by Cindy Rizzo
Leaving our idyllic existence and returning to our parents for the summer felt like torture, but neither of us had a choice. Our landlord was renovating the house, including our cozy apartment on the second floor. We’d have to find some place new for senior year, unless, of course, I decided to go to England.
Ruth’s father was traveling around the country a lot, raising money for organizations working to free Soviet Jews. She’d explained to me that there were millions still trapped without the kind of connections that had enabled her family to escape and obtain asylum in the US. Her mother was in New York, also working for the cause. She’d been insistent that Ruth come home for the summer and do her part. Even without her father, the Abramson women were capable of attracting decent-sized crowds, especially when they spoke to women’s organizations. Ruth told me that she felt an obligation to help out.
I had no place to go except Pennsylvania. Uncle Hank called one of his distributors and was able to get me a summer job at a B. Dalton’s bookstore right outside Philadelphia. It was the least he could do after barring me from working for his company. Being around books calmed me and gave my days a pleasant focus, which made it easier to tolerate my time away from Ruth.
We spoke on the phone as often as we could, both of us miserable. We’d begun in May with nightly calls, but about a month later, Ruth told me that the work with her mother would now include evening events. Our calls tapered off to only a few a week and then after July 4th, they stopped. When I called, the phone rang and rang.
I was despondent and confused. I thought about skipping work and taking the bus to New York, Son of Sam be damned. But I knew that turning up uninvited at Ruth’s home would only raise the kinds of questions and suspicions that neither of us wanted. So instead I wrote to her, begging her to call. And then one day late in July she did.
All of my fear and concern rose to the surface at the sound of her voice.
“Ruth, my God! What’s going on? Why haven’t I heard from you? Are you all right?”
She was quiet and sounded very far away.
“Yes, Elizabeth. I’d like to come see you this week. Is there a day when you’re available?”
Her tone was almost formal and lacking in affect, as if I were somebody she’d just met instead of somebody whose body she knew intimately. Excited at the prospect of her visit, I decided to put aside my fears and chalk up her absence to a busy calendar that had finally cleared.
“Can you come Tuesday? That’s my day off.”
“Yes,” she said. “There’s a train that gets into Philadelphia at eleven thirty in the morning. I have the schedule here.”
“I’ll be there! Oh, Ruth, I’ve missed you. I just want to feel your arms around me. I love you so much.”
“Elizabeth, I’m sorry. I need to get off the phone now. I’ll see you Tuesday. Good-bye.”
And then, nothing.
I tried my best not to read too much into how abruptly she’d ended the call. She was coming to Philadelphia after all. We’d have all day to talk in person. I could look into those magical dark eyes and I would know at once that she loved me, that everything was all right, and that I had nothing to worry about.
The day arrived, Tuesday July 26th, a date that would remain seared into my brain as if it had been put there by an intensely painful branding iron. I arrived at 30th Street Station an hour early, parked my car, and then proceeded to pace the marble floor, looking alternately at the large clock and the arrivals board every few seconds. Finally, the gate announcement echoed through the cavernous main room and I flew to gate five, where I craned my neck forward trying to spot her.
She walked toward me dressed in a denim skirt and a blue-and-white camp shirt I hadn’t seen before. She looked pale, especially for July, but that wasn’t unusual for Ruth. Her light complexion was the reason why her beautiful long, dark hair and her midnight-black eyes were so arresting. She walked slowly and her smile was almost sad when she saw me, very different from the broad grin on my face as I rushed to grab hold of her.
I clutched her close to me, not caring that we were in a public place, and repeated, “Ruth, Ruth, you’re here,” into the crook of her neck. Her arm held me gently, almost tentatively. I pulled back and gazed at her, still smiling. She looked at me for a second or two and then cast her head down, a serious expression on her face. I knew in that moment that something was wrong.
“Is there some place we can go to talk?” she asked. She was avoiding my eyes.
Whatever it was that had happened, whatever had been done to her, I would be there to take care of her and to bring joy back to her face.
“Come with me, darling,” I said as I put my arm around her shoulders and guided her back to my car. “I’m here now. No matter what’s going on, we’ll deal with it together.”
I had my mother’s Datsun Sentra. I opened the front passenger door for Ruth and watched as she slid into the seat. I bent down and kissed the side of her head.
“It’ll be okay,” I reassured her. “I love you.”
She continued to look down at her lap.
I drove us to Clark Park, which was close to the station. We were silent in the car. I held Ruth’s hand in mine, squeezing it every minute or so. She didn’t squeeze back.
I found us a bench in a quiet area and I turned to her.
“Now tell me what’s going on. It hurts me to see you so sad. Is it your parents?”
She finally raised her head and looked at me. Her body was stiff. Her hands were in her lap, fingers laced together. The sad expression was gone, replaced by something that appeared to be more than just serious. I could only describe it as hard. Her mouth looked tight; her nostrils flared. My heart thumped in my chest and the heat of fear spread from my stomach down to my thighs. And that was when I knew, as sure as I felt the burn in my gut, that this wasn’t something we would face together. Ruth was about to break up with me. I’d never even contemplated this possibility and yet here it was. I knew it even before she said the words. Now I had to sit here and receive the news.
“Elizabeth,” she began, “there are parts of my life that are very different from what you see at Fowler. And as our time there comes to an end, I need to accept the ways in which those parts are important.”
Her voice was resolute, forceful. It reminded me of her father. I turned my body away from her and bent forward to stare at the concrete path at my feet.
“You’re ending things,” I whispered. “You’re breaking us up.”
“I’ve become engaged to Bennett Miller.”
I jerked my body back up and looked directly at her.
“What?”
She nodded once. “He asked and I said yes.”
My fear boiled over into anger.
“You don’t love him. You love me! And you’re a lesbian.”
“I’m not sure that’s true.”
Her response was delivered with that same cold resolve and with a touch of arrogance that sent my anger into overdrive.
“So you’re taking the most sacred, the most real thing either of us has ever had and exchanging it for what? Obligation?”
“There’s more to who I am than our life at Fowler.”
I stood and looked down at her. My words came out in a staccato rhythm.
“Oh, Ruth, do not patronize me. Do not play the Soviet Refusenik hero card with me. I’m not some fawning devotee of your father.”
“Elizabeth, there’s no need…”
“You’re not a hero, you know. You’re a coward. You’re falling in line with what they expect from you. You’re marrying a man you don’t love.”
She stood and we faced one another.
“I’m trying to keep this civil.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Was she insane?
“Civil? Civil? You ruin our lives and you expect me to what? Nod in agreement with you and walk away? After everything these last few years?”
“I know this isn’t easy for you…”
“For me?” I shouted. I opened my mouth but could think of nothing more to say. The unreality of her patronizing words and this whole scene had left me incredulous and mute. She was channeling her father, and I knew there would be no way to get through to her. I was too angry to do so anyway.
“I should go back,” she said. “I won’t trouble you any further. I can find the way.” She didn’t sound angry, just distant.
For some reason it felt important to take a bit of control of the situation in the only way I could.
“No, I’ll drop you,” I said, my voice tight with sarcasm and rage.
I stood and she followed. I looked straight ahead at the road, rigid with both hands on the steering wheel. Once we were back at the station, I stopped next to the taxi stand.
Before she had a chance to say anything, and I’ll never know what that might have been, I lashed out.
“Well, enjoy your wedding, Ruth, and especially your wedding night. Oh, and don’t bother inviting me. I’ll be in Cambridge.”
She left the car and I watched as she entered the station. A horn behind me beeped and I jumped in my seat at the unexpected sound. I moved out of the way and drove mindlessly for a few blocks, not headed anywhere in particular. Finally, I pulled into an empty church parking area and drove to the back row, which bordered an abandoned lot strewn with trash and a discarded old couch, the cushions long gone and the remaining fabric in tatters.
I got out of the car and grabbed onto the tall chain link fence that separated the parking area and the lot. My fingers tightened around the rusty metal. I shook it violently back and forth and let out a wail of despair, at first fueled by anger but quickly turning inward to despondency.
My stomach lurched and I gagged, but I’d eaten nothing that day, so excited I’d been at the prospect of seeing Ruth. A trickle of sour bile came up. I bent my head forward and watched it fall to the ground in a spot of yellow that soon spread out into nothing.
June 2008
Damn you, Ruth! Elizabeth opened her eyes and lifted her head from its place against the seat back of Reese’s car.
“You’re awake, finally,” said Reese, glancing over from the driver’s side.
“Yes. Are we close?”
“Just crossed the border into Massachusetts, so it won’t be long. Did you sleep well?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Are you worried about seeing her? Ruth, I mean?”
After reliving that horrible day so many years ago, Elizabeth decided that perhaps it was best to keep her anger close as a kind of shield. Any discussion with Reese now might cause her to vent and lose her hold on it. She preferred to treat it like a talisman that she could clutch tightly when she found herself once again looking into Ruth’s dark eyes. She’d need something.
“Reese, it is not helpful for me to discuss it, so if you don’t mind, could we just ride the rest of the way in silence? There must be a nice classical station in the area?”
She heard Reese sigh and a few seconds later the sweet sounds of Beethoven’s Pastoral came floating out of the dashboard speakers. The angry storm ahead in the fourth movement would suit her mood quite well and might even coincide with their arrival at Fowler, if she was lucky. Until then, she once again leaned back and closed her eyes.
Summer 1977
In the days that followed Ruth’s visit to Philadelphia, I seemed to cycle through Kubler-Ross’s five stages of grief as if they were sections of a revolving door. Sometimes I refused to believe that any of this had transpired. I was sure Ruth would call, tell me she’d made a horrible mistake, and beg me to act as if it had never happened. At other times, the hot rage of July 26th returned. It was during one of those periods that I dashed off my paperwork for Cambridge and marched to the post office, my fury growing with each loud thump of the clerk’s rubber stamp. Often, alone in my bed at night, I would lie immobile, unable to sleep, yet exhausted. How I found myself at work at the bookstore the next day was a mystery.
There was another college student working at B. Dalton that summer, a gay man named, oh, what was it? Derrick? Drew? No, it was Douglas. Douglas something, I can’t even remember. After tentatively dancing around the topic for the first week, we finally came out to one another and I told him about Ruth. Initially, I subjected him to endless stories about my wonderful girlfriend, and then as the weeks went by, I confessed my growing fears and concerns.
Even in the ridiculous red polo shirt our employer made us wear, Douglas stood out with his wavy chestnut-brown hair and a mustache that he explained was de rigueur for any self-respecting gay man wanting to sport the popular clone look.
“I have no idea how other women spot you on the street, honey, but I make damn sure that the boys can pick me out from ten feet away.”
He reminded me a bit of Margaret, another soul who had no use for love and instead played the field, if you can consider a chain of meaningless one-night stands the field.
“Lesbians,” he would say as he rolled his eyes. “You girls never tire of playing house.”
At first, I’d respond that he didn’t know what he was missing. But in the wake of the breakup, I wondered if maybe he’d had the right idea all along.
Fortunately, he refrained from gloating when he heard what Ruth had done and instead promised me we’d go out to the bars to get drunk, and he’d make sure I could drown my sorrows in some pretty little thing. I couldn’t imagine anything I wanted to do less.
The day I reached the bargaining stage in what felt like my endless cycle of grief, I told Douglas that I was sure that if I saw Ruth I could talk her out of this ridiculous decision she’d made.
“Well, then, let’s go to New York,” he said as we pulled more copies of The Thorn Birds out of boxes in the storeroom.
“You’d come with me?”
“Sure, why would I want to miss an opportunity to go cruising on Christopher Street?”
“She lives in Brooklyn.”
“First, we’ll go take care of your business and then I’ll park you in some cafe in the Village and take care of mine.”
Although I wasn’t entirely comfortable with his plan, the prospect of having a friend with me in case things did not go as I hoped made me agree that I could sip a cappuccino somewhere while Douglas did whatever it was he did that I would not want to know about.
So, armed with a street map, we went off for what he described as an “ambush,” a characterization I disputed, but truly, he was right, that’s what it was. We soon found ourselves on a tree-lined street in Flatbush, looking across at a brown-shingled Victorian with white trim, a front porch spanning the entire first floor. Ruth had told me that her family lived in a small apartment on the third level and that the entire house, originally inhabited by one family, had been reconfigured to allow for three separate dwellings accessed from a common front door.
Douglas and I stood gazing at the house for a few minutes. I put my hands on my hips and stared down at the ground, gathering my courage to ring the bell, wondering if anyone would answer, and not yet knowing exactly what I would say. I felt a tug at my elbow and turned. Douglas gestured back to the house with his chin and put a finger to his lips warning me not to speak. The white front door had opened and there stood the pompous Leon Abramov dressed in his professorial jacket and white shirt even in the middle of a hot summer. And then right behind him, stepping onto the porch, were Ruth and a younger man who I realized must be Bennett Miller.
Douglas pulled my arm and I followed him behind the bushes of a nearby house. We crouched down but had a clear view thanks to a gap in the row of hedges.
“That’s her,
right?” he whispered as we watched. I nodded.
Abramov was talking to them, smiling and moving his arms around as he spoke. I hadn’t seen him smile that day at UMass, so it was strange to watch him so filled with delight. I knew he would never look at me that way. Ruth’s face was turned from me, so it was difficult to read her expression. But I didn’t notice any of the stiffness she’d exhibited the day she’d come to see me in Philadelphia.
Bennett’s face was more visible. He was only a little taller than Ruth and like me, his light brown hair contrasted with her long, dark, almost black hair. He had a medium build and was sporting a trimmed beard.
My plan to walk across the street and talk some sense into Ruth seemed doomed. Douglas and I watched as Abramov opened the front door and reentered the house, leaving Ruth and Bennett alone on the porch. They turned to one another and I could finally see Ruth’s face. She was smiling at Bennett. It was hard to tell from so many feet away, but the smile appeared genuine.
Bennett lifted her left hand and kissed it. Then he held on to it and they both looked at something. It had to be the ring on her finger.
I felt the ground spin beneath me. I dropped down onto my hands and knees to try and stop the motion.
“Don’t look,” Douglas said in a fierce whisper.
Of course, that only made me raise my head and peer through the opening just as Ruth moved into Bennett’s embrace, their faces meeting at the lips. I had a momentary bout of curiosity, wondering what it must feel like for Ruth to be kissing someone with a beard. But as they continued, I turned away and studied the blades of grass sticking up from the dry dirt.
“It’s safe now,” Douglas said, his voice gentle.
When I raised my head, I saw Bennett jogging down the steps toward the sidewalk and the front door closing behind Ruth.
We watched for another minute or so until Bennett was out of our sight. Douglas offered his hand to lift me into a standing position. He drew me into a hug and I rested my head on his shoulder.
