Ruby (21 page)

“You cut a deal with my mother,” Ruby said, actually pointing a nail-bitten finger at Olivia. “I heard you tell Rachel you went and talked to them, so don’t deny it.”

She had heard. Olivia tried to catch her breath, but she only made pathetic little gasping noises.

“I didn’t cut a deal—” she began.

“She probably paid you to take the baby so she and Mr. Wonderful can live in peace.”

“Ruby,” Olivia said helplessly.

“Do you know what he does for a job?” Ruby was saying. “He works at
EB
. He builds nuclear submarines.” Then she added, “He hates me.”

Olivia took Ruby by the shoulders, her skin slippery with sweat beneath Olivia’s hands. “Listen,” Olivia said. “I didn’t cut a deal with them. I should have told you I talked to her. Okay? But I didn’t get money from them. The only person I cut a deal with is you.” Olivia waited for Ruby to consider this. “I had to be sure,” Olivia said. “I had to.”

Ruby slid out from under Olivia’s grasp.

“Maybe I can win Ben back,” she said. “Rachel says if I go there and go to that special school and work for the Gap and take good care of Sage, Ben will see what kind of person I am. He’ll see how desperate I was to almost give away our baby. He’ll love me again. He’ll know I wasn’t what he said. Cavalier.”

“Fine,” Olivia said, standing. Now she loomed over Ruby. She felt tall and thin and wise and lovely. “Go to San Francisco. But I can tell you something that Rachel neglected to tell you. You’re not going to be thinking about cute ideas for baby clothes or quirky names for colors. You’re going to be folding thousands of pairs of jeans. You’re going to be hanging up shirts and waiting on customers and cleaning out dressing rooms. Then you’re going to go home and clean shitty diapers and make bottles of formula and stay up all night with a crying baby. This isn’t a game, Ruby. This is life. And Doctor Rachel works fourteen, fifteen hours a day. She’s not going to be there holding your feet and giving you aromatherapy.”

“Fuck you,” Ruby said. She was too ungainly to get to her feet. Olivia had the advantage. “Just fuck you,” Ruby said again.

Even though the book they had read and discussed was
The Beauty Myth,
all of the women—except Mimi, who was away at Club Med—were in the bathroom, positioned around Olivia, who sat facing the mirror, a towel around her shoulders, her hair damp; they were trying to agree on a good haircut for her. Amy thought she should lose a good four inches and get a simple blunt cut; Jill, whose own sexy shag gave her a good deal of credibility, thought she should lose only an inch or two and layer the front; and Pam, whose Snow White hairstyle made Olivia afraid she might end up looking like a cartoon character, too—the Little Mermaid, the Wicked Stepmother?—was talking about bobs.

Olivia looked at herself, at her cheekbones and at her eyebrows, which were in need of a good waxing, and remembered the days she’d take a taxi to her hair salon on Madison Avenue and give herself over to first her colorist, Courtney, and then her hairstylist, Robert, and then to a woman named Iliana, who waxed her facial hair and popped her blackheads and dyed her eyelashes with a vegetable dye. It was another lifetime when Olivia would go there for all those hours and emerge so self-assured, all smooth-skinned and with blow-dried hair. She would step off the curb and raise her arm to stop a taxi, certain that she looked good; that when she got the food from the Chinese delivery boy that night, he would smile at her; that if she saw Winnie, her friend would tell her how great her haircut was; that David would want to go to bed early and make love.

“I’m a mess,” Olivia said. She said it without any self-pity; it was true.

“When’s the last time you got your hair cut?” Jill asked her, lifting the heavy ends, then shaking her head before she let them fall.

“I don’t even know,” Olivia said.

“You need some good layers around your face,” Jill said.

“Layers are so eighties,” Amy said. “I mean, they look good on you. But in general, they don’t work anymore.”

Pam shook her head. “Bobs are in now.”

“I know exactly what she needs.”

Olivia recognized Ruby’s voice before she saw her face in the mirror.

“Something hip,” Ruby continued. “The thing about Olivia is, she’s a lot hipper than her grieving-widow look lets on.”

The others stepped aside to make room for her. Olivia saw them exchange surprised looks.

Ruby ran her fingers through Olivia’s hair, untangling, smoothing.

“Something very Cheryl Tiegs. Very late sixties. To here, maybe,” she said, sweeping Olivia’s collarbone with her fingertips. “You want to flip it up, like Mario Thomas’s hair in
That Girl.
Bangs are good. Long bangs.” She looked at the women. “Don’t you guys read
You!?
”

She took the scissors from Pam, then smiled broadly at them all in the mirror.

“I’m the neighbor’s wayward kid,” Ruby announced. “Knocked up and kicked out. Can’t go home until the baby’s been adopted and I’m skinny again. Olivia’s baby-sitting me.”

“Ruby’s moving to San Francisco,” Olivia said, staring in the mirror right at Ruby. “She’s got a future working at the Gap.”

“Their stocks are doing great,” Jill said, shrugging. “Maybe it’s a good place to go.”

“Do you guys all have kids?” Ruby asked. She kept running her fingers through Olivia’s hair. Even though they all nodded, she didn’t really pay attention. “I mean, once you’ve done this, had a baby inside you, moving around and stuff, you’re a changed person. You can’t even go back to your old self. You try to imagine your life the way it used to be before the baby. You were like a hundred pounds lighter and you got stoned all the time and stayed up all night and didn’t think about things, except in a kind of vague way, you know? Well, you can’t be that way anymore, so you imagine what your life will be like with a baby. Maybe you’ll live someplace different. Maybe you’ll get a cool job at the Gap. And your kid will wear funky hats and learn how to surf and not have to go to school or anything. But then you wonder if you can be a person like that. Or do you have to just reinvent yourself? Maybe you can’t go back to your old self and maybe you can’t keep the kid alone, so you have to become a person who had a baby and gave it away. Maybe you don’t know who to trust.” Ruby sighed. “Maybe you spent your whole life wanting a family and then when it was your turn to make one, you blew it. You acted cavalier.”

They all watched her as she talked and played with Olivia’s hair. It was as if they were all holding their breath, waiting to see where she would end up.

Ruby took a breath, then said, “I am so good at this. Cutting hair. I used to always cut my friend Betsy’s hair. Once I shaved both our heads. Bald. And my mother got so pissed off. She’s like, ‘There are women who have lost their hair from chemotherapy and you are mocking them.’ But we weren’t. It was just cool, you know?”

She started cutting, holding the ends out toward Olivia’s chin like a professional, the way Robert did at the Madison Avenue salon where Olivia paid over a hundred dollars for a haircut.

“The other thing I’m really good at is piercing,” Ruby said. “I used to, like, sit on the phone and just put needles through my ears.” She stopped long enough to show her array of earrings. “I didn’t do my nose myself, though. I had that done. And after I have the baby, I’m getting my navel pierced. My friend Betsy got hers done and it got all infected and stuff, so I figured maybe that wasn’t good for the baby, you know, so I waited. But in another month or so, I’ll be able to get my navel pierced and dye my hair some good color, maybe like platinum blond.”

Ruby stopped cutting long enough to meet their shocked stares. She smiled and started cutting again.

“Hair dye can make your baby like stupid or deformed or something, because, I mean, it goes right in your brain, through your scalp, your follicles, and all those chemicals are so toxic.”

Ruby looked right at Olivia.

“No one would adopt it then, right? If it was stupid or deformed?” she said.

“But your baby is perfect,” Olivia said. “Don’t worry.”

“So even if its mother acted stupid and like got all carried away with some fantasy about making a family when really she knew she couldn’t, she didn’t have the skills or the maturity or whatever, someone would still adopt the baby? Someone who had all those things, the skills and like, the desire and the love and stuff, maybe? Like they wouldn’t worry about stupid genes or anything?”

Olivia had won. She closed her eyes and let the pieces of her hair fall around her, let this girl cut and shape it for her.

“They wouldn’t worry about any of that,” Olivia said. “Someone will adopt your baby.”

O
LIVIA WAITED IN
the offices of Kurz and Beekman to see Ellen, the lawyer. The cool air-conditioned air felt so good that Olivia regretted not having brought Ruby. The girl had wanted to come, but Olivia thought she should do this herself, get her own information and ask her own questions.

An office door opened, and a man called Olivia’s name, pronouncing the Bertolucci perfectly.

When she stood, they looked at each other in surprise. It was the surfer boy from Amy’s party. The
sleazy
surfer boy, Olivia reminded herself.

“Well, well,” he said, shaking her hand firmly. He smiled a broad white-toothed smile and showed her into his office.

“I was supposed to see Ellen,” Olivia said.

“She’s on vacation. Cancun, if you can believe it. It’s probably a hundred degrees in the shade.”

He bothered her—the crinkly laugh lines at his eyes and those shoulders that hardly seemed contained under his suit jacket.

“You’re frowning,” he said. “Maybe you like Cancun in July?”

“No. I don’t know. It’s not Cancun—”

He raised one eyebrow. “No?”

“It’s that I can’t believe you’re a lawyer,” Olivia said. He should be a construction worker on a television commercial, a glamorized version of a working-class guy, she thought.

“That’s because you think of me as some idiot who came up to you with a bad line at a party,” he said. “Or worse, you think of me as a guy who hits on women at parties when he’s actually with someone. But I can explain. I tried to find you and do that then, but it seems you had already left.”

“Actually,” Olivia told him, “I don’t think of you at all.”

She shifted her weight uncomfortably. The truth was, Olivia
had
thought of this surfer boy. Up in her hot, airless bedroom, trying to sleep, he’d popped into her mind, dressed in the ridiculous Jams he’d had on and the brightly colored T-shirt. After that night she’d heard Ruby and Ben, Olivia had ached for someone to moan with. She’d tried to conjure David, but somehow the sex with him felt distant and meager compared to how much more of him she missed. No. What she longed for at night was simply fucking. And she was embarrassed, confronted with him now, that this surfer boy had been the focus of her fantasies lately. Touching herself so frantically, so desperately, burying her face in her pillow so that Ruby wouldn’t hear. Then feeling guilty afterward, and unsatisfied.

She shifted again, watched him shuffle some papers, his head bent in such a way that his profile looked almost appealing. All right, Olivia admitted. From this angle, he did seem harmless, like a guy you could have a beer with. Then her brain darted past a simple beer and again she imagined it: fucking him. She let out a weird little noise, like a seal barking.

Even now, as he looked up from his papers, puzzled, the guy made her irritable.

“Do you need some water?” he asked.

“Why would I need water?” Olivia asked crossly.

“Well, you barked or something,” he said.

“I’m perfectly fine.” She held her purse in her lap, the way her grandmother used to, as if someone might rush in and try to take it from her. Awkwardly, she set it on the floor.

“Well,” Jake said. He used the word
well
too much—a verbal tic, like saying
uh,
or
like.
“You’ll be happy to know that I’m just helping Ellen out while she’s away. You don’t need my type of lawyering.”

Relieved, Olivia relaxed a bit.

“I’m sure you’re very good,” she said, reading the framed diplomas behind him. Did that say
Yale?
She leaned forward for a better look. It did. Yale.

“I am very good,” Jake said, following her gaze. “These really are mine.”

Olivia blushed. “Anyway, Ellen is the one I need to see. When is she coming back, exactly?”

“Well,” Jake said, and Olivia wondered how he got through Yale Law School saying
well
all the time. “Ellen’s getting back in two weeks and she can handle all of your estate issues. I do family law. Like Amy’s divorce.”

“You do family law? But I spoke with Ellen on the phone!”

Jake shrugged. “She might have been covering for me.”

“Shit,” Olivia muttered, “I need to see you.”

“Family law? You have kids?”

She shook her head. “I want to adopt a baby. A particular baby.”

“Whose?”

“The mother is fifteen. Alone. She wants me to adopt the baby.” Remembering Rachel’s attitude, how inept she had made Olivia feel, Olivia added, almost defensively, “Of course, I’ve already talked to someone at Social Services—”

“What about the father?” Jake said, taking notes.

“Gone,” Olivia told him.

“But he’ll sign away his paternal rights?”

Another obstacle, Olivia thought, imagining Ben refusing to do it. Hadn’t Ruby said their fight was over this very thing? She swallowed hard.

“Olivia?” Jake said.

“I think I need a parental consent form or something. Then I can go.” She half-rose from her chair, looking around as if there might be stacks of these forms lying around, the way the IRS kept piles of tax forms.

“Whoa,” Jake said. “Can you bring the mother in here? And the father?”

Olivia sank back into her chair and, from seemingly nowhere, began to cry.

“Don’t badger me,” she said, though he wasn’t badgering her, of course.

Now Jake was hovering around her, clearly uncomfortable with a crying woman in his office.