Shout Her Lovely Name (5 page)

“I send you off to college so you can get one-red-hen drunk?” He dropped his hand onto her shoulder, licked his lips, and laughed loud. “What comes after the red hen?”

“Two-cute-ducks. Three-brown-bears. John Douglas can never make it through that game.” She sucked a full drag off her cigarette and laughed along with him. Laughed and coughed at the same time. “I-shit-six-sheets,” she sputtered out between coughs. “By nine, he’s all messed up”—her father slapped her on the back—“nine-running-cunts, he says. Like it’s some amazing thing he’s just got to see.”

“Whoa.” Milton held his hands up as if he were stopping traffic.

Ruby stubbed out her cigarette. She looked at Milton through watering eyes. “People talk like that all the time.”

“Charming,” her father said. “What about Meredith?”

“Once she’s drunk, John Douglas draws a chalk line on the floor and holds her good eye down to it. He holds her head about an inch above the line and everybody watches.” Ruby paused. “She stays there for hours, just staring at the white line.”

“Chickens are mighty stupid animals.” Milton chuckled.

“Poor stupid bird,” her father mocked.

“We
put
a circle of empty Coke bottles around so no one steps on her.” She looked from one man to the other, her cheeks flushed with alcohol and enthusiasm. “You ought to get one for entertainment here. Draw a chalk line down the center of the bar.”

“Remember your mother’s chicken?” It had been a long time since Ruby thought about Albertina. “That chicken just wandered into the yard and Sally built it a little pen,” Teddy was telling Milton. “She drew more pictures of that damn bird. Studies, she called them.”

“Sally is a talented woman,” Milton said.

Her mother had loved that bird. She’d claimed chickens were sensitive. Her father kept threatening to roast it on the Italian chicken machine. Food wandering into the yard must be rotisserized, he’d said.

“We set her free,” Ruby told them. She and her mother had thrown a suitcase over Albertina and loaded her into the back of the car. She’d squawked the entire drive up the inland waterway until they unzipped the cover and set her free on a deserted stretch of road. Sally brought along five pounds of seed that she spilled to make a trail into the trees. She brought the Brownie too, to take photos of the chicken hurling herself up in attempts at flight. She was a huffy bird. Sally went back twice, but as far as Ruby knew, she never saw Albertina again. “Shouldn’t we go home?” Ruby asked.

Her father passed her another nickel. “Keep your sweet self away from this John Douglas.”

“I am an adult, Daddy.”

He squinted, examined her with his watery eyes now gone dark, the color of thunderclouds. Next he leaned close to her fingers. “Pinch it tight, then let it fly.”

How long had they been at this? Her left earring pinched. She opened and closed it against her tender lobe. John Douglas gave the earrings to her on their third date, tiny enamel bumblebees. It seemed like days ago that she’d kissed John Douglas goodbye at the train station and he’d squeezed her arm, hard. Both of them were hung over. “God damn it,” he’d said. “Call me JD.”

“You gonna blow, puny?” her father asked.

She started to say she was marvelous, only the word was unwieldy and caught in her throat. It felt as if nickels careened around the inside of her skull.

“You’re just like your mother. Sally is what you call a delicate drinker.”

Ruby’s mother was sitting at home, waiting to welcome her with coleslaw and a pile of clean clothes to take back to college. They’d better leave. Soon.

Milton handed her a clean rag and she mopped her forehead. He slid a pile of soda crackers across the bar to her.

“Sally never could drink,” her father continued. “When we lived in the tent, when we were building the house, she’d barely sip brandy before she started complaining about the spins and climbed into bed. Your mother had icicles for feet. Tiniest damn feet”—he held his hands apart—“size four and a half. She’d get shoes in the little boys’ department at Sears.” He shook his head, grinned around the end of his pipe. The skin beneath his stubble had gone gray and loose as worn flannel.

Ruby shook the pack of Salem cigarettes, tapped it against her wrist, and then finally ripped open the entire side to get at one. She’d outgrown her mother’s ridiculous shoes in the sixth grade. She struck a match and inhaled long and full. The smoke came out, wrapped around her words: “We should go home.”

“We had ourselves a time. We had your sister, then you.”

Ruby played with a nickel on the bar, twisting it back and forth in her fingers. She and John Douglas could be together right now. Maybe they’d have driven to the coast for the weekend. His car, with its soft leather seats, the tiny blue and red lights on the dash, reminded her of a jewelry box. Perhaps they’d have gone out for crab, laughed while the waitress fastened paper bibs around their necks, and then piled crab shells high on the table. With John Douglas, Ruby wouldn’t have to hear again about her sister. When she flicked the nickel free, it shot out, glimmering in the faint light, spinning on its slender rim. The longest spin they’d had that night.

Her father watched. “It was losing Joyce that did it.” The nickel slowed, teetered, and fell. He dropped his arm around Ruby’s shoulder, leaned in, and kissed her cheek. “You were a baby.”

She felt the sagging weight of damp armpit on her shoulder. He sipped his beer. “She’s something,” Teddy said to Milton, and then, staring into the mirror behind the bar, “You’re something, all right. You’re it.” They clinked glasses and he told her to open her pocketbook. She held it beneath the lip of the bar and he swept the whole pile of nickels straight in. “A souvenir. Buy yourself some lipstick.”

“Maybe I’ll teach John Douglas to spin.” She thought about pulling a coffee table onto the porch at the fraternity house and spinning nickels, music and light pouring out the window behind them. She’d tell funny stories about Milton and the crackers, her father’s game, all to entertain her friends.

“There’s nothing like having yourself a daughter to keep you up. Hoisted me more times than she knows. Now she’s grown and gone. High hopes for this one.”

Milton held up his beer in salute.

“Thank you, Daddy.” She draped her arm around his shoulder and they both slouched over the bar.

“I know we had some ugly times.” He scraped his callused hand over his chin, pausing so long she thought he’d forgotten who or what he was talking about. “Your mother and me.” Her father kept staring at her in the mirror, his tone slipping into an intimacy that made her uneasy. “Your eyes are nothing like hers.”

She busied herself with a tube of lipstick, avoiding him. “We’d better get home,” she said, but it came out more like a question than a good idea.

“Make yourself into something. That’s all that matters—if you’re something and if you’re happy. Right, Milt?” But Milton was down at the other end of the bar delivering beers. “I’m hanging on tight to what makes me happy.” Teddy chewed on his tongue, working up to saying more. He slid his hand from her shoulder down her arm as if stroking a cat as it passed on its way out the door. “I’ve been keeping the family together . . . all for you, Ruby Jewel. But you’re a woman now.”

Looking in the mirror, she saw how they leaned together. Saw that she was drunk. She hadn’t thought about what it would mean to arrive home to her mother late and drunk. Just like her father. She applied a second layer of lipstick, dropped the tube into her pocketbook, and spread her hands on the bar to brace herself.

“I love Beverly,” he said, his voice flat and even, as if he were asking her to pass the salt.

Ruby’s feet slipped from the barstool and one of her pumps clunked to the filthy floor. Outside it was suddenly dark. How long had it been dark? Time tricked you in the Avenue. She remembered how it had dripped past as she’d waited in the Dodge, humming to herself, while inside the bar, time had been different for her father, and now it was different for her as well. Time evaporated like a puddle, so slow you didn’t notice till you looked up and all of a sudden it was gone.

“Now that you’ve said it, what am I supposed to do with it?” She took the pack of Dentyne from her pocketbook, unwrapped two pieces, and held one out to her father. “Let’s go.”

“Don’t you head upstate without coming in to say goodbye now,” Milton called after them as she and her father stepped into the parking lot.

Ruby lit another cigarette to clear her head for the drive home. Slumped beside her in the passenger seat, her father whispered, “Loose lips sink ships.”

She ignored him, rolled down the windows to blow away the smell of whiskey. The air was cooler now and she breathed it in—the salt, the tarry smell of the baked streets, the cinnamon gum—then started the engine. Her mother would be sitting in the silent house, staring out the window at the line of white rocks that defined their yard. Maybe she’d be watching TV. The quiet grew vast. It was the same numbing, after-the-fight quiet that often filled her parents’ house when she was growing up. Her father would scrub his nails with Lava soap as the start of his making-up ritual. He’d scoop Yuban into the percolator, crack an egg into his beer, and drop the shell into the coffee pot. He’d pull out a chair for her mother, a purple smudge seeping out from behind her pancake makeup. They’d eat breakfast like that; the clink of spoons against corn-flake bowls, her rueful daddy reaching out for anyone to hold his hand. When her mother actually took it, the gesture sent Ruby right out the door to swim before school. Her mother would put up with anything.

Ruby sucked at her cigarette, hollowing her cheeks, making her head go light, then lifted her chin and exhaled into the night. Quiet like this brought her to the edge of a gaping hole. “We’re a couple of real bastards.” She looked over at her father. His eyes were closed and she thought he was asleep. “Hey,” she barked, poking his ribs.

“We bought steaks,” he said.

She pulled the truck right up onto the lawn and jumped from her seat. The front door was locked. She knocked lightly, calling out in a singsong voice, “Mother. Mother.” She kept knocking, gradually with more force. Her father’s door slammed behind her. “Mom,” she called, her voice an apology. She wanted her mother to open the door to her alone. Her mother had to see her without her father there, as if her being alone would make a difference. As if her being alone would invite forgiveness. “Mommy,” she pleaded.

Her father pounded the door with his flat hand. “Sal. Your daughter’s home.”

The lock clicked and the door swung open. Sally stood there, light spilling onto the stoop around her, showing through her nightgown, revealing her slight legs. Her hair was different. New bangs skimmed her forehead. Little gold flowers dotted her ears. Neither her coral lipstick nor her wan smile hid the disappointment lingering at the corners of her mouth. She must have finally given up, turned off Steve Allen, and decided to change for bed when they knocked on the door. Shame blossomed in Ruby’s chest.

“Ruby, honey.” Her mother sighed, drawing her daughter into her arms. Ruby rested her cheek on her mother’s shoulder, breathed in the lily of the valley perfume, felt worry and relief—worry over how she must smell, relief for her mother’s stiff warmth.

“You must be hungry, Mom. We brought steaks.”

Teddy pushed past them. “I’ll light the coals.”

Sally stepped back, examined her daughter. Ruby hastily smoothed her hair. She ran her tongue under her lips, around the inside of her mouth. She wanted a mirror, a comb, and a toothbrush.

Sally’s smile sagged with reproach. “Your father knows where I keep the aspirin.”

“In the cupboard, above the percolator,” Teddy hollered on his way out the back door.

Her mother set the suitcase on the spare bed in Ruby’s room.

“So, here I am, Mom.”

Sally turned her back to Ruby, clicked open the suitcase, and began shaking out the clothing, separating it into three piles, dark, light, and white. Her arms dipped and retrieved, rising and falling, her naked arm flesh jiggling with the motion. Ruby leaned against the wall, waiting for her mother to ask a question. “I’m sorry to be late, Mom.” She hated that she kept saying
Mom,
as if it made her a better daughter. As if she should have to be a better daughter. She was in college now. Making her own decisions. “You don’t have to do that.” In the silence that followed, she picked up the alarm clock from the nightstand and slowly wound it. The room—with its seashell lamp, swim trophies, and magazines on the desk, the red pencils in a Hellmann’s jar, the stretched and puckered swimsuits hanging from the doorknob—was quaint, like an exhibit. Not one thing here seemed to be part of Ruby’s new life. Not her mother’s narrow stooped shoulders or her bony fingers checking over a paisley blouse as if she could discover something about Ruby’s new life in a missing white button. “Stop. I said I could do that.”

Sally paused, and then dropped the blouse in the darks pile. “Your dad will be wanting steak sauce, I suppose.” Each word seemed to be marching out of her mouth on tired feet.

Ruby switched from remorse to frustration in a single tick. “And you’ll be making it, I suppose.” Closing her eyes, she wound the clock tighter. “I have a boyfriend now. He buys me flowers.” She kept turning the key. Turning the key until she felt the pop beneath the metal backing.

Before she went to the kitchen to mix up ketchup, garlic powder, diced onions, honey, vinegar, and dry mustard, Sally touched Ruby’s shoulder. “I have learned to shift my expectations. You’ll learn that some things in life you just have to put up with.”

Ruby swallowed down two words:
Bev
and
never.

Her mother’s kiss was light and dry against Ruby’s cheek. “Don’t take it so hard. I still love you.”

Through her bedroom window, Ruby watched her father squirt too much lighter fluid on the coals. When he struck the match, a blaze flashed momentarily brilliant. Soon the three of them would sit at the kitchen table and Ruby would reach for her mother’s hand, tell her a different set of stories about college.