About Face

by Carole Howard

  “If Vivian can hold it in, I guess I can.”

  “When I’m finished talking, we’ll just change the subject. We’ll talk about … how about if we talk about our kids? So there won’t be that horrible awkward moment when we all look at each other and don’t know what to say next.”

  Carlos dipped a corn chip into the hotter-than-hot salsa and threw it in his mouth. “Kids. Good idea.”

  Ruth’s eyes were searchlights, first aiming towards the ceiling, then down at Carlos and over to Vivian, also noticing over their shoulders the couple at the next table who were necking as if they were the only ones in the place. When she realized what she was doing, she decided to focus on Vivian.

  “You know what I’m doing at work these days? That I’m all involved with women our age?”

  And she was off. She asked them to put their less-than-enthusiastic feelings about make-up aside for a minute. She spoke of the huge numbers of women their age who weren’t like their mothers, weren’t willing to fit themselves into shapes never intended for them. But they still wanted to look good.

  “I know you don’t wear makeup, Viv, but you do choose stuff like clothes and barrettes and shoes based on what looks good. Right?”

  Everyone looked at Ruth but no one said anything. “Hey guys, you can say something if I ask a question.”

  Vivian agreed that people like to look good. They clearly have different definitions of what looks good, as well as different thresholds of acceptable sacrifice for their appearance. “Like, for me, face lifts are a no-no but face exercises are okay. But looking good is good.”

  “Really?” Carlos was genuinely surprised. “Even you, babe?”

  “Yeah, even me, babe.”

  Ruth reminded Vivian of their shopping trip and of their discussion about the mis-fit of women’s pants to middle-aged bodies. And crotches and waistlines and fabrics.

  “I do remember. That was actually fun, which is a word I never thought I’d say in the same sentence with shopping. I mean, there we were in the dressing room with all the naked ladies. It was a great education in underwear.”

  “Everyone I know who’s our age feels that way, not just you and me. But no one knows what to do about it. Except Vivian.”

  “Vivian?” Carlos asked.

  “Earth to Carlos? Haven’t you noticed that I sew all my own clothes?”

  “To save money.”

  “Saving money is good. But also because nothing in the store fits me right. And if it does fit right, it looks awful. Those clothing guys just aren’t interested in ample bodies like mine, at least not middle-aged ample bodies, and certainly not moderately-hippie middle-aged ample bodies.”

  “Too many adjectives, I guess.”

  “Very funny, Carlos,” Vivian said.

  Ruth continued. While she couldn’t make clothing, there was something she was good at. After an appropriately dramatic silence, she spoke of her talent for selling things to people who needed those things.

  “Yeah, and … ?” Carlos said, with a rising voice that Ruth thought could mean curiosity or impatience or dread. Or even “I dare you.”

  “Suppose for just a minute that Vivian designed a line of clothing that was perfect for middle-aged women, so they could look good but also fit and even be comfortable. And suppose those clothes were manufactured. And then suppose she marketed the whole line of clothing to stores that would sell it.”

  “Is this a question I can answer?” Carlos said.

  “No.”

  “Just so’s I understand. You’re talking about our going into … business … together? Making clothes and selling them?”

  “But it gets better.”

  “I can’t imagine how,” Carlos said.

  Vivian glared at him.

  Ruth outlined the part of her vision she hadn’t even told David about. What if the venture were a means to raise money for worthwhile causes? What if they gave a certain percentage of their profits to charity? Like Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream did?”

  “Are you done? Can I talk now?” Carlos said.

  “No,” Vivian said. “Ruth asked us to hold our peace. So hold it, buster. Rules are rules.”

  He rolled his eyeballs and pulled at his beard. But he was silent.

  Everyone chewed carefully and swallowed slowly, being sure to get all the morsels of food out from between their teeth. The jukebox was playing “I’m Proud to be an Okie from Muskogee,” some people at the bar were singing along, and there were even a few who were dancing, making swirls and piles of the sawdust on the floor. The waiter, as if on cue, appeared at their table to clear it. The restaurant had filled up while they ate, and the laughter, singing and conversation were becoming boisterous, accentuating the silence at their table.

  “How’s Ida doing? Did the concert go okay? How was your date with the potential in-laws? Was the dress good? Did you get along? Did you offend them with your politics right away or did you wait a little bit?”

  David patted her thigh under the table. Sure enough, Vivian and Carlos were like everyone else, they liked talking about their kid. They told the story of the evening they’d spent with Ida, her boyfriend, and his straight-as-a-gate parents.

  Everyone had been polite and well-behaved. When they all went for coffee after the concert, the artificial politeness continued, everyone doing what they thought would make their kids happy. They made small talk about work and neighborhoods as if there were no elephant-sized subtext in the room.

  “What a scene: we work for a Battered Woman’s Shelter and a Prisoners’ Foundation,” Vivian said, “and they work for an investment bank and a Park Avenue law firm. And we live in Brooklyn and they live in Scarsdale. But we just mentioned all those things as if we were at a tea-party or something. You know, like ‘Oh, I grew up in Brooklyn’ or ‘Scarsdale has such wonderful schools, I hear.’ It was surreal.”

  Carlos, putting his elbows on the table, said, “But it turns out that the guy went to some executive junket a year ago and, while he was there, since his doctor had told him he had to learn to relax, he went to a Tai-Chi class, grumbling all the way. And he got hooked. And I’m into Tai-Chi, too, ’cause of my arthritis. So we talked about postures and routines and stuff. There we were, in some fancy place across from Lincoln Center, standing in the aisles and demonstrating ‘Grasp Sparrow’s Tail’ and ‘Needle at Sea Bottom’ to each other. It was so, so cool.”

  “And my dress was perfect. And the scarf, too. Thank you, thank you. Now tell us about Josh. What’s new with him? How’s teaching? And the girlfriend?”

  As Ruth and David walked to their car, she said, “Did you notice nobody said anything about the clothing business when we all said good-bye to each other? Did you think that was kind of weird?”

  “Ruthie, you told them not to say anything! You can’t complain that they did what you asked.”

  “I know, I know, but I just thought they’d say something like, ‘We’ll get back to you about the idea in a few days’ or something like that.”

  “They did say they’d get back to us, didn’t they?” David asked.

  “Not exactly. They said they had a good time and then ‘Speak to you soon.’ Do you think it’s because the idea was so ridiculous they were embarrassed and just didn’t know what to say?”

  “No, Ruthie. I think if Carlos thought it was ridiculous, no matter what your rules were, he would have let you know. They were doing exactly what you said you wanted, and you can’t blame them for not knowing that you didn’t mean what you said. You’re just making yourself nuts.”

  “Okay, okay. You’re right.”

  Just the same, though, she couldn’t help feeling ashamed, as if she’d vomited in front of everyone.

  CHAPTER 21

  Suffocation by Stuff

  “I JUST DON’T UNDERSTAND exactly when this happened,” Ruth said softly, as if to herself, the next day when she and David were finally cleaning out their garage. They had talked about doing it for months, but never manag
ed to get around to it until the Community Center asked for contributions to their annual rummage sale, forcing them to put a “clean out garage” date on their calendars. Lucky for David, there was a Yankee game on the radio. They’d been at it for about an hour when Ruth started running out of steam.

  “When what happened?” David was on the other side of the garage, facing the dusty wall of shelves crowded with sports equipment. He turned to look at Ruth as he blew on a ski boot he’d uncovered. “Whose is this, and does that person only have one leg?” He threw it on the “discard” pile.

  “This,” she said, pointing with both hands to the stuff in the garage as she made a 360-degree turn.

  “No big deal, just stuff we picked up along the way. We’ll get rid of it easy enough. I’m actually having fun going through it all. I forgot about most of this stuff. Like this wooden tennis racket. Wow, what a relic, complete with this old press you’d use to keep it from warping, remember? Boy, I remember how excited Josh was when we gave it to him. Can you imagine if someone had told us then how obsolete it would be?” He threw it on the pile of things to go to the Community Center.

  After a few minutes of working silently with baseball as background, David said, “I can’t believe we still have this camping lantern. I wonder if it works. What do you think, we ever going camping again?” he asked.

  “Not a chance.”

  He put it on the Community Center pile, then brushed off his hands. “Remember that time we went camping with Caryl and David? And we took the dog? And he wandered over to the next campsite and ate their dope? And we had to hold him all night long, imagining we were going to have to take him to a doggie ER and explain that he’d OD-ed? Was that Rufus or Nero?”

  “Rufus. See, that’s what I mean.”

  “What’s what you mean?”

  She considered every word. “We have so much … past.”

  “Huh?”

  “Everything around us, the stuff in the garage, like that camping lantern, the furniture in the house, even the bushes and flowers, every single thing here has a whole story attached to it. Nothing’s neutral. Nothing’s just what it is, it’s all part of what’s already happened. In the past. It’s drowning me. Like, look at this.”

  “What is that?”

  “It’s the cast I had on my leg after my skiing accident. I was about sixteen or seventeen. I can’t believe I’ve saved it all this time.”

  “Me neither.”

  She saw the word “Release” on the heel of the cast, scrawled by her sister Marge. It meant that, when Ruth had started to lose control on the slope, she’d have been better off releasing the pressure and letting herself fall than trying to right herself by digging in her left ski. Nice of Marge to rub it in on her cast.

  “Get rid of it. Fast.”

  “OK. But cleaning out the stuff is okay. It doesn’t clean out the memories, though.”

  “You want to clean out the memories? Hey, we’ll lose our memories soon enough, don’t rush it.” He laughed at his joke as he dropped a darkly-stained wooden box onto the pile of discards. It was handmade, with their names burnished on the front, and a brass-colored latched cover. It had been made and filled with 144 handmade candles, given to them by Seth the candle-maker as a wedding present.

  “I wonder what ever happened to Seth,” he mused.

  “Are you getting rid of that? It’s a perfectly good box.”

  “I thought you wanted to get rid of stuff. We can give it to the center instead of throwing it out, if you’d rather.”

  “But it has our name on it. Can’t we keep it?”

  “No one will mind the name.”

  “Okay I guess. But anyway it doesn’t really matter if I do or I don’t,” Ruth said. She stopped cleaning off the cross-country ski in her hands, dropping the cleaning rag and looking through the open garage door into the distance.

  “Do or don’t what?”

  Slowly, emphasizing each word, as if she’d explained this a hundred times to a student who wasn’t paying attention, she said, “Do or don’t want to get rid of stuff. It isn’t the stuff that’s the problem.”

  Rubbing one of the many bicycle water bottles to see which charity ride it had come from, he asked Ruth to tell him what was really bugging her.

  She sat down on a half barrel of sand, folding and refolding a stack of tablecloths with varying stains. “It’s just that our past is so much bigger than our future. It’s been a great past, but maybe that’s part of the problem.”

  “The problem?”

  “Everyplace I look around here I see something that pulls me back into the past. You just have to walk around a little bit and you see it.”

  She pointed towards one corner of the garage. “Outside that corner is the tree we planted when Josh came home from first grade on Arbor Day with something that looked like a twig.” She turned a little to the left. “Right around there is the magnolia we got when you got out of the hospital.” She kept turning in place, arm outstretched, finger pointed, and stopped to enumerate at various points. “The dogwood Mary and Jim gave us as a housewarming present and then we got the second one to match it but we couldn’t find the same color. The sculpture we got with the money my folks gave us for a video recorder. The spirit house we brought back from Thailand. See what I mean? And that’s just outside the house. Inside is worse. Doesn’t it all ever make you feel … I don’t know … complacent? Stuck?”

  “No. All this stuff seems good to me.”

  “I used to feel like being surrounded by all my stuff was like being hugged by my life, by our life together. Now maybe it’s a little too much of a bear-hug.”

  “You’d feel better if everything was new and had no associations?”

  Was he actually trying not to understand? She stamped her foot in frustration and tried not to weep as she explained that she was mourning the fact that so much of her life had gone by, that she was coasting on her old memories and not creating new ones. “I feel like I’m starting to stop living.”

  The baseball announcer’s voice rose with an urgency fit for the outbreak of war, as if specifically to annoy Ruth. It hijacked David’s attention, and Ruth knew better than to try to interrupt. She’d lose. Who could be as interesting as a double down the right field line?

  As soon as there was a commercial, he said, “You want to know what I think?”

  “I’m not sure. Does it have to do with the Yankees?”

  “I think it may feel right now like this bad feeling is about something real. But maybe all this stuff, the feeling old and all, is … you know … about the whole hormonal thing? You know?”

  “I hate that, David. I really hate it. It’s like saying ‘Oh, she’s hysterical, she must be premenstrual.’ Jeez, how patronizing can you be?”

  “I thought it would be reassuring to think it might be chemical because chemistry can be fixed.”

  “No, it is not reassuring. How about taking me seriously, just this once?”

  He slammed the screwdriver kit down on the workbench, and the fourteen different-sized ends he’d been arranging spilled out of the broken box. “I take you plenty seriously, Ruthie. But while we’re on the subject, did you remember that I said I wanted to retire when you invented a whole new business for me to be part of? Or did you just not take it seriously?”

  Ruth was fingering a long dry snakeskin that Josh’s pet snake had left as a souvenir before he escaped. She put it down gingerly in the “Things to Keep” pile, balancing it on top of a bike rack. “I heard it. Loud and clear.”

  “But chose not to believe it?”

  “Not exactly. Maybe I thought you just wanted to retire from being a math teacher but wouldn’t mind doing something else.”

  “I told you, Ruthie. No more jobs. Retirement with a capital G-O-L-F.”

  “Okay, okay, you’re right and I’m sorry. I guess I got swept up in being excited about my idea.”

  The UPS truck pulled up with two cartons, a large one from Land’s E
nd and a smaller one from Josh with the stuff, mostly books, he’d asked if he could store at the house. “Just what we need,” David said as he signed for them. “More things to get rid of some day. Which reminds me, we really should go through all the books in the house and get rid of the ones we’ve already read or are never going to read. We can give them to the Community Center.”

  “I don’t know if they want books.”

  “Well, then, the library.”

  They looked at each other. Ruth suspected David was just listening to the baseball game but willed herself to believe it was a moment of mutual understanding. She knew that when David was roused to annoyance, he got over it instantly, so “forgiveness” was too strong a word. But she liked to think it was mutual something.

  “Want to take a break?” he asked.

  Ruth brewed coffee and decided to grab some of the butter cookies they only ate when their sense of virtue or neediness outweighed their concerns about cholesterol. They sipped quietly until David asked, “Ruthie, don’t jump down my throat, but … is something going on?”

  “What do you mean?”

  David told her that, while he believed everything she’d just said about the past and the present, he also had the feeling that there was something else bothering her.

  “I guess you’re right. There is something else.”

  “Is it work? Or me? If I did something, I’m sorry. Whatever it is.”

  “It’s not you.”

  When he urged her to spill her gripes, she made him promise not to use it as ammunition for why she should retire.

  “You think I’d do that?”

  She licked her finger and picked up a few crumbs from her plate, then ate them absentmindedly. “No doubt about it.”

  David promised not to mention the R-word and asked if Colleen had found something out. She told him that Colleen had, in fact, unearthed a few affairs, but that wasn’t the interesting part. Just as she finished the story of the ‘110%-positive’ communication path between Pat and Jeremy and Jeremy’s unexpected reaction to her cleverly-planted fake information, the phone rang.