Goodbye To All That

by Judith Arnold

  “So we’ll go.” He suppressed a shudder. If this was what it took to win her back, he’d do it. “This Saturday. We could have dinner together before.”

  “No,” she said firmly. “If we’re hungry for a snack afterward, maybe.”

  “Ice cream sundaes,” he suggested, although from the sound of things, this club wouldn’t be conducive to such a sweet, innocent treat. He was envisioning black leather, torn denim, the aromas of beer and sweat. He was envisioning some of the rowdier parties in his frat house basement at Cornell forty-and-then-some years ago.

  “You can pick me up at eight-thirty,” she instructed him, waving toward the apartment complex across the street. “I’m in Building 4. I’ll wait in the entry.”

  “Don’t be silly. I’ll come to your door. You shouldn’t be standing all alone in the entry.”

  “No, I’ll meet you downstairs,” she said decisively. “And I’ll warn you, Richard—I don’t put out on the first date. So don’t get any ideas.”

  He stifled a laugh. He hadn’t dared to allow himself that particular idea. Dancing would have to do. And really, she wouldn’t have offered to go dancing with him if she didn’t want him to touch her. Bowling would have been a lot less romantic.

  So she wouldn’t put out. They’d dance. It was a start.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Thanksgiving had been Ruth’s holiday for forty-two years. Her first Thanksgiving as Richard’s wife, his parents and hers had bickered and squabbled, competing for the honor of hosting the family feast until Ruth had felt like the rope in a tug-of-war. To shut everyone up, she’d announced that she would host the meal and both sets of parents would be her guests. Her brother Isaac and his shiksa wife had come, and Richard’s nudnik brother Ben, who’d been living on a commune somewhere in the Adirondacks but had hitchhiked to Boston and shown up wearing his hair practically down to his tush and jeans that smelled like wet hay. He’d announced he was a vegetarian and then devoured three heaping portions of turkey.

  Ruth hadn’t even known how to cook a turkey that first year. Diligent newlywed that she was, she’d read several cookbooks, ignored the badgering phone calls from her mother—“Remember to brown the mushrooms in margarine before you mix them into the stuffing”—and her mother-in-law—“Dahlink, I don’t mean to interfere, but I think you should know, Richard’s father hates mushrooms”—and managed to concoct a delicious feast, which she’d served in the third-floor walk-up in Somerville where she and Richard had lived while he’d been in medical school. That ugly, sun-deprived flat had been smaller than the apartment she was living in now, but it had been all they could afford on her secretarial salary. Somehow, everyone had squeezed in, and Ben had remained an extra few days, devouring leftover turkey and taking full advantage of the indoor plumbing before he hitched back to the Adirondacks.

  Every year she’d gotten better at preparing a Thanksgiving dinner. Year three, she’d made her own pie crusts from scratch instead of buying frozen. Year six, with a toddler son and a baby daughter underfoot, she’d tried a recipe for cranberry bread which had proven enormously popular. By the time Richard had finished his residency and they’d bought their house, no one had dared to meddle. The holiday had become hers.

  This year it was Jill’s, and Ruth was surprised to discover that instead of feeling bereft, she felt liberated.

  Richard had persuaded her to let him pick her up and drive her to Jill’s, insisting that carpooling would save gas. She wasn’t so sure about that; he had to drive five miles out of his way to fetch her, the same five miles she would have driven if she’d taken her own car. But if he drove she could drink more wine, so she’d acquiesced.

  She’d told him she wanted to visit her mother first, and no doubt eager to prove what an accommodating, selfless husband he could be, he said he would be happy to drive her to the nursing home. Her mother had been in fine spirits, apparently more pleased to see Richard than to see Ruth. She’d kissed him, called him bubbela several times and sung a Yiddish ditty that was probably obscene, given the way she kept cackling and blushing at the end of each verse, but Ruth had no idea what the words meant. Her mother had eaten three of the chocolates in the Whitman’s Sampler Ruth had brought, and thanked Richard for them. Then they’d walked her to the dining room, where a turkey dinner had been prepared for the residents, said good-bye and headed off to Jill’s house.

  They’d talked mostly about her mother during the drive, about how well she was doing, how the nursing home seemed to be taking good care of her. What they hadn’t said was that Ruth’s mother was never to learn that they were separated. At this stage, she probably wouldn’t even understand what a separation was. She clearly couldn’t remember Richard’s name—hence the bubbelas—but there was no need for her to think anything had changed in their marriage. Because if Ruth ever told her, and she was lucid enough to comprehend the situation, she would hate Richard and blame him and pity Ruth. The blame was Ruth’s at least as much as Richard’s, and she was enjoying her life too much to deserve pity.

  She experienced a spike of anxiety as Richard pulled into the Sackler driveway and shut off the engine. This was the first time the family would all be together since the separation. None of the kids knew that she and Richard had gone on two . . . well, dates seemed like an awfully formal name for spending an evening with your spouse of forty-two years with whom you were not living at the moment. She didn’t want the kids to know she and Richard had spent a couple of evenings with each other. They might regard those two outings as proof that their parents were getting back together again, and Ruth wasn’t so sure about that.

  Not that their dates had gone badly. The first, she and Richard had wound up double-dating—God, that sounded so high-schoolish—with Wade and Hilda at a rock club in Cambridge. A different club than she’d gone to with them the last time; Wade had said the music would be a little mellower, which might be easier for Richard to take. Wade and Hilda were still having enough ups and downs to give a person the bends, but Ruth and Richard had ignored their oscillations between antagonism and affection and had taken to the dance floor. Richard had complained that he was the oldest person out there, and Ruth had said, “So what?”

  He hadn’t enjoyed the dancing the way she had. He hadn’t lost himself in the music, the beat, the collective energy of a crowd of people crammed together on a sticky dance floor, rocking and rolling. He hadn’t talked much to Wade or Hilda. He’d claimed the room was too noisy for conversation, but Ruth suspected he just didn’t feel comfortable. Wade and Hilda weren’t his type, after all. His type was late-middle-aged doctors who played golf after shul on Saturdays and channel-surfed in the evenings.

  Still, he’d been a good sport about the dance club. When he’d driven her back to her apartment at one in the morning, he’d assured her that he’d had more fun than he would have had bowling. But then, he’d never been much of a bowler, either.

  So when he’d invited her to have dinner with him at their favorite Italian place on Route 20 the following weekend, she’d said okay. She’d been dining alone so many evenings, she’d thought she ought to dine with someone else to make sure she hadn’t forgotten her table manners.

  The hostess at the restaurant had greeted them like loved ones just back from paddling a canoe around the world. “Where have you been? We haven’t seen you here in so long!”

  They’d wound up seated at their usual table, and Richard had ordered the chicken parmesan as he usually did, while she’d ordered the shrimp scampi, as usual. They’d split a bottle of Chianti Classico. He’d told her about a new stent currently in the testing stages. He’d asked her if she found running a cash register tedious. He’d mentioned that he’d vacuumed the house earlier that day, and that he’d had the sprinkler system winterized, and did she usually pay eighty dollars for that service, because that was what the guy had charged him and he hoped he hadn’t been ripped off.

  When he’d driven her back to her apartment, he’d kissed
her good-night. It had been more than a simple little peck on the lips, but less than a prelude to steamy sex. Ruth wasn’t sure she was ready for hot kisses. She missed snuggling, but not sex, not really.

  And now their third date: Thanksgiving dinner at their daughter’s house. Jill had insisted that she bring “nothing but herself,” as Jill had put it, but Richard had purchased a lovely autumn bouquet, brown and orange and honey-colored mums in a nest of ferns, for Jill. That had tempted Ruth to give him a hot kiss. She’d always been the one to remember to bring things for the children and the grandchildren when they’d visited. But Richard had thought of his daughter’s efforts and come up with a sweet, generous offering. Lacking Ruth’s input, he’d done the right thing on his own.

  Even without the flowers Richard had brought, the house was already beautifully decorated. A willow wreath hung on the front door, and the dining room was adorned with clusters of Indian corn on either end of the sideboard and a centerpiece of pine cones and holly anchoring the beige table cloth, which was obviously new since its rectangular packaging creases hadn’t been laundered out of it yet. Each place setting—and there were a lot of them; no way could Ruth have fit everyone comfortably around her tiny table in her apartment—had a crisp new linen napkin rolled inside a carved wooden napkin ring. Clove-scented candles stood flickering on the wide window sill. The living room was decorated, too, with tangy-smelling pine branches strewn across the mantel and another clove-scented candle burning inside a glass chimney on the coffee table. A little Christmasy, Ruth thought, all that pine, even though the ribbons tied around them were copper-hued rather than red. But still charming.

  The house was already humming with activity when Gordon ushered them inside. He kissed Ruth’s cheek, then led Richard away to get him a drink, as if afraid to allow Richard and Ruth to remain in each other’s company any longer than absolutely required. After a boisterous greeting from Mackenzie and Madison, who hugged her, yanked on her hands and jabbered incomprehensibly about some video they were watching downstairs in the rec room, Ruth made her way to the kitchen, where she found Jill monitoring the temperature of the roasting bird and Brooke arranging a platter of raw vegetables, creating a floral effect with broccoli florets and slivers of green pepper. Brooke gave her a smile, but she wasn’t one for big smooches, so Ruth refrained from kissing her.

  “You’re a sweetheart, helping Jill out with the cooking,” she said. She always felt an obligation to compliment Brooke. They weren’t that close—Brooke didn’t seem to be close to anyone except Doug and maybe, on occasion, her daughters—but Ruth didn’t want to lose what little ground she had with her. So she offered lavish praise at every opportunity.

  Brooke only laughed. “Don’t be silly, Ruth. I don’t cook. Jill’s done it all.”

  “Bull,” Jill said as she swung the oven door shut and crossed the kitchen to hug her mother. “Brooke’s my party planner. She created all the decorations. Look—she can even make baby carrots look cute.” Jill gestured toward the platter.

  “Baby carrots have always troubled me,” Brooke confessed. “It’s like they’ve got a pituitary disorder.” She shook her head, causing the delicate blond strands of hair framing her face to shudder.

  “Well, the salad dish looks very nice,” Ruth praised her, even though she thought Brooke’s concerns were a bit on the fussy side.

  “It’s crudités,” Brooke said. “Jill, what did you do with that dip?”

  Dip? At Thanksgiving? Ruth associated dips with potato chips and the Super Bowl. But it was Jill’s party, not hers. She wasn’t going to behave like her mother and mother-in-law had the first time she’d hosted the celebration. If Jill wanted to serve dip—with chips, salad or, pardon the pretension, crudités—by all means, let her serve dip. Ruth was a guest, not the hostess.

  She experienced another swell of liberation that washed away any lingering nervousness about surviving an evening with her children when she and their father were neither here nor there emotionally. She liked the fact that she wasn’t the one scurrying around, fixing and preparing and worrying that everything should come out perfect and everyone should go home stuffed to their eyeballs. She was a working woman now, a single woman, someone who had the right to expect others to cater to her.

  As if Jill had read her mind, she pressed a glass of white wine into Ruth’s hand. “Here. This is just to get you started.”

  “Thank you! A toast . . .” She raised the goblet, and Brooke raised a glass half-full of wine standing next to the vegetable platter on the counter. Jill raised a can of Diet Coke.

  “To Mom,” Jill declared.

  “You can’t drink a toast with Diet Coke,” Ruth objected.

  “I can drink a toast with anything I want. And I’ll be drinking wine once we sit. Right now I need caffeine. Potatoes,” she said, half to herself before lifting the lid of a pot bubbling on the stove. “I’m making mashed. No yams. I hate yams.”

  “You never said.” Ruth felt a pang of guilt. Every year she made yams, and every year Jill gamely ate half a yam.

  “So now you know.”

  “Where’s your sister?”

  “She called from the road. She said the traffic is awful, but they should get here by about four.”

  “They,” Ruth muttered. “What do you know about this new one? He’s not a hairdresser, is he?”

  “He’s a lawyer,” Brooke told her.

  “Ah.” Ruth didn’t want to seem snooty, but she was pleased that her Ivy-League daughter was dating someone at her professional level.

  “Not Jewish,” Jill warned.

  “That’s okay. He’s a lawyer. They’ll have something to talk about besides styling mousse.”

  “I liked Luc,” Brooke said wistfully, then took a long drink of wine. “I’ll go bring these into the living room for the boys to munch on.” She lifted the vegetable platter, nestled the small bowl of dip beneath the broccoli blossom she’d created, grabbed her wine glass and glided out of the kitchen.

  “It’s nice of her to help,” Ruth noted. “She doesn’t usually contribute in the kitchen.”

  “She’s helped me plan this entire dinner, Mom. I can’t believe it, but she and I are really getting along well. We’ll be moving into our office on December first. I think it’s going to work out.”

  “I think you’re both nuts,” Ruth said, “but why not? You can afford this?”

  “Not right away. We’ll both be operating at a loss for a while, but the accountant said that’s to be expected.” Jill sighed. Obviously, she wasn’t thrilled about operating at a loss. After a long slug of Diet Coke—straight from the can; why couldn’t she drink out of a glass like a civilized person?—she smiled. “We’re both taking a risk. The rent is cheap, at least, although God knows they wouldn’t dare to charge more for this room. It’s not much bigger than a closet. Actually, it’s smaller than the closet in Brooke’s bedroom, but she’s got a humongous closet. We’ll make it work. We’re planning to share a desk, which is good because there’s no way we could fit two desks into the place.”

  “And you’re going to lose money?”

  “Because of you, Mom.” Jill placed the lid back on the pot of boiling potatoes and gave Ruth a hug. “You took a risk. You took a chance. You took a leap of faith. That’s what we’re doing—taking a leap of faith.”

  “Faith has nothing to do with me,” Ruth argued. “As it is, I haven’t been in touch with the B’nai Torah Sisterhood in weeks.”

  “I mean faith in things working out. Or faith in yourself, knowing that if they don’t work out you’ll still be okay.” She released Ruth, and when she stepped back Ruth saw a shimmer of tears in her eyes. “If I lose money trying to expand my catalogue writing business, I’ll be okay. If Brooke’s party planning business doesn’t work out, she’ll be okay.”

  “Of course she’ll be okay, all the money Doug makes.”

  “And we’ll be okay, too. I thought Gordon would be opposed to this. I expected him to wav
e the checkbook under my nose and explain that we couldn’t afford it. But he’s fine. He said I should give it a try and see what happens.”

  “He’s a good man, your husband,” Ruth said, and meant it. If she’d stayed with Richard while working at First-Rate, he would have hated it. He would have seen her job as a commentary on him. He would have worried that people might think he didn’t earn enough to support her. Or he would have been embarrassed that she was doing a job you didn’t need a college degree for. She’d hinted for years that she wanted to get a job, and he’d always laughed off her comments or reminded her she already had a job.

  Taking care of him. That had been her job. Taking care of him, the house, her children—everything and everyone but herself.

  She’d had to leave. For her own sanity, for her own satisfaction, she’d had to.

  Abbie bounded into the kitchen, munching on a curl of green pepper. “Hey, Grandma!” She raced to Ruth and squeezed her in a crushing hug. When had she gotten taller than Ruth? Not only had she grown an inch in the couple of weeks since Ruth had last seen her, but she’d grown in other ways. Her bosom was no longer just a couple of bumps the size of mosquito bites on her chest, and her waist seemed a little narrower. So did her face. She was losing the baby fat that had softened her cheeks and chin.

  Before Ruth could comment, Abbie popped the rest of the pepper into her mouth and spoke while she was still chewing. “I didn’t even hear you and Grandpa arrive. I was texting Caitlin, and the next thing I knew, you guys were here. Grandpa said he drove you. Does that mean you’re back together with him? Because I think your apartment is so cool.”

  “I think it’s cool, too,” Ruth assured her. “Grandpa and I are friends. I’ve still got the apartment, though.”

  “Cool. Because if you decide to move back in with Grandpa, you should keep the apartment anyway. Like a secret hideaway or something.”