(These are excerpts from an unfinished novel draft, working title: Rue & Care. The two narrators, Ruth and Caroline, have been friends on and off since the age of seven, each the daughter of an unstable single mother. They’ve had breakups and rapprochements over the decades; now they are in their early twenties, and have just come together after three years apart over Caroline’s latest crisis. This excerpt directly follows Excerpt #1.)
Caroline
Ruth barely left my side over the next two weeks. I was so distraught by the whole experience, so fully disgusted with myself, and so suddenly alone, the illusion of the last eight months dissipated so quickly it left a painful, sucking vacuum in its wake. She was an endless source of exactly what I needed. How had she changed over the past few years, and how hadn’t she? I looked over at her, grateful but afraid of what I would someday owe, and she was ivory compassion, the placid, almond-shaped face of the Madonna. It was like having a mother again, my mother when she was very young and still somewhat in the game; protective, proactive and sensible in determining my needs and how to fill them. Most of all, she forgave me. We never had to talk about the last fight, or the six before that – we’d both grown, we weren’t the same people we’d been then. We’d learned. We’d separated, pursued different paths, and found they led back to each other.
“It’s like we were assigned to each other as kids, you know?” I told her.
“I know.” She was scrubbing down my stove (I’d cooked), and I was watching her, how fixed her attention was on the imperfections of the surface, how particularly clean she needed it to be. She spoke with the same vigor she scrubbed. “They say you can’t choose your family, but you can choose your friends? That’s bullshit. You don’t choose where you go to school, or who lives on your same block; you don’t choose who sits next to you or who likes the same things you do. It’s actually really random when you think about it.”
That was not my point, but Ruth was always ready to be the devil’s advocate, even if she agreed with you, just for the joy of sparring. A tiny tyrant, she was, now actively sticking her head in my oven as I remade my case. “But you pick certain people out of that pool and not others. Because you feel different around them, you feel understood at a more basic level, freer from criticism. More kin to them.”
“True, but the pool is a lot smaller than you give it credit for.”
“That’s what makes it all the more miraculous.”
Ruth wanted to fight this with logic, but she also wants me to believe that she is a miracle, so she lets it go, gets up and sticks out her hand for me to give her the heating pad that’s been on my lower back so she can microwave it again. She is a miracle. There is no one as concentrated, as full strength, as overproof as her; her her-ness seeps from her pores, evaporates in curlicue tendrils all around her. She bristles with it, shudders the way a cat or dog does, stretching its back legs all the way out to the toenails. Some people are described as catlike – imperious, demanding that you open the can of food – but she really took the cake. Now Ruth demanded only that I take care of myself, “rest,” watch TV for hours while she went out and came home husband-like with her twenty bags of stuff: magazines, Twizzlers, multivitamins, a DVD copy of Spice World. She presented me with the receipts and I didn’t get it for a minute, and then I felt stupid and I did and I got my purse and gave her the cash.
“How’s Sheila?” I asked. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t asked about her mother until now, and that she hadn’t mentioned it. I’d been entirely self-centered for days, thinking only of Ruth as she pertained to me, and I still wasn’t wholly sure how to think about that. I picked my head up and watched her, now peering into in the freezer, frowning at the state of the frost around the rim, then sucking on her tongue in her mouth, realizing that she could defrost it for me, and that would be one more thing in my life she’d solved, and I’d be grateful and so would she. So what was the harm in letting her do what she wanted to do, if it benefited both of us?
“She’s Sheila. She’s bitter, as usual. We’re not really…communicating right now.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m not.” She cawed her distinct anti-laugh: Braaaah, and I laughed too.
“No, right, I’m sure you’re right. I’m just sorry for her that she can’t get it together. You know, her loss that you’re not talking to her.”
“Thanks.” A brief tug of the left cheek to substitute for a smile. “I’d be sorry for her too if I didn’t hate her guts.”
“I know, right?” Bitching about our moms again, but adults now, with apartments, like we used to pretend in the Games. It felt so wonderful to be an adult, with an apartment I lived in alone, in which I did whatever I liked without anyone telling me not to. I should have cake for breakfast tomorrow, I thought. We should get a cake and eat it all day long and nothing else. But then I remembered that I wasn’t an adult, I was a failure, that I felt more helpless and outmatched by the world than ever, because I didn’t have any clear hope that things were going to get better. I lit a joint from the ashtray, trying to drown out the waves of self-hatred, but one of the main reasons I knew I couldn’t be a mother was because I couldn’t smoke when I was pregnant, or for the first few years of a kid’s life, and how much would I resent someone who kept me from smoking? What a lame reason to have an abortion, because a baby would get in the way of my drug use. Ruth didn’t even cough and wave her hand around like she used to. She didn’t seem to notice at all.
“You know she has seven cats right now? Seven. Her place is a wreck, they’ve clawed all the furniture to shit, she just sits there smoking cigarettes, the whole place is glazed with resin. And every time I talk to her, she complains and bitches to me, I’m like, what am I supposed to do for you? ‘I took care of you,’ she says to me. Because you housed me and didn’t let me starve? That’s the fucking basics, you don’t get a medal for that. She’s not even that old, but she’s acting like I’ve got to come take care of her in her dotage, it’s such a hoax. And then she starts bitching about her health – her health is fine! She just wants sympathy.” By now she has stacked all my frozen food (a bottle of vodka, two bags of edamame with hoary frost on them, diet ice cream bars) in the fridge and is attacking the frost around the freezer door with a steak knife. She is the Anthony Perkins of my fridge.
“So ridiculous,” I agreed. “It’s so funny, the way the tables turn, you know? Now she needs you, and it’s like, where were you when I needed something?”
“I know.” We shook our heads over our incorrigible mothers. When would they ever learn? I’d already told her about Ellen, who was making noise about going to rehab again, not that anybody believed her; she was just stalling for a few months to get through the holidays. Or trying to get money “for rehab” out of my grandfather so she could spend it on booze. You’re lucky it’s just booze, someone had said to me, a lot of alcoholics develop co-addictions. Assholes know nothing. Ruth would never tell me I was lucky. “I didn’t even want to be her daughter, I definitely don’t want to be her mother.”
But she didn’t seem to mind being mine; it seemed to suit her just fine, and I was so grateful. Her presence was the only thing keeping me from completely falling off the face of the earth. I was so miserable, angry at myself for being such an idiot – how did I ever believe anything Enzo said? I’d gone through every line of dialogue with Ruth in the past few days, and all of it was positively bloody with red flags, flashing DON’T GO THERE in semaphore. It was laughable, except it was also cryable, and throwuppable. And every night when I woke up at 3 a.m. to pee, it was like it had just happened again, I was forced to relive it anew: I’d had an abortion, and Enzo was gone. It would sicken me, the cold tile under my feet, the remembered pain in my midsection, the magnitude of how much this was not what I wanted. I’d slink back to bed where Ruth would be curled into a fetal position, slack mouthed for a change, asleep, and I’d want so much for her to wake up and talk to me, but I couldn’t wake her, not after all she’d been doing for me. But she’d always talked about our telepathy, our psychic bond, and how she felt like we could share thoughts sometimes, as I did. One time in college we had a conversation across a crowded plaza using only pantomime: Palms up, forwards motion with chin (Where are you going?); Right hand scoops air from left palm to mouth area twice, palms up, forward motion with chin (To eat, and you?); Clasped thumb and forefinger touched to lips (To smoke a joint); Pointing at invisible wristwatch and shaking head yes (Okay, let’s meet up here later.); blown kiss, kiss caught, ironically. I wanted her to feel how much I wanted her to wake up, I wanted to crawl into her backwards and be hugged by her.
She felt it and stirred. “Everything okay?” she asked.
“Yeah, I just had a dream.”
“Oh yeah?”
“It’s nothing, it’s okay.”
“Come here.” She wrapped one arm over me and pushed her knees into the backs of mine, then we were both quiet. I don’t think she was sleeping, though. Although she was breathing deeply and evenly, I got the sense that she wasn’t sleeping at all.