There's a (Slight) Chance I Might Be Going to Hell - v4 (27 page)

“That’s would be wonderful, Ruby, thank you,” Maye said. “Now I have a question for you. What puts you in such a good mood today? I’ve never seen you quite like this.”

Ruby laughed heartily. “Are you kidding? Why wouldn’t I be in a good mood this afternoon?” she replied as she stood up and gathered the ends of the picnic sheet. “I’m getting my fence painted today! And for free! Who wouldn’t be happy about that? And you’d better get hoppin’. That fence is longer than it looks. The paint and brushes are right over there on the side of the porch. Chop, chop, Girl!”

Ruby was right.

The fence was far longer than it looked. As Maye finished up her best Tom Sawyer impersonation, the sun was sinking quickly into the tree line. She was covered in white—from her shoe, which the paint can had tipped over on, to the speckled spray that dotted every inch of her arms and hands—and resembled a giant marshmallow. She had been painting for hours. Her arms were sore, and she was tired of standing, crouching, and standing again, and all she wanted to do was wash off as much of the latex color as she could and head home.

She knocked on the front door, and when no one answered, she glanced in the living room window and saw the two grimy, matted feet twitching on the kicked-up footrest of Ruby’s recliner. She went back to the front door and tried the knob; the door was unlocked. She could either wake the old woman up from her afternoon slip into unconsciousness, she realized, or go quietly into the house, wash up, and be on her way.

Maye chose the easier option, and with the cleaner of her two hands, turned the doorknob slowly so as to not make too much noise and startle the dogs, who were lying like a herd of sea lions all around their snoring, drooling master. Papa was the first to lift his head to see who was breaking into the house, and Maye smiled, then whispered, “Good boy!” to put him at ease. He dropped his head back down.

She tiptoed through the living room and into the kitchen and headed directly for the sink. Quietly, quietly, she turned the “cold” handle on and waited for a moment, but the faucet was dry. Maye tried the “hot” handle as well, but it, too, released no water. She turned both handles off and sighed, leaning up against the counter. Her hands and arms were covered in paint—there was no way she was going to get in the car like this, she’d get smudges of white all over the interior.

Suddenly, she heard the clicky toes of a dog behind her on the old, cracked linoleum floor, and she turned to see Papa in the doorway, nudging his empty water bowl. He licked the last droplets of water from the bottom and turned to climb the stairs.

Ah, Maye thought to herself, a thirsty dog will always know where to find water if there’s any around, but at the same time she prayed she wouldn’t have to dip any part of her body into Ruby’s toilet. She followed Papa up the creaky, spongy stairs, completely fearful that she had could drop through them at any minute. These stairs were used to supporting an old, skinny woman who weighed as much as a fifth grader, not a girl who could create a rhythm section when she walks, complete with castanets, with her plentiful thighs strangled in the prison of a spandex girdle.

Against the laws of gravity, Maye made it up to the dark landing where she could see only the outlines of two doors on her left and two doors on her right. One of them had to be a bathroom, she said to herself, hoping that Papa would show her to the right one. He just stood directly at her side. She remained on the landing for a minute or two, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the shadows and the absence of light, because this was Ruby’s house after all, and if the stairs were any indication, there might be floorboards missing or a trapdoor left open or any number of unimaginable horrors just panting with anticipation to break her leg. When she was confident that she had a straight shot to the door closest to her right and that the floor before her seemed intact, she took the necessary number of steps to reach it, turned the doorknob, and pushed.

Maye knew immediately she was not in the bathroom.

She was not in the bathroom.

This was not the bathroom.

Because, Maye reasoned to herself, when you go to the bathroom, there shouldn’t be two people in there already. The outline of two people, standing and looking at you.

Christ Almighty, Maye thought to herself in a split second, that old bat has been killing people and mummifying their bodies, and posing them like they’re at a party! In the next second, her mind flashed to an alternate scenario—Holy shit, these are crazy relatives she’s hidden in the attic, but if she’s the sane one out of the bunch, I’m in real trouble here. Then, in the following moment, she reasoned, they’re dead, they’re dead victims, and she’s going to keep me as her prisoner and I’ll spend the rest of my days picking up dog shit and my nights chained up in this room with dead bodies looking forward to picking up dog shit.

Thankfully, Papa whined precisely then and more or less broke Maye from her Janet Leigh moment. She took a deep breath, calmed down, and berated her irrational side for thinking that there were mummies of crazy relatives having a party in a dark, spooky, rotting old house. She felt along the wall until she came to a lightswitch and flipped it on. As the room was illuminated, it took Maye just as long to comprehend what she was seeing in the light as it did to try to figure out what it was in the dark.

In the room were two figures in what looked to be a neat, tidy, and undisturbed bedroom; dressmaker’s dummies, each adorned with an exquisite gown. One was a striking sky blue, a capsleeved satin dress with tiny beads and rhinestones dotting the neckline. It was cinched tightly at the waist, from which the blue material spilled over into a wide, generous, sweeping skirt that barely reached the floor. There would be only two purposes for a dress of its stature: a ball gown fit for a debutante, or a pageant gown, fit for a hopeful queen.

The second dress was a soft, light ochre color. It still held the shimmer of a good-quality silk, reflected in the light that shone brightly from the fixture directly above it. Its skirt was not nearly as broad; it was more subtle, more fluid in its lines, with the silk flowing instead of billowing to the floor; the entire bodice was gently shirred. Abundant cream-colored pearls were meticulously sewn to the rim of the sweetheart neckline. Maye thought there must have been thousands of them. They also gathered on the cuff of the wrist-length sleeve, making nearly a bracelet. Maye stepped closer to the dress, admiring the hours and hours of work it must have taken to attach all of those tiny little pearls. It was then that she noticed that only half of the neckline had been embellished; the other half was naked silk, looking plain and simple. The other sleeve, too, was not yet completed; pieces of it were pinned to the side of the dress, as if not to lose them. As Maye brought a piece of the sleeve between her two cleanest fingers and felt the texture of the silk, a whiter, fresher color showed itself beneath it. She lifted more of the unfinished sleeve up and realized the dress was not ochre at all; it had been white, and had aged into a deeper hue with time.

There was only one purpose for a dress like this, Maye thought as she returned the folds of the sleeve softly, putting it back exactly as it had been and smoothing it with her fingers.

It was a wedding dress.

“What are you doing in here?”

Maye turned around quickly. She hadn’t heard Ruby come up the stairs, hadn’t heard her standing in the doorway behind her.

“Who said you could come in here?” Ruby demanded angrily, her voice growing louder as she came closer to Maye. “What are you doing? Why are you in here?”

“I…I needed to wash up,” Maye stuttered. “And Papa needed water—the sink in the kitchen—I couldn’t get it on, so I followed Papa up the stairs and I thought this was the bathroom. I didn’t know, Ruby, it was the first door, I thought it was the bathroom.”

“Well, it’s not the bathroom!” Ruby roared. “Do you see a sink? Do you see a toilet? This is not the bathroom! This is Mama’s room!”

“I didn’t mean any harm, Ruby, it was an accident,” Maye said calmly. “I didn’t mean to upset you. I came in here by mistake, and the dresses were so beautiful I had to look at them. They’re exquisite.”

Ruby looked at the floor, shaking her head, and didn’t say anything until she looked back up at Maye with glassy, tear-filled eyes. “Those dresses,” she said in the smallest little voice. “My mother made them. It was a long, long time ago.”

“They’re beautiful,” Maye said. “Are they yours?”

“Can we go back downstairs?” Ruby didn’t ask, but demanded. “I don’t come in here. No one should be in here.”

“Sure,” Maye replied, stepping closer to Ruby but keeping an arm’s distance just in case she had a basket of rocks or a blow-torch behind her back. Since Ruby hadn’t tried to stone or sear anyone since the day she first knocked on the boxer head door Maye figured the time was ripe.

Ruby turned the lights out, returning the dresses to darkness, and shut the room back up.

“
That
’s the bathroom,” the old woman said as she pointed to the second door on the right and started down the stairs. “You can clean up in there.”

Maye washed her hands off, wiped them on the back of her overalls, and climbed back down the shaky stairs. In the living room, Ruby sat on the edge of the couch, smoking a cigarette and sipping out of a plastic tumbler.

Maye wasn’t sure what to say—she had never seen Ruby so upset, and in the short time that she’d known her, she had mistakenly thought she’d experienced the old woman’s range of emotions. Bitterness to rage to extra bitterness. She decided on the inane, not because she didn’t want to know what was up there in that room, and not because she didn’t care, but because a tough old battle-ax had been pushed into terrain they were both unfamiliar with, and that was just about enough for anybody.

“That fence sure was long,” Maye relayed to Ruby, who didn’t turn around. “It’s ten times longer than it looks.”

Ruby didn’t turn around. She said nothing, She simply sat on the edge of the sofa, sucking on her cigarette and sipping from her cup.

“When I won that pageant fifty years ago,” she finally said after a tense, long pause, still not looking at Maye, not looking at anything really, “it was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me. Sure, I had done the splits, but I was the
queen
. Me. Ruby Spicer. I had never been the queen of anything, the first place in anything, not even in my imagination. Not even in any wild thought I mighta had. That day—it was like I had passed through some kind of magic door. After I tumbled and Lula set off the fireworks, I put on that fancy blue dress up there and I stood on that stage in the town square and they put a crown on my head. They put a crown on this mess of red hair! I just laughed and laughed, but inside I was waiting for them to announce that they had made a mistake. But it was real. Nobody counted wrong, none of the judges took back their vote. It was true, I was the queen. I had won.”

Maye walked around the couch and sat down next to the old woman, who still did not turn to look at her, keeping her eyes fixed straight ahead.

“Everything was good, everything was perfect, just the way it should be for a young girl,” Ruby continued. “I was going to be a queen for a year. I went to all the dances, and everywhere I went, people took pictures of me doing this, doing that. It almost got to be silly. The opening of a grocery store, even! Who would have believed it! I got to sit on a throne during the Spaulding Festival, waving to all the people on either side of the street, watching them waving back. Waving back at me! People were so nice. My folks were real proud, and I was proud to have made them proud, see? They were always proud of Lula—she was a good student and a thoughtful daughter and did all that was expected of her. She married the Captain, settled down, whereas I was a little bit more of a troublemaker. Skipping school, staying out late, smoking.”

Ruby cracked a bit of a smile. “I started young,” she added. “I had a nice beau. He was so handsome and polite, and so kind to me. He was the smartest man I had ever met, and once he finished up his studies at the Polytechnic Institute in a couple of years, we were to be married. And my mother started sewing that dress upstairs, with that beautiful silk she went all the way to Seattle to get.

“He was a lovely man. Brought me flowers all the time, and the day I was crowned, you should have seen the ones he had made up for me. It wasn’t a bouquet—they were so heavy I could barely lift them. All of my favorite flowers—roses, tulips, peonies. Some of them weren’t even in season, that’s what a nice fellow he was. He went to some trouble there. I knew I was going to have a very happy life with him.

“But things don’t always happen the way you plan them, or even the way they are supposed to. Things sometimes get a mind of their own and follow a path you never imagined. All of a sudden, you are where you are. And there’s not much you can do about it.”

“Is that why you’re out here?” Maye asked gently. “Because of that fellow? Did he break it off?”

“Of course he broke it off!” Ruby cried as she turned and looked at Maye harshly. “What kind of man wouldn’t? Of course he did. There was nothing else he could do! There was no choice. He had no choice. I know that. Don’t think I don’t know that!”

“I’m not sure I understand, Ruby,” Maye said slowly.

“Wendy Dulden had been my best friend since I was four years old,” the old woman began again, almost impatiently. “We did everything together—wore the same clothes, took all the same classes, had malteds every day after school at Hopkins. The kind of friend you make once in a lifetime. I had known her since I was a bitty girl. Her folks lived out on the next farm over. Oh, we liked all of the same things, we flirted with the same boys, cheated off each other during tests, shared our homework. We skipped class when the days got hot and went for a dip in New River. We could be a little smarty-pants at times, but we had so much fun together. I could just say one word and Wendy would know exactly what I was thinking. It was wonderful having a friend like that. Almost like a twin.