Waltzing at Midnight (7 page)

“I don’t know. I think money matters are beyond me.”

Rosie stared. “Jean!” She picked up the ledger on the edge of my desk. “What do you call this? For a month, you’ve been keeping the books for my campaign. This is money matters.”

“But all you need to know to do that is how to add and subtract.”

She frowned and put the ledger down. “I wish you’d quit underestimating yourself. It’s getting on my nerves.” Rosie, irritated with me, went into her office and shut the door.

Was I underestimating myself? I opened the ledger and looked at the columns of handwritten figures. We should be doing this on a computer, I thought. And then I remembered that 4

I didn’t know how. That evening I sat in the den at our computer with one of Jerry’s Excel books and Rosie’s campaign ledger and began to teach myself how to build a spreadsheet.

Amy came and looked over my shoulder. “What are you doing, Mom?”

“Teaching myself Excel.”

“They’ve got a class at school.”

“I can’t wait that long. Do you know this, Amy?”

“Nope. Don’t know it, don’t want to know it and don’t care.”

When Jerry got home, he answered a couple of questions for me, but became almost immediately impatient. “Now look what you’ve done,” he said, pointing to a cell on the grid. “You’ve got a circular reference. It won’t work that way.”

“Instead of trying to make me feel stupid,” I said, “why don’t you help me?”

“I wasn’t trying to make you feel stupid.”

“Well, you are.”

“Fine. Do it yourself.” He left me alone, for which, I realized, I was grateful. His help was tinged with criticism. So I looked up “circular reference” in the online help to see what kind of sin I had committed. After a couple hours, I was beginning to understand how the thing worked. It wasn’t so complicated after all. In fact, it worked almost exactly the same as it did on paper.

At ten o’ clock, Jerry came in, saying, “Are you going to be playing with that thing all night?”

“I might,” I said coldly. He came up and looked over my shoulder. I was filling in figures now, having completed the formulas.

“That’s not bad,” he said, “for a first attempt.” How gracious he was. “May I make a suggestion?”

“Yes.”

“Change this formula from a simple addition to a sum. If you need to add another row later, you won’t have to recreate the formula.”

It was a good piece of advice. I made the change. I’d apparently 50

gained enough of his respect to be worthy of legitimate help.

“And here,” he said, “instead of putting the percent into the formula, put it off in a single cell somewhere and reference it as an absolute. That way, you can change the percent in the one cell and it will automatically change in all these formulas.”

We continued refining my design until about eleven when Jerry persuaded me to stop and come to bed. I had reached the point where I was satisfied, more than satisfied, with my accomplishment. I’d always assumed such things as spreadsheets were incredibly dense and mysterious. But if you took it a step at a time, patiently, it was pretty straightforward.

“Not to everyone,” Jerry said, undressing. “We’ve got people at work who can only use a spreadsheet that somebody else designed. And that’s after months or years. In one evening, you’ve gone far beyond them. I’m very impressed.”

I fell asleep with a great sense of urgency, anxious for tomorrow to come, as though I had been wasting my time, wasting my life. I wanted to do things. I didn’t know what, but something, something new, something that mattered. I was only just beginning to understand how much a single individual could accomplish. I had so much time to make up for.

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Faye and I were working out on side-by-side elliptical trainers at the gym, which we only occasionally managed to do together because of schedule conflicts. After a good forty minutes, we had both had enough.

“We may as well face facts,” Faye said, as we walked to the locker room. “Rosie’s gonna lose.”

“It seems so unfair,” I said.

“It makes you feel differently about her, doesn’t it?” Faye asked. “Knowing about this. I mean, it shouldn’t matter. But it does.”

“Yes,” I said, not really agreeing with Faye in the way she would assume. “How do you feel different?”

We changed into our street clothes while we talked.

Faye pulled off her tank top and wiped her face off with a towel. “I don’t know. I mean, I like Rosie. I think she’d make a first-rate mayor, even president of the country if such things were possible, but I am always aware of…I mean, just knowing that she has sex with women…”

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“She doesn’t do it in front of you,” I said. “She doesn’t talk about it.”

“I know. But you just know it. It makes a difference.”

After we left the gym, I said good-bye to Faye at her car.

Knowing about Rosie did make a difference. To me too. But I didn’t know how, exactly. Rosie didn’t make me uncomfortable.

For me, she had become more vulnerable, and perhaps because of that, more approachable emotionally. I felt closer to Rosie.

She was no longer super-human. Her Achilles’ heel, it seemed, had been exposed. To what instinct of mine did she appeal, I wondered. Maternal? I wanted to take care of her, protect her from harm like I did my children. How peculiar, I thought, that I should think of myself as potential champion to such a powerful woman. Especially since I had no means of protecting her against the wave of hostility washing over her.

Ever since the news of Rosie’s association with Catherine Gardiner had been revealed, I’d been looking for some of her poetry. The bookstores in town reported a run on the two volumes which were currently in print. I ended up driving into Sacramento to find them, and, after getting them home, sat alone in the family room reading, searching for something, I didn’t know what, some essence of Rosie, perhaps. Most of the poems were unapproachable, too difficult for me, full of social criticism, subtle irony, harsh imagery. There was nothing sentimental about Gardiner’s work. There was one poem, though, I read several times. It was called, simply, “Love Poem.”

Come home, ogress, claws bared

brown curls bouncing

rage in your veins

your blue-green veins

arms and legs thrashing crashing through walls
Come home,

scratch out my eyes

like a demon like a cat

I’ll drive a stake through your heart, vampire girl
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while you suck away my blood, my life

I’ll drink it in again from your punctured breast.

A curious sort of love poem, I thought. No, not a sentimental woman. Could this be about Rosie? A younger Rosie with “brown curls”? I tried to imagine Rosie in a rage and thought, yes, she could probably be ferocious “like a demon like a cat.”

When Jerry got home and found me reading poetry, he seemed uneasy. “Since when have you been interested in poetry?”

he asked. He read the author’s name. “Catherine Gardiner?

Where have I heard that name before?”

“She’s Rosie’s ex-lover.”

He balked. “Oh, that crazy woman who wants to teach high school girls how to masturbate? Why are you reading her?”

“I’m curious,” I said. “Just curious.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.” I examined my motives privately. I wanted to know more about Rosie, probably. She was still an enigma.

I thought her poet lover would have some insight. Maybe I expected a poem entitled “What Rosie’s Really Like,” written just for me.

“What kind of poems does she write?” Jerry asked suspiciously.

“See for yourself.” I handed him the books and went to the kitchen to make dinner, irritated by his questions.

I threw the vegetables into a hot wok with a little more vigor than was necessary, losing some of them on the floor in the process. What are you mad about, I asked myself. What’s the problem? Jerry has a right to be suspicious. You’ve never read a whole book of poetry in your life, you’ve never written a letter to the editor, you’ve never shown any interest in learning Excel. If he was behaving in ways you didn’t recognize, you’d be suspicious too. I breathed deeply and calmed myself. After disposing of the vegetables from the floor, I dumped a cup of rice into boiling water, covered the pan, and tossed the vegetables around the wok, more gently this time.

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Jerry came into the kitchen with one of the books. “You know,”

he said, “she’s good. Sophisticated and subtle. I especially like this one about the girl and the spinning wheel, how she’s so careful and proud of her work, but she’s oblivious to the thread that she’s a part of, the rites of passage and all that, the matriarchal lineage that she’s working herself into.”

I looked up from my cutting board, startled. “Uh, yes,” I said,

“I did read that one, but I didn’t think about it that much. I didn’t even know you liked poetry.”

“I used to like it a lot, but it’s not the sort of pastime you continue after college, unless you’re a teacher or something. I remember especially liking Gerard Manley Hopkins. Have you read him?”

“I don’t know. Probably not. I don’t think I’ve read anybody in the way you mean, if it wasn’t some English class assignment.”

Jerry had an associate’s degree. I had no college at all. We had been married as soon as I graduated from high school, so my exposure to poetry did not extend much further than “Listen my children and you shall hear of the midnight ride of Paul Revere.”

“Poets can do such clever things with just a few words,”

Jerry said. “They get just the right angle on a thing and it’s like a revelation.”

He looked thoughtful, then left the kitchen, reading on.

Who was that man, I asked myself. An admirer of poetry? What disarmed me most was the idea that I could learn something new about my husband at this stage of the game. Is this what they meant when they said that if one partner brings something new into the relationship, the other will show new faces as well?

They weren’t talking about poetry, though. Or maybe they were.

The only time in my memory that I could connect Jerry and poetry was when the children were toddlers and he did dramatic readings of poems like “Jabberwocky.” I could see him in my mind pacing alongside Bradley’s bed, his arms raised. “Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!”

Then he’d swipe at the air above Bradley’s head. Bradley would 55

squeal with delight. I smiled to myself, remembering this.

Jerry had been the storyteller in our family, reading the fairy tales and Dr. Seuss books to Bradley and Amy from a very early age, which is where his nickname of princess came from for Amy.

Jerry always changed the name of the princess in the stories to Amy, as in, “The witch grabbed Princess Amy and whisked her off to the deepest, darkest forests of North Umbria.” No doubt Jerry was a much better dramatic reader of poetry than I was.

That was probably where Amy got that from, after all.

When the vegetables were done, I turned off the stove and went into the living room. Jerry was lying on the couch, reading Gardiner, comfortable in his socks, shorts and T-shirt. I came up behind him and put my arms around his neck. He reached up and took my hand, then tilted his head back to look at me.

“Dinner’s ready,” I said.

The next day at the office, Faye and I went over the results of the latest e-mail poll conducted by the local news station. Rosie was holding at second place. Mike Garcia was third. Kiester now had a comfortable lead. “It looks like most of Rosie’s backing has gone to Kiester,” Faye said.

“Yeah, too bad it couldn’t have gone to Garcia instead, if it had to go somewhere.”

“This is just so damned disappointing. The only reason Rosie agreed to run in the first place was to get rid of Kiester. She had to be pushed into it, really. She didn’t seem to want the limelight of public office. Well, now I think I understand that, but I didn’t get it at the time. She’s worked so hard behind the scenes all these years, I just figured she ought to be right out there, you know, hosting the show. I thought she was the perfect candidate to take him down. Everybody did.”

“And she was,” I said. “She is, actually, and if there was a little more time, I know we could recover from this setback. People are just reacting to the surprise of it. They would get over it and get back behind the issues. At least most of them would, enough of them would.”

“But there isn’t any time,” Faye said. “They knew what they 56

were doing, Jean. They had this little firecracker in their pocket all along. They knew just when to light it for maximum impact.

All this time we were so sure of ourselves and so cocky and they were sitting over there snickering to themselves, just waiting for the moment.” Faye tossed the poll report on the table. “Oh, well, I imagine there’s a part of Rosie that will be relieved to return to her comfort zone, although things are bound to be a little different for her after this.”

Behind us, stacked into enormous piles, were the thousands of flyers that had yet to be mailed. Nothing much had happened in this office since the big revelation. Everyone seemed certain that there was no chance of winning the race now, so there wasn’t much point in working at it.

When the door to the street swung open, Faye and I looked up in unison to see a strikingly beautiful woman stride in. She was elegant and exotic looking with long, thick eyelashes and black hair wound into a spiral on top of her head. She wore white silk pants and a feminine, navy blue Nehru-style jacket with huge gold buttons. She was a petite woman, but her bearing created an undeniable presence. She directed a sharp gaze directly at me as I stood to greet her.