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Witnessing - Part One

By Jennifer S. Davis

The house sits at the end of a cul-de-sac, the last of a chain of McMansions modeled after Mediterranean villas. The yard is treeless, the live oaks Rose remembers covering this area in her childhood cleared to facilitate rapid construction. Bared and vulnerable to the morning sun, the pink stucco house looks vulnerable, sunburned. If Rose had the money, she would have done things differently, something she thinks about often. Left the trees. Built a little hedge of azaleas. Maybe even a gazebo in the front yard. Nothing too flashy, just a nice, shady place to kick back on a warm summer afternoon.

Before Rose can ring the bell, the door opens. Cecilia stands in the doorway in a long silk nightgown and a scarlet wig styled in a pageboy.

"You're here," she says. "That's good." A heart-shaped birthmark sinks into the crease of her smile. Rose has never seen her close up in person. She didn't expect her to be so striking.

Cecilia turns her back to Rose and begins walking through the vaulted foyer. "We'll talk in my bedroom so I can lie down," she says over her shoulder. "I assume you know where it is."

In fact, Rose has only been inside the house once. Cecilia was in the hospital at the time, and Baxter responded, as he usually does when Cecilia suffers a setback, by getting radiantly soused at dinner. Rose had to drive him home and help him into bed, where they'd made love gravely. After he passed out, she'd wandered around the silent house, studying the photos of Baxter and Cecilia in Paris, Rome, Bangkok, reading the little notes they scattered around the house for each other. (You are the soul of my world. I love you like pina coladas on the beach at sunset. Remember the corn maze in Kansas?) Overwhelmed, Rose hid in the master bedroom for almost an hour, rummaging through drawers, looking for something -- pimple cream, yeast infection medicine -- anything to make Cecilia seem base and ordinary, because strangely, the sicker Cecilia gets, the more ethereal she becomes to Baxter.

"Come here." Cecilia pats the velvet bedspread as she sits. "If you stand, it would only be polite for me to stand, and to be frank, I don't think I'm able."

Rose sits on the bed; the bells on her Christmas sweater jingle stupidly. Cecilia's flank is so close that the heat is perceptible. She smells of lavender and vanilla. Rose discreetly sniffs her own wrist: dishwashing detergent and fingernail polish remover.

"I thought you'd be blonder," Cecilia says. She moves as if she's going to touch Rose's hair, then seems to reconsider, her hand lingering in midair. "From what Baxter said about you, I mean. Although your shade is quite nice."

"Why am I here?" Rose blurts out. When Cecilia called the night before and asked Rose to come over, Rose had been too shocked to question her, too nervous to mumble anything other than yes. She'd assumed that Cecilia wanted to ask about the affair, but after thinking about it, she couldn't imagine that there was anything that Baxter wouldn't tell his wife himself.

"I don't know," Cecilia says. "Why are you here? Why are any of us here, that's the real question, huh?" She tosses her skeletal arms into the air and tilts her head back as if addressing the gods. Then she stares at Rose, deadly serious, waiting for an answer. Tiny red veins pop against the white of her eyeballs; her pupils are dilated, so large Rose feels as if she could dive into them. Cecilia is extraordinarily high.

"You asked me to come," Rose says. "I thought you might have something important to tell me. Something about Baxter." Three weeks ago, he'd sent flowers to Rose's work with a note about how special her heart was and how she'd go far in the world. She hasn't heard from him since.

"I did, didn't I?" Cecilia says softly. She stares out the bay window. Two neighborhood girls, out of school for Christmas break, are poking something with a stick in the drainage ditch. There is not a cloud in the sky. "It's a beautiful day," she says finally. "Too hot for December, but beautiful all the same. When Baxter and I were first married, he surprised me with a snow machine at Christmas. He set it up right at the front door so some would blow in the living room. My family's been down here forever. I'd never seen more than a powdering of snow." She turns to Rose. "That was a nice thing for him to do, I suppose, although I had to clean up the carpet."

"I hate cold," Rose says. "It's, well, it's cold."

Cecilia laughs as if this is the funniest thing she's ever heard. She slaps Rose's thigh, then wags her finger like Rose is a mischievous girl who just tried to outsmart an adult, and suddenly, Rose is tired. She couldn't sleep after Cecilia's phone call last night. And she's running late. Today's her company Christmas party. A Toyota dealership, where Rose processes orders for parts. (And what do you do? men ask her at bars on the occasional nights she goes out, looking for something better. Parts, she says, trying to sound cryptically funny and sexy, I do parts.)

"Well you know I approve of you tremendously," Cecilia says. "I'm grateful Baxter has had someone to talk to through all of this. It's been quite the ordeal."

"Baxter said you didn't mind," Rose says. She studies her tennis shoes, which she'd decorated in sequined Christmas trees. It had seemed clever at the time, an idea she got out of some ladies' magazine, but now, the misshapen trees horrify her. "I didn't believe him at first."

Baxter admitted that Cecilia found out about the affair, although he wouldn't mention how, last Christmas. They were supposed to exchange gifts that evening, toast to the end of the year, the beginning of the new. Instead, they sat on opposite ends of the sofa and opened their gifts guiltily. Something had shifted. Rose felt strange about Cecilia knowing, as if she and Baxter had been set up by a doting aunt. When Baxter began offering little tidbits of advice from Cecilia -- how maybe Rose should go back to school for her bachelor's, or how she shouldn't let her mother ride her so hard -- Rose told him she wasn't a pet project and threatened to leave him. But by then, it was too late. She already loved him in that mysterious way most love -- not quite able to explain the why.

"It's all very French, don't you think?" Cecilia grins. "My people are Scotch-Irish, but maybe I have a Parisian soul. I've been told that before, you know."

"I'm a Danish," Rose says, then realizes that she's just announced she's a pastry.

"Enough of Baxter," Cecilia says with a sweep of her arm. She lays herself lengthwise on the bed, a mound of satin-covered pillows supporting her, the bottoms of her feet pressed firmly against Rose's thigh. She wiggles her toes, the nails painted bright blue, the color a teenager would choose. "I'm sure two intelligent women can find something more interesting to talk about than a man. This is the age of feminism, you know." She laughs. Balls her hand and punches the air. "Girrrrrrrl power. Or whatever nonsense the kids say these days."

"I need to go," Rose says. She points to the dancing elves on her sweater. "It's the company Christmas party--"

"How old are you?" Cecilia says. "Twenty-nine, thirty?"

"Thirty-two." It sounds strange, the number. Rose sometimes forgets how old she is. She can still remember the junior college boys who hung around her high school some afternoons asking her age, her teasing voice when she responded Sixteen. That was half a lifetime ago, and if pressed, Rose is not sure if she could account for most of it.

"Well that's young," Cecilia says. "You don't think it is now, but you will. I'm fifty-six. When you're young, you never think you'll be fifty, then one day, you just are. Which is fine. But this you never expect." Cecilia reaches under her pillow, pulls out what looks like a fanny pack and throws it onto Rose's lap. "My friendly travel-size chemo. Goes anywhere you go. When it comes to this, you start thinking and doing things you never considered. Desperate things. But, then again, I'm sure you never thought you'd be single in your thirties and having an affair with a married man. Do you understand what I'm saying?"