Rose Dies At Ninety-Three
by Nola Ferraro
When Rose was thirteen, her favorite school subject was history despite the fact that it made her jealous. She had been born too late to experience any history of her own. All the countries had been found, electricity had been discovered, and the period of pirates had passed without so much as hinting at returning. Rose wanted to live in an exciting time period, not the boring 80s! She fantasized about going back in time to live in the midst of a more exciting period. Since she was little (and even at thirteen, though she didn’t dare admit it to anyone), her Dad read to her from the history textbook he used for college courses while she fell asleep each night.
Rose wanted four kids when she grew up: two boys, two girls. She was in a rush to get older: she would be a city girl, the kind of tall girl that strutted past opaque windows in New York City on her way to work; the kind of girl who wore sheer lace and tons of necklaces, and could visit the Natural History Museum any time she wanted.
At thirteen, Rose could not stand Rachel Gill, the prettiest girl in her grade, whose blonde bangs did the absolute most perfect swish without even trying. Something about the way Rachel’s slim neck swiveled, or the way she screwed up her face with pushed-out lips when she was reading, or the way her laugh tumbled out of her like so many bells, made Rose squirm in her seat. She always caught herself staring at her on the bus home. Rose reasoned it was simply because she hated her, and wanted to be like her, and allowed herself to think of Rachel as often as she liked under the pretense of hatred.
At thirteen Rose went on several dates with a boy named Michael from her band elective. He was always muttering and always wearing headphones, but he said he liked how nice she was, and her straight soft hair, and asked if she wanted to see Jaws with him in the theater.
“Let’s sit all the way in the back, Rose.” They did. Michael put his arm around Rose’s waist. Rose assumed the bile that rose to her throat was butterflies. “Don’t be scared, I got you,” Michael muttered. Rose wasn’t afraid of sharks. She’d been swimming since she was five. Every summer her Dad took her to Grandma’s house in upstate New York. He taught her how to swim in the lake behind Grandma’s house.
Michael’s hand moved up and down Rose’s thigh, and she wished for the clean, rough swathe of worn cotton towels on her pruned skin. At thirteen Rose had been kissed by boys before, had felt the reverse magnetism. Surely everyone felt while kissing, she reasoned. It’s worth it to be liked. Rose did her best to swallow the feeling and forced it down, past her heart and into her stomach, where it stayed like a swallowed cherry pit, unsure of how long the pit would remain.
Beach by Maddie Lowe
When Rose turned twenty-three she did not celebrate her birthday. No one knew it was her birthday besides her father, who might have called, but she had unplugged the telephone so she wouldn’t be upset when it didn’t ring. Instead she distracted herself by staring at open books and starting a crossword puzzle without finishing. She tried not to get hungry. Cooking for one person is difficult, and eating alone on a restaurant is difficult. But eventually she did get hungry, so she drew her bedroom curtains shut to make her room dark, as if it were late at night and not midafternoon, and tried making herself feel sleepy, and tried making herself not feel.
At twenty-three Rose was afraid of dying. She kept the news playing on her TV all day so the silence of the house didn’t crush her. Every hour deaths were reported. A mother of three children was found dead in the woods. A car full of teenagers crashed into a minivan. Another white man shot up another elementary school. She was terrified of death, and of being old, and alone.
At twenty-three she was too old to miss Pennsylvania and her dad so she didn’t let herself think of them, especially not when she accidentally touched what was definitely spit on the subway. It was strange being called Ms. Theobold. She wished she had fewer students, so she could get to know each one, to decipher which ones were lonely. She wished she knew how to get her students excited about history, how to tell it like a story. She wished she was little again, when there was so much to learn. She was disinterested in everything, the school she taught in, the city she’d been living in for months.
She had only carried one bag on the bus, a canvas tote from Macy’s, with her clothes and her money, a little bit tucked into each of her socks, so she would not lose all of it if some of it was stolen. She kept expecting to find her father’s phone number written in Sharpie on her palm, like when she went on school trips when she was little. “Now I won’t lose you,” dad had said, “if you ever got lost.” Her hand looked blank. She borrowed a pen from a guy on the bus, uncapped it with her teeth, and wrote into her hand, Not lost.
When Rose was thirty-three, she realized how freaking amazing her life was. She definitely had friends! She was so lucky to be alive! The cocktail weenies at the New Years’ Party were the best she’d ever had. Even their boss had showed up! She lost track of how much champagne she drank. Her arms were static electricity. The next day she would regret drinking so much, but it was New Year’s Eve, and Evan had given her something to smoke and told her he loved her, darling, in the gay boy kind of way, which was fine because she was supportive of the gays, even if it wasn’t for her. “You know what, Rose,” she told herself in the bathroom mirror, “tomorrow you will sit with some coworkers at lunch.” It was about time she had some friends, she was so cool and everyone should know it. She loved herself. She’d start going to the gym, too, she said, she’d be hot shit in the new year. And when she turned forty-three, she’d finally have a birthday party, like she’d always wanted, and she’d make homemade dip, and everyone would say wow, we’ve really been missing out, Rose is so good at making dip, we should hang out with her all the time! Maybe someone would fall in love with her in the New Year, too, not that she cared, because she didn’t need anyone, she was god enough already. Maybe it would be Jason, he was pretty cute, she thought, or at least she had always overheard the other girls at work saying so, she maybe he would be the one to put the moves on her.
She was thirty-three and the best dancer at the party, in the whole city, probably. She knew every word to Jessie’s Girl and she wasn’t afraid to show it. Someone smiled at Rose from across the room, probably staring because she’s such a good dancer and so pretty in a natural, approachable sort of way. Was that Heather?
Heather had taken Rose out for dinner once, and Rose had been so excited to tell her dad she finally had a work friend.
“Did she pay?”
“Yeah,” she paid, “I’ll pick it up next time.”
“Rose, it was a date!” He laughed, what a funny mistake Rose had made, accidentally going on a date with a lesbian. She hadn’t realized Heather was asking her out on a date, which was fine as a principle because she was accepting of the gays, but it wasn’t for her, so she’d just avoided Heather in the hallways between classes. Rose laughed along. When they hung up, she could not identify the dry lump in her throat.
Heather’s breath smelled of vodka when she whisper-shouted in Rose’s ear that she was the most beautiful girl in the room, and Rose giggled, she had never been called beautiful before, and her lungs felt like they were breathing in so much air and it felt so good, and she followed Heather to her Chevrolet.
It was almost midnight and she was in a girl’s car – a girl’s! – and she didn’t care who saw and she didn’t care that she tasted like old champagne and cocktail weenies. She was sitting in the backseat of a blue Chevrolet with Heather, who would kiss her at midnight and then never again, but Rose didn’t care, because she was thirty-three and the next day she would start living her life the way she’d always wanted to.
When Rose was forty-three everything she ate was microwaved. She drank coffee too late in the day and couldn’t fall asleep at night. She was tired of perking up her voice when her father called to ask about work, and her students, and what was she up to, and if she had met a nice man yet. She did not want to hear about his new Carla. He had sent Rose Polaroids of himself smiling with in front of cheap-looking palm trees with Carla, and Carla’s orange eyeshadow and too-big dentures.
At forty-three, Rose was much more overwhelmed than a person her age should be. The thought of eating a bowl of cereal in the morning was oppressive. She did not want to go to work, she did not want to wake up and get dressed, everything felt prickly all over. She was certain she had already learned everything there was to learn, and was unsure of what she was supposed to do next. She did not wish to die in an overly emotional, deeply painful sort of way: she was simply exhausted. She eventually went to sleep each night. She did not know what else to do.
1 by Devin Kasparian
When Rose was fifty-three she fell in love for the last time. Sandra wore hiking boots all the time, even when she hadn’t been hiking. Evan, one of the math teachers, had introduced them to each other. The three of them often shared lunch in the teacher’s lounge, and Rose was surprised to find herself laughing with friends over anything.
In January Rose invited her to her apartment to go over lesson plans. They sat close together in the dark on the floor of Rose’s bedroom. Their lesson plans sprawled out over the floor by the window, abandoned. The newspaper crossword puzzle flipped spread across their thighs, and their shoulders touched. Rose knew most of the answers. Sandra liked that she knew most of the answers. They rushed to fill in answers before the other, and every so often their fingers brushed against one another’s. Rose had been with people romantically and sexually before. All the other times Rose had been with someone romantically and sexually, she felt butterflies in her stomach like acid. But when Sandra’s fingers brushed against hers, the butterflies in her stomach seemed to press her closer to Sandra, not farther away, as they had attempted to in the past, when she’d been with men. When their lips pressed into each other’s she inhaled and remembered the weightlessness of slipping into the lake near her grandmother’s house, Michael slipping his hand under her skirt, her father laughing on the phone, the moths nipping holes into the lining of her stomach.
She had never been in a relationship longer than a few months. She didn’t see the point in dating someone she couldn’t imagine marrying, and she couldn’t imagine herself marrying any of the men she’d dated. The rain was lovely, Sandra was lovely, but Rose could only think that she should not. She was well past the age where it was cutesy to kiss other girls just for the curiosity of it. At fifty-three she was able to admit to herself that she had been curious before, once or maybe twice, that she might enjoy being with a woman, but surely she wasn’t full-out lesbian enough to be with a woman as wonderful as Sandra. A feeling of retreat like a peach pit-sized gyre formed just below her heart, and she did not fight it. Mentally she packed mud between herself and the room, the crossword, Sandra.
Sandra was too wonderful. She deserved a girl with a slim neck and sunshine freckles, with a laugh as bright and clear as her own. Sandra should be with a girl who knew herself, who , and easy to talk to, and Stay inside the peach pit. If she came out, if she allowed herself to feel the electricity that flowed from Sandra, she would break her. If she let Sandra discover all of her parts, she would hurt her, and then she would leave. She imagined the mud burrowing deep into her, barricading herself even from her own flesh, so that she was barely conscious of any sensations.
“I’m so sorry,” Sandra said, “I should have asked first, I thought that’s what you wanted, I didn’t mean to take advantage.”
“No,” Rose whispered. She sniffed furtively. She had never been in a relationship longer than a few months. Sandra should be with a pretty young woman who could cook well, Rose told her, a woman who was smarter and more fun to bring to parties. She didn’t want to hurt her, and she hoped they could stay friends.
At fifty-three, after Sandra left for the bus with her newspaper and her pens, Rose stared at herself in the bathroom mirror for a long time. She tried to imitate Sandra’s face – the relaxed brow, unclenched jaw, the puffed-out look of her smooth lips. But Rose could not make herself look as sure as Sandra. She brushed her teeth and laid naked between her cold bedsheets.
When Rose was fifty-three, she helped her dad plant a garden. It was May. He had just turned eighty-six. His back had been giving him trouble, so she agreed to help when she could. She hated dirt, and was terrible at gardening, and, and probably would never do it again.
“Everything okay, Rosie? You know you can tell me anything, right?” Maybe she could. He had never been mad at her for more than an hour. She was his girl, and he had never been angry at her for more than an hour. She wanted so badly for him to know her, and needed so badly to preserve the secure love they had always had. The two were at odds with each other. She should just say it now, to get it over with, while they were together, in person.
Carla burst through the front door ass-first, singing “God Bless America,” holding a glass of lemonade in each hand. She stayed outside with them the rest of the day, and stood beside Rose’s father waving her off when she left for the coach bus back to Manhattan, walking heavily beneath the weight of all her father did not know of her.
When she turned sixty-three, Rose spent her birthday on a bus from Manhattan to Pennsylvania to visit her father’s grave. She did not weep on the bus. She had found out he had died from Carla, his other girl – or former girl, now, she supposed, and what did that make her? – whose nasally voice she could not get out of her head for the entire three-hour bus ride. He died last night, just in his sleep, she said, he was in his nineties, you know, as if Rose didn’t know.
She called work to tell them she would miss a few days, but it was Sunday, and no one answered. Rose left a message and cringed at the thought of her voice coming through the receiver. She wanted to call someone else before she left. She wanted someone to miss her. Sandra? No, Sandra would come right away, and the idea made her feel stripped naked, so light she would float into space. She needed to cover herself, weigh herself down with something heavy and thick. Rose did not call Sandra.
She arrived in Pennsylvania early Monday morning. She kept waiting to see someone she knew, even though she hadn’t asked anyone to pick her up from the bus station. She did not weep in the taxi ride to the cemetery.
She and Carla had settled her father’s affairs within three days. Rose did not remember the details of the funeral. She had turned herself off. She would mourn alone, when it was just him and her. She was his girl.
She visited his grave the day before returning to Manhattan. His grave was an ugly plot of bare earth. She traced the letters etched into the cold gray stone with her finger: the word father, the word teacher, his name, Raymond Theobold, and she did not weep. She did not weep until she placed a folded later on the fresh dirt atop his grave and placed an orange on top of it.
On her final night in the dusty hotel, Rose ordered pasta to her room and ate alone on the bed while watching the Food Network. She kept eating even when she felt full. She kept eating until the tin foil pasta dish was empty. Her stomach bulged and she wished she hadn’t eaten so much and she wished there was more of it still. She was overcome with need to eat though she wasn’t the least bit hungry. She desperately needed to put something in her mouth, to fill herself up. She rushed to the bathroom and drank cup after cup of icy cold water from the tap. It was not refreshing and her stomach hurt more.
When Rose was sixty-three she went back to church, just once, just to say goodbye.
At seventy-three Rose had her cut short and discovered that short hair was not for her. Retirement was exhausting. She signed up for the free community garden down the block. She felt out of place in Lowe’s, she hadn’t really ever gone to a store that industrial by herself and wasn’t even sure of what she needed, really. She did enjoy the brightly colored paper packets of seeds. Sunflowers, squash, tomatoes, daffodils. Sandra popped to mind each time Rose saw a daffodil – they were her favorite, though she had tried to forget. Rose stood near the seed packets for fifteen minutes before deciding not to get the daffodil seeds. Half an hour later, just before paying for her trowel and garden gloves, she went back for the daffodil seeds. Maybe, if they grew, she would give some to Sandra.
She was much too old to be nervous about joining the community garden. But everyone there would already know each other, she would be an intruder of their private club, she didn’t even know how to garden, her plot would be the shame of the community. But the others were quite friendly. Most paid no attention to her, which was fine by Rose, except when their kids toddled through Rose’s plot. “Don’t worry about it,” Rose assured the young woman. “Your little boy’s a charmer.”
“Rose?” There was Evan, the math teacher from the old elementary school. He remembered the name of everyone he ever met and always asked about the last thing they had talked about. To her surprise, though, Evan was there; they had worked together at the old high school as teachers. He was always kind to her, she feared he was doing it to be polite, and could not fathom that he was just nice or just was fond of her. He had aged, he looked handsome in denim shorts and a black t-shirt. He introduced her to his husband, John, who looked Rose in the eye and kept a gentle hand on Evan’s back while they spoke.
Untitled 5 by Javier Bello
She learned that they were married and had been members of the community garden for years. Evan lived just a few blocks away. No kidding, Rose had said, and Evan joked with her, “C’mon, Rose, you lived only twenty minutes away from this whole time, we could’ve been going out for drinks for years!” Rose laughed, because he was funny, and because she could not imagine going out for drinks, especially not with Evan and his other handsome man-friends. She felt hot, she wanted him to ask if she was married, she wanted to say she was like him. She hoped he would talk to her even though their plots were on opposite sides of the garden.
When Rose was seventy-three she kept going to the community garden every Sunday morning even though it made her nervous. The knowledge that Evan would be there made her silly with panic. Her desire for his friendship was almost overwhelmed by her desire to hide herself, to push Evan away harder than he could ever push her. Every Saturday afternoon, she started feeling flushed and heavy, as if she were filled entirely with dense mud.
Still, Rose kept going to the garden. Each week, in increments so small she hardly noticed, the feeling that she was filled with mud lessened. By the end of September, she discovered one Saturday night that the weighty feeling of thick mud only came up to her knees.
That next day she invited Evan and his husband for coffee after gardening. “No pressure,” she wanted them to know, if they were busy it was fine, she just figured she’d ask since she was going, whatever they want. The boys said yes, they’d love to join her for coffee. The three of them sat in the diner for close to two hours, long after they’d each finished their second cup of lukewarm coffee, and Rose walked the two blocks to her home feeling stunned, her cheeks feeling oddly sore. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d laughed so much. Something in her chest felt oddly light.
When Rose was eighty-three, she had a birthday party. She had a handful of friends over, just Evan and John and Sandra and one other. At her age she was too old to get nervous over these sorts of things, but before everyone came over she had sweat so much she had to change her blouse twice. She baked herself a cake, which tasted nice but looked abominable, and she and her friends laughed about that. Her friends came over and they brought her cards and they listened to music and chatted over tall, frosty glasses of lemonade.
When Rose was eighty-three she started working at the diner, just for the fun of it. The managers gave her a seat to sit in, so she didn’t have to stand at the register during her long shifts. The young girls called her Lil’ Rosie – how funny! – and told her it was so great that she’s still active, considering her age and all. She loved listening to the girls chatter between turns at the coffee bean grinder. “I’m so stressed, I literally have so much to do. Ricky’s moving to L.A., should I go with him? I probably won’t find anyone else.” Usually listening to the girls made her smile, but occasionally it made her sad the way lemonade tastes sadly, familiarly sweet. That had been her, for such a long time, and Rose hadn’t noticed when it started, but now her days were bright more often than not. She hadn’t noticed when she’d started waking up early and rising from bed to water the pot of basil, and she had read six books that year, even though her eyes were getting worse by the minute. She had brought herself to the garden. The garden brought her Evan and John, and Evan brought her Sandra, again, and her hiking boots and her citrus laughter. This time Rose would unearth herself from the mud she’d hidden beneath. To be with Sandra for even a short time was worth years of crawling through muddy fear.
When Rose was ninety-three, she slow danced with Sandra in the living room. It was almost Christmas, and the living room was decorated with strings of lights. They had shared the smallest glass of champagne and her body felt electric. Rose could slow-dance, waltz, tango; Sandra had taught her how. The radio played music and they danced for hours. Rose and Sandra spun around the room, sometimes quickly and full of life and slowly, sometimes, and softly. The room spun, too, and Rose thought about how Sandra still smelled like summer rain; what her father would have thought of Sandra, and if they would have laughed together; about the pot of basil sitting on the kitchen windowsill; how lucky she was to feel anticipate anything; about how many years she had had no friends; about the years that she had had friends; how at some point her grandfather started learning a new instrument every year until he died; how the last one was a digeridoo. She decided tomorrow she would look up some place where she could learn something new – the library two blocks down always had signs up for different clubs, maybe she would try one of those? She would look it up somewhere tomorrow, in the phonebook, or maybe the Internet, and she would call them, and ask to join. She never would have done that when she was twenty-three. Ha! How funny! How her father would have laughed. Rose rested her head on Sandra’s shoulder and shut her eyes, and time seemed to cease.