She was tired and hot—summer had come early to the city this year—but she was also very happy. Curled in one arm was a little bag of groceries. Poking out of the top was a sheaf of yellow fliers, announcing the daughters and Sisters Swing into Summer Picnic and Concert. Rosie had gone by D & S to tell them how her first day at work had gone (she was all but bursting with it), and as she was leaving, Robin St. James had asked her if she would take a handful of fliers and try to place them with the storekeepers in her neighborhood. Rosie, trying hard not to show how thrilled she was just to have a neighborhood, agreed to get as many up as she could.
“You’re a lifesaver,” Robin said. She was in charge of ticket sales this year, and had made no secret of the fact that so far they weren’t going very well. “And if anybody asks you, Rosie, tell them there are no teenage runaways here, and that we’re not dykes. Those stories’re half the problem with sales. Will you do that?”
“Sure,” Rosie had replied, knowing she’d do no such thing. She couldn’t imagine giving a storekeeper she had never met before a lecture on what Daughters and Sisters was all about... and what it wasn’t all about.
But I can say they’re nice women, she thought, turning on the fan in the corner and then opening the fridge to put away her few things. Then, out loud: “No, I’ll say ladies. Nice ladies.”
Sure, that was probably a better idea. Men—especially those past forty—for some reason felt more comfortable with that word than they did with women. It was silly (and the way some women fussed and clucked over the semantics was even sillier, in Rose’s opinion), but thinking about it called up a sudden memory: how Norman talked about the prostitutes he sometimes busted. He never called them ladies (that was the word he used when talking about the wives of his colleagues, as in “Bill Jessup’s wife’s a real nice lady”); he never called them women, either. He called them the gals. The gals this and the gals that. She had never realized until this moment how much she had hated that hard little back-of-the-throat word. Gals. Like a sound you might make when you were trying hard not to vomit.
Forget him, Rosie, he’s not here. He’s not going to be here.
As always, this simple thought filled her with joy, amazement, and gratitude. She had been told—mostly in the Therapy Circle at D & S—that these euphoric feelings would pass, but she found that hard to believe. She was on her own. She had escaped the monster. She was free.
Rosie closed the refrigerator door, turned around, and looked across her room. The furnishings were minimal and the decorations—except for her picture—were nonexistent, but she still saw nothing which did not make her want to crow with delight. There were pretty cream-colored walls that Norman Daniels had never seen, there was a chair from which Norman Daniels had never pushed her for “being smart,” there was a TV Norman Daniels had never watched, sneering at the news or laughing along with reruns of All in the Family and Cheers. Best of all, there was not a single corner where she’d sat crying and reminding herself to vomit into her apron if she got sick to her stomach. Because he wasn’t here. He wasn’t going to be here.
“I’m on my own,” Rosie murmured ... and then actually hugged herself with joy.
She walked across the room to the picture. The blonde woman’s chiton seemed almost to glow in the late-spring light. And she was a woman, Rosie thought. Not a lady, and most certainly not a gal. She stood up there on her hill, looking fearlessly down at the ruined temple and the tumbled gods...
Gods? But there’s only one ... isn’t there?
No, she saw, there were actually two—the one peering serenely up at the thunderheads from its place near the fallen pillar, and another one, way over to the right. This one was gazing sideways, through the tall grass. You could just see the white curve of stone brow, the orbit of one eye, and the lobe of an ear; the rest was hidden. She hadn’t noticed this one until now, but what of that? There were probably lots of things in the picture she hadn’t noticed yet, lots of little details—it was like one of