Crooked Little Heart Read Online Free PDF Page B

court, where they both lost their first singles matches; milling around waitingto play a doubles match; huddled together on a bench whispering their secret thoughts and language. Rosie wore a sweet little dress with lace trim around the neckline that Simone had grown out of over the winter. Now Simone wore women’s tennis skirts and tight white scooped-neck T-shirts. Elizabeth glanced at her round sunny cleavage, the pale blonde milkmaid face. It was sometimes hard to take your eyes off Simone for her blossoming vanilla beauty, or Rosie, for that matter, so much smaller, but beautiful, raven haired, strong featured, like a fair-skinned gypsy, marvelously physical. Here at the tournament, Elizabeth observed their mix of unself-consciousness and hyperconsciousness. And she watched spooky Luther watch Rosie, feasting on her, getting juice from that wonderful nubility of flesh, female with no traces of age, seamless and dewy.
    Elizabeth sat as far away from Luther as she could but close enough so he would know a mother bear was watching. She kept glancing at him out of the corner of her eye, taking in the worn windbreaker, dark bristly crew cut, the wolf eyes watchful and patient. She imagined him stalking Rosie, talking to Rosie softly, hypnotizing her. Once she had begged Peter Billings to get him arrested somehow, to for God’s sakes do something, and he had looked at her like she was a nervous case. He said Luther was actually a pretty smart guy, harmless, sad, maybe not so good to look at but certainly of no danger to anyone. She had seen Peter and Luther sitting together in the bleachers at the Golden Gate Park courts last summer, the sun glinting off Peter’s Hollywood blond head, Luther in a tattered jacket on a warm summer’s day, the two men—one so light, one so dark—watching Rosie play. Peter said Luther knew more about tennis than he did and that he just liked to watch the girls play. But was that all? she wondered.
    She loved to watch the girls play, too. She loved their innocence but couldn’t remember having felt it herself, doing something so full of joy that she completely forgot about the watcher. Especially the self-watcher who judges and finds fault. She watched the girls get lost in the game and saw with a rush of anxiety that they didn’t stop to cover themselves. They were so naked.
    Luther was, to Elizabeth, all that was wrong with the real world, all that was dirty and drunk and mysterious, all that was random and cryptic. She sneaked another look at him. He was ragged, a tree that the weather had whipped away at for too long. He was so dark, and heloved to watch her curly-haired girl in the tiny white dress. She watched her child deliberately avoid his gaze, almost meanly, seemingly not afraid, and the thought crossed her mind, Who is stalking whom? Did Rosie miss his dark attentions when he didn’t show up? Her daughter was now playing out of her head, hard, focused, inflamed. Elizabeth, looking from Rosie to Luther and back to her daughter’s bright body again, felt suddenly how thin the membrane was between order and chaos, how thin but there, real enough to palpate, like a fontanel.

three

    R OSIE looked at herself in the mirror all the time now, half to see how she looked, half to make sure she was really there. She saw in the mirror the world’s saddest person. When she was eleven, she used to look in the mirror and imagine herself in the movies. Now, at thirteen, she saw herself all of a sudden as she imagined others saw her. Late at night, very late, when she explored the dark dangerous existential place where sleeplessness took her, she’d traipse down the hall to the bathroom, and look at her weird sick face in the medicine chest mirror. Under the awful humming lights she could see how
other
she was, could see the wrinkles and bumps and pores.
    She had insomnia. Maybe it was hereditary; her mother had it too. The fear of not sleeping kept her awake until the early hours. Just last