by Joan Barfoot
Fortunately Ruth takes over again. “You know, among us we have more than three centuries of experience with our own bodies, so I think it’s safe to say none of us is going to get falling-down drunk. If you think this is depravity of some kind, I can only think you’ve been lucky. In my time I have seen real depravity, and this is not it.”
Clever Ruth, pulling rank in that sweetest, sternest of voices, so that Annabel is left tamping down air with her hands. “No, no, I was just talking about taking good care of yourselves. I don’t want anyone falling and hurting themselves. I understand about knowing your own bodies, but bodies change.”
“Oh, my dear,” Ruth says more gently, regarding Annabel almost tenderly, “we know that better than anyone.”
Again, Annabel Walker sighs. “All right then, I just wanted a chat. Take care, though, all of you, won’t you?” When she leaves, Ruth recedes into her chair as if the air’s been let out of her. Sylvia notices that her own hands are unsteady. Greta also is shaken, as she generally is when there is conflict. She looks at George. It is a little cruel to see him in this state, although there was a time she might not so much have minded. Perhaps it is true that he should not be drinking. A glass of wine or two is not so bad for someone who has had heart attacks, but what are the effects on a survivor of strokes, whose attention drifts even at the most sober of times?
George has heard in Annabel’s tone how she would have spoken to Colette about him and his behaviour and prospects, and he shivers, and hopes he doesn’t start the damn weeping again.
“Honestly,” says Ruth, “some days this place is just like starting school. The first day of kindergarten all over again.” Although as she recalls, her parents were far more fretful than she was. She had other kids, and games, and everything new to look forward to. They only had losing her to a whole world of menace.
“There’s sure no rest from change, anyway, even now, when you’d think there should be,” Sylvia says. “But never mind, come on, we’re about as far from kindergarten as we’re going to get, and we’ve got this bottle to kill. Better a dead soldier than one that’s just seriously wounded, wouldn’t you say?”
Yes, at the moment, they would.
“So drink up,” she says, and they do.
10
AT THREE IN THE MORNING…
EVEN IF EVERYONE WERE CAPABLE OF HURRYING—and in good conscience none would deliberately dawdle—no one cares to rush toward their middle-of-the-night appointment. Just because, until something happens, it hasn’t yet happened.
Courage may have been the exhortation, but as the first two now set out together to fetch their more difficult, unwieldy third, nerve feels a more precise word for what is required.
They are keenly alert to the brevity of the corridor, no matter how cautiously they move. Every day and often enough in the evenings they travel it back and forth, back and forth. Every step should be utterly safe and familiar, but tonight feels uncertain, as if they’re on foreign, uneven soil.
In the pinkish uptilted light the atmosphere is dim and mysterious, but it’s not only a matter of distance and light. It’s the hour, as well. However often they’ve made this journey after the sun has gone down, they have never done so at this dense moment hung on the cusp between one day and the next; nor in this deepened silence in which the only sounds are the building’s inhalings and exhalings, and their own fast, shallow breaths.
At the third door they rap lightly and, no need for invitation, go through. Here they have to exert themselves; there’s some effort and clumsiness involved in adding this companion to the last leg of their journey.
They are, all three, grateful for each other’s presence. They have long since discovered the comforts of companionship, but now the knowledge is sharp and specific and shared: whatever would they do without each other tonight?
Probably they would be sleeping, safe and unanguished and innocent; it will soon be too late to say.
11
BASIC ARITHMETIC…
RUTH HAS NEVER BEFORE BEEN much of an arithmetician, but recently she’s been calculating like crazy. One, two, three, she adds, subtracts, even multiplies and divides, as if bound to arrive at a total that will amount to something; although nothing as unlikely as meaning, her math not as hopeful or pretentious as that.
Smugness and arrogance can be toasty comforts some days and nights, and it’s quite smug, of course, to suppose that everyone—barring the everyday abrupt, surprised finales of car crashes, planes falling out of the sky, bombs likewise, heart attacks and so on and so forth—that everyone should be prepared to set their own deadlines. And it would be arrogant to recommend the usefulness of arithmetic toward a particular end point, but Ruth can say it definitely sharpens the attention, and is a considerably more useful occupation than aimlessly putting in time, which looks to be the choice of at least a few Idyll Inn residents; as if their lives freeze-framed when they moved here, and there’s nothing to be done now but wait.
Or alternatively grow attached, as Sylvia says, to “embroidering other people’s lives and offering up far too much information about bladders and bowels.” Of course she overstates, and Ruth misstates. And Ruth’s own counting is a means, not an end.
The end is something quite different.
So: Ruth has here these one, two, three new friends. Or friendlike persons. She hoped to spot possible allies, but she did not expect any great affections and is surprised by how much she appreciates Greta’s steadfastness, and Sylvia’s bold, bitter laughter in the face of what they’re all up against. And she likes, not George’s occasionally excessive sentimentality, nor his sometimes peremptory words, but the solid banister of angry stubbornness, however unrealistic, that he hangs on to so tightly. These are not minor qualities, generally speaking or specifically, so—lucky Ruth to have landed among them.
There are other options. Ruth knows a number of people from public occasions—fortunately not private ones—attendant on her work and Bernard’s who might, she supposes, be cultivated for conscription to her cause. And plenty of people recognize George, and Sylvia can, when she feels like it, float through lounge, library and dining room like an arthritic butterfly, touching down briefly here and there as she pleases. Even Greta is acquainted with a few residents besides former customers, including a couple of retired teachers who once taught her girls. But almost always they wind up together, the four of them, for some part of the day.
From Greta’s knitting to exercise, afternoon concerts and crafts, TV programs, card games of, mainly, euchre and hearts, the Trivial Pursuit tournaments the recreation director Linda Swain organizes and even Sylvia periodically agrees to take part in, although not without pointing out that “Really, every day here is a trivial pursuit in its way, so what do we need with the game?”—Linda has already lost some of her perkiness although not, it seems, her determination—all this and much else could add up to waiting, or it can count for something.
Ruth would have been smarter to realize this so acutely years ago. As it is, her counting has to include wasted time: an average of three hours a day minimum spent, say, dawdling unnecessarily in the bath, watching foolish programs on TV, puttering about the yard in a heedless frame of mind, amounts to twenty-one hours a week, which are nearly one thousand, one hundred hours a year. Multiply that by sixty-five, to exclude childhood, when not an instant of time is wastable, and she has lost roughly seventy-one thousand hours that could have been better filled. Eight years, more or less; an eternity, practically. How might she use those years now?
She would donate some of them to Bernard; although only to Bernard without cancer.
No doubt he had wasted time of his own, but if he ever counted it up, she didn’t know.
She counts, too, the curves of a life: the sweeps and arcs of event.
So: parents first, those two small, dark, anxious, brave people running their side-by-side clothing stores, one for men and boys, one for women and girls. With their one late-arriving child,
Ruth. Whose preciousness was in part because they had no other children, in larger part because they had no other family at all. More prescient or more shrewd or more fearful than far too many others, they came to this country when some catastrophes, but not the worst catastrophes, were beginning to happen in the place they came from. Leaving them, finally, no one. People like, perhaps, Greta’s parents, grandparents, saw to that, although it would be wrong to hold this against Greta, and Ruth mainly does not. Indeed, they carefully do not discuss history beyond the bare tales of Ruth’s parents, and how years later young Greta and her Dolph abandoned the same country. Greta says old lives must, with determination and concentration, be left behind, and so, Ruth supposes, they must.
History has its terribly personal effects, however, not only large ones. Until she started school, Ruth spent her days bouncing back and forth between the two stores, underfoot in a world of long legs. With their customers, her parents’ voices were enthusiastic and soothing, their eyes bright with praise and encouragement. With Ruth alone, their voices dropped to darker tones, drilling her in their one rule, one lesson: “Be careful, beware,” they said, because there is no trusting the abrupt and evil, unpredictable turns the dangerously unreliable hearts of men may take. Or God’s heart, either. They had no faith, why would they?
They must have had such courage, before—look what they did, creating lives out of wreckage, the same wreckage Greta and her young husband set out to escape, but from entirely different perspectives. But how blind the young are: to not only their elders’ private passions, but their fears. Now Ruth could say, I’m sorry, I didn’t know about being frightened then; especially for somebody you love.
Too late now. Then, callous child, she scared them to death.
Too small or too useless for the rigours of team sports, she was steered instead at school toward the solo, personal feats of gymnastics.
People who play well in groups are said to play better with others later in life. Ruth wouldn’t know. She still has singular goals.
It was thrilling, even dazzling, learning to rise up and fantastically over, through and across beams and bars, rings and floormats, her ankles and wrists performing like springs, sending her soaring upwards and rolling downwards like a tumbling, blown feather. As freedom goes, this was a massively disciplined sort. The thrill lay not only in the moments of being weightless and airborne, but in the exacting, focused, excluding attention required—a toe placed here, a fingertip there, a particular twist of the spine and tilt of the weight, all in the interest of perfect balance, graceful performance. Done badly, bones could be broken; but hers were not. “Oh, I wish you wouldn’t,” said her mother and father. “Please be careful. You’re all we have.” That’s a lot of weight, two grown people, for a small person to carry. A wonder she could get off the ground.
Now, when bones bend and turn on themselves, the flamboyant boldness of the girl, along with comprehension and pity, are visited in old age on the woman, but what child thinks of these things?
What child should think of these things?
Give no thought to the morrow—that’s fine for youth, but is it a sustainable concept with age? Maybe. Maybe that’s just what it is, and there’s no point in giving thought to any morrow whatever.
Her parents’ house smelled old. All Ruth’s life there—her lives there—it smelled dark, wary; filled, too, wall to wall and floor to ceiling, with love. The Idyll Inn doesn’t smell remotely of love, its air never thickens or chokes. It is never allowed to smell bad, either, never carries any reek of warehouse or prison, zoo or nursing home. Other countable benefits of life here: having her laundry taken care of, even if in the process stockings and panties and bras sometimes vanish; having meals, even mediocre, bland ones, served up with no effort from her beyond getting herself to the table; being helped by aides in getting dressed and undressed, and if one or two staff are more brusque or indifferent than chatty Diane, well, why shouldn’t they be? Their job is to be competent, they don’t get paid to be happy. Although happy is nice. Diane has a new boyfriend, so she’s especially cheerful these days. He’s a mechanic, thirty-two, divorced with a little son he sees on weekends. “He’s really cool. Cute, too.” By cool and cute Ruth understands that Diane means there’s hot, fresh desire going on. Such a sparkly thing desire is. Even Diane’s complexion is better. “I remember,” Ruth remarked, immediately realizing that Diane could have no idea what Ruth remembers and anyway would consider it ancient, therefore irrelevant and even pathetic history.
The privilege, and the doom, of the young: to consider everything that comes new to them to be previously unknown and unique.
As is, often enough, the correct shiny outlook.
Armed with this same correct shiny outlook, Ruth left home for university. The young are supposed to abandon, and good parents raise their children to do so, and so Ruth tumbled and vaulted out of town toward lights, noise, darkness with sweet, sweet scents, and one at a time, three so-called lovers. So-called because they count only as practice, devising with her pleasing, adult forms of buoyant limberness that later, with Bernard, had real beauty.
She chose the work she would do to echoes of “Be careful, beware” took a job, part-time that might lead to full-time, in one of the very first shelters for women battered and abused by husbands and lovers. These were people who had suffered badly for love, been unhappily used by their hopes. Even so, pitiful, victimized adults could be unenchanting to deal with. If they’d ever had many charms, for the most part they no longer did.
The children, though—could they not be saved?
Ruth was wrapped in her robe, exhausted by another day of rescue and salvage, watching TV—what program?—with a drink—what kind?—when her mother telephoned, weeping. “Your father’s had a heart attack. He’s in intensive care. Please, can you come home?”
One event, one telephone call. Of course she could go home, for a few days. And then a few more, and later on more. Her father left the hospital shaken. He was only in his sixties, although that seemed quite old to Ruth at the time. He would have to sell his store, his doctor advised, and take it very easy. Times have changed, care is much more intrusive and vigorous now, but that was then. Overnight her father was an invalid, and her mother told Ruth, “I don’t know what to do, I don’t know how to manage him. What if I do the wrong thing? What if something happens and I’m here by myself? It was terrible, Ruth, watching him fall. Calling the ambulance. Sitting in emergency all alone. Frightened to death.” Any remnants of her mother’s younger courage had run down like a clock, and so finally Ruth gave up and gave in and moved from her apartment and job and city, back home. That’s what responsibility and duty and compassion are for, far beyond love.
“Just for a while,” she said. “Till you’re both back to normal.”
She found work, temporary she thought, at the children’s agency, and began learning more about this town than she’d dreamed, growing up. She took care of selling her parents’ stores and invested the proceeds, still under the impression that once their lives were organized, she could leave.
In a year, two years, three, a person grows accustomed; or loses hope, and any clear view. She could even see herself, like a camera, watching herself slide right into place.
And then Bernard walked into her office.
Move on, keep counting.
She has saved three little lives. Probably there were more, but she’ll only count what seems certain, no fudging or guessing. They are:
The two-year-old toddler who, while her mother was at work, was set by her mother’s boyfriend on a hot stove element. To make her stop crying, he later said. The child’s entire backside and thighs were branded and seared. The boyfriend was sentenced to eight months, got out in three. The child, fetched by Ruth from the hospital where her mother had taken her when she got home from work, was put into foster care. The mother said she loved and believed in the boyfriend and would not abandon him, and no, since she was a good mother she
would not attend a parenting course, nor would he, nor would she allow any outsiders into her home. The boyfriend said he’d just lost control for a minute or two—imagine the length of that minute!—and would never harm the baby again, but who cared what he said? Not Ruth, ferocious with the mother, with the court, and with Bernard’s backing, in the cause of keeping the helpless out of the hands of the exceedingly harmful. Because the next time, or the next, the outcome would doubtless be fatal.
A seven-year-old discovered, when Ruth took him to hospital after his teacher raised the alarm, to have multiple bruisings, four cracked ribs and many previous healings and scarrings, not to mention the possibly more permanent hopeless, dulled look in his eyes. Both father and mother had been ganging up on him for a long time, although they got to keep his little sister, who was doted on and untouched. “It’s only regular discipline,” the furious parents insisted. “He’s a bad boy, just bad. What would you do with such a bad boy?” Rescue him, obviously, before their small broken-boned bad boy wound up in the morgue.
An eight-week-old featherweight on the very verge of floating away when Ruth carried her off from her stupid—literally stupid, although one wasn’t supposed to use the word—young parents, who could understand neither how to feed her properly nor how to ask for advice nor, when it was given, how to follow it, and so let her starve and dehydrate nearly down to the bone. How that pair wailed, how distraught and baffled they were, crying out their confusion and grief. They spoke loudly of love; as if love is enough to keep any creature alive.
Whatever those children went on to endure or be broken or even redeemed by, Ruth can say she saved them from their first and worst fates. It would have been nice if the burned toddler’s young mother and her boyfriend, if boyfriend there had to be, had buckled down, taken parenting and anger management courses, settled into demonstrating responsibility and compassion, those hard things harder than love, and had earned the little girl back and lived happily ever after—that could happen, it’s somewhat possible. But it didn’t happen, of course.