Rosemary's Rain

Something about my Aunt Rosemary

After my mother was gone, my father’s mother and his sister Rosemary came to live with us. Slowly I realized that all was not well with my Aunt Rosemary, who was twenty years old when I was born. I was not the only one who found it difficult to comprehend her mangled speech. Only her mother, my grandmother, readily knew what Rosemary was trying to say.

I made out some of it. If someone said, "Looks like it's going to be a rainy day," Rosemary said, as if affronted by an absurdity, "T'is not." I've never heard anyone else use that expression, though I've seen it in old books. At the time it was simply one of the things I could understand that Rosemary said. More often, consonants and whole syllables were missing, and trying to take her meaning was like doing a jigsaw puzzle with a quarter of the pieces missing.

I did not think of Rosemary as young or old, nor as an old maid. She was indeed a grownup, that was evident from her height, and she was not married. Nor did she have a job. I remember her sitting, pencil in hand, on the couch with the afghan over the back, neatly filling in the letters on the cover of a "True Romance" magazine. Sometimes she just sat and watched the children skating the sidewalk that bordered our yard. Although both my grandmother and my father planted and tended things in the yard, I don't remember Rosemary working in the garden. She must have helped my grandmother with the cooking, but I don't remember her in the kitchen, either.

If my grandmother needed rickrack to trim an apron, or a new thimble, she took Rosemary and me with her to the corner five and dime. Rosemary clutched her black patent purse with the double-gold-ball snap at the top, pulling its flat surface tight against her chest, as if to hide her bosom. My grandmother might ask her to go find some green thread,  and she would do it, but Rosemary never actually made the purchase. And although I know she had a roll of currency in her snap-shut coin purse inside the black patent bag, I never saw Rosemary spend any money.

I thought that maybe Rosemary was only looking at the pictures in the magazines my grandmother brought to her. Maybe not actually reading.

I had heard at school about children who had mental retardation, as if it were a disease. As delicately as possible, I asked my grandmother one day in the kitchen if Rosemary might be mentally retarded. I thought that perhaps no one had ever considered the possibility. My grandmother grew grave and spoke to me as if I were grownup. "Yes, she is retarded," she said quietly. Then she told me how when Rosemary was a baby only two years old she had a high fever. Meningitis, the doctors called it years after the fact. And that was probably the cause of it.

"Well, can she read?" I asked.

Grandma wiped with the corner of her apron at the smudge on the chrome of the stove. "Yes, I think she reads, at least a little. She likes the romance and movie magazines I bring her." The smudge was gone, the chrome shining, but my grandmother kept rubbing it with the apron. "I can't be sure, because she won't read out loud to me. Sometimes she tells me something about Frank Sinatra, but she might have learned it from the pictures. Or she might have heard it on the radio."

I learned that Rosemary had stayed in school and graduated from the eighth grade. But it was only because the teachers passed her along each year to keep her with kids her own age. She was no trouble in the classroom. She sat quietly and was well behaved. Her teachers were kind, and soon they stopped calling on her in class, to spare her the humiliation. No one could understand her anyway, so what was the point?

To me this sounded horrible. Horrible beyond endurance. I could barely contain myself in school and was always exploding with things I needed to express. I knew the answers, and even when I did not, I wanted to talk. But my Aunt Rosemary had sat there year after year, neither speaking nor comprehending.

"How did she stand it?" I begged my grandmother. "I would have gone insane."

My grandmother made an almost imperceptible nod. "Into each life some rain must fall." She slapped at the stove's chrome with the apron, as if to say she'd polished it quite enough for one day, and told me to go outside and play.

The other kids in the neighborhood also realized there was something different about Rosemary. Once Rosemary walked to the drug store with me, and several of the neighbor kids formed a ring around us, staying with us and chanting "Why do you talk funny?" Rosemary made no reply but kept on walking, as if she did not hear. It was a skill she had learned as a child.

I had not learned it, though. I chased after the kids, shouting at them with retorts such as "You're the one who talks funny!"

When Judy Overhill from across the street kept up her taunts, I caught her and pulled her hair and didn't let go until she said "I take it back! I take it back!"