About Face (3 page)

Ruth insisted she couldn't retire. She had too much to do at work. And she had to leave on a high, without looking like she was being forced out. “You wouldn't retire without me, would you? Jeez, David, we haven't talked about retirement at all. I like working. I don't want to wear plaid shorts and play golf.”

“Can we be serious?”

“You're right. You don't wear plaid shorts. Sorry.”

“And how can you say you like working? You complain a lot. You're tired all the time. And you're always agonizing about being so corporate and so involved with make-up, you talk about not being who you used to be. Maybe it's time to—”

“Oh, sure, I complain, but I really like the challenges and the problem-solving, I like the people. Enough of them anyway.”

She felt the vertical crease between her eyebrows starting to deepen into the Grand Canyon of the Forehead as the antagonists in her familiar internal battle started warming up: Why
had
she stayed at this job? Because she liked it. Why did she like it? For the creativity and the validation of her talent. Was that enough, and was it time to leave? Yes, and don't be ridiculous

David started a sentence he chose not to finish. It wasn't distraction, she could tell, it was a self-stifle. “Go ahead,” she urged.

“I think what you like is being good at what you do, even if you don't exactly like
what
you do. You're addicted to competence, you're an achievement junkie. You could do volunteer work, maybe, and then be competent at something you believe in.”

He looked over at her. “C'mon, don't be mad.”

“I'm not mad. Not exactly, anyway. If you were thinking about this, why didn't you tell me? I feel kind of betrayed. You were clearly open to this idea, and I had no inkling.”

“Ruthie, you want me to tell you everything I might conceivably be open to thinking about? That's nuts.
Even I
don't know that. And even if I did….” his voice dropped off.

“I'm just trying to figure out and explain how I feel.”

“I don't actually need precision about the ingredients and proportions of your various emotions,” David said. “I get it. Enough of it, anyway.”

“I just wanted to be clear. So you'd understand.”

“It's time you knew. Your need to be clear is much greater than it is for your audience.”

“But it
is
a need for me, David. Maybe it's because I felt so misunderstood growing up. Or because I'm short, so I feel like—”

“Ruthie!”

“What?”

“You're doing it again.”

“Oh. Okay. Let me just calm down, okay?”

“Good idea.” After a few minutes, they pulled up to the concert hall, into the designated “Big Shot” parking spaces. It had stopped raining. Ruth took a deep breath and looked at her watch.

Hoping David would come to his senses in a day or two, she said, “I need for us to talk about this later. I don't like it at all, but I'll think about it. Later. But right now, more than anything else, I need to glow. Okay? Glow now, think later.”

“If that's what you need, you glow, girl. I'll be right beside you.”

CHAPTER 3

Face-to-Face in the Women's Room

 

 

RUTH GRABBED DAVID'S HAND as they entered the concert hall. They strode directly to the far right corner of the dazzling glass-and-brass lobby, to the Adams Room, where Mimosa was hosting a pre-concert party for employees who'd bought one of the specially-priced tickets that included a charitable contribution.

The Adams Room boasted fragile antiques upholstered in navy blue velvet, heavy curtains, and huge ornately-framed oil paintings of white men. When she entered this room with the pre-concert champagne and elegant dessert nibbles designed to entice donations to the Foundation for Children with Scleroderma, she felt as if she were leaving the twentieth and nineteenth centuries behind.

Pat had volunteered to come early to help set up and greet people as they arrived. Ruth was surprised but glad to be shed of it, and also thought it would be good career-development for Pat. That is, if Pat's long-range career plan included anything resembling charity benefits.

Ruth immediately set to work as hostess, making people feel included and appreciated, glad they'd come, and motivated to do it again.

First she approached the Keatings, tall and standing stiffly as if posing for a picture. His white hair and her white dress, combined with their height, made them hard to overlook.

“I'm so glad you could come. Jay, I never see you at work, so it's great to get a glimpse of you here. And Charlotte, how have you been? Last time I saw you, you were quite eloquent about the horrors of parenting an adolescent. Have things improved?”

Charlotte vented about her daughter's independent spirit and bragged about her PSAT scores.

Ruth moved on to a thin woman in a black suit looking around for someone to talk to while trying not to look desperate. “Hi Clarissa, how's it going?”

“Ruth you're such a genius. And it's so good of you,” said with hand over heart, “to raise all this money for these poor children.”

“It's a terrible disease. Imagine what it must be like to have your own immune system attack you. To count yourself lucky if it's only your skin that's affected and not your organs.

“Their friends are probably worried about acne, and these kids would give anything to have acne be their worst skin problem.

“And the most heart-breaking part is that these kids have no idea why this is happening to them. No one does, really. All they know is that their skin gets thick and stiff. That's why it's so important for us to raise money for research and treatment. Thanks, Clarissa, for being part of it.”

Next was diminutive Rita, with the huge eyeglasses and even huger earrings, who wondered aloud if the corporate benefits were cost-effective while her eyes ceaselessly roamed the crowd like a lighthouse beam.

“Come on, Rita, you have plenty of time at work to arm-wrestle with me about the bottom line. Tonight, let's just be music lovers, okay? Who knows, tomorrow I might actually agree with you.”

Cameron's son was considering the Peace Corps, which made it a convenient topic whenever they needed one.

“So there I was, running a health dispensary at the tender age of twenty-two, seeing people with diseases ranging from polio to elephantiasis to scleroderma. And also meeting David, the volunteer in the next village. Little did I know he was my future better half.”

Charm on command was exhausting, she thought. It was necessary social lubrication, she knew, and, even though David, the natural-born storyteller, had helped her learn to do it, she still preferred one-on-one intimacy. No one could tell she was a recovering introvert whose shyness had sometimes been mistaken for snobbery. And she'd even managed to stop worrying about how she looked in her dress.

Flickering lights signaled Turandot would start in five minutes.

As people ended their small talk and drifted out to the Mimosa block of seats in the first mezzanine, Ruth started towards Pat to tell her what a fine job she'd done. But Pat was busy talking to Jeremy. From her body language, she might easily have been talking about how big a fish she'd caught. She really shouldn't suck up so soon and so obviously, Ruth thought. You just never know. Office Politics 101.

Ruth tended to three others who needed herding into the theatre, then found David's waiting arm.

“How's it going so far?”

She commented on the gratifying mix of “regular” people mixed in with the rich folks. “I'm not sure, but I think we'll set a record. Lots of people paid at the door. Which means they paid a lot. I can't wait to see the figures tomorrow. Plus, Mark Bloom pulled me over. Remember him? He used to be CFO at our place, and everyone thought he'd be our new CEO but now he's being groomed for some top Big Daddy job. He went on and on about how great my charity benefits are, so he's okay in my book.”

Seated, Ruth quickly did an inventory of who was sitting with whom just as the lights dimmed and the overture welcomed her to the spectacle.

To avoid her usual operatic head-flopping, she'd read the English translation of the libretto and listened to the music before coming. And she was glad she had: knowing what was going on helped, even if what was going on was a fairy tale. Familiarity with the music made the arias more beautiful, too.

Maybe the plot isn't exactly twentieth-century realistic, she thought, but that's only if you take it literally. Longing for what you can't have is universal. And emotionally accessible.

Everyone wanted something they couldn't have. Or maybe they just don't want the right things. Some of them don't even know what they want. Like Turandot. The ice princess. And that poor slave girl, so faithful to her master while also obviously in love with his son.

Ruth was completely swept up by the music, the colors, the emotion. When the lights announced intermission, she was gratified to realize she'd done none of her usual mental flitting, had no negative fantasies about retirement or To-Do lists or Jeremy-the-enigma. All she'd done was wrap her attention around the opera.

However, like Pavlov's dog, her bladder responded to the break. She bolted for the women's room and her heart sank at the ten-person line. It was the cold, hard fact of restroom life: Women waited, men didn't.

“I'll bet the men don't have to wait,” she groused.

“Do they have more stalls, do you think? Or are they just faster?”

“Wanna find out?”

“We need to level the peeing field.”

Giggles all around. Then, as if they'd rehearsed, everyone got serious about waiting patiently. As she advanced from the anteroom to the main room, she counted: Four stalls, and I'm ninth on line. That's like being third on line for a single stall. Not too bad.

She turned to the long horizontal mirror to her right and multi-tasked. Hair, lips, cheeks, eyebrows. And check out the tummy. How could David say he didn't see it?

Finishing her personal mirror-work, her eyes brushed past the reflections of the women in line. She was struck—who wouldn't be?—by the wild head of light-brown frizzy hair on a woman near the end of the line. Thick, curly, with no attempt at good manners or any other form of restraint. It reminded her of kids at a swimming pool who yell to their parents, “Look at me, look at me. See what I can do. Look, watch me do a trick. Look at me.” Beneath it all, the woman had one thick eyebrow.

Among all the black sequins, rhinestones, and silk, she wore a huge blue and green print creation, the kind of dress usually referred to as a flowing robe.

The hair may be different, she thought, but not the mono-brow. That's Vivian.

 

 

SHE'D FIRST SET EYES ON VIVIAN, her Peace Corps Volunteer hut-mate, after six dusty hours on a washboarded red-clay road in a crowded bush-taxi. Emerging from the closely-packed vehicle, her brain shaken like a malted from the bumpy ride and the fatigue, she saw the village where she'd be living for two years. The huts were various shapes and sizes, but were all the color of the ground. There was an occasional fromagier tree whose base looked like the rich folds of a wedding gown spread out at the bride's feet for the traditional picture.

A large white woman emerged from one of the mud brick structures. She wore a faded blue version of the standard wax-dyed cloth wrapped around her waist like a beach cover-up, a reddish version around her head, and, separating the two competing patterns, a tee-shirt that had once been white. Ruth thought it hadn't taken her Peace Corps hut-mate very long to go native. Vivian, as she later recounted, was awed by how clean Ruth was.

 

 

“RUTH, OHMYGOD, RUTH, is that you? Is that really you? Here on the same bathroom line as me? Is it really you?” Vivian's eyes widened as her voice got louder and louder.

Everyone looked up.

Busted, thought Ruth. “Vivian? Vivian Denise Cassidy? Is that you? Geez, it must be … thirty years now? How are you?”

Plum-sequined Ruth and wild-haired Vivian tentatively stepped off the line, meeting half-way to talk. The women who had followed each of them in line kept their spaces empty as the line advanced. Everyone was rapt.

How lame, Ruth thought. What do I mean by ‘How are you?' How are you now? Or how have you been for thirty years? Or what?

Vivian didn't seem to notice. “I'm good. I'm really good. Oh, it's so good to see you. You look exactly the same. Haven't you gotten any older in all this time? How are you? You look so good. All grown up and everything.”

“I'm good too. And you look great. So beautiful, so exotic.”

And then they were at the moment Ruth dreaded. Where to go from here? Again, Vivian seemed oblivious to the awkwardness Ruth felt.

“I was just saying to Carlos the other day—”

“You two stayed together all this time? That's so great.”

“We knew it was true love or maybe no one else would have either of us but anyway here we are and we have a daughter too. She's in the orchestra here tonight, she plays the oboe, she's first oboe, actually, oh I can't believe I said that but I really am proud of her and that's why we're here. We've been living in New York for awhile now, and…”

She stopped for a second. “As you can see, I still talk too much. Tell me about you.”

“Remember David from Sine Saloum, the one who was just a friend even though everyone wanted us to get together but we insisted that it was just platonic?”

“Remember him? Of course. I believe my exact words were ‘Platonic, shmatonic.'”

“You were right. We've been married for about twenty-six years now … almost twenty-seven … and we have a son, Josh.”

The silence during the ensuing pause was interrupted only by flushing toilets. And then they hugged.

Ruth was mentally wording a question about Vivian's work life in a way that adhered to the feminist principle that work inside or outside the home was valuable, when Vivian said, “So what do you guys do?”

“I work in Marketing, here in midtown. And David's a math teacher. What about you?”

“I'm at a woman's shelter and Carlos is with a foundation. We both—” She stopped, looking around in a panicky way, then concentrating very carefully on the paper towel dispenser. She turned red and started fanning herself furiously with the program as beads emerged on her forehead. “Just wait a second and I'll be back on planet earth again.”

“You too? Believe me, I know just how you feel. Like you can feel your outline, the boundary between the hot and the normal.”

“Yeah, that's it.”

“Me too,” chimed the woman who was saving Ruth's place on line. Her short, close-to-the-skull salt and pepper hair framed a beet-red face.

The fanners fanned, the toilets flushed.

A stall door opened and the woman in front of Ruth's empty space entered. Ruth said, “Vivian, I'm next and I'd let the woman behind me have my turn so we could keep talking, but, believe me, I can't. I've really gotta go and I can't hold it in a second longer. And then I have to get back to my seat because I'm baby-sitting some people from work. Can you hang out after the performance for awhile?”

“No, we can't, cause we promised Ida we'd come backstage immediately so she can introduce us around, before the lines form. But I would love to see you again.”

“Me too. And I know David would, too. Can you two get together for lunch tomorrow? Or Sunday? Or next Saturday or Sunday?”

“Let me think.” Ruth wondered if Vivian was trying to figure out how she'd sell Carlos on the idea of a date with the Talbots. He was so wild back then, so pure, so opinionated. Who knows what he's like now, she thought? Actually, who knows what Vivian's like?

“Next Sunday would be good.”

“Are you in the phone book, Viv?”

“Yep. Brooklyn. Suarez. With a Z at the end. Just like always.”

“I'll call you tomorrow.”

She got back to her seat as the curtain was rising, and quickly told David about Vivian in the bathroom. Then, despite all her preparation for the opera, and all her involvement in the story, she never heard the second half. She never saw the slave girl kill herself, never saw the prince answer the riddles correctly, never saw Turandot realize her love. She never heard the piercing aria she'd been looking forward to, Nessun Dorma. She was back in Africa.