The Same Woman (4 page)

Tariq had met someone who made his palms sweat and made him re-consider his belief that there was no such thing as “made for each other”. His feelings for her had swelled and now there was no more room for Ruby. He was going to tell Ruby this. But her face was in a constant state of pre-wince. It takes bravery to hurt someone you love. He lied, acted tender, and said he would break up with the other woman.

On the second night after Ruby arrived, Tariq and Ruby were lying in bed miserably when the phone rang. Tariq had answered and used the voice that, until achingly recently had been only for Ruby. There was another phone extension in the kitchen. It lit up red whenever someone was on the phone. Ruby went and sat at the table in the
kitchen and chatted with Nal, dry-mouthed with shaking hands, and stared into the red light.

Ruby blocked out the memory of these days and when she tried to recount them, events dislocated themselves from time and she could not pin down the chronology. She remembered eating cereal in his kitchen and telling him that she didn't want him to choose between her and that other woman, because what if you don't choose me?

She had been enraged that he wouldn't choose. He was spineless. When was the last time the sun shone? Ruby'd asked her friend Isi. Isi'd rolled her eyes and said she couldn't remember. She had tried to distract Ruby and took her downtown. They drank coffee in the hip coffee shop where Octavia had just got a new job. They'd sat in the window and Isi had cried when Ruby told her what Tariq was saying.

Ruby had always hated New Year's. Tariq had made plans to spend New Year's with Frankie. What about me? she had shouted. I'm your fucking girlfriend. Tariq changed his plans. He would meet his other woman for an hour, and then pick Ruby up at home at 11 p.m. The anticipation was unbearable and Ruby had talked herself into falling asleep at 10:30 p.m.

At 3:00 a.m. she'd awoken to him coming in the door. He had smelled of burped alcohol. He'd stood over the bed and they'd stared at each other. He'd looked like he might throw up. Ruby had put her head between her knees and sobbed. On the morning of the first day of the new year, Tariq had cried like Ruby had never seen anyone cry before. His whole head turned red and his body went into spasms of grief.

On the evening of New Year's Day, she had told him she was leaving.

The next day Ruby'd called Isi to come and get her. There was still no sign of the sun. Isi had put her arms around Ruby and said, “This is what real friendship is about: when your friends call you, and you come and get them, that's what it's about. All that drinking and talking is fun but it's really bullshit when it comes to this stuff.”

Ruby had fallen asleep on Isi's kitchen floor in a sleeping bag. In the morning the sun crept across the wood panelling to reach her. The ice, crusted on the window, fractured the rays into infinite sparkles.

As she waited for the bus to Octavia's, Ruby swayed slightly, pretending there was a breeze. All the other people waiting for the bus stood two feet back, underneath the shade of a corner store awning, confident that the bus driver would see Ruby and stop. Someone had to stand in the designated area, otherwise the driver would ride on by. They had sacrificed her to the inefficiency of public transit. She tried to occupy herself by reading the bus schedule, its figures mostly bleached off the post by the unmitigated glare. The heat was exhausting.

A girl in a long skirt and a white cotton tank top with eyelet designs was pushing a bicycle to the intersection. She looked yogic, completely unworried though she was about to bike into the sun's death blaze. She pushed the bike off the sidewalk in two little bumps, and then swung her leg balletically over the back wheel. As she did this, a man in a car waiting at the intersection yelled from his window. “I can see your undies!” He dangled his solid, sunburnt forearms out the window and something about this pose made him look greedy and dog-like.

Violence lurks underneath the surface of everyone in the city. It starts off as a tiny grudge and slowly amasses others: indignation because your friend forgot your birthday; restraint in the face of slights from bullying managers and police officers; being charged more money than you have for things you can't help but need, like shelter, food and tampons; the endless shelving of your own dreams, because there simply is no time for them. Violence surges up at the slightest invitation. It is where people draw their energy from for acts of road rage, when anger bursts out so abruptly that it shocks even the person who possesses it.

The girl on the bicycle turned her head and screamed, “Get FUCKED! You lousy SACK OF SHIT!” Her rage seemed to fill the intersection. Two women standing in the shade behind Ruby clucked their tongues at such un-ladylike behaviour, choosing solidarity with the pervert over the woman, just for the sake of decorum.

The bus arrived, in a cloud of fumes that were preposterously hot for such a day. The other bus passengers had the vacant looks on their faces that people adopt on transit for safety reasons; heat-stunned, with blank eyes and slightly gaping mouths. A girl who was dressed so much like a famous television star that it couldn't be a coincidence chattered on a cellular phone. She lied to the person on the other end about where she was, saying that the bus was a full three city blocks closer to her destination than it really was.

Ruby found a seat by the window, dragging her bag behind her. She struggled with the squeaky latch and slid the window open, and then leaned her chin on the sill and felt the hot wind on her face.

She had begun to find the city a harsh place. Life in the quiet seaside town where she had spent the first half of the year had been very different. She had bought croissants in the bakery alongside round old ladies, sat on the cold beach and watched the sunset. But now she was back in the city, and what had once seemed glittering and alive seemed infused with dormant brutality and overwhelming anxiety. Butterflies twittered in her stomach and annoyed her, because she could not figure out what was causing them. There's nothing to be nervous about, she told herself crossly, but the butterflies were unconvinced by her bluster and continued to twitter.

Octavia's neighbourhood was very different from Nal's. Older
houses stood up straighter, better maintained through the promise of higher rent revenues. Tall, thick trees sliced through the heat, turning it into something leisurely and fun, instead of a death blaze. On the streets that ran through the middle of the neighbourhood, houses had been converted into vintage clothing stores, restaurants and old fashioned specialty grocery stores: fruit markets, bakeries, butchers, dried goods. They were mostly owned by older people with big bellies and Polish, Chilean, Turkish or Korean accents. Young, good-looking people with artistic haircuts slouched around in the middle of the day, as the less glamourous, in other parts of the city worked. They sat on porches smoking cigarettes like old movie stars, wore their grandma's wedding shoes, rode bicycles, discussed esoteric films, music and ideas, and used unnecessarily big words. Octavia worked in a coffee shop on the same street where she lived, right in the social centre of the scene.

Ruby got off the bus, blinking at the glare of the sidewalk. As she walked, she became aware of the unsophisticated sound of her dirty white sandals slapping against the pavement. She could see the coffee shop, nestled between ivy-d houses. The patio of rain-battered and mismatched chairs came into view. And then she saw the people: crowded around, on church pews and fifties-style kitchen chairs, some sitting cross-legged on the ground. Huge sunglasses. Straw hats.

Ruby had the instinct to stop and crouch behind a fence, to run back to the bus stop doubled over behind the row of garbage cans lining the curb. It would be easy to turn around now and go back to Nal's parched, scruffy, totally unpretentious neighbourhood. The idea of crawling across this severely fashionable patio with a huge stinky pack sweat-glued to her back seemed momentarily impossible. Instead, she took deep breaths and tried to imagine oxygen floating mellifluously through her lungs. She meditated on all the difficult things she had already done in her life.

She passed through the gate. Though she was trying her hardest to be inconspicuous, she felt as if everyone was staring at her. Was she hallucinating the drop in conversation volume, the movement of eyeballs to scan this new arrival?

Ruby got to the doorway, painfully conscious of how easy it would be to catch the edge of her sandal on the threshold and fall to death,
or worse — mortification. She made it inside. But her small victory faded quickly. Octavia was surrounded. There was no way she could see Ruby, blocked by the café's massive fridges, espresso machines, lemon presses, dishwashers, and languid customers who leaned up against the counter and chatted to each other, as if they were at a bar. If Ruby was a different kind of person — concerned more immediately with love than being inconspicuous — she would've yelled above the whirring of the bean grinder and the punk music on the speakers, and created a scene of joyful reunion. But fearful as she was of being branded a LOUD GIRL she opted to join the line.

She pretended to fuss with her bag, look at the art on the walls, look at the floor. Individual coffee beans lay here and there, like lost bugs. Mid-way through the construction of a soy decaf latte, Octavia spotted her. Octavia had no fear of being a LOUD GIRL. She was easygoing, open-hearted and totally opposed the things that made life unnecessarily complex — like incessant worrying about what other people thought. She shouted “Hooray!” jumped up and down, sped around the counter, as the customers she had abandoned looked on and smiled benevolently.

“Sit down! Sit down!” Octavia exclaimed like a grandmother, and then ran back to her station and began motoring through the line, yelling questions at Ruby that she didn't have time to hear the answers to.

After a while, it became easier for Ruby to just sit and watch Octavia instead of repeating the same answers seven times. Ruby sat and listened to the cheerful conversation, the exchanges between Octavia and “these people” — as Ruby had first thought of them — exchanges which were often unscripted and unslick. And a miraculous thing happened: Ruby was able to see the coffee shop through Octavia's point of view. It was transformed into something genuine, a place where people came to spend time with each other slowly and peacefully, rejecting the city's demands to always go faster. Everything is perspective. Ruby regretted, as she did every day, that her heart was so quick to jump to nasty conclusions, so quick to identify the ways in which other people were alien to her.

She sat on the window sill behind the counter and organised the spattering of flyers announcing DJ nights, plays, rallies and lectures.
The sun warmed her arms, and Octavia played a mix CD Ruby had made her for her last birthday. They chatted to each other in between line-ups, every story cut short in its infancy by excited interruptions.

We usually try not to look around in social spaces when we're alone: someone might think we are looking for someone, and not sufficient on our own. But in the lull of the afternoon, Ruby's earlier hostilities fading, she stood up against the window and surveyed the patio on the other side.

Groups clustered in islands of shade: next to a six-foot, overgrown bush; underneath a patio umbrella; against the outside of the storefront window. A woman entered the patio and found her friends on the bench close to the window. One of her friends stood up as the woman, ostensibly fearless in the face of the patio beauties, hugged her friend in the middle of a circle of seats. The newcomer faced Ruby, and Ruby watched her close her eyes as she hugged her friend to savour this moment of real friendship. The natural colours of her face were vibrant and tactile: powdery cheeks, bright lips, skin like cream. Glossy deep black hair was pulled into a casual pony tail, making her look easy-going and not vain. She was very pretty in a way that was lovable more than intimidating.

Ruby's lungs and stomach clenched and changed places.

She had thought she'd spotted this woman so many times. At bus stops and in parks, in shops and even in the bakery by her parents' house where she'd buy croissants. Every time she had been wrong. Now, faced with a person who was almost certainly her, Ruby was nauseatingly unsure.

Octavia was washing dishes. “Is that...?” Ruby said to Octavia, “On the patio?” Octavia looked up from her suds at the question, and groaned. “Oh yes.” Deep sigh. “Comes in every single day.” Octavia was exasperated, but also nonchalant. Her acceptance stunned Ruby who could not grasp what she saw. As Ruby stood in the coffee shop, with Frankie only meters away and her insides trying to escape from her body, it seemed obscene that both of them could be in such a small space at the same time. It seemed as if, after all the pain they had been forced to share, they should never have to share anything ever again.

Frankie had long hair. It was heat resistant. The humidity had turned everyone's hair into sweaty, frizzy piles, hiding under cover of hat — except Frankie's.

The weather was on her side, conspiring with her to bring out her beauty. At mid-day the wind was nowhere to be found. But when Frankie showed up at the top of the street, turning left past the tailors and the dried bean shops, the wind suddenly materialised. It lifted strands of thick, flowing, high-gloss hair and let it dance, rising and falling in a crescendo of loveliness. The hem of her skirt fluttered and brushed against her legs and flirted with her calves. She embodied summer beauty. As she walked towards the coffee shop she looked the opposite of anxious.

She was one of those people who always looked effortlessly clean, whose zipper teeth always fit neatly in with each other, who never dribbled ketchup on their front, who had never used an iron because their clothes were always creaseless, even after being balled up at the bottom of a backpack for days.