Drowning Ruth (30 page)

Amanda felt as if she'd dropped into a bottomless pool and was sinking fast. “Carl, no!” she flailed, “Mattie never …” But she couldn't grab hold of the right words.

He was sitting beside her then, and he caught the hand she was, without knowing it, beating against the cushion. “Listen, Amanda. Listen to me. I know it was my fault in a way. I didn't have to go so quick like I did. I didn't have to jump at the chance. You were right those times you said I wanted to go. I thought it was the thing a man would do, and I wanted to show her—to show everyone, even myself—that I was a man. I didn't think about what it would mean, how I would get so far away and not be able to come back.” He sighed and looked away. “All I'm saying is that I know what it's like to do something, and then later, the reasons why you did it seem foolish. I know how things can change in ways you never meant. And I'm sure that Mattie would come back, just like I did, if she could, if the baby hadn't killed her. I know she would.”

Amanda sat stunned as much by her silence as by his misunderstanding. Why wasn't she telling him the truth? His face, closer than she was used to seeing it as he sat there beside her on the davenport, looked different, as if it belonged to a stranger who only resembled him around the eyes.

“I realize what you've done for me and my daughter,” he was saying. “I know you gave up your nursing that you worked so hard for. It's not every sister who would do that. And I know it's far more than I can ever hope to repay. But I'm at least going to do my part from now on.”

He'd not understood at all, she thought. There'd been no communication of the spirit, no seeing into her soul. And now she was letting him think Mattie … oh, poor Mattie. Poor Carl. And along with pity and shame, she felt a trickle of outrage, shameful in itself, that she played only the most peripheral of parts in this version of events. “Carl,” she began. My daughter, he'd said, as if Ruth were his alone. Repay, he'd said, as if they were involved in some sort of transaction, as if she'd not lived every minute there with her Ruth for love. How tightly his fingers held the fragile bones of her wrist—should they make her feel safe or terribly afraid? Say it, she told herself, say it. She put her hand on his to make him listen, and her scar smiled up at her. “It wasn't your fault,” she made herself say. “It wasn't Mathilda's fault. It was my fault. I let her go.”

Of course that hadn't explained anything, Amanda admitted to herself the next week, after Carl had gone to Sheboygan to meet the
Rebecca Rae
. He'd only patted her, uncomprehending, and told her again how grateful he was to her for raising Ruth, and she'd been seized so violently by choking sobs, she'd been unable to go on. So it was worse now than ever before. She'd as good as lied, now, letting him believe the worst about Mattie. Only her vow to
reveal the entire truth the very next time the ship docked in Milwaukee comforted her enough so that she could fall asleep at night. Although, with the reassurance of morning, she always recognized that promise as futile.

In the meantime, Carl sent postcards from places like Gary and Duluth that Ruth hoarded in a box that had once held paper collars.

“Where was it the last one was from?” Amanda would ask, deferring to Ruth when people inquired about Carl.

And when she replied Sault Ste. Marie or Green Bay, they snapped their tongues against the roofs of their mouths and shook their heads. “That's a man likes to see the world,” they'd say, as if turning circles around the Great Lakes was somehow exotic and suspect. Ruth hardly listened. She'd begun to realize that people always had to say something.

Ruth kept her box of postcards in the house on the island. She liked to look at them there, where she didn't have to share them with Amanda, where the smell of his cigarettes lingered and the crazy patches of light on the floor reminded her of how he'd peeled the boards from the windows. On a map, she located each city from which he'd sent a card and memorized the facades and the vegetation in the picture, believing, although she knew it was unreasonable, that if he didn't return she'd somehow be able to trace him with such crumbs.

People ask about my hand, not just Ruth, but people who have no business wondering. They point; they look aghast. It's amazing what people think they have a right to know.

“What's that?” they say. “Is that a bite? Who bit you?” My hand could've been bitten at the hospital, back when I was treating those soldiers. You can't imagine how fierce people can be when they're crazy with fear, when they know they're going to die, when they believe you're an angel pushing them toward the grave.

Carl never asked. I think he didn't want to know what could turn a person into an animal.

“Hot enough for you?” Ray asked, passing Ruth one of the drinks he'd carried back to the table.

“Mmm,” she agreed. She took a tiny sip of the whiskey sour while he settled into a chair. She nodded and kept her smile fixed. She could think of nothing to say.

“Certainly is hot,” she said finally.

He beamed, grateful. “Certainly is!” He stood as Imogene approached the table. “Hot enough for you?”

“Never!” Imogene said, and she grabbed his hand and pulled him toward the dance floor with a shimmy, as a private wave rolled off her fingertips toward Ruth.

Ruth and Imogene had gone dancing every Friday night since the new dance pavilion opened that June of 1937. The pavilion was a platform at the edge of the lake, and when the band was playing, the water carried the music for miles. The summer people, who had cottages or mansions along the lake, depending not so much upon what they could afford but on their idea of what a summer place should be, came to the dances by boat, but Imogene and Ruth, who were “lifers,” as Imogene said, came in the Lind-grens' Ford.

“You know you've got a big run up the back of your leg? You better go back in and change,” Imogene had said that evening when she picked Ruth up.

But Ruth didn't have another presentable stocking and so the two of them sat there for a minute, examining the run, trying to decide if it was really all that noticeable. Ruth twisted it a bit to get a better look and then—zip—of course, it went all the way up and spread out a bit, too.

She pulled the stockings off—she hated the hot things anyway—and tossed them into the back seat. She rolled the window down as far as it would go and felt the breeze on her skin as they drove.

It
was
hot. Ray was right, if unoriginal. And the velvety, humid air of the dance pavilion was drenched in scent—smoke and
cheap fruity perfume, lipstick, shampoo and sweat layered over honeysuckle, grass and gasoline fumes rising from the boats' motors. Ruth's bare legs, which had felt almost racy in the car, now made her self-conscious. When they were crossed, a slick of sweat formed between the top of one thigh and the underside of the other. She tried to keep them beneath the table as much as possible.

These occasions were a trial for her, even though she knew she ought to enjoy them the way everyone else did. The new pavilion was all anyone talked about at Brown's Business College, and though Ruth had dreaded it from the moment she first heard the idea, Imogene made clear she'd have to go.

“Of course you'll go!” Imogene had been taking mental inventory of her dresses, trying to determine whether she needed to petition her parents for something new. “Think of the possibilities, Ruth. Everyone will be there. Bobby Hanser and Harold Koch and all those summer people.”

Bobby Hanser and Harold Koch were a couple of the boys Imo-gene talked to sometimes, when they came into the shop before a day of fishing. But they were definitely not, she explained to Ruth, the fishing type.

“They're sailors,” she said proudly, “members of the yacht club. They were talking about racing their A-boats. And they have iceboats, too, I bet.”

“What's an A-boat?”

“The big ones, I think. I'm pretty sure.” Imogene and Ruth had often admired those grand boats when they flocked on Sunday afternoons. They strung out in the fresh wind to cover almost the whole of the lake, pushing the smaller boats, the fishermen and dinghy sailors, to the edges.

“I'd like to ride on one of those,” Ruth often said, and Imogene, who appreciated not only their grace but the gracious leisure they implied, agreed.

From the shore, they gazed through Amanda's binoculars, keeping track of their favorite boats by the numbers on their sails. Imo-gene liked
V7
, whose deck was sky blue, although she rooted loyally for Bobby's yellow one, as well, but Ruth preferred a sea-foam-green boat.

“That's Arthur Owens,” Imogene said, and through the binoculars Ruth could see, when he turned his head, the string that would keep his glasses from falling into the lake.

So that Imogene could get to know Bobby and Harold and their friends better, maybe even go with one of them, maybe even marry one—who knew?—Ruth, every Friday for the last four weeks, had put on her good dress, the one Aunt Mandy had made for her three years ago.

Aunt Mandy disapproved of the dances. “Why do you want to talk to all those strange boys?” she'd asked that evening from the bathroom doorway. “I know your father wouldn't like it.”

Ruth had climbed onto the toilet cover to see as much of herself as possible in the mirror over the sink. “All right,” she said to Amanda, as she stepped back to the floor with a heavy thump, “I won't talk.” She began to arrange her hair, but when the comb caught in a knot and slipped from her fingers, she sighed, exasperated. “I'm only going for Imogene anyway.”

“Here. Let me.” Amanda picked up the comb and used it deftly to twist Ruth's hair this way and that. She pinned it roughly, not taking care to avoid Ruth's scalp, but the effect was nice. “Such beautiful hair,” Amanda said, “just like your mother's. Aren't you glad you listened to me and didn't cut it just because of some silly fashion?”

Aunt Mandy didn't need to worry about strange boys, Ruth thought now, savoring the sweet and sour tingle of her drink. Boys and girls, both, were interested in talking only to Imogene. They pulled her away from Ruth, as soon as the two of them walked in, and hung on her words, the back feet of their chairs poised inches
above the wooden floor, as they leaned toward her, offering lighted matches, pink punch, scraps of gossip, whispering “Did ya hear” and “Did ya get a look,” glancing furtively over their shoulders at the objects of their stories. Ruth leaned back in her own chair with her sweating glass and her fixed smile and listened as well as she could to the music.

When Bobby Hanser suddenly appeared, Ruth watched Imo-gene pretend to be surprised, pretend to need coaxing, and finally take his hand and, with practiced skill, lead him to the very center of the floor. Amanda was wrong—her father would like this place, Ruth thought, watching Imogene and Bobby fox-trot and remembering the happy night of the phonograph, although there'd been no more of that in the short weeks when he came home, while the
Rebecca Rae
was docked in Milwaukee or Chicago. If her mother were alive, he'd want to take her dancing. It would be nice, Ruth thought, with a little pain in her throat, if someone wanted to take her like that. But she tossed her head. Who, anyway, did she want as a beau? Certainly none of these. It occurred to her then, as it usually did about this time, that she could make a trip to the ladies' room. No one would notice if she disappeared for a little while.

She made her way between the tables and around the dance floor, dodging elbows, saying “Excuse me” and “Pardon me,” and when bodies would not notice and did not budge, turning herself sideways to squeeze between them. A girl pealed sudden laughter into her ear; a man stepped back, grinding his heel into her toe; gauzy dresses swirled; necks were damp with sweat; the music and the voices tangled exuberantly. Ruth pushed open the door marked
DOES
and slipped inside.

In the cool and nearly quiet room Ruth went directly to the little bench, padded in shiny pink fabric, that was pushed against one wall under the windows, convenient for any female who might feel a bit faint and require a quiet spot to recover. She kicked off her
shoes, tucked her feet under her, and pulled a novel from her handbag. She would finish this chapter, no more, and then go back out and keep up appearances.

She'd only read a paragraph when the door burst open, admitting a torrent of noise and two girls Ruth knew by sight as members of Bobby Hanser's set. They gave Ruth barely a glance before one went into a stall and the other leaned over the sink so that her face was only inches from the mirror and pushed her hair off her forehead to get a close look at her skin. She frowned at her reflection.

“She's a forward little thing, isn't she?” the girl in the stall said over the sound of streaming water.

“I don't know, Zita. He asked her to dance is what I saw.”

“That's what she wants you to see. I know her type.” After a moment she added, “You can smell it on her, didja notice?”

“Smell what?”

“Eau de grub.”

“I'll take your word for it,” said the other girl. She opened a compact and dusted some powder over her cheeks.