A Soft Place to Land (16 page)

God, I hate Peggy. You are right. She is a BITCH. Not just a mag. A BITCH!

November 10, 1993

Dear Ruthie,

I hate it here. I hate it here so much. Peggy does not want me. She doesn’t want me in her house, but she doesn’t want me to leave her house, either, because that would mean that I “win.” I never knew what it meant to really hate someone until I came here to live. Nothing Mom or Phil did compares to this. Nothing. It’s like Peggy has this impression that she always has to keep up, that she’s a perfect homemaker, a perfect mother to Sam and
me, a perfect Christian who never misses a week of church, a poor martyred woman who provides for her wayward stepdaughter no matter what.

BULLSHIT!!!

She sucks.

I don’t think I’m going to be able to talk her into letting me go to San Francisco for Thanksgiving, even after Aunt Mimi’s call. Truth is, Mimi’s call probably even made things worse, because it embarrassed Peggy, made her storm into my room and call me a little “snitch.”

You are right. Dad
should
be defending me. He should tell her to step the hell aside, that he’s my father and he’s in charge of whether or not I can go to California to visit my sister for the break.

So I got caught drinking. I had two wine coolers, Ruthie. Two wine coolers! I know you don’t drink yet, but that’s like having a glass of grape juice with a tiny bit of white wine poured in. But since Peggy doesn’t drink at all (what a good Christian she is!), she thinks that this is a really, really big deal. She keeps telling me that Sam knows how to have fun without using mind-altering substances. I wanted to tell her: “Some people consider round-the-clock masturbation mind-altering.”

I held my tongue. Luckily. I’m in too much trouble as it is. I had skipped a day of school the week before I got caught drinking and somehow Peggy found out about it, so now she’s on this big kick that I am “headed nowhere, fast.” Not like her precious Sam. Did I tell you he still does Boy Scouts, in the seventh grade?! Vomit.

God, he’s such a dork, Ruthie!! He has no friends, besides the little Christian prayer group that he’s a part of from church, and they have to be his friends. You can’t call yourself a Christian group and then not let in the losers.

Seriously, Ruthie, Sam is such a freak. The other day I was in the shower and I just had this feeling come over me that I was being watched. So I pull back the shower curtain, and I don’t see
anyone, but the bathroom door is cracked and I hear someone padding down the hall. He was watching me, I swear to god he was. What a perv. It’s like he’s getting off on having me in the house. Which is sick. I mean, not that I’m thrilled about this fact, but he
is
my half brother. Yick.

Ruthie, I’m so, so sorry that I’m not going to get to see you for Thanksgiving. I really wanted to be in San Francisco with you. I would have even eaten a little baby bunny if you had really wanted me to.

I love you,

Egg

It was cold and wet in San Francisco on Thanksgiving Day, the first holiday without her parents, and no Julia, either.

Peggy had not been swayed.

At least the weather matched Ruthie’s state of mind: clamped down, gray.

She spent the morning in the kitchen with Uncle Robert, helping him prepare the meal they would share that evening with their neighbors the Woodses. Robert had brined the turkey—which he had special-ordered from Drewes—for two days in a black Hefty bag filled with salt water and peppercorns. He took the brined bird out of the refrigerator, poured it out of the Hefty bag and into the sink, and proceeded to rinse it with cold water. He then took a bunch of paper towels and dabbed the turkey dry before placing it in the roasting pan that sat on the counter.

“We’ll let Mr. Bird hang out for a couple of hours,” Robert said. “It’s always best to roast meat at room temperature.”

Ruthie could not imagine her father ever calling the Butterball turkey Naomi roasted each year Mr. Bird, let alone going through the hassle of brining it. Not that he would have known how to do such a thing. The only food Phil knew how to prepare was fried
bologna sandwiches, which he would fix for Ruthie and Julia on the rare nights that Naomi was not home.

Next Robert took out an uncooked tart shell that he had made the day before and had refrigerated. He placed the shell on the island in the middle of the kitchen. The refrigerator door still open, he took out a package of bacon. After peeling off six slices, he spaced them apart in the cold Le Creuset Dutch oven. Turning on the gas, he adjusted it so that it burned at a medium flame.

Before Ruthie moved in with Robert and Mimi, she had never seen anyone fry bacon in a pan. When her mother fixed bacon she cooked it the microwave in a paper towel-lined casserole dish, one minute for every slice.

“Was your dad a cook?” asked Ruthie, who was, as instructed, rubbing a piece of Gruyère over a box grater, the shreds landing on the waxed paper Robert had placed beneath it. (She imagined rubbing off a layer of her own skin. She wondered how much she would have to grate before she felt the cut.)

“Oh God, no. My mother wouldn’t let him near her kitchen. Not that her cooking was all that great. Lots of bland pot roasts.”

“Who taught you, then? I mean to do things like brine? Mimi?”

Robert barked out a little laugh. “Not Mimi. Definitely not her . . . though she loves a brined turkey, she’s not going to be the one doing it. I’ve always been the cook in our relationship, but I really got into it a couple of years ago when I wrote a little piece about the Tante Marie cooking school for
Sunset
. Had so much fun learning professional
truques
that I continued taking classes even after the article was published.”

Ruthie did not ask Robert for the meaning of the word
truque
. Ever since she had moved to San Francisco, she was constantly being made aware of how much she did not know. Sometimes her dearth of knowledge embarrassed her and she would choose to remain privately ignorant.

Stealing a glance at her uncle, who was flipping the sizzling pieces of bacon with metal tongs, she wondered if he might
secretly be a homosexual, like Marc, Mimi’s business partner, who was gay, though not secret about it at all.

Uncle Robert was certainly unlike any man Ruthie had ever known in Atlanta.

In Atlanta, men—daddies—wore suits and ties, or doctor’s scrubs, and you didn’t see them between breakfast and dinner. They were gone, off to an office where important work was being done and there were refrigerators stocked with an endless supply of free Coca-Colas. That had been the detail about her daddy’s office that most impressed Ruthie, that when he went to work her father could have a Coke any time he wanted and he didn’t have to pay a dime for it.

Robert didn’t go to an office. Or rather, his office was in their home on Mars Street. It was the nicest room of the flat, with a gas fireplace and two walls of bookshelves. The walls were painted a deep red, and whenever Ruthie went in there she felt warmed, as if she were sitting by a fire.

It was a wonderful room, cozy, inviting, and a little old-fashioned. Robert even had one of those sliding ladders attached to the bookshelves, so that he could reach any book he wanted, at any time. There was a delicate prayer rug on the floor that he and Mimi had bargained for years ago in Morocco and an ancient but working record player on a metal cart in the corner. Sometimes Robert would play his jazz albums from college, all kept meticulously in a leather trunk beside the player, each record stored in its original paper sleeve.

Usually Cooper the cat was lying on the cleared-off section of Robert’s desk, but Cooper was such a mellow cat that it was easy to overlook him. He was more like a rug for the desk. “A rug that sheds,” Mimi always added.

Mimi was the first one up every morning. In that way she was similar to Ruthie’s mother, who always rose early to make a pot of coffee for Phil. And same as Naomi—well, before Julia got her license—it was Mimi who drove Ruthie to school in the morning. But the similarity between Mimi’s and Naomi’s (former) schedules
ended there, for after dropping Ruthie off at Hall’s, Mimi headed straight to her office in Hayes Valley, which was filled with fabric samples, antiques, and little clippings from magazines featuring rooms that she and Marc had designed. Whereas after dropping Ruthie off in the morning Naomi would head home for her second cup of coffee before “beginning her day,” which often involved waiting at the house for the various assortment of people who arrived to take care of it: the housekeeper, the plumber, the pool man.

Each morning when Ruthie made her way sleepily into the kitchen, Mimi was already there, drinking a glass of fresh-squeezed juice, the desiccated orange rinds in a pile beside the juicer. Bright-eyed, made up, her pale blond hair twisted into a chignon, Mimi was always dressed and ready to go. And just like the trace of a southern accent that she could not seem to abandon, the way Mimi dressed in San Francisco marked her as slightly different from her peers. She was more formal. Whereas the other women in their neighborhood wore soft T-shirts printed with interesting graphics atop jeans or leggings—that or something utterly unfeminine, clunky Doc Martens and thick canvas pants—Mimi always dressed up. She liked straight skirts made of natural fibers and lined with satin. She liked silky little tops with some interesting detail along the collar, tiny square buttons, say, or hand stitching. If the shirt provided no extra luxury she might throw a silk scarf around her neck.

In a way, Ruthie thought, watching Robert select three eggs from the carton and place them in the middle of the counter so they wouldn’t roll off, the rhythm of life at Mimi and Robert’s house wasn’t all that different from how the rhythm of life at her parents’ house had been. It was just that instead of the man leaving in the morning and coming home to a hot dinner, it was Mimi who left and Robert who cooked. Robert and now Ruthie.

Robert was reaching into the refrigerator again, this time pulling out a carton of whole milk.

He closed the refrigerator door, opened the carton, sniffed.

“Oh shit,” he said, and then held the carton close to his face so he could read the expiration date printed on it.

Ruthie was still not accustomed to hearing adults casually curse. In Atlanta the only adult she knew who cursed with any regularity was her father, and he almost never said anything stronger than “ass” or “damn.”

“Hmm. It says it doesn’t expire until next week, but smell this.” He offered the offending paper carton to Ruthie, who refused to take it.

“Ick,” she said. “I trust you.”

He glanced at the bacon sizzling in its grease. “I guess I’d better finish this and then run down to Eureka,” he said. “I can’t make the filling for the tart unless I have milk.”

Eureka Market was a bodega just a few blocks away, at Seventeenth and Eureka Street. It was a downhill walk to the store, a steep climb coming back up. Uncle Robert, who was not in the best shape, usually drove there, double-parking if there were no spots in front.

“I’ll walk down there and get some more,” said Ruthie.

“Are you sure you don’t mind?”

Ruthie shook her head. She really didn’t. It would be nice to be alone and outside for a few minutes. Her mind kept drifting to her parents, and she wanted to think about them with no interruptions.

Seventeenth Street, which ran perpendicular to Mars, was so steep that Ruthie felt as if she were being pushed forward during the whole walk down. She studied the sidewalk as she walked, afraid of tripping on something.

On clear days you could see a vast stretch of the city from this part of Seventeenth, from the art deco sign in front of the Castro Theatre to the yellow stucco Safeway on Market, past the tall buildings downtown, all the way to the sparkling bay. But today the view was obscured by fog. Ruthie wore jeans and a long-sleeve T-shirt, a down vest, a scarf (cashmere, a gift from
Mimi) wrapped around her neck. She trudged down the hill, imagining her mother just last Thanksgiving, a little harried with her schedule Scotch-taped to the kitchen counter, which listed the casseroles she had already prepared, and, beside each one, the time it should go in the oven.

Ruthie had helped her mother. She tore apart and washed the romaine lettuce for the salad; she stirred the squash and onions that were simmering on the stove. She brushed the tops of the unbaked Parker House rolls with melted butter. Her father kept coming in and out of the kitchen, just to check on them. Just to say hello. At one point he had forked the heart out of a pot of simmering giblets that Naomi was preparing for her giblet gravy.

“Phil!” Naomi said, clearly annoyed. “I needed that!”

She had stood with her hands on her hips, an angry mother scolding a child.

“Relax, babe,” Phil had said, his own contentment at having the day off evident.

He was so jolly on days off from the office, a juice glass in his hand, filled with red wine.

Holidays and weekends were the only times that Phil did not wear a suit and tie. And he never wore blue jeans. Last Thanksgiving he had worn khaki pants and a short-sleeve button-down shirt, blue plaid, tucked in with a belt. His dark hair grew a little long on both sides of his head, but he was bald on top. He had wire-rim glasses and a dark mustache streaked with silver hairs. Back when Dunkin’ Donuts had run its “Time to Make the Donuts” ads featuring a short, round, mustached man resigned to making donuts in perpetuity, Alex Love had joked that the “Donut Man” looked just like Ruthie’s dad.

It was a comment that highlighted the difference between Alex’s father and Ruthie’s. Mr. Love was tall and athletic, with a full head of hair and perfect vision. Whereas Phil was short, a little plump, and bald. And he not only wore glasses, but he also had a weak eye, one that wandered a little to the left whenever he was tired.

Despite all of this, her father seemed utterly confident, self-possessed in his Brioni suits and fancy leather shoes, purchased at Neiman’s annual sale. Naomi told Ruthie that Phil’s self-confidence was what drew her to him in the first place. The way his presence filled the room. The way he made the most ordinary outings fun. She said that just going with Phil to buy socks was fun. And yet . . . sometimes he shared the Donut Man’s defeated air of resignation toward his work. Phil was so tired when he came home at the end of the day. His eye would wander and he would be cross.