I nod. That would have been after I turned eighteen and it was safe to play in Montana again.
But her question makes me wonder about Brazos and Bill the Drummer, who is the ordinary working guy the two rich Boise kids recruited for their band because he’s so damned good on drums. Had Brazos and Bill tried to keep the gig going at the Kodiak Club after Gall’s meltdown? Did they wonder where I’d gone? If they found out I’d stolen Gall’s money, they might have called the police, and the police might have checked with the airport and discovered that I’d bought the ticket to Spokane.
No. The last I’d seen of Brazos and Bill, they had been too enraged with each other to worry about me.
“You never finished high school, Ruth?”
“No. But I—”
The equivalency exam. Getting me ready for it, prodding me to do it, was another of Brazos’s projects—Come on, Ruby. You can do this. This math ain’t that hard. Bill? You remember enough geometry to help her with it?
“Oh!” says Mrs. Pence, when I explained. “With the high school equivalency, you can apply for work.”
“A job?”
“Unless you’re thinking of starting another band? Going on the road again?”
She is right. A plan. A job. An even better idea than hitchhiking to Boise. One foot in front of the other for as long as I can stay awake and keep moving.
“A dear friend of mine is advertising for a data entry position at the college,” says Mrs. Pence. “You can type, can’t you?”
7
So, at seven-thirty on Monday morning, I drive Mrs. Pence’s Pontiac down the grade to turn on Main and then on College Way. Cloud shadows drift eastward across the low bluffs over the Milk River, and the brown grass on both sides of the street smells of roasted seeds and road oil. The air is parched and headed for 110 degrees before noon.
The Pontiac must be nearly as old as I am. I’m having trouble with the unfamiliar standard gear shift, forgetting to step on the clutch and stalling out at traffic lights and having to restart. But I make a major discovery: the Pontiac’s radio still works, and when I fiddle with the clumsy old knob, I find a retro country station playing James McMurtry’s “Fire Line Road,” and I almost pull over to listen.
Instead, I turn into the lot behind the administration building and park the Pontiac where the Indianhead hood ornament with his streaming hair can keep watch in the shade of the firs along the baseball field and where I can listen to the end of “Fire Line Road,” lock the Pontiac, and take a deep breath. I’m early.
I’ve been on the Versailles State campus once before, for a job fair while I was still going to high school, where I stood around pretending to read brochures from the rows of tables while people who knew where they were going dodged around me and hurried on their way. I didn’t belong here then, and I don’t belong here now. The brick buildings with their luxuriant ivy and their inscrutable windows, the walkways, the banks of flowerbeds, speak of profound thoughts and privilege.
No watering restrictions on campus, for example. In the Orchards lawns may have turned brown and gardens are shriveling, but on campus the underground sprinklers fling glittering arcs of plenty through the shadows of trees and the sunlit grass.
Mrs. Pence got out a campus map and showed me where to find the Office of Student Accounting. The college is in summer session, she explained. Many of the faculty will be off for the summer, and only a few students will be taking classes, so you won’t see many people. In fact, the shaded sidewalks are mostly empty. But when I enter through the plate glass doors of the administration building, the clatter of women’s voices and women’s shoes rushing across granite toward their offices makes me think I’ve come to the country of women.
I know the office I want is on the third floor, but I pretend to check the directory to give myself a moment to breathe. Then up a flight of stairs, up another flight and up another, while the air grows steadily warmer and stuffier. And there it is: an oak door with an opaque glass window lettered in gold. OFFICE OF STUDENT ACCOUNTING.
The lesson learned on the road. Always look as though you know where you’re going, even when you don’t. Especially when you don’t. I close my eyes for a count of three, pretend I’m about to hit an opening chord on the keyboard at Brazos’s nod, and walk in.
A narrow waiting area with a couple of chairs beside the door is divided by a counter from a larger work space with a closed and polished door at each end. Green plants hang in the windows and framed travel posters of Paris and London and Madrid on the walls, but all else is gray. Gray walls, gray metal file cabinets, and gray desks holding computers shrouded in gray vinyl covers.
No one seems to be around, so I sit down to wait and then nearly jump out of my skin when someone says, “Can I help you?”
A woman straightens from a coffee maker where she had been pouring water. No wonder I didn’t see her bending down on the other side of the counter; she can’t be five feet tall. But she is shaped like a fireplug, stout and formidable, and her tone makes clear that she’s in charge of this gray space.
“I’m Ruth Gervais.” Szcher-vay. “I’m here to apply for the data entry job?”
She doesn’t react to my name. “Oh, okay. Most people apply online. But you can fill these out,” and she hands me a clipboard with some forms. “The coffee takes about fifteen minutes. We need to get a new coffee maker up here.”
She has short clipped hair and a child’s round-cheeked face, but her eyes are dark brown and cautious, and I’m put in mind of Mrs. Pence’s hawk’s eyes. I don’t suppose this woman ever misses a false note either. But I take the clipboard and forms and the ballpoint she gives me, and I print my name and Mrs. Pence’s address. My social security number, my date of birth, my level of education. I’m pondering how to answer the question on work experience when a very young woman bursts through the door in an aura of citrusy perfume and a blaze of color, orange jeans and a yellow T-shirt and a cascade of maroon ringlets.
“Oh, Jamie!” she gasps. “I’m sorry! I’m so frickin frickin late!”
“You’d better start doing something about it,” says the short woman. “Coffee?”
“I’m dying for coffee! Dustin wouldn’t let me stop at the Mocha Bar this morning.”
She turns and stares at me as I write vocalist and keyboard player in a country-western band on the form, add some dates, and hand the clipboard back to the woman called Jamie, who glances through it, pauses on my final answer, and lays the form in a wire basket.
“Can you type?”
“Yes.”
“Come back here and show me.”
She opens a swinging door in the counter and leads me to a desk, where she uncovers a computer. “Here you go. Can you enter these names and numbers?”
At the computer keyboard I flex my fingers. I’ve got big piano-playing hands with a broad reach, just like Mrs. Pence’s, and while I haven’t done any typing since I dropped out of high school, Mrs. Pence had me practice on her laptop keyboard last night, and I know I’ll be okay. Accuracy and speed on a computer keyboard are a treat for a pianist.
The names and numbers on Jamie’s pages require just enough attention to keep my mind on track while my hands and fingers take over. The computer screen fills, and I hit SAVE in the file Jamie indicates and tap-tap-tap through the next page and the next in a rhythm that lulls me. If this is the most that is asked of me, I might be able to do this work. If vocalist and keyboard player in a country-western band doesn’t sink me.
“Stop!” Jamie shouts. “That’s good! Stop!”
I hit SAVE one last time, fold my hands in my lap, and surface back into the gray world. Jamie and the girl with the maroon ringlets are staring at me.
“Wow! I never saw anybody type that fast.”
“You’re hired. Catina, get her a cup of coffee.”
“You can do that? Hire her, just like that?”
“Dr. Brenner said—”
“Yes, but—”
While they argue about a search process and temporary hiring and somebody they call the Queen, I’m thinking that with this job, I’d just have to breathe and type. I could drive down from the Orchards and walk across campus every morning and take the cover off a computer and let myself dissolve into rows of names and numbers that might as well be random for all they mean to me.
“Here’s coffee,” says Catina, offering me a cup.
The outer door opens to let in a tall gaunt man in a gray suit with a close gray crew cut and a face as blank as a robot that has been assigned to oversee this gray office.
“Dr. Brenner! We’ve just hired Ruth Gervais, here.”
He sets down his briefcase and takes the cup of coffee from Catina. A ghost of a smile lights the bones of his face and fades.
“Ruth.” His voice is a robot’s hollow baritone. “You’re Mrs. Pence’s—” He interrupts himself to taste the coffee. “I’ve known Mrs. Pence for many years—yes, thanks, Catina. And I keep telling you. I can pour my own coffee. But it’s very good coffee. So. Ruth.”
I wait. He says no more, but his eyes travel over me. Brad Gilcannon used to say that people with college degrees were educated fools, but I don’t think Dr. Brenner is a fool. He’s thinking about something that matters to me—I just don’t know what.
At last he nods and carries his briefcase and coffee through the door with his name on it. The door shuts behind him.
“He never says much,” explains Catina.
“Go ahead and finish the batch you were working on,” says Jamie. “We take a half-hour lunch in the summer so we can leave a half-hour early in the afternoon. Do you always dress like that?”
I look down at myself. You’ll need a decent outfit to get started, Mrs. Pence had said. She went over her checkbook register and pursed her lips and finally decided she could manage the black skirt and black heeled shoes and hose and what she called blouses, one in black and one in a subdued blue, that I could alternate.
Until your payday, she said, as she combed back my hair and pinned it in a knot.
“We’re pretty informal here in the summer,” says Jamie.
8
At four thirty the clatter of women’s voices and women’s shoes on granite stairs and hallways is a noisy river out the doors and into the afternoon heat. They are the women of the classified staff, I have learned, and in the summer, with most of the faculty gone and the big administrators on vacation, they pretty much own the campus.
I save my files and help Jamie cover the computers and tidy away the coffee mugs and the clutter of papers on the counter. Catina is long gone, a departing flash of orange and yellow and a scent of citrus.
“That damned Dustin,” explains Jamie. “He throws a shit fit if she’s a minute late.”
She and I walk out of the administration building with a cluster of women and a few men in suits. Everyone seems to know Jamie, and they stare openly at me.
“Good night, Jamie.”
“Good night, Jamie.”
“Good night,” she says to everyone, and to me, “See you tomorrow.”
As I unlock the Pontiac, I watch her small sturdy figure trudge through the shade of the line of firs, which lies like a mirage across the parking lot. She’s a woman who knows where she’s going. When she disappears behind the firs, I climb into the oven of the Pontiac, thinking See you tomorrow. And tomorrow and the next day in this strange new world.
*
Just as I pull the Pontiac into Mrs. Pence’s driveway, with the cottonwoods and maples and ash trees of the Orchards hanging their dusty load of leaves overhead, the retro radio station begins “Fire Line Road” again, and I kill the motor and rest my forehead on the steering wheel.
We were playing “Fire Line Road” at the Kodiak Club that night, or trying to play it, when Gall spun out of control and Brazos and Bill the Drummer chased him all over Anchorage while my head vibrated with that hard-driving drumbeat and the hard-bitten lyrics and my pain screamed. Yes, yes, Gall promised when Brazos and Bill the Drummer finally caught him. I’ll fly home, I’ll go into treatment, whatever. Brazos caught my arm on his way out of the motel room.
I never thought he’d care if I balled you, Ruby.
Brazos and Bill the Drummer shout at each other outside the door of the motel room where the elk roam the wallpaper.
You’re quitting us? Now?
Brazos, for god’s sake! There’s no us anymore! I should have left a long time ago. Only reason I stayed was because of her. And now this crap! To Ruby? What the fuck was in your head?
Yeah, well, I never thought—
No, you never think! Gall’s a lunatic, but you should have had brains enough not to do what you did to her.
She never said not to. Anyway, why do you care about Ruby?
You stupid bastard, why do you think I care?
*
I raise my head from the steering wheel and get out of the Pontiac just as one of Mrs. Pence’s piano students hurries down the porch steps with her backpack of music. She’s about fifteen, with pretty blonde hair that floats around her face. Blue jeans, sandals, a lacy top. I wonder if she rates the Debussy étude. Probably not. I’ve been hearing a lot of “Für Elise” in various stages.
“Hi!” she says. “You’re Ruth, right? You’re staying with your gramma for a while?”
“I’m staying with Mrs. Pence. She’s not my grandmother. She used to be my piano teacher.”
“Oh.” She studies me, thinking complicated thoughts, while I feel scathed and suspect. Living with the old lady, spending her money, is probably what people are saying about me.
“Oh, well,” she says. “G’night then.”
She rights her bike from the sidewalk, mounts it with her satchel over her shoulder, and wheels off. The two boys doing wheelies by the mailboxes must have been waiting for her because they fall in behind her.
Mrs. Pence’s next student is murdering “The Happy Farmer” as I pass through the foyer on my way to the stairs, where Ray Pence smiles at me from his frame, still expecting good news.
“I got the job,” I tell him.
Safe in the white bedroom, I nod to the sullen young man in the Polaroid, step out of my shoes and ease off my sticky hose, hang up the skirt and blouse, and think about a shower but settle for passing a cold washcloth over my face and arms. Flat on my back on the bed, my breathing shallow in the warm air of the second story, I listen to the faint starts and stumbles through “The Happy Farmer” from downstairs.
What I can remember about my first piano lesson. I might have been five or six, and I have no memory of before or after the lesson, but I know I sat on the oak bench in the piano room, the same bench where the “Für Elise” student sat this afternoon and the “Happy Farmer” girl sits now. Mrs. Pence smelled of what I later knew was English lavender soap. Still does.
Do I really remember her arranging my fingers in the curved position and showing me which key was middle C?
The air in the white bedroom is heavy from the heat on the shingled roof. Sweat trickles through my hair and sticks to the sheet. I run my fingers along my thigh and find the sweet spot between my legs, thinking of rubbing myself until I reach relief, the way Sharyn the Screamer showed me. Then I stop.
Gall.
My memory is clear enough of that last night at the Kodiak Club, Gall laughing like a maniac and playing “Fire Line Road” faster and faster on his wild out-of-control guitar, faster than any of us had ever played, until I stopped singing and Brazos and Bill the Drummer struggled to drag the beat back down.
Gall, you gotta get help.
Gall promising yes, yes, then running down the freeway through the middle of town and spooking the goddamn moose that used to clatter across the median and hold up traffic. That was Anchorage for you, a moose in the middle of traffic. And then Gall. When Brazos and Bill finally caught him, he was Yes, hell yes, I’ll fly home, get help, whatever you say. But something terrible must have happened after they took him to t
he Anchorage airport because they came back shouting and swearing at each other outside my motel room door.
No. Better not to think about the Rivermen or Bill the Drummer or Gall, even if I never feel pleasure again or even relief. Better to think about the mindless job. If I can keep the job and earn a paycheck, I can repay Mrs. Pence for the clothes she bought me and perhaps buy a little fan to set on the windowsill and get me through the rest of the summer.
Get through the rest of the summer. There’s a goal. Anything might happen by the end of summer.
Downstairs the pianos wait for me. I feel their silent hum through the floor. The upright Kimball grand with the oak-leaf design carved on its front, the little walnut spinet where Mrs. Pence sometimes accompanies her students, the long and gleaming Steinway that no one touches but Mrs. Pence. They all will be in perfect tune. Mrs. Pence would go hungry before she allowed her pianos to go untuned.
Moonlight falls through the curtains as I turn back the sheet and slide out of bed, wearing nothing but the ragged T-shirt that has lost the scent of Gall. The floor of the white bedroom holds the warmth of the day as, barefoot and silent, I feel my way down the stairs, past Ray Pence’s smiling face, and along the hallway to the piano room.
Even on the dark side of the house, light from the moon illuminates the black and white keys of the upright grand and the spinet. The Steinway, of course, is a closed and shadowed bulk.
Beethoven keeps a pale presence in the dark. The familiar oak bench in front of the upright grand waits for me. Automatically, I slide it several inches away from the piano—my legs are longer than the legs of the pupil who last sat here—to play. I could turn on the music light clipped to the front of the piano, but I don’t. I touch middle C and listen to the lovely tone rising from the soundboard until it fades.
My hands must recall the stumbling attempts of the student this afternoon—Just get it right!—because they lift themselves to the keys and begin the rippling eighth notes of “Für Elise.” As long as I don’t think about how many years it’s been since I played a real piano or whether I will remember the next measure or where to place the accidentals, my hands need only to be set free to play through the first movements and find the long chromatic descent that leads to the reprise and the conclusion. Mindless, my hands seek the piano, and the piano answers with the beauty of the sad A minor.
Ruby Dreams of Janis Joplin Page 4