Drowning Ruth (31 page)

“It's too bad we can't bottle it, sell it to the locals.”

“Bobby seems to like it.”

The toilet flushed and Zita emerged and joined her friend at the sink. “Oh, you know Bobby and his summer flings. When it's hot, he likes anything in a skirt. He was going on the other day about how cute she was in her little apron, pulling worms out of the dirt by their tails. Isn't that the limit?” As she washed her hands, she leaned toward the mirror and bared her teeth.

“Oh, he's fickle all right. I should know.” The other girl crossed her arms.

“Where do I put this?” Zita said, holding up the towel she'd used to dry her hands.

“Give it to her, I guess,” her friend said, tilting her head at Ruth as she started out.

Working her way back to her table, Ruth found herself pushed toward the edge of the room until she was almost squashed against the screen that ran all the way around the pavilion to discourage mosquitoes. Below, the waves washed against the pilings, with a rhythm as steady as breathing. She looked out across the dark water and longed for her father to be there, skimming along the slick of moonlight in the rowboat, his arms pulling, his head turning to look over his shoulder to gauge his distance. He wouldn't care about all these other people. He would be coming just for her.

When Ruth turned back she realized with a start that Arthur Owens was looking at her from across the floor. It wasn't nice of him to notice her like that, adrift and obviously alone, obviously uninteresting to everyone else in the room. When had she begun to care about things like that? she asked herself angrily, frowning at Arthur. He was leaning against the railing, talking to the two girls she'd seen in the ladies' room. What had they told him about her? Quickly, she pressed on toward her table.

Imogene and Bobby were trying a sequence in which he spun her right and then left while she stepped together, stepped together, step, step, stepped together backward. It was something they'd seen Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers doing, but it turned out to be harder than it looked. Ruth observed that now Imogene had caught Arthur's attention, although he tried to concentrate on his conversation. She saw him laugh and nod, but continue to glance whenever he could in Imogene's direction. Ruth, safe in her seat again, examined him as carefully as she could without being obvious—Imogene would want to know every detail.

One of the women he'd been talking to, the one who'd given Ruth her towel, stepped forward suddenly, grabbing his hand to pull him onto the floor. He was just reaching to set his glass on the rail to follow her when Bobby spun Imogene so that she careened full force into his outstretched arm.

Everyone looked dazed for a moment and then there was a flurry of napkins. Imogene and Arthur and Bobby were laughing. The woman who had intended to dance looked less pleased. Ruth, who'd been watching all of this as if it were a play, was a little flustered when she realized that Imogene was leading the entire group toward her table.

“This is Bobby,” Imogene announced to the table at large. “And this is his cousin, Tom, and Zita and Kitty, and this is Arthur,” she said, her hand on his arm. And then, beginning with Ruth, she named everyone at the table. “Now we've all been formally introduced.”

Arthur smiled at Ruth and she blushed. Did he know she'd been studying him?

“Would you believe I shot a 76 out there today?” Bobby announced to the table at large as he sat down. Several of the others acted suitably impressed and began to offer their best games for comparison. Ruth was not surprised, however, that Imogene soon dominated the table, although she had never set foot on a golf course. Then Bobby danced with Zita and Arthur danced with Imogene.

“Now you'll want to dance with Ruth,” Imogene, fanning her face with both hands, announced to Arthur when they returned to the table.

“No, let's go out on the boat,” Bobby said.

“One dance,” Arthur said, and held his hand out to Ruth.

Ruth would rather not have danced, and she made a face at Imo-gene over her shoulder as Arthur led her to the floor. After all, if he'd wanted to dance with her, he would have asked her himself. But Imogene was already telling Tom one of her stories, sweeping her hands through the air so that her bangles jingled, tipping her head so that her rippling curls brushed her shoulders. Ruth gave up and turned to face her partner.

“Hot, isn't it?” she said.

Arthur was easy, relaxed. He held out his hand to her. He
smiled. He looked at her through his round glasses as if she were the one he had wanted from the start.

It was only a fox trot, but Ruth couldn't get the hang of the music. She tried to touch him lightly, to rest her hand soft as a moth on his shoulder, but she couldn't quite match his rhythm, and she had to cling to him, heavy and awkward, as he flung her to and fro, her hair loosening alarmingly with every jolt.

But then something happened. Maybe it was only that the heat and the drink overwhelmed her at last. She was still clinging to him, but now she moved with him, flexible, smooth as oil. She let him draw her close until they fitted together. She let him steer her and forgot herself. She spun and threw her head back and watched the ceiling turn; she listened to the music and let her feet jump and slide whenever they pleased. And her smile was not fixed.

When the dance was over and he'd led her back to the table, Ruth looked around in confusion; she couldn't remember which chair had been hers or where she'd left her bag. Bobby rose, pushing his chair back with his knees. “How about that spin in the Chris Craft now? We'll have to keep the speed down in the dark, but it's still a good ride.”

They herded down to the pier, jostling and jabbering, uncowed by the Milky Way and the expanse of restless black water. Their voices carried from one end of the lake to the other, as if in a massive theater.

Ruth watched Imogene climb gracefully into the boat and copied as best she could the way Imogene used first Arthur's hand to steady her on the dock and then Bobby's shoulder to keep her footing in the boat. She scowled as she nearly twisted her ankle on the final step, feeling ridiculous in her heels.

“Careful, there,” Arthur said.

It never helped, Ruth thought with irritation, to be told to be careful
after
you'd tripped. Her right hand, the one he'd held as he
helped her into the boat, was trembling, and she squeezed it in the other.

Almost before they'd found seats, Bobby gunned the engine, and they shot away from the lights of the pavilion. Suddenly he swerved, and Ruth had to grab Tom's arm to keep her seat. He swerved the other way, and she nearly flew into Imogene's lap. Between shrieks of laughter, Kitty and Zita shouted at him to slow down, but he only smiled and swerved again, this time pitching Arthur onto the floor and Imogene on top of him.

Finally Bobby tired of this game and slowed the engine. From a little mahogany cupboard beneath the bow he produced a bottle of whiskey and glasses. Ruth glanced at Imogene, who was smoothing her skirt back over her knees as she leaned calmly against the cushions, and she felt almost sorry for those girls with their smug cracks about the bait shop. There wasn't a whiff of “eau de grub” about Imogene. Obviously this was her natural element. She'd been born to listen to the rich rumble of the engine, to stroke the sleek varnished wood with her polished fingertips, to hold out her shapely hand, adorned with the tasteful, slim ring her parents had given her to mark her high school graduation, for a crystal glass.

“Let's lie down and stare at the stars,” Zita announced, sinking to the floor of the boat. She lay on her back with one knee bent, so anyone could see the smooth stretch of her thigh.

Ruth looked away, embarrassed for her.

“C'mon, get up, Zita,” Bobby said, offering her his hand, but she batted it away.

“Wait! I can hear the water!” she announced, pressing her ear against the floorboards. She sat up suddenly, grabbed Ruth's hand, and tried to pull her down beside her. “Listen! Turn off the engine, Bobby!”

Bobby did as he was told and, after a moment's struggle to stay in her seat, Ruth gave up and lowered herself to the floor.

“Listen!” Zita commanded, and Ruth tensely pressed her ear to the wood. Through the polished floorboards she could hear the water, slapping and sucking, worrying the wooden hull, trying to get in.

Above her, Kitty's voice rang. “Know what I heard about that place?” Her ear still full of the suck and slap, suck and slap, Ruth watched Kitty point over the water. “Some woman drowned her baby on that island during the war. You're supposed to be able to hear it crying late at night. Is that true?” She looked at Imogene, then down at Ruth. “You ever hear it?”

“No!” Ruth sat up abruptly. “Of course not. That's crazy!” But she could hear a baby crying in her mind even now, the thin wail that grew more and more distant but never disappeared. She closed her eyes to shut out the sound, but it persisted and, though her ear was no longer against the floor, she could hear the lake, too, mingled with the crying, and she could feel the water, its wet tongue in her ears, in her eyes, embracing her, pulling her down.

She opened her eyes, but the stars raced toward her and she felt as if she were spinning uncontrollably through space. Her insides rose to her throat in a wave. She scrambled onto the seat and was sick over the side.

Everyone was extremely kind.

“It's the heat,” Kitty said. “I feel a little green myself.”

“It's because Bobby was bouncing us around,” Zita said. “I told you not to drive like that.”

“Well, you shouldn't make people lie in the bottom of the boat,” Bobby said.

“You're right,” Zita said. “I'm sorry, Ruth.”

Ruth took the hankie Imogene offered and blew her nose. “I'm all right now. I guess I'm just not used to so much to drink.”

“If Bobby didn't serve such cheap stuff,” Arthur said, “this kind of thing wouldn't happen. I got sick last week on his gin.”

Ruth tried to smile at him, but her lips trembled and her arms were shaking so much she had to cross them over her chest to hold them still.

“You're cold!” Arthur exclaimed. “Hasn't anyone got a jacket?” He went to the bow and returned with a towel left over from that afternoon's swimming. “Come up front with me, why don't you?” he said, gently draping the towel over her shoulders. “The air's fresher away from the motor. You'll let me drive for a while, won't you, Bobby?”

“Sure,” Bobby said, settling into a back seat between Zita and Imogene. “Take it around by your place. Let's see if anyone's up.”

Arthur started the engine and turned on the running lights with a twist of the silver knob. The inboard began its soothing blub-blub-blub, but Ruth still shivered. In every direction, the water rippled like black crepe. If she dove in here, could she make it to shore?

“So how long have you been coming out here?” she asked to calm herself.

“Oh, years,” he said. “The first time was just a few days after the war ended. I must have been about five and my dad brought me out when he was thinking of buying the land. That was when he planned to raise geese on it, you know, for feather beds. He thought they'd like being close to water.” Arthur chuckled. “He always has these crazy schemes.”

“But then he built a house instead?”

“Well, not instead, exactly. We did have the geese and after that racing pigeons and then goats, until he converted the shed into a photography studio. He thought he had a quick way to develop film, but it didn't work out. Gave everybody a doppelganger. At the moment, he's revolutionizing the iceboat.” He pronounced “revolutionizing” in a mocking tone.

“So you don't think much of his ideas?”

“Oh, no, they're good ideas. He's bursting with good ideas. It's
just that bursting makes a mess, and somehow he's never around when it comes time to clean up.

“I've seen you in town before,” he went on after a moment or two, “with your mother.”

“That's my aunt. My mother died years ago.” And then, somehow, she felt like telling him more, maybe because he'd said so much about his father. “She drowned, actually. She fell through the ice.”

“Here? On this lake?” Arthur stared at Ruth, remembering the stinging gusts of a long-ago winter day.

“Now over here. Now just from here to there,” his father said, positioning five-year-old Arthur. And Arthur stood and stood, inhaling the smell of wet wool as his scarf trapped the clouds of his breath. He was proud to be helping, although his feet were freezing and his fingers numb. He held one end of a piece of string while his father paced deliberately around the property with the other end and stopped now and then to record numbers in his little book. Finally he said, “Enough. You can play now. I'm just going to the car for a minute.”

The ice was on the lake, a black sheet of it, lightly sugared with snow, upon which iceboats swooped and darted in the whipping wind, capricious as summer butterflies. Arthur hadn't been able to take his eyes off the frozen lake all the time he was standing, holding his string. It was fascinating. It tempted him to walk on water.

Released from his duties, Arthur stepped onto the lake. His right boot slipped immediately, but he caught his balance and shuffled forward a few steps toward a cluster of fishing shanties hunched against the cold. How deep the ice seemed to go, so deep he couldn't see where the frozen part ended and the water beneath it began. He fell on his knees for a closer look and bent
forward, his mittoned hands splayed in front of him, his nose almost touching the lake.

He studied the ice, the bubbles and fissures, the occasional leaf or frond of seaweed suspended in it, the clear patches that seemed to go down and down forever. Where were the fish? He crawled forward on his knees with no notion of where he was going, drawn on by the ice itself.

A rumbling warned him that an iceboat was coming close, and he looked up to see it hurtling toward the shore. Just when he was sure it would crash full speed into the rocks, it spun around, runners scraping, sail luffing, until—fwoom—it caught the air and shot toward the middle of the lake again. As it flew past, two masked faces turned toward Arthur, and a hand in a three-fingered glove rose stiffly in greeting. Arthur waved and chased them for a few yards.