The Book of Ruth (13 page)

May and I both worked five days a week from nine to five back then, at Trim ’N Tidy. When we came home at night May made supper while I went out to get water for the hens and collect the eggs. We got along. We were with each other so much we didn’t have a choice. We had to be companions because we were all each of us had, that’s not counting Mrs. Foote. When May did the grocery shopping on Saturday she bought us movie magazines and the books that tell what’s going on in the soap operas, and since we both smoked, she bought a carton of Newports. Mrs. Foote offered me a Camel once, and May didn’t say anything, so I started smoking. Except for a couple of coughs I did it expertly on the first try. I felt adult, only I wished I had a black holder, the kind Daisy used. May and I sat at the table after supper and while I cleaned the eggs, she smoked and flipped through the magazines. She read me news flashes, slowly, about all the celebrities and their new dates. I liked hearing the stories, and at the end May always held up the pictures so I could examine Farrah Fawcett’s big teeth. I’d squint to see; I’d have to make comments, like “wow, look at Liz Taylor’s tits.” We had to laugh over some of the stars’ body parts. We were good friends then, May and I, in a certain way.

Every fall I couldn’t help missing the cows and going across to the pasture to hear them shuffling through the leaves. My first September at Trim ’N Tidy I came home and stank in my blood and bones. I had to go outside, at the end of the day, to feel the weak sun on my skin. I walked up to the plateau, knowing I wasn’t a youngster any more, because I was out in the work force. I wondered why I went to school all those years, just so I could put clothes in plastic bags. Why had I undergone the torture of long division? Sometimes I couldn’t figure it out, what all the living was for.

I did know that I loved autumn even more than spring. There was something about it that made me feel fond and sad, the way the fields turned gold and all the wild apples dropped to the ground, smelling and wasting. The wind screeching around the house told me the year behind us was gone forever. You could see the animals in the woods, and the farmers, gathering up food for the winter, to keep from dying. The men, dwarfed by their machinery, were doing their tasks so urgently, shelling corn by tractor light with pitch dark closing in. I walked out in the early morning to sniff the leaves burning and whisper words to the geese on their way south. I loved how they knew exactly where they were flying.

On payday I handed my check over to May, because she was the banker, and she gave me five or ten dollars she said I could keep for myself. She said that we were barely scraping by: the oil, the taxes, the food, the car, were so expensive. I had a pink plastic pig Elmer gave me when I was six, where I stuffed the dollar bills. Someday, when something enormous was going to happen to me, I’d need the money.

That fall Artie got me to join the Trim ’N Tidy bowling league. He said I didn’t need to know how, he was going to teach me. I mumbled, “OK.” I thought he might fire me if I said I didn’t want to. Our team was made up of May, Artie, Debra, Louise, and me. Sometimes Mrs. Foote came too. She told me I should call her Dee Dee, but I couldn’t quite do that, so I just called her nothing. I’d say, “Hi,” and stop at that. She brought Randall along, with his change purse. He needed loads of quarters to buy Bit O’ Honey bars from the vending machines. He didn’t bowl at all; he said he wasn’t real athletic, and I murmured, “You can say that again.” He got mad at me, so mad he bought a Three Musketeers and tore at it with his teeth right in front of me. I wanted to tell him, Randall, you’re fat and useless, and I hate the way you stare at me—but instead I whispered my thoughts to myself because probably somewhere in him he hated how he was, he hated his body. I saw the backs of his legs once when he was in shorts and they were all dimpled like cottage cheese.

Dee Dee tried to get Daisy to come along on the league too, something to perhaps interest her a little. She came a couple of times. I couldn’t help gaping at her. I couldn’t help observing the way she walked up to take her turn, as if she knew everyone would wait all night for her to first spit on her hands, and then hold them over the drier, and get her thumb in the hole just right, and eyeball the pins. She shook her head so her curls flopped around, and then she licked her lips. When she held the ball in her hands all I could see was a motorcycle and her legs, and the little bathing suit strings hardly covering her up.

When we sat around waiting for our turn she’d ask me how it was going, and I’d say, “Pretty good. I’m working with Ma down at the cleaners.” Like she didn’t already know that, because there we were in the cleaners’ bowling league. She must have thought I was short on marbles. When she made strikes she said, “
Hot shit!
” and rubbed her hands together. She always wore tight pants and I was afraid her thighs might lose all their circulation and atrophy.

I liked bowling because I was halfway decent at the sport. Matter of fact, I always scored the most points for our team, and May grinned at me through the haze of smoke. She was a lousy bowler but she actually didn’t seem to mind being the worst. She smoked her cigarettes and drank whiskey sours and danced around with a butt hanging out of her mouth. She danced in her bowling shoes and her nylons, plus her bowling outfit, her pink-and-white-checkered pants suit. She started to hack too, because of all the nicotine she had in her poor soiled lungs. She could produce a hoarse laugh just like some of the stars on
Hollywood Squares.
I see May, a pink dancing lady with a big old ball on her thumb, blowing smoke rings up to the ceiling. She sure made me laugh, and the beauty of it is she made herself laugh too. We were in our element back then, at the Town Lanes. Daisy said to me, “You bowl fantastic!” It was my bowling skills that made her notice I was alive. If I had been a dud she probably would never have spoken to me. She made me so happy I had to go outside and catch my breath.

Right around Thanksgiving Dee Dee’s husband dropped dead. His kidneys gave out one morning and he didn’t wake up. They were expecting it for so long it wasn’t a great big deal, but of course Dee Dee came over and got trashed on May’s liquor. I went to the service they had for him. You could see his body sticking out of the casket. He looked just about the same dead as he did alive, except his mouth was molded into a smile. At the end the whole family walked down the aisle behind the casket—it was on wheels. Randall stared straight ahead while Dee Dee bawled into his sleeve. Daisy came last. She looked over all the guests as if she had just taken her wedding vows and was counting up how many presents she was going to receive. She didn’t seem too sad. I thought you were at least supposed to pretend to be mournful at funerals.

When we got home from the church I said, “Ma, how about you teach me some more dancing?”

I wanted to do something cheerful. May turned on the radio and she started one-two-threeing me. We were going along waltzing. I remembered every step and didn’t miss a beat. May spoke the words “Cha cha cha”—she liked getting jazzy—when all of a sudden she saw a ghost. She saw Matt standing in the hall in his high smart judgment. Her feet stopped working. She sank into the chair and started to cry.

“Ma, don’t cry, it’s OK,” I said, hardly patting her shoulder from behind. “Please don’t cry, Ma.”

She cried while I stood gripping the back of the chair. With the bowling and her whiskey and Dee Dee she sometimes forgot to miss Matt, but when she remembered him there was no one else on earth for her. Perhaps I’m wrong and she cried because she felt sorry for Dee Dee losing Mr. Foote, or she was recalling both her own husbands and how they left her. Since I’m not May I can’t be positive what she was thinking, but I’d say that most of all she was upset because Matt wrote her two postcards since he’d left for MIT in September. She had to make up details to tell people, about how he sent her letters three times a week and how popular he was with girls; he took them to dances, he couldn’t decide who to ask since they all wanted to go with him. She told about the clubs he belonged to—don’t ask her to say which ones, there were so many she couldn’t remember. I heard her telling someone at church that pretty soon, if her rheumatism improved, she was going to go visit Matt for a special weekend they had for parents, that Matt had asked her if she could come out. He was sending her cash for the jumbo jet.

After Mr. Foote’s funeral we didn’t carouse for a while. Sometimes after we ate, and the chickens were fed, the eggs wiped, I went out into the night and stared up at the sky. I wondered if there were someone just like me on another planet, if they had dry cleaners up there, and winters coming on, and the symbol and myth of Jesus Christ. I wanted to find out what she did when her heart grew so heavy not even lying smack on the ground relieved the terrible ache.

S
TILL
, those days were kind of like a honeymoon with May. We were just ourselves. We were in the mood to raise a little hell—that’s a phrase Dee Dee uses twice a night. It doesn’t really apply to us all that much, but we did bowl maybe three, four times a week. May and I had yellow vinyl bowling bags with our initials embossed under the handle, and I owned my own ball. It was a present from the Footes on my birthday. I can’t quote you prices, but they aren’t exactly cheap. It fit my fingers to perfection. I got the best feeling, knocking all the pins down, and Artie always petted my curls in praise of what he called my “sensational talent.” He was an old guy so I bowled far better than either he or his wife.

“Sweetheart,” he called to me, “you are a terrific bowler, there ain’t no doubt about that. You must have been born making strikes.”

I was queen at the Town Lanes, with my big old blackie ball on my thumb and fingers. I’d get crazy sensations when I stood up to take my turn. It must have been all the exhilaration because I was a natural expert that made thoughts and sayings fly through my brain. There I’d be with blackie ball, holding her up in front of me, looking at her like I’m worshiping, and what came to me was the sentence “In the beginning was the
WORD
, and the word was
GOD
.” And I had to look at blackie very hard for a few seconds, thinking about “In the beginning was the
WORD
.” I love how extraordinary that sounds, nothing in the world but one word, out in the blackness, not even stars. One word. Sometimes I felt so queer as if I weren’t standing on firm ground, to think of it all starting with a couple of letters. Everyone thought I was concentrating or saying a prayer when I stared and then brought my arm down smooth letting her go and wham all the pins all of them tumbling and a second later they’re swept away. You do the damage and bingo, it’s gone. Bowling was a fantastic sport for my eyesight back then because it made me focus on faraway objects. When I was mad at something, I said, seeing the pins fall, “There goes Honey Creek. There goes Randall.”

After bowling one night I got stuck in the car with Randall while May and Dee Dee went to buy gin at the liquor store. Randall tried to get me to hold hands with him. His hands were short and fat like lizard paws.

“Not on your life, Randall,” I said, when he asked me.

“Why not?” he said, leaving his mouth hanging wide open. We were both in the back seat; naturally he took up over half of it. I had to smash myself up to the window. I didn’t want to be near him. I didn’t want to smell him up close.

I felt as if I were watching myself from way up near the ceiling light. I wasn’t used to being in situations like this one. I heard myself sneer, “On account of I don’t love you, Randall. I don’t even like you.”

“A person don’t have to be in love to hold hands,” he said. “I’ve touched hundreds of girls. It don’t mean I have to marry any of them.”

“Why don’t you just go touch your other hundred girlfriends, then?” I mumbled. “If you ever mention the subject again I’ll make sure Ma never buys sour cream and onion potato chips.”

I didn’t think about what I was saying. He made my dinner thrash around inside me. I couldn’t stand the sight of him gripping his change purse, but after I spoke like a snide prom queen my knees went shaky and I felt a little sorry. But then again I couldn’t help thinking that if only Randall had been in my class in school, all the bullying would have gone to him. I had a nightmare that I ended up married to him and all my babies were as big as full-grown Randall when they were born. Randall didn’t speak to me after that. He turned his head away as if my presence disgusted him also.

Besides bowling we went for fish fries down at Johnny’s on Friday nights. Johnny’s has soft red paper that sticks off the wall, inviting you to pet it. May said I should keep my hands to myself. It was all you could eat on Friday nights for $3.99. May and I went down with Dee Dee and Randall and Daisy, and Daisy’s younger sister, Lou, and Lou’s friends. We’d have a long noisy table, everyone talking at the same time and grabbing for the onion rings and ketchup. None of the Footes had patience when it came to eating. I tried to sit far from Randall because he loved food so much, and because I was afraid he might grab my hand and squeeze it, to spite me.

Daisy didn’t have a job and probably spent all day being photographed on different kinds of vehicles. She was supposed to behave, stick around, seriously look for employment, and quit drinking as part of her probation. The police had their eye on her every move because she stole and went driving around when she was smashed. She had hurt Mr. Kirk—a farmer with a wife and three children—so badly his arms and legs will never function. They couldn’t absolutely prove it was Daisy’s fault because no one saw the accident and Mr. Kirk failed the breath test too. Still, she was not allowed to go out at night unless she was with family members. For me, Johnny’s was the special event of the week; for Daisy spending Friday nights in a greasy restaurant with her family was like being tortured mercilessly. She said, “It takes me a whole week to get the smell of this dump out of my hair.”

Sometimes she’d catch my eye and cock her head in the direction of the bar. She made my heart run and scramble just as it used to when I saw Miss Pin, my third-grade teacher. We’d go stand at the bar and talk while everyone else sat in the next room. Daisy said, “How come you don’t ever say nothin’ and I just jabber away?” She didn’t give me time to answer. She said, “I wish everyone was like you, you know, friendly without always giving me the time of day.”