The Book of Ruth (22 page)

“Still, you count your blessings. You hatched one first-class star and that’s more than some get. You have a handsome smart son and pretty soon you’ll probably have a real cute daughter-in-law.”

May stuck her face into the steam. She was probably wondering how she was going to get Matt to marry the cheerleader of her dreams.

I had had enough by now. I opened the door and stamped my feet. I didn’t say one word to either one of them. My nose was runny and my head felt perfectly round. I just stood there staring. Dee Dee thought I was looking at the empty chicken pot pie tins on the counter and she said, “I know she’s used to better but it’s all I had in my freezer, what with you two running off without making supper. For shame!”

I didn’t stay for the rest of the conversation. My sixth sense told me I should have laughed at Dee Dee, the greatest sucker for May’s lies, scolding
me,
but I couldn’t quite get into the mood for humor. I lay down in bed with my jacket on and went to sleep. When Ruby got home at two in the morning he smelled like booze and pot. He fell off the bed twice before he made it in. He tried touching me, but I wouldn’t let him. I cried out, “Why can’t you and Ma be friends?” I asked him the question, although I knew the answer.

“She don’t like me,” he said. “Let’s forget her, baby.” He was trying to stroke my neck and arms.

“Don’t touch me, Ruby,” I said, flicking him away. He was so loaded he fell right asleep. I guess you’d have to say that that was our very first lovers’ spat.

I
T
isn’t fair that Ruby can’t tell everybody what happened in his life and here I am talking about the kind of person he is, talking about his wide blue eyes and his gutter balls at Town Lanes. Even though it isn’t fair there doesn’t seem to be a way around it. I can’t leave him out. I can’t pretend he doesn’t exist. After being stymied for months I realized I would just have to do my best to explain what happened to us. I would have to look at him as if I were a judge with jowls and squinty eyes, the type who can see around all sides of a person. If I were a judge I’d try to congratulate people for their good points and then I’d tell them gently how to improve. Except you have to have crystal clear vision to judge—and that’s a quality I don’t have perfected yet.

Afterwards, they brought Ruby’s counselor, Sherry, to see me. I think the idea was to try to make me understand absolutely everything so I could kiss it goodbye and not have it come nagging back at me. Sherry always smiled and said, “Hi there,” when she came for her visits, as if we’d been best friends for years. We weren’t best friends. I always had to look twice to see that her short blond hair wasn’t a snug-fitting cap. She came in her professional clothes and I imagined her putting on her sleek white pants without a thought of Ruby or me or Ma or Justy. She told me quite a bit about Ruby, while I sat hating her unless I got especially interested. She knew so many details about his life because she got him to talk to her through tricks and games. She had a glass bowl full of black licorice twists on her desk, which is probably the only reason he even showed up for his appointments.

Ruby and I didn’t talk about his life history all that much because we were creatures of the moment. I like to think of us rolling in the grass and chasing through the woods like we had no more notion of the world than savages. Sherry sat in the recliner chair by the window in its upright position and she said she wondered where she should start; she laughed, ruffling up her hair, saying that I should probably be telling her about Ruby. Then, as if she’d had a novel idea, she said maybe we could help each other understand him, fill in each other’s blanks. I knew she probably got her act straight out of a textbook that said, First, make a suggestion hinting at what you want; next, act surprised and laugh at your own thoughts; third, do whatever you need to do to trick the person into giving away all the secrets. I was on to her. She so wanted, she said, to start at the beginning of Ruby’s life, and naturally we followed her wishes. I didn’t add one speck to her wealth of knowledge, though; I kept the facts I knew of to myself.

I owe Sherry a lot for Ruby’s story, but many of the details are mine. I already knew that Ruby and his two sisters grew up in a rambling old house down by the river in Stillwater. The parents rented it from absentee landlords who came to check up on it at a moment’s notice. The whole house was available to Ruby’s family, except for two rooms upstairs where the landlords stored their heirlooms. The special doors were secured with padlocks. Ruby and his sisters couldn’t help feeling curious about the valuables inside. He drove me by the house once when we were first married to see how it was getting along. Sometimes he prowled around there, I know he did, because he liked to remember fragments from the old days.

Sherry had been in touch with Nancy and Sally Jane, Ruby’s older sisters, but they hardly knew Ruby. Sherry explained that a professional has to go way back to the family, to the start, to get the answers. I laughed at the thought of her asking me in her innocent soft way, “Do you feel like talking about your mother?” I’d be so clever that she would never figure out that everything I’ve ever said in my life is in some way a reflection of May. I’d make her believe I was raised by Dinah Shore. At any rate, I’ve seen Ruby’s sisters’ senior pictures in Ruby’s wallet. They were quite a bit older than their baby brother. Ruby was a mistake—that’s what his father called him when he was riled. I never met either one of the girls even though they went to Stillwater High. Sally Jane was in all the plays and Nancy twirled batons in parades without dropping them. They both grew up, got married, moved away, and had children. Bingo, that’s their lives in front of me. Sally Jane almost came to our wedding, but she was expecting and they said she couldn’t fly on an airplane.

The sisters were half grown by the time Ruby was forced into the world with a pair of tongs at his head. He was awfully sick at first, according to Sherry. His organs couldn’t handle food. He spit up constantly, and not simply a dribble here and there. Ruby launched that old vomit so far it wrapped itself around Saturn, which is why weathermen keep finding new rings. Naturally, the parents couldn’t take him home right away. I can imagine all the adorable babies in the nursery, and then Ruby, screaming and puking on the soft white hospital blankets. Nobody said he looked precious. His mother cried the minute he was born probably, after she caught a glimpse of him. It didn’t take her long to shorten the Reuben to Ruby. She wanted him to know that she could convince herself of his beauty, even if he did look like a mongrel.

Ruby finally had a stomach operation after three weeks of his constant howling. There was a disconnected tube inside him, but they were able to patch it up, good as new. He didn’t have screaming fits now that he was put back together. The parents were only to keep observing their baby boy, see if he had strange behavior.

Then, as if the first weeks weren’t strain enough, Ruby’s mother, one warm summer evening, had a highball in the bathtub, holding her three-month-old baby in her arms. Next thing she knew her husband was slapping her awake and holding the baby upside down to drain water out of his lungs. In a voice as steady and quiet as a car’s idle he told her she was not fit to be a mother. When she was asleep Ruby had slipped into the water, maybe thinking it was time to go back where he came from. After a while the rescue squad screeched up to the house and the paramedics jumped out and saved Ruby’s life. The incident didn’t help the parents’ marriage too much. From the moment Mrs. Dahl stepped out of the bathtub, she decided, if her boy survived, that she would devote every inch of her life to him.

Sherry often hesitated before she spoke, as if she was sorting out the information she wanted to give me. She had said at first that she never betrayed confidences, but she had given this case a lot of hard thought and decided that it was important for me to know as much as possible about Ruby. To which I silently replied, “Remind me never to tell you anything.” Still, it was her soft voice and the way she tilted her head, looking at me with her expression of understanding and sympathy, which might have eventually won me over. She told me that Ruby’s first memory was of his father, in the living room, showing him how to put the toys away. Cleaning up was the last thing Ruby wanted to do. He sat picking his nose and then his father spanked him until his skin was raw and flaking. His father’s methods didn’t help Ruby learn to follow instructions or be tidy. As far as I can tell, when his parents explained a chore, Ruby’s brain danced a jig into the next county. If he didn’t respond, his father made him hang from the shower rod or he put him in the closet. Ruby sat still under the coats. He wasn’t so afraid of the dark. It wrapped around him warm and close. He could think to himself, be his own best friend. If his mother was watching Ruby she said, “It’s OK, sweetie, I’ll put the blocks away. It’s too hard for you.” Ruby had her number down pat—he knew she loved doing any task for him.

I was always dreaming about being a princess when May said I should clean the chicken shed. Ruby and I were taken from the same mold, I’m sure of it. Except that Ruby was born lazier. He was born smiling at the thoughts in his head that no one could imagine, not even doctors with their brain scanners.

Sherry went on in her kind, kind voice to tell me about the time in kindergarten when the teachers had the children put puzzles together so they could tell how smart everyone was going to be in life. Sherry had read Ruby’s top-secret school file to learn about his problems. Ruby didn’t want to do quizzes for intelligence. He sat and stared and grinned. He refused to look at the games. When he knew all the teachers were watching him he shoved the puzzles off the table and the pieces went flying. He wasn’t about to be a guinea pig. Sherry then explained the pattern at home for punishment: the father came in with his big stick and bashed Ruby over the head; the mother tried to rescue him and tell him he hadn’t done a single thing; and then the father slapped one or both of them to demonstrate that he knew right from wrong.

I couldn’t help blurting out that Ruby had always been a glutton for accidents. “How so?” Sherry asked, cocking her head so that the blond cap that was her hair flopped over to one side.

I told her about the time ten-year-old Ruby stuck a piece of macaroni up his nose and it practically killed him. His nose swelled up and took over his face. It sure was lucky, everyone at the hospital said, that he didn’t shove a navy bean up there, because at least the macaroni let him breathe through the hole. All of his nasal membranes got infected. They had to knock him out so they could fish up his nose and get at the noodle. Ruby wasn’t too crazy about doctors and hospitals. He felt like his nose was one of the seven wonders the way the staff wanted to look up it. He still breathes loudly—I think the macaroni made his sinuses get permanently out of whack.

Sherry and I found ourselves laughing over Ruby’s macaroni nose, until we remembered everything else and then we shut up. I was about to show her the pictures of Ruby’s parents but I decided I’d keep them to myself. Ruby’s mother looks forlorn and nice. She has bleached blond hair floating around her head like it’s cotton candy. You can barely make out the roots. Her eyes are pale blue as if someone washed them out with bleach, and they’re not as wide as Ruby’s. She looks dead tired in the pictures, but you can tell she’s a good person; you can tell she’s so sorry for drowning her boy.

Ruby told me once, when he was loaded and happy, that when he grew up his mother appreciated him all the time because he always helped her out. He hated to go to Longfellow elementary school because he was nothing but a troublemaker and he spent half his career in the principal’s office. Classmates teased him for reasons that are clear to me. They laughed because Ruby’s eyes were so far apart and dumb-looking, and because they turned their noses downwind and sniffed something different. Children have an advanced sense of smell and if your odor is off, they’ll punish you. Ruby wasn’t crazy about baths until he moved into our house and discovered the perfect combination: stewing in a hot tub and listening to the ball game. Perhaps the children thought the way he walked along the hall at Longfellow banging on each locker, with his pants falling down and his hair sticking up was queer and they couldn’t help taunting him He didn’t have good luck when he tried to behave like other people. Everyone knew that he got expelled from Sunday school for goosing all the boys and girls repeatedly. The Sunday school teacher said he was a little devil; that’s the exact person ministers don’t want to have in church. Ruby punched classmates whenever he got a chance, to get back at them for mocking him, and at home his father made him stick his head in a bucket and then he spanked him. It happened over and over, thousands of times. It doesn’t seem a mystery to me, that violence won’t cure violence. I suspect Mr. Dahl was a bale short of a full load.

But when Ruby came home from Longfellow in the afternoons there was his mother with her soft wide waist. She always had her apron on, and she hugged him so his head hit her middle. He just wanted to go to sleep right there on her small pot belly. After school they did activities together. She baked cookies and he measured the ingredients. He probably ate half the batter, but his mother didn’t mind—that’s how she was. They went to the grocery store and Ruby fetched items for her, because she walked slowly. She got winded if she went at a normal pace. He brought everything she said back to the cart and she never yelled at him, not once, even when he couldn’t see that the pancake syrup was right in front of his face. He didn’t have to do anything all that difficult for her to say he was a smart boy, a good boy.

When he was in high school he didn’t tear around wrecking things too much. He stayed close by and helped his mother in the back yard. Or he went over to the neighbor, Uncle Jake, and learned how to build birdhouses. Jake wasn’t actually his uncle, but that’s what the sisters, Nancy and Sally Jane, called him when they were youngsters. Uncle Jake didn’t talk a lot but he showed Ruby how to hammer and saw, drive nails into boards. I think Ruby was scared of him because he grumbled at mistakes and made sour comments into his beard. But Ruby liked doing crafts with his hands; he liked to see all the tools hung up neatly on the board, and Uncle Jake yelled at him outright, except the time Ruby hocked his best wrench. Uncle Jake was so old he couldn’t help being annoyed with young boys. I didn’t find out until much later, until Sherry came to me, that it was Ruby who discovered Uncle Jake shot dead in his tool shed, and that Ruby didn’t tell anyone for two weeks. Finally he told his girlfriend Hazel and she came to look at what was left, and then she called the police. Sherry said that years later, when Ruby was in her office telling her about Uncle Jake, he ate the whole bowl of black licorice while he paced.