Just Like a Musical (3 page)

He put his hand on my shoulder, trying to stop me, but I wriggled out. A slight wince crossed his lips as if he wanted to say something but then changed his mind.

“I’m glad we met,” I said, “but I really, really need to go. I’m sure I’ll see you around.”

Of course I didn’t want to leave like that. Of course I wanted him to ask me for my phone number since I obviously didn’t have the guts to ask him for his. Of course I wanted to say something more memorable, something charming that would make him think about me for the rest of the day. But considering the state I was in, these seventeen words were more than what I had expected to come out of my baffled mouth.

When I started running, it became obvious that there was nothing wrong with my knee.

“Hey, what’s your name?” I heard him shout from behind.

“Ruby! It’s Ruby!” I shouted back.

I had been ringing Mrs. Wheeler’s doorbell forever before she finally opened the door. When I entered her hallway, I was exhausted from running. The strange guy’s voice was still ringing in my ears.

“I’m so sorry I’m late,” I barely exhaled. “I met a friend in the park and lost track of time.”

Mrs. Wheeler’s house was dark. That was strange: it was only 8 p.m.

“Did I wake you up, Mrs. Wheeler?”

“No, my dear,” she said. “I was so lost in thought that I forgot to turn on the light.”

She settled her gaunt body in the rocking chair, switching on the lamp. Her tearful eyes rambled around the room before they landed on my face.

“Have you been crying?” I said.

I knew she had. I can recognize an
after-crying face a mile off; it’s one of my many secret gifts.

“Crying?” she said, making an effort to look surprised only a second after my eye caught the handkerchief that she was trying to hide under her blood red peignoir. “Why would I cry?” she said somewhat theatrically. She may have worked in Hollywood, but she was a lousy actress. I pretended not to have noticed anything.

“Should I put the kettle on?” Mrs. Wheeler asked, getting up before I answered.

“Sure, what new flavor are we trying today?”

“It’s Drum Mountain White Cloud tea,” she said. “It’s grown by Buddhist monks on the top of the mountain.”

“I love our tea routine,” I said. “It’s so poetic.”

She gently smiled at me and disappeared behind the folding doors. I glanced across the room. Nothing was different from the last time I’d been there, but I could still feel something imperceptible but heavy hovering under the ceiling. It was as if the walls had been evaporating some strange, almost tangible sentiment that slowly filled the entire room.

I heard Mrs. Wheeler blowing her nose in the kitchen. She came back a minute later with a teapot and two rose demitasse cups.

“Shall we choose a dress for tomorrow’s party now?” she said.

I followed her to her bedroom. She opened a wardrobe and gazed at me.

“I think light green would complement your beautiful hair and skin.”

Beautiful hair and skin
? I have always considered the ghostly pale shade of my skin particularly uninviting. As for my hair, I had tried to convince my mother to let me dye it, but she claimed that hair dye was cancerous, and one serious disease was quite enough.

“Try this one. It was worn by an actress whose name I forgot in a movie whose title I can’t remember,” Mrs. Wheeler said, giggling. “I’ll wait for you in the living room,” she added and closed the door.

I put the dress on and looked into the mirror.

Too skinny. Almost no breasts. Oh well, what can I do…

When I came out, Mrs. Wheeler was leaning on the window sill.

“Here I am,” I whispered.

I felt rather uncertain in an elegant, open-back dress. Mrs. Wheeler turned around. A large teardrop slowly slid down her flabby cheek.

“You look enchanting, my dear,” she sniffed and smiled.

“Thank you,” I said, bemused. “Mrs. Wheeler, do you want me to go home now? Would you like to be alone?”  

“There is nothing I would like less than being alone now,” she said in a beseeching
 voice. “I’d rather you stayed for a while, please.”

I sat on the sofa. Mrs. Wheeler turned toward the window again. Silence dense as a concrete block stood above our heads.

“It’s her birthday tomorrow,” she said suddenly.

“Whose birthday, Mrs. Wheeler?”

“Oh, you can call me Eleanor,” she said. “It’s funny to address people by their title while they’re crying in front of you.”

She sat next to me. Her wide-open, gray eyes were glowing like two lonely stars in the darkest time of night.  Her dry lips quivered as she rubbed her forehead. For a moment, I thought that she was sick.

“It’s my daughter’s birthday tomorrow,” she said, staring at me.

“But you said that you didn’t have children,” I reminded her, becoming more certain that she was having a fever. My hand reached toward her forehead, froze in the air, and then lolled beside me again.

She grabbed my shoulders in desperation.

“Oh, I have a daughter!” she shouted. “I had a daughter!”

A cascade of tears started running down her face. And I was just sitting like an idiot in a hundred-year-old dress, not knowing what to do with my arms. Speechless. Speechless again. Fortunately, Mrs. Wheeler pulled herself together quickly.

“I’m sorry,” she said wearily, wiping her eyes. “Will you get me a cigarette, please? The cigarette case is right there on the table. I feel too weak to stand up right now.”

She cleared her throat, rubbed her left palm, and lit the cigarette I handed to her. I felt that I needed one, too, although I had never smoked before.

“I had a d
aughter,” Mrs. Wheeler started after she lustily inhaled the smoke. “I was sixteen years old and I was in love, madly in love with Thomas Slade, who was three years older than me. I found out that I was pregnant two weeks before Christmas 1949. We didn’t plan to have a baby, of course, but once we imagined the three of us together, it painted our lives with the most wonderful colors. Well, mine at least.”

She sighed and held her breath for a couple of seconds before she continued.

“I knew my mother would disagree; she had other plans for me. She wanted me to go to college, and having a baby at the age of seventeen was something unacceptable to her. I guess it would be unacceptable for almost all mothers in the world, and I don’t blame her for that. But I do blame her for what came next, just like I blame myself. Tom and I made a plan to run away to New York. He was a mechanic, and I had some experience in sewing. We thought New York would be a good place for us to start a family.”

Mrs. Wheeler scratched her temple. The space around us shrank and darkened. The only thing radiating from the darkness was her furrowed face bathed in some new kind of glow, lighter than the one before.

“We were just a couple of hours away from a perfect life… I was packing my things when my mother furiously entered my room. She ran into our town doctor on her way back from the marketplace and he told her about my pregnancy. I can still feel the blaze of her fingers on my cheek.”

She stopped talking for a moment, stood up, and poured us some more tea. Her hands trembled as she placed the teapot back on the table. I tried to picture her as a seventeen-year-old girl, full of bright plans.

“My mother kept me locked in the house until the end of my pregnancy,” she continued. “No one was allowed to come and visit me. No one
. I was only allowed to go to the doctor. With her, of course. She had found the adopters for my baby long before she was born. It was a couple from Oklahoma in their late twenties.”

A cool breeze coming through the open window tickled my skin. I startled. Mrs. Wheeler went and got a scarf from the closet and draped it over my shoulders.

“Look at you, you look like a movie star,” she said and caressed my hair.

A tear rolled down my face and disappeared in the corner of my mouth. If only I had been able to find something comforting to tell her, something kind and hopeful. But like so many times that day, I remained silent when I should have spoken up.

“I held my baby for less than a minute. She was the most beautiful, the most fragile little creature. And then they took her away. For good. The only thing she got from me was her name.”

“Have you ever tried to find her?” I asked. My voice sounded strange and distant.

“No,” Mrs. Wheeler said,
“it would be unfair to her. Of course I thought about that. But I gave her away, didn’t I? So who was I to force myself into her life again?”

“But it was your mother’s decision, not yours.”

“Oh, my dear, I should never have allowed my mother to make decisions on my behalf. Never! I should have been stronger. And I was a coward! We were both lousy cowards, too afraid to live our lives.”

“Do you know where your daughter might be now?”

“I don’t even know if she’s alive,” Mrs. Wheeler said. “She used to live in Oklahoma, as I said. I even had her adopters’ address. I had stolen it from my mother a couple of days before I gave birth. I turned the whole house upside down to find it. But as much as I wanted to meet her, I had decided against looking for her.”

Somewhere in the street, a dog barked. I looked through the window into the stagnant night. Suddenly, I missed my mother.

“I spent many nights awake, thinking about her,” Mrs. Wheeler continued. “Imagining what she might be like. As time went by, the image of her grew vivid and tangible in my mind… painfully tangible.”

She stretched her legs like and old cat and looked into my eyes as though she was looking for something hidden inside them.

“You reminded me of this image of her, my dear Ruby,” she said. “Oh, there’s no need to be sad, I assure you. It’s a good thing. You brought me back a little part of my daughter. An imaginary, unreal part, of course, a part dreamed up by this old fool, but still bound to her in a peculiar way. Come on, wipe your tears, I don’t want to see you sad.” She put her trembling hand on my shoulder.

Mrs. Wheeler met Thomas Slade only once after she had given her baby away. He was about to take a train to New York, and he promised that he would come back to take her away, but he never did.

“Some people leave so easily,” Mrs. Wheeler said, shaking her head in disbelief, as though she was that seventeen-year-old girl again, full of fears and hopes, waiting for her lover to jump off the train and take her far away.

“Maybe he couldn’t forgive himself,”
I whispered, trying not to disturb the frail layer of memories that infused her thoughts.

Soon after Mrs. Wheeler decided to leave Texas and make Los Angeles her home, she met a man named Arthur. He was a crime movie director.

“To be honest, crime movies have never been my cup of tea,” she said, smiling, “but life with Arthur was wonderful, and although we didn’t have children, it was a life filled with joy and happiness. My dear Arthur died two years ago; we were married for fifty-seven years. I never told him about my baby, though. I’m not sure why. Actually, this is the first time I’ve told anyone.” She shrugged her shoulders and pursed her lips.

Mrs. Wheeler’s living room was now sodden with a strange mixture of deep sadness and serenity. I was afraid that any sound might interrupt this surreal atmosphere and capture us in that in-between space-time conjuncture forever. But Mrs. Wheeler broke the spell.

“Now, darling… enough of my stories,” she said. “If you don’t like that dress, let’s find another one.”

“Oh, no, I really like this one. You are right, sage green goes well with my hair color. It fits me, I think.”

“Yes, it looks gorgeous on you. Now hurry up, your mother must be worried, it’s late,” said Mrs. Wheeler, and walked me to the door.

***

I stepped outside with my ears full of voices whispering words – disheartening, exhilarating, soothing, promising words. An insane cocktail of all different kinds of words was running down my throat and I was unable to digest it.  I didn’t feel like going home yet, so I decided to sneak into my backyard and sit on a little sandalwood bench by the lilac tree. I felt the evening breeze caress my skin as I tried to understand how my life became so astonishingly filled with all these different emotions. Only a couple of weeks before it was a series of monotonous, achromatic days spiced with books and movies only. And now there was a real life tickling my soul with its fingers, inviting me to join the game. There was a real woman remorsing over giving her real baby away more than sixty years ago. I saw real sadness in her gray eyes. And somewhere out there, in this very same sleepy little town, there was a real boy whose name I didn’t know and to whom I felt close in a most unexpected and incomprehensible way.

I forced myself to stand up from the bench and enter the house.

“What’s that dress you’re wearing?” my mother said when I closed the door behind me.

It wasn’t before that moment that I realized I had left all my clothes in Mrs. Wheeler’s house, and now I was standing in front of my mother in a satin dress and sneakers. I am an inexhaustible source of awkwardness.

“It’s… a party dress,” I mumbled.

Then I had to hear about the importance of eating regular meals, wearing layered clothing, and all that stuff. The tender affection that I felt for my mother while I was sitting there in Mrs. Wheeler’s house, looking
at her silhouette behind the semitransparent floral curtains, dissolved completely. When I finally reached my room, I collapsed into bed, overpowered by the day behind me.