by Lynne Hugo
“Have an apple,” she commanded, thrusting one at me.
“If you don’t mind, I’d rather…”
“I said, eat the apple.” She anticipated the refusal that had, indeed, been on my tongue.
I took it and bit. The apple had lolled about the backseat with several others for days. The inside was mushy, with a slight vinegar taste, like hardening cider in large brown spots. I have no idea how I kept it down.
“There, you feel better now, don’t you?” she said later, after I’d thrown out the bare core.
“I do, thanks,” I answered. How could she be so wrong? It was a moment of crystalline clarity. The Ruth inside me who was discreet, separate, unknowable to her, didn’t have to work to bring what I felt into sync with what she wanted me to feel. With a whole different sense of privacy, I locked the stall of the bathroom door when we went inside to wash up.
The next day, I tried to hang on to that sense that I could want to be separate, that my power lay in my separateness, but by noon it was slipping away. Mother was trying to engage me, I could tell, with cheer and a solicitousness about how I was feeling, and I was unable to resist.
“Look, we’re really coming into mountains,” she said that afternoon, when we’d finally swung north onto Route 25, toward the Colorado border. There were fewer adobes already, although most signs were still in Spanish as well as English, and Indian artifacts dominated at little roadside stores when we left the highway. I longed for some turquoise earrings, but all of them were for pierced ears, something my mother considered an inarguable sign that a woman was a tramp, so they were out of the question. Timbered ranges rose, inviting and cool-looking on the horizon. Perhaps it was that, and that I knew we were drawing closer to Roger with each hour, but by the end of the day, I was more my familiar self and, at least outwardly, back to trying to keep her happy. I must have thought that all of us would slip with a satisfying click into our roles, that Roger would help me, and our family would lurch on as before, as God intended.
“Tonight, we’ll call Roger and tell him we’ll be there late tomorrow. Won’t it be wonderful to all be together again?” It was as if she’d read my mind and the sense of separateness I’d discovered the previous day eroded a little more.
“Yes, Mother, it will be wonderful.”
OF COURSE, WE WERE much later than we’d said we’d be. Mother was infamous for grossly unrealistic estimates of travel times. I knew that Roger knew that, but I also knew that he’d been standing at the curb at least a half hour before Mother had said we’d arrive. That was what we did, part of going the second, third, fourth mile. We knew what Mother expected. Still, I felt guilty as soon as I saw him, wanting him to know that I’d had no part in making us so late. It was beyond dusk, darkness rising skyward off the ground, and a deepening chill gathering. Roger stood without fidgeting, his square body massive and steady, bare armed, a grin spreading across his features as he made out our faces behind the bug-smeared windshield.
He had the good sense to hug Mother first. I watched him, inwardly marveling at how sincere his joy appeared. Eyes closed, he wrapped her in his arms and leaned back, lifting her off her feet. I saw that he’d let his dark sideburns grow much longer, and wondered if Mother would say anything right away.
“Put me down, young man,” she giggled. Rog laughed in response but held her another minute before he let go.
“Get over here, Ruthie, it’s your turn to get squeezed to death,” he said, still laughing and turning his wide arms to me. When he pulled me to him, I hugged him like a drowning person. All that had happened, all he didn’t know, everything I’d done and not done, the extent of my aloneness coalesced in the strength of my grip on him. I think I intended never to let go.
“Hey, hey. I’m the one supposed to squeeze you to death. Down, girl,” he gasped.
I let go and stepped back, looking at the pavement. Tears had started in my eyes; too much feeling was in the moment, more than I could stand. I wished I could tease him, say something to lighten myself, but at the same time, it was all much too serious for that, and I opted to just be silent. He looked at me for a clue, but I couldn’t give him one.
“I got you a room pretty near campus,” he said, our old way of taking each other off the hook. “Let’s head over there and I’ll unload your stuff. I want to show you around the school, too. Tomorrow, maybe. It’ll be too dark tonight.”
“Are you all packed up?” Mother asked.
“Not exactly. I’ve been taking finals, you know. One more to go, Calculus, tomorrow afternoon.”
“Good. Then we ought to be able to take off the day after tomorrow, first thing? I’m so tired of being on the road.”
Roger didn’t answer her, just smiled and said, “I can imagine. How did…things go?” He meant, of course, grandmother’s arrangements, but Mother answered brightly, misinterpreting the question or pretending to.
“I so wish you’d been at the Grand Canyon with us. It was simply spectacular, wasn’t it, Ruthie? Just so beautiful. We loved it. You know, of course, I’ve always wanted to go there.”
“I know. Great, I’m glad you had a good time.”
This must be the twilight zone, I thought. A good time? Our grandmother was dead and I knew the cause of death, or one of them, anyway. I needed to talk with Roger alone, though I had no idea how I’d manage it. Since Mother and I left home, the only contact I’d had with him had been the briefest of impersonal conversations while she stood a foot away, impatient for the receiver. He didn’t know what we’d done at the nursing home; he didn’t know what Grandmother said to me; he didn’t know about the ashes flying over Grand Canyon.
We all crammed ourselves into the Rambler’s front seat and Roger drove us to the motel, a ramshackle one-story spread that looked out of place near the University buildings. “You two settle in. I’ll leave you alone a bit, and we can go get something to eat in an hour or so. How does that sound?”
“No,” Mother said, too sharply, I thought. “I haven’t seen you since Christmas. You stay right here. Ruth and I will just wash up and we can go get something now. Maybe we should get carry-out anyway, and bring it back here. That way we can have some privacy.”
We did it Mother’s way. Roger just shrugged and said, “Sure,” and within five minutes, Mother and I had washed our faces in cold water, combed our disheveled hair and were back in the car headed for a Chinese carry-out. Each of us knew exactly what the others would order: Moo Goo Gai Pan for Mother, Beef with Peapods for me, and Moo Shoo Pork for Roger.
Except Roger ordered Chicken Almond Ding.
“No, I already ordered a chicken dish,” Mother objected. “You get pork, remember, and we all share.”
“Nah, if you don’t mind, I really like this almond ding-a-ling,” he said very lightly, cheerfully. He was dancing on shards of glass. Mother drilled him with her eyes, her features sharpened beyond even their natural look by a harsh light that cast shadows into every inclination. She let it pass.
“Don’t you eat in the dorm?” she asked.
“Not all the time, I’d starve to death. We come here a lot.” I was stung by his casual use of “we,” a pronoun that didn’t include me. He had friends, I surmised, seized by jealousy and pride.
Cartons in hand, we drove the five minutes back to the motel and spread ourselves on one of the beds. Something felt out of kilter, but I told myself it was everything that had happened, that it would be all right, I had Roger now to help me.
He went back to his dorm, to study he said, and Mother and I fell into exhausted sleeps. I woke before the end of a dream in which I was imploring Roger to help me, and he did. The next morning, Roger called, but couldn’t have breakfast or lunch with us: Calculus was critical for the engineering program and he had to get an A. “Never mind,” Mother said to me. “We’ll have the whole summer. He’s going to have to transfer, anyway. This is ridiculous. We’ve tried it, but it’s just too far away. He can get just as good a grant closer to
home. For heaven’s sake, he can look into another kind of engineering for that matter.”
I certainly wasn’t going to argue with her. I’d tried, and obviously failed to be enough for her. As ashamed as I was of that, I needed him. So, that night when he came after his Calculus final, I was on her side. She waited until we were at the diner next door to the motel to bring it up, alluding to it when Roger said he had to pick up more boxes to store his books in over the summer.
“I think you should just bring them on home,” she said resolutely, buttering a roll.
“No need. The maintenance people will move anything I want to my new dorm over the summer as long as I have boxes closed securely and labeled. They’re really good about that.” He hadn’t shaved and had on a denim shirt. Mother always said denim was hippie cloth.
“But what if you don’t come back?” She bit into the bread and licked a crumb from her lower lip. The tip of her tongue looked narrow and pointy, like her face, at odds with her cushy body. The light in the diner, overhead and fluorescent, threw the same planes and hollows I’d seen the previous night into relief. I stared at my meat loaf and mashed potatoes; I didn’t want to see her like that and, knowing what was coming, I didn’t want to look at Roger, next to me in the vinyl booth. I played with the pool of muddy gravy sunken into the potatoes.
“Ruth, eat your dinner,” she barked into the silence, then stared across at Roger, waiting.
“No danger.” Was he deliberately misunderstanding her? He actually laughed. “I might have blown my A in Calculus, but my average is plenty good enough.”
Mother inhaled, waited an extra beat, and breathed out, “I want you to stay home. There’s no reason you can’t commute to U Conn. I’m sure they have engineering, even if it’s not a hoity-toity program,” on the serrated blade of her sarcasm. I felt Roger look at me, but I kept my eyes down, as though not to intrude on a private conversation.
“I like this program,” he said evenly. I wondered whether he’d repeat the whole explanation about geological engineering he’d repeatedly offered when he was a senior and just making applications. He didn’t, though. Maybe he was tired and willing to just cut to the chase, unimaginable in our previous life.
“You can like another program. Or you can not go to school at all. It’s your choice.” It was an order.
“You’re right. It’s my choice, and I’m going to stay in this program.”
At that, Mother stared at him, a long moment, her eyes glittering, flinty and teary together in a combination I couldn’t bear. She wiped her mouth with her napkin, placed it on the seat beside her, picked up her purse and slid out of the booth. Her lips were a straight single grimness, a horizontal line on vertical rock. She turned her back and walked out.
Roger and I just sat, stupid and uncertain. I tried to decide whether I was supposed to follow her, and began to push against him to let me out when I decided I should, but I’d hesitated and the moment was lost. I didn’t even see the car, because a curtain had been drawn to block the glare of the setting sun, but when I heard tires squeal, I knew she was gone.
AFTER A MOMENT OF standing on the diner floor, I took a few steps toward the door, then stopped and just looked at the door in confusion. Rog got up behind me and I felt his hand take my arm and guide me back to the booth. I slumped where Mother had been sitting, the seat still holding the heat of her body. I pushed the scraps of her salmon croquettes aside; she’d be extra angry, I noted idly, because they were a favorite of hers and she hadn’t quite finished them. One more thing I’d need to remember to worry about. Rog slid back in where he’d been and slid my dinner into the spot I’d just pushed hers out of.
“Eat it, Ruthie, you’re too thin. I’m sorry, I don’t want this to cause problems for you,” he said. “It’s what I worry about most.” Concern wrinkled between his heavy, near-black eyebrows. They’d always been darker than his hair. It was almost the only thing that felt familiar about him.
“I’m really not hungry anymore. What are we going to do?”
“We’re going to finish eating, walk back to the motel, get an extra key at the front desk and wait for her to come back.”
“What if…”
“Come on, Ruthie. She’ll come back. She doesn’t have much choice, you know.”
“What’s she going to do?”
“Not now. Let’s finish eating and get back. I can see just looking at you how tired you are.” And he returned to his French fries, chicken, cole slaw, with a steady knife and fork.
“There’s a lot I have to tell you. I don’t even know where to start. Grandmother was…I mean she was different from what Mother said, and Mother…got these blue pills from the doctor and put them in water, and then ashes…Grand Canyon.” I was making hopeless stabs at the story, exhausted and completely distracted by the newest problem. I started to cry. Roger reached across the table and covered my hand, which fit entirely beneath his big one. There was hair on his knuckles I thought was new.
“Come on, Ruthie. It’ll be okay.” He took the napkin off his lap and handed it to me. “Don’t cry. Let’s go, now. It’ll be okay.” Of course, he didn’t know how terrible things had been, but it was as though he couldn’t remember how terrible things could be. Why else would he keep saying it will be okay, when nothing in our experience pointed that way?
“You have to help me, Roger, you have to come back and help me. I can’t handle it alone, she’s…. not right, I mean, she needs us.” I said it as we were walking across the parking lot toward the motel. Roger put his arm around me and rubbed my arm. When we reached the highway, along which we had to walk a short distance, he switched me to the inside to put himself between oncoming traffic and me. I noticed and took a little heart.
“You know I’ll do what I can.” The answer didn’t satisfy me. I wanted words chiseled in concrete, explicit and unbreakable, but we were nearly at the entrance to the front desk. I waited outside, while Rog went in. He returned with a key.
“She won’t like that we got a key. Maybe we should just sit outside the door.”
“It’s okay, honey.” He spoke like he was my father. I so wanted to believe him, but not one iota of my life told me it was possible. Still, we went into the room. Roger turned on the lights and began moving bags and suitcases off the beds.
“I have to talk to you, I have to tell you what’s gone on. Please,” I tried again.
“Okay. Speak.”
I sank onto one of the beds and faced him, sitting across from me on the other. I have no idea how long I talked, interrupted only by brief questions from him, when I spilled ahead too quickly. He reacted only once, lowering his face into his cupped palms when I told him about Grandmother sipping the blue capsule water. When I got to the ashes, how they’d flown up into my face and into my nose and mouth at Grand Canyon, he moved over to the bed I was sitting on and put his arm around me. My head, weighted with the unbearable visions, sank like a stone onto his shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”
At least he knew, now. He knew why he had to come home. “My nose is running all over your shirt. Let me get some Kleenex,” I said.
“We might as well try to get some sleep,” Roger responded, and stood to kick off his shoes. “Let me use a towel, will you?”
“Don’t you think we should…”
“She’ll come back when she comes back,” he answered, his voice tired. We each washed with few more words, and Roger pulled off his sweatshirt and jeans and climbed into one of the beds in boxer shorts and T-shirt. I used the bathroom to change into a nightgown and got into the other bed. A moment later, he reached up and switched off the light.
I lay in the dark unable to let go of all I’d told him. I read the digital clock on the radio across the room, 11:57, and realized how long Mother had been gone. I felt tears start all over again. I got up to go to the bathroom, too worried to even just lie still and sink into grief. When I came back, I went to Roger’s bed. “Move over,” I said,
in our old proprietary way.
I’d wanted him to extend his arm so I could lie on my side and rest my cheek in the hollow between his shoulder and chest the way I used to when we were children and I could siphon comfort from his body into mine. I just sat on his bed, though, in the imperceptible space he’d made, waiting for him to catch on, actually move over and invite me the rest of the way. He never did.
“I had a dream the other night. It was so strange, strong, you know? And you were in it,” I said. Maybe I could make him understand how badly I needed him.
“Yeah?”
“Remember when we lived in Roseton, and those times when she would lie in bed or on the couch for days?”
“How could I forget?”
“Okay, remember that time she lay down on the couch and the frame cracked?” I felt him nod yes. “She got so mad she sort of came to and dragged it out into the backyard and just left it there. Remember it was that red flowered thing?” He nodded again. His body felt tense and I thought I was bringing back bad memories, but I wanted to tell him. “I dreamed about that couch, out in the rain. It was half floating, half sinking, because it had been raining for days and days. It looked like an empty rowboat. I dreamed it was night and I was out in that yard, and the rowboat, which was the couch, couldn’t go anywhere. Then in the dream, I saw these beautiful, polished wooden oars, like they’d been handmade. I thought maybe you’d made them in woodshop…remember when you took that when you were a freshman? Anyway, the darkness was all watery, sort of, but these oars were just gleaming through it, like the moon was on them. In the dream, I’d see them but then I’d lose where they were exactly, the yard was all overgrown and filled with water, too, but then you came, and I begged you to help me find them, and you did. Do you think you can tell the future in dreams?”
Two things happened almost at once then. Roger sort of jerked up to a sitting position as he answered, like he was brimming with anger, “Take woodworking yourself, goddammit, Ruth, learn to use tools. Make yourself some goddamn oars.” As he rose, my perch on the edge of his bed was dislodged, and I frantically tried to untangle my legs in a graceless clutching effort to break my fall.