Talk Before Sleep (8 page)

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.

W
e 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, stepping 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.

Helen is telling us about her new boyfriend. His name is Rudolph. He makes pizzas. But his real job is writing poetry. “He read me this weird one last night,”
Helen said. “I couldn’t make sense out of it at all, and I knew he really wanted me to understand it.”

“So what’d you tell him?” Ruth asks.

“Oh, I just made myself get tears,” Helen says. “I can do it easy. Look.” She sits still for a moment, looks down, and when she looks up again, she does indeed have tears welling up magnificently in her eyes.

“Wow,” Ruth says.

“Naturally,” Helen says, “when I do that, I don’t have to say anything. He just thinks I’m moved beyond words.” She rolls her eyes, reaches for another muffin. “I don’t know how long I can keep this guy around. It’s kind of exhausting crying all the time.”

There is a feeling of a beat being missed when she says this. We none of us acknowledge it. We want to keep going in the direction we were headed.

There is another knock at the door, and Sarah comes in. “I just have a minute,” she says. She hands Ruth a slip of paper. “This is what I forgot to give you yesterday,” she says. “All of these are places where you can get buried for what you can afford.”

I have been on an airplane twice where it suddenly lost altitude. It felt just like this.

“Oh,” Ruth says. “Okay. Good. Thanks.” She puts her muffin down, looks at me. “Can you take me to see one of these before you go home?”

I nod, feel two parallel lines of an ache start in my throat. If there is one thing I hate lately, it’s the present.

While Ruth goes to get dressed, Helen says, “I’ll come with you guys if you want.”

“I wish you hadn’t done this right now,” I tell Sarah. “We were finally not talking about death.”

“Well, I’m sorry,” she says. “It has to be done. She asked me to help her. It really does have to be done.”

Neither Helen nor I say anything.

“I have to get to work,” Sarah says. “Tell her I’ll call her later.”

After the door shuts, I say quietly, “No. I won’t tell her anything. Just leave her alone.”

“God,” Helen says. “She’s relentless.”

“Oh, she’s just … I mean, it does have to be done,” I say. “She’s the only one of all of us who’s taken care of the details of all this necessary … crap.”

“I know,” Helen says. “But sometimes I hate her for it.”

“Me, too.”

Ruth comes into the kitchen, picks up the phone, and while Helen and I drink coffee, calls the first person on the list, tells them what she’s looking for. “I don’t want to be too crowded in,” she says. There is a long pause, during which she nods and says, “Um-hum. Okay. Okay.” Then she says, “Breast cancer.” And then, “Well, I’m only forty-three. Which is really terrible.”