The Book of Ruth (11 page)

One fall after supper, when I was a junior, May asked me if I didn’t want to go to the homecoming dance, and I got scared because it was within her power to make me do it. I felt myself looking like a cow when it’s being led somewhere it doesn’t want to go, bugging out its eyes so the bloodshot whites showed. I could see myself in some dress not fitting my top, and no one asking me to dance, not once the whole night, and all the other girls are queen.

“I don’t want to go, Ma,” I said, “and no one is gonna ask me either.”

“That’s what every girl thinks,” she said, mopping up the table. “You wait, someday someone will beg you to go.”

“Never,” I said under my breath. I didn’t say that I would pass out dead if it ever happened.

Then May started telling me that when she was my age she loved to dance. She wiggled her fanny and took me into the living room by the wrist; she trotted around moving the TV out of the way and pushing the chairs to the side. She grabbed my grandmother’s handmade broom, the antique May always said was especially valuable because of the walnut handle. She started waltzing with it. She was graceful, and she smiled at the broom awfully moony. I thought I was going to be embarrassed but she looked so idiotic and happy I had to laugh.

“Teach me to do that, Ma,” I said.

I wanted to look moony just like her. So she went and turned the radio on and yanked me into position and said, “OK, one two three, one two three.” May told me where to put my feet, how to be light, how to feel my bones dissolve into thin air. We worked at it for a good half hour. When we were taking a breather, she said next we’d learn the fox trot. She said I was getting the hang of dancing. We didn’t see Matt standing in the hall watching us. We were concentrating but giggling also. May didn’t call me a stupid. She told me I must have her feet because I was catching on so quickly. She said, “You’re getting it, now relax your shoulders.” We were floating around the living room skimming the floor. But when May saw the expression on Matt’s face she got flustered. When she saw the jacket that says “Varsity,” she dropped her hands from my waist. He looked at us like we were a couple of perverts. He didn’t need to say one thing. He shook his head, went into the bathroom, slammed the door. May frowned and turned the radio off. She walked upstairs. I heard her bed rattle as she climbed in it and adjusted the covers over her head.

Sometimes I dream we are dancing. We’re wearing dresses that look like they’re made out of the heads of Q-tips. Our skin is scrubbed clean to perfection; we don’t have chapped elbows, and I’m on the homecoming court. After the dance we teach each other hobbies: I show her some of the blind tapes, books I think she’d like, my favorites by the author Charles Dickens. And she can make my feet do steps that aren’t invented yet. We don’t even touch the floor. We trade secrets and guard them. Sometimes, I feel that I’m only just ready to start my life. I know what I need to, to live it a hundred times better. As far as I can see, no one is out there waiting for me with a ticket that says “Try it again.” I’ll probably really figure out exactly how to be alive right when I’m gasping for my last breath.

In those days I used to look around myself, trying to see farther than Honey Creek. I couldn’t see much beyond the cemetery, and I understood that I wasn’t ever going to go anywhere unless something explosive happened, such as a war in our state. I was going to be cooped up in a building with rows and rows of metal lockers and bad light in the halls, and drinking fountains with green gum sitting on the porcelain like toads, for years to come. When I watched the news on TV with May at supper we saw people getting bombed over in Vietnam. They were having battles while we ate our food. I used to imagine Honey Creek going up in flames and smoke and I wondered who would survive and if they would share their food and if the low would still be low or if the bombings would upset the pecking order.

I was still scared of everyone at school. There were two boys who menaced me. I won’t say their names; they know who they are. Maybe the teachers kept me in the dumb classes because I never opened my mouth and they forgot I was alive. They didn’t know that I was like the mice who come out after dark, squeaking and pattering. About the only time I spoke in school was the time I told Miss Daken I thought Hitler had some good points and she stared me down until I changed my mind. In most cases I couldn’t speak about history or math because I was dreaming about blind tapes. I couldn’t do math no matter how hard I stared at the page, and everyone thought to themselves, Why aren’t you like your brother Matt? When Miss Taylor said that very sentence to me out loud—she was exasperated because I could not do long division—I ripped up my math sheets and bit my tongue so I wouldn’t cry. I got an F. When we had to read books in school I never understood them like we were supposed to. My eyes hurt from looking at the pages all the time, and when the teachers asked me what the books were about, I couldn’t say in one single sentence. I seemed to feel the meaning with my body, rather than my head. When I got promoted to the regular English class my teacher asked me what I thought were the major themes in
The Great Gatsby.
My face heated up and turned to steam. I saw the rich people floating before me, very fat on being rich, and they were empty, and there was the big old billboard with the glasses watching over the highway like it thought it was Jesus Christ. When Mr. Davidson asked me what the book meant, the only words I heard were “one two three, one two three, now relax your shoulders.”

He wrote “See me” on all my school themes. He said I had serious problems with the language. I had to go in at lunch time and sit by him at his desk. I had to smell his perfume and watch the crust of shaving cream behind his ear. He always took his glasses off and wiped his eyes. My themes made him so tired he couldn’t stand to think about them. The whole paper was covered with red ink; there wasn’t one place to start correcting. Finally he demoted me to my old class. He decided he couldn’t save me.

I asked Miss Finch, “What would you think if I joined the army after high school?” I was certain they didn’t send girls over to Vietnam because the posters at the post office showed the women at typewriters and switchboards. They spoke of careers and travel. I asked Miss Finch, “Do you think I could get into the U.S. Army?”

She told me the superiors made a person do one thousand situps and push-ups, and run around, and that women as well as men were taught to handle guns. She said the army was a ghastly place, unfit for man or beast. I couldn’t imagine what else I might end up doing except wiping eggs and selling them to people who saw the sign on the road. I guessed the best thing I could do was sniff the air and say how good it smelled.

When I was in the last years of high school May got a girlfriend. That’s what she called her, only Mrs. Foote was over the hill. She was about forty-eight. She definitely was not a girl. She first came as an egg customer and gradually she got very chummy with May. She lived down the road, in a house that was more run-down than ours, with her three children and her husband. He had weak kidneys so he couldn’t work. Mrs. Foote had gray short hair that was so stiff it stuck off the back of her head like a slide. It looked slippery too. She had several black moles on her face and breasts so big if they had hands at the end of them they might be useful. They could wipe silver or sew on buttons. Her teeth had wide black spaces between them. If you were an organism in her mouth you’d have to be able to jump pretty far, going from tooth to tooth. Wherever she went her fat son followed. He bossed everyone around and thought he knew as much as Dr. Heck, the school principal, possibly even more. He had sisters at home who were always getting into trouble stealing and running away. He said his sisters were loose; he told me he whipped them but he was lying. He was too lazy to hurt people.

Mrs. Foote wore flowered dresses that zipped tight up the front, and an apron with a hammer, her flashlight, and a dust rag in the pocket. Her nylons had runs so wide I couldn’t figure out why she even bothered to wear them, and her shoes were holey. I could see her broken soles because she always put her feet up on a chair. She said she had to rest her swollen veins. She had probably the shortest fattest legs in the state of Illinois. If she wasn’t a person you’d laugh at the shape you saw out there in nature.

She was a fixture in our kitchen in the afternoons when I came home from stringing up the blind tapes. May didn’t ordinarily smoke, but with her girlfriend she lit up about five cigarettes, one after the next. The place smelled like a murky tavern. May exhaled as if she thought she was a knockout—she blew smoke up to the ceiling like a movie star.

Mrs. Foote and May became friends because Mrs. Foote had problems she couldn’t solve. She had to tell someone about them. For instance, her girl hurt someone on the road when she was driving around smashed. Mrs. Foote didn’t know what to do about her children, so she always cried with her head down on the table. But the beauty of it was May going over to Mrs. Foote, and patting her on the shoulder and saying, “Now, now.”

When I was in the living room folding laundry and watching the news I could hear them in there, Mrs. Foote sniffling and May saying, “It’s OK, it’s OK.” Sometimes I got little flashes of understanding. All of a sudden I knew what the Rev had been saying all those years ago when he talked about how friends are people who can surprise you with kindnesses. May was a friend, both ordinary and miraculous. What cracked me up was the way Mrs. Foote thought May had a TV-show life with her smart boy winning science fairs and math games, and a girl who didn’t do stunts, such as practically killing people at three in the morning. May didn’t say to her best friend, I’m just as miserable as you. Instead, she acted as if she had been guaranteed a trouble-free existence by Mr. J. Christ.

Probably compared to Mrs. Foote’s Daisy I was the world’s best-behaved high school girl. But Daisy was spectacularly beautiful. She was in my grade and she had dark hair that curled around her face, and big black eyes with thin feathery plucked eyebrows, and she put green makeup on her lids, piles of it with silvery specks, so she looked like she was from somewhere else—the moon, for example. Everybody couldn’t help looking at her when she walked straight down the hall, not turning to see a single person. She was two years behind in school, because she didn’t care about anything except boys. Some said even the football coach couldn’t help himself and that he took Daisy to the Rainbow Motel.

One spring night when I was sixteen I heard banging at the door. I lay stiff and alert in bed. Probably someone was coming to kill us. I listened to May go downstairs and pretty soon there was the noise of Mrs. Foote blabbering. I heard the wind moving out between the wide spaces of her teeth. Naturally she had her son Randall along. He was so fat if he sat on a worm on a rock it would make a fossil in about five minutes. Then scientists wouldn’t have to wait a million years. I went downstairs because I couldn’t help it; I was curious. No one said anything to me. Randall was the only one who glanced at me standing in my nightgown, shivering. He had a belt about a mile long stretching around his belly, as if he thought his pants could actually fall down. It was impossible they were so tight. He always stared at me like he was planning to gobble me up.

Daisy was gone. They couldn’t find her. It was four in the morning. “Actually,” Randall said, “she hasn’t been home for two days.” Mrs. Foote was having a fit; the flab on her arms was quivering even when the rest of her was quiet. May said, “Sit down, Dee Dee. Here’s some whiskey. You just steady yourself. We’ll find her.”

May spoke in a way that made us all believe her. May would make it come right, make no mistake. Randall kept saying he was going to murder Daisy when she got home, for driving his mother hysterical. Because Mr. Foote’s kidneys were on the blink, Randall acted like a big old rooster, watching over his brood of bad girls. May called the sheriff and the Rev while she poured drinks for Mrs. Foote. May was such a good friend, to share her alcohol. Mrs. Foote got loaded on the whiskey, so May put her to bed on the couch. She told Randall to use the recliner. When they woke up at about ten the next morning, Daisy was in our kitchen eating cereal. Daisy wouldn’t say much. She told Randall to lay off her. There was something she said about a trucker down at the truck stop near the highway, and how she went clear to Kentucky with him.

O
NCE
I got out of high school, where I didn’t learn a thing because I dreamed about blind tapes the whole time, I went to work where May worked. I kept trying to keep my eye on the world so I could get to it sometime. I wasn’t sure how I was going to get there without money or wits. I spent all my energy keeping track of dirty clothes, and chickens, and all the eggs: every day more eggs. I had dreams where I was shredding newspaper and wadding it into balls to stuff up the hens’ bottoms, stop them from laying for a while. Still, I knew the world was out there, another country, with an ocean between us.

It was right around my commencement when Miss Finch had to go to a nursing home. I didn’t say goodbye to her. Her family came and packed her up, and took her to a place full of old people strapped into wheelchairs, screaming about the 1920s. It was the Baptist Home, where May’s Aunt Margaret had gone, so May was an expert on the subject. She said in that place people die in bunches; there’ll be a dry spell for months and then three or four will go in the space of twenty-four hours. Before she left Miss Finch was forgetting everything I told her. She didn’t want to hear any more books. They made her so tired, she said. When I went over in the afternoons she was already angry with me; she’d say, “Where’s my lunch? I’m so hungry. Why don’t they bring me lunch?” She’d pout and then whimper. I had to take her hands and make her feel her empty lunch tray by her bed. I tried to make her remember the Jell-O with the bananas in it but she said I was pulling the wool over her eyes.

“Miss Finch,” I said, “don’t tell me I’m a liar.”