Ruby (9 page)

“I work with him,” Carl said. “Pete Lancelotta.”

Carl sold clothes hangers, of all things. To clothing stores. He also sold the racks to hang clothes on and the spinning racks that makeup and panty hose often sat in.

“He’s bald,” Kelsey said.

“Balding,” Janice interjected. “And very tall.”

“Big,” Carl said.

“Not fat,” Janice added quickly.

“I didn’t say fat,” Carl said. “Jesus. He’s a big guy.”

“Big sounds like fat,” Janice said. “I don’t want Olivia to think he’s fat, that’s all.”

“I don’t think he’s fat,” Olivia said.

“See?” Carl said. “Jesus.”

A vague image was forming. A tall, bald, fat man who acted like Carl.

“I can’t place him,” Olivia said. She wondered if she would get salmonella poisoning from the undercooked chicken.

Janice leaned toward her, across the scorched risotto—Olivia now knew what she’d smelled burning—and said in a low voice, “He got divorced recently. The wife is a nightmare. She got his credit cards up to something like ten thousand dollars and stopped working and only watched the O.J. trial. I mean, that’s how she spent her time. Shopping and watching the O.J. trial.”

Olivia shook her head, tried to look sympathetic. She was officially drunk and she wanted to leave.

“Not ten thousand,” Carl said. “Eight thousand.”

“I think it was more like ten, Carl,” Janice said. She said it in the voice of someone who would argue this small point to the bitter end.

“Maybe nine,” Carl said.

Janice rolled her eyes. “It was close to ten thousand dollars. Pete told me so himself.”

Carl looked at Olivia. “Isn’t nine close to ten?” he asked her.

“Either way,” Olivia said, “that’s a lot of clothes hangers.”

“Do you know why six is afraid of seven?” Kelsey asked no one in particular.

“The point is,” Janice said, “I think you two might hit it off.”

“Because seven
eight
nine,” Kelsey shouted. “Get it?”

“No romance necessarily,” Janice continued. “Go slow. You’ve both been burned.”

“Well,” Olivia said, “yes, in a way. He was burned by his ex-wife and I was burned by God.”

Everyone was silent.

Olivia realized that even Alex had stopped making noises out in the kitchen.

Then Kelsey said, “God burned you? Like with matches?”

“To tell you the truth,” Carl said, “I don’t think he’s even going to like you. He’s a nice guy. A regular nice guy.”

“Carl,” Janice said, “you’re making it sound like David wasn’t a nice guy.”

“No,” Olivia said, “he’s implying that
I’m
not a nice guy.”

“Gal,” Kelsey said. “Girls aren’t guys.”

“Will it hurt anybody if Pete and Olivia go to a movie?” Janice said, stretching her arms out like Christ on the cross.

“I’m just saying,” Carl mumbled.

Olivia stood up too fast, banging her knee on the screw that opened the middle of the table so that someday, if they ever ate in this room again, a leaf could be added.

“It’s late,” she said, though she had no job to go to in the morning, no husband waiting at home.

Janice looked stricken. “There’s cheesecake,” she said.

But Olivia was out of the dining room, moving through the kitchen, toward the Dutch doors that led out to the driveway and her car. The getaway car, she thought. Alex was in a crumpled heap on the floor of his playpen. Seeing him like that was the only thing that slowed Olivia down. She considered stopping and doing something. CPR, maybe? She wondered if it was too late for folic acid, and she made a mental note to get some for Ruby.

“We just keep him there,” Janice explained. “Otherwise, he’ll wake up when we pick him up, and then he’s awake all night.” She was right at Olivia’s heels. Somehow, she had retrieved the cheesecake from the refrigerator and was following Olivia, holding it out.

“How interesting,” Olivia said as she pushed her way outside.

The air smelled like pine trees and shit. Chicken shit, Olivia assumed, given the noise next door. The way Winnie’s air must smell in Rhinebeck. On the other side of Janice’s, a house resembling a castle was being built. Even in the dark, Olivia could make out turrets and large arched doorways. Her car looked familiar and safe.

“Thanks for dinner,” Olivia said, climbing into it. She breathed in its smell happily.

It was not until she had the headlights on, the car in reverse, that she saw Janice’s face peering in her window.

Reluctantly, Olivia rolled it down.

“He’s a nice guy,” Janice said, shoving the cheesecake at Olivia. “Pete.”

“I know,” Olivia said. “I remember. Big but not fat.” She backed away, the cheesecake sliding around on the seat beside her.

She had enough wine to make driving difficult. Olivia sat too close to the wheel, stared too hard at the road. Drunk like this, she could hit someone and kill them. Someone’s husband.

She pulled over at a Dunkin’ Donuts for coffee. While she waited inside, she thought about Ruby. What if she was not as Olivia imagined her? What if she
was
like that Drew Barrymore character, a killer? A thief? Not that Olivia had anything valuable in the house. Her good jewelry and bankbooks were all back in New York. But she had cash and credit cards in the beach house. Her grandmother’s pearls. Her most valuable possession was worthless to anybody else: the answering-machine tape with David’s voice on it. She had not played it since he’d died, not once. Instead, she put it in her jewelry box, the place where valuable things should go.

On the stools at the counter were some teenagers, kids around Ruby’s age, Olivia guessed. They all looked stoned, gobbling sugar doughnuts and laughing too hard about nothing at all. They all had tattoos and pierced body parts; one girl even had a small hoop earring jutting from her tongue. How is she eating so many doughnuts with that thing in there? Olivia wondered. These kids reminded her of Ruby, and they looked scary, dangerous.

What if Ruby was a criminal? In some kind of burglary ring, maybe? What is wrong with me? Olivia thought. She had let a strange girl—maybe even a criminal—into her home. I am a woman so desperate for—love, company, what?—that I put myself in jeopardy. Are you happy, Pal? For a frightening instant, Olivia thought she had spoken out loud, but, no, it was just that her lips were moving, and one of the pierced girls was looking at her as if maybe Olivia was crazy or dangerous. Olivia smiled at the girl, who stared back at her blankly.

Maybe the pregnant stomach is fake, Olivia thought. Something to garner sympathy and gain entry into people’s homes. And Olivia had told her she was there alone, that her husband was away. Instead of a poor kid from the wrong side of the tracks knocked up by some rich, callous college boy, Olivia imagined Ruby as streetwise, a runaway. She’d seen a documentary once about street kids who robbed for a living. They slept on park benches and beaches; they ate from garbage cans behind restaurants.

Olivia could see Ruby this way, with her tattoo and pierced nose. She was disappointed in her own suspicious nature. But then she remembered the careful way Ruby had studied her, the tough way she talked, not unlike these kids, who were eating too many sugar doughnuts and saying things like “Fuckin’ right, man” and “I’ll get that cocksucker.”

It was taking forever to get one simple cup of black coffee. While she waited, some kid was robbing her, vandalizing her house.

“Excuse me,” Olivia said to the kid closest to her, the one who had looked at her before. “Do you know someone named Ruby? She’s got a boyfriend at the college? She’s—uh—kind of, you know, pregnant?” Olivia clutched the slippery counter, drunk and scared and dizzy.

They all turned their red-rimmed eyes on her. They smelled like mothballs and sweat and marijuana. None of them answered. But they, too, narrowed their eyes and studied her.

“As a matter of fact,” Olivia continued, unable to stop herself, “she
is
pregnant.” Her own sour wine breath wafted up to her.

The girl closest to her had on black nail polish; her pupils were dilated, her lips chapped.

By the time the coffee came, Olivia was trembling with fear. What if Ruby was like them, a drugged-out kid who would stop at nothing? A desperate kid. Olivia didn’t want her things touched, gone over, examined by this kid. In a shoe box in her closet were pictures of David, a video Rex had made of a sailing trip to Block Island. What if Ruby took those?

She went back out to her car. The coffee burned her tongue as she gulped it, hoping to get clearheaded. She checked behind her to be sure the kids weren’t coming out to the parking lot. They weren’t. They were still in there, eating, laughing. Olivia drove the rest of the way home too fast, hugging the scenic route’s curves, keeping her high beams on the whole way to warn people’s pets and bicyclists and joggers that she was there. The cheesecake on the seat beside her was sliding around dangerously but never fell.

Her tires squealed on the gravel of her driveway. Too many lights were on in the house. It looked the way it might if someone had ransacked it, turned everything upside down. Olivia could not remember if she had put those lights on before she left. She could not even at this moment remember Ruby’s face. If she had to go to the police, she would be able to describe only the belly—large and round, with a protruding belly button. “If she drinks water fast,” she would have to tell them, “the baby kicks like crazy.”

Olivia stumbled up the few steps to the door and burst in, ready for anything.

But the kitchen was empty, untouched.

“Ruby?” Olivia called.

No answer.

She made her way through each room, turning off the lights as she went. Everything was in its proper place.

She climbed the creaky steps and called again. “Ruby?”

Still no answer.

But in the doorway of her bedroom, Olivia stopped, slumped against the frame. Ruby was there, in her bed, the hat still perched on her head. She was propped up against all the pillows, reading magazines. She smiled up at Olivia when she saw her there.

“These are great,” she said, and held up some chocolate truffles.

They were a gift from Winnie, who had started sending Olivia all the castoffs from the
You!
kitchen.

“You eat weird stuff,” Ruby said. “It must cost a fortune, huh? It’s good, though. I liked that chutney a lot, with all those chunks of—what, pears or something? I put most of it on the crackers with the cracked pepper. Not bad. I mean, all pepper is cracked, though, right? Unless it’s in those little balls like at restaurants when they come over and grind it up for your salad. They always do that in movies.” She licked the chocolate from her fingers, then asked, “Are you like a gourmet cook or something?”

Her face was blank and innocent. She was not a robber. She was just a teenager in trouble.

Olivia wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry from relief.

“My friend works for a magazine,” she told Ruby.

“Cool,” Ruby said. “I love magazines. You don’t have to concentrate on them the way you do on books. I’m not a big fan of books.”

Realizing its potential power, Olivia added, “She works for
You!
”

“No shit? That is like so cool.”

“You must have been starving,” Olivia said. The bag of food that Winnie sent was nearly empty.

“I’m always starving. I bet I’ve gained fifty pounds. No joke. Ben told me I look like I swallowed a pig. He said I’m like a snake. You know, there’re these snakes in South America that swallow pigs whole. So they’re like skinny on top; then they bulge out in the middle because there’s this whole pig inside them, and then they’re skinny again.” She grinned a toothy, chocolate-smeared grin. “Ben says that’s what I look like. One of those snakes.”

Ben.

Olivia wondered if she should try to find him next. Or his parents.

“Do you think those snakes kill those pigs first? Before they eat them?” Ruby was asking.

Olivia shrugged. “I don’t know. I would think so.” Ben’s parents should be notified, she decided.

“There is
so
much I don’t know. It blows my mind,” Ruby said, shaking her head. “And nature,” she continued. “Nature totally freaks me out. Like tornadoes and typhoons and hurricanes.” She ate another truffle, studying it after each bite. “And babies,” she said finally. “The way they get made. I mean, they come out of just a gob of come. A whole baby.”

“And an egg,” Olivia said stupidly.

“Remember Betsy?” Ruby said suddenly. “My friend who told me that if I didn’t do it on the fourteenth day, this
wouldn’t
happen? She also thought that you couldn’t get pregnant if you did it standing up, because the come just like falls out of you. That’s how
she
got pregnant. But Planned Parenthood made her watch this tape that explained stuff, which is supposedly where she got this other misinformation.”

Olivia did not know where to begin with Ruby. She sat on the very edge of the bed and tried.

“I don’t think Planned Parenthood gives out misinformation,” she said.

Ruby nodded. “Uh-huh. Betsy says so.”

“What did Betsy do with her baby?”

“Abortion,” Ruby said offhandedly, chewing her truffle. “Get this. They ask her if she wants like liquid Valium or if she just wants to do it without anything. And so Betsy says, ‘Oh, liquid Valium? Like I drink it?’ And they go, ‘No, it’s an IV.’ So Betsy says no thank you, even though she loves a good high for free, like anybody, because her boyfriend paid for everything—the abortion, and even for a year of the pill. So anyway, she doesn’t get the IV, because the thing about Betsy is, she is terrified of needles. Once she even bit her doctor when he gave her a shot. And another time, she puked when she got a needle. She asked this lady if it hurt a lot—you know, the abortion—and the lady said there might be a little cramping, so Betsy figures big deal, right? A little cramping’s better than having a baby, right? So they don’t give her anything, and it hurts so bad, she freaks out. I mean, she really freaks. And she sees everything. She says there wasn’t really anything to see, not like a whole baby or anything. But there was something. They called it ‘tissue.’”