The Book of Ruth

by Jane Hamilton

  I was still scared of everyone at school. There were two boys who menaced me. I won’t say their names; they know who they are. Maybe the teachers kept me in the dumb classes because I never opened my mouth and they forgot I was alive. They didn’t know that I was like the mice who come out after dark, squeaking and pattering. About the only time I spoke in school was the time I told Miss Daken I thought Hitler had some good points and she stared me down until I changed my mind. In most cases I couldn’t speak about history or math because I was dreaming about blind tapes. I couldn’t do math no matter how hard I stared at the page, and everyone thought to themselves, Why aren’t you like your brother Matt? When Miss Taylor said that very sentence to me out loud—she was exasperated because I could not do long division—I ripped up my math sheets and bit my tongue so I wouldn’t cry. I got an F. When we had to read books in school I never understood them like we were supposed to. My eyes hurt from looking at the pages all the time, and when the teachers asked me what the books were about, I couldn’t say in one single sentence. I seemed to feel the meaning with my body, rather than my head. When I got promoted to the regular English class my teacher asked me what I thought were the major themes in The Great Gatsby. My face heated up and turned to steam. I saw the rich people floating before me, very fat on being rich, and they were empty, and there was the big old billboard with the glasses watching over the highway like it thought it was Jesus Christ. When Mr. Davidson asked me what the book meant, the only words I heard were “one two three, one two three, now relax your shoulders.”

  He wrote “See me” on all my school themes. He said I had serious problems with the language. I had to go in at lunch time and sit by him at his desk. I had to smell his perfume and watch the crust of shaving cream behind his ear. He always took his glasses off and wiped his eyes. My themes made him so tired he couldn’t stand to think about them. The whole paper was covered with red ink; there wasn’t one place to start correcting. Finally he demoted me to my old class. He decided he couldn’t save me.

  I asked Miss Finch, “What would you think if I joined the army after high school?” I was certain they didn’t send girls over to Vietnam because the posters at the post office showed the women at typewriters and switchboards. They spoke of careers and travel. I asked Miss Finch, “Do you think I could get into the U.S. Army?”

  She told me the superiors made a person do one thousand situps and push-ups, and run around, and that women as well as men were taught to handle guns. She said the army was a ghastly place, unfit for man or beast. I couldn’t imagine what else I might end up doing except wiping eggs and selling them to people who saw the sign on the road. I guessed the best thing I could do was sniff the air and say how good it smelled.

  When I was in the last years of high school May got a girlfriend. That’s what she called her, only Mrs. Foote was over the hill. She was about forty-eight. She definitely was not a girl. She first came as an egg customer and gradually she got very chummy with May. She lived down the road, in a house that was more run-down than ours, with her three children and her husband. He had weak kidneys so he couldn’t work. Mrs. Foote had gray short hair that was so stiff it stuck off the back of her head like a slide. It looked slippery too. She had several black moles on her face and breasts so big if they had hands at the end of them they might be useful. They could wipe silver or sew on buttons. Her teeth had wide black spaces between them. If you were an organism in her mouth you’d have to be able to jump pretty far, going from tooth to tooth. Wherever she went her fat son followed. He bossed everyone around and thought he knew as much as Dr. Heck, the school principal, possibly even more. He had sisters at home who were always getting into trouble stealing and running away. He said his sisters were loose; he told me he whipped them but he was lying. He was too lazy to hurt people.

  Mrs. Foote wore flowered dresses that zipped tight up the front, and an apron with a hammer, her flashlight, and a dust rag in the pocket. Her nylons had runs so wide I couldn’t figure out why she even bothered to wear them, and her shoes were holey. I could see her broken soles because she always put her feet up on a chair. She said she had to rest her swollen veins. She had probably the shortest fattest legs in the state of Illinois. If she wasn’t a person you’d laugh at the shape you saw out there in nature.

  She was a fixture in our kitchen in the afternoons when I came home from stringing up the blind tapes. May didn’t ordinarily smoke, but with her girlfriend she lit up about five cigarettes, one after the next. The place smelled like a murky tavern. May exhaled as if she thought she was a knockout—she blew smoke up to the ceiling like a movie star.

  Mrs. Foote and May became friends because Mrs. Foote had problems she couldn’t solve. She had to tell someone about them. For instance, her girl hurt someone on the road when she was driving around smashed. Mrs. Foote didn’t know what to do about her children, so she always cried with her head down on the table. But the beauty of it was May going over to Mrs. Foote, and patting her on the shoulder and saying, “Now, now.”

  When I was in the living room folding laundry and watching the news I could hear them in there, Mrs. Foote sniffling and May saying, “It’s OK, it’s OK.” Sometimes I got little flashes of understanding. All of a sudden I knew what the Rev had been saying all those years ago when he talked about how friends are people who can surprise you with kindnesses. May was a friend, both ordinary and miraculous. What cracked me up was the way Mrs. Foote thought May had a TV-show life with her smart boy winning science fairs and math games, and a girl who didn’t do stunts, such as practically killing people at three in the morning. May didn’t say to her best friend, I’m just as miserable as you. Instead, she acted as if she had been guaranteed a trouble-free existence by Mr. J. Christ.

  Probably compared to Mrs. Foote’s Daisy I was the world’s best-behaved high school girl. But Daisy was spectacularly beautiful. She was in my grade and she had dark hair that curled around her face, and big black eyes with thin feathery plucked eyebrows, and she put green makeup on her lids, piles of it with silvery specks, so she looked like she was from somewhere else—the moon, for example. Everybody couldn’t help looking at her when she walked straight down the hall, not turning to see a single person. She was two years behind in school, because she didn’t care about anything except boys. Some said even the football coach couldn’t help himself and that he took Daisy to the Rainbow Motel.

  One spring night when I was sixteen I heard banging at the door. I lay stiff and alert in bed. Probably someone was coming to kill us. I listened to May go downstairs and pretty soon there was the noise of Mrs. Foote blabbering. I heard the wind moving out between the wide spaces of her teeth. Naturally she had her son Randall along. He was so fat if he sat on a worm on a rock it would make a fossil in about five minutes. Then scientists wouldn’t have to wait a million years. I went downstairs because I couldn’t help it; I was curious. No one said anything to me. Randall was the only one who glanced at me standing in my nightgown, shivering. He had a belt about a mile long stretching around his belly, as if he thought his pants could actually fall down. It was impossible they were so tight. He always stared at me like he was planning to gobble me up.

  Daisy was gone. They couldn’t find her. It was four in the morning. “Actually,” Randall said, “she hasn’t been home for two days.” Mrs. Foote was having a fit; the flab on her arms was quivering even when the rest of her was quiet. May said, “Sit down, Dee Dee. Here’s some whiskey. You just steady yourself. We’ll find her.”

  May spoke in a way that made us all believe her. May would make it come right, make no mistake. Randall kept saying he was going to murder Daisy when she got home, for driving his mother hysterical. Because Mr. Foote’s kidneys were on the blink, Randall acted like a big old rooster, watching over his brood of bad girls. May called the sheriff and the Rev while she poured drinks for Mrs. Foote. May was such a good friend, to share her alcohol. Mrs. Foote got loaded on the whiskey, so May put her to bed on the
couch. She told Randall to use the recliner. When they woke up at about ten the next morning, Daisy was in our kitchen eating cereal. Daisy wouldn’t say much. She told Randall to lay off her. There was something she said about a trucker down at the truck stop near the highway, and how she went clear to Kentucky with him.

  Seven

  ONCE I got out of high school, where I didn’t learn a thing because I dreamed about blind tapes the whole time, I went to work where May worked. I kept trying to keep my eye on the world so I could get to it sometime. I wasn’t sure how I was going to get there without money or wits. I spent all my energy keeping track of dirty clothes, and chickens, and all the eggs: every day more eggs. I had dreams where I was shredding newspaper and wadding it into balls to stuff up the hens’ bottoms, stop them from laying for a while. Still, I knew the world was out there, another country, with an ocean between us.

  It was right around my commencement when Miss Finch had to go to a nursing home. I didn’t say goodbye to her. Her family came and packed her up, and took her to a place full of old people strapped into wheelchairs, screaming about the 1920s. It was the Baptist Home, where May’s Aunt Margaret had gone, so May was an expert on the subject. She said in that place people die in bunches; there’ll be a dry spell for months and then three or four will go in the space of twenty-four hours. Before she left Miss Finch was forgetting everything I told her. She didn’t want to hear any more books. They made her so tired, she said. When I went over in the afternoons she was already angry with me; she’d say, “Where’s my lunch? I’m so hungry. Why don’t they bring me lunch?” She’d pout and then whimper. I had to take her hands and make her feel her empty lunch tray by her bed. I tried to make her remember the Jell-O with the bananas in it but she said I was pulling the wool over her eyes.

  “Miss Finch,” I said, “don’t tell me I’m a liar.”

  I had to cry about her lost brain. I took her hands and put them on my wet face and whispered, “Say I’m beautiful, OK?”

  “Remember the islands you went to with your husband?” I said, about one hundred times each visit.

  “Yes I do, clear as a bell, my deeah, that sweet warm blue water, clear as a bell.”

  She could remember the details about the islands, but what escaped her was, did she actually eat lunch? and who was I again? I wanted her to at least think of the books she loved. I tried to jostle her thoughts by saying, “Wouldn’t it be great if Mr. Darcy walked in here?” He was our favorite, out of all the people on her blind tapes. She was always saying “yes, yes,” but she wasn’t actually recalling; she was only saying “yes” like a little dog, thinking it might get a snack if it did the right trick.

  I watched from our house when they came to take her. It was a silent parade of people and suitcases. Then, when they were gone, I sat on our steps, just sat, thinking over the years I knew Miss Finch, thinking of all the afternoons we spent together. I sat there until it got dark. I sat through May calling me for supper three times. I was living in the books Miss Finch gave me—I couldn’t believe how lucky I was to have her for a friend. I couldn’t believe how much I was going to miss her blind eyes looking at me with all their tenderness.

  Matt and I graduated at the same time because we were in the class of ’73 together. He didn’t get anything but A’s for four years straight, so he made the speech. The girls were supposed to be dressed entirely in white, without flashy jewelry, and the boys had on black suits. We carried a couple of red roses in our arms but when I sniffed them they smelled old, as if they had been piled up in a grocery store for a few weeks. Our school probably got them cheap. I went into shock when the words began flowing from Matt’s mouth, because I hadn’t heard him say a complete sentence in ten years. He was exemplary, everything a person could wish for in a graduate, except for that complexion of his. He probably broke out because he was nervous standing up there in front of hundreds of people he didn’t like. He knew a great deal of information; he talked about wars we were withdrawing from. He didn’t mention any particular place. He probably didn’t want to get into trouble with the country, but he did say that wars resulted from the foolish work of the government and that our president would have it on his conscience. He talked about corruption in the highest places, that it was time for new leadership—this is Matt, I kept saying to myself—and that we were trying to be an honest generation. He said he was going to go to college and work to make peace through science; he said that peace was something everyone in our class had to work for, because we lived in a dangerous age. I could tell some of the parents out there in the audience, shifting around, didn’t appreciate Matt bad-mouthing the president. I guess commencement speeches usually outline a brilliant future. They don’t mention H-bombs that could fall on us and char the little children.

  I kept looking at Matt, at the back of his head, while he spoke. And I thought to myself, He’s my brother. I couldn’t believe that I grew up in the same house with him. We knew nothing about each other. If he said anything in my presence it was to tell me I was a moron. He stood up on stage informing everyone in the town about his plans to make peace on earth with the technology stored in the cavity of his head, and when he got home that night he would, as usual, call his sister a moron, with his eyes, not his voice.

  I had a tremendous urge: I was going to burst if I didn’t stand up in the spiky white heels May bought for me, and scream to everyone there—I could even see the Rev—GO TO HELL EVERY SINGLE LAST BASTARD! I was going to march down to the microphone, grab it from Matt’s smooth freckled hands, and tell the parents the F-word. I was going to turn to Matt and demand that he take me with him when he left Honey Creek. I had to clamp my hands to my chair to make myself sit rigid and not go clumping in my heels to the podium. I had to take deep breaths so I wouldn’t spontaneously combust.

  May appointed herself guest of honor, because she had made Matt with his fine round face and his clean fingernails. Everyone congratulated her, and she smiled vaguely, as if she were saying, My boy has been a genius for so long . . . why are you shaking my hand now?

  Daisy graduated also. It was common knowledge that she passed English because Mr. Davidson craved her every inch. He was too shy to take her out, but so in love he forgave her for not turning in her themes. At the ceremony she wore a dress that had holes punched out of it in rows all around her stomach, as if they were windows on a ship. She wore green fingernail polish to match her eyelids, and contrary to instructions, green plastic earrings the size of half dollars. Everyone’s heart raced when she pranced across the stage, chewing her gum. She was tall and dark and cared for no one. To me she looked like Mr. Darcy’s twin sister. In the book Miss Finch and I read, Pride and Prejudice, Mr. Darcy didn’t have a twin sister, but you never know, he could have had one they were ashamed of. I had always tried to get in gym class with Daisy so I could see her in the shower, but we were never on the same schedule. She winked at me and waved her diploma when she climbed the risers to find her seat. Her look made the fur on my back stand up all prickly.

  Afterwards, Randall shook my hand and said, “Best wishes.” He had his little change purse in his clutches. He always carried that thing around with him, as if he thought he was living in some fairy tale where he, the king, has a purse of gold. Randall wasn’t my favorite person of all time. He made me want to run away from the sight of his shirt coming out of his pants. Sometimes, when he sat on a stool in our kitchen, if he was straining to reach the potato chips, his pants, even though they were tight, slipped down. You could see his crack.

  Mrs. Foote asked May if we wanted to go out with the Foote family, not counting the mister, who was in the hospital hooked up to a kidney machine. May looked at Mrs. Foote as if she’d never laid eyes on her before and said, “We have other engagements.” She had her nose in the air as she turned her back. Mrs. Foote was only stupefied for an instant and then she remembered that people always treated her like that. She walked slowly away on her stumpy legs. She didn’t even put her
head scarf on to keep the rain from ruining the permanent May gave her—the hairdo that made Mrs. Foote look like a bald baby who has one curl on top of its head. It was true that we did have an invitation to go out for ice cream with Mr. Hanson and a few of the other graduates with brains and their parents. Still, in front of all the people at graduation, May had to make it absolutely clear that she was far too good for the Footes.

  I would have been happy to be on a date with Randall, compared to the company of the smart graduates, in that one single terrible hour at the ice cream parlor. I’m eating my chocolate sundae as fast as I possibly can in the white dress May borrowed from Mrs. Foote. It’s plain except for the puffy short sleeves and a scoop neck, and drops of chocolate running down the front. The salted pecans and the hot fudge don’t even taste good but I don’t know what else to do except eat. I wish I was a black hole that was swirling through space, suctioning up brilliant young stars. When Dr. Heck, the principal, asks me, “What are you planning to do, young lady, now that you’re out of high school?”—and he pats my diploma—I say, turning red like May’s lobster hands, I say fast, “I’m gonna go work at the dry cleaners.”

  Nobody makes one sound. Matt is wishing an elephant would come over, hook its trunk around me, and carry me off. I can see all of them thinking, How in the world did one family turn out a genius, ready to make peace on earth, and a dry cleaners employee? I have the urge again, it’s so fierce in me, to stand up and tell how Matt got a head start because he talked practically the day of his birth and because May was crazy about boy babies. He got all the new clothes from Sears. I want to scream that I’m possibly just as smart as any one of them, except Matt. I want to ask each graduate if they can name all the characters Charles Dickens ever wrote about—then I bet their faces wouldn’t gloat too long.