The Book of Ruth

by Jane Hamilton

  However, Mr. Darcy was the man I truly admired. I see him clearly. He is exceptionally tall, and his head is covered with black curly hair. He looks serious except when he smiles at you; it knocks you right straight across the room. His smile is that brilliant. He doesn’t ever do anything to hurt girls. I longed for him to walk out of his book and reach for my hand.

  I didn’t see Ruby for the longest time, but I couldn’t stop thinking about him. There was something woke up in me—I started saying to myself, in bed, “If Ruby doesn’t kiss me by tomorrow night, I’m going to actually die.” I reminded myself of the wild dogs who attack and kill sheep. Once the dogs get the taste of blood in their mouths they keep coming back to injure the poor innocent animals. I had learned a new sensation and I had to have some more of it instantly. I wanted terribly to kiss Ruby’s mouth, more than eating food, or drinking, or sleeping. It was the craziest predicament, because first I never wanted to see him again, after the trick he played on me, but then he crept into my head, thinking, as he did, that I was a hot number. His opinion of me had to make me see him in a slightly different light. He noticed I had good points. Maybe he liked my nose, it isn’t so bad, and the tone of my voice, and the way I teased him a little. Daisy said he couldn’t help himself, that he was attracted to me. Far as I know, he was the first man in the history of the universe who noticed that I had a feminine lure.

  I ate breakfast with my spoon in the cereal bowl stirring around, not knowing what my hand was up to. All I saw was blue eyes. I had to hope against all hope that Ruby’s pizza became my face when he sat down to eat. To tell the truth, I wanted him to think of me, and only me, continuously. I made a big request to the Maker, that this be so. Each night I went up to the plateau to talk, not to the stars or God, but to Ruby. He was listening to me, I knew he was. I repeatedly relived the beers we drank, and the words we said, and the kiss we gave each other in his car—only I didn’t go one step farther than the kiss. I re-created history: I had Ruby telling me I was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen; he couldn’t keep himself away, he just couldn’t help loving me, and then we stared at each other indefinitely—until we almost dropped dead. When he drove me home we met May on the doorstep and we all had to laugh over how stifling the weather was, how miserable the entire summer had been.

  In the night I dreamed I was just like Daisy, kneeling on the floor of his car, making him cry out, and he always did the same thing to me with his expert tongue.

  Then, about three weeks after our date, he walked into Trim ’N Tidy. The blood drained from my legs, every single last drop. I felt it wanting to seep out my toenails. There I stood like I didn’t have limbs, like there was nothing to my body except a fierce heart, thumping out of sync. The Madame Bovary hot juicy flashes came over me. I didn’t invite the feelings, but they were present nonetheless. Ruby grinned at me from the door and stared sweetly with his wide eyes. They weren’t blinking much. When he started to talk he blinked numerous times, to make up for all the seconds when his eyeballs didn’t have moisture washing over them.

  “Do you want to get a drink at Mabel’s?” he asked, and I murmured weakly, “Sure.”

  When we sat down at our spot in the bar I looked at him, and even though I wanted to go straight to the back seat of his car and try what he did before, because Daisy said I’d got my first experience out of the way, I mumbled, “I’m not about to handle that one-eyed snake of yours.”

  It took all my gumption to speak. My teeth were loose and chattering inside my closed mouth.

  I think I expected him to grin at me forever, but he didn’t. He looked down at his hands and frowned. He couldn’t say anything. I tried to peek under, to see his face. His head was bowed so low it practically touched the table.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  “You don’t like me no more,” he said, turning away.

  I had to laugh because he was such a bashful person behind his cocky walk. Without thinking I took his hands in mine. He had long slim fingers that curled around my hand the instant we touched, as if he’d been waiting for something to hold on to for a long time.

  “Course I like you, Ruby,” I whispered. “I want to know you so bad.”

  His face changed gradually. He wasn’t positive I meant it, but after I said the words again his big old grin came back, like the sun on the rise: first you see a ray of light and it gets brighter until finally there’s this burst, and it’s morning. I was powerfully strong, capable of making a person feel brilliant and sure. And for the first time I had nerve. For once in my life I wasn’t going to let people pull up my dress and look underneath.

  I said to Ruby, “I like discussing the river but I just ain’t ready for . . .” I couldn’t say exactly, but he knew what I was talking about. I said I wanted all the sensations in my body to go slowly. I didn’t want to miss out on one feeling. Then I had to whisper in his defective ears, “You can kiss me all you want,” and he did, right away, there in the bar. He kissed me all over my face while I sat still and shivered. I loved his face so close to mine.

  He said he was sorry for hurting me in the car. He said, “Baby, I thought you maybe done that millions of times!”

  “I never had no boyfriend before,” I told him.

  “I don’t believe it.” He stared at me and shook his head. “I don’t believe it.”

  “I ain’t lying to you—you was my first kiss.”

  “Which closet you been hiding in?” He was amazed I was such a late bloomer. He said, “Wasn’t you ready to explode?” and then he looked bashful again, because of his appetite.

  I felt so glad, being together, apologizing. Later, we drove down to Honey Creek, and he sang to me; he sang, “You’re sixteen, you’re beautiful, and you’re mine.”

  I didn’t ask him where he learned about girls. I didn’t want to hear how many others he had kissed. Daisy told me Hazel taught him. She’s an old bag in Stillwater. She pretends she’s a young girl still, but she couldn’t fool anyone. She has crimson hair—it isn’t her natural color, I can tell you that much. It’s in tight curls, looks like her head is killing her, and she wears blouses that are open all the way down to her waist. They lace up the front. She wears them loose so you can see her fake leopard-skin bra. Plus her jeans are too small for her pot belly that wants to pop out of her fly. She’s real sensual, all right. You can hear her coming a million miles away in her spike-heeled cowboy boots. The wrinkles on her neck are the giveaway: she’s at least fifty years old. I thought females were dried up by then, Daisy said that even though Hazel looked ferocious she was a kitten underneath, that she treated Ruby decently most of the time. She said she saw them hugging outside of Dino’s once after Hazel got mad at him and chased him around the bar with a fly swatter in one hand and a broken beer bottle in the other. I guess Ruby didn’t visit her too much any more. She found some other boys she liked better. I didn’t ask him questions about her. I didn’t want to know anything else about his education.

  At supper the next night I asked May if Ruby could come bowling with us, and she said he didn’t look like he had too much upstairs—the way he grinned at people, he looked like a fool. I said I had my own eyes and Ruby looked just fine to me.

  “Well, if you ain’t gonna turn feisty on me, on account of some man with bugged-out eyes and a girl’s name.”

  She didn’t look so hot herself. We were eating sweet corn, and she had a bunch of hulls stuck between her teeth. She said, “Don’t you know that he wrecked Viola Hanson’s car, plus he stole something from the gas station where he worked?” She spoke as if Ruby were a famous bandit, when in fact she had never heard about him before I met him. She got her information from Dee Dee. I looked down at the table and I saw the sweet blue eyes of Ruby’s and the way he sniffed the earth and looked out to the universe—and I raised my voice. I said, “Are you perfect?”

  “I’ve seen you loaded and driving too,” I mentioned, leaning toward her. “I’ve seen the way you squished Da
ddy down so much he left you. He never did anything right in your smart opinion; you was always at his heels. That’s what you did, Ma, you squished Daddy so much he drove down the road. He likes me and Matt. He sends us ten dollars when he thinks it’s our birthday. He don’t ever do that for you.”

  She froze. Her eyes were fixed on my face. “You just ain’t no angel,” I said slowly, to wrap it up.

  She looked at me as if I were a complete stranger. I thought perhaps her head would collapse from the weight of the reprimand, into something akin to a pancake, but the next minute I could tell she wanted to wallop me. She started to raise her hand.

  “Don’t touch me, Ma,” I begged. “I just want to be a little happy. Ruby don’t do real bad stuff,” I pleaded. “And he likes me—he’s good to me.”

  May snorted. She shoved her chair back and got up to slam some objects around. I didn’t say anything more, and after a few crashes, metal on metal, she came back to the kitchen and sank into her seat. She stared at the table. Finally she slapped the potholder down and said, “I’ll kill you if you get a baby and you’re not married, understand?”

  I said she could be sure I wasn’t going to do that.

  If I got pregnant without a husband I’d be like Dee Dee’s daughter Lou. Then May would have to live in Dee Dee’s shoes, and that’s one place she didn’t want to experience. May didn’t pay too much attention to my answer. She was watching me drift away. She saw me getting married and blasting off in the getaway car decorated with tin cans. I could see plainly on her face that she was thinking to herself. She was asking, Who’s going to take care of me when I’m over the hill? How am I going to pay the bills with my puny salary? She was watching herself move into the low-income housing apartments in Stillwater. The walls are cardboard, and there’s millions of kids chasing up and down the halls. You can smell everyone’s cooking and there isn’t a back yard for a garden. She was picturing herself without a soul in the world. Her narrow eyes said to me, I don’t need you; go ahead, leave. But I knew she wished I’d run to her feet and kiss her slippers that look like dirty carpet you let the dog sleep on. She wished I’d say, I’ll never ever leave you, Ma, please be my friend. I had to laugh at her fears. I had about one hundred dollars in my old plastic pig. How was I supposed to pick up and leave? Did she imagine that Ruby was actually a millionaire disguised as a drunk driver? He didn’t even have a job.

  May was sore over what I said about Elmer, even though she knew I was right, and that she couldn’t make an argument. It was a wound that festered for a long time. She didn’t forget easily. She put the fight away, for a later date. Her big worry right at the moment was getting old and uglier, and being left alone. She was going to be left to rot away. She’d tell me details at supper out of the blue. She’d push her chair back, and she’d say, “All them piles of dirty diapers that I used to wash.” She said having babies made her body change its shape drastically. May had the habit of saying, “Don’t have kids, they let you down each time.” She had a nick on her nipple where I bit her once. She made it clear that I owed her something. I owed her double, since we both knew Matt wasn’t going to come through.

  At any rate, Ruby came bowling with us, and I have to admit as a bowler he was a lost cause. He couldn’t get that ball to go anywhere except the gutter. He laughed and turned around to find me when he didn’t knock one pin down. I felt like part of a big family, though: there was May and Dee Dee and Daisy and Ruby and Artie, even Randall with his Bit O’ Honey, sitting around making sure we weren’t cheating on the score sheet. Daisy and Ruby talked about their social workers down at the resource center and the different times they got crocked.

  In those days I didn’t write Aunt Sid too much because I couldn’t explain how it was for me, and I was afraid she might not like me any more if she knew I drank alcohol and spent half my life in a bowling alley. I didn’t want her to know I thought about Ruby every single minute. Aunt Sid, with her choir and lilies pinned to her chest, might think I’m trash and stop telling me I’m a good person. I couldn’t stand to think of that, so I wrote her short letters saying Trim ’N Tidy was perfect, and May hadn’t bawled me out too much, telling me to say, “Have a nice day.” I mentioned briefly that I kind of liked to bowl and that we all went to Town Lanes occasionally.

  Aunt Sid wrote back and asked me, “Have you read a good book lately?”

  I knew I disappointed her. The cassette recorder she had given me didn’t work any more. I only thought about the blind tapes. They were living inside of me: there were thousands of different characters milling around saying advice, telling their stories to each other. There was Huck Finn, giving Madame Bovary a ride down the Mississippi, telling her not to worry about her dumb husband and all the cash she owed people for silk shawls and other things she couldn’t resist. They lay on that raft, smelled the muddy water, and she called the clouds names of men from her village. She wanted to kiss Huck like crazy but she knew it wasn’t appropriate. She controlled herself pretty carefully. I didn’t tell Aunt Sid that now when I conjured up Mr. Darcy he looked almost exactly like Ruby. I wondered if Mr. Darcy had rotten teeth. Maybe he did because I bet in those days they didn’t have dentists. I heard on the radio that people in England eat pounds of sugar and their teeth aren’t good like ours over here in the U.S.

  Ruby and I went out to various dark places. We drank beer and talked about fishing. We kissed like wild horses in the back of his car. He always said, “Please, baby, come on, come on,” and I had to say, like someone’s mother, “That’s enough now,” even though I wanted it all as fiercely as he did. It seemed like there wasn’t anything more important on earth except having him near me that way. Buildings could burn right next to us in the car, and if we were in the middle of a kiss we wouldn’t notice. I was learning about the perverse streaks within us: for example, I knew Ruby admired me for my strict control. We were experiencing something serious partly because I wasn’t like Hazel or Daisy, just letting the man have his way. We were developing a friendship; I can say in perfect truth that that’s what it was. Ruby would say to me, “You must be a goddess or somethin’,” and I’d smile at him mysteriously. He teased me; he’d say, “Baby, you a nun underneath your clothes?”

  Sometimes, maybe it isn’t very nice, I felt I had him eating out of my hand, the way he whispered into my face, “Ain’t you a goddess?” We had such sweet times in his car, parked up on Andrew’s Hill, in the hunting grounds. With the windows open, we sat, watching the night go by us, feeling that we were the only people who had ever breathed the air together and admired the evening.

  I had to feel sorry for Ruby because he didn’t have an easy life. You could tell it by looking at him. He smiled too much. He was covering up aches he didn’t want to speak of. One time, we were down at Mabel’s and Ruby was guzzling more than usual. Instead of getting raucous and joyful, he became more somber with each drink. I didn’t know what to do so I talked about nothing. Finally he interrupted me; he said, “Baby, what happens when someone dies?”

  “Huh?” I said.

  “Where do they go?” He was starting to cry.

  I thought of all the carcasses of sheep I had seen in my life, sinking into the pasture until all you saw was a rib cage and skull, picked clean.

  “They don’t go anywhere, Ruby, far as I know.” I figured I might as well tell it like it was. “Their bodies rot in the ground, and all you have left is the memory. It’s up to you to remember the person.” It was no comfort but I didn’t know what else to say except, “That’s about it.”

  He was bawling into his sleeve, and I felt so sorry. I took his hands and held them with all my might. “Don’t think about it,” I said. “We’re here now, and—and I love you so much.”

  I wasn’t planning on saying those words but there they were. Ruby stopped crying instantly. He blinked several times, and wiped his nose on his sleeve.

  I leaned across the table and put my hand on his face to make him know better. I whisp
ered again, “I love you, Ruby.”

  He burst into a grin and then jumped up and started dancing around, as if he were a wind-up bear and my words had activated him. He made me laugh until my side ached. He went up to the bar and told the farmers he didn’t even know that I loved him. He went to each one and said, “See that lady? She loves me.”

  Then he came back and took my hand and kneeled on the floor, like a chivalrous knight. He put his head in my lap. He kept saying, “Sweet baby, sweet baby, baby, baby.” He’s the silliest person in the world at times, Ruby is. What I wanted him to do was marry me. Then we’d climb into bed and it’d be like a ship. We’d sail away.

  I didn’t think too hard about what it meant to get married. I figured I wanted to be a wife because I loved Ruby, and I could tell he needed a girl to cook him good food and buy him clean undershirts. I figured with those three ingredients, especially counting true love, a person couldn’t go wrong being married. I didn’t stop to think because I knew I was plunging headfirst toward happiness. In addition, I was fed up watching the world march by me. I couldn’t stand seeing people such as Daisy’s little sister Lou have a baby. They named her Midnight Star Sandra Dee. The baby was called Midnight for short, but maybe when she went to first grade she’d want to be Sandra Dee. “She’s got the option,” is how Daisy explained it. Lou was sixteen years old and already she was a mother. I knew if I didn’t hurry up I was going to be past the prime in no time flat. They brought Midnight over on their way home from the hospital. Lou said when the baby came out her toenails were already long and they had to cut them right away. I couldn’t stop looking at the baby, complete with all her parts. I couldn’t get over how she started with Lou and one of three possible boys who cornered her one night by the drugstore while she giggled. “In the beginning was that old word” always comes to me. That’s a sentence the Rev uses nearly every Sunday. Maybe inside of me all that existed, besides I LOVE RUBY, were letters floating around in my body, the names of my babies. When I saw Midnight Star Sandra Dee, I knew I wanted to be in a family. I knew I wanted to look after a baby, all mine. I could picture Ruby and me, the father and the mother. I conjured up Ruby coming home from work, singing. I’d be feeding our baby something delicious from a jar.