When I tiptoe out of the piano room, I see the narrow strip of light under Mrs. Pence’s bedroom door and know she has been awake and listening.
9
Friday. Payday. At the little grilled window in the foyer of the administration building, I stop to ask for my check, and the woman behind the grill rummages through a file until she finds mine.
“Ruth Jarvis, right? With a G? How do you like working for Old Stone Face?”
“Okay.”
“Better you than me. Do you want to sign up for direct deposit?” she asks, and I realize I’m going to have to open a checking account.
With my check in hand, I push open the plate glass door at the end of the corridor and catch up with Jamie on the stone steps.
“Look at that, will you?” says Jamie.
Across the street from the administration building, on the strip of lawn by the firs, a young man in a red T-shirt and a baseball cap, a golf club in his hands, leans over a little white ball.
“Who is he? What’s he doing?”
“He’s practicing his putting. At least that’s what he wants us to think he’s doing.”
He glances up, sees we’re watching him, and gives the bill of his cap a sharp tug. Then he hunches over the ball and gives it a mild tap with his putter. The ball rolls about fifteen feet, and he gives us another furtive look as he goes to retrieve it.
“That’s Dustin.”
“Catina’s Dustin?”
“The boy himself.”
Jamie and I watch as he lines up his ball again and putts it in our direction. Something is self-conscious about his abrupt movements and the looks he sneaks in our direction. I don’t know much about golf, but I know I’m seeing a performance.
“What he’s really doing is watching for Catina. He’s making sure she isn’t stopping to talk to any other guys.”
We watch while he putts the ball once more. I can’t see much of his face under the bill of his cap, but he has a nice ass. And Catina really is late. Up until today she had shot out of the office ahead of Jamie and me at four thirty.
“Well—” Jamie shrugs. “Enjoy your weekend.”
On my way home from campus I stop at the branch bank in the Orchards and open an account and deposit my check. It’s a small one because I’ve only worked five days, but it’s enough for now. After I set aside the money to repay Mrs. Pence for my clothes, I can buy the little fan at the hardware store in the shopping strip and also a few things at the Safeway, including tampons, which I had dreaded having to ask Mrs. Pence to purchase for me.
I hear a piano as I open the front door. Another lesson in progress, another pupil trying to play “The Happy Farmer” but missing the B flat and having to start over. Finish it! I want to scream, and wonder how Mrs. Pence stands it.
I set my bag from Safeway on the kitchen table and look around for utensils. With a cutting board and a fairly decent knife, I slice chicken breasts and dice the celery and onion. Mrs. Pence doesn’t possess a wok, of course, but I’ve often watched Bill the Drummer improvise. One time he scrubbed out a hubcap and cooked stir-fry at the side of a highway. I’ll sauté the chicken and vegetables and then scramble an egg or two into leftover rice from the refrigerator. White rice and beans obviously are Mrs. Pence’s staples, meatloaf a splurge, and I don’t want to face another week of the bland and tasteless.
“The Happy Farmer” player blunders away in the piano room—ta-dah, ta dah, ta-dah-ta-dah-ta-dah and another missed flat and a restart—while I lace my fried rice with soy sauce. By the time Mrs. Pence dismisses the student and comes to find out what’s happening in her kitchen, my stir-fry smells as good to me as anything Bill the Drummer ever cooked.
Mrs. Pence looks from me to the skillet, then rummages in a cupboard, brings out a bottle of white wine, and uses a dish towel to wipe the dust out of two glasses.
“A bit of a celebration!”
We toast each other with wine that’s warm and flat.
“It was a present from a student,” Mrs. Pence explains, “some years ago.”
She looks too thin to me, and too pale, as though she hasn’t been getting outside the house enough. Her plates look like the survivors of several sets of china, her assortment of tarnished sterling silver knives and forks a medley of unmatched patterns. I pick up an oversized fork in an ornate floral design and am surprised as always by its weight and the way it holds the heat of the food. Had she brought the sterling from England with her? Why all the odd patterns? I’ve seldom heard her speak of England and then only in a sidelong way, right after she adopted the puppy, which was not long before I left with the Rivermen: His name is Jonathan because he is an American dog.
She picks at the fried rice, and I worry that the soy sauce has too much tang for her after all her bland food. But she eats a little of the chicken and then folds her napkin.
“So, the job turns out to be—well, not unsuitable?”
What to tell her. That the work isn’t difficult. And the campus isn’t the place of lofty vision I always feared. Maybe the great ones are thinking their thoughts at some high level where the air has thinned, but the corridors and stairs and front offices belong to the secretaries and clerks.
But working in the Office of Student Accounting is like waking up and finding myself in the middle of an animated cartoon. That remote third-floor space, inhabited by a fireplug woman and a glad girl of ringlets and bright colors, overseen by a gray robot and haunted by someone they call the Queen—and I suppose I’m as strange as any of them in my cheap black clothes chosen by Mrs. Pence—that office is also a safe space where information seems to float up to the third floor like warm air.
By the end of the first week I’ve learned that Dr. Brenner—Old Stone Face—frightens people but is a decent boss; that a woman in computer services wears long sleeves to hide the needle tracks on her arms; and that everybody but Catina believes Dustin the Golfer is a jerk, although a really cute jerk. I’m sure the news that Dr. Brenner has hired Ruby Jarvis, of all people, already has filtered through the corridors.
“Don’t musicians in bands gossip about each other?” asks Mrs. Pence.
I think about that. “They’re mostly guys. They know things about each other, but they don’t talk as much.”
Of course, in the case of the Rivermen, Gall and Brazos had known each other since high school in Boise and Bill the Drummer almost as long. I used to listen to them reminisce. There was one story they told about a big Samoan who hung around the basement where they practiced. I never understood what was so hilarious about the Samoan, but they would laugh so hard that Gall once spilled his beer down the front of his shirt and they all laughed harder.
“The job is all right,” I assure Mrs. Pence. “It’s going to be okay.”
The truth is, I feel removed. Like something has been removed from me. Well, the appendix, yes, the useless bit of flesh, and maybe the surgical incision stands for some deeper removal. A fragment of a familiar song—let it rain, and let the rain heal my heart—from the speakers of a passing car still wrenches me. I have to guard my thoughts by cutting off any stray creepers that lead back to the bad places. But here in Versailles, so far removed from Gall and where time has looped back into scenes pretending to be their former selves, I walk through the days. I rattle my data into my computer, come back to Mrs. Pence’s house and wake from dreams I can’t remember, and I prowl downstairs to play the piano in the dead of night. Something has been removed all right. Nothing has been added.
On Monday morning I climb the three flights of stairs to the Office of Student Accounting and, even as I open the door, sense a storm so strong I think I’ve wandered into an alternate time zone. The coffee has been brewed and the plants watered, but Jamie stares into her computer screen without glancing in my direction.
“The Queen’s back from her vacation,” she whispers when I’m near enough to hear. “I hope the hell Catina gets to work on time, for once in her life.”
I uncover
my computer and look around the long room where Jamie and Catina and I work. At each end of the room is a polished walnut door. One door is Dr. Brenner’s. We see him coming and going, silent and skeletal and gray, and once in a while he sticks his head out to speak to Jamie, but otherwise he stays in his office and minds his own business.
Whose is the other office? I’ve never bothered to read the nameplate on the door, just as I’ve never been curious about the identity of the Queen Jamie and Catina whisper about, and now it’s too late because a woman is walking through the outer doorway, and I recognize her just as she recognizes me.
Anne Roscovitch.
At first I think Anne hasn’t aged a day—the same big blue eyes, the long pointed nose, the blonde hair down to her shoulders—but of course she’s aged. Anne was in her teens when I was eight, and now her cheekbones have sharpened and lines have etched her lips, and she’s dressed in a way I’ve seen none of the women on campus dress, in an expensive blue silk suit and blue stiletto heels. Her eyes lock mine, and I feel as though I’m looking through sunspots.
Catina picks that moment to sidle in. She looks from one to the other of us with apprehensive eyes.
“What are you doing here?” says Anne.
I’m still holding the cover to my computer. I can’t speak.
“She’s the new data entry,” says Jamie.
“She’s what?”
“The data entry position? The temp hire? Dr. Brenner said to get somebody in who could type and was accurate—”
“Dr. Brenner did this? Do you know who she is?”
“Ruth Gervais?”
“She’s Ruby Jarvis!”
Anne turns on her five-inch heels, marches to Dr. Brenner’s door, raps twice, lets herself in without waiting, and closes the door behind her.
The silence is so profound that I hear Catina breathing through her mouth. I sit down because I have to. I lay the computer cover on the desk. I look at the desk. Gray metal surface, gray metal sides. Three small drawers that hold nothing. I imagine myself crawling under the desk, down on the industrial-grade carpeting among the dust rolls and lost paper clips and forgotten ballpoint pens. On my computer the screen saver pattern expands and contracts.
I’ve always known I’d eventually run into someone in Versailles who remembers me and hates me. I just never thought it would be Anne Roscovitch.
Jamie leans over my desk. “Better drink your coffee,” she says, and sets a cup in front of me. But the coffee sloshes when I try to lift the cup to my mouth.
“Are you okay?”
No, I’m not. But I’m not eight years old either, and I raise my head and will my hands to stop shaking.
“Catina, you’ve got the phone. Ruth, you come with me.”
Jamie leads me down the polished granite corridor, past the open doors of serene offices where women bend over their work, where a telephone is answered mid-ring and conversation is low and discreet. She stops at a locked door, which she opens with a key from the bunch she carries.
“Private restroom for staff. That’s us,” she says, and relocks the door behind us.
Someone has gone to a lot of trouble to make this space pleasant. White wicker furniture with flowered cushions, an ornamental mirror over the sink, and a vase of plastic tulips at a window that overlooks a sidewalk and a slice of lawn. I drop down on the settee and look at the floor of discolored octagonal tiles that wicker and plastic flowers can’t disguise. My feet look foreign to me in the black heeled shoes and black hose selected by Mrs. Pence. Somebody else’s feet.
Jamie sits beside me. She’s so short that her feet dangle. I take a deep breath and listen to the silence and the small sounds, pipes gurgling from a flushed toilet somewhere and voices from the sidewalk under the window, as indistinct as the chatter of birds.
“I take it you know Anne Albert.”
“Anne Albert?”
“She’s just staff like us but a high grade, a twelve or thirteen. Look, I don’t know what the problem is, but don’t worry—she can’t get you fired.”
I hadn’t thought that far ahead.
But Jamie exudes calm, and I will myself to listen to what she’s telling me about Anne.
“She’s from Boise. Rotten childhood and so forth. Ended up in foster care here in Versailles.”
“That’s how I knew her. We were in foster care together.”
Jamie gives me a sharp look. “I don’t know the whole story, I grew up in Bozeman myself, didn’t move up here until a few years ago. But give her credit—she got her act together and graduated from this college. She started working on campus as a clerk, and then Dr. Brenner hired her as his administrative assistant, which is what they call a secretary now. Don’t worry about her. She’s just pissed because Dr. Brenner went out and hired you without asking her permission. She’ll get over it or she won’t, but either way it won’t matter.”
Maybe it matters, and maybe it doesn’t, but I’m soothed by Jamie’s certainty. No holes in Jamie’s mind, no fears.
“She’s married to a rich doctor here in town. Francis Albert. That’s why she can buy the kind of clothes she does. Are you okay now? We need to get back and see how Catina’s doing. And—we need to get you out of those goddamn Walmart black clothes. You look like you’re wearing stuff your grandmother picked out for you. How old are you anyway?
10
Catina ducked out at four fifteen while Jamie was in Dr. Brenner’s office, conferring with him about something. I’m entering my last few rows of student data and keeping myself from time traveling by trying to think what I might pick up at Safeway for dinner when I catch a whiff of sharp scent and turn on my swivel chair to see Anne in her five-inch heels, towering over me in my chair. When she speaks, it’s in a shaky whisper.
“Don’t think I don’t know why you’re here!”
I hear the ratchet of one of the printers shutting down.
“Don’t think that you can hurt me now! Because you can’t! You can’t! You can’t!”
Her hands are trembling as badly as her voice. “I’m not afraid of you, Ruby Jarvis! You liar! You liar!”
Her blazing blue gaze holds mine, but her face is working, and suddenly she turns on her stilettos and runs out the door.
*
The Chopin Prelude in E Minor is more difficult than “Für Elise,” and I finally resort to clicking on the piano light and turning the pages of the Schirmer book until I find the music. Even then, the sad chords resist me until I work out the right hand and then the left at a tempo too slow to call a tempo. After all the years playing an electronic keyboard and then typing at a computer keyboard, the piano keys are asking my fingers for a force they’ve lost.
But line by line I find my way. How long have I been playing? I don’t know. Line by line, over and over, until my heartbeat slows and my breathing slows and whatever I had dreamed about has faded. I’m mindless, lost not in sound alone but in the weaving of sound into a web that contains me above a bottomless chasm. And then I come to the end, and my mind switches back on.
It had been a long day. When Jamie and I came back from the staff restroom, I tried to concentrate on my rows of names and numbers even with Anne seething behind her closed door. She hadn’t talked long with Dr. Brenner, Catina whispered. She walked out of his office and into her own and closed the door and hadn’t come back out.
I tell myself to think about something else. Think about music. Think about a tenor voice that, once heard, is hard to forget. Gall sings that it’s a hard way—take a deep breath while the instrumental line fills in—to find out. No, don’t think about that. Don’t think about the hickory wind and trouble that’s real.
And don’t think about Anne or her strange words. The way her voice shook. Why would she be afraid of me?
*
I’m sitting cross-legged in one corner of Brad Gilcannon’s TV-watching room, as they call the living room at his house. Isaiah and the other big boys in Brad’s fosterage are somewhere, maybe sh
ooting hoops in the driveway. Brad’s own little boys are sitting on the floor watching cartoons. Brad, out of uniform, has stretched out in his recliner, and Anne is cuddled up beside him. A father and his pretty teenaged daughter, anyone watching from outside the window might think. I’m only eight years old, and I haven’t been fostered with Brad for long but long enough to know that Anne is special. She makes straight As in high school, and she has medication she must take at exact times without fail. Her blonde hair tickles Brad’s face when she bends toward him, and he brushes it away and laughs. She traces the outline of his top shirt button with her finger, and then they both look up and see that I’m watching them.
Ruby’s got truth issues, says the tweed jacket woman when she leads me into Brad’s living room. We can’t get her to tell the truth about her bruises.
We’ll take care of that, says Brad. The heat in Brad’s house is turned up higher than the heat in my mother’s house or the Mister’s house ever was, and the lights are so bright that I squint against them. Brad’s wife stands in the kitchen door. She has faded brown hair clipped short in a cap around her face, and she holds her hands cupped like a basket in front of her stomach, and I wonder if her stomach hurts. I know, or maybe I learn later, that the two little boys playing with action figures on the floor belong to her and Brad, but the others are foster kids like I’m going to be.
The tweed jacket woman bends down to speak into my face. You don’t have to worry here. Mr. Gilcannon is a policeman. It’s his job to protect little girls like you.
Have her step in here so she can meet the other kids, he says.
In the living room four boys, one of them a black boy, watch television while an older girl keeps her book open and takes notes on what she is reading. Her long blonde hair falls over her face like a curtain.
Ruby Dreams of Janis Joplin Page 5
