Rose is a Rose is a Rose
Liz Shannon Miller
They stood in the line to go through Customs, her front to his side, each looking at someone else.
Hugo watched an old lady, her gray hair clipped short, run her passport through the scanner. Once, twice, three times, each attempt wrong in some new way. The move was unpracticed, and one might have assumed she'd never tried to enter the United States. But no, she was an old lady but a well-travelled one, used to the clerk and the stamps, not the machine and the scanner. She'd been living in Tahiti for a very long time.
Rose looked past Hugo's profile, to a couple in the line next to theirs, arms tangled around each other. The two women were happy, smiling -- not thinking about life on the other side of the line. Just enjoying the physical, for a few simple minutes.
Hugo and Rose clutched their shiny new passports, with their shiny new names, in the hands that bore shiny new wedding rings.
Their marriage was two weeks old, and it was over.
* * *
They'd chosen Tahiti in part because it was cheap (especially given their short timeframe for honeymoon-planning). But mostly because it would be a real retreat. An escape into a primitive, sun-kissed paradise. No climate control, little spoken English, quaint internal combustion engines and steel drums on beaches. That was how it'd been sold in the brochures.
The brochures hadn't lied. But the smoggy streets sent Rose into coughing fits. The television in their small oceanfront room played nothing but French-dubbed American movies, decades old and rerunning on the hour. And the steel drums on the beach pattered constantly with the foreign sound of rain.
They'd laughed about the rain. Made jokes about not wanting to leave the room, anyways. But five days later, they were low on condoms and chafed; the time came for them to talk. To interlock fingers and plan their future.
Rose and Hugo had nothing to say.
* * *
They had met in a bar on a Friday night, a joint packed so tight that elbows stayed down, pressed against sides, and most conversation started by apologizing for spilled drinks. But Rose had hated that shirt anyways, and as Hugo dabbed at her cleavage with one pathetic bar napkin, leaning in close to shout his name, Rose found it easy to lean forward, let her lips graze his earlobe as she told him hers.
They had absolutely nothing in common -- Hugo designed shrubs and hedges for environmentally conscious living, Rose toiled as a lawyer. But Rose loved the fact that Hugo had never gone to school, never known anything akin to her seven years of educational torture. It was a delicious rebellion, as tantalizing as their first night together: rough and fast on the floor of her apartment, slow and sweet the next morning.
The struggle was to think of anything but each other. Rose took long lunches that first week, every day raising eyebrows when she came back inside, one or two leaves snarled in her curls. High-powered associate lawyers don't concern themselves with botany, which was probably for the best, as her colleagues would have then recognized the leaves from the thick bushes outside.
Hugo would have paid for a hotel room, but that would have cost them time. So he met her by the front door of her office, a thick blanket over one arm. They crawled under the hedges like small children, fed each other energy bars, gulped down bottled water. The closest Rose came to packing a picnic.
It didn't matter, though. It was Thursday when, lying under those bushes, Hugo first traced a circle around Rose's ring finger. He didn't say the words for another three weeks, but Rose remembered that moment, the promise of it, when he knelt down on one knee in the bar where they'd met. Everyone cheered when she said yes.
"It's so fast, I know. Like something out of a movie," Rose told her friends. "Those horrible paperbacks our moms read." And her friends nodded, and smiled, and counted down to disaster. They were happy for her, after all. But they had limits. They had expectations. They were ready for the crash and burn.
Waiting for it.
* * *
Hugo hadn't wanted to invite all their parents to dinner, but Rose insisted, and eventually he saw her point, knowing that the fewer times they had to explain their idea, the smaller his headache would be. So he sat in his one bad suit, running a finger along the rim of his wineglass. Watching Rose negotiate the waters.
She kept shooting him looks -- speak up, say something, for the love of God make your father stop flirting with the waitress so we can tell them -- that he kept trying to ignore. When her shoeless foot curved around his ankle, he suddenly found the inspiration he needed to start the conversation. "Dad, why don't you tell the story of how you and Mom compromised on hyphenating my last name?"
"I'm sorry, what?" Rose's father Phil shouted. When Hugo had first noticed the earpiece burrowed into Phil's ear, he'd assumed that Phil was hard of hearing. But Phil kept twitching at odd bursts, face tight as a knot with concentration, and Hugo wondered what the score was.
Harold rolled his eyes, shouting back: "My son wants to know why he has two last names, and the reason is that Hugo's mother wasn't happy with the idea of passing down the family name and wanted to bunk the whole thing up for him with her own damn-"
"Harold, please," Emily said, the way she'd said it the previous ten thousand times. She hadn't brought her new husband, which Hugo thought was for the best. The restaurant was a little too classy for barfights.
"Oh, we did that too. Seems like everyone does, these days." Alicia spoke off-hand, through the corner of her mouth not busy chewing.
"Compromise?" Emily asked, confused.
"Hyphenate. Or however you say it. No big mystery why we did it, though. I just didn't want my daughter goin' through life as Rose Boze." Alicia tore off another hunk of the communal bread.
"You coulda named her something other than Rose." Harold muttered.
Phil gave Harold a nodding look, a flash of sympathy. "Hyphens."
Rose smiled, almost relieved. "Exactly. They're cumbersome, they snare up computers, they just mean extra effort. So Hugo and I... We decided..."
Another smooth caress of his ankle, and Hugo spoke up. "We're changing our names."
A confused silence. "What?" Alicia said.
"Rose and I are both changing our last names. To get rid of the hyphenate."
"So you're combining your names, Rosie? What, to Bosinski? That's no better than Kasinski-Boze."
"And what about you, Hugo? Gonna suck it up, be a Russo at last?" Harold snorted.
"Please don't take your father's name," Emily whispered.
"Why the hell not?" Harold said.
Hugo froze, realizing. "Rose, we skipped a step."
She laughed. "Yeah, we kind of did."
Hugo took her hand, placed it on the table where they could all see the ring. "We're going to change our last names to the same thing."
"O'Reilly. Hugo and Rose O'Reilly."
"It's the bar we met in."
"It's something we're doing together."
Their parents stared at the ring. Phil looked at Hugo for a long moment, then took out his earpiece.
"I'm sorry, son. But who are you, again?"
* * *
"Hugo O'Reilly," he repeats to the clerks, the customs officials, the assistant to the Denver Homeland Security CO, the CO himself. "My name is Hugo O'Reilly, and this is my-"
"Rose O'Reilly," Rose would interject. Dreading however he was planning on ending that sentence. Wanting her own voice to be heard.
Not that it mattered at all to the bureaucrats, who shrugged their shoulders, poked at their computers, and shrugged again. "How do you spell that?"
"With an apostrophe," Rose said.
When they'd finally made it to the front of the line at Customs, ready to once again embrace familiar smells and sights and brands, the machine wouldn't read Hugo's passport. At first, they assumed that it was a problem with the barcode. When Rose had tried hers, they figured that it was a problem with the machine. But everyone else before and after them had no trouble, leaving Hugo and Rose standing to the side, looking for someone to believe who they were.
They'd wanted a name without hyphens, a name uncompromised, a name they could both call their own. But it was the apostrophe that screwed them.
* * *
"The computer must have had some sort of difficulty in processing your request for a name change," Mr. Larenzo said, in his careful way. "That's the simplest explanation I can come up with."
"But we were able to leave the country just fine."
"Because the Tahiti customs officers don't have the digital system in place. They just look at the passports and let you in. We're much more advanced here."
Hugo tried not to laugh. "Yeah. No kidding."
Rose sighed, ignoring him. "I'm sorry, Mr. Larenzo, but can we just deal with this later?" Her voice dropped. "I just want to go home."
"Unfortunately, Mrs. O'Reilly, you and your husband don't legally exist right now."
"What?" they said in unison, startled into cliche. Rose's jaw actually, literally dropped.
Larenzo tried not to look directly at them. "If you give me a day or so, I can get you a temporary visa into the country, but-"
Rose glared. "Good. Get me the visa, the name of your supervisor, and any painkillers you might have."
"Honey-"
Rose spun towards Hugo, her battered khaki jacket finding just enough energy to flare out a little. "Let me handle this. Handling assholes is what I do."
Rose turned back to the man, doing what she did. Hugo watched her. Watched his wife, a woman he'd never met before.
A woman who currently didn't exist.
* * *
Citizen registration had been a bit controversial, and certainly there were still people who slid under the grid, kept their lives off the record. But most of the country had seen the reasoning for it, and with all the different rules, all the different cards...
'Keep it simple,' was the campaign the government had pushed into the national consciousness, convincing Americans that by pooling their resources, putting all the money and licensing and history onto one card, their lives would be easier. Americans liked to vote for things that would make their lives easier. And the effort put into a national identification system, all that data entry, had trained a new workforce, a hundred thousand welfare mothers now able to use computers, compete for real jobs. Everyone won, with the new system. Foolproof.
Except, of course, that without your card, you were nothing. Replacements were easy enough to obtain, but still required being in the system. 'Get in the system' was the new phrase. 'Get with the program' was considered quaint.
Of course it had been controversial, of course there had been protests and choruses of "No!" What was funny, Hugo thought, was that the prevailing concern had been whether the system would work too well, make it too easy for identities to be taken, or too easy for the government to monitor its citizens. But checks and balances had been implemented, computer programs designed to be impenetrable, unstoppable. No one stole the intangible from Americans anymore. Their money locked up tight, safe. Their identities secure.
So many concerns that the system would work too well. Not enough concern that it might fail.
Off-system was a scary place, a scary thought that took some time to understand. No money from your account. No license to drive, which was fine because you couldn't go anywhere interesting without proving your age, and with gas costing as much as it did...
* * *
As night approached, and the chairs of the Customs office waiting room beckoned, they called Rose's mother, begging for clothes that didn't reek of Tahitian smog. Alicia couldn't get past the security at Rose's apartment without Rose's ID, but she was able to bring them some clothes from Rose's high school days, a pair of pants Rose's father wasn't using. All old, reeking of the past and stale bread. But neither of them were picky.
They looked at each other, across the room. Hugo not quite able to keep the smirk off his face.
"What?" she asked at last. He laughed a little.
"I just like your t-shirt, is all."
Rose looked down at her chest, the faded photo of a now-dead boy band warped by her now non-adolescent breasts. "Oh lord."
"Which one did you have a crush on? The shy one? The big brother-type? Or the bad boy?"
Rose shot him a look, a look that said you-are-wearing-sansabelt-khakis-and-would-be-better-off-keeping-your-mouth-shut. "I liked the music, okay?"
"Oh, sure. How did that one song go? 'Don't rub me too hard, I'll keep going for you...'"
"Don't LOVE me too hard-" she corrected automatically, before catching herself in a blush.
Looking at her, Hugo's smirk faded into just a hint of a smile. "It looks good on you," he said without thinking.
"The shirt?" she asked.
No, was the answer.
"Yes," he said.
* * *
It was too easy to lie with a kiss, Hugo knew. But that didn't stop them from sneaking out of the waiting room, finding a stairwell, finding each other.
The best lies, after all, are the ones that don't require thought. And it was still the most natural thing in the world, the way they kissed together, the way they moved together. It didn't mean much, this ability to give over to the other, but when she kissed him and it was just the right amount of wet, the right amount of tongue, the right amount of her, it was easy to pretend that everything would be okay. That no mistakes had been made.
It was the first time they'd touched each other since they left Tahiti, and he was glad to realize that this wasn't something left in a hotel room, that emotions can't be misplaced under beds or behind shower curtains.
If he knew that she was clinging to him for the same reasons that he was clinging to her, he would probably hold on tighter. But he couldn't know for sure. He just kept on going.
* * *
They were tapped awake by Larenzo's index finger, which the man withdrew into a pocket as soon as they stirred to consciousness, bodies stiff after a few hours in plastic chairs.
"Good news!" he said, clearly thrilled at being able to remove these trespassers from his lobby. "I received authorization to recreate your identities."
Hugo blinked at the man. "Good news," he yawned out.
But Rose immediately sat up, moving away from Hugo's shoulder, ignoring the small patch of drying drool. "Fantastic. They'll match with our old ones?"
"Indeed. A back-up was created before the name change attempt, so you'll just reverting back to your old names. You filed the paperwork the same day you left the country?"
"Yeah. It was a pretty busy day," Hugo said.
"Then, essentially, it will be like you never left. So to speak."
"What do we need to do, then?" Rose asked?
Larenzo handed them each a clipboard and a new ID card. "Sign these."
And a few minutes later, Hugo Russo-Levin and Rose Kazinski-Boze left the Denver customs office and reentered the United States.
They walked side by side through the airport, through the glass doors, into the roar of outside.
"So..." Hugo started to say.
Rose interrupted him. "Do you want to get a cab?"
"Sure," he said.
As they waited in the line, a thought came to him. "You realize that we're not married anymore? Because when we filed the name change, that was also when-"
Rose nodded. "Yes."
"Wow. So it's like we never met."
She snorted, an inelegant little laugh. "No need to be so dramatic."
"But, really. We have a clean slate here. A fresh start."
She looked at him. "You really think so?"
"Why not?" he said, shrugging.
Rose nodded a little to herself. "Why not?"
Something about the tilt of her head, the slight off-balance lean of her, gave him the courage to drop his duffle bag, face her fully. "Okay. So I just wanted to say..."
"What?"
He took her hand. Shaking it.
"Hello," he said.
-END-