At least I knew I was staying away, even if nobody else did. And I felt good for it.
But maybe I wasn’t cut out for feeling good.
I was nearly two months into my new life when she called with something in her voice that put me on guard. Her words weren’t any different, but behind them I heard a storm brewing, heading my way, calling me by name to come out and see.
Whatever was up, I didn’t want any part of it. “I’m in the middle of fixing supper,” I lied.
“What, already? It’ll only take a minute.”
I told her I had fritters cooking and couldn’t leave them. Then I worried that she’d come over and find nothing at all on the stove.
“I wouldn’t have called if it wasn’t important,” she said. “You know that.”
That was her lie.
But I began to wonder if something really was wrong, so wrong she couldn’t speak it. “Is Carl all right?” I asked. For years we’d been waiting for him to drop dead, him being the way he was.
“Why certainly he’s all right,” she answered. “Why wouldn’t he be?”
Then it dawned on me: I’d seen him, but she hadn’t been over in a couple days. “Are you sick?”
“Sick?” She laughed. Then she didn’t say anything, and that’s when she had me. Because with Ruby Mondo there was never one moment of silence.
I fought anyway, knowing all the while it was a useless battle and I’d already lost. Time stretched out. I prayed that she’d hang up and find somebody else to bother.
But I heard her breathing on the other end, waiting for my answer.
I knew if I went and it was nothing, I’d be sorry. But if I didn’t go over and it turned out to be something serious, I’d never forgive myself. Either way she had me.
I’m a terrible gambler. I’ve never won a thing in my life, not even an argument with myself. “I can only come over for a minute,” I heard myself saying.
So it was done.
She let out a big sigh. “That’s all it’ll take,” she said. Then, “Leonard’s got a hammer, doesn’t he? Bring the hammer.”
Sometimes animals got into the chicken coop, looking for eggs. Once, they sucked the insides out and left the shells; I’d never seen anything like it. That’s what I was feeling like when I hung up the phone – those empty shells. Wanting me to come pound a nail for her when all she had to do was cross the road and get the hammer herself. Or wanting to use it as a weight for one of those idiotic school projects she was always gluing together, that her students rolled their eyes over.
As I scrounged for the hammer, cursing her and myself, I began to think maybe she was smarter than I’d given her credit for. Maybe she knew I was staying away and had been working on me all this time without my knowing it. Why? For no better reason than the pure pleasure of aggravating me.
When I opened the door, the cats came yowling, thinking I was going to feed them, so that I nearly broke my neck trying to get down the rickety stairs. Then I had to stop at the road to shoo the dog back. A car tooted, and someone waved. It took me a second to recognize who it was: the priest’s housekeeper, driving his big brown sedan with him sitting beside her. And there I stood, in my old housedress with the holes and stains on a Sunday afternoon, shooing the dog away from the road with one hand and holding up the claw hammer with the other to wave hello to the priest.
The emptiness came over me suddenly, and I got lost in it. It was because I was crossing over to Ruby’s again, with the deserted road and the broken-down farm, everything, reminding me of all that I had lost.
So it seemed fitting that I would climb her steps and try her door, only to find it bolted from the inside. I knocked, with no answer, knocked again, and finally let loose with the hammer, nearly splintering the wood.
“What’s the matter, is it locked?” she asked, breathless.
She didn’t wait for an answer. She flittered around, knocking over a framed photograph of some long-dead relatives from the shelf by the door; then she stooped to pick it up and set it back, asking me if I knew who they were and if I’d ever seen it before.
“Every time I come here you show it to me,” I told her, weary already.
She laughed. “Boy, what a memory you have. Your kids must take after you. Of course, Leonard’s smart, too. Our whole family is smart.”
Carl called from the kitchen, “Who is it, Ruby?”
“Come in, come in,” she shouted, waving and fidgeting and bustling, so that I felt like I was caught up in the giant corn combine.
Carl sat in his rocking chair by the stove. He snorted when he saw me. “Well, it’s the Stranger come to visit,” he said. He laughed and rocked faster.
I was surprised at how everything looked the same: the counter cluttered with dead geranium plants she’d brought up from the cellar, stacks of magazines, tin cans, a broken radio; the table cluttered with papers and books, her purse, a bowl of leaky pens and rubber bands; knickknacks crammed everywhere; greeting cards from the last two holidays scotch-taped to one wall; a pan of cooked food on the stove and dishes in the sink. And then there was the smell, the closed, stale smell of food and of them; and the heat, as if even on this warm day she had the furnace blasting.
“Stop, Carl,” Ruby said. “Watch out for the wall.”
“I’m not hurting anything,” he said, and he kept rocking.
She reached out to slow him down, and that’s when I noticed. She held her right arm down at her side. The hand was inside an old mayonnaise jar.
I took a seat at the table and lay the hammer in front of me, on top of a pile of opened mail and some newspaper clippings. So, I thought to myself, I am back in Ruby Mondo’s house, all right. I folded my hands and looked at her, waiting to see what she’d say.
She turned to the stove and lit a burner. “How about some tea?”
“You know I don’t drink tea,” I told her.
“Maybe if you tasted it you’d like it. How would you know if you never tried?”
“Did you want something?” I asked.
She gave me a look like she didn’t understand.
“You called me over here,” I said, my eye on that jar.
“Oh. I did, didn’t I?” She gave a little laugh, like she was embarrassed, which it looked to me she had good reason to be.
And then while the tea heated up, she busied herself at the sink, running water, knocking over a geranium and setting it right, and I could see it was all going to be up to me.
So I finally said to her, “How can you be canning so early in the year?”
“Canning? Why, I haven’t been canning.” She sounded indignant.
Carl started up with the rocking again. “Miss Ruby’s got her hand stuck in a jar.”
“It’s stuck?” I asked. I could see darn well that it was.
Anyone else would have found it funny. Anyone who hadn’t lived all these years with Ruby Mondo, that is, with one thing after another like this, day in and day out, and her supposed to be so smart, able to think things through.
She wouldn’t say it was stuck. “I can’t seem to get my hand out” was as much as she’d admit. “I thought you could break it for me. With the hammer.”
I looked at her a minute, thinking, “There’s a lot more than that jar this hammer could break about now.”
I went over to get a closer look. When I lifted the jar, Ruby went quiet for the second time in one day. She turned her face to the side, like I was looking at something private on her.
“Did you try putting oil on it?” I asked, my voice gruff. I could see the hand was dry as a dog bone and red, from trying to pull it out. It looked pitiful, closed up like that.
“Oil?” she murmured. She gazed off at the kitchen window a minute like she was going someplace in her head. “By golly, that’s right.” She jumped up and shuffled through the heap of papers near the phone. “This is what I wanted to show you.” She held out a magazine article to me, as if this was the real reason she’d called me over
and it had just come back to her.
The article was about porpoises, how smart they were and how they could even talk.
“Isn’t language fascinating?” she said. “Thousands of different languages the world over and most people are lucky if they know only one or two. Just think, though, God understands them all.” A moment later she added, “But of course, why wouldn’t He?”
I used to tell Len her mind worked like the algebra she taught: If you didn’t understand the formulas, none of it made sense. I never took algebra in school. I didn’t know the first thing about it.
“Shall we get this over with?” I said.
I took her bottle of cooking oil down from the cupboard, and a dish towel, and had her sit at the table. “If you were able to get your hand in this jar,” I told her, “you should be able to get it out.”
“You gotta use a shoehorn,” Carl said. He snorted and laughed.
“That’s for shoes, Carl,” Ruby told him.
“I know it,” he said, and he laughed again.
I worked the oil around her wrist while her free hand went scrabbling through the junk on her table the way her mind ran from one topic to another. “Inventors,” she said. She fished out a metal paper clip and held it up for me to see. “It takes a genius to think up something like this.”
The oil wasn’t working. “Should I try some soap?” I said. “Warm soapy water?”
She shrugged. “Oh, do what you like.” This was her hand we were talking about, her hand I was working on.
“That Leonardo da Vinci,” she said. “He’s another one.” She shook her head over the thought of him. “Of course, we’re all special,” she said. “We’ve all been put here for a reason, that’s not news.”
I didn’t need one of her geniuses to figure out the only thing I’d been put here for: cleaning up other people’s messes.
“If you’d stop moving around so much,” I told her, “maybe I could get this hand out.”
I worked some dish soap around her wrist, though it didn’t do any good.
“Why didn’t you say something if I was moving too much?”
“I’m saying something.”
She gave me an odd look, then laughed.
“Look here. Maybe you can figure this out,” she said. “Get your mind on a more positive note.” She held up a newspaper clipping of names for me to read. She’d cut the article away so there was no heading, no story, nothing except names.
“What is this?” I said. “Who are they?”
“I thought you knew.”
“I don’t know,” I told her. She does that. Saves things, then forgets what they are. Then she expects me to know what her junk is about. It was like she stored up everything for me, just waiting so she could dump it all out. She couldn’t talk about these foolish things with anyone else.
“I have no idea what this is,” I told her. “These names mean nothing to me.”
“Well, you don’t have to get cross.”
I rapped my knuckles hard against the jar, to change the subject before she had me packing my bags for the same rest home she should have put Carl in.
“Is there a purpose to this?” I said. “Or did you just put your hand in here for something to do?”
She shrugged, and the movement sent a few greeting cards to the floor. “I was in a hurry, that’s all. Never do anything in a hurry or you’ll regret it, don’t they always say that?”
I made a move to pick up the cards, then decided to heck with them.
“I thought I’d be smart, see?” she said. “And get to the bank before it closed.”
The minute she let the words out, her face bloomed scarlet, right under my eyes, like one of those high-speed films that shows a rosebud opening.
I stopped what I was doing. “The bank?” I said. “You mean Friday? You’ve had your hand in this jar since Friday?”
She gave me a look that reminded me of our dog, the time we found him caught in a muskrat trap.
I got some satisfaction, then. I pictured her going to bed like that, tucking the jar under the covers, trying to cook, trying to eat, trying to shave Carl, all with her left hand while the other was closed up in that jar. And then, for once, I almost felt like laughing. Almost, but not quite.
When it passed, I looked at her, and what I saw was a wisp of smoke. That smoke was my life and the lives of my kids.
I picked up the hammer and felt its weight, considering.
“This won’t work,” I told her, and I put the hammer back down. “You’ll get cut.”
“What’s a little cut? It’ll heal.”
I eyed her. Then I thought, All right. If that’s what you want. Just remember you asked for it.
She looked over at the hammer, like she knew what I was thinking.
“Look,” she said, a little too cheerfully, “I bet you can’t figure this out.” She dug out another article. “Here’s a story about two brothers. The oldest boy – he’s a man now – is only ten years younger than his mother. And he wasn’t adopted. Now how can that be?”
“I haven’t the foggiest idea,” I told her.
“Try,” she said.
“Oh, Ruby, please.”
“He was in a foster home,” she said. “It was his foster mother. Of course, it’s nothing new. Even Moses had a foster mother, everybody knows that. You don’t just find a baby floating in the bulrushes and think it doesn’t belong to somebody.”
And I thought, for this I came to Len and had four kids.
“But what a so-and-so that pharoah must have been,” she was saying. “Didn’t he think it was funny that his daughter had a baby when she wasn’t even expecting one?”
Everything belonged to her. Everything had a story behind it, a history, a whole thread of connections that somehow related to her personally, as if she was involved in every single event that had ever happened or would happen, and there was no such thing as time. No wonder I couldn’t figure which of them was the battier, Carl or her.
I looked over at him. He wore his cowboy shirt tucked into his dungarees, and his fat stomach strained against the belt. He didn’t look that much off, but his mind just wasn’t right. He sat watching us, content as pie. I wondered what she saw when she looked at Carl, how she imagined him. Her brother.
“Of course, when you think about it,” she said, “we’re all foster children. That’s nothing new.”
Her words trailed off as I went for some old newspapers under her TV stand.
She gave the papers an anxious look. “I hope there’s nothing in there I wanted to save,” she said.
I dropped the stack on the table. “Shall I cut out some names for you?”
“I can call somebody if you’ve got work to do,” she told me. “I don’t want to keep you if you’re not feeling up to snuff.”
We both knew she didn’t have anyone else to call. “I’m going to get this over with,” I told her.
“I would’ve done it myself, but I didn’t have a hammer,” she said. “Of course, I could have used a rock. But if something happened . . .”
What she meant was if she cut herself. What if she landed in a hospital – or worse. What about Carl was what she meant.
“But, by gosh, I’m lucky to have you next door,” she said, and she knocked on the wood of the table leg for superstition’s sake. “Thank goodness I’ve got you.”
It threw me for a loop. She’d never said a word to let on I meant anything to her – or that she even noticed the things I did for her. Then I got worried, that she was counting on me to take over if anything happened.
“But you’re too serious,” she said. “You should have come to our party, that would’ve cheered you up.”
I thought, She has some nerve thinking I need cheering up, when if it wasn’t for her –
“All your kids were here. Of course, Leonard was working. He’s another one, always working.”
That stopped me. “The kids?” I said. “What are you talking about?”
“It wasn’t exactly a party. I played the piano and we sang songs.”
Carl moved into high gear with the rocker and started singing, “Home, home on the range.”
“That’s right, Carl,” she said. “Where the deer and the antelope play. Oh well, this was back before Easter. Right before your daughter went away.” She drummed her fingers on the table and nodded her head to the tune that was in there. “Where would we be without music? It’s a universal language, did you know that?”
The only time the kids went over that I knew of was when they wanted to tease Carl and Ruby, get them going; and then it was just the two who were speaking to each other who went. I couldn’t see all four of them putting aside their grudges long enough to go visiting, much less to sing songs together.
“Of course, mathematics is another universal language,” Ruby said. “There are probably others, too, if we just stop to think about it.” Her face went serious as she thought about it. Then she said, “It took a lot of planning to pitch in and have that reproduction made and keep it all a surprise.”
I didn’t know what she was talking about, as usual. “Reproduction?” I asked her.
“That your kids gave me, of Ma and Pa’s wedding picture.”
Now it was my turn to forget the reason I was in her house. I dropped the hand. “My kids came over and gave you a picture?” Even as I was saying the words it came to me that she’d been talking about wanting a copy of that wedding photograph since I’d known her.
I hadn’t heard a word about the reproduction. I didn’t know anything about any of it.
“Of course, your oldest girl was behind it all,” Ruby said. “It was her idea. But where’d they get that frame?”
My girl? I thought. And just like that, Ruby had conjured her up for me, and I stood there dumbfounded by what I saw. But then a new kind of panic hit me, because I realized who else but Ruby Mondo would go slogging through the bulrushes of life and stumble upon my babies?
“I hope the frame doesn’t belong to anybody,” Ruby said, and she made a move to get up.
A Place Of Light Page 17
