Novella: “A Trick of the Light” (Part Four; Final)

10.

The Third Visit 

The first few days of March brought sudden, unpredicted, and unwelcome change to Rosie and those closest to her. Mattie and Ellie’s landlady, an old woman whom they called Grandma Vernon, died of extreme old age and the duplex they lived in was inherited by a thirty-year-old with a chinstrap beard who immediately forced them to move out because he wanted to turn the building into some kind of martial arts dojo. They couch-surfed for two days before getting the idea to volunteer themselves to the Barings as long-term paying guests, which would provide a steadier, but much smaller, source of hospitality income than did getting a few sets of short-term guests each month. Rosie crunched the numbers and found that they would have to charge Mattie and Ellie at least twice what she considered a reasonable rent in order to break even on this change, but Grandpa insisted on taking them up on it anyway, and talked the rest of the household into taking the financial hit. Mattie and Ellie moved in on March 4, a Lenten Sunday; they had very little in the way of luggage with them, but the martial arts guy was going to send up most of the rest of what they had left in their old place.

            Rosie decided to make up most of the money by putting up Mattie and Ellie in two separate bedrooms and charging them six hundred dollars a month apiece, plus moving some of their blue chip investments into somewhat riskier and thus somewhat higher-yield accounts.

            “How do you feel about the situation?” she asked Mattie and Ellie a day or two after they had moved in. “About being here for the medium-to-long term.”

            “Frustrated, if I’m being honest,” Ellie said. “We really liked where we were living before.”

            “It was in Hadley, right?” asked Rosie. She had a very vague perception of Hadley; it was between Northampton and Amherst, and it felt like it was between Northampton and Amherst. That betwixt-and-between feeling was all she really knew about the place; she had been there any number of times in the past six months, but could have told somebody very little about its history or its culture. She was mildly surprised to hear that Mattie and Ellie apparently had such strong feelings in its favor.

            “That’s right,” Mattie said. “Near Route 9, but not one of the parts of Route 9 that’s all strip malls and fast casual restaurants. It was near a bike path too, and you could walk to a used bookstore. And, for me, it was only ten or fifteen minutes to the UMass campus. Actually a little shorter, if you took the back roads to avoid traffic and let yourself speed a little. I wouldn’t have wanted to leave until at least finishing my degree.”
            “You’re at the all-but-dissertation stage, right?” Rosie asked.

            “I’m saying all-but-thesis. I think all-but-dissertation is for a Ph.D. And my thesis is almost done too, so really I only have about two more months of it. If Grandma Vernon’s great-nephew had only been willing to wait until June to kick us out…”

            Rosie doubted that what the martial arts guy had done to Mattie and Ellie was actually legal, but she understood not wanting to take him to court over it, especially as somebody who had just crunched a family budget to make up for shortfalls herself. She had no idea what it might lead to if, hypothetically, someone in this household ended up having expensive legal or medical troubles.

            They were having this conversation in the front upstairs bedroom in the northwestern corner of the house. It was the room immediately over Rosie and Mags’s and had been the room that Aunt Margaret was staying in when Rosie had first arrived in Greenfield six months before. Since then it had been Francine Kipperman’s room as well as that of six or seven other guests or sets of guests, plus Aunt Margaret’s again during the time when Rosie and Mags had been on the Cape. Now it was Mattie’s. She had a light bookcase filled with heavy books, and some sort of string instrument that Rosie did not recognize. The light was filtering oddly into this room.

            They finished up the conversation and Rosie left the room. When she got to the top of the staircase down into the downstairs central hallway, she saw Margaret Clooney looking up at her from the bottom.

            “Hello, Rosie,” Margaret said.

            “Hello, Margaret,” said Rosie. “How have you been?”

            “I’ve been dead. How have you been?”

            “I’ve been alive.”

            “I’d say ‘my condolences’ but that would be a little bit morbid, wouldn’t it?” Margaret said. “If you haven’t got the morbs already yourself I certainly don’t want to give you them! It’s not the sort of thing that should be contagious.”

            “Are you going to show me Horton Oldmeadow this time?” Rosie asked. She started down the stairs. As she descended, she was declining back into autumn. Through the hallway’s front windows she could see russet leaves.

            “After a fashion,” said Margaret, and led her, as before, into her bedroom, into that parlor.

            In that room, in which the coals of a fire were glowing, an old woman sat dandling a four- or five-year-old girl while an old man harangued somebody over a wall-mounted rotary telephone. Checkbooks and greenbacks lay scattered over the table at which the old woman was sitting, and in front of her were a mostly-empty cup of coffee and a half-eaten bologna sandwich. It seemed to be mid-afternoon and a calendar on the wall said October 1934.

            “I just don’t know what the Sam Hill you expect of me with this administration in the White House, Charlie,” the old man was shouting into the phone. “I had one of those NRA guys over here just yesterday, snooped through some bottles of milk I was going to send out to that creamery. Damn you, I already had to sell off all but four head of the cows, not to mention half my land out back to Wilbur Burroughs. I can’t tell what more you want from me other than the shirt off my back.”

            “Dear, it really can’t be helped,” the old woman said as gently as she could, but Rosie could tell that she too was upset. The little girl seemed blissfully unaware of whatever the argument was about; she was singing “Baa, baa, black sheep” off-key and grinning almost madly between her folds of brownish hair. She had the pink face and solid hands of a Baring. Rosie could tell now that these were the two Hortons, Oldmeadow with Baring on her knee.

            “Can I help you?” the old woman asked Rosie. Unlike last time, Rosie was dressed more or less appropriately for the age; she had on a light sweater and a knee-length pleated skirt that she had recently bought at the department store in downtown Greenfield.

            “I’m looking for Horton Oldmeadow,” Rosie said.

            “You’re looking at her, though that’s my maiden name. Horton Baring at yours. What can I do for you?”

            “You’re a relative of mine,” said Rosie.

            “Oh, some collateral family?” asked Horton Oldmeadow, or the elder Horton Baring, sounding oddly crestfallen. “I’m really sorry to inform you, but we haven’t weathered the last few years much better than anybody else has. We still got this roof over our heads, but the roof’s about all we can offer you for a time being, unless we can put you to work.”

            “I wouldn’t mind being put to work,” said Rosie, “but I don’t plan to stay here long. I came on what you might call family history business.” Thinking of Mags, and thinking of her (she was ashamed to admit) as an excuse, she added “I have a cousin who’s interested in it.”

            “Here on a cousin’s behalf,” Horton the elder said to her husband when he looked up from the phone with a confused expression.

            “I see,” Rosie’s great-great-grandfather said, then got back to listening to whatever the person on the phone was saying to him.

            “Gammy, can I have it?” Horton the younger asked, abruptly stopping “Baa, baa, black sheep” and pointing at the half-eaten sandwich.

            “No, this is for Grammy to finish,” said Horton the elder. “There has to be enough food for all of us, ‘specially with your brother or sister on the way.” This would be Franklin I, Rosie had to assume.

            Horton the younger made a face that Rosie had never seen any child make before, and Horton the elder laughed. “Heart of a wildwoman, that one,” she said to Rosie. “You can see it in her expression—funny but sad. She’ll be a heartbreaker and brokenhearted too, I’m sure.” Rosie regarded her great-aunt’s face. Horton the younger was still focused on the bologna sandwich, and to a lesser extent on what little was left of the coffee. “A real woman of sorrows, just like her grandmother,” said Horton the elder. “Half-wild, like the girl in that old novel.”

            “I know the kind,” said Rosie, with something stirring deep beneath her heart.

            “You ought to see her in the trees when we go on our walks in the woods up Oldmeadow Hill,” Horton the elder said. “Clambers all over ‘em. Goes from tree to tree to tree like an orangutan down in Borneo. Watching her really takes me back.”

            “You mentioned she has a baby brother or sister on the way?” asked Rosie.

            Horton the elder nodded. “Yes, my son’s second,” she said. “My daughter-in-law’s due in January. They want to name the child Franklin if it’s a boy, after our President. My husband doesn’t like that very much, I can tell you that! But he and our son’ve never really seen eye-to-eye on politics since Jonathan’s been a man.”

            “Where I come from we mostly think well of FDR,” Rosie said.

            Horton the elder frowned, but nodded. “Are you from that branch of the family that ran away to New York City?” she asked.

            “You could say that,” said Rosie. “My name’s Rosie. Rosie Newgarth.”

            “Hmm,” said Horton the elder. “Can’t imagine who your cousin could be. You sure you’re just here to look into family history?”

            “I’m sure,” said Rosie. “In particular I’m interested in somebody called Hosea Oldmeadow and a friend, possibly domestic servant, of his called Margaret Clooney. Do you know what became of either of them?”
            “Hosea Oldmeadow was my father, though he died when I was young,” Horton the elder said. “Margaret Clooney was a maid with my parents when they were newly-grown, yes; she fell in with a group of German peddlers, then married somebody over in Montague name of McNulty. My parents must’ve thought well enough of the German peddlers, more or less; one of ‘em was named Hortense and they liked the name well enough to name me after her when I was born. ‘Course, they misheard it, so here I am, a woman named Horton with a granddaughter named Horton.”

            “That’s my name!” said Horton the younger. “Gammy, give me the sandwich, pretty please?”

            “Run and play,” said Horton the elder. She set down Horton the younger and gave her a pinch on the shoulder to send her off. Horton the younger toddled out of the room into the hallway; a few seconds later, shouts, which must have been those of Jonathan Baring and his wife, came wafting from elsewhere in the house. Then there was a caterwaul, then silence. “Heartbreaker and brokenhearted,” Horton the elder said again.

            “So Margaret Clooney did all right for herself?” Rosie asked.

            “You could say so. She died of typhoid when she was still in middle age, but so did so many till recent years,” said Horton the elder. “I’m still friendly with a daughter of hers named Caroline who lives on Sanderson Street. Near the tap-and-die factory, you know—or maybe you don’t know, since you’re not from round Greenfield.”

            “I’m not,” said Rosie, “but I know about the tap-and-die factory.” And this was true; it was an important part of the local economy and local industry that Grandpa, the yet-unconceived third child of Jonathan Baring and his wife, was liable to wax nostalgic about.

            At this point Margaret Clooney opened the door and looked into the room. Horton the elder clearly could not see her. Rosie’s great-great-grandfather was shouting at his business associate, or rival, over the phone again. He could not see her either—but it sounded like Horton the younger might have caught a glimpse, because Rosie could hear her little feet running back their way. She could hear those feet running back and forth, as it were, in time, or back and forth between time and eternity, perhaps.

            Margaret led her out of the room. When she was back in the hallway it was 2012 again. “You didn’t let me say goodbye to them,” Rosie said, startled by how angry this made her.

            “Nobody ever really needs to say goodbye,” said Margaret. “A short goodbye is also a long hello.”

            “That’s easy enough for you to say; you’re already dead,” said Rosie. “Whatever you are, a ghost or a soul in purgatory or whatever else, you know what you are, and you know—you know—!” Tears were in her eyes as she tried to continue, as she could not continue. From upstairs, she worried Mattie and Ellie might be able to hear her crying. She had no idea why she was worried about that; she had no idea why the prospect of them hearing her embarrassed her so much. It was not that she was ashamed, not that she felt that she should not cry; so what was it? It was privacy, perhaps; it was a desire for a private mourning, a mourning of family that could not become familiar.

            “You and I are more the same than you might think,” said the ghost of Margaret Clooney then. Rosie would have thought that this would be exactly the wrong thing to say to her in this state, but in fact it worked wonders; she was shocked how much hearing this did to calm her down. She wished, suddenly, that she could reach out to the ghost of Margaret Clooney and hug her.

            “Will we meet again?” she asked. It was the first time she had asked this of the ghost, in any of the three times so far that they had met.

            “Not,” said the ghost, “this side of paradise.”

            “I see,” said Rosie, feeling now even more woebegone. She sat down on the stairs. The ghost arranged her hoops so as to sit down with her.

            “So,” said the ghost, “as they used to say in ancient times, ave et vale, hail and farewell.”

            “Hail and farewell,” said Rosie, as the sun westered a little, the light on the stairs intensified slightly, and the ghost vanished, for the last time, from her sight.

11.

The Birthday 

Rosie’s birthday fell on March 30. They had a little get-together at the Oldmeadow–Baring House. At this get-together Rosie finally met Zachary Stoneman, Mags’s boyfriend of three and a half months, and she was not impressed.

            “Nice hoppy flavor,” Zachary said about a can of Heineken while they were sitting around getting buzzed after Rosie’s birthday dinner. Rosie had had three slices of cake and had her jeans discreetly unbuttoned underneath her oversized cashmere sweater. She was not in the mood for this. “Good mouthfeel.”

            “You have strong opinions on Heineken, do you?” Grandpa Baring asked him.

            “I like to appreciate the little things,” said Zachary. “I’ve been making a study of beer since Mags apparently wants me to be a little more of an intellectual.” He reached over to Mags and tousled her hair as if she were a child. She smiled thinly. “So I’m assessing this Heineken the way my buddies and I would assess any other beer. You know how it is.”

            “I don’t think it tastes very good,” Rosie said. “Way too bitter for me.”

            “That’s because it’s hoppy,” Zachary said complacently. “Got lots of hops in it.”

            “You know that back in medieval times the monks put hops in the beer to discourage themselves from drinking it, right?” Rosie asked.

            “Yes, hoppiness in beer has done a remarkable historical about-face,” said Zachary. “It’s prized now. I suppose it is an acquired taste, but I’d think somebody celebrating her twenty-third birthday would have acquired it by now.”

            “I suppose I’ve had other things to drink than Heineken for most of my adult life so far,” Rosie said. “When I was in college the only parties I’d drink at were Purimspiels hosted by an ultra-Orthodox rabbi, and those were mostly vodka shots.”

            Zachary pulled a face. “Not exactly craft beverages,” he said.

            “Rosie, you went to Purimspiels in college?” Mags asked, evidently beyond desperate to change the subject.

            “I did,” said Rosie. “Long time ago now, it feels like, but when I was…well, it would have been four years ago now, this girl called Shoshana I sat next to in intro to macroeconomics invited me to one. Rabbi Machmer was a neat guy. He really kept the party going, but he kept everybody safe too.”

            “Hmm,” said Zachary contemplatively. “Sounds like an interesting guy. Does anyone know if the Pats are on tonight?”

            “It’s Friday and the Super Bowl was almost two months ago,” said Rosie. “If you’re uncomfortable hearing an anecdote about a Jewish person, you can find a better way to ask to change the subject.”

            “You’ve got me all wrong!” said Zachary. “I just had a brain fart, as the kids are saying these days.”

            “Okay,” said Rosie. She blinked heavily at Mags in a way that Mags by now knew meant “Mags, can I speak to you alone for a minute?”

            “I’m going to get some of the garlic bulbs from the pantry,” said Mags, standing up abruptly. “Rosie, I want you to come with me to take a look at them and let me know if you think you see some blight on them; I’m a little concerned about the way a few of them came up.”

            “Gotcha,” said Rosie. She followed Mags out of the living room through the kitchen and the mudroom to the pantry, a haphazardly insulated lean-to on the easternmost fringes of the house that was about shelving with nonperishable food and drink on it and half boxes of Christmas lights, old photo albums, and other Baring quasi-ephemera. Mags stood in the dim light looking at Rosie with an intent, half-thwarted-feeling expression on her face. “What are you thinking?” Rosie asked her. “What’s on your mind?”

            “Rosie, be honest with me,” said Mags. “Do you think Zachary is a scumbag?”

            “Based on just tonight, just the past few hours? Yes, absolutely,” said Rosie. “For the past few months I just haven’t understood why you’re dating the guy, but now, I find the fact that you are actively appalling. I mean, just to be perfectly honest with you.”

            “Thank you for your honesty,” said Mags. “I’m beginning to feel the same way.” She reached into a shoebox that was filled with onions and garlic, took out a head of garlic, and handed it to Rosie. “I wasn’t lying about being concerned about these,” she said. “Does this one look okay to you? How about those little spots on it?”

            “I’m pretty sure that’s just dirt or discoloration from dirt,” Rosie said. “So what are you going to do? About Zachary, I mean, now that you’ve realized he’s no good.”

            “I’m going to meditate and pray about it for a few days to be sure,” said Mags, “and then, if I still feel the same way by, say, the middle of next week, I’m going to dump him.” She walked past Rosie back out of the pantry. “Come into the kitchen with me and look at that garlic again, if you will; the light’s better in there.”

            Rosie nodded and took the garlic out into the kitchen. Looking at it in the kitchen like, she could see a faint greyishness radiating out from the specks of dirt that she and Mags had noted. It was in fact a little concerning to her inexpert eyes, but it looked like only two or three cloves were at all affected by it. She peeled these cloves off, put them in the compost bucket that stood next to the kitchen sink, and handed the rest of the head of garlic back to Mags. Mags looked at the garlic with a thankful, almost reverent expression on her face. Rosie was gratified to see that expression, even though she suspected on some level, with an odd suspicion, that it was the garlic towards which Mags was feeling reverent.

            “The rest of it should be completely usable,” she said to Mags, unnecessarily. “What are you going to do with it?”

            “I’m going to make a peanut sauce,” said Mags, immediately taking up a hand whisk and a small enamel bowl. “Why don’t you go back to the living room? I think Uncle Franklin is telling a story.”
            Uncle Franklin was indeed telling a story to the assembled company, but it was not a very fun one. It was about Mags’s late father, and how Uncle Franklin had always been jealous of him and had never been quite sure why. It was not a self-pitying anecdote and did not feel like a particularly confessional one either, but even so, Rosie found herself wondering if he meant that he had felt jealous of Carl McNulty or that he had felt jealous over him. She wondered if Uncle Franklin really knew the answer to this himself.

            “Anyway, I don’t really know where this story is going,” said Uncle Franklin at last.

            “Maybe you just needed to get it off your chest,” Zachary supplied as if this was the most counterintuitive and staggeringly insightful thing anybody could possibly say about it, “for emotional reasons of your own.”

            “Yes, that may be, Zachary,” said Uncle Franklin with a graveness that did a little bit, but only a little bit, to disguise the underlying and fundamental sarcasm. “I hadn’t considered that at all.”

            “Glad to be of service,” said Zachary. “Oh, you’re back, Rosie! Is Mags cooking up something good for us with that garlic of hers? I’m quite a wiz with garlic myself, you know. Now and then, anyway.”

            “Now and then, I’m sure,” Rosie said.

            The party drifted apart from there. Uncle Franklin turned in very early, probably to avoid continued conversation with Zachary. Mags went to her room to work on a special order of a bracelet for The Word for World is Forest. Aunt Margaret went over to the rarely-used spinet piano and started banging out “Star of the County Down” while Grandpa Baring sang along. By a little before nine-thirty it was Rosie, Zachary, and Grandma left in the living room while everybody else was doing his or her own thing somewhere else in the house. This was not a scenario that Rosie had foreseen and it was not one that she particularly appreciated; nevertheless, there it was, and she supposed she had to make the best of it and encourage Grandma to talk as much as possible so Zachary would be forced to listen.

            “I remember back in 1957 when I was first going steady with your grandfather,” Grandma said to Rosie, “he aspired to become a manager at either the tap-and-die factory or the paper mill over in Turners Falls. ‘Course, he didn’t work at either of those places; he worked at Wilson’s Department Store that’s still there on Main Street, and he’d drive home afternoons to help his father manage the accounts for the farm the way you’re currently helping us manage the accounts, Rosie. I told him I’d love him no matter what it was he ended up doing to make his living, but that’s just the sort of thing one does say in that case, isn’t it? But I meant it, oh, I meant it, and so he knew, and so we’re still together.”

            “That’s a beautiful story, Grandma,” said Rosie. “Zachary,” she said poisonously, gazing at his immaculately sculpted brown beard so she would not have to look him in the eye, “don’t you think that’s a beautiful story that my grandmother is telling us?”

            “I certainly do,” said Zachary. “Reminds me a bit of myself and my first girlfriend. Of course, that ended very differently, much to Mags’s delight!” He laughed and took a sip of his second can of Heineken. “I want to go easy on this stuff,” he said, “but I just can’t get over that smooth, rounded flavor.”

            Rosie looked at her own second can of Heineken, held loosely in her hand, which in turn dangled loosely between her legs. She had bought three six-packs of the stuff at the Circle K near the interstate because it was a little bit cheaper than Sam Adams and she was still trying to get all the accounts balanced from having Mattie and Ellie here. If she had known that this smug little man would be going on and on about how much he loved the stuff, she would have taken one for the team and bought something even crummier.

            “You really don’t like hoppy beer, Rosie?” Zachary asked.

            “The word ‘hoppy’ always makes me think of Thumper,” Grandma said with a wink at Rosie. “Thumper is from Bambi. Did you ever see that film, Zachary? Bambi. It’s a Disney film. It was the first movie I ever went to see in theaters, when I was…gosh, I must have been seven or eight years old. The Garden downtown was an even nicer kind of place back then and I was so excited to go downtown with my mother and eat at a nice restaurant and go see a motion picture show. Wonderful picture, Bambi. Rosie watched it here with me on our old television set when she was a girl, if she remembers.”

            Rosie did remember. Yes, she did remember.

            “I’ve seen Bambi,” said Zachary.

            “Wonderful picture,” said Grandma Baring.

            “No pipe I’ll smoke, no horse I’ll yoke, tho’ with rust my plough turns brown, till a smiling bride by my own fireside sits the star of the County Down!” sang Grandpa Baring.

            “I’m going to talk to Mags for a bit,” said Rosie. “If that’s okay.”

            “Sure,” said Grandma. “Maybe go upstairs and see how Mattie and Ellie are doing too.” Mattie and Ellie had fled upstairs very early in Rosie’s party; they disliked Zachary even more overtly than Grandma, Grandpa, Aunt Margaret, and Uncle Franklin did, and almost as intensely as Mags apparently was coming to. Rosie took Grandma’s advice and went up to see them first; she brought them each a slice of cake, and they thanked her. Then she went into her and Mags’s room and flopped down on her bed.

            “Had enough?” said Mags.

            “Of your soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend?” asked Rosie. “I’d had enough of him three hours ago. If I never hear the word ‘hoppy’ in my life again it’ll be too soon. I thought you said he was more of a Boston sports guy than a Hill Towns craft beer guy.”

            “I made the mistake of telling him I wished we had intellectual conversations more often,” said Mags. “Getting really into craft beer was his way of doing that.”

            “And Heineken is craft beer as far as he’s concerned?” Rosie asked.

            “He thinks that treating it as if it is makes him seem discerning in the same way that Mattie is discerning for writing a serious thesis on French children’s stories,” Mags said.

            “I see,” Rosie said. “Well, your breakup with him can’t come soon enough.”

            “It’s just that I don’t want to go through the Sturm und Drang of a breakup at your birthday party,” said Mags. “I might send him a text after he’s gotten home tonight.”

            “Breaking up by text?” Rosie said. “You hussy!”

            “Can you honestly look at him and tell me he doesn’t deserve it?” said Mags.

            “He absolutely does,” said Rosie. “I have to go to the bathroom,” she said; she had realized this, about herself, quite abruptly. “I’ll be right back, okay?”

            “Okay,” said Mags. “Go ahead.” She sounded a little put-upon somehow, or maybe Rosie should say a little arch. It was very clear how little she had enjoyed the party and how little she was enjoying her relationship.

            Rosie went to the bathroom, and when she got out, she was alone in the living room with Zachary; Grandma was in the kitchen. “Would you like to come home with me?” Zachary asked without any prelude.

            “I beg your pardon? You’re dating my cousin.”

            “You seem like less of a cold fish than Mags, and besides, I think that between you and me she and I are probably on the outs more or less now anyway.” Zachary shrugged. “Just thought I’d ask. I’m planning to end things with her at some point because I don’t think either of us is really into it, and you seem like you could stand to get laid. Plus it’s your birthday.”

            “Get the hell,” Rosie exposited, “out of this house right this minute and don’t you dare darken the door of 729 North Meadows Road ever again, you pathetic, weak little man.” She turned on her heel and went back to her room. “Zachary propositioned me,” she told Mags.

            “What?!”

            “Zachary propositioned me so I threw him out of the house.”

            “Good job!” said Mags.

            “We’ll get this toad out of your life by hook or by crook,” said Rosie. “Rosary Newgarth doesn’t let herself get affronted like this by woefully subpar men, and I’m sure Margaret McNulty doesn’t either.”

            “She certainly doesn’t,” said Mags.

            A few seconds later they heard the door to the mudroom slamming, then, after an interval, saw through the windows the lights of Zachary’s car careering along the driveway and speeding off down the road. Mags fired off a breakup text within minutes. The story, however, did not quite end there.

12.

The Car

Holy Week for Rosie and Mags was spent on the not-particularly-pious task of plotting revenge against Zachary. When he had gotten home after Rosie’s birthday party he had seen Mags’s breakup text and sent twenty-seven texts in response, in addition to fourteen AIM messages (Mags still used AIM, under the name “LoyalToTheGroupOf17”), fairly begging her to take him back. She had texted him back “f u” and he had responded with another forty-one texts detailing what a frigid bitch she was. It was from this experience that the determination to teach him a lesson emerged and took shape for the two of them.

            Easter 2012 was on April 8, which according to one of Mags’s astrological almanacs was the exact median date on which Easter could fall. Rosie had never been sure of how the date of Easter was calculated and on the day before Maundy Thursday, which Aunt Margaret and Uncle Franklin called Spy Wednesday, Mags explained it to her.

            “So, way back in the day, there was a group of Christians who wanted to keep celebrating Easter alongside Passover on the fourteenth day of the Jewish month Nisan,” said Mags, “but this was repudiated as heretical for reasons I don’t pretend to understand. The system that was arrived at, again for reasons I don’t pretend to understand, was to define a standardized ‘liturgical spring equinox’ on March 21, count forward from that date to whenever the next full moon was, and then make Easter the next Sunday after that. So, for example, this year, the Pink Moon is two days from now, and so the week including that day is Holy Week and Easter is on the eighth. Does that make sense?”

            “Yes,” said Rosie, who was struggling to wrap her head around this but had four years ago struggled at least as much with economic concepts that she now understood very well.

            “Like I said, I really don’t understand why the so-called Quatrodecimans were condemned,” Mags said. “When I was at UMass I had a Jewish friend called Zeke who told me he could never decide whether to be angry that Christianity became so unmoored from Judaism or relieved that it hasn’t been occupying the same ritual space for the past two thousand years. I can’t say I understand Judaism well enough to have any particular feelings about that question myself, but, well, those were his feelings.”

            “Huh,” said Rosie, who had actually heard similar sentiments now and then at the Purimspiels in Binghamton.

            “Anyway, do you want to get back to planning out how to take care of Zachary, or have you had about enough of that?” Mags asked.

            “Honestly, I say we just drive to his house and tell him what we think,” said Rosie. “I’d feel a little childish doing anything more elaborate than that.”

            “Good idea,” said Mags. “How does tomorrow work?”

            “Tomorrow? You’re not interested in going to Mass?”

            Mags shrugged. “To be honest, not really,” she said. “I’ve actually never felt very comfortable about Maundy Thursday. All that facetime with men’s feet. It’s just a bit much for me, you know what I mean?”

            “I think I do,” Rosie said. “All right, then. Tomorrow will be our day to yell at Zachary.”

            And it was. They drove up to Guilford, Vermont, where Zachary lived with two or three housemates who according to Mags had more or less the same personality that he did. It was a beautiful drive through bare spring woods—up the Green River, along a road called Weatherhead Hollow Road (another place called Weatherhead; remarkable how that word recurred), through fields and forests.

            They reached Zachary’s house. It was an old farmhouse with a stream to its back, across the road from a lightly wooded hill. “You know,” Mags observed to Rosie, “I did leave some stuff of mine here the last time I stayed over.”

            “I thought you never slept with Zachary.”

            “I slept on a foldout.”

            Rosie nodded. That made enough sense; she even thought she approved of that, more or less, considering what the alternative evidently had been. “Mags,” Rosie said, “would you prefer to just—just be the better and bigger people for a day, and get your stuff back, and leave?”

            Mags looked at her cautiously for a few seconds, then sighed and nodded heavily. “Yes,” she said, “I think I would prefer that, at long last.”

            Rosie parked the Subaru and the two of them got out. Zachary must have seen them from inside because in a few seconds he was out on the front porch gawking at them.

            “What the fuck are you doing here after what you did to me?” he shouted at Mags, and at that point everything went belly-up.

            First, one of Zachary’s roommates, a man called Jake of whom Mags seemed to have a much higher opinion, came outside with a baffled expression on his face. “What the hell is going on, man?” he asked Zachary, then turned and saw Rosie and Mags. “…Oh, it’s you. You here for your CDs and stuff, Mags?”

            “She certainly is,” said Rosie, and—secondly—Mags marched forward, physically pushed Zachary aside when she got to the porch, and entered the house with, apparently, Jake’s blessing.      

            “What the fuck, man?” Zachary said to Jake.

            Jake shrugged. “It is her stuff,” he said.

            Zachary had a hushed, hurried conversation with Jake in which Rosie caught the words “insecure,” “clingy,” and “frigid” uttered multiple times in quick succession. Then, from inside—thirdly, in the list of things going not according to plan—there was a loud crash inside, and Zachary’s other housemate started shouting at Mags from somewhere within the house.

            “Mags, where are you?” Rosie called.

            Jake looked over his shoulder, back into the house. “She’s, uh, she’s in the kitchen,” he called to Rosie.

            As soon as Rosie heard the k in kitchen she was—fourthly—striding past Zachary and Jake herself, into the house where Mags was now apparently being screamed at. The house was much like the Oldmeadow–Baring House, old and with mostly warm-colored décor. Mags was in a small, tiled kitchen, holding up a saucepan as a defensive weapon while a strapping man in a backwards snapback hollered and waved his arms at her.

            Fifthly—and from this point on the hits just kept on coming—Rosie ran back out to the car, got one of Grandpa’s nine-irons from the trunk, ran back into the house, and hit the man menacing Mags across the small of his back.

            The man picked up Rosie and hurled her against the wall; she felt a stabbing pain in her mid-back as she hit a series of thumbtacks hard. She fell to the floor, stilling holding the golf club, and crawled forward far enough to reach up and punch the man in the crotch. He doubled over, then fell to his hands and knees and grabbed Rosie by the hair. He started screaming some sort of sexist slur at her but stopped when Jake ran back inside and started pulling him off Rosie. Rosie, clutching the golf club the way Mags was clutching the saucepan, stood up and hobbled out of the house, Mags following.

            “What the fuck is going on in there, Mags?” Zachary demanded.

            “Get the Gogol Bordello CD and as many of the Loreena McKennitt ones as you can find and just mail them to me in a box, Jake!” Mags was calling back over her shoulder.

            “Will do!” Jake called back.

            “What the fuck are you doing?!” Zachary said again.

            “What does it sound like we’re doing?” Mags asked, her voice dripping with righteous contempt. “We’re arranging for me to be sent back my stuff. The wool socks too, Jake, and that skirt I never got around to trying on! We’re done here, Zachary.”

            Rosie, stumbling around in the driveway and hoping the altercation had not somehow damaged her right kidney, saw what she recognized as Zachary’s car parked underneath a budding maple tree. “I have an idea, Mags,” she said.

            “Is it an idea I’m going to like?” Mags asked.

            “Your id certainly is,” said Rosie, and put the grip of the nine-iron through one of Zachary’s taillights.

            “Oh my gosh!” Mags said; Rosie couldn’t tell if it was in delight, horror, or a mix of both, so she assumed the latter.

            Rosie noticed, with an evil delight, that Zachary had left his keys sitting in his driver’s seat. She got into the car. Mags and Zachary were both shouting at her at the tops of their lungs, for very different reasons. She jammed the keys into the keyhole and turned so hard that she felt as if the blade of the key might snap off. She was already beginning to feel bad about her actions—she knew this was vindictive overreaction that might even lead to legal trouble, and, worse, that she was “helping” Mags in ways that Mags really did not need—but she could not help herself. More than anything else she was impelled on by the pain in her back, the pain in her side. The world compressed to the desire to teach Zachary a lesson, which was, in a way, also a means of teaching herself a lesson. She was an exterminating angel, and Zachary’s 1999 Chevrolet Malibu was her chariot of fire.

            She revved the engine; Margaret Clooney’s hand was on her shoulder. She put the car in reverse; so too were Horton Oldmeadow’s and Horton Baring’s. She backed the car out into the road; Hosea Oldmeadow, Lydia Oldmeadow, and Lydia Oldmeadow’s two older brothers were praying for her somewhere, or she for them. Asaph Oldmeadow guided her hand as she shifted the car into drive; Carl McNulty’s feet were her feet as she drove the car back into the driveway and straight into the bole of the maple tree, opening the door and bailing out just before the crash.

            The tree shuddered, sending down a shower of buds and bark. Rosie lay in the driveway covered in a thin spray of maple tree epiphenomena with every country song ever written playing in her head at once. She noticed, but did not have the energy to care, that Mags was fending of Zachary with the saucepan while Jake brawled with the third housemate.

            At some point, probably while backing the car up, the golf club had been thrown clear; it was now lying in the middle of the road, bent at about a thirty-degree angle, and nobody was bothering to go pick it up. They all had more important things on their mind. For the first time in years, Rosie felt that she was truly “living in the moment” the way the mindfulness gurus in the spirituality sections of mainstream bookstores were always saying that one should.

            The moment soon came to include Mags dragging her to her feet and situating her in the passenger’s seat of the Subaru. Jake was hollering something at Mags about exchanging insurance information, and the third roommate, considerably bruised and contused from the fights with Rosie and Jake, was now waving around what looked like some kind of hunting rifle. Mags shouted something back to Jake about texting him a picture of her insurance information once she got home, then pulled out into the road and took off like Jason Statham.

            “That was very stupid of you, Rosie,” she said once they had put about a mile and a half between them and Zachary, “and about the only thing I can think of to say in your defense, morally speaking, is that some of the way they were behaving was illegal too.”

            “I’m seriously worried about internal injuries after getting thrown into that wall,” said Rosie. “But I was worried that guy was going to seriously hurt you.”

            “So you decided you’d rather he seriously hurt you? That’s very noble of you, Rosie, and it might help us convince them not to press charges, but there’s little else I can think to say in favor of that thought process.”

            “I’m not asking you to say anything in favor of it. Just explaining it to you on my own behalf as best I can…understand?” Rosie asked through gritted teeth, getting more and more worried by the second about the shooting pain in her side.

            “I understand,” said Mags. “And it does mean a lot to me that you’d go to the mattresses for me like that.”

            “Where does that come from, ‘go to the mattresses’? Do you know? That’s another one of those expressions I’ve never really understood.”

            “I think it comes from some mob movie or other,” Mags said. “You go to the mattresses when you start a mob war. Sleeping in warehouses and so forth. I don’t think it’s in The Godfather; I’d remember if it was because I re-watched that movie with friends quite recently. Something by Scorsese, maybe?”

            “Maybe, maybe, perhaps,” said Rosie. “Oh, I am glad I got that out of my system. I am glad, I am glad.”

            “My number one priority right now is getting you medical attention,” Mags said grimly. “If you’re really that concerned about your kidney then we need to get you to Baystate Franklin as soon as we get back to Greenfield.”

            “Oh, God, I haven’t been in the hospital since…it must have been when I got my wisdom teeth out,” Rosie said. “I’ve been to the doctor since then, of course. Height and weight, coming off birth control when I broke up with my last boyfriend, that sort of thing. But the hospital…” She whistled. She was not sure why she was whistling; there was nothing remarkable and nothing that should have been at all frightening about going to the hospital, beyond the remarkable and frightening fact that she had been badly beaten up in the first place. And yet there it was: she was afraid, and that fear was getting stronger as her side hurt more and more and as Mags sped closer and closer to Greenfield—going five, ten, twenty miles an hour over the speed limit, saying prayers under her breath that Rosie could not understand.

            “Are you afraid?” Mags asked after an interval. She glanced over at Rosie. Her face was pale, concerned, caring, as the shadows of the trees did battle with the late-morning sun behind the driver’s-side window.

            Something about being asked the question made a difference. Rosie could not think how or why, but it did. It made a difference and she felt the fear lessen, the fear lessen and the pain with it. Rosie allowed the pain and the fear to drain out of her as if she was draining a bathtub, or a sink after doing dishes in the haphazard way that she had. She was numb, now, but it was the numbness of knowing, somehow, almost a priori, that eventually even the pain would be all right again.

            “No,” she said to Mags with a smile. “No, I’m not afraid at all.”

The End

Feast of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, 2020