Chapter 13. The Grocery Trip
It may just be that Ruth is reluctant to drive her to the grocery store any more, after the many, many trips they’ve made there together since Wayne died and Peter was shipped to Regency Place. Ruby Mae can, without stretching too much, discern a pattern of increasing tardiness in Ruth’s arrivals for these expeditions. Of course, Ruth is late for everything, and has been since Ruby met her 30 years ago at one of Arnold Cruse’s homemade donut parties. In those days she was always the same sheepish 15 minutes behind schedule, as though she’d been born late and had never quite stopped running to catch up in the ensuing 60 years. Since Ruby met her, though, there’s been a slow but steady accretion of tardiness, averaging about a minute per year, like a set of meandering tree rings that eventually add up to a substantial growth. The usual wait for Ruth is now more than half an hour, but at least with a dependability that allows her friends (whose own preparations for departure on a shopping trip or a lunch date at Applebee’s have also been slowed by the years) to predict her arrival time with a fair degree of certainty. More distressing, though, of late, have been the increasingly common occasions on which Ruth has simply failed to appear at all, the grocery date, or doctor’s appointment, or food-packing session at the church having been forgotten altogether. That is what Ruby fears has happened this time.
There are 602 bones in the human body, according to Dr. Advert – or is it 206? she’s not quite sure – and Ruby thinks that by now, the beginning of her 83rd year, she must have broken, or at least cracked, a significant fraction of them. There was the broken humerus when she tripped on the throw rug. All throw rugs were subsequently removed from her floors by Stephanie, who comes in three times a week (not, unfortunately, today), but this precaution had not prevented Ruby from tripping on the white shag wall-to-wall carpeting she’d indulged in after the kids had all grown up and left home (the very carpet on which she now lies, waiting resignedly for rescue) and crashing to the floor, cracking her pelvis and incidentally separating her right shoulder. “You don’t pick up your feet!” Stephanie told her after that event. Which is true; but the fact is, the whisper of her slippers shuffling across the carpet comforts her – it’s the only sound in the house once she shuts the TV off. Then she broke her left forearm while falling down a short flight of stairs. Now she sleeps downstairs in the guest bedroom, but there she broke two toes, stubbing them against that unfamiliar bedstead. She’s also broken both collarbones, one when she slipped on the ice on her back porch and fell against the steel railing, the other when a cast-iron skillet fell out of an overhead cabinet and landed on her shoulder. And she snapped off part of the upper socket of her right femur when Clawdius took it into his head to leap from a bookshelf onto her temptingly bowed back, like a cougar dropping onto a tottering, superannuated deer. There have also been a couple of cracked vertebrae, caused, according to Dr. Advert, by a startle reaction when the phone rang one night at midnight, as she was removing her robe preparatory to getting into bed. It was only Wayne’s brother, calling from his new condo in Budapest and confused about the time difference. It took Ruby nearly six months to recover from that one.
These are the major incidents, or the only ones she can remember. By now she doesn’t bother to count or report to Dr. Advert the numerous sprains and what she suspects are hairline fractures. The current situation clearly belongs in the major incident category. She has no idea how it happened. She simply found herself lying on her back on the rather comfortable white shag rug, unable to move herself toward the telephone without blacking out, which she’s already done she thinks twice. That is why she now has both the time and good reason to worry about Ruth’s attitude toward their grocery shopping expeditions.
The grocery trips, Ruby now suspects, as she tries to adjust her position on the shag rug without fainting again, which were once a welcome release from the home imprisonment both of them were experiencing, have devolved over the years into an obligation and a burden for Ruth. In the bleak mental illumination encouraged by her enforced immobility, Ruby can see that she bears some responsibility for this change. She is the sort of grocery shopper who must examine each of the 14 varieties of Colgate toothpaste and the 12 varieties of Crest and the three types of Tom’s of Maine, inspecting minutely their claims of whitening power, tartar removal, bacterial massacre, gentleness, sparkle-enhancing properties, naturalness, and of course price per ounce before making her final selection or, sometimes, rejecting all of them and threatening in outraged tones to brush her teeth solely with baking soda from now on. And she has to compile the nutrition readings on each brand and variety of spaghetti sauce, from Ragu to Paul Newman and even sometimes those suspicious brands that make their way into the store from some stray Chinese container ship: comparing the carbs to the protein and the fat to the sodium (Ruby has congestive heart failure in addition to her galloping, or limping, osteoporosis), and balancing all of them against the calorie count, although she weighs only 89 pounds. But I don’t do it deliberately, she says to herself. I like to see all the new things they have out there, and after all a responsible shopper can’t just buy the first brand of canned peas that happens to be at eye level on the shelf. And even Ruth is sometimes entrained in that consumer vortex and will stand for a few anxious minutes holding a jug of Eco-Savior in one hand and a jug of Tide “Classic” in the other, reading all the explanatory text and wondering which will keep her closest to the treacherous path of civic responsibility while still getting her socks clean. Unlike Ruby, though, Ruth doesn’t enjoy such fraught decisions. “Why do they have to keep coming out with all these new things?” she’ll ask plaintively. “What was wrong with the old ones? Maybe we should just go back to the washboard, or start beating our panties with a tree branch on the banks of Fall Creek. But I suppose it’s too muddy there,” she’ll sigh. There seems to be no solution. To Ruth this is a nearly paralyzing state of affairs, whereas to Ruby it’s all a stimulating challenge and an opportunity to cluck her tongue at the inexhaustibility of human folly and venality.
The fact is, as Ruby can now admit with all this unexpected time on her hands, she has sometimes deliberately tormented Ruth at the grocery store by lingering longer over the root beer display or the cheese counter than she really wanted or needed to. Partly it’s just that Ruby can’t get out of the house much any more because of her frailty, and when she does make an escape likes to extend it as long as possible, sometimes even bullying Ruth into a stop at the drugstore on the way back to the car. Partly, too, she feels a simmering but unacknowledged resentment because she’s at Ruth’s mercy for these trips. By now all her other friends, not to mention her children, with their long experience of her ways, know only too well what awaits them at Kroger’s, and are more than happy to leave such duties to Ruth, as long as she can be persuaded to undertake them. And Ruth, for her part, has never yet failed to show up eventually. Or at least not without calling to explain and apologize. She’s unusually adept at putting herself in other people’s place, and at some point doubtless gets a vision of Ruby, trapped in her too-big house and subsisting for days entirely on Cheerios without milk until someone, who is nearly always Ruth herself, comes by to rescue her.
But, trying with enormous caution to shift her weight from her right to her left buttock and casting her mind back over the last year or so, Ruby can see quite clearly the pattern of increasing lateness and even, on one or two occasions, the postponement of the grocery expedition to the next day. Ruth does always call in those cases. Eventually. But in her current situation, Ruby will not be able to answer the telephone, and she fears Ruth will simply assume that Linda Sue or Geoffrey has stopped by to take her out, or maybe just to drop off a bag of basic rations to tide her over, and will not show up at all today. She knows in her heart that Ruth is just as happy, or at least no more unhappy, to sit at her kitchen table, reading an article from a year-old Christian Science Monitor or starting yet another letter to her far-flung children in her loopy illegi
ble handwriting, and gazing out the window at the finches mobbing her feeder and the squirrels who tirelessly battle with its squirrel-proof features. This although – another cause for the resentment that Ruby never quite allows to surface – Ruth is the only one of her friends who is still mobile enough to get out of the house on her own. God knows she never falls down, although she’s occasionally admitted to a dizzy spell or two, and she has bones like steel in any case. She drinks a glass of milk every day, and takes two- or three-mile walks with her dog, all the way up to 65th Street and over to Keystone and back, picking her way along the steep and weedy shoulders where there are no sidewalks, with the cars roaring by, and never a mishap. And she still has her driver’s license, although having driven to Glendale with her a couple of times lately Ruby wonders why no one has taken it away from her. Everyone else in the aging neighborhood, except for the 50-ish Burtons, who have adopted Ruth as one of their projects (but not Ruby, since she lives too far away, over on Sherman), is housebound and at the mercy of their hired helpers or Ruth. Gladys is even frailer than Ruby, can barely talk and can’t move at all without a walker; Frances left for a nursing home a year ago; the Fürtwanglers moved to a trailer park in Florida; both of the Dubais are near death from various ailments of old age, although their daughter, soft-hearted Deanna, has not been able to get them to leave their old house. Helen is diabetic, vastly overweight, and obsessed with retrieving her car and her driver’s license, although she’s nearly deaf and legally blind. And Ruth’s husband, Peter, is already imprisoned at Regency Place, probably slumping over his dinner tray with his elbow in the mashed potatoes at this very moment, the way he was the one time Ruby visited with Ruth.
The telephone is ringing. This is heartening to Ruby Mae, but at the same time disturbing. Heartening because it means someone is at least thinking of her, even though it might only be the SPCA people again, calling her for a donation. More likely it’s Jared or Geoffrey, just checking in. Disturbing because she doesn’t dare move even the least little bit toward the phone, which means that whoever is on the other end of the line will have to reach their own conclusions about her status. Despite the mounting tally of her medical incidents, no one will want to think it’s an emergency; or if there is a slight nagging in the back of their minds, they’ll tell themselves Well, she’s just out with Ruth at the grocery store again, we know how that is, not really wanting to admit that she might possibly be prostrate and immobilized on her white shag rug with a broken hip, because that will mean they’ll have to disrupt whatever important project they’re engaged in to deal with the situation. Only Ruth, being old like Ruby although relatively healthy, really understands and cares enough to worry. As the phone continues ringing, Ruby has an almost physical sense of another person’s consciousness on the other end of the line, trying to decode the electronic buzzing for clues as to the state of things at Ruby Mae’s house. It’s Ruth; she knows it. Everyone else would hang up after a few rings, relieved that they wouldn’t actually have to talk to her. Also it must be 4 o’clock or even 4:30 by now, although she’s afraid that if she twists her head far enough around to see the clock she’ll pass out again. She doesn’t like the periods of oblivion. Ruth was supposed to come by at 3:30 to take her to the grocery store, so this would be just about the time she’d realize she was half an hour late and would call to reassure Ruby. And that is the most disturbing thing of all, because Ruby, confined to her rug and without the distraction of TV or her washing machine, can easily come up with half a dozen reasons why Ruth, getting no answer, might not follow up her call.
Although Ruby herself has often been the beneficiary of it, she sometimes finds herself getting a little annoyed by Ruth’s excessive solicitude. A lot of it, she feels, is a sort of spineless catering to the demands of a bunch of spoiled old brats. The most glaring example is Ruth’s tireless although largely futile effort to get her husband, Peter, out of bed once a day and to at least take a hike around the dining room table, and make him stick to his diabetic diet, and interest him in some news story or even a rerun of Colombo. At least while she was immersed in that project she sometimes needed to escape from the house and Peter’s oppressive depression, and would as a result often drop by Ruby’s on the way back from her dog walk. With Peter now at the Regency, though, Ruth has to visit him every single day and sometimes twice, to take over his clean laundry and a couple of sugarless Eskimo Pies, although half the time he doesn’t say a word to her; and if she’s gotten a little behind schedule, the first thing that might fall off her list could be the grocery trip. Given that she no longer really enjoys those trips, if she ever did, it will certainly be easy for her to convince herself that she doesn’t have time to make it this afternoon.
Of course, if it really is Ruth on the phone (which has finally stopped ringing), that at least means she’s not on the phone with Helen. But at any minute Helen could call Ruth, which she does frequently just to reassure herself that there’s somebody at home somewhere in the neighborhood in case she has to be taken to the hospital. She can’t call anyone else, because all her friends except Ruth are mad at her for calling them every half hour. Ruth may be mad at her, too, but she puts up with it. And if she does call, Ruth could easily be on the phone with her for an hour or more, because Helen has a very long list of complaints about the world, starting of course with the loss of her driver’s license, and because she’s nearly deaf, which means everything Ruth says has to be repeated at least once, and because Ruth is too polite, or cowardly, to ever just tell Helen she has to hang up. Plus there’s the possibility that Ruth will be reminded of the horrible state of Helen’s house – the result partly of her blindness and partly of her obsession with the driver’s license, which has driven every other thought out of her head except for the unproductive one of how old and alone she is (Helen’s husband, Milton, sat down for a nap in his lawnchair one day after mowing the lawn 10 years ago, and never woke up) – and Ruth will feel that she has to drop in to chat for a minute and at least change the cat box, even though this is a futile task, because the box has been topped off with turds so many times by now that the cat never even thinks of it any more, just goes behind the furniture or down in the basement, so that a hideous jungle odor pervades the house. Luckily, Helen has also lost her sense of smell. But once Ruth is actually inside Helen’s house, there’s no telling what emergencies might arise, what errands will have to be run for Helen, once again moving the visit to Ruby’s to the back burner and possibly foreclosing it completely. It’s maddening, because nearly all of Helen’s laments, except when she has one of her TIAs and has to be taken to the hospital, are just garden variety whining, whereas Ruby, whatever failings she knows she has, almost never complains about anything, but actually needs Ruth, right now! And here she can practically see Ruth, with the crusted plastic spatula in her knobbly arthritic fingers, sifting through Helen’s cat box.
And if it’s not Helen, then of course Gladys might call up and whisper God knows what demands into the phone with her failing voice; or Ruth might just remember that she had meant to make a batch of her infamous raisin bran muffins and take some over there, because she worries that Gladys doesn’t eat enough – Gladys being a classic stick figure, with calves no thicker than the legs of her aluminum walker and much less flexible – even though Pam is there at least four times a week to clean and bring in groceries, and always leaves her some kind of casserole or a tupperware full of tuna salad. And Ruth might look at the clock (or not look, with the thought of the dreary grocery trip in the back of her mind) and mistakenly calculate that there would be just enough time to make a batch of muffins and run them over and then pick up Ruby to go to the grocery store. Which for Ruby would mean at best another three hours or so of lying on the white shag rug and waiting for Ruth to arrive and at worst a cancellation of the trip altogether. At which point Ruth would probably try to call again, although she might not, telling herself it was a bit late to call Ruby (although she knows perfectly well Rub
y stays up until 2 or 3 in the morning), and after all she called earlier and Ruby wasn’t there, which must mean one of the kids came by to take her to the grocery store. But if she does call, Ruby won’t be able to answer – even if she’s still alive by then – and she can see Ruth sitting there on the other end of the phone, pursing her crepey lips and thinking over the possibilities of why Ruby isn’t answering. She wasn’t home earlier, and she’s still not home. Probably Jared came over and took her downtown for dinner somewhere. Once or twice she’s even stayed overnight in the guest room of the Victorian he’s renovating one room at a time. So that should be all right, she’ll tell herself. In any case, although Ruby knows Ruth sometimes worries about her when she doesn’t answer the phone, just because of those times when she’s broken some tibia or other and had to be taken to the hospital, or of course the time when Wayne just dropped dead in the dining room, she also knows Ruth doesn’t really start worrying unless it’s been two or three days, because Ruby, unlike Helen or Gladys, never calls her up to demand anything, she’s very independent despite all her medical problems and doesn’t like to put too much weight on the friendship. And Ruth is liable to put all this together and decide to wait until tomorrow to call. But tomorrow Pam will probably be there early in the morning to distract her; and once Pam leaves, Lee will show up to mulch her leaves or paint her closet or something; and meanwhile there’ll be the raisin bran muffins, which she probably didn’t quite get around to this afternoon, or Helen will call to say she thinks she’s having another TIA... The possibilities are endless, once the thing gets extended through a night and into the next day. It could be two or three days before Ruth remembers that she was planning to drop in on Ruby. I can’t lie here for three days! Ruby thinks. And though there’s really no pain to speak of as long as she doesn’t move, she moves a little bit anyway, in order to feel some pain and reassure herself that there definitely is something badly wrong with her hip, and indulges herself in a rare tear.
It’s getting dark now, the early January twilight that materializes like a black fog, and Ruby is beginning to notice that she’s very hungry. Not that there’s really anything to eat in the house anyway, which is of course why Ruth was supposed to come over and take her to the grocery store. But obviously that’s not going to happen. It’s necessary to resign herself to that; otherwise she’ll spend all these long hours consumed with impatience and resentment that Ruth has thought it more important to change Helen’s cat box than to take her friend Ruby to the hospital with a broken hip. That’s not quite fair, of course, but it captures the essence of the situation. Her own hunger also reminds her that another thing Ruth could be doing is just sitting at her kitchen table this very minute in front of a bowl of Campbell’s chicken and rice soup and a half-eaten piece of cinnamon toast, having suddenly noticed that she was hungry herself and thinking she’d better put something in her stomach at least before going over to pick up Ruby, so she won’t keel over while Ruby reads the nutritional information on her 25th package of sliced lunch meat. And, sitting at the table, she could easily get distracted by some article in a Christian Science Monitor from last March, or just in watching the chickadees make their final twilight sorties to the bird feeder, and forget all about Ruby, who is lying on her white shag rug with a broken hip. And once you start examining all the possible excuses Ruth has for not showing up (and after all, it’s not only Ruby she stands up in this way), you have to ask yourself, Ruby thinks, envisioning and even smelling the chicken and rice soup, which she’s not allowed to have, however, because of her congestive heart failure and all that salt, you have to start asking yourself whether there isn’t some level on which Ruth doesn’t really want to do all these things that she does – Helen’s cat box and the bran muffins she distributes all over the neighborhood and taking Ruby Mae to the grocery store, and even visiting her own husband in the Regency Place. Aren’t they all just things she thinks she has to do, for some reason? Everyone loves Ruth, all right, because she’s always cheerful and spreads herself all over the neighborhood helping people out, but you also somehow never quite know what she’s thinking about it all. Which in the spirit of honesty, given her current extreme circumstances, Ruby will admit has sometimes led her to delay just a little longer than strictly necessary in the frozen food aisle, reading one or two extra labels, in the not really malicious and only partly conscious hope that Ruth will at some point actually express the impatience that is usually revealed only by the way she stands with bowed head, sighing and idly examining a canned ham. And it even occurs to Ruby that, having done all these things for all these different people, for years, perhaps not very willingly, and not really out of the milk of human kindness, but just because she thinks she ought to, Ruth has become hardened toward her friends just a little bit, has gradually become more and more reluctant to perform these charitable tasks, has developed and elaborated more and more reasons for putting them off, even when they might really be necessary; so that when, for once, Ruby actually needs her, it’s actually this one time that she won’t show up. And if she’d been a little more honest with herself, and with others as well, if she’d gone over to change Helen’s cat box just one less time when she didn’t really want to, she might now have enough energy to drag herself away from her bowl of chicken and rice soup, which she isn’t going to finish anyway, and leash up her dog and come over to see why Ruby isn’t answering the phone.
The timer clicks, and the floor lamp turns on, casting one cone of warm golden light down to the white shag rug, where Ruby lies turning these things over in her mind, and another up to the ceiling, where a few bedraggled spider webs can be seen festooning the moldings. I should vacuum that, she thinks, or at least get Stephanie to do it. I’ve lived in this house for 40 years, and I’ve never washed the ceilings, although they’ve been painted a couple of times. She’s relieved that the timer has worked, however. It wouldn’t be fun to have to lie here in the dark, wondering if anyone was going to show up. Thank God she at least had turned up the thermostat before she fell, so she’s reasonably warm and has the sighing of the furnace to keep her company. Where is Clawdius, I wonder. He could be lying three feet away from her on the couch, with his paws tucked under him, enduring with feline stoicism her odd preference for the floor (although she should be feeding him by now), and she wouldn’t even know he was there, because she can’t really move her head to look. Does anybody wash their ceilings any more, she wonders. All of her friends’ houses have spider populations, or at least ragged old webs with desiccated insect mummies, although the spiders themselves long ago died of old age or moved and reopened their nets elsewhere; but maybe that’s just because all Ruby’s friends are old. Even though her left eye isn’t that good (she never did bother to get that cataract operation), with her right eye she can see what looks like a bug hanging up there under her own ceiling; yes, an old dead carcass in its antique silken hammock, swaying gently in the tropical breeze from the heating ducts.
At the sight of the fly husk, Ruby Mae, who rarely allows herself anything like a negative thought, is finally, after more than five hours on the white shag rug, beginning to appreciate the gravity of her situation. The most frustrating aspect of the whole thing is that nobody knows! And nobody seems to care! She’s suddenly furious at them all, starting with Wayne, dying without notice like that; and Stephanie, who’s always so busy fighting with her boyfriend that she can only come by three days a week, and not the right days, obviously; and right on through her own children, all four of them, calling up to smooth out their own consciences but never actually doing anything much; and down to Clawdius, who could at least be keeping her company while she waits; but especially at Ruth, the only one of them who probably actually understands, who was supposed to come by in her dog-smelling Ford Taurus and drive them to the grocery store, but instead is missing in action. What is her excuse? Yes, obviously Ruby knows all those reasons why Ruth might have forgotten or gotten sidetracked, she’s just spent a couple of
hours going over them in her head, but none of those are really excuses. When you get to the bottom of it, there is no excuse. If you’re lucky enough to still be able to walk and drive a car when you’re 83 years old, then you should at least be responsible enough not to leave your friends lying on a shag rug with a broken hip. They had a date; Ruth is supposed to be here. She just clutters her life, and this is the result. I’ve always let her get away with it, with her lateness and her forgetfulness and all her unnecessary complications, and now I’m paying the price. Ruby’s face feels hot.
But the click of the timer has darkened the whole rest of the world except for the two vertical cones of light – not just outside, where the twilight is still methodically wrapping its cold tentacles around her house, but even inside, reminding her how alone an 83-year-old widow can be. Though Ruby can’t turn her head, she can see how the golden lamplight thins and turns grainy at the edge of her vision, and if she could lift her head a little she knows she’d see the light fading even more and shading into an absolute blackness in the corners of the living room and the various crannies of the kitchen, in the ironing board closet, and the guest bedroom, whose warm bed on which she once broke two toes now seems very remote, part of an earlier existence. She’s afraid that darkness will penetrate her head, if she continues along this line of thought. And what about when the timer clicks off again, at 2 a.m.? God, that’s nine hours from now or something, nine endless hours to wait just for the next event, for her loneliness to be suddenly lifted to a whole new plateau by total darkness.
And here’s another tear, two in one day, almost a record for Ruby Mae. She has to get a grip on herself. Come on, girl, she thinks. They’re all just busy with their own lives. There’s nothing wrong with that. I’m busy with mine, too, so to speak, except unfortunately this is it, this is just the latest part of it. And Ruth, she has to admit despite her resentment, is just old; she’s older than I am, in fact, and some emergency probably came up, something to do with the plumbing or the furnace or her asthmatic cat, or she got distracted, or she just plain forgot. She hates these grocery trips anyway, I know that, it’s partly my fault of course, but I can’t help it either, there’s something cheerful about the grocery store, those long aisles with the colorful shelves narrowing to their vanishing points, and the lazy swirls of vapor from the banks of frozen pizzas, and the displays of condoms that you would never have seen anything like that when I was a young mother with four kids. She feels a terrible longing for the bright fluorescents and the camaraderie of the grocery store. But why should Ruth come, anyway, what with her old age and her hammer toes and her sick cat and all the rest of her own disorganized life constantly threatening to slosh over its crumbling levees? It’s just bad luck that it’s today, when I actually need her, that something got in the way.
Ruby hears the double thump of Clawdius hitting the floor behind her head, and soon his black and white body appears in her peripheral vision, stretching and yawning with eyes closed and white paws extended in front of him. It’s dinnertime, and he must be getting restless. Maybe that means at least he’ll be a little more friendly for a while, until he figures out he can’t expect anything from his guardian, now useless on her white shag rug. But no, he doesn’t come any closer; in fact, he’s walking away expectantly, toward the back door, where Ruby can now begin to discern some noises from outside. She hears the door open and feels a tide of cold air pouring across the floor to break on her prone body, then sees the black and white streak of Clawdius disappearing into the back bedroom as Ruth’s overly enthusiastic dog, Rumpole, bursts in with loud, joyful exhalations and a great scrabbling of unclipped claws, followed by, presumably, Ruth herself. Yes, it is. She appears above Ruby, coated against the cold, backlit electric tentacles of white hair raying out from under her wool cap in a mad corolla, glasses too big for her thin face and already fogging up. On one profoundly mittened hand she’s balancing a tupperware container. “Oh, there you are,” she says, as Rumpole gives Ruby’s face a dutiful swipe or two with his tongue and then prances off to look for Clawdius. “Stop it, Rump! Leave her alone,” says Ruth. “I’m sorry I’m late. But I see you’ve made good use of the extra time to get yourself in trouble.”
“No, I just thought I’d lay down on the rug,” says Ruby, “and it felt so comfortable it seemed like I should stay here for awhile. I might start sleeping here, I think. That way I won’t have to get out of bed in the morning.”
“I decided I had enough time to make some raisin bran muffins for Gladys,” Ruth explains, placing the tupperware tub on the couch and pulling off her mittens. “Eww-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo, it’s cold out there! Aren’t you cold down there on the floor?” She takes off her glasses, now useless with fog. “I got them in the oven, and then Florence called, of course, and wanted to talk about the plans for Bible study, which I realized with a horrible shock is this Thursday. I’m glad she called me, because I suppose I would have completely forgotten otherwise, but then she has to discuss every detail, right down to the kind of paper napkins I’m supposed to use. And by the time we got that all organized, the raisin bran muffins were hard as rocks. I brought some over anyway, but they’re so hard you might have to just put them right in your compost bin.” She pops open the tupperware, extracts a muffin, and offers it to Ruby. “What did you do to yourself this time? How long have you been lying here?”
“Not very long,” says Ruby, accepting the raisin bran muffin. “I think it’s my hip, but I don’t really know. I can’t move though, without taking a nap. I suppose you’ll have to call the ambulance again.”
“Well, they’ll probably be very glad to see you,” says Ruth, “you’re such friends with all the ambulance drivers by now. Now what did I do with my glasses?” She’s stretching her wrinkly neck out of her coat collar like a turtle to look here and there, and patting the pockets of her coat. “Oh damn! How does this happen? I had them right in my hand 30 seconds ago.” She disappears, and for a while Ruby hears her shuffling around the room, running her hands over all the surfaces. “It’d be a lot easier if I could find the light switch,” she says. Ruby hears her pick up the phone, but there’s no sound of buttons being pushed. “Of course, now I can’t see these damn buttons,” says Ruth. “And I can never figure out which ones to push, anyway. All these things are different! Why do they have to keep changing everything? What’s wrong with the old ones?” Ruby, still flat on her back, takes a bite out of the bran muffin. It’s very dry, almost sandy, and she can feel crumbs raining onto her collarbones and working their way inside the neckline of her dress. But there are widely scattered raisins, too, golden raisins. “Damn, damn, damn!” says Ruth. The raisins, when Ruby encounters them, are very juicy and sweet, especially in contrast with the sterile powder surrounding them. She has plenty of time to linger over them while her friend fumbles for 9-1-1.
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