A Soft Place to Land: A Novel

by Susan Rebecca White

  During the three-hour car ride home, everyone was silent. About thirty minutes into the drive, I dug my Discman out of my backpack and tried to play a CD before realizing that the batteries had died. I kept the earphones in. It felt better to pretend I was overriding their silence with music, even if nothing was being played. After another couple of hours we passed our exit, kept driving south on 81.

  “Weren’t we supposed to get off?” I asked.

  Peggy turned around in the front seat, looked at me coolly. “Your father and I thought The Roanoker might be a good place to talk.”

  The Roanoker, an old-fashioned restaurant housed in a sprawling brick ranch, was famous for its country ham and biscuits. As its name implied, it was in Roanoke. It was true my father loved their country ham, but it seemed odd to drive an extra thirty miles south after having driven all the way from D.C. But I didn’t say anything. Tried to be a good little lamb. And then Dad exited, miles before the exit for the restaurant, driving us past a couple of gas stations and a McDonald’s before turning on a residential street I had never been on. I didn’t even know what town we were in, though it didn’t look all that different from Virden. Muted, with those beautiful mountains in the background. We passed brick ranch after brick ranch.

  I must have known at that point that they were taking me somewhere, but I remained calm, quiet. We made two more turns, driving deeper and deeper into this unfamiliar territory. On our right was an undeveloped woods, the trees growing densely together, their trunks tall but slim. Dad slowed down, turning into a long drive marked with two signs, one saying PRIVATE, the other THE CENTER, the “t” in “Center” made to look like the Christian cross. And here is what I remember even as I was becoming fully aware that we were not stopping for ham and biscuits and I was not going home: the high morning sun slicing through the trees, casting shadows on the wooded acreage we were entering. The way the dust in the air sparkled when caught in a shaft of light. The calm of the woods.

  I remained mute as we drove up the long road. I was looking around, trying to figure out where we were. Finally my father stopped the car in front of what appeared to be a series of trailers, the kind that overcrowded schools use for classrooms. In front of the middle trailer was a wooden cross, large enough to hang someone from.

  “Now, honey,” he said, turning to look at me. His lower lip was trembling like a child’s. His eyes were glassy with tears.

  And then I heard a click, the sound of the doors being locked, a sound I would hear again and again in different forms, in different volumes, but that first click came from Peggy, who was savvier than my dad, who realized that before you sentence a prisoner you had first better make sure she can’t escape.

  “What are you doing, Daddy?” I asked, trying to pretend Peggy was not there. Out of the corner of my eye I saw two jubilant-looking white men walking toward the car. Men in crew cuts wearing blue jeans and white T-shirts that showed off their muscular arms. Buddies, I would soon learn they were called.

  My father began to cry without making noise, the tears collecting in the straight lines around his mouth. To this day I believe that had Peggy not spoken, or had I not answered the way I did, I could have convinced him to back out of the long driveway, past the trees with the light shining through, past the undeveloped woods, the streets dotted with brick ranches, the gas stations, and the McDonald’s, and back onto 81 North, which would take us home. Dad wouldn’t have been able to leave me there, I believe, if I hadn’t provoked him into doing so.

  “Believe it or not, we are doing this because we love you,” Peggy said.

  “Believe it or not, you are a fucking bitch.”

  (My god. What was I thinking? I was not thinking. One thing I have learned since then is diplomacy.)

  Calling Peggy a fucking bitch was, of course, the coup de grâce. Was worse than having run away with a Haight Street kid, worse than having been involved in a drug deal with an undercover cop. My saying those words strengthened my father’s resolve, allowed him to click open the lock for the “Buddies,” who led me, twisting my head to babble desperate apologies at Peggy and my father before becoming subdued by their tight grips, into the front hall of the Center. My home for the next five months, until my father’s money ran out and the Bobs declared me in recovery, if not yet saved.

  Chapter Eleven

  Fall 2001

  On the first day of the fall semester, Gabriel Schwartz, wearing a white T-shirt inside out, walked into the senior seminar on Flannery O’Connor that Ruthie had been waiting three years to take. It took Ruthie a moment to figure out where she knew him from, but then she remembered. Remembered him from all of those years back in Atlanta—a lifetime ago!—when they were fifth graders together at St. Catherine’s School and he was the classroom pariah. Every day he was teased, for his long hair, his sissy name, and the strange foods his mom packed for his lunch: leftover fried rice still in its Chinese take-out box, onion and cream cheese sandwiches on rye, an unidentifiable square lump in a Tupperware container, which, when asked, he said was vegetarian lasagna. And for dessert, perforated raisin bars. Ruthie still remembers John King snatching a raisin bar off Gabriel’s desk and asking, “What’s in there, Schwartz Wart, your ground-up boogers?”

  The adult Gabriel Schwartz didn’t look all that different than he had as a boy. He was still skinny, still had hair so dark it was nearly black, still had blue eyes framed with thick lashes. Only now he was tall, his curly hair cut short, and on his right arm Ruthie could make out the lower half of a tattoo, its design obscured by the sleeve of his inside-out T-shirt.

  Their seminar professor, Dr. Finney, started the class by having them all introduce themselves. Ruthie glanced at Gabriel when she said her name, but he showed no recognition upon hearing it. Good. Let him not remember her from St. Catherine’s. Let him not associate her with a place where he had been so incessantly teased. When it was his turn, he introduced himself as Gabe Schwartz. It had to be Gabriel. He must have just shortened his name. She wondered what he was doing at UC Berkeley. St. Catherine’s kids, who often went on to be Coventry kids, typically didn’t end up going to college in Northern California. And the rare ones who did went to Stanford, not Cal.

  Then again, Gabriel Schwartz had not been a typical St. Catherine’s kid. For one thing, he was Jewish, which put him in a tiny minority. Ruthie remembered his mother visiting their class to teach them about Hanukkah. Wearing some sort of flowing purple ensemble, her tight curls forming a thick halo around her head, she casually flipped potato pancakes on the electric griddle while trying to get the students to pronounce “latke.” She was unlike any mother Ruthie had ever met. She made Naomi look normal by comparison. A hand on one hip, the spatula in the other, she leaned conspiratorially toward the students, telling them, “Officially my name is Norma. But Norma—yikes, right? My middle name is Rose, but I’m not really a Rose kind of a girl. So people just call me Schwartzy. Does that work for you guys?”

  The good little southerners at St. Catherine’s School had responded, “Yes, Mrs. Schwartzy.”

  To which she replied, “Mrs.? Ha. Just ‘Schwartzy’ will do.”

  Dr. Finney was a compact man, impeccably groomed, who spoke with an Irish brogue. When it was his turn to introduce himself, he told the class he was Catholic, which Ruthie already knew. Which anyone who was an English major already knew. Dr. Finney’s Catholicism, which he referred to often, was part of his lore. It made him an oddity at Berkeley, whose faculty tended to be secular to the extreme. He explained to the twelve students in the seminar that in order to understand what O’Connor was “up to” in her stories, they must have a working knowledge of Catholicism. He would be their tour guide through her faith.

  “Grace enters through the ragged hole left by the destructive yet redemptive power of the Holy Spirit,” began Dr. Finney, and while Ruthie normally took umbrage at any sort of religious maxim, she found herself scribbling down every word her professor said, lulled by his beautiful a
ccent.

  She was walking out of class when Gabriel—Gabe—sidled up to her.

  “Should we file a complaint?” he asked.

  “Hmm?” she said, not wanting to seem too excited that he was talking to her. His jeans rode low on his hips. His arm muscles were ropey, and he smelled of burnt sage.

  “I thought it was a requirement that professors be atheist, or at least agnostic,” he said.

  “He’s a corrupter of youth, all right,” she said, joining the joke.

  They were outside now, passing under Sather Gate. It was a warm day, no hint of fall, though it would soon be September. The leaves on the old trees, their trunks patterned and knobby, were still dark green. Ruthie had a moment of self-consciousness, a moment of watching herself walk toward Sproul Plaza with this boy. It was as if they were in a movie about a college couple, the meet-cute scene.

  “By the way,” she said to him. “Your shirt is on inside out.”

  “I ran out of clean clothes,” he said.

  “Gross,” said Ruthie, though in truth she didn’t find Gabe gross at all. She found him alluring. She found herself wondering what kind of a kisser he might be.

  “Basically, I’m a disgusting human being,” he said. “Rude, crude, and socially unacceptable.”

  “Mrs. Strokes’s famous words,” she said.

  She hadn’t meant to reveal their shared history. But he had just quoted their fifth-grade history teacher, a woman who had never liked Ruthie, who once asked Ruthie if she was “deaf, dumb, or just disobedient.”

  “How do you know Mrs. Strokes?” he asked. He turned his head, studied her with those dark blue eyes. She felt a little dizzy being watched so closely by him.

  “Wait, you said your name is Ruthie?”

  “Yep.”

  “You didn’t go to St. Catherine’s in Atlanta, did you?”

  “Guilty as charged,” she said.

  “Oh wow. That’s bizarre. I never thought I’d ever run into anyone from there. It wasn’t exactly my scene. But Schwartzy—that’s my mom—was going through a stage where she felt I didn’t have enough structure in my life. Enrolled me at St. Catherine’s in the fourth grade. She got over it fast, though, and I transferred to White Oaks in the middle of fifth.”

  It made sense that he would leave for White Oaks, which had the reputation of being sort of a hippie school.

  “I remember your mom. I remember her making us potato pancakes for Hanukkah.”

  Gabe laughed. “That was one of maybe four times in my childhood that she actually cooked. Schwartzy was a big fan of Stouffer’s frozen dinners.”

  He glanced at his watch, which was black and utilitarian looking. “Damn. I’d like to talk more, but I’m actually running late for something. But I’ll see you in class, right?”

  Ruthie watched him walk away, not hurrying really but taking long strides. She wasn’t ready for him to go. She wanted to keep talking. She wanted to find out more about him, about his life in Atlanta after St. Catherine’s. She wanted to know where he lived, what his major was, whether or not he liked Berkeley. She wanted to see his full tattoo, not hidden by the sleeve of his T-shirt.

  An image flashed in her head: she and Gabriel naked, bodies pressed against each other, his lips on her neck, her head tilted back. Such a contrasting picture to the actual memory of the few clumsy times she and Brendan, a kid from her class at Urban, had slept together. Both were still virgins their senior year of high school, and their coupling was fueled not by desire but by a mutual urge to leave for college having had sex at least once. They had it three times, none of them satisfying, at least not for Ruthie. She was so dry the third time that the condom broke without them realizing it and he came inside her. What followed was a horrible experience: the missed period, the positive e.p.t., having Mimi drive her to the appointment early one Saturday morning, standing after she awoke from the anesthesia used for the procedure—as Mimi insisted on calling it—and having what seemed like a gallon of blood splash on the floor.

  The one silver lining: The night after the abortion was the one time since her sister went to rehab that Ruthie felt close to Julia. Julia who spoke with her for two hours on the phone, who reassured her that she was not a bad person, who told her that no one makes it through life without getting a little stained.

  The following week Ruthie and Gabe sat next to each other in seminar, during which the class discussed the assigned story, “The Enduring Chill.” Ruthie suggested that perhaps Asbury, the superior young protagonist, represented O’Connor at an earlier age.

  “It could have been a self-referential wink-wink. I mean, don’t you imagine she was condescending to her mother when she returned from the writers’ workshop at Iowa?” Ruthie glanced at Gabe while she spoke. He watched her, seemingly interested in what she had to say, though he did not seem to be interested in speaking himself. Indeed, during the three-hour seminar he contributed to the conversation only once, when he explained what the catechism was to a student who did not know. Apparently Gabe knew what he was talking about, because Dr. Finney nodded in agreement.

  When class was dismissed Gabe stood by the door waiting for Ruthie while she packed her books into her messenger bag. She glanced up at him and smiled. They walked down the hall together, walked out of the building, and walked into a brilliantly sunny day.

  “Do you have time to get coffee?” he asked, placing his hand over his forehead to block the sun’s glare.

  Ruthie checked her watch, even though she knew she had time. The O’Connor seminar was her last class of the day.

  “Sure,” she said. She reached into her bag and pulled out a pair of retro sunglasses she had bought at Buffalo Exchange for six bucks.

  “Caffè Strada?” he asked. He had a little gap between his front teeth. She had forgotten about that. She found it endearing, reminding her of her mother’s gap, which Naomi always hated.

  “I’m a Milano girl myself,” she said. “But I can do Strada. Especially because it’s such a nice day.” She pushed the pink-framed sunglasses onto her face.

  At Caffè Strada they each got a cup of coffee and sat at a table outside. And there they stayed for hours, talking. It began with Gabe asking Ruthie how a St. Catherine’s girl managed to land at Berkeley. And so she told him about the plane crash, and moving to San Francisco to live with Mimi and Robert, and being separated from her sister, Julia.

  It was rare for Ruthie to bring up the accident, even rarer to bring up her sister. With new acquaintances she often didn’t mention her dead parents or Julia at all. It wasn’t that she lied. It wasn’t as if she called Mimi and Robert “Mom” and “Dad.” She simply didn’t feel a need to interject the details of her tragic past into casual conversation. And yet she felt compelled to tell Gabe the truth about her life. It was the way he listened, the way he leaned in toward her while she spoke. He seemed actually to be interested. And she wanted to be interesting to him. She wanted him to think that she was a woman with an interesting story.

  She told him about how hard it had been to connect with Julia, even that first year, before things got really bad. How different their lives became, just by virtue of Ruthie being in San Francisco, Julia in Virden. How when Julia finally did come to San Francisco, to visit, the trip had been a disaster and she had ended up running away with some boy she met on Haight Street. How after she was found by the authorities and sent back to Virden, she was put in a drug treatment program for five months, which left her both bitter and subdued. Or at least that was how she sounded on the phone, during their more and more infrequent and dissatisfying calls.

  And then Julia had surprised them all by not only being admitted to the University of Virginia—she was a disciplined student after her time at the Center and her SATs were astronomical—but by deciding to go there, even though it was little more than an hour’s drive from Peggy and Matt.

  When Julia called to tell her the news, Ruthie expressed surprise, saying she assumed Julia would want to go to co
llege as far away from Virden as possible.

  She remembered Julia’s exact reply, and she repeated it to Gabe.

  “‘UVA is the cheapest good school I can go to, and I don’t want to squander my money. The only thing I can count on in this world is my trust fund.’”

  “You took what she said about counting on her trust fund to mean that she couldn’t count on you?” Gabe asked.

  “I know that’s what she meant. I don’t think she’s ever forgiven me for having said—when I was fourteen years old—that she was responsible for our parents’ deaths. Even though I wrote her a letter when she was in rehab, telling her how wrong I had been. Even though I tried to tell her the first time I spoke with her on the phone once she got out.”

  Gabe made a clicking noise out of the side of his mouth. “That’s rough,” he said.

  “But all’s well that ends well, right?” Ruthie said, fearing that she was being too much of a downer. So she told him about how Julia had been a star in the creative writing program at UVA, how she had gone on to get her MFA there, how she had polished her master’s thesis into a true manuscript, which was accepted for publication by an imprint at Penguin. How Julia had sent her a bound manuscript, which Ruthie had read. How the pub date for her sister’s book—titled Straight—was scheduled for March of the upcoming year, March 11, 2002.

  “Is her book good?” Gabe’s elbows were on the table, and he was resting his chin in his palms. They had pushed their coffee mugs to the side. They had already had several refills, and could drink no more.

  “It is. It’s sad. The place she was sent to, the Center, it was totally out of a made-for-TV movie. There was corporal punishment, and isolation rooms where they’d leave you—cut off from everyone—for up to four days. And every afternoon they had these sort of group therapy sessions, but if you weren’t forthcoming enough, or the counselors thought you were lying about something, they’d yell, ‘BS!’ and someone would pull your chair out from under you and sort of kick you into the middle of the ‘sharing’ circle and they’d put a scratchy brown wool blanket over you and everyone would pile on top. It was supposed to symbolize that you were drowning in your own bullshit. Though they’d never go so far as to say the actual word. The initials were as risqué as they’d get.”