Talk Before Sleep

  I feel Ruth looking at me, and I open my eyes. She says, “You know what I was thinking? I was watching the birds and then I started looking at the branches of the tree and I was thinking how much they look like nerve cells. And then I was thinking how everything is so connected. I mean that there must be one thing, somewhere that ties everything together.”

  “Yes, I think so, too.”

  “Do you?”

  “Yes.”

  She readjusts herself on the pillow, takes in a breath. “What I mean is that if you could just get at the real heart of one thing, you’d understand everything else. Like linguine would have something to do with linguistics, there’d be a link there.”

  “Yes, right.”

  “You’ve thought this, too?”

  “Yes.”

  She stares straight ahead, blinks. “Oh. I thought I was having profound death thoughts.”

  While we are eating breakfast, Ruth asks me if I think she should have an epitaph on her tombstone.

  I shrug, a bite of food in my mouth now refusing to do anything but he there.

  “I’ve got a few ideas,” she says. “Want to hear them?”

  I say nothing.

  “Oh boy, time to read,” she says.’ “What do you think of that one?”

  I smile.

  “Or, ‘See? I told you!’”

  “Ruth … ”

  “Well, why not? Why not have some fun? Do you think they can do italics?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Ruth picks up a piece of French toast with her fingers, drags it through some syrup, and the absurd thought comes to me that she doesn’t have to watch her calories. “Know what Helen wants on her tombstone?” she asks. “‘Oops.’ Isn’t that great? Or, ‘Up, up and away.’”

  “When were you talking about tombstones with Helen?” I ask.

  “When it wasn’t real,” she said. “Remember when it wasn’t real?”

  I nod. I feel sick.

  “Michael’s picking us up at eleven,” she says, and then, when I look alarmed, “It’s okay. He’ll be fine. He’s my son. He’s not chickenshit like you.”

  She puts her dishes in the sink, runs water on them, then turns around, arms folded across her chest. “Here’s something else I was thinking. You know how you can make donations in peoples’ names to the American Cancer Society instead of sending flowers to a funeral?”

  “Yes. Do you want that?”

  “No. I want flowers. Really, tons of them. Tell anyone who talks about giving money to cancer to buy me roses instead. The most they can afford.”

  The cemetery is small, off a well-traveled, two-lane highway. “Isn’t this road too busy?” I ask Ruth, as we turn down the central driveway.

  “What, I might get hit by a car?” Ruth asks.

  “No, I just … ”

  “She means it should be quiet, Mom,” Michael says. “Right? Isn’t that what you mean?”

  “Right.”

  “Quiet for what?” Ruth asks.

  “For … contemplation,” I say.

  We are out of the car, walking past rows of graves, tombstones all in careful alignment with each other. Michael stops before one that has a stone dog lying permanently bereft at the base of a tombstone, his head on his paws, his mournful eyes fixed on a vision. The name of the person is on the headstone in formal capital letters, then the dates the person lived, then a simple and essential listing of roles: father, husband, son. It occurs to me that this matter-of-fact reduction is the kind of reorientation we need from time to time, that there is a value and a comfort in being here and understanding what matters most is only who you were to someone else.

  There are many flowers on the graves, some plastic, most real but frozen now, bent over as though in sympathy, the petals curled up and blackened. Ruth stops before the grave of an infant, a lamb carved into the stone above the baby’s name. She stoops down, traces with her fingers the dates of life. The baby lived six weeks. I had forgotten these things happen. Maybe Ruth is old.

  We stop, finally, at an open area toward the back of the cemetery. It is the last row; beyond it are only trees, black and stark against the snow. There is a bushy gully and a frozen-over stream down a little hill from us, and the noises we make flush out a large bird. There is a rapid rustle of feathers, a cry of alarm, and he is gone. Ruth watches him fly away, then points to the ground. “Here,” she says. “This is it.” I look around, my hands in my pockets, inspecting the area, as does Michael. I don’t know what we’re looking for, but we’re being thorough. There are two trees, just as Ruth said. “These are dogwood, they’ll be beautiful in the spring. And there’ll be shade here in the summer,” Ruth tells Michael. He nods, avoids looking at her. “Are you all right?” she asks, and he goes to silently hold her. Between the sleeves of his coat and his gloves, I see the exposed flesh of his wrists and I look away.

  You’ve only tried Western medicine,” L.D. says. “There’s so much else. Why don’t you go to another country? I’ll go with you. China. Tahiti. They know stuff we don’t. They could help you.”

  Ruth smiles tiredly. We are eating an early dinner in Ruth’s kitchen, the three of us, and L.D. is not happy about Ruth having selected a grave site. “L.D.,” Ruth says, “at some point, we have to deal with what’s happening.”

  “You can’t give up,” L.D. says.

  Ruth shapes a pile of macaroni and cheese into a symmetrical mound. “My parents died in a car accident,” she says. “This is better. I can … plan. I can make provisions, say good-bye. What is wrong with us, that we are all so afraid of what we know will happen to every single one of us?”

  “I’m not afraid!” L.D. says. “But this is too soon, Ruth!”

  Ruth pushes her plate away, leans back in her chair. “You know, I read about these people, in Madagascar, I think, who dig up people’s bones from the grave and take them out. They take them out, like on a date! That’s what you can do, L.D. You can come get me, take me out somewhere.”

  L.D. is silent, furious. “Where would you want to go?” I ask, more in an effort to break the tension than anything. “Outdoor café? Movie? I guess not dancing.”

  “Here,” Ruth says. “Here would be good. This table. This room. Right here.”

  She stands up. “I’m tired. I’m going to lie down.”

  I carry Ruth’s dishes and mine to the sink, avoid looking at L.D. Ruth’s parents died when she was thirty, before I met her. But I have always felt that I knew them, somehow. I have always thought I knew exactly how it was before they died. The radio in the car would have been on, low. Her mother’s purse would have been beside her, with its comb and lipstick and small calendar, with its coupons for the supermarket, and photos of Ruth and Andrew. There would have been a skidding sound, some flash of terrible warning. And just before impact, Ruth’s mother would have reached toward her husband, her earring that she had put on that morning in the usual ignorant way glinting in the sun. “Jack,” she would have said, “wait a minute.”

  Ruth is right. This way is better. She has things to say to people. And some time to say them. Behind me I hear L.D. get up and put her coat on, walk out the door and slam it. I go to the window, watch her get into her car, pull away. She’ll be back, I think. But she’d better hurry up.

  I go to Ruth’s bedroom, thinking she’ll be asleep, thinking I’ll pull her door closed so that the rattle of dishes doesn’t wake her up. But she’s not sleeping. She’s lying on her side, eyes open. Two white candles burn on her dresser top. When she sees me, she smiles.

  I sit in the chair by her bed. “This is hard for her. She just needed to get out of here for a while.”

  “I know that.”

  “She thinks you’re giving up.”

  “Well, I am. But it’s time to.” She pushes her pillow behind her, sits up. “How come it can’t be an ordinary thing? I mean, as smooth and natural as opening a drawer or something?”

  “That’s how people are,” I say. “We resis
t death. Even if we don’t like it here, if we find out we’re dying, we like it here.”

  “Not everyone resists,” Ruth says. “I like how the Indians say ‘It’s a good day to die.’ We ought to be like that.”

  “Well, it’s hard to be like that!”

  She sighs, smiles. “I know. I’m mostly full of shit. I think a lot about what I’ll miss. I mean, as though I will miss it, as though I’ll be standing around somewhere wringing my hands and looking down, like in movie heavens. And you know, it’s all the simplest stuff I’d miss. Sounds, you know, the clink of a teaspoon on a saucer. Folding towels. The way the moss grows up through the cracks on the sidewalk. I wonder why I was so wild and reckless when all I ever really wanted was so ordinary. I fought so hard against what I needed most. I made such big mistakes.”

  “Eric was not a wonderful man,” I say. “I wish you’d stop feeling bad about leaving him.”

  “I know,” she says. “I can’t. Isn’t it funny?”

  “No,” I say.

  What I really didn’t get,” Helen says, “is why they were so desperate to feel us up. I mean it. I remember being at the drive-in the first time I let a guy feel my boobs. It took him about five hours to get my damn bra unhooked, and he was panting and wheezing like he was an asthmatic and I was feeling nothing. I mean nothing! I was looking out the window at the car next to us, and it was a family, you know, a mom and dad and two little kids in their jammies and the mom had fallen asleep, her head was against the window and her glasses were all crooked. And I just wanted to shove this guy off me and go get in the car with that family. And then he finally gets to my boob and just … holds it, like it’s his fucking lunch money or something!”

  It is Friday night, late. We are sitting on the floor in Ruth’s bedroom. Ruth is in bed, and the rest of us are leaning against the wall facing her. We look like a lineup accused of some eccentric crime. “Well,” Sarah says, “for him, touching you was like … I don’t know, I mean they fantasize for what, months? years? about feeling a real breast. So when they do, that’s enough. To just feel it.”

  “Well, it was cold,” Helen says. “I remember feeling a little breeze against my nipple and thinking, God, this is so weird. I’m sitting here in a car with my boob hanging out like laundry. And then that guy came around with the flashlight, you know, the morals squad? so I smacked my date on the top of his head to make him quit. He came up like a fish, I swear, his eyes all pop-out and his mouth hanging open.”

  I am laughing so hard and I think, God, this is strange. This is the best time I’ve ever had.

  L.D. has been cleaning out her fingernails with the small blade of her Swiss army knife. Now she snaps the blade closed and says with disgust, “How could you have done that? What was the point? You weren’t having any fun!”

  “Well, did you have fun the first time?” Sarah asks L.D.

  “Absolutely. We knew exactly what we were doing.”

  “How did you know?” Helen asks.

  “We were alike,” L.D. says. “The translation was simple.”

  We are all quiet for a moment, thinking. I suppose we are all imagining L.D. making love for the first time, and for me, anyway, the thought is a tender thing.

  Suddenly Ruth lifts up her nightgown, baring her chest. “What’s this?” she asks.

  No one answers, and she says, “A back.” And then, into the awkward silence, “That’s a joke, you guys.”

  Saturday morning, Joe calls and asks if he and Meggie can come to visit. “Of course,” I say.

  “What should I tell Meg?” he asks, in a low voice.

  “What do you mean?”

  “About, you know, what to expect.”

  “I don’t think you have to tell her anything other than you’re coming to visit Ruth.”

  “Well … Don’t you think she’ll be scared?”

  “We are talking about Meg here, right?”

  He says nothing. I know where he is. He is standing in the kitchen, talking on the blue wall phone. The receiver has a hairline crack down one side from my once dropping it, and I have noticed that Joe and I both seek that crack out—both of us with our ring fingers, in fact—when we are talking on it. I suppose we find imperfections comforting, as people do. I imagine Joe holding the phone now, feeling the crack, looking at the floor, noticing and not noticing the crumbs under the kitchen chairs and thinking, how will I do this, do I have to do this? I’ve stood in that same spot.

  “Just come,” I say. “It’s not as bad as you think.”

  “Should I bring something?”

  “I think all we need is paper towels,” I say. “But wait, I’ll ask.” I go into the bedroom, then come back to the phone. “And a couple of boxes of doughnuts. Not little ones. Big ones. Bow ties and cinnamon coffee rolls, the big ones. And go to McDonald’s and get a Sausage McMuffin.”

  “L.D.’s there, huh?” he asks.

  When L.D. came back—two hours after she left—she told Ruth she was taking her to the airport. “Just to browse,” she said. “I don’t think I can do that,” Ruth said. “I can’t walk very far, L.D.”

  “Then I’ll push you in a wheelchair. They have wheelchairs there.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think I want to.”

  L.D. looked at me, wanting an ally.

  “Well, what do you mean, ‘browse?’” I asked. “What does that mean?”

  “Why don’t you learn the language?” L.D. asked. “You’ve been in this country a long time. Now go start my car, so it’s warm for her. I don’t want to talk anymore about this.”

  “She doesn’t want to, L.D. She’s too tired.”

  “Oh, I’ll go,” Ruth said. “What the hell. I need out. What should I wear?”

  L.D. handed me her keys. “Start the car. I’ll help her get dressed.”

  When I came back in, Ruth was in a sweater and jeans, her high-top sneakers tied into neat bows. Her wig was on, slightly askew, and I straightened it. L.D. was in the bathroom, and I whispered, “Why are we going to the airport?”

  “Because she said to.”

  “Are you afraid of her?” I asked. “Do you want to do this?”

  “No,” Ruth said. “And yes.”

  L.D. came out of the bathroom, put Ruth’s coat on her. “Can you make the stairs?”

  Ruth said she could, but halfway down it was clear that she couldn’t. L.D. carried her the rest of the way, then helped her into the car, assigned me the rear seat. It was hard to sit there, because of the incredible pileup of junk on the floor. My knees were almost to my chin, my feet resting on empty food containers, shoes, paperbacks, random pieces of clothing, junk mail, and mysterious looking tools from L.D.’s landscaping business. I was curious about what they were, but didn’t want to ask any questions. Up front they were listening to k.d. lang and L.D. wouldn’t tolerate any interruptions of her. I’d made that mistake once.

  Inside the main terminal, L.D. found a wheelchair and pushed Ruth up to various monitors showing departure times. “Where would you go?” she asked. “New Orleans? San Francisco?”

  Ruth smiled, said nothing.

  “Paris?”

  She stopped smiling then, turned around in her chair. “What’s up, L.D.? I mean, what do you want me to say?”

  “Just … I’m just asking where you’d go. If you could go anywhere you wanted.”

  There was a long moment of silence. All around us, people were hugging each other through the bulk of their winter coats, saying good-bye, wiping away tears. I hate seeing people cry when they say good-bye. “Don’t go, then!” I always want to say. “Obviously you love each other! So don’t go!” But of course they have to, and they do. Every day. Everywhere. It’s the ones who are left behind at the gate that I worry about, those with their hand pressed uselessly against a huge plate-glass window, watching, while outside engines roar so loud that no matter what you say, you can’t be heard above them.

  An announcement for a flight leaving for Phoenix made me
jump, and Ruth finally said, “Well, I’ve never been to Arizona. They have coyotes there. And desert. I’ll bet the moon looks bigger.”

  L.D. pushed Ruth to the nearest airline desk and told the curly haired, sleepy looking agent that she wanted two round-trip tickets to Phoenix, first class, dates open. While the agent pushed blankly at the keys of her computer, I felt L.D. looking at me. I didn’t move. I stared straight ahead. Some people pray, I was thinking. Others buy airplane tickets.

  Meggie brings Ruth two presents: a book of riddles, and a Baby Ruth. She puts them down on the kitchen table, then points to the candy. “Get it?” she asks. “A Baby Ruth.”

  “You,” Ruth says, pulling Meggie to her, “are a very clever girl. Are you in college yet?”

  “No. Only fourth grade.”

  “Unbelievable.”

  “Is that your wig?” Meg asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Oh.”

  A little moment, and then Ruth asks gently, “Would you like to see how my real hair looks?”

  Meg nods. Ruth pulls her wig off, bends her head down low so Meggie can see the top of her head. Meg stares wide-eyed and I see her fingers curl into the safety of her hand. “Does it hurt?” she asks.