Authors: Elizabeth Berg
Ruth is wearing L.D.’s pearl studs, a little makeup—lipstick, some black mascara. She looks only slightly pale. You wouldn’t know. “Something to drink?” the stewardess will ask her, bored. Bored!
“Ruth,” I say, and start to shake.
“Don’t,” she whispers.
I kiss her cheek, pull back. “Okay. So call me when you get there.”
Yes.
“Or I’ll call you.”
“Okay.”
“You can call me anytime, you know. The middle of the night. Really, anytime you want. For anything.” Tears roll down my face and I brush them away impatiently, as though they are someone else’s, as though they are rain.
“I’ll call you, Ann. I have to go.”
“I know.”
Neither of us moves. “Do you need a wheelchair, Mom?” Michael asks, finally. “The gate’s a long way down.”
“That’s a good idea,” she says, and when he leaves to get one, she says, “Go now. Pretend this is something normal. And don’t think about me on the way home. I don’t want you to crack up your car and sue me.”
“What would I sue you for?” I ask. “You haven’t got shit.”
“Oh, boy,” she says. “Are you wrong.” And now she is crying.
I watch Michael push her away. I have never seen anyone look that way in a wheelchair, sit up so straight and proud. She makes you think it’s the only way to get around. She makes you think she’s lucky.
I
close the car door, put on my seat belt, search the dashboard for the claim ticket. I can smell her, feel her. I look over at the seat she sat in, then out the front windshield. It seems much too wide, and for a moment I think I got in the wrong car. I get out to check the license plate. No. It’s the right car. Just the wrong size. When I get home, I’ll tell Joe we need a new, smaller car.
I pay the parking lot attendant, an outrageously beautiful young black woman who is playing a radio loudly, tapping her heel against the rung of her high metal stool to the rhythm of someone I’ve never heard.
“Have a nice day,” she says, and I say, “You, too.” And then, “Why are you doing this? You could be a model.”
“Well, thank you.”
“Really,” I say. “You should call someone. I think there are agencies in the Yellow Pages.”
She smiles tightly, looks pointedly past me.
“Oh—sorry,” I say, looking into my rearview at the cars lined up behind me.
“It’s okay. But if you could just move on, now.”
I ride inside the shell that drives my car home, wondering why I said what I did to the parking attendant. I believe it was the need to try to keep saving something.
When I pull into my driveway, I see a plane passing directly overhead. Of course it isn’t Ruth. I only make it be, and I watch it until it disappears.
The house is empty. Meg is still at school, Joe at work. The living room looks different from the way I remember it. I feel as though I’ve been gone for years, and am a stranger here now, vaguely uncomfortable and overly aware of colors and light and the placement of the furniture. I feel as though I’m wearing a kind of bodysuit that keeps me from feeling the real air of home.
I put my suitcase on the stairs to get carried up later, go into the kitchen, open the refrigerator door. Yes, that is the butter we buy. There is some leftover vegetable soup, the ABC kind, Meggie’s favorite. I shut the door. The coffeemaker is still on and I turn it off. Joe. He forgets. I look out the window over the kitchen sink for a while, then go to check the answering machine
chine for messages. The light is blinking and I hope it’s Ruth, saying, “Oh, all right, you big baby! Come with me.” I could still get there. I have time. Or if I miss that flight, I could wait for the next one. But it is not Ruth, it is Helen, saying, “I hope it crashes. I hope one person dies instantly and the rest walk away. Is that a terrible thing to say? Call me.”
I go up to my bedroom, pull the shades, get into bed with my shoes on. When Meggie comes home from school, I get up to fix her a snack. “Do you have homework?” I ask, handing her a plate of apple slices.
She nods. I realize that she is acting as though she’s afraid of me.
“I’m just sad,” I say.
“I know.”
“I took Ruth to the airport today. I don’t think I’ll get to see her again, and so I’m feeling a little sad.”
“I know.”
“Okay, so I’ll just … could you just do your homework, Meg?”
“Yes.”
“Thank you.”
I go back to bed until Joe comes home. I hear the door slam, hear Meg greeting him. “I think we have to go out to dinner again,” she says.
He comes into the bedroom, and I feel him sit at the edge of the bed. “Ann?”
I say nothing. I try to, but I can’t.
“Can I turn a light on?”
“No.”
“Are you … do you want to go out to dinner with Meggie and me?”
“No.”
“Okay. Well, I’m just going to take her, then.”
Silence.
“I’m really hungry,” he says.
What is
that?
I want to say. What is “hungry?” What is the matter with you? How can you even say that to me, that you’re hungry? But what I say is, “She shouldn’t have gone. I can’t believe what she stole from
US
.”
Joe sighs. “I know you feel that way. But maybe she only meant to spare you all something.”
“No!” I say. “You’re just scared. You don’t want to deal with it even secondhand. You’re glad she’s gone because now you can get back to your regular life.”
“That’s not true. And it’s not fair.”
“Daddy!” we hear Meggie call. “I’m
hun
gry!”
“I’ll see you later,” Joe says. “I’ll bring you something back.”
“I don’t want anything.”
“Maybe you’ll change your mind. I’ll bring you something back.”
He closes the door quietly. I pull the quilt up higher, then cast around inside myself for a moment, looking for symptoms. Then I think,
Oh. That’s right. I’m not sick. It’s just grief
. I look at my watch. In about half an hour, I can call her. But maybe they got there early. Sometimes there’s a good strong tailwind.
Andrew answers on the first ring. “Is Ruth there?” I say, and then, into the questioning silence, “This is her friend, Ann.”
“Oh,” he says, guardedly friendly. “Of course. Hello, Ann. No, she’s not here yet. I was just getting
ready to go to the airport. She’s actually going to be a little late.”
Late? I think.
Late?
What’s the matter with that goddamn airline? She’ll be too tired!
“Well,” I say. “If you could have her call me when she gets there, all right?”
“I’ll tell her.”
“Also, she wanted me to tell you … she likes her bed by the window.”
“Yes, I’ve put it there. She’s always liked her bed by the window.”
“Well, I just wanted to make sure.”
“That’s fine.”
“She hasn’t been eating much.”
“Is that right?”
“No, she doesn’t have much of an appetite.”
“I see.”
“She might like some french fries, though. And of course she really likes ice cream.”
He shifts the phone, I can hear the noise of it. And the impatience. Then he says, “Ann, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate what you and all your friends have done for Ruth. I want you to know I’ll take very good care of her. We’ve always been very close.”
Huh! I want to say. You’re not so close! She used to be very mean to you, I happen to know. When you were little and sleeping in the bunk below her, she told you that ghosts were in the room and she made
whoooo
noises until you cried. She told you the story of the Crucifixion and embellished all the gory details until you cried about that, too. She pretended to turn into another person so you’d say things about her and then
she beat you up for what you said. What an idiot you were, Andrew! And now you object to Ruth’s language. You flinch every time she swears, get a white ring around your lips, yes, she told me that.
“I know you’re close,” I say.
“I’ll have her call you.”
“Thank you.”
I go into the bathroom, look at myself. In the mirror, I see Ruth holding her spoon over her cereal that morning. Her hand was shaking, a fine tremor, and I was thinking, brain involvement, oh, Jesus, it’s her brain, she’s getting worse, please don’t let her have a seizure on the way to the airport. I put my hand on the mirror, drag it down the surface, note with a sense of terrible satisfaction the dirty tracks I leave behind.
B
y ten o’clock, she still hasn’t called me. And I don’t call her. I’ll wait until tomorrow, I think. I sit at the kitchen table in my pajamas eating the eggplant sub Joe brought me and thinking about a time before Ruth got sick when we talked about how we wanted to die. “I think I want a massive heart attack,” I said. “Sudden death. But no matter what gets me, I want the last thing in the world I feel to be peace.”
“Not me,” she’d said. “The last thing I want to feel is … dazzled.”
“That’s a pretty tall order,” I’d said, and she’d said, “Yes. But it’s what I want.”
How will she get that now, I wonder. How?
W
hen I climb into bed beside him, Joe turns on his side and reaches out toward me. I think, if he tries to get laid I will kill him with a butcher knife. And then I start to cry because he is only Joe, touching my hair, pushing it back from my face because he knows I love it when he does that, and that is all, it is whitely innocent.
“Who knows why people make the decisions they do?” he says softly. “Especially when they’re dying. Maybe this was just something she couldn’t explain. Maybe it had nothing to do with you.
Maybe it didn’t, I think. The pull of family is formidable, I know. I haven’t yet let myself feel how grateful I am to be back in my own bed, but I know it’s coming. And I know I’d better get ready. Because feeling good will feel awful.
I
got my hair cut,” I tell Ruth, a couple of days later.
“Really? What’s it look like?”
“It looks like hell,” I say. “I told him an inch and he heard ‘Shave it.’”
“Beauty seclusion again?”
“Are you kidding? I put on a scarf to go to the bathroom.”
The inevitable pause. “So,” I say. “How are you?”