A Soft Place to Land: A Novel Read online

  Gabe loaned her a clean T-shirt and a pair of sweatpants to sleep in. She changed in the bathroom, passing one of his scruffy housemates on the way out, who gave her a quick nod before scurrying to the kitchen.

  It was not the sexiest outfit to be wearing, that first night in bed with Gabe, but soon after the two of them squeezed into his twin bed her shirt was off and he was running his finger along the curve of her breast, telling her she was beautiful. Her response was to point to the few stray hairs that grew along the periphery of her nipples.

  “A guy I knew once told me these grossed him out,” she said, and immediately started berating herself. Why bring up Brendan’s careless insult? Why insinuate that she had more sexual experience than she had? Why, after Brendan’s reaction, had she not started plucking?

  “That guy was full of shit,” Gabe said.

  They didn’t have sex that night, just kissed and kissed. Later, having put back on his shirt, she nestled into him, and they talked sleepily about casual things: favorite movies, favorite singers, favorite candy bars. Hers were Big Night, Lucinda Williams, 100 Grand. His were The Graduate, a draw between Elvis and Johnny Cash, and Snickers. The next day, Wednesday, September 12, in pinking morning light, without any discussion of their nascent relationship or their past sexual history, without any discussion of whether or not a practicing Catholic should even be doing what they were about to do, with only the words “good morning” murmured between them, she asked if he had a condom and he answered by walking over to his dresser, opening the top drawer, rifling through its contents, and pulling one out.

  He moved with her while she was on top, and she quickly had an orgasm, which surprised them both. Ruthie did not tell Gabe that this was the first orgasm she had ever had during sex, that he was only the second person she had ever slept with. She also did not tell him about the abortion. It was something that had happened in the past. It would do no good to share. If she were to get pregnant by Gabe, that would be a different story. If that were to happen she would allow him to help determine their course of action. She would see how much of a hold his relatively newfound Catholicism had on real life. (It certainly wasn’t stopping him from having pre-marital sex.) But considering how turned on she was by him, she could not imagine that they would encounter the same problem she and Brendan did. Gabe made her so wet surely a condom could not break inside her.

  After that first night sleeping at his house, Ruthie’s life became all about Gabe, all the time. Every week or so Ruthie would decide that she had to take a (brief) break, she had to spend some time with Dara and catch up, she had to get a full night of sleep without staying up late having sex. So she would shoo Gabe from her apartment, or return to hers from his. She would put a load of laundry in the washer, take a shower, make dinner for Dara. She would try to pay attention to her roommate’s stories, but her mind would wander to thoughts of Gabe. Thoughts of his eyes, his protruding clavicle, his strangely alluring tattoo that she had nicknamed “Jesus of the flexing abdomen.”

  She simply could not get enough of him. And it wasn’t just sex, or kissing, or cuddling. There was something so familiar about him, so comforting. It was the Atlanta in him, she supposed, for even though they came from very different parts of the city, they held memories in common, and not just of St. Catherine’s.

  Like how they both loved going to the Krispy Kreme donut factory on Ponce, though Gabe thought it was ridiculous that Ruthie’s family would not stop for donuts unless the HOT sign was on. Or how they both loved the Varsity onion rings, each a tangle of onions suspended in thick, salty breading. Or their shared memories of southern springs, the flowering dogwood trees, the pink and yellow tulips in everyone’s front yard, the lengthening days of bloom and green, before the mosquitoes arrived and the heat became oppressive and unrelenting. Of course the last spring Ruthie had spent in Atlanta had been heartbreaking—all that new life bursting forth when her parents’ lives had so recently ended.

  Gabe asked if she had ever gone back, was surprised when she shrugged and said no. He asked if she would like to go with him to Atlanta over winter break, stay with Schwartzy in her bungalow in Inman Park. Ruthie surprised herself by saying yes. She wanted to experience the world he was from. It was Atlanta, true, but it was removed enough from the Atlanta of her youth, from Buckhead, to make returning there, if not easy, possible.

  She spent Christmas day in San Francisco with Mimi and Robert, where they celebrated the holiday in a mishmash fashion, borrowing from Christian and Jewish tradition: unwrapping presents in front of the tree that morning, eating Chinese food and going to a movie that night. Julia called from Vermont, where she was spending the holiday with Molly’s family. They had an easy conversation, and Ruthie was grateful that the terrible burden of their past seemed to be subsiding, that she could enjoy speaking with her sister again.

  The next day Ruthie boarded a plane to Atlanta, where Gabe already was, where she would stay through the New Year, celebrating with him and his mom.

  As the plane approached the city, she pressed her head against the small, cold window and took in the trees, miles and miles of them, interrupted only by skyscrapers. It was winter, and though there were some evergreens she saw mostly branches shed of leaves, sculptural in their bareness. She had forgotten just how dense Atlanta was with trees. Now it was coming back. She remembered being ten or eleven and going with her parents to the rotating circular bar on top of the downtown Peachtree Plaza Hotel. She had sipped a Shirley Temple through a thin black straw and marveled at the view as the bar turned slowly on its axis. Observing the other skyscrapers from up close was neat, but it was the vast clumps of green that awed her. When she commented on the trees to her parents, her father told her proudly that Atlanta was a city built inside a forest.

  Once off the plane she was surprised by how many fat people she saw, fat men especially, lumbering past her with their wheeled suitcases, their soft bellies spilling over pleated pants. In San Francisco and Berkeley the gay community set the standard: men were expected to be lithe; women were allowed a little bulk. Here it was the opposite; here the couples looked more like Robert and Mimi, plump men with thin women. At least among whites. Black people seemed to have a kinder standard. Many of the black women were bigger, more fleshed out, and seemingly more confident in their bodies.

  Ruthie noticed one black woman in particular, walking in the opposite direction from her, toward one of the boarding gates. Not walking, striding. Shoulders back, chest out. She was big, thick; and while a white woman her size might have tried to hide her weight beneath baggy sweats, this woman wore her stretchy red dress with an attitude that implied anyone who got a glimpse of her was damn lucky. (And she was right. Ruthie felt lucky just being witness to her stride.)

  What a difference attitude made.

  She had forgotten how racially mixed Atlanta was, and it made her proud of her home city, though her pride was not really earned. In truth the only black person in Atlanta Ruthie had known—despite the city being full of black professionals—was the housekeeper, Addie Mae. And could she even lay claim to having known her? Ruthie had never even seen Addie Mae’s house, could not tell you what neighborhood she lived in, yet two days a week Addie Mae had taken the bus to the Peachtree Battle stop, where she waited for Naomi to come pick her up and drive her to 3225 Wymberly Way. She had known the insides of their closets, their drawers, their toilets. Had changed their sheets, had folded their underwear. Had called the girls Miss Ruthie and Miss Julia, though Ruthie and Julia had called her, a grown woman, only by her first name.

  Oh God, the South. Ruthie had forgotten so much. Had forgotten the accents, the elongated vowels, the authority with which they were articulated. On the underground train that took her from the concourse to baggage claim, she overheard a mother scolding her child. “Kelsey, no ma’am!” the mother said. And then a moment later, “I’ve got two words for you, young lady: be-have!”

  Gabe was waiting for her as she ascended
the escalator from the underground train. Her heart jumped when she saw him, in his thin white T-shirt, dark jeans, and green Army jacket. What a miracle it was that this beautiful boy was attracted to her. His mother, Schwartzy, stood beside him, her dark hair still as wild and curly as it had been when she visited Ruthie’s classroom in the fifth grade, though now her curls were streaked with silver. She wore a pair of brown cords and a long-sleeve blue T-shirt with the words CHICKEN BABY printed above a graphic of a little girl’s body with chicken feet and a chicken head. Though Schwartzy’s hair had grayed, her skin was still smooth and her body slender. She looked younger than her fifty years.

  “Hey,” said Gabe, brushing his lips against hers. “Meet Schwartzy.”

  As Ruthie turned to say hello, Schwartzy enveloped her in a hug, as if she were a long-lost child. “Darling! Gabriel has told me so many wonderful things about you.”

  Ruthie was taken aback by the hug, but she tried not to stiffen. She breathed in, breathed out. Tried to stay loose. Schwartzy smelled of something good, something warm and slightly sweet, like a yellow cake baking, like vanilla.

  “We’ve actually met before. You made me my first latke,” said Ruthie, though technically that was not true. She had first eaten latkes with applesauce and sour cream at the Snack and Shop deli, where Phil and Naomi liked to go after their adult Sunday school class. They would go to church only for the intellectual classes taught by Emory professors—classes with names like God and the Big Bang Theory or Jesus, the Buddha, and You—and leave immediately afterwards, while everyone else headed to the sanctuary for the actual worship service.

  They were walking toward baggage claim, Gabe on one side of her, Schwartzy on the other. “That was me,” said Schwartzy. “Have electric griddle, will travel. How was the flight?”

  “I’m happy to be on the ground,” said Ruthie. She hated flying, found it only tolerable if she took Xanax. And the flight from San Francisco to Atlanta was long, over five hours.

  “I don’t like to fly, either,” said Schwartzy, linking her arm through Ruthie’s. “I do not appreciate being thirty-five thousand feet above ground, in a metal tube, kept in the air through a sustained explosion.”

  Gabe turned to give Schwartzy a look of admonition. Her eyes widened in embarrassment. “Oh shit. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sound so flip. Gabe told me about what happened to your parents.”

  “It’s okay,” said Ruthie, though in truth she found Schwartzy’s straightforwardness a little unsettling. “It was a long time ago.”

  Ruthie wondered how soon she could unhook her arm from Schwartzy’s. She was glad that Gabe’s mom seemed to like her; still, it felt weird to be walking arm-in-arm with a virtual stranger. Ruthie wasn’t really used to touching people all that much, even those she knew well.

  “And Gabe says this is your first time back to Atlanta?”

  “My aunt tried to get me to come when I was in high school, just to see old friends, but, I don’t know. It didn’t work out scheduling wise.”

  Another lie. Until now, until Gabe, what was left for her in Atlanta other than ghosts?

  Schwartzy parked her ancient Volvo sedan on the street in front of her yellow wood bungalow, and she, Gabe, and Ruthie climbed out.

  “It’s beautiful,” said Ruthie, taking in the house. “It’s perfect.”

  Schwartzy lived on Sinclair Avenue, a long street of craftsman bungalows, a few dilapidated, but many renovated to pristine condition. Sinclair was lined with magnificent old trees, the bare branches dark and noble against the blue sky. Ruthie envisioned spring, the street canopied in green.

  “It’s not quite as Norman Rockwell as it looks,” said Gabe, walking to the trunk to retrieve Ruthie’s bag. “We’re only two blocks from Little Five Points, where it’s easy to get a pair of used Levi’s, an album from the seventies, a healing crystal, a juice cleanse, a bag of pot, a bag of blow, and—oh yeah—mugged.”

  Holding the handle of her suitcase in one hand, her backpack slung over that same shoulder, he closed the trunk with a resounding clang.

  “Oh hush,” said Schwartzy, as they walked toward the house. “Little Five Points is fabulous. And Inman Park is the only Atlanta neighborhood I’d even consider living in. That is if we can keep the damn yuppies from taking it over.”

  “Those damn yuppies who have tripled the value of your home,” said Gabe.

  “Oh God, here he goes again, having one of his Alex P. Keaton moments.”

  Ruthie felt as if she were watching a comedy routine that had been recycling its material for years and years.

  “Well, I think it’s gorgeous,” Ruthie said, stopping in the middle of the yard to really take it all in: the wavy glass windows that widened at the bottom, the black wooden shutters, the shingled roof, the large front porch with a swing and two rockers. The house looked as if it belonged on a Hollywood set, the perfect backdrop for a lighthearted family movie: falling leaves, gangs of mischievous but ultimately innocent children on bicycles, simple domestic disagreements that resolve themselves with a look and a quiet touching of hands.

  “When was it built?” Ruthie asked.

  “Nineteen twenty-one, we think,” said Schwartzy, standing beside Ruthie, in open admiration of her place. “Cost me nineteen thousand dollars when I bought it, nearly twenty years ago. Of course it had asbestos in the attic and a homeless man sleeping in the basement.”

  “Gabe mentioned that,” said Ruthie. “How did you get rid of him?”

  “It turned out the asbestos was a blessing. They had to wrap and seal the whole house. There was nothing for him to do but move. I felt bad for the guy—bad for kicking him back to the streets—but I had Gabriel’s safety to think about.”

  They climbed the three steps that led to the front porch. They stood on its wide wooden planks, looking at the black cat that slept on the swing.

  “Meet Solomon,” said Schwartzy. “The real master of the house.”

  The cat must have weighed twenty pounds.

  “He’s huge,” said Ruthie, and then worried that she might have offended Gabe’s mom. How was she supposed to act toward this person, this person who had raised the boy—man—that Ruthie was pretty sure she loved? (Though neither she nor Gabe had used that word with each other.) Was she to be completely herself, or deferential? It mattered that Schwartzy liked her. It was conceivable that Schwartzy might one day be her mother-in-law. It was too soon to think of such things, yet she could not help herself.

  How strange. To have a mother-in-law but no mother.

  “In his heyday Solomon was catching three or four rodents a day. But he’s a lover boy at heart, aren’t you, Solo?”

  Schwartzy reached out her hand, her long, thin fingers laden with silver rings, and scratched the cat’s back. The cat turned his head toward her and let out a plaintive meow.

  “Yo, Schwartz,” said Gabe, who waited by the door, holding Ruthie’s suitcase and her backpack. “I don’t have the key, and these bags are heavy.”

  “Why don’t you have your key?” she asked, walking toward him.

  “I don’t know. I must have left it inside.”

  Schwartzy unlocked the door and then pushed it open, standing aside to let Gabe and Ruthie enter first. As soon as Ruthie stepped inside she noticed the smell of baking yellow cake that she had first detected on Schwartzy. The inside of the house was dark, save for a flicker of candlelight from above the mantel, which Ruthie was pretty sure was an aromatherapy candle, and the source of the cake smell.

  “Oh shit,” said Schwartzy, walking toward the mantel. “I forgot to blow this thing out before we left.”

  Gabe turned on the brass lamp that sat on the table by the front door and flicked on the overhead lights, revealing a room with smudged beige walls filled with well-worn but comfortable-looking furniture: a dark blue couch that sagged a bit in the middle of each seat cushion; a love seat covered in a floral damask slipcover that Ruthie could tell, even from a distance, was coated with bl
ack cat hairs; an old corduroy La-Z-Boy with a reading lamp behind it. There were no rugs on the floor, or curtains on the windows, only white vinyl blinds, which appeared to be dusty. In the center of the room was a heavy wooden coffee table that looked as if it was from the seventies, cluttered with loose papers, legal pads, and a half-filled coffee mug. Framing the fireplace was a painted brick mantel that housed, in addition to the scented candle, several picture frames and a brass menorah. On either side of the mantel were built-in-bookcases, each crammed full of paperbacks.

  “We’re so happy to have you to our home,” said Schwartzy, beaming at Ruthie.

  “Thank you. It’s great,” said Ruthie, hoping she was sounding enthusiastic enough. “I love it.”

  It was great, homey, and Ruthie did love it. But also, being there made Ruthie self-conscious. She was aware, for the first time really, that Gabe had grown up with significantly less money than she had. She already knew that, of course, but she hadn’t thought about it concretely. Even at the age of twenty-one, almost twenty-two, she still could not escape seeing the world through the filter of her youth, through Buckhead standards. She forgot that most people did not grow up in huge homes designed by architects and cleaned by black women, flanked with wide green lawns maintained by Latino immigrants. And though she loved that Gabe was not from that world, not from Buckhead, she was embarrassed by her own blinders, embarrassed by the fact that she was surprised by the middle-class furnishings of his house. What did she expect, that Schwartzy, a single mom and defense lawyer for the poorest of the poor, would have decorated her home exclusively with Stickley’s line of Mission furniture? (Yes, that was what she expected. That was what the aesthetic of both Phil and Mimi led one to expect.)

  “Let me show you our room,” said Gabe, glancing furtively at his mom, as if he was a little embarrassed to admit that he and Ruthie would be sleeping together. (And, Ruthie was aware, if Gabe and Schwartzy were from Buckhead, she would be offered her own room, for propriety’s sake if nothing else.) “Then do you want to get something to eat?”