The Lonely Hearts Hotel(80)
Rose wondered what would happen to this extraordinary child after the Great Depression. She hoped she wouldn’t just become someone’s wife.
“Would you like me to wring the rabbit’s neck? It’s messy to cut off its head. I hit it on the head with a mallet. It’s pretty quick. I cried about the first fifty times, but I don’t anymore.”
Rose was carrying a suitcase—she put the live rabbit inside. She walked down the street with the suitcase, with the live rabbit inside it. Perhaps she wanted to save the life of just one living thing. It thumped around in there as though it were someone’s heart she had stolen.
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“WHAT IN THE WORLD have you done, Rose, my darling?” Pierrot asked when he got home.
Rose was sitting next to the rabbit on the couch.
“I thought we could use the rabbit in our show. But I need a bit of meat. I’m feeling dizzy all the time. It’s only a matter of time before I say something and all the teeth fall out of my head.”
“This just won’t do. Next you’ll be bringing me home peacocks from the zoo to put in the stew pot to eat.”
“Very funny.”
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ROSE FELT BAD for the rabbit. But she needed to eat some meat, otherwise she would faint dead away. And the baby was inside her, demanding sustenance. Her appetite was ferocious. In her heart she felt like a wolf. As if she would do absolutely anything to get what her heart desired. There was nothing she could do for the creature sitting pert and attentive and eager to please on the couch next to her. It was an object of prey.
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THAT NIGHT ROSE AND PIERROT ate the rabbit. The power had been turned off and so they ate by candlelight. It was like they were out in the wilderness, in the light of a campfire, eating their wild game. There was nothing but darkness all around them. They would return to civilization tomorrow. And they would have new wisdom and knowledge for the others.
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TWO DAYS LATER, Rose stayed home, feeling sick to her stomach. She lay down all by herself on the bed and let out a groan as she delivered a tiny baby on the mattress. She put the baby in the little suitcase that had once held the rabbit. She was terrified of the actual body. It was something you shouldn’t be looking at. It was unholy. The dead baby was not her baby but the opposite of it. It was only after she had disposed of it that she could begin to grieve.
As she stepped outside the Valentine Hotel the sun was going down. The sky became darker and darker shades of blue, as if it were applying more shades of eye shadow, until it was finally sufficiently mysterious to go out on a date.
Rose walked to the edge of the water. She opened the lid of the suitcase. She piled some rocks inside it and then she closed it and tossed it into the river. She was too ashamed to tell anyone that she threw her babies away. But she couldn’t bring herself to ask what she should do with them. She felt terrible and bleak, as if under all her clothes she were naked, which essentially she was.
At dusk Pierrot found Rose sitting on a bench, facing the river. She was having morbid thoughts. She was descended from people who had come to this great land, killed off its inhabitants and settled in with their treacherous ways. Did you have a right to expect anything from God if you were white and North American?
“What’s the point to any of this?” Rose asked. “Do you think that our mothers went on to have amazing lives after giving us up? I hope it was worth it.”
“Don’t start asking yourself those types of questions, Rose, sweetheart. You are pursuing a dark train of thought.”
“I bet they did and repeated their mistakes. I bet they got pregnant again the week after they left. It was just their fate to keep raising up their dresses in alleys. They were going to get pregnant their whole lives. And they wouldn’t know what to do with all those babies.”
“What’s wrong?” Pierrot asked.
“I lost the baby. I threw it in the river.”
Pierrot hadn’t expected it to hurt so much. Rose had already been through this. Pierrot ran down to the river to look for it. Rose put her hands over her face so she wouldn’t have to watch him. Fireflies danced around her like embers after someone has thrown a log into the stove.
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ROSE WOKE UP in the middle of the night and saw that Pierrot was putting on his coat and heading toward the door. “Where are you going?” she asked.
“I’m sleepwalking.”
The drugs cried out to him like a siren’s song. He so wanted to walk down the corridor and jump off the plank. She jumped up out of bed and ran after him.
“I can’t do it, Rose.”
“You’re going to ruin everything if you get high. We tried so hard to find each other.”
He put his hand on the doorknob, which was shaped like a rose.
“If you get high, don’t come back. I don’t want to spend my whole life trying to stop you from doing drugs.”
All over the city, women were begging their partners not to go out and get drunk or high. Rose was used to seeing them. It was one of the most common sights during the Depression. They pleaded with their husbands as though the men were angry gods. Rose had always felt sorry for them. But she knew that any good relationship involved a constant willingness to go to war.
She leaped in front of the door. She spread her arms out to both sides as if she were being crucified, as if she were some sort of natural barrier, like she was a dead bolt. He took both her arms and pulled her out of the way. She grabbed him from behind, jumping onto his back like a banshee.