Saving Ruth (2 page)

2

T
he screen door opened and my mom peeked her head out.

“Helloooooo,” she sang.

“Hi, Mom!” I yelled back. She looked like Mom—roundish, medium height, with the same dark hair and eyes as me. Her hair was shorter than I had ever seen it—a kind of Mia Farrow meets Blanche Devereaux mom-do—and curled softly around her face. Pretty.

As she got closer, I watched her features freeze in a mask of worry, and my hands balled themselves into fists reflexively.

“Ruthie.” Her voice trembled a bit.

“Mama,” I whispered back as I hugged her. “What are you crying for?” I pulled back and looked into her eyes, which were welling up behind her glasses.

“Oh Ruth, I'm just glad to see you.” She paused. “Are you sick? I mean, what is this?” She gestured toward my body, her hand flipping up and down its length.

“I'm not sick!” I flew into defensive mode. “Can we please not talk about this for the thousandth time? I went on a diet and I lost weight. Funny how that happens.”

For as long as I could remember, my mom—and my dad, actually—had been trying to get me to go on a diet. Not in a passive-aggressive way either. Aggressive-aggressive was a Wasserman trademark. Now that I had gone too far in their eyes, they both took turns giving me shit for it. Christmas break had been one melodramatic confrontation after another. I had found my mother up to her elbows in a box of Oreos late one night, only to have her blame me for her demise.
I'm eating for you!
she had cried, with chocolate lodged in the corners of her mouth and capping one of her front teeth.

“Okay, I'm sorry. There's no need to be a smart-ass. You know me, I can't help it. I say what I think. Forget it.” She sighed. David dragged my suitcase around to us. I braced myself.

She bit her lip, and I imagined her anger brewing like a pot of coffee. Few things enraged my parents more than our abuse of things they had bought us. She hadn't gotten a good look at my jeans yet. Between that and the suitcase, it was going to be a tense welcome-home lunch.

“Ruth, why?” she asked.

I dug my hands into my pockets and imagined lighting a cigarette. “I'm sorry, Mom. I overslept and packed like a jerk.”

“You know you're going to have to buy yourself a new one, right?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, as long as we're clear on that one.”

I nodded.

“And the next time you beg me for million-dollar jeans, I am going to ignore you. Are we good on that too?” Wow, she had already noticed. She was quick. Quick-Draw Marjorie.

“Roger that, Mom. I'm sorr—”

Her hands flew up in front of her chest, palms out. “Not going to talk about it anymore. I'm glad you're home, Ruthie.” She hugged me again, and I relaxed into her softness. “Even if you're ungrateful.”

“I'm really not, Mom. Just careless. I'll try to be better.” She sighed again and gave me a final squeeze.

“Where's David?” she asked.

“He went inside.”

“Well, pull that sad thing in the house, will you? And where's your father? He's probably passed out from the excitement of you coming home. He's been up since daybreak, I am telling you. Running around the house like a maniac and driving me crazy.”

I followed her inside, lugging the suitcase up the two concrete stairs by the back door and into the kitchen.
Home.

“Close the door, for goodness' sake, we don't want to let out all of the air conditioning!” yelled my father as he shuffled around the corner. “Ruthie girl!” He held out his arms and walked toward me.

“Hello, Dad,” I whispered as I melted into his hug. He was wearing what I liked to call his dad weekend uniform—a knit Polo and tennis shorts. He released me, and we looked at one another in silence. Same dad—blue eyes, salt-and-pepper hair, big smile.

“You're too skinny,” he offered.

“Bet you never thought you'd say that,” I replied.

“It's not a joke, Ruthie.” His smile faded as he switched gears into stern mode. “Every time I see you this year, you're smaller. Enough already. You looked great ten pounds ago.” He smoothed my hair. “Enough already,” he repeated.

I nodded. How could I tell him that the mere thought of gaining weight gave me a panic attack?

“Hey, where's Maddie?” I asked, changing the subject. Maddie was our Shih Tzu. We'd gotten her on my eighth birthday when a client of my dad's couldn't take care of her any longer. Tiny even for a Shih Tzu, with a caramel and white coat that badly needed brushing, at first she had strangely terrified me.

“Ruth, what's your problem?” David had asked in all of his nine-and-a-half-year-old wisdom. “It's a little dog. Look! Look at how cute she is.” My stiffness didn't break until we got home and let her run through the house. She had careened into every room, sniffing around their perimeters and nodding to us in approval, until she got to mine. She trotted around the Barbies and the baby dolls, looked up at me, and proceeded to pee right in the middle of my floor.
You're mine
, she was telling me. And from that point on, I was.

“Here she comes,” said my dad. Tiny nails tapped tentatively around the corner. She was getting old—eleven years now—and it showed.

“Maddie!” She looked up and swung her hips in greeting as her tail swished from side to side. I picked her up. She was as light as a bag of pretzels.

“Old girl,” I cooed, nuzzling my face into her fur. She licked my nose.

“I need a shower,” I announced as I put her down.

“Okay, but make it quick,” said my mom. “We're going to have lunch in a half-hour or so.” Lunch. The word made me nervous on principle. A meal with carbs and protein and chips and who knew what else, not to mention the three pairs of eyes that would study everything that went into my mouth. I chewed on the inside of my cheek.

“What the hell did she do to that suitcase, Marjorie?” my dad asked as I dragged it out of the room behind me.

I made a left into my bedroom and dumped it on the blue carpet. My room. My mom and I had redecorated it a few years ago—the summer David had left for college. It had been her way of coping with the fact that he was gone, and although it had started out under the guise of a bonding project for the two of us, it had quickly evolved into The Marjorie Show. I had wanted an
Us Weekly
bedroom—a canopy bed with mosquito netting was the height of chic to me at that point—and my mom had wanted Laura Ashley. Laura had won in the end, but I had at least scored mirrored closet doors after hours of begging. The walls were papered in blue stripes with tiny flowers weaving in and out of them, and a vanity table sat in the corner, freshly dusted. A wooden bookcase that had been painted white leaned against the wall, filled with
Anne of Green Gables
books and trophies from my various soccer, swimming, and softball teams. My twin bed was covered in a mauve, pink, and blue quilt. I collapsed onto it.

I glanced to my right, smirking at my reflection. How many hours had I spent in front of those mirrors with my door locked, trying to gather my stomach with my hands in an attempt to see it flat—mottling my pale flesh with red welts in the process? The three of us had spent a lot of time alone in our respective rooms the year David had gone to college. Without him around, our family dynamic was strange, forced even.

“You taking a shower?” David asked from my doorway. “I need to get in there.” Already it was starting.

“Jesus! Yes, I'm taking a shower. I'll be quick.”

I got up and walked across the hall, slamming the door behind me. I turned on the water and peeled myself out of my sweaty, smelly clothes. The mirror revealed someone I only sort of knew. Who was that girl with the protruding rib cage and the tiny breasts? Oh right, me. I turned to the side. To see a back with no back fat was a sight to behold. That was when I first knew that I had lost weight—when I had noticed in my dorm mirror that my back was as smooth as a car's hood. Meg had walked in once while I was admiring myself fully naked—standing on my desk chair with my hand mirror angled up to get the view from behind.

“So, this is what you do when I'm not around,” she had mumbled, blushing and making a beeline for her bed. I was mortified. But not as mortified as I might have been had she walked in and seen me trying on her clothes, which was my other activity of choice when I had the room to myself. Meg was a girl who could eat Whoppers and pizza and never gain an ounce. The day that I could fit into her jeans without suffocating was going to be a good day. That day had come and gone around February.

As I washed my hair, the smell of smoke billowed around me. And Tony. His smell was unmistakable—pungent and rich, lingering as I scrubbed him away. Tony was the real reason I had overslept. I soaped up my legs and dragged the razor carefully around my bony knees. I thought it would be a good way to go out—to blue-ball him into submission and then leave, the way all of the cool girls did in the movies. Instead, because I wasn't a cool girl in a movie, I had slept with him and fought back tears as he had rolled off of me and returned to the party beyond his bedroom door.

“Ruth, you minx,” he had said as he stepped back into his jeans and winked at me. “Let's get back to the party, babe. This is it for me. Graduation is tomorrow, dude, I can't believe it.”

“Yeah,
dude
, me either.”

He had left me there, twisted in his dirty sheets. The same sheets I had lost my virginity on, a few months prior. I wondered if they had been washed. I wondered if he had slept with anyone else since we had broken up two weeks ago. Instead of asking those questions, I had just gotten up, pulled on my jeans, and slipped out the back door.

I let the water pour over me one more time before turning it off. I toweled off and opened the door, sending a cloud of steam into the hallway. In my room, I attacked my suitcase with some scissors—puncturing its layers of electrical tape until my clothes spilled out. I thought about the rest of my stuff at Meg's house in Milwaukee. She was holding on to it for the summer—storing it in her basement with the rest of her college life. I imagined our winter coats sitting in the corner and reading Psych 101 textbooks together.
When clothes come alive!

There was a knock at the door.

“Ruthie, lunch is in five minutes,” my dad bellowed through the wood.

My face grew hot as I began to formulate a game plan in my mind.
I'll eat a few bites of whatever vegetables are available, push the rest around on my plate, and then go for a long walk later.
I pulled my cutoffs up my freshly shaved legs and a clean tank top over my head.
Wash it down with a couple of glasses of Diet Coke to fill up the empty space in my stomach.
I dragged a comb through my hair, scooped a glob of gel from its container, and slicked the whole mess back into a wet bun.
Keep talking throughout the meal to distract everyone from my plate.

“Ruuuuuuuuuuuuuuth!” my mom yelled from the kitchen. “Let's go!”

I can do this.

“Cominggggggg!” I yelled back. God, how I hated being bellowed at. A lot of that went on in my house. What was so hard about walking your lazy ass down the hall to someone's door? Sometimes I wondered if my parents ever had conversations at close range. They were constantly summoning each other from remote parts of the house:

Marjorieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!

Sammmmmmmmmmmmmm!!!!!!

“Could we make a rule this summer not to yell for each other?” I asked as I slid into my place at the table. David and my parents looked up from passing bowls of potato and chicken salad. Great, a mayonnaise fantasia.

“No,” answered my dad.

“But it's so annoying.”

“Tough.”

“Who wants to be yelled at before they've even engaged in conversation? It sets a tone, can't you see that?”

“Ruth, you're wasting your breath,” said my mom.

I sighed and surveyed the table. Calorie counts hovered over each dish in my mind like Pac Man bubbles. Mayonnaise fantasia, no way. Baked beans I could do. And corn on the cob. Tomatoes. Pickles. Okay, I could work with this. I began to assemble my lunch.

“Ruth, have some chicken salad,” my mom said.

“I can't, I'm a vegetarian.”

“Since when?” asked my dad.

“Since vegetarian became code for anorexic,” mumbled David. I shot him a dirty look.

“Since this year,” I answered.

“Then you'll eat the potato salad.”

I locked eyes with my dad, who was giving me his best
I mean it, Ruth
face.

“Mayonnaise makes me want to puke,” I retorted. “I'm not eating it.” I looked away and reached for the jar of pickles. What was he going to do, shove a forkful down my throat?

“Do you have a workout plan for the summer, David?” asked my dad. David played soccer for Mercer University. The star player on our high school team, he had been recruited aggressively and was there on scholarship. This was a huge source of pride for my dad, who still hadn't given up on my own potential for some sort of sports stardom, despite the fact that I had been an award-winning bench rider all of my sporting life. Well, except for swimming. I had been decent until my breasts arrived. Unfortunately, that had been around age nine.

“Yeah.”

“Well, this is an enlightening conversation.”

“Sorry, Dad, I just don't want to talk about the work I have to do right now,” explained David in a measured tone. “I just got home yesterday, okay? Can I have a little bit of summer?”

“You're right, David,” said my mom, glancing sharply at my dad.

He looked at me. Great, my turn. I cut my tomato in half and speared it with my fork, pulling it toward my mouth in the hopes that chewing would delay the inevitable.