Fiction River: Fantasy Adrift (21 page)

My breath caught as I watched him.

Delmar Musslewhite.

Laughing as he walked to a battered truck parked at the side of the road.

Delmar. With a fat, bottle-blond, and too many children.

A fat, bottle blond whose only resemblance to my supposed cousin Ruby was her sloppiness, her fatness, her children, and her bad dye job.

I set the opera glasses on the seat beside me, my hand shaking.

I leaned my head against the leather seat, watching the children laughing with each other at the bus stop. They seemed happy. The whole family seemed happy.

Just like my supposed cousin Ruby’s family in the real world.

I shook my head. This couldn’t be.

Was attraction something as simple as extra pounds of flesh and a bad dye job? Or was it more complicated than that?

Had my subconscious mixed up dreams and reality to present me with this narrative? Or was this somehow true, just like the real world was somehow true?

I willed myself awake, then lay in the darkness staring at the ceiling. Usually, my husband’s regular breathing beside me soothed me. But nothing could soothe me right now.

I didn’t want to believe this was all about looks and nothing else.

***

“Do you know someone named Lon Goudy?” I asked my so-called cousin Ruby the next day. It was eleven o’clock on a Saturday morning, and she still wore her purple sateen pajamas with a matching pair of mules. The mules had a purple puff over the arch, and they left a trail of thin feathers wherever she walked.

“Lon Goudy?” she said and frowned. My so-called cousin Ruby always managed a world-class frown. Her entire face bent toward her nose, making her look like a child about to pull a tantrum. “Sounds familiar.”

She poured me a cup of her extra strong coffee and handed me a lemon bar, even though I didn’t ask for it. Her kitchen smelled of fresh baked bread and a slab of beef just starting to brown in the giant roaster she had on the surprisingly clean counter.

“Lon Goudy,” she repeated. Then she smiled. “Yeah. I know him. Delmar and I bought our first car from him way back when we couldn’t afford nothing.”

Anything
, I wanted to correct her, knowing that my Real Cousin Ruby would never make that mistake. But I didn’t speak up. I’d learned long ago that correcting my so-called cousin Ruby led to a fight.

“Did you like him?” I asked.

“Like a car salesman?” she asked. “Are you kidding?”

I felt a slight shock. Who knew that my so-called cousin Ruby had standards? I certainly wouldn’t have guessed it, not from the parade of men she slept with before she met Delmar.

“He’s not just a salesman,” I said. “He owns the business. I hear it made him rich.”

“I bet it did.” She sat next to me, her manicured fingers picking at the lemon bar on her plate. “Fifteen percent interest would make anyone rich.”

“Is that what you paid?” I asked, shocked.

“When you don’t have credit and you have to drive to work, you pay exorbitant rates for a car and you’re grateful for it,” she said.

“I thought he advertises that his cars are cheaper than a regular car dealer’s,” I said.

“They are. He makes all his money on the financing. And the payments are exactly what you’d pay at some reputable dealer’s. I certainly couldn’t’ve gotten a car loan back in those days from a normal financing company. Neither could Delmar. Much as I hated paying the rates, it was Goudy’s that got me back on my feet. Because I got credit through him, I was able to buy the house, and once I had the house, I could rent my business. It all worked out.”

It was my turn to frown. Lon Goudy, car dealer, had had an impact on her life. I wondered if that meant Delmar Musslewhite, car mechanic, had had an impact on my Real Cousin Ruby’s life.

“That bother you?” my so-called cousin Ruby asked.

I blinked. She’d caught the frown and figured another reason for it.

I shook my head. “I guess I had no idea you were in that kind of financial trouble.”

“It’s not what you discuss with the Perfects,” she said.

It took me a moment to understand what she had said. “Us?”

“Oh, come on,” she said. “All of you are so educated. Pam’s in like every magazine being interviewed, and I even saw Debbie on the Discovery Channel one night. And then there’s you with those kids. Did they even spit up when they were babies? They were always so damn clean.”

I stared at her. I’d had no idea she was jealous of me. Or of my siblings. “You call us the Perfects?”

She shrugged. “Nothing bad ever happens to you people.”

“Of course it does,” I said. “Bad things happen to everyone.”

She gave me a crooked smile, then got up and poured herself another cup of coffee. I hadn’t even noticed her drinking the first one.

“You said you needed help with something,” she said.

I took a sip of the coffee, then tried not to grimace. The burned bean taste was what coffee from my childhood tasted like, before Americans knew any better.

“Pictures,” I said. “Do you have family reunion photos from when we were kids? None of us can find any.”

“What do you want pictures for?” she asked.

“My kids have never seen us when we were kids,” I said, making up the first thing I could think of.

She grunted in acknowledgement, then stood. I stood too, but she waved me down. “I know where they are. I have a box.”

She waddled out of the kitchen. I took a bite from the lemon bar. It was good, which wasn’t a surprise. My so-called cousin Ruby had always been a good baker.

I picked up my coffee cup and wandered toward the hall. There dozens of school pictures hung—every child with the current photo, plus the marriage photos of the older two, and a baby photo for the first grandchild.

I heard Ruby return before I saw her, breathing hard and stepping heavily on the scuffed wood floor. She balanced a large box on her large hip and swept the dishes aside. I grabbed a few so that they wouldn’t fall off the table. She set the box down where they had been.

“Heavier than I thought,” she huffed.

I smiled politely. The scent of mildew mixed with the browning beef. She opened the box and grabbed handfuls of black-and-whites, some with scalloped edges, all with dates along the white space.

“They’re not in order,” she said.

We searched. She pulled out the reunion photos, starting with the photos from the 1980s. I found the 1960s pictures beneath them and stared at them in surprise.

My Real Cousin Ruby, thinner than I had been, slightly hunched, her bright, brilliant eyes gazing directly at the camera, stood with me, arm in arm, as if we were best buddies.

How did my Real Cousin Ruby get into the real world?

“Remember that?” my so-called cousin Ruby said. “Those three years we went to Kent, everyone thought we were sisters.”

Kent was a private school that my father had finagled us into. My siblings all went to it, and I did too. I had thought my Real Cousin Ruby went, and my so-called cousin Ruby hadn’t gone at all. I thought she was too stupid to go.

“Then Mom and Dad moved out of the district and the fees would’ve been too high.” She smiled ruefully. “So I had to go to public school.”

She slapped another picture down. In it, she sat alone next to a picnic basket. She was much heavier—what we would call pudgy now—and her brown hair was stringy.

“I wasn’t a fan of public school,” she said.

Something in her voice made me look at her.

“I don’t remember this,” I said.

“Of course not.” She set down more pictures. The next year, and the next. We no longer stood together. She was always in the back of the great big family photograph, using someone (and then several someones) as a shield for her widening body. “I have a gift for disappearing.”

I frowned at her. My so-called cousin Ruby wasn’t self aware. She had never been self aware. It was one of the reasons that I didn’t like her.

But how long had it been since I really talked to her? I always avoided her at family reunions, preferring to make snide little comments later to my siblings. My husband always defended her, but, as I used to say, he liked to defend the weak.

I looked at the photographs again. I had been hoping to see a young Delmar or Lon Goudy at the fringes of the crowd. Instead I saw some happy, healthy children, laughing and playing. And one very sad, very lonely little girl on the sidelines.

My stomach twisted. “Something happened to you.”

She picked up the photograph of herself, sitting alone by the picnic basket. “Your brother would say what happened was that I discovered food.”

Yeah, he would say that. And he probably had said that. We weren’t kind. I didn’t remember being mean to her in those years, but I didn’t remember standing arm in arm with her either.

“What would you say?” I asked softly.

She tapped that photograph along the edge of the table. “I would say that Mr. Eckhart happened to me.”

My gaze met hers. My stomach ached even more than it had when I first looked at the pictures. I wanted to blame the bitter coffee, but I knew that wasn’t the cause.

“Mr. Eckhart?” I repeated.

She nodded. “I was his special girl that year. In the bleachers. In the music room. In his office.”

She wasn’t looking at me. Her cheeks were rosy, but not with any joy. She was blushing.

“My therapist wanted me to prosecute the bastard, but by the time I actually told her what had happened, he’d been dead for ten years.”

“You have a therapist?” I asked, unable to disguise the surprise in my voice.

“What? Do you think I got better on my own?” she asked.

I shrugged. “I guess I credited Delmar.”

She smiled. “Delmar was great. He was a good friend. He wouldn’t date me—and in those days, that meant sleep with me—until I got professional help.”

I shook my head a little. The world was tilting.

“It seems really obvious from a modern adult perspective,” she said. “You see a bright, active child who withdraws, gains weight, won’t go near people, and you realize something’s gone wrong. I’d know that about my kids. But in those days, who had any idea?”

My mouth was dry. These days, who had any idea? I certainly hadn’t. This was all new to me.

“I learned that those kids—the ones who fatten up and disappear—have two responses, sexually, to the abuse. One group withdraws completely. Never gets touched. The other group lets any old damn fool touch them. Because it doesn’t matter.”

She bit her lower lip. It mattered to her, telling me. She was afraid to tell me, afraid of my response.

And who could blame her? Judgmental me. I hadn’t even noticed a problem.

“Delmar knew me then. He said he’d be with me if I valued the relationship. I didn’t know what that meant. He gave me a book about healing. And that started it all.”

Her flush was deep now. Her eyes swam with tears.

“So you are right,” she said. “He saved me.”

Then she wiped her hands along her sateen robe.

“At least, part of me. I’ll never stop eating. I don’t want to.”

My Real Cousin Ruby forgot to eat sometimes, especially after the abortion. She would curl into a ball and not talk for a while too.

I was there for my Real Cousin Ruby. But this woman—this girl, who had stood arm in arm with me in a beautiful green park forty years ago—never really had me at her side.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know.”

She shrugged. “It’s okay. It’s in the past.”

She got up, got another lemon bar, and handed me one without asking.

Then she sat down. She stared at the bar for the longest time.

Finally, she said, “But I wonder sometimes, you know? Who would I have been without Mr. Eckhart?”

***

Had I known who she would have been?

Had we all known, me and my siblings?

Children rarely react with compassion. Children see danger and flee from it, because children know how easily they can be victimized. Children are the ultimate savages. The kindness of the world, the obligations, the responsibilities, all have to be learned.

Was my so-called cousin Ruby a changeling child because she had become someone I didn’t recognize? Were all my dreams about her just directed dreaming about the person I wanted her to be?

Then how to explain the bad twists of fate? The wet sweatshirt? The fact that Lon and Delmar existed in both worlds?

I told my physicist sister Debbie in general terms about the dreams I’d had, about the men who existed in both. I described them by their professions, not by their names.

“That car dealer,” she said, “does he have ads? Like on TV?”

He did. They were on the web too. He kept them archived on his website. And one, which aired about six months ago, featured his hunched little economist wife, Constance.