“There are different kinds of hungers, Ruby,” I say. My voice comes easily now that I am discoursing on my specialty, the treatment of eating disorders. “There are mental, emotional, and physical hungers. If you can listen to your hungers, you can learn to tell them apart. You can’t feed an emotional or mental hunger with food. The more you try, the less you satisfy yourself.” I blink, and realize that this is not my office in New Haven, and Ruby is not one of my regular patients.
“I’m hungry for something else?” She touches her mouth, which is slightly open. Her teeth are not ordinary. Her lips are generous, a deep color I suspect would be red in normal light.
“You could be hungering for love, attention, satisfaction. You could be hungering for your true self, for all the things you needed and never received. Most of my patients eat when they’re angry; they’ve never felt safe expressing anger, so they stuff it down with food. Anger is persistent; it takes a lot of food to keep it quiet.”
Ruby rises and turns her back on me. Her full-length dress was once white; it is tattered and stained now, its hem muddied and stepped on. Through small rips in the fabric I catch glimpses of her body. It is smooth, pale, desirable. I remember why I decided to specialize in this field. I have always loved large women.
In college I deemed this perverse, so I studied how to cure their affliction, instead of working on my own. I majored in nutrition and psychology as well as general medicine. Now I live in a cauldron of uncertainties, as women I adore enter my office, learn what their fat is really trying to tell the world, learn to speak with their mouths as well as their bodies, and change into women I couldn’t care less about.
Ruby is one of the beautiful ones, more lovely large than she would be thin. Her features have grace and clarity. I know this even though I have not seen her by daylight. Even under these circumstances—my wrists bound to each other and my ankles tied to this chair—I find myself falling in love with her.
“You think I’m angry?” she asks, turning back. For a moment she stands still, though I sense a lot of activity going on behind her face. Her hands tighten into fists. “I never get angry.” Her voice shakes.
“Why not?”
“Anger destroys people. It reaches out and rips them to shreds.” Her hands open. She stares down at her naked palms. “I watched what my father’s anger did to me, and to the other kids. He twisted us all up. I got the younger ones away, most of the time, so he’d concentrate on me, but I’m never going to get mad like that and hurt people.”
“You never got mad back?”
“Once, I did. Just once.” She flexes her arm. “It never set quite right, but now it’s okay,” she says, looking at her forearm. “I thought maybe everything gets fixed, this side of the grave, but my appetite’s still out of control.”
“Your appetite isn’t a physical thing; it’s other things, turned sideways.” I feel my curiosity rise, wanting to study how she has changed. But I can’t think about that now. “How many children in your family?”
“Four.”
“And you’re the eldest? You tried to take care of them?”
“Tried to? I did take care of them. Somebody had to, with Mama gone since I was seven, and Papa—Papa…whenever they needed something, I figured some way to get it for them. I kept them clean. I bought them new shoes. I made their lunches and sent them off to school on time. We stuck together. I raised them good.” She smiles, her eyes looking over my shoulder. “I wonder how they’re doing now.” She frowns. “I’ve been afraid to go back and check up on them. The hunger…”
Her arms go around herself. “I always took care of everything, Doctor. When this man, Darcy, started seeing my sister Linda, I tried to find out about him. Nobody knew where he came from or anything about him, so I told him to stop seeing her. After that, he came to see me. Papa couldn’t stop him. Darcy told me he’d make me strong, like him. I thought if I was stronger I could deal with Papa and make the kids safe forever. But first I got sick…”
She paces away, stands with her face to the wall for a moment, comes back. “Everything changed when I got sick. The kids got mad at me, and so did Papa. They all thought the roof caved in. Ruby’s not supposed to get sick. Who’s going to take care of the housework? Who’s going to pay the bills if Ruby’s not working? Who’s going to phone in sick when Papa’s been drinking too much?’”
“Who’s taking care of Ruby while she’s sick?” I ask. Her story is familiar to me in outline; I have heard it from many women. Every time, though, it hurts me. Every time my own response confuses me.
Of course, I never get sick either.
“Why, nobody really knew what to do for me. I’d never been sick before.” She walks to the window, lays her hand flat on the glass a moment, then lifts it away. Living hands leave a print on cold glass, yet Ruby’s hand leaves no mark. “I felt so tired, and I felt so evil for watching them run around wondering how to take care of themselves. Linda, she was always the wild one, but she tried to cook. She brought me a rose and all I could do was cry. I wanted to get better right away and get things back to normal, but I couldn’t. Darcy came for me three times. He shared himself with me. He said he would give me power, and he did.”
She turns toward me. Half her face is silvered by the moon, half burnished by candlelight. A tiny sob rises in her throat. “On the third day, I rose again, and I tried to go home to them. I wanted to make sure they were all right. I was walking home—I hadn’t yet learned to fly—when the hunger rose in me, and I couldn’t stop it. Three people died by the time I woke up. My hunger eats me up, and I can never escape it until too late.” She looks at her hands. “It’s been six years, Doctor. I can’t go on this way. Most of the others like me survive on just a little blood—a couple mouthfuls—they can stay in one place a long, long time without people noticing. I can never stay anywhere more than a week—people die and the police start looking for me. I can’t stand doing this anymore.”
She puts her hands to her cheeks. “When I found that copy of the Gazette, with the article about your work, I thought—can you help me?”
I look down at my hands. Though I am certain the circulation is cut off, my long fingers are pale, not purple with congested blood. My class ring is heavy on the third finger of my left hand. I have married my career, since I cannot find a woman I love without working to make her unlovable. I look up at Ruby. “You want me to help you stop bingeing? I don’t think we can do that in one night.”
Her hands grip each other. She closes her eyes a moment.
She smells like ripe apricots.
“Work like this takes years, Ruby.”
“I don’t have years.” She stares at me, then comes back to sit facing me across the candles. She reaches out to touch a pulse point on my neck. “You don’t either. Help me, Doctor. I feel the hunger waking, and you’re the closest blood.”
I hunch my shoulders, feeling exhaustion along the lines of my bones. I said goodbye to my last patient at five P.M., left my secretary to close up the office for the weekend, and drove two hours to come here to Greystone Bay. I have my retreat here, a converted apartment upstairs in one of the Victorian houses on North Hill; I spend my weekends here alone, walking the pebbly beach, into the fog and away from my work.
After I had some of “the best chowder on the coast” at the Golden Oyster, I went home to bed…and woke in this house from a sleep deeper than any I am accustomed to. I know where we are. Out the window, I can see Blind Point across the bay. We are in a deserted beach house north of town, between the sea and the marshes, one of a scattering of houses an ambitious developer built in the twenties, hoping to establish another Jazz Age getaway, but the lost generation did not want to get quite this lost; the project withered. I have walked past these rotting houses on windy days, when they seemed ready to blow away like paper. No one lived here for long, and no one lives here now.
No rescue will walk in off the midnight beach.
At first I thought Ruby was c
razy, with her talk of blood. Now my doubts are gone.
“There are several steps to this,” I say, letting my training take over. “The first thing you must do is accept yourself just the way you are. Until you love yourself, there is no hope for change.”
“Doctor, haven’t you heard me? How can I accept myself when I can’t forgive myself? I am a hateful, evil creature. I am totally out of control. I break commandments to survive.”
“Cast out everything you’ve been taught. Everything you know is wrong. Recognize you have always done the best you could with the information you had at the time. Say this: ‘I, Ruby, love and forgive myself unconditionally.’”
Sobs shake her, but they make no noise and no tears. She tries to repeat the affirmation. She breaks down on the third word. She covers her face with her hands.
“Ruby, I love and forgive you unconditionally,” I say. I feel this is true, but it hurts me to say it, because once she believes me, the balance will start to tip, and she will be her own person. She will reclaim the power she never knew she gave away. I sigh. “I love you, Ruby.”
“How can you? I don’t believe you! I’m awful, worse than Papa!”
“Ruby, I love you. I love you. No matter what you’ve been, no matter what you’ve done, no matter what’s been done to you. I love you.”
She rises and comes around the table, to stand between me and the light, a large dark silhouette. “You lie. No one could love me.” She leans closer. I wonder if she sees better in the dark than I. Her clothes smell of rot, but her own scent is musk and apricots. I look up toward her eyes, knowing my love is naked in my face. “You love me,” she whispers. Then, louder, “You must be crazy.”
“Throw the beliefs away, Ruby, or we’ll never get this done.”
She gasps. “What?” she whispers.
“Throw away your beliefs. You are not evil. You are not horrible. You are a perfect being. Say it. ‘I, Ruby, am perfect the way I am.’”
“I, Ruby…” She stumbles away, bumping the table. She staggers toward the wall and puts her face against it.
“Say it.”
She says it, sarcastically. She turns to face me.
I smile at her. “You have to say it as though you believe it. We can’t go any further until you convince me you believe it. ‘I, Ruby, am perfect the way I am. I, Ruby, love and forgive myself unconditionally.’ Say it. And feel it.”
She speaks in the night, sometimes loudly, sometimes very softly. The moon rises above the house and out of sight, leaving light and shadows behind. Ruby alternates between fighting me and fighting everything she has ever learned. She paces. She screams at me. Once she stalks toward me and lays her hand against my throat, lifting her lip to show me her teeth. Her canines are longer than usual, but I forget to be afraid. The candles melt down to puddles of pleasant-smelling wax.
At last she stands in the center of the floor, her feet planted firmly, her hands on her hips. “I, Ruby, am perfect the way I am. I love myself unconditionally. I forgive myself—I forgive myself completely!”
At last I believe her.
“Listen,” I say. My voice is hoarse. “I hear that you believe that now, but your resolution will falter. When that happens, there is a source of strength you can call on. Address it however you please. Some call it God. I think of it as my second self. When you need help, ask for it. It will come.”
“I don’t believe you! Are you a doctor or a priest?”
“I’m a midwife. You asked me to help you give birth to a new self, Ruby. I’m doing my job. This is one of the steps in the procedure. Believe in a force you can draw on for strength.” My head falls forward. The excitement and challenge of the work no longer sustain me; I am too tired.
“Well, all right. If I can believe I’m a perfect being, I suppose I can believe in The Force.” She sits on the floor at my feet. She touches my knee. The candles have dwindled to weak blue flames. “Doctor,” she murmurs, “I’m hungry.”
“Is it a physical hunger? Consult your body.”
She sits a moment in silence, her head lowered. “Yes,” she says at last.
“If it is a physical hunger, you should take care of it.” The words are coming out of me by rote. “Think of what you most want to eat. Don’t settle for anything else.” I shake my head, trying to wake up. I cannot believe what I just said. “The secret now is to eat slowly. Pause often and ask yourself if you are satisfied. When you are satisfied, stop eating. Know there will always be food. You don’t have to eat it all now. You can have more tomorrow, or whenever you want it.”
She sits still a long moment, staring up at me. I glance out the window. False dawn lights the line between sea and sky.
Ruby rises to her feet. She comes to me, gently lifts my chin. Her lips are warm against my neck; her breath smells of ripe fruit. I close my eyes.
I wonder if I will be awake when she stops.
KVETCHULA, by Darrell Schweitzer
“Ruth,” my grandmother Esther once explained to me, “there’s no helping it. You’re a born kvetch. A kvetch is a complainer, a person who complains and complains all the day long and all through the night, because kvetches, they don’t have peaceful dreams. A kvetch can’t stop kvetching no more than they can get rid of the damp when it rains and soaks everybody to the skin. The kvetch just kvetches about being wet; then she sneezes, and then kvetches about sneezing, because a kvetch kvetches, plain and simple. The woid is both a noun and a voib, depending on where you put it.”
Grandmother Esther said “woid” and “voib” ’cause she’s is not sophisticated like me, though she did go to school.
So I am a kvetch. The world needs its kvetches, or else why would God make so many of them? A dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it.
I tell you, it keeps me constantly busy.
There’s my husband Morris, whom I married out of pity, and that’s the truth, because he needed looking after so badly. Every moment of the day he keeps me hopping.
“Morris, your spectacles are on top of your head, so stop tearing the place apart,” I have to tell him, and “Morris, did you change your shorts?” (and this in front of people sometimes, but I’ve got to remind him), and also “Morris, stop wearing those awful ties!”
The ties are the worst part. I don’t know where he gets them. It’s no use if I throw them out, because he always gets more. I swear they’ve got a whole department of devils in Hell just working full time to keep my husband supplied with ties, for the sole purpose of trying the patience of Ruth Leibowitz.
And my patience has its limit, to tell you the truth.
The glaring, puke-green silk one, that one I can live with, or the day-glo pink one with the eyeball, even the one with the hula-girl under the palm tree, and I refuse to take seriously the plain white one he wears with a black shirt so he looks like some Mafia don. But his warped idea of class is going to our fancy 20-year highschool reunion banquet showing off a tie with a picnic-table pattern that’s got enormous ants all over it! With that one, he goes too far. That one I took to the office and fed into the shredder, but it did me no good, he has more of them. Maybe they grow in his closet. I swear he wears them just to torment me, such an ungrateful man.
Then there are the vampires. Morris, he’s partial to wolf-men and mummies and Frankensteins like he is still a little boy, but he is really loves are these vampires, especially the young and sexy ones he watches over and over again on our VCR. Every vampire movie ever made, my Morris he’s got them all, and he sits all day and watches them when he should be mowing the lawn or changing his shorts or something.
Once, just to make a joke, I ask him if he’s ever seen Mein Yiddishe Dracula, and he doesn’t blink, and starts rummaging among his Mount Everest pile of tapes and says, “I think it’s in here somewhere, Honey Love.”
My Morris, he’s totally nuts about vampires and such.
So I’m not surprised—but this is not to say I’m not appalled—when he says, “Honey Love, gu
ess where we’re going for vacation. To Transylvania. I’ve saved up. I’ve already bought the tickets. So we’re going on the Deluxe Vampire Tour.” And then he adds, “There’s no refunds.”
You could hear my jaw drop in Brooklyn. We live nowhere near Brooklyn.
Morris, he’s all smiles, like some kid who’s got an “A” on his report card or something. He’s even gone and bought a new tie for the occasion. It’s all black with a glow-in-the-dark bat with motorized wings that really flap. He’s particularly proud of that. And the noise it makes. Whir…flap, flap. Oy!
Kvetch? Maybe you think I should celebrate?
So the summer arrives and off we go to the airport with Morris wearing his stupid tie, which delays us because its tiny motor makes the security machines bleep, and the guards look at Morris like he’s a mad bomber with an exploding tie, but finally we get through, and he babbles all the way about Vlad the Impaler, who was not a nice man at all, and nosferatu, a word which could never fit into the crossword puzzle I’m doing to occupy myself with and hide my embarrassment.
Then we’re in Bucharest and everything gets much worse. Our tour group is forming up, and now there’s a whole busload of people just like Morris. They jabber and jabber things like, “Listen to them, the children of the night, such beautiful music they make,” but I don’t hear no music, and I don’t care, it’s so awful, because everyone one of them is wearing that same damn tie!
* * * *
Now I have to admit those mountains are pretty, the Balkans or Carpets or whatever they are. “Carpathians,” Morris whispers in a tone like it’s some crime to make a little mistake in geography, even if I did graduate almost thirty years ago and how many of these Romanians know their> way around Jersey City?)
So they’ve got nice mountains. Almost like the Catskills.
The Vampire Megapack Page 16