Drowning Ruth

by Christina Schwarz

  They herded down to the pier, jostling and jabbering, uncowed by the Milky Way and the expanse of restless black water. Their voices carried from one end of the lake to the other, as if in a massive theater.

  Ruth watched Imogene climb gracefully into the boat and copied as best she could the way Imogene used first Arthur's hand to steady her on the dock and then Bobby's shoulder to keep her footing in the boat. She scowled as she nearly twisted her ankle on the final step, feeling ridiculous in her heels.

  “Careful, there,” Arthur said.

  It never helped, Ruth thought with irritation, to be told to be careful after you'd tripped. Her right hand, the one he'd held as he helped her into the boat, was trembling, and she squeezed it in the other.

  Almost before they'd found seats, Bobby gunned the engine, and they shot away from the lights of the pavilion. Suddenly he swerved, and Ruth had to grab Tom's arm to keep her seat. He swerved the other way, and she nearly flew into Imogene's lap. Between shrieks of laughter, Kitty and Zita shouted at him to slow down, but he only smiled and swerved again, this time pitching Arthur onto the floor and Imogene on top of him.

  Finally Bobby tired of this game and slowed the engine. From a little mahogany cupboard beneath the bow he produced a bottle of whiskey and glasses. Ruth glanced at Imogene, who was smoothing her skirt back over her knees as she leaned calmly against the cushions, and she felt almost sorry for those girls with their smug cracks about the bait shop. There wasn't a whiff of “eau de grub” about Imogene. Obviously this was her natural element. She'd been born to listen to the rich rumble of the engine, to stroke the sleek varnished wood with her polished fingertips, to hold out her shapely hand, adorned with the tasteful, slim ring her parents had given her to mark her high school graduation, for a crystal glass.

  “Let's lie down and stare at the stars,” Zita announced, sinking to the floor of the boat. She lay on her back with one knee bent, so anyone could see the smooth stretch of her thigh.

  Ruth looked away, embarrassed for her.

  “C'mon, get up, Zita,” Bobby said, offering her his hand, but she batted it away.

  “Wait! I can hear the water!” she announced, pressing her ear against the floorboards. She sat up suddenly, grabbed Ruth's hand, and tried to pull her down beside her. “Listen! Turn off the engine, Bobby!”

  Bobby did as he was told and, after a moment's struggle to stay in her seat, Ruth gave up and lowered herself to the floor.

  “Listen!” Zita commanded, and Ruth tensely pressed her ear to the wood. Through the polished floorboards she could hear the water, slapping and sucking, worrying the wooden hull, trying to get in.

  Above her, Kitty's voice rang. “Know what I heard about that place?” Her ear still full of the suck and slap, suck and slap, Ruth watched Kitty point over the water. “Some woman drowned her baby on that island during the war. You're supposed to be able to hear it crying late at night. Is that true?” She looked at Imogene, then down at Ruth. “You ever hear it?”

  “No!” Ruth sat up abruptly. “Of course not. That's crazy!” But she could hear a baby crying in her mind even now, the thin wail that grew more and more distant but never disappeared. She closed her eyes to shut out the sound, but it persisted and, though her ear was no longer against the floor, she could hear the lake, too, mingled with the crying, and she could feel the water, its wet tongue in her ears, in her eyes, embracing her, pulling her down.

  She opened her eyes, but the stars raced toward her and she felt as if she were spinning uncontrollably through space. Her insides rose to her throat in a wave. She scrambled onto the seat and was sick over the side.

  Everyone was extremely kind.

  “It's the heat,” Kitty said. “I feel a little green myself.”

  “It's because Bobby was bouncing us around,” Zita said. “I told you not to drive like that.”

  “Well, you shouldn't make people lie in the bottom of the boat,” Bobby said.

  “You're right,” Zita said. “I'm sorry, Ruth.”

  Ruth took the hankie Imogene offered and blew her nose. “I'm all right now. I guess I'm just not used to so much to drink.”

  “If Bobby didn't serve such cheap stuff,” Arthur said, “this kind of thing wouldn't happen. I got sick last week on his gin.”

  Ruth tried to smile at him, but her lips trembled and her arms were shaking so much she had to cross them over her chest to hold them still.

  “You're cold!” Arthur exclaimed. “Hasn't anyone got a jacket?” He went to the bow and returned with a towel left over from that afternoon's swimming. “Come up front with me, why don't you?” he said, gently draping the towel over her shoulders. “The air's fresher away from the motor. You'll let me drive for a while, won't you, Bobby?”

  “Sure,” Bobby said, settling into a back seat between Zita and Imogene. “Take it around by your place. Let's see if anyone's up.”

  Arthur started the engine and turned on the running lights with a twist of the silver knob. The inboard began its soothing blub-blub-blub, but Ruth still shivered. In every direction, the water rippled like black crepe. If she dove in here, could she make it to shore?

  “So how long have you been coming out here?” she asked to calm herself.

  “Oh, years,” he said. “The first time was just a few days after the war ended. I must have been about five and my dad brought me out when he was thinking of buying the land. That was when he planned to raise geese on it, you know, for feather beds. He thought they'd like being close to water.” Arthur chuckled. “He always has these crazy schemes.”

  “But then he built a house instead?”

  “Well, not instead, exactly. We did have the geese and after that racing pigeons and then goats, until he converted the shed into a photography studio. He thought he had a quick way to develop film, but it didn't work out. Gave everybody a doppelganger. At the moment, he's revolutionizing the iceboat.” He pronounced “revolutionizing” in a mocking tone.

  “So you don't think much of his ideas?”

  “Oh, no, they're good ideas. He's bursting with good ideas. It's just that bursting makes a mess, and somehow he's never around when it comes time to clean up.

  “I've seen you in town before,” he went on after a moment or two, “with your mother.”

  “That's my aunt. My mother died years ago.” And then, somehow, she felt like telling him more, maybe because he'd said so much about his father. “She drowned, actually. She fell through the ice.”

  “Here? On this lake?” Arthur stared at Ruth, remembering the stinging gusts of a long-ago winter day.

  “Now over here. Now just from here to there,” his father said, positioning five-year-old Arthur. And Arthur stood and stood, inhaling the smell of wet wool as his scarf trapped the clouds of his breath. He was proud to be helping, although his feet were freezing and his fingers numb. He held one end of a piece of string while his father paced deliberately around the property with the other end and stopped now and then to record numbers in his little book. Finally he said, “Enough. You can play now. I'm just going to the car for a minute.”

  The ice was on the lake, a black sheet of it, lightly sugared with snow, upon which iceboats swooped and darted in the whipping wind, capricious as summer butterflies. Arthur hadn't been able to take his eyes off the frozen lake all the time he was standing, holding his string. It was fascinating. It tempted him to walk on water.

  Released from his duties, Arthur stepped onto the lake. His right boot slipped immediately, but he caught his balance and shuffled forward a few steps toward a cluster of fishing shanties hunched against the cold. How deep the ice seemed to go, so deep he couldn't see where the frozen part ended and the water beneath it began. He fell on his knees for a closer look and bent forward, his mittoned hands splayed in front of him, his nose almost touching the lake.

  He studied the ice, the bubbles and fissures, the occasional leaf or frond of seaweed suspended in it, the clear patches that seemed to go down and dow
n forever. Where were the fish? He crawled forward on his knees with no notion of where he was going, drawn on by the ice itself.

  A rumbling warned him that an iceboat was coming close, and he looked up to see it hurtling toward the shore. Just when he was sure it would crash full speed into the rocks, it spun around, runners scraping, sail luffing, until—fwoom—it caught the air and shot toward the middle of the lake again. As it flew past, two masked faces turned toward Arthur, and a hand in a three-fingered glove rose stiffly in greeting. Arthur waved and chased them for a few yards.

  When one of his feet slid, he looked down instinctively, throwing his hands out to break his fall. If the lady had not been entombed in ice, he would have landed in her arms. He saw first the swollen gray hand and then the arm, the purplish fabric in folds, and finally the face. It was turned toward him, the blue eyes staring, the mouth open, screaming without sound, trapped in that bottomless black hole.

  He tried to get away, tried to rise and run, but his feet slipped and he fell back in the same spot, as if the hand had grabbed his boot and pulled him down. He managed to slide forward, finally, by staying on his knees and crawling, and in that manner he made his way as fast as he could to the shore.

  Once his feet were on solid ground, Arthur began to scream, and he ran up the hill toward the car, screaming every second he wasn't drawing breath. When his father snatched him up, Arthur buried his head in his huge shoulder, trying to blot out the face that was calling him from under the ice.

  “What?” his father asked, first alarmed, then soothing, then irritated. “Did you fall? Did you bang your head? Are you hurt? What? What in the hell's the matter with you?”

  Arthur pressed his eyes until they ached against his father's collarbone, and finally he managed to point without looking back toward the water. Arthur's father put him down and they walked to the edge of the ice. There Arthur stopped and, when his father took his hand to draw him on, leaned back with all of his weight.

  “All right, stay here then,” his father said impatiently. “Don't move. I'll be back in a moment.”

  Arthur watched his father, arms slightly raised, shuffle and slide along the ice, following the trail Arthur's knees had left in the light snow. He saw him stop, reel back, catch himself, and then lower himself slowly to his knees. He saw him brush at the powder with his glove. Then he stood up again and made his way back.

  “How did the lady get in the ice?” Arthur asked when his hand was safely within his father's again and they were trudging up the hill toward the car.

  “I don't know.”

  “Shouldn't we get her out?”

  “The sheriff will do that, Arthur.”

  The sheriff came out of his house with a napkin tucked into his trousers. He leaned into the car and winked at Arthur.

  “You take the boy home now,” he said as Arthur's father got back in the car. “ We know who it is. We'll find her.”

  So they left the lady in the ice.

  “That's it,” Arthur said, pulling back on the throttle before a wide lawn, gray under the night sky, that ran steeply up to a white house fronted with looming pillars.

  “Lovely,” Imogene breathed, pretending, Ruth noticed, that she hadn't often stared from a rowboat at that facade and speculated about the lives inside.

  “When are you going to have another party, Arthur?” Zita asked. She stepped onto the seat behind Arthur, as if to get a better look, and rested her hands on his shoulders for balance. “The one you had last year was the best of the season. Don't you remember, Kitty? Swimming in the afternoon and then the dance floor over by the boathouse. And, Tom, remember when Eddie pushed you off the pier?” She laughed somewhat more wildly than the memory warranted. “Oh, Arthur, you have to promise me you'll have another,” she said. “You must or the whole summer will be wasted!” She leaned close so that her sculpted hair brushed his cheek. “You promise?”

  “Anyone ever tell you there's a depression on?” he said, tipping his head toward hers.

  “Well, then we need something to cheer us up!”

  “Say, are we gonna sit here all night?” Bobby said. “Let me take the wheel.”

  And so they rearranged themselves, Bobby and Zita taking the seats up front; Imogene, with a lift of her eyes and a slight shift of her skirt, inviting Arthur into the place that Bobby had given up, and Ruth sliding in next to Ray. Kitty and Tom, who'd begun whispering to each other, stayed together in the back.

  “Not so hot out here,” Ray said.

  “No.” She smiled at him. Good old Ray. “It's not bad out here at all.”

  Bobby pushed the throttle forward suddenly then, and they raced smoothly through the black water, following their own tiny white beam. Greedily, Ruth leaned into the rushing warm air.

  Amanda

  I was digging a few onions out of the garden, squatting in the dirt somewhat awkwardly because I couldn't bend, when what I assumed was an acorn dropped on my shoulder.

  “Hey!” I said, looking into the trees. Another one bounced off my arm. When it rolled into the dirt, I saw it wasn't an acorn but a marble.

  “Inside!” Mattie hissed from a window. “Quick!”

  “What is it?”

  “Shhh. Rudy,” she mouthed.

  Quickly, I scanned the water. Yes, there he was. His back was to us as he rowed, but only a couple more pulls on the oars and he'd be dragging the boat onto our beach.

  The screen door slammed and Mathilda, with Ruth glued to her hip, hurried down to the water. Keeping as low as I could, I scuttled for the back door.

  I watched from one of the front windows as they talked, watched Rudy throw Ruth into the air a few times, saw him heft a couple of filled burlap sacks from the boat. When he started carrying one of them toward the house, I bolted. I ran out the back door again and locked myself in the outhouse.

  If, over the last month, I'd forgotten that my situation was a shameful one, I couldn't help but remember it now as I breathed that stink and peered at the back of the house through the moon-shaped cutout in the door.

  I didn't come out until I saw Mattie, obviously searching for me. She grabbed my arm and shook me.

  “You scared me half to death, Mandy! I was afraid you might have gone in the lake.”

  That night for the first time in the season the wind shifted to the east and the temperature dropped. I tucked wool blankets around Mattie and Ruth and then spread one on my own bed. It felt heavy after the summer of cotton and sheets. After I got under it, it seemed to pin my arms and legs to the bed and press me into sleep.

  At Brown's Business College, Ruth and Imogene learned to write shorthand and work the machines. Imogene was good at these things. In two weeks she could type without looking at her fingers. In four weeks she could take a two-page letter from dictation without faltering. And, of course, the accounting was simple from the start. The assignments she turned in were always neat, the white pages clean and unwrinkled, the ink unsmudged.

  Ruth, on the other hand, was foundering. Imogene had convinced her that secretarial skills were important, but she missed the job she'd given up at the five-and-dime. She couldn't seem to type two lines before her mind wandered or her fingers disobeyed and punched the wrong keys. It was impossible to remember how many spaces went between the return address and the date, the date and the internal address, the internal address and the greeting. And who cared, who cared, who cared? she thought, tugging at a paper the typewriter refused to release. When she got behind in typing, she kept up with the rhythm of the class by hitting any old keys. While she was supposed to be taking letters about how much Mr. P owed to Mr. Q and in what increments he intended to pay, she sketched tiny figures wearing complicated hats in the margins of her paper. Imogene agreed that some of them turned out rather well.

  “Don't worry,” she said, leaning over to correct Ruth's shorthand when the Browns were distracted, “you're the creative type.”

  Imogene had decided that she and Ruth were going to be mod
ern women. When they finished school they would open an advertising agency together in Chicago. She would see to the business side and decide on the angles—she knew what made people want things. Ruth would do the art and write the copy. Imogene was not sure how they would get commissions, but she had vague notions of businessmen in gray suits and horn-rimmed glasses raising their eyebrows in admiration at the originality and style and sheer selling power of their sample ads.

  Ruth suspected that Imogene had seen this in a movie. The idea made her anxious, but if Imogene wanted it, she was willing to do her part. She practiced her drawing, experimenting with different techniques she saw in the magazines. She did pen-and-ink renderings of ladies' shoes and watercolors of fruit and charcoal sketches of families frolicking by the seashore under enormous beach umbrellas cut from brightly colored paper. She liked to imagine the apartment they would have together in the city, where friends would stand in the street under their window and whistle for them to open the door. They would shop for groceries on their way home from their office, and they would sing along with the radio while they made chicken cacciatore and salads with tiny mushrooms.

  “I'm wrecked, absolutely wrecked!” Imogene announced when class was dismissed for lunch that Monday. “I'll never be able to wear those shoes again.” She flexed her pretty ankles before swinging her feet under one of the tables pushed beneath the windows in the typing hall.

  “What did you do this weekend?” asked Lillian. She knew what was expected of her. Ruth and Imogene often ate lunch with Lillian and Myrtle, two sisters from Baraboo.

  “We went to one of those dances, you know, over at the pavilion.”

  “Oh, a dance.” Myrtle winked in a knowing way that Ruth disliked. Myrtle was older than the rest of them and divorced. She was always hinting at something dirty. “Anyone interesting there?”