Ruby on the Outside

by Nora Raleigh Baskin

  So I know I could just tell my mom why I want to stay home today and she would understand. I just don’t feel like explaining all this to Matoo.

  So I almost start to tell Matoo that I have a big, huge book report due, which is the usual go-to excuse for everything, but then I remember it’s nearly the end of June and a big, huge book report with a week left of school seems unlikely. The air conditioner shuts off as quickly as it went on, and the room is dead silent.

  Matoo closes the fridge door and looks at me. “What is it?”

  I saw something about migraines on television news this morning and it’s the first thing that comes into my head, so I say, “I have a bad headache.” And then, just to make sure, I add, “And I think I have a little stomachache.”

  Bad move. Matoo looks worried. Sickness is her best thing. She isn’t so keen on things that hurt that you can’t see, but she’s really good at taking a temperature, spooning out cough syrup, or setting up the humidifier and filling it with that nasty VapoRub.

  “Well, you know, it’s going around. There’s that summer virus. Or it may be food poisoning. Some kind of parasite. What did you eat yesterday?” Matoo says.

  She looks really worried and I feel bad. Matoo lost her husband when she was younger and he was still young too. They had only been married five years and they never had any children. He died of a brain aneurysm so whenever someone has a headache I bet she thinks about her husband, Uncle Thomas. And now I feel terrible but not so terrible because maybe I think it is working.

  “No, I’m not that sick,” I say quickly. “Maybe I’m just tired.”

  “Ruby.” Matoo is holding her glasses in her hand and rubbing the indent on her nose. Matoo wears thick glasses—really thick glasses. When she takes them off, there’s a deep groove in the bridge of her nose.

  I can’t imagine holding up all that weight on my nose all day long. Maybe that’s why she’s always so worried. It’s those heavy glasses.

  “Maybe I should stay home with you,” she says.

  “No,” I blurt out too fast. “I’ll be fine. I’ll just lie on the couch and watch TV. I mean, a little TV, and I’ll read some.”

  I finally get Matoo to agree to leave me home alone, and then as soon as I watch her car pulling out of our spot in parking lot—space 102, like our house number—I really do get a stomachache, and it’s a horrible stomachache.

  I watch Matoo’s car heading out of the condo complex without me and I am all confused. Maybe I should run out into the parking lot after her, but it’s too late. I feel like I am losing my mother all over again. And there goes my heart, beating like crazy again. But I remember what my mother has told me: We don’t have so much time together, Ruby. So when we are together there is no pretending. I never want you to visit me and be wishing you were somewhere else. We don’t have time for that. It just gives us more to talk about when you do come.

  So here I am, lying on my back, on my towel in the grassy area that surrounds the concrete ledge of the pool, trying to figure out how I can get to meet this new girl at our condo, when a shadow comes across my body. I feel the heat of the sun disappear from my face. I open my eyes.

  “Hey, I’m Margalit. Wanna be friends?”

  I sit up.

  “Huh?”

  “I’m Margalit. I see you watching me so I thought maybe you wanted to be friends.”

  “I wasn’t watching you.” It’s a knee-jerk reaction.

  She sits down on the edge of my towel. “Oh, well, I thought you were. I’m Margalit.”

  Today she is wearing a different bathing suit, a red one, like a lifeguard’s but without the big white cross and without the wording. But you could get confused, I bet, if you were drowning or something.

  “I’m Ruby Danes,” I answered, not sure why I just gave my full name.

  “Oh, cool,” she says.

  Then she falls quiet and that doesn’t seem to bother her either, like it’s just okay to sit here, so close to each other on my towel, and not talk, which I suppose it is.

  Her black hair is wet and it shines, practically glistens in the sun. We sit like that for a while, and I am wondering if I’ll just wait like this, watching this girl’s hair dry.

  “I’m hot,” I say after another beat or two.

  Margalit jumps up. “Great, let’s go in the pool.”

  Chapter Four

  I am pretty sure that this awful feeling I have, lying on the couch waiting for Matoo to get back from Bedford Hills, is what’s known as extreme guilt. I also had to hide my bathing suit in my bottom drawer, turn on the water in the shower so it looks like I took a shower, because my hair is so wet and there’s no way it will dry before Matoo gets home. Then just as I hear the front door lock turn I realize my hair will smell like chlorine anyway, and, oh, why didn’t I just get in the shower and really wash my hair? Then I wouldn’t be lying, at least, about one thing.

  But it’s too late.

  “Ruby? I’m back.”

  Matoo walks into the living room and sits right down at the end of the couch. Maybe she doesn’t smell anything.

  “How was mom?” I ask.

  Matoo shrugs.

  “Did she ask about me?”

  “Of course she asked about you. I didn’t want to tell her you weren’t feeling well. You know how upset she gets when she thinks you’re sick.”

  Oh right, I didn’t think about that. Why am I such a selfish person?

  “What did you tell her?”

  Matoo leans against the back of the couch.

  “I told her you made a new friend at the pool and you wanted to hang out with her today.”

  What?

  I look at Matoo to see if I can see anything in her face that might give her away, but her glasses are so thick, like prisms. I can’t tell if she’s tricking me.

  Does Matoo know?

  Did she know the whole time?

  “I knew that would make your mother happy. She doesn’t think you have enough friends,” Matoo explains.

  “Oh.” That’s all I say.

  Talk about ironic. I can’t now suddenly tell the truth and tell Matoo, I do. I do have a new friend.

  But I do. I do have a new friend. At least, I think so.

  Margalit.

  We spent a whole hour in the pool. First we had a tea party under the water, holding our breath, crossing our legs, and sitting at the bottom of the shallow end, pretending to pour and sip cups of tea. To be honest, I’m not sure what the point of this was, but it was fun.

  It was fun just being with someone who laughs so quickly and fully, like Margalit. I never laugh that easily, but with Margalit I was howling. Just hearing her laugh made me laugh, a deep, full laugh the kind that has a life of its own and feels like you are floating in a happiness tank.

  Next we dove for dimes and nickels that I found in the bottom of my pool bag. We took turns being the one to throw the coins, scattering and waiting for them to sink.

  “One, two, three, go,” Margalit shouted and we both splashed into the water, trying to remember where we saw the money settle.

  We did cannonballs off the diving board and did this made-up thing where we had to call out our favorite dessert in midair before we hit the surface of the water. We played all sorts of games that Kristin would have thought were too babyish until I said I had to get home.

  “Why?” Margalit asked me. “It’s still early. It’s still hot out.”

  I had to go.

  I had to get back before Matoo got home from visiting, but I said I could stay a little longer, and a little longer, and then it was almost four o’clock.

  “I really gotta go.”

  Matoo never seemed to suspect anything. We eat dinner and I go to bed early. She comes in and sits at the end of my bed, like she has done every night since I told her my mother used
to do that. The truth was, I had no idea if my mother used to do that or not, but it was one night, just a couple of weeks after we had just moved to Mt. Kisco and I was scared. It was a new house and I was starting first grade. I was already forgetting my mother, it had been so long, nearly a year since she was arrested, so I just said that. I didn’t know how else to ask. I told Matoo, kind of offhanded like that—I think she was still Aunt Barbara back then—that my mother used to sit with me until I fell asleep.

  Matoo was exhausted that night, I knew. She is a lot older than my mother, and besides she was still unpacking all our boxes and she had just started her new job and she probably wasn’t used to having a little kid around all the time.

  She sighed, but she didn’t say anything and she sat down at the end of my bed. Matoo didn’t sing or tell me a bedtime story, but she did sit there for a while, quietly, not saying anything. I remember that night, peeking every now and then to see if she was still there, and she was. Then, the next thing I knew, it was morning.

  Now, all these years later and Matoo comes in every night and sits down. She doesn’t wait until I’ve fallen asleep anymore, but she sits for just a minute or two. We usually talk about the day, school, chores, or what we have to do the next day.

  “So are you feeling better?” Matoo is saying now.

  I almost forget I am supposed to have a headache.

  “Yeah, all better,” I tell her.

  Matoo is looking at me so I think it’s because she can somehow tell if I still have a headache or not, just by looking at my face. But she says, “Why don’t we get you a haircut?”

  “A haircut?” I have been growing my hair for so long. My goal is to see if I can get it to reach midway down my back. Or does Matoo smell the chlorine after all and this is her way of punishing me for not telling the truth?

  “Yes, a real haircut at a real fancy salon. You have such a pretty little face, you don’t want so much hair overwhelming it.”

  No, this was just one of those times Matoo thinks she’s forgotten something she is supposed to do as my stand-in mother. Matoo was not one of those ladies who gets her fingernails painted pink or her hair done once a week, but she thinks it’s something a girl needs to learn about.

  She means well.

  “But I was wanting to grow my hair, Matoo.”

  “Well, we can talk about it in the morning.” She pats my feet, poking up under the covers. She stands up. “Try and get some sleep.”

  When she closes the door I suddenly feel like crying. I miss my mother so badly and I missed my chance to see her today. I can’t go back and fix it now.

  My nose starts to tingle. I get this burning in my throat and I don’t even know where it is coming from. I know I am lucky. I know I have a safe place to live and people who care about me.

  I am ungrateful and a double liar.

  Smile more, Matoo always tells me. When you smile you feel better. It’s another one of Matoo’s famous sayings.

  So lying in the dark, I try to smile. I force my mouth to turn up at the corners. I think I am smiling and I wonder what my mother is doing. She is in her cell by now, the steel bars pulled shut and locked. Maybe she is asleep. Maybe she is thinking about me. I try to smile but I feel the wetness leaking out of my eyes and dripping down my cheeks onto my pillow. I miss my mother so much.

  Chapter Five

  Needless to say, the corrections officer didn’t let me take my mother home, and “soon” became the most meaningless word in the world to me. It was six years ago that I tried to take my mother home with me, and after that, we all just stopped talking about it. We never used the word “soon” again, and in fact, thinking about it now, there are millions of things we just didn’t talk about.

  We didn’t talk about those certain things but still, sometimes I would hear Matoo on the phone with my mother, or the two of them talking in front of me in clipped, cryptic sentences about things they thought I didn’t understand. Parole hearings. Lawyers. Letters to some family named Tipps. Prisoner advocates.

  And I was just as willing not to hear and not listen. And not to know.

  I had figured out one thing very clearly that day: My mother was not coming home. And from then on, everything shifted from waiting to coping.

  That same CO was still there. Not every time I visited, but a lot of the time. Enough that she knew me by name and I knew hers—Officer Monroe. She was actually the nice one. There was another seminice one, Officer Peterson. A meanish one, Officer Charles. And then there was Officer Rubins.

  “Table fourteen,” Officer Rubins told us one visit.

  I didn’t want table fourteen.

  Table fourteen is right next to the vending machines and there’s no privacy. But I didn’t say anything. I must have been visiting my mother for a couple of years by then. And I may have only been seven years old, but I knew better than to make trouble. Matoo and I sat down and waited.

  Sometimes it took a long time for my mother to arrive. Sometimes it took forever. They had to call down to the housing unit and my mother might not be ready. It wasn’t like we were here for a doctor’s appointment or a business meeting.

  It was prison.

  We just had to wait.

  “She might be in the library or in her class,” Matoo said. “Or on work duty.”

  My mother had a job in prison. She answered calls from people who thought they were calling the Department of Motor Vehicles and so when I was in school and had to tell someone where my mother worked, that’s what I said. I told them she worked for the DMV, which really wasn’t a lie at all.

  I didn’t mention that she got paid $1.10 an hour.

  Matoo and I twiddled our thumbs, literally four fingers making little spinning windmills. There were books and toys in the children’s center, but that part of the visitors’ center hadn’t been opened yet that day. The visitor’s room was pretty empty still.

  One by one, a few of the inmates had come down and those families were huddled together at their table. Each time the big metal door would clank open, everyone else would look up, hoping it was their person, finally coming in. I could hear that noise anywhere in the world and I would know what it was. My heart would stop and I would stop whatever I was doing, expecting to see my mother. It’s that kind of sound.

  That day, there was a little girl at the next table, a little younger than me, I guessed. She was waiting too. It looked she was with her grandmother, but the grandmother was just dozing, right in her chair, sitting up. They had been waiting longer than we had. Maybe the girl’s mother was in her class or checking a book out of the library too.

  Or on her work duty.

  But then all of a sudden this girl made this funny noise, like a dog yelping or a cat when you step on its tail, but she didn’t move; she sat frozen. I followed her eyes past the other tables, and all the other families, inmates in green and officers in blue, to where her mother had walked in.

  The mom was so young and pretty. Her hair was twisted into tight braids that ended, each one, in a tiny colorful beads at the nape of her neck. And she was smiling, a smile bright with all the love in the world. Just like my mom did when she would see me waiting for her.

  And for the first time, I wondered.

  What could this pretty mother have done to be put in jail? In prison, because back then I didn’t know the difference between jail and prison. It was all the same. On the inside. Or on the outside. You’re either out or you’re in.

  Here.

  Or there.

  I knew as much about my situation as I wanted. I knew about my mother’s husband, Nick. Even though we were all living together, I can’t remember him at all. I had seen one picture of him, one that must have slipped by Matoo when she threw all the others away. He was tall and dark, with hair on his face but none on his head, and in the photo he is standing next to my mom, gripping her arm l
ike he doesn’t want her to get away. I don’t know who took the picture, but she is squinting and he is wearing those aviator sunglasses. He looks very confident and I guess he was, because he convinced my mother to accompany him when he needed drugs and my mother thought she needed him.

  So I never wanted to ask why my mother was in prison, but all of a sudden I wanted to know about this little’s girl’s mother.

  What had she done? Did she have a bad husband like my mother?

  “Larissa,” the mother called out, and that seemed to do the trick; the little girl jumped right up out of her seat like a Ping-Pong ball smacked by a paddle. She ran directly to her mom. And I watched the mother wrap her two arms all the way around her little girl, until I couldn’t tell one body from the other.

  I don’t remember anything about visiting with my own mom that time. I’ve had so many they start to blend into one another. But what I do remember was that when our visit was just nearly over, there was a random mandatory head count, or maybe it wasn’t random. Maybe something had happened somewhere else in the prison. Whatever it was, everybody in the whole place needed to be accounted for.

  All the visitors had to sit down, not move, and all the prisoners had to stop talking and stand.

  “Don’t move.” Officer Rubins started counting with his little clicker everyone in green, everyone standing up.

  It took another forever. Then, and no one said why, all the moms and sisters and daughters were all taken back to their cells and we had to leave. It was just one of those things.

  “I’m just going to the ladies’ room before we leave, Ruby,” Matoo said. “Wait here.”