The Book of Ruth (8 page)

I
T
wasn’t until I got to eighth grade that I started seeing clearly how different we were from other people. It took Miss Finch to show me all the colors in the world, such as the people who live in jungles without clothes, hunting for berries and nuts.

I had the job, for five years, of running Miss Finch’s tapes. She was the blind lady who lived in the stone farmhouse down the road. She had arthritis and was blind on top of it. She couldn’t string up a tape recorder so I’d go over there and thread the tapes and turn them on. They have books recorded on them. They were supposed to keep her company. The first time I went over she called me “my dear,” just like Aunt Sid, only she said, “My deeah.” For the longest time I couldn’t figure out what she was saying. I thought she was talking about an idea she had, but it never made sense in the sentence. She said, “My deeah, why don’t you stay and listen? This book is one of my favorites.”

I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to spend the entire afternoon sitting in a boiling room that smelled of old age. Her filmy eyes were hard to look at, and she blinked so slowly I had the urge to tell her to hurry up and finish. When I didn’t respond she said, “Well then, make yourself comfortable. Is the machine ready?”

I switched it on, thinking I could sneak out of the house after a while, but I couldn’t help getting sucked into the book. It was called
Oliver Twist.
Miss Finch said, “I just adore Dickens, don’t you?” and again I said nothing. In the story there were evil people and exceptionally good ones also. I figured that must be like life, good and evil, otherwise people wouldn’t listen to blind tapes so hard. I wished I could meet Oliver Twist. I knew we’d have a million things to talk over. I pretended I had a cudgel and I beat up Bill Sikes and his little dog, too. Afterwards Nancy and Fagin and all the boys had a party to celebrate. Miss Finch said she meant to listen to new books as well as her old favorites, even the ones that pierced her heart, before she departed this world. After
Oliver Twist
we listened to a book about an artist named Picasso. I daydreamed through some parts, when they were talking about cubism, which I couldn’t figure out for the life of me, but I listened when the author, his mistress, talked about how the artist made her feel captive, and how she served him, and felt hollow. I listened when she told about sitting naked on the patio so he could look at her. Miss Finch often murmured that he wasn’t a very nice man, but mostly he made me feel small. He made me think about the strangeness of the world, and how very large it must be. I thought about Paris, France, a place full of buildings full of pictures, and I was stumped. Nothing I heard in the Picasso book related to Honey Creek, and yet I couldn’t help remembering the people, and how they were tied to each other.

I got off the school bus every afternoon and went straight to Miss Finch’s house. There were a couple of people who took care of her, made her meals and gave her baths, and her son came home from his engineering job in the evening, but she was alone in the afternoons, and she got lonesome, you could tell. Her blind filmy eyes even looked excited when she figured I was in her room. She told me she had been a great reader all her life, that she gobbled books like candy, until her eyes went bad. “My deeah,” she said, “treasure your eyes and all that you behold.” I looked out the window and saw May in the distance cutting the lawn in her curlers and her apron. I thought I saw rocks being thrown up from under the machine; I saw her stop and lift something out of the grass, knowing it was probably a rabbit’s nest, or blind baby mice, which she would take inside and put in a warm oven and nurse with a doll’s bottle.

At first I felt like I had to be prim around Miss Finch, sit up straight and pull up my socks, make sure I sat like a lady, but then it came to me that she couldn’t see one single thing. I stuck my tongue out at her as fast as I could. Nothing. Those eyes of hers were looking in two different directions. She didn’t care what I looked like or if I abused her until kingdom come. So I lay on the floor with my head on a pillow, like princesses get to, plus I sucked on the hard candies Miss Finch had by her bed. I tried to get candy out of the jar without Miss Finch hearing, but she always said, “Help yourself,” right when I had my greedy hands on the loot. Her ears were extra perked up.

Sometimes I ran all the way from the school bus with my bag over my shoulder slapping my back. I couldn’t wait to hear the next chapter. I dreamed about the plots all day long without once touching down to real life. Once, we were listening to a book called
The Mill on the Floss,
and we were finally, after twenty reels, right near the end. I had a terrible feeling about Maggie, that her days were numbered, and that water was going to be responsible. I couldn’t bear it. I thought about her constantly at school, hoping the best, although my heart told me she didn’t have a chance in the world. I bumped into people in the halls and they pushed me away with their elbows. They didn’t know Maggie was the only person on my mind. I was desperate to hear the end. I raced down the school bus stairs and tore along the road while the boys leaned out the windows jeering at me. I took the porch steps by twos; I didn’t even call, “Hello, hello.” I was out of breath, heaving and gasping. I said, “Hi, Miss Finch.” I couldn’t keep it straight that she was married once and that her real name was Mrs. Finch.

“Is that you, my deeah?” she asked. She didn’t wait for an answer; she said, “I don’t feel up to reading today. Why don’t you and I have a little chat?”

“Huh?” I said. I couldn’t believe it. I stood there staring into her useless eyes. It seemed that every time we got to the juicy part in a book Miss Finch wanted to talk. I wasn’t going to listen to her mouth run on. I scowled and flapped my hands with my thumbs sticking in my ears. I hated for her to start in her slow, tired voice about how great it all was back when she was a girl in New England, and how they always ate Boston baked beans and she shoved the beans into a little drawer in the table because she couldn’t stand to eat them. I plugged up my ears but I couldn’t keep my fingers in my eardrums all afternoon and pretty soon the book magic occurred—that is, I sat there with my mouth hanging open, greedy for what she was talking about. She always said, “My deeah, I’ll tell you about the good memories. I don’t have any use for the unhappiness I’ve had in my life.” She told me about her husband, Mel, and his massive coronary attack. He was sitting at dinner and he dumped over into his chicken salad. She told me about their trips, all the beautiful islands, and living in the memories made her cry for the lost pleasures. She had a whole set of photo albums. My job was to describe each picture, and then she told about where they took place. There were pictures of lobsters she ate, and girls doing the hula dance. She went all over the world because Mel was a merchant. I’d go to the islands with her, sitting right by the bed, and remember my favorite parts for her.

I started to bring Aunt Sid’s letters over to Miss Finch because she liked anything at all from the outside. I think I can imagine how it would be, not seeing a thing except all your past life swirling around in your brain. Any noise would be magnified: the clang of silverware, the mice scratching in the walls, the cats knocking paint cans over on the porch—all vibrations carrying noise long after it’s stopped. Miss Finch was always looking alarmed, saying, “What’s that?” when I hadn’t heard anything at all. So, just as it used to be with Miss Pin, Miss Finch got acquainted with Aunt Sid. Miss Finch, Aunt Sid, and I were a family, always eager to know the news about each other.

Aunt Sid wrote me more about her life, now that I was older. She talked about her job teaching music at the high school in De Kalb. She said sometimes she closed her eyes while she conducted and she saw flocks of blackbirds leaving the basswood tree at the home farm in one gust, and then all of a sudden she had to perk up, because she realized the students were singing their song without mistakes. Sid was more than your average conductor. She had no children of her own since she never did get married—despite her stunning looks. She probably had so many offers she didn’t know who to pick. She wrote me about the pale green evening dress she wore for the spring concert, plus the white lily pinned to her chest. She had to stand on a platform with her arms stretched out like a goose flapping its wings right before takeoff. And when she brought her arms up in a certain way all the singers opened their mouths and blasted the audience to pieces. Miss Finch wouldn’t have been able to tolerate such a thing. The students usually sang songs by dead composers. Then, after they were finished, Aunt Sid had to turn around and bow to the parents. The entire auditorium rose up clapping and stomping their feet. I asked Aunt Sid to write and tell me every little thing in her life, because I wanted to breathe with her, and Miss Finch did too. She described the time she went to Chicago and heard a singer named Leontyne Price. She said she had dreams that she herself was a black opera star, and when she woke up she was awfully disappointed. I was shocked; I couldn’t stand to think of Aunt Sid as a Negro.

I read the letters to Miss Finch and she’d say, “Ask Aunt Sid what her house looks like.” So I had to write to Aunt Sid, “Don’t send a picture because remember Miss Finch is stone blind. She can’t see her own nose.” I confessed that I stuck my tongue out at her, just to make sure.

When I got Aunt Sid’s letters I ran over and ripped them open, and then I read the news to Miss Finch. There was the one summer Aunt Sid took a group to Europe. They sang songs and people threw flowers at them. Before they left the U.S. they sold thousands of grapefruits to raise money, and it had to make me wonder if the grapefruits were those Elmer picked way down in Texas. It had to make me think that somehow, in a strange way, there are a few binding strands between us. Picture it—Aunt Sid selling Elmer’s grapefruits to go to Europe, to sing songs to the communists so she can write me, so I can read the letters to Miss Finch, and add something new to her brain. It’s all a big old chain. There isn’t one unconnected link.

There were parts of the letters I didn’t read to Miss Finch. I’d skip sections like this:

I know how hard it is to be a teenager. There is so much going on inside a person’s head and heart. It is sometimes difficult for me to watch my students struggling through adolescence; I think it’s much harder for your generation than it was for mine. You sound as if you have a good friend in Miss Finch, and I’m so glad you can share all the lovely books. I don’t think I could have survived if I hadn’t discovered the library in Stillwater, and Miss Ogelsvee, the choir director, who told me repeatedly that I had a good voice. Still, it is books that are a key to the wide world; if you can’t do anything else, read all that you can.

I didn’t have much luck reading to myself because my eyes weren’t extra-strong. I needed glasses but May said she didn’t have the money for the optician. I wrote to Aunt Sid and said how adolescence, that’s what she called it, wasn’t so bad. I told her that every minute I could, I was out of the house, at Miss Finch’s, and that when May talked to me I pretended I was far away, and then her voice came to me like it was a thin column of smoke from way over on the other side of the mountain. That’s what I said, although we don’t have mountains in Illinois, except Starved Rock—where some people didn’t have food and they died. I wrote Aunt Sid about how I walked out into the night, back through the cow pasture and up into the woods, to the plateau where there are a few cedar trees and long wild grasses. I lay on the ground looking up to the sky and sometimes I got the queerest feeling. I could sense the earth spinning around, and I felt small, probably how a midget feels in a room with regular people. For a split second I had the sensation all through my body that there wasn’t a reason for our being on the planet. We were hurtling through space and there wasn’t any logic to it. It was all for nothing. Such a thought made me feel so lonesome I had to turn over on my stomach and cry for all the world. I cried for the little lamb we had once that lost its hind leg in a dog attack. It had to hobble around the yard bleating, waiting for someone to feed it corn. I cried for it, and the hungry people on top of Starved Rock, and Miss Finch’s blind eyes, and how long and soft the grasses were that I lay in. I cried for the loveliness in the night. I couldn’t stop the flow, because I knew if Aunt Sid ever saw me for an extended period of time, not counting her short yearly visits out of duty, she’d change her mind about liking me. “Adolescence, it isn’t so bad,” I wrote Aunt Sid, even though I could tell she knew I was in all the dumb classes. I had the feeling she knew I cried up on the plateau at night, in the grass, that I felt just as fragile as the tender green shoots.

I didn’t mention May’s habit of yelling at me. She wasn’t actually yelling at me all the time; she only needed someone to blame for how rotten her life was going. I did do stupid things more often than not. The day I made scalloped onions I took the onions out of the bag down the basement, where I thought we kept them, and I cut them up, just as May had taught me, and I got the cheese and bacon and toast together. I read the recipe about four hundred times so as to get it perfectly accurate. Then I put the casserole dish in the 350-degree oven for forty minutes. It was my job to make supper on the nights May worked at the dry cleaners. I dreaded her coming home because she always walked in the door, took her coat off with a terrible slowness, as if her arms were so tired she wouldn’t ever get her wraps untangled from her body, and then shuffled into the kitchen to take stock of my disasters. I could tell she was tired by the way her skin hung on her face, and I didn’t improve matters with the smell of char coming from the oven. She couldn’t help hollering at me sometimes, wringing that dish towel, saying, “Won’t you ever learn to get your tasks right?” I always said I didn’t know, and she’d tell me she wished she could order me some new brains. She wondered out loud if scientists could figure a way to do brain transplants.