Short story: “Strategy of Tension”

One of Becky Zylberberg’s roommates, Rosie Distano, read feminist genre fiction from the eighties and nineties with titles like Nights at the Circus and Tipping the Velvet; she had been in, sequentially, a feminist punk band called Clitemnestra, a Wiccan folk-metal band called Dorothy Clusterfuck, an all-female symphonic metal cover band called Tinúviel, and an agrarian anarchocommunist agitprop band called Tractor Hacker, in addition to putting her own songs on Soundcloud under the name Anni DiPiombo. Raised Italian Catholic among ravioli-battening nonnas and Seaside Heights douchebags (hence the first name, which in full was Rosaria), she had soldiered on through her own doubts about the standard corpus of controversial social teachings into her very early twenties, then bolted from the Church for the neopagan community halfway through her junior-year spring at UMass Amherst because of some quiddity in Pope Francis’s diplomatic relationship with a Southeast Asian dictator Becky had never heard of. These days she described herself as a hopeful agnostic on her good days and a Freudo-Marxist on her bad ones, even though since starting her graduate studies at la Sapienza she had also started going to Mass at Santa Maria Maggiore about once every six weeks. She was nominally working towards a doctorate in international relations with a focus on the European Union, but most of what she actually wrote was a series of thematically linked short stories that she described as satirical but Becky thought of as pretentious.

            Rosie’s current short story was inspired by something she was reading in her coursework about “Operation Gladio,” a NATO stay-behind operation that had been meant to keep Italy in the Western Bloc, ideally with a deeply entrenched center-right government (only some of which had gone according to plan), during the Cold War. The preexisting literary chronicler of this history in Italy par excellence was Umberto Eco, who had been dead for several years but who appeared as a character in Rosie’s short story through the conceit that the British novelist Sarah Waters, author of Tipping the Velvet and for all Becky knew possibly of Nights at the Circus as well, was contacting him via Ouija board. Waters, as she appeared as a character in the context of Rosie’s story, was exploring a departure from her usual subject matter, which was apparently woebegone British lesbians of past generations, to write a political thriller about a series of unfortunate events in the late 1970s in which Aldo Moro, an Italian political leader who had forged a power-sharing agreement between the Catholic center-right and the Italian Communist Party, had been kidnapped by Marxist hardliners, then abandoned to his captors by the rest of the Italian political establishment. At some point in this series of events a professor at the University of Bologna, Romano Prodi, himself a future Prime Minister of Italy, claimed to have contacted a then-recently-deceased politician named Giorgio La Pira in a séance and obtained from him the address where the Marxist hardliners were holding Moro. Such was the subject matter of Waters and Eco’s book in the context of Rosie’s story.

            Gorging herself on metafiction like this as she did, it was a miracle, Becky thought, that Rosie had time to go to class and do her research on top of these stories and her musical pursuits.

            “La Pira might be a saint one of these days, you know,” Jerry said to Rosie at one point.

            Jerry, Becky’s other roommate, was in full Yirmiyahu Polen. Like Rosie, he was a New Jerseyite by birth and to a certain extent by temperament, but at the time that the three of them had met at UMass he and his family had been living in the Amherst area for about three years and his parents had become heavily involved with a group that styled itself “Ethical Warrior Activists.” Certain other people involved with Ethical Warrior Activists—not Jerry’s parents—drove around a truck festooned with bumper stickers that said things like “Jesus Hearts Wikileaks” and “Hearing Crazy Voices? Turn Off Fox News,” the first of which had aged poorly in relation to the second. Jerry’s birth name was Jeremy; he had changed it to Yirmiyahu, which was the Hebrew form of Jeremiah, to follow through on a promise made to a Chabadnik rabbi over vodka shots on Purim. To this day he was perpetually mildly astonished that somebody named Rebekah Zylberberg was not actually Jewish. He had come to Rome a year and a half after Becky and Rosie, to work for some sort of think tank focusing on Christian-Jewish reconciliation. His music taste extended to “Video Killed the Radio Star” and some but not all music from early-2000s Japanese video games. He voted absentee at his parents’ address and had voted for Ted Cruz in the last Massachusetts presidential primary, then been a Hillary Clinton-Evan McMullin swing voter in November.

            About three days into Rosie’s work on her Sarah Waters Umberto Eco story, she suddenly asked Becky and Jerry to show her how to make a recipe for a sort of fish stew that they had found in a Sephardic Jewish cookbook earlier in the year and more or less regularly made for themselves, Rosie, and on a couple of occasions Rosie’s other friends ever since. They got the fish from a grocery store in Ostia whose regular clientele included seventy-year-old Communist Refoundation Party voters with full beards and man buns, svelte drag queens in lacy black minidresses and six-inch stilettos, and, on one occasion, the distracting lead singer from the band Lacuna Coil. The fish was made with a sauce that had a tomato base and several spices that in American cooking would have been associated with sweet fall flavors like apple and pumpkin. All three of them just called it “the tomato and cinnamon fish” rather than whatever the cookbook called it. Becky and Jerry had memorized the recipe very quickly and now felt comfortable making their own minor alterations to it, some of which they were happy to teach to Rosie if she wanted.

            “Okay, Rosie,” said Becky to Rosie, “at this point you just let it simmer and stir it intermittently. It’s supposed to cook down into a thicker sauce than it is currently. And we should be cooking the fish at the same time, ideally, but it doesn’t necessarily matter if we leave that for later in the process.”

            “Do we add any more seasoning?” asked Rosie.

            “No,” said Becky, “it’s supposed to taste mostly like the tomatoes and cinnamon. Trust us on this; the flavor combination is better than it sounds.”

            “I know. I’ve had it numbers of times. It’s just that I associate cinnamon mostly with these Christmas cookies my mom’s cousin makes,” said Rosie.

            “Yes, I think all of us have that mom’s cousin who makes Christmas cookies somewhere in our family tree,” said Becky. “Except Jerry—”

            “I do have an aunt on my dad’s side who always overdoes it with the blintzes on Shavuot,” Jerry said. He had, for this project, furnished the recipe, but was currently lounging on the couch in the living room into which the kitchen opened in a natural manner, listening to Billy Bragg, to whom somebody in his think tank (of all people) had recently introduced him, on those earbuds that Becky could never get to sit in her ears properly. “By the way,” he went on, shouting over the music as if the others could hear it too, “did you know that Rosie is in love?”

            “Jerry!” snapped Rosie in a way that confirmed it. She turned to Becky and there was a slight flush rising on her cheeks, visibly spreading over the course of seconds.

            Becky was not too surprised, but she was a little more surprised than she thought she probably should have been. It was a rare thing for Rosie to express strong emotions other than feminist outrage, thirst for love in the abstract without any particular object or target, and something that bore the same surface resemblance to religious ecstasy that dolphins bore to certain smaller and more docile sharks.

            “It’s with Maddalena,” said Rosie. “Maddalena Galluccio.”

            “Yes, I knew which Maddalena,” said Becky fatuously. “How many Maddalenas do we know?”

            This made things stranger, she thought to herself as she continued explaining the stirring and simmering to Rosie. Maddalena Galluccio was a little younger than them; she had just graduated with a baccalaureate in music and dance from some university in Abruzzo earlier this year, then moved to Rome to hack it in the arts scene here, a program of life that had not gone as planned so far in part because she self-described as a “bad Catholic” and made sure everyone knew it. Like many bad Catholics, Maddalena had an ambivalent relationship with the idea of the sanctity of human life; also like more bad Catholics than was commonly supposed, she had apparently been an intense supporter of the center-right coalition at the last election. The idea of Rosie being in love with Maddalena was in and of itself unsurprising and felt what Becky’s junior-year medieval lit professor might have called “behovely,” but it was behovely in the same way as were songs from Darkness on the Edge of Town played in a Polish fusion restaurant. It was a complete mystery to Becky whether or not Maddalena had any interest in women.

            It was while eating the tomato and cinnamon fish for dinner with Roman artichokes and hazelnut candy later that evening that it became clear to Becky from context that Jerry had some pretty fond feelings for Maddalena Galluccio also, and had probably brought up Rosie’s feelings in order to castigate his own.

            “What do you find so appealing about Maddalena, Rosie?” Becky asked as they ate the fish.

            “She just intrigues me,” said Rosie. “She’s an Italian original; I don’t think I could find her even in Seaside Heights.”

            “That’s racist,” said Becky archly.

            “Maybe so but I do feel that only she could be the way she is. Anybody who’s had a weird enough childhood and is afraid of their parents in just the right way can be a Rosie or a Jerry or a Becky, but it takes a special kind of person to be a Maddalena.”

            “If you say so.”

            “The first time I ever really noticed Maddalena,” Jerry cut in, “was that incident with Pedro a couple months ago. Do you remember that, Becky?”

            “All too well,” said Becky.

            “Surely ‘Pietro’?” said Rosie.

            “No,” said Becky, “his name is Pedro. I think he’s from Valencia. He’s a year older than Maddalena and first met her when she hiked the Camino de Santiago when she was twenty. I think they online dated for a while but the relationship didn’t survive the transition to meatspace when he moved to Rome. I actually wasn’t privy to what exactly happened with the two of them and Jerry, though, only that Jerry went out to Maddalena’s apartment late at night and came back muttering something about how attempting to attribute emotional significance to performing mitzvot is a form of idolatry. I think it behooves Jerry to give us the details.”

            “Well, there’s not a whole lot to tell,” said Jerry. “Maddalena and Pedro were both at a party somewhere near the Piazza Barberini and Maddalena had a little too much to drink and looked like she might hook up with this guy who looked a lot older than her and seemed aggressive. Pedro got really concerned for her so he roofied her.”

            “Oh God,” said Rosie with a revolted look on her face.

            “Hold on,” said Becky. “I’m interested in this ‘so’. He got concerned for her so he roofied her? Is ‘so’ really the word you want here, Jerry?”

            “Yes, actually,” said Jerry. “He took her back to her own apartment, put her to bed fully clothed, then sat in her kitchen and made himself an Aperol spritz and sat there nursing it like Humphrey Bogart while he waited for her to come to. At a certain point I came over because I’d arranged to watch a movie with her that night; she’d made two commitments for the same night, or something. I didn’t know her well yet at that point. She came to and Pedro explained the situation to her.”

            “And how did Maddalena, uh, react to this, this…you know,” said Rosie, so confused and disgusted that abstract nouns failed her.

            “She was a lot calmer and more philosophical about it than I would have expected, personally,” said Jerry. “She acted a little like she was a noble lady and she was giving us an audience.”

            “Oh, God,” said Rosie again.

            “We ended up watching a Rossellini movie and eating jam sandwiches,” said Jerry.

            “Oh,” said Rosie.

 ❦

At this point something in the living room moved, possibly in a draught, in such a way that Jerry’s phone started playing, out of nowhere, a song that he had paused before dinner.

In the Soviet Union, a scientist is blinded

By the resumption of nuclear testing, and he is reminded

That Dr. Robert Oppenheimer’s optimism fell

At the first hurdle.

“Oh, sorry,” muttered Jerry, and went to the living room to turn his phone off.

            “This fish really is very good,” Rosie said to Becky while he was gone. “Not to be self-aggrandizing or anything but I think I did a really good job for my first try.”

            “I do too,” said Becky. “The spices in the sauce actually ended up really well-balanced.”

 ❦

“I know you’re not as stoked for L’Italia del Treno as I am, but will you watch it with me when it airs?” Jerry asked Becky over lunch the next day while, as was supposed, Rosie was reading a book for one of her assignments.

            “Stop saying ‘stoked’ and ‘L’Italia del Treno’ in the same sentence,” said Becky. “It’s making me crazy.”

            “Well, will you?”

            “Yes, of course.”

            “Rosie wants you to tell Maddalena she has feelings for her,” said Jerry a couple of minutes later, with a forkful of puttanesca halfway from his plate to his mouth. A caper slid down to the bottom of a trailing bit of spaghetti and then dropped gently off back onto the plate. “Don’t ask me why.” He took the bite, then another. Becky looked down at her strangozzi alla norcina, a recipe that she had picked up on a weeklong trip to Orvieto with some classmates last summer, with the sudden, unaccountable, barely even excusable, more than slightly queasy feeling that she would move heaven and earth and give up love and sex and morality alike for a milkshake and fries.

            “Rosie,” called Becky, “Rosie!”

            “She’s out,” said Jerry. “I think she’s telling some of her IR friends about that short story she’s writing. I don’t think any of them know who Sarah Waters is but they know Umberto Eco and they definitely know Romano Prodi.”

            “‘Umberto Eco I know, and Romano Prodi I know, but who is Sarah Waters to me?’” snowcloned Becky.

            “I actually read some of that book Fingersmith the other day,” Jerry said. “It’s pretty good, although I wouldn’t recommend it to Maddalena.”

            Becky set down her fork, took a gulp of wine, and said, not doing much to hide her frustration, “Why the Christ is everything in our lives about Maddalena these days?”

            “Maddalena’s an intriguing person.”

            “Maddalena is a berlusconiana. Maybe she should read Fingersmith and then we can see what she makes of Rosie’s short story. Think of it as a Rorschach test for the twenty-two-year-old soul.”

            “Eat your strangozzi, Becky,” said Jerry.

            “Anyway,” Becky said, “I think I’ll give Maddalena a call this evening after my evening class and explain…parts of the situation to her. I’m pretty sure I do have her contact info in my phone somewhere. Do you think that would be a good idea?” Jerry nodded. He seemed a little too enthusiastic about being able to nod at this, an enthusiasm that Becky made a mental note to make a mental note of, but did not actually make a mental note of and had forgotten within thirty seconds. “Do you know if Maddalena is into women?” Becky asked.

            “I wouldn’t bet on it,” said Jerry, “but I think it’s better to go straight to the horse’s mouth for these things. So to speak.” Becky wasn’t sure what was “so to speak” about it, since she guessed Maddalena could be considered a little funny-looking, but not in a John Kerry Sarah Jessica Parker “why the long face?” sort of way.

            This conversation petered off, and Becky did not think about it again until she actually did call Maddalena, at about quarter of ten that night. Maddalena’s phone rang seven times—at each time from the fourth onwards Becky kept expecting it to go to voicemail—but finally Maddalena picked up, and Becky could immediately hear that she was at a party, probably a hipster party given that a song that Becky could place as being by either MGMT or Metric was blasting so loudly that Maddalena had to shout.

            “Pronto?” shouted Maddalena.

            “Buona sera; sono Rebekah Zylberberg. Posso parlare con Maddalena Galluccio, per favore?”

            “Sono Maddalena Galluccio. Scusi—” There was a moment of pure, unadulterated hipster music as Maddalena seemed to move through a crowd to a somewhat quieter place, maybe a coatroom of some sort. “Mi dispiace. La musica è più forte. Lei chi è?”

            “Rebekah Zylberberg, un’amica di Rosaria Distano e Yirmiyahu Polen. Vorrei parlare in inglese, per favore.”

            “Sorry,” said Maddalena after a moment. “Of course. Yes, I remember you now; you are their roommate, right?”

            “Yes, that’s me. Can I ask if you’re at a party, Maddalena? I hear music playing pretty loud; is it Metric? MGMT?”

            “It’s Metric.”

            “Okay.”

            “I don’t think Metric and MGMT sound much alike. Do you?”

            “Okay.”

            “Yes, I am at a party. Why do you ask?”

            “Nothing, it’s just…” Becky sighed and steeled herself for what was for to come. “My roommate Rosie, Rosaria Distano, has a crush on you, it seems like,” she said. “She wanted me to get in touch with you and let you know.”

            Maddalena was silent for about ten seconds, then said, in a placid, contemplative tone of voice, “I’m sorry, but I’m not very interested in women in that way. Besides, shouldn’t someone who is almost twenty-seven years old be past the point of having her friends confess for her?”

            “Okay,” said Becky. Then something overtook her, spiritually speaking, and she said “Did Rosie ever tell you about the short stories she writes?”
            “Not in so many words, no,” said Maddalena, whatever that meant. “Why?”
            “Well, because she’s writing one right now that has—do you know who Sarah Waters is?”

            “No; should I?”

            “That’s for you to decide. You know who Umberto Eco was, though?”

            “Yes, of course; I have a couple of volumes of that history of philosophy that he co-edited sitting on my bookcase at home in Castrovalva. I—you know what?” she asked. “I think I would rather hear about Rosie’s short stories from Rosie, if that is okay with you.”

            “That’s fine with me, of course,” said Becky. “Now—listen, I’d sort of like to get to know you better, since Rosie and Jerry are both so fond of you.” She let this imply what it may. “Would you like to grab dinner tomorrow?”

            “Tomorrow? Sure; it is a Saturday night and I don’t believe I’ll be doing anything. I know a place in the Jewish Ghetto if you’re interested.”

            “Sure. Text me the name of the restaurant and name your best time and I’ll see you there.”

 ❦

They met at the restaurant, which was in a square with the grandiloquent name Piazza delle Cinque Scole Sinagoghe del Ghetto di Roma già Via del Progresso, and sat around for about five minutes looking over the menus after dismissing a smiling waiter who was trying to help them and seemed to love his job.

            “I like this place because it gets a number of totally nondeserved bad reviews online,” Maddalena said. “I don’t know why—maybe the people reviewing it are antisemites or maybe they have just been to much better restaurants elsewhere—but I like it here, it is one of my favorite restaurants in Rome, and there are usually not too many tourists, although on some nights there are.”

            “Isn’t the seventy-fifth anniversary of that Under the Pope’s Windows thing coming up this coming week?” Becky asked.

            “Yes, very much so, it is,” said Maddalena, “and I do sort of wonder, you know, how the Pope might react. It is such a black mark on his predecessor, even if it’s overblown by some histori—sorry, is this making you uncomfortable?”

            “Huh? No,” said Becky. “My Jewish great-grandfather actually had pretty good experiences with the Church during the War. But of course I’m aware that that’s far from universal. Speaking of the Pope,” she said after a stage-managed pause of only a couple of seconds, “what is this ‘spaghetti papali Francesco’ stuff? It’s an interesting thing for a restaurant in the Jewish Ghetto to be serving.”

            “It has ham and parmesan,” said Maddalena. “So it’s doubly not kosher. Triply, even, if they named it after the Pope.” She furrowed her brow as if trying to remember something, then said, with a fluttering giggle, “Don’t tell Jerry!”

            “I won’t,” said Becky. “Anyway, I think I’ll get this baccalà lasagna; that sounds interesting. You?”

            “Puttanesca, probably, for the primo piatto. Let’s split some of the artichokes.”

            “Yes, let’s.”

            “I don’t mean to lead Rosie into delusion or too much romance about what I am like,” said Maddalena when the artichokes got there. “I don’t want to be thought of as a shrinking flower because I am Catholic; honestly I would probably be the hugest slut if enough guys were ever interested.”

            “You mean,” said Becky with the same feeling overtaking her as when she had asked Maddalena about Rosie’s stories, “other than Jerry?”

            Maddalena was silent for almost half a minute before Becky made an inquiring sound in her throat and she finally answered. “Is Jerry also interested in me, then?” she asked.

            “Yes,” said Becky, remembering what she had said so dismissively to Jerry about this young lady the day before. “I think he started to be interested in you around that incident with Pedro and the roofies.” This was calculated to instantiate some sort of feeling in Maddalena, but Becky did not want to admit to herself what feeling that was.

            “I see,” said Maddalena, and then changed the subject to a rambling, unevenly-told story about something she had seen or done or read or danced in high school at whatever bumfuck nowheresville in the Apennines she was from. Becky tried to imagine Maddalena at an American high school, perhaps one in small-town Texas or somewhere like that. She was certain, in a flash, that she would have been one of those rarest and dearest creatures in creation, a cheerleader with an IEP.

            It was at this point that Becky realized that she felt, suddenly, the first stirrings of a sexual attraction to Maddalena of her very own. It was not like how she had felt attraction before; there was in fact something high-school about it; it felt off, like a store brand; it made her feel disproportionate, like a majorette. She listened to Maddalena talk excitedly about a vacation she would be going on in a couple of weeks—on whose dime neither of them seemed quite sure—and then their primi got there.

 ❦

“Maddalena,” Rosie said dramatically, sitting in her favorite chair with her legs at a bizarre angle and a hand flung over her eyes. “You will be in sunlight soon.”

            “She’s going on vacation,” said Becky.

            “Your twisting is done—you have the last thread of my heart.”

            “She’s literally going on vacation. It’s not even that far away. She’s going to spend a week half-conscious in a bikini on some beach in Tunisia, alone, and then she will be back in Rome and you can talk to her then.”

            “Oh, let me be dramatic,” said Rosie, and nursed her cappuccino. “She told me you told her about my story, by the way. And she told Jerry you reminded her of the roofie incident. Why exactly do you do these things to us, Becky?”

            “I’m not doing anything ‘to’ you. I didn’t think it would kill you or her to be told about or reminded of those things, geez. Besides, they’re relevant subjects if either of you want her to date you. They were to have come up sooner or later.”

            “Yeah, on my watch.” Rosie sighed. “It’s whatever. It’s just that this story is very personal to me, and…I guess you wouldn’t understand.”

            “Why this of all stories is ‘very personal to you’? No, I guess I don’t understand, and—” Becky cut herself short. She was trying to be humane and equanimous. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Besides, I think she is after all a little too young for you, anyway.”

            “Maybe so,” said Rosie. “And she’s a far-right Forza Italia fingersmith. But, you know, I love her anyway.” Becky immediately caught the allusion to the, in their circles, semi-set phrase far-right Tory wanker and now was not sure whether she had much more desire or much less desire to read Sarah Waters than she had had before.

            “It’s not the first time a friend of Berlusconi’s has taken an extended leave in Tunisia,” said Jerry, which Rosie laughed at and which went over Becky’s head. “Anyway, did she say anything about—?”

            “She said to take it up with her yourself,” snapped Becky. “She told both of you to take all this stuff up with her yourselves and she’ll decide what to make of it and what to think of you—of us—then.”

            “Becky,” said Rosie, softly enough that Becky could almost believe she was trying not to stir shit, “do you want Maddalena to think highly of us?”

            “Sure I do,” said Becky. She turned the question, and other potential answers to it, over in her head for a little while, then gave up on it and went over to where Jerry was fiddling with his phone trying to expand his musical horizons again. It seemed to be the same Billy Bragg song as before.

It’s a mighty long way down rock ‘n’ roll

From Top of the Pops to drawing the dole

Waiting for the great leap forwards.

If no one out there understands

Start your own revolution and cut out the middleman

Waiting for the great leap forwards.

“I’m going out,” Rosie said suddenly, frustratedly. “Don’t wait for me. I’ll be back mid-afternoon.”

            “Okay,” said Jerry placidly, much as Maddalena would say things placidly. “Have fun.”

            “I’m sure I will,” said Rosie. “You too.” Becky was not sure of the clusivity of this “you too”; she suspected, but as yet it was only a suspicion, that she might be excluded from it more specifically than she would have liked. Rosie left with a jangle of keys and a thud of her thick boots on the staircase. Becky flopped down into the chair in which Rosie had been sprawled and crossed her legs at the ankles.

            “So now what?” asked Becky.

            “What do you mean ‘now what’?” said Jerry, pausing the music. “We wait for Rosie to get back. I’m not going to continue this whole thing with you without her. Sorry to disappoint you if you expected me to.”

            “You’re being uncharacteristically snippy,” said Becky. “You sound a little like her. –I’m sorry,” she said, finally, before Jerry could say anything, then apologized again for not letting him speak.

            “I think I understand what’s going on here,” said Jerry without explaining what that might be. “I’m gonna call Pedro. Might be good to touch base with him again.”

            “Pedro? The Pedro who roofied Maddalena to keep her from having sex with someone?”

            “I mean, in the situation at hand, it was…” Jerry sighed. “Actually, you know what? No. No, it was still inappropriate; you’re right.”

            “I didn’t say anything.”

            “I could tell what you were going to say, and you would have been right.”

            “I’m just saying that if it’s a strong male friendship you’re after then there are much better people out there than this Pedro guy seems to be. Do you even know if you have anything in common with him other than being involved in that, uh, incident?”

            “Look, we all have fondnesses for people we’re not proud of having,” said Jerry. “You’re right that, that it’s…but yeah. You’re right. I’m going to call him anyway, though; there’s probably something in that situation from back then that’s worth repairing that’d be easier to repair talking to him than to Maddalena.”

            “I’m sure that’s true,” said Becky, who developed the sureness that it was true that she was claiming as she was saying the sentence claiming that she was sure that it was true. “Okay, yeah, why don’t you call Pedro?” She could not help but feel, and be unable to shake the feeling, that she was enabling him in something. It was not so much the fact that he was going to call Pedro that bothered her as the fact that he was going to call Pedro, to lead with the same proud-to-be-an-American, hey-ya over-intimacy with which she had led with Maddalena thirty-six hours ago.

            “I think I will,” Jerry said, “this afternoon.” Something in his voice sounded foggy, as if the idea had some sort of implication or connotation that he had not considered and did not want to. Becky contemplated the obvious but did not want to decide on it before Jerry did. Jerry, she suspected, might never decide on it, nor, maybe, should he. In spite of this, she did not feel the need to force something. She would also not tell herself what she would be forcing. Maybe Rosie and her tastes had rubbed off on Becky less than Becky had thought or hoped.

            “Jerry,” Becky asked, “where is Rosie going, anyway? Did she have some sort of power brunch?”

            Jerry boggled. “She’s at the canonization,” he said, and Becky swallowed something in her throat that had more power over her than it ever had before.

❦

This is the second in a six-story cycle called Haters and Losers.