Every Last One (2 page)

I put on a pair of khaki pants, a white shirt, and soft flat slip-on shoes with rubber soles. “Those are such … mom clothes,” Ruby sometimes says. It is not exactly an insult. I am wiry and tan from work, or perhaps from genetics. My mother taught English to high school students, not exactly a physically taxing profession, and she, too, is wiry and tan. At seventy, she still wears tennis clothes without thinking about it.

At eight-thirty a dump truck pulls into the driveway. On its side is a trio of primitive painted flowers, the kind that second-grade girls draw in their notebooks in colored markers. A blue flower, a pink flower, a yellow flower, and to one side the words
LATHAM LANDSCAPING.
One day I was a freelance copy editor, then I had three children, then I took a master gardening class, then I started a landscaping business. The business is successful.

“Hey Mary Beth,” says Rickie from the truck. He’s wearing his Latham Landscaping windbreaker, but the zipper strains over his big hard belly. The truck is tidy, but I know that the glove compartment is filled with candy wrappers and greasy waxed paper. Rickie runs the equipment; he’s past being able to use a shovel or do the weeding. We are going to see a copper beech two towns over that is losing its bark. It’s probably a fungus that’s been going around, moving slowly and silently through the forests and the front yards,
the way a cold does through the kids’ classes at school: first one, then another, then a half dozen or so. This tree is probably a hundred years old, and it’s probably not going to get much older. It’s a shame; it’s a glorious tree, the kind that looks immutable.

That’s the humbling thing about doing what I do for a living: You can look at the pin oak in a front yard, or even the daffodils you put in the autumn before, and know that long after you are gone there will be shade, and color, and you won’t be there to see it. In many ways it’s a soothing feeling, like telling your daughter that someday she will have your diamond earrings, without ever spelling out what “someday” means.

“Want to stop for coffee?” Rickie says. What Rickie means by coffee is a box of assorted doughnuts.

“Sure,” I say. “There’s never enough.” I rummage in my bag. “Wait, I forgot the phone again. I’ll be right back.”

We might still have a nighttime frost, so there’s not much we can do yet in people’s gardens. Last year around this time, a woman hired us to put in hundreds of flowering plants for her daughter’s outdoor wedding. God had smiled on her. The spring afternoon had been sunny and warm, and the delphiniums, the lobelia, and the sweet-faced purple and blue pansies glowed against the green of the grass, vying with—overshadowing, I would have said—the Dutch blue of the bridemaids’ dresses. The next night there was a hard freeze. Those pansies were the saddest things imaginable the next morning, splayed on the ground. I hated the sight of them.

“We got a call for a big job around the courthouse,” Rickie says. “The county clerk wants you to give them a proposal.”

“Oh God, save me from the county clerk. No matter what I come up with they’re going to want geraniums.”

Rickie hits a pothole and the tools jump in the back of the truck with a jangling sound. I take a tissue from inside my bag and blow my nose. A woman I only vaguely recognize waves as we
wait at a red light. Every day, with few variations—snow, minor illness, the failure of the paper to arrive, a lost backpack, a sleepover that’s left us one, or two, or sometimes even three kids shy of the usual full set—every day is like this. Average. Ordinary. More or less.

I am sitting on a small padded bench outside the dressing rooms at Molly’s Closet. The dressing rooms look like shower stalls. In fact, I suspect that Molly’s dressing-room curtain is really a shower curtain. It is a lively print of flowers that I know are not found in nature. The bench outside is far too low for even a middling-sized woman in good physical condition. My back hurts, I’m hungry, and I have to go to the bathroom. The trifecta of the over-forty female crowd. At least I don’t have cramps. Ruby does. “I so need chocolate,” she said in the car, which is a warning not to talk about school, or her friends, or anything else of moment. Tears hover.

Ruby is trying to find a dress for the prom. This has become her life’s work, along with a short story that I have not been permitted to read but which apparently may be the lead story in this year’s literary magazine. Ruby will edit the literary magazine next year. She is also president of a club that concerns itself with what they call the enslavement of the people of Tibet, and a member of the council that meets with the principal once a week to tell him what
is going on at school. “Oh, you’re Ruby Latham’s mother,” people sometimes say to me when I introduce myself. She is not what I envied in high school, the popular girl. She is something I’m not even sure existed then, the sure-footed girl. She gives the impression of being completely herself, and only a part of that impression is false.

“No way,” I hear her groan from inside the dressing room, and yet another dress is thrown over the bar that holds the curtain. The bar looks as though it’s a shower bar, too. Molly’s husband, who is a builder, built her shop, but on the cheap, she always complains. “Anything that didn’t make it into another job, I got,” Molly says, but with that mock irritation that means it’s not a big deal.

“Can I see?” I say.

“There’s no point,” Ruby replies.

Two weeks ago, Ruby went to look for a prom dress at the vintage store in the next town. The doodles on her desk suggested that she had hopes of finding one of those dresses my mother wore for important occasions when she herself was young: a snug bodice, a belted waist, a long full skirt. When I was a child, there was a trunk in the basement with my father’s name stenciled on it, but instead of old suits and books inside there were dresses of my mother’s that we wore to play princess. My mother didn’t care. She was usually upstairs at the kitchen table, drinking tea, correcting papers, looking up toward the yellowish fluorescent fixture, then down to scribble comments in the margins. “Oh, Mary Beth, I have no idea where those dresses got to,” my mother had said when I called her in Florida the other day to ask about them.

Nancy told me with a faint air of superiority that Sarah bought the second dress she tried on. And Rachel said sadly last week that she’d ordered a dress from a catalog and didn’t really like it much. But Ruby is incapable of being either casual or resigned. I can see her feet beneath the curtain edge, the nails painted blue, the tiny
baby toe curled in like a comma, just as it was when she was born. I was doing copyediting at home then, in the apartment in Chicago that we rented while Glen was finishing his ophthalmology training. I knew no one, did nothing but read textbook manuscripts and make careful marks in pencil, hieroglyphics of error. My left hand worked the ledge of my belly, back and forth, feeling toes beneath my skin, like pebbles under a layer of loose sand. You don’t feel so silly, so stupid, so sad, talking to yourself if there’s someone inside you that you can pretend you’re talking to instead.

When Ruby came back from the shopping trip to the vintage store two weeks ago, her hands were empty and the big tapestry bag slung across her body looked flat and sad. The sound Ruby’s feet make on the stairs is the window of her soul. “She’s pissed,” Alex had said, sitting at the kitchen table. “Language,” I said mildly. “Pissed isn’t a curse,” he said. “It’s vulgar,” I replied, taking chicken out to defrost.

My back is aching as Ruby tries on two more dresses. She will never find anything at Molly’s Closet. They’re pretty dresses, but they’re ordinary, made of ordinary fabrics. Ruby loves panne velvet, moiré taffeta. She appears in a beautiful cream-colored satiny dress. I’m pleased to realize that it is one I took off the rack.

“Imagine this if I took off the sleeves and made the neck square. And maybe, I don’t know, added some kind of inserts in the skirt. Maybe lace, so that part of the dress you could see through? Does that make any sense?”

I breathe and try not to make my breathing sound like a sigh. If Ruby hears me sigh she will say, “I told you you didn’t have to come.” Everything for Ruby is an either/or. I think this may be a keystone of her personality, although it may be her age, too. My mother says I was the same, but she seems to refer to most of motherhood as a martyrdom. Her widowhood, her real martyrdom, we have never really discussed. “It must have been so hard for
you when Daddy died,” I said one evening when we had been watching the sun go down over the golf course behind the condominium where she and Stan live. She waved her hand, a gesture of dismissal. “That’s life,” she said. “And everything turned out fine.” She waved her hand again, this time at the green on the fourteenth hole, water diamonds arcing from the invisible sprinklers buried belowground. We could hear Stan in the kitchen, doing the dinner dishes. Maybe he was what she thought of when she thought of having a husband, not the man I could only vaguely remember: longish sideburns, a heavy jaw, the smell of citrus cologne, a dry kiss on the crown of my head. For some reason, my father liked to call me Mary Elizabeth Ever After, one of those nonsense names parents make up. I had one for Ruby, too: When she was small I used to call her Ruby Tuesday, and she would frown and say, “That is not my name.” I had done the same to my father, hands on hips, brows knit together: That is not my name. Oh, your mother was willful, my mother says to my children sometimes, shaking her head and exchanging glances of complicity. I am so middle-ground these days that it seems impossible to believe, but I suppose that is the progression: the sharp edges of youth ground down by life. A razor becomes a knife becomes a paperweight. It’s difficult to believe it will ever happen to my own children, especially my daughter.

“I’m having a hard time seeing it, but maybe that’s just me,” I say.

Ruby sighs loudly. “I don’t know,” she says.

“Did you try the blue one?” I ask.

“It’s such a magazine dress,” Ruby says. When I was a girl, I used to sometimes rip a picture of a dress from a magazine and take it into town to see if anyone had it, or something like it, something like it but cheaper. If Ruby sees a dress, or something like it, in a magazine, this means it is devalued by ordinariness.

The phone rings. It is my oldest friend, Alice, who was my college roommate and now lives in New York City. “What does chicken pox look like?” she says, without greeting or identification.

When we were in college, Alice divided men into three categories: boyfriend material, husband material, and father material. Since we graduated twenty-two years ago, she has met many of the first and almost none of the last two. Her son, Liam, is three now, and was fathered by Donor No. 236: medical student, sandy hair, tall, mathematical, methodical. Because I am a good friend, I’ve never mentioned that the shorthand description of the nameless Donor No. 236 sounds something like a description of my husband, who Alice called “the straightest guy on earth” until she realized I was serious about him. Sometimes there are people you love because you learned to love them a long time ago, because when you say, “Remember the night we went skinny-dipping in the dean’s pool?” she does.

Alice and I had a period of frost when my children were small. When we talked, the sentences were empty—how’s work, where did you spend the holidays, how are your parents? “You’ve lost yourself,” she’d finally said. Of course, I had. Now Alice has, too.

“How large an area does the rash cover?” I ask, while Ruby taps one foot insistently and tugs at a long ringlet.

“There’s just one blister, but it’s very red and angry. And he’s been out of sorts all morning.”

“Let me call you back. There’s never only one chicken pock. He’s probably out of sorts because he’s three. I’m shopping for a prom dress with your goddaughter.”

“Call me back as soon as you’re finished,” Alice says, and hangs up. “I am not one of those crazy older mothers,” she often says. She is one of those crazy older mothers. It’s good of me not to say so,
especially since she told me I was certifiable when I was just twenty-six and discovered I was expecting Ruby. “He rushed you into it,” she’d said of Glen. “He absolutely did not,” I replied at the time, and it was true. Ruby was an accidental baby. We had been thunderstruck when I got the news three months after our wedding, as stunned as teenagers who had skipped sex-education classes. I have never been able to decide whether I should tell Ruby this someday, perhaps when she has children of her own. My firstborn, my girl, my happiest accident.

Molly has a dress over her arm and holds it up for Ruby. It is a high-waisted dress in some filmy coral material. Ruby says so sweetly, “I have a problem with that color because of my hair, but thanks so much, Mrs. Martin, it’s really pretty.” Ruby likes to say that her hair is red, but it’s really brown with auburn highlights, a big wavy mass that she pulls at when she’s thinking and that makes a hair curtain around her pointed, slightly elfin face. She has outside manners and inside manners, company manners and home manners. Or lack of manners. You can see it in her brothers’ faces sometimes, as they think to themselves, Will Ruby offer to take me to the diner for breakfast or scream at me for leaving the shower dripping?