The Same Woman (12 page)

“Do you know what the rain will do to a suit like this?” he cried. Ruby wondered if he had a designer rain hat to protect his high-priced haircut.

“Who wears an expensive suit to a bar? We should go spill red wine on it just to teach him. What a total nightmare,” Ulli said, his constant
perkiness finally worn thin.

“Well, you did a good job, and didn't punch anyone.” Ulli patted Ruby on the shoulder as he steered her through the crowd with over a $1500 in her till. “I thought you might be kind of a psycho, you know, because you wanted to work here with Frankie. I guess I sorta hoped you would be too, but you're actually pretty sweet.”

“Gee, thanks.” Ruby said sadly.

“So,” Dan screamed from his desk, as the slid out out the luxury bar and into the drab office, “how did the first shift go? No draaaaama?” He lifted his hands above his head and wiggled his fingers manically.

“No, it was fine.”

“Great! You come back next week! You did a good job! You looked hot!” She found her sweater in the closet and zippered away her chest. Ruby could not think of anything she wanted less than come back here again.

“Well, run along,” he handed over her time card. “Don't spend all your tips in one place.” He guff awed and slapped the desk once again.

With the lights turned up full, the club looked disastrous. The cleaning crew — made up mostly of immigrant women who had already worked a full day — began to sweep up sodden napkins, plastic cups, and something that looked horribly like a condom. One of the curtains had been ripped from the wall and lay in a pathetic puddle on the floor. The DJs were coming down from the booth, still talking about the same unfortunate woman, it seemed. “So then she says, ‘Of course I expect you to call me if you're going to be late.' And I was like, bitch, you're not listening!”

Ruby dropped her bag and sat down in one of the booths to change her shoes. She was not looking forward to the night bus on a rainy Friday after last call. A car horn honked outside. She looked up and she could see Aurelio and Ulli sitting in a car. Aurelio was frowning. He tapped his watch and mouthed something and then Ruby realised he wasn't looking to her. She hadn't noticed Frankie standing in the doorway.

“Just hang on,” Frankie called. She was struggling with her bag, and Ruby could see that the zipper teeth were stuck. She heard her curse softly. Frankie hooked her fingers on something inside the bag
and then wrestled it out through a tiny opening that the malfunctioning teeth had allowed. Aurelio honked his horn again.

She looked so real, crouching for shelter in the dirty doorway, weary fingers struggling to unfurl the sweater she had freed from her bag, as an unsympathetic boyfriend rudely held down the horn. She was not a icon, not magic. She was just another woman.

I guess this is everything,” Octavia said. “Are you excited to have a real dresser again, instead of a suitcase?”

“I think it might be a little strange to have drawers,” Ruby said, as she propped her suitcase and her backpack against each other, “I might still insist on keeping everything in these puppies,” she whacked them and dirt rose off them, “at least for the first few months.”

Octavia lifted the backpack so Ruby could get her arms into the straps. “I can't believe I have to go to stupid work with this thing. I'm already sweating.”

“It does seem kind of funny.”

“Tariq says tonight's the only night he can get the car, so if I want him to take my stuff to the new place, we have to do it after work. But everyone's going to laugh at me.” Octavia made a big show of strapping Ruby into the bag, closing the thick straps around her waist with a satisfying “click” and yanking various ribbons to pull the bag tight against Ruby's body. She admired her work.

“Just look at you!” she said, “all grown up. And just think, a week
ago you were crying into your eggs. Now you're all set. You've got a job, an apartment — I told you things would be okay.” Ruby smiled, but her mouth started to tremble. Octavia went on, “Just make sure Frankie doesn't slip a mouse into your suitcase, or something.” And Ruby's face crumbled into tears.

“Oh no,” Octavia yelped.

All week, Ruby had been hiding in bathrooms and around corners, waiting till the lights went out, sitting in unknown parks, and crying. She had managed to hide these outbursts from everyone — until now. She collapsed cross legged on the floor, in the doorway to the bathroom.

“What did I say?” Octavia said, “what happened?” She tried to put her arm around Ruby but her pack prevented any kind of comforting gesture.

“I—can't—do—this—anymore.” The tears she had withheld all week busted out, running down her chin and out of her nose, annexing her respiratory system so she could not breathe or speak. She gasped for air and her body shuddered. Octavia did not know what to do. She waited, and several minutes passed, but Ruby continued to heave. Octavia went into the kitchen and to get her some water. When she came back Ruby was hopelessly trying to wipe her face on her arms.

“Oh! Octavia!” she said. “I—have—done—the—wrong—things!”

“Just take deep breaths. Drink some water. Whatever you did, it can't be that bad. It's okay lovey.” Octavia started to pull Ruby's arms free of her backpack. She floppily complied.

“Octavia, I knew she worked at the Squat.”

“What?” Octavia stopped and leaned back as the backpack crashed onto the floor.

“Ohhoohooo noooo,” Ruby made garbled noises and lay back with her hands over her face, using the backpack as a pillow. Tears began to pool in her eye sockets.

“Ruby please. You're frightening me,” Octavia took hold of both of Ruby's shoulders and said into her face, “tell me what's going on.” So far this year, no one had asked her to pull herself together. Octavia's surprising sternness sobered Ruby. She sat up straight and rubbed her face with her soaking hand.

“I knew she worked there. I took the job even though I knew she worked there. I took it because she worked there.” But the effort of getting this out was overwhelming and Ruby started to sob again. She pulled the hem of her shirt up to her face and put it in her mouth to try and stem the flow. She wished she had Nal's hankie. Octavia bit into the back of her index finger, her eyes frowning. This meant she was thinking.

“You lied to us,” she said.

“I know. I behaved terribly. Please don't be mad at me,” she blubbered.

“Why... why would you do that?”

“I don't know, I don't know what was wrong with me. I was just so angry. I was so angry I was crazy.” Ruby's head felt clogged and achy. Her careful make-up had run all over her face, blurred into patches of black, pink and brown. She took a deep breath.

“I felt like, she had taken so much from me — she took Tariq, then she took the coffee shop, she took this whole neighbourhood. She even tried to take your birthday party. I wanted to take something back. I wanted to take something that she had, and ruin it.”

Octavia put her arm through Ruby's. It was hard to be angry with someone so disconsolate.

“She didn't take Tariq. You can't take people. People just, go.”

“I know,” Ruby nodded vigorously.

“Do you really?”

“I do now! I just, I blamed her for everything. It was so easy to project all that pain onto her, as if she was an inanimate screen, you know? And then she told everyone what had happened between us and I don't think she told the story fairly —”

“Wait. Frankie didn't tell anyone what happened.”

“What?”

“It wasn't her. It was Ronald.”

“What do you mean? How do you know?”

“I know everything that goes on in this neighbourhood. The coffee counter is the seat of power,” Octavia joked, and then seeing this was a bad time for humour, continued, “Frankie didn't tell anyone anything. Frankie told Aurelio, who is kind of a jerk, and Aurelio told Ronald, who is a real jerk as well as a gossip, and he told everyone.
Frankie was really upset when the story got out.”

“Oh God. I thought it was her. I was so eager to misunderstand her.” Ruby slumped in a pile of bones and mucus, too sad to cry. “I didn't see her as a person. I didn't see her as a human. I didn't identify with her. She was just, like, this monstrosity, this thing. But she's not a thing.”

“No, not quite.”

Ruby leaned her head against the frame of the bathroom doorway that was smudged with fingerprints, and listened to the tap dripping. Octavia opened the cabinet under the toilet sink and moved some crinkly plastic to produce a toilet paper roll. She handed it to Ruby. Ruby cleared paths on her cheek and then looked down at the dissolving tissue and the many colours now marking its surface.

“Do you know the story behind why she was always at the coffee shop? Was that an accident too?”

“No, I don't know about that.”

“Why do you think she was always coming around?”

“I don't know. Maybe for the same reason why you took a job at her bar.”

“Ugh. Good point.” Ruby rubbed her nose vigorously for a moment. “I think that we, people, or maybe just women, don't really learn to identify with each other. You know? If we identified with each other, if we saw everyone else as just like us, with feelings like ours, reactions like ours and tears like ours, it wouldn't be easy to hurt and hate each other.”

“Well, we could still hate each other.”

“I don't know. I feel like I could only hate Frankie as long as I could think that she was nothing like me, that she was not capable of feeling the way I felt.” Ruby was quiet for a bit, with the exception of sporadic sniffs. Then she dissolved again. Octavia patiently patted her back and waited some more.

“The—Thing—Is.” she gasped, trying to collect enough breath to speak without sobbing, “the thing is, she is more like me than anyone else.”

“How do you figure?”

“Because, she went through the exact same thing as me. No one else knows what it felt like. We shared something that nobody else will ever really know.”
“Are you saying you want to be friends with her?”

Ruby laughed, spluttering snot.

“No. I haven't gone around the bend. I just realise we have something in common. As soon as I realised that, I also realised how awful I was being — am being. Oh God.” Ruby took another deep breath. “I'm going to be so late for work.” She turned and looked at Octavia's face. “I'm so sorry I lied to you.”

“It's okay,” Octavia squeezed her arm. “It's been a hard couple of months for you.”

“Yes, yes it has.”

“But what are you going to do now?”

“I don't know.”

“You're keeping the job?”

“I hate that job. That shift I worked was, yuck, I can't even describe it.”

“You should quit.”

“That would be fantastic.”

“You should.”

“Yeah, I should.”

“Is Frankie working tonight?”

“No. I think the owner actually took her shift away and gave it to me. I think he wants to keep us pitted against each other.”

“Geez. Are you going to say anything to Frankie?”

“I want to. But I think that would be weird. I can't think of how I could say it. I wouldn't even know how to talk to her.”

“Well, I guess you could ask Tariq how to get in touch with her.” Even after all Ruby's revelations, the reminder of Tariq's intimacy with Frankie still made her ache.

“Oh boy,” she said, “I've hardly said anything to him in weeks. I mean I've said things to him, but nothing real.”

“You haven't talked to him about this yet, about how you feel about Frankie... and him?”

“No. Everytime I tried to sort out how I felt, to tell him that I was angry and blahblahblah, I just felt so freaked out. I couldn't even think the thoughts, let alone say them. I think I might've almost destroyed our relationship.”

“Meh,” Octavia said, “You've forgiven him for worse. You two have
gotten through worse. Do you love him enough to still want to be with him, after all this?”

“Yeah,” Ruby said softly.

“Does he love you?”

“I think so. I hope so.”

“Then you'll work it out, I believe. Come on, let's get off the floor. Go wash your face and I'll call you a cab.”

“Thanks Octavia. You know, I don't know what I would do without you...” Ruby started to tear up again.

“Oh brother,” Octavia said. She gave her a kiss on one of the few unmarked spots on her face. “Go on, get going!”

Ruby tried to put more make-up on in the cab, but the driver was a street cowboy. He squeezed into the smallest spaces between curbs and streetcars, embracing amber lights and narrowly missing garbage cans. She gave up on dramatically enhanced eyes, after almost impaling her eyeball with her eyeliner pencil.

“Who needs them,” she muttered. And then suddenly giddy, she surreptitiously rolled down her window, stuck her arm out and released the sharp little pencil onto the road. She watched it disappear beneath rolling tires, marking some car's undercarriage with colour that lasted up to twelve hours. She was happy, and this amazed her. It occurred to her that she could actually quit her job if she wanted to, and that window of potential freedom made her looming shift bearable. She bit her bottom lip to stop from laughing, so that the driver wouldn't think she was undesirable cargo.

The cab climbed up onto the curb in front of the Squat, almost squishing a pigeon. She got out, displayed in the club's floor-to-ceiling windows.

She could see Ulli through the windows. He made the “dead meat” sign, dragging his finger across his neck. Ruby thought about getting back into the cab and hightailing it. But the driver had already tossed her bags onto the sidewalk.