Rosalie

By Raanan Geberer
First Published in `Wings' Magazine

It was May 1974. I was on the bus coming back to New York City from the State University at Albany. As always, the ride was an excruciatingly long, boring four hours. In my three years at college, I must have taken this bus at least 40 times. Also as usual, I started looking around for someone to talk to. There were always college-age kids to talk to. There might even be a girl.
Hearing loud laughter, I looked in back of me. Three kids—a tall, long-haired guy in a Syracuse sweatshirt with movie-star looks and two tall blonde girls with tight pants and revealing T-shirts—were talking. The boy talked loudly and overconfidently over the din of the motor, and the girls smiled at him. He was talking about George Harrison and Rod Stewart. I looked at him with hostility. Why should girls admire such a loud, aggressive person and ignore a shy, nervous guy like myself without giving me a chance?, I wondered for the thousandth time. "And then I did some work as a backup pianist for Elton John," the guy said. Oh come on, I thought to myself, give me a break! Elton John is a piano player!
Reluctantly conceding that the girls were totally enthralled with the ersatz piano player, I looked around the bus for someone else. Two rows in front of me, I noticed a short, chubby, very buxom girl with long, chestnut-brown hair, a hippie-type peasant blouse and a long denim skirt. She was reading a copy of "Remembrance of Things Past." She looked shy but intense, much more my speed than the two blonde girls. I counted to three, got my courage up, left my seat, stooped over to avoid the bus's low ceiling, and moved to the seat next to her.
"Hi," I said to her, "I'm Steve, from SUNY Albany. I see you're reading `Remembrance of Things Past.' She looked up, and with a nervous expression in her eyes, said hello in a low, tentative voice. She went back to reading her book. But 5 minutes later, she introduced herself, and little by little, we got into a conversation. Her name was Rosalie Rosenberg, and was a sophomore at Plattsburgh, a year younger than me. That is, she had been a sophomore until January, when she decided to drop out for awhile and take some time off to travel. She was going to her mother's house in Long Beach, but probably would leave as soon as possible to do some more traveling.
"But you can call me: I'll probably be home by next month," she said, handing me a folded-up piece of paper with her name and two phone numbers. "The first is our regular apartment in Flushing, but the second is our summer house in Long Beach, where I'll probably be."
She smiled, and went back to her book. Soon, the bus was going over the George Washington Bridge. I got off right afterward, at the Uptown Port Authority terminal on 178th Street; Rosalie stayed on to go the main bus terminal downtown. All the way home from the terminal, I felt elated: I hadn't gone out with anyone for more than a year.
I called next week. "I'm sorry, I don't know where she is. She was here for two days and left," said a woman I assumed to be her mother, in a curt, businesslike voice and a hint of a British accent. I called again in two weeks, and received the same reply. I began to worry -- maybe she was dead. I called a third time the last week of June. And this time, Rosalie answered the phone.
"Oh, I just got in two days ago," she told me. "I was back at Plattsburgh for awhile, visiting my friend whom I haven't seen in a long time." I talked to her a little more and made a date for that Saturday at 1 o'clock. "You just take the Long Island Railroad to Long Beach—it's about six dollars and runs every half hour—and take the West End bus about 12 blocks until you reach Susquehanna Street, and we're at 88 Susquehanna. It's not the greatest part of town—we don't have much money, but mother says since we're educated, we just say we're `Temporarily without funds,'" she said with laugh.
"Oh," she added, "I work in one of those little booths at the entrance to the beach on weekday mornings during the summer, so I can get you onto the beach for free." I was deliriously happy.
A few days later, I went out to Long Beach and took the little bus. The town wasn't like any of the suburban towns where my college friends lived. A block away, on the boardwalk, I glimpsed a small amusement park with a Ferris wheel. The houses were made of stucco, like in Miami Beach. On every other block, there was a rundown old hotel that had been turned into a nursing home. As I headed west, the houses got smaller and shabbier. Here and there, they were interrupted by sandy, empty lots that seemed like extensions of the beach.
When I saw Susquehanna Street, I turned left into a row of tiny wooden one-story houses that were more like bungalows. Soon, I found number 88. It looked pretty beat up and obviously hadn't been painted in quite a few years. But a small, well-tended garden of forsythias, petunias and roses livened the scene considerably. I saw the name "Rosenberg" painted onto the door in gothic lettering.
I knocked on the door. A small, thin woman with gray hair answered. "I'm Steve Rothstein, Rosalie's friend," I mumbled, embarrassed. "Rosalie," the woman cried out, without smiling, and then vanished into the rear of the house. Through another door, Rosalie entered, smiling, wearing an all-denim outfit. "I hope you got here OK," she said. "Come, I'll give you the grand tour."
I looked about the living room. There were several dusty bookcases of dog-eared books. Most were 20th-century English and American novels. Against the far wall stood an old upright piano with several keys missing. Alongside the piano, a clarinet.
Rosalie then led me into her room. It was very tiny and Spartan--there was very little there except for Rosalie's single bed, a small bookcase containing her schoolbooks and a violin leaning against the wall. A table held an ancient portable mono record player that had a picture of two kids Lindy-hopping, the girl with a pony tail, and the words "rock and roll." Rosalie's few records were in a cardboard box nearby, and I sneaked a look. They were either classical or stuff like Joan Baez, Judy Collins or Joni Mitchell--no rock except for one Beatles album and one Wings album. "Oh, you're looking at the records," Rosalie said, giggling. "That needle hasn't been changed in 10 years!"
Rosalie told me a little about the family. She had a brother at Yale law school; he rarely spoke to or came to see Rosalie and their mother. Her mother, born in Belgium, was a music teacher. Her father, who was born in England, died in a car accident when Rosalie was 6.
"I remember how he used to call me," she said.. "He said, Ro-sie! Ro-sie!" She stared into space.
Suddenly, she became cheerful. "Okay," she said. "Let's go to the beach." We took our bags, and walked to the boardwalk.
Approaching the nearest booth, Rosalie just flashed her badge, and in we went. We changed clothes at the bathhouse. I was impressed with the cleanliness of the beach compared to the city beaches and, most of all, the gigantic waves. For the next three hours we went into the waves, lay in the sun, and talked. At the end, I even got the courage to put my arm around Rosalie, and she just smiled coyly. After we changed back into our street clothes, we took a walk on the boardwalk, hand in hand. If only those guys from school could see me now, I thought happily.
Soon, I was going out there every weekend. Usually, I returned the same day that I came, although once I slept over on a little cot in the living room. And starting the next week, we started playing around. It was easy because her mother frequently was absent for hours--she, too, worked at one of the beach entry booths. Rosalie would strip to the waist, revealing her gigantic breasts, which I loved, and her protruding stomach, which I didn't. But she wouldn't let me make love to her. As a matter of fact, she rarely let me kiss her on the lips. "I have to save something for the man I eventually love," she explained. I would have to meet one of the few girls that are still like this, I said to myself.
Once she let me lie next to her naked after I promised I wouldn't have sex with her, but it made her so nervous that we didn't repeat the experiment. Still, it was pleasant to lie next to her half-clothed on the sandy bed. And my friends back in the city thought I was screwing her, which was something. They only met her once, when I took her to a party at Angelo's house in the East Bronx. She slept over on the living room couch at my parents' Inwood apartment, but we didn't do anything because my parents were there. She got along well with my friends, although she seemed not to have any friends of her own other than the one at Plattsburgh.
I knew she didn't like rock music, but I thought she might like jazz, so I bought my Lester Young album and my Charlie Christian album one day. "Euuh!" Rosalie exclaimed when she heard them. "Listen to them, slurring those notes. I can play better than that!" Still, she liked it when I played rock or jazz on the beat-up piano. "You know, you're really a different person when you start to play," she said. "Your eyes light up...." My playing inspired Rosalie's creative urge as well. "Yesterday, I picked up my violin for the first time in four years and started playing Mozart," she said. "Mother was pleased."
Most of the time, we didn't do much but hang around the beach. There just wasn't that much to do on the West End of Long Beach. A few times, we went to one of the Italian restaurants near the railroad station. Another time, we went to an antique store a few blocks away. Rosalie's neighborhood was so bereft of commerce that there was only one food store: the "Three Neapolitan Brothers" fruit and grocery store on the next block. The noisy old refrigerator barely kept the soda cold, but the peaches were so ripe and soft.
The second week in August, Rosalie looked at me and said, "You look like someone who masturbates a lot," she said. "What?" I asked. "Yeah," she said. "You have those dark circles under your eyes, just like someone who masturbates a lot." I didn't know what to say, so I said nothing.
The next week, as we were making out, Rosalie suddenly said, "I don't really care for you." "What?" I said, surprised more than anything else. "I mean," she said, "that if I'm going to get really involved with a man, I fantasize someone from a top-rated school, like Harvard or Columbia, tall, blond, preferably not Jewish. I'm only half Jewish, you know."
I was so stunned that I couldn't find the words to reply, but from that time on, I became somewhat less keen on Rosalie, although I continued to go out there. The last weekend of the season, she said to me, "You know, mother thinks you're just using me to get to the beach." By then, there was some truth to what she said.
Soon after that, I went up back up to Albany. Rosalie had decided not to go back to Plattsburgh—she would enroll at Hunter College in Manhattan while living with her mother in their regular Flushing apartment.
I developed a case of unrequited love for another girl up at school, but I didn't completely forget Rosalie. In early October, I called her from school. She had missed some deadlines, so she ended up enrolling for only one course at Hunter and, as she put it, "Hanging out with my mother most of the time." I began to worry about her.
When I came home for Thanksgiving, I made a date to see her. We met near Hunter College. While we were walking through Midtown, she pointed to a car. "Look," she said, "this car is as big in the back as it is in the front. Are the cars in New York bigger in the back than the cars in Long Island?" Again, I was so shocked I could give no answer.
I called her again during Christmas vacation. This time, her mother answered. "I'm sorry," she said, "but Rosalie has run into some problems, and has checked into the Vanderbilt psychiatric institution and can't be disturbed. I'll tell her you called." She hung up. Six months later, I called to see if Rosalie was back. She was, but she merely mumbled something unintelligible and hung up.
* * *
It was 10 years later. I was working at two part-time newspaper jobs, trying to make ends meet. One Sunday, one of the papers, the Jewish Standard, sent me out to Long Beach to cover an event involving Russian Jews at the Long Beach YMHA. After the event ended, I decided to walk west to take a look at the Rosenberg house. I wasn't sure whether I even wanted to try and see Rosalie. Her number was no longer listed. Then again, maybe she was no longer living with her mother, maybe she had moved out, even gotten married. I didn't know if I could take her or her mother's hostility. But I was curious.
In Long Beach, signs of gentrification were everywhere. Posters advertised space in a new mini-mall on the site of the old amusement park. Co-op apartment buildings had sprouted up in two empty lots. But I still wasn't prepared for what I saw when I turned onto Susquehanna Street. The Rosenberg house was boarded up with a "For Sale" sign, and its once-tidy garden was overgrown with weeds.
Oh well, I thought, dismayed. I might as well get a Coke. I started walking toward the Three Neapolitan Brothers. But when I got there, it wasn't--a beauty salon with a pink stucco facade stood in its place.
I waved to a 14- or 15-year-old boy who was passing by. "Hey," I asked, "you know what happened to the Three Neapolitan Brothers?"
The kid turned toward me. "Where have you been?" he answered. "That burned down years ago!"