(no subject)
“You’re going out with James to the party at Alyssa’s,” Rosalind’s father states from where he leans near the front door.
Rosalind pats her front pocket to make sure she has her license and the money she’ll owe Sam after tonight. She doesn’t bother wondering how her father knows that Alyssa is having a party as she searches under the sofa cushions for her keys. She briefly considers lying and then passes it off as too much effort.
“Yep,” she says brightly when she spots her keys on the coffee table.
“You’re driving.”
He doesn’t even bother sounding disappointed (and she’s proud of him for that - repulsive as he can be, at least he’s no hypocrite), instead he just sounds so… tired. Like a child who missed his nap. Tired to the point of whining.
“Well, I could let James drive me home but he’d probably wrap my car into a loving embrace around a fucking pine tree. Chill out, I’ve got school tomorrow, I’ll be responsible.”
He takes a deep breath and she freezes, instantly furious as she feels him switch into his father act.
“I don’t like how he’s been treating you, what he’s done to you, who you’re becoming. Drinking on school nights, cussing all the time, you smell like cigarettes every second-”
“I’m sorry?" She cuts him off, "A failed marriage, a whore on the side, a lost job, and you have the gall to try to purge me of my obscenities?”
He blinks, tries to reassemble his coagulated thoughts, and leans forward to rest his weary hand on the sofa.
“I just think you can do better, deserve better, than a cheating heroine addict-”
“‘Lacking the basics of personal hygiene’, Jesus Christ, I KNOW, God you’re starting to sound like Mom. Leave him the fuck alone, Christ leave ME the fuck alone.”
She grabs the keys and peels past him, slamming the door in his resigned face.
Written on the bathroom mirror in blood-tinted lipstick,
“I deserve more than a husband too drunk to know which of his women he’s talking to.”
Rosalind leans heavily on the door frame for a moment as she surveys the damage in her bathroom. Her father lays snoring, head at the base of the porcelain throne, dried vomit creating a path from the seat of the toilet to his head. She knows that her mother left him like this, and from the smell didn’t even bother to flush whatever he managed to get inside the toilet bowl.
A last ember of vindictive spite burns in her, and she turns to stumble away to her own bed. But then she sighs and revolves slowly back. She tears a paper towel off the roll on the counter and runs it under the faucet. Crouching next to his balding head, she turns his snoring face towards her and begins to wipe the crusting bile from his cheek.
Rosalind tosses the sullied paper towel into the grimy metal wastebasket and hooks her arms under his armpits to drag him out of the bathroom, into the living room. She manages to drag his torso onto the sofa, but before she can get his legs up as well, his chest rolls with a thud onto the floor.
“Fuck,” she breathes, and her eyes flicker to the dark doorway of her mother’s room. She hears her mother shift and Rosalind knows that she must have woken up.
Suddenly her face screws up into anger; her teeth grit and she nearly screams in fury at the bitch too stubborn to help her get her father onto the couch.
Rosalind picks up her father’s torso once more and flings it onto the sofa. Before it can begin to roll, she whips to the other half of his body and throws it on the sofa’s cushions as well. She stands there, panting and shaking and ruing that last gulp of vodka. She closes her thin eyelids and puts trembling hands out, too dizzy to move on.
She opens her eyes and looks hard at her father. She tries to find her tired anger, the rage that hummed inside her when they last spoke.
Instead, Rosalind remembers pictures.
A picture of him on the sofa of another house, purple-black bags under his eyes a mile long, a look of weary ecstasy on his face, as though he’d never been more tired nor felt more alive. On his right arm, herself, barely three days old; on his left, her brother, eighteen months. A whisper of a smile speaks from the corner of her lips and the fire of anger sinks below.
She meanders blankly back to the bathroom, with a vague idea of finishing the job: cleaning and flushing the toilet, wiping the lipstick off before it stains.
Instead, Rosalind halts in front of the mirror. She sees a blurred vision of herself through the interstices of the lipstick. She blinks, oddly surprised to see tears on her cheeks, red with the light of the mirror. She touches a shaking finger to one, like picking an apple.
Rosalind remembers her father, stealing an apple from a neighbor’s orchard for his children; face lighted up in mischievous glee, as content as the playful children themselves. The anger sinks deeper below the depths and she slumps forward into the age-weary slumber of a woman too old for her tears.