by KJ Hannah Greenberg
Rosemary ran her finger through the pile of clipped job announcements and twiddled the index of her atlas. The notices she’d cut from the professional newsletter were printed in blue ink. The notices she”d pinched from The Chronicle of Higher Education were printed in black. Other notices, taken from a free, local paper, were grey on grey newsprint. Together, those bits made a dreary montage of words and aspirations.
One of the cats, who mistook the intent of Rosemary’s finger wiggling, dove. As he lunged, he chirped. Rosemary’s papers jumped, landing near where Rosemary had sprayed enzyme on cat piss. She hadn’t wanted the preschoolers to get their toes dirty.
Other stains, menstrual ones, seemed easier to remove. A good scraping of panties or of jeans against a sink’s inner wall, using noncastile soap and cold water, eliminated most blood. The concomitant bloat, though, could not be banged off or otherwise scrubbed away. There always seemed to be something that hung back as a reminder of difficulties.
For her distended abdomen, Rosemary drank “water free” tea. Those cups worried her, though; if she accidentally conceived, those herbs might affect a fetus. Moreso, those drinks constituted a cheat, an artifice that did not directly address Rosemary’s weight problem. Preparing for babies ought to be easier. Maybe she should postpone finding a new position.
Rosemary picked at the wart on her nose. Toni, the next door neighbor with the rabbit, had moved. Toni had kicked Niles “out” of the house, having gotten tired of being beaten by him and of watching her son being similarly smashed around. Yet, since Niles owned the building, in the end, it was Toni who had had to search for a new home. Even after two children, Toni’s stomach had remained flat. Even after Toni left, Niles remained Rosemary’s neighbor.
As she reorganized her papers, Rosemary found half of a race car, a doll’s head and a clump of unidentifiable material under her desk. In less than an hour, nap time would be over. The magic would end sooner if one of the cats climbed into the smaller boy’s crib. Uncontrollable variables populated her days.
During her final course of weeding, Toni had left celery, red and brown tomatoes, and kale gone crazy, in the ground. She had pulled out only the black radishes, the sugar beets and the zucchini plants as she sipped at the last can from a six-pack. Waving her arm, she had invited Rosemary to the remnants of her harvest. Toni then crunched her empty can and walked away from the garden she had spent years tending.
Little boys grow into older ones. Older boys grow into men. Men are sometimes misogynous.
Toni’s teenage daughter had morphed into a blob of belly and pimples and her teenage son had become the ward, respectively, of a parole officer and of a gay minister. Her daughter had run away with a trucker and her son had refused to leave the man of the church. Toni saw herself, she told Rosemary, before backing down their common, narrow driveway and nearly executing a woodland snake, as merely a victim.
Life was messy, Toni had offered. She was okay with the fact that her portion included untidy amounts of human excess and exigency. At least she had the option, she explained, blowing kisses from the window, to move on.
The snake slithered completely off of the road’s margin. Rosemary heard the jalopy’s departure long after she could no longer see its cloud of dust. She stared at the spot where the reptile had been; it had lacked the sense to understand what it had escaped.
Rosemary had slow-baked and then had frozen the tomatoes. The celery, though, had been too bitter for use. Although she had collected it, she had no need of the zucchini.
Beyond her office, Rosemary heard growls. Likely, the dominant cat had encountered one of the other ones. She hoped the ruckus would not wake the children. Before they had arrived in her life, the cats had been her focus. These days, though, those pets’ utility was questionable.
Her husband’s utility, too, often came to mind. Although Rosemary had stopped praying for his death and had tried to rededicate herself to his care, she found that change difficult. The other night, for instance, Johnny had exhaled noisily after taking his pleasure, but before pulling himself closer to Rosemary. When, at last, he had remembered her, she was asleep.
In balance, Johnny was good at changing diapers and at making sandwiches. In counterbalance, however, Johnny otherwise found himself “too busy†to help with the boys. Rosemary’s solution was to kiss his forehead in the same way that she kissed the foreheads of her sister’s little ones.
Most nights, her nephew Jimmy adorned the diningroom floor with the evidence of his having eaten too quickly and her nephew Roni missed the potty. Those children, though, were more whole than Toni’s teens could ever hope to become and more sunny than a month of her husband’s smiles.
Although they were frightened by those small adventurers, at times, the cats persisted on trying to wedge between Rosemary and those damp, smelly little people for cuddles. At such moments, Rosemary persisted on hugging both the two-legged and the four-legged loves of her life and on allowing herself to be a bit lax about phoning up employers. Only at naptime was she insistent on resuming her hunt.
Fortunately, her sister’s two towheads were as quick to fall asleep on Rosemary’s lap as they were to deconstruct the contents of her bookcases. They often forgot which end of the cats to pet, but made up for that antic by being willing to have their hands scrubbed with soap. Smiling and skipping, those nephews readily drew sticks and circles on any scrap of paper Rosemary provided and had even sung songs to her, about the dishwasher breaking down, when her kitchen had flooded. They played boats and skyscrapers, in turn, with the basket of zucchini Rosemary had brought home, too, and left her gifts of blocks on the staircase.
It was turning out to be okay that while the boys’ parents hiked Europe , Auntie Rosemary was unemployed. It was turning out to be okay that life alternated between a warm stream and a cold, stone pillar.