The Book of Ruth

by Jane Hamilton

  Justy loved to blow out candles, and he and May used to sit at the kitchen table working at a king-size box of matches. She’d light the candle while Justy stared at the flame, utterly fascinated, and then he’d blow it out. There was a pile of used matchsticks, enough wood to keep us warm all winter, there on the table. May liked to kiss Justy all over and he put up with it; he didn’t squirm too energetically. While she cooked she had Justy on the floor playing with pots and pans. Over the fried apples sizzling on the stove she told him the high points of her life story. He licked the floor while she described her favorite doll, but she was in a trance and didn’t notice.

  She spanked him when he was terribly bad, if he whacked her over the head with the bellows, but even then she wasn’t crazy about punishment. She wanted me to be the one to hit him if he was about to stick his head into the hot oven, or run out on the road. Her favorite act was taking Justy into town by herself and strutting down the street as if she were a one-person parade and a baby was a novelty no one had ever seen before.

  May said to me, “All right, go ahead on your vacation.” She said it as if she was dragging her feet, but actually, as I knew from my lifelong association with her, she had a huge old chorus line in her heart, lifting up their legs, doing the cancan. I knew she was gleeful about getting rid of us for a week.

  Up in our room Ruby said, “Hey, baby, where we going on our trip?”

  “We’re visiting Aunt Sidney in De Kalb,” I said, “and then we’re going to Chicago to see the Cubs.” I had counted the money in my pig and I was going to spend every last cent on my husband.

  Ruby acted as if Chicago was the place he’d always wanted to visit most. He got up on the bed and started batting and jumping. He was like Justy, loving everything except chores. When I told Justy he could push the button to start the drier he had a nervous breakdown brought on by excitement. However, if you asked him to put the toys away you had to be careful you didn’t get a block aimed directly at your rear end. I wrote Aunt Sid and told her that Ruby had a tremendous urge to see a Cubs game, and I wanted to see for myself how millions of people lived in tall buildings. I told her that we were going to stay in a motel in Chicago. It was bound to be the greatest adventure of my lifetime, so far, and I was going to believe it only after it had actually happened. I asked her if we could stop at her house for one night, on our way. I figured when we ran out of money, after two days, we’d sneak home and camp on the lake. Aunt Sid wrote to say that she didn’t have her chorus in the summer. She said any time we wanted to come it would be a pleasure to see us.

  The real news from Honey Creek that summer was Daisy’s marriage. It knocked us all off our stumps. One minute she’s on the loose, the next she’s promising forever as if she truly understood the meaning of her words. I guess she knew her mind instantly, and didn’t need to dwell on her past or future life. She met the man when she was cutting his girlfriend’s hair at her beauty shop, Shear Magic. He was waiting for Dolores to hurry up and get done so they could go on a date. Daisy must have done an impressive job shooting the breeze with him. He told Dolores he had a stomachache and couldn’t go to the show. Then he called Daisy’s shop and asked her out. He felt bad about the whole episode but he couldn’t help it He had his own business doing upholstery for people’s furniture. He was starting to go bald, although he wasn’t much older than Daisy. It seemed as if he saw through her; he saw what a fine person she was underneath the paint on her face. He understood that she was kind and true, down in the core, despite the fact that she had used her wiles to land nearly every male west of the Atlantic Ocean. He said, “I’ll bet you are prettier without that glop on your eyes, Daisy Mae,” and he suggested she take it off. He went wild over how great she looked, so she stopped wearing orange mascara and purple and green eyeshadow. She didn’t look like she was suffering from gangrene any more She switched to a calm pale blue above her eyes. They were a nice couple; you could see they cared for each other. He didn’t paw at her or goose her but on occasion he walked up to her and put his arms around her and she let him stay there circling her. His name was Bill. He looked like he’d been standing on his own two feet since the day of his birth. Probably there wasn’t anyone who could knock him down without a struggle. That’s not counting his ex-girlfriend, who punched him in the eye. He took it without flinching because he said he deserved it.

  I guessed Daisy wasn’t planning on going to New York City or Los Angeles to work in the television industry after all. For a while her ambition was to stay at home and make casserole recipes. She didn’t even want to go to Shear Magic. Bill owned a house outside of Stillwater and she couldn’t wait to spend his money to fix it up. She was thinking of going to night classes in interior design. It’s as if there’s a virus that steals under a girl’s skin sometimes, and makes her want to be a good wife, even when she wasn’t planning on going that route.

  They got married in our church. She didn’t have any bridesmaids. I wished I could have been in her wedding party, but I wasn’t mad at her. It didn’t hurt my feelings too much. I knew she wanted to keep it simple, that it wasn’t personal. It wasn’t because of my looks. She didn’t invite any of her old boyfriends so there weren’t many people attending. When I asked her, two weeks after they got back from the Wisconsin Dells, if she could take care of Justy while we went on vacation, she said, “Justy’s my godson, and he’s going to be my little baby guinea pig. What do you bet I want a kid after chasing the Moose around for a week?”

  She took my shoulders and said, “You go and have the greatest time. You deserve a break; no, I take that back, you deserve something fabulous. Don’t worry about Justy. He won’t miss you one bit.” She winked at me. Daisy’s so professional at winking. It makes a person feel warm all over.

  It was the middle of July, two weeks until our trip, although already my nails were bitten to shreds. I could hardly wait to see Aunt Sid. I was going to do all the things I had wanted to do since I was small: sit at her kitchen table, look in her closets and see the dresses she gives concerts in, smell the lilies she probably presses in books after she’s worn them on her chest, to commemorate each choral concert.

  On a scorching July day, the type where you feel as if you’re pinned under an iron, our plans were changed. Ruby walked across the street in Honey Creek—don’t ask me where he was going, maybe to church to pray—and he dreamed himself into one of his dazes where he has to stand still and look at something hard; the thing either looks tremendous or minuscule to him. The gas station once looked shrunk and he thought he saw little tiny ants getting into puny cars. It wasn’t a secret that Ruby took artificial stimulants, although he did it on the sly. I couldn’t always be sure when he was on something, but his bloodshot eyes were often a dead giveaway. Ruby had contacts through Hazel, people who gave him bargains on drugs. He could handle life when he was high, except for the times when objects looked so queer and he had to tell me about his sensational eyesight.

  On July 18th Ruby started across the street, and all of a sudden he had to stop in mid-step to look at the texture of the road. The small asphalt bumps looked like California foothills, and of course the pickup truck didn’t expect him to stop. It rammed into his leg and knocked him over. I stood in the door weeping when the driver delivered Ruby, complete with his freshly mangled leg. I have to tell the truth: I cried not for Ruby, but because I knew our vacation was out of the question.

  Ruby didn’t have to go to the hospital overnight, even though his leg was banged up and out of commission. He could barely make it to the liquor cabinet. May said under her breath, “Why didn’t they just run him over?”

  We were stuck in July. All the breezes in the world were hovering over Europe and the Virgin Islands. The heat made us feel like screaming and crying at the temperature, but we were too slow and stupid to open our mouths. Ruby spent his time in the living room on the couch with the fan blowing over him and I brought him iced drinks and lemons. I watched TV with him and his hurt leg
. I felt like there wasn’t anything left inside of me. I was nothing but eyeballs watching reruns of Hogan’s Heroes and Bewitched, F Troop and Gilligan’s Island. Justy was hot and cranky. I yelled at him for the dumbest reasons. I spanked him for ripping the cover off the TV guide. I told him to shut up repeatedly when he whined. Good mothers aren’t supposed to say words of that sort, but I said all of the worst profanities, trying to vent my spleen so I wouldn’t throw Justy out the window I was so glad when May came home from work. I was at the end of my rope.

  After a week Ruby hobbled around but the slightest movement wore him out and he groaned from the living room, from his couch. He didn’t want anyone to bother him, except people who were in the mood to serve. He hollered at Justy when Justy got on his nerves—that was about every three minutes. One night, I couldn’t bear it any more. I called up Daisy to come over and get me. We went out to the Town Lanes like old times and we played a few games. I let her win a couple; I didn’t care about anything. She sat there telling me about her Bill and how great they were getting along, and how she never had met a man before him, who she liked as a person, to talk to. She said it was fabulous, their relationship. All of a sudden she felt mature, she explained. She knew she was a grown woman, not one of them wild girls so crazy for a hunk of flesh. “Not,” she added, “that he ain’t sensational on the horizontal.

  “Bill sure saved me from wrecking my life,” she said. “I bet I would have turned into an old broad like Hazel. She practically pays boys to do it to her.”

  I turned away. I didn’t want to hear a word about Hazel, Ruby’s former girlfriend.

  “Bill knows about all kinds of information.” Daisy was still talking. “He teaches me things I never knew about. He’s going to teach me how to hunt deer. I mean, how’d I get so lucky?” She looked up to the ceiling as if the crumbling plaster was going to answer her, tell her that she deserved heaven on earth.

  The minute she mentioned the word lucky I sat down on one of the yellow vinyl chairs they have and I burst into tears. I put my head on the score table and cried the way I always cry with Daisy: flat-out hysterics. I told her how terribly I wanted to visit Aunt Sid, and go to the city, and now I couldn’t because Ruby was in bed all day long with his bum leg. It’s a miracle she could understand my choking and stuttering. I said I didn’t feel like a person any more. I said that Aunt Sid always made me think there was something good about me through the mail, and imagine how seeing her in real life would make it one million times better.

  Daisy picked up my sweaty hand, looked me in the eye, and said, “Too bad if Ruby can’t go along. You take off anyway. You don’t need to go all the way to Chicago, but you could visit your aunt for a few days.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked. Sometimes her thoughts were so unusual. I stopped crying instantly. I never went anywhere by myself—I told her that.

  “Go alone, you big sissy. What are you scared of, muggers and knifers on the bus?”

  “No,” I lied. My fingers were shaky and wet, even though I got up and put them over the drier they have for your hands, so you won’t sweat into your bowling ball and lose your grip.

  Daisy kept telling me I should do something for myself, that I had earned a trip. “Besides,” she said, “your Aunt Sid don’t know Ruby. You wouldn’t be able to have no heart-to-hearts with a man hanging around. I never said nothin’ but I thought it was a stupid idea to take Ruby along in the first place.” We weren’t bowling any more. We were standing at the line. We didn’t hear any other conversations; we didn’t notice pins crashing to the floor. “But Daisy,” I said, “it’s supposed to be our honeymoon.”

  “Jeeeeeesus,” she whispered, smacking her palm to her forehead. “You don’t need a honeymoon. You need a break from your kid and your ma and your husband. Everyone needs time off—it don’t mean you ain’t a prize-winning wife and mother.” She said I should go for it. She kept saying, “Go for it,” whenever she got the opportunity.

  When we got home I banged the screen door for dramatic effect and stood under the light in the kitchen. May was playing solitaire. She had all her aces up. She was having terrific luck, so I said quickly, “Ma, I’m visiting Aunt Sid next week for a few days without Ruby, for a vacation.”

  “No you ain’t,” she said, slapping down the king of hearts. “I’m not going to care for your husband.”

  Daisy stepped out from the shadows and said, “Now look here, May, you’ll be at work half the time and I’ll take care of Justy, and Ruby’s a grown man. Even though he don’t walk like a ballerina, he can take care of himself. I’ll get him the things he needs.”

  May had her card in midair. There wasn’t anything she could say after the speech, because Daisy is so tall and gorgeous and well married. She always makes a mess sound easy. There aren’t ever any problems for Dais. If she doesn’t like someone she says, “Go to hell.” Then she wipes her hands and walks away. It was the funniest sight when she came down the aisle for her wedding. She looked like a dewdrop with her lowered eyelids and her blush. It seemed as if she couldn’t ever have uttered a filthy word—or experienced the meaning of one of those words—in her life.

  Ruby was lying on the couch like a recently decorated and blasted-apart war hero when I told him my plans. His bum leg hung off the side as if it was just barely connected to his body. “Baby,” he said with tears in his voice, “don’t leave me.”

  I talked cocky although it was a charade. There were swarms of moths giving birth right inside my stomach. I said, “Don’t be silly, Ruby, it’s only for two days. You won’t even miss me.”

  “My leg hurts me so bad, baby. It’s killing me.”

  I stood up. I said, “Well, my staying around ain’t going to make it feel better. It’ll have to heal on its own. You have to be patient, that’s all.”

  I walked out of the room exactly like Daisy does, tossing her head. She wouldn’t look back if you paid her fifty dollars.

  That’s how I found myself packing one bag for a trip, my first voyage away from home. I caught the Greyhound in Stillwater. Daisy calls those buses “metal dogs” and has a whole series of “metal dog” jokes. I was a wreck at first, especially my digestive system. I needed to use the squat box, as Daisy says, every five seconds, but I didn’t have the courage to walk to the back of the bus. I sat right up front so I could look out the window and observe my movement through the world. Sitting high you can see the land stretched out flat, as if there’s four people at each corner, holding a blanket. And all the rows of corn, whizzing by, row upon row It gets going so fast it makes you dizzy all those rows like bristles on a toothbrush, flashing by a person. I pot hypnotized thinking about the king-size teeth that com rows could brush.

  De Kalb is forty miles from Honey Creek so it didn’t take more than an hour to get there. Suddenly the driver was saying into his microphone that he was glad we’d traveled Greyhound, and he hoped we’d come aboard again soon. I said I would, almost out loud. I felt like telling him that my husband was laid up at home with my mother, because he seemed like such a nice man, with a picture of his daughters on the dashboard, along with his bag of peppermints.

  There was Aunt Sid, waving to me as I climbed down the stairs. When I got to her I dropped my bag, thinking to hug her with all my might. I didn’t want to be shy. I had planned to tell her what I thought about her. I imagine there’s probably so much quiet where you are when you’re cold and dead, you might as well say how crazy you are about people while you have a mouth and teeth and tongue. Before I could get it out she grabbed my shoulders and stood looking at me from head to toe. She said that I looked lovely—and I should have, because Daisy lent me her wardrobe. I had on a blue-and-orange-and-yellow-striped cotton skirt, very full it was, and past my knees. My top was a dark blue silky shirt. Not actual silk, spun from worms. Still, I felt like an advertisement for extra-strength brighteners people put in their wash. Daisy did up my hair too. She said I looked like a million dollars but she was probably e
xaggerating.

  Then I did it: I threw my arms around Aunt Sid, and after the two-second contact, while I looked at the sidewalk glinting with sunshine, I told her I had waited for this moment ever since I was five, when I first met her and her coral lipstick. I said I had had the feeling, so long ago, that I was destined to visit her in De Kalb. She has a laugh like water coming over a waterfall, sparkling and frothing.

  I wish I could hire Charles Dickens to describe Aunt Sid. I don’t have a chance in the world to do her justice. She wore beige slacks and a sleeveless blouse with brown horses galloping in rows across green turf. Her hair was piled on her head, as usual, and her smile came directly from the heart. If I were a Catholic I’d believe that the Blessed Virgin Mary came to look like Aunt Sid, when she got older, after her son died and her life got on track. When I mentioned that very thought to Daisy, at home, she, an unbeliever, said I could get struck down for thinking such a thing. She also told me I was creating a goddess out of an ordinary person, which, I admitted to myself only for a moment, was exactly the beauty of Aunt Sid. Daisy said, “You’ll probably find out one of these days that she picks her nose with a tuning fork.”