Every Last One Page 9

  The day after the funeral, Deborah followed my car to the garden center. Her voice sounded funny, as though it were coming from the bottom of a hole. "Can Kiernan stay with you?" she asked, her words slurred. "He says he wants to stay with you."

  "Oh, sweetie, that's not a good idea," I said, stepping away from the car so that Ruby couldn't hear. "He needs to be with you and Kevin."

  "Just for a little while, Mary Beth. I can't take care of him right now. It would be good if he could stay with you just for a little while."

  "Deb, you know that's not a good idea." I reached out to hug her, but she stiffened and staggered back, and then she pushed me in the center of my chest with the flat of her hand, and those green eyes had flared. "Fair-weather friend," she spat.

  "Deborah, you know that's not true."

  They had a construction crew fill in the pool. In less than a year, you couldn't tell there had been anything in the backyard but grass. And when they moved back to town, to a different house, Kiernan walked two miles to ours, although he was only twelve.

  "Everybody's exactly the same," he'd said when he sat down for lunch. But Deborah and I were never friends again, not really, and after a while we were not even friendly.

  Ruby's different when she returns from the writing program. To begin with, she asks that I not come to pick her up. Instead, a young man brings her home, helps her unload her things onto the driveway, gives her a chaste kiss and a long hug, and drives away. It's only once he is gone that I emerge and follow his hug with one tighter, longer, from which my daughter divests herself slowly with a smile, as though she were taking off a heavy coat on a hot day.

  "He's just a good friend," she says. "In answer to your question."

  She seems quieter, and happier, too. She has two journals full of poetry. She says her teacher disapproves of writing poetry on the computer. She says she has sent three poems to small magazines and that she is waiting for replies. "As soon as I get the rejection letters, I'll send them out again," she says evenly. Ruby is using her make-nice voice with me, and I don't like it. It's as though she has outgrown the need to oppose me, which I fear is only a few beats away from outgrowing me entirely. Sometimes I feel as though the entire point of a woman's life is to fall in love with people who will leave her. The only variation I can see is the ones who fight the love, and the ones who fight the leaving. It's too late for me to be the first, and I'm trying not to be the second.

  At dinner, faced with Max's cast and its unmistakable model of the solar system, a little of the old Ruby resurfaces. "Nice," she says to Max, tapping the plaster, recognizing Kiernan's handiwork. "Really subtle."

  "Did you hear from Kiernan while you were away?" I asked Ruby, and she replied, "Every single day."

  She tells the boys about her summer as her father and I listen. She talks about her roommate and her teachers--"brilliant," she says reverentially, her voice tremolo, of her poetry professor--and an aspiring short-story writer with whom she seems to have spent much of her time. "He starts Yale next week," she says, and I suspect that he is the young man who brought her home. Max scowls. It's not just that he is loyal to Kiernan but that he has never liked the idea of either his sister or his brother having intimates he doesn't know. Last year Alex visited Colin, his friend from camp, and then Colin came to our house for a few days. Max was so truculent that the two boys moved into the guest room to avoid him. "I didn't do anything to him," Colin had said, and Alex replied, "Sometimes he's just like that."

  He has been like that for weeks, except for the times when Kiernan was at the house. His hair is ratty, two weeks away from white-boy dreadlocks. "Who cares?" he mutters. I pray that among the kids moving up to the high school from the other middle school there will be someone who loves comic books, Japanese animation, and drums.

  "So how, exactly, did you do that?" Ruby says to Max, cocking her head at his arm, after asking both boys about their time at camp.

  "I fell out of a tree."

  "Figures," says Alex, his mouth full of spaghetti. His story is that he has eaten nothing but cereal and peanut-butter sandwiches since July.

  "Why?" Max says.

  "Why don't you just tell people that you were playing soccer or something? Who falls out of a tree?"

  "People who don't give a shit about soccer," Max says.

  "Whoa whoa," says Glen. "You're not at camp anymore, buddy."

  "Yeah, like I don't know that."

  "Max!" says Ruby.

  "You don't talk to your father like that, Max," I say.

  "I'm sorry, but can someone make Lacrosse Boy shut up about how great he is. You know what, never mind, I'm done anyhow." He picks up his plate with his free hand, starts toward the sink, and drops it. There is chicken cacciatore, lettuce leaves, and bits of Italian pottery all over the floor.

  "Oh, not those dishes," I hear myself say, and wish I could snatch the words from the stuffy summer air and shove them into my pocket, to be whispered later when no one is around.

  Ginger begins to snuffle excitedly around the food, grabbing a chicken bone and trying to run into the next room. Ruby wrestles it from her mouth as the dog breathes heavily. "No, no, Ging," she says. "Not chicken."

  "Shit!" Max yells.

  "Upstairs," Glen shouts, and Max leaves the room with the sound of a battalion of boys. A moment later, the detonation of his door slamming seems to shake the house, and Ginger runs, her tail tucked, into the mudroom.

  "I didn't do anything," whines Alex.

  "He's just hormonal," says Ruby.

  "Uh--news flash? He's a guy?"

  "Uh--news flash? Guys have hormones, too? They just happen to be different hormones?"

  "I don't care who has hormones," Glen says, gulping down his food the way he does when he's unhappy. "We're going to keep the profanity under control in this house. I'm not giving an inch on this."

  "It's just lazy," Ruby says airily.

  "What is?" Alex says.

  "Profanity."

  "Are you really going to be a writer?" Alex says.

  "Yes."

  "Are you getting back with Kiernan?"

  "I prefer not to discuss that," Ruby says, taking her plate to the sink.

  "Max'll hate you if you don't."

  "Max doesn't hate any of us," I say.

  "Max won't hate me," Ruby says. "He'll just be upset. He's having a tough time. I had a tough time starting high school, too." Ruby's dark eyes slide across the table and into the air above, away from me, away from Glen, into the middle distance of uncomfortable memory. This is her material. She's shown me one of the poems she's written. It says:

  Together they eat as the sun sinks behind them.

  But he is eating his fears, and she is eating her cares.

  He is eating his exhausted hours

  And she is eating nothing at all because there is too much to swallow.

  Her throat is thick with her selves.

  Nothing can squeeze by them.

  Only one of them eats what is on his plate, not what is in his mind.

  But they all smile at one another as the chandelier makes silver demitasse of light on the polished pine.

  Black past the windows, yellow inside.

  Plates empty.

  "Oh, Ruby," I said. "The demitasse."

  "I know," she said, dancing in place, a jig of joy--the sort that she did so often as a little girl and seems to have outgrown. "I know. As soon as I wrote that, I thought, yes." It was as though she were talking about someone else, some other family, as though the person in the poem with the cares was not me, the exhausted one not her father. Where is the joy that I worked so hard to create? Perhaps it is in the demitasse of light, or in the fact that she can even invent the demitasse of light.

  "Do you want to drive over to Tony's and get ice cream?" Ruby says to Alex. We have gotten her her first car, an elderly Volvo wagon Glen bought from a patient who was retiring to some small town in the South where it is always warm. "Volvos have the best
safety record in the business," Glen had told Ruby, but her face had been alight the moment she saw the boxy car in the driveway. "It is so completely me," she said. What she means is that it is retro, unexpected, that no other student at the high school will have one. She has hung a blue crystal rosary from the rearview mirror; it snags the light and sends it back in shards across the dashboard. Ruby will drive the boys to school each morning so they won't be reduced to taking the bus, which I'm told is populated entirely by losers.

  "Uh, yes?" Alex replies, as though he is trying to figure out the trick behind this new solicitous sister. He goes upstairs for Max, comes downstairs alone. Ruby shrugs and takes the car keys from the dish by the door.

  "Maybe Mr. Huntington was right about Max," I say. "Maybe something really is wrong."

  "Who?" says Glen.

  "His drum teacher. Maybe he was right about Max. Maybe he needs to see a therapist."

  "Oh, for God's sake, Mary Beth," Glen says. "Ruby's right. It's hormones. His face is a mess, he could use a shave, he smells like the zoo in summer. He'll get over it." This is a step up for Glen. His own father had a veritable Bartlett's of stoicism sentiments. "I'll give you something to cry about" was his favorite.

  "He told me he wants his own room," I say. When I asked Max whether he had discussed this with Alex, he'd replied flatly, "He won't care." I think he's right about that.

  "Spoiled," Glen says, shaking his head. "These kids are so spoiled. I shared a room with two of my brothers until I went to college. I got to that tiny little dorm room with a twin bed and thought I'd died and gone to heaven because I had it all to myself."

  "And you walked seven miles through the snow to school," I say.

  "You're such a hater," Glen says, and I burst out laughing. This is one of his favorite things, to co-opt the children's slang and denature it with adult use. Two years ago he said "That is major" so often that it was excised from kid-speak forever.

  "I love that term, and now they'll never use it," I say.

  "That's their problem."

  Max has mentioned moving to the room above the garage, but this seems a terrible time to turn it over to either of the boys. I envision Max cocooned in solitary disaffection, refusing to come into the house, slipping into the kitchen at night to make a pouch of the front of his T-shirt and fill it with food from the fridge. I envision Alex watching the glow of the lights on the second floor, waiting for us to turn off our reading lamps and then sneaking out for a spate of pool hopping. It's too late to move Ruby. She's already nervous about her territory. "You're not going to turn my room into an office when I go to college, are you?" she has asked. Apparently, Rachel's mother already has plans to turn her daughter's bedroom into a home gym.

  Glen goes to bed early and I look at some garden plans at the table. I'm drowsy when I hear the car door slam outside. Alex goes upstairs to shower, and Ruby puts the kettle on. "The ice cream wasn't enough?" I ask.

  "I didn't have ice cream," Ruby says. "Alex ate enough for both of us." She sits down opposite me, her face cupped in her hands. Her hair is in a braid down her back, and she wears silver stars in her ears.

  "Has Kiernan been here?" she says.

  "When?" I ask.

  "Any time," she says.

  "I don't know how often he stops by, honey," I say, putting my hand over hers. "Max likes to see him. Kiernan was a big help when he came home from camp."

  Ruby stands and reaches into the pocket of her overalls. She takes out a silver ring. Like her car, or the polka-dot chiffon shirt she is wearing, or the mixture of anger and sadness in her brown eyes, the little silver circlet of lopsided hearts is so Ruby.

  "I found this on my bedside table," she says, dropping it on the counter, where it makes a high note of a noise, then spins and falls.

  "What should we do?" I say, and for the first time I am looking at her, talking to her, one woman to another.

  "I don't know, Mommy. I feel so bad for him. His mother is crazy, and she's such a bitch, I'm sorry, I know you hate that word, but it's true. To make him go to a new school for senior year when he's already in such bad shape? He leaves me messages and he sounds like he's been crying, or he's going to cry, or he's pretending not to cry. I want to be his friend. But I need him to let me be, you know? I just need him to let me breathe. He doesn't let me breathe."

  "He thought it was going to be more than you did," I say.

  "I don't think that's it. It was a big deal for me, too. But after a while I started to think that Kiernan didn't really want to be with me, the way I am now. I think maybe Kiernan just wants to freeze everything forever. Like, like--like Peter Pan."

  "And you're Wendy."

  "See, that's it. That's the problem. I'm not Wendy. I'm Ruby. And I'm not Ruby when she was five, or fifteen. I'm a different Ruby." And she starts to sob, the kind of sobbing that refuses comfort, and all I can think is, Life is hard. Life is hard.

  Finally she reaches for a paper towel, blows her nose, and wipes her eyes.

  "Should I tell him he's not welcome?" I say.

  "How can we do that? It would kill him."

  How deeply she feels, my grown-up girl. I can remember the moment when I realized that. We had gone to London together, the five of us. It was just before Ruby began to waste away, but she was already starting to concern herself with odd things, to plumb the scope of the universe: ocean life, the constellations. In retrospect, I wondered if she was immersing herself in notions that made her feel small before she took the next step of actually making herself smaller.

  Before our trip, she had read a half-dozen books about the Tudors and the Plantagenets, and she wandered the aisles of Westminster Abbey carrying a royal family tree. The boys were eleven, bored and hungry, sitting in the back banging the heels of their sneakers against the bottom of a bench until I had to hiss a warning. Ruby and Glen were standing together by a pale marble tomb, and as I joined them I saw that atop it was the figure of a woman.

  "It's Elizabeth," Ruby had said. "Isn't it terrible, to think that she's under there, dead? And Shakespeare, and Charles Dickens, and Henry VIII, and everyone else I read about? They're all dead." Her voice was rising. A tour guide at another tomb paused, then resumed in a slightly louder voice.

  And then Glen began to speak as though his whole heart were in his words. He turned to Ruby and said, "All that tread the globe are but a handful to the tribes that slumber in its bosom."

  "What?" she whispered.

  "All that tread the globe are but a handful to the tribes that slumber in its bosom," he repeated. "'Thanatopsis,' by William Cullen Bryant. I wasn't always an eye doctor, pumpkin." The lines from the poem were still on an index card in the center of Ruby's bulletin board. I was betting they would wind up on her yearbook page.

  I cover the ring with my palm, feel it warm under my skin. "I'll figure out how to handle this," I say.

  "No, Mommy," Ruby replies. "I have to give it back myself. I just hope he'll listen to me. I don't think he really listens to me anymore." We both look up as Max tromps across the floor above us. "I'll take Max some nachos," Ruby says, putting the ring back into her pocket. "He didn't really get much to eat at dinner. I'm worried about him."

  "I know. Bring him up something to eat. Just make sure he brings down his plate after."

  "Yeah, right, that'll happen," she says, not yet completely transformed.

  We're sitting side by side in a small office that was clearly once the best bedroom in a Victorian house one block over from the hospital. It has a bay window and a tin ceiling. There are tea-colored lace curtains, but all the rest is standard doctor's office: a slab desk, some framed diplomas, two armchairs covered in a brown-green nubby fabric, the kind that no one uses in the home, the kind that is designed to endure.

  I cross my legs and smile. I am wearing a dress and carrying a real purse, instead of a canvas tote bag filled with shears and spades. This is my good-mother apparel. I may have been wearing the same dress when we met not f
ar from here with the woman who helped Ruby begin eating again.

  "I think this is a remediable situation," she had said.

  "Who uses the word 'remediable,'" Glen said angrily in the car afterward.

  "This is less about body image than about Ruby's sense of autonomy," she said.

  "She's a kid," Glen said as we pulled away from the curb. "She needs autonomy?" When Glen is afraid, he loses his temper. "Where's the goddamn doctor?" he'd yelled when I abandoned my rhythmic breathing and started to wail as Ruby was being born. "The goddamn doctor is right here, Dr. Latham," the obstetrician had said, pulling on her gloves.

  I am breathless with anxiety. Once, when I was thirteen, I broke a bottle of perfume that sat on my mother's bureau. I could never remember her wearing the perfume, which looked like old scotch and smelled as dark and exotic as its amber color suggested. But I couldn't remember a time when the heavy cut-crystal bottle was not on the right-hand corner of the lace doily, balancing a set of silver-backed brushes on the left. I'd yanked open a drawer, and the bottle wobbled and crashed to the floor, filling the room with the suffocating odor. I left the pieces there, and when later my mother called sharply, "Mary Beth!" I sat on one corner of her bed, the smell making me sick and faint, and said I couldn't imagine how such a thing had happened. Many years after, it occurred to me that perhaps my mother had made so much of it because my father had given her the perfume, but at the time I simply insisted I'd done nothing wrong, even in the face of the evidence.

  That feeling is the same feeling I have in this doctor's office.

  His name is Pindaros Vagelos. Nancy told me he was the psychologist who treated a girl in Fred's class who had tried to kill herself her junior year, although the girl's mother insisted that it was an accident. "An accidental wrist-slitting after thirty Xanax--you don't see that very often," Nancy had said in her harshest voice. Apparently, the young woman was now doing brilliantly at one of the most prestigious liberal-arts colleges and was planning to attend medical school. "She'll probably go into psychiatry," Glen had said on the drive over to Dr. Vagelos's office. "All the nuts do. The beautiful girls go into dermatology. The jocks do orthopedics."