Rosie Finger Donne by Robert Long Foreman

Rosie Finger talked about nature versus nurture, about which one decides the course we take through life. She thought they played equal roles, that the way we were raised and the parts we were born with conspire to shape us.

I agreed, because to not choose one or the other was a way to dodge the question. It was over my head. We were at the wedding of the manager of the Italian restaurant where she worked. I never ate there. I’ve never liked how noodles feel in my throat.

I hadn’t yet told her I loved her. It didn’t take me long. I adored her early, but we were only together six months.

When we met, she didn’t look in my eyes. Without turning around, she waved to me from the front seat. I climbed in back. We were driving to see a band I didn’t like. I don’t know why I went. I must have had nothing else going on—which I cannot fathom, twenty years later. There’s not enough time left for all of the things I want to do.

Another young woman had invited me on that trip. The car was hers. It may have been a date, I wasn’t sure. She’d brought friends, maybe for backup, in case things went sideways: some redhead named Jordan and Rosie Finger. If a man brought two friends on a date it would look like an ambush.

I didn’t talk to Rosie Finger on the drive to Pittsburgh. She wore jeans, glasses with black frames, and a vest over a long-sleeved shirt. We passed the Cathedral of Learning, which rises tall, Gothic, and absurd from the University of Pittsburgh. She said she wanted to go there, take classes at the Cathedral, and call her apartment the Fortress of Masturbation.

I laughed. She looked back. Our eyes met.

When we returned to the town where both of us lived, we went home together.

I made her laugh sometimes. All conversations stopped, when her laughter rang out, infectious and brilliant. Everyone who heard it wanted to know what was so funny, that it would make someone laugh that way.

I hadn’t dated much before Rosie Finger. It wasn’t until well after we broke up that I learned what I’d lost. My next girlfriend’s laugh gave people headaches. My mother asked me to stop bringing her home. She couldn’t take the headaches.

Finger was Rosie’s middle name, not her last. She was Rosie Finger Donne. Her parents were Classics professors.

I think her name was why she was funny. It’s a name you have to live up to by being a jackass. I guess that means I’m on the side of nurture, because it would mean she wasn’t born with her sense of humor, it was a side effect of the name she was given.

We had that conversation again, when she met my aunt, who’s been dead now for a decade. She asked Rosie Finger if she was on the side of nature or nurture. I’d say it was improbable, that question coming up again. It’s not, though. People discuss it all the time.

Rosie Finger said she thought it was like someone playing a guitar. The fret hand was nature, the strumming hand nurture. It’s hard to say which matters most, but without both you can’t do much.

My aunt asked why she went by Rosie Finger and not Rosie.

Why hadn’t I asked her that?

She said it was a recent thing. Her old friends called her Rosie. She thought she’d try being Rosie Finger for a while.

Did I really love her? I don’t know. When I told her I did, I meant it, but now I’ve been with my wife, Ellen, for sixteen years. The word “love” doesn’t mean what it meant twenty years ago. It’s so much bigger now.

I thought of Rosie Finger yesterday after E and I had sex. We saw our chance to do it, with the kids absorbed in YouTube two rooms away. She lay beside me with her eyes closed while I admired her laugh lines and bunny lines. I didn’t know what bunny lines were called until she told me. She hates them, but everyone can see this lady has only gotten prettier as she’s aged.

Watching her like that made me wonder how Rosie Finger looks now. Does she have bunny lines? Does she know what they’re called? Does someone lie beside her and admire them, or is she taken for granted? Or does she live alone, and would that be better or worse?

I looked her up online. I didn’t find her. The results were mostly pages about The Odyssey.

Rosie Finger is not on social media, not even LinkedIn. I’m not still in touch with anyone who knew her, and I think it’s a shame that people don’t stay put. I was so eager to get away from the town where she and I lived. She was from there. I was in school. I could have hung around, but I’ve moved eight times since then, farther every time.

I let people go, when I was young. I didn’t hesitate. I didn’t know people mattered, or how much. I didn’t know what love was, how huge it could be.

I don’t wish I were still with Rosie Finger, but what if I’d kept seeing her at the hardware store, once a year, let’s say? We could have said hello, made each other laugh, and shoved off, knowing we would meet again someday.

I think she almost had it right. I think nature is the strings of the guitar, what they’re made of. The fret hand is nurture, and the strumming hand is us, banging through our lives, making mostly bad choices and saving ourselves and each other with some good ones. We try to get the chords right, but we make a lot of noise, on the only instrument we’ll ever hold in our fickle, wrinkling hands.

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ROBERT LONG FOREMAN — Robert’s most recent books are WEIRD PIG and I AM HERE TO MAKE FRIENDS. His chapbook HEAVENS TO BETSY is out from Cutbank Books. His work has been in AGNI, The Missouri Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, and other magazines. He lives in Kansas City and is online at www.robertlongforeman.com.

Art by TAMIZH PONNI VP — Tamizh is an ambivert and a stoic art buff who loves to express her skills through literature, visual arts and music. She is an IB educator and sees learning as a life-long process. Her stories were featured in 2 anthology books, Mia and Varna. Tamizh’s articles, poems and paintings have also been published in many digital journals and educational blogs. Tamizh spends most of her free time painting, reading, writing articles, stories and poems, playing piano and watching documentaries/movies.