A Soft Place to Land: A Novel Page 11

  Instead Ruthie brought in an orange, purchased the night before at Eureka Market. When it was her time to share with the circle, she said, “When I was a kid my favorite snack was always an orange. Even if my mom offered me ice cream, or cookies, I usually chose orange slices.”

  “How did your friends react to that?” asked Mr. Z.

  Ruthie knew that he wanted her to add some drama to the story, to say that she was teased, or people assumed she was a suck-up, or that she devised a clever method to barter her desserts for oranges plus cash.

  “No one really cared,” she said.

  She looked down at her lap. Usually when she did that Mr. Z left her alone. Which he did, calling on Deena, who had lugged in the first saddle she ever owned, a tiny though substantial thing that smelled of leather and animal sweat.

  While Deena spoke lustfully about riding her mare, Silky, Mr. Z kept looking at Ruthie, even cocking his head to the side at one point. As soon as the bell rang he told her he wanted the two of them to have a “powwow.”

  “I’ll write you a tardy excuse,” he said. “Don’t worry.”

  Being tardy was the last thing Ruthie was worried about. The punishment for tardiness was to receive a notice. Two notices equaled a detention, which meant you had to spend an hour after school helping the office ladies make copies. That in itself did not sound too unpleasant, and besides which, she had never actually seen anyone receive a detention. The girls at Hall’s were good at talking their way out of things.

  “Ruthie,” said Mr. Z. “I don’t mean to pry. But I know that something very difficult happened to you not so long ago, and I just want you to know that this classroom is a place where you can share some of your sadness.”

  Ruthie nodded and Mr. Z pressed on. “Isn’t there some object from your childhood more meaningful than an orange?”

  Ruthie wished she felt composed enough to tell him that she also liked apples, but she did not. She felt like she was going to cry, and she really didn’t want to cry in front of him. To do so would bring him too much satisfaction. She looked down at her feet.

  “Okay, kiddo,” he said.

  There was nothing she hated more than being called kiddo.

  “You don’t feel like sharing. I understand. Take your time. No pressure from me. Just know that whatever feelings you shove down are going to have to come up again sometime. And some people think it’s better to control when it comes up than to have it just one day boil over and take you by surprise.”

  Ruthie imagined a boiling mess of green grief bubbling out of her mouth the first time a boy tried to kiss her. She smiled at the image.

  “May I be excused now?” she asked.

  “One more thing.” He walked over to his desk, looked around for a scrap of paper, and scribbled her an excuse for being tardy. “You don’t want to forget this, do you?”

  Talk. That was all people did in San Francisco.

  Talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk.

  Talk at dinner, talk on the phone, meet for coffee and talk, take walks in the morning up and down the hills, talking.

  Processing was what Aunt Mimi called it. That or unpacking, as in “let’s try to unpack your feelings about this situation.”

  Mimi told Ruthie that everyone was trying to be conscious.

  Everyone was trying to be intentional.

  Everyone was trying to be honest.

  Ruthie just wanted to be left alone.

  She wanted nothing more than to retire to her tiny bedroom after dinner, do her homework, check it twice, and, if there was time afterwards, read a book. (Actually, what she really wanted to do was watch TV, but in Mimi’s house, that was not an option.)

  Uncle Robert seemed to understand Ruthie’s desire for alone time. He was quiet by nature, a writer who sometimes got so lost in his head Aunt Mimi would resort to snapping her fingers in his face to get his attention. Sometimes Robert snapped back. Once he told her not to treat him like a dog. Other times he smiled, sheepishly, and called himself an absentminded professor. Except he wasn’t a professor; he was a writer of self-help books for business leaders, his most successful titled Chi Your Mind . . . and the Rest Will Follow. When Ruthie first saw it—along with a row of foreign editions—on the bookshelf in Uncle Robert’s office, she pronounced “chi” like the Greek letter, like Chi Omega sorority. But Robert said it was pronounced “chee, like you’re almost saying ‘cheese’ but not quite.”

  Ruthie asked Robert what “chi” meant. He told her that it was a Chinese term that stood for balance and well-being.

  “To be honest,” he said, “I’m no expert on Chinese philosophy. But the book’s point is this: If you live from a generous frame of mind, if you train your psyche to assume abundance instead of scarcity, success will follow. But you can’t only be generous when dealing with the top dogs. You have to be generous with the little guys as well, your server at a restaurant, Amelia who rings you up at Alpha, the Muni worker who drives the streetcar.”

  “Have you cheed your mind?” asked Ruthie.

  Robert shrugged. “Sure, I try. But at the end of the day, I’m just the scribe. And the more of these books I write, the more often we can get roast chicken at Zuni.”

  Zuni Café was Robert and Mimi’s favorite place to eat. Located in a strange, angular building on Market Street near Franklin, the restaurant initially confused Ruthie, because she knew it was supposed to be a special, fancy place and yet it was nothing like the special, fancy places in Atlanta. It had no tablecloths; the stairs leading to the second floor were steep and unwieldy; the diners were seated as close together as the houses on Robert and Mimi’s street. Yet no matter what night of the week, Zuni was always packed. Even though Mimi always made a reservation, they usually had to wait at the bar for a few minutes before being shown to their seats, which Mimi said was part of the fun because that allowed them to people watch.

  And people watch they did. The most interesting people ate there! Older men and women who did not dress as if they were older, who dressed instead as if they were characters in a strange, abstract play. Women with cropped hair, spiked hair, bleached hair, crazy hair. Men in T-shirts that read: ACT UP; women in three-piece suits. One crazy-haired woman argued so fiercely with her male companion over whether or not Mia Farrow was a fashion icon that Ruthie thought they were going to get in a fistfight.

  At the restaurant, there were women with women. Men with men. Ruthie had never seen so many gay people in her life. In Atlanta Naomi had once rented the garage apartment behind the house to two women, but when Ruthie asked her mom if they were lesbians Naomi had grown irritated and said it was rude to make assumptions. And once Ruthie’s parents had dragged her to see Torch Song Trilogy, because they had read a good review of it in the New York Times and they couldn’t find a babysitter. Ruthie, who was in the fourth grade at the time, had been utterly mortified by the whole thing.

  Except now—only months after moving to San Francisco—she couldn’t remember why she was embarrassed by it. Everyone was gay in San Francisco. Or if they weren’t gay, they were weird—punk, pierced, androgynous. Even at Hall’s, which was one of the more traditional private schools in the city, several of her classmates had two moms and Abigail Stevenson had two dads. And there was Ruthie’s French teacher, Madame Dubois, elegant in her tailored pants and tucked-in blouses, who spoke openly about her partner, Isabelle.

  Sometimes Ruthie felt as if she had been swept into a vortex, a Twilight Zone. Sometimes it seemed hard to believe that Buckhead actually still existed. It was so very different from where she was now; it was as if it spun on a different axis.

  Robert loved to eat raw oysters, which Ruthie thought was disgusting until she overheard the two most popular girls from her class at Hall’s rhapsodizing over how much they loved Kumamoto oysters, which were small and surprisingly sweet. (Another difference, another change. At Coventry Eleanor Pope and the Eight had loved iceberg lettuce and unbuttered French bread.) And so Ruthie joined Ro
bert in the first part of his Zuni ritual: the sliding of a half-dozen raw oysters down the throat, while Aunt Mimi sipped a glass of champagne and nibbled on Acme bread. For the next course, Robert and Mimi would split a Caesar salad, ordering extra anchovies on the side. During the salad course Ruthie always ordered shoestring French-fried potatoes, which were thin, hot, and salty.

  And finally, the three of them would split the Zuni roast chicken. Unlike the oysters, the roast chicken took no getting used to. Ruthie loved it from the beginning. Salt-brined for days, stuffed with herbs, and then roasted in a hot wood oven, the chicken was served with a salad made of cubes of toasted sourdough bread, pine nuts, currants, and arugula, then tossed with a champagne vinaigrette and juices from the cooked chicken.

  Eating the salty meat with the flavored, warm bread made Ruthie feel inordinately comforted. It seemed to have the same effect on Ruthie as drinking had on Mimi, whose shoulders relaxed and eyes softened as soon as she took the first sip from her champagne flute. For Ruthie, taking that first bite of chicken made her forget about the strange and lonely new life she had somehow fallen into. Or rather, not so much forget as momentarily not mind.

  At night, once the lights were out and she was lying in her bed, not sleeping, she ached for Julia, missing her even more than her parents, for Julia was still alive, Julia was still, technically, reachable, although Ruthie found it harder and harder to connect with her on the phone. It was the three-hour time difference that made things so difficult, that and the fact that Mimi and Robert always ate late, around 8:00, so that if Ruthie wanted to call Julia after dinner it would be nearly midnight Virginia time. And calling before dinner was tough because there was therapy two days a week, plus homework. Not to mention the fact that Uncle Robert, who worked from home, often made business calls in the late afternoon.

  The first week after Ruthie moved to San Francisco she did call Julia after dinner, figuring that it was summertime and Julia would probably be up late.

  The phone rang three times before someone picked up. Ruthie heard Julia say “hello,” but then she heard another voice, the voice of an irritated woman, Peggy.

  “Who in the world is calling at this hour?” she asked.

  “I got it, Peggy,” said Julia in her most insolent tone. “You can hang up now.”

  “Julia dear, I don’t need for you to tell me what I can and cannot do. Who is calling?”

  “It’s me, Ruthie, from California.” (How strange it was to say she lived in California.)

  “Okay? So hang up the phone now,” said Julia.

  “Ruthie, honey, it’s good to hear your voice,” said Peggy. “It would be even better to hear your voice before nine P.M.”

  Ruthie, near tears, apologized for the late call.

  After Peggy hung up, Julia spent the rest of the conversation detailing what a bitch her stepmother was. Every weekend Peggy would make a long list of chores for Julia to do, and if she didn’t finish with them by nightfall, she couldn’t go out. Peggy threw away Julia’s favorite pair of ripped jeans, saying that “there was no need to go around deliberately dressing like trash.” Worse, Peggy implied that it was Phil and Naomi’s fault that they were dead, that they were utterly foolish to have boarded the Ford Trimotor.

  “Those two never thought about the consequences of their actions, did they?” Peggy said.

  “Of course the real reason Peggy hates me is because I look like Mom,” said Julia. “She knows Mom left Dad and not the other way around, and she resents that I resemble the woman who broke his heart.”

  “Gosh, Julia,” said Ruthie. She really didn’t know what else to say. Peggy sounded horrible.

  “How’s Aunt Mimi?” Julia finally asked.

  “She’s good,” said Ruthie. “She’s really nice.”

  “Well, lucky you.”

  “Yeah, I sure am lucky,” said Ruthie, irritated.

  For a moment neither of them spoke, and then Julia said she had to get off. Hanging up the phone, Ruthie was more aware of the distance between her and her sister than she had been before the call. Their lives had taken such different turns.

  Somehow the difference in their lives was easier to accept through letters. In writing, Julia presented the details of her new life in Virden with humor and irony. In fact, Ruthie heard her sister’s voice clearer in letters than she did on the phone. It was like being in bed with Julia, late at night, when Julia would tell Ruthie stories, or play Seven Steps to an Unlikely Outcome, a game she had invented. To play, Julia would come up with a far-fetched ending to a story that had yet to be told, something along the lines of, “Phil quits his job, gives away all of his money, and becomes a Hare Krishna.” And then Julia and Ruthie would have to create the story in seven steps, starting with step one (“Phil notices a homeless man holding an ‘I will work for food’ sign on his way to work . . .”) and going back and forth with the telling until they reached step seven, where the story had to end with Julia’s prescribed resolution.

  “And it has to be logical, too,” Julia would instruct. “Each step has to work with the one that preceded it.”

  Only now, it was as if their lives had become the game. All of Julia’s letters to Ruthie contained details that could have been taken straight from a round of Seven Steps. And though many painful things were happening to her, Julia wrote of her new reality with a certain bemused acceptance. She told of her two paternal grandparents, Rhubarb and Elsie, who only had twenty teeth between the two of them but still ate Milky Ways every day, sucking the candy bars like Popsicles. She told of being pressured at church not only to sign a virginity pledge (“too late!” Julia had written) but also to attach a small pink plastic baby to her key chain to show her support for Operation Rescue.

  As for Ruthie, writing letters to Julia allowed her to share her new life without feeling so self-conscious. Without feeling as if she were bragging about the fact that she landed the better deal. She wrote of eating Kumamotos—knowing her sister would wrinkle her nose—and taking long walks with the overweight uncle Robert, who would always buy the two of them some sort of treat in the course of their outing, making her promise not to tell Mimi, who, in general, did not approve of processed sugar or snacking between meals.

  “But what’s the point of a walk without a destination?” Robert would ask, usually as they were nearing Tart to Tart, a bakery in the Inner Sunset.

  And Ruthie would say that there was no point, no point in walking at all, unless you were rewarded with cake. And with that agreed upon, they would push open the door of the bakery and stand in line along the display case of sweets.

  “You won’t believe how many cakes there are to choose from,” Ruthie wrote. “We’ll have to try to taste them all when you come for Thanksgiving.”

  Chapter Seven

  October 1, 1993

  Dear Biscuit,

  Man, do I miss you! And man, do I wish that I was in San Francisco, or you were in Virden—don’t laugh—one or the other, so long as the two of us could hang. I mean, I wouldn’t need you to be my shadow or anything. We wouldn’t have to spend all of our time together. We wouldn’t have to share baths or watch each other pee or anything like that. . . .

  Speaking of peeing, do you remember the time when you were little and you got that urinary tract infection because you were wiping the wrong way—back to front instead of front to back? And you had to take those pills that turned your pee orange? You were eight at the time and every time you peed you wanted to show me because it looked so weird. Anyway, one night during The Time of the Orange Urine, you slept with me in my bed. When I got up the next morning and went to the bathroom (you, of course, were still lying lazily beneath the covers) I asked you why the cap was missing from my brand-new expensive tube of Shiseido facial wash I had gotten for my birthday. And you said, oh yeah, that in the middle of the night you had gotten up to pee, and at the same time you had taken the cap off of my Shiseido wash to smell it and had somehow managed to drop the cap into the toil
et. And so you very kindly left the cap off so you would remember the next morning to tell me that it had been floating in orange pee.

  Hmm, maybe it is a good thing we ended up in two different places. . . .

  Just kidding. I miss you tons. Virden pretty much blows the big one. It is beyond boring here. There is nothing to do but watch TV, go to the crappy ass mall featuring the oh-so-sophisticated Belk’s as its anchor store, and look out my window at the mountains. I guess my boredom will serve you well, ’cuz it means you will be the lucky recipient of my vivacious wit and wisdom, as told through my wicked pen.

  Peggy is a total bitch, as to be expected. Today I made chocolate-chip cookies (told ya I’m bored), and just as I started creaming the butter and sugars she warned me that she had bought very expensive chocolate chips so I “should save them all for the dough and not snack on them.” So I’m expecting the chips to be really impressive, right, to be made out of Jesus’ dark flesh or something like that, but when I look in the pantry all I see is a twelve-ounce bag of Hershey’s semisweet morsels.

  Way to live it up, Pegs. No Kroger brand for you!

  Dad doesn’t seem to know what to do with me. He is spending a lot of time out back, in his workroom. He and Sam are building me a desk, which I guess is nice, though it’s not really necessary. I always just sit on my bed to do my homework. Plus I don’t really like the thought of Sam having anything to do with any part of my life. Remember how he was always a little creepy? Well, he’s way creepy now. And way religious. He actually listens to Christian rock. It’s all about lifting up your hands to praise the Lord. I bet God hates that crap. I ask you: how can “praise music” be worthy of God’s ears? It is all so vapid. Makes me think about Coventry, actually, and how during one assembly this conductor dude came and talked about how you don’t find God through books, music, art, nature. You find God in books, music, art nature. . . .