The Book of Ruth (17 page)

May was sore over what I said about Elmer, even though she knew I was right, and that she couldn’t make an argument. It was a wound that festered for a long time. She didn’t forget easily. She put the fight away, for a later date. Her big worry right at the moment was getting old and uglier, and being left alone. She was going to be left to rot away. She’d tell me details at supper out of the blue. She’d push her chair back, and she’d say, “All them piles of dirty diapers that I used to wash.” She said having babies made her body change its shape drastically. May had the habit of saying, “Don’t have kids, they let you down each time.” She had a nick on her nipple where I bit her once. She made it clear that I owed her something. I owed her double, since we both knew Matt wasn’t going to come through.

At any rate, Ruby came bowling with us, and I have to admit as a bowler he was a lost cause. He couldn’t get that ball to go anywhere except the gutter. He laughed and turned around to find me when he didn’t knock one pin down. I felt like part of a big family, though: there was May and Dee Dee and Daisy and Ruby and Artie, even Randall with his Bit O’ Honey, sitting around making sure we weren’t cheating on the score sheet. Daisy and Ruby talked about their social workers down at the resource center and the different times they got crocked.

In those days I didn’t write Aunt Sid too much because I couldn’t explain how it was for me, and I was afraid she might not like me any more if she knew I drank alcohol and spent half my life in a bowling alley. I didn’t want her to know I thought about Ruby every single minute. Aunt Sid, with her choir and lilies pinned to her chest, might think I’m trash and stop telling me I’m a good person. I couldn’t stand to think of that, so I wrote her short letters saying Trim ’N Tidy was perfect, and May hadn’t bawled me out too much, telling me to say, “Have a nice day.” I mentioned briefly that I kind of liked to bowl and that we all went to Town Lanes occasionally.

Aunt Sid wrote back and asked me, “Have you read a good book lately?”

I knew I disappointed her. The cassette recorder she had given me didn’t work any more. I only thought about the blind tapes. They were living inside of me: there were thousands of different characters milling around saying advice, telling their stories to each other. There was Huck Finn, giving Madame Bovary a ride down the Mississippi, telling her not to worry about her dumb husband and all the cash she owed people for silk shawls and other things she couldn’t resist. They lay on that raft, smelled the muddy water, and she called the clouds names of men from her village. She wanted to kiss Huck like crazy but she knew it wasn’t appropriate. She controlled herself pretty carefully. I didn’t tell Aunt Sid that now when I conjured up Mr. Darcy he looked almost exactly like Ruby. I wondered if Mr. Darcy had rotten teeth. Maybe he did because I bet in those days they didn’t have dentists. I heard on the radio that people in England eat pounds of sugar and their teeth aren’t good like ours over here in the U.S.

Ruby and I went out to various dark places. We drank beer and talked about fishing. We kissed like wild horses in the back of his car. He always said, “Please, baby, come on, come on,” and I had to say, like someone’s mother, “That’s enough now,” even though I wanted it all as fiercely as he did. It seemed like there wasn’t anything more important on earth except having him near me that way. Buildings could burn right next to us in the car, and if we were in the middle of a kiss we wouldn’t notice. I was learning about the perverse streaks within us: for example, I knew Ruby admired me for my strict control. We were experiencing something serious partly because I wasn’t like Hazel or Daisy, just letting the man have his way. We were developing a friendship; I can say in perfect truth that that’s what it was. Ruby would say to me, “You must be a goddess or somethin’,” and I’d smile at him mysteriously. He teased me; he’d say, “Baby, you a nun underneath your clothes?”

Sometimes, maybe it isn’t very nice, I felt I had him eating out of my hand, the way he whispered into my face, “Ain’t you a goddess?” We had such sweet times in his car, parked up on Andrew’s Hill, in the hunting grounds. With the windows open, we sat, watching the night go by us, feeling that we were the only people who had ever breathed the air together and admired the evening.

I had to feel sorry for Ruby because he didn’t have an easy life. You could tell it by looking at him. He smiled too much. He was covering up aches he didn’t want to speak of. One time, we were down at Mabel’s and Ruby was guzzling more than usual. Instead of getting raucous and joyful, he became more somber with each drink. I didn’t know what to do so I talked about nothing. Finally he interrupted me; he said, “Baby, what happens when someone dies?”

“Huh?” I said.

“Where do they go?” He was starting to cry.

I thought of all the carcasses of sheep I had seen in my life, sinking into the pasture until all you saw was a rib cage and skull, picked clean.

“They don’t go anywhere, Ruby, far as I know.” I figured I might as well tell it like it was. “Their bodies rot in the ground, and all you have left is the memory. It’s up to you to remember the person.” It was no comfort but I didn’t know what else to say except, “That’s about it.”

He was bawling into his sleeve, and I felt so sorry. I took his hands and held them with all my might. “Don’t think about it,” I said. “We’re here now, and—and I love you so much.”

I wasn’t planning on saying those words but there they were. Ruby stopped crying instantly. He blinked several times, and wiped his nose on his sleeve.

I leaned across the table and put my hand on his face to make him know better. I whispered again, “I love you, Ruby.”

He burst into a grin and then jumped up and started dancing around, as if he were a wind-up bear and my words had activated him. He made me laugh until my side ached. He went up to the bar and told the farmers he didn’t even know that I loved him. He went to each one and said, “See that lady? She loves me.”

Then he came back and took my hand and kneeled on the floor, like a chivalrous knight. He put his head in my lap. He kept saying, “Sweet baby, sweet baby, baby, baby.” He’s the silliest person in the world at times, Ruby is. What I wanted him to do was marry me. Then we’d climb into bed and it’d be like a ship. We’d sail away.

I didn’t think too hard about what it meant to get married. I figured I wanted to be a wife because I loved Ruby, and I could tell he needed a girl to cook him good food and buy him clean undershirts. I figured with those three ingredients, especially counting true love, a person couldn’t go wrong being married. I didn’t stop to think because I knew I was plunging headfirst toward happiness. In addition, I was fed up watching the world march by me. I couldn’t stand seeing people such as Daisy’s little sister Lou have a baby. They named her Midnight Star Sandra Dee. The baby was called Midnight for short, but maybe when she went to first grade she’d want to be Sandra Dee. “She’s got the option,” is how Daisy explained it. Lou was sixteen years old and already she was a mother. I knew if I didn’t hurry up I was going to be past the prime in no time flat. They brought Midnight over on their way home from the hospital. Lou said when the baby came out her toenails were already long and they had to cut them right away. I couldn’t stop looking at the baby, complete with all her parts. I couldn’t get over how she started with Lou and one of three possible boys who cornered her one night by the drugstore while she giggled. “In the beginning was that old word” always comes to me. That’s a sentence the Rev uses nearly every Sunday. Maybe inside of me all that existed, besides
I LOVE RUBY
, were letters floating around in my body, the names of my babies. When I saw Midnight Star Sandra Dee, I knew I wanted to be in a family. I knew I wanted to look after a baby, all mine. I could picture Ruby and me, the father and the mother. I conjured up Ruby coming home from work, singing. I’d be feeding our baby something delicious from a jar.

A couple of nights after I told Ruby the news, exactly how I felt about him, he came over and we went outside. I took him to the woods because I couldn’t wait to show him some of my favorite places. We were listening to the crickets in the grass. I’ve always wanted to sneak up on crickets so they keep making their racket even while I’m close. Although they quit singing we could almost feel them breathing. I could imagine myself a cricket with my antennae on alert sensing two pairs of gigantic feet coming closer, and being too terrified to squeak or run. When we moved away they started up again. They were so relieved. We were sitting on a blanket listening, when Ruby said, “Baby, you make my crazy head feel better, you know that. You’re so sweet and nice.”

I lapped up all the words. I asked him to say that sentence over again.

He didn’t say anything for a second. He took a deep breath and then whispered, “How about you and me get married?” I quick told him, “Yes, yes, yes, yes.”

He took a ring out of his pocket. He said he bought it with Green Stamps once, and couldn’t figure out why he did it, but now he knew he had been saving it for me. It had been for me all along. It had five sparkling diamonds in a row. Ruby put it on my finger and said now we were engaged and I was his girl. I said that was just fine with me. There’s times I wish I could have keeled over and died right then and there.

I
T
was the end of August when Ruby proposed to me, when we were out in the woods and he slipped diamonds on my finger. He put his head on my lap and I stroked his hair. We talked about our romance, remembering the high points. Ruby told me Daisy gave him advice all the time, in particular after our first date. She told him I was pretty upset and what he should do to make friends with me again. They rehearsed speeches he could say to make me forgive him. She even gave him pointers on proposing. We laughed over Daisy and what a busybody she can be. I was engaged to be married; I couldn’t be angry at Daisy for running my life.

When it started to rain, and we were damp and uncomfortable, I figured I better tell May what we were up to, get it over with. Ruby and I kissed leaning against his car. I half wanted to get in, forget the wedding, and drive off with him to the wilds of Indiana.

I came into the kitchen where May was making pickles. She had on her pickle apron, the green one with yellow flowers that stretches across the hill of her middle and ties in a large crisp bow at the back. The whole place smelled like dill and vinegar, so strong I’m sure the stench in there could have cured any disease you had, guaranteed. I sat down and put my hands out on the table, with the five diamonds showing. While she stuffed pickles in the quart jar—she packed them in so there wasn’t any air space—I said, “Ma, I’m going to marry Ruby.” She didn’t even quit stuffing; she laughed as if I’d just told her the joke of the year. She said, “How was a man”—then she stopped because she had to shove a gherkin in so tight, and it took all her concentration—“who don’t have no job, going to support a wife and then a whole slew of babies?”

“Ruby’ll find himself a job, that’s how,” I said.

She shook her head and pursed her lips. She didn’t know why anyone would hire Ruby with what she called “his disconnected brain.” It was starting to thunder but we hardly noticed it.

“Don’t say that, Ma,” I cried. “There ain’t a thing wrong with his brain. Whenever people ain’t exactly how you think they should be you call them retarded. It ain’t fair. Ruby’s good and kind,” I shouted. “He’s good and kind.”

“Turn off the boiling water,” she said. “Well, my my my, you can’t eat good and kind. You ever had good and kind sandwiches? They’re real juicy, all right; they don’t stick to your ribs too good though.” She was snickering and snorting, shaking her head and slamming the lids on her pickles, screwing on the covers.

“These better seal,” she said to me, like it was going to be my fault if they didn’t. “You listen for them to click—my ears ain’t that accurate. I’m getting so old.”

She was always saying words of that sort. I should have told her Ruby had weak ears too. Perhaps it was something they could have talked about, in common. “Ma,” I said, “I’m going to marry Ruby.
CAN YOU HEAR ME
? Should I shout them words into your deaf ears?”

That was the clincher. She turned around to me as fast as an old lady can, and said in a stream, “I suppose you think you’re going to live here. I bet you think I’ll make the money and you’ll sit around staring into space and Ruby’ll drink morning, noon, and night. I know what you’re planning.”

She closed her eyes, and then she chuckled over how we were going to dupe her. That’s how May is sometimes. She thinks everyone is against her, and she’s left with nothing but a scrubby chicken yard.

I didn’t say anything. I got up and walked over and stood in front of her at the sink. The rain was coming in through the window, splashing the counter, but I said to myself, So what? In those days I felt like a strong nun, skinny and tough, who had the words from God, or someone who knew the answers. It was Ruby who made me feel absolute.

I said softly, but actually wanting to make a display like the thunder, “Ma, how can you think we’re trying to trick you?” I could tell by her small eyes that she was scared of certain events in the future. I said, “I’m going to keep working and Ruby’ll do his best to find a job. I know he will.” I had to shiver from my dripping clothes. For once May didn’t make any mention of my mess. I talked quietly still. I said, “You know we don’t have a single cent. We love each other, ain’t that enough? Don’t you remember what it was like when you were in my position? Can’t you be happy for me?”

I had practiced my speech out in the rain before I came in to tell May the good news. I felt as if a soap opera personality had fed me the words, they came out so smooth.

“Close the window,” she said and then she went to the table. She put her head in her hands. I followed, saying, “If it’s OK, we’ll live here for a while, while we get our bearings. We don’t have a place to go.” I said, “We’ll help you out, Ma, we’ll do the heavy work.” I said it like I was beseeching her, only I knew those exact words were what she wanted to hear.