Drowning Ruth (10 page)

Slowly, I pushed the spoon into the white mass. It felt almost like ice cream, only not so cold and much more slippery. I lifted the spoon, tried not to breathe through my nose and stuck the stuff into my mouth. I swallowed as quickly as I could, but it stuck on my tongue. I forced it down in large spoonfuls, trying not to taste it, not to feel it in my mouth, not to think
about what I was doing. My father watched, his arms crossed, waiting.

The tip of my spoon scraped the bottom of the cup when my mother walked in.

“Amanda! What are you doing? Henry? What is she doing?” She grabbed the cup away from me and stared at us.

“She started that custard. She's got to finish it,” he said.

“Custard!” She thrust the cup in front of him. “This isn't custard, Henry! This is lard!” Now she banged the cup down on the table. “Didn't it taste awful?” she asked me. “What did you want to eat that for?”

“I didn't. I …” But I couldn't explain. I didn't want to put my father in the wrong. And really, he hadn't been wrong. I had disobeyed. I'd been stealing food out of the icebox. If it had really been custard, I probably would have eaten it. Probably I would have spoiled my supper, whatever that meant. My father was sniffing what remained in the cup now, frowning, as if he still didn't quite believe us.

Suddenly, my stomach gave a horrible turn. I ran out the kitchen door and into the woods behind the house. I was still retching under a honeysuckle bush when my father came up behind me. He handed me his handkerchief.

“I'm sorry, Amanda. I should have listened to you,” he said. He tucked the damp strings of my hair behind my ears.

It made me want to squirm, his saying that. I tried to push the words away. “I shouldn't have been in the icebox,” I said.

“Well, you won't do it again, will you?”

“Never ever!”

“That's my good girl.”

I would have eaten that lard a hundred times over to hear those words.

I stepped into the hall now, took my father's jacket from its hook and slipped my arms into its sleeves. The cuffs dangled far below my hands. The jacket smelled of pipe tobacco and hay, molasses and grease, as all of his barn jackets had, ever since I could remember. I stuck my hands in the pockets—shreds of loose tobacco, two washers, a pencil stub, a list for the lumberyard—“eight 2×4s, four 4×6s, ten 2×8s,” each number formed precisely, just the way he entered them in his ledger. He made his eights by drawing two balls, one on top of the other. “Like a snowman,” he'd said to me as I sat on his lap, the pencil he'd just sharpened in my hand. I suppose he taught me to write, although I'd never given that a thought, believing it no more than my due as his child. I remembered his huge fingers wrapped around my tiny ones as he guided my hand—a hand I wouldn't even recognize as my own now—over the page, until we'd made all the numbers up to ten.

“Look at how she's going to town, Mother,” he'd said.

Later, when he discovered I had his knack for figures, he showed me off every chance we got. “Mandy'll tote up the bill,” he'd say. “Watch this.” He'd hand me a slip with a column of numbers and in a second or two I'd announce the total. What I liked best, though, were the early mornings when we quizzed each other while we milked, just us and the cows in that big warm barn.

I took the jacket off, folded it, and set it near the front door. Maybe Rudy could use it, or one of the Manigolds. I went upstairs to my parents' bedroom.

Mathilda refused to answer me when I knocked on her door. I could hear her singing “Lavender's Blue” to Ruth, her voice unconvincing, quavery, broken by sobs, while I sorted through the drawers, separating things to give away from things we ought to keep. My mother's dresses smelled of lavender water. She kept them perfectly, the sleeves and bodices stuffed with paper to hold their shape, old shawls draped over their shoulders to keep the dust off. It looked as if there were six copies of my mother in the wardrobe,
each without a head. I was far too tall to wear those dresses, but perhaps Mattie would want one or two. I carried them to the attic and closed them in a trunk.

That night I woke up sweating, my heart racing.

“Good,” I thought.

I hoped I, too, would be ill. I hoped I would die. How could I have brought such disaster on them and yet suffer hardly a cough myself? I writhed in my bed, desperate for the fever and delirium, the heavy limbs and cloudy head that would overwhelm the sharp, clear picture of what had happened, the irrevocable fact that they were no more, not one, not the other, both gone forever from the earth. But it was only fear that made my heart beat faster. There was no escape for me. I could not even cry.

“I can't stay any longer,” I told Mathilda the next morning. “I have obligations.”

I was ready. I had repacked my little bag even before the funeral. No sense waiting until the last minute, my mother always said.

“You'll be fine,” I told Mathilda. “Rudy will help you.”

Rudy drove me to the station and I didn't look back, not once, although I could feel Mathilda staring after me with those red, swollen eyes, all the way to Nagawaukee.

Back in our mustard-colored room, Eliza was kind. She brought me coffee while I unpacked.

“I did the best I could for them,” I told her, and tried to tell myself. “Now I have to get back to work. My sister doesn't understand how busy we are here.”

Under the tissue in the top drawer of my dresser, I slipped my father's list of lumber and my mother's hairbrush in which a few strands of her hair were tangled. Again, I woke at night in a panic. I was going to have to start my life all over again from scratch, I thought. There was nothing behind me now, nothing to stand on. And then I thought of Mathilda, and I clung to her image to right myself, to pull myself back to the surface.

In the daylight, it was better. I worked a day shift and, at the hospital, wounded men clamored for my attention. I had to remember dosages and schedules. I had to bandage and massage and produce soothing words. As if those things mattered! As if they would make any difference! I knew better now, but I did what I was supposed to do just the same. Were there others like me, who knew that all of our efforts were only a way to pass the time, to distract and comfort ourselves? I studied the faces of the doctors and nurses, even of the orderlies. Was I the only one who understood? “I don't care if you don't like it,” my mother used to say when I complained about church or school. “You can act right.” And that was true too. I could act right, and I did.

And so, although I was no longer so confident, no longer so sure of my every move as I had once been, I kept busy. I volunteered to take the worst patients, the most contagious, the most pitiable injuries, the men who threw their bedpans across the room in a fury. None of it bothered me.

I had been back only a few days and was running up the stairs from the dispensary when somewhere between the second and third floors I heard a familiar voice.

“Damn,” he was saying. “Damn. Damn. Damn.”

“What's the matter?” I hurried to turn the next landing. There I saw what the trouble was—papers everywhere, in ragged heaps and shingling the steps nearly to the top of the flight where Clement stood.

“Oh, dear,” I said, or something sympathetic like that, but I couldn't help smiling a little as I bent to gather the pages that lay near me.

Clement stood still, looking down at me glumly. “One of the nurses asked me to take these to the basement on my way out.”

“I don't think she meant for you to throw them.”

“You don't say.” He laughed. “And it seemed like such a good idea at the time.”

He came several steps closer to me and began to collect the pages from the stairs. “This is going to take me hours to sort out! Do you see a folder for Zimmerman? Stuart?
O'Toole?
” He held up papers and dropped them again, one by one, to the floor.

“Well, you're not going to do it that way, are you?” I said. “Here. This won't be so bad.” I cleared a few steps and began sorting the loose pages alphabetically, making neat piles. “Join in any time.”

If not for me, I'm sure he would have buried Charles Bo-gusewski's ulcerated stomach in Peter Halliday's chart, and Peter's gassed lungs in Ronald Faculjak's chart. “No one's going to look at these things again, anyway,” he said.

But I wouldn't permit such a thing. “Accurate record-keeping is essential,” I told him, “even when the files are going to the basement. You'd be surprised how often doctors need to revisit the course of an illness.”

I hadn't meant to be funny, but he laughed, and very soon we were talking and laughing more than filing. The things we said were too vacuous and nonsensical to bear repeating, even if I could remember them, but we put a great deal of effort into amusing each other. Certainly it was the most pleasant half hour I'd ever spent sorting papers. When we'd finished, I helped him carry the folders down to the records room, and there we spent another ten minutes, talking steadily, but not saying very much, until he asked, “Would you like to have dinner with me on Thursday?”

Eliza lent me her rabbit-fur stole. I wasn't ready at seven, what with the number of times we had to rearrange my unmanageable hair, but luckily he was late and we were watching out the window by the time he came down the street. Eliza assured me that the two-seater he was driving was a very good kind of car to have. We drove all the way up to Appleton to eat at a supper club.

“This place has the best steak,” he said. “You have to try it.” He told the waiters how long a steak should be cooked and how much ice to put in a glass.

“I guess I'll have a cup of coffee,” I said.

“Coffee! You don't want to ruin a meal like this with coffee! The lady'll have champagne.”

“Clement, I couldn't!”

“Why not? You don't like it?”

“I've never had it, of course.”

“Well, you've got to try champagne.” And the waiter had already gone, so what could I do?

He was right. Now I knew why people liked a drink. My champagne was fizzy and almost sweet. Nothing like the whiskey my father used to swallow on cold winter nights.

After supper we went dancing. “Amy,” he said, as the band played “The Blue Danube,” and he waltzed me smoothly around the floor. “I'm going to call you Amy.”

Such a light, pretty name. No one, not even Joe, had ever called me Amy before.

“It suits you,” he went on. “It means love, you know, in French.”

My face got hot, and I had to look at the floor, but I stored the moment up, so that later I could examine again and again just the way he said it, and recall the scent of starch on his shirt collar and the warm press of his hand against my back.

It turned out that we always drove far away when we went out. We went to Madison and Fish Creek and Racine and several times to Chicago. It was romantic, thrilling, to drive so fast along those long dark roads, to find out what lay behind those doors he ushered me through, his hand hovering a whisper from my waist, to dance in those dark places to colored music, to eat steaks and snails. I would get so tired that I would fall asleep on the way home.

Some evenings I said, “Why don't we just be cozy tonight, get a hamburger someplace close?”

And he'd say, “You want a hamburger, I know the best hamburger place in the country.” And we'd wind up all the way in Fort Atkinson or Sheboygan or Fond du Lac.

It was just like with Joe, except better, since this time no one was saying “Hadn't you better think about this?” or “You're young, what's your hurry?” When my mother said those things, what she really meant was, it's all very well to be friends with Catholics, but you don't want to marry them. And what Joe's mother meant when she said, “Of course, she's a sweet girl, but sweet isn't everything,” was that Lutherans make excellent neighbors but aren't fit to be wives. Clement, as far as I could tell, had no religion, and that suited me. When I thought of God, now, He was hovering somewhere over France, not paying any attention to me at all.

Generally, I wouldn't let a man put a hand on me if we weren't dancing, unless maybe he wanted a good-night kiss, but the first time Clement touched me, we were parked somewhere along the edge of Lake Michigan, water so vast, you couldn't see to the other side. That night he only ran his fingertips over my face—my eyelids, my cheeks, the outline of my lips—carefully, gently, yet firmly, as if he were painting my features on my face. Nobody ever did anything like that to me before. I wasn't sure how I was supposed to respond, so I waited to see what would happen next.

Nothing else did happen, for weeks it seemed, until I was used to his fingers on my skin and, for all my shyness, I couldn't help tilting my chin up, ready for more, and then he put his fingertip just along my collarbone, just inside the edge of my dress, and then he kissed me, as light and melting and unsatisfying as spun sugar.

When he told me he loved me, I laughed. Not in a mean way, but lightly, warning myself really, more than him, not to take it too seriously. You have to be careful with your feelings, I think. It's a mistake to let them go just because they're summoned. But, like
Mathilda, Clement was very good at getting his way. It wasn't too long before I gave in and let myself believe him, let myself love him back. It seemed like a sure thing. It felt just like it was supposed to. I began to think about what would happen sooner or later; I imagined the house with the spreading elm in the front yard, the sunny kitchen and the clean, white linens, the children, four or five, at least, with his rosy cheeks and my almond eyes. Of course, I would miss my work, but I was secretly a little pleased to see my proper course lay elsewhere.