A Widow for One Year

  Ruth lay in bed, listening to Scott flushing the condom down the toilet in the master bathroom. After Scott had come back to bed--he'd almost instantly fallen asleep--Ruth lay awake listening to the dishwasher. It was in the final rinse cycle, and it sounded to her as if two wineglasses were rubbing against each other.

  Scott Saunders had fallen asleep with his left hand holding her right breast. Ruth was not terribly comfortable, but now that Scott was sound asleep and snoring, his hand no longer held her breast; rather, the hand pressed its dead weight against her like a sleeping dog's paw.

  Ruth tried to remember the rest of the George Eliot passage about marriage. She didn't even know which George Eliot novel the quotation was from, although Ruth distinctly recalled copying the passage into one of her diaries long ago.

  Now, as she was falling asleep, it occurred to Ruth that Eddie O'Hare might know which novel the passage was from. At least it would give her an excuse to call him. (In fact, if she'd called Eddie, he wouldn't have known the passage--Eddie wasn't a George Eliot fan. Eddie would have called his father. Minty O'Hare, even in his retirement, would have known which George Eliot novel the passage came from.)

  " '. . . to strengthen each other in all labor . . .' " Ruth whispered to herself, reciting the passage from memory. She had no fear of waking up Scott, not the way he was snoring. And the wineglasses went on grinding together in the dishwasher. It had been so long since the telephone had rung that Ruth felt the world had fallen sound asleep; whoever had been calling (and calling) had given up. ". . . to rest on each other in all sorrow . . ." George Eliot had written about marriage. " '. . .to minister to each other in all pain,' " Ruth recited, " 'to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting . . .' " It sounded like a pretty good idea to Ruth Cole, who finally fell asleep beside an unknown man, whose breathing was as loud as a brass band.

  The phone rang almost a dozen times before Ruth heard it. Scott Saunders didn't wake up until Ruth answered the phone. She felt his paw revive against her breast.

  "Hello," Ruth said. When she opened her eyes, it took her a second to recognize her father's digital clock. It took a second, too, before the paw on her breast reminded her of where she was, and in what circumstances--and why she hadn't wanted to answer the phone.

  "I've been so worried about you," Allan Albright said. "I've been calling and calling."

  "Oh, Allan . . ." Ruth said. It was a little after two in the morning. The dishwasher had stopped. The dryer had stopped long before the dishwasher. The paw against her breast had become a hand again; it cupped her breast firmly. "I was asleep," Ruth said.

  "I thought you might be dead !" Allan told her.

  "I had a fight with my father--I haven't been answering the phone," Ruth explained. The hand had let go of her breast. She saw the same hand reach across her body and open the top drawer under the night table. The hand chose a condom, another blue one; the hand also removed the tube of jelly from the drawer.

  "I tried to call your friend Hannah. Wasn't she going to be out there with you?" Allan asked. "But I kept getting her answering machine--I don't even know if she got my message."

  " Don't talk to Hannah--I had a fight with her, too," Ruth told him.

  "So you're all alone out there?" Allan asked her.

  "Yes, I'm alone," Ruth answered. She tried to lie on her side with her legs tight together, but Scott Saunders was strong; he was able to pull her up on her knees. He'd put enough lubricating jelly on the condom so that he slipped inside her with surprising ease; it momentarily took her breath away.

  "What?" Allan said.

  "I feel terrible," Ruth told him. "Let me call you in the morning."

  "I could come out there," Allan said.

  "No!" Ruth said--to Allan and to Scott.

  She rested her weight on her elbows and her forehead; she kept trying to lie flat on her stomach, but Scott pulled her hips into him so forcefully that it was more comfortable for her to stay on her knees. The top of her head kept bumping the headboard of the bed. She wanted to say good night to Allan but her breathing was jerky. Besides, Scott had jammed her so far forward that she couldn't reach the night table to return the telephone to its cradle.

  "I love you," Allan told her. "I'm sorry."

  "No, I'm sorry," Ruth managed to say, before Scott Saunders took the phone from her and hung it up. Then he cupped both her breasts in his hands, squeezing them until they ached, and he humped her from behind, like a dog--the way Eddie O'Hare had humped her mother.

  Fortunately Ruth did not remember the episode of the inadequate lamp shade in great detail, but her memory was sufficient for her to never want to be in the same position herself. Now she was in it. She had to push back against Scott with all her strength or her head would have kept bumping against the headboard.

  She'd been sleeping on her right shoulder, which was sore from all the squash, but her right shoulder didn't hurt her as much as Scott Saunders hurt her. There was something about the position itself that hurt her--it wasn't only a matter of her memory of it. And Scott's grip on her breasts was much rougher than she liked.

  "Please stop," she asked him, but he could feel her pushing her hips back against him and he humped her all the harder.

  When he was finished with her, Ruth lay on her left side, facing the empty bed; she listened to Scott flushing away another condom. At first she felt she was bleeding, but it was only an excess of the lubricating jelly. When Scott came back to bed, he tried to touch her breasts again. Ruth pushed his hand away.

  "I told you I didn't like it that way," she said to him.

  "I got the right hole, didn't I?" he asked her.

  "I told you I didn't like it from behind--period," she said.

  "Come on, your hips were moving. You liked it," Scott told her.

  She knew that she'd had to move her hips against him so that she wouldn't keep bumping her head on the headboard. Maybe he knew it, too. But all Ruth said was: "You hurt me."

  "Come on," Scott said. He reached for her breasts again, but she pushed his hand away.

  "When a woman says 'No'--when she says 'Please stop'--well . . . what's it mean when a man won't stop?" Ruth asked. "Isn't that a little like rape?"

  He rolled over on the bed, turning his back to her. "Come on. You're talking to a lawyer," he told her.

  "No, I'm talking to an asshole," she said.

  "So . . . who was the phone call?" Scott asked. "Someone important?"

  "More important than you are," Ruth told him.

  "Given the circumstances," the lawyer said, "I presume he isn't that important."

  "Please get out of here," Ruth said. "Please just go."

  "Okay, okay," he told her. But when she returned from the bathroom, he'd fallen back to sleep. He was lying on his side, his arms reaching out to what had been her side of the bed; he was taking up the whole bed.

  "Get up! Get out of here!" she shouted, but either he was sound asleep again or he was pretending to be.

  In retrospect, Ruth might have deliberated a little longer on her next decision. She opened the condom drawer and took out the tube of lubricating jelly, which she squirted into Scott's exposed left ear. The stuff came out of the tube a lot faster than she expected; it had a more liquid consistency than normal jelly, and it woke up Scott Saunders in a hurry.

  "Time to go," Ruth reminded him. She was completely unprepared for him to hit her. With left-handers, there's always something you don't see coming.

  Scott hit her only once, but it was a solid shot. One second he was holding his left ear with his left hand; then he was out of the bed, facing her. He caught Ruth on her right cheekbone with a straight left that she never saw. As she lay on the rug, approximately where she'd seen Hannah's open suitcase, Ruth realized that Hannah had been right again: Ruth's alleged instincts for detecting a man's capacity for violence against women, even on the very first date, were not the instincts she'd thought she had. Hannah had t
old her she'd just been lucky. ("You just haven't had that date," Hannah had warned her.) Now she had.

  Ruth let the room stop spinning before she tried to move. Again she thought she was bleeding, but it was only the jelly that Scott had got on his left hand when he'd touched his left ear.

  She lay in a fetal position, her knees pulled up to her chest. The skin over her right cheekbone felt stretched too tightly, and she sensed an unnatural warmth on her face. When she blinked her eyes, she saw stars, but when she held her eyes open, the stars disappeared after a few seconds.

  She was locked in a closet again. Not since childhood had she been this afraid. She couldn't see Scott Saunders, but she called to him. "I'll get you your clothes," she told him. "They're still in the dryer."

  "I know where the dryer is," he said sullenly. As if she were not part of her body, she saw him step over the spot where she lay on the rug. She heard the stairs creak as he went down them.

  When she got up, she was momentarily dizzy; the feeling that she might throw up lasted longer. She carried the sick-to-her-stomach feeling downstairs, where she walked directly through the dining room to the darkened terrace. The cool night air instantly revived her. Indian Summer is over, she thought, dipping the toes of one foot in the pool; the silky-smooth water was warmer than the air.

  Later she would go in the pool, but right now she didn't want to be naked. She found her old squash clothes on the deck near the outdoor shower; they were damp with cold sweat and dew--the T-shirt made her shiver. She didn't bother with her underpants, her bra, or her socks. Just the T-shirt, her shorts, and her shoes would suffice. She stretched her sore right shoulder. Her shoulder would suffice, too.

  Scott Saunders's squash racquet was leaning--handle up, racquet head down--against the outdoor shower stall. It was too heavy a racquet for her, and the grip was too big for her hand. But it wasn't as if she intended to play a whole match with it. It'll be fine, Ruth thought, going back inside the house.

  She found Scott in the laundry room. He'd not bothered to put on his jock. He'd pulled on his shorts and stuck the jock in his right front pocket; he'd put his socks in the left front pocket. He'd put on his shoes, but he'd left them unlaced. He was pulling his T-shirt over his head when Ruth caught him with a low backhand that crumpled his right knee. Scott managed to pop his head through the head hole in his T-shirt, maybe a half-second before Ruth struck him full in the face with a rising forehand. He covered his face with his hands, but Ruth had turned the racquet head sideways. She slashed at his elbows--one backhand, one forehand, both elbows. His arms were numb; he couldn't raise his arms to protect his face. He was already bleeding over one eyebrow. She took two overhead shots, at both his collarbones--snapping several strings on the racquet face with the first blow, and completely separating the racquet head from the handle with the second.

  The handle was still a pretty effective weapon. She kept slashing at him, hitting him wherever he exposed himself. He tried to crawl out of the laundry room on all fours, but his right knee wouldn't support his weight and his left collarbone was broken. Therefore, Scott couldn't crawl. All the time she was hitting him, Ruth repeated the scores of their squash games--a fairly humiliating litany: "Fifteen-eight, fifteen-six, fifteen-nine, fifteen-five, fifteen- one !"

  When Scott lay in a collapsed position of lopsided prayer, with his hands hiding his face, Ruth stopped hitting him. Although she didn't help him, she let him get to his feet. His damaged right knee gave him a jolting limp, which doubtless caused him considerable pain in his broken left collarbone. The cut over his eyebrow was a real bleeder. At a safe distance, Ruth followed Scott to his car. She still held his racquet handle; it felt about the right weight for her, now that the racquet head was gone.

  She had a passing concern for Scott's right knee, but only if it might affect his driving. Then she saw that he drove a car with automatic transmission; he could operate the accelerator and the brake with his left foot, if he had to. It depressed her that she had almost as much contempt for a man who drove a car with automatic transmission as she did for a man who hit women.

  God, look at me--I'm my father's child! Ruth thought.

  After Scott had gone, Ruth found the head of his racquet in the laundry room; she threw it in the trash, together with what was left of the racquet handle. Then she started a load of laundry--just her squash gear and some underwear, and the towels that she and Scott had used. She mainly wanted to hear the washing machine; the sound of it running was reassuring to her. The empty house was too quiet.

  Next she drank nearly a quart of water, and--naked again--carried a clean towel and two ice packs out to the pool. She took a long, hot shower in the outdoor stall, soaping herself twice and washing her hair twice, too, and then she sat on the bottom step in the shallow end. She put one ice pack on her right shoulder and held the other ice pack against her face, covering her cheekbone and right eye. Ruth had avoided looking in a mirror, but she could tell that her cheekbone and her eye were swollen; her right eye wouldn't open wider than a slit. In the morning, the eye would be completely closed.

  After the hot shower, the pool felt cold at first, but the water was silky-smooth and much warmer than the night air. It was a clear night; there must have been a million stars. Ruth hoped it would be as clear the next night, when she had to fly to Europe. But she was too tired to think more about her trip than that; she let the ice numb her.

  She was sitting so still that a small frog swam right up to her; she cupped it in her hand. She reached out and let the frog go on the deck, where it hopped away. Eventually, the chlorine would have killed it. Then Ruth rubbed her hand under the water until the sensation of the frog's slipperiness was gone; the slime had reminded her of her too-recent experiences with the lubricating jelly.

  When she heard the washing machine stop, she got out of the pool and transferred her wet laundry to the dryer. She went to bed in her own room, and lay in her clean sheets, listening to the comfortingly familiar tap or click of something spinning around and around in the dryer.

  But later, when she had to get out of bed to go to the bathroom, it hurt her to pee, and she thought about the unfamiliar place--far inside her--where Scott Saunders had poked her. It also hurt there. The latter pain was not sharp. It was an ache, like the onset of her cramps-- only it wasn't time for her cramps, and it wasn't a place where she'd ever felt pain before.

  In the morning, she called Allan before he left for the office.

  "Would you love me any less if I gave up squash?" Ruth asked him. "I don't think I've got many more games in me--that is, not after I beat my father."

  "Of course I wouldn't love you any less," Allan told her.

  "You're too good for me," she warned him.

  "I told you I loved you," he said.

  God, he really must love me! Ruth thought. But all she said was: "I'll call you again, from the airport."

  Ruth had examined the fingerprint bruises on her breasts; there were fingerprint and thumbprint bruises on her hips and buttocks, too, but Ruth couldn't see all of them because she could see only out of her left eye. She still refused to look at her face in a mirror. She knew without looking that she should continue to put ice on her right eye, which she did. Her right shoulder was stiff and sore, but she was tired of icing her shoulder. Besides, she had things to do. She'd just finished packing when her father came home.

  "My God, Ruthie--who hit you?"

  "It's just a squash injury," she lied.

  "Who were you playing?" her father asked.

  "Mostly myself," she told him.

  "Ruthie, Ruthie . . ." her father said. He looked tired. He didn't look seventy-seven, but Ruth decided that he looked like someone in his sixties. She loved the smooth backs of his small, square hands. Ruth found herself staring at the backs of his hands, because she couldn't look him in the eye--not with her swollen-shut right eye, anyway. "Ruthie, I'm sorry," her father began. "About Hannah . . ."

  "I don't want to hear
about it, Daddy," Ruth told him. "You can't keep your pecker in your pants, as they say--it's the same old story."

  "But Hannah, Ruthie . . ." her father tried to say.

  "I don't even want to hear her name," Ruth told him.

  "Okay, Ruthie."

  She couldn't stand to see how sheepish he was; she already knew he loved her more than he loved anyone else. Worse, Ruth knew that she loved him, too; she loved him more than she loved Allan, and certainly more than she loved Hannah. There was nobody Ruth Cole loved or hated as much as she loved and hated her father, but all she said to him was: "Get your racquet."

  "Can you see out of that eye?" her father asked her.

  "I can see out of the other one," Ruth told him.

  Ruth Gives Her Father a Driving Lesson It still hurt her to pee, but Ruth tried not to think about it. She quickly got into her squash clothes; she wanted to be in the court, warming up the ball, before her father was ready to play. She also wanted to erase the blue smudge of chalk that marked the dead spot on the front wall. Ruth didn't need the chalk mark to know where the dead spot was.

  The ball was already warm, and very lively, when Ruth felt that almost imperceptible shudder in the floor--her father was climbing up the ladder in the barn. She sprinted once to the front wall, then turned and sprinted to the back--all before she heard her father tap his racquet twice and open the squash-court door. Ruth felt only a twinge of pain in that unfamiliar place where Scott Saunders had poked her the wrong way. If she didn't have to run too hard, she would be okay.

  That she couldn't see out of her right eye was a bigger problem. There were going to be moments when she wouldn't be able to see where her father was. Ted didn't crash around the court; he moved as little as he had to, but when he moved, he glided. If you couldn't see him, you didn't know where he was.