Robin and Ruby

by K. M. Soehnlein

Barbecue smoke paints the air, hot dogs blackening on the grill like corpse fingers. There’s nothing for her to eat here, but she barely has an appetite anyway, with the rancid smell of vomit rising up from the alley alongside between the houses—the designated place to puke.

  “I love summer,” Benjamin says. “I love the humidity and all the exposed flesh and everyone dropping their inhibitions, girls especially. I love bikinis. I love a chick’s stomach. And when they shake water out of their wet hair, I love that. I love the way your hair looked when you came out of the shower. Much sexier. I love the days being so long. Winter sucks, the whole turning-back-the-clocks concept, and the fucking cold. Last winter I got a backache from tensing up because of the cold air. I went to a physical therapist, like I’m some kind of middle-aged man, can you believe it? I’m from Florida, we don’t have winter, you know? It’s stupid to live in these cold places. Do you see my point, Princess?”

  Ruby nods. It doesn’t matter if she says yes or no, Benjamin is talking for the sake of talking, his voice an apparatus running on cocaine.

  “Ruby?”

  It’s Calvin, pushing open the back door. He looks at her with a droopy-eyed expression that could be worry, or is perhaps just the result of too much beer. “Come on a booze run with me. I’m going to the store with this guy.”

  Behind him is the curly-haired jock who helped Ruby wipe up earlier in the day. He waves at her like they’re old friends and announces, in his own tipsy slur, “I’m legal, so I’m buying.”

  “I’ll wait here,” Ruby says.

  Calvin looks from Ruby to Benjamin, and there’s something very unsure in his eyes. “Whatever you do,” he says, pointing a finger to Benjamin, “don’t listen to anything this hose-bag says.”

  “What would I possibly say to your girlfriend that she wouldn’t want to hear?” Benjamin is so smarmy, it makes her wonder. What secret is being held here?

  “Ruby,” Calvin says, almost a whine. Do me a favor, she wants to say, and go.

  The jock places a meaty hand on Calvin’s shoulder and says, “This is a mission for men.”

  Calvin turns to the guy and breaks into a smile—it’s almost sweet to see—as if he’s been granted some great and unexpected honor among his gender.

  “I’ll be right here,” she says. Unless Chris returns, and then…

  “Right here,” Calvin says, pointing his finger down emphatically, as if she mustn’t leave this little dirty wooden porch. He backs away with his new friend—making room for Dorian, who stumbles onto the porch waving a cigarette that she doesn’t seem to be smoking.

  Dorian looks at Benjamin, then throws a hard stare at Ruby.

  “How nice to see you again,” Ruby says. She’s pretty sure this will provoke Dorian, and she’s surprised to discover she doesn’t care. Why did she agree to wear this awful girl’s clothes? It’s like she has donned a uniform making her Dorian’s employee.

  Dorian turns her gaze back to Benjamin and says, “You can’t fuck her.”

  Benjamin flashes Dorian a delighted smile. “Do blow jobs count?”

  The cigarette flutters through the air, but Dorian—so drunk that she can’t keep her balance—is unable to form a response. She points a finger at Ruby and dramatically says, “You don’t fool me,” and then she’s gone, swerving back into the house like a shopping cart with a loose wheel.

  Ruby and Benjamin glance at each other and share a laugh at Dorian’s expense. For a brief moment, she forgets her dislike of this guy. Then he opens his mouth again. “What I’m wondering, Princess, is, who are you saving it for, huh? I’m referring to the Big V.”

  “Do we have to talk about this?”

  “Are you some kind of Puritan, dressed all in black?”

  She turns back to the yard, squinting into the sun. “Once it was a religious belief. But now I’m just used to the idea.”

  “Are you going to give it to Mr. Right when he comes along?”

  “I’ve waited this long, it might as well be right.”

  “And how will you know exactly?”

  “I’ll feel it. Like an answer to a question I’ve been carrying around.” She looks at him, wanting this to be the last word. He frowns. Maybe her answer didn’t convince him. She’s not sure she’s convinced herself. But how could she tell him the truth—that the next time she has sex, it has to be someone who won’t rush through it, won’t hurt her with his clumsiness, won’t say, Let’s just get it over with?

  Alice reappears, carrying a tray of Dixie cups. “Jell-O shots, Jell-O shots,” she announces. She hands one to Benjamin, then holds the tray out to Ruby. Ruby tries to refuse, but Alice insists, “You have to take one before they get scarfed down by the townies.” She waves an arm over the backyard.

  There’s a song coming from inside the house that Ruby has heard before—in a store, in the background somewhere, who knows—one of those songs she hears a lot lately. It’s this pretty clichéd rock and roll song about a boy, a girl and a guitar. She hates this song and every song like it, but it’s catchy, and she finds that she actually knows the words: “Those were the best days of my life, back in the summer of ’69.” Her life is not going to be like that, a slide downhill after some fabled glorious youth.

  “What’s that look on your face?” Alice says. “Loosen up!”

  Ruby reaches out and takes a cup in each hand and throws back one, then another blob of colored gelatin. The faintest taste of liquor passes coldly across her tongue. “Happy?” she asks Alice, but Alice is already moving down the steps into the yard, where she’s swarmed by the crowd.

  “Maybe you’re a lesbian,” Benjamin says. “D’you ever think of that?”

  Ruby crumples the cups in her hand and throws them at him. “Maybe you’re mentally retarded. Ever think of that?”

  The insult just rolls off him. “I’m from Florida, we Christmased in Key West every year—I know from lesbians. They’re not all diesel-truck drivers. Some are cool customers like you.”

  “My brother’s gay,” Ruby says angrily. She’s surprised to hear herself say it; she doesn’t blurt this out to strangers. Benjamin has probably already heard it—Calvin would have told Alice about Robin, Alice would have told Dorian, who probably told Benjamin, and probably not in very nice terms: “Calvin’s girlfriend’s brother is a fag, can you believe that? Isn’t that sick?”

  Benjamin says, “Why don’t they just stop having sex altogether? Death, my Princess, is stalking the faggots.”

  “Straight people get it, too,” she snaps. “In Haiti it’s men and women both.”

  “In Haiti the men fuck the women up the rear. That’s the problem. The body is rebelling against this invasion to the system.” Benjamin reaches into his pocket—since leaving the bedroom, he’s put his pants on—and he retrieves a box of Dunhills. He lights one and puffs on it like an amateur, pulling the cigarette away from his face and spitting out smoke without inhaling. Ruby knows what a real smoker looks like. Her mother and her brother smoke constantly. “There’s a very fantastic article about it in Rolling Stone,” Benjamin says. “It’s almost mystical, this plague. Like a cosmic cleansing mechanism.”

  “It’s not cosmic, it’s medical,” Ruby tells Benjamin. “You should learn something about the science.” She knows about these terminal cases, the young men dying in New York hospitals as if they’re at the end of their lives, their bodies unable to fight. There’s a man in her apartment building with a purple splotch on his handsome face. In the elevator, he caught her staring, and before she could look away in embarrassment, he started up a conversation about the building’s garbage collection, and they chatted, like all was normal, for five flights down. She worries for her brother. He took an AIDS test last year, right after they became available. He was negative. But still—he’s told her about a lot of sex in the past. So she can’t help but worry. She has asked him if he used poppers—they say that poppers have something to do with it, with immune system damage—and he said only a couple of ti
mes. He and Peter are monogamous, he said, and they’re using rubbers, which is what doctors say you should do now. He told her, you’re lucky you’re not fucking your way through college. She told him that she didn’t feel lucky. She felt apart from people because of it.

  “You know,” Benjamin says, “there’s talk about Calvino being a little, um, susceptible. To, you know, tendencies. Alice says Calvino used to wear their mother’s lipstick.”

  “Maybe you haven’t noticed, lots of guys wear makeup now,” Ruby says. “It’s fashionable.” Chris was wearing eyeliner, she thinks. But she hates hearing this about Calvin. What does it say about her, to be dating someone who could be in the closet?

  Alice comes skipping up the stairs, her tray now empty but for one last shot. “Right, Alice? Calvin wore your mother’s lipstick?”

  “Shut up,” she says, but her voice lacks force, and she turns to Ruby, jabbing the edge of the tray into her chest. “Why don’t you give Calvin some action, so people will just shut up?”

  Ruby’s stomach tightens again as she considers the sticky, dense world she’s been lured into—she’s not a toy for cats but a winged insect snagged in a spiderweb. She wants to make herself weightier, heavy enough to break through the cords they’re trying to tighten around her. She nudges the tray away. “Mind your own business, OK?”

  Alice presses her lips together, and Ruby wonders if she’s gone too far. She doesn’t want to make an enemy here. But she’s fed up.

  “Ladies, ladies,” Benjamin says.

  Alice downs the last Jell-O shot, and then the injury or anger or whatever it was vanishes, smothered in a toothy smile that takes over the lower half of her thin face. She throws an arm over Ruby’s shoulder and says in a too-emphatic voice, “I know we’ll be great friends if we just keep drinking!” And she slips back into the house, and Ruby lets go the breath she was holding.

  Benjamin relights his cigarette—which apparently went out because he wasn’t smoking it right—and Ruby studies his face as the light casts a perfect magic-hour glow upon him. Benjamin is one of those people you could never be friends with no matter how much you drank. She takes a guess that of everyone here, he comes from the wealthiest family—maybe from the most uptight, emotionally frigid family, too. A rich kid, always suspicious of everyone he meets, because he has more than they do—more money, more things, has probably traveled more and been schooled more rigorously. Even with his drug-induced twitchiness, he’s not bad looking. He was probably a cute little boy. Now he’s a horrible, handsome young man. A user. It was unfair, how the sun cast the same light on the good as it did on the bad, on kind people as well as cruel. She still finds herself wishing for cosmic justice—if there is a God, why doesn’t he punish those who truly deserve it?

  She looks westward into the sun, hovering between some distant, inland hills and the town’s water tower. It’s a solid, fiery ball. And she thinks of all those Friday evenings, after they moved into Manhattan, when she and Robin were driven by their mother across the George Washington Bridge to the house in Greenlawn where her father still lived. The fireball in the sky is the very image of joint custody, of every-other-weekend, of sinking into the tan upholstery of the Nissan Maxima as her mother and her brother gabbed up front, smoking their cigarettes.

  The house on Bergen Ave. still retained touches of their mother’s decorating style—arty black-and-white photos hung on the living room walls in pricey frames—though after the divorce, Dorothy never again stepped inside. She never made this refusal explicit, she just held back at the front door, and the rest of them came to understand that she would not cross that threshold. When she dropped them off, money went from Clark’s hands to Dorothy’s on the stoop, and then she drove away. The scenario changed over time: Dorothy staying in Manhattan, and Ruby, after she got her driver’s license, taking on driving duty. Their father couldn’t cook much more than hamburgers and macaroni and cheese, SpaghettiOs in a can, or frozen fish sticks, so she and Robin would stop at the A&P and concoct a menu: meatloaf or tuna casserole or pan-fried chicken breasts glazed with apricot jam. Clark loved it, he always thanked them, said they were better cooks than their mother had ever been (information that they passed on to Dorothy, who fumed in response but then bought cookbooks and became more skilled in the small kitchen of their Upper West Side apartment than she had ever been in the suburbs). In New Jersey, Ruby and Robin would pass hours of the weekend in silence with their father, but it was a gentle silence, not the tension of unhappiness that once ruled the house. After dinner, they watched movies on HBO or Cinemax. Their father paid extra for the good cable channels; in Manhattan their mother didn’t even get the basic package that would have removed the static from the screen. That’s what the setting sun conjures up—years of adjusting to separation. Separated parents, separate homes, a dividing line between her old life and her new.

  She learned to sleep well in her old room, still appointed as when she was a little girl—the tramped-down russet carpet, the closet door with its mousy squeak, that ceramic bedside lamp in the shape of a ballerina, its hollow pedestal once a hiding place for little things she shoplifted—though it wasn’t easy at first. The house had a negative charge buzzing through it. Not just the divorce but the terrible time leading up to it. And before that, the time of Jackson in the hospital, in his dark, damaged sleep.

  Tomorrow’s his birthday. Jackson’s. She’s been thinking about it for weeks. Thinking about going to the grave, and how frightening the idea was to her, because of what happened the last time she was there. She’d had the idea, a week or two ago, that she’d be able to deal with the cemetery if she could get all of them to go with her, her mother and father, showing up at the grave at the same time, and maybe Robin, too, if he could get a train from Philadelphia. They could all be there together to mark Jackson’s birthday. But Robin said he had to work, and her father said that he didn’t know if he and Annie, this woman he’d been dating lately, had made plans already. He had managed to slip into their conversation that Sunday was also Father’s Day—she hadn’t remembered, and felt bad about it, though, really, Father’s Day strikes her as a fake holiday, a Hallmark holiday, not an important memorial like Jackson’s birthday. (Plus, wasn’t it creepy that the person her father had planned to spend his Father’s Day with was Annie, his much-younger girlfriend?) Her mother hadn’t been open to the idea of the group outing to the cemetery, either. She said that she had her day planned out, and she wasn’t feeling very flexible about the schedule—she wanted to be at the grave early enough to allow her to get back to Manhattan and cook dinner. Of course, she was just avoiding Clark, still holding on to all the unfinished business surrounding the divorce, even though they’d actually been civil to each other lately—they even managed to share a few laughs at Uncle Stan’s wedding last weekend. Still, the plan fell apart, because everyone in her family was basically self-absorbed or petty or both, and Ruby wound up feeling that she had expended way too much energy on the plan, and gotten nothing back from any of them, which was typical. Calvin tried to be nice about it, told her they could stop at the cemetery on the drive back from the shore tomorrow, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to go with Calvin. He didn’t know Jackson. It wouldn’t mean anything to him. Plus, he’ll probably have some critique of the whole concept of a cemetery, the way the funeral industry is essentially capitalist exploitation of grief, which of course, it kind of is, but who wants to hear that when you’re standing in front of your dead brother’s tombstone? What if she started praying and Calvin challenged her about it? It would be better not to be there at all than to be there with someone who misunderstood.

  She makes a decision.

  She turns to Benjamin and says, “I’m going for a walk. If Calvin asks, tell him that.”

  “Are you going to the boardwalk?” Benjamin asks, exhaling smoke past her shoulder. “We should all go!”

  “No, we shouldn’t.”

  “Oh, the Princess needs her personal space?” He w
inks at her, as if cementing a pact between them.

  So she assumes, though she can’t be sure it’s true, that Benjamin has guessed that she’s going to look for Chris.

  The beach is only a few blocks away. Ruby walks eastward, away from the now-set sun, her boots slung over the strap of her handbag, a thermos in her hand filled with something called a New Jersey Iced Tea—lemonade, Coca-Cola, rum, and vodka—mixed by the girl playing bartender back at the house. She passes a church called Our Lady of Perpetual Help. She thinks of the fact of the ocean, and how they take it for granted as a place of recreation, though it’s more powerful than any of them. She felt that briefly today when she was jumping around in the crashing waves by herself. She thinks of sailors lost at sea, of cap-sized boats, of swimmers carried away. The ocean is perpetual, and the tides, and drowning. But so is love, and desire. She is staring at the church, a brick building with a strip of dehydrated lawn surrounding it. She ignores the pull she feels to enter, kneel, and pray to God that she finds Chris. She keeps walking. She walks another block and comes upon Waterworks, a giant waterslide occupying an entire block in the middle of this neighborhood, emitting splashes and shrieks from every direction. This is what people do, we take the forces of nature and we corral them into amusements. We’re always trying to control everything. She hears her thoughts cascading and realizes she’s definitely buzzed. Waterworks is situated catty-corner from the borough hall and the police station. Could she get arrested here, for being underage and under the influence? No, not with wasted teenagers everywhere. But she keeps her head down anyway.

  Twilight settles upon streets dense with cruising traffic. With every step the noise of the night swells up. She dodges cars turning in and out of liquor store parking lots. Gangs of happy-hour drunks stumble serpentine along the sidewalk. Everyone seems so young, so inconsequential, and yet she doesn’t feel safe, on her own like this. Catcalls fly out from guys on porches and hotel balconies. She guesses she’s an easy mark, a single girl in preppie shorts, barefoot, unsteady on her feet.