The Book of Ruth

by Jane Hamilton

  Then one day, when I was weighing a pile of filthy blankets, I looked up to see him, out of water, coming into Trim ’N Tidy. He stood at the door smiling at me, and I had to smile back, breathless with surprise, at his face in daylight. He stared and grinned, showing all his rotten teeth. Something woke up in me, something that was hiding, although it used to come alive in particular spots of Miss Finch’s books, such as the one about Madame Bovary. Miss Finch never knew I ordered the tape from the library. She had told me once that it wasn’t an appropriate book for me. I took it home and sweated through most of it. When Madame Emma was in the hotel with one of her men she locked the door and then her bathrobe fell away from her shoulders, and there she was standing at the door with nothing on her body calling out for what the man had.

  When I saw Ruby shifting back and forth on his feet, looking at me, I wished I had the bathrobe at my shoulders, that I could let it fall. All of a sudden I longed to own a bathing suit that would barely cover me, and I desperately wanted Ruby to first slowly stroke the motorcycle I would of course be sitting on, and then he’d find me with his hands.

  He told me he had a sweater he needed clean because he had somewhere special to go. He made his speech deliberately. I could tell he had practiced saying the words. I weighed the sweater without checking the scale. I glanced up at him and looked at the ground, back and forth. Ruby has wide blue eyes that look straight at a person, and he doesn’t blink all that much. He smiles to show off his crooked teeth, the dead and the living. His brown hair that day was plastered to his head because he always wore a Cubs baseball hat. It’s the team that doesn’t ever win. But it was his eyes, reflecting the kindness, and his broad steady smile that had me caught. He wasn’t asking me questions; he was saying, “Here I am.” When Ruby keeps his mouth shut he’s especially handsome. He isn’t exactly devoted to his dentist. May, at least sent us to the dentist every so often so we wouldn’t have to have our teeth pulled. She restricted our sugar intake because she said not having her teeth spoiled her pleasure in just about everything. Ruby told me that when he was little his father tied his front tooth to a doorknob and then closed the door. The tooth refused to budge but a few months later it turned black and died. I’m not sure if it’s a true story, or if he got it from one of the Three Stooges movies.

  At Trim ’N Tidy Ruby and I stared at each other and time stopped. I kept thinking about water, how gently it lapped his inner tube, how peaceful we all were, Daisy talking almost quietly into the night. I shivered and had to look away, and then he said he had never seen a lady bowl so professional before. He was talking about me. I had to laugh, because he complimented me just the way I liked to hear.

  When he came to pick up his sweater the next day he said all in a stream, “Do you want to go to the bar across the road for a drink after work?” He had to clear his throat and say it all again, so I could understand him. I had to grin to myself because Ruby swaggered so confidently with the clumsy shoes he wore—they had chunky wooden heels—but when he opened his mouth you could tell his nerves were on edge. I knew that we were two humans, that’s all, two humans walking around blindly in the night, looking for a warm hand.

  “Hold on,” I said. I went to find May to tell her that I had an invitation. I wished I had a better outfit on. I was wearing dark blue stretch pants and a faded sleeveless shirt decorated with rosebuds. Daisy as usual had issued her compliments earlier in the day: she had said my outfit looked like something people in the depression wore. May came out and looked Ruby up and down, mumbling phrases under her breath. Perhaps she was comparing him to her handsome and dead Willard Jenson. She said to him, “Don’t be late with her.”

  We walked across the street watching out for every pebble on the road. We sat down and Ruby ordered a beer and then I did too. We didn’t say anything. Finally he asked me, “Do you want some peanuts?” and I said, “Sure.” I felt embarrassed even having a mouth to put food in. It didn’t seem like a girl should eat; it didn’t seem like eating was how dates got to like each other. Then, after hours of grinning and eating, staring at the walls and the ceiling, picking skin around our cuticles, I mentioned how peaceful he looked in the inner tube, and he said, Yeah, he liked it out there in the middle of the lake, only thing that bothered a person was flies, but that was something he could pretty much handle.

  “I love being outside more than just about anywhere,” I said.

  He took a big swallow of beer. His fingers gripping the glass were dirty.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  We grinned at each other some more. It was a nice habit we were getting into.

  “I used to get up at six in the morning and fish until night,” he said. “I got some fish, sheesh, you wouldn’t believe the size of them babies, my old man had to drag me in at night by the ears. I didn’t want to stop catching fish.”

  He told me about his lures and the bait. He loved night crawlers. He’d watch the fish come up, stuck through a bright red and yellow lure. “I’d watch them flap around for a couple of minutes,” he said, “and then I’d throw them back. Boy, were they relieved.” He laughed a great ha-ha, which sounded like something that didn’t quite belong to him. Still, I had a clear picture of little Ruby fishing in a dazzling white T-shirt, with every single white tooth in his mouth. I saw him, by himself for hours, listening to the water and the bees buzzing around him on the bank.

  “What did you think about all day long there by the river?” I asked him, putting a peanut in my mouth as primly as I could.

  “Stuff,” he said. “I looked at the water floating by. I liked being warm and peaceful. Sometimes I didn’t even have my line in the water, I just slept on the bank. I sure liked being warm and peaceful.”

  When he said those words I knew we were meant for each other. There wasn’t one doubt in my mind. It happened that quickly.

  We were on our third beer when I told Ruby that I had an aunt named Sidney in De Kalb.

  “You ever been there?” he asked.

  “A couple of times,” I lied. I tried to look like I had done that a million and one times, had beers with a man, but my teeth were chattering, and also the undersides of my thighs were quivering against the seat, so I could barely make sense.

  “What do you do besides pretend you’re a fish out in the middle of the lake?” I whispered, changing the subject. That question made him grin again for at least a minute. He liked my teasing. He told me he worked at the gas station and they were all set to make him manager, but then the boss got mad at him for no reason and shouted, “You’re fired.”

  “That ain’t fair,” I said, and he shook his head and said he was looking for another job. He said he could get a job at the glass factory they have in Stillwater. Only it got so noisy in there, and he had real fragile ears. He couldn’t tolerate too much noise.

  “I was born with them that way,” he told me, and I felt right then and there like leaning over and kissing his feeble ears.

  I couldn’t believe I was with the waterman. It was crazy to hear him utter words, after I had seen him in my dreams, a sea animal, without a drop of human blood. To tell the truth—and it probably is not a revelation—I had had fantasy dreams about him ever since I met him: he was a seal, black and shiny, barking at me. We were always swimming together with our legs touching, our stomachs rubbing close when we rolled over—when we were playing games.

  Each time I looked up at him I had a jolt. I had to connect the person talking to me with the one my mind had created. I bit my tongue so I’d know here I was in the flesh having romance like I had seen on TV all my life. I didn’t think anything like it would ever happen to me. I always put myself in other people’s shoes, people such as Emma Bovary or Elizabeth Bennet. I imagined I was them, and then love came to me.

  Once I opened my mouth, after the third beer, I couldn’t stop talking to Ruby. I told him things I never mentioned to anyone, not even Aunt Sid. He made me tell the secrets because he looked straight into my face and sm
iled, and because he fished all day long by the river when he was young. I told him about one of my favorite sights in the world: old Wendell Kate riding his bike down the road herding his cows and pumping his horn. Ruby nodded and looked at me with beer foam on his lips, making a mustache, and then I blurted that I loved, almost more than anything, the first spring peepers singing up from the marsh, come April, and how full of longing the little frogs must be, wanting a mate so desperately after being frozen all winter long. I felt my whole head thunk on the floor and glow like an ember when I mentioned the word mate. He smiled and gazed at me with his wide blue eyes, hardly blinking. He listened carefully to my words. He listened like Miss Finch used to. I knew he understood my thoughts. I quickly said that I always sniffed the earth and wished on stars and that I knew something powerful was going to take me from Honey Creek. I said it so Ruby would hear me and maybe make my plans come true.

  Afterwards, before he took me home, we went up to Andrew’s Hill, the hunting grounds outside of Honey Creek, because of what I said about liking to sniff the earth. We stood outside and were quiet together, breathing deeply, and he watched me, as if he had to have lessons in breathing. He watched my chest rise and fall. When we got into the car he spoke slowly, his grin spreading across his face as he moved closer. He said, “Do you want to see my little one-eyed snake?”

  “Sure,” I said. I didn’t mind snakes. They usually had fancy designs on their backs. There must be reasons for the patterns but I didn’t know what they could be. I thought maybe Ruby could teach me—maybe he was an expert on nature.

  He stretched both his arms around me and started kissing my mouth, first softly on the outside and then he went inside. Our teeth clacked together. For a long time I saw nothing but searing white light with my eyes closed. The whiteness filled me up until in a flash I saw Madame Bovary letting her bathrobe go. The next part happened before I could open my eyes: I felt my slacks down at my knees; he yanked them down, he was saying, “Oh God, baby, oh Christ in a convertible.” He was hurting me with a dagger, reaching under and inside. I cried out but he didn’t hear. He had my arm in his grip while he pricked the skin with his teeth. When he let go he laughed one minute and then moaned the next. He kept shouting, “JesusJesusJesusJesus,” for a reason I couldn’t understand. When he was done—it didn’t take more than one long minute—he collapsed on top of me. He shuddered. I could see his half-closed eyes, just the white part. When he opened his eyes he laughed again. He told me to wait, he’d make me feel better. He said he was Mr. Magic Fingers, some friend had told him so. I was whimpering, a sound I hate to think of. Even though he rocked me in his stiff arms I still wanted to cry because I was so dumb about all the things a person is supposed to know about in life. I cried because Ruby didn’t hear my shaking voice. I wanted to escape from him but there he was holding me in his arms like I’m newly born, saying so jubilantly, “Baby, you’ll get to like what we was just doing, take it from expert me. I never met a lady that didn’t go crazy in the sack.”

  I didn’t believe anything he said. I sniffed and swallowed and watched a firefly make its way along the floor of the car. He was attentive for a minute; he patted my head with his filthy hands. It wasn’t exactly like on some TV shows I’ve seen where the man breaks into the apartment, takes the girl with a lead pipe at her head, and then dumps her on the sofa.

  When I got home May asked me with a queer grin on her face, Was I in one piece? And I sat at the table eating some old stale cake smiling down at it, except I wanted to die right then and there, because I didn’t know who the good people were. I ran out of the house, wishing I could crawl into the ground, join the worms. I stumbled up to the plateau where I always go, and I wept.

  When I stopped I rolled over on my back, tired and wet. I looked up to the sky, to the Swan constellation. I looked up to all the untroubled stars shining down on me from so far away. Something inside, maybe the part of me that’s the best bowler in the universe, whispered faintly that I was more than an animal, and I tried to remember Miss Finch telling me I had good thoughts—good thoughts, she said. And every time the memory came to me, of Ruby and his cruelty, I thought of Aunt Sid, the liar, saying how big the world is, and how, when she conducts her chorus and sees all the wide open mouths and hears the music coming out of them, she knows there’s a force, perhaps born of the earth itself, that insists on beauty.

  Nine

  A COUPLE of days later Daisy came strutting into Trim ’N Tidy. She leaned way over on the counter, sweeping her tongue along the outside of her mouth, as if her lips were made of butterscotch candies. She started singing the song “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing,” in an opera star voice. I’ve heard those singers on TV. They sound scared to death. I turned my back on Daisy. I stood between the racks, plastic on both sides of me. She called out, “Does he kiss good?” She knew I didn’t know anything about kissing. She reminded me of Missy Baker and Diane Crawford, jeering. I was standing between all the plastic bags that say, “CAUTION—PLASTIC CAN CAUSE SUFFOCATION.” I didn’t need plastic I was smothering in my own skin and Daisy thought it was funny. She moved on to a tuneless song, singing the words “I need you I want you,” over and over.

  I felt feverish, and couldn’t stop trembling. Finally I had to turn around and shout, “Stop it, Daisy.” Tears streamed down my cheeks, into my frowning mouth, past my chin. She couldn’t believe the way I looked. She came behind the counter quickly—regular people aren’t supposed to do that—looking so worried. I loved her wrinkled forehead. She asked, “What’s the matter?” That question uncorked me. I cried my head off on her shoulder. I got her black shirt with the silver letters B-I-T-C-H all wet. Daisy went back and told Artie I had to have a little break; she said I was having my period and I needed to walk to distract myself from the pain.

  Daisy and I went up the highway to the Dairy Queen. We sat on the picnic benches and I told her what Ruby had done to me and how I was sure I had been sliced in half. I said I didn’t ever want to do that again, and Daisy giggled. She said she couldn’t help it. She explained that the first time is like sitting on a spike but there is improvement like you wouldn’t believe. She put her arm around me and said, “Don’t worry, you have that first experience behind you now.” She said, “Ruby likes you so much. He was too crazy for you.”

  “How come he’s on probation?” I asked her, blowing my nose on Dairy Queen’s napkins. It was the first time I wondered, seriously, if he had done something against the law, but she said, “He ain’t on probation. He got a little kooky after his old ma died, and went around smashing stuff, nothin’ major. He just goes to that same class I do for drunk drivers. The teacher likes him because he don’t mouth off. He sits so quiet. I ain’t sure what he did before,” she said, handing me another napkin, “but it wasn’t anything too terrible.”

  Drunk driving didn’t bother me. I know it isn’t responsible, but just about everyone in Honey Creek, including May, drives around smashed now and then. The bars are all out of town so you can’t help driving home a little tipsy. Most of all, I was worried that he went around showing hundreds of girls his little one-eyed snake, but Daisy said, “Far as I know he don’t have a girlfriend, besides you.

  “Don’t kill me, OK?” she said, trying not to crack a smile.

  “I won’t,” I said, even though I had the feeling I might want to.

  “I told Ruby where you worked, and about league night—I’ve never seen a man wanting to know a girl so bad. I told him he should take something into Trim ’N Tidy to get cleaned. I was his coach, see. He really thinks you’re a hot little number.”

  “Thanks, Daisy,” I said, trying to scowl.

  She bought me an ice cream to make up for it. I didn’t mention to her that somewhere inside of me I kept saying the words over and over to myself: “He thinks you’re a hot little number.” I went into the ladies’ room and looked at my face, trying to see it through Ruby’s eyes. I had hives all over from crying, and my eyes were puff
y. I wasn’t exactly at my best.

  We walked slowly up the road. I knew I was going to be embarrassed talking to Artie. He thought it was the time of the month for me. He didn’t do anything but pat my shoulder once as he rushed by.

  All afternoon I pictured Daisy and the girls she told me about who went out with men and let them perform all types of maneuvers on and in their bodies. Daisy described some of the details. She didn’t blush. She said on her dates sometimes she kneeled on the floor of the truck and put her mouth places I wouldn’t think could taste—good; that’s putting it mildly. Still, Daisy and her acquaintances didn’t look so happy for the fancy sensations. It isn’t nice to say of my best friend, but I knew Daisy was a cheap girl. There wasn’t anyone who truly loved her. She didn’t have strong attachments to her partners either. She used her men for their money and their certain body parts, and if she was lucky she was finished with them before they got tired of her. She gave herself away to millions; she sucked on them like they were food for life and then she spat it out. Even though I wasn’t an expert on men I understood that she didn’t have perfect bliss in life. She was restless without knowing why.

  It was true that I didn’t have experience with men, except for Elmer, and he doesn’t count. And Matt, of course, but he never had much of a body; he was a brain stuck on a pole. Artie, my boss, was one man I liked. He called his wife Dumpling—always made me smile to hear it. Also, I tolerated the Rev. He isn’t too bad, if you don’t consider the crazy stories he believes in.