1.
The first time Leo said he was taking her to her mother’s. Then he stopped in front of a place she’d always thought was a prison.
Inside: weeping walls and voice noise. Smiles on trays and straps at the ready.
Doctors asked if she knew who was president.
“Roosevelt.”
“And the date?”
In the next bed, Mrs. Finn had to be tied down.
Rosaleen slept underwater and woke like someone drowning.
To get out, you must volunteer for work duty keep eyes down keep quiet never cry. Her sister came and washed her hair, and asked, “How will you be when you go home?”
Careful, she thought, having learned the rules, except this one: how to make Leo kind.
2.
Wary children with questions. The oldest boy didn’t speak. The second son embraced her, and said, “I’m hungry. Where were you?”
The girls followed her from kitchen to porch to kitchen for days.
Work, keep your eyes down, don’t cry.
“No,” her sister said, “Look up, Rosaleen, you have to be part of the world.”
When she looked up she saw the sled speeding into traffic. Her oldest yelled. She ran faster, threw herself on to the younger, wrecked boy, so no one would have to see the red mess in the soft new snow.
3.
When she came back from the asylum the worst time, the time with needles full of insulin and her face swelling like a sponge, Patrick, her only remaining boy, sniffed her, touched her cracked lips, and looked at her bulging body in horror.
One girl asked, “Can we go back to Aunt Alicia’s?”
“There’s not enough room.”
The other asked, “Where’s Daddy?”
She didn’t know. But she knew: Don’t cry.
4.
She lives from the heart now, since her mind is a stewed thing. Her writing looks like spaghetti.
Patrick signs permission slips and covers her with a blanket when she falls asleep in her chair. The girls blossom in the calm. “Does Daddy have to come back?” they ask.
She can’t read. She used to make rhymes. “Eileen, it seems/ has some dreams/A’s in spelling/without doing a thing.” Back then, she was better. “Hate has a sound,” she once wrote, “the slap of my cheek on the floor.” At least that’s what the words look like.
Does love have a sound?
“Mama? Is Daddy coming back?”
What happened to her story, the one inside her mind? Life happens around her now, as if she’s a chair in someone else’s house. But the rules stick with her, like scabs inside.
Honor thy husband. Or is it father? No matter: she takes Leo and his bottle back. The children disappear behind bedroom doors, then neighbors’ doors. Her only boy calls her stupid and leaves; returns, punches Leo, and leaves. Then Leo leaves.
5.
Days later, left by herself, Rosaleen sinks, like everything in the fetid Meadowlands. Even the church is sinking sideways, the sidewalks crack underfoot, the air tastes like rotting fish and turpentine. Leo once said that when Satan finished digging Hell, he made the Meadowlands with the leftover sludge.
Her rules run through her mind as she walks home from her job sweeping up hair at the salon: work, keep quiet, look up.
Look up!
Leo is in his battered car, cruising slow, coming this way.
Look this way, that. The grocer is closed.
Honor thy husband. Be a good girl. Step under the streetlamp, let him see.
But suddenly hands on her arm and orders from her boy:
“Stop! Mama! Are you crazy?” Sigh. “Oh, that’s right. You are crazy.”
“Let go!” Resist. Stumble. Step forward.
“Mama, no!”
Stop, sort. Honor? Love? Husbands? Sons?
Her perfect boy is still pulling her.
Is there a rule for this? Don’t whimper. There’s that. Don’t fight, as Patrick, much older now than a minute before, pulls again. And this: nod and love him, because that rule—love—has captured him, even though he doesn’t know it. So love him fiercely as he takes you to your sister’s place; love him as he hates you and fidgets on the porch, suffers your kiss, and vehemently melts into humid air.
Now watch the last swish of lilacs he’s brushed in his retreat. Linger in the window your sister has given you, along with a fresh notebook, a place to write new rules; then stand, stand steady, and decide on tea in the kitchen as a battered car parks to wait through the night.
Lee Reilly has won recognition from Writers at Work, the Barbara Deming Fund, and other arts organizations. Online, you can find her work in Hippocampus, SmokeLong Quarterly, Flexible Persona, the London Independent Story Prize, and elsewhere. The author of two nonfiction books, she’s at work on a memoir about her life as an eldercare worker.
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