Ruby (12 page)

She saw her sister and two other women through the sliding glass door that led to a small terrace. They were inside, putting food on the table. Olivia paused, watching. The women were all laughing. They took the time to style their hair, to put on lipstick, to choose what they wore—jewelry and sundresses and headbands. Olivia had put on the same backless dress and sandals covered with cat hair that she’d worn out to dinner with Pete Lancelotta. Everything about her and coming here felt so wrong that Olivia turned around and began to go back down the stairs.

But it was too late. The sliding glass door slid open and Amy said, “No way. You’re coming inside and you’re going to have fun.”

“You know, Amy,” Olivia said, “I’ve had a really shitty day.”

“Me, too. My darling ex-husband and his bimbo girlfriend want to take Matthew to the Galapagos fucking Islands to watch turtles hatch. And P.S., they’ll be getting married while they’re there.” Amy pointed overhead. “The bug zapper’s dead,” she said. “Come in so I can close the door.”

Obediently, Olivia followed, but her legs felt like tree trunks, heavy and unwilling to be uprooted.

Inside, Amy introduced the other two women: Pam, who not only sounded like Snow White but looked so much like Snow White that Olivia found herself staring at her, and Jill, who was tall and lean and too sexy—pouty full lips and a tousled shag haircut, thin hips and large breasts. Olivia looked from them to her sister, who wore her usual Lycra to show off her overly worked-out body, and thought, I don’t belong here. Amy was explaining that the other woman, Mimi, was always late.

Amy handed her a glass of white wine and, as if she had read Olivia’s mind, said, “I’m glad you came, sis.”

Snow White shook her head. “Amy told us what happened.”

For an instant, Olivia thought she meant about Ruby, about having everything stolen. But then she realized that of course the woman was talking about David.

They led her into the living room with its black-lacquer furniture and Erté prints, the tiny white brick fireplace with its Dura-flame log. Olivia settled into a mauve suede chair.

“Sometimes,” Snow White said in a near whisper, “I think I would have preferred it if Phillip had died.”

Amy, who always found it difficult to sit and stay seated, as if she had to do aerobics constantly, jumped to her feet. “I said the same thing. I mean, being left for a bimbo completely out of the blue is so humiliating.”

Snow White nodded. “It’s like none of it meant anything. Twelve years, three kids—”

“And you had those miscarriages,” sexy Jill said, taking a slow puff on a cigarette. She looked at Olivia. “You have no idea what she’s been through.”

“And he leaves me for a woman he met on business in Finland.”

“A Finn!” Amy said, as if it were the craziest thing possible.

“Her name is Hickie,” Snow White said. “You know. Like a hickey? And the worst part is, he’s moved there.”

“To Finland!” Amy said.

“And he wants the kids to go to Finland to visit him four times a year.” She leaned back, weary, disgusted.

Jill leaned forward. “Don’t they believe in trolls there?”

She seemed to be asking Olivia this. “I have no idea,” Olivia said.
Trolls!
She looked around for some books; weren’t they going to talk about
The Celestine Prophecy?
But there was nothing except
People
magazines fanned out on the glass coffee table.

Amy hopped around in front of Olivia. “Jill’s story is even worse,” she said.

“My ex-husband,” Jill said, stretching each word out carefully, “is a fucking faggot.”

“He fucks men!” Amy said.

“I know what a faggot is,” Olivia snapped at Amy. She sank into the suede chair, realizing what her sister was up to: proving that Olivia wasn’t the only one with a terrible story to tell. But Olivia knew that already. She couldn’t imagine anything worse than sharing sad stories, trading regrets.

They were all looking at her, the sympathy in their eyes enough to make Olivia puke.

Olivia said, “I honestly don’t care what happened to you and your marriages. Dead is worse.”

The other women looked at her, round-eyed. She was not like them. She had been to a place none of them had ever been.

“Dead is worse,” she said again. “Trust me.”

After dinner and wine and cigarettes, the talk finally turned to the book. Olivia hadn’t read it. The size alone wore her out. Still, she tried to listen to the discussion, but it was useless. Olivia had drunk too much wine—again. She tried to remember those questions you’re supposed to ask yourself to determine if you should go to AA. But the only one she could think of was: Do you ever drink alone? What a joke; she did everything alone.

When she tuned back in, Snow White was saying “Do you think Mimi’s okay? She isn’t here and it’s so late.”

“And she has dessert,” Jill said.

“Cheesecake,” Amy added. “She always brings cheesecake.”

Snow White said, “Whose turn is it to choose the next book?” Turning to Olivia, she added, “We take turns choosing the book every month.”

Olivia looked around. The book discussion was over already?

“Like I chose
Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus,
” Snow White said.

“Which sucked,” Jill said.

“
She
chose a book about sex abuse that was so depressing!”

“
Bastard Out of Carolina,
” Jill said to Olivia, as if somehow they were on the same wavelength. “Didn’t it win the Pulitzer Prize or something?”

“I’m not sure,” Olivia said. Why did this woman think she and Olivia were so alike? Is this what I’ve become? Olivia wondered. A comrade in abandoned womanhood? Someone who reads the book review alone at night, wears sexy clothes to the supermarket, is desperately needy?

Snow White continued, “And Amy had us read
Prozac Nation,
which was a real eye-opener.”

“So now we’re all on Prozac,” Jill said to Olivia in that same confidante’s voice.

“What do you like to read?” Snow White asked Olivia.

Olivia wanted to tell them about Ted Bundy and Charles Manson and some woman in Washington State who tried to kill her daughters because she loved a man who didn’t want children. But she knew that if she opened her mouth to speak, she would cry instead. She would cry because these women were all friends and she had lost her best friend to love and domesticity, because the only title that she could come up with was
Drinking: A Love Story
and that seemed like the only safe love story there was; because they had ex-husbands, at least, in Providence, in Finland—remarried or gay, they were out there. These women could touch them, call them, scream at them, look at them, hate them, and Olivia had lost the last piece of David, his voice, coiled tightly in plastic, safe and cozy as when they slept side by side spoon-fashion.

Crying had become so second nature to her that Olivia did not realize that she was indeed crying until Amy was by her side, stroking her hair and explaining with such hopelessness in her voice, Olivia cried even harder. “She just does this sometimes,” Amy said. “Out of the blue.”

The sliding glass door opened noisily, and a woman—Mimi, Olivia assumed—burst in. She was short and squat—like a Jeep, Olivia thought—with a head full of blond ringlets and a floral baby-doll dress. Unlike the others, who were tanned and well toned, Mimi had very white skin that was soft and unmuscled. Olivia decided she was more like a woman made of dough than a Jeep. A Pillsbury dough woman, a Michelin baby all grown up. She was also out of breath.

“You’re not going to believe this,” she said, gasping. “I was robbed.”

“I was, too!” Olivia blurted, jumping to her feet.

“You were?” Amy said. “When?”

Even though Amy had asked Olivia, Mimi answered.

“This afternoon. I went to get the cheesecake”—and here Olivia saw all of the others sneak a glance at each other, but Mimi didn’t seem to notice—“and when I got back, everything was gone.”

“Everything?” Snow White asked. “Like what?”

“You name it! Both TVs, the VCR, the stereo. And get this, selected CDs. They only took certain ones. They left all the classical and jazz and pretty much took everything else.” Her bottom lip quivered as she took a deep breath. “They took my Beatles
Love Songs
album. And you know that one—‘In My Life’? That was the song from our wedding and the song we played when Trey was being born. I mean, it was our defining song.”

Olivia closed her eyes to try to regain her own composure. It wouldn’t do to break down now, what with Mimi needing solace of her own. But she couldn’t stop thinking of her tape, discarded somewhere. She imagined it in the sand, seagulls uncoiling it. She imagined it tossed carelessly into a Dumpster beside garbage. Worse, she imagined Ruby in a dark basement with her loser friends, playing it and laughing. She could hear her: Hey, a dead guy’s voice. Cool.

“The weirdest thing,” Mimi was saying, “and this is what has me so upset—they took my wedding gown. I mean, it’s useless, right? It only means something to me. Not to Frank, that’s for sure. Just me. I mean, you can’t sell it or anything. It sat in the same dry cleaner’s bag since 1981, for Christ’s sake. You know?”

Mimi was crying now, and Olivia wondered if that was what always happened here, if it was a chance to cry with someone instead of by yourself, the way you usually did.

Amy let the other women console Mimi. She took Olivia by the elbow and pushed her into the galley kitchen.

“God,” Olivia said, forcing a laugh. “Thanks for the rescue. I feel like I’m on
Geraldo
or something. ‘Women Who Got Left Behind.’”

Amy refused even to smile. Or to let go of Olivia’s arm.

“Would you believe ‘Women Who Got Robbed’?” Olivia asked.

“What do you mean you were robbed?” she said, not letting go of Olivia’s arm. “When?”

“Last night. This morning. I don’t know. While I was asleep.” Even now that the girl had taken everything from her, she still wanted Ruby to be a secret.

Amy was waiting for more, so Olivia said, “I woke up and everything was gone.”

This was exactly what Mimi had said, and it felt right to Olivia, until Amy said, “You didn’t have anything to take. Your house is basically empty.”

With great clarity Olivia remembered what was on that answering machine tape: “Hello, you’ve reached the summer cottage of Olivia and David. We’re outside playing croquet right now, but leave your name and our butler will get back to you.” It had been funny, she remembered. A joke for Rex, who liked to tease them about having bought a summer house. In fact, David had ended the message with: “Unless this is Rex. Then our butler’s butler will call you.”

“Olivia?” Amy said, and by the way she said it, Olivia realized her sister had been trying to get her attention.

“I had some jewelry and stuff.”

Amy’s face went all sad. “Like your wedding ring?”

“And Grandma’s pearls.”

Amy, so much shorter than Olivia, tried to hug her, but it felt awkward, her head pressed into Olivia’s breasts and their legs knocking together.

When they got back into the living room, Mimi had stopped crying. “This is so embarrassing,” she said. “Trey,” she began, then, to Olivia, added, “That’s my son.”

“He’s a JD,” Jill said.

Amy jumped in. “A juvenile delinquent. Ever since the divorce.”

Jill took over. This time, when Olivia could relate, Jill avoided meeting her eyes. “There’s a group of kids who are real trouble. High school kids. They run away from home and live in abandoned houses here at the beach or at the college in summer. And basically, they rob people. Break into houses and wipe them out. Trey has been caught twice already. He runs away for a couple weeks, until Mimi finds him and brings him back.”

“Where do these kids hang out?” Olivia asked. She thought of Ruby sitting at her kitchen table that day. She thought of how long her house had sat empty, inviting these kids, these J fucking Ds in. She thought about how stupid she was. Even as she waited for their answer, she was getting up to leave.

“At the A&W past the college,” someone said.

“Olivia,” Amy said, following her, “these are not nice kids. Don’t go down there thinking you can get your stuff back or anything crazy like that.”

But Olivia could not stop to explain. Ruby’s face floated in front of her, sure and smart-assed. Olivia held that image, and she let it lead her as she ran now down the wooden steps toward her car.

There was something creepy about this part of Rhode Island. Too far from the beach, too far from the orchards and chicken farms in the western part of the state, too far from the city or the suburbs, and too far from the college to be quaint or historic. It was, Olivia thought, nowhere. The road was dark and straight. Here and there, behind the trees that lined it, were some new housing developments, like Janice’s, and a few older ones, like Ruby’s parents’. There were also trailer parks and the remnants of communes. Then, out of nowhere, the old A&W, its sign slowly spinning, bright white and orange.

The parking lot was full of dented cars with rusty paint jobs and souped-up cars that sat on oversized fat wheels. In the darker corner of the parking lot, a group of teenagers sat around on hoods of cars, or on the asphalt itself. Amy was right—these were not nice kids. The boys had greasy long hair that reminded Olivia of the bad boys when she was in high school in the seventies. Some tied it back in loose ponytails. They wore faded jeans jackets, leather vests, tight jeans stained with grease. Their skin looked sickly, too white.

The girls were either waiflike, skinny and pale, with tangled long hair and wide eyes, or tough-looking, all large breasts and wide hips and too much makeup. Olivia watched them from the safety of the brighter area near the building. She didn’t see Ruby among them. In a way, Olivia wanted this to be a dead end. But there was only one way to find out. Olivia forced herself from her car, toward the group at the far end of the lot. She felt, walking toward them, as if she were in a Stephen King novel, that at any moment some sort of inhuman force would leap out at her. She remembered why she’d stopped reading Stephen King novels; they scared the hell out of her.