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The more immediate result of Sammy's offer had been Working Gals, "shocking but true tales from the fevered lives of career girls." It debuted in the back pages of Spree Comics, at the time the lowest-selling title put out by Gold Star. After three months of steadily increasing sales, Sammy had moved Working Gals to the front of the book and allowed Rosa to sign it with her best-known pseudonym. [17] A few months after that, Working Gals was launched in its own title, and shortly thereafter, Gold Star, led by three "Rose Saxon Romance" books, began to show a profit for the first time since the heady early days of the war. Since then, as Sammy had moved on from Gold Star to editorships at Olympic Publications and now Pharaoh House, Rosa, in a tireless and (for the most part) financially successful campaign to portray the heart of that mythical creature, the American Girl, whom she despised and envied in equal measure, had filled the pages of Heartache, Love Crazy, Lovesick, Sweetheart, and now Kiss with all the force and frustration of a dozen years of lovelessness and longing.

After Sammy had hung up, Rosa stood for a moment holding the phone, trying to make sense of what she had just heard. Somehow-it was a little confusing-their truant son had managed to find the man who had fathered him. Joe Kavalier was being fetched back, alive, from his secret hideaway in the Empire State Building ("Just like Doc Savage," according to Sammy). And he was coming to sleep in her house.

She took clean linens from the built-in cupboard in the hall and carried them toward the couch on which, a few hours from now, Joe Kavalier would lay down his well-remembered, unimaginable body. Where the hallway met the living room, she passed a kind of star-shaped atomic squiggle with a mirror at its nucleus, and caught sight of her hair. She turned around, went into the bedroom she and Sammy shared, put down her fragrant armful of sheets, and yanked out the variety of junk, office supplies, and small bits of hardware she used to keep her hair out of her face when she was at home. She sat down on the bed, got up, went to her closet, and stood there, the sight of her wardrobe filling her with doubt and a mild sense of amusement that she recognized as, somewhat magically, Joe's. She had long since lost the sense of her dresses and skirts and blouses; they were rote phrases of rayon and cotton that she daily intoned. Now they struck her as, to a skirt, appallingly sensible and dull. She took off her sweatshirt and rolled dungarees. She lit a cigarette and walked into the kitchen in her underpants and brassiere, the bramble of her loosed hair flapping around her head like a crown of plumes.

In the kitchen she took out a saucepan, melted half a cup of butter, and thickened it with flour to a paste. To the paste she added milk, a little at a time, then salt, pepper, and onion powder. She took her roux off the stove and started a pot of water for noodles. Then she went into the living room and put a record on the hi-fi. She had no idea what record it was. When the music began she did not listen, and when it finished she took no notice. It puzzled her to see that there were no sheets on the couch. Her hair was in her face. When flakes of ash had fallen into her roux, she now perceived, she had stirred them right in, as if they were dried bits of parsley. She had, however, forgotten to add the actual dried parsley. And for some reason, she was walking around in her bra.

"All right," she told herself. "And so what?" The sound of her voice calmed her and focused her thoughts. "He doesn't know from suburbia." She ground out her cigarette in an ashtray that was shaped like an eyebrow arched in surprise. "Get dressed."



She went back into the bedroom and put on a blue dress, knee-length, with a white waistband and a collar of dotted swiss. Various contradictory and insidious voices arose within her at this point to say that the dress made her look stout, hippy, matronly, that she ought to wear slacks. She ignored them. She brushed out her hair till it shot from her head in all directions like the mane of a dandelion, then brushed it back and tucked it up at the nape and fastened it there with a silver clasp. A dazed hesitancy returned to her ma

After she had slid the casserole into the oven, she returned to the bedroom to put on a pair of stockings and blue pumps with white buckles that were covered in the same glossy fabric as the waistband of the dress.

They would be here in two hours. She went back to her table and sat down to work. It was the only sensible thing she could think of to do. Sorrow, irritation, doubt, anxiety, or any other turbulent emotion that might otherwise keep her from sleeping, eating, or, in extreme cases, speaking coherently or getting out of bed, would disappear almost completely when she was in the act of telling a story. Though she had not told as many as Sammy over the years, working, as she did, exclusively in the romance genre, she had told them perhaps with greater intensity. For Rosa (who, from the first, and uniquely among the few women then working in the business, had not only drawn but, thanks to the indulgence of her editor husband, also written nearly all of her own texts), telling the story of pretty Nancy Lambert-an ordinary American girl from a small island in Maine who put all her foolish trust in the unstable hands of handsome and brilliant Lowell Burns, socialite and nuclear physicist-was an act that absorbed not merely the whole of her attention and craft but of her senses and memories as well. Her thoughts were Nancy's thoughts. Her own fingers turned white at the knuckles when Nancy learned that Lowell had lied to her again. And little by little, as she peopled and developed the world she was building out of rows and columns of blocks on sheets of eleven-by-fifteen Bristol board, Nancy's past was transformed into her own. The velvet tongues of tame Maine deer had once licked her childish palms. The smoke from burning piles of autumn leaves, fireflies writing alphabets against the summer night sky, the sweet jets of salt steam escaping from baked clams, the creaking of winter ice on tree limbs, all of these sensations racked Rosa's heart with an almost unbearable nostalgia as, contemplating the horrific red bloom of the bomb that had become her Other Woman, she considered the possible destruction of everything she had ever known, from kindly Miss Pratt in the old island schoolhouse to the sight of her father's old dory among the lobster boats returning in the evening with the day's catch. At such moments, she did not invent her plots or design her characters; she remembered them. Her pages, though neglected by all but a few collectors, retain an imprint of the creator's faith in her creation, the beautiful madness that is rare enough in any art form, but in the comics business, with its enforced collaborations and tireless seeking-out of the lowest common denominator, all but unheard of.

[17] Among some dozen she is believed to have employed over the years.