Ruby (14 page)

“I know you’ll never believe this,” Ruby said, “but I’m not a total moron. Like I even got
A’s
and stuff in school. Some of my teachers consider me a total disappointment. My English teacher even told me I had potential.”

“You’re right,” Olivia said. “I don’t believe you.” Who knew? Maybe Ruby was the class valedictorian, a bundle of contradictions, a good girl gone bad.

“It’s true!” Ruby said, insulted.

“Fine,” Olivia said. “You’re a genius and you and Ben are madly in love—”

“We are!” Ruby shrieked. “What do you think? This was like the Immaculate Conception or something?”

“Hardly.” Olivia laughed.

Oh, she imagined there could be a dozen potential fathers, all of them like those stoned boys in the parking lot. Boys with greasy hair and fast cars.

“I get it,” Ruby said. “You think I just screw guys randomly.” She hesitated, then added, “
Indiscriminately,
right? Well, for your information, I have only been with nine guys—”

Jesus,
Olivia thought. Nine guys and she was fifteen years old. Olivia couldn’t help but think of her own fifteen-year-old self, with her John Lennon glasses and Indian-print skirts and her one true love, Peter Hershey. They hadn’t had sex until senior year.

“And I love Ben,” Ruby said, her voice passionate now. “I love him desperately. I never got pregnant before. I didn’t just fuck anybody anytime, so there.”

“Okay,” Olivia said. “Okay.”

“It’s not okay. Who do you think you are, anyway?” Ruby leaned back, weary, her stomach rising like a whale on the horizon. “I like sex,” she said dreamily. “I do. It’s hard to believe it can cause you so much trouble. The first time I had sex, I was like thirteen years old—”

“Thirteen!” Olivia blurted.

“And drunk, of course.”

“My God,” Olivia said. She knew nothing about anything, she decided. She was certain that when she was thirteen, she had not even known for sure what a French kiss was, or exactly how babies were made.

“The guy’s name was Guy. Can you believe it? I guess it’s like a French name, except they say
Gee.
But we all called him Guy, you know. And it was a Halloween party and I went as Scarlett O’Hara because I had just seen that movie for the first time, and I swear I watched it like fifty times in a row because I loved it so much. It’s still my favorite movie, and I thought, Why can’t I be her? Why can’t I have Tara and Melanie and Rhett and all of it, you know?”

That stupid movie again. Here was the kind of young girl who fell for all that romantic gibberish. Olivia shook her head. How could she have seen so much of herself in Ruby? Maybe she was just hoping for that sameness, hoping for a kindred spirit to fall into her lap.

Ruby sighed again. “Where was I?”

“Gee,” Olivia said.

Ruby laughed. “Right. Gee. So I go to the party and I drink only bourbon because that’s like a big southern thing and I wear this hoop skirt and these gross green curtains my mother had in the basement. In case you don’t know, that’s what Scarlett O’Hara does—she makes a dress out of these curtains. And I get drunk as hell, and of course whenever I smoke pot, I get really horny because it like gives me a buzz down there, like I’ve got an electric current down there. And Guy comes as Ike Turner with like a Nehru jacket and this Afro wig and bell-bottoms and he has his face painted black and I’m so drunk that when I lie down, I can’t pull myself back up because of the hoop skirt and everything and Guy and I are making out and laughing because I can’t get up and then he makes some stupid joke about doing the horizontal waltz or something, but I know what he means and I think, Why not? Why not just get it over with? He’s cute and everything, so I go, ‘Let’s do it, yeah’ and he goes, ‘Really?’ and I go, ‘Sure,’ because by this time we’ve smoked a joint, too, and I’m buzzing down there and so we do it.”

“Just like that?” Olivia said. She thought about how much she and her friends had discussed it: “Should we? Should we?” She thought about how terrified they all were.

“It was so nice, too,” Ruby said.

“It was?” Olivia said, surprised.

“I guess if I didn’t like it so much, I wouldn’t be in this predicament, right?” Ruby laughed.

Olivia closed her eyes and imagined her own first time, Peter Hershey pushing into her on the golf course behind his house. He kept his jeans on, just pulled out his dick and slipped her panties off, lifted her denim skirt, and did it. She was afraid of getting caught. The zipper on his jeans made tiny welts on the inside of her thigh.

“After Guy, I would think about doing it with other people, you know? Like I wanted to do it in a bed. And be naked, too. But it wasn’t like a slutty thing. Not like some girls, who go to parties and blow everybody or something.”

When Olivia didn’t answer, Ruby said, “You think it is, though, right?”

“What?”

“You think it’s slutty to have sex like I did?”

Olivia hesitated and then said, “Not slutty exactly. But not right.”

This was hypocritical; she knew that. Certainly she’d had sex
indiscriminately.
She’d made love with strangers. Sometimes she’d even sought it out. But somehow what she’d done was different. She was older, after all. An adult. Ruby was fifteen.
Fifteen!

“All I know is, I don’t want this baby,” Ruby whispered. “And Ben doesn’t want it.”

Olivia reached across the cold, hard place between them.

“I do,” she whispered back to Ruby.

They had picked out names, Olivia and David, for the child they would have. They had wanted just one child, so they could stay in New York, in their apartment on Bethune Street, and send their child to a good school, to summer camp, to ballet class or piano lessons or gymnastics. They would have one child and give it everything they could. “What a lovely, lovely life we’re going to have,” David whispered to her the night before he died. He died not knowing if she was pregnant or not. He died hoping, maybe even believing that she was.

Olivia lay in her bed, thinking of all these things.

Ruby was back, on the cot in the room that was going to be the nursery. That
would
be the nursery, she reminded herself. Because they struck a deal: Olivia would take care of Ruby so that Ruby would not have to rob anyone, or sleep in abandoned university buildings, or lie anymore. And Ruby would give Olivia the baby. Olivia knew she was crazy to trust Ruby. But she wanted to trust her. She wanted to believe that Ruby would live up to her end of the deal. If I don’t have that, Olivia thought, what do I have?

She would name it the name they chose.

She would send it to a good school, to summer camp, to ballet or piano lessons. She would give this child everything.

“What a lovely, lovely life we’re going to have,” Olivia whispered, pressing her lips to the wall. On the other side, growing in a young girl’s stomach, was her baby. Her hands fluttered above her own stomach, as if the baby were there instead of resting inside a fifteen-year-old girl who didn’t want it. Olivia had traveled in her lifetime from being the Protestant girl her parents raised to being an atheist, then a Unitarian, an agnostic. After David died, she was, she supposed, a nihilist. But now she believed that someone—God, maybe?—had brought Ruby to her. That she was meant to have this baby. “Karma is a boomerang,” Ruby had told her. And Olivia was certain that the good she’d done in her life had finally bounced back to her.

Winnie called from Rhinebeck.

“You have to get that house on the market and come up here and stay with us,” she said. “Jeff insists.
I
insist. We’re spending the whole month of July here and we want you.”

Olivia watched as Ruby ate the stack of pancakes she’d set before her. Syrup glistened on her chin, all sticky and sweet.

“July?” Olivia said. “I don’t think I’ll be ready by July.”

“Not ready? What is there to do there?”

“Actually,” Olivia said, “I’m not selling the house. I’ve changed my mind.”

Winnie sighed. “This isn’t good,” she said. Then she let out a little squeal. “Oooh,” she said, “the baby’s foot is right in my ribs.”

Olivia waited for the familiar pang of jealousy that came with every conversation she had with Winnie these days. But there was nothing. Instead, Olivia watched as Ruby picked up her empty plate and licked every last drop of maple syrup from it. Then she sat back and rubbed her belly in a lazy circular motion.

“It’s the most incredible thing,” Winnie was saying. “Watching a baby grow inside you. Did you get the sonogram picture I sent you up there?”

“Mmmmm,” Olivia said. Somewhere sat a huge pile of unopened mail, much of it addressed to David or “Resident.”

“Doesn’t that profile look exactly like me?” Winnie whispered. “I think Jeff’s kind of pissed off about that.”

“I’ve got to go,” Olivia said.

“I’ve upset you, haven’t I? The baby and Jeff—”

“Bye,” Olivia said, and hung up almost happily. Winnie wasn’t living her life. She’d made one of her own.

“Once,” Ruby said, “I went away with a married man for a whole weekend.” She pulled out a tin of Scottish shortbread from one of Winnie’s baskets, opened it, and started to eat. “My French teacher,” she added—wickedly, Olivia decided.

Olivia tried not to act shocked. When she was in ninth grade, she and Janice had a crush on their French teacher, Monsieur Levesque. They used to stay after school for special tutoring and do extra-credit projects. But they never even considered sleeping with him. It wasn’t how they thought. Once, Janice got a ride home with him in his convertible MG, and it was all they talked about for weeks—the way Monsieur Levesque’s hair blew in the wind, how his knuckles whitened when he downshifted, how he took off his tie and unbuttoned his top button for the ride.

“And how old was this married man?” Olivia asked.

“I don’t know exactly. He wasn’t my official teacher. He was like a student teacher. So in college. Twenty-two, maybe? And his name was Michael, so we had to call him ‘Michel,’ which was a real trip. You know, a man named Michel. So for our midterm, we had to give an oral presentation, and I sang that Beatles song ‘Michelle,’ except it was like the masculine form and I changed the words so it fit, like
‘Michele, mon beau.’
You know. Goofy, but he blushed and everything and he liked it a lot and he stopped me after class and said it had kind of turned him on, having me sing him a love song like that.”

“He
said
that?”

“Not in so many words, but yeah, basically. And then he like brushed up against me and squeezed my hand when he left. This was a Friday, so all weekend that’s all I can think about, you know. And then I stay after school on Monday and tell him I need help conjugating irregular verbs, and after about fifteen minutes of conjugating, he’s got me pressed up against the blackboard and we’re making out like crazy.”

Olivia decided Ruby was a liar. Every time that thought crossed her mind, she saw the promises the girl had made to her start to crumble. She found herself wanting to believe Ruby. But a teacher with such a young girl? Even a student teacher would have more sense.

Out of nowhere, Ruby laughed. She pointed a cookie-crumbed finger at Olivia. “You don’t believe me.”

“I just can’t imagine that a teacher—”

“
Student
teacher—”

“—is going to make out with a fifteen-year-old—”

“—Fourteen, actually, at that time.”

“—in a classroom where anyone could walk in on him.”

Ruby grinned. “Crazy, isn’t it? I mean, he’s got his hand up my dress and he’s poking at me down there, inside and everything, and he says, ‘I’ve got to have you. I’ve been wanting to fuck you since you walked into class the very first time.’”

“Uh-huh,” Olivia said. This kid is too much, Olivia thought. How far will she go, anyway? “He said, ‘I’ve been wanting to fuck you.’ And you said?”

Olivia looked in the basket for something sweet and found dried Mission figs stuffed with nuts—hazelnuts, walnuts, pecans. Funny how living with Ruby had given her a sweet tooth. Briefly, she thought of David and how he used to forgo white sugar, white flour, red meat. “I’m a California boy,” he used to say, throwing his arms in the air as if surrendering to his roots. He would give her golden seal when she had a cold, tea made from fresh ginger root when her throat hurt, lavender baths for stress. She bit hard into a fig, the sweet fruit making her teeth ache slightly. They were incredible.

“So I take the bus to Cape Cod,” Ruby was saying. Olivia realized she has missed part of the story. “And he picks me up at the bus stop and drives me to this house on the beach and we go inside and he’s got like a pound of cocaine—”

“He gives drugs to you, too?” Olivia said. “Sex and drugs with a minor. Interesting. Is this guy actually teaching somewhere now or is he doing time at the ACI?”

Ruby leaned back in her chair, her hands folded on her stomach.

“I wouldn’t know,” she said. “He’s probably still married, living in a renovated historic house, like on Benefit Street. That’s his style, you know?” She narrowed her eyes. “What are you eating?”

“Stuffed figs,” Olivia said. She was enjoying them so much, she didn’t want to share them with Ruby. Still, she handed her one.

“I do admit I miss snorting a few lines of coke from time to time. Even though it got me in trouble,” Ruby said, chewing thoughtfully. “Coke makes me so horny”

“I thought pot made you horny,” Olivia said. The girl could be a screenwriter—with these crazy stories of hers.

“Coke makes me different horny. Not the buzzing down there, but like you want something inside you all the time, you know?”

You’re lying, Olivia thought, and it felt good to think it—better than imagining all of this to be true.

Ruby smiled. She closed her eyes. “What a weekend that was,” she said. Then, abruptly, her eyes opened and she was digging through Winnie’s basket of food again. “Made French class interesting for the rest of the quarter. Then he was gone, back to college, I guess. I used to pretend he would leave his wife and come and get me and take me away. We would talk French all the time, you know? Maybe even live in Paris.”