Free Rosie O'Dell by Bill Rowe Page A

that’s it.”
    “That sounds right,” I said.
    “I heard Daddy and his friends saying that at a party at our house. That was
     the same night I heard one woman tell him that the sexual imagery in his poems
     was erotically powerful enough to make women swoon orgasmically at his public
     readings.”
    “Hmm,” I responded sagely. “Interesting.”
    “Very.” But getting back to the word “exquisite,” Rosie continued, what was
     important to her now were the years she’d had with her father when she had
     discovered from him the three exquisite things she would always treasure most in
     life: exquisite action to excite the body and brain, exquisite books to engross
     the mind and spirit, and exquisite love to swell the heart and soul.
    Her need for exciting action had come from being with her father in his canoe
     on a river, happily frightened out of her wits cascading from the mountains down
     to the sea.
    Her esteem for engrossing books had begun with her father’s bedtimereadings to her and Pagan. He’d make them squirm with pleasure
     in their side-by-side beds by starting with, “All right then, ladies, let’s see
     if I can put you to sleep with this story, because if I can, that’s all the
     proof we’ll need that it’s a flop as literature.” He never put them to
     sleep.
    Her fascination with love had formed during the months before his death, after
     she’d been secretly rummaging in the bookcase in her parents’ bedroom and came
     across a volume of his poetry. She used to lock herself in the bathroom every
     day and sit on the laundry hamper and read and reread and learn by heart another
     of his poems before peeping out to make sure no one was upstairs so that she
     could sneak the book back to its shelf. It was this third treasured exquisite
     thing of Rosie’s that occupied her thoughts most that summer, and would agitate
     me for years ahead.
    She told me she could not stop herself from imagining that she would be
     grief-stricken unto death unless she was saved by impassioned love. What I
     wanted to know was what did she mean by impassioned love? To take one example, I
     asked, did she think our love for each other was impassioned love? Our love was
     wonderful, she said, really, really great. It had saved her from going around
     the bend. But we did have to realize that so far in life we were just kids. So
     what was she talking about, I demanded— sex? No, no, she replied, it had nothing
     whatever to do with physical sex. Like me, she had long had an academic concept,
     of course, of physical mating between men and women learned from prescribed
     books at home and in school, augmented by dirty discussions and speculations
     with friends, but none of her knowledge in that area comprised what she meant by
     impassioned love now. In fact, all that physical stuff seemed to belong to a
     different race on a different planet that she had merely read about.
    Her mother had confirmed to her that when she entered puberty in months to come
     she would be experiencing novel feelings that she should talk to her about, but
     all that was irrelevant for the present, stored in a part of her mind separate
     from present reality, for the distant future when she and I would be grown up
     and married and living together with our children in a house of our own. I liked
     the sound of that, until she went on that she could not really say, at least not
     right now, what she actually meant by impassioned love. She only knew that she
     had a feeling inside her which identified it perfectly, but she did not
     understand it enough yet to put it into words. Well, I said, raising my voice
     and getting up from beside her, when she got around to putting it into words,
     would she mind letting me in on the big secret?
    Rosie jumped up herself and put her arms around me. “Don’t get
     mad, Tommy,” she said. “That’s just me—a weird feeling I have that’s got
     nothing to do with me and you. I love you