But this? He broke my heart, as brutally as anyone or anything had ever broken it, and now I was too old to throw myself at his silly two-toned shoes and beg him to stay. Heartbreak makes you plead and weep, or else it shuts you up. Who was I to him? The Professor. As Mose Sharp I was useless.
Rocky said, uncertainly, “I won the bet.”
“There was no bet,” I said. “No bet, no show, no team. Nothing.”
Suddenly he seemed afraid of what he’d done. Thinking back, I believe he’d tried to get out of his threats by calling it a gamble. He didn’t care about politics any more than I did. Just another story we’d telclass="underline" one day, in 1954, we wagered over some ridiculous thing, and that’s how Life with Rocky began.
“Mose,” he said. “Professor.”
But I had my back turned to him. My kids were in the yard — Jake and Nate had heaped all of the cowboy costumes on Gilda, and died gloriously as she shot the pistols into the tree, over the roof of Jess’s studio. All those times we stopped talking, and this was the first time I’d begun it. I could see the appeal. I hadn’t known before, when I’d borne the brunt, that it was the worst thing you could do to someone. I felt cruel and happy. Rocky said, “Mosey.”
I am not talking to you.
Rocky said, “Okay, listen, wait.”
I am not talking.
If I’d opened my mouth, I would have said, over and over, You broke my heart, can’t you see you broke my heart? I kept my back turned. Jessica murmured something to him, and led him to the front door, and then I didn’t see him again for a long time.
14. Instead of Me
In Greenwood Park, when I was fourteen and Hattie sixteen, I got mad and sat on the grass and refused to speak to her. “The little man has a temper,” said Hattie, which is what my sisters always said when I fell into a sulk, almost admiringly. A boy could get away with that kind of moodiness, and though I never yelled or threw punches or used my teeth (Rose, at age two, went through a brief biting period), my silences seemed full of manly anger to them, or so I was happy to think. I liked to be cajoled the way some kids liked to be tickled: I held very still and waited for someone to tease me into cheerfulness.
Not this day in Greenwood Park, though. Hattie and I had gone to a picnic, on one of those July days so hot your brain poaches in your skull and your blood turns to mucky syrup. This was nine months before Hattie died. We’d packed a lunch and taken the streetcar in. Some kids had made a fire and thrown in potatoes and corn to roast, and Hattie wanted to stand near it to talk to people, and I wanted to lie in the grass as far away from any kind of extra heat as possible.
So we each did what we wanted, and I might have been annoyed that she preferred to joke with strangers instead of me, but that’s not what got me so mad. I found a tree for shade. The best ones had already been taken: this was a scrubby maple, not much of a parasol, roots braiding through the dirt at its feet. It took me a while to get comfortable. When I looked at the cook-fire, some huge freckle-faced teenager had speared an ear of corn for Hattie at the end of a stick; he blew across it gallantly and — to my eyes — lasciviously. His breath was probably too hot to do much good. Then he stripped off the husk and burned his fingers. Good. He stuck them in his mouth and looked at Hattie, who laughed and touched the back of his wrist. Bad.
I ate my chicken sandwich — mustard, no mayonnaise, because of the heat. How long would Hattie want to stay? Maybe I should just go back to Vee Jay by myself. Drowned by the heat, I napped.
When I woke up, I looked: no Hattie. No big teen boy.
I waited. I scanned the park. Had I lost her? Was she my responsibility, or her own? Should I call someone, or sit tight and hope the guy wasn’t a white slaver?
God. A white slaver. I wished I hadn’t thought of that. Annie believed in white slavers so completely she made me want never to leave the house, even though she didn’t think I was at peril. (In that trade, boys weren’t precious.) She even kept a pamphlet in the kitchen drawer, with other instructive tracts, Annie’s version of motherly advice. There was a fascinating one published by the Kotex company that I wasn’t supposed to read, and another on using electricity safely, and another on baking. “If you have a question, just read the pamphlet,” Annie said, and so the contents of the drawer were so jumbled together in my memory that I sometimes believed my sisters were visited every month by Reddy Kilowatt or — because there was also a tract a religious person had left at the door, angrily annotated by Annie — that we should be careful not to be converted to Christianity, possibly by Aunt Jemima.
White slavers. Were they freckle-faced? High-school students? As imaginary as Aunt Jemima? Maybe they hired high schoolers as agents. I couldn’t figure out what to do. I looked at the edge of the woods and considered storming them. The only person who’d give me good advice was Hattie, and I’d let her be kidnapped.
Then suddenly Hattie walked out of the woods with her gangly friend. At first I thought they were holding hands, but instead they each gripped a hat. Then they exchanged the hats, because they’d been holding each other’s. The boy put his cap on his head, and then tipped it and walked away, and Hattie came up the slant of the park, adjusting the men’s straw boater from Sharp’s Gents’ that she had covered with silk flowers. Bigheaded Hattie.
She kicked the bottom of my shoe, but it was too late: I was furious at her. Not shanghaied at all, worse, just walking in the woods with a boy.
“What’s the matter with you?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
“Ready to go home?”
I shrugged.
“Are you mad at me?”
Another shrug.
“The little man has a temper,” she said.
All the way home she examined my face. She’d say something cheerful. I’d grunt, or shrug. Why couldn’t she just guess why I was mad? I wanted her to know, so we could forgive each other, but it seemed impossible to explain myself, and I got angrier the longer she failed to read my mind.
I’d never been that upset with Hattie before. Soon enough, that anger was forgotten, eclipsed by her death. Now, of course, I can see it plainly: months before she announced she’d be going to Iowa City, I realized Hattie might leave me. I saw how easily she talked to someone who wasn’t me, how handsome she looked next to a kid happy to burn his fingers for her. How ordinary it felt to be watching her from a distance: That’s how she talks, without me. That’s how she walks. That’s how she laughs.
I thought Rocky’s threats came out of something similar. He might have worried when I first got married, but I stayed in the picture, up for nightclubs and movies, all the trappings of our success. He might have eyed each of my children, wondering whether a person who might take me away from him had finally arrived. Still, I hung around, I donned my mortarboard, I hit my mark. Then, suddenly, I planned to walk away into the woods, my arm around that girl from Des Moines after all. Obviously, he would have to deal with her.
Stuck in his ways, I thought. Devoted to the shadow I cast on him, because he needed a shadow to dance around. I wanted for someone to talk me out of my anger — I didn’t think I could be cajoled this time, but someone would tell me, as they always did, to cut the guy some slack.
Nobody did.
While Jessica didn’t indulge me, she did think I should give him some air. Tansy hadn’t thought much of the situation-comedy idea anyhow, didn’t think the public would buy Carter and Sharp as family men. Neddy — now working for Milton Berle, another famous pain-in-the-neck — said I was better off.
As for Rocky himself: he wrote a few letters, and then a few telegrams. Maybe he apologized, and maybe he told me to go to hell. I don’t know. I never read them. I was working on forgetting him.