“Come watch the dude make the cotton candy,” Penny said. “It’s pretty sweet, the way he does it.”
“She would have been eleven,” I said. “She would have had a chocolate cake with decorations on it. But I don’t know what.”
“Carrie. You can’t go down this hole. It’s like, a depressing hole and it’s not going to do you any good. Come do something fun and you’ll start to feel better.”
“She told me she had this idea for a Simple Minds cake,” I said. Simple Minds was a band. “But I think Tipper would have steered her away. It’s too hard. And kind of, I don’t know, cheap-looking.”
Bess came to stand with us. “You okay?” she asked me.
“Not really.”
“I’m advocating cotton candy,” said Penny. “She needs to do something normal.”
Bess looked around at her new friends, and at the older kids she didn’t know yet. “The timing is bad right now,” she said, like I had asked her for something. Like I’d asked her to come over. “I have people waiting for me,” she added.
My sisters loved Rosemary. I knew they loved her. And they must have mourned her. But I didn’t know how to talk to them about it. When I tried, like now, they changed the subject.
They hadn’t come to see how I was feeling.
They had come to tell me to stop feeling that way.
* * *
—
I LEFT THE carnival.
I climbed to the top of my dorm building and went out on the catwalk that led around its roof.
I took a felt-tip marker from my bookbag and wrote on the weathered wooden railing:
ROSEMARY LEIGH TAFT SINCLAIR
She loved
Snoopy and chocolate cake,
potato chips and big cats,
and the band Simple Minds.
She loved
her green bathing suit and swimming in the wicked ocean.
She loved
her sisters
even though they were not worthy of her.
She would have been eleven years old today.
And I loved her.
Happy birthday to Rosemary, now and forever.
* * *
—
WHEN WE WENT home for Thanksgiving, Tipper put on a bright face. She helped us unpack our suitcases. She baked beautiful pies and had relatives in for the traditional meal. Harris was jocular and intense, wanting to play chess and discuss books and movies.
The closest either of our parents came to mentioning Rosemary was to say that the house seemed nice and noisy now that we were home. It had been a quiet fall.
I know my parents did what they thought best—for us, and for them. It hurt to be reminded of our loss, so why remind anyone?
6.
DURING WINTER BREAK of that same year, Harris brought up the jaw surgery again, this time with new urgency. He insisted it was medically necessary. Postponing the decision, as we had done since I was fourteen, was dawdling. We should take care of things when they neeeded taking care of.
I tried saying no, but he reminded me that don’t take no for an answer is one of his life philosophies.
I was forced to comply.
Now that I am grown, I think don’t take no for an answer is a lesson we teach boys who would be better off learning that no means no. I also see that my father wanted me to look like him even more than he wanted me to be pretty. But back then, some part of me felt relieved. Harris was in charge, and I had always been told that he knew best.
I left school in February for what was supposed to be two weeks. The doctors cut open my jawbone and put a wedge inside it. They built the bone up and moved it forward and reattached that part of my skeleton. Then they wired my teeth shut so everything could heal in position.
They gave me codeine, a narcotic pain medicine. Instructions were to take it every four hours at first, then as needed. The pills gave me a strange sensation—not numb, but aware of the pain as if it were happening to someone else.
My jaw. The loss of Rosemary.
Neither one could hurt me, if I took that medicine every four hours.
The liquid diet was not so bad. Tipper brought me frozen yogurt. We no longer had a nanny, but our housekeeper, Luda, was exceptionally kind. She was from Belarus, thin as a pole, with bleached hair and eye makeup my mother found vulgar. Luda made me soft, almost-liquid custards, chocolate and butterscotch. “To get your protein in,” she’d say. “So nourishing.”
The family dogs took to sleeping in my room during the day. McCartney and Albert, both golden retrievers, and Wharton, an Irish setter. Wharton was noble-looking and stupid. I loved her best.
The infection came on suddenly one night. I could feel it arrive, underneath the haze of my medicated sleep. An insistent throbbing, a thrumming red ball of pain in my right jaw.