They never pretended to be anything other than her grandparents, and as she got older, they showed her photographs of her mother, and shared their happy memories with her and some sad ones. When she was old enough, they told her the circumstances of her mother’s death, and hid nothing from her. Remarkably, despite Camille’s drug use when she was pregnant, Ruby had suffered no ill effects from it. And although they did nothing different with Ruby than they had with Camille, all the things that had angered Camille about her parents were comfortable for Ruby, and she embraced them. She had no rebellious side, even in her teens, and was very conservative by nature, fascinated by their family’s history, and she enjoyed their traditions. She looked remarkably like Camille, and bore a strong resemblance to Eleanor as well, since mother and daughter had looked similar, except that Eleanor had dark hair and Camille was blond. Ruby had their features and their body shape, the same blue eyes, and her hair was red. Ruby was a beautiful child and grew into a very beautiful young woman.
Unlike her mother, she was an excellent student. She was accepted at Stanford, and her passion was computer sciences. She spent hours explaining computers to her grandfather, and Eleanor always laughed and said she didn’t understand a word and didn’t want to. Ruby preferred studying to social life, and she was shy about making friends, and often preferred to spend time with her grandparents to people her own age. She loved working in their shop during the summers. When the letter came that summer inviting Ruby to be presented at the cotillion and be a debutante, Eleanor was sure she wouldn’t want to, and would think it frivolous or old fashioned. A decade of girls before her had boycotted it, in the sixties and the days of “flower power,” not long after Camille had refused to do it. But by 1977, when Ruby received the invitation to be a debutante, she pounced on it and waved it at her grandmother.
“Can I do it, Grandma? Can I?” She was starting her freshman year at Stanford in September, but she loved the idea of being a debutante in December, right before Christmas, just as her grandmother had done, almost fifty years before. She said she had always thought it sounded like being Cinderella or a fairy princess for a night and Eleanor grinned when she said it, and was pleased. Life had a way of coming full circle.
“Of course you can. I was afraid you’d think it silly.”
“I think it sounds exciting. You made your debut. I want to too.” Eleanor smiled at the memory and Ruby’s reaction to it, the opposite of Camille’s vehemently negative response nearly twenty years before.
“It was different when I came out,” Eleanor said with a sigh. “People gave their own balls, they didn’t come out together the way they do now. I met your grandfather the night of my debut. He looked like Prince Charming to me.” Just for the sake of history, she showed Ruby her debut dress by Worth, still carefully preserved, and told her about going to Paris to have it designed for her. It looked old fashioned now, and very much of its era in 1928. She and Ruby went to Saks and picked out a beautiful white organza gown that floated around her and showed off her figure and tiny waist, and she invited a boy she’d gone to school with to be her escort. They were just friends and he was as crazy about computers as she was. She had had no serious romances yet and didn’t seem to care. But she could hardly wait for the big event in December.
* * *
—
Alex and Eleanor watched her come down the steps at the Sheraton-Palace Hotel on the arm of her escort in the beautiful white dress, with her flaming hair falling in waves down her back, and they smiled at each other. It was what they had wanted for Camille, and had been such a battle. And nineteen years later, Ruby was thrilled. She had loved looking at the photographs of Eleanor as a debutante, those of her grandfather at the same time, and the photographs of their wedding a year later. Eleanor had shown Ruby her wedding dress, and it didn’t look outdated. Ruby said it was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen.
Ruby thoroughly enjoyed her presentation at the cotillion. Her escort had been the right choice, as just a friend. He was at Harvard, and they spent the whole night talking computers. And it was a fun opportunity for them to see the young people they had gone to school with, since several of the girls being presented at the cotillion had been her classmates.
To Ruby and her grandparents, the evening was a great success. It wasn’t marked by the vast opulence of Eleanor’s debut forty-nine years before, but it was appropriate for the era, and a lovely party, filled with young people and their parents and grandparents in evening clothes. It was everything Camille would have hated, and that Ruby loved.
She had more in common with the grandparents who had raised her than she would have had with her mother, who was such a rebel. Ruby was never rebellious at any age. If anything, she studied too hard and they had to remind her to take a break and play. She thought studying was fun.
In her sophomore year at Stanford, she was studying in the library one weekend, when a senior sat across the desk from her, seemed fascinated by her, and stared at her red hair. They left the library at the same time, and he explained that he was working on his senior project. He said he’d had a summer job at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center the previous summer, where he said he got interested in GUIs. He explained that they were graphical user interfaces, which allowed a person to interact with a computer through graphics. He made it sound fascinating. His senior project was to devise some applications for GUIs to make using a computer easier for a home user. His name was Zack Katz, and she understood what he was talking about immediately and thought it was brilliant. He grinned when she told him that and they became fast friends from that moment on. He shared his progress on his project with her, and they studied for exams together. He had grown up in Palo Alto with his father, who worked for Hewlett-Packard. He said his parents had been divorced since he was eleven, and hated each other, and now he rarely saw either of them, and had no home life, and never had. They had gotten married because his mother was pregnant with him. He was an only child like Ruby. His mother had remarried and lived in Texas and his stepfather was a jerk. He hated visiting them so he no longer did. His father hadn’t remarried but had a constantly changing slew of very young girlfriends. “My family defines dysfunctional,” was how Zack summed it up. It sounded sad to Ruby. She told him about her parents OD’ing when she was three weeks old, and being raised by her grandparents, whom she said were fantastic and she adored. She seemed happy, normal, and well balanced, and they liked each other immediately and rapidly became best friends and constant companions.
Zack was what other students called a geek, and during school holidays and weekends when she was there, he dropped in to see Ruby at her grandparents’ shop in the city. He enjoyed lengthy conversations with her grandfather, and thought that he and Ruby’s grandmother were “cool.” He liked being around them, unlike his own family. He hung out as long as Ruby’s family would let him.
“He’s so smart, isn’t he, Grampa?” Ruby said admiringly, and Alex laughed.
“He certainly is. I have no idea what he’s talking about most of the time.” But he liked him and he was a good friend for Ruby, and a very decent boy. Alex felt sorry for his disrupted home life too.
“Really?” She seemed surprised at her grandfather’s comment that Zack’s theories were beyond him.
“He makes everything so simple to understand,” she said easily and Alex shook his head.
“For you maybe.” Her grandfather smiled at her. “For us mere mortals, he’s speaking Chinese.”
Zack invited Ruby to his Stanford graduation. She had met his father by then. His mother hadn’t come, and his father brought a cheesy girlfriend who wore a tight dress with a plunging neckline, and was younger than Zack, and Zack’s father flirted with Ruby during the ceremony. Zack was mortified by him. He invited Ruby to join them for lunch at a restaurant in Palo Alto. It was awkward but she stayed.
Two weeks later the applications he
had designed for GUIs as a senior project and the new software he had written sold to a high-tech company for two hundred million dollars. He was interviewed in Time magazine and had dazzled the company that bought his software. Zack treated it as an ordinary occurrence, and went to work immediately on more complicated ideas for networking to connect researchers all over the world. He took Ruby out to dinner to tell her about it.
“Wait a minute, hold on here. You just sold your senior project for two hundred million dollars? That’s a huge deal, Zack,” She tried to get him to focus on it and he looked embarrassed. He had picked her up for dinner wearing cutoff jeans, a faded T-shirt, and old high-top Converse with holes in them, and she was wearing shorts and flip-flops and a Stanford T-shirt. They were an even match.
“My next one will be better. That was just the rough model. I don’t know why they bought it.” He looked puzzled.
“Oh my God. You’re crazy. You’re rich now. You’re a huge success. You’re going to be famous in computer circles.” He already was but was paying no attention to it. The newspapers had been full of the story for two days. He had made history.
“My dad’s going to invest the money for me.” He didn’t like his father but thought he was smart in business. Zack was twenty-two and looked like an overgrown kid and acted like one. They had burgers for dinner at Jack in the Box, and then walked back to the building where she still lived with her grandparents, above the shop, when she wasn’t at school. It never occurred to Zack to take her to a better restaurant after his win, and neither of them considered it a date. They were just friends. “I’m going to Europe on a graduation trip with my dad. He’s bringing one of his girlfriends.” He rolled his eyes when he said it. “What are you doing?”
“Just going to Tahoe as usual. It’s nice there. You should come up when you get back.” He nodded and liked the idea, gave her a hug and left her at her front door, and she ran into her grandparents when she got home.
“That’s quite a deal your friend Zack made,” Alex commented and she nodded. He’d been reading about it in the papers. It was all over the press.
“He’s already working on other concepts.” It was becoming clear that he was something of a genius in the high-tech world, the money didn’t mean anything to him, the challenge and the fun did, and she loved that about him. She hated show-offs. Zack was anything but that. He was the perfect geek, and her closest friend.
He drove up to Lake Tahoe for a weekend in his battered Toyota when he got back from Europe, and visited Ruby regularly at Stanford that winter whenever he had time. He had kept his abysmally ugly student apartment just off the Stanford campus, where he still lived. He didn’t care how it looked. The project he was working on was intricate and intense and took up all his attention. He explained it to her carefully, and she had a relatively good grasp of the theory, and loved talking to him about it. She was studying computer sciences too, but she was nowhere near his league. She felt earthbound compared to him while he was out in the stratosphere somewhere. All she wanted was a good job with a great high-tech outfit of some kind, when she graduated. He said he’d help her find one. She still had another year at Stanford to get through. There were never any romantic overtones between them. He dated occasionally, but usually scared the girls off after the first date. He was painfully awkward or stood them up when he forgot about the date and kept working. Ruby told him to set an alarm clock, but his dating skills were embarrassingly poor, and he didn’t seem to care. He had other pursuits that interested him more, like work. Most girls bored him to extinction and if so, halfway through dinner, he said so, despite Ruby’s coaching. She called him a Space Age Neanderthal in the dating world.
She had dated a few people too, but by the time she graduated, she had never been in love. She had loved her years at Stanford and graduated with honors, but the nerdy boys she met were always too boring, and looked like unmade beds, as her grandmother said. The ultra smart ones who were more worldly and hell-bent on success were too full of themselves, and too superficial, to interest Ruby, and the pretty boys were too narcissistic. She wanted to fall in love with a real person, like her grandfather.
She admired the relationship her grandparents had after fifty-two years together. Her grandmother was seventy-one, and her grandfather eighty-five, but still going strong. They had withstood the test of time and everything that had happened to them. She didn’t want anything less than they had and had never met anyone like them. Most of her friends’ parents were divorced, and her own mother had been a disaster. Ruby wasn’t worried about meeting someone, when she graduated, all she wanted was a good job that used the skills she had learned, and her innate talent with computers.
A month after she graduated, she was sending out applications, when Zack called her and told her he had made another deal for his concept for a new operating system. He told her it was a much bigger deal than the first one and far more complicated. He sounded a little dazed when he called her. He told her about a menu bar and controls for windows he had incorporated into his entirely new operating system, and computer animated films.
“Fantastic!” She congratulated him. “How much did you get this time?” she asked him casually. “Jack in the Box tonight to celebrate?”
“Yeah, sure,” he said just as casually, and then in an undervoice, “A billion.”
“A billion what?”
“I sold it for a billion dollars,” he said. “It’s kind of embarrassing. It’s too much money. They overpaid me.”
“Holy shit! Are you serious?” she screamed at him. “A billion dollars? What are you going to do with that?”
“I don’t know. I need new Converse. Do you want to go shopping with me tomorrow?”
“Zack, will you stop for a minute. This is a huge achievement. Can you please enjoy it for a minute? You can do anything you want. You’re a super important person, and very rich now,” at twenty-four. He couldn’t get his mind around it yet, and was trying to ignore it.
“Yeah…maybe…I don’t know…I never think about that.”
They had dinner at Jack in the Box that night, and shopped for Converse the next day. She talked him into buying two pairs, a low-top black pair he said he would use on dress occasions, and high-top white ones. He wasn’t cheap. He just didn’t care about material things for himself. He loved creating things that involved computers. The money was less important to him. He was twenty-four years old and a billionaire. It was beyond his ability to comprehend. Ruby knew that people would try to take advantage of him now. They had been since the first win, and Zack knew it too. She felt sorry for him sometimes. It was hard for him to know who his friends were. But he always knew who she was. She was a constant for him. They were still best friends, and always would be. He knew he could count on her.
“Don’t forget, I need you to help me find a job,” she reminded him. “Maybe your dad can get me an interview with Hewlett-Packard.” He had a very senior position, although Zack didn’t talk to him often, and was happier when he didn’t.
“I’ll ask him but you don’t need his help with that. You’re the smartest girl I know,” Zack said, smiling at her. He could talk to her about anything, his computer inventions, or other things like sports or books or people or movies, or abstract concepts.
He thought about it that night when he went home. He had messages from The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal wanting interviews, and some foreign newspapers, and Time magazine and he erased them. He had nothing to say to the press. He wasn’t interested in talking to them. And he knew Ruby agreed with him. She thought they would exploit him, and had warned him of that.
He thought about the job she wanted him to help her find, and then he realized he knew exactly the right one. He called her in the morning and woke her up.
“Why are you still asleep?” He sounded annoyed.
“Because it’s seven o’clock on a S
aturday morning and I stayed up late, watching a movie on TV last night,” she grumbled at him. “You’re supposed to wait till nine o’clock to call people on a weekday, ten o’clock on weekends. My grandma told me so.”
“That’s regular people, not you. I thought of the perfect job for you.”
“Did you talk to your dad?” She sounded hopeful as she sat up in bed. It was a foggy San Francisco summer day, and she had promised her grandparents she would help them in the shop. She’d been doing that a lot since she’d finished school a few weeks before.
“No, this was my idea,” Zack said about the job he had in mind for her. “I’ll come over and tell you about it later.”
“I’m working in the shop today.”
“I have to get something and then I’ll come over.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” she said, and then they hung up, and she got up a little while later. They didn’t open the shop until eleven, and she was going to work with Tim Avery and a young woman who worked for them now too, and helped her grandmother with her decorating business. Her grandparents were taking the day off. They were going to a museum exhibit that her grandmother wanted to see.
Ruby was helping a customer who was interested in an English partner’s desk when Zack came in just before lunchtime. He sprawled in a chair and smiled at her, while she gave the customer all the details, and a photograph of the desk to think about and show her husband. She left and Ruby came over to talk to him. He was wearing a pair of ancient shorts and his new white high-top Converse. He looked excited, and she smiled at him.
“So what’s the job for me?”
“Easy. I should have thought of it before, but you had to graduate anyway.”
The Wedding Dress Page 17
