L.D. pushes herself up off the floor, heads for the bathroom. “You never will, either.” She slams the door shut.
Ruth smiles. “Loosely translated: Good-bye, Sarah. Great seeing you.”
“Do you know what it stands for?” Sarah asks quietly. At the same time Ruth shakes her head, we hear L.D.’s muffled voice. “No, she doesn’t. Nobody does.”
“Oh. Well. Good night then, Lucinda Diane,” Sarah calls.
Nothing.
“Laura Dee Dee?”
The toilet flushes, the door bangs open, and L.D. reappears. “Fuck you, Sarah.”
“Oh, no, that can’t be it,” Sarah says. “That would be F.Y.” She smiles, embraces all of us, and is gone.
“Does that woman even have to use deodorant?” L.D. asks.
“Oh, come on, she’s great,” Ruth says. “You should see her apartment. It’s so … comfortable. She’s really learned how to enjoy living alone. I wish I’d learned how to do that.”
“You’re learning now,” L.D. says. “Look at this: every night, a fucking party.”
“Well,” Ruth sighs, “not a fucking party. Unfortunately.” She takes her Red Sox hat off the bedpost and puts it on her head. Then she gets out of bed to start gathering up the dirty dishes.
“We’ll do that,” L.D. says. “You … meditate.”
I wash the dishes, L.D. dries. We don’t have to guess anymore where things go; the place is beginning to feel like ours, too. The kitchen radio is turned on low to a country-and-western station. The stupidity of the lyrics is comforting.
When we are done, L.D. hangs the dishtowel evenly over the rack. “Are you staying with her tonight?”
“Yeah.”
“Call me if … you need to.”
“I will.”
We go back to the bedroom and L.D. sits down beside Ruth. “Tonight, before you go to sleep,” she says, “I want you to think of all the things you want to do tomorrow.”
“L.D.”
“What?”
“What does L.D. stand for?”
I stand back respectfully, but stay in the room. I want to hear.
“Someday,” L.D. says, “I’ll get drunk and tell you.”
“Oh, you’re such a tease.”
“No, I’m not,” L.D. says, and there is such honesty and innocence to her voice I want to hold her. The bedside lamplight is a rich golden color, and it is falling on her face in a way that makes it seem gilded. For a moment, L.D. looks to me like an angel. Another case of illusion only being the larger truth.
After L.D. leaves, Ruth and I look for something on television that might entertain us. This turns out to be too much of a challenge. “Want me to go get a movie?” I ask.
“No.” She sighs, looks around her room. “You know, I never thought dying would be boring. Did you? I mean, I find myself getting to this place of readiness. It’s a kind of deep peace, that I never felt before. And so I lie there thinking, okay, I guess this is it, this is a good time, go ahead; and then the phone rings and it’s somebody wanting to steam clean my wall-to-wall carpeting, which of course I don’t even have. And I want to say, Oh, stop with this carpet nonsense. Listen to me. You’ve got to be careful. Say all you need to say, right away. You have no idea how fragile this all is!’ But of course all I say is ‘No thank you.’” She smiles. “Who would have thought it would be like this?”
I am quiet for a moment, then say, “Know what I’m really glad about, though?”
“What?”
“That you get to be peaceful, sometimes.”
“Oh, yeah, when I’m not terrified, I’m real peaceful. And you know what else? It’s such a rich thing. It’s so … good. And sometimes I think, God, my life has taken these awful turns, but they’re also sort of wonderful. I mean, the constant presence of you all—my friends …” Her eyes fill and I put my hand on her arm. She is talking too much. She’s too short of breath.
“Rest a minute,” I say. “Stop talking.”
“No,” she says. “Let me.” She turns to face me earnestly. “Sometimes I feel as if I want to stay sick so I can keep all this.”
“Oh, God, don’t say that!”
“I don’t want to die, but sometimes I wonder … Wouldn’t it be terribly anticlimactic if I went back to normal? I mean, for all of us?”
I am lying on Ruth’s sofa in one of those states where your body seems asleep but your mind has other ideas. I turn on the little lamp on the table, look at my watch. Three forty-seven. I sit up, look around, wish that I were home. Then I could go into Meggie’s room and watch her sleep, set myself right. I worried, when I was pregnant, that it would be so hard to be a mother, that it would drive me crazy to be needed so much. I never suspected that it would be I who needed Meggie more.
I pull a magazine from the pile in the handwoven basket Ruth keeps under her coffee table. The cover advertises a story about preventing breast cancer. I wonder if she has seen it. I put the magazine at the bottom of the pile, go out into the kitchen and turn on the light. I want some tea, but I don’t want to wake Ruth up by running water.
Assuming she is alive.
I stand up, then sit back down. Then I stand up again, tiptoe into her bedroom. She is turned away from me, but I can hear her breathing. I see moonlight lying against the back of her bald head, pooled in the small valley at the top of her neck. They are so graceful and beautiful, necks, so full of a kind of combined strength and vulnerability. I wish we could get over our horror of baldness and appreciate instead the tender revelations it provides.
When Ruth first heard about how the chemo would probably make her lose her hair, she asked me if I would go with her to get a wig when the time came. I said I would, but I also asked her if she were sure that’s what she wanted to do.
“What else would I do?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “If it were me, I think I’d be more of a scarf type. Or just walk around bald. I mean, it’s kind of a badge of honor, isn’t it?”
“You didn’t think I should get fake boobs, either,” Ruth said.
“I know. Same reason. Except what you did is just as good.” What Ruth did was to get prostheses three times the size she was—she went from a 34 A to a 38 C.
She waited until her hair was quite thin before she decided it was time for a wig. And even then, on the way to get it, she asked me, “Do you think I have to get one now? Does it look really bad?”
She was driving, and I looked over at her and the sun was coming through her hair, making it look like an aura. I thought it was beautiful. “It just looks as if you have real thin hair,” I said.
“That’s what I think, too,” she said. “But I’d better get one now in case it gets worse.”
I was carrying a magazine I thought would give us ideas for wig styles. Ruth had said she wanted something really short for a change.
“Look at this woman on the cover,” I told her, holding up the magazine. “Her hair is pretty short, and she looks great.”
Ruth snuck a glance, then looked back at the road. “Yeah,” she said. “That’s what I’ll do.” Then she sighed and I was careful not to look at her. I turned on the radio, and we rode the rest of the way there without talking.
The place was located in a suburban medical building. When we got into the lobby, we looked at the roster of names to see what office we were supposed to go to. A man in a uniform seated behind a small desk asked, “May I direct you ladies?” We didn’t even look at him, even when he asked again. We were full enough of what we had to do.
The sign on the door said PATRICIA LOOMIS, which Ruth and I agreed was highly unimaginative. “It should say BALD BUSTERS or something,” Ruth said. “Or HAIR TODAY, GONE TOMORROW.”
She took in a breath, opened the door, and announced herself to the blank-faced receptionist wearing a show-off ponytail. Then we sat on an overstuffed sofa with a coffee table in front of it that held a book called Cancer and Beauty.
“Oh, man, look at this,”
Ruth said, picking the book up and flipping through it. Mostly it was tricks for tying scarves. Don’t be afraid to get creative! the book said. She rolled her eyes and put it down. There was a basket of fake geraniums on the table, too, and Ruth fingered one of the thick green leaves in disgust. “In keeping with the fake-o theme, I suppose,” she said. She crossed her legs, swung her foot. “I’m a nervous fucking wreck,” she said quietly, not looking at me.
“Me, too.” I looked down into my lap, saw my fingers squeezing a knuckle.
Finally, a woman came out and called Ruth’s name. As we followed her down the hall, she turned around and looked critically at Ruth. “Have you been walking around like that?” she asked.
I thought, oh, God, don’t cry, Ruth, and she didn’t. She said, “Well, of course I’ve been walking around like this. Jesus Christ. What else? If I had a wig, I wouldn’t be here now, would I?”
Yeah, I thought. Yeah! And then I thought, what is someone like that doing working in a place like this, where women with broken hearts come?
After she’d brought us to the fitting room, the woman left to get some sample wigs. Ruth was seated in a swivel chair before a huge mirror, a setup like those they have in beauty salons. There was a hand mirror there, too, so she’d be able to inspect the back of her head.
“I think that woman is premenstrual,” I said.
“I think she’s prehistoric. Did you see the wrinkles in her neck?”
“Yeah,” I said, though I hadn’t.
When the woman returned, she handed Ruth a hairnet. Ruth pulled it on, then turned her head this way and that, looking at herself in the mirror. “I look great,” she said. “Like a cafeteria worker.”
“Give me some of that, uh, American chop suey,” I said.
Ruth smiled. I smiled. The woman frowned and I wanted to drive something wide and sharp into her softest part. On the way out of the place, I asked her, “Why do you have to be such a bitch? Why do you have to make a hard thing harder?”
“I beg your pardon?” she asked coldly.
“You should,” I said.
“Don’t worry about it,” Ruth said, paying for the wig she’d ordered—a short, dark-brown one—with her MasterCard. “Rush this order, okay?” she said. “Put it on the next rocket. I just found out I’m not supposed to be walking around like this.”
I see a movement under Ruth’s covers, and then she sighs and turns over. “Ruth?” I whisper.
Nothing. I go back into the kitchen, turn the faucet on, but when the water hits the kettle, it is too loud. Back into the living room, I stand before the bookcase, looking for something to read. Ruth has different pieces of art mixed in with the books. There is pottery: a short, round vase the color of eggshell; a small box with a geranium leaf imprint; a deep-blue bowl holding dried rose petals, a purple shoe with unfurled wings at the heel. There are tiny oils of individual flowers. I find something that I made years ago, the one time I tried to use clay. I pick it up and hold it, close my eyes, think maybe all it requires is a certain kind of belief and you really can go back in time. I wish hard, and open my eyes. Naturally, I am nowhere else. I am actually sort of surprised.
I always think incipient miracles surround us, waiting only to see if our faith is strong enough. If I am standing at a traffic light before I cross a street, I stare at the people on the other side, thinking, why can’t we just concentrate, and change places? And I have a real belief that this kind of thing will eventually come to be, this convenient kind of transmigration. “Come over for dinner, why don’t you?” we will say into the phone to our friends in California when we are in Wisconsin. And moments later they will appear, shiny with star-dust, briefly shaken but mostly without memory of how it happened that they arrived. We won’t have to understand it; it will just work, like a beating heart, like love. Really, no matter how frightened and discouraged I may become about the future, I look forward to it. In spite of everything I see all around me every day, in spite of all the times I cry when I read the newspaper, I have a shaky assurance that everything will turn out fine. I don’t think I’m the only one. Why else would the phrase “Everything’s all right” ease a deep and troubled place in so many of us? We just don’t know, we never know so much, yet we have such faith. We hold our hands over our hurts and lean forward, full of yearning and forgiveness. It is how we keep on, this kind of hope.
I turn out the light, lie back down on the sofa, close my eyes, and try to remember everything about the time Ruth wanted to help me make some pottery. You take what you can get. That is another one of the lessons here.
We went to the studio she taught in one snowy Sunday afternoon. She shared it with a potter, and she’d told me I could sculpt while she painted. She turned the radio up loud to a rock station and brought out some off-white clay, put it in a mound before me. “Go ahead,” she said, patting it affectionately. Then she went to her easel, picked up her brush.
“Go ahead what?” I asked. “I don’t know how to do anything.”
“Make it up,” she said. “That’s what the first guys did.”
I made a ball. “There.”
She shrugged. “Okay.”
“Well, help me,” I said.
“What’s in you?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Jesus,” she said. “You’ve got to loosen up.”
I sat still, waiting for inspiration. I hoped I’d recognize it if it did come. I felt nothing. Finally, I said, “Okay, I’m going to make a pot to piss in. Then I can never say I don’t have a pot to piss in.”
“There you go!”
She worked on her painting, while I created, for reasons unknown, a dog on a raft.
At one point, she came to stand in front of me. “A dog? On a raft?”
I blushed.
“I love it!” she said.
I shrugged, smashed it down.
“What did you do that for?” she asked, incredulous.
“I don’t know. It was stupid.”
She sat down across from me, took the clay, examined it. Nothing was left. “Somebody did something to you around this creativity thing, right?”
“What do you mean?”
“Somebody got you all inhibited about doing anything creative.”
“Oh, boy,” I said. “Art therapy. How much is this going to cost me?”
“Can you remember anything that happened?” She was serious, staring intently at me.
“Actually,” I said, “I do remember one thing. I think I was about five or six, and we were drawing in school, and I kept standing up to do it. I could work better that way. The teacher told me to sit down, but I kept forgetting—I was real excited. So she took my chair away, and then every time we had art after that, she took it again. I always had to stand, every time we had art. Of course it was highly amusing for everyone but me.”
“See?” Ruth said. She handed me back the clay. “Take it all back. Get it back.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said.
“Sure you do.”
I made another dog on a raft. I showed Ruth and she put her hands on my shoulders and kissed me full on the mouth. There is a pure place in all of us that makes no judgments about anything, ever. That place recognized what Ruth did as being absolutely right. The rest of me was nervous. I stepped back, blushing, and she laughed.
She had my piece glazed and fired and, when I said I didn’t want it, she kept it. She tied a tiny bandanna around the dog’s neck, laid a baby Frisbee at his feet.
Seeing that piece again now, I realize how much I need Ruth. She hears my unspoken sentences. My stomach contracts, and I feel the terrible sense of claustrophobia that comes from knowing there is nothing you can do about a situation that is intolerable but tolerate it. I let myself cry a little, quietly; and then, mercifully, I go to sleep.
I am awakened by a soft rapping at the door. It is Helen, asking in her high, little-girl voice, “Is she up?”
“No,” I whisper, st
epping back to let her in. I point to the kitchen and we go in there, shut the door to keep things quiet.
“There’s a good couple inches of snow out there,” Helen says. “It’s so exciting!” She slides her coat and boots off. She is wearing two different-colored socks.
“Nice look,” I say.
“Oh, I’m like this all the time, lately,” Helen says, looking down at her socks. “I forget what the hell I’m supposed to be doing. I miss my exits on the freeway. Sometimes I even answer the phone and then for get I’m on it.” She puts a bag on the center of the table. “I brought six million muffins.”
“I’ve gained five pounds from all this goddamn stress,” I said. “I can’t have any.”
“Ten,” Helen says, pointing to her stomach. “All I can wear are sweat outfits anymore. But I don’t care. I’m making coffee and then I’m eating a lot.”
Helen is Ruth’s oldest friend. They met in junior high school, were on the cheerleading squad together. Helen’s mother was part Cherokee, and the bones in Helen’s face are the kind your eyes can’t leave. She is one of the most unusually beautiful women I’ve ever seen, and also one of the least aware of her own loveliness. She works in a bookstore, sits on a stool behind the counter reading all day, and makes customers wait if she’s at a good part.
When the coffee is done, we both take a chocolate-chip muffin. We are on our second when Ruth comes into the kitchen. “Hey,” I say. “Want some coffee? And a muffin?”
“Sure,” she says, and sits down. She actually looks good, well rested, pink-cheeked. She has her hat on, her lumberjack shirt, kneesocks under her nightgown. She has washed her face and brushed her teeth: I can smell Listerine. We sit at the little table in the pale-yellow, winter-morning sun; and we eat and talk and laugh, and nobody says anything about illness or death or dying. It is so close to the old way. I have the sensation of both sitting at the table and floating above it.
Talk Before Sleep Page 5