Roz Sleeps

by Sharon Mollerus

After Easter Mass, Roz was scrabbling through her purse for the keys when her head drooped forward, she slumped down the door, and her legs folded under her. A gallon of milk slipped from her left hand, burst open and glugged over the varnished boards of the pine porch. With her chin tucked in and her flaxen hair spread around her shoulders, she slept like a tiny entranced princess in the doorway with her tall dark-haired daughter standing behind her.

"Dad, she had a fit again," Anne called back toward the truck, where a tall light-skinned man in black boots stood with the hood open, filling the radiator with a glowing green liquid. Roses entangled with jasmine sent up a mist that wafted over the porch and clung to the needles of the white firs. The girl slung her backpack over her shoulder, stepped over her mother and opened the rounded door to the log chalet. Joe carried the slight woman into her room and laid her over the bed, setting her legs out straight and covering her with a white crocheted afghan--the daisy string rays reaching to the corners from dense round centers. The four grandparents and her second cousin Anne were slamming the car doors and following them in.

After changing into her coverall, Anne scrambled up her treehouse with her fingers curved against the guides and a plastic pitcher of iced tea balanced in her other hand. Her cousin Gina followed her up slowly, taking deep wheezes of breath as her long black skirt caught on a sprig; a pump slipped off and was left at the trunk. Her father had built it for Anne when she was little, and they’d had tea parties then, sitting cross-legged on the varnished board floor. The three real windows divided into four glass panes each looked over the log chalet, the forest, and the snaky road which bent east toward town and in the opposite direction rolled back into a densely wooded pass. Once she’d gabbled to her dolls in the tiny rocker and peered out to the limits of her sight, but now she could no longer stand up inside her house.

“It's terrible being an only child,” Gina said of Anne’s mother with a piece of almond mazurek in her mouth.

“It’s not that bad,” the girl answered. Gina’s 12-year-old son lived with her first husband two thousand miles away. "Did you bring cigarettes?"

"Your dad will kill me. I’m your godmother." As they gummed them, Gina lit each with a silver lighter.

“You were saying, about my mom’s first boyfriend?”

“The boys were jealous of your dad because he was always at your grandma's house with his family. Her and her girlfriends would make fun of his nerdy flood jeans, his square glasses, and of course his pimples; they would all turn and stare at him at once and run into her room giggling.”

"You mean 'we,' not 'they.' But what about the first boyfriend?"

"Why don't you get us more food?"

"Like cucumber salad?"

"Brat. Like fritters and pancakes."

At the buffet table pushed against the wall in the dining room, her grandma Felicia put a plate of potato and cabbage pierogi on the table and leaned over to give her a kiss.

"Come play cards with us, Anne.”

“Maybe later. Is mom still napping?”

“Yes, always, like a baby. You should have seen her when she was first born, lying there without crying or moving, like a sleeping doll. They suctioned her and slapped her and the doctor pushed deep breaths into her lungs, and she was like a mermaid who belonged in the sea. At the baptism, she sunk down into the family’s lace gown, and we had to pull her back up. Her godmother said she might not live."

“Was she some fortuneteller? Everybody dies.” Anne gathered pierogi and donuts on a plate while her grandmother returned to the living room.

“That black hair, so shiny,” her paternal grandmother hollered from the other room. “And she’s so tall and what a healthy complexion. She’s more beautiful than her mother now--no offense, Felicia. Good thing she didn’t get Joe’s skin. He better keep an eye on her, you know.”

“Lower your voice, Corinne, you’re the only one who’s deaf around here,” her husband shouted back. The grandfathers George and John were drinking vodka as the four played rounds of cards.

"How did Gina get up there, and how will she get down?" her father asked Anne, as he walked up to the table and speared an olive. The man’s gray blonde wispy hair belted in his shiny crown, and bushy eyebrows topped his face in thick double frowns. His skin had the rough red terrain mapped by a hard adolescence and the self-consciousness of a once pustulated visage whose peer outward had been rarely kindly returned. "I hope the treehouse will hold."

"Daddy, you built it, you know it would hold five of her."

"Don't believe everything she tells you. A spell has been cast over her, and she is perpetually thirteen years old."

Anne added a red apple to her plate, and her father followed her to the base of the old oak tree with its outstretched trunk. A string of ants marched in a single line carrying fat bitten leaves, burdens far beyond their weights. A squirrel had the bottom story, a hollow knob with a stash of nuts and foil wrappers, saving against want.

“She’s a problem for her family,” he said quietly. “Round three. Marries, divorces, moves home, and then it starts again. Husbands who don’t work, husbands who drink, husbands who don’t know she’s alive. She’s bitter and doesn’t want anyone else to be happy. She can’t even get her kid to live with her.”

“Maybe the boy needs a father. Besides, Dad, we’re just talking.” She scrambled up the tree.

"Now what was that about my mom’s first boyfriend?" Anne asked as she sat cross-legged on the wood plank floor. A little hand broom lay in the corner for sweeping pine needles and fine dust through the boards.

“ Harrison --even the teachers didn’t know his first name. He had black hair with some gray streaks. What's to tell? Your mother couldn't date, and that was the end of it.”

"That wasn’t worth a trip to the kitchen,” Anne said, flicking crumbs through the cracks in the floor. Gina laughed. The girl picked up the apple and took a bite and set it on the floor, rocking, with a half-moon shape gnash in the side.

"’Have you come down with chickenpox?’ or ‘Has your voice settled on a pitch yet?’ she would ask him.”

"So why’d they marry?"

"He grew tall, and his voice changed. His cheeks still exploded with blackheads and oozing zits and red scars where he’d popped them. Right before they got married, your grandparents took him to a dermatologist and he got the top layer of skin burned off—a dermabrasion. It’s very painful.”

“How awful. But dad still has scars.”

“He had a bad case, but it was a real improvement.”

“Here,” Roz said, handing Anne a towel in the kitchen. Her outstretched forearm had a blue bruise from a fall. The lights threw back the darkness of the grove as the three cleaned up, the relatives gone.

"Why did you marry dad?" Anne asked, as she dried the pots.

"Why does anyone?" Roz’ hands were red under the soapy crust of the water, and she splashed drops up as she scrubbed. "It's obvious. He loved me; I loved him back."

“When did you meet?”

“You know that--we were children. Our mothers were best friends, and we all got together every Sunday after Mass. Put that one on the top shelf.”

"Did you have any boyfriends before Daddy?" She watched her mother’s lips twitch.

“Everybody meets boys in high school. It’s no big deal.”

“What about Harrison : did you dump him for Daddy?” Roz held the streaming faucet with one hand and gripped the counter with the other while her head started to droop.

"It's been a long day, Roz,” Joe said, bringing the bowls in from the table and seeing her falter.

“She was in bed all day,” Anne said.

“Why don't you go put your feet up?" he asked.

"I will … tired," she slurred. She dropped the pot, and he caught her as her knees buckled.

Anne walked behind them into Roz’ bedroom with the canopy bed and a tall oval mirror perched on a stand. The girl’s smooth olive skin didn’t splotch or burn under the sun, and the teenager had the height and hardness of an athlete. When mother and daughter went to town together, it was the petite blonde who used to get the second look from the high school boys. As a child, Anne had been pudgy and slow, falling behind her mother’s brisk stride, a woman with a task for every five minutes and always another place to go. Now it was the daughter who ran cross-country in the fall and track in the spring, met boys on her own terms, and Roz instead was always falling asleep.

The log paneled room had a dresser next to the mirror, both fashioned by Joe. Dark knobs looped through the straight grain of the walls. Anne watched in the mirror as Joe laid her sleeping mother in bed and pulled the sheets and white lacy coverlet over her. The canopy curtains were gathered in light green gauzy folds like four slender hourglasses. For the first time, Anne thought there could be reasons other than the narcolepsy that her parents didn’t share a bed.

"What were you talking about?" Joe asked, standing behind her. Anne stared at her own face in the mirror with her long black hair falling around her shoulders and, remembering her grandmother’s words, tried to find the resemblance to her mother. Instead she saw more likeness with her father, with his strength and wiry readiness. Her hair and eyes were all her own.

"Nothing." Roz slept behind them with her mouth parted and her legs bent as if she were running in her dreams.

“Goodnight, princess,” he said and kissed her on the forehead.

Anne carried her pillow and sleeping bag up to the treehouse. On the moonlit road, the stars glistened in a slate sky and droplets of light settled over the black pine needles. The road wound away under the evergreen canopies.

Anne shuffled her feet through the chalky dirt of the curved track as her father caught up with her after the meet. Her hair was pinned up, and the sweat circled her face along her hairline. Seeing his balding head broke open her dream of the night before, of a black-and-white haired man so tall he stooped through the doorways of their house. He had moved in, and the rooms were now so full of suitcases and boxes that they had to walk on top of them, hunched below the ceiling.

“Personal best, right?” he asked.

“I’ve been trying for that time for two years. Can we go out for pizza?”

“We’ll order in. I need to check if mom’s back.”

“Why can’t we ever go out as a family?”Anne asked in the car. She stared out the window as they drove away from town. “I heard mom used to have a boyfriend.”

“Who told you that?” Her father looked straight ahead toward their grove, a patch of trees in the distance away from the open area of the town.

“Gina. Sounds like he was some character.”

“Any characters in your life, Anne?”

“None like that.” She brushed the hair out of her eyes. “Why’d you marry mom if she was so mean to you?”

“Gina should talk--she was worse. You know how kids are. In the end they grow up.”

“Sometimes.”

Joe leaned against the dresser as Roz lay on the bed, dressed in her black suit with her toes pointed. She nearly always wore black: molded sweaters and tight slacks, sleek nightgowns and satiny underwear, and shimmering ebony dresses she met clients in. It set off her platinum blonde hair and frosty blue eyes.

“Good night, Joe. I’m barely awake.”

“Stay awake a few minutes. We need to talk.” He had made the walls solid, padded, so noise didn’t move through. In the rooms he built they could talk or wail or sigh or scream, and no one would know. But it didn’t matter--he and Roz never yelled at each other or cried out in love. They lived in the house together like deaf-mutes or silent sleepwalkers.

Instead, it was the walls that talked to him, at night, in their creaking and settling when battered by the wind that funneled straight down through the trees. They spoke of the restless rumpus under the house, of mice whisking through dead spaces, of drafts and flushing water and forced warm air, and they repeated spoken words in whispers as they stood holding up the house.

At Cathedral the system was tight-- if you missed class your parents were called, and the Wiaters were never called about their daughter. Years later she told him how it happened--once when she was drunk on the blood red cabernet Joe kept pouring for her--how she had gone to Harrison 's car to take a look and ended up going for a drive. She tutored slow readers every Wednesday afternoon off-campus at the nearby parochial grade school. That day she called the grammar school and told them she had transferred, and they never checked back with her school. Instead she took a drive with Harrison and was back by the close of school, just before her mother came to pick her up. The next week she did the same and the next, until school let out for the summer and the students went home and realigned their friends around their backyard pools and softball teams.

“She asked me why we got married,” Roz said.

“When are you going to tell her? She’s putting the pieces together.”

“You mean the birds and the bees—she gets that in school, doesn’t she?” her mother asked.

“I was talking about something more specific--about her.”

“Who gave her any pieces?”

“Gina. They talk, you know. All afternoon in the treehouse last Sunday. And her body tells her the story: her hair, her face.”

“That could have come from anywhere. This is hardly the time—her adolescence, she’s vulnerable. What’s so important anyway? It’ll just mess everything up.” Roz was applying an aging formulation to her face. Her law books were opened on the bed and the little yellow tabs were splattered over the edges of the pages.

“She has to know sometime.”

“Maybe when she has a boyfriend of her own. Or settled, married.”

“Are you sure she doesn’t have a boyfriend?” Joe asked.

“Well, I doubt it. She’s a bit of an ugly duckling, not that she won’t turn out alright.”

“When’s the last time you took a look at her, Roz?”

“Oh, come on. Either she’s sweaty from practice or just sitting up in that treehouse by herself. She doesn’t even wear makeup.”

They always went to the 11:00 Mass at the Our Lady of Czestochowa when they were kids, and Roz wore a gauzy pastel dress cut widely around her shoulders and white pumps on her tiny feet. Her tressed blonde hair was gathered up on her head, and he would watch her shoulders shudder slightly with her breathing as she held a hymnal open and mouthed the words. On one side there was an elaborate altar with the serene soldier Florian and on the other the delicate seminarian Stanislaus Kostka, who died early. The main altar had angels dipping down around a painted cross, all sheathed in gold leaf.

It was a scorching Sunday afternoon, and a feverish breeze pushed through the screen door as Joe watched TV at her house with their fathers. He couldn’t get enough ice tea--he felt he was melting out as the sweat poured through his irritated red pores. Gina was home with stomach flu. For once, she wasn’t following Roz everywhere like a yapping dog with razor teeth.

Their mothers played cards and waved magazines in front of their faces. It was the fourth quarter in a tight game. Still, Joe was suddenly curious and walked down the hall of the ranch-style house toward the bathroom on the opposite end. The door was ajar and the light off, but the window let in a cascade of light. He saw Roz in the mirror over the double sinks, her ivory face and shining white gold plaits; her arms gleamed against the afternoon shadows. He was backing out when she tapped her finger against her lips. He froze, and she stepped around him and gently pushed the door closed. Her dress then slipped into a pool around her ankles, and her bra dropped off to tangle into the crumpled cream-colored mound. Her dark nipples nodded with her fast breathing, and her arms and legs shimmered in the filtered light as she stood there in black lace panties, filched he guessed from the department store when her mother was shopping. Roz reached up and looped her arms around his neck; up on her toes, she whispered in his ear. She offered him what he never hoped to have, what he had rolled all his desires into and buried deep inside his raucous blood tributaries. But there would be no second or third wishes to undo the unseen menace of the first one. What she told him made his chest swell in anger and his face glow in red peaks of passion. With the reckless devotion of the boy at the brink of a man, he swore his secret troth, unknown to all but the priest who could never tell, their parents, and Harrison, perhaps, who hardly cared.

Felicia was so upset she took pills and stayed in her room for two weeks while Corinne sat by her bed talking to her quietly. The men sat in the living room and smoked. Her parents brought her to the priest in his office, and the wedding was planned for right after graduation. Roz wore a white silk gown cinched close with the long white cords wrapped zigzag through gold eyelets at the back, and the Polish wedding party continued for two more days after the couple left for a quiet honeymoon in the woods.

There were misfortunes which followed, unraveling from the ominous wish. Roz barely spoke to him when they lived in the apartment above an auto parts store while Joe built their house in the woods. He put off an engineering program and apprenticed as a carpenter, while Roz went to college. He got up with Anne at night, while Roz was studying. She had her own bedroom even then, long before her illness, so she could get enough sleep before her classes. She never said much to him until the home was finished and they had moved in. Then she complained that she hated the chalet and being alone in the woods. What she really wanted was to move back to town and live in a two-story house in the executive neighborhood. The jagged tear starting at the edge of their shaky union was ripped clean through by the tubal ligation Roz had done after Anne’s birth. Joe clung to his house in the woods--and Anne.

“Just talk to Gina. Make her shut up,” Roz said.

“You talk to your idiot cousin. Not that I think her promises would mean anything. ”

“Who could be more a father than you? If he’s alive, I’m sure he’s in jail. What if she wants to find him or something?”

Roz’s eyes dropped from his face. In the silence the walls whispered words in the swaying night wind: “alive,” “pieces,” “promises.”

“My dad says I’m too young to date,” Anne told Trevor. He was a quiet, large boy with black hair and walnut brown eyes. He sat behind her in English class, with his feet caught up on the rungs of her chair, and he waited for her in his car while she ran with her team. At lunchtime they sat in his red Corvette in the parking lot and talked and smoked, although he never looked at her. He stared out the window or flipped the visor up and down.

“Shit, aren’t you fifteen anyway?”

“I told them I went to Joanne’s.” They sat on his parents’ bed cross-legged in their jeans with their shirts off. Grainy pinkish figures twisted over the big-screen TV. Trevor drank a beer while he mashed a hand against Anne’s breast.

“Do they actually check up on you?”

“My dad doesn’t too much. My mom is too busy sleeping.”

“Everybody sleeps.”

“Not like her, they don’t. So, what happened to the date?” she asked.

Trevor groaned with the woman in the film and moved his hand down her spine.

“I made you pizza, and here’s the movie. I didn’t say it would be Disney.” He leaned over and kissed her, pushing his tongue between her lips and against her closed teeth. She got up and fastened her bra back on, looking back at her green eyes reflected in the mirror above his parents’ dresser.

“ Hey, where are you going?” he asked.

“I need a smoke, and I don’t want to in here.”

“Not so fast. Come on, baby.” He got up and pulled her back by the bra strap onto the bed, unfastened it, pulled it down her arms and moved his hands to her waist as she sat, the straps entangled in her arms.

“I want to smoke.”

“We’ll smoke soon. You know, I’m really sure you love me, aren’t you?” His breath bubbled with the aftertaste of beer.

“I’m taking a new job, Joe,” Roz called to the kitchen from the bed where she sat with her books cross-legged and her back propped against the pillows. He was scooping the enchiladas onto the plates and topping the salads with thousand island. The TV trays were already crossed open in her bedroom, and they would watch the news on her swivel TV in the corner as they ate, as they always did when Anne wasn’t home. He came and set them down on the trays and stood over her with a towel stretched between his hands.

“What’s the matter with this one?”

“They’re not making me partner—probably because of my illness.”

“You’re not consistent about your medications.”

“That’s not true. You have no idea how limiting it is.”

“So you say. Are you thinking of doing some freelance work here, or would you start your own practice?”

“I’ve interviewed with another firm.” She brushed a blonde lock back behind her ear.

“In town? I didn’t think there anything else here.” He wrung the towel around his wrists.

“There’s not.” He bunched the cloth into a tight ball and meshed his fingers around it.

“You’re not thinking we’re going to move.”

“I wouldn’t ask you to. Not now.” She took off her reading glasses and wiped them on her black chemise.

“It’s not enough to have your own room, sleeping your life away, but you still can’t get enough space between us. What about Anne?” Joe crossed his arms and bored his fingers like dowels into his fleshy forearms as he stood at the foot of the bed.

“I never asked for a little house in the big woods. It’s only five hours away. You can drive down, or Anne can take a commuter flight for the weekend. I’ll pay for it.”

“So you’re leaving me.” Roz got up on the other side of the bed and stood in front of the mirror. She stared at her face a moment, rubbed under her eyes and turned back and looked at him.

“I’m not that interested in being married, to you or anyone else.” Roz looked past him, toward the lightless window. “But don’t you want a divorce?”

“When I made a bad marriage, I did it for good.”

“You can get an annulment. Don’t throw it back at me—we both got what we wanted. Nobody can help it that circumstances and people change.”

“People choose, and they change,” Joe said. Roz caught the oval mirror at the base and flipped it up. As the top hit the back of the wall, the glass shattered, and shards of glass spread over the wood floor, trying to piece together the reflection of her face.

“I’ll fix it,” Joe said.

“Don’t.”

He walked back to the kitchen with the plates and emptied them into the trash. The grove was windless, and the walls dozed without whispering.

Joe stepped through the rounded log door he had carved between their two rooms. It had been a week of fifteen-hour days fashioning custom furniture for his word-of-mouth clients who had driven ninety miles to his shop. He pulled his clothes off and climbed into bed in his briefs, flipping on the reading lamp and opening a trade magazine. The calculations clicked through his head again. He measured the door and decided how many boards of the white pine he would need and the lengths. With his eyes closed, he numbered the slats he needed to panel this bedroom, Roz’ room, the living room, or the three together with the kitchen. He sketched plans over his mind for a loft bedroom and bath in the angled attic for Anne. Every Sunday afternoon after church, he had calculated his dream chalet in the same way. It had everything except the fireplace—he would never kill wood just to burn it to ashes. Every piece had to be either left rooted and alive, or shaped into something beautiful to be placed in view and kept.

He was shy then--it was that terrible self-consciousness which flipped conversations around like shards that slashed his quivering mind and left it bleeding for days; he eventually picked out the words and flung them back into the wind. He both wanted to stay home and wanted to see Roz. So every Sunday afternoon he went to visit the Wiaters with his family, and she teased him. Then he made his calculations of a house for her; he added up the number of nails and hinges, and laid out the floor. He put Roz in that house—sitting in the living room, standing in the kitchen, rocking on the spacious porch, and lying on the four-poster bed in their bedroom. But it would never happen. He would go away to college and meet someone else, a plain girl probably with glasses and acne, but one who might at least love him. He hadn't counted on Harrison, nobody had. He closed his eyes.

As she scooted to the edge of the mattress, Trevor grabbed Anne by the shoulders and pulled her flat down, pinning a leg over hers and curving his body over hers, with one large arm circling her like a rollover bar. Her black hair fell over her face and caught in her mouth as he moved. And, like the driver who rouses at the screaming crunch of metal, she woke fully from the beer buzz as her adrenaline surged up.

“Ugh, I’m not used to drinking this much,” she said, spitting out her hair. She retched from deep in her throat and pushed up against his face with the thrusts of dry heaves. It was a skill she had taught herself as a fifth grader when she feared her teacher, an old woman with a particular dislike for Anne and who yelled at her continually. Her faked stomach flus worked until her mother brought her to the doctor who, instead of giving her chalky medicine, prescribed a classroom change.

“Do you have anything for my stomach? I know I’m going to puke,” Anne said, gagging again. Trevor shifted his weight back, and she slipped under him and rolled off the bed.

“Come on, baby. It’s just starting to get fun.”

“Really, my stomach is not happy. You must have something here.” She went back into the bathroom and rifled through the bottles in the medicine cabinet. Her eyes found the opposite doorknob which opened into the main hallway.

“Come on, baby.” Trevor lay back on the bed with his arms crossed behind his neck.

“This won’t be pretty. Don’t worry--I’ll be out as soon as I get my stomach under control.” She closed and locked the door to the bedroom and slammed the toilet seat up. She pulled out the pink liquid bottle, opened the top and quietly emptied it onto the floor. Then she turned the tap on full blast and flushed the toilet. Slipping through the opposite door to the hallway, she found her jacket at the entryway, zipped it over her knobby mid-growth breasts, and slipped on her sneakers without socks. She turned the knob quietly and walked out the back door into the starry night with a quarter slice moon rocking above her. After jogging the first twenty minutes, she slowed to a walk in the chill fall night. In an hour and a half, she arrived at the house and saw that the night light that always cast a little red glow in her mother’s room was extinguished, and the window was dead black. She had a raspy soreness in her throat and blisters bit into her heels. Her sleeping bag was still in the treehouse, so she climbed up and fell asleep until the bright saffron sunlight gushed through the road window.

After slipping into her room in the morning and dressing, she stepped into the kitchen as her father was cooking pancakes.

“Do you have enough for me?” she asked.

“Plenty. When did you get back? I thought you were staying at Joanne’s.”

“We had a fight, and her mom took me home.”

“I never heard the car. Anyway, you could have called me to pick you up.”

“I know. Did you ever feel like beating up Harrison ?”

“Interesting question. Yes, I probably did. But he was bigger than me.”

“Oh.”

“Can you get the syrup out and set the table?”

“Sure.” She sniffled.

“It sounds like you’re getting a cold. Were you wearing your jacket?”

“Come on, dad.”

“Just checking.”

“Tell me again how it is I have black hair, and I’m from pure Polish stock.”

“Like I always said, it was a fairy who switched you at birth. The blondie went to the Italian family. But we like you better, anyway.” Joe flipped the pancakes onto the plate and dropped more butter into the iron skillet. It bubbled and spit.

“Must be someone dark in the family tree, like a black sheep.”

“Or a gypsy. Do you want more pancakes?”

“No that’s enough, thanks.”

Joe slipped the last batch on his plate and joined her at the table. He grabbed the syrup and stared down at his plate, drowning the pancakes in swirls.

“You know, princess,” he said, looking up, “when you were four, you had lots of questions--you threw a new one at me with each bite of gingerbread cookie. You would look out the windows of the treehouse and ask which creatures lived there with you in your tree. And why did the sun chase away the moon in the morning and then hide its face again at night? And where did the other half of the road go down there where it’s swallowed up by the mountains. You’ll get all your answers, in due time.”

“I couldn’t understand why nobody cleared that road.”

“That’s because there’s an easier road in town.”

“I know. And I didn’t understand why you didn’t build a house for mommy in the treetops like you did for me. But I guess you did. Where’s mom now?”

“She’s left.”

“It sounded different here this morning. And no light.”