The Same Woman (6 page)

“Hey buddy, did I wake you up?”

“No, I was just getting up.”

“You're lying. Come on lazybones, up and at ‘em!”

“Don't call me lazy.”

“I was just kidding! Hey, I only have a second. I was just wondering what you're doing tonight.”

“I don't know.”

“I thought maybe you could come over and we could watch a movie together and then maybe do something else, hint hint, nudge nudge...”

“Yeah, maybe.” Ruby was noticeably unresponsive.

“Maybe?”

“I should probably see if Octavia wants to do something first. I think tomorrow is her day off. She might want to go out for a drink.”

“Are you avoiding me?”

“No!” Ruby laughed, but even to her own ears her laugh sounded unnatural. “How about if you come over to Octavia's and we all do something together?”

“I guess we could do that. I just thought it would be nice to do something, just the two of us.”

“Well,” Ruby exhaled, “Maybe tomorrow night we can do that.”

“Tomorrow night's Octavia's birthday party.”

“What about the night after?”

“I guess.”

“Okay buddy have a good day.” Ruby got off the phone quickly.

She walked to the bathroom. The cool floor boards felt nice against her feet and she enjoyed the peacefulness of a small space that contained only her. And then her cellular phone rang on the kitchen table.

“Hi Ruby, it's Nal!” Nal talked fast, without pausing for pleasantries like “how are you,” or confirmation that it was actually Ruby who had picked up the phone. “I've been meaning to call you since you got back. I think we should spend some time together.” Ruby wasn't sure what to say. Was Nal making a statement or a demand? Ruby could never tell. Nal had never asked to spend time with Ruby before.

“What are you doing today?” Ruby stared down at her dirty toenails. She had been planning to take herself out on a date. She had been looking forward to getting out of this Frankie-painted neighbourhood. She thought she might take the subway to some random distant station and explore, to try to rekindle her love for this city, which had died quite abruptly under the weight of her bad memories.

“Nothing,” Ruby replied, “Did you want to hang out?”

“Well, I have a long lunch break today, and I thought we could go and get a cup of coffee.”

“Okay,” Ruby said, noticing the school-room style clock on the wall of Octavia's kitchen and realising it was almost lunchtime, and she had done nothing. Nal had probably drafted the constitution for a battered women's organisation, helped a tenants' group bring their landlord to justice, and made her own ketchup all before noon.

“There's a great coffee shop close to my office. Do you want to come and meet me here?”

What did Nal want to talk to her about? Was she going to lecture Ruby? Pump her for information? Ruby went back to Octavia's room and sat on the bed. She stared at her pale thighs, spread out and pressed against the bed. Her legs looked stout and hairy.

Everything about Ruby was short, round and curly. Sometimes she liked her own compact cuteness, but today she wished her body was a more stylish, urbane shape. She put one hand on either side of her right thigh and squeezed, imagining what it would be like to have thin legs.

Ugh, she said out loud. Why do I like legs I saw once in a magazine more than my own? They've stuck with me and carried me so far. Ruby resisted the temptation to wallow. Instead she focused on the tasks of choosing a t-shirt, putting on her pants, and lacing up her shoes, tasks which lately had begun to take an unreasonably long time. Ruby was four minutes late.

“Hooray! Finally!” Nal yelled as she saw Ruby coming up the path ten meters away, and started walking before Ruby could reach her. Ruby had to jog after her to catch up.

“I love the place I'm taking you to. They have coffee from this fair trade co-operative in Peru that's run only by women. It's shade grown, which is something people don't realise is just as important as labour...” Nal chattered away and Ruby nodded and tried to add to the conversation, though she was slightly breathless because they were essentially running down the sidewalk.

Ruby had lost track of the number of cups of coffee she had drunk over months of people flooding in to take her out and cheer her up. There had been aunts, parents, co-workers, bosses, acquaintances, school mates — even a stranger who had seen her crying on the beach.
People rushed to respond to such clear-cut, uncomplicated loss. Her loss was easy for sympathisers to navigate. As soon as people heard “he left her for another woman”, without thought or awkwardness, they called her up, made her mix-tapes, offered their couches, vacation homes, pets. The masses had rallied around her, and Ruby was grateful.

But now she was starting to wish the sympathy would stop. She did not want her name to conjure up “how-is-shes” or sad faces anymore. And yet now more than ever she seemed to need coddling. Even as they were hurrying down a seemingly neutral block of restaurants and apartment buildings, she couldn't help but remember the day last December when she had taken an aimless heartbroken walk and wound up on this exact street. The fact that Tariq loved her again didn't soften the memory, and tears began to gather in her chest.

“So, how are you doing?” They were stopped at a traffic light, across the road from an inner-city church. It had a sign board out front where messages were posted in black, capital letters. It still displayed the same message it had last December: IF YOU ALWAYS DO WHAT YOU'VE ALWAYS DONE, YOU'LL ALWAYS GET WHAT YOU'VE ALWAYS GOT.

Ruby turned to answer Nal's question and instead burst into tears. Ruby stared, mortified, at Nal's shocked face. She could not stop, it was like a humiliating coughing fit on a first date, every attempt to say “I'm fine, fine!” just made things worse.

Nal took her gently by the arm to a mercifully close bench. She gave Ruby a slightly scruffy handkerchief and said, “I'm sorry I don't have any disposable tissues, I don't use those.” It was the first time Ruby had ever heard Nal apologise for one her political choices, and as she pondered this, her sobs slowed down. They sat for awhile quietly. Nal listened to the measured breathing of a homeless woman sleeping on the grass not far from them, while she fingered her own black buzz cut hair now graced with grey.

“I'm sorry,” Ruby said, “I don't know where that came from.”

“You should never apologise for your feelings,” Nal said sternly. Ruby felt that she had once and for all confirmed Nal's suspicion that she was a wimpy, useless girl. She felt another crying fit looming and pushed part of the hankie into her mouth in an attempt to stifle it.

“Ruby. I feel like I should apologise to you.” Ruby spat the hankie out.

“To me?”

“Sometimes,” Nal said, “I feel sorry that I didn't do more to convince Tariq to be kinder to you. I feel a little bit like I failed you and Frankie.” Ruby was so surprised to hear Nal speak of failure, that the additional controversy of being put in the same category as her nemesis — Frankie — escaped her.

“This is why you called me up today?”

“Yeah.” Ruby was temporarily cheered by Nal's strange, rarefied approach to social interaction.

“But Nal,” Ruby said, “You can't possibly feel responsible for what happened.”

“I don't feel responsible. I mean clearly the whole thing had nothing to do with me.” Nal leaned back against the bench and took the longest pause Ruby had ever known her to take. The park smelled of the wood chips the gardeners had used to mulch the flower beds, and it made Ruby think of her childhood pet hamster.

“But that's the thing!” Nal burst out suddenly and Ruby jumped. “I feel like I had a blind spot in my own home! My life is consumed with working for social change. But activists can spend so much time rallying and pointing fingers at politicians, that we forget to critique own relationships, to look for negative patterns that we are so good at identifying elsewhere and in everyone else.” Nal was speaking in rapid, interview sound bites now. “Do you know how common abuse is in radical political communities? We work so hard setting up violence against women campaigns that we don't stop to make sure our own are safe.”

“Tariq was never physically abusive...” Ruby struggled to see how Nal's words were relevant to her.

“No no, but because he is Tariq and I am Nal, because I am such a revolutionary and such a radical and he is one of my best friends, and holds so many of the same values as I do, I forgot to question his actions. And when I finally did, it was too late. He was already flitting this way and that, repressing his guilt in the way that is lauded in an unsustainably atomised culture.” Ruby was taken aback by this academic critique of her personal life.

“But Nal,” Ruby said, “It wasn't all his fault.”

“What, did you fool around on him first?”

“No, no, but,” Ruby was almost too embarrassed to say what she needed to. “Did Tariq ever tell you how, just before I left for school, I suggested we have an open relationship?”

“He said that you asked, and he said no.”

“He said no, but it changed our whole relationship. Suddenly we were insecure. Not that things weren't already uncertain, since I was leaving.”

“Did you want to see other people? Is that why you suggested it to him?” Ruby pressed the back of her thumb against her left eye. It didn't make a very good dam, and tears flowed out around it.

“No, I didn't.” It was strange to finally say it out loud. “I don't know why I asked him to. I just felt like, ‘this is a good thing to do.' I had this sense that it was what a ‘good girlfriend' did.”

“Well, I would say a good partner is someone who tries to go along with what their partner wants, as long as it's in line with what they want.”

“I just felt like, I wanted him to think I was okay with it, if he wanted to date other girls. Like, somehow he would love me more if he thought I was adventurous, like it would be... hot.” Shameful goosebumps rose on Ruby's arms. “But it's not hot to suggest that your ‘man' sleep with other women, if you don't want him to! It's just plain stupid.” Ruby wished that Nal was not the one she was confessing this to, but now that this avalanche of hidden motives was descending, she couldn't stop talking about it.

“It's not even like you could say that he cheated on me, since I suggested it.”

“Now Ruby, that's rubbish.” Nal put a stop to this self-flaggelation. “You suggested that he find someone to sleep with if he was lonely. You didn't suggest that he go and find someone to replace you with.” Ruby sucked in her breath, in sudden pain because it was true that Tariq had tried to replace her.

Nal continued, “Look, I only have open relationships. But they're not about just sleeping with anyone who tickles your fancy. Open relationships, like any relationship, are based on trust. You trust that your partner will keep their agreement to you. I don't think that anyone
would accept a partner who used an open relationship to shop for a replacement. The problem wasn't that he was with someone else, it was that he broke his agreement to respect you and your feelings.”

“It hurt me not just because he was with someone else, but because he said he liked her more than me.”

“And he didn't tell you that he had started seeing Frankie until he was way in over his head! He kept it from you —” Ruby moaned a little bit and Nal stopped her sordid recounting.

“Why are you so afraid to get angry with him?” Nal asked.

“I'm not,” Ruby said quickly. “Why does everyone keep saying that? I'm not afraid to get angry with him, I'm just not angry with him.”

“Why not?” Nal countered. Ruby huffed, exasperated. “Are you saying you never feel, or felt, frustrated? You don't resent him?”

Ruby felt like Nal was trying to give her therapy. This was not what she wanted to talk about. But sometimes it is easier to explain heart-ache to near strangers than best friends.

“No! Of course I feel all those things. Of course I am really angry with him. I just don't know how to say any of the things I feel, without...” Ruby couldn't finish her sentence. She was realising things as she was saying them, and the revelations were becoming overwhelming.

“Without damaging the relationship again? Without having to bring up the horrible past?” Nal suggested. Ruby tilted her head back. The pressure from the snot and tears in her skull was beginning to hurt.

“What is it like to always be right about everything?” She was serious, but Nal laughed.

“I'm obviously not always right. But what passed between you and Tariq will never go away until you deal with it.”

“Yeah, right. It would help if Tariq's ex-girlfriend could stay bodily in the past.”

“What do you mean?” Ruby sighed again and the air escaping from her body made a musical sound.

“I see her everywhere. She's always at the coffee shop where Octavia works. Or she's on the front stoop, walking down the street, or buying fruit or climbing the freakin' jungle gym with her friends.”

“Oh. God.” Nal seemed uncharacteristically stumped by this.

“Do you think she is trying to torture me?”

“I don't know,” Nal said. “These could be coincidences.”

“It's too much of a coincidence.”

“Do you want to believe that she means you harm?”

“Of course not! Why would I want to believe that?”

“Well, she's a better candidate for your anger than Tariq. You're trying to re-build your relationship with Tariq, whereas you will never have a relationship with her.” Psychobabble, Ruby thought.

“But everyone is okay. And it's so backwards to be upset with her. It's the opposite of progressive, to treat her as if she's some cunning seductress. It was Tariq's fault, so why should it bother me to see her?”