by Ilie Ruby
“It’s me, Ruthie,” I said, knocking on the door.
Mrs. Green came out, thin, frail. She closed the door behind her.
My job had been to catch her, to keep her on the planet. But things would be harder now. Even though he’d not lived at Wild Acres since I’d been there, Mr. Green had been a grounding presence.
“This was not his life,” she insisted, her hands drifting to his thick glasses in her hair, now matted on one side. She pushed her gold bangles back up over her tiny wrists, trembling. I opened the suitcase on the table in the hallway. She pulled out the items, one by one. One day, I would help her pack up all her husband’s belongings into one box, and she’d remark that it was strange that a life as big as his could be contained in one box.
Carefully unfolding the suit and the tie, she took a deep breath. She looked at me, then at Dr. B., who stood a few feet away, holding a notepad, her gray hair pushed back in a red headband. “Do you need something, Fay?” Dr. B. asked.
“This morning, I made banana pudding, his favorite. I made it this morning as soon as I got here. He didn’t touch it,” she said, shaking her head. “It didn’t matter. I got into his bed. I must have fallen asleep. I’d never done that before. I slept better than I had in years,” she said, her eyes pleading. When she woke up, he had passed. “He loved light blue because it matched his eyes.” Her face grew flushed as her hands searched the suitcase. “His silk robe. Where is the robe? My husband needs his blue robe.”
I pushed the robe into her hands. She drew it to her lips and closed her eyes. “I just don’t know whom I’ll wake up for every day,” Mrs. Green said, wiping her eyes. She searched my face, touching my cheek. “You are a good girl, Ruthie.” As I hugged her, small bird cries escaped from her lips. If it was possible to call the Shekhinah, her spiritual essence, I wanted to do that now. I closed my eyes, thinking the sounds outside too brash: the sudden splash of water from a tangled garden hose, a blaring horn, a siren, the squeak of hinges before a shuffle through the front door, the echo of a tennis ball tossed against the apartment next door. None of these sounds seemed the right one—the sounds of life whirling on.
“Come, Fay. Let’s go to him,” said Dr. B., placing her hand on Mrs. Green’s back.
I didn’t follow them. They escaped into the room, and I imagined Mrs. Green’s fingers sweeping a comb over the tufts of his silver hair, then carefully dabbing his cracked lips with a cool washcloth.
During the funeral, I stood next to Dolly, watching Mrs. Green.
Her two sons stood on either side of her, holding her up, each with an arm hooked in hers. They’d flown in and would leave again in a couple of hours. I was already trying to imagine how I would catch her, taking her to places where she’d see that there was more of life to be lived. “She doesn’t look good,” Dolly worried, nodding at her.
Fistfuls of dirt fell onto the casket. It had started to rain, the mist dampening our faces.
“We never sat shiva for Mom,” said Dolly.
Our mother had been cremated, something Jews usually weren’t. I slipped my hand into Dolly’s, feeling her smooth short fingers, the edge of her squared fingernails. My mother’s urn was kept in Dr. B.’s office, on the third shelf in a wall safe, behind the “D” encyclopedia.
“Where’s Graham? Shouldn’t he be here with you?” she said.
“He’s working,” I said too quickly, noticing the holes in the toes of Dolly’s scuffed gray shoes.
We wore cut black ribbons pinned to our shirts, a sign of being torn with grief. No one from the funeral should bring death back into the apartment. Placed outside the front door: a pitcher of water, paper towels, a small trash can. We covered all the mirrors. We took off our shoes. We sat on low stools to show we were humbled, that we knew we were never far from our return to the earth. We let our hair tangle as we sat for seven days—“shiva” was the Hebrew word for “seven.” The number of days we would say goodbye.
After the funeral, we set out a dairy meal of boiled eggs, a symbol of life. I thought no one would come. I feared the quiet. But people came every day. The old came, carrying memories of youth on their backs. Old friends and strangers came, those he’d done quiet favors for, who’d never paid him back. They brought comfort foods—trays of kugel, chicken soup, brisket, bagels, and fruit. I missed Graham, and yet I was glad for his absence. I sat with Dolly, our shoulders pressed together in our black dresses. My thoughts racing, I asked my sister if she’d dress me after my final hour, if she’d make sure I had my favorite robe, that I was taken care of, that I was resting where I wanted to be. “If there’s no one else, will you?”
“Ruthie, you don’t have to ask,” she said.
On the seventh day, Mrs. Green wiped her eyes and walked outside. Everyone had a story about Mr. Green, and she said she felt like she’d met him all over again. This was what shiva was for, to help the loved ones of the deceased finally know him as he let himself be known by the world. I thought about my own mother, and how I’d never really known her. I remembered how that last disappearance was unmistakably different from all the previous ones.
YOU WOULD STUMBLE on imagined rocks for days. You would reach for a hand that was not there. You would hear a voice when you were alone. Sometimes you could imagine a door opening. The scent of her perfume would drift by when you unfolded the sheet. Ring marks from a glass of whiskey would appear on the table. Her tall black boots would stiffen on the mat. For weeks, you would tell yourself that the dead refused to leave you just yet. You would run to the sliding glass door and press your lips to it, breathless, believing she could still kiss.
If you were a child, you would jump on your bicycle and pedal as fast as you could, holding your breath, praying as hard as you could that you would get where you wanted to go before the next day, and the next day, and the next, caught up with you.
The only choice: to keep moving.
SEVERAL WEEKS LATER, Mrs. Green pressed a new tallith in my hands, having buried her husband with his. I stood beside her in the courtyard, listening as she said a blessing to help us begin our day. Mrs. Green mourned something she had lost, and I something I had never had.
“I think of him every day,” I admitted. She nodded with generosity and folded her hands.
Inside my apartment, I let in the absence. I rearranged the pillows on my blue striped couch. I took out my oils and worked on a new painting, this one of the desert. I pored through the books I’d borrowed from Dr. B. and brought the big glossy art book over to the couch. I set it on my coffee table and opened it to my favorite page—an oil painting from 1893 of a naiad, a water fairy. The naiads guarded a particular body of water. In the painting, a young river nymph peers through the trees at a young man lying on the bank of a river. There are leaves strewn through her long dark hair. Her lips are red. She is young, hesitant, but not enough to keep her from her investigation. My child, she was waiting.
Early each morning, I walked with Mrs. Green, trying to fill the time she’d spent with her husband.
WHAT WOULD MY mother say if she were alive? I wondered. Would she take my face in her hands and say, “I understand, my love, be strong,” or would she throw her hands up and shout that all her suffering was wasted on me, that I hadn’t learned a goddamn thing from her mistakes?
During this time no man so much as looked at me. Perhaps Graham’s energy, that which he emitted, had traveled across the waves and put a protective fence around me. The whole dance was about defense, about damage, about communication, about rescuing, and about the strength of chemicals emitted from bodies in waiting and those under stress.
I didn’t want to see other men. The mailman had leaned in too close when asking me to sign for packages that arrived at Wild Acres. “You like to surf? Swim? Eat?” Every time I saw him, he had another question. I always answered no. “I don’t like to do anything. Just work,” I told him finally, as gently as I could.
“The more you hang on, the harder it will be, Moose,”
said Dolly. “Face it. It’s over.” I wondered if, in his mind, I existed beyond this apartment. Did he think of me at work, as I did him? I took my mother’s photograph off the wall and held it on my lap, asking her to bring through a sign, a dream, anything.
There were people who had it much worse, my mother said, over and over. Do you know what your life could be like? You were lucky. You were lucky to have a roof over your head, even if it was the roof of a car, and to have the food you had, even if it was Coke and kettle corn, and to have people around, even if they kept disappearing.
The sky was overcrowded with prayers. The Wailing Wall was packed with wishes.
Hills were still burning in the wake of the Santa Ana winds. Strawberry fields were igniting, and little boys were watching their fathers get taken away for reasons they did not understand. There were girls stolen under trees, who’d return to school the next day, their eyes vacant and their lips swollen. Children were tossed out of cars on the side of roads like empty bags. But you never heard about them, those who could sustain damage and just keep going. They moved forward with their lids at half-mast. They were always tired at school. They wore dirty clothes. You never heard about how they walked twenty miles in the hot sun, choosing their direction based only on the sliver in the sky, the corner of a gas station sign, or a steeple peeking out from the canopy in the distance. You never heard about the children who refused to get into strangers’ cars because it wasn’t safe, knowing they’d have to continue to walk alone, directionless, into an unknown future.
No matter what had happened, Dolly and I would always look as if we’d just narrowly escaped. We knew we were lucky.
I thought of my child. I could feel her winged impatience. What was she telling me? She wanted to be here, now, with me.
ON THE NIGHT of the Thunder Moon in July, I stood on the second-floor landing at Wild Acres. Gazing down the long burgundy hallway, I sucked in my breath. Graham leaned against my door, holding a vase full of white tiger lilies. I watched him pace up and down the hallway with it pushed against his chest. Then he set it down on my mat. Mrs. Green came out twice. I watched him shake his head no. She spotted me first and waved. Keeping my eyes focused on Mrs. Green, I picked up my bag and made my way toward them.
He stood there, knees flexed, legs apart, feet planted firmly on the ground as if on the wooden deck of a ship. “You have every right to be upset. There was some trouble. I couldn’t get back,” he said.
“Two tubes of Titanium White, at your service,” I said, handing Mrs. Green the bag of paints. She tried to force a smile, but it didn’t work out so well. At least she was painting again, working on a still life that I’d helped arrange. A frayed blue fisherman’s net flowing over a cluster of bougainvillea petals, atop Mr. Green’s Los Angeles Dodgers–signed baseball from 1963. “I’ll be fine,” I told her. She raised her chin and told me to call if I needed her. Inside my apartment, Graham folded his wetsuit over the railing. “This season was hell,” he said, reaching for me. I became a shadow slipping away from him. His hands returned to his pockets.
“Mr. Green died,” I said.
“I know,” he said. His scent was equal parts salt water, sweat. His thin white T-shirt was ripped, drenched to his chest. “What will she do now?” he asked, putting his hands on my shoulders.
“She’ll go on,” I said, pushing back from his chest.
That night, I layered myself to safety, sleeping in my bathrobe over a sweatshirt and my nightgown. “Ruthie, are you awake?” he asked.
“A little,” I whispered.
“How do we come back from here, Ruthie-Ruth?”
I turned on the light. “You’ve never been left. I always watch you go,” I said. He nodded. He kissed me in a rush, pouring his saltwater lips over my breasts. I hadn’t practiced the pattern of anger. It was not instinctive for me.
Perhaps during that thunderous boom of creation that my mother used to speak of, amid the splitting atoms and the collision of gases, there were souls that had split. This was the Split Souls Theory of Creation. Now, these souls with torn edges were colliding, trying to find their beginnings. The odds were not in your favor. The statistics were daunting. But you told yourself that if you just kept moving, you could find yours. For a time, you decided that you’d think only about exceptions to the rule. Mrs. Green was proof that you could find true love, the only person I knew besides my great-grandmother Ruth who’d found hers. Mrs. Green spoke about how she had never believed in the possibility of a soul mate until she met her husband. These were the types of stories that kept us all hoping. This was the type of story that I’d wanted to have with Graham. Not with anyone else. Only him.
The next morning, I left to do my rounds, knowing I’d return to an empty house. Hours later, I found him sitting on the porch, patching his wetsuit.
How dare I make hospital corners on the bed after all this silence, Dolly said, when she surprised me with a visit later that afternoon. Graham had gone for a swim while I made dinner. How dare I go on like nothing had happened. “You’re in a love trance. You’re suffering from domestic amnesia. There’s a welcome sign on your door with a Christmas wreath and a white dove, for God’s sake.” She assessed my damage, my folded blue afghan on the arm of the couch. My yellow woven place mats set at my miniscule kitchen table. The waiting pitcher of fresh-squeezed lemonade in my refrigerator. The peaches on the counter, freshly washed. It was clear. I had crossed the line.
“None of the Sunshine Family dolls came from Russian stock and had the knock-knees that run in our family, like Mom’s, and like yours, too. Don’t forget that.”
I knew I shouldn’t start with her. But she forced me to defend myself. “You’re right. I should be a domestic rebel all my life. Since I’m only allowed to be one thing,” I said.
She was at a loss for words, for once. Sitting cross-legged on the couch, she fiddled with the two gaping holes in the afghan.
“Dr. B. made that. Don’t do that.”
“Sorry. Well, it’s old and ratty,” she said. I took it from her and folded it away.
“Dalia,” I said, sitting next to her.
“Your relationship is not b’shert. Don’t even think for a minute that this man is your destiny. Moose, this man will always leave you.”
“I’m in love with him.”
“Is that a threat?”
“I guess to you that is.”
She sat back. “If I loved somebody,” I wouldn’t care if you didn’t like it.”
“He doesn’t love me. See what happened,” I said.
She hesitated, her eyes softening. “Now you’d better fucking look out for yourself.”
When Graham walked in, Dolly jumped like a frightened horse. He had that sandpaper look, his muscles taut, his hair strung in wet locks, his skin blanched by salt. They exchanged hellos, and she said she had to go.
Graham stayed for one more night. That evening, we sat on the porch, our shoulders touching. He told me that the animals were being taken from the ocean.
There were always more boats to be brought down, more pirates to stop from pillaging, he said. “The law’s useless, even with the bans. There’s no law in the ocean. No one knows what goes on. It’s a different world there. Different laws. The animals still need protection.”
I wasn’t sure I believed him. I wasn’t sure what I believed anymore. Tails of starlight streaked the waves. My eyes caught the tiny lights that trickled down from the rivers of the blue-black. What rested there in the highest-up, seeds of lightning. You couldn’t catch light. By the time you saw it, it was already a memory. Most things you thought you’d caught would not be yours. Not the single-celled organism in the ocean, the one with the microscopic beating fins. Not the girl in your painting, the one who was running. Not the jumping trout. Not the spirit of your unborn child. Not love.
Light, like water, pushed into footsteps.
I got up. Before I could say anything, Graham pulled me onto his lap. We clasped hands. He st
ayed there, inside me. I climbed off him, my thighs aching. This is my body, I thought. My body.
I looked down over the railing, letting my fingertips touch the bougainvillea petals. I wanted to recapture the past, as if in a net. To run with it back across the beach to the first night I met Graham, to even before that, and then to spill it out over the sand so that I could relive it.
Chapter Seventeen
MY BLOOD WOULDN’ T spill in August. The Red Moon.
This moon signified the end of summer and the beginning of the cool ocean breeze. Graham arrived with a bruise under his right eye. “It’s nothing,” he said, when I reached for him. I told him we had to go. He knew where.
As we rode through the streets, the wind pushed against my face as I opened my mouth, breathing it in, memory, letting it dry my tongue, my lips, letting my tears drift onto the sides of my face, my hair, my ears, my neck.
The Bougainvillea Castle, still here after all this time, was more lush, more full with blossoms. When I looked up from beneath the canopy, I saw fuchsia, purple, and orange hues spilling across the night.
My heart flitted in my chest like a trapped bird as I gripped my bike handles, my toes touching the earth, one foot down, then the other up, tipping back and forth, letting my weight help me decide where to go. Clusters of vines heaved petals across the air, their buds reaching out ravenously, splaying the biggest blossoms. Into the vines were woven the secrets of all the girls who had gone before and after me. The voices of those girls I could almost hear now. I pushed back my hair, trying to listen.
“Is this how you remembered it?” Graham asked, as I got off my bike. He stood next to me, his hand touching my shoulder. I felt the heat of the white sky pressing down, and the drumming pulse of the flowers. I felt the blood rushing through the veins of the trees, deepening the cadence of memory. I felt the long rain piercing the grass; the heat of the animals breathing in the dark; the quick beat of small hands on drums; the scrape of bird wings across tinny skies, their moonlit tails whipping against the flash of night, passing.