The Book of Ruth (31 page)

There were a few times that summer when Ruby and I were on our own, without May. On the weekends we took Justy down to the lake in Stillwater, where I first met Ruby. On hot days we took the baby’s clothes off and played with him in the water. I had a hand-me-down bikini from Daisy. It was light blue and it didn’t fit me. I always felt as if everyone was looking at my body, the way the bottoms hung on me, like extra skin. We lay on the beach from nine o’clock in the morning until it got cold and dark, and then we came home cooked. We got so tired from all the sunshine. May said how lazy we were, to spend the whole day on our backsides, but we were too sleepy to notice her scolding us. We were too hot, too thirsty, too tired, that summer, to think what a strange family we made, May and Ruby and Justy and me.

O
N
Justy’s first birthday we had a party for him. When he was in bed our big family, Dee Dee, Randall, and Daisy, came over. Everyone except me played poker. I didn’t feel like celebrating. I wanted to think about the year gone by. I wanted to get the time back right after Justy was born and I stayed at home with him. By some trick I had yet to invent I would command myself and Ruby to sit still on the couch with our newborn, singing our songs, parting each other’s knees. We would turn to stone in that attitude. At the birthday party Randall watched TV. He never tried to brag any more. He didn’t seem to be anything more than an enormous husk made from old yellowing paper To my surprise he wasn’t eating anything that night. I wondered if he was about to keel over and die from starvation, or if he had lately discovered that food didn’t really make him feel happy at all I put a bowl of peanuts by him and waited until he gave me a feeble smile and dug in.

Everyone else was concentrating on their poker cards so I went upstairs to look at Justy sleeping. There were so many things I wished for him. I hoped that he would never know that evil groups existed in other countries, sneaking and prowling in the mountains and then killing the poor people. I hoped that he would grow up blind to all our shortcomings and that he would understand and forgive my poisoned thoughts.

It seemed both like seconds ago and one thousand years before that Ruby and I were playing cards in the labor room, and now here was our boy, one year old. The days had melted into each other: twelve months of May and Ruby and me, watching Justy in his baby seat, watching Justy rise up on his haunches—all the gray space I tried not to think about, where we were squabbling with each other. Often one day was no different than the next, except for the outside temperature. I didn’t have time to look around and see the seasons, since I was either going to Trim ’N Tidy or washing heaps of soiled diapers. When a girl is a teen and when she first gets married she thinks having a baby is going to be a real treat all the time, but it isn’t true. For the first year you’re so tired the world spins around in front of your face, you feel dizzy, and the sunshine hurts your eyes. I kept saying to myself, every five minutes, “I guess this is what life is; it makes a person so tired.”

The summer Justy was one and a half I had a brainstorm. I said to Ruby, “How about you and me going on a vacation somewhere?” I asked Artie if we could take our week in August and he said, “Sure, no problem.” Then I went to May and blurted out that we, meaning Ruby and I, were going to go on a holiday in August, if she could watch Justin. She looked up in disbelief, as if I had just announced that we were moving to Texas to pick grapefruits.

Ruby and I needed time alone desperately. The trip was something Sherry suggested—she’s not always full of hot air. It was Sherry who insisted we get away. She told Ruby that we needed privacy, and that we must take the time to get to know each other. I knew Ruby well enough, but what we needed, I said to myself, was a vacation from the bristles of everyday life.

“It’s only going to be one short week, Ma,” I said quickly, after I wrapped up the agenda. I had the time broken up into half-day units on paper so she would know when to take Justin to Aunt Daisy’s and when she had to be at the cleaners. It was Artie who had suggested that I make a chart. There was even a night out for May in my plan. Daisy had promised she would watch Justy so May wouldn’t get an overdose.

“When we come back, you can take a trip,” I said to May. “It’s healthy to get away. It’s good for a person.”

I didn’t have any experience with vacations but Sherry said you return refreshed. She said you realize how wonderful home is if you can get away now and then. I didn’t think I could ever call Honey Creek wonderful, after no matter how long an absence, but I was willing to give it a try.

May snorted. She said, “I’ll go on a cruise by myself, won’t that be dandy? I’ll send you the bill from the Love Boat. Can’t you picture it, an old lady getting sick into the swimming pool in the middle of the ocean? No thanks, that don’t sound like my idea of a party.”

“Ma,” I pleaded, “at least you and Dee Dee could go to Rockford for a day of shopping, anything, just to get away.”

Sometimes she acted as if taking Justy was a burden she didn’t deserve so late in life. She said, “Go, leave me alone, see what I care”—and she heaved a sigh.

What surprised me was how May coped now that Justy was in one of his impossible stages. He was all motion but he didn’t have any coordination. He moved like a drunkard. He wanted to get into everything and if you weren’t watching he demolished the house in no time flat. I went around and moved the breakable knickknacks to the top shelves so there weren’t valuable objects he could ruin, but it was May who performed continual miracles: she never once lost her patience with him. He was discovering he had his own will, and if he banged on the table with his spoon, so you couldn’t tolerate the noise, to get a rise out of us, May, with perfect calm, would gently lift him down so he wouldn’t do it any more. He’d bang on the floor instead where it didn’t make such a racket or dent the table. She was a genius sometimes, I swear. I was not prepared for her control, because of the way she used to rant around in my younger days. I had fully expected that she would be an older, meaner version of herself, but all the traces of her former days had vanished.

Justy loved to blow out candles, and he and May used to sit at the kitchen table working at a king-size box of matches. She’d light the candle while Justy stared at the flame, utterly fascinated, and then he’d blow it out. There was a pile of used matchsticks, enough wood to keep us warm all winter, there on the table. May liked to kiss Justy all over and he put up with it; he didn’t squirm too energetically. While she cooked she had Justy on the floor playing with pots and pans. Over the fried apples sizzling on the stove she told him the high points of her life story. He licked the floor while she described her favorite doll, but she was in a trance and didn’t notice.

She spanked him when he was terribly bad, if he whacked her over the head with the bellows, but even then she wasn’t crazy about punishment. She wanted me to be the one to hit him if he was about to stick his head into the hot oven, or run out on the road. Her favorite act was taking Justy into town by herself and strutting down the street as if she were a one-person parade and a baby was a novelty no one had ever seen before.

May said to me, “All right, go ahead on your vacation.” She said it as if she was dragging her feet, but actually, as I knew from my lifelong association with her, she had a huge old chorus line in her heart, lifting up their legs, doing the cancan. I knew she was gleeful about getting rid of us for a week.

Up in our room Ruby said, “Hey, baby, where we going on our trip?”

“We’re visiting Aunt Sidney in De Kalb,” I said, “and then we’re going to Chicago to see the Cubs.” I had counted the money in my pig and I was going to spend every last cent on my husband.

Ruby acted as if Chicago was the place he’d always wanted to visit most. He got up on the bed and started batting and jumping. He was like Justy, loving everything except chores. When I told Justy he could push the button to start the drier he had a nervous breakdown brought on by excitement. However, if you asked him to put the toys away you had to be careful you didn’t get a block aimed directly at your rear end. I wrote Aunt Sid and told her that Ruby had a tremendous urge to see a Cubs game, and I wanted to see for myself how millions of people lived in tall buildings. I told her that we were going to stay in a motel in Chicago. It was bound to be the greatest adventure of my lifetime, so far, and I was going to believe it only after it had actually happened. I asked her if we could stop at her house for one night, on our way. I figured when we ran out of money, after two days, we’d sneak home and camp on the lake. Aunt Sid wrote to say that she didn’t have her chorus in the summer. She said any time we wanted to come it would be a pleasure to see us.

The real news from Honey Creek that summer was Daisy’s marriage. It knocked us all off our stumps. One minute she’s on the loose, the next she’s promising forever as if she truly understood the meaning of her words. I guess she knew her mind instantly, and didn’t need to dwell on her past or future life. She met the man when she was cutting his girlfriend’s hair at her beauty shop, Shear Magic. He was waiting for Dolores to hurry up and get done so they could go on a date. Daisy must have done an impressive job shooting the breeze with him. He told Dolores he had a stomachache and couldn’t go to the show. Then he called Daisy’s shop and asked her out. He felt bad about the whole episode but he couldn’t help it He had his own business doing upholstery for people’s furniture. He was starting to go bald, although he wasn’t much older than Daisy. It seemed as if he saw through her; he saw what a fine person she was underneath the paint on her face. He understood that she was kind and true, down in the core, despite the fact that she had used her wiles to land nearly every male west of the Atlantic Ocean. He said, “I’ll bet you are prettier without that glop on your eyes, Daisy Mae,” and he suggested she take it off. He went wild over how great she looked, so she stopped wearing orange mascara and purple and green eyeshadow. She didn’t look like she was suffering from gangrene any more She switched to a calm pale blue above her eyes. They were a nice couple; you could see they cared for each other. He didn’t paw at her or goose her but on occasion he walked up to her and put his arms around her and she let him stay there circling her. His name was Bill. He looked like he’d been standing on his own two feet since the day of his birth. Probably there wasn’t anyone who could knock him down without a struggle. That’s not counting his ex-girlfriend, who punched him in the eye. He took it without flinching because he said he deserved it.

I guessed Daisy wasn’t planning on going to New York City or Los Angeles to work in the television industry after all. For a while her ambition was to stay at home and make casserole recipes. She didn’t even want to go to Shear Magic. Bill owned a house outside of Stillwater and she couldn’t wait to spend his money to fix it up. She was thinking of going to night classes in interior design. It’s as if there’s a virus that steals under a girl’s skin sometimes, and makes her want to be a good wife, even when she wasn’t planning on going that route.

They got married in our church. She didn’t have any bridesmaids. I wished I could have been in her wedding party, but I wasn’t mad at her. It didn’t hurt my feelings too much. I knew she wanted to keep it simple, that it wasn’t personal. It wasn’t because of my looks. She didn’t invite any of her old boyfriends so there weren’t many people attending. When I asked her, two weeks after they got back from the Wisconsin Dells, if she could take care of Justy while we went on vacation, she said, “Justy’s my godson, and he’s going to be my little baby guinea pig. What do you bet I want a kid after chasing the Moose around for a week?”

She took my shoulders and said, “You go and have the greatest time. You deserve a break; no, I take that back, you deserve something fabulous. Don’t worry about Justy. He won’t miss you one bit.” She winked at me. Daisy’s so professional at winking. It makes a person feel warm all over.

It was the middle of July, two weeks until our trip, although already my nails were bitten to shreds. I could hardly wait to see Aunt Sid. I was going to do all the things I had wanted to do since I was small: sit at her kitchen table, look in her closets and see the dresses she gives concerts in, smell the lilies she probably presses in books after she’s worn them on her chest, to commemorate each choral concert.

On a scorching July day, the type where you feel as if you’re pinned under an iron, our plans were changed. Ruby walked across the street in Honey Creek—don’t ask me where he was going, maybe to church to pray—and he dreamed himself into one of his dazes where he has to stand still and look at something hard; the thing either looks tremendous or minuscule to him. The gas station once looked shrunk and he thought he saw little tiny ants getting into puny cars. It wasn’t a secret that Ruby took artificial stimulants, although he did it on the sly. I couldn’t always be sure when he was on something, but his bloodshot eyes were often a dead giveaway. Ruby had contacts through Hazel, people who gave him bargains on drugs. He could handle life when he was high, except for the times when objects looked so queer and he had to tell me about his sensational eyesight.

On July 18th Ruby started across the street, and all of a sudden he had to stop in mid-step to look at the texture of the road. The small asphalt bumps looked like California foothills, and of course the pickup truck didn’t expect him to stop. It rammed into his leg and knocked him over. I stood in the door weeping when the driver delivered Ruby, complete with his freshly mangled leg. I have to tell the truth: I cried not for Ruby, but because I knew our vacation was out of the question.

Ruby didn’t have to go to the hospital overnight, even though his leg was banged up and out of commission. He could barely make it to the liquor cabinet. May said under her breath, “Why didn’t they just run him over?”

We were stuck in July. All the breezes in the world were hovering over Europe and the Virgin Islands. The heat made us feel like screaming and crying at the temperature, but we were too slow and stupid to open our mouths. Ruby spent his time in the living room on the couch with the fan blowing over him and I brought him iced drinks and lemons. I watched TV with him and his hurt leg. I felt like there wasn’t anything left inside of me. I was nothing but eyeballs watching reruns of
Hogan’s Heroes
and
Bewitched, F Troop
and
Gilligan’s Island.
Justy was hot and cranky. I yelled at him for the dumbest reasons. I spanked him for ripping the cover off the TV guide. I told him to shut up repeatedly when he whined. Good mothers aren’t supposed to say words of that sort, but I said all of the worst profanities, trying to vent my spleen so I wouldn’t throw Justy out the window I was so glad when May came home from work. I was at the end of my rope.