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This writing was accepted for publication in the May 1996 issue, v79 of cc&d, and was re-releases in 2019 as a 100 page perfect-bound ISSN# / ISBN# issue/book “Poetry and Prose” cc&d (v79, 2019 re-release)  You can also order this 6"x9" issue as a paperback book:  |
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Order this writing in the issue book Among the Debris the cc&d July-Dec. 2019 issues & chapbooks collection book |
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get the 494 page July-Dec. 2019 cc&d magazine issue collection 6" x 9" ISBN# paperback book:
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“Come with me, Ruby, let’s go for a ride,” Ruby’s father said one day after school. It was spring, and he was in a good mood.
“Where?” Ruby said.
“Never mind.” He jingled his keys in his pocket. “Just come. Put your coat on.”
She didn’t move. Last time he’d taken her somewhere he left her with some women in a house with an old fashioned clothes washer which crushed children’s fingers if they got near it. One of the women had offered her a homemade donut. It was small and greasy and Ruby wanted it so bad her mouth filled with spit. But she’d taken her head. She didn’t know why she was there or where her father was. The women wore black and smelled like steam.
Her father looked at Ruby, surprised. “Don’t you want to go for a ride?”
She never got to be with him alone, so she put her coat on.
****
They stopped at a gas station with a broken sign. “Have you met Mr. Phelps?” he said as they got out of the car. “You know Mrs. Phelps and old Mrs. Phelps. The two ladies down there?” He pointed down the hill towards the house with the crusher washing machine. “This is old Mrs. Phelps’ son. Hello! Hello!” He pushed open a dirty door.
First a man’s work boots, then his green legs oozed out from under a car. He smiled slowly at Ruby’s father.
Her father touched Ruby. “The youngest. Hey--how’s your mother? This one’s been there.” He rapped her on the head with his finger.
Mr. Phelps said, “pre-e-tty good,” and smiled like he was getting a lot of attention. Then he rummaged for some old pipes and showed them to ruby’s father. They didn’t fit together and had big rust spots. Ruby’s father shrugged and said sadly, “Let ‘em go.”
Back in the car her father said: “That’s stop number one. Now we go to the heating plant. Have I ever taken you to the heating plant?”
“No.” She imagined a big, warm plant growing in water.
He swung the car down a hill and parked by a gray cement building, and a man covered with black powder came out.
“Hey--” Her father shook the man’s hand and put his hand on Ruby’s head. “Have you met the youngest?”
The man had sad eyes. He put out a sooty hand and Ruby slowly put hers in it. After he shook it she looked at her hand.
“Do you know what that is?” her father said.
“No.”
“That’s what Walter uses to keep the school warm. It’s coal. Did you know that?”
Then she realized that the tall smokestack she saw from her house came from this building and heated the school. “How come I never knew that?” They laughed. They talked about coal and oil and people who didn’t know enough. Ruby waited.
“Are we going home now?” she asked back in the car.
“We’re only half done. Aren’t you having fun?” He looked over in surprise. “I tell you what. One more stop and we’ll go home.”
They parked in front of a big flag and her father winked at her and inside he whisked her through a swinging door.
She was sure they shouldn’t be there. He always did things he wasn’t supposed to do. She edged up against the swinging door while he talked to some women behind a fence that looked like a bank. Her father was on the secret side of the fence. The women were laughing and her father acted like he was telling them something scandalous. Ruby hung by the door and wished he’d hurry up before they were caught. But he turned and yelled, “Ruby! What are you doing over there? Come meet these nice women.”
Everyone behind the fence and in front of it looked at Ruby. She edged over. A woman touched her hair and said, “Aren’t you lucky to have hair like your Daddy.”
Outside, she told him he wasn’t supposed to go through those doors.
He laughed. “Ruby! I’ve been visiting these women for years. They’re my friends. Can’t you tell?”
She was silent.
He started up the car. “Don’t you see I make it a point to know people? Some people go around like this.” He put a finger on his nose and pushed it up so he looked like a pig.
She smiled.
“Do you know what I mean? It means someone’s a snob. But I don’t like snobs. You can go anywhere in this town, Ruby, and tell people who you are, and I bet they’ll know you. You have to reach out, you can’t live in a cocoon. Your mother doesn’t always realize that but it’s true.”
Her father started singing. Ruby relaxed and felt the car safe and rumbling around her. She felt her father’s big, singing presence, and watched the dorms and fields go slowly by. Catnip mountain came into view in her window.
Her father must be right. She shouldn’t have worried. She turned to look at him, at his big face and red hair. He was thinking about her mother too. “She’s not a snob,” Ruby said.
He looked at her. “You don’t think so?”
“No,” Ruby said, “not exactly.”
He seemed to be listening, to be thinking. “No,” he agreed, “she’s not a snob. That’s not it.”
****
Ruby’s mother’s long, pale hands moved across the pages of books at night, and her voice took on the low shapes of trolls and wolves. When Ruby was upset, her mother said, “I know, I know”, with deep, awful meaning.
On her seventh birthday her mother took Ruby to a toy store. Ruby was astonished to see so many toys in one place. She chose an enormous bouncing ball with a plastic ring around it you jumped on. It was the first time she’d picked out a toy like that and she clutched the box to her chest.
They went to a diner for lunch. She had never been out to lunch with her mother. They sat in a soft, sticky booth eating french fries and cheese sandwiches. Then her mother said they were doing something even more special.
They drove to a tar papered building that was dark inside and sat in a row of chairs. It reminded Ruby of waiting for her mother while she measured the arms and legs of the reform boys at the school for costumes. She slouched in her seat.
When the curtains lifted, a room of straw burst out with a girl in a red dress talking to an old man, and the girl cried when he left. Then a little man darted in. Ruby forgot about the hard seats.
When the play ended, she was stunned to find herself in a dark room full of people and chairs. As they walked out, her mother hummed. Ruby made a noise in her throat. Her mother said, “Did you like the play?”
Ruby burst into tears.
“What’s the matter? Did it scare you?”
Ruby sobbed.
“Ruby, tell me, please.”
She couldn’t stop. She waved her arms to try and tell her mother.
Her mother smiled. “Oh, I know,” she said.
On the way home Ruby asked whey they’d never gone there before.
“They were visiting actors--and actresses,” her mother explained. “They travel around the country and put plays on in different towns.”
“They’re leaving””
“They have to. Other people want to see the play.”
The were the most special, wonderful people in the whole world, and Ruby wished she could make them stay. But she understood other people wanted to see the play. “How come more people don’t do that? What those actors do?”
“I was part of a traveling theater once,” her mother said dreamily. “Before I was married. But your Aunt Melanie was the one who did it for years. She directed her own company. She was probably the first woman to do that. I remember my parents being very upset that she was gallivanting around the country with no money, sleeping on trains. She got sick in Louisiana, from exhaustion I think, and my father went and got her.” Her mother paused. “She gave it up after that.” Her voice got a familiar tightness. “It’s too bad.”
“I want to do that,” Ruby said quickly.
Her mother turned to her. “You can do whatever you want. You don’t have to do something practical, no matter what your father says. You should do something you love. That feeds the imagination.” Her fingers gripped the steering wheel. Her shoulders tensed.
Ruby stared across the long car seat at her. She studied her mother’s pale face and dark hair against a wide, moving landscape.
****
After that, Ruby hung around the theater at the reform school. She made a nest in the seats with her books and toys.
One boy offered to read her a story, and then he played tag with her in the back lobby. After that Ruby looked for him, and they played between the acts when he came on.
“Don’t go far,” her mother warned. She was busy sewing and measuring, collecting props and gluing broken ones.
The boy asked Ruby to play hide and seek in the fieldhouse on the other side of campus. Her father had forbidden her to go there because he said it was just for the boys. Ruby thought it was really because the school hadn’t used his plans for building it. She and her friend Kate went there on weekends, and no one had said anything to them. So she rode her bike there. The gym was empty and they played hide and seek. When it was the boy’s turn, Ruby couldn’t find him.
He motioned to her from the women’s bathroom. He waved her in and then locked the door. “I have to ask you something, Ruby.” He knelt down. “I’m studying to become a doctor and I noticed something might be wrong with you. I want to help you. Will you let me help you?”
She took a step back. Her parents had told her not to play with the boys. “What’s wrong with me?”
“I’m not sure, I need to check. We’ll stop if you say no.” He looked concerned.
“Are you really a doctor?” She thought the boys were just students.
“I will be. I’m almost one.”
She was worried something was wrong with her. She took off her clothes like he asked and was surprised when he took off his clothes. “Why are you taking off your clothes?”
“I need to in order to check you. Could you lay down on the floor? On your back?”
She lay down. He appeared over her like he was doing push-ups, and his big red penis touched her leg. She froze. He said, “I need to put this inside you, and I’m going to pee just a little bit.”
She eyed it. It was huge. “I don’t want to do this.” Her voice shook. “I want to go.”
“It’ll just take a minute. It’s for you, I’m worried about you.”
“I want to go,” she said, louder.
It took forever to put her clothes on.
He said, dressing quickly, “It’s alright, I think you’re okay.”
He unlocked the bathroom door and she ran for the outdoors and jumped on her bike and pedaled as fast as she could, knowing something awful had happened.
He pulled up on his bike, next to her. “You won’t tell anyone will you? We’re still friends, aren’t we?”
She pedaled so hard her lungs hurt. But she couldn’t outpedal him. He was talking, begging. She didn’t look at him.
She ran to find her mother and her mother took her upstairs and sat her down on her bed. “What did he do?”
Ruby squirmed. She wasn’t used to having her mother look at her so closely. She looked down at the bedspread. “He asked me if he could pee--inside me.”
Her mother stiffened.
Her brother Toby stomped up the stairs with a bunch of boys. “Mom? MOM!!”
Ruby looked at Toby in the door, but her mother didn’t seem to hear him.
“Mom?” he said.
Her mother’s body was rigid. Without looking at Toby she said, “What? Can’t you see we’re talking?”
“He has a question,” Ruby said. She felt sorry for him. All his friends were standing behind him looking at their mother.
“I just want to know--”
“I don’t know!” their mother cried. “Do whatever you want!”
Ruby looked down at the floor as the boys went quiet and shuffled off.
Her mother turned her back to her. “So tell me what he did.”
Ruby swallowed. “He said there was something wrong with me and he could make it better, but when he--he--”
“He what?”
“He asked me to lie on the floor, but it was cold and when he got near me I--” Her mother’s tension overwhelmed her.
“You’ve got to tell me Ruby. Tell me what he did.”
“I wanted to go home.”
“Did he do anything?”
“He wanted to pee in me but . . . I didn’t want him to.”
“But did he?”
“No.”
“Are you sure? Did he touch you?”
“He didn’t touch me. He let me go home.”
Her mother sagged against the wall. “Oh thank God, Oh thank God.”
****
That night her mother dressed her in a dress and told her that the boy who they thought had taken her into the bathroom was coming over. Ruby was supposed to tell her if it was him.
Ruby waited with her mother in the kitchen until her father came home. She heard voices in the living room. “Now go out and look at him,” her mother said. She pushed Ruby towards the door.
There was a man in a black suit at the far end of the living room. His hair was slicked down. He didn’t look up, and she couldn’t see his face clearly across the room.
She went back to her mother and said, “I can’t tell if it’s him.”
“What do you mean you can’t tell? Go back out and look again. This is important, Ruby, you have to.”
“I can’t just stand there,” Ruby whimpered.
“Pick out a book. Sit down to read, and just glance up at him.”
It felt strange to Ruby to look at a book while the boy who had almost peed in her was in the room. It was strange to pretend that nothing had happened. It felt wrong to wear a party dress. It didn’t make sense that he was in a suit with his hair slicked back. But she walked back out to the living room and took a book off the shelf. She walked stiffly in her dress to a chair and opened the book, and peeked over at the man. She still couldn’t tell if it was him.
She went back in to her mother. “I think that’s him.”
The next day her mother said that he was expelled from school. “He did a very bad thing. He shouldn’t have tried to touch you. Don’t you ever let one of the boys--any boy or man--touch you.”
“But how do you know it was him?” Ruby felt anxious about that. Her mother was good with costumes, but when it came to finding out who someone really was, Ruby wasn’t sure she trusted her.
“He confessed,” her mother said.
Ruby imagined a meeting in which the boy was surrounded by men from the school, questioning him. She felt sorry for him. She felt relieved.
What happened to her made waves at the school, little ripples that came back to Ruby, disguised.
Her friends, Drew and Kate, whose parents were teachers, said they weren’t allowed out anymore without a grown up. Her own parents whispered at night and stopped when Ruby or her brothers walked into the room. Her bother Abe said they were thinking of quitting their jobs and moving, all because of Ruby. He said he’d heard them talking about it.
Ruby wondered what they said. No one said anything to her. She wondered if they ought to tell her what to think about it all. She wondered it they told her brothers her mother was a snob. She wondered if her father knew her mother wanted to be a traveling actress.
No one said.
