Ruby Among Us

by Tina Ann Forkner

  I did remember how she’d leaned over from her seat on the couch to inhale the roses’ sweet fragrance in the morning, a cup of tea in one hand. The memory emerged on canvas when I was only twelve, and even though my strokes weren’t as good back then, it became Kitty’s favorite. She’d set it on a small tabletop easel on a side table in the living room.

  That was when I threw out my crayons and started painting my memories on canvas. I couldn’t photograph them, but on canvas I could refine them over time as things came to me in dribs and drabs. Most of my memories were as incomplete, hazy images emerging, broken and faded, like a photograph that doesn’t develop all the way. But the memory of the rose bowl was complete, and my dream was to fill in all of the half paintings in my life with the truth.

  “Your mom was good at painting and piano,” Kitty had told me. “You will be too. You have Ruby’s gift. If you keep practicing, you will no doubt surpass her.” I took that to mean I had a long way to go to live up to the beautiful paintings by Ruby that were left to me.

  My room was decorated with Ruby’s stunning self-portraits and portraits she’d painted of Kitty and my great-grandmother Freda.

  I tried my own painting of Freda from the only photograph Kitty had of her. I found the black-and-white photo in a dresser drawer. It had taken a week to paint, but it was worth it when Kitty saw the portrait propped on an easel in the living room. Tears had pooled in the dark circles under her eyes.

  “Oh, Mama,” she’d whispered as her hands found her damp cheeks. I’d known then that the likeness, even though it was painted in color, was accurate.

  My paintings of Kitty, who was the one DiCamillo woman I knew well, were of her full figure, head to toe: voluptuous but trim and healthy, dressed in her favorite kimono-style dresses from old photographs when she was in her twenties and thirties. I painted her reading books, sewing quilts, and once, to her chagrin, I even painted her nude. I’d almost destroyed the painting when I saw her mortification. But when she calmed down, she asked why I’d do such a thing.

  “It’s a study of the human body, and yours is the only one I’ve ever really seen.”

  Kitty laughed and thanked me for shadowing various areas of the painting so that it really was modest. She said I’d been very complimentary by covering most of her generous derrière with her long, graying hair when she didn’t even have long hair anymore. She’d loved the red scarf, which was the only color, though muted, that arose from the soft sepia tones.

  After being assured I was simply experimenting with the human form, she made me promise I wouldn’t study nudes anymore.

  I did promise and continued to paint Ruby more than anyone else. Sometimes she looked a lot like me in the paintings, but I also painted her as she might have been at ages she never reached, like thirty or thirty-five, based on comparisons of her pictures and Kitty.

  I lined these portraits above the self-portraits in my room painted by Ruby. I thought they were a nice comparison study of the way Ruby saw herself at times and the way I saw her or imagined her to be.

  As well done as most of my paintings of Ruby were, they never seemed as good as Ruby’s. Even Kitty hinted that Ruby was the more gifted painter of the two of us.

  “But you, Lucy, are the most gifted piano player of the whole family.”

  Kitty did that a lot, compared Ruby and me like we were sisters and not mother and daughter. Of course, she might have gotten confused because I wasn’t too much younger than my mother was when she’d died.

  Often I sat at Ruby’s piano and thought how someday I’d outlive the age of my mother. Would Kitty think then that Ruby was the younger of two daughters? I’d reach for the sheet music Ruby had left on the piano, imagining in my mind that my fingers were hers, dancing over keys she had touched. I wished I could play the music with her, that she would be sitting beside me on the piano bench, teaching me like I knew she had before she died.

  I would have given anything to play one song with her, to feel her beside me, to ask her any question I wanted. So many times I wished I could just talk to Ruby.

  As I grew, I longed for letters from Ruby to me, for friends of hers to dig information from, for a scrap of history beyond what was in our house. Sometimes I’d lie on my bed on top of the Wedding Ring quilt Kitty had made for Ruby and dream of her.

  The quilt was made with green, purple, and gold fabrics, and I wondered if Ruby had helped stitch it. Had she lain on this quilt before, dreaming of who she would be one day? Did she dream of me? Had we snuggled beneath the colors together?

  I asked Kitty things like this because Kitty had kept Ruby’s memory alive for me. But as Kitty became more reticent, I became more certain that the picture Kitty painted of Ruby’s life wasn’t totally accurate—like one of the unfinished paintings that had been left behind.

  What could I do though? I was just a kid and owed everything to Kitty, who juggled a part-time job at the university museum with raising me, homeschooling me, and sewing quilts for extra money. It was an amazing feat really, sometimes requiring me to do my homework during the day while she worked, and then we’d have school when she got home at night. I liked the solitude we had because it allowed me to read, paint, or play my piano all day long. This encouraged Kitty, who always kept a close eye on me, constantly pushing me to work harder.

  “I have plans for you, Lucy. I want you to do better than I have.”

  I took her meaning to be that, at some point in her life, she felt she’d stopped trying. I didn’t want to disappoint her. So I studied and tried and pushed myself. Every day.

  Later, when I walked to the museum after my college classes, Kitty would tell the museum curator, Louise Roy, that when I graduated with my humanities degree, I’d go straight into the master’s program.

  Louise, who had given Kitty a flexible schedule for the past several years so she could raise me, would always say, “I believe it. Lucy can do anything she puts her mind to.”

  While I hated for Kitty to brag about me to her boss, I had been admitted to graduate school and hoped it might make me more acceptable in the eyes of the older students. It’s not that I really wanted to impress them, but I think they thought I was even younger than I actually was. I was young, but I hoped maybe by the time I started graduate school, I would be a more mature age—twenty—and I would get on better with the older students. Of course, I hardly had time to think that far ahead since I needed to get through my final undergraduate semester first.

  The only thing that seemed to take away my joy of going to graduate school was the fact Ruby wouldn’t be there.

  I still wasn’t over her death. Inside time had stopped—stopped the moment I watched Ruby’s cherry wood casket lowered into the dirt. I’d sent a part of myself into the soil, and I felt an invisible pull toward that pit. Maybe that’s why I had such a hard time remembering so many things about Ruby; a part of me had disappeared with her.

  I wanted to remember all of my years with Ruby though. I’d been eight, almost nine, when she died, so I always thought I should have at least been able to recall back to age four or five. It wasn’t so. My mind refused to hang on to hardly any of my memories.

  Often I would pick up the picture of me on the tricycle, wishing for the millionth time that I could remember that moment. I stared into the image, imagining what Ruby’s laugh sounded like.

  Hadn’t she laughed many times on the day she died?

  I remembered one instance when I’d walked out of her bedroom in my Barbie nightgown, wearing her high shiny black heels and big, floppy straw garden hat. Her favorite red beads were draped around my neck, and I’d borrowed her lipstick. I could still hear her laugh, and for a moment I imagined it all around me. That was one memory I knew I must hang on to. I knew I mustn’t let myself forget her laugh. It was the one thing I was never able to paint.

  Mostly I worried that what I remembered weren’t my memories, but stories Kitty told me that had become my own.

  Was I like the woma
n who was so into her work as an archaeologist that when she was old she thought herself to be an Egyptian princess? I cannot remember which book I read that in, but the woman had heard so much about the princess, she’d simply adopted the facts she’d learned as her own reality. Maybe that was me. Maybe the few things I recalled were just stories I’d heard told to me or pictures I’d seen.

  At some point I decided I would never be able to remember Ruby on my own, no matter how desperately my heart wanted a mother—not that I ever stopped wanting to know the truth of her every day. If I could only remember her and know who she was, maybe I could figure out who I was; maybe if I knew myself, I’d be able to paint a self-portrait to hang on my wall beside Ruby’s. I imagined the completed paintings hanging side by side, but in reality Ruby had finished her canvas and I could not.

  In fact, my self-portrait seemed ridiculous. I had no mother, no father, no other grandparents except Kitty. I could never get out of her why she wouldn’t share about my grandfather with me, but she always said I didn’t need to know everything.

  She was wrong. I did. And so I replayed several times a day the rare memories I had.

  Sometimes Ruby seemed so near that I could feel her arms wrap around my shoulders in a morning hug, pulling me against the warmth of the red lacy shirt she was wearing in her self-portrait. But constantly revisiting the day of her death became exhausting.

  I went through a phase where it hurt to know—to literally feel—that Ruby had loved me and yet not be able to remember anything about her except the day I let her die. That part of me was still the little girl who wanted to know her mommy.

  Nothing Kitty could say then comforted me as I turned to my dreams, trying to remember Ruby on my own.

  In fact, Kitty would have to wait until I started to ask real questions, and by then she might’ve wished the questions had never started.

  3

  Kitty used to say that working hard is next to godliness, which surprised me because she claimed she didn’t even believe in God. But I understood what she meant. Working hard was always a matter of self-respect for her, and it always had been for me too. She claimed that our family was filled with hard-working people.

  “Our family?” I pressed.

  She was quickly dismissive. “Let’s just let bygones be bygones, dear.”

  Most of the time I did.

  This night Kitty had worked extra hours at the museum, and I worried about how heavily she leaned now on the cane she tried to avoid using but needed on days when her arthritis flared up. She was too young to be afflicted by such pain, but she often joked it was her punishment for not leading the best life.

  Louise, her supervisor, was a fortyish single mom who had always been able to afford day care and a housekeeper on her single salary. Kitty said Louise tried to pass her good fortune on to someone else, and the “someone else” just happened to be Kitty. I believed our lives might have been much different had it not been for Louise’s compassion and the small amount of Ruby’s life insurance. I appreciated Louise, but on nights like this one I couldn’t help but wonder if Kitty should be working less.

  I glanced up at Kitty from my chair.

  “Why don’t you sit?”

  “You look busy,” she said, sitting down in the blue velvet wingback chair. She looked past me out the window and asked casually what was bothering me.

  I swiveled my desk chair around to gaze out through the back patio doors with her and explained how I hadn’t been able to concentrate because of thinking about Ruby.

  Kitty patted my leg and gazed out the window at the sunflowers leaning in the breeze, their heads bowed toward the sun in the backyard of our Sacramento home. The sun was low in the sky now, with just a slant of light at the edge of the garden, giving the roses an old-fashioned daguerreotype appearance.

  We both still loved Ruby’s garden. Kitty usually came out on the back deck at about seven every morning with a much-appreciated cup of Earl Grey, cream, and sugar. We’d spend a few moments, comfortable in the silence, until someone eventually, regrettably shattered the silence with thoughts about the day. We’d share our plans with each other—little updates that kept us in tune. Sometimes it seemed it was the garden itself that kept us in tune. Often, we ended our evenings, like this one, gazing out at the garden again.

  “What have you been thinking?” asked Kitty. “Is there some question I can answer?”

  I watched her face, compassionate but guarded. I had been asking her many questions lately, and I wondered what she was reluctant to share. I knew she wouldn’t tell me all I needed to know, and I guessed it was her right. In the end I had more respect for her than to pry too much.

  As I sat with Kitty, I thought of the secret photograph I’d been hiding of Ruby, pregnant, with a man who looked to be in his thirties. Before I’d always thought the man my father. I’d wanted to ask Kitty about it, but the time I decided to ask, I looked at her eyes, so devoted to me and concerned, and decided it wasn’t right. Maybe this night would be different. Perhaps it would be a good time to see if Kitty would explain some things about the photograph.

  Afraid Kitty would say no, I took a deep breath and turned my now streaming eyes away from hers. I really did want to remember Ruby, my amazing mom born on the heels of an earthquake, but it seemed like I could never get the memories on my own. If I could do that, I wouldn’t have had to rely on tugging difficult answers out of Kitty.

  “Don’t look so sad, dear.” She leaned toward me, kissed my forehead, and gestured toward the cup of tea still sitting beside me on the desk. “Maria,” she said, reverting to my first name. “I’m not that old, but my health is already failing”—she motioned toward the cane. “I might be alive until I’m ninety-nine, but I could die tomorrow. And I don’t want to take your mother’s memories to the grave with me. I will try to answer your questions, dear. Just ask them.”

  But not all of them, I thought to myself. I was feeling so conflicted about Kitty’s selective sharing that I was almost ashamed of myself. My doubt about her honesty had been building over the last few weeks, and for the first time in my life, I considered sleuthing on my own for details about my mother and our family.

  The idea haunted me like Ruby’s face hovering in one of her self-portraits.

  Every time I walked across the campus, I thought about her short tenure as a student at the small private university I attended. I wanted to know more about her. My anxiety had been building up, and nothing seemed to help. Even my more relaxing pursuits did only a little to help me escape from the thoughts that tormented me. The hole my mother had left grew as deep as the lake in which Kitty had once tried to teach me to swim. I’d felt myself sinking into the dark water and was sure I was drowning when what must have been a current swelled and lifted me up. I’d sputtered and cried, making Kitty promise I never had to go back in again.

  Lately my paintings remained as incomplete as the emptiness of my heart. I could barely compose the piano sheet music I’d been working on, and sometimes I didn’t even feel like eating. My desire to remember Ruby tormented me, and each time I asked Kitty questions about Ruby or our past, she responded but wouldn’t say what I really needed to know. And I wasn’t sure what that even was, but I knew she wasn’t willing to tell me everything. I was convinced there was more.

  Sometimes I would lie on my bed and let my eyes sweep the room, resting finally on the unfinished paintings, knowing that some of the details were on the canvas of my brain but cloaked by something darker that kept me from remembering. I realized it was partly a protective covering I’d draped over my memories as a child, but now I wanted to rip it away. If Kitty could help, I wasn’t sure she would. I considered telling her I needed more than what she seemed willing to tell me, but every time I tried, I felt guilty. I needed facts too, not just her stories. I wanted to demand all of it, but I was afraid of hurting her feelings. After all, she was my grandmother and mother combined in one form.

  “I don’t mean to up
set you, dear,” she said, “but I’ve tried not to push. I admit I pressed too much when you were younger, but talking about it now might help.” These were the times I was the most confused by Kitty. She wanted to talk, just not about everything—I knew.

  She laughed quietly, oblivious to my inner turmoil. “Of course, you might not be a little girl, but you are still stubborn. You get that from me.”

  I had to smile then because she was right.

  “Dear, even if you can’t remember everything about Ruby, it all really happened. Wouldn’t you at least rather hear about it from someone else than never know about her?”

  Yes! I thought. I would!

  If only she knew how much I really wanted to hear about everything, I wondered if she would tell me. I wanted to know the answers to things Kitty had not talked about for years. I wanted to know: Who was Ruby? Who loved her? Who was her father? And, of course, who was mine?

  Kitty took a sip of her tea, allowing a moment for her words to register with me. I stared at my own cup, the steam now gone. I wrestled with the stubborn idea of remembering on my own.

  “I will share my memories with you, dear,” said Kitty. “They can be your memories too. And who knows? Maybe someday your own will open back up.”

  Yes, please, Kitty. Please share them with me, I thought. Share more than Ruby’s talents and her day-to-day activities. Tell me where she came from. Tell me where you came from. Why do we look Latino, especially you, the darkest of the three? Why doesn’t this matter? Who are the men in our lives? I wanted to know. All these thoughts circulated through my mind, but as usual I didn’t say anything.