Or going to take a poop. “Be a credit to the family.”
It made us laugh, but Harris was serious. He meant it, he believed it, and even though we laughed about it, we believed it, too.
And so we did not flag when Rosemary died. We kept up our grades. We worked at school and worked at sports. We worked at our looks and worked at our clothes, always making sure the work never showed.
Rosemary’s would-have-been eleventh birthday, October fifth, was Fall Carnival day at school. The quad was filled with booths and silly games. People got their faces painted. There was a cotton candy machine. Spin art. A pretend pumpkin patch. Some student bands.
I stood with my back against my dorm building and drank a cup of hot apple cider. My friends from softball were together at a booth where you could throw beanbags at one of the math teachers. My roommate and her boyfriend were huddled over a lyric sheet, going over their band’s performance. A guy I liked was clearly avoiding me.
Other October fifths, back when I was home, my mother made a cake, chocolate with vanilla frosting. She served it after supper, decorated however Rosemary wanted. One year, it was covered with small plastic lions and cheetahs. Another year, frosting violets. Another year, a picture of Snoopy. There’d be a party, too, on the weekend. It would be filled with Rosemary’s little friends wearing party dresses and Mary Jane shoes, dressed up for a birthday the way no one ever does anymore.
Now Rosemary was dead and it seemed like both of my sisters had forgotten her entirely.
I stood against the brick dorm at the edge of the carnival, holding my cider. Tears ran down my face.
I tried to tell myself she wouldn’t know whether we remembered her birthday.
She couldn’t want a cake. It didn’t matter. She was gone.
But it did matter.
I could see Bess, standing in a cluster of first-year girls and boys. They were all drawing faces on orange balloons. She was smiling like a beauty pageant queen.
And there was Penny, her pale hair under a knitted cap, dragging her boyfriend by the hand as she ran over to see her best friend, Erin Riegert. Penny took a handful of Erin’s blue cotton candy and squashed it into her mouth.
Then she looked over at me. And paused. She walked to where I stood. “Come on,” she said. “Don’t think about it.”
But I wanted to think about it.
“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.
I woke up and took another codeine.
I made myself a bag of ice. Pressed it to my face.
It was five days before I asked my parents to bring me to the doctor. Harris believed that complaining isn’t the behavior of a strong-minded person. “It adds nothing to the company you keep,” he often said. “?‘Never complain, never explain.’ Benjamin Disraeli said that. Prime minister of England.”
When I mentioned the pain, to Luda and Tipper, I was lighthearted. “Oh, this one side is just giving me a little trouble,” I said. “Maybe we should have it checked out.” I didn’t tell Harris at all.
By the time the doctor saw me, the infection was severe.
Harris told me I was a fool to have ignored an obvious problem. “Take care of things when they need taking care of,” he reminded me. “Don’t wait. Those are words to live by.”