Robin and Ruby

by K. M. Soehnlein

  “You’re not even twenty, and you’re acting like you’re ten.” Clark says, “And tell me, what kinda example do you set when you run off like that?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “No one knew where you were!” Clark says. “You were supposed to be staying at the beach house.”

  Ruby looks to Robin, and he must see the plea in her eyes, because he speaks up. “Dad, that place should be condemned. The party was going on nonstop.” He adds, “She called me last night, so she did try to get in touch.”

  “I stayed in a hotel room.”

  “Let me guess,” Clark says. “It’s on the credit card I pay for.”

  “For emergencies, which this was.” She crosses her arms and leans back against the counter. This is not how it’s supposed to be, her father on a rampage. She’d expected Dorothy’s anger, but Clark has always been her ally during mother-daughter duels. Setting an example for whom? No one has ever looked to her for anything, and now that she has done something she wanted to, without checking in and seeking permission, now she’s guilty of falling short of standards?

  Dorothy appears to be perplexed by something. “Were you with Calvin at this hotel?”

  “No.” Then, quickly, Ruby says, “There was a guy at the party—”

  “What guy?”

  “—I knew him from Crossroads.”

  “The Catholic program?”

  “Yes. His name’s Chris. We lost touch, but we still have—I don’t know how to explain it. He was there, and I stayed with him.”

  “Just the two of you?” Dorothy asks.

  Ruby nods.

  “Since when are you sexually active?”

  “Since last night! OK? The entire world now knows. My parents, my ex-boyfriend, my brother, George, a whole party full of people I don’t even like. Everyone knows I had sex last night.”

  Silence. No one seems to know what to say or where to look. After a moment, Robin speaks up, a forced levity in his voice. “When I first had sex, I kept it as quiet as possible.”

  This actually makes her want to laugh—nervous relief—but Clark wrinkles his nose and says, “Aw, Robin. Come on,” and she can see Robin’s posture shift, so that he’s now looking almost as defensive as she is.

  Dorothy says to Ruby, “You did use protection, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.” She feels her face warming up. This is really too much.

  “I mean, with everything going around these days—”

  “I said yes, Dorothy.”

  The phone rings—a light, electronic trill, so unlike the old mechanical ring from their rotary phone. Clark answers and they all hear him say, “Yes, she’s right here. But we’re having a family discussion right now.”

  Ruby feels a jump in her chest. It’s him. “Give that to me.”

  “Look, Ruby, we’re not done here.” Clark speaks into the phone again, saying, “Hold on, Calvin.”

  Calvin?

  She holds out her hands, mouthing, no. She looks to Robin again for intervention. He peels himself from the wall and takes the handset from Clark. “Hey, it’s me…. Yeah, but we’re in the middle of some family, um, negotiations…. Mm-hmm, it’s like Reagan and Gorbachev here…. What?…No, of course I didn’t.”

  It’s annoying to have to witness them bonding like this, but he’s doing her a favor, he’s saving her from a really awkward conversation. There’s a hollow grinding away inside her. Anxiety about Chris, about where he is, what he’s doing, what he might have already done.

  When Robin hangs up, he announces, “Calvin says he’ll be home later, and he wants to speak to you.”

  All of a sudden both of her parents are talking at once, weighing in on Calvin’s call—their words mercifully drowned out by the wail of the kettle. She turns off the flame, pours water over a tea bag in the mug, lets it saturate and drop to the bottom. “I’m not taking relationship advice from my divorced parents,” she says.

  “Harsh,” Robin says, as they all fall silent.

  She picks up her tea, grabs the cordless phone, and leaves the room. Enough is enough.

  Ruby’s exit has both of his parents looking to Robin, as if they’re the confused children and he’s the adult with the answers. He knows what Ruby just went through; he’s been grilled like this before, long ago in this kitchen, for his own transgressions. He was ready to mediate, if need be, but she didn’t exactly make it easy. Now he expects to be reprimanded, to take the heat because she won’t. They’ll surely find something wrong with what he did today, and they’ll jump on him for it. But, no, they just look at him, helplessness on their faces. Is it actually possible that he will get through all of this blamelessly, that Ruby, who never gets blamed for anything, is going to absorb all the bad feeling in the family?

  Clark shakes his head. “Could you imagine if your brother was alive to see this?”

  “He’d probably have been down the shore this weekend, too,” Robin says, “raising hell like the rest of them.”

  Clark throws up his hands, and Dorothy admonishes, “Robin.”

  At first he thinks it’s “hell” that has upset them, because who wants to be reminded about eternal damnation when you’re remembering your dead son? (And for all he knows, his parents, who have always struck him, more or less, as being atheists, might still entertain the notion of the afterlife.)

  But then Clark says, “He was a good kid, he had a real love for life,” and Dorothy says, “He truly enjoyed himself, didn’t he?” and Clark adds, “If he’d only had the chance to grow up,” and Robin sees that it was a mistake to even insinuate that a grown-up Jackson would have been just another problem child.

  The more time that passes, the more Jackson, in his father’s eyes, and maybe in his mother’s, too, has been turned into an angel, beatified as the slugger who was destined to be a source of pride, had he not been cut down at the dawn of his potential. If he’d had the chance, he would have grown into the kind of young adult who wouldn’t let them down, as Robin has always done, as Ruby has shown she’s more than capable of as well. This is so far from what Robin imagines, when he imagines Jackson grown up: definitely a jock, certainly socially aggressive, probably embarrassed to be saddled with a gay brother and a weird sister. Someone who loved his own life but couldn’t be counted on to love Robin’s, or Ruby’s. There’s a divergence in these visions that can’t be bridged, because it’s all speculation anyway, speculation hardening into something like a fact. The might-have-been.

  If he’d had the chance… And whose fault was it, that he hadn’t? The fact that they were both there, Robin and Ruby, at the moment Jackson fell, is never, ever discussed, but none of them have forgotten.

  He finds that he wants another cigarette. Wants to call George. Wants to disappear. Little desires flying by in a fraction of a second.

  Dorothy stands and dusts off her lap. “It’s been a long time since my daughter listened to me,” she says, “but I’m going to give it one more try.”

  Robin says, “Why don’t you listen to her?”

  She cocks her head to the side, as if to more fully receive the idea. “Maybe I will,” she says.

  Clark gives her a thumbs-up, and Dorothy rather self-consciously returns it, an exchange so unlikely it leaves Robin staring at them both. And then off Dorothy goes into the living room, the path of her footsteps following Ruby’s.

  And so Robin finds himself alone with his father for the first time in ages. They look at each other, both aware of this.

  “Oh!” Robin says, remembering. “I have something.” He picks up his bag and pulls out the postcard. “Happy Father’s Day.”

  Clark looks it over, front and back. It’s hard to read his expression. “Cheesequake! That brings back memories. Your mother used to sing that song.”

  “I thought it was your song.”

  “Your mother was the one with the voice.” Clark places the card under a magnet on the fridge. He puts the photo facedown, the inscription facing o
ut. The “prodigal” joke seems to Robin lukewarm, an almost.

  “So,” Clark says, “Wanna see my fax machine?”

  The machine, a big beige contraption with a phone and a keypad built into it, sits on a file cabinet in the office, next to a surprisingly modern-looking black desk. “I dial the number of the other machine,” Clark demonstrates, fingers tapping, “and then I feed in my document here.” On a piece of paper, Clark has written in big letters, “Someone is thinking of you!” With a sheepish grin, he explains, “Annie’s got a machine at home, too.” Robin listens to the oddly melodic pattern of the numbers with their individual tones, the hiss and beep as the connection is made, the efficient clip and slide of the paper getting sucked inside the machine. The sound of his father sending a love note. “It takes a few minutes, but pretty soon a confirmation comes out the other side, in the tray.”

  “Cool. Bet that wasn’t cheap.”

  “Company paid for it.” He says this with pride, evidence of something earned. “Plus, I bought stock in Xerox,” he says, pointing to the logo on the console.

  Robin takes in the scope of the office, the comfy order his father has created here, in this room that was once meant for their brother’s recovery, and then became a place to escape. Last time Robin was here, his father was excited to show him a new computer, something made by IBM. Clark’s interest in technology has seemed to Robin a curiosity, but today he’s encouraged by it. After all those years of inertia, he’s making room for the future, for possibility.

  He glances back toward the dining room, as if Dorothy might still be there, and even though she isn’t, he lowers his voice. “So, Annie was here earlier when I called…”

  “She decided to leave. She could feel the temperature rising, with all of you closing in.” He chuckles.

  “You didn’t want her to meet Dorothy?”

  “They’ve already met.”

  “When?”

  “At your Uncle Stan’s wedding.”

  “That already happened?”

  “Last Sunday. Apparently, ahem, you didn’t get around to RSVP.”

  Robin makes an excuse about his mail getting lost in the shuffle between Pittsburgh and Philly, but he knows where the invitation to his uncle’s wedding is: exiled to a pile of unopened letters at the bottom of his steamer trunk. He had no intention of celebrating with Stan, Dorothy’s brother, the blowhard of the family, the kind of guy who never once visited them in Manhattan because “the city is full of ingrates.” The kind of guy who says “ingrate” because he knows you won’t let him get away with saying “nigger” or “queer.” Why his father has stayed close to Stan even after the divorce has always been a puzzle, a notch against him. But the real shock of this news isn’t that the wedding has already come and gone with both of them there, but that Dorothy hadn’t mentioned it. He realizes that they missed their weekly phone call last Sunday, and that today’s call got swallowed up by Jackson’s birthday.

  Clark pushes the door shut, blocking the living room and dining room from view. Robin feels himself on alert now. Clark says, “The wedding was pretty nice. Your mother and I got along just fine, even with both of us having dates.”

  “Who did she bring?”

  “A fellow named Stewart. Nice guy. Insurance. Not sure how they met.”

  “She mentioned him to me, I think.” What she’d mentioned, he recalls now, is that she’d placed a personal ad some time ago; but he didn’t know about any insurance man. “I guess I haven’t been keeping up,” Robin adds.

  “You kids live your lives,” Clark says, as he runs a finger over the fax machine, wiping off dust that doesn’t actually seem to be there, “and we live ours.”

  There might have been a time when the possibility of his parents, dating other people, meeting face-to-face, would have filled him with agony. Now it’s come and gone, out of sight, out of mind. A nonevent. And maybe that’s not so surprising, because as much bad feeling was stirred up by the divorce, at its heart it was never about unfaithfulness. Neither one of them had an affair. There was no injured party. There were only “irreconcilable differences.” I just couldn’t seem to do anything right in your mother’s eyes was Clark’s way of talking about it. Your father pulled away from me, was Dorothy’s. She became such a critical person, he said. He’s so shut down, she said. He wasn’t/She wasn’t the person I married. For a time, they had confessed to him, over and over. But that was years ago.

  And then he remembers what had angered him about Stan’s wedding invitation, why he looked at the envelope but decided he wouldn’t open it. “I wasn’t invited with a date,” Robin says. “Ruby got a plus-one, but I didn’t.”

  “Ruby didn’t come, either. Two no-shows.”

  “But you know I’ve been dating someone, right?”

  Clark doesn’t say anything, doesn’t exactly meet Robin’s eyes, either, which only pushes Robin to forge ahead, to make a point. In a rush of words he talks about Peter, how they met, their life together in Pittsburgh, how it got “serious,” none of which he’s mentioned to Clark before. He takes him all the way through to the breakup. “Just yesterday,” Robin says.

  Clark mumbles something, impossible to make out but with enough of an encouraging tone that Robin keeps going.

  “You know that George is gay, too, don’t you?”

  “It was great to see George again. I’ve always liked him.” With an uneasy laugh, Clark adds, “Not sure what he’s doing with his hair, though.”

  “He’s growing dreadlocks,” Robin says.

  No response.

  “I assumed you knew about George, but maybe you haven’t thought about it.” He pauses, every second like a full minute ticking by, demanding to be filled with words. “But, see, the thing is, we’ve been best friends for so long, but now, I’m wondering if maybe we might be more than friends…”

  Clark blows a bunch of air through his lips. His head hangs a bit, and his eyes stay on the fax machine.

  Robin feels his own face heating up in embarrassment. This conversation started out okay, but now…Why’d you have to go and ruin a perfectly good moment? He’s angry with his father, with himself, too, and it comes out in his tone of voice: “Are you going to say anything, Clark?”

  Clark turns to him with a pained look, though he seems to be working to contain it, to put a braver face forward. “One thing I’ve learned over the years, sometimes less is more. If you shoot off your mouth, it’s hard to unshoot it.”

  “If you need to say something to me, let’s just have it out.”

  Clark waves his hand, as if wiping steam off a bathroom mirror. “Annie told me something recently. She said life is about expansion. Pretty good, huh?”

  “I guess.”

  “Because as you go along, you have to hold more and more in your head. You meet new people, come across some new ideas, adjust to new circumstances. You can’t say, ‘Nope, that’s all there is, I already know everything I need to know, nothing new for me, end of story.’ Because where does that leave you? So, yeah. Life’s about expansion.”

  “All right,” Robin says, because he feels like he has to say something agreeable. What he wants to say is What does that have to do with George and me? But he knows: A gay son is still a new idea for Clark. A black boyfriend on top of that is newer still. This is what George was predicting, in the car today: If I was your boyfriend we’d see how racist they were…

  I’m not there yet, his father is saying, but I’m trying. So be patient. Don’t expect too much from me, not yet.

  Is this the burden of coming out? Wait for them to catch up, while they try to understand who you are and how your heart works. It’s not exactly the father-son moment he thought they were about to have, a few minutes ago when Clark closed the door as if to signal a new alliance. It’s not the advice he maybe thought he might get when he brought up Peter, and George. Because that’s what he could use, he realizes. Advice. A way out of the thicket. Not “I’m trying to expand so I can fit you in
,” but “I have enough room for you now.”

  In acting class, his professor told them to identify the moment when they freeze up, when they can’t go any deeper. At those moments, ask yourself: What am I afraid of? This is one of those moments: He can’t find a way to play his part, the good son following the father’s lead. What are you afraid of? His mind flies back to Jackson’s grave.

  “I’m afraid if I get sick you’ll abandon me,” he says. He says this out loud, though it could have remained an unspoken thought, an exercise.

  Clark looks bewildered, and then the words sink in, and his look turns stricken.

  “I’m not sick,” Robin says. “I mean, I don’t think I am. But it scares me.”

  “I don’t know much about it,” Clark says, in a clear voice.

  Robin waits for something more, but there’s only silence that can’t yet be filled in.

  “Never mind,” Robin says and makes a move for the door. “This is the wrong time—”

  He’s shot off his mouth, and now he can’t unshoot it.

  Clark extends his arm, as if to stop Robin from leaving, but his reach falls short, and so Robin keeps going.

  Behind Ruby’s bedroom door, Robin hears them going at it, his mother and his sister, loud enough that he considers listening in for the blow-by-blow, loud enough that he decides to keep on moving.

  In his bedroom, he flips the light switch and is assaulted by the flashy, silver Art Deco wallpaper he chose years ago. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Jackson’s bed had been taken out, and the room was Robin’s alone. (He never asked where all of Jackson’s things went. Were they thrown out? Or is there a box in the basement packed with the baseball trophies that used to line a shelf over Jackson’s bed, brass-plated figurines of boys with raised bats that glinted in the morning sunlight while Jackson lay sleeping beneath, a bubble of spit at his lips? Robin remembers how he used to wake up early and read quietly in bed, getting a half hour to himself before Jackson bolted up and began talking right away: “Wanna play Star Wars? Wanna play Army? Wanna play Planet of the Apes?”)