“I thought I was taking you—”
“I can’t get in the car with you. Not if you’re high.”
He drops to the sidewalk. Just crumples so that he’s sitting on the curb, his head in his hands. From above, she watches as he begins shaking. “Who’s going to take care of me? I don’t have anyone.”
“Ruby!”
She raises her eyes and sees her brother, standing at the curb, with George nearby. She’d been so intent on Chris she’d forgotten that all of this was in view of Alice’s house. And she hadn’t realized that the rest of them were there, too, the whole sordid gang—Alice, Benjamin, Dorian, Cicely, Nick—gathered on the porch like they’re posing for a yearbook photo. The Wasted Club. Mean Kids of America. The Young and the Useless. All of them, taking in the show. Captivated. At least Calvin is not among them—a small blessing. Thank you, God.
Robin marches toward her, carrying her overnight bag. “It’s time,” he says. “I just put in a call to Clark.”
“You did?”
“He said thanks for making his Father’s Day so special.”
She scowls, certain that this isn’t true. Clark isn’t sarcastic like that. She wants Robin to understand what she’s been through. “OK, OK, we’ll go. But you haven’t met Chris yet, have you?”
Robin looks down at Chris, slumped beneath them. “We met,” he says, icily.
Chris’s smooth, pale face is now damp with tears. “I was hoping Ruby could stay,” he mutters. He lifts his arm to Ruby, as if to keep from sinking.
George is there, next to Robin. Always at his side. Why is George here, anyway? Why did Robin have to bring him? George, however, does something remarkable. He crouches down next to Chris and very gently but clearly says, “Hey, brother, listen. It’s just not the right time, OK?”
Chris flicks his head toward George. He casts his sad eyes upon them all. “Guys, you don’t know me, so maybe you won’t believe me, but—I’m in love with Ruby.”
So it is true. He’s feeling what she’s feeling. He’s going to forgive her.
“That’s great,” Robin says, not very convincingly. “But how about some perspective, OK? If you love somebody, set them free, right?”
“Right,” George adds. “Love is patient. Love conquers all.”
Ruby tightens her hand around Chris’s. “Why are you guys being such jerks?”
Robin begins to back away, but he keeps his eyes on her. “I’m giving you one more minute. One.”
She can see that she really has to go.
“What are you going to do?” she asks Chris.
“Go back to the motel, I guess. The sheets still have you in them.”
She leans in for one more kiss, taking his face in her hands. His mouth responds desperately. They sink into each other. At the same time she feels herself carried up and away from the lies and the angry words, from the pain. She is free again, free from doubt, as she’d been last night, when she put her trust in him. This has all been a test—this kiss is the proof that they have passed. Are the others still watching? Let them. Let them see there’s something strong here, stronger than what any of them have ever known. Let them witness this. True love should have a witness.
“Damn, that scene was white,” George says as the three of them move down the sidewalk, “White people, white music, white drugs.”
“Now you know why I didn’t stick around last night,” Ruby says.
“Because you’re not white?”
She flinches at George’s sarcasm, which is so unlike him. “Because it was gross,” she says.
They reach a big gray Cadillac, which Ruby recognizes as George’s, going all the way back to Greenlawn. His parents always had Cadillacs. They passed the old ones on to their kids and bought a new one every few years. It seemed so showy at the time, all those big boats. But now the body is dinged and scratched, the back bumper dented. Age—or West Philly—has taken its toll.
“Can I have shotgun?” she asks. “So I don’t get sick again?”
“No. You can’t,” Robin says, and gets in the passenger side.
She looks at George as if he might help, but he simply slips in behind the wheel.
For the first time it occurs to her to wonder how the two of them wound up here. There was no plan for this. Someone called Robin. Someone called because she was missing. Which means this whole thing got bigger than she ever stopped to consider.
As soon as George steers the car toward the long, broad bridge that spans the bay, Robin spins around in his seat. “Do you mind telling me what the fuck you’ve been thinking?”
So condescending. So aggressive. So Robin. He could have just eased into a conversation instead of going for the jugular. Now she has to defend herself, after he’s seen her leaning over the toilet, seen the coke on the table, the empty keg on the porch, the bottles everywhere all over the house. Seen the results of punches thrown, and Chris in tears. She says. “I didn’t ask you to come here.”
“No, your boyfriend did.”
“Things are over between me and Calvin.”
“You should thank him,” Robin says. “He was worried about you.”
“You’re just taking his side—”
“There are no sides here, Ruby.”
“—because you want to be in his dumb movie.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“He’s never going to make a movie, Robin. He’s all talk. He never works for anything.”
“He worked pretty hard to find you.” She hears a quivering in Robin’s voice that tells her she has rattled him. He does care about Calvin’s movie. It’s not surprising—he’s so focused on what he wants, he hasn’t considered that getting involved with Calvin would impact her. Robin adds, “For all his faults, Calvin means well.”
“Too bad he’s such a lousy kisser.”
From the driver’s seat, George lets out a low whistle. “Harsh.”
She hates that George is here, that Robin has an ally while she’s on her own. It’s like when she first started dressing the way she wanted to, and Dorothy called in Nana so they could gang up on her. Not good cop/bad cop, but bad cop times two. Maybe it’s better if she says nothing at all. She doesn’t owe them anything.
But Robin persists. Did she have this all planned out ahead of time? Was she with him all night? Nobody knew where she was! She was facedown in the bathroom! On and on like that, until she snaps, “I’m not some damsel in distress, so stop trying to play the hero.”
George catches her eye in the rearview mirror. “You got in a bar brawl.”
Robin adds, “George left his shift early, so we could find you.”
“I didn’t ask George to get involved.”
“But he did. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”
George says, “I seem to remember a message on our machine—”
“That message was for Robin. This is between me and my brother.”
George says, “I just thought you might appreciate another point of view.”
“Since when is your view any different from his? You follow him around like a puppy.”
“Excuse me?” He pivots and glares at her—it’s nerve-racking, the way he takes his eyes off the road. She’s aware now of the traffic thickening around them as they approach the bridge.
“I’m just saying, George, speak for yourself.”
“Speaking for myself, how about I kick you out of my car?”
“Fine with me. I’ll call Chris.”
Robin says, “Ruby, stop being so obstinate.”
Obstinate? she wants to shout. I’m trying to stand up for myself. But saying this out loud would sound childish, like “You’re not the boss of me,” and they won’t be convinced, anyway. They pushed her into an argument that she can’t win, and now whatever she says will only prove to them that she’s at fault. At fault for what? Causing worry? Is that such a crime?
She takes a deep breath. Scrambles for another tactic. Says, “You’ve been doing what you want your whole life, Ro
bin. Without telling anyone where you were going or who you were with. So don’t moralize.”
He is silent for a moment. Then he says, “That’s different.” But there’s not much strength in the statement.
A point for me. Finally. “Look, my head is pounding, and I just puked my guts out. You don’t even know what I’ve been through.”
She expects him to just leave her be, but of course, her brother never lets anyone else have the last word. He always has to win. So she’s not surprised when he says, “We’ve been through some shit, too.” And she’s also not surprised when he punctuates this by turning on the radio and with an angry flick of his wrist, cranking the volume. It must have been tuned to some other station, now out of reach, because a blast of static erupts. She watches him spin the knob until he picks up something familiar, the “Hey, hey, hey, hey” of that song from The Breakfast Club. She can picture the singer in the video, in his sharp suit and floppy hair, encircled by monitors, faces whizzing by as if everything in his life is closing in.
Why did she get in the car with them? Why didn’t she stay with Chris? This is torture. She chose this, instead of doing what Chris had asked—she could have gone back to their room, spent another night being treated like someone special instead of someone being blamed for everything. Instead, she left things with him on shaky ground. All those accusations. He was trying to forgive her, and she was such a bitch. But that last kiss. Maybe that was enough to let him understand.
She glances through the back window at the receding town—water tower, squat little houses, billboards advertising real estate. There’s the Ferris wheel in the distance, looping people round and round, dropping them off where they started. She has the sensation of being pulled in two directions at once—toward her family and toward her lover. She looks at the ring on her finger, the fake red stone, wishing it was a crystal ball that would reveal to her his face, his state of mind. Is he at the motel already? Is he lying in their bed and thinking of her? Is he mad, upset, afraid? What if he’s miserable, feeling hopeless, what if he’s given up on her? She forms an image of him walking out of their hotel room, across the beach, toward the ocean. He passes oblivious families and girls in bikinis rubbing Coppertone on each other’s shoulders, the lifeguards unaware that the boy in the black jeans has rocks in his pockets. Would anyone stop him? Or will the riptide pull him in and under, his last steps invisible to every living soul? Please, God, she starts, a plea for his safety. But she cuts off her own thought. There is no assurance from above, from the great beyond. When has there ever been? God won’t save Chris. Only she can.
What is she thinking there, in the backseat, her head turned toward the ocean, her gaze upon the town they’ve left behind? Is she retracing her steps, wishing she had made better decisions, wishing that she hadn’t vanished for a night and a day? Is there any sense of remorse in her, or is she simply mooning over that messed-up boy? Robin wants to yell at her again, and keep at it, until there’s some sign that she gets just how much disruption she caused and how dangerous it was to go off with a stranger like that. On this day, of all days! And yet, the fact that she’s here with him, that they’re in the car together, driving away, is such an enormous relief that he wants simply to embrace her. Really, the way she looked on that bathroom floor, he feared for a moment she might be dead.
It was petty of him, not letting her have the front seat. He remembers all too well her motion sickness from when they were little kids. Long trips were always a problem. She’d hit a point where her face would drain to a sudden pale green, as if her blood had been replaced by poison, and they’d have to pull over quickly. Sometimes she threw up. Sometimes she just needed to stand still and breathe fresh air for a while. Then she’d take the passenger seat, and Dorothy would switch to the back. Robin would take the hump in the middle, because even though Jackson was smaller he could never sit still and he would drive Dorothy crazy as he bounced up and down, chattering nonstop.
Not long before Dorothy and Clark announced their separation there was a road trip to Massachusetts to see Nana in Northampton. There was no Jackson then. There was the abyss where he had been, a vacuum, a force without shape. An hour into the journey, Dorothy, sitting up front, lit a cigarette. Her smoking, which for years had been covert and intermittent, had emerged after the funeral as a regular habit. A minute later, Ruby was complaining, “It’s giving me a headache,” to which Dorothy said, “It’s psychosomatic,” a word Robin had never heard before, though he instantly grasped Dorothy’s meaning: Ruby wasn’t really feeling sick from the smoke, she simply didn’t like it, and she was making it worse for herself. But as Ruby began to moan, Robin saw that it was his mother who was making it worse. “Dad,” Robin said, speaking up for his sister, “you might have to pull the car over.” Since they were on the highway, a quick stop was impossible, so Clark yelled at Dorothy to put it out. “I’m exhaling out the window,” she said, “it’s not even reaching the backseat.” She took a few final fitful puffs, before flicking her fingers and sending the butt flying to the road. For the rest of the day, Ruby sulked, and Dorothy found reasons to snap at her.
That day for Robin came to be a marker: the start of a long period of open hostility between his mother and his sister. It got so bad that when Dorothy first told him she had found an apartment in Manhattan, he was afraid she wouldn’t take Ruby along with them, would leave her in Greenlawn with Clark. There was never any real chance of this happening, but the notion had power. A foundation of doubt had solidified, and until all three of them actually relocated, he found himself asking his mother again and again about her plans for Ruby: what school would she go to, how would she get to school, what would her new bedroom be like, was the kitchen large enough for a table they all could sit at together? Each answer was a bulwark against an even greater splitting of their family. He knew he couldn’t keep his parents together, but his sister was his responsibility.
So what do you say to your little sister when she has clearly fucked up, but you’ve spent most of your life trying to shield her from harm? Shouldn’t he just forget everything that happened over the past day? She wasn’t kidnapped or raped; she’d emerged with only a scratch and some nausea. She would recover from drinking too much. He will get her back to safety, and they’ll be together on Jackson’s birthday, as she wanted all along.
Don’t you forget about me, I’ll be alone, dancing you know it baby. He likes this song, likes the catchy way it ends in a string of la-la-la-la. He sings along, tries to take his mind off all this drama.
But it’s that boy. Chris. It’s the fact that he didn’t keep her from harm. It’s the sight of the two of them arguing in the middle of the street one minute and then making out the next. Who does that? One of those creepy straight boys expecting a girl to take care of him, even when she’s someone else’s girlfriend. The type who claims to be in love to justify the fact that he pressured her into sex. Ugh, did Ruby have sex with him? She never did with Calvin; there was only that one brute in high school, the one who pressured her into sex without a condom. Did she use a condom with Chris? In the message she left on the answering machine, Ruby said something about knowing this guy from her God Squad days. If he’s a Catholic, maybe he doesn’t believe in birth control. The Roman Catholics have been railing against condom use, even with the news that it can stop AIDS. Robin has memories of her on the phone with a boy back then, lengthy conversations behind closed doors. So this strung-out character is the same one she met at a Catholic retreat all those years ago? Unbelievable.
George is watching him, reading the worry on Robin’s face, reaching across to stroke the back of his hair. Their eyes hold.
Hours ago, during the ride into Seaside, anger had flared between them; now, heading out into the slow-moving exodus, they are once again on the same team. Ruby’s troubles have given them a way to stand together. He closes his eyes and accepts what George is offering: a sensation of being held in the palm of his hand.
Geor
ge looks into the rearview mirror. “I think Her Highness fell asleep.”
Indeed, her eyes are closed; her breath makes a soft whistling sound. Her face still carries some tension, as if she’s fallen off in the midst of bad emotion.
“You know how all of this could have been avoided?” George asks.
“How’s that?”
“If we all had car phones. She could have reached us here, and we could have turned around hours ago.”
“Ha! But that still would’ve depended on Ruby actually calling someone.”
“My Pop was talking about getting one. His guy at the Cadillac dealer says you can get one for the car that runs off the lighter. It’s the wave of the future.”
“I hope I live to see it,” Robin says.
“What’s that mean?”
“Nothing.”
As they merge onto the Garden State Parkway, the evening is still bright as the early afternoon, maybe even brighter, now that the final traces of last night’s storm clouds have been blown from the sky, leaving pale blue in every direction. If the traffic isn’t too bad, they’ll get to Greenlawn before darkness falls.
June 16th. It’s one of the longest days of the year, and it feels like it, like the daylight will never fade, like the night will never come and put all of this to rest.
Robin looks into the backseat again. “I think she really is sleeping.”
George says, “You missed the craziest part of the whole thing. When Calvin threw a chair at the other guy.”
“Actually threw it?”
“Picked it up and just—” He makes a thrusting gesture, as if he was ramming the steering wheel into the dashboard. “And what’s his name, Chris? He was only a few feet away so it really knocked him into the wall. Calvin just stood there, like he couldn’t believe his own strength. But then, wham, Chris just charged at him. Most people, if someone threatens them, they back away, just by instinct, right? This guy was the total opposite. He just went for it. Came back swinging, and one of them connected with Calvin’s face.”
Robin and Ruby Page 25
