Helen is telling us about her new boyfriend. His name is Rudolph. He makes pizzas. But his real job is writing poetry. “He read me this weird one last night,” Helen said. “I couldn’t make sense out of it at all, and I knew he really wanted me to understand it.”
“So what’d you tell him?” Ruth asks.
“Oh, I just made myself get tears,” Helen says. “I can do it easy. Look.” She sits still for a moment, looks down, and when she looks up again, she does indeed have tears welling up magnificently in her eyes.
“Wow,” Ruth says.
“Naturally,” Helen says, “when I do that, I don’t have to say anything. He just thinks I’m moved beyond words.” She rolls her eyes, reaches for another muffin. “I don’t know how long I can keep this guy around. It’s kind of exhausting crying all the time.”
There is a feeling of a beat being missed when she says this. We none of us acknowledge it. We want to keep going in the direction we were headed.
There is another knock at the door, and Sarah comes in. “I just have a minute,” she says. She hands Ruth a slip of paper. “This is what I forgot to give you yesterday,” she says. “All of these are places where you can get buried for what you can afford.”
I have been on an airplane twice where it suddenly lost altitude. It felt just like this.
“Oh,” Ruth says. “Okay. Good. Thanks.” She puts her muffin down, looks at me. “Can you take me to see one of these before you go home?”
I nod, feel two parallel lines of an ache start in my throat. If there is one thing I hate lately, it’s the present.
While Ruth goes to get dressed, Helen says, “I’ll come with you guys if you want.”
“I wish you hadn’t done this right now,” I tell Sarah. “We were finally not talking about death.”
“Well, I’m sorry,” she says. “It has to be done. She asked me to help her. It really does have to be done.”
Neither Helen nor I say anything.
“I have to get to work,” Sarah says. “Tell her I’ll call her later.”
After the door shuts, I say quietly, “No. I won’t tell her anything. Just leave her alone.”
“God,” Helen says. “She’s relentless.”
“Oh, she’s just … I mean, it does have to be done,” I say. “She’s the only one of all of us who’s taken care of the details of all this necessary … crap.”
“I know,” Helen says. “But sometimes I hate her for it.”
“Me, too.”
Ruth comes into the kitchen, picks up the phone, and while Helen and I drink coffee, calls the first person on the list, tells them what she’s looking for. “I don’t want to be too crowded in,” she says. There is a long pause, during which she nods and says, “Um-hum. Okay. Okay.” Then she says, “Breast cancer.” And then, “Well, I’m only forty-three. Which is really terrible.”
We were sitting in a restaurant, talking about Ruth’s current boyfriend. She was excited, her eyes wide, her cheeks flushed with color. She was wearing a new sweater, new earrings, new underwear. She was going to have dinner with me, then go and spend the rest of the evening with him. She’d told Eric we were going to a late movie. “Don’t forget, if it ever comes up, that we saw that movie together,” she said.
“Okay.”
“And don’t tell Joe.”
I said nothing.
“You don’t tell him about this stuff, do you?”
I didn’t answer.
“Jesus! What do you tell him for?”
“Well, what do you think, Ruth? You think he’s going to tell Eric? He never sees Eric!”
“Things can slip, Ann. Shit!”
“Maybe I have a different relationship with my husband than you do with yours,” I said.
She looked at me, said nothing.
“I mean, I do tell him things. We are able to speak to one another.”
She picked up the check, dug in her purse for her wallet. “Fine.”
“It’s nothing against you, Ruth! Why do I have to he too?”
“You don’t. You’re right. I’m sorry.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“I’m sorry! I am! I won’t ask you to he any more, okay?”
I put my money on the table. “Okay.” I looked down for a long moment, then back up. “I’m jealous, okay? I’m jealous of you. I can’t remember the last time I was excited to see a man. I’m sick of folding fucking laundry for entertainment. I feel three hundred years old. I never even wear perfume anymore.”
“Well, get some,” Ruth said.
“Get some what?”
She smiled. “There you go.”
The graveyard we look at is small, surrounded by a low, black, iron fence that leans slightly inward.
“I hate it,” Ruth says. “It looks like a vampire lot. There might as well be fog swirling around our feet, wolves baying in the distance.” She turns to Helen and me. “Don’t you think? I don’t want Michael to have to come here. He’ll get depressed.” A beat, and then we all laugh. “But you know what I mean, don’t you?” she asks.
“Okay,” I say. “We won’t ask about this one. We’ll find another one. Let’s go. You must be tired, anyway.”
When we are in the car, Ruth says, “I’m actually not tired. I feel so good today. I don’t have any of that back pain, I can breathe better. I have energy. Why are we looking at graves?”
No one answers.
When I get home, I sit in the wing chair by the bay window in the living room, feel my things around me like a blanket. I will make a fire, play music, read magazines with the afghan over my legs. When Meggie comes home from school, we’ll play a game, or go shopping. I need time away from Ruth. There’s nothing wrong with that. Anyone would need a break. I call my husband at work, tell him we’re all going out to dinner and a movie tonight. “I want you to know I really appreciate how much you’ve been doing,” I tell him.
“It’s okay. It hasn’t been so bad.”
I pause, then ask, “Are you going to come and see Ruth, ever?”
“I don’t know. Do you think I should?”
“She wants you to. And maybe you should pretty soon.”
Silence.
“You know what I mean?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you scared to go?” I ask.
A pause, and then, “I think so.”
“It’s okay,” I say. “We’re all scared. I mean, it’s scary.” I mean to laugh, but I start to cry.
“Maybe,” he says, his voice gentle, “you need a few days away from her, huh?”
I nod, gulping, then say, “Yeah, that’s what I decided, too. It’s been kind of hard, sometimes.”
“I know. I know it has. So let’s just go out and try … well, don’t take this wrong, okay? But let’s try not to think about her.”
“Okay. Okay. You’re right. I know what you mean.”
I hang up the phone. Then I go upstairs and lie down on Meggie’s bed, find her scent in her pillow and push my face into it. I want everything that’s mine to come to me right now. I want something inside me to get so full it pushes everything else away. There are other people who can be with her. I need a break. I tell myself this over and over, like a mantra.
Later, I call Ruth, tell her I won’t be over that night. “Okay,” she says. “That’s fine. Helen’s coming. Probably L.D., too.”
“I just need to spend some time with Meggie and Joe,” I say.
“Of course you do. I understand.”
“You don’t need me.”
“No.”
“I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“Okay.”
We hang up and I immediately call her back. “I’ll be there after the movie.”
“Okay. Bring hot fudge.”
It was around three years after we met that Ruth called at seven-thirty one morning and told me to come to the Gem Café. The Gem was our favorite. We liked the fact that there were stools at the counter and booths along th
e walls, that the menu was written on the back of pizza boxes taped unevenly above the grill. We had the good fortune to be there one day when one of the boxes fell into the spaghetti sauce. Stuie, the owner/cook, just fished it out with a spatula, wiped it off, and stuck it back up again. Not that you could count on what was on the menu actually being available. Stuie was moody. Sometimes you’d say, “I’ll have today’s special,” and he’d say, “Don’t have it.” One July day Ruth and I went there for lunch and found a sign taped to the locked door saying, CLOSED, TOO HOT. But there was a pleasant, worn-down feeling to the place, like a favorite chair. And all the food was wonderfully bad for you.
“I can’t come right now,” I told Ruth. “You know that. I have to get Meg ready for school.”
“When does her bus come?”
“Eight o’clock.”
“Okay, then meet me at 8:05, okay?”
“I’ll get there as soon as I can. What’s up, anyway, Ruth?”
“I’ll tell you when I see you.”
“Are you all right?”
She hung up.
I got Meg on the bus, brushed my teeth, washed my face, and drove to the café in my pajamas. No one would know—I slept in sweat outfits. Anyway, I was worried. Something had happened.
When I came in, I saw her at a booth reading the paper. I slid in opposite her. “What?” I asked, breathless.
She looked up, smiled. “Hey, baby. Want some pancakes? Blueberry today, served with nine sticks of butter.” She gestured toward her own plate, empty except for an incriminating ring of yellow.
“Come on, Ruth.”
She folded the paper. “I did it.”
“What?”
“I told Eric I’m moving out.”
I sat back, stunned.
“I did it!”
Jesus.
“He’s not in,” Ruth said. “You’ll have to talk to me.”
“Well, are you … did you tell Michael?”
“Get some pancakes,” she said. “I’m so happy. Everything’s fine.”
I ordered pancakes and some of Stuie’s soulful coffee. Then, while I ate, Ruth told me what happened.
“I was sitting at the kitchen table yesterday eating a tuna sandwich,” she said, “and Eric walked in. He’d forgotten something that morning, so he’d come home to get it. He was on the way out the door and I called his name and when he turned around, I said, ‘I want a divorce.’ And he stood there and looked at me. And I just … I was remembering everything he’d done that had hurt me so much. I mean things I never even told you about, Ann, ways he made fun of me, humiliated me, like the time I was pregnant and asked him to just once put his head on my stomach to hear the baby in there and what he said was, ‘Jesus, even your legs are getting fat.’ I remembered everything as though it were one single incident, you know what I mean? And I felt as if I were being carried along by this huge, righteous wave, and I just … said it. And it felt fine, Ann. It’s the right thing to do.”
“What did he say?”
She smiled bitterly. “He said, ‘I’m in a hurry, Ruth. What’s your problem?’”
“Are you kidding?”
She shook her head.
“That’s it?”
“That’s it. I told him I wasn’t kidding. I told him I was going out to see an apartment that day. And I’d be moving as soon as possible. And he left and I finished my sandwich, which I enjoyed quite a lot—I’d put green olives in, you should try that, Ann, chop some green olives up and put them in there—and then I went and rented the apartment.”
“But what did you tell Michael?”
“That was the most amazing thing. He came home from school and I sat on the sofa with him and took a big breath and told him that I’d decided I needed some time alone, that Daddy and I were having some problems, and I wanted time to think about what the best thing to do was. He was absolutely calm. He said he understood. I know he was a little sad, but he was mostly … I don’t know, prepared, as if he’d just been waiting for this. I suppose he has been. Anyway, he knows the apartment is close enough to walk to, he knows he can stay with me whenever he wants, and he’s all right! I can’t believe I waited this long. I feel like a noose is off my neck. Wait till you see my place—it’s so pretty. Of course, I’ll have to get a real job now, I can’t rely on what I make from painting.”
“This feels … there’s something wrong here,” I said.
“You think this is too easy.”
I nodded.
“You think I’m in some manic phase, that the truth will hit pretty soon.”
I shrugged, then nodded again. “Yeah, I guess so. Something like that.”
“You know what’s wrong here, Ann?”
“What?”
“You.”
She was right. I just couldn’t quite believe that everything was happening as smoothly as it was. Michael was fifteen now, caught in the bulldog jaws of adolescence. Surely this kind of change in his life would be extremely difficult for him; surely he would pay the highest price for Ruth’s freedom. But I had dinner with her and Michael at her apartment soon afterward and saw nothing but a sweet and calm boy who openly loved his mother and had learned to make tacos. These he proudly served on orange and yellow paper plates, selected, he said, for “that fiesta feeling.” He had Ruth’s fine sense of humor: he’d strung jalapeño peppers on dental floss, made necklaces for us all to wear while we ate. There were no longing glances, no sighs, no leaks of sadness in his voice or in his face.
Finally, I did believe her. Michael was fine, and so was she, and, apparently, so was Eric. Two weeks after Ruth left, he began dating one of the paralegals he worked with. “She’s a dweeb, Mom,” Michael had told her. “She’s never funny.”
“Is she pretty?” Ruth asked, and Michael said, “Gag me, Mom. What a woofer. Red hair. Freckles.”
Ruth’s apartment was small, but it was beautiful—high ceilings, lots of windows, a fireplace in both the bedroom and the living room. She lined up pieces of pottery on the mantles, hung her artwork above that. She painted her walls delicate shades of pastels: peaches; blues; pale, pale yellows. At a garage sale, she found an Oriental rug made only more elegant by its fading colors and thinning nap, and she put it on her living-room floor. She kept white birch logs in her fireplace, baskets of beautiful rocks and seashells on her coffee table. Birds’ nests lodged above doorways, in corners on open kitchen shelves. At night, she burned candles, several of them grouped together like lit bouquets. I loved being in her apartment. As soon as you walked in the door, you relaxed. It was a woman’s place, plainly and un-apologetically. It seemed to me to breathe, to wipe its hands on its apron and welcome you in, inquiring immediately as to your spiritual well-being.
She took a job at a software company, something in marketing. This meant that we could no longer spend long afternoons together, but we talked every day and saw each other at least one night a week. It was on one of those nights a full year later that she told me about her lump. “Come with me to get the biopsy,” she said. “Maybe I’ll feel weird after, and I won’t want to drive.” Then, looking at my french fries, she said, “Are you going to finish those?”
I pushed my plate toward her. “Aren’t you scared?”
She waved her hand in dismissal. “I’ve got lumpy breasts. I’ve been through this before, no big whoop. Slice and dice, hardly a scar left behind. It’s never been anything before. It won’t be this time, either.”
“Okay,” I said.
She looked up. “It won’t be!”
“Okay, I believe you! What time?”
“Nine-thirty,” she said. “Want to go out and look at fabric afterward? I’m taking the whole day off.”
“Of course,” I said. Ruth and I could spend hours in a fabric store. She was the only woman I’d ever met whose fascination for those places matched mine. The colors. The quiet undercurrent of industry. The tactile pleasure and smells of jewel-colored silks, calico cottons, wide-wale corduroy, p
ristine interfacings. We enjoyed looking through pattern books, especially when they got old and you could feel the history of so many hands on them. We loved the racks of buttons, all with personalities: shy pearls, flamboyant rhinestones, sensible round navy-blue buttons, lined up three in a somber row—Ruth said if they were little girls they’d all go to Catholic school. Every time we went there we admired the expensive scissors kept behind a glass case, and one Christmas I finally gave Ruth a pair. She made a house for those scissors—lined a drawer with burgundy velvet and kept nothing but them there. I was a novice at sewing and struggled through each thing I attempted. Ruth made a raincoat, fully lined suits with invisible zippers, slipcovers for her sofa out of gorgeous French florals whose very presence on their five-foot-long bolts intimidated me. When winter came, we built huge fires and spent hours piecing together quilts on her bedroom floor. The wind rattled her windows and occasionally, with thrilling gusts, pushed itself into the room with us. But we were warm and distracted, sitting in our turtlenecks and flannel shirts and sweatpants and thick socks. Our hair was secured up off our faces with chopsticks and we were listening to moody jazz on the radio, drinking cocoa, and making art that would last for years. We were protected.
Of course we didn’t go to a fabric store that day. Because the lump was not nothing.
I was in the waiting room, watching television and reading magazines, looking at my watch with greater and greater frequency. It was taking too long. Finally, the surgeon came out and called my name. I followed him to a corner of the room. He began speaking, but he wouldn’t look at me, and I felt every part of myself grow stiff and cold. “It’s not good,” he said and I began nodding like an idiot.
I stayed with her that night. Both of us crowded onto her little bed, like sisters. “Aren’t you at all scared?” I asked, just before we fell asleep. She had reacted to her diagnosis as though she’d encountered a minor road detour. She hadn’t wept. She hadn’t looked anxiously about. Her hands stayed still, resting half open on her lap. Her only movement was to cross her legs and lean back in her chair. A moment passed. Then she sighed and said, “Shit.” And then, leaning forward again, “So. How are we going to get rid of this?” The surgeon said she should come to his office in a few days and discuss it. Ruth looked at me and I nodded yes I would go with her.