“Well,” Ruth says. “Not like when you cut yourself. More like when you miss someone.”
“Oh.” A big breath in. “Remember when you built the snow lady with me?”
There have been times in the past when I have been proud of Meggie. And there will be many times more to come, I know. But none will surpass this moment. She’s only nine. It would be all right for her to pull away, out of fear, out of strangeness. But she doesn’t. She looks up fully into Ruth’s face and she is smiling. Love is there.
“I certainly do remember that snow lady,” Ruth says. “You couldn’t say ‘lady’ then. You said ‘yady.’”
“Yes,” Meggie says. “I remember. I was little. I was only three.”
I remember too. It was shortly after I’d met Ruth. She baby-sat for me while I went to get groceries. I’d been having a bad week. The prospect of standing before the tomato bin for as long as I wanted with no one yanking at my sleeve seemed roughly equivalent to a week at Canyon Ranch spa. And I did stand before the tomatoes for a good long time. I also looked at every single kind of cereal. I pressed the buzzer for the butcher, just because I had time to wait for a special cut. I got rack of lamb, which I knew nothing about, including how to cook it. I just wanted it. I was hoping the check-out clerk would say admiringly, “Oh, rack of lamb,” and I would say, “Yes.”
When I came home, I’d found a snow woman, wide-hipped and big-breasted, standing beside the lamppost in my front yard. She wore a wreath of evergreen around her head, and her arms were shaped so that it looked as if her hands were on her hips. She had an attitude, even as she melted.
I see Joe signaling to me out of the corner of my eye, and I follow him into Ruth’s bedroom.
“What?” I ask.
“How are you?” he says quietly.
“I’m okay. It’s okay. You know.”
He nods, then says, “Now, don’t misinterpret this, okay?”
“What?”
“I want you to stay as long as you need to.”
“What, Joe?”
“I just wondered, you know, do you have any idea how long this might take?”
A small rush of air comes out of me as though I’ve been punched. “Go home, okay?” I say. “I don’t know. I don’t know how long. I don’t fucking think about it. I’m just here. For Christ’s sake.”
Joe sags into himself, takes my arm. “You’re doing just what I asked you not to. You’re misinterpreting this. I only mean …”
I wait, say nothing.
“I guess I mean how do you think she’s doing?”
“Is that what you mean, Joe?”
“Yes!”
Behind us, we hear Meggie calling. She comes into the bedroom, holds up half of the candy bar. “We shared this. Can I have mine now?”
“Yes,” I say. “You sit here and eat it, and let’s let Daddy talk to Ruth.”
Joe goes into the kitchen, and I sit with Meggie on Ruth’s bed. “Don’t get chocolate on her sheets,” I say. “These are very fancy sheets. They come from France, and Ruth likes to keep them nice.”
“They come from France?” Meggie asks.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I guess they have good cotton there.”
“Can I lie on them?”
I nod, hold out my hand for her candy bar, and she puts her head down on the sheet. She holds extremely still, her eyes wide and unblinking. She is a member of the Junior Scientists of America Club, carries her signed-in-cursive membership card in her red plastic wallet. Finally, disappointed, she sighs and sits up. “They just feel like mine.”
“Really?” I lie down myself. The truth is, I don’t feel any difference either and I tell Meggie this.
“Maybe Ruth is like that pea princess, and she can feel better than us.”
“I think that must be it.”
“Ruth gave me a teapot,” Meggie says. “The blue one on her counter.”
“Did she?”
“Yes, there’s a dragonfly on it.”
“I know. It’s very pretty.”
“I will keep it forever,” Meggie says.
“I don’t blame you.”
When Joe comes to get Meggie, his eyes are red. He hugs me good-bye, says into my ear a quiet “I’m sorry.”
“Yes,” I say. “I’ll call you later.”
He and Meggie are going to Bradlee’s to get light bulbs. I am ashamed at what I am feeling: I want to go, too. I want to walk up and down long aisles, saying, “Let’s see. Q-tips? Do we need shampoo?” I want doormats and polyester blouses and matched sets of mixing bowls to be the only thing in my head. I want to look at stupid Barbie dolls with Meg, buy her a new one with hair down to its knees and breasts forever high and fall.
That night I dream that I invite many dying people for dinner. The table is long and rectangular, covered with a white tablecloth. One man, his fingers eaten nearly away by some terrible disease, looks down at his hands, smiling sadly and saying he was a pianist. Then he looks up and says, “I used to love my hands so much.” There is a couple there, both of them very old, and they want to sit together but people keep saying, no, you should mix with the others, you always sit together. One woman whose husband died ten years ago says she visited his grave every day for three years. Then she decided it was enough, and she simply stopped going. I have a vision of the man’s grave as she is describing it. The number of years he’s been buried is written on it and the numbers change, click up like those in a gas pump. It says 17, then 25, then SO, until finally it’s 200 and you realize everyone who knew him is dead, too. It is profoundly comforting. The phone rings and I jerk awake and grab it quickly. “Yes?” I whisper into the receiver. It’s Joe, saying, “You’re not sleeping, are you?”
“Yes.”
“It’s only eight-thirty!”
“She was really tired tonight. She went to bed at seven. I read for a while and then I figured I’d just go to sleep, too. I’ll get up early. It’s actually nice to get up early.”
Silence, and then, “So how’s it going?”
“It’s all right.”
“It was so weird to see her, knowing I probably won’t see her again.”
“Yes.”
“Know what she said?”
“What?”
“That the hardest thing is she doesn’t know when it’s coming. She’ll feel a little dizzy, and think, is this it? She said she was on the toilet and she felt that way, and she didn’t know whether she should get out and arrange herself or not.”
Here is the ache back, the lazy and insolent spreading out in the center of my chest of the diffuse heaviness I hadn’t realized I’d been without. “I know. We don’t know what to expect.”
“She said mostly it felt like falling really slowly, in a place that had no light. And no sound.”
“She did?”
Yes.
“God.”
“But you know what? I don’t think she’s scared.”
I say nothing. I am thinking, Why doesn’t she tell me things like that? Why must she keep holding something between us? I am here to be here.
“Is Meggie all right?” I ask.
“She’s fine. Laura’s spending the night. At the moment they’re eating cucumber sandwiches. They read about it somewhere.”
“She’ll be crabby tomorrow. Whenever Laura sleeps over, they never go to sleep. They wake each other up all night, go downstairs and turn on the television, looking for sex.”
“How do you know that?”
“She told me once, when she was in a good mood.” I hear a noise coming from Ruth’s bedroom, and whisper hastily, “I have to go. She’s up. I’ll call you in the morning.”
I go into Ruth’s room, see her sitting at the edge of the bed. “What time is it?” she asks.
“Eight-thirty.”
“It’s so dark out!”
“Well, yes, it’s eight-thirty.”
“At night!”
br /> “Yes.”
“Oh. I thought it was morning.”
“No. You’ve only been asleep for an hour and a half.”
“I think I’m hungry.”
I turn on her overhead light. “Then let’s go eat.”
She turns out the overhead, turns on her bedside lamp. “I hate overhead lights. They’re gross.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
She reaches for her flannel shirt, pulls it on, starts to stand up, and falls back down. I reach out toward her and she waves me away. “I can do it.”
She takes in a breath, waits, then rises slowly. “See?”
We go into the kitchen, and she puts a slice of bread in the toaster. “I was thinking cinnamon toast,” she says.
“Okay.”
“Do you want some?”
“No.”
She sits in the chair, looks over at me with weary tenderness. “Thank you for staying with me all the time.”
“You’re welcome. I’ll bill your estate.”
“No, really. It’s really nice of Joe, too.”
“It’s no big deal. He’s pretty well set up to work at home.”
“It is a big deal. You tell him I said thank you, okay? You let him know that I was very grateful for what he did for both of us.”
I nod, and find suddenly that I am starting to cry. I put my hand over my face. “I’m sorry,” I say.
“What are you sorry about?”
“I don’t know. I don’t want you to feel bad.”
“Seeing you cry doesn’t make me feel bad. It never has.”
“Right. Okay.” I take my hand away, look down, shudder slightly, then look back up again. We hold something between us, no words, and then I say, “I wish you’d do something for me.”
“What?”
“I wish you’d forgive me.”
“For what?”
“For everything wrong I ever did to you.”
She smiles.
“I mean it!”
“You didn’t do anything wrong to me.”
“Yes, I did. I did so many wrong things I don’t have time to fix.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“Yes, I did!”
“Okay, fine. I forgive you. Okay?”
“Do you?”
“Yes. Now get me the cinnamon down. I can’t reach that high. One thing I have always been is too short. It’s adorable when you’re in junior high. After that, it’s a pain in the ass for the rest of your life.”
When she recovered from her first round of chemo and radiation therapy, Ruth decided to take up swimming. I went with her, met her at the Y every Thursday evening. Once, as we sat at the side of the pool, I sighed loudly.
“What?” she said.
“I don’t know. You’re so little and delicate. I always feel like a jerk next to you. Like you’re Princess Grace and I’m Larry Bird.”
“What are you talking about?” she said. “Look at your beautiful long legs. Everybody wants that.”
“I’d rather be little and delicate.”
“You’re one of those people who wants everything but what they have.”
“The whole world’s like that,” I said.
“No it isn’t. It’s just that we are.”
“Well, there you are,” I said. “Close enough.”
She smiled, then dragged her foot slowly up out of the water. “You’ll never get divorced, Ann. Your situation is very different.”
“What do you mean? I’m not even talking about that!”
She looked at me. “No?”
“No!”
“Sure you are,” she said. “You always are. Ever since I got divorced, you’ve been wanting to be little and delicate. So to speak.”
“You know, you are just not always right, Ruth.”
“Oh, I know,” she said. “Not always.”
On the afternoons that Michael comes to visit, I leave for a while, let them have themselves to each other. Michael is impenetrably cheerful around me; I hope with her he can cry. Sometimes I go for walks outside, taking in the stubborn shape of frozen things, enjoying the give of snow beneath my boots, listening to the clear winter sounds: birds, barking dogs, children exuberantly name-calling as they disengorge from dirty yellow school buses. Other times I drive, usually aimlessly—there’s no time to go home. I bring Ruth back little presents: magazines, bubble gum, quarts of soft-serve ice cream, the hand games you play with ball bearings.
Once, as I drove down a road I’d not been on before, I saw a sign in the picture window of a turquoise blue ranch house saying, PSYCHIC—OPEN. There was a clumsily drawn crystal ball with disembodied hands sporting long red fingernails hovering over it as illustration.
I pulled into the small parking lot in front of the house. There were no other cars there, and I wondered if the place was really open. I knocked on the door, and an older woman in a print housedress and a white cardigan sweater answered. She wore open-backed blue plastic slippers, and her gray hair hung long down her back. “Do you do readings?” I asked.
“Yes, of course,” she said and stepped aside, waving me in. I heard children arguing behind a beaded curtain in another room, and the obnoxious droning of an exercise instructor on TV.
“Sit,” she said, indicating a folding chair on one side of a card table. The room had no other furniture with the exception of religious pictures on the wall: Jesus, staring forlornly upward; Mary with a soft smile and a halo like a gold plate behind her head; the apostles sitting at their famous table. There was a rug on the floor that looked like the kind you win at state fairs, a red-and-black silken weave featuring crouching panthers.
The woman sat in the chair on her side of the table. “Now,” she said. “For five dollars I can read your palm. But what you really need is the Tarot cards.”
“Is that right?” I asked.
She nodded, lit up a cigarette from a mint-green pack, exhaled courteously up into the air.
“How much does that cost?”
She frowned deeply, her mouth like an upside-down smile. “Okay. For you, I make it cheap. Fifteen dollars. Usually it’s twenty-five.”
I nodded agreement, and she shuffled a well-worn Tarot deck, then put it down before me and told me to cut it. I did and she made an arrangement of cards, faced the drawings toward me. She tapped a long fingernail against a card showing a man in armor seated on a horse. Then she drew in on her cigarette, exhaled. “This is your husband,” she said. “He don’t get along with the ladies so well. He is of the practical nature.”
I smiled.
“Sometimes you want to leave him, but …” She shrugged. “You don’t.” She looked up at me. “You are right to stay. Divorce is no good for children, you understand me? And anyway, you love this man. You got a red-haired girl, right?”
I stopped smiling.
“She is a lot like you.”
“I think so.”
“Yes,” she said, agreeing with herself. “That is true.” She turned another card over, and her forehead wrinkled. “Someone is sick,” she said. “Who?”
“I … my friend. I have a friend who is sick.”
“I don’t see no cure,” the woman said, turning over two more cards. She looked up again. “You must pray for your friend to accept this.”
I said nothing. But then, when the silence became uncomfortable, I said, “Well, I’m … I don’t pray, really.”
She raised her eyebrows. “No?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t exactly believe in God. I mean, I believe in something, but not a Being who’s interested in me. Aware of me. I believe … I think what I believe in is a Great Spirit.”
The woman leaned back in her chair. She was a mix of incredulity and weariness. “Don’t you know,” she asks, “that God is a spirit?”
“Well … yes,” I said. “Right.”
“So you will pray for your friend?”
“Yes.”
Let her think she has
made an easy convert, I thought. This is too hard to explain.
On the way back to Ruth’s, I passed a small Catholic church. I went in and lit a candle, put my head down on my arms at the kneeler, opened with, “Dear God.” You try, sometimes, in spite of yourself.
I’d meant to tell Ruth what happened. I thought she’d enjoy the story, with certain omissions. But I never did.
After I die, you guys have really got to go on a diet,” Ruth says. We are eating dinner: angel hair with a sauce Helen made that called for two sticks of butter; crusty rolls, Caesar salad. Brownies and ice cream are for dessert.
“You’re supposed to gain weight in your forties,” Helen says. “It’s actually sexy.”
“Oh, bullshit.” Sarah can afford to say that. She’s the only one of us who hasn’t gained a lot. She sits now with her irritatingly small portions before her, with her stomach flat under her napkin. She probably belts her nightgown.
“You’d look a far sight better if you gained a few,” L.D. tells her. “Way it is now, you look like an asshole. All women as skinny as you look like assholes.”
Sarah looks up at her, considers saying something in response, but then changes her mind. She winds pasta around her fork, lifts a tidy bundle up to her mouth.
“You’re like one of those insects, look like a stick, what are they called, walkingsticks?”
A thin silence.
“Yo, Sarah,” L.D. says, “isn’t that what they’re called? Come on, you know everything, right?”
Ruth puts her napkin over her plate. She hasn’t eaten a bite. “L.D.,” she says.
“I can take care of myself,” Sarah says. Then, to L.D., “What’s your problem, anyway?”
L.D. points to herself in mock surprise. “I have a problem?”
“Let’s have the brownies,” I say, but it is as useless as though I’d said nothing.
L.D. says, “I’ll tell you the problem, Sarah. I’m sick of your grim predictions. I’m sick of your CEOing Ruth’s life. I think we need a new boss here. Someone who believes in Ruth’s strength to goddamn overcome this. Because she has it. She has it. If people will just stop taking it away from her, she has it. I think we should plan on her getting better, not burying her!”