by Lori Weber
Ruth sticks out her chin, furrows her brows, and slams down the button on the toaster. She bangs the kettle onto a gas burner and, as the fire spreads out under it, says, “Who cares? They’re rats.”
“Oh, Ruth,” her mother replies gently. None of Ruth’s outbursts seem to bother her mother, and this makes Ruth want to lash out even more. She sometimes feels that her mother is a balloon that she is blowing air into, daring it to burst.
The whistle blows on the kettle, sending steam into the air. Ruth pours boiling water into a coffee filter that sits on her special mug. On it is a picture of a yellow bird holding a diploma above the words, Smart Aleck. She won the mug at school, for writing the best essay in her Social Studies class. Her topic was “Assertiveness and the Passive Woman,” a topic Ruth feels like an expert on. Ruth often thinks about how this mug proves that she and her mother are different. She’s assertive in a way her mother never could be. Whenever she looks at the mug, she feels relieved. She won’t live her life slaving away for others as her mother has. As Ruth stares at her mother’s back, she sees herself running away, leaving her mother way behind in her chair where she sits, day after day, looking out into the yard, like the goddess of a kingdom, watching over her creatures. It’s the only job she has.
Ruth’s toast pops up, snapping her out of her daydream. Her mother draws her face away from the window and says, “There’s some good marmalade in the pantry, Ruth. I got it yesterday at Laura Secord’s.”
Ruth drops the slightly burned toast on a plate. “I don’t like marmalade. I never have,” she says, as she carries her plate and mug over to the table. You’d think that after seventeen years her own mother would know her taste.
“Oh, sorry,” her mother says, turning to stare out at the yard again.
“Yuck. This coffee tastes like crap,” Ruth declares, after taking her first sip.
“Oh Ruth, it’s not that bad.”
“It is too. No wonder the girl wanted to get rid of it.” Ruth remembers the girl who came to the door to sell it yesterday. She wore a pressed white shirt, navy vest and skirt, and carried a shiny black briefcase. Ruth boils when she thinks of the astonished smile that spread over the girl’s face when her mother agreed to buy a jar of the coffee, which had supposedly been made by a non-profit organization in Brazil. She pictures the peasants slaving away to pick the beans and some fat plantation owner chuckling all the way to the bank.
Ruth drinks the coffee anyway, because it’s there and she needs the boost. Her toast would taste better with marmalade, but there’s no way of getting it now. She watches her mother’s eyes circling the back yard and thinks how unbelievable it is that anyone could spend so much time worrying about silly creatures.
“Those squirrels and birds make such a mess out there with all their cracked shells. I hate it,” Ruth says, taking her dishes to the sink.
Her mother just shrugs, so Ruth strides down the hall to her room, sits at her desk, and stares at her reflection in the black screen of her laptop. She combs back her yellow hair and thinks how lucky she is to be so pretty, with her green eyes, small nose, and full-lipped mouth, which always curves upwards in a confident smile. She doesn’t even need make-up. It’s the face of a person destined to be independent and to have an important job, one with many people working under her. The only job Ruth remembers her mom doing the whole time she was growing up was at a co-op daycare where she looked after other people’s kids two days a week. Even that job had ended after a few years. People often tell Ruth she looks like her mother, but it isn’t true. Her mother’s eyes are blue and her hair is red, not yellow.
The doorbell rings and Ruth hears her mother’s slippers shuffling along the hall. She peeks around the door frame and sees Rachel, her hair swept up in a high bun that looks like a beehive, standing on the other side of the fishnet curtains. Fat little Jamie clings to her legs, his mouth open as though he’s whining. “Brat,” murmurs Ruth.
“I hope you’re not busy,” Rachel says.
“Oh, no, not at all,” Ruth’s mother responds. “Can I get you a coffee?”
“Okay. I’ve got some time to waste,” Rachel replies. “It’s getting so damn cold I won’t be able to leave the house soon. Then what’ll I do? I’ll be stuck in the house with him.”
Ruth pictures Jamie crawling along the black and white tiles to the kitchen cupboards. Every time he comes over he pulls out all the Tupperware that the Greek lady down the street managed to sell to Ruth’s mother. The more destructive he got, the shinier his eyes grew, as though he had never enjoyed such freedom.
“I’m sorry I’ve no nice treats to offer you. I really need to do a shopping.”
Ruth winces. She can’t stand hearing her mother apologize to Rachel. Rachel should consider herself lucky that she’s been allowed past the front door so early in the morning. Ruth would never have let her in that far. She wonders if the reference to shopping was her mother’s subtle way of telling Rachel she did have things to do.
“That’s okay,” says Rachel. “Jamie can eat later and the last thing I need is any more calories.” Rachel chuckles at her own wit and Ruth pictures her patting her stomach.
Ruth’s mother met Rachel last summer when she came over to complain about the caterpillars that were crawling off their tree and into Rachel’s house through the back porch. She suggested that Ruth’s mother call an exterminator, but Ruth knew that her mother couldn’t stand to see any creature hurt, not even ones that crawled. Finally, Ruth’s father, who agreed with Rachel that the caterpillars had gotten out of hand, took care of them himself, burning the cottony nests with fire-rags tied to the end of a mop handle. Every time a group of ashes fell to the ground, Rachel raised her fist in victory. Ruth’s mother stayed inside, far from her usual post at the window, during the operation. Afterwards, Rachel came over with Jamie to thank her, but now she couldn’t stop coming.
“Jamie, stop it!” Rachel commands, without any authority in her voice. “He’s such a bugger,” she adds, chuckling. Ruth cringes at the crashing and scraping sounds that echo down the hall. Jamie must be making another Tupperware tower.
“Oh, don’t worry about it, Rachel. The floor’s dirty anyway,” Ruth’s mother says, which isn’t true. Their floor is never dirty because Ruth’s mother washes and polishes it once a week.
“I get so fed up of staying in the house all day. And this guy —” Jamie gurgles loudly, like he’s driving something along the floor. “I wish I could send him to daycare, but they won’t take him until he’s two. Five months to go.” Jamie bangs more plastic, as if he’s responding to his mother’s eagerness to be rid of him.
Ruth starts slowly down the hall, waiting to hear what will come next. She has to go to school, but she can’t leave her mother alone with Rachel. When she steps into the kitchen she sees Rachel playing with a hair curl which loops around her ear like a snail. Her mother is making her way through the Tupperware to pour their coffee at the counter.
“Here you go,” Ruth’s mother’s voice squeaks. The coffee runs down her hands, hot with steam. “Oops, I’m sorry. It spilled.”
Ruth grinds her teeth.
“Oh, it’s okay. There’s enough left,” Rachel says.
Ruth stamps along the kitchen floor, kicking Tupperware out of her way to make a path to the sink.
“I don’t know if you’ll like it,” Ruth’s mother says.
“Why? What kind is it?”
Ruth turns the tap on full-force and tries not to listen. She glares down at Jamie, who sits cross-legged in the midst of his Tupperware Empire, grinning like a CEO counting his cash. “Brat,” she reminds herself.
“I don’t really know. I bought it yesterday. This young lady was selling it to raise money.”
“Oh!” Rachel sets her cup down, hard. Ruth watches the beehive on Rachel’s head shake as though real bees are whirring around inside, waiting to be released. “She came to my door too, but I never buy from people like that. You don’t know if you
can trust them. I just slam the door on them.”
“Well, it seemed like a good cause,” Ruth’s mother responds apologetically.
Ruth glares at Rachel. Jamie tears a magnetic lady bug off the fridge and throws it into a plastic bowl. Ruth bends down, retrieves it, and slams it back onto the fridge, higher up. How will they deal with Jamie in three or four years, when he’s taller? Ruth shivers. But she won’t be here then, she reminds herself. She suddenly wants to take an ax and slice off Rachel’s beehive.
Rachel raises the cup of coffee cautiously to her lips. Ruth’s mother’s small frame is curved delicately in her chair, but her eyes are distant, as though she has removed herself from the scene. A cold chill runs through Ruth’s entire body as she watches Rachel scrunch up her face in disgust, as if to say the coffee tastes like crap. Two pictures flash in Ruth’s mind: one of herself and the other of Rachel, her brown curls plastered against her head like swirls in a stucco pattern. She and Rachel have the same expression in their eyes. Again, Ruth wants to take an ax and chop off the ridiculous bun that’s fifty years out of fashion. She wants to watch it fall to the ground in a million pieces, like the ashes of the caterpillar nests.
“She thought she had it hard,” Rachel says, her high-pitched voice calling Ruth back to reality.
Jamie shoots a cup at Ruth’s leg to get her out of his way. Ruth cups her hands around her mouth so that no one will see and sticks her tongue out at him. Then she pulls a chair close to her mother and sits down. She’ll just stay for a few minutes then head up to school, where she’s preparing a debate with her team on the topic of “Ten Commandments for the Postmodern World.” Ruth thinks how the first one should be: Don’t let annoying neighbors into your life.
“She had all those millions, and maids, and chauffeurs, and still she was unhappy. I’d trade places with her in minute,” Rachel’s voice continues to buzz. Ruth has no idea who she’s talking about, but she knows it isn’t someone her mother would care about. The lives of the rich and famous don’t interest her at all; she only cares about her backyard creatures.
Suddenly, Ruth’s mother cranes her neck forward and turns her head slowly, as though she’s following something. Ruth looks out the window and sees a black cat creeping along the top of the picket fence that separates this house from Rachel’s, slinking along as though it’s sneaking up on some prey.
“She thought she had it hard, she should try being cooped up with him all day. She should come to live at my house.” Rachel clutches at a gold chain around her neck as she talks, as though it is somehow holding her back. “She’s just a trashy go-getter.” As Rachel says this, Ruth’s mother leans forward, a rare mean slant closing over her left eye. “Chauffeurs, expense accounts, trips around the world.” Rachel’s high bun draws a circle in the air.
Ruth’s mother nods, but she’s barely listening. All her attention centers on the black cat, which has stopped beside the tree, above the bird bath.
“Meeting all those famous people.” Jamie is throwing the cups and bowls against the counter, punctuating his mother’s words, as though they’re complaining together. “I wouldn’t give a damn either what all the newspapers had to say. I would’ve left him, too, and gone for the money. You gotta do what you gotta do in this world.”
The black cat crouches onto its hind legs, its eyes concentrating on whatever it’s looking at.
“I saw her picture online, dancing at some fancy club in New York, eating caviar and drinking champagne. That’s the way to do it, fling yourself at every opportunity.”
The black cat leaps off the fence and, almost simultaneously, Ruth’s mother springs out of her chair. She runs out the back door and starts screaming, “Shoo, get out of here, shoo,” as she claps her hands. Rachel and Jamie run to the window together, their eyes wide with astonishment, like they’re watching a freak show. Jamie wraps his fat arms around his mother’s legs, as though he’s afraid she’s going to run outside and start screaming too. Rachel is laughing and shaking her head in disbelief. Ruth has never hated Rachel more than at that minute. She wants to yell at her, to tell her to stop gawking at her mother that way, as if she has a right to judge. If only she could have cut off Rachel’s beehive. Then Ruth would have known that no one can stand in her way, that no one can stop her from leaving her mother and her animals behind. But that hasn’t happened.
Rachel’s nose is now scrunched up, as though she smells something rotten. A mocking grin stretches above her chin. The bees buzz in her bun, and Ruth hears the buzz travel over the air as Rachel tells the neighbors that the lady who feeds the birds and squirrels is crazy. I was there, I saw it with my own eyes, she’ll buzz.
Finally, Ruth’s mother is quiet. Ruth fixes her eyes on the back door as her mother steps into the kitchen. Her face is white and her eyes, still distant, don’t move. Ruth feels herself panic when she looks down at her mother’s hands. Cupped gently in her palms, lies a baby squirrel. The skin on its back is torn and blood runs down its body, over her mother’s hands, and drips onto the floor. The squirrel’s mouth hangs open. Two pointy teeth stare up at Ruth — harmless, as tiny as grains of rice.
“Ooo, gross,” Rachel exclaims, as she crams herself into the corner, clutching her gold chain again. “How can you touch that?”
Ruth’s mother doesn’t answer. She lays the squirrel down on a dish towel and wraps its body. Then she looks up at Rachel with cold, blue eyes that sparkle with rage. As her mother glares at Rachel, Ruth finally sees the beehive fall to the ground. Rachel grabs her sweater off the back of her chair, yanks Jamie’s hand and runs with him down the hall and out the front door. Ruth’s mother’s eyes follow her the whole way.
Ruth pushes her chair back, gets up and, with her arms wrapped tightly around herself, approaches her mother. She reaches one shaky hand toward her, wanting to touch her somehow. She brushes the edge of her mother’s shoulder and opens her mouth hesitantly, as if she’s speaking to her for the very first time. But when her mother turns to face her, the cold blue in her eyes hasn’t melted.
Ruth watches her mother open her mouth and shrinks back.
“Rat,” her mother says, her voice steady, barely above a whisper. Then she carries the blood-soaked dish towel out the back door. Ruth hears her mother mumble, “How can anyone say they’re rats?”
Ruth sinks to the floor, landing in the midst of Jamie’s abandoned empire. Her nose is running, but she doesn’t wipe it. Her eyes are glued to the counter. Her special mug sits there, looking down at her. The words Smart Aleck hit her like a dagger at the exact same second that her mother lowers the dead squirrel into the ground.
RELATIVITY
“We tend to think of time as being fixed and linear, but, in fact, time and space are relative to each other,” says my father. “For example, if you were traveling in a train that was moving at the speed of light, you would no longer be part of the time going on outside the train, so that when you arrived at the station, you would be younger than anyone who was traveling outside the train in normal time.”
As he talks, my mind drifts. I picture myself sitting in some supersonic turbo train, whipping past green, blurry fields. We travel so fast the cows are smears of black and white and when we get to the station I’m a baby again. If the train travels fast enough, I’m not even born. My mother is twenty-five, just married to my father, who was forty-five at the time. Or even younger and still working at the hair salon where my father came in for a cut and later courted her with newly refurbished curling irons and blow-dryers.
“Now you explain it to me,” he says when he’s finished.
“I can’t, Dad,” I reply. It isn’t fair that he expects me to. None of my friends know the theory of relativity.
“You have to pay attention, Alberta. You’ll never learn anything if you don’t. You have to work hard and with maximum effort. Then you’ll be remembered for great things, like Einstein.”
Einstein is my father’s hero. He’s always pointing out his gen
ius and reminding me that Einstein worked in the same field as him: electricity. Well, at least that’s the field Einstein started off in. Plus, they were both born in Europe and moved to North America when they were older. He makes it sound like they’re brothers or something. My dad even has white bushy hair that springs out from behind his ears and two white tufts of hair that twist out of his nostrils, like Einstein. People stare when I’m with him, which I don’t like.
He’s been trying to teach me the theory of relativity forever and, now that I’m fifteen, I’m sick of it.
“Come on, Alberta,” he says again. “Try.”
“No, Dad. I don’t care,” I spit back. My father just looks at me, stunned, then he shuffles off to his workroom, as though he can’t stand to be near me. As I watch him walk away, I think about my best friend, Camille, who escaped for the summer. She found a job as an au pair for a family that owns a lakeside cottage in the Laurentian Mountains. While I’m being grilled about Einstein, she’s probably sun-tanning on the shore of some picturesque lake. Camille has all the luck. She has young parents who throw wild parties where people dance until morning. Her mother laughs the whole time, shaking her breasts exaggeratedly inside skimpy tops, a move that would mortify my mother. My mom is so proper that when she hangs out laundry in the summer, she hides our bras under towels.
I’M SITTING OUTSIDE the next day when a moving van pulls up across the street. The back door swings open and a couple of men begin hauling out furniture. It’s cheap stuff, busted-up, like you find in the back of Value Village, buried under inches of dust. None of the kitchen chairs match and the bed-frames look ancient. Even though my mother isn’t with me, I can hear her tutting and sighing.
A minute later a red car pulls up behind the truck, also screeching to a halt. A woman wearing a bright orange t-shirt springs out of the driver’s seat and hops onto the sidewalk. She stands there, looking around, then lets out a huge laugh, as though she’s just seen something hilarious.
