Ruby (5 page)

“I found the extra key. Under the rock by the door.” The girl let her arms drop, and she giggled, the way Olivia knew she could. “It’s probably not a good idea to keep it there,” she said. “That’s the first place a burglar would look. My aunt, her name is Dolly—I swear that’s her real name, not even a nickname or anything. She used to keep her money in her freezer because she thought a robber would never look there, but then she read in a magazine—I think it was
You!
—that the freezer is the first place a robber would look.”

Olivia’s eyes drifted toward her freezer, where she had twenties rolled into neat bundles, hidden behind the ice-cube trays.

“You have to go,” Olivia said. The air between her and the girl seemed almost electrically charged.

“I’m not a robber or anything,” the girl said, insulted. “Jeez. I just wanted to cool off. I think it’s like a hormone thing or something.” On the girl’s arm, in the spot where children of Olivia’s generation got their smallpox vaccination, was a tattoo of a butterfly.

“Cool, huh?” the girl said, grinning. “It hurt like hell, though. I’d never get another one. I hate pain.”

Olivia nodded. This close, she saw that the girl’s shorts were unzipped to allow room for the baby. Under her too-small T-shirt, they gaped open. This broke Olivia’s heart.

“I guess,” the girl said, “that having a baby hurts a lot.” Her eyes were that odd yellow-brown that some redheads have. “Right?” she asked Olivia.

She looked like a child herself, Olivia thought.

“Oh,” Olivia said, “I don’t think it’s really that bad.”

“You don’t have any kids?” the girl said, lazily scratching a mosquito bite on her arm.

Olivia got the feeling that the girl was sizing her up, taking some kind of measure of her.

“No kids yet,” Olivia said with false cheeriness.

Then she had another, frightening thought. She had seen movies about teenaged girls who were ruthless killers. It was their youth, their seeming innocence that got them into the places they needed to be.

She swallowed hard, then forced herself to say, “My husband and I are working on it.” She hoped the girl hadn’t heard the way her voice caught on the word
husband,

The girl narrowed her eyes. “No luck yet, though, huh?”

Olivia shook her head. “Not yet.”

“I’m pregnant you know,” the girl said. Then she laughed that adolescent laugh. “No shit, Sherlock, huh?” Her face clouded as quickly as it had cleared. “It sucks,” she says. “It sucks big-time.”

There was a moment of silence, less like the awkwardness between strangers and more like a settling in.

Olivia said, “Where’s the father?”

She looked at Olivia blank-faced, then giggled. “Oh,” she said, “
the
father. Ben. The asshole. He goes to college here and he was supposed to stick around all summer so I go there, to the college, to his fraternity house—which, I just want to say, is something I don’t believe in. I mean, they’re so fascist. Like they blackball people they don’t like, and they’re prejudiced and everything, and they drink until they puke, honest to God. But Ben said I could live in the basement during the summer and no one would even know because only like five people are even there at all in the summer and there’s a bathroom there and everything.”

Olivia wondered if the girl would even stop for air. She didn’t. She kept talking.

“Except Ben, that asshole, was supposed to be one of those five people and sort of take care of me. You know. And then yesterday he tells me that A, he got a job at a camp in upstate New York and so he’s leaving, and B, they’re coming in to exterminate the place because it’s infested with fleas or something and they have to bomb it and no one can go in for like three days because this bomb is really bad shit, chemicals and everything, and you can’t breathe the air, especially me. Because if I breathe the air and the baby gets retarded or something, no one’s going to want it.”

Finally, she paused to twist a ring that she wore on her index finger, a silver star and moon, like a ring that Olivia herself might have worn when she was a teenager twenty years earlier.

“That’s a fact,” the girl said, her voice soft now, and distant. “No one will adopt deformed babies or stupid babies or HIV babies unless they’re from someplace like Romania where they’ve been tortured really bad.”

The girl looked up, away from her hands and right at Olivia. All those freckles and the tip of her nose sunburned made her seem even younger, like a little girl herself.

“Anyway,” she said, taking a big loud breath, “thanks for the water.” She picked up a tattered backpack, made from patches of velvet and sewn with thick gold thread. Again, Olivia thought of herself as a teenager, the vest she had that was made in the same ragtag fashion. She used to wear that vest for special occasions only—rock concerts, dates with older boys.

The girl moved past Olivia, who stood this entire time in the center of her empty kitchen, and toward the door, trailing patchouli.

“Wait!” Olivia said, and hurried to the girl, grabbing her by the shoulder to stop her from leaving. Was it that familiar scent that made her keep the girl there? Olivia remembered the jar of patchouli oil she’d kept on her dresser, how she’d carefully put droplets on her pulse points, the way it clung to everything. Or was it her own loneliness, her own desperation?

“Where will you go?” she asked. The girl’s freckled arm under Olivia’s hand was warm from the sun.

The girl shrugged.

“Where will you stay for the three days?”

She looked at Olivia, puzzled. Someone should tell this girl to use sunscreen on her face, to get her hair trimmed—the edges were all split ends. Someone should help her.

“While the fraternity house is getting bombed,” Olivia said.

“Oh, that.”

The girl twisted her ring again. Her fingers were swollen, Olivia noticed.

“I haven’t exactly thought it through,” she told Olivia. “But at the college, there’s this whole street of fraternity houses. So I figure they must all have basements, right? And they can’t all have fleas, right?”

“This boy,” Olivia said. “Ben?”

The girl nodded.

“Has he given you any money? Have you seen a doctor?”

Questions bubbled up in Olivia’s throat. Where was this girl’s mother? Why didn’t she get an abortion, get married, get help?

The girl was giggling again. “Of course I didn’t go to a doctor. What’s
he
going to say that I don’t already know? And about Ben …”

Her eyes got dreamy, the way Olivia’s own used to when she looked at pictures of rock stars in teen magazines, or when the older boy up the street would stop his white VW bug and talk to her on a summer evening.

The girl sighed. “If you’ve got a million years, I’ll tell you all about him and me. But I have to warn you—it’s a sad sad story. Honest to God.”

Olivia decided it must be a Romeo and Juliet story. A girl from the wrong side of the tracks in love with a college boy—a fraternity boy, Olivia reminded herself. He was richer, and smarter, and older than she, and he made her all kinds of promises that he couldn’t keep. Maybe he even really loved her, but his family had swept him away, to a camp in upstate New York, on a beautiful lake surrounded by pine trees and girls like him, rich girls who played tennis and sailed and were not pregnant, would not get pregnant. They were tanned and lovely in their white shorts and clean Keds. And now this girl, his girl, was alone and confused and still carrying in her, somewhere, the hope that he would come for her.

“Your parents—”

“Kicked me out,” the girl said.

“But surely you could call them and—”

“I’d rather die!” she blurted, ferocious. “I’d rather get run over by like a tank or something. He’s not even my real father,” she muttered.

Olivia could hear her own father, his voice stern. “Olivia, we are so disappointed in you.” He’d said those words over and over when she was a teenager, when she went to art school instead of a “real college,” when she’d called to tell them she and David had gotten married. “Olivia, you simply aren’t using your head.”

“Stay here,” Olivia blurted.

The girl, surprised, took a few steps back, away from Olivia, closer to the door.

Olivia laughed, a nervous, embarrassed laugh. “I mean,” she said, “until you can go back to the fraternity house.”

Again, the girl studied Olivia, sizing her up.

“Look,” Olivia said, “I cannot send you out into the streets, scrounging around fraternity basements for a place to sleep.” Olivia remembered her own college days, the damp, dark basements in those houses, the sour smell of old beer. “For God’s sake,” she continued, “you need to eat properly and get rest and take care of yourself.”

The girl said, “What about your husband?”

Olivia had forgotten her lie. She considered what to say, but the girl didn’t wait for an answer.

“I mean, what’s he going to think when he walks in that door”—and here she pointed dramatically to the gaping door—“and finds a knocked-up fifteen-year-old girl eating your food and wearing your clothes and sleeping in your bed? I mean, what will he do?”

The girl’s words were a tornado in Olivia’s head. Fifteen! And who said anything about wearing Olivia’s clothes? There were assumptions and wrong conclusions everywhere, and still Olivia stood there, tongue-tied.

“I mean,” the girl said, “I could be a crazy person. Or worse. A killer. Like Drew Barrymore in that movie where she goes on a killing spree with her boyfriend.”

She leaned so close to Olivia now that Olivia smelled her breath—salt and vinegar potato chips, just like the ones Olivia had eaten on the ride up here.

“Like Ted Bundy,” the girl added, giggling wickedly.

David had grown up in Berkeley—Oh! She could almost hear him say it:
the Bay Area
—in the 1960s. He once told her he’d dropped acid when he was only twelve. He used to go to see Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix live. A wayward teenager would not frighten him.

“My husband wouldn’t mind,” Olivia said finally.

The girl grinned. She stretched out her hand for Olivia to shake.

“Well then,” she said, all teenager again. “I’m Ruby.”

Olivia’s mind had cleared. She managed to break all this down to the simplest of terms. She took the girl’s small hand in hers, felt the delicate bones, the cheap silver rings, the swollen fingers. Olivia didn’t shake Ruby’s hand, but she didn’t let go, either. She just stood there pressing it into her own and thought, Home. Baby. Ruby.

O
LIVIA HAD NOT
eaten Spaghetti-Os since she was a kid. But here she sat at her kitchen table, eating the stuff cold, straight from the can. The Cumberland Farms down the street only sold things like beef jerky and ranch-flavored chips. And Spaghetti-Os. Olivia had gotten up early this morning and gone there for supplies while the girl slept upstairs, hot and tangled in the sheets, frowning. Olivia had watched her, willing her—uselessly—awake. Giving up, she’d gone for some food and come back with all the junk she could afford. “This is disgusting, Pal,” Olivia said to the empty room. Since her husband had died, she had started to talk to empty rooms. She had even started to hope for replies. She had started to make lists, to break things down to their simplest terms. Eating her Spaghetti-Os, waiting for Ruby to get up, she listed things she missed about being married to David. They loved to eat sugary cereal for dinner if they’d had a long day. They loved painting each other’s toenails, Siamese cats, square cars, Eames chairs, reading Rod McKuen poems out loud to each other. They loved Leonard Cohen songs,
Disneyland
but not Disney
World, The Twilight Zone,
Sam Adams beer. They loved each other.

The little round noodles slid around Olivia’s mouth like worms.

“I will not cry,” she told the empty room.

She waited.

“Cold Spaghetti-Os,” Olivia continued. “For breakfast. Are you happy, Pal? This is what you’ve reduced me to.”

Her friend Camille told her he wasn’t really gone, that he’d just taken a new form. Olivia tried to imagine him: an angel on a fluffy cloud, a beam of light like Tinkerbell, a shadowy image of his former self lurking in this very room like one of the ghosts in Disneyland’s Haunted House. But none of it worked. Olivia knew that if he were here, in any form, he would have pointed out that she had ended a sentence in a preposition.

So she added, “This is what you’ve reduced me to,
asshole.
”

Anger, everyone told her, was a good thing.

She stood and smeared a good-sized section of the wall in front of her with artist’s glue, the kind she’d used back in art school fifteen years ago for her mosaics of broken china and crystal that she tided
The State of Domesticity at the End of the Twentieth Century.
Then she stepped back and flung the can of Spaghetti-Os at the wall. The little round noodles sprayed out, landing haphazardly. Some stuck immediately. Others slid down a bit before resting.

Olivia stepped back and surveyed the results.

It worried her that she was starting to like the wall. That the happy fat fruit she’d imagined painting on it grew more and more surreal every time she tried to envision them.

Olivia decided that later she would shellac the Spaghetti-Os and spray-paint them gold. Which would do absolutely nothing for the resale value of the house. Which was why she had come: to pack up, clean up, and put it on the market.

She opened another can, sat back down at the table, and began to eat, reading the ingredients to avoid thinking about why she had come.

“There are carrots in here,” she said out loud. She looked around the kitchen, hopeful, imagining David in some ghostly see-through form, as if he were made of organza.

David once ate so many carrots, he’d told her, that the whites of his eyes turned orange. That’s when he was macrobiotic, back in the Bay Area. Even the mention of carrots could make him gag.

“Look,” Olivia said, holding a spoonful of Spaghetti-Os out to the room, the universe. “Carrots.”

But the room remained silent and empty. Of course. Dead people don’t correct grammar or worry about eating food they don’t like. Dead people, Olivia thought for the hundredth or thousandth or billionth time, were simply dead.