Rooftops

ou should've been butch, you're so stubborn," Chick told

R, leaning into Patsy's passenger-side window where R sat, arms folded, eyes angry. "You're as bad as Donny. I got you this far, now let's truck on up to the doctor's office."

It was weird being with R in the blasting dry heat of the Greenhill Clinic parking lot instead of the woods, or tiny Waterfall Falls. Greenhill was a lot larger than their country town-20,000 people, not 1,400. R had brought her shepherd's crook-for protection, she'd claimed-but Chick could see the woman was wobbly on her feet. Was that culture shock at being out in the world or the cancer?

If R had breast cancer. The thought gave her a queasy feeling, and the lump, big as it was, might yet turn out benign. R's sore underarm might have nothing to do with cancer. Yet there was no escaping R's mother's history.

The clinic was enormous, its air-conditioning a relief. She held onto the crystal necklace to help her through this. R had to register and fill out a bucket of forms. Her earrings, three flat circles each, were never still. She was surprised to learn that R got Social Security Disability and Medi-something or other.

"They can buy guns or feed me," R replied peevishly when Chick noted aloud that the despised patriarchy supported her. "I consider it a supplement to my alimony."

"No shit. You still get alimony?"

"Not officially. I put him through Wharton School of Business, didn't I? The feds don't know, but he'll repay my services for the rest of his life."

"Generous ex. That's a lot of cash."

R looked up from the medical history questions. "I'm not greedy. He can well afford the little I ask for." She huffed out a laugh. "And generosity had nothing to do with it. He was a coward pure and simple."

"A coward?"

"I know too much about his wild days, and I was too close to his parents for his comfort."

"You blackmailed him?"

"I'm really offended by that term, Chick. It's very racist."

"I don't mean it that way, you know that."

"I may, but would a woman of color?"

"Not-" she started to say, but understood that, aside from the truth of her objection, R was using the argument to deflect more questions. The woman might not be as emotionally frail as she appeared. It was pretty ridiculous to call her a racist when Donny was the most important person in the world to her.

When R turned in the completed paperwork, they were sent to a second-floor waiting room crowded with patients and frenzied staff. They took chairs facing a listless little boy, some parents comforting a squalling infant, and a middle-aged woman who restlessly flipped through a magazine and ignored the old woman beside her.

"I have to admire your friend Jeep," said R.

Chick suspected R was trying to distract herself from her surroundings. "Why?"

"Taking in a boy-child is not a popular choice in this community. I watched her with Muriel at a gathering last week. She was trying to defend what she was doing to Muriel."

"What," asked Chick, "does Muriel have to say about it? Luke is such a gentle kid."

"Exactly what Jeep told her. Muriel wanted to know how she could say that about a male child?"

"Jeep must have been pissed off."

She thought about scrawny Muriel and her wild curly hair. Muriel played an adequate washboard base in the band, learned solely, as she frequently announced, so she could play music with women. Jeep had told Chick that the addition of a bass fiddle in the hands of another band member had Muriel edgier than ever toward her, the only professional musician in the band that Muriel had started and, although she called it a collective, now led. Muriel was being silly. Jeep didn't want to lead any band. All that booking and getting people to rehearsals and finding replacements-uh-uh, she'd said, not for her. All Jeep wanted was a chance to play music. So she sparred with Muriel, both of them stepping on each others' toes, backing off and saving their relationship by laughing at themselves.

"This is what comes of playing your Grateful Dead music," Jeep quoted what Muriel had once said. "Right," she'd told Muriel, "I love Luke because I listen to the Dead. I can see that connection, no problem. Real clear."

"Jeep is clever," R told Chick now. "She offered to make Muriel Luke's aunt because Muriel loves her blood nephew." R shook her head. "Then Muriel was all over the child. Why is it so difficult for women to live their principles?"

"Luke is a special little boy," said Chick.

R seemed to loom over her, although she'd done nothing but turn toward Chick. "You think having a disability makes him different from other man-children, don't you?" R accused in a whisper. "That's a typical ablest mistake."

"R, Luke happens to be different, and even if he wasn't, even if he spent his time mugging two-year-olds for purple dinosaurs, he deserves love as much as any living creature." That was an idea Donny preached. She thought even R deserved love, though she was adamant that it didn't have to be herself giving out the love.

"Yes, but in the right place. Look at us. He's in our space, taking up our words and thoughts and energy."

"I know my memory isn't what it once was, R, but didn't you bring this up? I don't think I did."

Lesbians are so nuts, she thought. Seps were ancient history, like from the seventies. Sure they had to keep men away while they did their thing, whatever that was. But this was a new century. Time to get on with it. You couldn't change anything if you hid in the backwoods. She admired them in some ways, but the handful that were left looked kind of pathetic, like some navel-gazing backwards culture making its last stand. Not Luddites, but maybe Luddettes. You had to love them.

"What good does it do to hide out in the mountains, R? I mean, we've been there, done that, two decades ago, haven't we?"

"You can live in their world," said R. "I can't. Won't."

"And the other land women?"

R shrugged. "We're not all separatists."

"Everyone needs safe space."

Chick saw such a mixture of defiance and serenity in those eyes that she felt glad for R, glad she had her sanctuary. Maybe keeping guys out wasn't such a fossilized idea. Goddess knows, she needed a space like that herself.

"Let's move where we can look out a window at least," R said, leading the way.

The day was bright and around 102 degrees, but mill smoke made the sky more a hazy white than blue. A view of rooftops and backyards, full clotheslines, scratching dogs and toddlers splashing in little plastic pools stretched maybe three-tenths of a mile to the foothills south of the city. On the way north she'd seen several groups of people in rafts, Tahitis, and inner tubes going over riffles on the mostly tame, brown, half-empty Elk River. This section of Greenhill was a mix of duplexes, old two-story homes, and crazy-quilt add-on cottages. The town had been built around Greenhill Wood Products, one of the last of the great mills in the state.

R was looking outside too, picking and picking at a loose thread on her cuff. Chick stopped her and felt the chill of R's hand. "Isn't that a homey sight? I can almost smell the clean laundry."

"Home doesn't look like that to me anymore. I want to see nothing but old-growth forest from my windows."

Chick sighed. R, who had agreed to go to the clinic only after Chick had done the work of finding a doctor who would see her, didn't know how disagreeable she sounded, but Chick wished the woman would make an effort to be pleasant. Deep down she was good people, Chick told herself, although sometimes talking to her was like blowing up balloons for a kid with a slingshot.

"My earliest memory," Chick said, automatically going into her cheerful mode, "is of watching my mother hang clothes out to dry on the rooftop of our apartment building. It smelled so good up there-like the country, my mother said. The sheets were bleached white and the wind lifted them like kites. Martin was terrified of the roof. He'd wail all the way up the narrow stairs and glue himself to the door." She looked at R's face. It had the same pale hue and sweaty-looking shine to it as Martin's once had-the look of fear.

R gave no sign of hearing, but Chick went on with her memory-lane trip. "I was maybe three years old. I knew from cowboy and Indian movies that you waved white flags to surrender-and yes, I know those movies were racist too. I was convinced my mother left white sheets flapping in the wind to tell God he should send my daddy home from World War II."

She patted R's still hand as she had Martin's. "I'd run back to Martin over and over, to get him to come look. The poor little guy had nightmares of Daddy walking off the edge of the roof to get to the war and of himself falling off as Japanese bombers attacked us. When my mother talked about the war, she said God was on our side. I pictured this god bending over the rooftop, his cheeks all puffed out, blowing at the sheets. He was not a nice god. I was mad because he was playing some ego game using Daddy as a toy soldier. Bombs, weeping women, little kids like us were no more than pebbles in a creek to him. No wonder I grew up wanting to make love, not war. Do you remember the Dylan song 'Masters of War'? 'You that only built to destroy, you play with my world like it's a little toy'?"

The infant's irritating yells crescendoed as the parents changed her diapers on a cushion between them, peppering the air with baby powder. R, sitting with her proud posture, looked stiff. Her hand had taken no warmth from Chick's. The woman was an ice statue, Chick was thinking, completely shut down. It wasn't like breast cancer was a death sentence any more, she wanted to tell R. On the other hand, R had apparently been fooling around with self-healing for months.

"Go on," R urged in a strangely tiny voice, like Martin's at bedtime. "It's never as dark while you're talking," he'd say. R was only the second person she'd told this story to. Donny had been the first.

"I always got my mother's god mixed up with the landlord of our building, an old guy who collected the rent in a Cadillac, skimped on coal for our furnace, and told us that going up to the roof without Mom was against the rules. We had to go up. We could see the lake from the roof. That's where God and Daddy were fighting the war, somewhere over the water."

R turned to face her. "You have a remarkable memory from that age. I was born long after the victory, but I remember stories about the end of the war-all the shouting and relief, as if men would really ever stop fighting completely."

"After the war my father turned out to be nothing like the pictures Mom had all over the apartment. He'd gotten bald and scrawny and glum. He apprenticed with Mom's plumber uncle. When somebody asked about his job, he'd say, 'I'm still cleaning up the messes of this world.' Martin wouldn't let Daddy near him for the longest time. He screeched like Daddy was an enemy soldier."

If only R would say she was scared, squeeze her hand, break down and cry. But no, she was as uptight as Martin had been, hanging on to her and hanging onto her fear. No matter what she did, no matter how much time she'd spent trying to make Martin happy, he'd always needed, needed, and needed, and she had always failed him. She never seemed to fail Donny.

The waiting room was becoming even more crowded. These establishment doctors, she thought, were always over-scheduled and would probably only refer R on to specialists. A woman in white came out of the back with a clipboard and glanced down at it. R withdrew her hand. She seemed to pull even farther inside herself, but the call was for a mother with three preschoolers. The noise level in the waiting room immediately went down.

Feeling a familiar helplessness, Chick kept telling stories. "Our parents bought the house Grandmom had been renting, and we moved in when I was ten. I have a picture of Martin and me. He was scowling and fragile-looking. I was chubby, smiley little Cicely, my arm around Martin. I wore a homemade navy-blue Easter coat with lace at the cuffs and collar. I remember the deliciousness of those bright yellow, spongy marshmallow chicks we'd get in our baskets, and the little milk-chocolate bunnies laid out against fake green grass."

R came out of her frozen stupor again long enough to look at her, head back, eyes narrowed, arms again folded. "Were you a happy child?"

The question startled Chick. "I tried to be. It made everyone around me happier if I was. I mean, Martin's behavior made my mother so unhappy, I tried to make up for him."

"And you did everything you could to make your mother happy. That's why Katie calls you the Earth Mother of Waterfall Falls," R said with sarcasm.

"Does she? Is that a bad thing?"

"It is if you're doing penance for having a mentally ill brother. I would counsel you to let him go. It's an old story, yet another man draining yet another woman."

"Martin is not just another man. He's sick and he's my little brother." She got up and went to the window. Donny understood this part. Maybe she should fake R out and stop taking care of everyone right now. Let R find her own high-and-mighty way home.

She stayed at the window several minutes, the sound of the clinic too loud and irritating, surprised at her unaccustomed anger. R's words, like a dentist's probe exploring decay around a raw nerve, wouldn't go away. Her head was as bad, refusing to abandon R without setting up another ride. She couldn't storm off and send Abeo back for her in Patsy now that Abeo seemed to be in permanent party mode at Harold and Joe's, another bad scene. Abeo had even quit coming to help out at the store.

When she went back and sat next to R she said, "I still feel best when I'm taking care of the world, but now my world is smaller and I get to pick who's in it. I like being an earth-mother type. I wish, if it's going to be my karma, that I could be better at it."

"Stop belittling yourself, Chick." R's brow was furrowed, her look cross. "You give enormously of yourself. It's no wonder you're depressed, the way you tear yourself down while the rest of us thank the Goddess you're here for us. You've made up for not curing your brother a thousand times over. We know that Chick equals love, but is it love or is it some kind of insurance so you won't ever fail your impossible tasks again? Martin's not stalking you any more. Let it go."

"You think my brother stalked me?"

"Emotionally, yes, that's obvious."

"You think my depression comes of feeling like I failed to cure my brother?"

"And everyone else in your world. As my mother used to say, that's as plain as the nose on your face. Look at Donny's temper. I'd find living with that much anger depressing."

"She never turns her anger on me. It used to be hard to watch because I was afraid it was hurting her."

"Used to be?"

"The things she might have blown up about a year ago don't set her off any more. I can see her forcing herself to shrug and moving on to something else. Later she'll work on whatever it is, but sometimes she won't even bother. It's like she found some common sense lying out on Stage Street where somebody dropped it, and she picked it up and put it in her pocket."

R gave her a funny little smile, then turned away and was soon picking at her sleeve again. Now Chick's head fought what R had said. Had she set herself impossible tasks in early childhood? Had caretaking become some kind of survival technique for her? It was true; anyone would feel depressed in the face of all that futile nurturing.

A woman in white emerged from an open door. "Rosemary Harris?" she called. Chick was startled when R rose. She said nothing, but to hear R of all people called by such an ordinary name?

R stood, leaned on her stick, and looked down. Chick had a vision of a tree after an ice storm, R's powerful aura falling from her with the crackle of icicles melting.

"Do you want me to go in with you?" Chick asked.

R's eyes were huge in her thin face; she looked like a person in shock.

"Ms. Harris?" encouraged the woman in white.

R closed her eyes for a long few seconds, then lifted her chin and slowly shook her head. The look on her face was of pure affection. "No. You don't need to go through this. See if you can take care of my friend Chick for me, will you?" R turned to the woman in white and followed her through the door.

The baby sputtered to silence, the daughter crisply turned another magazine page, the clothes in the backyards rose with the breeze. Chick didn't want to think about R in the examining room, resisting medical help or, even worse for R, surrendering to it. With an older partner, she had to think how it would be to watch Donny go through this. She looked out at the clotheslines again. Greenhill had its white sheets hanging too. She was thinking how nice it would be if she could remove the clothespins from her sadness, such an old useless feeling, let it fly off like a sheet of surrender over the town, out beyond the mountains where it could disintegrate into the sea.

Could it be that easy? Would she fall apart without the fabric of depression shaping her, or would she plummet into schizophrenia? She'd been dressing up in tie-dyes, bright colors, soft, protective flesh, and cheerful words all her adult life, but had never been able to give up this under layer of gray. Now she was more together than she'd ever been, practically a crone, and she had Donny, the store, a good community, even a fairly stable income. What was she waiting for?

A little girl of four or five sat next to her mother, head bowed over a Golden book. She seemed to sense Chick looking at her and raised her eyes. Chick smiled. She was a sturdy-looking freckle-faced kid, with big glasses, short unruly hair, and an earnest expression. Would her mom expect her to care for a sick little brother? What about Luke? The thought made her angry. She'd cream anyone who ever again tried to burden her grandson with adult problems.

"Take care of my friend Chick for me," R had said.

She went to the little girl and told her and her mother, "I have a grandson your age who likes me to read to him."

The child offered up her book almost before Chick finished talking.

"She's greedy for stories," said the mother. "I have to ration them or I'd never get anything done."

"Would you rather I didn't?"

"Be my guest."

"Once upon a time," she began when they'd made room on the couch for her. The little girl stuck her thumb in her mouth and wiggled in close.

Chick felt a laugh surfacing. While it might not look like it to R, she couldn't be more content than she was right now. This was taking care of herself. But, oh, what about her Donny, Jeep and Katie, Abeo, and poor, poor R?

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE