Drowning Ruth (32 page)

When one of his feet slid, he looked down instinctively, throwing his hands out to break his fall. If the lady had not been entombed in ice, he would have landed in her arms. He saw first the swollen gray hand and then the arm, the purplish fabric in folds, and finally the face. It was turned toward him, the blue eyes staring, the mouth open, screaming without sound, trapped in that bottomless black hole.

He tried to get away, tried to rise and run, but his feet slipped and he fell back in the same spot, as if the hand had grabbed his boot and pulled him down. He managed to slide forward, finally, by staying on his knees and crawling, and in that manner he made his way as fast as he could to the shore.

Once his feet were on solid ground, Arthur began to scream, and he ran up the hill toward the car, screaming every second he wasn't drawing breath. When his father snatched him up, Arthur buried his head in his huge shoulder, trying to blot out the face that was calling him from under the ice.

“What?” his father asked, first alarmed, then soothing, then
irritated. “Did you fall? Did you bang your head? Are you hurt? What? What in the hell's the matter with you?”

Arthur pressed his eyes until they ached against his father's collarbone, and finally he managed to point without looking back toward the water. Arthur's father put him down and they walked to the edge of the ice. There Arthur stopped and, when his father took his hand to draw him on, leaned back with all of his weight.

“All right, stay here then,” his father said impatiently. “Don't move. I'll be back in a moment.”

Arthur watched his father, arms slightly raised, shuffle and slide along the ice, following the trail Arthur's knees had left in the light snow. He saw him stop, reel back, catch himself, and then lower himself slowly to his knees. He saw him brush at the powder with his glove. Then he stood up again and made his way back.

“How did the lady get in the ice?” Arthur asked when his hand was safely within his father's again and they were trudging up the hill toward the car.

“I don't know.”

“Shouldn't we get her out?”

“The sheriff will do that, Arthur.”

The sheriff came out of his house with a napkin tucked into his trousers. He leaned into the car and winked at Arthur.

“You take the boy home now,” he said as Arthur's father got back in the car. “ We know who it is. We'll find her.”

So they left the lady in the ice.

“That's it,” Arthur said, pulling back on the throttle before a wide lawn, gray under the night sky, that ran steeply up to a white house fronted with looming pillars.

“Lovely,” Imogene breathed, pretending, Ruth noticed, that she
hadn't often stared from a rowboat at that facade and speculated about the lives inside.

“When are you going to have another party, Arthur?” Zita asked. She stepped onto the seat behind Arthur, as if to get a better look, and rested her hands on his shoulders for balance. “The one you had last year was the best of the season. Don't you remember, Kitty? Swimming in the afternoon and then the dance floor over by the boathouse. And, Tom, remember when Eddie pushed you off the pier?” She laughed somewhat more wildly than the memory warranted. “Oh, Arthur, you have to promise me you'll have another,” she said. “You must or the whole summer will be wasted!” She leaned close so that her sculpted hair brushed his cheek. “You promise?”

“Anyone ever tell you there's a depression on?” he said, tipping his head toward hers.

“Well, then we need something to cheer us up!”

“Say, are we gonna sit here all night?” Bobby said. “Let me take the wheel.”

And so they rearranged themselves, Bobby and Zita taking the seats up front; Imogene, with a lift of her eyes and a slight shift of her skirt, inviting Arthur into the place that Bobby had given up, and Ruth sliding in next to Ray. Kitty and Tom, who'd begun whispering to each other, stayed together in the back.

“Not so hot out here,” Ray said.

“No.” She smiled at him. Good old Ray. “It's not bad out here at all.”

Bobby pushed the throttle forward suddenly then, and they raced smoothly through the black water, following their own tiny white beam. Greedily, Ruth leaned into the rushing warm air.

I was digging a few onions out of the garden, squatting in the dirt somewhat awkwardly because I couldn't bend, when what I assumed was an acorn dropped on my shoulder.

“Hey!” I said, looking into the trees. Another one bounced off my arm. When it rolled into the dirt, I saw it wasn't an acorn but a marble.

“Inside!” Mattie hissed from a window. “Quick!”

“What is it?”

“Shhh. Rudy,” she mouthed.

Quickly, I scanned the water. Yes, there he was. His back was to us as he rowed, but only a couple more pulls on the oars and he'd be dragging the boat onto our beach.

The screen door slammed and Mathilda, with Ruth glued to her hip, hurried down to the water. Keeping as low as I could, I scuttled for the back door.

I watched from one of the front windows as they talked, watched Rudy throw Ruth into the air a few times, saw him heft a couple of filled burlap sacks from the boat. When he started carrying one of them toward the house, I bolted. I ran out the back door again and locked myself in the outhouse.

If, over the last month, I'd forgotten that my situation was a shameful one, I couldn't help but remember it now as I breathed that stink and peered at the back of the house through the moon-shaped cutout in the door.

I didn't come out until I saw Mattie, obviously searching for me. She grabbed my arm and shook me.

“You scared me half to death, Mandy! I was afraid you might have gone in the lake.”

That night for the first time in the season the wind shifted to the east and the temperature dropped. I tucked wool blankets around Mattie and Ruth and then spread one on my own bed. It
felt heavy after the summer of cotton and sheets. After I got under it, it seemed to pin my arms and legs to the bed and press me into sleep.

At Brown's Business College, Ruth and Imogene learned to write shorthand and work the machines. Imogene was good at these things. In two weeks she could type without looking at her fingers. In four weeks she could take a two-page letter from dictation without faltering. And, of course, the accounting was simple from the start. The assignments she turned in were always neat, the white pages clean and unwrinkled, the ink unsmudged.

Ruth, on the other hand, was foundering. Imogene had convinced her that secretarial skills were important, but she missed the job she'd given up at the five-and-dime. She couldn't seem to type two lines before her mind wandered or her fingers disobeyed and punched the wrong keys. It was impossible to remember how many spaces went between the return address and the date, the date and the internal address, the internal address and the greeting. And who cared, who cared, who cared? she thought, tugging at a paper the typewriter refused to release. When she got behind in typing, she kept up with the rhythm of the class by hitting any old keys. While she was supposed to be taking letters about how much Mr. P owed to Mr. Q and in what increments he intended to pay, she sketched tiny figures wearing complicated hats in the margins of her paper. Imogene agreed that some of them turned out rather well.

“Don't worry,” she said, leaning over to correct Ruth's shorthand when the Browns were distracted, “you're the creative type.”

Imogene had decided that she and Ruth were going to be modern
women. When they finished school they would open an advertising agency together in Chicago. She would see to the business side and decide on the angles—she knew what made people want things. Ruth would do the art and write the copy. Imogene was not sure how they would get commissions, but she had vague notions of businessmen in gray suits and horn-rimmed glasses raising their eyebrows in admiration at the originality and style and sheer selling power of their sample ads.

Ruth suspected that Imogene had seen this in a movie. The idea made her anxious, but if Imogene wanted it, she was willing to do her part. She practiced her drawing, experimenting with different techniques she saw in the magazines. She did pen-and-ink renderings of ladies' shoes and watercolors of fruit and charcoal sketches of families frolicking by the seashore under enormous beach umbrellas cut from brightly colored paper. She liked to imagine the apartment they would have together in the city, where friends would stand in the street under their window and whistle for them to open the door. They would shop for groceries on their way home from their office, and they would sing along with the radio while they made chicken cacciatore and salads with tiny mushrooms.

“I'm wrecked, absolutely wrecked!” Imogene announced when class was dismissed for lunch that Monday. “I'll never be able to wear those shoes again.” She flexed her pretty ankles before swinging her feet under one of the tables pushed beneath the windows in the typing hall.

“What did you do this weekend?” asked Lillian. She knew what was expected of her. Ruth and Imogene often ate lunch with Lillian and Myrtle, two sisters from Baraboo.

“We went to one of those dances, you know, over at the pavilion.”

“Oh, a dance.” Myrtle winked in a knowing way that Ruth disliked. Myrtle was older than the rest of them and divorced. She was always hinting at something dirty. “Anyone interesting there?”

“No,” Ruth said quickly.

“Yes,” Imogene said. “Ruth met someone interesting.”

“You don't say. What was he like, Ruth?” Lillian leaned so eagerly over the table that some of the egg salad dropped out of her sandwich.

Ruth was trying to finish her homework for that afternoon, two pages of shorthand she'd neglected over the weekend. “He wasn't anything special, Lillian. He liked the way Genie danced, but who doesn't?”

“When are you going to let me do something with your hair, Ruth?” Myrtle asked, offering cigarettes around before lighting her own. “Men would like the way you danced, too, if you didn't look like an old-fashioned schoolmarm.”

“Myrtle can do hair, Ruth,” Lillian said. “She does mine, you know, the cut and the wave.” She turned to show off the back.

“And the color,” Myrtle added. “Under that henna, Lillian's got hair like a mouse.”

“It's true. I do.”

There was something of the little girl with the black tooth in the way Ruth looked at the sisters then, as if they were the oddities and not she, but now she smiled, as she would never have done before. After all, they were only trying to help.

“My aunt likes it this way,” she said. “It doesn't bother me.”

The office door at the back of the room opened and young Mr. Brown, the typing teacher, stepped out and strolled slowly through the classroom with his hands in the pockets of his smartly cut trousers. He was known as “young” Mr. Brown to distinguish him from his father, the school's founder, but he was hardly young by Imogene and Ruth's standards. He'd had ambitions once and pursued them to Milwaukee, but had been somehow disappointed. He combed his hair back to show its curl to advantage and kept his nails manicured. While other teachers rolled up their shirtsleeves and smudged chalk on their ties, no one could imagine young Mr.
Brown shedding his jacket during the school day. Imogene said that was because he couldn't bear to be separated from the flask in the pocket.

“How're my girls?” he asked, resting one hand on Imogene's shoulder, the other on Ruth's, and leaning between them to put his face next to theirs. He took a paternal stance toward his female students as an excuse to touch them and to stroke their hair. Ruth twitched almost involuntarily like a horse with a fly on its neck. She closed her notebook and studied its cover, waiting for him to move on.

Imogene, though, looked him full in the face and nodded briskly. “Ruth needs to finish her work,” she said. “Was there something you wanted?”

Mr. Brown straightened his back. “No, no,” he said, “I'm off for my coffee break.” He removed his hand from Imogene's shoulder and to compensate gave Ruth's a little squeeze.

Imogene rolled her eyes at his retreating back. “Coffee, I'll bet.” She turned her attention back to the table. “I wonder if Arthur Owens will be at the dance this week. Did he say anything about it to you, Ruth?”

“I already told you everything he said to me,” Ruth answered without looking up. She slid her notebook in front of Imogene. “Show me how to do ‘ough' again. I can never remember.”

“You could remember if you tried,” Imogene said impatiently but she took the pencil Ruth held out to her.

The woman who stepped into the room just then wore a cinnamon-colored suit and a hat that wasn't the usual cloche, but a new style with a feather, angled to half hide her face. “Would you please tell me where I could find Mr. Brown?”

“Young Mr. Brown or old Mr. Brown?” Lillian piped up.

The woman hesitated. “I don't know. I want to hire a secretary.”

“Then you'll want to see old Mr. Brown,” Imogene said. She was already on her feet. “I'd be happy to show you to his office.”

“Did you see her shoes?” Imogene whispered as she slid back into her seat.

When the woman emerged from the office, she glanced toward the table and raised her hand to Imogene, who waved back.