Drowning Ruth

by Christina Schwarz

  “I'm going to keep this forever,” Imogene said. “Feel how smooth.” She held it against Ruth's cheek and rolled it slowly upward with her palm.

  They walked on, stopping now and again to look into the marble from a new angle, handing it back and forth, blinking as the sun filled their eyes.

  “My mother says your mother is dead,” Imogene said. She glanced at Ruth out of the corner of her eye, not knowing how the other girl would respond. Did you cry when someone mentioned your dead mother?

  But Ruth was busy polishing the marble on the hem of her dress and hardly seemed to care. “Yes.”

  Emboldened, Imogene pursued the issue. It was interesting, after all. She couldn't think of anyone else she knew who didn't have a mother. “How did she die?”

  “She drowned.”

  “In the lake?”

  “Of course. Where else would a person drown?”

  “There's other water than Nagawaukee Lake, you know.”

  “Well, that's where she drowned, anyway. In Nagawaukee Lake.”

  Imogene had the marble back again and she rubbed it between her palms before asking an even more daring question. “Did you see when it happened?”

  Ruth thought about this for a moment. “I guess so,” she said finally. “I drowned too.”

  “That's stupid. If you drowned, you'd be dead.”

  “Sometimes you die, sometimes you don't. That must be how it is with drowning.”

  Ruth said this with such authority that Imogene felt her own position as the one who knew the most, who was most interesting, who would clearly be the one to say which answer was right and which game was played and for how long, slipping. “My mother found me in the garden, like in the Green Fairy book,” she countered.

  “Really?” Ruth seemed suitably impressed, and Imogene felt generous again.

  “You sure are going to look better when that tooth comes in,” she said.

  Not knowing what to say to this, Ruth threw the marble up and caught it.

  Imogene gasped. “Don't lose it.”

  “Don't worry,” Ruth said, tossing it up once more to prove she could. When she caught it, she handed it back to Imogene, who slipped it into her pocket.

  They had reached Imogene's turnoff. “Well,” she said, “I guess I'll be seeing you tomorrow.”

  “Wait a minute.” Ruth reached into her pocket. “Here.” She held out the gory handkerchief.

  “How about washing it?” Imogene said, leaning a little away from the thing. Ruth looked at the handkerchief and nodded, as if noticing for the first time that it was soiled, and then began to fold it carefully. Imogene, watching, amended her words. “You can keep it.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course, I've got plenty. So long, then.”

  Imogene walked on a few steps toward her house and then turned back. Ruth was still standing in the road, watching her. “Ruth!” Imogene called. “You want this?” She drew the marble out of her pocket and held it up.

  “No. It's yours. See you tomorrow.”

  Imogene waved and half ran, half skipped with her delight in her treasure all the way home. Ruth, on the other hand, was in no hurry. Had Imogene looked again, she would have seen Ruth turn and start back toward the school. She walked with her chin very high, placing one foot carefully in front of the other, as if she were balancing something on her head. By the time she reached the playground the sun had begun to set in crimson streaks and the manure had mellowed in the cool of the evening so that it now just seasoned the air with a hint of organic richness.

  She returned to the culverts and chose again the one in which Imogene had found her that morning. This time, however, she took a running start and tried to hurl herself on top of the concrete cylinder. On the first try, she didn't jump high enough to reach the summit and slipped back to earth, grazing her elbow slightly on the way down. On the second try, her footing was off and she veered away at the last moment. On the third try, she ran so fast that she could not keep track of her steps, planted her feet hard in the dust about a foot from the tunnel and flew into the air, spinning her body as she went so that she landed smack, sitting nearly at the top. She had only to grip hard with her thighs and wriggle her way upward and she was there.

  Inching up as she pressed against the concrete had pulled her dress tight across her throat and she leaned first to the left and then to the right to loosen it. Then she crossed her ankles, one over the other. Despite the overcast afternoon, the concrete had soaked in enough sunlight to warm the backs of her legs. For a moment she leaned back until her body draped over the curving tunnel and looked at the playground upside down. If she concentrated very hard, she could almost believe that the trees and honeysuckle hung from a green sky and that the orange and red rivers of the sunset flooded over a periwinkle ground, but soon the blood throbbed in her head and her skinned elbow began to sting. She sat up, spit a little on her fingers, and rubbed the sore spot with the pink saliva.

  Ruth smoothed her skirt neatly over her knees and then drew the lace-trimmed handkerchief from her pocket and smoothed it over the skirt. It was a little stiff where the blood had dried, but she was able to press it fairly flat. Delicately, she pinched the lace edges between her first two fingers and thumbs and set the crown on her head. Sitting tall upon her throne, she gazed at the empty playground rolling out before her.

  Chapter Nine

  It had worked out all right. They had made do. That was what Amanda could hardly get over every morning when she woke to the sound of Carl's chair scraping on the wooden floor as he got dressed to go out to the milking. He never could keep from moving that chair, she thought fondly. It was almost as if he wanted her to know he was up and their day was beginning.

  There had been that year or two of wondering who would stay and how exactly things would be arranged, but somehow they'd settled into a family at last, the various tasks of life divided comfortably among them, and the days now turned like a wheel with three spokes. So that even though Carl had been distracted lately, Amanda and Ruth simply shifted themselves to accommodate his moods.

  Joe had begun to visit regularly, ever since the day Carl invited him to dinner, and on Friday nights he escorted Amanda to the pictures and a fish fry. They felt an affection for one another based on their old love and sustained by avoiding personal conversation. If he'd hoped for something more, he never hinted at it, except to ask occasionally if Amanda would go out on a Saturday. She never would. Saturday was the night she and Carl listened to their programs on the radio.

  All this would have been enough, really, more than enough, but then Ruth had found Imogene too.

  The first time Ruth mentioned Imogene, the night she'd come home with blood smeared on her cheeks, Amanda had felt her own blood drain away. She was tempted. She could feel the retort coming to her tongue—“There's no Imogene. You can't know an Imo-gene.” But, of course, there was and Ruth did.

  “You've ruined this dress,” Amanda had said instead, pulling the garment a little too roughly over the girl's head. “I doubt I'll be able to get this out.”

  “Imogene says the fairies brought her.” Ruth's voice was muffled by the fabric over her mouth.

  Amanda bent over the pump to hide her face. “That's just a story, Ruth,” she said.

  Carl wasn't interested in fairies either. He put one hand on Ruth's forehead, the other on her chin, and tilted her head back to study her gums.

  “Here,” he said, wetting his handkerchief with the contents of a bottle he kept behind the flour bin. “This'll make it better.”

  Ruth frowned at the taste, but she held her jaw steady and let her father minister to her.

  It wasn't accurate, of course, to say that Ruth had found Imo-gene. Imogene had been there all along, as Amanda well knew, for after she was released from St. Michael's she often went into the bait shop to assure herself that the child was showing no signs of the inauspicious way she'd come into the world. Although she understood the safety of
her secret depended upon holding herself as far as possible from the girl, she couldn't seem to help drawing near.

  Mary Louise would push Imogene forward for Amanda to admire, but at the same time would hold tight to her shoulder. “Hasn't she grown? Genie, you know Miss Starkey. Say how do you do.”

  But Imogene would hang back, as if in obedience to a message she felt through her mother's fingers.

  When Ruth started school, Amanda found herself in town more often. She was in the shop one day in March when Imogene was feeling weak and dizzy, and she was the first to realize that the girl had scarlet fever. She insisted that she be quarantined along with the Lindgrens, although the doctor might have been persuaded to let her go home.

  “We can't risk infecting Ruth,” she declared, brushing aside Mary Louise's protestations. “Besides, Imogene needs me. I haven't forgotten my training.”

  Imogene's illness scared Amanda so much that she could hardly catch her breath when she thought of what might happen, but once the real danger had passed, she wished her recovery would go on forever. She cut paper dolls for the little girl, not just the kind that stood stiff and simple, joined at the hands like a fence, but also shapes that resembled real women, who could model clothes Amanda cut from the catalogs. Ruth had never been interested in the just-looking, the just-laying-out of paper dolls, but Imogene loved it.

  “Look!” Imogene announced to her mother one evening, swatting aside the pillow slip Mary Louise was mending and climbing onto her lap with a sheet of paper in her hands. Amanda had drawn whiskers on the girl's face and colored the tip of her nose black. “Miss Starkey taught me to write my numbers.”

  “Those are beautiful, darling,” Mary Louise said, but that night she had a talk with Amanda. “I'm taking Genie back to the shop with me tomorrow. It isn't fair, our keeping you from Ruth and Carl like this, and I think she's well enough now. I mean, thanks to you, she's completely recovered. I don't know what we would've done without you, Mandy. I was so worried. But everything's all right now, isn't it?”

  So Imogene went off the next morning with her hand in her mother's, and Amanda went back to the farm. She didn't stop visiting, though, and Mary Louise was always pleased to show her daughter off. “Amanda, you should hear the way Imogene can do her sums. What's five plus seven, Genie?” And later, “What's five times seven, Genie?” And later still, “What's five times seven plus seventy-five minus fifty-seven,” until the numbers were so quick and complicated that only Amanda and Imogene knew the answers.

  As Imogene got older, it would have been natural for Amanda to encourage a friendship between the girls, but she did not. Something alarmed her about Imogene, something that made her feel it was too risky to bring them together. She'd noticed it one Sunday morning, when she'd stood across the street, watching the family emerge from church, Imogene riding on her father's shoulders. The girl looked exactly like Mathilda.

  “That'll be fifteen cents, please,” Imogene said in her most grownup voice. She'd hoisted herself onto a stool behind the counter in her mother's bait shop, so that she could reach the register.

  “Arthur, have you got a nickel?” the man asked the boy who stood beside him. “I'll pay you back when we get home.”

  “That's all right,” the boy said. “You gave it to me in the first place.” His hair fell forward over his glasses as he reached into his pocket.

  “My son and I are thinking of starting a tour boat company at Nagawaukee Beach,” the man said. “If there was a boat that drove around the lake, would you girls ride on it?”

  “Dad,” Arthur said. He shuffled his feet in embarrassment and looked at the floor.

  “Nagawaukee Beach is too far,” Ruth said.

  “But it would stop for you anywhere around the lake and bring you back again.”

  “Just going around in a circle?” Imogene said.

  “A big circle, all the way around the lake. And it would be a nice boat, two decks and a mahogany rail. Red velvet seat cushions. Or maybe a nautical stripe.”

  “I like the red,” Imogene said. “Would there be food?”

  “There could be. That's a good idea. Don't you think that's a good idea, Arthur?”

  “Yes,” the boy said politely. “Shouldn't we be getting home, though?”

  After the door had closed behind them, Imogene said, “You know the big white house with the pillars? Down the road from the Franciscans? That's theirs.”

  Everyone who'd ever been on the lake knew the house with the pillars. “The White House,” certain people said, smiling snidely behind their martinis, as they cruised by, but it drew them nevertheless. “Who'd have thought there'd be so much money in swamps?” they said, referring to the Florida land boom, which had made the Owenses' fortune secure, not so much because Clement Owens, like every man and his brother, had known when to get in, but because he'd known when to get out.

  Imogene propped her head on one hand, sighed, and sifted aimlessly with the other through a box of lead sinkers. Ruth kept an eye on her as she drifted around the shop, examining the merchandise—tubs of night crawlers and leeches, tanks of minnows, coils of line, baskets of red and white cork bobbers. She clasped her hands behind her back. “Look, but don't touch,” Aunt Mandy always said.

  Ruth wanted her own store when she grew up. Only it didn't have to be a bait shop. In fact, she thought she might prefer a dry goods store or a grocery or maybe a penny candy store—a place where the goods weren't alive and didn't make such a mess. What she wanted was a stock of items, all on their own special shelves, and a big case on the counter with lots of tiny drawers. She would know without looking what was in each one, the way Mrs. Lind-gren did.

  Ruth liked the way you just had to wait, when you had a store, for people to come in and tell you what they'd been up to since the last time. She liked the account books, with their special columns for credits and debits, and the neat way Mrs. Lindgren made her numbers.

  Mrs. Lindgren was only good at writing the numbers, not at the adding and subtracting, so sometimes Imogene had to go over the figures for her. Imogene could do sums in her head faster than other people could write them down. Most of her other chores, she hated. She only pretended to dust when she went around with the cloth, and whenever Mrs. Lindgren asked her and Ruth to clean out some of the tubs, she mainly just pumped the water and talked while Ruth did all the scrubbing. Ruth didn't mind. It was fun working as long as Imogene was in a good mood, telling about the people they knew or what she'd done with her cousins up north. Ruth hoped she would get to work the register sometime, but Imogene said better not, her mother wouldn't like it.

  After their bloody afternoon two years before, Imogene had sought Ruth out, as was her right by virtue of her popularity, mostly because she was curious. She craved drama and expected Ruth to do and say unusual things. For the sake of the company, Ruth was clever enough to oblige. Even now, when curiosity had long since given way to familiarity and familiarity had ripened into affection, Ruth still felt she'd better get Imogene interested or soon enough she'd be saying Ruth might as well go home. Ruth picked up a knife with a flat, curved blade. “What's this for?” she asked, just to say something. It took a lot of effort, sometimes, to have Imogene for a friend.

  “Ugh. To take the scales off. I hate fish.” Imogene said the last part quietly, so her mother, who was doing the bookkeeping in the back room, wouldn't hear her. Mrs. Lindgren always told Imogene that she should be grateful—fish bought her dresses and hair ribbons, chicken dinners, train trips to Milwaukee, a warm house. It was a funny idea, Ruth thought—a perch standing on its tail with a shopping basket over one fin, choosing a nice piece of calico and seven mother-of-pearl buttons at the dry goods store.

  Imogene went on lifting handfuls of sinkers and letting them fall back into their box through her fingers.

  And then Ruth thought of something to offer, something so big and important, she couldn't believe she hadn't already used it up. “Want to see where my mother is buried
?”

  Imogene sat up straight. “Really?” She slid off the stool.

  “Sure. If you want to.” Ruth said it like it was nothing, like she could show her a hundred things just as interesting if she was in the mood.

  “We're going out, Mother,” Imogene called toward the curtained doorway behind her.

  “Have a good time, girls. Don't be late,” Mrs. Lindgren's voice came back.

  Ruth liked the way Mrs. Lindgren treated them as if they were old enough to know what they were doing, so different from Aunt Mandy, who'd never stop fussing, even now that she was fourteen and Imogene was nearly eleven.

  Ruth didn't bother to walk all the way to the cemetery gate, instead, when they reached the rock wall, she boosted herself onto it and swung her legs over.

  Imogene balked. “Ruth, anyone could see right up your dress!”

  “So? Everyone here is dead.” Ruth stood on the wall, then, and grabbed the branch of a pear tree that hung over her head. She walked up the trunk, until she could hook her knees over the branch, and hung there. “Don't worry. No one can tell it's me.” Her voice was muffled by her skirt, which hung upside down over her face.

  “Ruth, please!” Imogene said, but she giggled and scrambled onto the wall herself. “Help me up.” Too short to reach the branch on which Ruth was now sitting, she held her arms as high as she could over her head and scratched the air with her fingertips, waiting.

  Ruth leaned precariously toward her, supporting first herself and then both of them by hooking her instep under another branch. She wasn't strong enough, however, to pull Imogene up. “I have to let go,” she said and dropped her onto the soft cemetery grass.

  “Come down, then,” Imogene demanded. “Let's go.”

  Usually Ruth didn't like visiting the graveyard. Walking up the gravelly path with Amanda, her feet always slipping a little back for every step forward, it had always seemed too hot or too cold. She'd felt sorry for her mother and her grandparents, too, stuck there, twelve back, six, seven, and eight in, baking or freezing, nothing to see—even though she knew dead people, being in heaven, didn't care about those things. Today, though, scuffing through the grass with Imogene, the place felt different, like a playground.