Novella: “A Trick of the Light” (Part One)

Note: This is part of a thematic series called Compulsory Figures, and not the first part. I wrote it in the great and terrible year 2020. Compulsory Figures in its entirety—written on and off between 2017 and 2021—will see the light of day eventually.

1.

The Train

Rosie Newgarth graduated from college in 2011 and moved back home right away. Since the Great Recession had hit she had had no idea what “came next” for her, and she did not want to live with her friends. She had majored in economics and graduated on time with a good, not great, GPA; she was physically attractive and had done some sportswear modeling one summer, and between that and a series of merit scholarships she graduated with less debt than one might have expected. Home for Rosie was the 1950s pseudo-Cape where her parents Richard and Martha and her sixteen-year-old sister Madison lived on Long Island. Newgarth was an anglicization devised at Ellis Island ninety or a hundred years before, and the family still owned a velvet painting of Luciano Pavarotti that Rosie’s paternal grandmother had given her as a Christmas present when she was ten years old.

            “You really should visit my folks one of these days, Rosie,” Martha Newgarth said to her one day that summer as they sat in their backyard drinking sangria—Martha in a sundress with a warm-toned, youthful pattern, Rosie in her bikini top and a pair of palazzo pants.

            “In Massachusetts?” Rosie asked, and Martha nodded. “I dunno; maybe,” Rosie said. “I’d like to. But I’d also like to focus on finding a job before I go around visiting people.”

            “That’s actually part of why I’m bringing this up, Rosie,” said her mother. “That bed and breakfast your grandfather was trying to start up might finally work now and they want someone there managing the books. You’re smart, you’re good with figures and with money. You studied economics. I think you should consider it.”

            “Mom, I just got back from four years in the Southern Tier. Forgive me if I’m not plotzing at the idea of moving to Discount Stars Hollow to work at Grandpa’s bed and breakfast.”

            “Don’t call it ‘Discount Stars Hollow’; there’s nothing cheap about it,” said Martha. “Rosie, it’s just a suggestion. Think it over, okay? Please just see how you feel about it for my sake?”

            “I think I already know how I feel about it, but okay,” Rosie said.

            And she did think it over; for the next two or three weeks she spent about half an hour each day, on average, contemplating what it might be like to be on the outskirts of Greenfield, Massachusetts 01301, managing the books for Grandpa Baring’s passion project hotel. She called him once, and he was glad to heart from her.

            “Rosie! So good to hear from you! Your mother told me you might call,” he said in a canny tone of voice. “How are things? Got that fancy diploma yet hanging on your wall? How’s the boyfriend? Still together?” he asked without waiting for an answer to the question about the diploma.

            “No, not still together, sorry to say,” Rosie said. “He wanted to be in some living situation with some friends of ours that I didn’t want.” She did not wish to get into the details with her grandfather, who was closing in on three-quarters of a century and had married before 1960. “So we had a big fight right before graduation and now we don’t speak anymore.”

            “Relationships are difficult,” said her grandfather after, apparently, a moment’s contemplation. “A donnybrook or two now and then is one thing. Survivable, I’d say normal. But right before graduation seems like about the worst time for it possible. Do you feel okay about it? I’m happy to send your Uncle Franklin down in his truck if I need to.”

            “There’s no need to send anybody down in his or her truck, Grandpa. I feel…I feel as if it ought to hurt more than it does. I find myself wishing that a lot of things these days hurt me more than they do.”

            “Live to my age, life’ll get to you,” her grandfather said. ‘Some day soon you’ll stop wishing things hurt more.” There was a lull in their talk; then he asked “You give any thought to coming to work up here for a bit? I figured that could be what you were calling about.”

            “It is to an extent,” said Rosie. “Is what I’m calling about to an extent, I mean. I have been thinking about it; the issue is that I don’t know what I want adult life to look like for me quite yet.” She avoided the temptation to add out loud but I’m pretty sure I don’t want it to look like that. There was another lull in the conversation; from downstairs Rosie could hear Madison practicing on her spinet piano that they had inherited from Great-Aunt Jenny, and outside Rosie’s bedroom window the back yard sat green-brown and pluripotent.

            “Just be in touch more, okay, Rosie?” her grandfather asked. “It does me and your grandmother a world of good to hear from you, mentally speaking.” She nodded, and made a little sound in her throat to indicate to him that she was nodding. Then they hung up. She set her phone—a few years old; still not a smartphone—aside on her writing desk and flopped down on her bed. Vague yet not unpleasant memories of times when she had gone up to Greenfield to visit her Baring relatives there passed through her mind the way rosary beads had passed through her pious child fingers ten or fifteen years before. A house painted in the colors of a barn; a door being opened to let some kind of long-haired cat in; a car ride to a garden supply store with her Aunt Margaret and another young girl whose face Rosie remembered more faithfully than her name. There had been cool summers back then up that way, and she had once or twice gone for a fully clothed swim in some river or other, falsely thinking it would keep her warmer. She recalled food of some heavy, tragic ethnic origin, and a Christmas Eve service in one of those whitewashed churches with windows of mostly clear glass. She recalled raspberry ice cream and astonishingly bitter iced tea.

            Would life really be so much different if she did spend a while up there, she wondered? What was she doing here, in Nassau County, that was so worth her while that she could not stand but to stay? Each day she got up, texted, listened to music, listened to Madison practice piano (which practice, increasingly, could also be called music), ate and drank, sat with Mom or with Dad in the back yard, and so on, and so on. Some Sundays she went to St. Agnes for lack of anything else to do, and some Tuesdays she went to see a blockbuster at the Loew’s in the shopping center. In this manner three and a half months had already passed by, and passed her by, since she had graduated in Binghamton in May. It was a life of leisure, but leisure with little chance of gaining dimensions, of developing mystery or depth. She felt an attachment to it, but it worried her to think that this feeling might not correspond to anything in the real world. An observer who did not know her might very well conclude that what she was doing these days was little worth her while. She almost felt just such an observer, some unknown titan lurking deep in the early history of her brain, convicting her of a vague and mild but somehow undeniable guilt. It was not a feeling that she relished.

            After August passed Rosie made up her mind. She had still not found a job with enough hours or enough pay to seriously change her situation here, so she might as well take the Amtrak up to Greenfield to see what she could see there. It would be an open-ended visit, probably not a very long one, but she could not honestly say that for sure. She called her grandfather again and he told her that he was able and ready to host her for just as long as she wished. Now all that remained was to arrange the travel itself. Somehow the romance of doing it by rail was not a romance that Rosie was willing to give up.

            She secured her ticket. It was one-way even though she fully intended to return to New York, because she did not want to commit herself to returning at any particular time, and in particular not at any time that might fall after she got sick of her Baring relatives. She was still convinced that indeed she would get sick of them eventually; they were old, and had a dour and uncool flintiness to them, one and all. Rosie did not understand herself to be cool, but she certainly did not understand herself to be flinty or dour either. She was picturing an environment like in that book Cold Comfort Farm, tragicomic to a point that would be difficult to take seriously.

            Her last evening at home Madison put on a little concert for her. Madison’s voice was a beautiful contralto much richer than you would expect from a rising high school junior, better actually than her skills with the piano as an instrument; she plugged away at the chords of “St. James Infirmary” and “These Foolish Things” while her voice carried the melodies, and even when she got to one of Satie’s piano pieces she hummed, or keened, along with it. They had lox bagels for dinner; ten or twelve hours after the appointed time for such a meal, but an important and crowd-pleasing send-off considering that in much of small-town New England you couldn’t find a decent bagel sandwich for love or money. It was the middle of September and the wind had an aroma of fall or even of early winter when Rosie went outside to look down the evening street for the last time in weeks or months.

            The nearest train station to Greenfield was an unmanned little platform in Amherst, through which the Vermonter passed once a day in either direction. Amherst was known for Emily Dickinson, lefty politics, and at least two or three different colleges, including the one Madison’s friend Jessica wanted to go to in a few years. Rosie wasn’t sure what Greenfield was known for, other than her family; she had asked her grandfather this over the phone and he had observed that not everywhere had the luxury of being known for something; and besides, what was Rockville Center known for other than police unions and an obscure Catholic diocese? “There are quite a few Underground Railroad houses in this area though,” he conceded, “our own house not least of all. Or at least that’s the family lore that’s come down to us from your Baring great-great-grandmother. Remarkable character, my grandmother, she was. I feel somehow you’d have liked her if you’d have been alive back then.”

            “When did your grandmother die?” Rosie asked. “Out of curiosity, if you don’t mind the question. I don’t think I’ve ever heard my mother mentioning having known her.”

            “No, she never did,” Grandpa Baring said. “People had kids younger back then but they tended to die younger too. My grandmother passed in 1950, when I was eleven or twelve; I forget which side of my birthday it fell on. Not a good birthday for me either way.” He paused. “I apologize,” he said, “for sharing too much about it, if share too much about it I have.”

            “Don’t worry, Grandpa. I’m easygoing about oversharing.”

            “Oversharing,” said her grandfather, and she actually heard pen scrape against notepad. “I’d better remember that word, I feel. So thank you for it, Rosie. I’ll see you soon?”

            “Yes, Grandpa. I’ll see you very soon.” Rosie hung up. She sighed. At this time tomorrow evening she would be just settling in up in Greenfield, probably wanting to sleep after a long journey. It was odd to think of, and she felt that something about her life was changing more irrevocably than the fact that it was meant to be a temporary visit would suggest. A strange feeling, a feeling that left her with little in the way of sympathy for herself. She wondered if she would be able to explain it to her family when she got up there.

            She took the train into New York and got on the Vermonter at Penn Station. It had been her hope that she would embark at Grand Central, a much better-looking and better-feeling and thus more auspicious station from which to begin a long journey northward, but she was to have no such luck. So she let herself be content with Penn Station, and settled onto the train as best she could as it passed out of the city.

            Between the city and the Connecticut state line the train passed through an odd borderland of coastal wetlands, abandoned factories, suburban tracts, and sometimes a school running track or a dreary baseball diamond. The businesses whose signs she was able to see from the window of her compartment mostly had name like Moskowitz’s and Martinelli’s. As the train passed into Connecticut and turned north on its long line towards Canada, the Italian and Jewish names on the signs and billboards gradually gave way to—or, at least, were gradually supplemented with—Irish and Waspish ones: Shea’s, Clark’s, Murphy’s.

            The train came to Amherst. By that time Rosie had read about half of a Haruki Murakami novel, which she had disliked, and maybe a third of an old horror paperback, which she had loved. A taste for horridness in her literature had coexisted with normalcy in her dress and affect for about a year now; the former was something to which her now-ex-boyfriend had introduced her.

            The station in Amherst was, as she had been told, an unmanned landing with a little red brick building that looked like it was long-disused. Trees now showing the first blush of fall color shielded a busy-sounding road from view. A man with a short white beard and an expression that implied a tragic sense of life stood next to a Subaru Outback waiting for her. It was her grandfather. She waved, and he came over and hugged her tightly. The outer voyage was over and the inner voyage would soon begin. 

2.

The Dinner

The drive from Amherst to Greenfield was pleasant, if a bit chillier than Rosie would have expected. Her grandfather, for reasons best known to himself, evidently did not feel the need to discuss how her train ride had been or how she felt about being up here after having said before that she would rather not. Instead he would laconically, almost churlishly, point out the sights with a jab of his pink, hairy hand and a few words from his close-pursed lips. The way he spoke about the things they passed would seem to heighten a feeling of some kind of inevitable tragedy. “We’re passing the UMass campus,” he’d say, or “We’re passing the First Church of Sunderland,” or “That there’s the Yankee Candle headquarters; its says ‘Scenter of the Universe’ on it.” Rosie felt that he would likely take much the same attitude towards showing her the house when they got to it. “Your cousin Mags went to UMass,” he observed at one stage, and Rosie did not want to wonder out loud who her cousin Mags was and why she never heard her mother talk about her.

            They took a few back streets through Greenfield and ended up on a partially suburbanized road leading up away from the town. The house was just after a graveyard on this road, between and behind a patchy curtain of yellowing and browning trees. It had been repainted since Rosie was young and was now a mousy sage-green color that made it fade somewhat into its surroundings. It was in what she believed was called a Federal style, vernacular, wooden and shingle. Her grandfather turned the Subaru up a longish gravel driveway and waved hello to a young woman Rosie did not recognize who was watering a raised bed of what looked like some kind of fall root vegetable. She was a few inches taller than Rosie, looked about her age, and had a pale face with a pointed nose between curtains of auburn hair. She was dressed in a tan jacket and a long multicolored skirt and the watering can that she held was of battered and slightly corroded metal of some kind.

            “Mags, this is your cousin Rosary Newgarth,” said her grandfather as they got out of the car. “She goes by Rosie.”

            “I remember. It’s good to see you again after all these years, Rosie.” Mags shook her hand and pulled her into a loose half-hug. Rosie racked her brains and then finally saw it, something unchanged in the roiling hair or the big glaring grey eyes. Yes, this was that girl with whom she had gone to the garden store and swum in the river long ago. She tightened the hug a little, and it felt like a long-forgotten instinct.

            “You have a good trip up, Rosie?” someone asked as they entered into what Rosie believed was called the house’s mudroom. He was a thick-set man with very dark hair and dark blue eyes, standing next to a tall, thin woman who seemed to have been painted from the same palette. They looked to be between forty-five and fifty years old, about Rosie’s father’s age and a little older than her mother, and she recognized them as Uncle Franklin and Aunt Margaret, her grandparents’ two eldest children. Uncle Franklin was in a plaid shirt and black jeans, Aunt Margaret in a plaid shirt and bluish-grey jeans. She held in her hand a pitcher of what looked like the bitter iced tea that Rosie remembered from her girlhood. One or two lemons wedges, which had clearly been squeezed out as much as humanly possible, floated in it like tablets or oracles cast into the sea. Rosie nodded, and told Uncle Franklin that, yes, her trip had gone fine and she felt excited for the weeks to come. And after all, that was true now; something about actually getting up here had reminded Rosie of the fascination that this place had held for her back in her early days, and she looked forward now to rediscovering that if she could.

            It was a little before six o’ clock and dinner was at seven, so Aunt Margaret took it upon herself to give Rosie a tour of the house. It had a nineteenth-century skeleton on which an up-to-date kitchen and bathroom had at some recent point been grafted like old skin around new wine—or was it the other way around? There were five bedrooms, three upstairs and two downstairs; one was Grandpa and Grandma’s, one was Mags’s, and the other three—two up and one down; the three that were easiest to reach considering the house’s warrenlike floor plan—were in principle for guests. Rosie was what was in principle about it and Aunt Margaret told her that Uncle Franklin was living her for the time being after a collapse in his life, a collapse of some unspecified but dramatic-seeming kind. One of the two real guests room, then, was at the moment occupied by a family from Maine, who were out visiting with friends right now and would be taking off after breakfast tomorrow (Aunt Margaret would be leaving after dinner tonight to return to her divorcée’s apartment in downtown Greenfield). Rosie wanted to ask where, all this being the case, she was going to sleep, but it slipped her mind when Aunt Margaret started telling her something about the house’s radiators.

            Dinner was something called a New England boiled dinner; it was a plate of boiled potatoes with other vegetables and some sort of corned beef. Grandpa Baring informed Rosie that it had entered the region’s cookery via immigration from Ireland, and Rosie said, by way of a joke, that it tasted like seven hundred and fifty years of oppression and regret must have felt. To her relief, everybody laughed at this.

            “I know the family that’s staying in that upstairs room won’t be eating with us tonight in particular,” she said, “but in general, can we expect people staying here as guests to eat with us more dinnertimes than not? I just want to know what to expect in terms of, well, privacy in this house, frankly. It’s a question that I have to admit I’ve been apprehensive about.” Nobody answered immediately. “I’m sorry if there’s something obvious that I’m missing,” Rosie said. “I don’t know much about what it’s like to run and bed and breakfast; I’m a numbers girl, not a hospitality industry girl.”

            “I’m going to address you as ‘Numbers Girl’ from now on, Rosie,” Mags said. “It’s cute.”

            “Go right ahead,” Rosie said. “Can somebody please answer my question about who will be here at a typical dinnertime?”

            “Just those of us who live here,” said Rosie’s grandmother, who looked almost exactly like Aunt Margaret only with silver hair and a more advanced set of crows’-feet. “Guests are responsible for their own meals other than breakfast. We have a narrow view of what the mission of a bed and breakfast ought to be, in part because of our own much-depleted resources, a subject that I would have been wondering about for a while now if I were you.”

            “I had been, actually, now that you mention it,” said Rosie. “Is this paying for Grandma and Grandpa and Mags and Uncle Franklin’s keep?” Uncle Franklin shook his head. “Okay.”

            “We’ve got money in the blue chips,” Uncle Franklin explained. “Just not as much of it as we used to.”

            “What does the bed and breakfast business actually pay for, then?”

            “Itself, barely,” said Grandpa Baring. “It holds a fascination for me, hosting people for a living. Something to do in my golden years—in my retirement, that is.” Rosie realized that she actually had no idea what manner of a career it was that her grandfather was retired from.

            “I see,” said Rosie. “If all that’s needed is to keep the bed and breakfast itself in the black, then I think I can manage that reasonably.”

            “You’re staying?” asked Uncle Franklin.

            “I’ve been here two hours,” Rosie said. “Ask me that again when I’ve been here two weeks. That is how long my dad always told me I should stick with a task to see how it goes.”

            “Helluva name, Newgarth,” said Uncle Franklin. “Where’s it come from, if you know?”

            “Ellis Island anglicization,” said Rosie, “I think of an uncommon Italian name called Nogarotto or Nogaretti. People think it’s German or Dutch for some reason; I’ve never understood why.”

            “Helluva name, Nogarotto,” Uncle Franklin said with a little bit more of a twinkle in his eye than he had had at any point before this.

            “Or Nogaretti,” said Mags. “Rosie, I’m sorry we couldn’t welcome you with a more impressive dinner. There was this elaborate salad that I found a recipe for in an old book of Aunt Margaret’s, but I couldn’t find some of the ingredients when I went to Foster’s this morning so I went with the old standby instead. I know it’s not very impressive.”

            “Did you cook it?” Rosie asked. Rosie herself was an acceptable cook, and Madison was growing into a good, if unsystematic, one, so back home their parents need not cook nearly as often as their inability ever to agree on a takeout option would normally have implied. Rosie was cautious about how such things were handled in such a household as this one appeared to be.

            “I cook more nights than not,” Mags said. “Breakfast is Grandma and Uncle Franklin’s responsibility, though, and we’re each responsible for our own lunch. That’ll include you, of course, once you’ve been here for a while and have your own stuff in the pantry and the fridge and so forth.”

            “I had no doubt,” said Rosie. It came out a bit more aggressive than she had meant it or wanted it to. Aunt Margaret looked up from her corned beef and potatoes to give Rosie a somewhat sharp look, probably because of that accidental but unmistakable harshness.

            “So you have issues with preparing your own food, Rosie?” Aunt Margaret asked. It sounded like a sincere question, much more sincere than it probably would have been had Rosie asked it of somebody herself.

            “No,” Rosie said. “That system sounds all right to me. Sorry if I gave the wrong idea.”

            “Don’t worry about it,” said Aunt Margaret. Rosie was unsure what that meant here.

            “What do you like to eat, Rosie?” her grandfather asked her then. “Franklin usually does the shopping so if you’ll just put things up on the Big Board when you want ‘em or need ‘em then we ought to be able to get ‘em for you.” He jabbed a thumb at a whiteboard on one of the kitchen’s walls. Rosie would not have called it a particularly big board, but it did have the pride of place amidst the other items in the kitchen that a genuinely big board might well have had. Currently it had written on it peanut butter (chunky), hot sauce, rice cakes, bacon, black tea, Earl Grey tea, unsalted butter, and incense. Rosie asked what the incense was for.

            “Mags likes the stuff,” Grandma said. “Burns it all hours.”

            “Couldn’t tell you why,” said Grandpa. “Might could be a habit she picked up from her mom and dad.” This raised, more or less explicitly, the question of who exactly Mags’s mom and dad actually were. Rosie’s occasionally-seen Aunt Lizzie and her husband, maybe? Aunt Lizzie was the little sister of Mom, Aunt Margaret, and Uncle Franklin, and she had married someone almost-famous. It was not at all clear to Rosie why, if Mags was Aunt Lizzie’s child, she would be living here rather than somewhere “better.” Rosie looked at Mags. Her big grey eyes were turned down to her plate of vegetables, but not, apparently, with embarrassment or with desire not to be understood. Did Rosie want to be understood, she wondered? For a long time now it had haunted and bedeviled her, the prospect and possibility of knowing what she wanted and being known for who she was. It was one of the scariest things in the world to think of, and something about Mags, this putative cousin of hers whose face had always stuck with her, made her feel as if her fears might soon come true.

            “Some day I’m going to tell one of my online friends the awful truth about this family,” Mags said archly. Rosie wondered if she really meant this. Somehow or other, she hoped that she did not.

            “Eat your vegetables, Mags,” Aunt Margaret said to her offhandedly.

            “Rosie,” said Mags as she ate her vegetables as instructed, “what music do you listen to?”

            Rosie shrugged. “Lady Gaga, Adele, Arcade Fire, sometimes Taylor Swift or something off some opera CDs I got from my Newgarth grandmother. You know, white people music for the most part. You?”

            “Much the same,” said Mags, “as well as some stuff that’s a little more wooish and mystical like Loreena McKennitt and Heather Dale. Do you know either of them?”

            “I know of Loreena McKennitt,” said Rosie. “Oh—I forgot to mention traditional pop. Sinatra, Rosemary Clooney, Doris Day, and so on. Would you believe my sixteen-year-old sisters got into that stuff and then got me into it?”

            “I’d believe it,” said Grandma.

            Grandpa nodded. “Lotta younger people getting sick of the stuff on the radio and going back to the classics,” he said. “Not to make a moral thing of it of course like some of my old-man friends do, but it can do my heart good sometimes to be able to discuss this stuff with the young. You and I could have some good talks about it, Rosie. Helen O’Connell is a favorite of mine.”

            Rosie nodded. “Helen O’Connell is great,” she said, even though she had only heard a few of Helen O’Connell’s songs and was worried she might be getting her mixed up with Kitty Kallen. “I’d be glad to talk music with you or with Mags,” she said. “It’s a good thing Mags and I listen tot a lot of the same stuff since Aunt Margaret implied she and I will be in the same room for the first little while I’m here.”

            Mags looked at Aunt Margaret. “That’s the decision that’s been arrived at?” she asked.

            “Are you unhappy with it, Mags?” Aunt Margaret asked her. Mags shook her head. “You seem a little perturbed,” Aunt Margaret said.

            “I’m not unhappy with it, quite the contrary,” said Mags, whatever that meant, “but ‘perturbed’ is a good word for the fact that you didn’t ask me about this beforehand and I’m just hearing it from Rosie now at this dinner. That’s all,” she finished, with a bite of carrots.

            “Would you rather set things up otherwise?” asked Rosie. She was honestly hoping that Mags would say yes; having a roommate was not an aspect of college life that she missed now that it was over.

            “I would rather we see how it works out, to be honest with you,” said Mags. “We might as well. More room for guests.”

            “More room for guests,” conceded Rosie, and she felt uncomfortable about it till she saw how honest Mags’s smile was.

3.

The Conversation 

September passed into October and Rosie got to know the guests, the family, and how the house and the area worked. She reassured her grandparents early on that, although she was Catholic, they did not need to worry about getting her to Mass except on the major holidays. Mags was also Catholic, but otherwise the whole household was Yankee Congregationalist; indeed, Uncle Franklin had apparently been ordained as a Congregationalist minister at some church out in Chicago before coming back East after his crackup. Grandma and Grandpa went to a church in a nearby little town called Bernardston rain or shine each Sunday morning. Rosie took a ride up there with them once and was interested to see that the church had a rainbow flag out front of it and was just up the little town’s main drag from a pizza place.

            She and Mags managed to share a room more or less convivially. It was an odd room, with a boarded-up fireplace and a closet that stretched out strangely along one of the outer walls of the house; it had two twin beds in it. Rosie was unsure what exactly Mags did in terms of work, whether it be for the bed and breakfast or managing the blue chips or doing something else to earn her own keep. She spent many afternoons cooped up in their heavily shaded room, reading old pulp paperbacks in her one of the two small beds. Some evenings she would sit up late with a jeweler’s glass in one eye working on crafting projects of beadwork and wire. She kept the resulting pieces—decorations, jewelry, or wherever they may be—in the drawers of a work desk that took up one corner of the room; Rosie was loath to go over there and rifle through it, wanting to be polite despite the temptation.

            One day in early October, when the trees of Massachusetts were blazing, Rosie complained of a pain in her stomach.

            “What’s wrong?” Mags asked, casting a brief glance at Rosie before going back to one of her crafting projects.

            “Oh, it’s just my period,” Rosie said, feeling a little embarrassed. “Lately it’s been coming in weird fits and starts. It’s more painful than it used to be too.”

            “I know of numbers of herbal remedies you can take to regulate that,” Mags said casually. “Although I wouldn’t recommend most of them if you sleep with men and have strong feelings about abortion.”

            Rosie shook her head. “Haven’t slept with a guy in six months, don’t think much about abortion unless someone else brings it up,” she said. “Hit me.”

            Mags proceeded to rattle off the names of five or six different flowering plants Rosie had never heard of, plus something called cramp bark that she remembered from a joke in an old episode of Seinfeld. Mags—whose puffy white blouse and dark jeans were also reminding Rosie of Seinfeld—noted Rosie’s lack of recognition and wrote down the names of the herbs on a legal pad for her. “If you do start sleeping with men again then these might be best avoided,” she reiterated.

            “I’ll keep that in mind,” said Rosie. “It—do you mind if I ask if you’re one of those girls who have an interest in witchcraft, spells, what-have-you?”

            “Don’t call me a ‘girl’; I’m pretty sure I’m two years older than you,” said Mags. “And yes, sort of. I like herbs, I like flowers, I like cooking, and most of the prayers my mother and father taught me were to get boons from various saints. So I’m Catholic, but…” She shrugged. “Catholicism’s probably the most witchlike form of Christianity anyway,” she said, “although you didn’t hear that from me if someone chats with us after Midnight Mass in a couple months or whatever.”

            “Who exactly are your mother and father?” asked Rosie. “Your last name is McNulty, right?”

            Mags nodded. “My name is Margaret Evangeline McNulty, yes.”

            “I’d been assuming you were Aunt Lizzie’s daughter, but if I remember right, Aunt Lizzie’s husband’s last name is Scott or Skerritt or something like that.”

            “Scott, yes. Chuck Scott, the Food Network guy. No, I’m not Aunt Lizzie’s daughter; she was only sixteen when I was born, and she got married young but not that young. My parents were Charles and Sherrill McNulty; the McNultys and the Barings always had close ties in these parts, and your grandfather’s family took my father in when his father turned to drink and started beating on him. This was in the early sixties, when Aunt Margaret and Uncle Franklin were babies and just before your mother was born.”

            Rosie paused to give this some thought. There was much that this still did not explain—Mags and her father going completely without mention in twenty-two years of Mom’s stories about the family, the fact that Mags called the same people “aunt” and “uncle” that Rosie did but referred to Grandpa Baring as “your grandfather,” the fact that Mags had affirmatively called herself Rosie’s cousin for weeks now rather than qualifying it in any way. Rosie guessed that some of this would probably make sense if she put two and two together, but she did not have the energy to do that just this minute; she was still having a bad period, and she had slept badly the night before.

            “What’s that you’re working on?” she asked Mags. “With the beads and the wires.”

            “This is what I do to earn my living,” Mags said. “I make jewelry inspired by classic sci-fi and fantasy novels and sell them through an online store. I started doing it for friends in the UMass sci-fi club when I was a student there four or five years ago, but it surprised me how many people were willing to pay good money for the things. It takes up a lot of my time, but I enjoy it and I’m good at it and some of the money I make from it does go to help the rest of this family stay afloat.” She got up from where she was sitting, handed a bracelet of some sort to Rosie where Rosie sat in her own bed, and went back to where she had been sitting. “That one is for A Case of Conscience by James Blish. The ones I’m working on now are for The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin and Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury.”

            Rosie looked at the bracelet that Mags had handed her. It was made of a tight spiral of thin strong wire and on it were green and silver beads and charms depicting a crucifix, a lizard, a television set, and several other things for which she lacked context. “Have you read it?” Mags was asking her.

            She shook her head. “I haven’t even heard of it. I’ve heard of the other two, though.”

            “Not many people have heard of Blish these days except as an author of Star Trek novelizations, but in his own day he was, as our esteemed Vice President would say, a big fucking deal,” Mags said. “I’d recommend A Case of Conscience if I’ve read your tastes right over the past few weeks. If you take that recommendation, I hope you’ll let me know what you think of it?”

            “Of course I will,” said Rosie.

            “So what about you?” asked Mags, with her legs crossed and her arms crossed and her head held high and arch over her body. “What’s your story, Rosie? I’ve gleaned bits and pieces of it over the past few weeks, and of course I remember you from back when we were girls, but I don’t think I’ve ever been privy to the full Rosie Newgarth experience, so to speak. You went to a state university in New York, didn’t you?”

            Rosie nodded. “SUNY Binghamton,” she said. “Generally considered the best SUNY campus, although believe it or not that wasn’t why I applied; I just didn’t want to be too near home.” Mags nodded sympathetically, but probably not empathetically given that if she had been to UMass Amherst herself it had clearly not been that much of a consideration for her. “Binghamton is an interesting place. It’s one of those old industrial cities out near the Pennsylvania line. Lots of poor black people and what I guess used to be called ‘white ethnics’ whereas the campus was mostly middle-class kids, mostly white, lots Jewish. So you can imagine that town-gown relations were a bit touch-and-go. But that itself is something I learned a lot from, especially considering that I’d spent my whole life until then in Nassau County, on Long Island, with its police unions and so forth.”

            “Aren’t Jewish people themselves considered ‘white ethnic’ among people who use such terms?” asked Mags. “Never mind; I know that’s not the point. I understand what you’re saying.”

            “Thank you.”
            “You majored in economics, right?”

            Rosie nodded. “So did both my parents. Actually when they met my mom was doing her BA in resource economics and my dad was in the MBA program at the same university. They graduated in the same year and got married right after. I don’t think they were ever in a situation where he was helping teach a class she was in; they’re both too ethical for that, I think. They were always very concerned that Madison and I not feel like we were owed a living or like the rules didn’t apply to us. That’s probably part of why rather than coming right up here when it was suggested I fired off a few last salvos of job applications first. I don’t like nepotism, or whatever you’d call it instead of nepotism in a granddaughter’s case.”

            “Hmm,” said Mags with what sounded an awful lot like mild disapproval. “But that isn’t your real number one reason for not having wanted to come back up here, is it, Rosie? I don’t doubt that it played a role, but when you did come here, as a little girl, I remember that you were always so concerned to go home and get back into things with your parents and sister. Do you remember the Heath Fair? It’s that little agricultural fair we went to together in I think the year 2000, when you were eleven and I was thirteen.”

            Rosie thought back on it and came up with vague, pleasing memories of deep and unapologetic rurality. Petting zoos; competitions in various things that could be grown or jarred or bottled; a string band; some sort of contest in feats of strength between a series of tractors. It had been in late summer, probably, a series of warm evenings with a breeze with fall’s first bite in it. She remembered that it had been a long drive up to the fairgrounds, even from Greenfield; it must have been very deeply and very specially local, and thus, since she was a visitor, very carefully and very magnanimously shared with her. She nodded. She did remember it, whether or not she remembered it in the way that Mags apparently wanted her to, whether or not she remembered about it the things that Mags apparently wished to evoke.

            “I think you were apprehensive about being among people you knew less well in a situation where everybody would have to constantly evoke blood family ties rather than actual familiarity to justify spending all our time together,” Mags said. “Of course, you and I can’t evoke even that and have to rely on a network of relationships that existed twenty or thirty years before either of us were born. But now you’re here; you volunteered yourself for that ordeal. And it is something of an ordeal; I don’t say that sarcastically at all.”

            “Are you going to let me speak for myself, Mags, or are you just going to analyze me all afternoon?” Rosie asked.

            “I’m sorry,” said Mags, and she genuinely did seem to be sorry. “Please, go ahead with what you were saying about your parents.”

            “Oh, just that they’re very well-matched and it’s in fact a little strange to think of Mom as having originally come from another family—from this family—given that it’s always been Dad and Dad’s family who I’ve…known along with her,” said Rosie, trailing off as she realized that known along with her was a belabored phrase of a kind that deflated what she was getting at.

            “I wish I could say the same about my parents,” said Mags. “Things weren’t easy when I was a kid.” She shrugged. “Probably I shouldn’t make this about me, though,” she said. “Aunt Margaret’s always telling me I’m a little too focused on myself and my own needs. You seem not to have that problem, at least not as much.”

            “I wish I had that problem,” said Rosie. “I have the ‘productivity’ problem; the Recession’s not letting me ‘contribute’ the way I think I’m supposed to, and being an econ major makes me feel better about that rather than worse. I thought I’d be working at some regional business or the branch headquarters of some big white-collar firm right around now. Not glamorous, maybe not even that socially useful, but, well, something I wouldn’t feel embarrassed telling others. When I was at that coffeeshop downtown the other day I ran into this other girl who was new in town and she asked me what I was doing up here. I told her I’d taken a job in hospitality management.”

            “But you have taken a job in hospitality management,” said Mags. “You helping Aunt Margaret talk down our electric bill the other day is going to save us at least fifteen hundred dollars a year without us having to raise prices for the guests.”

            “It feels weird when it’s for your family,” said Rosie. As she was saying it she realized that there was a slight ambiguity here, around the idea of family. Mags had put her finger on this when she pointed out that it was just family that Rosie had here, not people with whom she was familiar. Yet the two words, family and familiar, were similar enough that Rosie had a difficult time making the distinction, especially since they had the same etymology; therefore she felt guilty, as if to complain about her family was to complain about being among people who loved her, rather than about being among people whom she did not let know well. Mags seemed to understand at least well enough to nod.

            “I doubt it would feel less weird if we weren’t your family,” Mags said. “New subject, but do you have any pets at home you’re missing? I’m thinking of getting a cat—not a black one, if you can believe it; I’ve always liked tabbies and calicos.”

            The change of subject was abrupt, but Rosie experienced it as a lifeline; probably Mags had meant it as one. As it happened, she had a late, lamented, beloved dog whose history she could relate to her cousin. Mags was happy to hear that history, and so they passed the time companionably as that afternoon winged into a chilly autumn evening.