by Lynne Hugo
I walked unsteadily toward the bathroom, picking up my shorts, T-shirt and bra from the floor as I went, each retrieval setting off a new series of overlapping throbs. I was wearing Evan’s undershirt, as I sometimes did at our apartment, like an oversize cotton nightshirt. I tiptoed past Roger, fully clothed, dead out on the couch. Once in the bathroom, I pulled on yesterday’s clothes, washed my face in cold water and brushed my teeth and fumbled through the medicine cabinet for aspirin. I had to clear my head, figure out what to do. The image that stared back at me in the mirror was of a chalky woman, whose fading freckles looked like gray scars in that weak light. The dawn made me a black and white portrait of myself, the deep circles ringing dull eyes like a study of the living dead. Maybe that was what she’d wanted.
The swinging door between the kitchen and living room squeaked when I eased it shut, but Roger didn’t seem to stir. As quietly as I could, I made a pot of coffee and tried to think. When the coffee was ready, I poured a cup and went out onto the back porch. From the back steps, even in the still-muted light, the disarray of the garden accused me.
“RUTHIE, FOR GOD’S SAKE, what are you doing?” It was Roger, slamming the screen door behind him and hurrying down the porch stairs. The sun was high, the sweat running along my body as though my whole being were in tears. “We had no idea where you were.” Then he yelled over his shoulder toward the house, “I’ve got her, she’s out here.” Evan’s face appeared, ghostly behind the screen.
“Quit yelling,” I hissed. “The Jensens! Let them sleep.” Two large piles of weeds and dead blossoms had grown along the border of the garden. No zinnias this year.
“I can’t believe this. You don’t need to be doing this. Goodwill is due in fifteen minutes, and then we’re out of here. Did you pay that past due rent yet?”
“Yesterday. And the last month of the lease, like you said. I stuck it in their mailbox.”
“Okay. Well, we don’t owe the Jensens anything. In fact, they’re almost a month ahead if they rent this place right away. There’s nothing in the lease about keeping up the yard.”
“I know.”
“Ruthie, here, stand up.” He extended his hand, which I ignored. My knees had cramped from too much kneeling, and I had to use both hands on the ground to slowly straighten them and work my way up to standing. “Come inside, please. We need to talk about who’s doing what.”
“You do what you want and I’ll do the rest. Isn’t that the way it always is?”
I saw him flinch. “Please. Please, don’t let’s start this again,” he said, and I was ashamed. That was the thing, I bounced from shame to anger to raw pain without the least warning, not to myself, not to Rog or Evan. “You go in and clean up, okay? You’re soaked and all dirty. I’ll get rid of these weeds. Look, you did a good job, all right? The garden looks good. She would have liked that. I do understand, okay? I do.”
In the kitchen, Evan looked awkward. “Hi,” he said. “How’re you doing this morning, honey?” He was trying so hard.
“I’m okay,” I said, making an effort not to be curt, yet I knew it had come out with a definite shortness. “Excuse me. I’ve got to clean up.”
I showered, letting the water run with my oldest tears, the ones left over from being eleven or twelve and not knowing what to do for Mother, terrified of the gulf between where I was and pleasing her. The shower curtain had splotches of gray mildew at the bottom, like the freckles I’d seen on my face that morning. I took Mother’s robe off the hook behind the door and wrapped myself in it before heading to her bedroom where my clean clothes were.
But once there, I was suddenly exhausted and sank onto the bed, dazed. In a moment, I got up, lifted the urn and took out the letter to read it again. The indictment was unmistakable.
I HADN’T MOVED AT ALL when Evan knocked. “Ruthie, sweetheart, the Goodwill truck is here. We need to get in to strip the bed and get the rest of the furniture, too.” I pulled on some clothes and hurriedly ran a brush through my damp hair, tangled from washing. Strands of wet-darkened red collected in it, and when I pulled it out, I recognized Mother’s brown hair now mixed with mine. I stuffed it back into the bristles, and put the brush in my small suitcase.
“I’m coming,” I called. “I’m coming.”
Loading the truck went almost too quickly, Roger and Evan working along with the driver. I held the door and handed them boxes. Everything went except the personal things like Mother’s brush and comb, her jewelry, her flute. (I’d given her library of sheet music to her students, but Roger and I had divided the small but exquisite collection of classical hi-fi records.) Everything except the six boxes of Roger’s and my heritage, which I couldn’t bring myself to give away, nor open.
Roger wanted no part of them. “They should go to you, if we keep them at all,” he said. “You’re the one who stayed, you’re the one who—” His voice broke and he turned away then. So they were loaded into Mother’s car, four crammed into the trunk, two in the backseat. The Goodwill truck backed by inches out of the gravel driveway and disappeared.
“There goes our life,” I said. “Seems like it ought to take longer to dismantle.” Roger kept his face blank. Evan reached for my hand, but I pretended not to see and he didn’t persist. I turned away and went around to the front door, the Jensens’s entrance, and knocked to say goodbye and return their keys. Mrs. Jensen’s arthritic shuffle—she was using a walker now—required a long time to answer a knock. The old rockers were still there, dirty and mildewed. I wished I’d scrubbed them down and spray painted them—I could have done that if I’d noticed sooner. I could have done a lot of things.
“I will miss your wonderful mother,” she said loudly when she got the door open. Mother had counted on the landlords’ deafness for years, when there would be commotion in the downstairs we inhabited. “And you, dear, you are such a lovely girl.”
“Will you advertise for new tenants?”
“Speak up, dearie.”
“Will new people move in downstairs?”
“No. No, sad to say. We think we have to sell now,” she said, shaking her head with its disheveled white cloud of hair. “Max isn’t doing well. I don’t want to, but he says we must. This has been my home for over fifty years, you know.” She spoke more slowly than she used to, though Mrs. Jensen had been ancient from the first time I’d met her. I wished again I’d done more to help her, but she and Mother intermittently feuded over petty things, and I hadn’t dared.
“Mrs. Jensen, I’m sorry for the times my mother might have upset you. I know she wasn’t always easy to get along with. Thank you for renting to us for so long. This place is home to me, too. I never lived anyplace else for as long as here.”
“Dearie, dearie. You’re a good girl,” she said, patting my arm. “You have a good life with your young man.”
“Thank you,” I said. “May I say goodbye to Mr. Jensen?”
She began the laborious motion of moving her body sideways and backward, to let me in off the porch. I’d been propping the screen door open with my back. “He’s in the bedroom, looking out at your garden. He does enjoy that.”
“I’m sorry it wasn’t kept up this summer,” I said, holding my hand out to prevent the screen door from slamming.
“Well, my goodness, when your mother said you’d gotten married, we knew why you weren’t here to do it.”
“She told you?”
“Oh my, yes. She was in quite a state about it, wasn’t she? I don’t know why. He’s a handsome young man. I saw him out the window. But I told her to tell you that we wished you a long and happy marriage. Did she tell you?”
“She must have forgotten.”
“Oh, well, my dear, I’m sorry. I would have sent you a card, you know.”
So she did know, and know for sure. I’d comforted myself with the notion that perhaps she didn’t. After all, there was no real proof; I could cling to the rambling lack of specificity in what she’d written even though I’d sensed her knowing.<
br />
Everything was coming to a close.
ROGER HADN’T WANTED A say in what to do with Mother’s ashes. The Goodwill truck was gone, and I’d returned from the Jensens’s upstairs. Rog and I stood awkwardly on uncovered worn hardwood in the emptied living room, where I’d set the urn on the window seat that had hidden the six cardboard boxes. A late morning sun glared through the window, revealing dirt and smudges. Dust motes swam toward us. “I just don’t think that way, Ruthie. It’s not meaningful to me, you know? Unless you don’t want to any more than I do, I’d just as soon we do whatever you want with them. Keep them on your mantel or bury them, or whatever people do with ashes.”
“It would mean something to her.”
“Maybe so.”
“I just don’t know what she’d want, specifically, I mean, where…”
“Look, whatever you want is fine with me, but we need to do it soon. I’ve got to get to LaGuardia.” He was standing at the kitchen counter stuffing underwear and shirts into his big duffel with uncharacteristic messiness. When he folded his sports coat and crammed it on top, I had an impulse to push him aside and redo it all, the way Mother would have made him do it.
“I told you, I can take you.”
“And I appreciate that, but we’ve got to get going. I want to be there well before the plane time—that airport’s a zoo.”
“Nothing seems right yet, I don’t know what she’d want.” I looked at my brother, square-built, high-colored, Mother’s hair, and desperately wanted something from him.
“If you want, then, you can just hold on to them, and when you figure out what to do, go ahead and do it.”
“That doesn’t seem right, you should be there.”
“I’d do it for you, if that’s what you want, but it’s not important to me. I’ve said goodbye, as best I can. So, if you want to do it now, let’s do it.” He picked up his duffel as if we might just dump ashes in the driveway on our way to the car.
“Okay. No. I don’t know.”
He shook his head in exasperation. “Fine. I already said it. Do what you think best, whenever.” Then he must have realized how harsh he sounded, and touched my arm lightly. I studied the dark hair on his knuckles. His hand was a completely different shape than Evan’s. I could tell them apart in an instant glance. “You’re the one with rights here,” he said. “I mean it. Anything you want is okay by me.”
And that was that. The ashes would stay with me. Now I had Evan to contend with. I let him corner me in Mother’s bedroom when I went in to fold my clothes back into my suitcase. I’d laid them out on the bare floor where her bed had been. “Honey,” he began, but I interrupted him.
“I can’t go back with you,” I said abruptly.
“What?” He must have been expecting it, but his eyebrows still shot up over the frame of his glasses, and there was hurt mixed in his shocked tone.
“I just can’t. I’m too much of a mess inside. I don’t know anything anymore.” I didn’t know if it was entirely the heat in the house that was making me sweaty, faintly nauseous, or how ashamed I felt then. I lifted my heavy hair off my neck and fastened it to the top of my head with a barrette.
“Ruthie, you know—don’t you?—how much I love you. How much we love each other. You don’t want to be married to me?”
“I don’t know if I mean that.” I forced myself to look at him, to remember how good he was, but how anyone’s love can get poisoned. How I could be the one holding the vial that could kill us both.
“How can you not know if we love each other?”
“I just don’t know if I can make you happy.” I folded a shirt on the floor and stayed on my knees.
“Wouldn’t that be up to me to decide?”
“I guess.” My shorts went into the suitcase. Poor Evan. I could feel his agitation. He squatted down by me to try for eye contact.
“Then it’s that you don’t know if I can make you happy.”
“I have no idea what being happy is. I know you can’t understand that. I don’t want to let you down anymore. I don’t want to mess up any more lives.”
“Ruthie!” He was distressed, both his hands out. “You don’t mess up my life. I need you, I want you, I love you.”
“Just try to understand. Please. I promise I’ll call you.” I could see how he wrestled with himself, knowing I’d made up my mind yet casting for something, anything he could say that would change it. I couldn’t endure hurting him again. I fastened the latches on either side of the suitcase, stood and picked it up by the handle.
He got up, too, and put himself between me and the bedroom door. “How can I just let you go? I don’t know what’s going to happen. Can’t you let me help you? Where are you going? What are you going to do?” I didn’t answer. A minute passed and the one side of Evan pinned the other to the mat. “Here, you’ll need money.” Then he had his wallet out and open. “I got cash before I left the city because I didn’t know what we might need.”
“No, Ev, I’m okay.”
“This much. Ruthie, I’m asking you this much. Just take this money.”
“I do love you, it’s not that I don’t.” But was I saying that because he was insisting on stuffing a wad of folded bills in my skirt pocket and I felt like I had to give something back?
“Then?” I saw light flicker on his features.
“I’ll call you when I can. That’s all I can promise.”
Evan stepped to the side, letting me pass.
So Roger and I and Evan set out in Mother’s car, the trunk crammed with our heritage and Mother’s ashes. Evan rode with us down to Route 95, and before the route to LaGuardia diverged, we got off the thruway and dropped Evan at the Port Chester railroad station for the short hop into the city. When I kissed Evan goodbye, his eyes filled, but I was numb. Then it was just Rog and me. We talked as I drove, which wasn’t as difficult as it might have been if I’d had to look at him.
“I’ll keep you posted about probate, if you’ll make sure to let me know where you are. I take it I shouldn’t call your home…I mean Evan’s. Where are you going?”
“I’m not exactly sure. I can’t go back to school right now, and I can’t go home. Whatever home is, anyway. I just need some time to think.” An enormous semi passed me on the right, and I realized I wasn’t paying enough attention to traffic. I moved into the slowest lane.
“I’ll need an address,” Roger said. “There’ll be things I need you to sign. You could come stay with me. You know that, I’ve told you.”
“Maybe. Nothing feels right just now. I keep trying to explain that I don’t know. I appreciate your taking care of the legal stuff.”
“Okay, Ruthie. It’s okay. It’s just formalities, hoops to jump through. Call me collect, any evening. You’ve got the number at the department, too, right? Are you all right for money?”
“For a while. Evan insisted I take all his cash, plus I’ve got a credit card. I don’t want to use his money, though. It’s not right.”
“For God’s sake. Use it. You haven’t asked me, but I’ve got to put in one thing. He’s a great guy, Ruthie. I really like him.” He’d swiveled his body toward me on the seat, emphatic.
“I know.” I sounded defensive, a shrug implicit in my voice, not what I meant at all.
“You know he’s a great guy or you know I really like him?”
“Both.”
I parked the car and waited with Roger for his plane. He’d been right, as usual: there wasn’t all that much time to spare. We sat at his gate and drank coffee out of cardboard cups and deliberately talked about nothing of consequence. A uniformed man called for his flight to board; he wrapped me in his arms and put his cheek to mine. “I’m sorry, Ruthie. I’m sorry,” he whispered into my hair, and then he was gone.
29
I THINK I KNEW ALL ALONG where I would go, but I wouldn’t let myself name it so there would be no lie involved to Evan, or even Roger. I was going back to Cape Cod. In spite of how it had ended, the fir
st nine days Mother and I spent there were the happiest I remembered her, and the happiest I remembered myself. Of course, the irony wasn’t lost on me that I was traveling with my mother’s ashes, just as she and I had journeyed with Grandmother’s. Yes, of course I wondered whether poison just ran in my veins, like those of the women before me, and whether the same diseases of anger and alienation were an inescapable heredity. I was clinging to the memory of a brief time when it had seemed there might be an endurable world, even a good world, for Mother—though it had turned out not to be so. I didn’t know if there could be one for me, but the hope of it had been so shiningly real once; and the Cape was where I located it in the geography of my heart.
It wasn’t difficult to be driving Mother’s car. I’d used it on a daily basis the summer I worked at the nursing home, and it had come to seem mine as much as hers. It was the only property—paid for—of any value that Mother had owned; Roger had been generous in insisting I keep it. In a lot of ways, it would have made more sense for him to have it, unless I wasn’t going back to New York. I rolled the window all the way down and let the wind pull ends of hair from the barrette that held it all back and whip it around my face. That morning had brought the first break in an extended stretch of heat and humidity, and now the air was almost sparkling with dry, crisp light. Though I was tired, the solitude of the drive was a great relief. The back of the afternoon rush hour had been broken while I was at the airport, so traffic wasn’t much problem.
The car hummed north, back into Connecticut on the thruway, just inland from the coastal towns. At New London, I stopped for the night. Darkness had overtaken me and the Cape was still several hours away. This was the first time I’d been in a motel since Mother and I had made our cross-country trek to Grandmother, and I’d not anticipated how memory would rise like cream to the surface of consciousness. The motel room was generic, the kind of cheap, Mom-and-Pop operation where you pull in late, pay cash, park a foot from the door of your room and unlock the door to worn-out carpeting, a colorless decor and a bathroom that’s clean but hardly “sparkling.” You would not want to spend any time barefoot in the place, and the bed springs have likely been long sprung, but it’s well-enough lit, cheap, and you’ll probably sleep in spite of the highway noise because you’re that tired.