Drowning Ruth

by Christina Schwarz

  “Stand still. These are sticking together.” Amanda was trying to rat Ruth's hair around a handful of burrs. “Good. Just like a witch.” She cackled to make it a game, and Ruth giggled. “And now a little of this on your cheeks.” Gently, she smeared rouge on Ruth's soft skin. “Not too much. Now you remember what we practiced?”

  Ruth nodded.

  “All right, under the covers and close your eyes, and remember, not a word, no matter what he asks you.”

  Amanda was keeping Ruth out of school as long as possible. No one had argued with her that first year after she'd been released from St. Michael's. Ruth was only five, after all, and what with the months of not speaking and the toilet accidents, she hardly seemed ready for kindergarten. The next year, though, had been more difficult. She'd had to remind Carl that he knew nothing about children, that he could not imagine the trauma Ruth had suffered at losing her mother, that she was teaching the child more than any school would have. The last part, at least, was true. Ruth, although she wasn't a wizard with arithmetic as Amanda had been, could already add and subtract, and although she hated the cruel Struwwelpeter, she could read every word about him. She could identify trees by their leaves, and birds by their calls, and could point out at least four constellations. She understood that blue and yellow made green, knew how to differentiate a Guernsey from a Jersey and had raised a lamb whose mother had died of distemper.

  Carl was fairly easy to persuade, but Amanda knew Ruth's precocity wouldn't impress the school board. When that body sent someone to the house to investigate, she pretended that Ruth was ill, and even staged a convincing epilectic fit.

  “Perhaps you'd better wait in the front room, Mr. Schmidt,” Amanda said calmly, as Ruth, her tongue lolling from her lips, began to jerk and then to bark.

  It'd worked wonderfully the first time, but this year Carl, who'd left a pair of pliers in his room, came home to find the school board member on the davenport.

  “It's very sad about your daughter,” Mr. Schmidt said. “I'd hoped she'd be better this year.”

  When she heard Carl running up the stairs, Amanda realized there was nothing more that she could do. Ruth would have to go to school.

  Part Two

  Chapter Eight

  It was a morning ripe with the smell of manure, an odor acrid when it first penetrated the nostrils, but compelling and pleasant like a good cheese the longer it clung to the air. The school and its playground were bordered by fields, all freshly spread and drying in the warm September wind. On a hillock at the west end of the playground twelve girls had settled, most with their legs crossed Indian style, skirts pushed to the ground in the space between their thighs, cradling their dinner pails. In the cluster was the entire female enrollment of Lakeridge School with the exception of Ruth Neumann, who always ate her lunch alone.

  A few who had finished eating leaned back on locked elbows, tilting their chins to catch the last of the year's sun. At the crown of the hill sat Imogene Lindgren, her knees crooked together, legs angling off to one side in imitation of older girls. At eight and three quarters, Imogene already gave clear indications that she was to become a woman, and although none of her girlfriends, nor even Imogene herself, could have defined this quality, they all studied her carefully, as if she were one step ahead in the game.

  For the boys, too, Imogene was mesmerizing and, almost without knowing they did so, two or three would always be circling and circling, making tentative forays toward her and then drawing quickly back or veering off toward one of her retinue, a safer target.

  “Watch this, watch this,” one demanded, darting up and poking her in the shoulder with the tip of his finger. Then he rolled his eyelid until it was inside out and glistening red above the eyeball, turning his head this way and that to give the widest audience a chance to admire.

  Delighted shrieks and groans rose up. Several girls, giggling, threw their hands over their faces and one, who had been seated on the slope of the hill, tumbled over sideways. Imogene was not beyond this sort of pleasure, but she knew better than to express it and instead rolled her own eyes in disgust and put the last bite of her ham sandwich into her mouth.

  A small knot of boys, seeing that an emissary had paved their way, then approached. Imogene watched them out of the corner of her eye as she finished her pickles, neatly folded the waxed paper that had kept the sandwich from soaking in brine and wiped her fingers on the clean white handkerchief that her mother had edged in lace. Among the younger children, the popular game of the last few weeks had been a version of hide-and-go-seek and tag, boys against the girls. It was understood that whoever was caught might have to submit to a kiss or reveal a glimpse of underpants, although the unwilling on either side could, without too much difficulty, delay this prize until the bell rang to rescue them.

  Leaving their pails in a row by the school wall, the girls went off to find hiding places in the count of one hundred. By forty, Imo-gene had observed with increasing dissatisfaction that each bush and corner on the playground had been inhabited so often that it was marked by a telltale path of trampled dust. By fifty, she gave up looking for a place where she couldn't be found, and instead ran to the three concrete culverts that had been left over from a drainage project and were now abandoned in one corner of the playground like a ruined shrine to some forgotten god. This sort of hiding place was more to her liking anyway, since from one of the tunnels she could leap out easily and turn the tables, becoming the aggressor.

  On sixty, she crawled into the first tunnel and immediately scrambled out, horrified by the crooked, unbroken trails of ants that covered its floor. The second tunnel, as it turned out, was already inhabited, but Imogene crouched at the entrance for a moment, peering in.

  Ruth Neumann was a mess, as usual. Her fine hair had pulled halfway out of her braid on one side, so that it bulged in a snarled mass over her ear, and the hem of her skirt was coming down. She was so blatantly odd that she'd been a scapegoat almost from the first week she appeared in school four years before. Even Imogene had occasionally joined her schoolmates when they felt particularly mean in taunting Ruth, usually about her upper right incisor, which was dead at the root and rotted to the gray of pencil lead, a baby tooth that clung to her gum although the girl was eleven. Many a dull lesson had been whiled away by sketching a face with a wide grin, shading in the appropriate tooth, labeling the modified drawing “Ruth” and, when the teacher's back was turned, holding up the ingenious creation for general viewing.

  Ruth rarely seemed even to notice or would quietly look at the perpetrators and those who laughed, not with reproach, but with curiosity, as if she saw something unnatural in their faces. This experience was at first disturbing but ultimately boring and eventually only those who could find no other means of maintaining their status punctured her solitude.

  In the culvert, Ruth was simply sitting, examining the pocked surface of the concrete and enjoying its coolness through the thin cotton of her skirt. Whenever her body warmed an area, she shifted to another cool spot. A few lines of ants marched around her, but she didn't seem to mind. From time to time she shot a clay marble from the small handful in her pocket through the tunnel with just enough force so that it rolled to the edge but did not fall over.

  Imogene was not only queen of the second and third grades but also marble champion of the entire school, or at least she and everyone else believed she was. But here is what she saw when she looked into the tunnel: a blue mib, very slightly lopsided, rolling slowly, slowly, slowly to the edge of the tunnel where it gently nicked a brown mib and then lay still. In other words, she saw a marble shooter who could beat her.

  This didn't upset her. Imogene appreciated skill, especially if she could make use of it. She duck-walked into the culvert's entrance, blocking most of the light. Ruth glanced up at her but didn't move.

  “What are you doing there?” Imogene asked.

  Ruth didn't answer, but she looked down at her hand and rolled another marble, slowly
, slowly, slowly, to the edge of the concrete tunnel.

  Offended, Imogene forgot her attempt at condescension. “Look, you're shooting marbles,” she said, slapping one palm against the tunnel floor. “I can see you're shooting marbles. Why don't you just say so?”

  “If you can see I'm shooting marbles, why do you want me to say so?” Ruth said to the cool concrete beside her hand. And then she squinted up at Imogene, dark against the hard, bright blue of the sky and smiled, showing her black tooth full to the world.

  Imogene's fingers stung where they'd hit the concrete. She narrowed her eyes for a moment, hesitating, and then she let her anger evaporate. Forgetting about her hiding place, oblivious to the ants, Imogene crawled into the tunnel beside Ruth and explained her excellent plan.

  Imogene coveted an aggie as blue as the sky at noon. This marble had somehow come to be in the clutches of Bert Weiss, at eight already a swaggering, self-satisfied boy, who picked his nose often and in public. Imogene wanted that marble for herself, but she'd also become convinced that she had a duty to free it from the fat, greasy sack of marbles that Bert kept in his desk.

  So far she'd gone about her quest in the wrong way, as it turned out. She'd practiced for months and pumped an older boy she knew, already in seventh grade and tired of marbles, for his secrets: a lick of saliva on the finger for certain shots, shoulders positioned a particular way for others. Her skirts had become permanently brownish at the hems and across the front from squatting and kneeling in the dirt to shoot. She had become good, then better and better, collecting many other children's prize marbles along the way, until her own supple cowhide marble bag was stuffed nearly full. In these early games, the blue marble had appeared often among the brown mibs and the green and red and yellow crystals and the rainbow swirlies and the cat's-eyes, but Bert, ever vigilant for opportunities to thwart another's pleasure, began to notice Imogene's interest in that particular sphere, and when her aim improved he pulled it out of the game.

  Pulled it out of the game. Just like that. Just like that it was gone, dropped into the limp gray bag, and he tugged the drawstring tight, squeezing out the fresh air, as she watched. He would not take it out again.

  But now she had a plan.

  “Hey, Bert,” she whispered to the greased hair in front of her the next day, as Miss Crawley began her scratchy litany about the letters that go above the line and the letters that go below the line in cursive script, “marbles today at recess, got it?”

  “Nah, marbles is for kids,” Bert said into his shoulder.

  “No, I've got a good idea. We'll play teams.”

  Miss Crawley turned from the series of l's she'd been admiring on the board. “Who is talking? I will have no talking while I am talking. Do you understand that, pupils?” She turned back to the board. “Now the l should not be confused with the i, which comes only to the halfway point and, of course, has the dot. Now I do not want to see any more of those large, scribbled dots above your i's. There is no need to make a rat's nest. What is called for here is simply the touching of pencil to paper. Like this.” She made a series of small taps with the chalk across the top of her row of letters. Some of them did not show up. “You see?” she said. Ahead of Imogene, Bert shrugged his acquiescence to her suggestion, just as Miss Crawley turned, smiling, to the class. Her smile dropped from her face. “Bert, you are driving me pret' near to the end of my rope. Do you have something to share with the rest of the class?”

  The plan played out just as Imogene had intended. She let Bert choose his own partner, Otto Schmidt, and then told him to pick a partner for her as well. He scanned the group of onlookers, rapidly dividing the good players from those who could hardly balance a marble between finger and thumb. And then he saw Ruth, standing perhaps just a little bit closer than she ordinarily would, chewing a hangnail and looking down at her shoes, apparently hoping to be part of the group without being noticed. Imogene's heart jumped a little as she saw his eyes squint with triumphant glee.

  “There, she's your partner. Ruth the Tooth. Let's play.”

  The blue aggie lay trapped in the bag at first, and Imogene had trouble concentrating on the game because of it. Even without meaning to, she made several poor shots right at the start and sacrificed an apricot cat's-eye, one of her favorites, to the greasy pouch. Ruth bungled every shot admirably, just as Imogene had instructed. She seemed unable to keep the shooter from slipping out of her hand and kept catching her heel in the hem of her skirt when she tried to kneel. At last their performance encouraged Bert's maliciousness to get the better of his caution and he produced the blue marble. “Ain't she pretty?” he observed, shining the orb on his yellowed shirtfront. “What will you give me to put this one in the game?”

  “A nickel,” Imogene said promptly.

  “You ain't got a nickel.”

  “I have, too.”

  “Show me then.”

  “I can get one.”

  “Ha! Fifty years from now! No, I'm thinking I should get something better than that to risk this beauty.”

  Imogene seethed. The marble meant nothing to him. This was pure meanness. “Well, what do you want then?”

  “I want”—he looked around and licked his narrow lips—“I want the black tooth.” He stared at Ruth.

  Somebody snorted a laugh. Somebody else made a retching sound and was rewarded with a wash of giggles. Imogene looked at Ruth. For a minute she hesitated, seeing out of the corner of her eye the blue marble glowing with hope in Bert's hand.

  Then she said, “Forget it. That's ridiculous.” She reached to pick up her remaining marbles from the circle.

  “Wait,” Ruth said, “I'll do it. See, it's ready for pulling anyway.” She parted her lips to move the tooth back and forth with her tongue.

  “You shouldn't,” Imogene said. “It's not right.”

  “It's my tooth,” Ruth said, “I can do what I want with it.” And then she smiled at Imogene, as broadly and brilliantly as she had smiled from the culvert. “Let's play.”

  “Tooth first,” Bert said. But just then Miss Crawley came into the yard, ringing the bell. “After school,” Bert said and dropped the blue marble into his bag and drew the drawstring tight.

  When they were finally released into the September afternoon, a gray layer of cloud had thickened the smell of manure to a pungent miasma. Ruth was among the last out of the building and the children who had gathered several yards from the door had begun to punch each other lightly about the arms and kick each other a little about the ankles by the time she appeared. They quieted immediately and watched as she drew from her dress pocket a piece of string she had stolen from the supply cabinet while Miss Crawley's attention was focused on the third grade's times tables. Tying it on the little tooth was difficult; it slipped off several times before she was satisfied that it was secure, but at last she declared herself ready and walked over to the school's toolshed, the string dangling from her mouth.

  “Ain't you afraid it's going to hurt?” a small girl asked at her elbow.

  “Not too much. I worked it during arithmetic,” Ruth answered as she opened the shed door. She had to kneel to tie the string around the handle. “Now who's going to slam this?” she asked, looking at Imogene.

  Imogene hesitated. The thought of yanking that tooth out of Ruth's gum made her feel sick. But Ruth continued to look at her steadily. Finally Imogene took a deep breath and grabbed the door. “You ready?”

  “Ready.”

  Imogene inhaled again and held her breath. Ruth's eyes were still wide upon her, but Imogene squinted her own eyes until they were nearly closed. Then she slammed the door as hard as she could into its frame.

  The blood was everywhere. It seemed to be spurting in all directions, running out of Ruth's mouth and all over her dress. Without thinking, Imogene produced her handkerchief and pushed it into Ruth's right hand. As Ruth looked blankly down at it, a few drops of blood seeped from between the fingers of the hand that she was holding to her lips and
stained the white cloth red. She glanced in alarm at Imogene, who looked slightly disgusted.

  “Use it,” Imogene said impatiently, and Ruth stuffed the handkerchief into the raw space.

  The tooth dangled from the door handle, pearly gray and red where it had yanked free. Ruth untied it and then polished it with a clean corner of the hanky. “Here,” she said, handing it to Bert, “let's play.”

  Winning the marble was easy. One quick flick of Ruth's shooter and it was out of the circle, out of the game, and no one was much interested after that.

  Imogene felt in her chest an overwhelming desire to run home as quickly as she could and sit beside her mother on the long, low sofa in the front room. But she gritted her teeth and walked beside Ruth, for their way lay in the same direction. As they walked, Ruth pressed her tongue into the newly empty space and Imogene rolled and rolled the blue marble between her fingers in her pocket. It felt heavy and tainted. She drew it out, half expecting its color to be blotted, but the blue glowed on, indifferent to the blood that had been spilled in its winning.

  “Here, let's see once.” Ruth held out her hand.

  Imogene hesitated a moment and then put the aggie in the center of Ruth's palm. Ruth plucked it out between the thumb and index finger of her left hand and turned toward the sun. She held the marble in front of one eye while she shut the other. “Look, you can see right in there.”

  “Give it here,” Imogene said, and Ruth passed the globe back to her.

  Ruth was right; you could see into it. Imogene studied the layers of deeper blue that ran through it and a small cloud of lighter color that drifted near one edge.