The Book of Ruth

by Jane Hamilton

  I can’t think about the ice cream parlor without feeling my face heat up with the humiliation. In those days I didn’t have an ounce of gumption. I only dreamed about standing up and telling Dr. Heck, GO TO HELL, because I knew if I did I’d get put in the clinker, or May would blindfold me and drop me off on someone’s doorstep, where she delivers eggs.

  Matt told all the ignorant parents what he was going to study when he got to MIT out on the East Coast. It wasn’t a secret that the college was paying for him to come and learn science concepts. Diane Crawford was going to be out there too, at Smith College. Dr. Heck made some crazy remark about Diane and Matt getting together in Boston to talk about their alma mater and old times. Diane almost gagged on her cherry. She was probably planning never to think of Honey Creek again once she got beyond the town limits. When I got home I looked at a map to see where Boston was located. It didn’t look so far away. Only, I knew it was one thousand miles away, so distant I couldn’t imagine the length of those miles.

  Right after graduation Matt went off to another one of his summer camps. He lived in a dormitory in New York City and did his math. He got money for doing it. He was probably rich. He never sent May a nickel. He sent her one postcard of the Empire State Building, and that’s when I knew Matt was gone for good, as I had predicted, and what’s left is May and me in our house, and the job at the dry cleaners. Mrs. Foote came over the day after graduation and she and May picked up where they left off. I could hear May saying, “It’ll be all right, Dee Dee, it’ll work out good, you’ll see.”

  So there May and I are out at the dry cleaners just at the edge of Stillwater on Highway 12, trying not to breathe. I remember nothing about the early days, except the smell. The smell got into your heart, and your heart pumped poison all over you, up into your brain, so everyone you looked at appeared gray. Still, I thought it might be awfully nice to be a clean coat, underneath the plastic, an orange ticket saying you belong to somebody.

  The Trim ’N Tidy dry cleaners is a low square white stucco building with glass windows so you can look out and see the trucks going by. Trim ’N Tidy: it sounds like the perfect place to be. It’d be funny if that’s what planet earth were called. There were rows and rows of plastic bags with coats and sweaters, dresses and blankets, men’s suits and quilts—everything you could think of that attracted dirt. Every now and then an idiotic girl brought in her bathing suit because it said Dry Clean Only. May and I stood at the counter to take the clothes and weigh them and write up the tickets. It was the only place in about four towns for cleaning so we got everybody’s dirty—soiled we were supposed to say—garments. After we weighed the clothes we were to look them over and mark the spots, and take off the buttons that could get wrecked by the chemicals. Artie, he’s the boss, and Louise, the steamer, and Debra did the work in the back. There were enough clothes in Trim ’N Tidy to make a mountain for people to ski down. After the clothes were clean May and I sewed the buttons back on, wrapped up the articles in plastic, and put the number stickers on so we would know who owned what. We were called the finishers.

  At first I thought I’d never get used to the smell. You feel it in your veins. My breath smelled like dry cleaners. I could feel the odor in my mouth and on my teeth. I could taste it in my chicken soup from my thermos at lunch. I could feel that smell behind my eyeballs.

  I watched the trucks flashing by the window, taking pop and flour and hogs and junk to places far away. Maybe they were carrying Daisy to see the world, down in Kentucky. I stared at people’s faces when they weren’t paying attention to me, and I made up stories about their lives. I imagined how the elderly ladies with professional permanents and blue handbags lived alone in three-story houses with their small dogs and their gardens. They were so prim when they came into Trim ’N Tidy. They were doing their spring cleaning all year long, getting their blankets and curtains freshened up. They dabbed their runny eyes with immaculate white handkerchiefs. I watched the farmers come in with their wives. I watched them stand in the doorway, shuffling back and forth in their tall rubber boots. They smelled like cows; they were going to smell like cows even after they were dead. They didn’t say anything. They looked big and dumb, like being with a herd their whole lives had made them mute. I saw the little children sniff the air and turn up their noses. I saw all of Stillwater passing by. Nothing escaped my attention. If I didn’t keep my hands busy I had to think, Here goes my life; I’m going to spend the rest of my days working at Trim ’N Tidy. I couldn’t stand thinking there wasn’t anything more left for me so I worked at a frantic pace to keep my mind still.

  There were a couple of times when I’d forget and May would bawl me out for not saying things such as “Have a nice day.” I laughed so hard to myself when she demanded I say, “Have a nice day.” The Rev’s words came to me: “The dung heap shall smile.” The dung heap shall say, “Have a nice day.” I had to tell Aunt Sid about that one, May shouting, “You tell them customers to have a nice day.”

  Aunt Sid wrote me and said I was resilient. I had to look the word up. It has something to do with my wanting to laugh at May when she tells me to say, “Have a nice day.” Resilient. I liked being resilient because it sounded like a jewel glittering in the light.

  Mrs. Foote came into the dry cleaners when Artie, the boss, wasn’t around. She must have known his schedule because she always came in with her pack of cigarettes just after he’d left, and she and May chewed the fat while May bagged the clothes and I washed the windows, swept up, waited on people. Mrs. Foote had information on everyone in Honey Creek and Stillwater. May would always say, “Is that right?—you don’t say. My God, I can’t believe it,” as if old Frank Wartman and his bum liver were the most fascinating news she’d ever heard about in her life. Sometimes Mrs. Foote told stories about Daisy; that’s when I perked up my ears. I tried to move closer to her big empty mouth. She said Daisy had a boyfriend from way down in Peoria, who bought her little tiny bathing suits. Mrs. Foote had found pictures of Daisy on a motorcycle with a strap as thin as a string bean around her, “Ahem, ahem.” I couldn’t stop thinking about Daisy on a black metal bike with her legs spread apart, and all that dark hair around her face, and then the little strap. I could almost imagine how that motorcycle must have felt to her legs.

  May and I both worked five days a week from nine to five back then, at Trim ’N Tidy. When we came home at night May made supper while I went out to get water for the hens and collect the eggs. We got along. We were with each other so much we didn’t have a choice. We had to be companions because we were all each of us had, that’s not counting Mrs. Foote. When May did the grocery shopping on Saturday she bought us movie magazines and the books that tell what’s going on in the soap operas, and since we both smoked, she bought a carton of Newports. Mrs. Foote offered me a Camel once, and May didn’t say anything, so I started smoking. Except for a couple of coughs I did it expertly on the first try. I felt adult, only I wished I had a black holder, the kind Daisy used. May and I sat at the table after supper and while I cleaned the eggs, she smoked and flipped through the magazines. She read me news flashes, slowly, about all the celebrities and their new dates. I liked hearing the stories, and at the end May always held up the pictures so I could examine Farrah Fawcett’s big teeth. I’d squint to see; I’d have to make comments, like “wow, look at Liz Taylor’s tits.” We had to laugh over some of the stars’ body parts. We were good friends then, May and I, in a certain way.

  Every fall I couldn’t help missing the cows and going across to the pasture to hear them shuffling through the leaves. My first September at Trim ’N Tidy I came home and stank in my blood and bones. I had to go outside, at the end of the day, to feel the weak sun on my skin. I walked up to the plateau, knowing I wasn’t a youngster any more, because I was out in the work force. I wondered why I went to school all those years, just so I could put clothes in plastic bags. Why had I undergone the torture of long division? Sometimes I couldn’t figure it out, what all th
e living was for.

  I did know that I loved autumn even more than spring. There was something about it that made me feel fond and sad, the way the fields turned gold and all the wild apples dropped to the ground, smelling and wasting. The wind screeching around the house told me the year behind us was gone forever. You could see the animals in the woods, and the farmers, gathering up food for the winter, to keep from dying. The men, dwarfed by their machinery, were doing their tasks so urgently, shelling corn by tractor light with pitch dark closing in. I walked out in the early morning to sniff the leaves burning and whisper words to the geese on their way south. I loved how they knew exactly where they were flying.

  On payday I handed my check over to May, because she was the banker, and she gave me five or ten dollars she said I could keep for myself. She said that we were barely scraping by: the oil, the taxes, the food, the car, were so expensive. I had a pink plastic pig Elmer gave me when I was six, where I stuffed the dollar bills. Someday, when something enormous was going to happen to me, I’d need the money.

  That fall Artie got me to join the Trim ’N Tidy bowling league. He said I didn’t need to know how, he was going to teach me. I mumbled, “OK.” I thought he might fire me if I said I didn’t want to. Our team was made up of May, Artie, Debra, Louise, and me. Sometimes Mrs. Foote came too. She told me I should call her Dee Dee, but I couldn’t quite do that, so I just called her nothing. I’d say, “Hi,” and stop at that. She brought Randall along, with his change purse. He needed loads of quarters to buy Bit O’ Honey bars from the vending machines. He didn’t bowl at all; he said he wasn’t real athletic, and I murmured, “You can say that again.” He got mad at me, so mad he bought a Three Musketeers and tore at it with his teeth right in front of me. I wanted to tell him, Randall, you’re fat and useless, and I hate the way you stare at me—but instead I whispered my thoughts to myself because probably somewhere in him he hated how he was, he hated his body. I saw the backs of his legs once when he was in shorts and they were all dimpled like cottage cheese.

  Dee Dee tried to get Daisy to come along on the league too, something to perhaps interest her a little. She came a couple of times. I couldn’t help gaping at her. I couldn’t help observing the way she walked up to take her turn, as if she knew everyone would wait all night for her to first spit on her hands, and then hold them over the drier, and get her thumb in the hole just right, and eyeball the pins. She shook her head so her curls flopped around, and then she licked her lips. When she held the ball in her hands all I could see was a motorcycle and her legs, and the little bathing suit strings hardly covering her up.

  When we sat around waiting for our turn she’d ask me how it was going, and I’d say, “Pretty good. I’m working with Ma down at the cleaners.” Like she didn’t already know that, because there we were in the cleaners’ bowling league. She must have thought I was short on marbles. When she made strikes she said, “Hot shit!” and rubbed her hands together. She always wore tight pants and I was afraid her thighs might lose all their circulation and atrophy.

  I liked bowling because I was halfway decent at the sport. Matter of fact, I always scored the most points for our team, and May grinned at me through the haze of smoke. She was a lousy bowler but she actually didn’t seem to mind being the worst. She smoked her cigarettes and drank whiskey sours and danced around with a butt hanging out of her mouth. She danced in her bowling shoes and her nylons, plus her bowling outfit, her pink-and-white-checkered pants suit. She started to hack too, because of all the nicotine she had in her poor soiled lungs. She could produce a hoarse laugh just like some of the stars on Hollywood Squares. I see May, a pink dancing lady with a big old ball on her thumb, blowing smoke rings up to the ceiling. She sure made me laugh, and the beauty of it is she made herself laugh too. We were in our element back then, at the Town Lanes. Daisy said to me, “You bowl fantastic!” It was my bowling skills that made her notice I was alive. If I had been a dud she probably would never have spoken to me. She made me so happy I had to go outside and catch my breath.

  Right around Thanksgiving Dee Dee’s husband dropped dead. His kidneys gave out one morning and he didn’t wake up. They were expecting it for so long it wasn’t a great big deal, but of course Dee Dee came over and got trashed on May’s liquor. I went to the service they had for him. You could see his body sticking out of the casket. He looked just about the same dead as he did alive, except his mouth was molded into a smile. At the end the whole family walked down the aisle behind the casket—it was on wheels. Randall stared straight ahead while Dee Dee bawled into his sleeve. Daisy came last. She looked over all the guests as if she had just taken her wedding vows and was counting up how many presents she was going to receive. She didn’t seem too sad. I thought you were at least supposed to pretend to be mournful at funerals.

  When we got home from the church I said, “Ma, how about you teach me some more dancing?”

  I wanted to do something cheerful. May turned on the radio and she started one-two-threeing me. We were going along waltzing. I remembered every step and didn’t miss a beat. May spoke the words “Cha cha cha”—she liked getting jazzy—when all of a sudden she saw a ghost. She saw Matt standing in the hall in his high smart judgment. Her feet stopped working. She sank into the chair and started to cry.

  “Ma, don’t cry, it’s OK,” I said, hardly patting her shoulder from behind. “Please don’t cry, Ma.”

  She cried while I stood gripping the back of the chair. With the bowling and her whiskey and Dee Dee she sometimes forgot to miss Matt, but when she remembered him there was no one else on earth for her. Perhaps I’m wrong and she cried because she felt sorry for Dee Dee losing Mr. Foote, or she was recalling both her own husbands and how they left her. Since I’m not May I can’t be positive what she was thinking, but I’d say that most of all she was upset because Matt wrote her two postcards since he’d left for MIT in September. She had to make up details to tell people, about how he sent her letters three times a week and how popular he was with girls; he took them to dances, he couldn’t decide who to ask since they all wanted to go with him. She told about the clubs he belonged to—don’t ask her to say which ones, there were so many she couldn’t remember. I heard her telling someone at church that pretty soon, if her rheumatism improved, she was going to go visit Matt for a special weekend they had for parents, that Matt had asked her if she could come out. He was sending her cash for the jumbo jet.

  After Mr. Foote’s funeral we didn’t carouse for a while. Sometimes after we ate, and the chickens were fed, the eggs wiped, I went out into the night and stared up at the sky. I wondered if there were someone just like me on another planet, if they had dry cleaners up there, and winters coming on, and the symbol and myth of Jesus Christ. I wanted to find out what she did when her heart grew so heavy not even lying smack on the ground relieved the terrible ache.

  Eight

  STILL, those days were kind of like a honeymoon with May. We were just ourselves. We were in the mood to raise a little hell—that’s a phrase Dee Dee uses twice a night. It doesn’t really apply to us all that much, but we did bowl maybe three, four times a week. May and I had yellow vinyl bowling bags with our initials embossed under the handle, and I owned my own ball. It was a present from the Footes on my birthday. I can’t quote you prices, but they aren’t exactly cheap. It fit my fingers to perfection. I got the best feeling, knocking all the pins down, and Artie always petted my curls in praise of what he called my “sensational talent.” He was an old guy so I bowled far better than either he or his wife.

  “Sweetheart,” he called to me, “you are a terrific bowler, there ain’t no doubt about that. You must have been born making strikes.”

  I was queen at the Town Lanes, with my big old blackie ball on my thumb and fingers. I’d get crazy sensations when I stood up to take my turn. It must have been all the exhilaration because I was a natural expert that made thoughts and sayings fly through my brain. There I’d be with blackie ball, hol
ding her up in front of me, looking at her like I’m worshiping, and what came to me was the sentence “In the beginning was the WORD, and the word was GOD.” And I had to look at blackie very hard for a few seconds, thinking about “In the beginning was the WORD.” I love how extraordinary that sounds, nothing in the world but one word, out in the blackness, not even stars. One word. Sometimes I felt so queer as if I weren’t standing on firm ground, to think of it all starting with a couple of letters. Everyone thought I was concentrating or saying a prayer when I stared and then brought my arm down smooth letting her go and wham all the pins all of them tumbling and a second later they’re swept away. You do the damage and bingo, it’s gone. Bowling was a fantastic sport for my eyesight back then because it made me focus on faraway objects. When I was mad at something, I said, seeing the pins fall, “There goes Honey Creek. There goes Randall.”

  After bowling one night I got stuck in the car with Randall while May and Dee Dee went to buy gin at the liquor store. Randall tried to get me to hold hands with him. His hands were short and fat like lizard paws.

  “Not on your life, Randall,” I said, when he asked me.

  “Why not?” he said, leaving his mouth hanging wide open. We were both in the back seat; naturally he took up over half of it. I had to smash myself up to the window. I didn’t want to be near him. I didn’t want to smell him up close.

  I felt as if I were watching myself from way up near the ceiling light. I wasn’t used to being in situations like this one. I heard myself sneer, “On account of I don’t love you, Randall. I don’t even like you.”