A Soft Place to Land: A Novel Read online

  “May Tatiana and I have a taste?” asked Ruthie.

  Mimi considered the request, and then gave a little nod. “I don’t see the harm in cultivating a taste for champagne. You don’t mind the girls having a sip, do you, Nina?”

  Nina Woods sucked in her breath so her cheeks went concave, before raising her eyebrows a little mockingly. “Why would I mind?” she asked, her tone indicating that only in coddling, litigious America would Mimi’s question even be asked.

  Robert poured the girls a third of a glass each, in thin champagne flutes etched with wispy flowers. They clinked their glasses together, and Tatiana said, “Salut.”

  Ruthie studied Tatiana, who took a tentative sip of the wine. She was small and delicate like her mother, with thin wrists and long fingers, her nails painted blue. But unlike her mother, she was a blond, her straight hair shoulder length and worn parted down the middle and pulled back rather severely with two metal barrettes.

  “Want to come hang out in my room?” Ruthie asked.

  She thought she might play big sister, show Tatiana her CDs and her makeup, which included the stuff that Alexandra Love’s mom had bought for her the year before, when Mrs. Love took Ruthie and Alex to JC Penney to have their colors done at the Color Me Beautiful counter. Ruthie would determine Tatiana’s colors, declare whether she was a fall, winter, spring, or summer. She would tell Tatiana about Julia, how Julia rarely wore makeup, only pinched her cheeks to give them color and coated her lips with clear gloss so they would shine. How Julia was kind of a hippie, even though the sixties had long since passed. How when Ruthie was a little girl her sister had succeeded in convincing her that she, Julia, was a witch, that she had magical powers, that she could cough up dollar bills and cast a spell on the moon, making it follow them home from dinner.

  Maybe Ruthie would even teach Tatiana how to play Egg and Biscuit. Or if not that exact game—which seemed a little too sacred to share—maybe a similar game, Coffee and Cream or Croissant and Jam.

  Tatiana glanced warily at her mother, who had settled on the opposite side of Tim on the upholstered sofa. It was covered in a fabric that Ruthie recognized from Mrs. Love’s house, cream with dark green palmetto leaves.

  “Can’t we just stay in here?” Tatiana asked.

  Ruthie felt deeply embarrassed. Rejected by a nine-year-old. Rejected by a dorky nine-year-old who wasn’t even pretty. Whose skin was so pale you could see her blue veins.

  They stayed with the adults—Tatiana lying between her parents on the upholstered sofa, Mimi in one of the two Stickley leather lounge chairs, and Ruthie on the floor, pressing the side of her face against the top of the ottoman, feeling the cool leather, trying to blink back tears.

  Closing her eyes, she imagined that when she opened them she would be back in Atlanta, back in the house on Wymberly Way, sitting around the antique dining room table with her parents and Julia, sitting on Chippendale chairs that God help her if she rocked back and forth on and caused a leg to break. Smirking at Julia while their father, who every day but holidays was an atheist, declaimed his Thanksgiving prayer.

  The loneliness Ruthie felt was so deep it reached all the way to her groin.

  Robert disappeared into the kitchen, then returned with a plate containing thin slices of the bacon and Gruyère tart. Ruthie took a slice gratefully. It was warm, rich, and buttery, the saltiness of the bacon tempered by the sweet cream of the custard.

  Soon after, Robert returned with a tray full of little white espresso cups filled with pumpkin soup, each cup topped with a dab of a triple crème cheese called St. André. Ruthie felt a melting sort of love for her uncle, this kind fat man who cooked delicious, fattening foods. She took a sip of the soup and for a moment thought of nothing besides its rich creaminess, its marriage of sweet and smoke.

  “Don’t I need some sort of utensil for this?” asked Tatiana.

  “Drink it straight from the cup,” said Mimi. “Like this.”

  Mimi threw back the soup with one sip.

  Tatiana followed Mimi’s example. “Outstanding,” she proclaimed.

  “It really is,” said Nina. “What is your secret, Robert?”

  “Bacon,” answered Ruthie. “He starts the soup with six pieces of it.”

  “It’s a nice surprise, isn’t it?” Robert said, settling into the other Stickley chair. “So often people pair pumpkin with sweet ingredients, but I think it works really nicely as a savory soup. Plus everything goes better with bacon.”

  All of the adults agreed, and Robert made a joke about how Jews who kept kosher missed out. “The Italians are the real chosen people,” he said.

  It was a joke Uncle Robert made often. Ruthie had begun to notice this about him. He was very entertaining. He had good stories. But if you hung around him often enough—which, of course, Mimi and Ruthie both did—you realized that he told the same stories again and again, rotating them the way Mimi rotated the best pieces in her wardrobe, the gray cashmere wrap, the alligator pumps, the strand of pearls so long she could double it up and the two loops would still hang to her waist. Sometimes when Robert went on too long about one thing or another, Mimi started spinning little circles with her hand, encouraging him to speed things up.

  Since she had come to stay with her aunt and uncle, there were occasional times when Ruthie noticed Mimi looking at Robert in a way that was far from affectionate. Mimi would study him, he who during the day was often in need of a shower. Who was unshaved, and even had hair growing out of his ears. She would study him in a detached manner, almost as if she were trying to figure out how this man got into her house. Once when he was particularly grungy, she told him he was relying too much on “pure intellectual capital.”

  Mimi confided in Ruthie that even though Robert was one of Phil’s best friends at Duke, Ruthie’s dad had initially been against the marriage. He thought Mimi was too good-looking for Robert, and though he wouldn’t have stated it explicitly, he made suggestions that Mimi was lowering her social status by marrying a Jew. At least if they planned to live in the South, which Phil erroneously assumed they did.

  Aunt Mimi was more physically attractive than Robert. She was so thin, so collected, so put together, so elegant. When Ruthie first saw the actress Gwyneth Paltrow on-screen she thought, That’s Mimi as a movie star. A cool sort of beauty, Mimi was the type of woman who could get away with wearing an all-white outfit: white sandals, white pants, white top, gold jewelry. If Robert attempted to wear all white—a Tom Wolfe—style suit perhaps—he would spill something on it within an hour. Or let out one of his earthshaking sneezes and land a green booger right on the lapel.

  Most of the time Mimi and Robert seemed to get along, but sometimes Ruthie overheard them fighting in the master bedroom. It was just across the hall from hers, only a few feet away, not like it had been in the house on Wymberly Way. In Atlanta, her parents’ room was on the other side of the house, down a long hall and barricaded by a heavy door that locked. And if her parents ever fought in there, Ruthie never heard it. The sound of her mother’s “train” was the only noise that ever carried to Ruthie’s room.

  In Atlanta, whenever Ruthie thought she heard an ominous bump or bang from downstairs—which, imagined or not, was often—she would tiptoe down the hall and try to enter her parents’ room. Sometimes the door would be locked. She was never certain enough of the presence of a robber to knock on the door and disturb her parents—that would mean serious trouble unless there really was an intruder.

  On the nights when the door wasn’t locked Ruthie could usually calm herself down just by going into their room for a few minutes. She would listen to them breathe, her father lightly snoring, her mother slowly inhaling and exhaling. But on the nights Ruthie found their door locked she felt panicked. Finally she convinced her mother not to lock it, ever. Instead Naomi bought a sign that read: PRIVACY PLEASE, I’M ON THE PHONE TO PARIS.

  “If you see that on the door do not disturb us,” her mother warned.

  An
d Ruthie, who by that time had overheard the train, promised she never, ever would.

  The grown-ups were talking about some city ordinance and Ruthie was bored.

  During previous Thanksgivings, she and her sister would play games while waiting for the meal, Connect Four, or checkers, or maybe even chess, though Ruthie wasn’t very good at it. Or Julia would rope Ruthie into being the watch guard for some forbidden thing she wanted to do: smoke a joint in the pool house, or lock herself away in her bedroom for an hour with Dmitri, back when she was dating him. If her parents’ plane had not crashed, if they were in Atlanta where they were supposed to be for Thanksgiving, Julia would probably find some way to sneak off and see Jake Robinson after everyone had feasted on turkey, stuffing, and her mother’s homemade Parker House rolls, which were so light and delicate it was entirely possible to eat five in one sitting.

  Ruthie glanced at Tatiana on the couch. Her head was in her mother’s lap, her feet in her father’s. Ruthie felt a surge of animosity toward her. What kind of a nine-year-old turned down the offer to hang out with someone older? Ruthie had never turned down Julia’s offers to hang out. Julia made life fun, rich with drama and intrigue.

  Ruthie wondered: what was Julia doing at this exact moment? Certainly not sipping from a glass of sparkling wine with her dad and stepmom—of that Ruthie was sure. Peggy was Southern Baptist and did not drink anything stronger than coffee. Probably Julia was sitting in Peggy’s living room, bored, just like Ruthie. Listening to adults talk about whatever it was they considered themselves experts on. Maybe Julia had her Discman in and was listening to The Cure or Morrissey. (As if Peggy would let Julia get away with exhibiting such obvious antisocial behavior!)

  Maybe Julia was writing Ruthie a letter.

  The letters Ruthie received from Julia were always mailed in envelopes the backs of which were decorated with hundreds of wavy lines and circles, like henna on the hand of an Indian bride. Even if the letters had no return address, Ruthie always knew immediately who they were from. Even if Julia didn’t hand-decorate the envelopes, Ruthie would immediately know who the letters were from. Her sister had the most distinctive handwriting, impossibly slanted, like all of her letters were in danger of toppling right over.

  “Do I have time to call Julia before dinner?” Ruthie asked, interrupting Nina, who had just said something about the homeless in San Francisco being out of hand.

  (Terribly suspicious of the left, Nina took pride in what she coined her “unfashionable ideas.” And whenever Robert tried to argue with her politically she trumped him by pointing out that his mother didn’t risk her life escaping from a Communist country.)

  “Great idea,” said Mimi. “Do you want to call her from your room so you have privacy?”

  Ruthie nodded, relieved. Mimi was good at intuiting her needs.

  She walked to her room at the end of the flat. Even though it was half the size of her old room in Atlanta, it was pleasant, with a bay window overlooking the garden. And while Naomi had never let Ruthie hang any posters on the wall, fearing the damage the tacks might do to the paint, Mimi told Ruthie she could decorate however she wanted. Ruthie knew that if Julia had been around to help, the walls of her room would be covered with posters of the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Dylan, Morrissey, and The Cure. But Ruthie wasn’t really into Julia’s music and especially disliked the Dead. She found Julia’s Dead tapes, with their long instrumental riffs, tedious.

  The walls in Ruthie’s San Francisco bedroom were painted a soothing blue-green. Mimi said she had come up with the color by bringing her favorite Armani sweater to the paint mixer at Cole Hardware. Ruthie liked the color so much she kept the walls mostly unadorned, save for a corkboard with pictures tacked to it—mainly pictures of Julia—and a framed Ansel Adams print of silvery birch trees. On her desk she kept a framed picture of Naomi and Phil, sitting on the living room couch, looking at each other as if there were no one else in the world, smiling.

  Ruthie’s phone was on her desk, too, an old white Princess phone of her aunt’s whose number buttons were stained a putty color from where Mimi’s foundation had rubbed off. Ruthie dialed the Virden number, which she had memorized the first week she was in San Francisco. After two rings Peggy picked up.

  “Hello, Smith residence,” she said.

  “Hi, it’s Ruthie. May I please speak with Julia?” she asked.

  Ruthie never knew what to call Peggy, so she tried to avoid addressing her directly.

  “You could if she was home,” said Peggy, a fleck of impatience in her voice. “I sent her to the Kroger to buy marshmallows. Her father forgot to get them when he went grocery shopping for me.”

  “Are you making sweet potato casserole with marshmallows on top?” asked Ruthie, a little envious.

  “I most certainly am. I have to make Sam and Matt’s favorite dish, don’t I?”

  It was Julia’s favorite, too, but Ruthie felt shy about mentioning that to Peggy.

  Earlier that afternoon when Ruthie had suggested to Robert that he place marshmallows on top of the sweet potatoes that he had mashed with butter, cream, bourbon, and molasses, he had looked at her as if she had asked him to please stuff the turkey with the limbs of small children.

  “Can she call me when she gets home?” Ruthie asked.

  Peggy sighed. “Well, we’re going to eat as soon as she gets back, so she better call you after supper is finished and the dishes are washed.”

  “Okay,” said Ruthie. “Thanks. Um, Happy Thanksgiving.”

  “You, too, cutie.”

  Besides calling Ruthie cutie, Peggy had sounded nothing like her former bubbly self. Instead she sounded both resentful and self-satisfied.

  Ruthie returned to the living room to find Mimi telling Nina and Tim Woods about Julia being grounded from coming to California to celebrate Thanksgiving with Ruthie.

  “What can you do?” asked Mimi, lifting her hands, palms up. “What can I do? Peggy says no, her father goes along with it. He’s her legal guardian. What choice do I have but to go along with their decision?”

  Mimi’s voice warbled and Ruthie realized that her aunt was about to start to cry. She cried easily, especially if she was drinking. Ruthie wondered how many glasses of champagne—sparkling wine—Mimi had consumed.

  “I feel so sorry for this girl. She has to go through the divorce of her parents when she’s so young. And then she grows accustomed to living with her mother’s new husband, my brother, who was a wonderful person—”

  She glanced at Ruthie.

  “But was pretty set in his ways. And then her mother and stepfather die. And now she’s living with this zealot who won’t let her blink without permission.”

  Was her father set in his ways? Ruthie supposed he was. He was always the one to drive, the one to choose the restaurant on nights they ate out, the one who set the tone at the dinner table. Indeed, his authority had been such a core part of who he was that it actually amazed Ruthie that he had died. It was hard to believe that he had allowed death to happen to him.

  The zealot Mimi referred to was surely Peggy. But Ruthie’s understanding of the word came from Julia, who used to spit out the name—“zealots!”—in reference to the evangelical Christians at Coventry, the kids who would slip behind the closed door of room 103 in Cushing Hall for early-morning prayer sessions. The kids who would call in sick en masse and then show up on the evening news for having taken part in the swarming of an abortion clinic by Operation Rescue. The kids who always seemed to be covertly trading notes back and forth when they passed each other in the hall between classes, notes that were signed with Christian fishes and their initials, as if it were dangerous to write out their full names.

  Julia spoke most virulently about a girl named Ashley Lavelle, a serious girl with a penchant for plaid knee skirts. Ashley often volunteered to give the devotionals at Coventry, during which she would tell her fellow students that she had “a crucial message” for them about the necessity of accepting Christ
as their personal savior. Again and again she told them that humans were inherently flawed, God was inherently perfect, and the only way to connect the flawed humans with the perfect God was through the divine bridge of Jesus Christ.

  “I have a crucial message for her,” Julia would say. “A flannel tartan skirt accented with an oversized safety pin is not attractive.”

  Ruthie used to laugh at Julia’s wickedness but in bed at night would pray for Jesus to enter her own flawed human heart. Though Julia did not take the devotionals seriously, Ruthie did, even if she only heard their content secondhand. At Coventry, students didn’t give devotionals until high school. In the junior high the devotionals were given by the teachers, the most memorable the one when Mr. Tarkenton confessed to the entire assembly that he had once murdered a man. And then at the end of his confession—the students rapt, stunned—he made another confession: He hadn’t really killed anyone. He had made the story up. But if he had killed someone, Jesus would forgive him. That was the thing about Christ. There was nothing you could do to lose his love. . . .

  And then Ruthie’s reverie was interrupted because Tim Woods was saying something about how Julia could petition for emancipation.

  Ruthie turned her attention to Mr. Woods. Julia had mentioned the possibility of emancipation in one of her letters, but Ruthie didn’t know whether or not it was a real thing she could actually petition for or if Julia was just exaggerating, comparing herself to a slave owned by Peggy. But Mr. Woods used the word, too. And he was a lawyer, and not likely to use overblown language. At least not if he was anything like Ruthie’s dad, who was always telling Julia that hyperbole weakened one’s argument.

  “Robert and I have discussed that possibility,” Mimi said carefully, glancing at Ruthie again. “But Julia only has a year and a half left of high school. And if things get really bad—well, her eighteenth birthday is next October, near the start of her senior year . . . and while we hope she and Peggy will have worked out some sort of truce by then, if not . . . at that point she could legally come here.”