Rubyfruit Jungle

by Rita Mae Brown

  Before going to my room I went into Leroy and Ted’s room. Between their two beds, on the wall, hung an embroidered fancy piece of satin from the casket. “Mother” it said with red roses embroidered on it. Leroy was under the covers, his enormous eyes were all that showed. Ted was sitting up in bed.

  “Hey, you guys, hey, I came on in to say goodnight. Your sign is pretty up there. Maybe tomorrow we can go down to the pond or something. Maybe the three of us can do something.”

  Ted looked at me like an old man. “Sure. They said I don’t have to go to the Esso station tomorrow. I’ll go down to the pond with you.”

  Leroy didn’t say anything and started crying again. “I want my mother. They said God took her away. That’s a crock of shit. God don’t do evil things like that and if he does then I don’t like him. If he’s so good then let him bring my mother back.” He screeched on like that and Carrie came hustling into the room. She sat down on the bed and held Leroy to soothe him. She gave him that line of crap about God and how we don’t know what his plans are because we are only people and people are morons compared to God Almighty. Leroy stopped crying. Carrie rose and told me to “come on to bed and leave the boys alone.” Leroy gave me a look, but I could only hold up my hands because she was dead set against me staying there. Ted slouched down on his bed, closed his eyes and looked one hundred years old. Carrie switched off the naked light bulb and there wasn’t another sound.

  I didn’t stay in bed too long. I couldn’t sleep thinking about Aunt Jenna there under the ground. What would happen if she’d open her eyes and see only dark and feel satin from the coffin? That’d scare her enough to kill her all over again. How do they know dead people don’t open their eyes and see? They don’t know nothing about being dead. Maybe they should have sat her in a chair along with other dead people. But I’d seen a very dead cow once and that made my thoughts worse. Was Aunt Jenna gonna swell up like that cow and turn black and smell and get full of maggots? I couldn’t think about that, it tore my stomach right off its moorings. That’s animals, same thing doesn’t happen to people does it? That’s gonna happen to me someday, too? No, not me. I ain’t dying. I don’t care what they say, I ain’t dying. I’m not lying on my back under the ground in everlasting darkness. Not me. I’m not closing my eyes. If I close my eyes, I might not open them. Carrie was asleep so I crawled out of bed and crept down the hall covered with peeling green wallpaper with white gardenias on it. I was planning to hotfoot it out on the porch and watch the stars but I never made it because Ep and Carl were in the living room and Carl was holding Ep. He had both arms around him and every now and then he’d smooth down Ep’s hair or put his cheek next to his head. Ep was crying just like Leroy. I couldn’t make out what they were saying to each other. A couple times I could hear Carl telling Ep he had to hang on, that’s all anybody can do is hang on. I was afraid they were going to get up and see me so I hurried back to my room. I’d never seen men hold each other. I thought the only things they were allowed to do was shake hands or fight. But if Carl was holding Ep maybe it wasn’t against the rules. Since I wasn’t sure, I thought I’d keep it to myself and never tell. I was glad they could touch each other. Maybe all men did that after everyone went to bed so no one would know the toughness was for show. Or maybe they only did it when someone died. I wasn’t sure at all and it bothered me.

  The next morning the sky was black with thunderclouds, and we had to spend the whole day in the house. The rain poured down and the leak by the kitchen table opened up again so Ted went out with shingles to patch it. After the storm the sky stayed dark but across the horizon was a brilliant rainbow. We all stared in silence for a long time, then went back inside. Ep stayed on the porch to look at the rainbow. Leroy bet me I couldn’t find a pot of gold at the end, and I told him that was a stupid bet because the rainbow was enough.

  Cheryl Spiegelglass lived on the other side of the woods. Her daddy was a used car salesman and they had more money than the rest of us in the Hollow. Cheryl wore a dress, even when she didn’t have to. I hated her for that, plus she was always sucking up to the adults. Carrie loved her and said she looked exactly like Shirley Temple and why didn’t I look like that instead of roaming around the fields in torn pants and dirty teeshirts. Cheryl and I had been friends of a sort since first grade so sometimes we played together. Carrie squirmed like a dog with a new bone every time I’d go off to the Spiegelglass’s place, partly because she thought I was moving into polite society and partly because she hoped Cheryl would influence me for the better. Leroy usually tagged along. Neither Leroy nor I could stand it when Cheryl carted out her dolls, so when she had doll days we steered clear.

  One time Cheryl decided to play nurse and we put napkins on our heads. Leroy was the patient and we painted him with iodine so he’d look wounded. A nurse, I wasn’t gonna be no nurse. If I was gonna be something I was gonna be the doctor and give orders. I tore off my napkin, and told Cheryl I was the new doctor in town. Her face corroded. “You can’t be a doctor. Only boys can be doctors. Leroy’s got to be the doctor.”

  “You’re full of shit, Spiegelglass, Leroy’s dumber than I am. I got to be the doctor because I’m the smart one and being a girl don’t matter.”

  “You’ll see. You think you can do what boys do but you’re going to be a nurse, no two ways about it. It doesn’t matter about brains, brains don’t count. What counts is whether you’re a boy or a girl.”

  I hauled off and belted her one. Shirley Temple Spiegelglass wasn’t gonna tell me I couldn’t be a doctor, nor nobody else. Course I didn’t want to be a doctor. I was going to be president only I kept it a secret. But if I wanted to be a doctor I’d go be one and ain’t nobody gonna tell me otherwise. So I got in trouble, of course. Cheryl went snotty-nosed into her mother and showed her the split lip I just gave her. Ethel Spiegelglass, mother hen, came flying out of that house, with the real aluminum awnings on it, and grabbed me by the teeshirt and gave me a piece of her mind, which was very uncomplimentary to me. She told me I couldn’t see Cheryl for a week. That was fine with me. I didn’t want to see nobody who’d tell me I couldn’t be a doctor. Leroy and I started home.

  “You really gonna be a doctor, Molly?”

  “No, I ain’t. I’m gonna be something lots better than a doctor. If you’re a doctor you have to look at scabs and blood, besides only people in one place know your name. I got to be something that everybody knows my name. I’m going to be great.”

  “Great what?”

  “That’s a secret.”

  “Tell, come on, you can tell me, I’m your best friend.”

  “No, but I’ll tell you when you’re old enough to vote.”

  “When’s that?”

  “When you’re twenty-one.”

  “That’s ten years from now. I might be dead. I’ll be an old man. Tell me now.”

  “No. Forget it. Anyway, whatever I am, I’ll make sure you get some of the goodies so let me do it my own way.”

  Leroy settled for that, but with rancor.

  We got home and Carrie was hopping mad. Somehow, between my splitting Cheryl’s lip and us walking home, she gathered the news. “You big-mouthed brat. Can’t play nice, can you? Can’t act like a lady, no way. You’re a heathen, that’s what you are. You going up there and hitting that sweet child. How could you do such a thing? How am I gonna show my face around here? And you doing such a thing so soon after Jenna’s passed away. You got no sense of respect. God knows, I’ve tried to bring you up right. You’re not my child. You’re wild, some wild animal. Your father must have been an ape or something.”

  Leroy’s mouth fell open. He didn’t know about me yet. Damn, I could have killed Carrie for shooting her big mouth off right then. Why’d she have to lay me out in front of fat Leroy? She’s the one with no respect.

  She ran on and she got me for this offense and that offense as well as one hundred trespasses. She’s gonna make a lady out of me that summer, a crash program. She was going to keep
me in the house to teach me to act right, cook, clean, and sew and that scared me.

  “I can learn them things at night, you don’t have to keep me in the house during the day.”

  “You’re staying in this house with me, Miss Molly. No more going out with the roughhouse Hollow gang. That’s one of the things wrong with you that I can fix. Your blood’s another matter.”

  Leroy sat down quietly at the table and played with the diagonal pattern on the tablecloth. He wasn’t liking this no more than I was. “If Molly stays in then I stay in.”

  Leroy, I love you.

  “You ain’t staying in here, Leroy Denman. You’re a boy and you go out and play like boys are supposed to do. It’s not right for you to learn those things.”

  “I don’t care. I’m going where Molly goes. She’s my best friend and my cousin and we got to stick together.”

  Carrie tried to reason with Leroy but he wouldn’t budge until she started telling him what would happen to him if he picked up women’s ways. Now old Leroy was shaking. Everybody would point at him and laugh. Nobody would play with him if he stayed in with me and soon they’d take him to the hospital and cut his thing off. Leroy sold out.

  “Okay, Aunt Carrie, I won’t stay in the house.” He looked at me with utter defeat and guilt.

  Leroy you ain’t no friend of mine.

  Carrie went down into the root cellar to get jars and rubber rings. Canning was going to be my first lesson. Before she hit the last step I leaped at the door, shut it, and locked it. She didn’t notice it until she was ready to come up. Then she called out, “Molly, Leroy, door’s shut, let me out.”

  Leroy was scared shitless. “Molly, let her out or they’ll beat both of us good. Ep will get out the strap. You let her out.”

  “You take one step toward that door Leroy Denman and I’ll slit your throat.” I picked up the carving knife to make my words true. Leroy was between the devil and the deep blue sea.

  “Molly, let me outa this root cellar!”

  “I ain’t lettin’ you outa that root cellar until you promise to let me go free. Till you promise I don’t have to stay in this house and learn to sew.”

  “I’ll promise no such thing.”

  “Then you staying in that root cellar until Jesus comes back.” I walked out the door and slammed it so she could hear, dragging Leroy with me every step of the way. No one was home. Florence was down at West York Market. Ted was at the Esso station, and Carl and Ep were at work. No one could hear her pounding on that door and screaming her lungs out except Leroy and me. Her screams just scalded Leroy. “She’s dying in there. You got to let her out. She’ll go blind in the dark. Molly, please let her out.”

  “She ain’t dying in there, she ain’t going blind and I ain’t lettin’ her out.”

  “What’d she mean about you not being her child? About you being an animal?”

  “She don’t know what she’s talking about. Talking through her hat. Don’t pay no attention to her.”

  “Well, you don’t look like her nor Carl neither. You don’t look like any of us. Maybe you ain’t hers. You’re the only one in the Hollow with black hair and brown eyes. Hey, maybe she found you in the bull rushes like Moses.”

  “Shut up, Leroy.” He was on the track. He was bound to find out sooner or later, since Carrie let the cat outa the bag so I guessed I’d have to tell him. “It’s true what she says. I ain’t hers. I don’t belong to nobody. I got no true mother nor father and I ain’t your real cousin. And this ain’t my home. But it don’t matter. It matters to her when she gets mad at me. She says I’m a bastard then. But it don’t matter to me. But we’re still cousins in our own way. Blood’s just something old people talk about to make you feel bad. Hey Leroy, you don’t care none, do you?”

  Leroy was buckling under the weight of the news. “If we ain’t true cousins then what are we? We got to be something.”

  “We’re friends, though we might as well be cousins cause we’re together all the time.”

  “What does it mean, bastard? What’s the difference between you and me if you ain’t Carrie and Carl’s?”

  “It means that your mother, Jenna, was married to Ep when she had you and my mother, whoever she is, wasn’t married to my dad, whoever he is. That’s exactly what it means.”

  “Well hell, Molly, what’s being married?”

  “It’s a piece of paper, that’s all I can figure. Some people don’t even have to stand in front of a preacher, so it ain’t religion. You can go on down to the courthouse and sign up like Uncle Ep signed up for the Marine Corps. Then you hear words said over you and you both sign this piece of paper and you’re married.”

  “Could we get married?”

  “Sure, but we got to be old, fifteen or sixteen, at least.”

  “That’s only four more years, Molly. Let’s get married.”

  “Leroy, we don’t need to get married. We’re together all the time. It’s silly to get married. Besides I’m never gettin’ married.”

  “Everybody gets married. It’s something you have to do, like dying.”

  “I ain’t doin’ it.”

  “I don’t know, Molly, you’re headin’ for a hard life. You say you’re gonna be a doctor or something great. Then you say you ain’t gettin’ married. You have to do some of the things everybody does or people don’t like you.”

  “I don’t care whether they like me or not. Everybody’s stupid, that’s what I think. I care if I like me, that’s what I truly care about.”

  “Now that’s the damndest dumb thing I ever heard. Everybody likes themself. Fact, Florence says you got to learn not to like yourself so much and like other people.”

  “Since when have you started listening to Florence? I can’t like anybody if I don’t like myself. Period.”

  “Molly, you are flat out crazy. Everybody likes themself, I am telling you.”

  “Oh yeah, smartass? Did you like yourself when you told Carrie you’d go out and play and leave me trapped inside with a sewing basket?”

  Leroy’s face flashed shame. Bull’s eye. He switched the subject to save himself having to think on that one any more. “If you’re not gonna get married then I won’t either. Why do people get married anyway?”

  “So’s they can fuck.”

  “What?” Leroy’s voice went into a high-pitched trail.

  “Fuck.”

  “Molly Bolt, that is a dirty word.”

  “Dirty or not, that’s what they do.”

  “Do you know what it means?”

  “Not exactly but it has something to do with taking all your clothes off and messing around. Remember how upset Florence got when those two dogs were stuck together? That’s what it is, I think. I don’t know why anyone would want to do it, because those dogs didn’t look very happy about it. I know that’s what it is, besides I seen dirty books Ted hides under his mattress and you should see them. It’d make you sick for sure.”

  “Dirty books?”

  “Yeah, Ted’s been reading them ever since his voice started cracking. You ask me, I think his mind is cracking right along with it, myself.”

  “How’d you find out he was reading them?”

  “Spied on him. After you go to sleep he turns the light back on so I knew he was up to something and I snuck out for a peek. There he was reading. Now the only books in this house are the Bible and our school books. I know he ain’t reading none of them.”

  “You are truly smart, Molly,” Leroy said with admiration.

  “Yeah, I know.”

  Carrie’s screams and poundings had died down by this time. “Let’s go back and see if she is ready to make a deal.”

  A soft whimper came from behind the cellar door when I knocked on it. “Mom, you ready to come out now? You ready to make that deal?”

  “I’m ready, just let me outa this dark hole. It’s full of bugs.”

  I unbolted the door and opened it. Carrie was sitting on the root cellar steps like a little girl, h
olding her arms and crunched over. She looked up at me with pure hate and flew out of the cellar like a jack-in-the-box. She grabbed me by the hair before I could dodge and started hitting me in the face, stomach, and when I doubled over like a porcupine, she hit me on the back with both fists at once. I could feel my eye start to close up already. I was so busy trying to get away from her that I didn’t hear what she was calling me. Leroy fled the house in total terror. He didn’t once try to gang up on her. If he’d blasted her with a couple good kicks, I might have gotten away. But Leroy never was tactical, plus he had a streak of the coward in him.

  That night I was sent to bed without supper. I didn’t care because I couldn’t eat my supper anyway. My mouth was all swelled up ugly, and it hurt to talk. The whole crew got Carrie’s version of my sins and I couldn’t open my mouth in self-defense. I guess she thought she’d shame me in front of all of them, but I stared at her with real pride as I marched into the bedroom. She wasn’t going to beat me down, no how. Let’em all get mad at me, I wasn’t giving her a goddamned inch, not one. I crawled in bed but I was so sore I couldn’t sleep and late that night I heard Carrie and Carl get in a blowout. Only time I ever heard Carl raise his voice, and I bet the rest of the house heard him too. “Carrie, the child’s high-spirited and she’s smart, you got to remember that. That kid’s quicker than all of us put together. She started reading all by herself when she was three with no help from any of us. You got to treat her with some respect for her brains. She’s a good girl, just full of life and the devil, that’s all.”

  “I don’t give a goddamn how brainy she is, she don’t act natural. It ain’t right for a girl to be running all around with the boys at all hours. She climbs trees, takes cars apart, and worse, she tells them what to do and they listen to her. She don’t want to learn none of the things she has to know to get a husband. Smart as she is, a woman can’t get on in this world without a husband. We can’t be sending no girl to school as it is. It’s the boys we got to worry about. Them’s the ones will be earning livings. You make too much of her head.”