Wednesday Fiction Story Tellin'

Growth Charts

Rosie read biographies. Her night stand at any given time held a ceramic mug of peppermint tea and the life stories of people such as Marilyn Monroe, Winston Churchill, Simone De Beauvoir, Andy Warhol, Tolstoy, or Theodore Roosevelt. She considered biographies on par with children's growth charts. She plotted points of her own life achievements and compared them to the life-growth curve of others. She knew, for example, that she would fall in the < fifth percentile of sex symbol-ness as compared to Monroe but she perhaps considered that she may fall into a > fifty percentile chance that she would sip tea and write in coffee houses of Paris such as De Beauvoir. She created life-growth charts with each biography she read and this resulted in towering stacks of folded pieces of paper settled on her desk. The most outstanding and inspiring growth curves were pinned on a cork board and she created her life goals based on these charts.

When Rosie was twenty-two she moved to Chicago to attend the Art Institute of Chicago and found a job styling windows of a small boutique store on Oak Street. She prided herself on the fact that the event was almost equivalent to Mr. Warhol who moved to New York when he was twenty-one and became a window dresser. Perhaps, she considered, commercial illustration was in her future and per Andy Warhol's growth chart, she expected such an event to occur in six to eight years. She created a life goal around the prediction and refused to settle for less.

Her hobby (she never admitted it to be an obsession although family members did have their concerns) did not enhance her romantic life. She found herself judging the life events of her dates as they compared to the charts. And what political science graduate student could compete with the growth chart of Winston Churchill? It was unfair and pretentious, her sister argued again and again. Rosie did not realize she was breaking her own heart with such lofty charts.

She turned twenty-eight one snowy March and was actually on target with most of her life achievement goals but found herself unsatisfied and restless. She became fond of an aspiring novelist and  they spent many evenings discussing Polish political literature published during the second war. While she adored their conversations and the way she could actually feel the reverberations of his voice when she sat next to him on a wooden bench, she was disappointed how his life achievement faired against Tolstoy or even Jonathan Safran Foer. Her sister audibly sighed on the phone when Rosie called her one morning with the news that the aspiring novelist was not going to work out. The sound of another heart break was as angering to her sister who began to plot the death of the charts.

That evening Rosie's father stole Rosie away for a drink on North Avenue while her sister and mother (who was shamelessly dressed in a white sweatshirt featuring cats) snuck into Rosie's apartment and destroyed every chart they could find. Her sister was not an artist but she did bring a large can of paint and several pictures. She removed the framed illustrations that hung above the couch and spent two hours constructing a new chart: Rosie's life-chart. Later, Rosie would not be angry or even sad that almost 18 years of work was gone. Instead she smiled and felt an astonishing amount of relief. Her sister's chart had placed her as being perfectly where she should be. Which was where she was.