The All You Can Dream Buffet

by Barbara O'Neal

  “You don’t?” Hannah echoed with incredulity. “I love them. You don’t have to be yourself.”

  Ruby seized a skirt made of endless varieties of blue with a silvery overskirt. “Or maybe more yourself than you could be in real life.” She held it up, disappointed to discover that the waist was tiny, tiny, tiny.

  Of course. She smoothed the fabric over her belly sadly, knowing it would never fit in a million years. “Nothing in here is going to work for me, is it? Even not pregnant, I’m not small enough.” A sudden vision of everybody else dancing in tutus, their feet bare, while she swayed in her ordinary clothes made tears well up in Ruby’s eyes. She ducked her head, smoothing a palm over the dress, and tried to blink herself back to an even keel. Again she touched the skirt. “It looks like a blue moon,” she said with longing, and a sense of tragedy swamped her. Her tears flowed like a fountain. She couldn’t stop them.

  “Oh, sweetie,” Ginny said, sliding an arm around her shoulders. “If we can’t find something here, I can make this for you in about an hour.” She looked over her shoulder. “Lavender, do you have a sewing machine?”

  “I don’t sew,” Lavender said, tugging out one after another of the skirts, “but there are a couple in the workroom.” She frowned, rubbed her belly. “We need to get some food sometime soon. I’m starving.”

  “Me, too,” Hannah said, walking down the aisle and flipping through the dresses.

  “You could do this in an hour?” Ruby asked, her tears drying up as fast as they’d arrived. She ran her fingers over the fabric. “This sparkly stuff and everything? It’s the silver and blue that I really like.”

  “We would buy it like that, with the sparkles on it. I’m sure Portland has plenty of places to buy good fabric.”

  “You would do that?”

  Ginny gave her a quizzical smile. “Of course.”

  Ruby abruptly settled her head on Ginny’s shoulder. “You’re the best.”

  Ginny chuckled.

  “Let me find you something, please, please, please?”

  “I don’t think so, Ruby. I feel so—”

  “You don’t have to wear it if you try it on and feel bad. What could it hurt to just try it on?”

  Ginny hesitated, and Ruby suddenly saw her deep shyness and remembered how far she’d come in the years they’d known her, from a wallflower to a star.

  Ruby grabbed Ginny’s hand and hauled her down the row, looking for a color that popped out at her—not that tepid blue or the screaming yellow. No, no, no. About three rows over she finally saw it, the very shade of the flesh of a perfectly ripe peach. “This,” she said, pulling it out. The construction was simple, too, just the floating skirt and a sleeveless bodice adorned with sequins.

  Ginny reached for it, brushed her hand over the bodice. “This color,” she said with a sigh. A stain of bright red burned over her cheekbones.

  Intrigued, Ruby said, “What are you thinking to have that blush on your face?”

  “Do I?” She put her hands on her cheeks. “It’s just that … well …” She looked over her shoulder. In a near-whisper, she said, “Jack said that my lips tasted like peaches.”

  “So try it on! It will be perfect on you.”

  Ginny agreed. “Where?”

  Ruby laughed, looking around. “Here, I think. Just take off your shirt and pull it over your head.”

  Ginny felt self-conscious, but she did it. Her shoulders were slim, her waist small, and the tutu fit her with a little bit of snugness over the bust, which actually made her breasts swell up over the bodice in a very nice way. Ruby tugged it slightly. “Will it stay on?”

  “I can’t wear this!” Ginny put both hands over the upper swell of her breasts.

  Ruby brushed her hands away. “Look at me, Ginny.” She smiled. “You look amazing. I swear. Walk around in it for a minute, see how it makes you feel.”

  She did, wandering down the aisle away from Ruby, her head down as she brushed her hands over her skirt, palms open like a little girl. Ruby smiled and swung around with the blue one against her body, thinking inexplicably of Noah trying to cheer her up yesterday. Maybe they would dance together at the festival. She imagined the dark starry sky and the lights strung around the platform, which a crew was finishing today, and Noah’s thick, too-long curls falling around his face. It was only a flash, a sense of his hands on her sides, his smiling mouth close, their bodies—

  Rebound, said a voice. Don’t do it. Not for you, not for him. She knew he was vulnerable. She could feel it in him, deep and hungry, a yawning need for union.

  For healing.

  Ruby attracted men like him by the platoon, men broken by a thousand different things, hearts shattered, hopes smashed, souls shredded. She gave them kindness. Sometimes she had given them kisses. She gave them laughter and high regard, and that was often just right.

  Ambling up the aisle, aimlessly pulling out a gown or a tutu or a costume, her fickle mind fluttered and settled on Liam. He had not seemed broken, not by anything in this life, anyway. It all went back to that weird vision she’d had of him in the very beginning, of his monkish self in a medieval world. And who was she to say—maybe they were memories of another life. Millions of people all over the world believed in reincarnation, and it would certainly explain a lot. Liam’s monkish current self, her own sense of connection to him. Maybe this life, this broken heart and the baby, were corrections to karma—punishment or reward.

  Who knew?

  Which ducked the Noah question. She prided herself on being real with other people. She was so ripe for a rebound lover, and he would probably be very willing, but she was adamantly not over Liam, and Noah deserved the full-throated focus of a woman who was ready to love someone.

  Too bad, really. She could like him. She just wasn’t ready to love anyone else yet.

  A pale silvery tutu caught her eye, and she pulled it out. The sleeves were long and sheer. Iridescent beading swirled over the bodice and tea-length skirt. It was perfect for Lavender, and Ruby pulled it out to carry with her.

  Ginny stood at the end of the row, swinging back and forth to make the skirt sway. Her hair fell down around her face, show- ing her pale white neck. From this distance, she looked about seventeen.

  Jack said that my lips tasted like peaches.

  Half of Ruby wanted to protect Ginny from the possibility that this guy was a player who made time with lonely women. The other half wanted to see Ginny let her miserable marriage go, by whatever means necessary. As if she heard these thoughts, Ginny looked back at Ruby. Ginny’s glossy, uncolored hair was in her face, and her shoulders were bare, and Ruby realized that she had absolutely no idea that she was stunning.

  “I think I like it,” she said quietly.

  “It’s right for you.”

  Ginny pulled the dress over her head and put her shirt back on. “Let’s go find the others.”

  Lavender and Valerie stood with the wardrobe mistress, arrayed in a half circle around Hannah, who admired herself in a long mirror. Her hair was loose on her shoulders, and she wore a red tutu, strapless, that showed off her tiny waist, impressive bust, and delicate shoulders in a way that was slightly astonishing.

  “Well, girl,” Ruby said, giving a catcall. She lifted one corner of the skirt in her hand. “I guess you found your dress.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” Valerie said with lips pursed. “It’s much too old for her.”

  “She’s fourteen?” the wardrobe mistress asked, cocking her head. “That’s perfect for Persephone.”

  Hannah put her hands on her waist and swung the skirt slightly. “I think it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.” She met her mother’s gaze in the mirror. “Please? It’s not like I’m going to wear it to a high school dance or something. It’s a grown-up party.”

  For a long moment Valerie was silent, looking at her daughter. Ruby eased over and put a hand on her shoulder. “She looks like herself in this.”

  Valerie nodded. “A
ll right.”

  Hannah clapped her hands. “Yippee!”

  Chapter 26

  After lunch and a bit more shopping, they drove to the ocean, at Ruby’s insistence. She had discovered over the meal that neither Ginny nor Hannah had ever seen it. “It’s only seventy miles from here!” She opened her wide eyes wider. “Lavender! We have to take them!”

  So Ruby drove, with Valerie beside her. Ginny and Hannah rode in the middle seats, both of them peering out with excitement, eager to be the first to spot the sea. Lavender stretched out in the far backseat, taking a little nap. Ginny looked at her a couple of times, slightly worried. Lavender had not eaten much of her lunch.

  But she was sleeping easily, her color good, and Ginny told herself that because someone was old was no reason to think they were about to get sick.

  In the back of her mind, Ginny fretted over the phone messages she had not finished listening to. She also kept mulling the question of whether she would meet Jack tomorrow in McMinnville.

  She didn’t think so, but a part of her kept imagining him in a booth in a café, facing the door, looking up hopefully every time a new person came through the door. She didn’t have to kiss him again or anything like that. She could just have a nice glass of iced tea and go back to the farm.

  Maybe.

  Maybe not.

  “I see it!” Hannah shouted. “Right on the horizon!”

  Ginny peered hard, and she gave a little whoop when she saw the line of blue against the sky, darker, definitive. “I see it, too!”

  They traveled down a bluff to the sand, and during the whole journey Ginny kept dipping her head, trying to keep the water in sight. The ocean!

  The van had barely stopped when she pulled open the door and dove out to the parking lot. A stiff wind swept over her face, sending her hair back in a flag. She closed her eyes, wishing Willow was with her, that the two of them could be running on this beach together, seeing the water for the first time.

  She bent over and took off her shoes and socks, leaving them in a pile beside the van, and jogged toward the sand, forgetting everything and everybody as the water lured her, a dark blue-gray and endless, restless, under the clouds gathering overhead. She walked through the sand, feeling it shift beneath her feet, and stopped only when she arrived at the edge of the water.

  It didn’t matter that a lot of other people were there, that people walked behind her, that some children were squatted over buckets and small orange shovels, making roads in the sand. It didn’t matter that an almost certain promise of doom hung over her life.

  Nothing mattered except the fact that, by some miracle, she—Ginny Smith from Dead Gulch, Kansas—was standing with her feet in the Pacific Ocean, and she’d made it here almost entirely on her own will.

  For a long time she stood there, watching the waves undulate, little caps here, big waves there, a breaking edge of foam, then a tube of clear water that looked like glass as it rolled toward her, coming from who knew where. Japan. Russia. Vietnam. That water had touched lands and feet in the vast far away. She imagined she could hear echoes of them, carried on ghostly water radio waves.

  She closed her eyes and breathed in the smell, which was like and unlike the coppery notes of a river or a lake. It was denser, deeper, woven with dead flesh and living sea beings and the approaching rain.

  But the best of it was the sound, the sibilant ruffling of the water over the sand, the splash and roar born of constant movement. It was vast and incomprehensible. It made her feel tinier than a single molecule in the foaming waves and, conversely, so much a part of all things, everything. For a moment she nearly slipped away into the ether, dissolving into sky and sound and scent.

  She realized that tears were streaming over her face. How was it possible she was standing here?

  Whirling around, she flung her arms out and whooped. “Woo-hoo!” she cried at the top of her lungs, and then Ruby was there, grabbing her hand, the scarf gone from her head, her hair blowing around her face. They danced in a circle, leaping when the waves covered their feet. Hannah ran up and each of them grabbed her hand, and her hair, too, blew in the wind.

  They danced and Ginny cried out, “I am never going back to Kansas!”

  When they returned to the farm, Valerie volunteered to make dinner for everyone, since they had decided not to go out. “I promise I won’t poison you all.”

  Lavender, looking pale, headed upstairs to take a nap. Ginny wanted to make Ruby’s gown. She’d found pale-blue organza dotted with silver sequins at a big-box store in Portland.

  She sewed the simple costume in the workroom of the farmhouse, thinking of her daughter and all the costumes she’d sewn for her over the years. Sticking spare straight pins into her sleeve, Ginny thought she probably ought to try Christie again. Had Matthew said anything to Christie about the divorce letter?

  It all seemed so far away.

  As Ginny stitched up the seams and put in a simple hem, the smell of lavender hung thickly in the air around her. Many of the products sold in the store were assembled in the very same room. A long table stood against a windowless wall, lined with baskets of thick-ribbed corduroy and flannel, all in shades of purple and gray and the thread of gold that marked the farm. Canisters of lavender blossoms were nearly empty. Eye pillows, neck wraps, and even gloves were carefully stacked in tidy piles, ready for ticketing or stickering.

  In the other room were screens covered with lavender blossoms drying on racks, and in another was the distillery, a big copper teapot that looked like a shrunken still from Prohibition. Ginny had walked around it, curious to see steam circling in a glass tube and lavender oil dripping out of a spout into a jar with a narrow neck. She bent close to the spout and nearly swayed with the power of the oil. It almost seemed she could feel it entering her pores, little purple fingers massaging her temples and chest.

  It was quite a large operation, and Lavender hadn’t started it until she was in her late fifties. That was encouraging: Ginny had lots more time to build a sustainable business of her own if she so chose.

  Was the blog a business? Did it count, all by itself?

  When she finished the gown, she carried it outside, intending to take it to Ruby right away, but she spied the shiny blond head walking amid the chickens, clearly talking to them.

  So she took the gown with her to her own trailer, hung it up, called Willow to come sleep with her, and they curled up in the familiar comfort of the Airstream’s bed. It had been quite a busy day. As she settled down, pulling the quilt over her, the phone rang. She sighed and reached for it, knowing who it would be.

  Matthew’s number flashed on the screen. She let it ring again, and then one more time, debating whether to answer. Only the fact that she owed him a report of her safety made her answer. “Hello?” she said, as if she didn’t know it was him calling.

  “Ginny, is that really you?”

  “Yes, Matthew, I’m so sorry—I dropped my phone in the dishwater the other day and drowned it. I’m—”

  “You couldn’t call from a phone booth?”

  “They don’t really have phone booths anymore, in case you haven’t noticed. You could have gone to my blog.”

  “I did, and it wasn’t all that clear what was going on until last night, and then there was that email from you.”

  “Matthew, we can talk about that—”

  “I don’t want to talk. You’re just mad about the voice messages, but you know how I get when I’m drunk. You had a right to be mad, but I didn’t mean it. You know I didn’t. I was just lonely and horny and a little out of control, I guess.”

  Ginny sat up. “Horny? You?”

  He paused. “Have you listened to the messages I left?”

  “No, I haven’t had a—”

  “Jesus fucking Christ. Then that email was for real?”

  “No, I mean, yes, I mean—”

  “You want a divorce, Ginny?”

  Her heart clutched, cold, condensing down down down to
a tiny pea of terror, then she took a breath. “I didn’t mean to send the email—”

  “Thank God for that.”

  “—but, yes, Matthew.” Her heart swelled with blood and heat and pulsed with new possibilities. “I want a divorce. I’m not coming back to Kansas.”

  “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of. You’re having a midlife crisis. You’ll come to your senses.”

  “No, Matthew—”

  “I’m not talking anymore, Ginny. Erase all those messages from me. They don’t mean a thing.”

  “You can’t just”—a click on the line—“hang up on me!”

  The line was dead. Ginny stared at it, her head buzzing with the clearest fury she’d ever felt in her life, like a thousand wasps ready to rise up and—

  She roared aloud, “Argh!” Willow jumped, tail thumping nervously against the bed. “Oh, I’m not mad at you, sweetie. Never you.” She rubbed her vigorously, turning the fur into a crackling static field.

  Unable to bear the tight space of the Airstream, she flung open the door and carried the phone outside, shaky with fury. A brisk wind was blowing up, the same rainstorm they’d been fleeing since they left the ocean, and it didn’t cool her in the least. She punched in the messages he’d left while he was drinking.

  At 8:52, his voice considerably more boisterous than in the previous one: “I’m just sitting here with my bros, thinking what bullshit it is that you’re out on the road like this. Why would you do that, Ginny, huh? I’m a good husband. I know you’re all pissed off about the sex, but not everybody cares that much about all that. I’m a good catch, God damn it!”

  Ginny pulled the phone away from her ear to see how much more of the message there was, and she was only a tiny bit of the way into it. Without a qualm, she moved on to the next message.

  The next one was short, at 10:05 P.M.: “You know what, wife?” His voice was definitely slurred now. “You’re a cunt. Thass right. I said it.”

  Ginny rolled her eyes, the anger settling somewhere along her shoulder blades, hot burning spots beneath her skin, both painful and buzzing. She thought of the Rockies, pointed and bold against a blue sky. She thought of the Columbia River, shimmering in the dusk. She thought of the ocean today, roiling and dancing.