“Of course,” Donald said.
Ruby crossed her arms over her chest, then moved her hands to her shoulders, as if she were trying to cover as much of herself as possible.
“I suspect he moved in with a family. You know, consistency makes a happy home.” Donald lifted his hand and Nora thought he would pull a coin from behind her mother’s ear. She stood and walked toward them, then pressed against her mother’s side. Donald jerked his thumb toward the 25 MPH sign. “Drove a bit too fast.” Sunlight glinted off his thick watch, and Ruby’s hand fluttered up, covering the O of her mouth. Nora rubbed her toe against the mound of plastic. “Sorry, Nora.” He pulled a tube of glue from his pocket. “Looks like we’ve both had a bit of bad luck.”
Her mom banged her fist against her thigh. It was the second time that week she’d banged her fist. She led Nora down the sidewalk. “Sanctimonious bastard. Moved in with a family!”
“Phil Donahue is gone?” Nora hurried to keep up with her.
Her mom turned sharply on her heel, gripped Nora’s shoulders, and searched her face. “What do you consider us?”
The question seemed so strange. Did she mean us without Phil Donahue?
Her mom’s voice tightened and her hands trembled. Whatever her mom wanted to know, it was costing her a lot. “When you think of me, what do you think?”
“Mommy?” Nora closed her eyes and swallowed, trying to push back her feelings. Her mother was scaring her.
“Yes, and you’re my daughter.”
Nora wanted so much to give what was needed. Ruby stared at her hard, then looked over Nora’s shoulder, toward Donald, hunched in his carport. She looked as if she were deciding something important.
“The way he said family, talking about Phil. As if we aren’t.” She knelt in front of Nora, stroking bangs away from her eyes. “You have to know your cat didn’t prefer another family.”
Nora felt a lump in her throat.
Ruby hesitated. “Phil Donahue was hit by a car. Beanie, honey, given the choice, Phil dead or Phil picking a new family, we have to choose dead.”
Nora cried and her mom did too, right there on the sidewalk. “I am so sorry.”
Ruby hugged her close, and in the waning light, their shadows lengthened behind them. Neighbors they didn’t know pulled into driveways, arriving home from work. A dog yapped, waiting to be let out for a walk. The ice cream man’s tune played in the hills above them.
Nora missed Phil Donahue so much. But she missed more than just her cat. She missed everything, the pool and Margaret and Jocelyn. She missed the whole idea of a pet. And even with Ruby right in front of her, holding her, she missed her mom.
“I hate this street,” she said.
Her mom sighed. “So do I.”
Take Your Daughter to Work
The new dent in the passenger door had jammed it shut. Since her mother decided to use the insurance money from the accident to pay off her Ohrbach’s charge card, they would both be climbing in on the driver’s side from now on.
“Four doors were so conventional.” Ruby slid in easily after Nora, filling the car with her scent: cigarettes, coffee, and Jean Naté After Bath Splash.
Today Nora was excused from school. Her mother, who had been reading Ms. magazine, had decided that since she was definitely raising a liberated daughter, it was important for Nora to see her in action at Hollenbeck High, where she claimed to be breaking down boundaries as the youngest, hippest teacher in East LA. Nora squeezed her hands together to stop herself from jouncing in her seat and irritating her mother. She was nervous about visiting Hollenbeck High and delighted about missing a day at her new school, where her fifth-grade teacher, Mr. Marshall, was making good on his promise to turn his students into real men. Instead of playing red rover or steal the bacon, Nora’s class spent their PE time marching in formation around the blacktop while Mr. Marshall shrilled his whistle. As much as she hated marching, Nora hadn’t mentioned the drills to her mother for fear Ruby would forbid her to participate as an antiwar statement. Nora was having a hard enough time fitting in without being sidelined with the asthmatic kids.
Rush hour on the Santa Monica Freeway—the early-morning sun bouncing off so many windshields made Nora squint. Despite pervasive smog and auto exhaust, a huge and alarming hedge of dusty pink oleander flourished in the median strip. Nora had heard that at a cookout, an entire family had died from eating hot dogs roasted on oleander sticks. Highly poisonous. Yesterday at her school they served hot dogs at lunch and then everyone had to stay indoors for recess due to the air quality. You just never knew what could happen.
Ruby tapped her short fingernails on the steering wheel. “I hope there’s no smog alert today.”
“Mr. Marshall says only grubs stay inside for bad air.” From the glove box, Nora removed the last strawberry Pop-Tart and peeled open her breakfast. She would have to remind her mother to stop at the store on the way home.
“Remind me to talk to your principal about Mr. ROTC.” Ruby pointed to her purse on the floor. “Dig me out a cigarette, Beanie.” In deference to Nora’s lungs she dangled it out the window and blew the smoke from the side of her mouth. “This morning I especially need you to keep quiet while I teach. I have a plan, something new I’m trying in homeroom.”
Ruby often complained about her homeroom. Nora overheard her talking to her friend Maxine about it nearly every night, a wine spritzer in one hand, the phone in the other. It was Ruby’s answer to the not-drinking-alone problem. Homeroom was a waste of time, she fretted. How could she connect with her burgeoning girls—shellacked by Aqua Net, trapped by girdles and the sexist stereotypes of their small-minded community? “Holy shit, it’s the seventies!” she practically shouted into the phone last night. “You’re so right. My girls should aim higher than having babies for the church! I should aim higher than being Frank Lessing’s dalliance!”
As soon as Ruby flicked her cigarette butt out the car window, she told Nora to grab another one.
“They cause cancer,” Nora said.
Ruby held her two peace fingers aloft until Nora finally slid a fresh cigarette into the V. “You can draw or something,” Ruby said.
“I brought books.” Nora had Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn tucked into her knapsack, along with a hairbrush, chewing gum, a package of oyster crackers her mom brought home from a dinner date at the Santa Monica pier, a collapsible cup, a small tin of aspirin, a Stayfree maxi-pad, and a clean pair of underpants. She’d added the last three items to her inventory after the weeklong Family Life class she’d endured with the other fifth-grade girls. Nora didn’t want to be caught unprepared.
“I wish my students read as well as you do, Beanie. Never forget . . .” Her voice trailed off as she craned her neck, seeking to merge toward the off ramp. “Damn it—let me in.” She leaned over and took a bite of the Pop-Tart. “You are smart. Oh my God. Turn it up.” Crumbs flew from her lips. “A Taste of Honey” by the Tijuana Brass filled the car, the turn signal clicking steady with the beat as they rolled off the freeway. “I love this song.”
Homeroom girls arrived in clusters—stiff haired, torpedo chested, and tight skirted—after the tardy bell. Nora stayed behind the teacher desk while Ruby greeted the girls at the door. Her mother nodded and touched girls’ shoulders, delicate creases appearing at the corners of her bright eyes. Even her voice was different here, warm and open, so unlike her most recent at-home moods, either lackluster monotone or spring-loaded tension.
“Marisol, you brought your notebook. Wonderful. Good morning, Carmen. Anna, how was the test?” The girls smiled and answered her questions. “Lucy, come on. You know that skirt is totally wrong at school. Fabulous out in the world, but tug it down.” Hollenbeck High had a dress code that required girls in questionable-length skirts to kneel in front of the class. If the fabric didn’t meet the floor, they were sent home to change. At home, Ruby ranted against the rule and called it sexist. “Elena? To what do
I owe the pleasure?”
Elena, a slender girl with teased hair and Life Savers–candy–green eyes, strolled in. She looked past Ruby then snapped her gum.
“Lose the gum, and just so you know, once a month isn’t enough.”
Elena made a big show of stretching the gum and wrapping it in a long string around her index finger, then she slid a pack of cigarettes from her pocketbook and stuck the gum to the cellophane.
A slight smile played at the corners of Ruby’s mouth. “You won’t pass my class,” she said, tension leaking back into her voice.
“What a tragedy.” Even Elena’s eyebrows were haughty.
Girls laughed, smoothed hair, tugged at blouses with tiny pearl buttons, and watched one another. Around their necks, heavy boys’ rings and crucifixes dangled from chains. Their beige foundation makeup ended abruptly at their throats, revealing darker skin. Their lips were iced with pale pink lipstick. Everything about them was put together, all of them except for one girl, her dress shapeless as a Brownie uniform, her face bare of makeup. She stumbled in the aisle on the way to her seat.
“Are you okay?” asked the girl Elena, her voice slinky and frayed, like ripped satin. “Maybe it was your shoelaces?” she added, her chic black heels peeking into the aisle, condemning the girl and her blue Keds.
“Puta,” the girl said.
“Skunk.”
“Hey! We’re all in this struggle together,” Ruby said. When she turned to take Nora’s hand, Elena whispered another insult, and Nora looked down at the scuffed toes of her own Buster Browns. Ruby’s hand felt damp, and Nora let her own hand go limp clasped inside her mother’s. She was stuck between pride and worry over what her mother might say. Stuck between belonging to her mother and wanting to belong with the girls who only half listened, whose brains were filled with mysterious and far more important thoughts. Ruby explained about Gloria Steinem and equal rights and Ms. magazine and the bright future while girls filed their nails and stared out the window. When Ruby finally introduced Nora, she slid her hand from her mother’s and wiped it on her skirt.
“What’s her name?”
“Can I braid her hair?”
“She’s cute.”
“How old is she?”
The way the girls fussed over her wasn’t all that different from her mother’s boyfriends’ fawning, with their stuffed animals and Tootsie Pops for her, wine and flowers for her mother. “Knock with your elbows,” her mother always told the men, encouraging gifts. The ones that hung around for a while, like Frank Lessing, brought books when they realized Nora would disappear with them into her bedroom.
“She’s so smart.” The girls pointed to Nora’s books, talked about her as if she weren’t standing right in front of them.
“She’s beautiful,” Elena said. “Do you have a boyfriend yet?”
“She’s ten,” Ruby answered.
Nora pretended to pull up her knee socks, hiding her pleasure and disappointment. She was thrilled Elena spoke to her, but she wanted to be older, thirteen. More than anything, she wanted to be part of this club.
Her mother pointed to an empty seat across from Elena and behind Celia, the girl who had tripped. In the roomful of teased hair, Celia’s long braid, pouring down the middle of her back like oil, seemed out of place, as if Celia had been deprived of important girl-knowledge, as if she’d been forced to live without girlfriends or television or Teen magazine—which Nora sometimes bought with her mother’s cigarette change when Ruby sent her to the corner store.
“These are journals.” The tap of her mother’s heels against the wood floor as she handed out composition books lent authority to her words. “These are private. Write anything you wish. I’ll count the number of pages you’ve filled but I won’t read a word unless you mark a star at the top of the page.”
“What’s the point?” Elena asked.
“The point is—these are for you. The point is—I’ve had the antenna broken off my car four times this year.” Ruby paused and looked over the girls’ heads toward the back of the classroom with its map of the United States and the WAR IS NOT HEALTHY FOR CHILDREN AND OTHER LIVING THINGS poster she kept retaping to the wall. “My antenna—filed into a shiv, a weapon for some crazy rumble.” There was snickering in the room and Ruby nodded her head. “Okay, laugh, but I like music in my car. I can’t afford to keep replacing my antenna. Every day people tell you who you are: enemy, girlfriend, sister, daughter. These journals are a place for you to figure it out. On your own terms.” Her mother paced. Her blond hair and pale skin made her stand out in the classroom, but watching and listening, Nora felt that Ruby was more like these girls than not. Ruby was more like these girls than Nora was. She was young and pretty, with her short hairdo, her cinch-waisted dress floating just above her kneecaps, her high heels emphasizing her shapely calves.
Elena glared at Ruby. She was snapping her gum again. “You act like this is West Side Story and we’re all Maria.”
“Not true. I’m leaving it up to you to tell me who you are.”
“What about your hija?” Elena gestured toward Nora with a slight lift of her eyebrow.
“Great idea.” Ruby nodded and set a composition book on Nora’s desk.
“Who are you?” Elena whispered to Nora, loud enough for Ruby to hear.
Nora’s smile shifted toward uncertain and stuck there; she felt pinned down, like a butterfly specimen. She never thought about who she was. She was a fifth-grader. She was Ruby’s daughter. She was trying to make friends. Ruby was a mother and a teacher, often a girlfriend. Sometimes on weekend mornings, stirring up frozen orange juice with the spoon thunking against the plastic pitcher, her mother would ask Nora if she was happy. “We’re happy, right?” Ruby would say. “Even if it’s just us girls?”
Her mother allowed fifteen minutes for writing. Girls took up pencils. Elena leaned back in her seat, tapping her eraser on the blank page. Celia drummed her fingers on the desktop, her nails chewed to raw skin. “You’ll only read if there’s a star?” she asked. Ruby said yes, that was so. Then Celia cramped her raggedy fingers around the nub of her pencil and began.
Amid these grown girls, with their scented deodorants, pantyhose scratching each time they shifted in their seats, Nora didn’t know whether to slouch or sit tall, to become as small as she felt or to strive against it. Soon she would matter in a way she didn’t quite matter yet. She was on the cusp of something private and fulfilling. She imagined the girls around her wrote about love, about the searching, sleepy look in men’s eyes after a kiss. She’d seen that look in movies, and in Frank Lessing’s eyes late one night when she got up to pee and surprised him in the bathroom. Staring out from his reflection in the mirror, his bristled cheeks dripping water, Frank’s sleepy eyes seemed to have forgotten who Nora was and why she was in the apartment. He quit humming and asked her how she liked the new TV. She thanked him again, then he dried his face and left to go home to his wife. Once the front door shut, Nora’s mother called her into her bedroom and asked if Frank had said anything. When Nora said not really, Ruby told her to get back in bed.
Ruby had given Nora a picture book about puberty called What’s Happening to Me? Along with discussing pimples and sprouting hair and the mechanics of sperm and egg, it described sex as being exhilarating, like jumping rope all afternoon and then eating a double-scoop marble fudge ice cream cone with exhausted and tingling legs.
Nora focused on her composition book. Starting with deodorant, she wrote a list of things she needed: a training bra, feminine hygiene spray. She’d detected an unpleasant odor in her armpits, which she learned in Family Life class was a first sign of puberty. She also learned that odors could happen in other places on her body and it was important to feel fresh. Next she wrote about Lana, who sat next to her in Mr. Marshall’s fifth-grade class and whom Nora was trying to develop as a friend. After three elementary schools, Nora had friend-making skills—a practiced smile, a just friendly enough Hi, the ability to complimen
t—but the fifth-grade girls at her new school already had best friends. She added to her list: headband, Dr Pepper Lip Smacker, a fringe skirt. Lana’s best friend was Kathi W. They wore fringe skirts and everyone treated them like royalty. At recess Nora lingered near their bench, imitating the way Kathi W. stood, with her knees hyperextended and her chest thrust forward, looking like a bent straw. So far, all Nora had managed to do was finesse herself a role as their gopher, delivering notes to the popular boys.
Then, because Nora felt like she had to write something in the journal for her mother, she put a star at the top of the next page and told Ruby how much she loved her visit to Hollenbeck High. She thanked her mom for taking care of the Frigidaire someone dumped behind their apartment building, between the Dumpster and an abandoned sofa. Nora spent her afternoons reading on that sofa as if it was her very own living room. When News Channel Four reported a boy had suffocated inside an abandoned refrigerator, her mother lectured her about climbing inside, as if Nora had no sense. Then she hounded their landlord to haul the Frigidaire away. Finally, Ruby unhinged the door herself and dropped it in the dirt.
“Two more minutes,” her mother announced.
Nora stopped writing. Every i on her page was dotted with a perfect tiny circle, as if bubbles floated up from her words. She glanced around to see if anyone was looking at her. In front of Nora, Celia sighed and leaned back in her chair. Her journal was also covered with words, the cursive tiny and precise, each f a flourish of curlicues. The entire page was covered with one word, written over and over. Fuck.
At home, with a game show on the TV, Nora and her mom settled at opposite ends of the sofa. In their apartment the TV was always on, beating back the quiet. Nora rearranged herself, coughed, ate a Ritz cracker, glanced at Monty Hall, who was talking to a man dressed in a giant diaper, and waited for her mom to find Celia’s journal.
Shout Her Lovely Name Page 11