A Soft Place to Land: A Novel Read online

  I suppose you sent me pictures of all of those animals because you imagined I was lonely and you wanted me to have some companions. Well, I was lonely, sweetheart. You were right. It was a hard time. You are also correct when you say that Peggy coming into my life was a blessing. Peggy followed by Sam.

  Julia, it’s always been one of our wishes that you knew your half brother better than you do. Please remember that you are as related to him as you are to Ruthie. Someday you might even feel as close to him as you do to your sister.

  I know it is going to be hard to be separated, but we want you to know that Ruthie is allowed to visit any time she wants. If she would like, she can come spend a few weeks with us every summer, just as you used to do. In your letter you spoke about applying the “wisdom of Solomon” to your situation. Well, Peggy and I have been talking about it, and we think that the wisest decision is for you to come live with us in Virden. We believe we can offer you a steadier environment here than you would have in San Francisco. There are many reasons for this, and here are just a few: Neither Mimi nor Robert are your blood relatives, and they might not feel as responsible toward you as we will. Neither Mimi nor Robert have ever had children, and we are not sure if they know what it takes to be a parent. Plus, sweetheart, from what I understand, they live in the middle of the city. I am sure that is an exciting place to be, but I’m not sure it’s best for a teenage girl. Especially a spirited teenager like yourself. Peggy in particular feels strongly about this.

  I imagine this letter will be greeted with some disappointment, but I hope you are soon able to see that you coming to live with us in Virden is really the best solution. I think you are going to like living here. Not only will you be able to develop your relationship with Sam; you will be able to develop your relationship with Peggy, too. She always wanted a daughter, you know. And now she can be a real mom to you.

  If you would like to talk about this more on the phone, that’s fine. Just call us. Call us anyway; it is always good to hear your voice. And we’ll be seeing you soon. On June 10 as planned.

  With love,

  Dad

  Part Two

  Chapter Six

  All was lost, all was changed, and Ruthie could not get warm.

  The morning of their departure from Atlanta, Mimi had suggested that Ruthie dress in warmer clothes than a tank top and shorts, but Ruthie politely ignored her aunt. Atlanta was so muggy and hot it was impossible to believe she would ever feel cold again. Simply walking from their taxi to the entrance of the Atlanta airport caused little beads of sweat to appear on Mimi’s upper lip. Hours later they landed in thick fog, the temperature forty degrees cooler. Ruthie shivered as she and Mimi stood on the sidewalk in front of SFO, scanning for Uncle Robert’s silver Audi.

  “Mark Twain said the coldest winter he ever spent was summer in San Francisco,” Mimi said.

  It was the first time Ruthie had ever heard that saying, but it would not be the last. It turned out everyone said it in San Francisco, everyone delighted in rolling it out to any newcomer surprised by the cold summer.

  Not just cold. Bone-chilling. Ruthie’s bones were chilled, even though Mimi immediately bought her thick scarves to wrap around her neck, a fleece jacket, a puffy down vest, mittens. In the room where Ruthie slept, which overlooked the tiny backyard garden where calla lilies bloomed, the window was leaky, a half-inch gap between it and the pane.

  “Robert jokes that all our windows are nailed open,” said Mimi, when first showing Ruthie the flat. Ruthie stood in the doorway, surveying the space, which was half the size of the bedroom she had left behind. “It’s wasteful, I know, but don’t you think the old wavy glass is beautiful?”

  Mimi claimed she loved beauty even more than her brother, Phil, had. Though she could not be such a purist with her clients, when decorating her own home, anytime she had to choose aesthetics or function, aesthetics always won. So instead of cluttering up the living room with a boxy TV, Mimi chose simply not to have one. (Later, when flat screens came along, she relented.) Instead of putting a washer/dryer where the outlets were in the kitchen, which would have taken up precious space and jutted into the area where beautiful foods were to be prepared, Mimi used the wash and fold down the street. (Or, to be more accurate, she dropped her laundry off there on her way to her office in Hayes Valley and had someone else wash and fold it.) Mimi even used her sterling silver as her everyday flatware.

  “We have it, it’s gorgeous, why not?” she said. “I suppose if we had been able to have children we would have been more practical, but we couldn’t, and so . . .”

  She waved a tarnished repoussé fork in the air to finish making her point. A lover of beauty or not, Mimi rarely got around to polishing the silver. Of course, Ruthie’s mother never polished her silver, either, but Addie Mae the housekeeper did.

  “Addie Mae loves polishing silver!” Phil used to say.

  Once Julia added, “Just like she loves ironing your shirts!”

  Phil had glared at her. “Don’t be a smart-ass,” he barked.

  He was a man who, though he loved to tease, was not so good at being teased himself.

  Maybe it was better that everything was so different in San Francisco. Maybe if Ruthie had stayed in Atlanta, had, say, lived with the Loves while Julia went to Virden to live with her dad and Peggy, things would have been even harder. Ruthie would have forever been near but never at home. Whereas San Francisco, San Francisco was a different planet, with its rolling fogs and cold summers, its eucalyptus trees that made the air smell medicinal, its houses packed so close together, and none shaded by one-hundred-year-old white oaks, as Ruthie’s house on Wymberly Way had been.

  Almost all of the houses on Mars Street were attached on each side, with only front and rear windows. Mimi and Robert’s house (they co-owned the property with friends, the Woodses, who lived in the flat downstairs) was rare in that it was freestanding, but it stood so close to the house next door that Mimi could reach her hand out the kitchen window and rub it against her neighbor’s siding. Ruthie wondered if this, plus the fact that they only owned the upstairs half of the property, meant her aunt and uncle didn’t have much money. But that didn’t make sense, because the inside was filled with old rugs and gleaming wooden chests of drawers, upholstered sofas and chairs topped with bright silk pillows, vibrant paintings preserved behind thick glass, lined silk curtains on the windows. Robert and Mimi had money. It was just that like everything else, money in San Francisco presented itself differently than it did in Atlanta.

  The worst moment of every day was waking up, opening her eyes, and remembering where she was. The bathroom was down the hall, not attached to her bedroom, and her uncle Robert might well be using it, as there was only one toilet in the entire flat. Ruthie was terribly anxious during those first few months that she might stop up the toilet and only Robert would be home to help her clean up the mess.

  Her sister was thousands of miles away, at her father’s house in Virden, VA, not across the hall in her queen-sized bed, big enough for Ruthie to share if Julia deigned to let her. Her parents—she did not know where her parents were, but she knew she would never see them again except in photographs. Naomi was not about to wake her, to tell her with forced cheer (Naomi had not been a morning person) to rise and shine, breakfast will be ready in ten minutes!

  It was summer, and Aunt Mimi believed that with all she had gone through, Ruthie deserved to sleep in. So no one would appear in the doorway at all. Each night Mimi would tell Ruthie to help herself to anything in the kitchen when she woke up, that there was cereal in the cabinet, juice and milk in the fridge.

  “We’re out of regular milk, but there’s soy milk. Do you like soy milk?”

  Ruthie did not. She found it too watery, too sweet. Yet what was the point of telling Mimi she did not like it? Everything had changed. She might as well get used to another new thing.

  “Do you want to go to the museum this weekend?”

  “Walk across th
e Golden Gate Bridge?”

  “Take a ferry to Sausalito?”

  Ruthie did not, did not, did not. She did not want to do anything that forced her to leave the flat, to go outside into the strange cold air.

  Ruthie’s refusals did not seem to bother Mimi. The only requirement she had of Ruthie was that she meet with a therapist. And so, once Ruthie was more or less settled into the flat, and once she more or less knew her way around the neighborhood streets (walking down the hill took you to the Castro, up the hill and to the right to Cole Valley), Mimi arranged for Ruthie to see Dr. Cooper two days a week, Tuesday and Thursday mornings at 10:00 during the summer and, once the school year began, Tuesdays and Thursdays at 5:30.

  It was Dr. Cooper who saved her, not because he helped her unearth buried feelings of grief and rage, but because he told her it was okay to pour all of her energy into external concerns: reading during the summer, and sometimes helping Uncle Robert cook, and, once school began, studying.

  That past spring, when it was determined that Ruthie was coming to San Francisco to stay, Mimi had managed to enroll her niece at the Eleanor Hope Hall School for Girls. Hall’s had been around for almost a hundred years. The middle school girls—the oldest of the students—wore sailor uniforms, blue skirts and white middies with blue flaps. Hall’s was in the ritzy Pacific Heights neighborhood, in a pink marble building that overlooked the bay.

  Ruthie was embarrassed when Mimi showed her the babyish sailor uniform she was required to wear, yet she was also relieved that she did not have to figure out what the styles were for eighth-grade girls in San Francisco, at least not immediately, not until a “free dress” day or a weekend spent with a friend.

  During the fall of Ruthie’s eighth-grade year at Hall’s, a weekend spent with a friend seemed increasingly unlikely. Most of the girls had attended the school since they were kindergartners. Eighth grade was it; the following year they would splinter off, heading to various private day schools in the city and Marin, boarding schools on the East Coast, or the magnet public high school, Lowell.

  No one was exactly unfriendly, but Ruthie definitely felt like an interloper and an oddity at Hall’s. She shocked her fellow classmates one morning in homeroom when she admitted that she had never been to a Bar or a Bat Mitzvah. And they giggled at her use of the word “y’all,” asking her to say it again and again.

  But besides a casual interest in her southern exoticism, no one reached out to be her friend. No one, that is, besides Dara Diamond, who had purple-tinted hair and wore black lipstick, a girl who claimed to dress “full-out grunge” on the weekends. On the third day of the school year, Dara had sat down next to Ruthie in the outside courtyard during Snack, the fifteen-minute break in the middle of morning classes. Ruthie was sitting on the low wall of the courtyard, watching the little kids play kickball, eating a hard-boiled egg. Though the cafeteria menu changed daily, during Snack you could always get an egg.

  “You know the yolk is yellow because that’s the color the chick would have been, right?” asked Dara.

  Ruthie glanced at her, and then looked at the crumbly yolk of her half-eaten egg. “Gross,” she said.

  “I know. Totally gross. My sister is always telling me crap like that because she’s a vegan and she wants everyone else to be a vegan, too. Which drives my mom crazy. I mean, my mom is like practically best friends with Alice Waters, so she totally worships food and thinks nothing should be forbidden. Except, you know, junk food. And going to school with boys.”

  Ruthie knew about Alice Waters because of Robert. He had told Ruthie that Alice was an “important” chef, possibly the most important chef in America. He said that sometime soon they would drive over to Berkeley to eat at her restaurant, Chez Panisse.

  Dara swept her arm from left to right, as if she were a tour guide at a museum, making a pronouncement about an entire collection.

  “Smell the estrogen,” she said, widening her nostrils for effect.

  “That’s dumb,” said Ruthie, focusing her attention on Dara, wondering what it was that made some people just spill everything.

  “I know. Veganism is dumb. It’s like, I’m sorry, but she wants me to give up cheese? I practically live on cheese. Especially the queso dip they serve at Chevys. Oh my god, that stuff is so good, maybe sometime—”

  Ruthie looked at Dara so coldly it was as if she dried the words up in her mouth. “What’s dumb,” she said, “is your saying you can smell the estrogen at Hall’s. Hello? You don’t have estrogen until you have your period, which means that at most maybe half of the seventh grade and most of the eighth grade has it. That’s not the whole school.”

  Ruthie felt a little thrill at her rudeness. (How polite she was at Robert and Mimi’s house! How much like a visitor she felt, even though it had been three months since she moved in.)

  “You’re telling me Mrs. Lowery doesn’t get raging PMS?” asked Dara.

  Ruthie laughed, despite herself. Even though she’d only had her for two classes so far, Mrs. Lowery stood out. Yolanda Lowery (who allowed the girls to call her “Yo Lo”) was the acting teacher. Every eighth grader was required to take her class because at the end of the year the entire grade put on a musical, complete with costumes and set design created by the girls. Yo Lo’s flamboyant dress—she was especially fond of flouncy skirts and all things purple—and her utter belief in the girls’ talent made her popular with the students, but the rumor was, God help you if you got on her bad side, which Dara apparently had. It was said that Yo Lo, who was in her late fifties and had been teaching at Hall’s for over thirty years, used to whap the tops of distracted girls’ heads with a yardstick, back when such things were permitted.

  “Even if you count the teachers, that’s hardly the majority of the school,” Ruthie said primly.

  “Hardly” was not a word Ruthie usually used. It was a Phil word, one he pulled out when he was trying to win an argument. “That’s hardly relevant,” he would say, or, “I hardly think that matters. . . .”

  “Do you have PMS?” asked Dara. “Not to be a jerk or anything, but you kind of act like a snob.”

  “Not to be a jerk or anything,” mimicked Ruthie. “God.”

  Ruthie tried not to show it, but she was a little pleased. Being labeled a snob was much better than being labeled a clueless southerner.

  The truth was, she wasn’t trying to be snobby, at least not toward anyone but Dara. It was simply that Ruthie didn’t have her bearings. Just last spring she was firmly ensconced on Coventry’s campus, its white-columned brick buildings lined in perfect geometric order among rolling green lawns and towering trees, the leaves of which shaded the students, who trotted from building to building in their collared polo shirts, their L.L. Bean backpacks hanging off one shoulder.

  Now she was enrolled in a school housed in a pink marble mansion that towered above the sea, where girls wore sailor uniforms and her French teacher was a lesbian—no secret about it! Where every morning at 10:15 Ruthie stood in line in the cafeteria to have a Spanish-speaking woman in a hairnet hand her a hard-boiled egg, still warm. Where her classmates were the children of famous people: a mystery writer who sold so many books she owned three houses all on the same block overlooking the bay, a mathematician from Berkeley who last year was given the Nobel Prize. One of Ruthie’s classmates was from a family who had a whole wing named after them at the San Francisco MOMA.

  How was she to act among these people? She had barely broken the code at Coventry and now here she was, completely alien to California culture, just as she had been alien to Coventry culture the year before.

  “I guess I act like a snob because I come from Mars,” she told Dara, relenting.

  “You mean Mars the planet or Mars the street?”

  “You know Mars Street?” asked Ruthie, surprised. Most of her classmates did not live near the Castro. Most lived in the Avenues, or in Pacific Heights or Sea Cliff.

  “Dude, we live on Uranus,” said Dara.

  “
Hardy, har, har,” said Ruthie. “That’s so funny I forgot to laugh.”

  “No, I’m serious. My mom’s house is on Uranus Terrace. We’re neighbors.”

  “Oh wow,” said Ruthie. There was a Uranus Terrace in her neighborhood.

  She was briefly excited by the fact that they both lived on streets named after planets. Then she noticed how absolutely eager Dara looked, how she was leaning toward Ruthie as if they were about to share confidences, as if she believed they were on their way to becoming fast friends.

  Ruthie needed a friend. But she wasn’t sure if she wanted a friend who seemed to need her just as much.

  Ruthie buried herself in schoolwork. During lunch she would go to the library, preparing her assignments for the next day. Before the bell rang and classes began, she did not laugh and talk with the other girls, did not discuss who might or might not be at that weekend’s dance at the Jewish Community Center, did not plan trips to Union Square to buy new jeans. She sat quietly at her desk. She reviewed her notes from the previous day’s lesson.

  She liked most of her teachers at Hall’s, and they liked her. Most were fairly traditional in their pedagogical approach, and that suited Ruthie just fine, reminded her of Coventry in fact. But in one class the students were encouraged to sit in a circle on the floor and “let it all hang out.” That was Zeigfeld’s—“call me Mr. Z”—class, eighth-grade English, and Ruthie hated it. During the second week of class Mr. Z gave the girls an assignment to bring in an object from their childhood that they cared deeply about and then talk about why that object held such significance. This proved hard for Ruthie, who did not want to dig through the boxes of childhood artifacts she had brought with her from Atlanta. For comfort that first week in San Francisco she had dug out the rag doll Naomi had sewed for her when she was four, whom Ruthie had named Crystal Bell.

  But Ruthie could not bring Crystal Bell to class. There was an unseemly quality to her, primarily because over the years the doll had developed dark stains on her pink cotton skin. Naomi used to say that Ruthie loved Crystal Bell “just a little too much.” Julia used to call the doll Melanoma Bell. Certainly she was not the type of thing to bring into a group of eighth graders, many of whom had probably played with dolls with real hair and porcelain faces in their homes in Pacific Heights.