Robin and Ruby

by K. M. Soehnlein

“He’s totally bad news. I mean, anyone who makes Calvin look responsible…” Robin checks once again to be sure Ruby is out, then says to George, “You know what he told me? Calvin?”

  “That he’s secretly in love with you.”

  “Close.”

  George’s eyes go wide. “I was joking.”

  “No joke. He said he’s bisexual.”

  “Really? Did he use that word?”

  Robin nods.

  “Did you tell him, ‘Bisexual is just another word for closeted’?” George says this in a voice that Robin realizes is mimicking his own, slightly high pitched and superior. It’s embarrassing. But George cracks a tiny smile, which is a good sign, because Robin does indeed remember saying something like that when George first came out to him, after which they didn’t talk for weeks. It turned out to be true, for George, anyway. Bisexuality was a way station. Maybe not for Calvin. It’s hard to imagine Calvin as completely gay, or completely straight.

  George’s laugh turns into a yawn. He shakes his head, back to alertness.

  “Are you OK to drive?”

  “Why, you think I’d turn my car over to your unlicensed ass?”

  “Better than falling asleep at the wheel.”

  “Better would be to get a license.”

  “OK, whatever you say, Peter.”

  “Ouch!” George’s eyes shine. “I got it! Let’s make Ruby drive.”

  “Yeah. We can sprawl out in the backseat and suck down cocktails.”

  “Or something.”

  A few days ago, a casually flirtatious remark like that would have made Robin laugh; now he’s tongue-tied and blushing. It’s the same for George. So now what? Robin’s thoughts leap ahead, to where the two of them are going to end up tonight. Taking a look at the slow-moving traffic on the southbound side of the Parkway, he says, “There’s no way we’re driving all the way back to Philly.”

  “I can drop you off at your father’s, and then go to my parents’. I hadn’t planned on telling them I was coming to town, but…” George sighs, a labored sound that only hints at much deeper frustration. Robin remembers the earlier phone call from Mrs. Lincoln. He remembers, after George got off the phone with her, hearing him sigh in much the same way.

  “I never mentioned this to you, because I didn’t want the pressure,” George says, “but I promised myself I would tell them everything, once I turned twenty-one.”

  “Which was May 18th.”

  “Yeah, I’m about to hit the thirty-day statute of limitations.” George shakes his head. “You’re lucky, Robin, to have parents who accept you. That’s pretty rare.”

  “Dorothy’s had a lot of time to get used to it. She claims she’s known I was gay since I was two years old.”

  “Really?”

  “I told her it’s her fault. The first movie she took me to was Funny Girl. I remember thinking it seemed so real, because I’d been on the Staten Island Ferry, just like Barbra Streisand. I thought I could just walk into the screen.”

  “My first movie was Willy Wonka. I remember thinking it all seemed really fake.”

  “That’s called fantasy.”

  “I guess I’m built for reality.”

  “And Clark’s fine as long as I don’t talk about it.”

  “I can’t imagine my parents being fine with it under any circumstances,” George says. “Churchgoing folks hear another message, you know.”

  “When’s the last time your father went to church?”

  “It’s a cultural thing,” George says. “It’s deep.”

  For a moment, the comment stings, as if it’s meant to be yet another reminder of this essential difference between them, a gap Robin wonders if he is even allowed to cross. But the sensation of George’s hand on his head, that comfort offered just moments again, is still with him, and he thinks, Wait. Clarity takes hold: He’s not trying to push you away. He’s trying draw you in. To get you to see what you haven’t seen before, but still might.

  “It’s hard to see ourselves from other people’s eyes,” Robin says, not sure this is exactly what he wants to say, trying to make the words work for him. “I mean, we want to see everything the way we already see it.”

  “Yeah,” George agrees. “Yeah, that’s part of the problem. But that’s why we keep our friends around, right? To call us on our shit?”

  “Or something,” Robin says.

  “Or something.”

  Driving all the way back to Philly tonight would take at least until midnight. The very thought is exhausting: hours and hours of dealing with Sunday traffic, reversing the path they’ve been on all day. So tonight, he and George will likely stay at their separate homes in Green-lawn, with their very different families, like they were still freshmen in high school, 1978 all over again. He thinks with some embarrassment of the condoms and lube he packed; in the midst of the rush to get out the door and rescue his sister, he found time to prepare for more sex with George. As if there was anywhere for them to be together. Was he imagining that they’d check into a hotel room?

  Ruby went to a hotel with Chris. She must have, though she didn’t actually say so. But what else would you do if you wanted to be together? Where else could you find enough privacy?

  He looks again at her sleeping face, and has a moment, as he did earlier with George, where he sees someone between two incarnations, an old and a new self. And then his mind makes another leap and he and Ruby are young again, two little blond kids playing a game of hide-and-seek in the backyard. He preferred this game to other neighborhood games, the ones requiring balls that he would inevitably bobble and drop or swing at and miss. Running and hiding he could do. There was something so exciting about waiting quietly while the person who was “it” went searching; you wanted to peek and see if he was near, but it was better not to risk exposure, to be patient and wait it out. On this one day, a boy from down the street named Jimmy was “it” the other kids all scattered, but Ruby hovered at Robin’s side. “Go away,” he told her. “Find your own place.” But she followed him behind the garage, and he was so aware of her on his tail that he didn’t see Jimmy sneak around from the other side, and then she was in his way when he tried to escape. Jimmy tagged him. Robin was so mad at Ruby that when he finished counting to ten, he went straight for her. He chased her down at full speed, and when he reached her, he crowed, “Now you’re it,” and smacked her shoulder so hard she stumbled to the grass. On the spot, she quit the game and walked away. “Don’t be a baby,” he shouted after her. “I’m not a baby,” she said, with a coolness that stunned him. “You’re a jerk.”

  It made an impression, the word “jerk” like a sudden jolt, an impact. The jerk is the one who upsets things, the one heedless of other people’s feelings. He carried her admonishment around as warning, the danger of being selfish, of being petty, even vengeful. When his mother had smoked cigarettes in the car despite the fact that it was making Ruby sick, he understood that she was being a jerk. Last night, Peter had been a jerk, but Robin had only made it worse by exploding. Earlier in the car, his own defensiveness with George caused him to act like a jerk again. Had he done it again with Ruby, by yanking her away from a boy she seemed to feel something for? Or have the roles reversed, and is Ruby, for a change, the one who has selfishly knocked everything out of place?

  Traffic clogs and opens up, clogs and opens up, all along the drive northward, as the shore roads empty onto the Garden State Parkway. As highways go, it’s not a bad one to be stuck on. Rolling green slopes line either side, and a wide grassy median separates north and southbound lanes. There are wooden guardrails instead of metal and no billboards. Still, New Jersey drivers are infamous for a reason, and Robin tenses up as cars shift across multiple lanes without warning. George’s driving is as bad as anyone’s. The long day seems to be wearing on him, and he’s become impatient, heavy on both the brake and the gas, taken to muttering, and sometimes shouting, “asshole” and “idiot.” There’s a truly scary moment when a car on the sho
ulder makes a move back onto the road, jutting quickly in front of them. George speeds up, even though the other guy is clearly about to merge, and lands his fist on the horn as he swerves. Robin gets thrown from side to side, grasping for equilibrium. George says, “Sorry,” but it sounds more like a challenge than an apology.

  From behind him, Ruby stirs.

  “I don’t feel good,” she says. “Can we pull over?”

  “Are you going to be sick?”

  “I need some air.”

  “There’s a place coming up,” George says, reading the sign for the Cheesequake Service Area.

  Robin sings, “Cheesequake, hit the brakes, let’s go eat a piece of cake.” The lyrics burst forth unbidden, a little tune invented during a family vacation, way back when. He seems to remember that his father, who is more prone to corniness than his mother, was the one who made it up, but he’s not entirely sure. The song is a mystery, like the word Cheesequake itself (which could be derived from some Indian language, butchered by white people, or could also be nonsense). He looks back at Ruby to see if she’s remembered this song, too, but she doesn’t seem to be paying attention. She’s looking more than a little green.

  As soon as George moves them into a parking spot, Ruby bounds out of the car toward the restrooms.

  Inside, a crowd lines up for fast food; another group mills around at a little gift counter, perusing bumper stickers and T-shirts with the slogan NEW JERSEY AND YOU, PERFECT TOGETHER.

  Robin looks through the racks, hoping to find a Father’s Day card. No luck. So he buys an oversized postcard with a picture of the Cheesequake Service Area. On the back, he writes, “Dad, Here’s a trip down memory lane for Father’s Day. Love, your prodigal children.”

  Next stop is the men’s room. Along a wall of urinals, a couple old men are spaced intermittently; a father in a baseball cap keeps an eye on his young son at the kid-sized pisser. Robin heads for the farthest one. George takes the spot next to him.

  He can hear their streams hit the porcelain at the exact same time, which secretly pleases him. Sometimes, pissing in public, he becomes inexplicably pee-shy, and no matter how bad he has to go, it takes forever to start up. But since moving in with George, this hasn’t been a problem. They’re sometimes in the bathroom at the same time, one of them peeing while the other brushes his teeth, and though it’s not something they’ve bothered to talk about, Robin figures George probably takes the same kind of comfort in this brotherly intimacy as he does. Brotherly, because it reminds him of Jackson. Some of his earliest memories are of the two of them “crossing streams” into the bowl in the upstairs bathroom, the one with the fuzzy gold bathmat always bunched up against the tub, and talking with playful fascination about arcs and splashes, the varying smells and colors. It was their game, regular and unremarkable, and no one knew about it. How long would it have continued, if Jackson had lived? Or would having a gay brother have driven Jackson away from anything resembling physical closeness?

  George is the nearest thing to a brother in his life now. And maybe that’s what’s so confusing about the line they stepped over last night. You put people into compartments, but they break out of them, and then what? Can you seal yourself back in, or are you forever changed?

  At this very moment he can glimpse George’s cock as George shakes off, which should be no big deal but after last night seems tinged with taboo. George senses it, too, if the quick eye contact he makes with Robin is any indication.

  Down the wall, father and son have departed, and one by one the old men leave; and then it’s only the two of them inside the cavernous, tiled room. Now the eye contact is not so subtle. Their glances drift across each other, mischievous, expectant.

  George turns sideways. He thrusts his pelvis out. He slaps his cock onto Robin’s, saying, “Swordfight.”

  Robin’s mouth drops open, giddy with the audacity of it.

  George does it again. Slap, slap, slap. And then he steps closer, lingering, more gentle. Rub, slide, rub.

  But that’s all. There’s the squeal of a door hinge, the sound of entering footsteps. Robin moves back to his urinal and shields his crotch. His heartbeat quickens in the rush of nearly being caught.

  George flushes. “Meet you outside.”

  Robin spots him near the curb, standing in profile studying an oversized map under glass. The sun hits him softly from behind, hugs the solidity of his neck, highlights the texture of the twists in his hair. There’s the undeniably beautiful way the arch of his lower back becomes the curve of his muscular ass.

  George finally sees him and waves him over. “I had you speechless in there,” he says through a smile.

  “Definitely.”

  “Is something wrong?” George asks. “You’ve got some look in your eyes.”

  “I guess I’m just thinking about last night.”

  “Is that a good thing?”

  Robin nods. Speechless again.

  George glances around. There’s no one in close range, but people and cars are coming and going every which way. “Fuck. This is crazy! We’ve created a problem.” He looks down at his pants, where Robin can see that the problem isn’t easily concealed. “You need to walk away and let me think about something else.”

  “Gotcha.” Robin steps back, scans the parking lot, remembers where they are, what they’re in the midst of. “I’ll go find my sister. Have you seen her?”

  George shakes his head. “Actually, for a minute I forgot all about her.”

  She hasn’t eaten meat in years, but impulsively, guiltily she orders a bacon cheeseburger and devours its fatty, salty bulk in record time.

  While she sucks a Cherry Coke through a straw, all the way down to the ice, she hurries to the pay phone and dials the Island Beach Motor Lodge. The old guy at the desk puts her through to the room.

  The phone rings and rings. Eventually he comes back on the line and states the obvious, “No answer.”

  “Did you see him come in? The guy I was with last night?”

  “What’s a’matter, honey, lost your husband already?”

  “I’m not your honey,” she snaps. “That’s totally sexist.”

  “Oh, I got a real women’s libber here,” he says.

  “How about I call the Better Business Bureau on you?”

  He begins an answer, but she hangs up without hearing the rest of it. And immediately she’s wishing she’d ignored his condescension. Her anger today is an undertow. She’s barely aware of it until it’s pulling her in deep.

  Collecting herself, she calls back. She swallows her pride and apologizes, and in the sweetest voice she can muster she asks him if he’ll leave a message for Chris. She can only hope that he actually writes down the phone number, Clark’s phone number in Greenlawn, which she recites carefully.

  At the next phone, a young mother—flowered bikini top, dingy white shorts, sandals too tight for her doughy feet—rocks a baby over her shoulder while carrying on a loud conversation, the receiver balanced against her neck. The baby stares with unblinking eyes at Ruby as a string of spittle falls from its tiny mouth to a discolored towel on its mother’s bare shoulder. Ruby smiles at the smooth, blank face, trying to draw out a happy reaction, but all she gets is a wince that quickly turns into tears. The mother shifts her child around, shushing the sudden wailing without halting her own irate conversation. Ruby hears “child support” and “delinquent” and “You don’t know a fucking thing,” and in glimpses she comes to see just how young this “woman” is, maybe even younger than she is. A teenager. Suddenly it all seems shocking—the foul language, the crying baby, the tacky clothes. Then the girl catches Ruby’s stare and squints suspiciously, and Ruby turns away, ashamed.

  There are kids everywhere she looks. Little kids being dragged along by their mothers. Sleepy kids being lifted by their fathers. Boys shouting as they dash into the parking lot without looking—that’s the kind of kid Jackson was, untamable. She roots around her purse for more change. She might have enough
to call home, though she dreads the idea, and anyway Robin said he talked to Clark, so there’s no need to call now. She’ll see her father soon enough.

  Still there’s this urge to talk to someone. Among the clutter at the bottom of her purse she finds Wendy’s phone number. She dials, wondering why she’s even bothering.

  “Hi, this is Ruby, from last night?”

  “Holy shit! What’s happening?”

  “Well, I never checked in with you again, so—”

  “Are you still with that guy?”

  “I was with him all day. We ran into Joanne on the boardwalk.”

  “Really? I’ll get the scoop from her, you can be sure.”

  “She told me you got in trouble.”

  “Yeah, you owe me a total apology.”

  “Oh, I’m really sorry—”

  “Psych!” Wendy exclaims. “J.K.—just kidding. Don’t worry about it, my mother always grounds me. It lasts for like two days. It’s her way to get me to do a bunch of housework for her. I call her the Sheriff, ’cause she totally runs a jail around here.”

  She listens to Wendy launch into the same story that Joanne told her today. (Recalls, too, how rude Chris had been in that moment. What was that about? As soon as they left the hotel room, their problems began.) Finally, she gets a chance to interrupt. “Listen, I didn’t get to thank you. You guys saved me.”

  “Aw, you’re so sweet. That was so fun last night. I’m psyched we ran into you.”

  “You are?”

  “You’re the coolest person I’ve met here all summer. Most people who come down here, I can’t stand ’em.”

  Ruby laughs. Such a relief to know there’s one person in the world who wasn’t put out by her behavior.

  She looks up and sees Robin coming her way. He calls out, “Train’s leaving the station.”

  “Wendy, I gotta go. My sheriff just blew his whistle.” They say good-bye with promises to keep in touch. Maybe we will, Ruby thinks. I could use some new friends.

  She catches up to Robin and walks alongside him, out of the building onto the hot pavement. The uncomfortable silence between them is hard to bear. When he showed up at Alice’s, she was so happy, felt like finally she’d be able to emerge from the purgatory of the party, wouldn’t simply be sliced to ribbons by the cats clawing at her from every direction. Why did it go downhill from there? Because Robin was convinced she’d done the wrong thing. Because he wouldn’t give Chris a chance. Because he still treats her like his baby sister, still bosses her around and expects her to yield.