Getting Back

by Cindy Rizzo

  “Thank you,” I said. “Nice touch with the sock, by the way. Why did you use a glass and not a cup with a handle?”

  Ruth stood and stared at me as if she was trying to come up with an answer. I often caught her looking at me, though when I would notice, she’d quickly turn away just as she did now.

  “It’s how Mama always made it when I was sick,” she said softly, a hint of apology in her voice, her cheeks pink with embarrassment.

  She had a slight accent that I had noticed right away when we’d met but couldn’t place. Now I knew it was Russian.

  I watched as she lifted her black wool jacket off a hook on the door.

  “Where are you going tonight? Do you have a date?” I tried my best not to sound as if I was teasing her, especially after she’d been so nice to me.

  “Oh no,” she replied in her usual serious voice. “There’s a local family that has me to dinner every Friday night for Shabbes.” She saw my puzzled look. “The Jewish Sabbath. They wanted my parents to be assured that I would have a good home-cooked meal at least once a week.”

  I nodded, lifted a tissue out of the square box in my lap, and blew my nose. “Why didn’t you tell me your father was famous?”

  She seemed to be thinking for a few seconds. She gazed past me at the wall.

  “I guess he is, isn’t he? When we first arrived here, we met President Nixon at the White House and Senator Jacob Javits. I was hoping to sit in on a session of the Supreme Court but there wasn’t time.”

  “The Supreme Court? Why?”

  “For a chance to observe the American justice system. Papa promised he’d take me back to Washington. We went last March and I heard lawyers argue a case from your home state of Pennsylvania that involved the need to pay women the same wages as men. It was one of the most exciting days of my life.”

  She spoke with more enthusiasm than I’d heard from her over the past two months. It made me wonder what she envisioned for her future. And, I had to admit, I was excited that she’d remembered I was from Pennsylvania. Could she be as interested in me as I was in her?

  Following that night, I began to spend more time in the room, even after I had recovered from my illness. I was determined to get to know Ruth, to peel away her layers and try to see who she really was underneath all that quiet politeness.

  I soon figured out that she kept herself apart from other students because, while she spoke perfect English, she was embarrassed by how much she didn’t know about popular culture. She also feared that we couldn’t possibly understand who she was and what she’d been through.

  “Elizabeth, your blue jeans are tearing at the edges from scraping against the ground when you walk. If you want, I can fix them for you.”

  I glanced down at the frayed back legs of my bell-bottoms, dirty from my afternoon at the grove, a small hole beginning right above the bottom seam.

  “I like them this way. Everyone does.”

  Ruth looked at me with her usual expression of silent confusion and concern.

  “But won’t they be ruined? You’ll have to replace them.”

  “So? I’ll buy a new pair next semester if I don’t get one for Christmas.”

  “But they cost a fortune. How do you expect your parents to buy you a new pair so soon after you got these?”

  “Ruth, twelve dollars is hardly a fortune.”

  Ruth picked up the calculator on her desk and began to punch in numbers.

  Had I said something to embarrass her? “Are you upset with me? I didn’t mean to speak to you so sharply.”

  She shook her head and put the calculator down. “I was just figuring out the exchange rate. In the Soviet Union, blue jeans were fifty rubles. That’s over forty US dollars. But you could never find them in stores, so you had to buy them on the black market for one hundred rubles, which is more than eighty dollars. Those were the prices two years ago when I left. I don’t know what they are now.” She was quiet for a moment. “I’m sorry that I’m so ignorant about these things.”

  I watched as the shame crept up her neck to her cheeks. I was slowly noticing more and more things about her that I hadn’t seen before. Her eyelashes were impossibly long. Her dark hair, usually tied back in a ponytail, was soft and wavy. She brushed it before bed each night, the way I’d seen women do in movies.

  “Mama says one hundred strokes each night will keep my scalp healthy.”

  She often referred to her parents as the fount of all of her received wisdom. I was beginning to realize how close she was to them, likely stemming from the dangerous journey they had taken together to escape the Soviet Union. Also, she was an only child, so her mother and father were all she had.

  I watched her one afternoon in her usual position: bent over a textbook, a pen in her hand.

  “It must have been difficult to come here and leave behind everything that was familiar to you.”

  She raised her head up from the term paper she was writing and looked at me with that hesitation that always seemed to signal the distance she felt between herself and everyone else. She stood and walked over to my bed where I sat with a copy of Macbeth in my lap. She sat down on the edge, her feet on the floor. Her silence continued beyond its usual length and I wondered whether my question had been too personal.

  I leaned toward her and put my hand on her arm. She turned her head, her mouth open in surprise. I was immediately captured by those dark, probing eyes. I had an impulse to reach around with my other hand and remove the band that held her hair back. I wanted to watch it fall onto her shoulders.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have asked,” I said.

  Her face softened but the intensity of her gaze remained. “No, it’s all right that you asked. I was just trying to figure out how to explain things in a way that could make sense to you. There’s so much.”

  I moved Macbeth off of my lap and patted a space on the bed. “Come sit here and tell me. I want to understand.”

  I wasn’t sure if she’d agree to sit so near. I was used to a kind of casual intimacy with Margaret and my other friends, but with her it felt different. I didn’t know whether Russians had an aversion to physical closeness, but I didn’t think so. I remembered scenes from movies and TV shows where big men in heavy coats and fur hats hugged one another.

  Ruth’s eyes remained on me as she swiveled her body and pulled her legs up onto my bed until she sat with her knees close to her chest, her arms wrapped below them.

  “You have a driver’s license, don’t you?” she asked.

  I was surprised by this question. What did it have to do with her life in Russia? But I decided not to interrupt and just let her continue. “Yes,” I replied.

  “Well, what if the authorities wanted to see your license every time you applied to school or for a job? And what if your license had a marking on it that made it clear that you were different from everyone else, not because you looked different or did anything different, but just because? And what if this marking on your license made it more difficult for you to be accepted into the schools you wanted to attend or have a career that you’d dreamed about?”

  I squinted at her. “All because of something on my license?”

  “Yes. In Soviet Union…” she paused. “In the Soviet Union, we had something like a passport, but it wasn’t for out-of-country travel like it is here.” She smiled sadly, almost smirking, an expression I hadn’t seen before. “Not that a passport like the ones here would have done us any good. We were prisoners, forbidden to leave the country, even for vacations. Papa’s research and teaching was all about the United States and England, but he’d never been able to travel to either place.”

  She paused again and looked down at my purple-and-blue-striped bedspread, smoothing it with the palm of her hand. I stared at her long fingers as they moved in a circular motion, wo
ndering if she’d ever played piano, wondering if they’d ever touched someone’s cheek.

  “On the fifth line of our passports was a space for nationality. Because the Soviet Union is made up of so many different groups and former countries, you had to declare your place of origin, like the Ukraine or Latvia. But there was a hierarchy. Russians were at the top and anyone from places to the west was in the middle. Those from the east, mostly Asian, were lower down. But even below them were people like me and my parents and millions of others. This was because we were forced to list our nationality as Evrei. Hebrew. Jewish. It didn’t matter where we were born or where we lived. We were Jews, plain and simple.”

  I opened my mouth. How could this be true?

  “But, but that’s what the Nazis did. The Soviet Union fought against them.”

  “Yes, but Stalin and later Breshnev didn’t care about the Jews. The Nazis invaded our country. They almost reached Moscow. They wanted to dominate the world and everyone in it who wasn’t German. That’s why we fought them, not because of the Jews.”

  The intensity of her words was matched by the intensity of our eyes on one another. I knew I shouldn’t, but I couldn’t help myself. I took her hand and held it. It was soft and warm. I felt the backs of her long fingers against my palm.

  “Is that why you couldn’t go to college there?” I asked her, speaking softly.

  She looked at our hands clasped together and I heard her exhale. Maybe I should let go, I thought. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. I wanted to stay connected to her.

  “I could go to a college, but it would be a technical school. The only careers I’d be able to consider would be at a lower level than what I was capable of. Like an assistant in a medical lab or an accountant in a factory. Mama had trained to be an attorney, but she had to take a job working in a law library. She was forbidden from bringing cases to court. Only Papa had a real career.”

  “Why?” I asked as I slid my hand off of hers, worried that she might be getting uncomfortable with the intimacy. “Why did they let him?”

  “Because he was valuable to them. His research on American and British politics and culture helped them place current events in context. He was the top in his field. A few Jews were kept in these kinds of positions so that those in charge could prove they weren’t anti-Semites. But, of course, they were. And they still are.”

  We were both silent for a moment, each of us looking down at the bed. This was all so foreign to me. I hardly knew how to talk about it with Ruth. But then I remembered that it hadn’t been that long ago in this country that some of the same things were happening to people who are black. They were unable to attend certain schools or be trained for professional careers. They were shunted into jobs as porters and housecleaners. I was about to bring this up, but Ruth spoke first.

  “So you see, Elizabeth, it was no great sacrifice to leave there. While Papa’s position at the Institute meant we had a nicer apartment and a dacha in the country, we knew at any moment that could all change. They could tighten the restrictions against Jews and invent some kind of charge against him. As for me, there was nothing to miss. I had only a few friends. As you know, I’m not a social person, but even if I was, I would have not been very popular because I’m Jewish.”

  I wanted to pull her to me and hold her. I wanted to feel her weight against me and her head on my shoulder. But I knew that taking her hand had been about as far as I could go. It was right on the line between friendship and something else.

  “Did you learn English there?” I asked, grasping for a topic. “You speak so well.”

  She nodded just as I heard a knock at the door. I turned to see Margaret and two of my other friends.

  “Okay, study time’s over,” she said, her voice booming.

  She looked over at the bed. Ruth swiveled back into her position at the edge, both feet on the floor.

  “Oh?” said Margaret. “Are we interrupting something?” There was a challenge in her voice and a kind of half-smile on her face.

  I picked Macbeth up so it was visible.

  “No, just a little Shakespeare review. Ruth hasn’t studied Macbeth and I read it last year in AP English.”

  Ruth looked up at Margaret. “Yes, Elizabeth was helping me understand some of the more difficult phrasing.”

  “Well, enough ‘Double, double, toil and trouble’ for you two today. Let’s get out of this place.”

  I slid off the bed.

  “Come with us, Ruth,” I said.

  Margaret looked at me, her eyes wide. Then she grinned. “Yes, Ruth. You haven’t gotten into nearly enough trouble to suit my purposes. But don’t worry. We’re here to change all that.”

  Ruth stood still for a few seconds. I knew she was considering Margaret’s invitation. We caught one another’s eyes and I nodded once to reassure her.

  She smiled. “All right, Margaret. I’m curious to see what kind of trouble you think you can stir up.”

  After that day, Ruth became a regular member of our little posse, joining us for meals, shopping trips in town (though she never bought a thing), and movies shown in the college’s auditorium. She especially liked the movies because they taught her about American culture, although sometimes they confused her even more.

  “The music was wonderful, I really like Cat Stevens. But the film itself was so odd. I don’t understand how a woman of her age could be with a teenage boy,” she said as we returned back to the dorm room after seeing Harold and Maude.

  Ruth hung her jacket on the wall hook and sat down at her desk.

  I lowered myself onto the floor with my back resting against the side of my bed. “You have to look past the obvious. The story is what’s called a dark comedy. It’s about the coming together of two people who are outsiders. Neither one fits into society: Harold, because he’s a teenager who’s obsessed with death and Maude, because she’s old and spunky. They’re an unexpected couple, but they work.”

  “An unexpected couple,” she said slowly.

  Ruth’s smile lasted only a second and was followed by one of her serious looks, the kind that was beginning to penetrate me more and more deeply. It was getting increasingly difficult not to touch her. I stood up and looked away, noticing a paperback copy of Great Expectations on her bed. I hadn’t seen it before. A blue bookmark stuck out at about the halfway mark.

  “What class is that for?” I asked, pointing to the book.

  She looked in the direction of my arm.

  “Oh, that’s not for a course. I’m just reading it.”

  “You’re just reading Dickens?”

  She blushed a bit and looked at the floor.

  “Yes. Papa thinks I need to get Russia out of my system, including all the books I read while we lived there. He thinks they’re too melodramatic and morbid.”

  I picked up the book and gestured with it. “And this isn’t?”

  She shrugged. “It was on the list he sent me, so I’m reading it.”

  I’d read Great Expectations in my junior year at prep school, so I knew of its rather dismal portrayal of romantic love. But I wondered if maybe this was my entree into a conversation with Ruth about the more personal issues we’d both been avoiding. I hadn’t been ready to talk to her about what I was pretty sure was my developing sexuality. Well, not just her; I hadn’t felt able to broach the subject with anyone. While I could joke around about sex with Margaret and my other friends, it was always in the context of talking about boys and what we’d all done in the past and were hoping to do in the future. I exaggerated wildly because when it came to boys, I’d actually done very little, which actually suited me just fine. It was what I’d wanted to do with girls that preoccupied my thoughts.

  I perched myself on the edge of her bed and she turned her desk chair around to face me. We hadn’t sat close together sin
ce that day when we were interrupted by Margaret’s intrusion and knowing look.

  “So let me ask you something,” I said. “Who do you think you most resemble in this book? Pip, who’s hopelessly in love with someone beautiful yet unattainable? Estella, who’s been trained to be alluring so she can break a man’s heart? Or Miss Havisham, who has stopped time and is wreaking havoc as revenge for having been left at the altar?”

  I smiled at her, hoping she’d see this as a game.

  “Are those my only choices?” she asked. She wasn’t smiling. “I think I’d prefer to show the kind of love that Joe had for Pip.”

  “Ah, but that is parental love, not romantic love. Ruth, have you ever had a boyfriend?”

  She looked at me and said nothing. I was once again drawn to those dark eyes and, for what felt like the first time, noticed the full lips against her pale skin.

  Her silence was making me nervous and I wondered if it had been a good idea to begin this conversation, especially since I’d never really had a boyfriend myself. I was hoping to get us closer to a real discussion about love and what each of us wanted, but I worried that I’d instead taken us to a forbidden territory where the language was unknowable.

  “There is a boy,” Ruth said at last as she studied one of her fingernails. “He used to write to me before we left Leningrad. His family is very involved in helping Jews in the Soviet Union. When we came here, I met him. I think Mama and Papa are hoping that, well, you know, something will come of it.”

  I sat there as I felt a wave of something hit me. Was it disappointment? Jealousy? I shook it off and stood up.

  “What’s he like, this boy?” I asked, working hard to keep my voice even. I busied myself by turning my desk chair around to face her.