Robin and Ruby

by K. M. Soehnlein

  On Bergen Avenue, George slows down, clicks on the blinker as if to turn in to the driveway. But there’s a car already there: Dorothy’s Maxima.

  “Mom’s here?” Ruby asks.

  “I guess she’s in the house.”

  Ruby groans. “I must be in major trouble, if she’s waiting inside.”

  Robin looks at George. “Not sure you’re going to want to stay for this.”

  “Your mom’ll be pissed if I don’t say hello.”

  They wander up the driveway, which is a fresh, deep black; Clark had it repaved after the winter snow melted. Robin lags behind Ruby. It’s her day. Her mess. She can lead the parade. She lugs her bag as if it weighs a hundred pounds.

  When they turn into the backyard, they meet the sight of their mother, atop the stoop, her arm holding the screen ajar. Such a familiar sight: all those times he came up the driveway to find her in this doorway, stopping him before he could enter so that she could say whatever absolutely had to be said, right away. But today, this strategic motherly ambush is not directed his way.

  “Ruby Regina MacKenzie,” Dorothy says. “You scared me to death.”

  Ruby for her part says only, “Where’s Dad?” The audacity of this strikes Robin as almost cruel. It’s Clark’s house now, she seems to imply. I answer to him.

  “He’s in his office.”

  “I need to clean up.” Ruby steps into the doorway, forcing Dorothy to make room for her and her bag, and passes into the kitchen.

  “She got carsick,” Robin offers.

  “Is she all right?”

  “I think so,” Robin says gently, kissing his mother on the cheek and following his sister inside.

  Dorothy says, “George, maybe you can enlighten me?”

  “I’m just the driver,” he says.

  “I promise, I won’t kill the messenger.”

  “Everyone chill out,” Ruby calls from the kitchen, which strikes Robin as unnecessary, since Dorothy is maintaining a surprising level of composure. Ruby vanishes into the living room. A moment later he hears her footsteps heading upstairs, and then the sound of water moving through the pipes. The house, an eighty-year-old wooden structure, has always been a collection of creaks and groans, and the older it gets, the less it conceals.

  Robin says, “Mom, you should try to get her to talk.”

  “She just flew right past me!”

  “She’s kinda stressed out.”

  Dorothy narrows her eyes at him. “Of course you’re sticking up for her.”

  He is, he realizes; he hadn’t actually made a decision to do so, but something about being back in the house, in this kitchen, the site of so many arguments in the past, brings out an urge to pacify. “I’ve already given her a hard time.”

  “She’ll listen to your father.” She calls out, “Clark! They’re here!”

  Now he can hear his father’s voice carrying through the wall from his office. Robin is seized by the idea Clark is in there with Annie, his girlfriend, that she’s lounging on the daybed in a bathrobe, cooing, “Clark, take care of your family and then come back to me, baby…” The anxious fantasy dissolves as Robin realizes Clark is talking on the phone. But now that he’s imagined it, he can’t quite shake the idea that this mystery woman is somewhere in the house. Does his mother even know that his father is dating? Would it bother her? It’s been five years since the divorce, enough time to get over it. But is she? For a while, it was very ugly; Dorothy would sit at the edge of Robin’s bed and tell him through tears how miserly Clark was, how little he wanted to spend on child support, on tuition; and Clark would counter, on the weekends, with brutal one-liners: “Your mother has always had her own version of the truth.”

  The reality of all four of them here under the same roof again makes him want to flee. He looks to George, whose expression says that he, too, is braced for confrontation Dorothy says, “Well, how are you? How’s Peter? How’s his dissertation?”

  “Peter is on my S-H-I-T list.”

  “Whatever for?”

  “We broke up. He might have been cheating on me.”

  “Are you sure?” she asks. The way her mouth drops open makes Robin swell with love for her, for being on his side, for embracing his romantic well-being. She turns to George as if for confirmation, and he nods. Robin remembers what George said, that he’s lucky to have his parents: This bright truth smacks up against the old ghosts still lingering, hissing the conflicts of the past.

  “I saw him making out with someone,” Robin says. “But then there was a message from him on the machine, saying I got it wrong.”

  George says, “What message?”

  “When I checked the machine…” He wishes now that he hadn’t kept this from George all day. “He wants an apology. He almost made it sound like, if I did, maybe we might get back together in the fall.”

  Dorothy says, “Don’t throw it away. Peter’s a catch. I always thought a scholar was a good match for you.”

  George shakes his head in disapproval. There’s a challenge in his eyes that says, There will be no apologies to Peter, no getting back together, not if I have anything to say about it.

  And Robin has to ask himself: So why didn’t you tell George about the message when you first heard it? Are you still hoping you have a chance with Peter?

  To his relief, Clark appears. Robin hasn’t seen him since Christmas. Unlike Dorothy, who has filled out, his father seems as lean as ever, perhaps even fitter; he’s been jogging again and is talking of running a marathon next year, a feat that Robin finds more impressive every time he himself wakes up in the morning coughing up last night’s cigarettes. Clark’s hair went silver back when he and Dorothy only communicated through their lawyers—Clark ruefully dubbed it “litigation white”—but his face hasn’t changed. He greets Robin with a hug and extends his hand to George. There’s a round of pleasantries about Philadelphia, and college, and it’s-not-the-heat-it’s-the-humidity, before he finally looks around and says, “Where’s the fugitive?”

  “Clark, talk to her,” Dorothy says, slumping into a seat at the table. “She’s upstairs.”

  George clears his throat. “I guess I should go?” He pauses, uncertain. “Can I use your phone?”

  Dorothy says, “Of course,” and then catches herself. “I’m sure it’s—Clark won’t mind. Clark, where is that thing?”

  Clark hands George the handset of a cordless phone. Robin glances to the wall where their old rotary phone, with its long, coiled wire, used to hang. The phone base is mounted there, a hunk of bright, white plastic

  Robin’s attention splits between George on the phone with Mrs. Lincoln, and Dorothy pushing Clark to go upstairs to Ruby. Both conversations make Robin uneasy. So he steps out into the backyard and lights a cigarette and stares across the lawn, which is thick and green and trim, healthier than it’s looked since Robin himself used to mow it (a chore left behind with the suburbs), and he stares at the house beyond the hedge.

  The Spicers used to live there, though they haven’t for several years: Victoria Spicer was once his best friend, but became a stranger to him even before he moved to New York; their friendship fell apart during Jackson’s hospitalization, though he couldn’t say why. He remembers no defining break, no argument, just a general air of estrangement, of disappointment. It had something to do with Todd, her older brother, with his lean body and his long hair and his stoned eyes that could turn hard and cruel without warning. Todd who could be a bully towering above him, tormenting him, or who might be on his knees sucking Robin’s dick in his bedroom. Victoria never knew what was going on between Robin and Todd, but maybe she suspected. Maybe she even knew that Todd was half-queer then. And now he might have turned completely queer. That was the rumor anyway, as Robin had heard it from Ruby who heard it from one of her old Green-lawn High classmates who showed up at some event at Barnard with a gay boy from San Francisco. This boy said he’d “almost slept with” someone named Todd, from Greenlawn, New Jersey (it was t
he name, Greenlawn, that had triggered the story), who worked on Castro Street, busing tables at a café with an entirely gay clientele. He had pierced ears and a lion tattoo on his shoulder, and he drove some old muscle car, and he was apprenticing with a metalsmith who made jewelry out of silver. Robin has imagined San Francisco for years, a kind of frivolous, fantasy city always hosting a parade or a protest march, but he can’t imagine Todd Spicer in the midst of it. He doesn’t fully believe that this tattooed guy working at this café was his Todd; but he doesn’t disbelieve it, either, because the story is much like Todd himself always was: available only in pieces, an accumulation of surface details open to interpretation. If he met him face-to-face, he’d know what to think: the gaydar would be set off, or not. And if it wasn’t even a matter of gaydar, if Todd had actually come out, what then? Would Robin rejoice at this miraculous turn of events? Demand an apology for past mistreatments? Sit down and have a heart-to-heart with him? The boy who’d been the source of the story couldn’t offer any more details; he wasn’t going back to San Francisco, he said. He called it “the elephant graveyard.”

  George enters the yard and says, “I’m heading over to my mom’s.” He makes his hand into a gun and shoots himself in the temple.

  “Save a bullet for me,” Robin says.

  “So, are you staying overnight?”

  “Let’s see how it goes. Are you?”

  “Let’s see how it goes.”

  Robin walks him to the street. After all this, it seems impossible that they’re parting company. It feels like the end of a date, where you’ve entertained the idea of continuing into the night but instead, through circumstance or sensibility, have decided to hold off. He flips backward through the day: the look in George’s eyes at the Parkway rest stop when he called “swordfight” the sweat on his brow after he broke up the scuffle at Alice’s house; the hurt and anger on his face when they were tailed by a cop and Robin told him he was being too sensitive. At last he lands on the one moment that is tugging at his insides, the one that makes what should be a nonevent, this good-bye-for-the-night between best friends, something more tumultuous. It was a moment in the Cadillac, just after listening to Al Green, when George said, “I predict you’re going to be over Peter really soon,” a prediction which now seems to have come true, because he is, isn’t he? Over Peter: over the hope of reunion, maybe even over the desire for it, no matter what thoughts just flashed through his mind in the kitchen. George knew it right away; he might have known also who would replace Peter in his imagination: George himself. That was the unspoken part. Peter’s exit cleared the way, at last, for something to emerge between them that had never before had the room to grow.

  But he can’t say anything like this to George. You can’t fall for your best friend. Everyone knows that. So they hug, and Robin thanks him, “for everything,” and says, in a grand flourish of understatement, “Well, we got through the day.”

  George says, “It’s not over yet.”

  Back in the kitchen, Robin realizes how hungry he is. He asks his mother, “Did you bring that paella and gazpacho you were talking about?”

  “It’s at home. I’m saving it for someone who’ll appreciate it.”

  “So you’re punishing Ruby for not showing up?”

  She smiles. “I’m not that petty. No, I decided I’d offer it to the young man who lives upstairs. Do you remember him? Donovan?”

  He nods. “The gay guy.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t want to make assumptions.”

  “Pretty safe bet, Dorothy.”

  There’s an awkward silence, and then they both try to say something at once. He prompts her to go first.

  “Are you being careful, Robin?”

  And of course he knows what she means, and why she brought this up right now, in the context of their neighbor who is not well. But the last thing he wants to do is talk with his mother about the dangers of his sex life.

  “Nothing to worry about,” he says.

  “Of course there’s something to worry about. You’re aware of what’s going on among homosexuals.”

  “Don’t say homosexuals.”

  “This is not a semantic issue, dear.” She lays her hand on his. “You can talk to me.”

  “I know.” He pulls away from her. How could he possibly talk to his mother about everything he fears, every dark thought that crosses his mind? And yet, were the worst to happen, how would he possibly go forward without her?

  He stands up and heads to the fridge. “You think Clark keeps any provisions around here?”

  Another bathroom, another shower. Everywhere she goes, she’s washing off the mess of where she has been. She’d prefer to be cleaning up in Manhattan, where Dorothy recently badgered the landlord to upgrade the fixtures, and where they now have a shower with a built-in massager. This bathroom, off the upstairs hallway, next to her childhood bedroom, has been the same for as long as she can remember. Gold-flecked wallpaper, a toilet that runs too long after you flush it, a mirror with a chip in it at exactly the level of her eyes, so that she has to shift around as she applies her makeup. Her father has made changes all over the house but not here, which strikes her as just like a man. A woman would make sure to renovate the facilities, as her mother likes to call them, before repaving the driveway. Not a very feminist thing to say, but there you go. Not even a women’s studies curriculum is going to erase her desire to look presentable.

  She showers and wraps herself in a towel and is moving through the hall back to her bedroom when she sees, at the top of the stairs, leaning on the banister, her father. He’s clearly been waiting for her. “They sent me up here for you,” he says, averting his eyes.

  “I’m getting dressed.” She scurries into her bedroom and closes the door.

  Nothing has changed in here. Ever. Robin had his room redone, and she always expected she would, too. The excuse was that his room had been Jackson’s—they had to clear the air of the memories, or something. But she, too, has memories, stuck to the walls like the flowery pink wallpaper. She’d like to clear them out. But first she’d like to climb into bed and sleep for two days.

  “Notice anything different?”

  “I’ll be down in a minute!” she snaps, in disbelief that he’s still standing out there, waiting for her.

  “I added a light fixture by the bed.”

  “Oh. I see it.” She used to complain that she wanted to be able to turn off the overhead light from her bed. So he did that for her. There’s a new switch within arm’s reach.

  “Figured you’d want more control.”

  “Yeah, it’s great.” She still has some clothes here, even though the formal joint custody visits ended more than a year ago, on her eighteenth birthday. She finds a pair of loose sweatpants and a T-shirt, white, with three-quarter-length black sleeves and the logo of Doris & Georgie’s Sweet Shoppe, an ice cream parlor in Greenlawn where she worked one summer while she lived with Clark. It’s a little tight, and has a few stains, but it’s better than the other option, a big baggy thing with a Ziggy cartoon on it that says, IT’S EASY BEING ME…BECAUSE I’M ALL I GOT!

  “Clark, don’t stand there waiting for me, you’re making me nervous.”

  Finally, she hears him step away.

  But when she comes back downstairs, many minutes later, he’s hovering near the bottom of the banister. “So are you ready to talk?”

  “What do you want me to say?”

  He throws his arms wide. He’s not the most articulate person, her dad. He’s not hyperverbal like her mother or her brother. She decides that her first priority is settling her still-knotted stomach. She swallowed two Anacin in the bathroom for her headache, but they’re already churning in her gut like sand in salt water. She entertains the passing thought that there’s something physically wrong with her, beyond even being sick to her stomach. Maybe it’s also a touch of sun poisoning—the burned skin on her stomach has begun to tingle and itch.

  Dorothy is at the kitchen ta
ble—sitting in the same chair that used to be “hers,” with a cup and saucer in front of her, a few crumbs on a plate. “Come sit with me,” she says, patting the chair next to her.

  The way the light slants in from the window over the sink is no different than light falling on her five, six, ten years ago—Ruby can peel away the extra weight on her mother’s body, dress her in a chic, tailored blouse like she used to wear instead of the loose tunics she favors now, imagine her hair bigger and brighter, as it once was—and the effect is of a figure from a dream emerging in the flesh. Or from a nightmare, in which Ruby is still a boxed-in little girl, doing what she was told and praying faithfully for intervention because she had no will of her own.

  Dorothy looks comfortable, her posture relaxed, as if sitting down to tea with Clark is a usual occurrence. There was a time when the only words that passed between her parents were angry ones. It embarrassed Ruby to see her father in those days, looking beaten down. Later, during the divorce, her mother questioned each legal detail, made everything more difficult than it had to be, until she brought out the fight in Clark. Enough time has now gone by, it seems. They can be in the same room without lawyers present, without seething at each other. What have they been talking about? About her, probably.

  Ruby pulls a box of Lipton tea from the cupboard, then goes to the stove to turn on the kettle. Robin stands near the back door, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed. Clark is in the other doorway, to the dining room. She’s surrounded.

  With her back to them all, she asks, “Why can’t anyone be happy for me?”

  Dorothy answers, “How can I be happy for you if I don’t even know what happened?”

  “The circumstances seem pretty clear—” Clark begins.

  “You don’t know the circumstances. You weren’t there.”

  “Don’t give me attitude, young lady!”

  “I’m not a lady, this isn’t the nineteenth century. I’m a woman.”