The Book of Ruth (32 page)

After a week Ruby hobbled around but the slightest movement wore him out and he groaned from the living room, from his couch. He didn’t want anyone to bother him, except people who were in the mood to serve. He hollered at Justy when Justy got on his nerves—that was about every three minutes. One night, I couldn’t bear it any more. I called up Daisy to come over and get me. We went out to the Town Lanes like old times and we played a few games. I let her win a couple; I didn’t care about anything. She sat there telling me about her Bill and how great they were getting along, and how she never had met a man before him, who she liked as a person, to talk to. She said it was fabulous, their relationship. All of a sudden she felt mature, she explained. She knew she was a grown woman, not one of them wild girls so crazy for a hunk of flesh. “Not,” she added, “that he ain’t sensational on the horizontal.

“Bill sure saved me from wrecking my life,” she said. “I bet I would have turned into an old broad like Hazel. She practically pays boys to do it to her.”

I turned away. I didn’t want to hear a word about Hazel, Ruby’s former girlfriend.

“Bill knows about all kinds of information.” Daisy was still talking. “He teaches me things I never knew about. He’s going to teach me how to hunt deer. I mean, how’d I get so lucky?” She looked up to the ceiling as if the crumbling plaster was going to answer her, tell her that she deserved heaven on earth.

The minute she mentioned the word
lucky
I sat down on one of the yellow vinyl chairs they have and I burst into tears. I put my head on the score table and cried the way I always cry with Daisy: flat-out hysterics. I told her how terribly I wanted to visit Aunt Sid, and go to the city, and now I couldn’t because Ruby was in bed all day long with his bum leg. It’s a miracle she could understand my choking and stuttering. I said I didn’t feel like a person any more. I said that Aunt Sid always made me think there was something good about me through the mail, and imagine how seeing her in real life would make it one million times better.

Daisy picked up my sweaty hand, looked me in the eye, and said, “Too bad if Ruby can’t go along. You take off anyway. You don’t need to go all the way to Chicago, but you could visit your aunt for a few days.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. Sometimes her thoughts were so unusual. I stopped crying instantly. I never went anywhere by myself—I told her that.

“Go alone, you big sissy. What are you scared of, muggers and knifers on the bus?”

“No,” I lied. My fingers were shaky and wet, even though I got up and put them over the drier they have for your hands, so you won’t sweat into your bowling ball and lose your grip.

Daisy kept telling me I should do something for myself, that I had earned a trip. “Besides,” she said, “your Aunt Sid don’t know Ruby. You wouldn’t be able to have no heart-to-hearts with a man hanging around. I never said nothin’ but I thought it was a stupid idea to take Ruby along in the first place.” We weren’t bowling any more. We were standing at the line. We didn’t hear any other conversations; we didn’t notice pins crashing to the floor. “But Daisy,” I said, “it’s supposed to be our honeymoon.”

“Jeeeeeesus,” she whispered, smacking her palm to her forehead. “You don’t need a honeymoon. You need a break from your kid and your ma and your husband. Everyone needs time off—it don’t mean you ain’t a prize-winning wife and mother.” She said I should go for it. She kept saying, “Go for it,” whenever she got the opportunity.

When we got home I banged the screen door for dramatic effect and stood under the light in the kitchen. May was playing solitaire. She had all her aces up. She was having terrific luck, so I said quickly, “Ma, I’m visiting Aunt Sid next week for a few days without Ruby, for a vacation.”

“No you ain’t,” she said, slapping down the king of hearts. “I’m not going to care for your husband.”

Daisy stepped out from the shadows and said, “Now look here, May, you’ll be at work half the time and I’ll take care of Justy, and Ruby’s a grown man. Even though he don’t walk like a ballerina, he can take care of himself. I’ll get him the things he needs.”

May had her card in midair. There wasn’t anything she could say after the speech, because Daisy is so tall and gorgeous and well married. She always makes a mess sound easy. There aren’t ever any problems for Dais. If she doesn’t like someone she says, “Go to hell.” Then she wipes her hands and walks away. It was the funniest sight when she came down the aisle for her wedding. She looked like a dewdrop with her lowered eyelids and her blush. It seemed as if she couldn’t ever have uttered a filthy word—or experienced the meaning of one of those words—in her life.

Ruby was lying on the couch like a recently decorated and blasted-apart war hero when I told him my plans. His bum leg hung off the side as if it was just barely connected to his body. “Baby,” he said with tears in his voice, “don’t leave me.”

I talked cocky although it was a charade. There were swarms of moths giving birth right inside my stomach. I said, “Don’t be silly, Ruby, it’s only for two days. You won’t even miss me.”

“My leg hurts me so bad, baby. It’s killing me.”

I stood up. I said, “Well, my staying around ain’t going to make it feel better. It’ll have to heal on its own. You have to be patient, that’s all.”

I walked out of the room exactly like Daisy does, tossing her head. She wouldn’t look back if you paid her fifty dollars.

That’s how I found myself packing one bag for a trip, my first voyage away from home. I caught the Greyhound in Stillwater. Daisy calls those buses “metal dogs” and has a whole series of “metal dog” jokes. I was a wreck at first, especially my digestive system. I needed to use the squat box, as Daisy says, every five seconds, but I didn’t have the courage to walk to the back of the bus. I sat right up front so I could look out the window and observe my movement through the world. Sitting high you can see the land stretched out flat, as if there’s four people at each corner, holding a blanket. And all the rows of corn, whizzing by, row upon row It gets going so fast it makes you dizzy all those rows like bristles on a toothbrush, flashing by a person. I pot hypnotized thinking about the king-size teeth that com rows could brush.

De Kalb is forty miles from Honey Creek so it didn’t take more than an hour to get there. Suddenly the driver was saying into his microphone that he was glad we’d traveled Greyhound, and he hoped we’d come aboard again soon. I said I would, almost out loud. I felt like telling him that my husband was laid up at home with my mother, because he seemed like such a nice man, with a picture of his daughters on the dashboard, along with his bag of peppermints.

There was Aunt Sid, waving to me as I climbed down the stairs. When I got to her I dropped my bag, thinking to hug her with all my might. I didn’t want to be shy. I had planned to tell her what I thought about her. I imagine there’s probably so much quiet where you are when you’re cold and dead, you might as well say how crazy you are about people while you have a mouth and teeth and tongue. Before I could get it out she grabbed my shoulders and stood looking at me from head to toe. She said that I looked lovely—and I should have, because Daisy lent me her wardrobe. I had on a blue-and-orange-and-yellow-striped cotton skirt, very full it was, and past my knees. My top was a dark blue silky shirt. Not actual silk, spun from worms. Still, I felt like an advertisement for extra-strength brighteners people put in their wash. Daisy did up my hair too. She said I looked like a million dollars but she was probably exaggerating.

Then I did it: I threw my arms around Aunt Sid, and after the two-second contact, while I looked at the sidewalk glinting with sunshine, I told her I had waited for this moment ever since I was five, when I first met her and her coral lipstick. I said I had had the feeling, so long ago, that I was destined to visit her in De Kalb. She has a laugh like water coming over a waterfall, sparkling and frothing.

I wish I could hire Charles Dickens to describe Aunt Sid. I don’t have a chance in the world to do her justice. She wore beige slacks and a sleeveless blouse with brown horses galloping in rows across green turf. Her hair was piled on her head, as usual, and her smile came directly from the heart. If I were a Catholic I’d believe that the Blessed Virgin Mary came to look like Aunt Sid, when she got older, after her son died and her life got on track. When I mentioned that very thought to Daisy, at home, she, an unbeliever, said I could get struck down for thinking such a thing. She also told me I was creating a goddess out of an ordinary person, which, I admitted to myself only for a moment, was exactly the beauty of Aunt Sid. Daisy said, “You’ll probably find out one of these days that she picks her nose with a tuning fork.”

When Daisy made that remark I stepped in a whole bed of marigolds and ground my heels into the earth. If Ruby and May and Dee Dee, and just about everyone I knew, could have comfort in their alcohol I saw no reason why I couldn’t have the fantasy of Aunt Sid. Some day I was bound to find out that she had a terrible quirk, but until then there was no harm in believing she was a good witch.

Aunt Sid drove me all over De Kalb. She showed me the state university. We saw a tour bus full of Chinese people jabbering at each other in their language, which surely requires gymnastic classes for the tongue and voice. I giggled at how crazy they were speaking while Aunt Sid pointed out all the buildings and what kinds of learning took place in them. I kept looking around to see if there were any criminals, fresh from Chicago, waiting to rape the college coeds, but no one looked like a knifer. Summer school was in session and people were scurrying along the paths with their notebooks tucked under their arms.

Finally Aunt Sid took me to her blue wooden house. There is an arch of oak trees over her street so the sunshine can’t blast through and make the cement boil. She has a front porch, screened in, and a yard with the wildest display of flowers and colors: crimson and indigo, vermilion and plain yellow, lush green and an entire bed of blinding white petunias. There is a special rubber door with a slit in it so her collie dog, Elizabeth, can go in and out whenever she pleases. She looks at you with moony eyes, hoping for food. I knew I should be sad to think of Ruby back in Honey Creek with his wobbly leg, lying in the heat of the house, but my body, my mind, couldn’t conjure up unhappiness for anything just then.

We sat at lunch, on the porch, in elegant white wire lawn furniture, sipping our lemonade politely. Aunt Sid told me about her neighborhood and the children who lived on the block, and gradually she started remembering how she used to play back at the home farm, in the hay fields and pastures, in the creek. I couldn’t keep my mind on her words, because I was concentrating on eating daintily, until she started talking about May’s Willard Jenson, and the ingenious methods she had for spying on the smooching couple from the closet in the basement. I had had no idea how May felt about Willard. I had only seen pictures of him once, and May got irritated with me for asking about the people. She snatched the photos away and I never saw them again.

After we finished eating our egg salad sandwiches, cut in wedges with green olives and lettuce, and emptying our little bowls filled with melon balls, Aunt Sid brought out her three photo albums, each one filled with old pictures. She sat on the arm of my chair and told me about every picture. I couldn’t look at them hard enough. I couldn’t stop staring at the snapshots of May when she was a girl, squinting into the sunshine with her hand over her forehead. She was young and thin, with the entire world before her, or so she thought. Aunt Sid told me about how Willard Jenson and May danced in the basement and the dirty clothes went scooting around the floor. There was a picture of the two of them, with their arms around each other, smiling into the great unknown. The photos, the stories, put May in a new light. I almost said out loud that I wished May herself had wanted me to know her as a young girl with heartaches.

After lunch Aunt Sid took me up to my room. She said she often napped in the heat of the day. She disappeared around the corner to her room, which was filled with heavy golden sunlight, and white curtains billowing and snapping in the open windows. When she was gone I took off my skirt and my blouse and climbed under the cool perfumed sheets. I didn’t sleep of course, but I lay there, not daring to move, staring around myself. The room was white with paintings in gilded frames on the walls, paintings of haystacks and ponds, blue and yellow, shimmering. My room had a desk in it, and shelves with books, some of which I had read on the blind tapes. I knew the authors. I was half afraid I had taken some of Ruby’s drugs and when I came to I would be sitting on the sofa at home absently stirring the ice cubes in his rum and Coke and staring into the gray space. I kept my eyes open so I wouldn’t drift off and dream I was in Honey Creek.

Later in the afternoon we went to Aunt Sid’s school and I saw the empty room where her choir rehearses. She sat at the piano playing and singing a song by Brahms. She hissed and gurgled softly in the German language. Her lips quivered with the notes while she closed her eyes to listen to herself. If you want to see a sight to make you get lumps in your throat, watch Aunt Sid singing. It will slay you each time.

When we got home Aunt Sid cooked steaks on her small outdoor grill, and I sat on the patio drinking a gin and tonic she had made for me. In the next house someone was playing the piano and it seemed as if everything in the yard, the flowers, the green grass, the still evening itself, heard the music and became part of the melody. Children down the alley were playing kick the can, calling out and laughing. We didn’t speak as Aunt Sid prepared the food, and I wasn’t really too nervous while I sat waiting.

After a drink we got to talking. I answered her questions about spotting and how to remove tough stains. She wanted to know every single person who worked at Trim ’N Tidy, and I told her about Artie, and how he was always giving me good advice. I mentioned his prize possession: the Trim ’N Tidy bowling trophy. After my second drink I had enough courage and I said, “Aunt Sid, do you remember when you sent me money to buy May perfume for her birthday?”