Ruby (8 page)

Olivia grinned and nodded, only feeling a little guilty at how bad the hat looked.

“Oui, oui,”
Ruby said, strutting out of the bathroom and into the living room. “
Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir?
Oo la la and humma humma. Jeez. I wish my mom could see this. Every time I came home with something new, even if it was on sale or something, she’d be like, ‘Well, la-di-da,’ even though it would be nothing. Maybe a pair of jeans or something. But this”—Ruby shook her head and patted the top of the hat—“this is so fancy.”

Olivia was due at her friend Janice’s for dinner in twenty minutes. But she wanted to stay here with the girl. They were making progress. Ever since she’d felt that baby move under her sweaty hand, Olivia knew there was no going back. But how could a girl—even this girl!—feel that every day and still give the baby away? She thought of all the teenage girls in the news lately who had their babies in motel rooms or bathrooms somewhere and then killed them. Would Ruby do something like that? Maybe in some crazy way killing the baby was easier than handing it over to someone else.

Olivia needed a plan, a plan that would convince Ruby that giving the baby to Olivia was the smartest thing, the best thing, the only right thing. She would show Ruby how charming she was. She would convince her that she could give a child a wonderful life. She would show Ruby her credentials—not diplomas and résumés, but charm and sophistication and wisdom and anything else Olivia could think of to impress this girl. She would make it so that Ruby could not do anything except sign over the baby to her.

Already, Olivia had laced her conversation with words that she thought could seduce a teenaged girl looking for a certain kind of life: “Symphony,” she’d said. She’d said, “Greenwich Village.” Ruby’s eyes had widened at all the right times. “Wow,” she’d said, “you’ve been there? You’ve done that?” And now there was the hat, Nicotiana. It was too soon, Olivia knew, to lay it all out for the girl, to tell her she’d talked to her mother, to a lawyer, that they could settle this so easily. It was too soon because Olivia didn’t trust the girl yet. And she knew the girl didn’t trust her, either.

“I wish we could go somewhere tonight,” Olivia said. “You could wear the hat.”

Ruby flopped onto the sofa, looking even more ridiculous with her stomach up in the air and the hat perched on her head.

“Whatever,” she said. She started to flip through a copy of
You!,
ignoring Olivia.

But as Olivia walked out the door, Ruby looked up and said, “Like maybe if you have time, you could teach me how to use chopsticks sometime.”

The girl had tried to sound casual, but Olivia knew that it was not a simple request. Show me, the girl was saying. Show me what you know.

Olivia couldn’t shake the image of Ruby in the hat. She sat in Janice’s kitchen, watching her three-year-old daughter, Kelsey, methodically tear out all the pop-up pieces of a storybook and thinking about Ruby. Olivia and Janice had been friends since seventh grade. They had double-dated at their junior prom, lost their virginity in the same week of November during college, and then drifted apart, Olivia to New York, Janice here, to Rochester, the same small formerly rural town where Ruby’s family lived right across the highway. The town was being developed in a frenzy of mismatched architectural styles and economic classes. The family next door to Janice raised chickens; Olivia could hear them now, clucking away.

Still, Janice and Olivia were friends of sorts. Olivia had worn an embarrassing emerald green bridesmaid’s dress at Janice’s wedding and Janice made a yearly weekend trip to visit Olivia in Manhattan. When she came, they drank pink zinfandel, the way they had when they were younger and trying to be sophisticated. Once, Janice brought her old Ouija board, and the two of them sat on Olivia’s bed, asking it the same questions they used to at overnights in junior high: “Who will I marry? Where will I live? How many children will I have?”

Olivia looked around Janice’s kitchen with its slate blue cupboards and ornamental copper molds hung along one wall. She had never thought she would one day envy Janice’s ordinariness, but, Olivia realized, she did in a way. Janice’s husband, Carl, was stretched out on a recliner in their family room, watching CNN and enjoying a beer; Kelsey was entertaining herself, humming “Frère Jacques” as she tore up a book; the baby, Alex, stood in the playpen, throwing measuring spoons onto the linoleum floor; and Janice herself was at the stove, frowning over a recipe that was too complicated for someone who could not cook very well. It made Olivia feel bad that her old friend was trying so hard for her. But then Olivia was gripped by an even stronger pang of envy for the things that Janice had.

Across the state, the country, the world even, families were operating in this very way, Olivia knew. Even Winnie, who was up in Rhinebeck painting a mural of a cow jumping over the moon on the nursery wall. Olivia imagined Jeff, Winnie’s investment banker husband, downstairs cooking spaghetti just the way Winnie liked it: so al dente, it crackled slightly when she bit into it. They could hear chickens, too. And the low mooing of cows at the farm across the street. They drank milk from that dairy, milk so rich and fresh, it lay heavy on your tongue all day.

And what do I have? Olivia asked herself.

She was surprised by the answer that popped into her mind: Ruby. Ruby’s baby.

The girl was back at Olivia’s house, in Olivia’s bed, wearing Olivia’s white cotton nightgown. Before she left for Janice’s, Olivia had given Ruby extra pillows, warm milk, an iron pill, and a stack of the magazines that her sister, Amy, had left for her to read. “They’ll help you get a grip,” Amy liked to say. “Look at what’s going on in the world. Put things in perspective.” Surely the girl needs iron, Olivia thought. Six months pregnant—“I guess,” Ruby told her. “Something like that. I wasn’t ever too regular, you know? My girlfriend Betsy told me just not to do it fourteen days after your period and you’re fine. Ha!”

Olivia had cringed. Didn’t they teach birth control in schools these days? Even she and Janice had suffered through a course euphemistically named Health when they were in high school, lessons about ovulation and condoms and how long sperm could live. She thought again of Sheryl Lamont, happily pregnant in Texas, and Winnie, fat and happy in Rhinebeck, and she sighed.

“I know,” Janice said, appearing beside her to refill her wineglass, “dinner’s taking forever. Carl told me just to make steak, but I told him a lot of people don’t eat red meat anymore. You know Carl, though. Steak, potatoes, and ranch dressing.” She rolled her eyes so that Olivia would know that she, Janice, was better than that.

Olivia reached out and patted Janice’s arm, a gesture she meant as something kind but which came out wrong.

Janice squinted and said, “Is the wine okay?”

The wine was an expensive one. Too expensive, Olivia decided. Overhead, a ceiling fan churned the hot air around. Earlier, Carl had explained that the house never got hot because of all the ceiling fans. But Olivia was sweating and miserable, hungry for air and food.

“
Bon Appetit
recommended it,” Janice was explaining. “Carl wanted to get a jug of something horrible, but I wanted to splurge. Here you are, a New Yorker now. A city girl. I want you to know that not everybody here is such a hick. I want you to know that you’re not all alone.”

Olivia decided she would drink too much tonight. She had let a stranger into her house; she was reckless.

“When you were pregnant,” she blurted out, “did you have to take iron pills?”

It occurred to Olivia that maybe she had done the absolute wrong thing giving Ruby iron tablets. Maybe she should race home this instant and be sure Ruby and that lovely kicking baby inside her were fine.

Janice was back at the stove, frowning over a recipe. “Probably,” she said. “But I threw up everything, so eventually I stopped taking stuff. Even the prenatal vitamins. They say you really need that folic acid, but I didn’t take it, and my kids came out fine.”

Olivia glanced over at the kids. Alex was banging his head against the side of the playpen; Kelsey was eating Play-Doh. She stopped when she discovered Olivia watching her.

“It’s nontoxic,” Kelsey said.

Three years old and she knew words like
nontoxic.
What other words did they know?
Nuclear waste? SCUD missiles? Safe sex?
Not my baby, Olivia thought, her hand jumping a little at the memory of those glorious kicks. She would go to some special school where they taught the ABCs and long division and none of the bad stuff.

Kelsey was staring hard at Olivia. She had brown hair cut in a sort of pageboy—short, straight bangs and the rest in a bob. Her eyes were oddly big—not in a charming wide-eyed way, but in a way that reminded Olivia of Marty Feldman.

“Is your husband still dead?” Kelsey asked.

“Yes.”

“You’re never ever going to see him again?”

“No,” Olivia said.

“Never never ever?

Olivia decided she didn’t like this kid.

“Never,” she said.

“Not even in a million years?”

“I’m not going to be alive in a million years myself. No one lives that long.”

Kelsey considered this, then ate more Play-Doh, the blue.

“Are we going to eat anytime soon?” Carl bellowed from the family room.

He was a bellower, a backslapper, a man who used
party
as a verb. Whenever Olivia saw him, he said, “You still living in that shithole city?” Since David had died, he backed off a bit, but Olivia still didn’t like him very much. She studied Janice’s back at the stove—her ass was too big, her jeans were too tight, and she was making a bad dinner. Sadly, Olivia wasn’t even sure she still liked Janice.

Janice was talking about babies. Should she have a third? she asked, not expecting an answer, and, silently, Olivia said, Hell no.

Something was burning. Olivia got up and poured herself more wine. She was slightly drunk already.
Good,
she thought. She wondered if Ruby still had on the hat. There was something almost exciting about sharing her home with this girl she didn’t know, this stranger, for three days. Ruby thought David was away on a business trip, in New York. For a while at least, Olivia could pretend that her life was different, the way it was supposed to be.

“Okay,” Janice said. “Carl?”

Olivia sat at the table, but Kelsey shook her head no. “We’re eating in the dining room,” she whispered, pointing through the archway to a room that held Janice’s parents’ old furniture—made of heavy dark wood with years of furniture-polish buildup. It was too big for the small room. But there were fresh flowers in a vase, and candles lit, and what Olivia recognized as Janice’s wedding china. The pattern, Olivia remembered, was named Strawberry Field, just like the street where Ruby lived, cream-colored plates with small ruby strawberries in the center, dusted with gold flecks. Olivia thought of that small house, of Ruby’s mother, and tried to picture the girl there, sullen and hostile and desperate to go. The image comforted her; she knew Ruby wouldn’t go back.

Carl seemed especially awkward in here, with his faded jeans and large gut and flannel shirt. He gripped a bottle of beer in one hand, the edge of the table in the other.

“We’ve never eaten in here,” Kelsey whispered.

Janice laughed nervously. “Of course we have,” she said.

Kelsey looked at Olivia with great seriousness. “Honest to God, we never eat in here. Not in a million years.”

“Well,” Olivia said, watching Janice bring in steaming plates of food, everything either undercooked or overcooked, “it’s lovely.” This ceiling fan seemed even more sluggish, and Olivia felt as if she were getting a facial with all the hot air and the steam rising from the platters.

When she’d finally brought all the food to the table, Janice surveyed everything nervously. Olivia was reminded of the way Janice had acted when presenting oral reports in school: flustered, like she was now, blushing slightly, almost giddy.

“Since it’s June,” Janice said in her oral-presentation voice, “I made summery things. Like risotto primavera and stuffed chicken breasts with spinach and sun-dried tomatoes.”

Janice pointed to the food as she talked. Carl and Kelsey glanced at each other. Back in the kitchen, Alex was in his playpen, grunting. Olivia wondered if maybe Janice should have been more careful with that folic acid.

The food was passed around in silence, with a forced formality that sent Olivia straight for more wine. She was embarrassed for everybody. She wished she hadn’t come. She and Ruby could have rented movies. Movies about babies.
Baby Boom
and
Look Who’s Talking
and
Three Men And a Baby.
They could have sat together under a quilt and eaten popcorn and watched movies, the way people do.

“Don’t you think?” Janice was saying.

Everyone was looking at Olivia, who just shrugged and laughed a little. People excused her for everything these days, rudeness and absentmindedness and for not listening when she should.

Janice spoke louder, slower, like Olivia’d gone deaf instead of drunk too much wine. “Don’t you think summer is a good time for fresh starts?”

“I suppose,” Olivia said. “Starting over” was a phrase people always used around her. They told her to “start over,” how important “starting over” was. But Olivia still wasn’t sure what it entailed. Moving away? Getting remarried? Dyeing her hair red? Learning to tango?

“Carl?” Janice said with a “Come on, do it already” look.

“Yeah, well,” Carl said.

Olivia noticed that Carl unrolled his stuffed chicken breast and scraped the stuffing from it. He picked all the vegetables out of the risotto primavera.

He stroked his scraggly beard and said, “You remember Pete?”

Olivia shrugged again.

“Of course you do,” Janice said with strained gaiety. “From our wedding.”

Olivia almost said something about how badly she’d looked that day in that screaming green dress and with her ridiculous French curls, but then she remembered that all of that had been Janice’s doing, so she tried to look as if she was straining her memory. “Pete,” she muttered. “Pete …”