Roz’s old blue Corolla was in the parking lot when I got to Fort McClary. She was sitting inside reading a new New Yorker. All those years of New Yorkers that came when we were living together. She would read the articles. I flipped through, checking out the poems and laughing at the cartoons — some of the cartoons. And meanwhile the magazine got thinner. There was that terrible period a few years ago, after the crash, when there were almost no ads. Monsanto was on the back cover for a while — Monsanto, for goodness’ sake, who wanted to inject cows with growth hormones so that their bony overtaxed bodies would rev up and create ungodly udderfuls of milk until they mooed to the skies for relief and their hooves rotted in the muck of their tight stalls. Monsanto actually had the gall to sue a dairy up in Portland, Maine — Oakhurst Dairy — to stop them from saying on the label that Oakhurst milk had no artificial bovine growth hormones, even though it was just a fact. Monsanto is evil, truly evil.
Roz hugged me and hugged our dog — it was our dog for a while, now it’s my dog again — and she said happy birthday. She was wearing a light cotton sweatery thing I hadn’t seen before, and a soft scarf that I knew from way back. I asked her how she was doing. “Okay, how about you?”
“Doing fine,” I said. “The washing machine finally died, but I’ve kind of gotten into using the laundromat. Shall we clamber over the rocks? You know, the way we used to?” I gave it a Mick Jagger inflection and she smiled.
We led Smacko down to the shore and smelled the seaweed and looked out at the boats for a while. There were some drops of rain. We were a bit awkward with each other, I have to say, or maybe it was that the stones were unusually slippery — we’d lost some of our wonted familiarity. She told me she was working on a show about synthetic thyroid pills. Then we went back and I invited her out of the rain into my superclean car. She got the sandwiches and I opened the picnic basket. She’d brought a demi bottle of champagne to celebrate, which was awfully nice of her. The cork blew out the open window and we took bites of her egg salad. It was the best egg salad sandwich ever, and I said so. She’d also made a lemony beets-and-greens creation. I offered her some carrots and she crunched one, making an enormous sound.
“So what are you up to?” she asked.
I told her I’d bought a guitar and was learning some chords. “I think I’m done with poems for the moment. I’m writing songs now.”
“Can I hear one?”
“Not yet. But I vacuumed the car in your honor.”
She looked around. “Very nice. I have to say—” She hesitated. “It smells a tiny bit like smoke. Are you smoking cigarettes?”
“No no no. Cigars.”
“Oh, baby. Why?”
“I tried a corncob pipe and it was no good for me. Before that, I tried a can of Skoal, and it made me ill. I’ve stopped drinking. No beer, no Yukon Jack, no Tyrconnell. I need some new tongue-loosening addiction.”
“I can’t imagine you as a cigar smoker — I don’t want to imagine you as a cigar smoker.”
“It’s just a phase. It’s my brown period.” I stuffed the plastic bag that my sandwich came in into the picnic basket. “Are you still on friendly terms with that doctor dude?”
“Harris.” She nodded.
“Isn’t ‘Harris’ kind of a needless encumbrance? Does he really know you and understand you?”
Roz gave me a look. “Progress is being made,” she said. “There are complications.”
“Because I know you and I love you,” I said. “It’s my birthday and I can say that.”
“Then what about that woman in Pennsylvania?”
“You’d moved out, you were gone!” I said. “It was brief and fleeting and completely wrong in every way.” Several years ago I had an untidy interlude with a poet from Lehigh University, and I’d made the mistake of telling Roz, hoping it might make her jealous and bring her back.
“I moved out because you were being impossible,” Roz said. “We had no money and you were singing in the barn all day long.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
She looked at her hands. I made a big sigh. Smack whimpered from the back and Roz gave him some of her sandwich.
“Cigars,” she said. “Not good.”
“I’ll stop smoking them if you move back in with me.”
“Please, I’m serious. The show is so much work, and — I wasn’t going to tell you this — but I’m anemic. I’m very anemic. I have pica.”
“Oh baby, how absolutely awful.” I moved the picnic basket clumsily so I could hold her hand. “What’s pica?”
“Do you remember how I used to have those terrible periods that just went on and on?”
I said I certainly did.
“Well, they’re worse now,” Roz said. “They last more than a week and I go through boxes of ultra tampons. It’s a festival of gore every month. I haven’t been sleeping, because when you’re anemic you don’t sleep. You just sit up eating poppy seeds and anything crunchy. Sesame seeds — I eat tubs of sesame seeds. And dry oatmeal. Sometimes I want to eat the whole sidewalk. That’s what pica is. For instance.” She pointed. “See that big rock? To me it looks chewable. I want to eat that rock. That’s how messed up I am.”
“Oh my goodness,” I said. “Are you taking iron pills?”
“Yes, yes, but they don’t agree with me. I’ve been eating masses of collard greens, though.”
“What does the gynecologist say?”
“She says—” Roz started to cry.
“Sweetie!” I said.
“Don’t worry, it’s not cancer. But it sure is a pain.” She wiped her eyes with her napkin and took a breath. “I’ll be fine. I have to go now. I have to read a stack of research papers. We have a show coming up on colonoscopies. Harris thinks they’re a false religion, that most of them are unnecessary, and he’s pretty convincing.”
“Good, because nobody’s going to be poking around in my bottom. A doctor snuck a thermometer in there when I was five years old and it was horrible. Humiliating.”
Roz smiled. “I’m sorry to hear that,” she said.
“Ah, don’t be, water under the bridge.”
“Well, happy birthday, honey.” She kissed me on the cheek and drove off in her sporty battered car.
Nine
ROZ LOOKED PALE, now that I think of it. She’s working too hard. I sent her an email thanking her for the egg salad sandwich. “I’m worried about you,” I said. “Call me if I can do anything. Thank you for the picnic. Love — P. PS Forgot to say — great show on spinal fusion surgery! PPS I’m having problems writing lyrics. Only if you have time — can you think of some random three-word phrases, each using only one-syllable words?”
When Roz first moved in with me, I dusted off the traveling sprinkler and showed her what it looked like. I showed her how it worked, how you hooked up the hose to its fundament and the water surged in and up through its bowels and out the two twirly wands and how you could adjust the angle of the spray that came from the rusted ends of the wands. She lifted it and remarked at how heavy it was. She was delighted by it in her good-natured way. “It’s so simple,” she said.