Ruby Dreams of Janis Joplin

by Blew, Mary Clearman;

  Practice was over an hour ago.

  Coach kept us late.

  Like hell!

  I catch a glimpse of Brad’s wife’s face in the kitchen door before she turns back to where she’s supervising her boys and their homework at the table. Something bad is going to happen, and I hover, as if I could wish that bad something out of the house and into the night. Or wish it wouldn’t happen. Wish that Brad would be Brad again and like to hold me on his lap. You’re too big for that, he said the last time he pushed me away.

  Brad grabs Isaiah by the upper arm and turns him so he can smell his breath. Isaiah’s had a growth spurt during the past summer, and I see that he’s as tall as Brad, although not so heavy. For an awful few seconds I’m afraid Isaiah will try to twist out of Brad’s grip and throw a punch, but he doesn’t. He just stands there and looks right at Brad, and not a muscle of his face moves.

  You can ask Coach.

  That goddamn football coach! Coach! Thinks he’s a big shot! He thinks he knows it all, and he don’t know a goddamn thing!

  He knows I was at practice.

  Brad snarls and shakes Isaiah, and when he still can’t get a reaction from him, he shoves him against the wall between the living room and the kitchen, so hard that one of Brad’s wife’s ornamental plates falls off its bracket and clatters and breaks. Brad’s wife peers around the door, white-faced. Brad’s wife has a name, Nona, but no one calls her by it.

  Pride! Don’t think I don’t know what you’ve been up to! Swilling my food and stealing my beer and out there in the dark chasing them goddamn chippies as bad or worse than your lowlife mother was! You know they let her out of prison today, don’t you? So she can go back on the street like a goddamn bitch in heat! You ever wonder which one of her customers planted you? And that poor damn fool of a lawyer thinks he can turn her around. Isaiah Pride! Your name oughta be goddamn Isaiah Shame! You black bastard!

  Isaiah makes no attempt to break away from Brad, but something changes in his face, something like contempt. Growling, Brad jerks him away from the wall and flings him so hard he has to catch his balance.

  Get the fuck outta my sight. Go downstairs and go to bed.

  Brad turns, sees me. Ruby, you get to bed. Nothing going on here that’s any of your business.

  The last I see, Brad’s wife is sweeping shards of china into a dustpan. But much later I wake and hear the faint sounds of Isaiah’s guitar through the floor of my room, an old tune I think I recognize, “Silver Threads and Golden Needles,” which I heard long ago on an old Janis Joplin album in my mother’s house north of the river. Even though I am afraid, I slip out of bed and down the basement stairs to the room Isaiah used to share with Curtis and T.J. and Paul. The guitar pauses at my scratch on the door, and then Isaiah opens it and looks down at me.

  Hey, he says, and he puts his arm around me and leads me inside, where I sit beside him on the bed while he plays the tune about silver threads and golden needles. Eventually, he sends me back upstairs before I get in trouble with Brad.

  14

  At four thirty on the dot, Jamie covers her computer, drags her fanny pack from under her desk, and she’s out the door and gone. Anne’s door is closed, as it has been all day.

  “Wow,” says Catina. “And to think it used to be pretty normal around here.”

  It’s never seemed normal to me, but I don’t say so.

  Dr. Brenner comes out of his office with his briefcase. He takes in Catina and me and lingers on Jamie’s shrouded computer.

  “Did you girls get a chance to talk?”

  When Catina seems tongue-tied—Dr. Brenner, actually talking to us!—I speak up. “No, not really, sir.”

  “Hmm.”

  He sets his briefcase on the nearest desk and seems to ponder. Then he looks directly at me, and I see that his eyes are magnified and alive behind the black-rimmed glasses he occasionally wears.

  “She—well, she hoped to get custody of her daughter yesterday. Instead, the judge set another three-month probation period. Anything you two can do—well, to ease things—if you can think of anything.”

  “Of course!”

  “Of course!”

  He nods, takes up his briefcase, and nods again. “Good night.”

  “Good night,” we chorus.

  “Wow,” says Catina as the door closes behind him. It’s getting to be her favorite word.

  “That must be what she was asking you about,” she goes on. “About foster care and what it was like and whether you ever went back to live with your mother.”

  I nod.

  “Did you miss your mother a lot?”

  The office suddenly feels deserted, with only the two of us. Even the corridor has fallen silent. The voices and footsteps of departing secretaries and clerks have passed us by. The overhead fluorescent lights flicker. Catina’s new yellow shirt and slacks are the only bright spots in a room of gray filing cabinets and gray desks and computer covers. She looks so young to me, with her piercings and her eyes so large and shadowed by her ringlets, and I realize that she, too, is asking me something I don’t quite understand.

  “Yeah. I missed her a lot. Even though I started to love Brad—my foster dad. It was awful, especially at first.”

  “But you can remember her?”

  “Yes.”

  “My mother died when I was five. I don’t really remember much about her.”

  “I’m so sorry.” I feel the absurdity of the words. “Who took care of you after that?”

  “My father and my grandmother. And it was fine. They were kind of old-fashioned. I just wish I could remember more about her.”

  I can’t think of anything else to say. We sit in silence for a few long moments while the shadows of computer stations stretch farther into the room.

  Finally, Catina rises and straightens her slacks. “Well! Let’s get the flock outta here.”

  “The what?”

  “Oh, the flock? Something my dad said the old sheepherders used to say. My dad’s Basque.”

  “What’s Basque?”

  “Who knows? Some old-country thing. They had lots of sheepherders.” Catina shrugs. “There’s been enough fricking excitement around here for one day. I’m going home to peace and quiet.”

  “Peace and quiet with Dustin?”

  “Oh, Dustin! He’s cool! He felt so bad about my eye that he bought me this outfit.” Catina grins, clearly pleased with herself.

  *

  How much I missed my mother.

  After I’ve lived in Brad’s house a week, I slip out through a basement window and sniff the night air, the pungency from the gypsum plant that I’ve known all my life, the grit and dust left over from the afternoon. What time is it? I don’t know, I’ve been huddled in bed listening to the sounds of the other kids settling down for the night, somebody thrashing under the sheet, somebody farting, somebody giggling. The long summer dusk has taken its own sweet time to darken. Now I edge along the neighbor’s bloomed-out lilac hedge, keeping to the lawn, because a streetlight illuminates the pavement, and when a dark shape darts out of the lilacs, runs across the street, and disappears into the darker shadows under a parked car, I nearly jump out of my skin. For a long minute I crouch down in the lilac roots and wait for trouble. But it was just a cat. Just a cat.

  And not that I don’t love the safe feeling of sitting on Brad’s lap, the sharp-sweet scent of the gum he keeps in his pocket, the rough texture of his work shirt against my cheek. What leads me down this street by dead of night is the thread that reaches all the way from me to my mother. Her outline at the screen door as she watches the last streaks of sunset. The heavy softness of her hair when she lets me touch it.

  I know the way, more or less. I’ve been strapped in the back seat of Brad’s wife’s car with some of the other kids when she drove to Safeway, and from the Safeway parking lot I could see the highway bridge over the Milk River that I’ll have to cross. It’s a long walk, farther than from the Mister’s house. And I�
�m not easy about crossing the river on the narrow pedestrian bridge, where even at this time of night the cars will roar by with blazing headlights and the deep secret current will flow almost under my feet and there will be no lilac hedges or even the shadows of parked cars to hide a small scampering girl from anyone’s eyes.

  I decide I won’t think about being afraid until I get to the bridge.

  I walk and walk. My legs ache, my feet ache from the slap on concrete. I need to pee. All that keeps me going is the image in my mind of the screen door at the rented house north of the river, on the far side of the fearsome bridge, and in the screen door the outline of my mother growing more and more indistinct as the sunset in my memory fades.

  A car draws up even with me, slows. I keep my head down, I won’t look, but I’m aware that it’s a black-and-white with a cherry bubble light on its roof.

  A window slides down.

  Ruby?

  *

  “How did you learn the old music?” Isaiah asked me when we both were teenagers.

  “I heard my mother singing. And I listened to her records.”

  She had real records. And now I’m time traveling; I’m lifting the album out of its box and opening its cover where brown paper sleeves hold the gleaming black records with their red and gold centers, like hidden royalty. My fingers shake with the excitement of touching the records, though I’m barely old enough to read the labels. The Carter Family, “Wildwood Flower.” Vernon Dalhart, “The Prisoner’s Song”—if I had the wings of an angel. Jimmie Rodgers. Where’d she ever find those records?

  Damn it, kid, keep out of my stuff!

  “She had a real turntable,” I said.

  “What became of it?”

  “No idea. Probably trashed.”

  No, I have no idea what became of the records. Yes, probably trashed. The rented house north of the river hadn’t had nooks and crannies where belongings could be stowed away, and my mother’s closet shelf I knew well, and there had been only the box with the picture of a hat and the clippings.

  What was she waiting for, that woman who sat and smoked on the porch steps and listened to music from a neighbor’s radio? What did she long for? What became of her?

  Was she alone and listening to music when the car slowed and the off-duty policeman, foster father of frightened children, turned to the blonde teenager beside him in the front seat and said, Was this one of the houses? And when she nodded, he said, Ruby?

  When the child in the back seat doesn’t answer, he barks her name again. Ruby!

  Yes, the child whispers through the fingers she has laced over her mouth.

  15

  “What is it like for you to remember?” I ask Mrs. Pence on Saturday morning.

  She looks up from the sheet music she’s reading over her breakfast bowl, surprised. Strands of hair float from her usually neat coif, creating an insubstantial halo in the morning light and giving her the illusion not of youth but of innocence.

  “Remember what?”

  “Anything.”

  I see that I’m perplexing her. “What it’s like to remember? To do it.” I’m not finding the right words, and I start over.

  “Do you ever feel like you’re time traveling? That you can be somewhere, doing anything—having breakfast, for example—when, flash, you’re somewhere else for a moment? At some other time?”

  “Time travel,” she muses. “That’s one way to put it.”

  She spoons up a bite of oatmeal and sips her sorry coffee. Typical English slop. But her gaze has softened.

  “At my age? My mind is a magpie’s nest.”

  I’ve never seen a magpie’s nest, as far as I know, but the image evokes a messy basket of sticks and twigs that contains, besides the magpie, oddments scavenged from here and there. A spoon, a bone, a lock of hair, a key without a lock. If I, who am about to turn twenty-seven, live to be Mrs. Pence’s age—I try and fail at a mental subtraction of twenty-seven from eighty-something—how many more spoons and bones will I have collected in my nest? The sugarless gum that Brad chewed incessantly, the notebook Anne wrote in, the imaginary basketball Isaiah slam-dunked through an imaginary hoop?

  “The hardest part for me was the trees,” says Mrs. Pence.

  “Trees?”

  “I stayed in London with my mother through the whole war, you know. There was talk of evacuating me, I was only ten, but my mother was too sick to do without me, so I stayed. By ’41 the Royal Academy reopened, and we thought it was safe for me to go back. One day there would be a girl in my form missing, and someone would say, She lives in such and such a road, doesn’t she? And nothing more would be said. But we all knew that such and such a road had gotten the worst of the bombings the night before and that the girl might turn up the next morning, or we might never see her again and never know whether she lived or died.”

  Her eyes drift off. “We went on with our lessons. We got almost accustomed to the empty chairs. But walking home in the evenings, after I got off the tube, I would see the bomb craters, the burned tree trunks, and sometimes the stumps and splinters of those lovely old trees, limes and oaks that had been growing for hundreds of years—such beautiful trees that I would never see again. Poor shattered trees.”

  I wait for her to say more, but she doesn’t, and so I ask, “How old were you when you left England?”

  It takes her such a long time to answer that I think she must be time traveling herself, sorting through who knew what scraps and spoons and keys that don’t open locks. Finally, she seems to return.

  “I was twenty-two. I had my BMus, and I had been teaching after my mother died. She had cancer, you know, and it had been so difficult to get treatment during the war. Every time she was scheduled, there would be a siren, and they would have to take the radium back down to the underground vault.”

  So much I don’t know. “Did you miss England?”

  A sad smile. “Mr. Pence tried to describe Montana for me. We’ll be east of the Rockies, he said. Where we’ll live is rolling hill country with lots of sky, he said. I remember the names as he spoke them, wonderful names. The Highline. The Marias River. The Judith River. The White Cliffs of the Missouri. I imagined having a home in a place like the moors of Yorkshire or Lancashire. But when Mr. Pence met my plane in Great Falls and drove me up to Versailles, I thought I’d come to the end of the world.”

  So much I want to ask. But already she’s gathering up the sheet music she’d been going over and heading for the piano room.

  I pause in the hallway with grocery sacks in my arms, listening. In the piano room, behind the closed door, Mrs. Pence has just struck the big opening chords of the Polonaise-fantaisie and is rippling up the long elegiac arpeggio that nearly spans the keyboard. Her fingers sound as strong on the keys as they ever have, and I have time to think big piano-playing hands before the music sweeps over me and I nearly sob with the power of the yearning. The Fantaisie winds its intricate, deceptive way, sometimes rhythmic, almost playful, but always yielding to the undertow of melancholy. Where does the power of her playing come from, what does Mrs. Pence long for, what can she possibly regret?

  What do you long for, Ruby? whispers Bill the Drummer in my head.

  “What happened with your friend and her daughter?” Mrs. Pence had asked me at breakfast. “How did her custody case turn out?”

  “Jamie? She got another probationary postponement. She didn’t get to see her little girl.”

  “So hard to lose a child,” she mused. Then she gave herself a small shake, like a reminder. “Mustn’t dawdle,” she said, more to herself than to me as she rose and carried her cereal bowl and her cup and saucer to the sink. “I have a full slate of lessons today.”

  Of course she did.

  Now I listen until the Fantaisie comes to the end and the beautiful tones fade and fall silent. I imagine Mrs. Pence lifting her hands off the keys in the same formal motion she had taught to me, then folding her hands in her lap and bowing her head to listen to the l
ast reverberations from deep inside the concert grand.

  The grocery sacks in my arms are heavy, and the kitchen waits, so reluctantly I continue down the hall and set down my purchases on the scrubbed table. Jonathan, asleep under the table, thumps his tail to say hello and goes on sleeping.

  Mrs. Pence had picked at my stir-fry, so I’d tried to remember what she cooked for herself in the old days and finally settled on a nice piece of fresh salmon and new potatoes to go with the garden peas one of her neighbors had left for us. Without the din of the campus food court in my ears, I feel hungry myself, so I wash my hands at the sink and settle down to shell peas.

  The simple, repetitive motion, the snapping open of pods and the rattle of shelled peas into the saucepan lulls me, while the sharp garden scent of the discarded pods lingers on my hands and limns my fingernails with a pulpy green stain. I don’t know a thing about gardening, but probably it’s peaceful. Maybe I can learn how, and next summer I can take over from the mystery gardener, spade up a few new rows in the backyard and plant some seeds. More carrots maybe. And peas.

  Wherever I’ll be next summer.

  When the doorbell sounds from the other end of the hallway, I push back my chair to get up and answer it, but then I hear Mrs. Pence’s footsteps, followed by the creak of the heavy front door. Jonathan hears it too, scrambles out from under the table, and trots off to see what’s going on. Probably a late piano student. I go on shelling peas.

  Sounds of voices in the hallway, Mrs. Pence’s voice high and pleased, the other voice a man’s, baritone—and I turn from my pile of peapods to see Isaiah with an arm over Mrs. Pence’s shoulders and Mrs. Pence with her arm around Isaiah’s waist and Jonathan sniffing his shoes and wagging frantically.

  “Ruby,” Isaiah says, and corrects himself. “Ruth.”

  “Ruth,” Mrs. Pence agrees.

  I’m too surprised to speak. My thumb has stuck in the peapod I just split open, the peas going nowhere.

  “It’s a pity we don’t keep chickens,” says Mrs. Pence. “They’d eat those fresh pods.”