
couldn’t come because I had to do something. She didn’t ask what and she didn’t
seem disappointed. I stayed home and read an old Hardy Boys book.

PERHAPS BECAUSE OUR BIOLOGY
class was then
learning how genetic mutations caused an organism either to thrive or wither, I
would date from about February of this new year the beginning of Rosie’s
withering mutation.

After the first couple of weeks of school following their
southern Christmas holiday, an impression came to me that Rosie’s face was
darkening. She still had a slight tan and a few freckles from the sun, but that
wasn’t what I was seeing. Her face was going dark, not in colour but in
brightness. The light around her head seemed to be fading like one of Mom’s
candles guttering in the gloom. And I could not shake the thought that compared
to before Christmas her whole person had physically shrunk.

Nobody else but Brent noticed much of a change in her at first. She was still
greeting everyone with a cheery “hi,” but I could see that when she went about
school, more and more by herself now, she hugged the walls and looked as if she
was making her body take up the smallest possible space, and Brent said to me
early on that every time he saw Rosie now she almost looked like she was trying
to disappear.

Soon, others remarked the change in her. She began to turn her head away from
anyone approaching and failed to speak unless the other person greeted her
first. Then she would respond barely audibly, without looking at the person. And
in class, instead of playing her normal role of human encyclopedia, now she
began to murmur, whenever a teacher asked her a question, “I don’t know.” Soon
she was slipping into class like a phantom to sit silently unless prompted by a
teacher and then responding only in low monosyllables.

In sports, newspaper, student council, drama, all the extracurricular
activities she used to thrive on, her participation dropped off. She would never
hang around school for a minute after the final bell. She left like someone
heading somewhere secretly and urgently. When I tried to chat with her in school
I got nowhere, so I called her at home a couple of times before supper. Nina
answered that she wasn’t home from school yet. Whenever I called at night, Pagan
would reply, “She’s up there in the bathroom again. I’ll be some glad when we
get that new house with three full bathrooms.”

By Easter, I learned that, to every request, suggestion or invitation from
classmates, she was replying, “I can’t.” One afternoon, I asked her if I could
walk home with her and she murmured, “No.” Then, as if as an afterthought, she
turned and said, “Thank you, Tom.” A few days later I followed her at a distance
to see what she did and where she went. What she did was walk around the streets
of St. John’s, moving in a decided way, as if she had an important destination.
Where she went was no place. After
miles of walking she never
stopped or arrived anywhere but at the door of her own home. Then I discovered
that she was no longer getting a drive to school in the Land Rover with Pagan in
the mornings. She was walking. Rain or shine. By herself. Without me.

“
DO YOU AND ROSIE
see much of each other at school?”
Mom asked me when just the two of us were in the television room.

“Mom, we’re in the same class.”

“I know that, Tom. I was wondering if you’re still friends in school. I haven’t
seen her around the house here this year.”

“You make it sound as if that’s something new all of a sudden. She wasn’t
around much last year either.”

“No, perhaps not. But I used to hear you on the phone with her sometimes, and
you used to go to her house sometimes before Christmas.”

“Well, I guess we have different interests or something now.” I turned
pointedly back to the television where an old
Gilligan’s Island
repeat
was on that I’d already seen or changed the channel on a dozen times.

Mom rose, saying, “You’ll both be
thirteen
in a couple of months. You’ll
soon be a young man, and she’ll soon be a young woman.” She started to
leave.

I suddenly felt a desperate need for help from my mother. I muttered, “There’s
something wrong with her.”

“What do you mean? Do you think she’s sick?” She moved back fast and sat down
beside me.

“I don’t know if it’s sick or what. You’re at her house sometimes. Don’t you
think there’s something wrong with her?”

“That’s really why I was asking. I’m not there that often these days, and even
when I am I never lay eyes on Rosie. Nina says she’s barricaded in her room all
the time. She never comes down to say hello like she always used to. Pagan still
does. What do you think it is?”

“I haven’t got a clue. Why don’t you ask her mother what’s wrong with
her?”

Mom stayed quiet for a moment. Then she said, “I’ve got an idea. Why don’t you
call her right now and ask her over here to supper tomorrow night?”

“Mom, I’m trying to watch this.”

Soon after that, I started to hear muffled conversations between my parents
behind closed doors. They were hardly ever together at home
without shutting the door to whatever room they were in and going at it for a
few minutes. Usually I couldn’t hear anything but the sound of their voices. But
sometimes, a voice would be raised, usually Mom’s, and I could make out the
words. Once, from behind the closed door of Dad’s den: “I’m going to do
something,
Joe, I know that.” Another time, her near shout from their
bedroom: “Please stop saying that. I can’t just do
nothing
.” After Mom
came out of these sessions her face would often be red, and sometimes she stayed
pensive, oblivious of everything, even my presence, for a good ten
minutes.

Naturally, I concluded my parents were getting a divorce. It made my stomach
flutter uncomfortably. How could I ever decide which one I would live with? The
thought of having to hurt either parent’s feelings because I’d been forced to
choose one over the other turned my stomach-flutters to pain.

One afternoon during school hours, Brent, who sat near me in class, came back
from the washroom and whispered as he sat down, “How come you didn’t tell me you
were in deep shit?”

“Why, what are you talking about?”

“I just saw your old lady going in Curly’s office.”

I could only shrug and shake my head. Mom hadn’t mentioned any forthcoming
visit to the principal. After school I was going to tell Brent I thought my
parents were separating and that that must have been the reason for Mom seeing
Curly. But then I thought I’d better make sure. So, as soon as I saw Mom that
evening I asked her why she’d been to see Mr. Abbott this afternoon. She replied
without looking up that it was a confidential matter. Then she glanced at my
face and added that, as I was aware, she was on the board of the parent-teacher
association. I had taken her by surprise and it was clear she was hiding
something.

In bed for the next three nights, reflecting that Mom and Dad were as
affectionate with each other as ever outside those closed-door talks, and showed
no sign of breaking up, I searched in the dark for the real truth. It dawned on
me. No wonder their secret talks were so tense and argumentative. The truth was
so horrible they could not decide how to tell me. Mom’s secret visit to Curly
Abbott’s office had been to prepare principal and staff for the horrors to come.
Yes, my parents had covertly received the results from that medical examination
I’d undergone this winter when I had that heavy chest congestion, and the
diagnosis was clear. I had leukemia.