Talk Before Sleep (5 page)

I watched her take a bite of the pizza, then delicately wipe the corner of her mouth, and an image came to me. I saw Ruth and a man in bed together, naked. Ruth lay beneath him, her eyes closed, her hands knotted into fists of pleasure. A wide swatch of warm afternoon sun lay across the two of them and the rumpled sheets. Their sounds were quiet, earnest, intensely exclusionary. Orange peels lay in beautiful, two-tone disarray at the side of the bed. There was a romantic blurriness to the scene; and a wrenching kind of sweetness, too. My appetite disappeared.

“Does your son know?” I asked.

“About the others? No.” She shook her head. “No, I’m incredibly discreet.” She looked at her watch. “You know, I’m not that anxious to go to a movie. Let’s go look at stuff that’s too expensive for us to buy.”

“Okay,” I said. “We should try on evening gowns.”

“Of course,” she said.

“Who do you sleep with?” I asked.

She leaned back in her chair, smiled. “Why, Ann. I hardly know you.”

I
spill the french fries into a bowl when I get back to Ruth’s, and we begin to eat them, slowly at first, then rapidly, even though Sarah has not yet returned with the lobsters. “These were better when they fried them in beef fat,” Ruth says. “Everything’s getting too goddamn good for you.”

“I know.”

“And even the things that are made the same taste different to me now. Do you think things taste different as you get older?”

“Of course,” I say. “Potato sticks, Snoballs, they’re nothing like they used to be.”

“Peanut butter and jelly,” Ruth sighs.

“But now we can appreciate martinis,” I say.

“And semen.”

I stop a french fry midair. “You don’t
like
semen!”

She nods. “Yes, I do.”

“Oh, God!”

“Don’t you?”

“No!”

“Why not?”

“Well, it’s … you know, like raw egg but even worse. It’s too salty. And it’s that terrible luke
warm
!”

“Well, what can I tell you? I always liked it.” She takes another handful of fries. There aren’t many left.

“Do you think we should cover these, save some for Sarah?” I ask, looking into the bowl.

“Nope. I don’t wait anymore. They’re here, right? We’re here, right? Seize the moment.”

I nod, think about all she is saying—and not. But what is “not waiting, anymore,” really? What kind of hyperawareness does she live with? When she looks in the mirror, what does she see? What stands, see-through, behind her? When she puts down a fork, when she steps into her shoes, when she opens an envelope addressed to her—what is happening? Surely she must feel as though she is in another dimension. And surely she must be wiser, and capable of teaching us all something essential. It’s as though she’s wearing a robe that’s hiding her real outfit.

“What’s this all like, really?” I ask her now.

She stops chewing, looks at me. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. I mean, I think about what it must be like to wake up at night, knowing all you know. And how everything … I don’t know. I guess I wish you’d tell me more … inside stuff.”

She stands up, pushes her chair in. “What do you want, Ann? A closer seat?”

“I didn’t … I’m not asking—”

“Just be my friend, okay?” She starts toward her bedroom. “Just call me when the fucking lobster gets here.” She turns around, her face flushed. “What’s it
like for
you
, Ann? What’s it like? What do
you
think about when you wake up? You’re going to lose me, and I’m really important to you. The truth is I’m your only goddamn friend and I’m leaving. One-way ticket, Ann. And you have to stay here. Sometimes it’s you I feel sorry for, not me.” She is running out of breath. She looks around the room, then suddenly holds her hands out to me, palms up, as though she is giving me the whole world in the form of light and space. Then her arms collapse at her side, her head hangs down. “I think I don’t know what the fuck I’m saying,” she says. She begins to laugh, then to cry, jagged spasms of sound. “Jesus.” She covers her face with her hands.

I cross the room and hold her, crying myself. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m so sorry. Oh, I wish I could take a day for you. I wish we could trade for just one day.”

She steps back from me, smiles bitterly. “No, you don’t.”

“Yes, I do. I do!”

“It might be the day I check out.”

“I’d take the chance.”

“The hell you would.”

Nothing. Nothing except for the gigantic fact that she is right.

“We’ll just eat, okay?” I say. “We’ll just … eat.”

“Okay. Okay.” She embraces me again, her fingers press into my back, and I relish this small demonstration of strength. “I know what we should do,” she says, pulling away from me and wiping the tears from her face. “Let’s call L.D.”

“Good idea,” I say. Most times, L.D. is too much. But now she will be perfect.

“And bring those fries in here,” Ruth says, heading again toward her bedroom. “Let’s finish them. We’ll call the restaurant and tell Sarah to go get more. Of course, whatever she brings, if L.D. is here, it won’t be enough. We’ll need to go get more again. It’ll be like that Disney movie, where the buckets keep throwing water. What is that movie?”

“
Fantasia
.”

“Right,” she says, crawling into her bed.
“Fantasia
. Do you know what I mean?”

I pull her quilt up over her, put the bowl of french fries in her lap, push my sneakers off my feet, climb up on the bed beside her. “Yeah, I know what you mean. Mickey couldn’t keep up with the water, and we won’t be able to keep up with the demand for french fries. It will just keep going on and on. Like frustration dreams—you know, you fall, you can’t get up, and the truck keeps coming and coming.”

“Yeah.” She closes her eyes, then opens them. “Hey, Ann?”

“What?”

“That’s
what this is like.”

“I know.”

“You don’t know.”

“Okay.”

“Call L.D.”

“After Sarah.”

Sarah wants to know why we need more fries.
“Because Ruth and I ate the ones I got,” I said. “And because we’re calling L.D. to come over.”

“Jesus,” Sarah says. “Then we need about ninety more lobsters.”

R
uth has friends like other people have wardrobes. I mean that there’s someone for every occasion. Sarah is fine-boned, delicately beautiful, the kind of woman who can wear a perfectly tailored silk dress to take out the garbage and not spill a single thing on it. You know she’s wearing makeup, but you can’t find it. Her voice is low and smooth, conciliatory. She is management material through and through, clear-eyed and decisive. It was Sarah who organized all of us, made sure that there was a neatly typed roster of our names and phone numbers so we could reach one another, so we could make sure someone was always with Ruth.

L.D. is a football-player-sized woman I’ve never seen in anything but checked flannel shirts and bib overalls—even on hot summer days. Her only variation is in the caps she wears—John Deere for dress up, sports teams for everyday. She is fearless, plain and simple. Ruth once said about L.D. that she appears to walk through life with her mouth wide open, taking in everything in her path. “I mean, she’s a real life-eater,” Ruth said. And then, when I snorted, “I
guess!”
she hit me, saying, “She’s the best. You should get to know her. She has incredible wisdom. She watches things, and she
notices things you’d pass right over.” Then, when I looked hurt, she added, “I mean, that anyone would pass over.”

Ruth has friends she goes to bars to hear country -and-western music with, friends who invite her to chic little cocktail parties and openings, old college roommates who visit her for the weekend and play Scrabble. She rows on rivers, skis down mountains, sails on oceans, bikes down dirt roads for miles. Well, she used to. And anything she did, she had matching friends to do it with. Once, after she started chemotherapy, she called to tell me about a bike ride she’d taken. “We had to stop,” she said. “My hair was flying off my head and causing visibility problems.”

“
Was
it?” I asked.

“What,” she said, laughing, “causing visibility problems?”

“No. Was it falling off?”

“Yeah,” she said. “That’s what happens. Remember when they told us that would happen?”

I remembered. But I thought she’d be standing over her bathroom sink, weeping. I should have known better. I should have known she’d be out on a bicycle, laughing.

“Are you really okay?” I’d asked.

“What do you mean? I mean, it doesn’t
hurt
.”

I was silent.

“It’ll grow
back,”
she said. “This wasn’t unexpected. Right?”

I put my hand to my own hair, shaped a ponytail. “Yes,” I said. “Right.”

I have a bunch of rocks on my kitchen windowsill
that I collected for their beauty, for their silent perseverance. After I finished talking to Ruth, I went to look at them. Then I picked one up and squeezed it.

L
.D. is knocking at the door. You can tell because the apartment is reverberating with the sound of it. She lets herself into the hallway, comes into the bedroom, nods to me, and then to Ruth. “Get the fuck out of bed,” she says.

“Can’t. I’m really tired, L.D.”

L.D. nods, pulls out a small package from her pocket. “For you,” she says. Ruth opens it and finds pearl earrings, studs.

“Put them on,” L.D. says, settling herself down on the floor beside Ruth’s bed.

“Oh, they’re beautiful,” Ruth says. “Thank you, L.D.”

“I thought they were, you know … you,” L.D. says, then turns to me fiercely. “Don’t you think so?”

“Absolutely,” I say. “Uh-huh.”

And they are. They glow prettily against Ruth’s earlobes. They are just the right size. I wonder what L.D. said when she bought them. Probably nothing. Probably she just pointed, and the clerk wrapped them up fast.

“We ordered out some dinner,” Ruth tells L.D. “Can you stay?”

“What’d you get?”

“Lobster and french fries. Want some?”

“It’s a start,” L.D. says. Then, stretching, she asks Ruth, “Have you been outside today?”

Ruth shakes her head no.

“Put your coat on,” L.D. says.

“I’m not kidding, L.D., I’m tired,” Ruth says. “I don’t think I can do the steps.”

“I’ll do them for you,” L.D. says. She stands up, swoops Ruth up off the bed, carries her to her closet. Ruth, laughing, pulls her coat off the hanger and wraps it around herself, and L.D. starts downstairs. “Don’t come,” L.D. says over her shoulder to me.

“I’m
not,”
I say, though I suddenly ache to.

“We need to talk,” L.D. says. “Nothing against you.”

“I understand,” I say, and I do. It’s hard to be private with Ruth anymore; anyone can and does show up at any time. But L.D., in her usual way, mows over obstacles. She wants to be alone with Ruth. And so she will be.

I watch from the bedroom window as L.D. carefully sets Ruth on her feet outside. There is a thin layer of snow on the ground already and L.D. is making a tiny snowman. I can only see Ruth’s back, but I believe she is smiling. Then L.D. is standing close to her, embracing her, and saying things in her ear. Ruth pats L.D.’s back and her hand looks even smaller than usual. Then L.D. turns her toward the door, smacks her butt, and they are on their way back upstairs.