Robin and Ruby (17 page)

Tomorrow’s his birthday. Jackson’s. She’s been thinking about it for weeks. Thinking about going to the grave, and how frightening the idea was to her, because of what happened the last time she was there. She’d had the idea, a week or two ago, that she’d be able to deal with the cemetery if she could get all of them to go with her, her mother and father, showing up at the grave at the same time, and maybe Robin, too, if he could get a train from Philadelphia. They could all be there together to mark Jackson’s birthday. But Robin said he had to work, and her father said that he didn’t know if he and Annie, this woman he’d been dating lately, had made plans already. He had managed to slip into their conversation that Sunday was also Father’s Day—she hadn’t remembered, and felt bad about it, though, really, Father’s Day strikes her as a fake holiday, a Hallmark holiday, not an important memorial like Jackson’s birthday. (Plus, wasn’t it creepy that the person her father had planned to spend his Father’s Day with was Annie, his much-younger girlfriend?) Her mother hadn’t been open to the idea of the group outing to the cemetery, either. She said that she had her day planned out, and she wasn’t feeling very flexible about the schedule—she wanted to be at the grave early enough to allow her to get back to Manhattan and cook dinner. Of course, she was just avoiding Clark, still holding on to all the unfinished business surrounding the divorce, even though they’d actually been civil to each other lately—they even managed to share a few laughs at Uncle Stan’s wedding last weekend. Still, the plan fell apart, because everyone in her family was basically self-absorbed or petty or both, and Ruby wound up feeling that she had expended way too much energy on the plan, and gotten nothing back from any of them, which was typical. Calvin tried to be nice about it, told her they could stop at the cemetery on the drive back from the shore tomorrow, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to go with Calvin. He didn’t know Jackson. It wouldn’t mean anything to him. Plus, he’ll probably have some critique of the whole concept of a cemetery, the way the funeral industry is essentially capitalist exploitation of grief, which of course, it kind of is, but who wants to hear that when you’re standing in front of your dead brother’s tombstone? What if she started praying and Calvin challenged her about it? It would be better not to be there at all than to be there with someone who misunderstood.

She makes a decision.

She turns to Benjamin and says, “I’m going for a walk. If Calvin asks, tell him that.”

“Are you going to the boardwalk?” Benjamin asks, exhaling smoke past her shoulder. “We should
all
go!”

“No,
we
shouldn’t.”

“Oh, the Princess needs her personal space?” He winks at her, as if cementing a pact between them.

So she assumes, though she can’t be sure it’s true, that Benjamin has guessed that she’s going to look for Chris.

The beach is only a few blocks away. Ruby walks eastward, away from the now-set sun, her boots slung over the strap of her handbag, a thermos in her hand filled with something called a New Jersey Iced Tea—lemonade, Coca-Cola, rum, and vodka—mixed by the girl playing bartender back at the house. She passes a church called Our Lady of Perpetual Help. She thinks of the fact of the ocean, and how they take it for granted as a place of recreation, though it’s more powerful than any of them. She felt that briefly today when she was jumping around in the crashing waves by herself. She thinks of sailors lost at sea, of cap-sized boats, of swimmers carried away. The ocean is perpetual, and the tides, and drowning. But so is love, and desire. She is staring at the church, a brick building with a strip of dehydrated lawn surrounding it. She ignores the pull she feels to enter, kneel, and pray to God that she finds Chris. She keeps walking. She walks another block and comes upon Waterworks, a giant waterslide occupying an entire block in the middle of this neighborhood, emitting splashes and shrieks from every direction. This is what people do, we take the forces of nature and we corral them into amusements. We’re always trying to control everything. She hears her thoughts cascading and realizes she’s definitely buzzed. Waterworks is situated catty-corner from the borough hall and the police station. Could she get arrested here, for being underage and under the influence? No, not with wasted teenagers everywhere. But she keeps her head down anyway.

Twilight settles upon streets dense with cruising traffic. With every step the noise of the night swells up. She dodges cars turning in and out of liquor store parking lots. Gangs of happy-hour drunks stumble serpentine along the sidewalk. Everyone seems so young, so inconsequential, and yet she doesn’t feel safe, on her own like this. Catcalls fly out from guys on porches and hotel balconies. She guesses she’s an easy mark, a single girl in preppie shorts, barefoot, unsteady on her feet.

Someone yells from a second-floor motel balcony, “Show us your tits.” She hears the same thing a half block later from a different group of boys. She drops her head and walks faster, away from the harassment. Calls of “prude” trail her like the barking of provoked dogs. If it happens again, she thinks she might just do it. Drop everything, yank up her shirt and bra, give them a glimpse of her B-cup breasts, gleaming white in the darkening night air. She’d yell back at them, “Satisfied?” An Amazon, a Bond Girl, Bettie Page.

She sips from the thermos, wipes a splash from her chin. Just forget about those guys.
Fuck
those guys. That’s what she’ll yell next time they shout at her.
Fuck you. Show me your prick.
The strong drink stimulates courage, or the concept of courage anyway. But then she rounds a corner and comes upon a tall motel taking up half the block. Its sign bears the lofty name Skyview Manor, but there’s nothing posh about the four floors of long balconies jammed to the railing with riotous teens, like a hundred-eyed creature from a monster movie. If anyone gives her serious trouble, she’ll run back to the police station. Until then she’s keeping her course. She has no idea where Chris is, but the closer she gets to the ocean, the more urgent it seems that she’ll find him. Maybe then she’ll have the answer to the question that nagged at her all day long.
Why am I here?

She turns a corner and comes upon another motel, the last block before the boardwalk, lit up in white light. This one looks more typical of Seaside Heights—a two-story building, a parking lot, a vending machine near a sign marked
OFFICE
. There’s a fenced-in pool running the length of the place and a big sign bearing its name, The Surfside. The picture on the sign stops her in her tracks—an illustration of a woman in a swimsuit, her body bent in half, diving into the water. Ruby has been here before. That family vacation, all those years ago. She was only eight, maybe nine, and she shared a room with her brothers. It felt like an adventure, like being on their own, though Dorothy and Clark were just on the other side of the wall. Jackson wanted to build a fort, so she and Robin stretched sheets and blankets between the twin beds, and brought the desk lamp underneath, and the phone, too—whatever they could move from all corners of the room into their “underground hideout.” Robin decided this should be the Batcave. Robin was Batman, Ruby was Batgirl, and Jackson was Robin the Boy Wonder (which was confusing to him, only six years old and asked to play the character with his older brother’s name). Robin fashioned capes for them out of pillowcases and they ran around the room fighting crime. Then they started over, playing criminals this time. Ruby called Catwoman, but Robin wanted to be Catwoman, too, so she agreed to be Catgirl, a criminal not part of the TV show but fine for pretend. She and Robin hissed to each other in cat-voices—“We’re going to commit the
purrfect
crime”—while Jackson, as the Penguin, waddled around making honking noises. Eventually the door swung open and their father barged in, annoyed. “Aw, come on, guys! Clean up this mess.” He wore his bathrobe, bare chest showing at the collar, hairy legs visible below. After lights out, she and Robin giggled about it—
Daddy wasn’t wearing pajamas!

This was the very place, wasn’t it? The Surfside Motel. She remembers her mother lounging by the pool, even though the beach was just a block away, reading the
New Yorker
. She remembers that they only stayed one night before they moved to another place—too many teenagers, making way more noise than she and her brothers ever could. Ruby strides past the pool, full of girls and boys splashing around, toward a phone booth near the vending machines. She pulls a few dimes from her purse, flips through her address book, and finds her brother’s new phone number in Philly. It’s Saturday night. He’s probably working at the restaurant, or maybe he and George are out for the night. (He’s only been in Philly for a month. Does he have friends? Where do they go when they go out? Do they use fake IDs and go to gay bars? Do they have parties?) The phone rings, then the machine picks up. Dorothy bought him an answering machine when he moved in with George, afraid that she’d lose him in the wilds of West Philly—after the news of the police bombing, she’d called the neighborhood a “war zone.” Ruby had argued that Dorothy didn’t understand politics at all; Dorothy said Ruby had no idea what it was to be a mother. Another standoff.

Robin and George have recorded a funny outgoing message together: “It’s Robin. And George. We’re out recruiting for our secret club. If you leave a message, we might let you join.” When she hears the beep she fumbles with what she wants to say. It’s harder to form words than she’d expected. (What was in those Jell-O shots?) She mentions Seaside, the motel, the party, Chris. “I’m trying to find him. I
followed
him. I’m a little buzzed.” At some point she realizes the machine has already cut her off. There’d been a time limit, without warning. She thinks about calling back, changes her mind. Keep to the mission.

She’s remembering more and more of Chris, things he told her during those phone calls after the retreat weekend. His father was an engineer at an aircraft company. His mother was a college English professor. Ruby remembers Chris’s descriptions of how brilliant his mother was, but also how unbearably skinny she had been. How he never used to see her eat anything of substance. His older sister was a curvy beauty, a good student with good looks planning on earning scholarship money by entering the Miss New York pageant. Brainy and bubbly and blond. There was a younger sister, too. Chris told her that his bedroom ceiling was hung with model airplanes, rockets, spaceships. Tiny components pieced together by hand. The satisfaction of assembling something intricate. And then, the discovery of inhaling glue. He’d seen a psychiatrist after his sister found him passed out on the stairs, eyes rolling back in his head. He laughed bitterly when he related the catch-22 that emerged during his treatment: the shrink said a “creative outlet” was important, but since his beloved models provided the means to getting high, they were forbidden. The solution was painting and drawing, but the images he came up with frightened everyone—space creatures devouring children on barren planets, blood bursting out of human ears, noses, assholes. He told Ruby he used to squat over a mirror to get a look at his own asshole, in order to be able to draw one correctly.

His confessions made her uneasy, and then made her bold. She, too, held her privates open in front of a mirror, wanting to see the parts she contained. After reading a sex-soaked paperback found in Dorothy’s bedroom, she tried out different textures down there, not just her fingertips, but stuffed animals and a hairbrush and a powder puff stolen from her mother’s makeup table, which tickled to the point of ecstasy. She nicknamed the most tender spot her “clint,” because she wasn’t sure how to pronounce its real name (
clit
oris or cli
tor
is?). She told him she gave it a man’s name because it felt like a stranger living there inside her. A sensitive, secret self.

It was Chris’s mother who brought him to Jesus. Chris’s shrink had taken one look at Mrs. Cleary and decided all was not well with this bone-thin woman. She had been seeing a therapist, too, and attending a regular support group, and letting a nutritionist put her on a regimen. The Save Your Life Diet, Chris called it. He told Ruby that before, he never hugged his mom because she was so hard and brittle—“Can you imagine that, thinking you could snap your own mother’s bones?” But she put on flesh and grew softer, and the first time she held him against her newly cushioned body, he wept. His mother hushed him, “Don’t cry, I’m getting better.” She told him the change was not only in her body but also in her soul. It wasn’t just the doctors, it was prayer that had made the difference. So the Cleary family went back to church—sober Chris, fleshy Mom, and the rest of them. Chris told Ruby he would stare at a painting of the crucifixion—Jesus’ suffering like an image he himself might have sketched in oil crayons, Jesus with long hair like a rock star and a body as starved as the one his mother had just conquered. Chris would stare and then go home and read the New Testament, looking for anything that spoke of the pain, the actual bodily suffering. He went to their priest trying to understand the meaning of a single idea—that this man who walked the earth so long ago had
suffered in order to end our suffering.
It didn’t make sense. The priest told him about a teen retreat called Crossroads.

Ruby remembers all of this. She remembers, too, the jealousy she felt. Chris lived in a house where healing had been possible. (And now? Who was Chris Cleary now? What did he believe in, if anything?) In her own home, pain only rooted deeper over time. Her mother did not go to church, did not forgo her bottles of wine to drink from the cup of Christ, had no miraculous transformation. Dorothy didn’t even drive Ruby to church on Sundays, not even in the winter when the sidewalks were treacherous with ice, and slush seeped into her boots. Ruby believed all on her own, until she stopped believing. That’s what she tells herself, and others, too: She no longer believes in God, as she did back then, when the circumstances of her life brought her face-to-face with the kind of pain only God seemed fit to remove. Because He didn’t remove it, and it deepened: an injured brother became a dead brother, a troubled home a broken one. She’d been uprooted from a quiet town and dropped into a dangerous city. So for a couple years now, she has resisted anything that smacks of the divine. It’s all superstition, placebo. Rhetoric about things that are
meant to be
is just a way to rationalize a power structure, one that keeps people in their place, especially women. But given all that—how is she supposed to explain why crossing paths with Chris feels so preordained, so fated?