And after awhile, they stop laughing. They stop because the lady in the sleeveless tee-shirts and loose gray pants, after her initial clumsiness and foul ticks (several times she is even hit by the dense rubber balls the machine serves up), begins to make first good contact and then great contact.
‘She drivin that beauty,’ one of them says one day after Rosie, panting and flushed, her hair drawn back against her head in a damp helmet, screams three line drives, one after the other, the length of the mesh-walled batting tunnel. Each time she connects she voices a high, unearthly cry, like Monica Seles serving an ace. It sounds as if the ball has done something to offend her.
‘Got that machine cranked, too,’ says a second as the pitching machine hulking in the center of the tunnel coughs out an eighty-mile-an-hour fastball. Rosie gives her indrawn cry of effort, her head down almost against her shoulder, and pops her hips. The ball goes the other way, fast. It hits the mesh two hundred feet away down the tunnel, still rising, making the green fabric bell out before dropping to join the others which she has already hit.
‘Aw, she ain’t hittin that hard,’ scoffs a third. He takes out a cigarette, pokes it in his mouth, takes out a book of matches, and strikes one. ‘She just gettin some — ‘
This time Rosie does scream — a cry like the shriek of some hungry bird – and the ball streaks back down the tunnel in a flat white line. It hits the mesh . . . and goes through. The hole it leaves behind looks like something which might have been made by a shotgun fired at close range.
Cigarette Boy stands as if frozen, the lit match burning down in his fingers.
‘You were sayin, bro?’ the first boy asks softly.
7
A month later, just after the batting cages close for the season, Rhoda Simons suddenly breaks into Rosie’s reading of the new Gloria Naylor and tells her to call it a day. Rosie protests that it’s early. Rhoda agrees, but tells her she is losing her expression; better to give it a rest until tomorrow, she says.
‘Yeah, well, I want to finish today,’ Rosie says. ‘It’s only another twenty pages. I want to finish the damned thing, Rho.’
‘Anything you do now will just have to be done over,’ Rhoda says with finality. ‘I don’t know how late Pamelacita kept you up last night, but you just don’t have it anymore today.’
8
Rosie gets up and goes through the door, yanking it so hard she nearly tears it off its fat silent hinges. Then, in the control room, she seizes the suddenly terrified Rhoda Simons by the collar of her goddamned Norma Kamali blouse, and slams her facedown into the control board. A toggle switch impales her patrician nose like the tine of a barbecue fork. Blood sprays everywhere, beading on the glass of the studio window and running down it in ugly rose madder streaks.
‘Rosie, no!’ Curt Hamilton shrieks. ‘My God, what are you doing?’
Rosie hooks her nails into Rhoda’s throbbing throat and tears it open, shoving her face into the hot spew of blood, wanting to bathe in it, wanting to baptize this new life which she has been so stupidly struggling against. And there is no need to answer Curt; she knows perfectly well what she is doing, she is repaying, that’s what, repaying, and God help anyone on the wrong side of her account books. God help —
9
‘Rosie?’ Rhoda calls through the intercom, rousing her from this horrid yet deeply compelling daydream. ‘Are you okay?’
Keep your temper, little Rosie.
Keep your temper and remember the tree.
She looks down and sees the pencil she has been holding is now in two pieces. She stares at them for several seconds, breathing deeply, trying to get her racing heart under control.
When she feels she can speak in a more or less even tone of voice, she says: ‘Yeah, I’m okay.
But you’re right, the kiddo kept me up late and I’m tired. Let’s rack it in.’
‘Smart girl,’ Rhoda says, and the woman on the other side of the glass — the woman who is taking off the headphones with hands that only shake a little — thinks, No. Not smart. Angry.
Angry girl.
I repay, a voice deep in her mind whispers. Sooner or later, little Rosie, I repay. Whether you want it or not, I repay.
10
She expects to lie awake all that night, but she sleeps briefly after midnight and dreams. It is a
tree she dreams of, the tree, and when she wakes she thinks: No wonder it’s been so hard for me to understand. No wonder. All this time I was thinking of the wrong one.
She lies back next to Bill, looking up at the ceiling and thinking of the dream. In it she heard the sound of gulls over the lake, crying and crying, and Bill’s voice. They’ll be all right if they keep normal, Bill was saying. If they keep normal and remember the tree.
She knows what she must do.
11
The next day she calls Rhoda and says she won’t be in. A touch of the flu, she says. Then she goes back out Route 27 to Shoreland, this time by herself. On the seat next to her is her old bag, the one she carried out of Egypt. She has the picnic area to herself at this time of the day and year. She takes her shoes off, puts them under a picnic table, and walks north through the shallow water at the edge of the lake, as she did with Bill when he brought her out here the first time. She thinks she may have trouble finding the overgrown path leading up the bank, but she does not. As she goes up it, digging into the gritty sand with her bare toes, she wonders how many unremembered dreams have taken her out here since the rages started.
There is no way of telling, of course, nor does it really matter.
At the top of the path is the ragged clearing, and in the clearing is the fallen tree — the one she has finally remembered. She has never forgotten the things which happened to her in the world of the picture, and she sees now, with no iota of surprise, that this tree and the one which had fallen across the path leading to Dorcas’s ‘pomegranate tree’ are identical.
She can see the foxes’ earth beneath the dusty bouquet of roots at the far left end of the tree, but it is empty, and looks old. She walks to it anyway, then kneels — she is not sure her trembling legs would have supported her much farther, anyway. She opens her old bag and pours out the remains of her old life on the leafy, mulchy ground. Among crumpled laundry lists and receipts years out of date, below a shopping list with the words PORK CHOPS!
at the top, underlined, capitalized, and exclamation-pointed (pork chops were always Norman’s favorite), is the blue packet with the spatter of red-purple drops running across it.
Trembling, beginning to cry — partly because the scraps of her old, hurt life make her so sad and partly because she is so afraid that the new one is in danger — she scoops a hole in the earth at the base of the fallen tree. When it is about eight inches deep, she puts the packet down beside it and opens it. The seed is still there, surrounded by the gold circle of her first husband’s ring.
She puts the seed in the hole (and the seed has kept its magic; her fingers go numb the instant they touch it) and then places the ring around it again.
‘Please,’ she says, not knowing if she prays, or for whom the prayer is intended if she does.
In any case, she is answered, after a fashion. There is a short, sharp bark. There’s no pity in it, no compassion, no gentleness. It is impatient. Don’t fuck with me, it says.
Rosie looks up and sees the vixen on the far side of the clearing, standing motionless and looking at her. Her brush is up. It flames like a torch against the dull gray sky overhead.
‘Please,’ she says again in a low, troubled voice. ‘Please don’t let me be what I’m afraid of.
Please . . . just please help me keep my temper and remember the tree.’
There is nothing she can interpret as an answer, not even another of those impatient barks.
The vixen only stands there. Its tongue is out now, and it is panting. To Rosie it appears to be grinning.
She looks down once more at the ring circling the seed, then she covers it over with the fragrant, mulchy dirt.