A Widow for One Year (49 page)

She lay in a fetal position, her knees pulled up to her chest. The skin over her right cheekbone felt stretched too tightly, and she sensed an unnatural warmth on her face. When she blinked her eyes, she saw stars, but when she held her eyes open, the stars disappeared after a few seconds.

She was locked in a closet again. Not since childhood had she been this afraid. She couldn’t see Scott Saunders, but she called to him. “I’ll get you your clothes,” she told him. “They’re still in the dryer.”

“I know where the dryer is,” he said sullenly. As if she were not part of her body, she saw him step over the spot where she lay on the rug. She heard the stairs creak as he went down them.

When she got up, she was momentarily dizzy; the feeling that she might throw up lasted longer. She carried the sick-to-her-stomach feeling downstairs, where she walked directly through the dining room to the darkened terrace. The cool night air instantly revived her. Indian Summer is over, she thought, dipping the toes of one foot in the pool; the silky-smooth water was warmer than the air.

Later she would go in the pool, but right now she didn’t want to be naked. She found her old squash clothes on the deck near the outdoor shower; they were damp with cold sweat and dew—the T-shirt made her shiver. She didn’t bother with her underpants, her bra, or her socks. Just the T-shirt, her shorts, and her shoes would suffice. She stretched her sore right shoulder. Her shoulder would suffice, too.

Scott Saunders’s squash racquet was leaning—handle up, racquet head down—against the outdoor shower stall. It was too heavy a racquet for her, and the grip was too big for her hand. But it wasn’t as if she intended to play a whole match with it. It’ll be fine, Ruth thought, going back inside the house.

She found Scott in the laundry room. He’d not bothered to put on his jock. He’d pulled on his shorts and stuck the jock in his right front pocket; he’d put his socks in the left front pocket. He’d put on his shoes, but he’d left them unlaced. He was pulling his T-shirt over his head when Ruth caught him with a low backhand that crumpled his right knee. Scott managed to pop his head through the head hole in his T-shirt, maybe a half-second before Ruth struck him full in the face with a rising forehand. He covered his face with his hands, but Ruth had turned the racquet head sideways. She slashed at his elbows—one backhand, one forehand, both elbows. His arms were numb; he couldn’t raise his arms to protect his face. He was already bleeding over one eyebrow. She took two overhead shots, at both his collarbones—snapping several strings on the racquet face with the first blow, and completely separating the racquet head from the handle with the second.

The handle was still a pretty effective weapon. She kept slashing at him, hitting him wherever he exposed himself. He tried to crawl out of the laundry room on all fours, but his right knee wouldn’t support his weight and his left collarbone was broken. Therefore, Scott couldn’t crawl. All the time she was hitting him, Ruth repeated the scores of their squash games—a fairly humiliating litany: “Fifteen–eight, fifteen–six, fifteen–nine, fifteen–five, fifteen–
one
!”

When Scott lay in a collapsed position of lopsided prayer, with his hands hiding his face, Ruth stopped hitting him. Although she didn’t help him, she let him get to his feet. His damaged right knee gave him a jolting limp, which doubtless caused him considerable pain in his broken left collarbone. The cut over his eyebrow was a real bleeder. At a safe distance, Ruth followed Scott to his car. She still held his racquet handle; it felt about the right weight for her, now that the racquet head was gone.

She had a passing concern for Scott’s right knee, but only if it might affect his driving. Then she saw that he drove a car with automatic transmission; he could operate the accelerator and the brake with his left foot, if he had to. It depressed her that she had almost as much contempt for a man who drove a car with automatic transmission as she did for a man who hit women.

God, look at me—I’m my father’s child! Ruth thought.

After Scott had gone, Ruth found the head of his racquet in the laundry room; she threw it in the trash, together with what was left of the racquet handle. Then she started a load of laundry—just her squash gear and some underwear, and the towels that she and Scott had used. She mainly wanted to hear the washing machine; the sound of it running was reassuring to her. The empty house was too quiet.

Next she drank nearly a quart of water, and—naked again—carried a clean towel and two ice packs out to the pool. She took a long, hot shower in the outdoor stall, soaping herself twice and washing her hair twice, too, and then she sat on the bottom step in the shallow end. She put one ice pack on her right shoulder and held the other ice pack against her face, covering her cheekbone and right eye. Ruth had avoided looking in a mirror, but she could tell that her cheekbone and her eye were swollen; her right eye wouldn’t open wider than a slit. In the morning, the eye would be completely closed.

After the hot shower, the pool felt cold at first, but the water was silky-smooth and much warmer than the night air. It was a clear night; there must have been a million stars. Ruth hoped it would be as clear the next night, when she had to fly to Europe. But she was too tired to think more about her trip than that; she let the ice numb her.

She was sitting so still that a small frog swam right up to her; she cupped it in her hand. She reached out and let the frog go on the deck, where it hopped away. Eventually, the chlorine would have killed it. Then Ruth rubbed her hand under the water until the sensation of the frog’s slipperiness was gone; the slime had reminded her of her too-recent experiences with the lubricating jelly.

When she heard the washing machine stop, she got out of the pool and transferred her wet laundry to the dryer. She went to bed in her own room, and lay in her clean sheets, listening to the comfortingly familiar tap or click of something spinning around and around in the dryer.

But later, when she had to get out of bed to go to the bathroom, it hurt her to pee, and she thought about the unfamiliar place—far inside her—where Scott Saunders had poked her. It also hurt there. The latter pain was not sharp. It was an ache, like the onset of her cramps— only it wasn’t time for her cramps, and it wasn’t a place where she’d ever felt pain before.

In the morning, she called Allan before he left for the office.

“Would you love me any less if I gave up squash?” Ruth asked him. “I don’t think I’ve got many more games in me—that is, not after I beat my father.”

“Of course I wouldn’t love you any less,” Allan told her.

“You’re too good for me,” she warned him.

“I told you I loved you,” he said.

God, he really
must
love me! Ruth thought. But all she said was: “I’ll call you again, from the airport.”

Ruth had examined the fingerprint bruises on her breasts; there were fingerprint and thumbprint bruises on her hips and buttocks, too, but Ruth couldn’t see all of them because she could see only out of her left eye. She still refused to look at her face in a mirror. She knew without looking that she should continue to put ice on her right eye, which she did. Her right shoulder was stiff and sore, but she was tired of icing her shoulder. Besides, she had things to do. She’d just finished packing when her father came home.

“My God, Ruthie—who hit you?”

“It’s just a squash injury,” she lied.

“Who were you playing?” her father asked.

“Mostly myself,” she told him.

“Ruthie, Ruthie . . .” her father said. He looked tired. He didn’t look seventy-seven, but Ruth decided that he looked like someone in his sixties. She loved the smooth backs of his small, square hands. Ruth found herself staring at the backs of his hands, because she couldn’t look him in the eye—not with her swollen-shut right eye, anyway. “Ruthie, I’m sorry,” her father began. “About Hannah . . .”

“I don’t want to hear about it, Daddy,” Ruth told him. “You can’t keep your pecker in your pants, as they say—it’s the same old story.”

“But
Hannah,
Ruthie . . .” her father tried to say.

“I don’t even want to hear her name,” Ruth told him.

“Okay, Ruthie.”

She couldn’t stand to see how sheepish he was; she already knew he loved her more than he loved anyone else. Worse, Ruth knew that she loved him, too; she loved him more than she loved Allan, and
certainly
more than she loved Hannah. There was nobody Ruth Cole loved or hated as much as she loved and hated her father, but all she said to him was: “Get your racquet.”

“Can you see out of that eye?” her father asked her.

“I can see out of the other one,” Ruth told him.

Ruth Gives Her Father a Driving Lesson

It still hurt her to pee, but Ruth tried not to think about it. She quickly got into her squash clothes; she wanted to be in the court, warming up the ball, before her father was ready to play. She also wanted to erase the blue smudge of chalk that marked the dead spot on the front wall. Ruth didn’t need the chalk mark to know where the dead spot was.

The ball was already warm, and very lively, when Ruth felt that almost imperceptible shudder in the floor—her father was climbing up the ladder in the barn. She sprinted once to the front wall, then turned and sprinted to the back—all before she heard her father tap his racquet twice and open the squash-court door. Ruth felt only a twinge of pain in that unfamiliar place where Scott Saunders had poked her the wrong way. If she didn’t have to run too hard, she would be okay.

That she couldn’t see out of her right eye was a bigger problem. There were going to be moments when she wouldn’t be able to see where her father was. Ted didn’t crash around the court; he moved as little as he had to, but when he moved, he glided. If you couldn’t see him, you didn’t know where he was.

Ruth knew it was crucial to win the first game. Ted was toughest in the middle of a match. If I’m lucky, Ruth thought, it will take him a game to locate the dead spot. When they were still warming up, she caught her father squinting at the front wall of the court, looking for that missing smudge of blue.

She took the first game 18–16, but by then her father had pinpointed the dead spot and Ruth was picking the ball up late on his hard serve— especially when she received his serve in the left-hand court. With no vision in her right eye, she practically had to turn to face him when he served. Ruth lost the next two games, 12–15 and 16–18, but—although he was leading 2–1 in games—it was her father who needed the water bottle after their third game.

Ruth won the fourth game 15–9. Her father hit the tin in losing the last point; it was the first time that either of them had hit the tin. They were tied 2–2 in games. She’d been tied with her father before—she’d always lost. Many times, just before the fifth game, her father would tell her: “I think you’re going to beat me, Ruthie.” Then he would beat her. This time he didn’t say anything. Ruth drank a little water and took a long look at him with her one good eye.

“I think I’m going to beat you, Daddy,” she told him. She won the fifth game 15–4. Once again, her father hit the tin in losing the last point. The telltale sound of the tin would ring in her ears for the next four or five years.

“Good job, Ruthie,” Ted said. He had to leave the court to get the water bottle. Ruth had to be fast; she was able to pat him on the ass with her racquet as he was going out the door. What she wanted to do was give him a hug, but he wouldn’t even look her in her one good eye. What an odd man he is! she thought. Then she remembered the oddness of Eddie O’Hare trying to flush his change down the toilet. Maybe all men were odd.

She’d always thought it strange that her father found it so natural to be naked in front of her. From the moment that her breasts began to develop, and they had developed most noticeably, Ruth had not felt comfortable being naked in front of him. Yet showering together in the outdoor shower, and swimming naked together in the pool . . . well, weren’t these activities merely family rituals? In the warm weather, anyway, they seemed to be the
expected
rituals, inseparable from playing squash.

But, upon his defeat, her father looked old and tired; Ruth couldn’t bear the thought of seeing him naked. Nor did she want him to see the fingerprint bruises on her breasts, and the thumbprint and fingerprint bruises on her hips and buttocks. Her father
might
have believed that her black eye was a squash injury, but he knew more than enough about sex to know that she couldn’t have got her
other
bruises playing squash. She thought she would spare him those other bruises.

Of course he didn’t know he was being spared. When Ruth told him that she wanted a hot bath instead of a shower and a swim, her father felt he’d been rebuffed.

“Ruthie, how are we ever going to put the Hannah episode behind us if we don’t
talk
about it?”

“We’ll talk about Hannah later, Daddy. Maybe after I’m back from Europe.”

For twenty years, she’d been trying to beat her father at squash. Now that she’d finally defeated him, Ruth found herself weeping in the bathtub. She wished she could feel even the slightest elation at her moment of victory; instead Ruth wept because her father had reduced her best friend to an “episode.” Or was it Hannah who’d reduced their friendship to something less than a fling with her father?

Oh, don’t pick it apart—just get over it! Ruth told herself. So they had both betrayed her—so what?

When she got out of her bath, she made herself look in the mirror. Her right eye was a horror—a great way to begin a book tour ! The eye was puffy and closed, the cheekbone swollen, but the discoloration of the skin was the most striking aspect of her injury. For an area roughly the size of a fist, her skin was a dark reddish-purple—like a sunset before a storm, the vivid colors tinged with black. It was such a lurid bruise, it was half comical. She would wear the bruise for the duration of her ten-day tour in Germany; the swelling would go down and the bruise would finally fade to a sallow yellow color, but the injury might still be discernible on her face the following week in Amsterdam, too.