The Lonely Hearts Hotel(23)
There were days when Rose decided to be absolutely quiet, as if life itself were a silent film. She would gesture her needs and desires. She rubbed her belly to ask the children whether they were hungry. She scolded them by making an extremely dour expression, stomping her feet and wagging her finger viciously. It was the only time the maid witnessed Rose chastising the young savages. And it was in jest.
She was teaching the children how to do cartwheels and backflips in the nursery one afternoon. Their knees were all bloody from doing front flips and falling. They were bleeding happily at the kitchen table, eating chocolate cake for lunch. The maid thought she might need to have a word with Mrs. McMahon about Rose to save her own neck.
“She keeps them out of my hair, so what do I care if they’re off murdering small animals?”
“I don’t mind myself, Mrs. McMahon. We all quite like the girl. I’m just telling you so that if you see your children running around the backyard buck naked, you don’t get alarmed and blame me.”
“Fine. Fine. I grant you immunity.”
Despite the telescope being off-limits, Rose often found herself looking through it.
She placed her little rag down beside her so that she could pick it up and begin dusting the telescope at a moment’s notice, if need be. She focused the telescope so that she could look at the moon up close. It always startled her, as though she had turned around and there was the moon, following her down the street. Or she opened her bedroom door and there was the moon, lying in her bed, under the sheet.
She tried to see whether there was an alternate reality up on the moon. She looked at it closely, expecting to see herself and Pierrot standing up to their ankles in silver sand with their arms stretched out toward the earth.
When she looked through the telescope, she always asked herself the big questions. Who made us? And why did that being put us in the middle of all this great emptiness? What did anything matter? Why did they put all those stars so far away? Why did they put strange creatures at the bottom of the ocean? Why did they give us the minds to find them, if they didn’t want us to find them? She wondered whether if she went to university and studied astronomy and mathematics she would be able to answer these questions.
One day Hazel came to peep through the telescope too. Rose put a chair beneath it so that she would be at eye level. They took turns looking deep, deep into the universe: Saturn like a knee that had been dipped in iodine, Neptune like a peach covered in mold, Jupiter like a half-sucked jawbreaker, Mercury like a large shooter marble, galaxies like crushed candy, galaxies like the suds from a bubble bath blown off the palm of your hand.
“You are so lucky,” she said to Hazel. “You get to be educated! How wonderful is that? I would love to go to school and learn to read giant books of mathematical problems like they were novels. Don’t you always find that math problems are quite beautiful to look at? I do. They remind me of funny little insects pinned to a corkboard. And you wonder so much about their origins.”
“I never pay attention when the tutor comes over.”
“Well, I think you should. Try to be good when he comes over.”
“I find that I can’t help being bad. I promise and promise and promise myself that I won’t be a bad person. But then I just do something bad.”
“That’s because we’re girls. We’re supposed to only have emotions. We aren’t even allowed to have thoughts. And it’s fine to feel sad and happy and mad and in love—but those are just moods. Emotions can’t get anything done. An emotion is just a reaction. You don’t only want to be having reactions in this lifetime. You need to be having actions too, thoughtful actions.”
? ? ?
THE OTHER SERVANTS became quite fond of Rose. She was in the kitchen juggling eggs. The maids and the cook were screaming with laughter, yelling that she was for sure going to break all of them.
She walked across the banister in her stocking feet. She was carrying in all the plates from the dining room and pretended to trip. Everybody shrieked. They all thought she was quite mad. They loved when she tried to get through an open door but was pushed back in an imaginary wind tunnel. It was quite extraordinary.
They had never met a girl who made jokes about farting. When she bent over to pick something up, she would make a loud farting noise. It always made them guffaw noisily. She had such a good sense of humor.
They had never seen the children so happy. Rose was able to control them just by virtue of being crazier than them. They were all three of them sitting in the backyard wearing Napoleon hats made out of newspaper. The servants were very surprised that she had grown up in an orphanage and that she hadn’t been lobotomized.
? ? ?
ONE NIGHT Rose was sitting by herself in her room. It had been raining all evening. The soft sound of the rain on the rooftop sounded like young girls sneaking off in stockings to elope. She felt lonesome for Pierrot.
Rose pulled her suitcase from beneath her bed. She kept her most precious belonging in there. She took out the plan she had drawn on a piece of paper on the trolley when she and Pierrot were little kids. It seemed like the most absurd plan in the world. It had come to her in a fit of inspiration. Who really knew where these fits came from? Perhaps it had been an angel whispering in her ear. There were doodles on the margins of the paper, a vine creeping up a white wall.
It seemed so fantastical and silly. It was a make-believe story that she would tell the children. She had a future as a domestic house cleaner. She wasn’t qualified for anything else. But she kept the piece of paper near to her. It was the closest thing she had to a photograph from her childhood. It made her nostalgic for all the good times at the orphanage, without remembering the bad.