The Book of Ruth

by Jane Hamilton

  I didn’t have much luck reading to myself because my eyes weren’t extra-strong. I needed glasses but May said she didn’t have the money for the optician. I wrote to Aunt Sid and said how adolescence, that’s what she called it, wasn’t so bad. I told her that every minute I could, I was out of the house, at Miss Finch’s, and that when May talked to me I pretended I was far away, and then her voice came to me like it was a thin column of smoke from way over on the other side of the mountain. That’s what I said, although we don’t have mountains in Illinois, except Starved Rock—where some people didn’t have food and they died. I wrote Aunt Sid about how I walked out into the night, back through the cow pasture and up into the woods, to the plateau where there are a few cedar trees and long wild grasses. I lay on the ground looking up to the sky and sometimes I got the queerest feeling. I could sense the earth spinning around, and I felt small, probably how a midget feels in a room with regular people. For a split second I had the sensation all through my body that there wasn’t a reason for our being on the planet. We were hurtling through space and there wasn’t any logic to it. It was all for nothing. Such a thought made me feel so lonesome I had to turn over on my stomach and cry for all the world. I cried for the little lamb we had once that lost its hind leg in a dog attack. It had to hobble around the yard bleating, waiting for someone to feed it corn. I cried for it, and the hungry people on top of Starved Rock, and Miss Finch’s blind eyes, and how long and soft the grasses were that I lay in. I cried for the loveliness in the night. I couldn’t stop the flow, because I knew if Aunt Sid ever saw me for an extended period of time, not counting her short yearly visits out of duty, she’d change her mind about liking me. “Adolescence, it isn’t so bad,” I wrote Aunt Sid, even though I could tell she knew I was in all the dumb classes. I had the feeling she knew I cried up on the plateau at night, in the grass, that I felt just as fragile as the tender green shoots.

  I didn’t mention May’s habit of yelling at me. She wasn’t actually yelling at me all the time; she only needed someone to blame for how rotten her life was going. I did do stupid things more often than not. The day I made scalloped onions I took the onions out of the bag down the basement, where I thought we kept them, and I cut them up, just as May had taught me, and I got the cheese and bacon and toast together. I read the recipe about four hundred times so as to get it perfectly accurate. Then I put the casserole dish in the 350-degree oven for forty minutes. It was my job to make supper on the nights May worked at the dry cleaners. I dreaded her coming home because she always walked in the door, took her coat off with a terrible slowness, as if her arms were so tired she wouldn’t ever get her wraps untangled from her body, and then shuffled into the kitchen to take stock of my disasters. I could tell she was tired by the way her skin hung on her face, and I didn’t improve matters with the smell of char coming from the oven. She couldn’t help hollering at me sometimes, wringing that dish towel, saying, “Won’t you ever learn to get your tasks right?” I always said I didn’t know, and she’d tell me she wished she could order me some new brains. She wondered out loud if scientists could figure a way to do brain transplants.

  The time I made scalloped onions I took them out of the oven—the top was sizzling and golden—and I set the dish on the table. I stepped back to admire it. May was the first one to take a bite because she was always starved after a day at the dry cleaners. She swallowed without chewing, due to extreme hunger. She sat still for ten seconds and then she spat what was left in her mouth out on her plate.

  “You’re trying to kill me,” she whispered. She couldn’t talk too well because she still had food clogged in her throat. She choked, “You’re going to poison us.”

  She took the casserole dish and threw all the onions into the garbage pail. There went the whole supper I had planned so carefully. “You show me where you got them onions from,” she said. She made me march down the basement stairs with her right on my tail.

  When I pointed them out she laughed uproariously, with her hand to her bosom and her eyes closed. She laughed, not out of happiness, but because what I had done proved to her that I was without one sign of intelligence. Those onions were actually tulip bulbs.

  I didn’t tell Aunt Sid the scalloped onion story because I thought if she knew how dumb I was she wouldn’t write to me. Once though, I got to feeling so sad and useless I had to tell Miss Finch about the tulip bulbs, and other episodes. Miss Finch didn’t laugh at me at all. I couldn’t believe it. She said it was all right, anyone could make a mistake like that.

  “You mean anyone could?” I asked her.

  And she said, “Yes, that’s correct. It was simply a mistake.”

  She had a worried look that would come over her blind face when I imitated May snickering at me. Miss Finch said it wasn’t right. She shook her head and said, “No, my deeah, that isn’t right.”

  Miss Finch, even though she was blind, made a person believe what she was saying, on account of her high forehead and her soft white hair that started way back on her scalp. She might well have worn a crown since a young age, that didn’t let her hair grow in perfectly. She looked like she was reigning over some little kingdom, with her long nose and all her own teeth. She sat up straight in her bed and she always had on a clean night jacket decorated with flowers and lace. And she spoke so confidently, saying things like, “No, my deeah, that isn’t right.”

  Perhaps it was hard for May to see me growing into—a woman. Perhaps I reminded her of how she used to be, of what she lost by getting old. When she watched TV she drooled after Steve McQueen, and maybe she realized all too often, like about every time she looked in the mirror, that Steve McQueen might mistake her for someone dressed up as an ogre for Halloween. It must be strange to keep your strong mind in a body that grows older and weaker and no longer resembles your own image of yourself.

  Maybe she was already scared about the future, about being left behind in her kitchen while everyone else went out to the world and never came back. She made sure I didn’t get notions. There was only one time when I tried to talk to May like the characters in the books by my favorite author, Charles Dickens. We were cleaning the living room and while I vacuumed I practiced the sentence over and over. When I switched off the machine I said, “This room is excessively bare and disorderly, wouldn’t you say?”

  May dropped her dust rag and put her hands on her hips. She looked at me like I was a Jap who had snuck up behind her, something she would never tolerate. “Did a bird shit on your brain?” she asked.

  When I didn’t say anything she said, “Well, did it?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Then don’t talk like there’s a pile of crap in your head.” She picked up her rag and started dusting her china dogs, which meant lifting each one carefully, and gently wiping their bodies.

  In Charles Dickens’s books I had to admire the way the meanest enemies spoke to each other, with what seemed to me to be the greatest civility.

  Sometimes I think that May purposely stopped noticing certain progressions. She never bought me a brassiere at the store. There I am in my second year of high school squeezing into little-girl undershirts, until my nipples showed through. Some of the boys made circles around me, smirking, because of my new tits. They said I was behind the other girls developing, which wasn’t news to me. Finally, because of the humiliation I wrote to Aunt Sid. I said,

  Dear Aunt Sid,

  I have a special favor to ask you. It’s all because Miss Finch doesn’t ever remember to pay me for the job I do at her house. I don’t even mind, we are great friends, but I don’t have money I need for certain things, and Ma says if we aren’t careful with the funds we’re going to go to the poorhouse. It’s her birthday coming up and I thought I’d get her a bottle of perfume. She got a whiff of some on a lady at the check-out at the grocery store, and she said she sure wished she could smell so good. Isn’t that an ideal present for her? Only a bottle the size of a soup can costs about ten dollars. If I could
borrow that money from you I could make Ma’s day a real jubilant one. I’ll pay you back the minute Miss Finch delivers, I promise. I know you and Ma aren’t the best of friends so you might not want to contribute. I’ll understand. Ma said she would let me visit you over her dead body when I suggested a trip to De Kalb. She really burns me up. I bet you’re going on another journey this summer. Your luggage must have stickers all over saying the places you stayed at. I sure wish I could visit you sometime. Did you ever see pictures by a man called Picasso over in France? He is on my and Miss Finch’s bad list.

  Aunt Sid wrote right away with twenty dollars inside the envelope. She said to keep ten for myself and to forget paying her back, period. I spent two dollars on some lacy potholders for May’s birthday and the rest was going for brassieres. I know brassieres aren’t an important subject to talk about, but back then they seemed like the hardest trouble in my life. I didn’t pay attention to the world, such as the story of the students who got shot down in Ohio because they didn’t like the war we were having in Vietnam. I felt sorrier for me without underwear than I did for the poor dead college people.

  The next Saturday I walked to Stillwater. I went to the Sears store and bought myself three brassieres. They were in boxes with young girls standing in mist with nothing on except the item. Each day I stuffed one in my lunch sack and then when I got to school I went into the restroom and put it on. The boys laughed more when they saw I finally had one. They slapped my back to feel it, but I didn’t care. I knew I had been smart to get cash from Aunt Sid.

  When I got home one day, May saw the strap sticking out of my lunch sack. She said, “Where did you get that brassiere?” I stood up tall and said that I wasn’t going to be laughed at in school so I went out and bought it. She didn’t even ask me where I got the money. I could tell she was a little impressed.

  “Well, ain’t you grown up all of a sudden?” she said. There was half a smile on her mouth.

  I wanted to say, No, Ma, it ain’t all of a sudden. If you’d been watching you could have seen that it’s been going on for a year or so. I didn’t say anything. I had the feeling I knew what it would be like to be a plant stuck in a pot, with a mistress who every now and then remembered to give it a trickle of water.

  If my nose were taken away I would have no memories. When I have lain awake all night and my eyes are finally closing I’ll get a whiff of something far off, from another year, another county. Aunt Sid asked me how she could help me sleep and I thought to myself, Nose plugs. Sometimes, there are only smells: the smell of chickens, the smell of Miss Finch’s stale breath and the hard candies by her bed, peppermint, all stuck together with the heat of her house; the smell of Matt’s math books where you crack the bindings, they’re so new; the smell of May in the kitchen frying the onions.

  I have smells and also the sound of words. I heard something in church once that made me grin. The Rev declared from his stage, “The dung heap shall smile.” I had to crack up in private thinking about a splat of smelly cowpie with a grin on its face. I kept hearing the words “The dung heap shall smile” all day long, and I wondered what kind of miracle it would take to make such a substance happy.

  When I’m lying here thinking about our lives and imagining some of the words May could have spoken, and how it was for her when she was young, and the way she got riled on occasions, I think, Maybe May’s not so bad, and somehow I got it wrong. It doesn’t seem fair: here I am telling it, and she can’t come in and say, No, that ain’t right. There were the times when I knew she was a good person, struggling with something a little bigger than herself. I remember shortly after Elmer left and she was yelling at me for spilling lemonade on that precious carpet of hers, and then all of a sudden she was in the chair, her long legs, covered with varicose veins, flapping around. I looked and she was crying with her hand over her eyes, gasping for breath. She told me to come over to her that instant, and she got me all wet. I stood leaning into her, stiff, like something dead. She scared me because I had never seen her cry. She didn’t say anything except when she choked, “God damn it.” She sobbed, and when it was over she removed me from her path and went into the kitchen sniffling and honking. She blew her nose on her apron, she didn’t care. She was extremely nice afterwards, as if crying had purged her of the venom.

  The funny thing about May was how unpredictable she could be. Every now and then she went out and bought me a dress, even though we were almost in the poorhouse, and she made me put it on to show her. She admired me in it, like she was some kind of fashion expert. I didn’t like the dresses; they were slimy material, with flashy checks or flowers, and I felt like I was a sign that said “Road Repairs.” But the next minute after the fashion show where I modeled the new dresses and May oohed and aahed, she barked at me to do the dishes. With the weather at least you get storm warnings. Still, I’m probably poisoning the times she was good to me, because of the way things turned out. On some days I can’t help thinking she designed my every move. If she was cleaning the bathroom she sent me out to use the woods even in winter. She woke me up in the morning by taking the blankets off the bed. My memory has replaced her with someone completely warty, no teeth, stiff bristles growing out of her chin.

  And I have to say to myself, Think of the happy episodes. Think of your fourteenth birthday. May baked me a cake in the shape of a lamb, and she even made Matt shut up so she could sing “Happy Birthday.” She gave me some pink barrettes, and a hat and scarf set that she knit. She kept saying she couldn’t believe I was fourteen. She told us exactly how it was when she gave birth. I know the story by heart: they knocked her out, and then when she woke up there I was, a five-pound red wrinkled baby girl. She said they couldn’t decide on my name for the longest time and so my wrist bracelet said BABY GIRL GREY. She told me I cried for hours and she never got a wink. I can see May lying on the sofa praying for sleep while the thing in the basket screeches.

  May said what she was going to do was give me fourteen kisses for my birthday, and I clamped my teeth down while she did it. I couldn’t imagine what possessed her to kiss me. It didn’t occur to me that maybe she secretly liked me, but that she couldn’t often be enthusiastic because of all the times I let her down. If she got her hopes up it would be one more example of putting her eggs in the one basket.

  In grade school I gave her the ultimate disappointment. It happened when by some miracle I made it into the Stillwater All City Spelling Competition. There were three eighth grades in my school. I was to represent my class; Matt and Missy Baker won in their rooms. When I was the only one left up in front of the blackboard during the first elimination, my teacher almost dropped her pants. I was shocked myself and had to look left and right to make sure I was standing alone.

  I wrote to Aunt Sid to tell her the good news. I described how we would stand on stage and spell, after repeating the word. I told her Miss Finch wanted to help me study but I said, “Miss Finch, how can you drill me when you can’t read?” Miss Finch demanded I leave the word sheets with her, and when I came the next day her son had recorded all fifteen pages on the tape machine. While I sat on the floor the machine spoke, using all the words in a sentence. I spelled, and Miss Finch corrected me. If I misspelled she made me do it right three times in a row. “Let’s get this right!” she would say, slapping her hand on the night stand. There were times I practically hated her for making me drill, and she always remembered every single word I had missed and made me spell them at the end of the session.

  The day of the spelling bee May washed one of the navy jumpers I loved, and right before we drove to school for the big night she gave me a special pin of hers. I was sitting at the table finishing my macaroni, studying the word lists frantically, when she loomed over me out of the blue. She started dusting off the front of my jumper, like she was cleaning a wall to hang up a masterpiece.

  “This is an heirloom pin I’m going to let you wear,” she said, holding it up to the light. “Your grandmother had it when she wa
s married, and her mother gave it to her. It’s for real rare events.” She latched it on me. “There, ain’t it pretty?”

  She made her shoulders shimmy while she looked at me. She went crazy when her offspring won their way through contests. I didn’t know what to say; I didn’t know May owned anything so beautiful. I kept touching the brooch on the way to school, feeling the gold and the purple gems. The pin was made in the shape of a daisy and the stones were the petals. I knew the gift was going to make me lucky.

  The spelling bee took place in the junior high gym. The thirty contestants were on stage and the audience sat on the bleachers. Matt, naturally, sat right up front on the stage. Everyone expected him to spell the hardest words with the greatest degree of accuracy, but I was what’s known as the dark horse—what they call people who are dumb but astonish the public every once in a while. I had to spell exemplary. When I heard the word I held my hand over the pin, closed my eyes, thought of the sounds, each one, and spelled. The pin came first; I felt it alive and burning at my throat; next I heard the sounds, and then the picture of all the letters flashed up on a board in front of me in white neon, and I could spell the word correctly. Each time I sat back down in my chair I was breathless with surprise. Other children were falling dead like flies. I had trouble believing I was myself, sitting still in a metal chair, apparently destined to be a winner. When there were seven people left I stroked my pin right before I got the word It was devout. I said, “Please use it in a sentence,” and Mrs Golden said, “The congregation was devout.” I spelled just right, D-E-V-O-U-T. I blew air out of my cheeks on the way back to my seat. I had survived for such a long time. Missy Baker was up next, and I wished on the heirloom pin that she would fall flat on her face and contract permanent scars. They gave her exercise. She started to spell it. She lost her place. She was so mad she stamped her foot, like a cow that has insects biting its flanks. She said R in two places. She was down. Mrs. Golden had to say twice that she was sorry, but to please be seated, Missy could try again next year. It wasn’t true. Next year we would be in high school.