The Book of Ruth (12 page)

I had to cry about her lost brain. I took her hands and put them on my wet face and whispered, “Say I’m beautiful, OK?”

“Remember the islands you went to with your husband?” I said, about one hundred times each visit.

“Yes I do, clear as a bell, my deeah, that sweet warm blue water, clear as a bell.”

She could remember the details about the islands, but what escaped her was, did she actually eat lunch? and who was I again? I wanted her to at least think of the books she loved. I tried to jostle her thoughts by saying, “Wouldn’t it be great if Mr. Darcy walked in here?” He was our favorite, out of all the people on her blind tapes. She was always saying “yes, yes,” but she wasn’t actually recalling; she was only saying “yes” like a little dog, thinking it might get a snack if it did the right trick.

I watched from our house when they came to take her. It was a silent parade of people and suitcases. Then, when they were gone, I sat on our steps, just sat, thinking over the years I knew Miss Finch, thinking of all the afternoons we spent together. I sat there until it got dark. I sat through May calling me for supper three times. I was living in the books Miss Finch gave me—I couldn’t believe how lucky I was to have her for a friend. I couldn’t believe how much I was going to miss her blind eyes looking at me with all their tenderness.

Matt and I graduated at the same time because we were in the class of ’73 together. He didn’t get anything but A’s for four years straight, so he made the speech. The girls were supposed to be dressed entirely in white, without flashy jewelry, and the boys had on black suits. We carried a couple of red roses in our arms but when I sniffed them they smelled old, as if they had been piled up in a grocery store for a few weeks. Our school probably got them cheap. I went into shock when the words began flowing from Matt’s mouth, because I hadn’t heard him say a complete sentence in ten years. He was exemplary, everything a person could wish for in a graduate, except for that complexion of his. He probably broke out because he was nervous standing up there in front of hundreds of people he didn’t like. He knew a great deal of information; he talked about wars we were withdrawing from. He didn’t mention any particular place. He probably didn’t want to get into trouble with the country, but he did say that wars resulted from the foolish work of the government and that our president would have it on his conscience. He talked about corruption in the highest places, that it was time for new leadership—this is Matt, I kept saying to myself—and that we were trying to be an honest generation. He said he was going to go to college and work to make peace through science; he said that peace was something everyone in our class had to work for, because we lived in a dangerous age. I could tell some of the parents out there in the audience, shifting around, didn’t appreciate Matt bad-mouthing the president. I guess commencement speeches usually outline a brilliant future. They don’t mention H-bombs that could fall on us and char the little children.

I kept looking at Matt, at the back of his head, while he spoke. And I thought to myself, He’s my brother. I couldn’t believe that I grew up in the same house with him. We knew nothing about each other. If he said anything in my presence it was to tell me I was a moron. He stood up on stage informing everyone in the town about his plans to make peace on earth with the technology stored in the cavity of his head, and when he got home that night he would, as usual, call his sister a moron, with his eyes, not his voice.

I had a tremendous urge: I was going to burst if I didn’t stand up in the spiky white heels May bought for me, and scream to everyone there—I could even see the Rev—
GO TO HELL EVERY SINGLE LAST BASTARD
! I was going to march down to the microphone, grab it from Matt’s smooth freckled hands, and tell the parents the F-word. I was going to turn to Matt and demand that he take me with him when he left Honey Creek. I had to clamp my hands to my chair to make myself sit rigid and not go clumping in my heels to the podium. I had to take deep breaths so I wouldn’t spontaneously combust.

May appointed herself guest of honor, because she had made Matt with his fine round face and his clean fingernails. Everyone congratulated her, and she smiled vaguely, as if she were saying, My boy has been a genius for so long . . . why are you shaking my hand
now?

Daisy graduated also. It was common knowledge that she passed English because Mr. Davidson craved her every inch. He was too shy to take her out, but so in love he forgave her for not turning in her themes. At the ceremony she wore a dress that had holes punched out of it in rows all around her stomach, as if they were windows on a ship. She wore green fingernail polish to match her eyelids, and contrary to instructions, green plastic earrings the size of half dollars. Everyone’s heart raced when she pranced across the stage, chewing her gum. She was tall and dark and cared for no one. To me she looked like Mr. Darcy’s twin sister. In the book Miss Finch and I read,
Pride and Prejudice,
Mr. Darcy didn’t have a twin sister, but you never know, he could have had one they were ashamed of. I had always tried to get in gym class with Daisy so I could see her in the shower, but we were never on the same schedule. She winked at me and waved her diploma when she climbed the risers to find her seat. Her look made the fur on my back stand up all prickly.

Afterwards, Randall shook my hand and said, “Best wishes.” He had his little change purse in his clutches. He always carried that thing around with him, as if he thought he was living in some fairy tale where he, the king, has a purse of gold. Randall wasn’t my favorite person of all time. He made me want to run away from the sight of his shirt coming out of his pants. Sometimes, when he sat on a stool in our kitchen, if he was straining to reach the potato chips, his pants, even though they were tight, slipped down. You could see his crack.

Mrs. Foote asked May if we wanted to go out with the Foote family, not counting the mister, who was in the hospital hooked up to a kidney machine. May looked at Mrs. Foote as if she’d never laid eyes on her before and said, “We have other engagements.” She had her nose in the air as she turned her back. Mrs. Foote was only stupefied for an instant and then she remembered that people always treated her like that. She walked slowly away on her stumpy legs. She didn’t even put her head scarf on to keep the rain from ruining the permanent May gave her—the hairdo that made Mrs. Foote look like a bald baby who has one curl on top of its head. It was true that we did have an invitation to go out for ice cream with Mr. Hanson and a few of the other graduates with brains and their parents. Still, in front of all the people at graduation, May had to make it absolutely clear that she was far too good for the Footes.

I would have been happy to be on a date with Randall, compared to the company of the smart graduates, in that one single terrible hour at the ice cream parlor. I’m eating my chocolate sundae as fast as I possibly can in the white dress May borrowed from Mrs. Foote. It’s plain except for the puffy short sleeves and a scoop neck, and drops of chocolate running down the front. The salted pecans and the hot fudge don’t even taste good but I don’t know what else to do except eat. I wish I was a black hole that was swirling through space, suctioning up brilliant young stars. When Dr. Heck, the principal, asks me, “What are you planning to do, young lady, now that you’re out of high school?”—and he pats my diploma—I say, turning red like May’s lobster hands, I say fast, “I’m gonna go work at the dry cleaners.”

Nobody makes one sound. Matt is wishing an elephant would come over, hook its trunk around me, and carry me off. I can see all of them thinking, How in the world did one family turn out a genius, ready to make peace on earth, and a dry cleaners employee? I have the urge again, it’s so fierce in me, to stand up and tell how Matt got a head start because he talked practically the day of his birth and because May was crazy about boy babies. He got all the new clothes from Sears. I want to scream that I’m possibly just as smart as any one of them, except Matt. I want to ask each graduate if they can name all the characters Charles Dickens ever wrote about—then I bet their faces wouldn’t gloat too long.

I can’t think about the ice cream parlor without feeling my face heat up with the humiliation. In those days I didn’t have an ounce of gumption. I only dreamed about standing up and telling Dr. Heck,
GO TO HELL
, because I knew if I did I’d get put in the clinker, or May would blindfold me and drop me off on someone’s doorstep, where she delivers eggs.

Matt told all the ignorant parents what he was going to study when he got to MIT out on the East Coast. It wasn’t a secret that the college was paying for him to come and learn science concepts. Diane Crawford was going to be out there too, at Smith College. Dr. Heck made some crazy remark about Diane and Matt getting together in Boston to talk about their alma mater and old times. Diane almost gagged on her cherry. She was probably planning never to think of Honey Creek again once she got beyond the town limits. When I got home I looked at a map to see where Boston was located. It didn’t look so far away. Only, I knew it was one thousand miles away, so distant I couldn’t imagine the length of those miles.

Right after graduation Matt went off to another one of his summer camps. He lived in a dormitory in New York City and did his math. He got money for doing it. He was probably rich. He never sent May a nickel. He sent her one postcard of the Empire State Building, and that’s when I knew Matt was gone for good, as I had predicted, and what’s left is May and me in our house, and the job at the dry cleaners. Mrs. Foote came over the day after graduation and she and May picked up where they left off. I could hear May saying, “It’ll be all right, Dee Dee, it’ll work out good, you’ll see.”

So there May and I are out at the dry cleaners just at the edge of Stillwater on Highway 12, trying not to breathe. I remember nothing about the early days, except the smell. The smell got into your heart, and your heart pumped poison all over you, up into your brain, so everyone you looked at appeared gray. Still, I thought it might be awfully nice to be a clean coat, underneath the plastic, an orange ticket saying you belong to somebody.

The Trim ’N Tidy dry cleaners is a low square white stucco building with glass windows so you can look out and see the trucks going by. Trim ’N Tidy: it sounds like the perfect place to be. It’d be funny if that’s what planet earth were called. There were rows and rows of plastic bags with coats and sweaters, dresses and blankets, men’s suits and quilts—everything you could think of that attracted dirt. Every now and then an idiotic girl brought in her bathing suit because it said
Dry Clean Only.
May and I stood at the counter to take the clothes and weigh them and write up the tickets. It was the only place in about four towns for cleaning so we got everybody’s dirty—
soiled
we were supposed to say—garments. After we weighed the clothes we were to look them over and mark the spots, and take off the buttons that could get wrecked by the chemicals. Artie, he’s the boss, and Louise, the steamer, and Debra did the work in the back. There were enough clothes in Trim ’N Tidy to make a mountain for people to ski down. After the clothes were clean May and I sewed the buttons back on, wrapped up the articles in plastic, and put the number stickers on so we would know who owned what. We were called the finishers.

At first I thought I’d never get used to the smell. You feel it in your veins. My breath smelled like dry cleaners. I could feel the odor in my mouth and on my teeth. I could taste it in my chicken soup from my thermos at lunch. I could feel that smell behind my eyeballs.

I watched the trucks flashing by the window, taking pop and flour and hogs and junk to places far away. Maybe they were carrying Daisy to see the world, down in Kentucky. I stared at people’s faces when they weren’t paying attention to me, and I made up stories about their lives. I imagined how the elderly ladies with professional permanents and blue handbags lived alone in three-story houses with their small dogs and their gardens. They were so prim when they came into Trim ’N Tidy. They were doing their spring cleaning all year long, getting their blankets and curtains freshened up. They dabbed their runny eyes with immaculate white handkerchiefs. I watched the farmers come in with their wives. I watched them stand in the doorway, shuffling back and forth in their tall rubber boots. They smelled like cows; they were going to smell like cows even after they were dead. They didn’t say anything. They looked big and dumb, like being with a herd their whole lives had made them mute. I saw the little children sniff the air and turn up their noses. I saw all of Stillwater passing by. Nothing escaped my attention. If I didn’t keep my hands busy I had to think, Here goes my life; I’m going to spend the rest of my days working at Trim ’N Tidy. I couldn’t stand thinking there wasn’t anything more left for me so I worked at a frantic pace to keep my mind still.

There were a couple of times when I’d forget and May would bawl me out for not saying things such as “Have a nice day.” I laughed so hard to myself when she demanded I say, “Have a nice day.” The Rev’s words came to me: “The dung heap shall smile.” The dung heap shall say, “Have a nice day.” I had to tell Aunt Sid about that one, May shouting, “You tell them customers to have a nice day.”

Aunt Sid wrote me and said I was resilient. I had to look the word up. It has something to do with my wanting to laugh at May when she tells me to say, “Have a nice day.” Resilient. I liked being resilient because it sounded like a jewel glittering in the light.

Mrs. Foote came into the dry cleaners when Artie, the boss, wasn’t around. She must have known his schedule because she always came in with her pack of cigarettes just after he’d left, and she and May chewed the fat while May bagged the clothes and I washed the windows, swept up, waited on people. Mrs. Foote had information on everyone in Honey Creek and Stillwater. May would always say, “Is that right?—you don’t say. My God, I can’t believe it,” as if old Frank Wartman and his bum liver were the most fascinating news she’d ever heard about in her life. Sometimes Mrs. Foote told stories about Daisy; that’s when I perked up my ears. I tried to move closer to her big empty mouth. She said Daisy had a boyfriend from way down in Peoria, who bought her little tiny bathing suits. Mrs. Foote had found pictures of Daisy on a motorcycle with a strap as thin as a string bean around her, “Ahem, ahem.” I couldn’t stop thinking about Daisy on a black metal bike with her legs spread apart, and all that dark hair around her face, and then the little strap. I could almost imagine how that motorcycle must have felt to her legs.