A Soft Place to Land (26 page)

An image flashed in her head: she and Gabriel naked, bodies pressed against each other, his lips on her neck, her head tilted back. Such a contrasting picture to the actual memory of the few
clumsy times she and Brendan, a kid from her class at Urban, had slept together. Both were still virgins their senior year of high school, and their coupling was fueled not by desire but by a mutual urge to leave for college having had sex at least once. They had it three times, none of them satisfying, at least not for Ruthie. She was so dry the third time that the condom broke without them realizing it and he came inside her. What followed was a horrible experience: the missed period, the positive e.p.t., having Mimi drive her to the appointment early one Saturday morning, standing after she awoke from the anesthesia used for the procedure—as Mimi insisted on calling it—and having what seemed like a gallon of blood splash on the floor.

The one silver lining: The night after the abortion was the one time since her sister went to rehab that Ruthie felt close to Julia. Julia who spoke with her for two hours on the phone, who reassured her that she was not a bad person, who told her that no one makes it through life without getting a little stained.

The following week Ruthie and Gabe sat next to each other in seminar, during which the class discussed the assigned story, “The Enduring Chill.” Ruthie suggested that perhaps Asbury, the superior young protagonist, represented O’Connor at an earlier age.

“It could have been a self-referential wink-wink. I mean, don’t you imagine she was condescending to her mother when she returned from the writers’ workshop at Iowa?” Ruthie glanced at Gabe while she spoke. He watched her, seemingly interested in what she had to say, though he did not seem to be interested in speaking himself. Indeed, during the three-hour seminar he contributed to the conversation only once, when he explained what the catechism was to a student who did not know. Apparently Gabe knew what he was talking about, because Dr. Finney nodded in agreement.

When class was dismissed Gabe stood by the door waiting for Ruthie while she packed her books into her messenger bag. She glanced up at him and smiled. They walked down the hall
together, walked out of the building, and walked into a brilliantly sunny day.

“Do you have time to get coffee?” he asked, placing his hand over his forehead to block the sun’s glare.

Ruthie checked her watch, even though she knew she had time. The O’Connor seminar was her last class of the day.

“Sure,” she said. She reached into her bag and pulled out a pair of retro sunglasses she had bought at Buffalo Exchange for six bucks.

“Caffè Strada?” he asked. He had a little gap between his front teeth. She had forgotten about that. She found it endearing, reminding her of her mother’s gap, which Naomi always hated.

“I’m a Milano girl myself,” she said. “But I can do Strada. Especially because it’s such a nice day.” She pushed the pink-framed sunglasses onto her face.

At Caffè Strada they each got a cup of coffee and sat at a table outside. And there they stayed for hours, talking. It began with Gabe asking Ruthie how a St. Catherine’s girl managed to land at Berkeley. And so she told him about the plane crash, and moving to San Francisco to live with Mimi and Robert, and being separated from her sister, Julia.

It was rare for Ruthie to bring up the accident, even rarer to bring up her sister. With new acquaintances she often didn’t mention her dead parents or Julia at all. It wasn’t that she lied. It wasn’t as if she called Mimi and Robert “Mom” and “Dad.” She simply didn’t feel a need to interject the details of her tragic past into casual conversation. And yet she felt compelled to tell Gabe the truth about her life. It was the way he listened, the way he leaned in toward her while she spoke. He seemed actually to be interested. And she wanted to be interesting to him. She wanted him to think that she was a woman with an interesting story.

She told him about how hard it had been to connect with Julia, even that first year, before things got really bad. How different their lives became, just by virtue of Ruthie being in San
Francisco, Julia in Virden. How when Julia finally did come to San Francisco, to visit, the trip had been a disaster and she had ended up running away with some boy she met on Haight Street. How after she was found by the authorities and sent back to Virden, she was put in a drug treatment program for five months, which left her both bitter and subdued. Or at least that was how she sounded on the phone, during their more and more infrequent and dissatisfying calls.

And then Julia had surprised them all by not only being admitted to the University of Virginia—she was a disciplined student after her time at the Center and her SATs were astronomical—but by deciding to go there, even though it was little more than an hour’s drive from Peggy and Matt.

When Julia called to tell her the news, Ruthie expressed surprise, saying she assumed Julia would want to go to college as far away from Virden as possible.

She remembered Julia’s exact reply, and she repeated it to Gabe.

“‘UVA is the cheapest good school I can go to, and I don’t want to squander my money. The only thing I can count on in this world is my trust fund.’”

“You took what she said about counting on her trust fund to mean that she couldn’t count on you?” Gabe asked.

“I know that’s what she meant. I don’t think she’s ever forgiven me for having said—when I was fourteen years old—that she was responsible for our parents’ deaths. Even though I wrote her a letter when she was in rehab, telling her how wrong I had been. Even though I tried to tell her the first time I spoke with her on the phone once she got out.”

Gabe made a clicking noise out of the side of his mouth. “That’s rough,” he said.

“But all’s well that ends well, right?” Ruthie said, fearing that she was being too much of a downer. So she told him about how Julia had been a star in the creative writing program at UVA, how she had gone on to get her MFA there, how she had polished her
master’s thesis into a true manuscript, which was accepted for publication by an imprint at Penguin. How Julia had sent her a bound manuscript, which Ruthie had read. How the pub date for her sister’s book—titled
Straight
—was scheduled for March of the upcoming year, March 11, 2002.

“Is her book good?” Gabe’s elbows were on the table, and he was resting his chin in his palms. They had pushed their coffee mugs to the side. They had already had several refills, and could drink no more.

“It is. It’s sad. The place she was sent to, the Center, it was totally out of a made-for-TV movie. There was corporal punishment, and isolation rooms where they’d leave you—cut off from everyone—for up to four days. And every afternoon they had these sort of group therapy sessions, but if you weren’t forthcoming enough, or the counselors thought you were lying about something, they’d yell, ‘BS!’ and someone would pull your chair out from under you and sort of kick you into the middle of the ‘sharing’ circle and they’d put a scratchy brown wool blanket over you and everyone would pile on top. It was supposed to symbolize that you were drowning in your own bullshit. Though they’d never go so far as to say the actual word. The initials were as risqué as they’d get.”

“Jesus,” said Gabe. “Makes my junior high experience look tame.”

“Um, yeah, I’d imagine. Your junior high wasn’t run by a bunch of fundamentalist sadists, was it?”

She experienced a feeling of slight irritation toward Gabe. Junior high was a universal hell, but no one’s experience could compare to what Julia went through during those five months of being locked up and at the mercy of “Christian” counselors who thought suffocating a kid would put her on the road to recovery.

“I’m just talking about this crazy teacher I had at White Oaks. Crazy, but kind of great. He had us write autobiographical stories, and he rode you really hard if he thought you weren’t committed, weren’t putting in real effort. And he really went apeshit if he thought you were bullshitting. Or being maudlin or self-pitying.

“When I was in eighth grade I wrote a story about how I
wanted to slit my wrists because my mom drove me so crazy with all of the men she would bring over to our house. I swear to god I’d wake up each Saturday and Schwartzy would be toasting an Eggo for some new guy. Well, three days after I turn in the story Howard saunters in, tells us he’s read all of our papers, and says that one of them was particularly nauseating. From his satchel he pulls out mine, looks right at me, and says, ‘Shit, kid, if I wrote such whining, driveling crap I’d want to slit my wrists, too.’ And then he chucked the paper at me.”

“Are you kidding? He didn’t make you go see a counselor?”

“He did. I had to talk to the school shrink. But what I remember about the experience is Howard making me rewrite the story. He told me he’d kick my ass if I turned in anything less than brilliant. I believed him, too, spent two weeks solid working on it. Skipped a couple of days of class just so I could focus single-mindedly on it. It was probably the best piece of writing I’d ever done. Might still be. And he knew it, too. He published it in the
Book
, which was a collection of the class’s best stories, sold at the school’s annual auction.”

“They sold a story about you trying to kill yourself?”

“I was just being dramatic with all of the slitting-my-wrists talk. It was really a story about my mom. About how much I loved her but how mad I was at her for bringing home all those men. I mean there I was, this horny little eighth grader, embarrassed to death by my own boners, and my mom is flaunting her own extremely active sex life.”

Ruthie pretended not to be flustered by Gabe talking about his pubescent erections. “What did your mom think about your paper?”

“Oh, she loved it. Thought it was genius. Thought Howard was genius. She was always saying he deserved one of those MacArthur awards.”

Ruthie laughed. “I remember when she came to our class at St. Catherine’s. She told us to call her Schwartzy and we all said, ‘Yes, Mrs. Schwartzy.’”

“That sounds like St. Catherine’s all right.”

“Is she still in Atlanta?”

“Yeah. She bitches about it, says I’m so lucky to be on ‘the best coast.’ But she’s not going anywhere. She’s a defense lawyer, the court-assigned kind for the sorriest, poorest, saddest sons of bitches in the state. Does a lot of work for the Southern Center for Human Rights, too. She’s too needed to leave. And she lives in Inman Park, which is its own little liberal ghetto. Has a great house. Reminds me of the bungalows around here, only she bought hers for nineteen thousand dollars. Of course that was in 1982 and there was a homeless man living in the basement.”

“You come from a very different Atlanta than I do,” said Ruthie.

“Ah, but at least we have St. Catherine’s.”

She smiled at him. “Hey, lift up your shirtsleeve. I want to see that tattoo.”

Dutifully, he rolled up the right sleeve of his shirt. Tattooed on his arm, in blue ink, was an utterly realistic Christ on the cross, complete with nails through his wrists and his ankles. When Gabe flexed, the Christ’s bare abdomen tightened.

Ruthie squinted her eyes at him. “What is a nice Jewish boy doing with a full-out crucifix on his arm?”

“I’m a Roman Catholic,” he said. “Converted my sophomore year.”

“What!?”

Ruthie would have been less surprised had Gabe said he was actually born a woman.

“I don’t know. It just sort of suits me. I like the structure. I like the history—that it traces all the way back to Peter. I like going to mass. I especially like that half of the masses are in Spanish. I like Walker Percy, and Flannery O’Connor and Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day. And sure, maybe I did it at first to piss off Schwartzy, but it took. I’m a mackerel eater, as Owen Meany would say.”

Ruthie knew very little about Catholicism and was not sure what Gabe meant by it tracing all the way back to Peter. She had
read a lot of novels, though, so she got his reference to Walker Percy and John Irving.

“What in God’s name did your poor mother say when you informed her that her Jewish son had converted to Catholicism?”

Gabe laughed. “She had the perfect thing to say, the perfect thing to deflate me of any notion that I have the ability to upset her. I remember her words exactly. She said, ‘Well, I guess this is another one of your Alex P. Keaton moments. I just hope you don’t stop using birth control.’”

“Ha! So do you?” Ruthie tried to make her tone as breezy as possible.

“Most Catholics do actually. It’s especially important for me to be really vigilant about it because of the whole abortion thing.”

“What, you’re antiabortion?” Her tone was light, joking. She did not know a single person in Berkeley who was not pro-choice, except, perhaps, for Dr. Finney.

“I say ‘pro-life,’ but all of the language around that stuff is probably just designed to create wedges between people who share more in common than not.”

Ruthie felt on the defensive. He was really pro-life? Why did he even think he could have an opinion on such a topic? It wasn’t as if he could get pregnant.

“If you’re antichoice, pro-life, whatever, I don’t see how we can share much in common. At least not philosophically.”

“Are you against the death penalty?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, so am I. It’s part of taking a sacramental view toward all of life—from womb to tomb. So why is it that instead of talking about what we agree on—being anti—death penalty, for example—we instead become polarized over the issues where we disagree? I’m always telling Schwartzy, if Democrats could just be a little more open-minded toward pro-life progressives, then that overgrown frat boy from Texas might not have won the election.”

“I don’t think he really won it.”

“Okay, whatever, if there had been a critical mass of people voting Democrat, Florida wouldn’t have mattered.”

“Hmm,” said Ruthie.

She thought about Dara, with whom she had lived all four years of college, first in the dorms and later in their apartment in North Berkeley. Dara volunteered at a Planned Parenthood clinic in San Jose every other Saturday morning. She left in the middle of the night in order to arrive by 5:00
A.M
., when the appointments began. Her job was to escort patients from the parking lot to the front door of the clinic. To ensure that the first voice that greeted each woman, many of whom were poor and young, was one of support. Otherwise the only voices they would hear, walking through the parking lot, were those of the protesters yelling loudly from the sidewalk, “Mom, mom! Please don’t kill your baby!”