Talk Before Sleep (14 page)

She stared at me. “What’s wrong with that? Wouldn’t you?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I really don’t. You
know, in spite of everything you’ve gone through, I still envy you.”

“Well, isn’t that ironic?” she said, and I saw her suddenly in my chair at the dinner table, bathing Meggie, making love to Joe.

“I liked it better when you didn’t need men,” I told her.

She sighed. “I can’t keep living out your fantasies for you forever. I’m tired. I wish I’d never left. You know, I write all the time in my journal about being home. I try to re-create scenes of my life back there just so I don’t forget, and so I can have them again, just the ordinary stuff, just the regular routine I had, morning coffee in my blue cup, the ten-thirty mail, looking at Michael asleep every night before I went to bed. Smells in that house, even—the hallway always smelled like ironed clothes, remember? The living-room floor dipped in certain places, but you could only feel it in the summer, when your feet were bare. I remember the exact order of the canned soup in the cupboard, and then I think, well, it’s probably been changed now, and that terrifies me. I want to go home. I just want to go home. Can’t you understand that?” Her eyes filled, and she pushed the heels of her hands into them, then bent over, bowed by the kind of grief that will not let you stand straight.

I didn’t say anything. I got out of my chair to put my arms around her, because I’d been so wrong about her, because I knew as well as she did that she’d never be able to go home again, and I was so sorry.

T
hings got worse. Ruth stopped going out. She wouldn’t let me come over, would only talk to me on the phone. And then one night she called while I was eating dinner. I sat on the steps in the hall with the kitchen phone cord stretched taut and heard her say, “I have some pills here, Ann.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

She breathed out heavily.

“Ruth?”

“I don’t want to be alive anymore. I don’t, Ann. I’m miserable. I don’t see anything changing. I don’t have any hope. I want to stop. But I don’t want Michael to know I did this. Help me figure something out.”

“I’m coming over there,” I said, and heard Meggie say, “Where’s Mommy going? We’re
eating!”

“Don’t come,” Ruth said.

I went. I packed a bag for her, told her she was not safe alone and I was taking her to a hospital. They admitted her to the psych unit, and I left her sitting at the edge of a narrow bed, her hands folded on her lap.

For a week, I wasn’t allowed to even talk to her. Then, when they told me I could visit, I went to the hospital and found her outside the main door, waiting for me. “I get to go out,” she said. “Yahoo. Let’s go get ice cream.”

We went to a Friendly’s and ordered gigantic sundaes. Her eyes were no longer flat; she’d moved back inside herself.

“They want me to go to AA meetings,” she told me. “Can you believe that?”

I said nothing.

“I mean, I know I drink too much.”

I shrugged.

“Do you think I drink too much?”

I meant to say, gently, that yes, she did, but what I did instead was to start crying, embarrassing myself. I thought it was because when I’d looked up to answer her, I’d seen the plastic hospital bracelet on her wrist, with its mean metal clasp, with its smeared and indifferent
THOMAS, RUTH
, but it wasn’t that. It was that I loved her and realized at that moment that if she hadn’t called me, I might have lost her. This I muttered, more or less, between the hands I held over my face.

“Hey,” she said, moving out of her side of the booth to come and sit with me. “Hey. You’re supposed to be taking care of me. You’re supposed to be making sure I don’t do crazy-person stuff. Stop crying.”

“I’m so happy you didn’t do it,” I said. “I want you to always be here. You’re my best friend. I never had one. Not like you.”

“Will you stop crying?” she said. “Listen to me. I’ll tell you a story. There’s a guy in with me there, we play pool. He has big tattoos, but I kind of like him. I like him. He writes me poems, and there are no grammatical errors. Last night, he painted my toenails for me. Red.”

I stopped crying. “Really?”

She nodded. “Don’t get too excited. You have to do therapy shit all day. It’s enough to drive you crazy, in case you’re not already. Yesterday, we had to put our
chairs in a circle and we all were given colored scarfs, and we had to fling them into the air in front of us while we said, ‘I’m
throwing
my guilt away! I’m throwing my
guilt
away!’”

“God,” I said, sniffing away the last of my emotional squall. “Well, when do you get to come home?”

“After I go to a couple of AA meetings, for one thing. Can you imagine? I
have
to go!”

“So go.”

“Oh, it’s a bunch of crap. A bunch of people sitting around in church basements, wearing polyester and drinking bad coffee out of Styrofoam cups. Smoking their brains out because they can’t drink. And praying or something. I’ve heard about those things. They’re not for me.”

“Go anyway.”

She sighed. “I will.”

“Want me to come with you?” I asked.

“Yeah. We can go get drunk afterward.”

“Go alone,” I said. “I can see you need to go alone.”

And she said, “I know. I will.”

She did go, several times, and soon after that she came home. Three days after that, Eric married Jani with an i. I stayed with Ruth that whole day and night. We made a devil’s food cake for breakfast and then we went and bought kites and found a park to fly them in and then we went to a movie and then we went out for a lobster dinner and then we went to another movie. After she got home, we played some Billie Holiday and it was only then that she cried for a while. I asked if she wanted to call the happy couple on their wedding night,
see how Eric was making out with his premature ejaculation problem, and she said no, she thought half the reason she was crying was that she was relieved it was over.

She began rowing on the lake in the early morning for exercise, and lifting hand weights to rock and roll at night. She was going to concerts and plays with various men and movies with me, and she was saving money so that in a year she could buy a condo where Michael could stay with her when he was home from school. Then one day she came back from a follow-up chest X ray and called me on the phone and said, “Guess what? There’s something on my lungs.”

“It’s probably nothing,” I said. I was sitting at the kitchen table, doodling on a grocery list. “It’s probably just a shadow.” I stopped doodling, held still, waiting, until I heard her say, “Yeah. Probably.”

Of course it was not a shadow. It was cancer, back and smiling. I lay in bed that night, weeping on Joe’s chest. “Oh, it’s so scary,” I said. “I keep thinking, every time she breathes in, she must wonder, Is this making it worse? Am I hurting anything, moving these lungs in and out like this?”

Joe was pushing my hair back away from my forehead over and over, aching in his own way and for his own reasons. When Ruth had come over for the first time after her double mastectomy, he’d put down his sandwich, risen up from the kitchen table, kissed her, and told her she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever known.

“Well,
Joe”
she’d said, looking over his shoulder at my face, tight with pride. And then she’d put her
arms around him and hugged him tight, then tighter, and then tighter still until he grunted in pain.

“This is a strong woman, here,” she’d said. “Don’t mess with me. Now that my tits aren’t in the way, I can aim better.”

“I thought she was cured,” Joe said.

“I did, too,” I said. “She did, too.”

Silence, and then Joe said, “Who’s with her, now? Who’s holding her?”

I opened my eyes wide, stopped crying.

S
he had part of one lung removed. I brought her a huge bouquet, purple and blue for healing, white because she loved white, and no carnations because she hated them. I gave her chest tube a name, Charles, because she was afraid of it. I held her hand when they pulled it. “Now,” she said, after they’d put a dressing on. “Back to business. I’m really tired of these constant interruptions.” She said something like that after she found out it was in her bones, too. Then, when it was in her brain, she quit saying it. When the work gets too hard, you stop talking about it. You just try to do it.

R
uth is wearing her wig, charcoal eyeliner, black mascara—“How
old
is this?” Helen asked, “I had to spit all over it to make it work!”—blush and lipstick. Her white silk blouse is tucked into her jeans, and she’s put on her red ostrich-leather cowboy boots. She turns sideways before the mirror. “How do my falsies look?”

“Excellent,” L.D. says. “You’re definitely my kind of girl.”

“Let me sit a minute,” Ruth says, and squeezes between me and Sarah on her bed. Then, “Whew! I’m beat!” You can see her fatigue like a veil she is wearing, but, also like a veil, you can see her great beauty through it.

“If you’re too tired, we can get rid of him,” L.D. says. She is full of hope.

Ruth smiles. “No, I really want to see him. I want
you
guys to meet him. And then you have to leave for a while.”

“What for?” I say.

The doorbell rings. We stand immobile, all of us, and then Ruth takes in a breath and gets up to answer it. Sarah straightens her bed while the rest of us wait nervously, picking at our nails or looking out the window, around the room. We hear Ruth say something, then a man’s deep voice, then Ruth’s laugh. L.D. sternly adjusts the bill of her hat so that it is centered
& over her forehead, then strides forth into the hallway to inspect him. Like ducklings, the rest of us line up and follow.

H
e still looks like a stupid movie star,” Helen says. “I
hate
guys like that!”

“He brought her a rose,” Sarah says. “He was nice. It was a good beginning.”

L.D. snorts, finishes her beer. We are in a pizza parlor consoling ourselves, eating garlic bread and drinking beer—except for Helen, who has to go to work in a little while and has been told never to come to work after drinking again. (“The irony,” she said, “is that I sold more books that night than I ever did. People trust drunks about art.”)