A Soft Place to Land (17 page)

Once after Phil had snapped at Ruthie during dinner, snapped at her over nothing, and she had run away from the table in tears (Ruthie did not like people to see her cry), Naomi had found Ruthie in her room, and had tried to explain to her why Phil could be so grumpy.

“He loves being able to send you and Julia to private school,” she said, tickling Ruthie’s neck with her long nails. “And you know he loves this house. But it takes a lot of money to keep everything running. There’s just a lot of pressure on him, that’s all.”

Once Phil told Julia not to consider law school. “Being a lawyer pays the bills,” he said. “But it sure is a drone.”

So occupied was Ruthie by her thoughts, and by watching the ground while she walked, not wanting to stumble and fall down the steep hill, that it wasn’t until she was standing directly in front of Dara, whose hair was freshly tinted purple, that she saw her. Her appearance was so sudden it was as if Dara, and the young woman standing beside her, had materialized out of the fog.

The woman standing by Dara wore baggy jeans and a Bikini Kill T-shirt, a pink plastic headband holding back her curly hair, which looked exactly like Dara’s except it was dyed black.

“I’ve been saying your name like ten times now!” said Dara, slightly out of breath from climbing the hill.

Ruthie didn’t know how to respond to that. What was she going to say: “Sorry, I was preoccupied with thoughts of my dead parents”?

“So anyway, what are you doing here?”

“Just going to Eureka Market for milk,” Ruthie said. “We need it for the bacon and Gruyère tart we’re making.”

“Yum! We just came from there. For ice cream. But what are you doing in this neighborhood?”

Did Dara not remember any of their conversation from the first week of school? Ruthie certainly had not forgotten that Dara said she lived on Uranus.

“I live up there,” Ruthie said, pointing behind her.

Dara made a show of slapping her forehead. “Of course! You live on Mars. You’re a Martian. Right. I totally forgot. Well, anyway, hi! Happy Thanksgiving.”

Why was Dara acting so friendly, so bubbly? Ruthie had been so bitchy to her that day during Snack, had actually taken pleasure in being rude. Since then, Ruthie had been nicer but never really accepted any of Dara’s direct overtures toward friendship. But seeing Dara here on Seventeenth Street with the pink-headband woman—hadn’t Dara said she had a sister, a vegan?—so far away from school and sailor uniforms, Ruthie could not remember why she had chosen to remain so aloof.

“Are you Dara’s sister?” Ruthie asked.

“No, I’m her mom,” said the woman. “I was a child bride.”

Ruthie was confused. Headband woman looked no more than twenty years old, if that.

Dara rolled her eyes. “Ruthie, meet Yael, my sister. Who is so funny she ought to do stand-up.”

“The vegan?” Ruthie asked.

“Am I that exotic?” Yael teased Dara. “That you discuss my eating habits with strangers?”

“You say ‘exotic’; I say ‘bizarre,’” said Dara.

Yael bumped her sister playfully with her hip and Ruthie felt consumed with jealousy.

Julia was supposed to be here.

If Julia had not been caught drinking, she would be here.

“And Ruthie’s not a stranger. We go to Hall’s together.”

“Hi, Ruthie from Hall’s,” said Yael. “So back to your oh-so-appropriate question about my eating habits, I usually am vegan, but I’m going to indulge in dairy today. Can’t get Chandra to stop making her crusts with butter, and can’t help but eat them once she does.”

“What about turkey?” asked Ruthie, even though Yael had just implied that questions about what she ate were rude.

Ruthie didn’t care. She thought Yael was rude.

“Chandra got a Tofurky,” said Yael.

“It looks like a turkey, but it’s made of tofu,” explained Dara, who seemed to intuit that Ruthie might not know what one was.

Ruthie was dying to tell Julia about Tofurky.
God. San Franciscans.

“Is Chandra your cook?” Ruthie asked.

Many of the girls at Hall’s came from homes where there was a full-time cook.

“Jesus, Dara, you really go to a ritzy school, don’t you?” said Yael. Turning to Ruthie, she said, “We have no cook. No butler, either, for that matter—”

“That’s not what I meant,” said Ruthie, deciding she
really
didn’t like this Yael person, wondering what the hell kind of name was Yael anyway?

“Chandra’s our mom,” said Dara.

“You call your mom by her first name?” asked Ruthie. She didn’t mean to keep firing off questions. What she meant to do was act cool, erect a wall, make an excuse, and get away. Yael was too prickly, and it was too hard seeing sisters together, joking, having fun.

“We call her Mom to her face, Chandra when we are talking about her,” said Dara.

“Ice cream’s melting,” Yael said in a singsong voice, waving the plastic grocery bag she held in her hand.

“I guess we should go,” Dara said. “You want to come over later and eat ice cream with us? We’ve got Health Bar Crunch and Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough.”

“Thanks,” said Ruthie. “I don’t think I can. My family doesn’t eat Thanksgiving until late.”

“Are a lot of your relatives in town?” asked Dara.

The question pleased Ruthie, because it indicated that Dara didn’t know she was an orphan, that Dara believed her to be normal. Believed her to be the type of girl whose mom was just now brushing melted butter on the uncooked Parker House rolls. Ruthie had assumed that everyone at Hall’s knew what had happened to her mom and dad. It was such a small school, and it was so rare for someone to matriculate in the eighth grade.

The teachers definitely knew. Mr. Z’s constant psychological probing made her sure of that.

“Just my aunt and uncle,” said Ruthie, pleased with her answer. It was not a lie, but it obscured the truth.

“We’ve got to go, girl,” said Yael, pushing on Dara’s shoulder with her free hand.

Dara growled at her sister, but in a friendly way. “Okay, I guess I’ve got to go . . . but call me! Let’s get together over break!”

Ruthie murmured something noncommittal but was surprised, once they started climbing the hill back toward Uranus Terrace, that she was not relieved by their departure.

She was so damn lonely.

At five o’ clock the Woodses arrived, exactly on time. Ruthie had returned with the milk hours earlier, and she and Robert had prepared the bacon and Gruyère tart. Still, there were lots of last-minute things to do, and Robert, pulling the perfectly browned turkey out of the oven, muttered to himself while he and Ruthie listened to Mimi greet the Woodses at the door.

“Don’t they know to arrive at least ten minutes late to a party?” he whispered to Ruthie. “I haven’t even had time to have a drink.”

Ruthie wasn’t sure what to say in response and Robert, sensing her concern, said, “Don’t listen to me. I’m just being a kvetch. Go say hi and I’ll finish in here.”

Ruthie walked into the living room. The Woodses were still standing by the door, Tim Woods holding an oversized bottle of wine.

Tim Woods was a blond, muscled man of great height, well over six feet tall. His dark-haired wife, Nina, whose mother had escaped from Communist Romania, was tiny by contrast, her bones birdlike in their delicacy. They had one child, a girl named Tatiana, who had a preternaturally advanced vocabulary for age nine, and who walked over to Ruthie and handed her a pot holder, woven from colored elastic bands that Tatiana had strung together on a plastic loom.

“Thanks,” said Ruthie, holding the pot holder limply in front of her.

“I hope you get ample use from it,” said the child.

Mimi, who was so tall and blond next to Nina, was ushering in her guests. She looked casually elegant in black pants, a slinky cream top, and a gray cashmere wrap that she slung oh-so-casually around her shoulders.

Ruthie knew that Mimi must have been popular in school while Nina, sharp little Nina with her tacky skintight lace top over a too-short black skirt, was not. At least, not in the way Mimi would have been. Not in any way wholesome.

Except Nina married Tim, who was as wholesome looking as could be, with his sweep of blond hair and broad shoulders. Tim looked as if he grew out of a cornfield, as if he shot right out of the ground, ready to inherit the earth, with a toothy smile.

The sparkling wine Tim had brought was chilled, and so Mimi took the bottle into the kitchen, where Robert poured it into flutes, emerging to serve. The grown-ups settled in the living room, each with a flute of bubbly. It was a large bottle, the largest bottle of wine Ruthie had ever seen. Robert, who was still wearing an apron tied around his significant middle, told her that it was called a magnum and that it was the equivalent of two regular bottles of champagne.

“Though technically Roederer Estate is sparkling wine, since
it’s grown in the Anderson Valley and not in the Champagne region of France,” Robert said. Encouraged by her interest in his cooking, Robert was always imparting little epicurean lessons to Ruthie.

“Roederer Estate is my absolute favorite,” said Mimi, giving Robert a nonverbal rebuke with her narrowed eyes. Though Mimi loved to say that she had “gone native” when she moved out to California and was now a true San Franciscan, she would forever remain a southern woman in that she was always worried about the possibility of offending a guest.

“May Tatiana and I have a taste?” asked Ruthie.

Mimi considered the request, and then gave a little nod. “I don’t see the harm in cultivating a taste for champagne. You don’t mind the girls having a sip, do you, Nina?”

Nina Woods sucked in her breath so her cheeks went concave, before raising her eyebrows a little mockingly. “Why would I mind?” she asked, her tone indicating that only in coddling, litigious America would Mimi’s question even be asked.

Robert poured the girls a third of a glass each, in thin champagne flutes etched with wispy flowers. They clinked their glasses together, and Tatiana said,
“Salut.”

Ruthie studied Tatiana, who took a tentative sip of the wine. She was small and delicate like her mother, with thin wrists and long fingers, her nails painted blue. But unlike her mother, she was a blond, her straight hair shoulder length and worn parted down the middle and pulled back rather severely with two metal barrettes.

“Want to come hang out in my room?” Ruthie asked.

She thought she might play big sister, show Tatiana her CDs and her makeup, which included the stuff that Alexandra Love’s mom had bought for her the year before, when Mrs. Love took Ruthie and Alex to JC Penney to have their colors done at the Color Me Beautiful counter. Ruthie would determine Tatiana’s colors, declare whether she was a fall, winter, spring, or summer. She would tell Tatiana about Julia, how Julia rarely wore makeup,
only pinched her cheeks to give them color and coated her lips with clear gloss so they would shine. How Julia was kind of a hippie, even though the sixties had long since passed. How when Ruthie was a little girl her sister had succeeded in convincing her that she, Julia, was a witch, that she had magical powers, that she could cough up dollar bills and cast a spell on the moon, making it follow them home from dinner.

Maybe Ruthie would even teach Tatiana how to play Egg and Biscuit. Or if not that exact game—which seemed a little too sacred to share—maybe a similar game, Coffee and Cream or Croissant and Jam.

Tatiana glanced warily at her mother, who had settled on the opposite side of Tim on the upholstered sofa. It was covered in a fabric that Ruthie recognized from Mrs. Love’s house, cream with dark green palmetto leaves.

“Can’t we just stay in here?” Tatiana asked.

Ruthie felt deeply embarrassed. Rejected by a nine-year-old. Rejected by a dorky nine-year-old who wasn’t even pretty. Whose skin was so pale you could see her blue veins.

They stayed with the adults—Tatiana lying between her parents on the upholstered sofa, Mimi in one of the two Stickley leather lounge chairs, and Ruthie on the floor, pressing the side of her face against the top of the ottoman, feeling the cool leather, trying to blink back tears.

Closing her eyes, she imagined that when she opened them she would be back in Atlanta, back in the house on Wymberly Way, sitting around the antique dining room table with her parents and Julia, sitting on Chippendale chairs that God help her if she rocked back and forth on and caused a leg to break. Smirking at Julia while their father, who every day but holidays was an atheist, declaimed his Thanksgiving prayer.

The loneliness Ruthie felt was so deep it reached all the way to her groin.

Robert disappeared into the kitchen, then returned with a plate containing thin slices of the bacon and Gruyère tart. Ruthie took a slice gratefully. It was warm, rich, and buttery, the saltiness of the bacon tempered by the sweet cream of the custard.

Soon after, Robert returned with a tray full of little white espresso cups filled with pumpkin soup, each cup topped with a dab of a triple crème cheese called St. André. Ruthie felt a melting sort of love for her uncle, this kind fat man who cooked delicious, fattening foods. She took a sip of the soup and for a moment thought of nothing besides its rich creaminess, its marriage of sweet and smoke.

“Don’t I need some sort of utensil for this?” asked Tatiana.

“Drink it straight from the cup,” said Mimi. “Like this.”

Mimi threw back the soup with one sip.

Tatiana followed Mimi’s example. “Outstanding,” she proclaimed.

“It really is,” said Nina. “What is your secret, Robert?”

“Bacon,” answered Ruthie. “He starts the soup with six pieces of it.”

“It’s a nice surprise, isn’t it?” Robert said, settling into the other Stickley chair. “So often people pair pumpkin with sweet ingredients, but I think it works really nicely as a savory soup. Plus everything goes better with bacon.”

All of the adults agreed, and Robert made a joke about how Jews who kept kosher missed out. “The Italians are the real chosen people,” he said.

It was a joke Uncle Robert made often. Ruthie had begun to notice this about him. He was very entertaining. He had good stories. But if you hung around him often enough—which, of course, Mimi and Ruthie both did—you realized that he told the same stories again and again, rotating them the way Mimi rotated the best pieces in her wardrobe, the gray cashmere wrap, the alligator pumps, the strand of pearls so long she could double it up and the two loops would still hang to her waist. Sometimes when Robert went on too long about one thing or another, Mimi
started spinning little circles with her hand, encouraging him to speed things up.