The Book of Ruth

by Jane Hamilton

  “Really, baby? That don’t sound like too much fun.”

  “Guess why,” I said.

  He was trying to figure out the menu. He couldn’t think of a reason.

  I reached over and held his hand; I said, “You and me, Ruby, we’re going to have a little baby.”

  His eyes just about popped out of his sockets while that slow smile spread over his face. He asked me, “What did you say?” and I told him again. I showed him about where it was inside me, way down by my fly.

  He got so excited he knocked over his water glass. He whispered, “We’re going to have a jungle baby?” He made his fingers dance all over the place mats to his favorite song that goes Do-do-doot-do-doot.

  Then he told the waitress his wife was PG. He said he was the father and he asked her what we should name it. I laughed at Ruby, asking the dumb waitress what we’re going to name our own baby. When we finished our supper Ruby came over and held my elbow while I stood up. He was already being sweet and careful with me. He kept saying, “Baby, you got a person inside you. I wish I could peek in there and see what it’s up to.”

  We walked in the kitchen at home looking so happy, I know we did, and May said, “What’s going on with you two? You got some big secret?”

  And Ruby blurted out, “She’s gonna have a baby!” He said so nicely to May, “Hey, Ma, that means you’re a grandmother.”

  She sat down. She didn’t know what to make of it. I took out a minuscule T-shirt I’d got at the grocery store and I said, “Look, Ma, look at how small it’s going to be.”

  She didn’t say anything for three days. I was so nervous in front of her I didn’t know where to look when she was in the room. I tiptoed and knocked over vases. I couldn’t tell if she was mad or what. On Sunday, after church, she cut the first tulips. We were all sure winter was truly over. She came in the kitchen with tulips and a gift box. She handed the present to me and said, “Don’t just sit there, open it.”

  I did without saying a word. It was a yellow fuzzy suit that keeps babies toasty.

  “See what I got for my grandson?” she said, wiping her nose. She already had it figured out. It was going to be a boy.

  Fourteen

  BY the time the month of May came and there were purple and red tulips and yellow daffodils all over the lawn, and the grass was so lush and green I half hoped someone would put me out to pasture, we had a better attitude about living together on the planet. We weren’t burning oil to keep us warm. Everything we needed, it seemed, was right out the back door. May and Ruby and I now had the habit of sitting at supper with the kitchen door open, the smells of the steaming ground coming in, and we talked about what the baby was going to be like. We couldn’t be quiet at the table because we had stories to tell. We were planning together. We were in the future together. We bought wallpaper with clowns on it for the nursery—May bargained with the lady at the hardware store and got it cheap. She repeatedly described how she had had her babies: all of a sudden giving birth was the biggest drama May had ever lived through. She talked about her infants as if they were dear and long dead. She didn’t make the connection that I was what sprang out of her.

  She said perhaps the baby would have an enormous intelligent brain like Matt’s, and he would achieve in school—wouldn’t we be surprised? Ruby, sucking up his macaroni from his spoon, said the baby was going to be a baseball star. He’d play on the Cubs team, make them Cubbies win.

  I sat back and grinned at them both, the way they were carrying on. I had to ask, “What if it’s a girl?”

  Ruby took a bite of the peanut butter sandwich he had on the side, and he said with his mouth full, “A girl can play on the Cubs too.” May snickered and said, “Don’t kid yourself, Buster, they don’t let girls do one thing except wash uniforms and clean out the shower stalls.”

  I felt lousy half the time but I tried to shrug it off. I kept telling myself that I was going to get a baby out of the arrangement. I sat by the window pretending I was on an ocean vessel. I imagined I was on a cruise with fancy food prepared by experts. It didn’t matter that I couldn’t eat any of it, even though the waiters offered me shrimp from a silver platter. I was thankful to be on the boat, rocking back and forth, looking out to the sparkly blue water. I tried to think those voyage thoughts when I felt seasick, all day long.

  I sat in the window and watched Ruby helping May rake up last year’s leaves. She gave orders and he did just what she said. He had the humiliation buried away. He was practically enthusiastic. I suppose they had a common purpose. He hardly missed any spots that she said to rake clean. He took care of the chickens too, after I told him the feel of the warm eggs made me gag. He said, “Baby, don’t you lift one of them little white fingers of yours, I’m going to take care of the hens.”

  Ruby and May weren’t hugging each other after long absences but they seemed to be making a special effort while I was upstairs in the bathroom waiting to heave. He still did the things that irked May—she hated the way he came down the stairs in the morning with nothing on except a towel wrapped around his waist. His eyes weren’t open yet. She looked every which way around him. Possibly Daisy was right: perhaps if May had glanced at near-naked Ruby she would have knocked him down, ripped off his towel, and forced herself. Maybe she was lusty. She didn’t really seem in the market for such things but perhaps when I’m an advanced age I’ll understand. He left eggshells on the counter and the cereal box out; there was usually a puddle of milk by his glass, and a licked jelly spoon in the puddle. He isn’t the tidiest person we ever met. She hated the way he dumped into the chair and turned on the TV. Still, she had something else to occupy her mind now. She didn’t have to concentrate on Ruby’s mess, and since I was home more I could clean up after him, hide the traces. He wasn’t actually what you’d call a slob, that much, he just didn’t notice items if they were out of place.

  Maybe we were all feeling extra-generous and trying to shape up a little since in the future we were going to have to be examples. It could have been my hormones crisscrossing through my body in massive doses, but I felt a lot sorrier for people than usual. One day in the early summer, I walked into the Footes’ house, and I could tell instantly that one of the Foote children had done something seriously wrong. Dee Dee had her head set tight into her neck and her shoulders came up to her ears. She was furiously balling up cookie dough and splatting it on her trays. She had three earthenware bowls filled with dough; she had all the greased trays lined up in a row. I wasn’t about to tangle with her so I walked past her into the living room. Daisy was home from Peoria for a week, sewing padding into the top of her swimming suit.

  I raised my eyebrows to ask her what was going on.

  “You don’t want to know,” she said, glad for the opportunity to tell me. “Randall’s got a girlfriend.” She looked straight at me. “She lives over on the Kates’ old place.”

  Naturally I was surprised. Furthermore, I didn’t know there was anyone eligible living there. I started to ask who but Daisy said, “Baaaaaaaaa.”

  I stood staring while Daisy stuck her tongue into her cheek to keep from laughing. It didn’t take me long to understand. Ruby had told me the plots of the movies he and Randall loved to drool over. I nodded my head and went out the front door.

  I walked for a long time before I saw him. He was in the cemetery, sitting on a large rectangular gravestone. His knees came up to his chin.

  “Move over,” I said. He did. “Just a little more.”

  He moved around the corner and we sat back touching back.

  “I never thought anyone was going to like me,” I said. “I know I ain’t pretty.” I felt his back sink into mine a little. “But I got taken by surprise, and I bet some time you might be surprised too.”

  When he started to cry I got up and went around to his side. I kneeled down and kissed him on his fat wet lips. I moved his hair out of his eyes as tenderly as I could and felt along his bristly cheek. Then I kissed him again. He kept his eye
s closed. “You sure are a handsome fat man,” I said.

  “Naw,” he said, looking sideways and wiping the tears from his cheeks. “One more,” I said, kissing him again. “Now. Go home to your mother. She’s got some cookies for you.”

  I got up and walked away, and when I turned around I saw him lumbering in the other direction. He moved slowly because if he walked quickly his thighs rubbing together probably would have started a fire. He took up so much space cars passing him swerved way over to the other side of the road. For the first time, watching him lug his body home, I felt how lonesome he would always be.

  Dee Dee and Randall came every day that summer because May and Dee Dee were making a quilt for the baby. Randall was hanging around a lot more than usual, watching the ladies sew. I could tell that May was looking out for him too. She made sure his plate was always full and she patted him on the back. He had his stool drawn up to the table, and with his change purse in his clutches he pored over his Mad magazines. They all sat in the dining room with the fan blowing on them, Dee Dee’s behind lapping over the edge of her stool, and she and May talked about babies for hours. They talked without listening to each other, about how it was when they raised theirs up. Even then I knew they had amnesia: they were talking with fondness in their voices. They recalled how a baby’s neck smells, and how it gurgles. They laughed at the way toddlers can wreck a house if you let them. I lay on the sofa feeling the glow of pride creep all the way up to my forehead. I was doing something they were awfully excited about and they didn’t try to hide it Dee Dee missed the world of infants because her daughter Lou had given up Midnight Star Sandra Dee when she realized having a baby wasn’t a picnic, even if she was the only mother in the sophomore class She went South gave it up for adoption and moved into a house with a lot of girls. She sent word that she was working long night shifts waitressing but Daisy had a theory about the true nature of her long nights. Dee Dee blew her nose and frowned every time she thought about Lou. Her breasts heaved so that the dress zipper down her front undid itself an inch or two.

  The quilt was a light blue pond with green and orange ducks swimming around the reeds. May said there wasn’t going to be one spot of pink in it. I didn’t do anything but lie on the couch in the living room while they stitched. Randall lent me his reel-to-reel tape recorder and Dee Dee got me blind tapes through the library. I had to call in sick to Trim ’N Tidy half the time because I was so hot and miserable. I lay on the couch listening to my favorite books by Charles Dickens, in particular that one called Bleak House. It’s about one million years long, and that’s hardly exaggerating. It has Esther in it, the heroine in literature I root for the most. I always felt so sorry for her because she had a very pure heart, and all the same there were people who treated her cruelly. I wished I could be some kind of magical wise person who was able to walk into books and change their course would slip in and be Esther’s long-lost sister, comfort little Jo before he died, tell Ada that loving Richard Carstone was a dead end, and finally, melt the ice out of Lady Dedlock’s heart and reunite her with Esther, and me, and then we’d both inherit her fortune.

  May was bossy with me but I could laugh behind my pale sick face because I knew she was thinking about the baby. She said so sternly that I had to have vegetables, and she butchered two chickens and fried me their livers. They made my stomach do cartwheels so she fed the organs to Randall with chocolate cake on the side. We were all ready to be happy about something; it almost didn’t matter what. If we had had a dog that was going to have puppies May probably would have fried up livers for the bitch and sewed a quilt for the puppies to lie on. She had been waiting for something great in her life for a long time, ever since Matt left home and I met Ruby.

  Finally, in September, I started feeling better. I woke up one morning and told Ruby I had to have a cheeseburger without delay. He ran and told May and she made me one lickety-split. She sprinkled olives on top and set me a place with the doily napkins. I had figured out how to be queen quite by accident. Everyone was concerned about me; if I picked up the laundry basket, say, both May and Dee Dee ordered me to put it down. They yelled in unison as if they were trying to sing a duet. I did exactly what they said. Even Ruby took the laundry himself and hung it on the line, never mind that he left it out in the rain and we didn’t have any clean underwear.

  I love being pregnant, feeling like a big old elephant. Some girls hate the sensation, I know, but if you throw your shoulders back and let your belly lead you down the street, never fails, people smile going by. I love how suddenly everything tiny seems beautiful, the tiniest, thinnest blade of grass. You want to go out and put a fence around it, so no one will step on it. I like thinking about the drama going on in a mother’s body—for instance, Artie told me the fluid the baby grows in is the same as the salt water in the sea, exactly. That information gave me goose pimples and I felt glad knowing porpoises are my cousins. I could almost remember jumping up to get the fish out of my keeper’s hands. Although I’m a small person, during my first pregnancy Ruby said my stomach was as tremendous as them blown-up hot air balloons. When he walked with me in town he loved to watch people thinking I was a fat girl. He swelled and beamed, knowing that he was the one who did it to me.

  The doctor at the clinic told us about classes at the hospital in Humphrey where nurses teach girls how to grin through labor. He said we ought to attend. I got up my nerve and asked May to write a check for twenty-five dollars, so we could go to class. She only scowled for a minute. There were ten other couples learning about babies also. I knew everyone was examining us in great detail. I felt their eyes piercing through the holes in my shoes and the tears in my socks. At the cleaners you don’t actually have to talk to the people; you say the same conversation all day long, like “Is it cold enough out there for you?” And then you tell them how much their clean clothes cost, and naturally at the end you say, “Have a nice day.” But in the childbirth class the couples were so different from us. We had to go around and say what our occupation was: ninety-nine percent were physical therapists and salesmen. One of the ladies worked on a newspaper writing stories. Ruby said right out that he was the can man in the grocery store parking lot; he sang it out, and I said quietly that I was the spotter at Trim ’N Tidy. Our teacher, Silvia, had to ask, “What did you say? Can you speak up?”

  I could tell people were laughing at us, or commenting, “Oh brother,” under their breaths. We were right back in grade school again, saying the wrong answer, sounding dumb. The other mothers had blond hair, all of them—I’m not lying—nice and straight, and they dressed in pink maternity sweaters with initials on the front. Their plump soft faces made them all look like identical stuffed animals.

  I knew we were poor and strange against the people in our class. Sometimes I felt so sad for my baby. I didn’t want it to see the world, if it was going to find out about our oddness. I talked to it down in my stomach. I told it not to worry; we’d hide it away, we wouldn’t let other children taunt it. We’d chase bullies out of the yard and throw stones after them.

  It always relieved me to get home, back with my Ruby, back up to our room. He played his music on his guitar with the radio and he’d say, “OK, baby, breathe in, breathe out, let’s practice you having a kid. Look at the speck on the wall and imagine all them magic nights we’ve had, breathe in one of them cleansing breaths, pant blow pant blow.”

  One night he pretended he was the doctor giving me a Cesarean section. He strapped a flashlight bulb to his head and outlined my stomach with his fingernail. He told me, “I’m gonna open you up and get the kid out in no time flat. I got to fish in real quick before you wake up.” I laughed and squirmed and then he tore the rest of my clothes off. He whispered that he was going to keep me pregnant all the time because he liked my boobies to be the size of a cow’s bag.

  Artie kept saying that I was the best worker and what was he to do when I had Oscar. I said, “Artie, you think I’m going to quit? How do you think I’m
supposed to pay for our Oscar’s doctor bills if I’m not working?” Artie was good to me, as always, because he said when it was born he’d figure out a part-time schedule for both May and me.

  Those nine months were serene. I worked, thinking about the baby every other minute. My mind wasn’t at Trim ’N Tidy; my mind was inside my stomach, with our child. We were swimming around together like goldfish circling in a bowl. I felt the world closing in on me. The space in front of me was getting smaller and smaller, until all I could see was my family, and the threesome we were to become. I told Daisy, when she came home from Peoria for a week, that I was with my baby constantly, and she looked at me as if I was cracked.

  “You think you’re swimming inside your own stomach?” she said. “Maybe that baby is growing in your head and it’s going to swim down your nose.” She smirked at her joke. I didn’t tell her further thoughts about being a mother, but when I felt the baby I had to stop whatever I was doing, no matter who was present. I had to put down the steam iron and hold my stomach to feel the kicks. Ruby felt the movement too. We sat in bed and he put his ear against me to listen. “Baby,” he whispered, “it’s spooky in there, inside of you.”

  We didn’t notice the winter coming on because we were preoccupied with ourselves. We didn’t mind how cold it was getting. The night of our anniversary Ruby brought home pizzas, with some coaching on the part of Dee Dee, and all of us sat in the kitchen talking about what we should name the baby. I never said out loud the name I wanted. I was keeping it secret. I went along with Ruby and May very agreeably. May bought a book from the store filled with names and she read them to us—it took her two hours just for the boys. The one she wanted was Josiah, but to me it sounded like those old men in the Bible who are always getting into trouble with God. Ruby liked the name Clover. He said it should be called Clover Reuben Dahl. May said if we named it that it would turn into a homo. I’ve never seen one that I know of, so I can’t tell if it’s a bad way to be. I said no way in a million years was our baby going to be called Clover, we might as well call it Wheat Groats or Quack Grass. After Ruby watched a Bewitched rerun one night he declared the baby was going to be christened Darren. I smiled at him and whispered, “You’re out of your gourd.”