Bright Young Women(31)
RUTH
Issaquah, Washington
Winter 1974
After the second girl went missing, the Seattle police chief warned women live on Channel 5 not to venture out after dark. It was March in the Northwest, the sky blue-black by four in the afternoon. That the call to stay at home for three-quarters of the day coincided with the height of the women’s lib movement in downtown Seattle did not seem to me like any coincidence.
I trailed my mother through the stationery store, checking my watch only when she wasn’t looking. The grief group was meeting in thirty minutes, but if she felt hassled, she would spite me by dawdling. She’d already changed her mind twice on the calligrapher as we worked out the invitation wording for my father’s garden-naming ceremony at Issaquah Catholic, where he’d been the high school history teacher for eighteen years before he died last summer.
For the one-year anniversary of his death, Issaquah Catholic had planted hydrangea bushes in the front yard of the old clergy house, which for a time had served as a rehabilitation station for fugitive slaves who had escaped the South. It was an important piece of the school’s history, and my father had made up his lesson plan in such a way that the unit about the Underground Railroad fell in the springtime, when it was warm enough to conduct his class in the unkempt yard outside the sagging white cottage. The new history teacher planned on continuing this tradition, and the school had sprung to clean up the grounds and install a plaque dedicating the space to my father. This sounded more like landscaping than a garden, but I was trying to hurry my mother along and kept that observation to myself. Besides, I hated to remember the clergy house and all the abasement that occurred under its rotten roof.
“Have you spoken to CJ about it yet?” my mother asked when we were finally in the car on the way to Frances’s house.
CJ was my ex-husband. He’d been in my older brother’s class at Issaquah Catholic. It was of the utmost importance to my mother that CJ attend the ceremony so that all the nuns would think we were still happily married.
“I haven’t,” I admitted, squinting like a bad dog caught tearing up a couch cushion. “But I will.”
My mother pulled into a Chevron station abruptly, failing to signal, and someone smacked a horn, a short burst of indignation. My mother put her hand up in the rearview mirror and waved apologetically. “Can you please take care of it this week, Ruth? I’ve been asking for months. It’s not like you are so busy.”
My mother had a way of making me feel like I was both too old to behave the way I did and also too young to be trusted out of her sight. “I promise.”
“And please apologize to Martha on our behalf and tell her we are so sorry about this.”
Martha. My ex-husband’s new wife. I nodded dutifully, my eye on the time. The grief group was meeting in seven minutes, and we had half a tank of gas. There really was no reason we had to stop at that moment. In a small, penitent voice, I asked, “Is there any way you could fill up after you drop me off?”
My mother turned off the engine and heaved her door open. “I completely forgot that I told your brother I’d take the kids to the winter sale at Frederick’s tonight. Your nephew desperately needs a new coat.”
She was blushing violently when she got out of the car. Funny, for all the lies my mother expected me to tell, she could hardly stand to tell one herself.
I looked down at the container of meatballs in my lap. I’d wanted to cook the girls something sophisticated, something that wouldn’t be served by a cafeteria lady in a hairnet. Good Housekeeping had a recipe for salmon mousse canapés in last year’s holiday entertaining issue, but my mother had wrinkled her nose and said yuck when I told her what went in them. I’m not spending nine dollars on a nice piece of salmon just so you can turn it into mush. There was a pound of chuck in the freezer left over from Christmas; I was welcome to that. I’d sealed the meatballs in one container and some chopped parsley in another. I could at least impress the women by sprinkling fresh herbs over the dish. My father had taught me to finish a dish with something green. He’d happily moonlighted as the home ec instructor every time Mrs. Paulson had another baby. Cooking was one of my favorite hobbies, but it had died along with the only other person in my family who appreciated good food.
I sighed, full of pity for myself. Maybe I could freeze them for next week. The parsley wouldn’t keep, so I’d have to buy some more, but parsley was cheap. And I was sporting an especially vile blemish on my chin. I’d just started on a new medication, Acnotabs, that I’d seen advertised in that same issue of Good Housekeeping. “Now stop acne where it starts… inside your body.” I was supposed to start seeing an improvement in two to three weeks. Maybe by next week I could attend the grief group and not have to worry about finding a seat in the shadows. And certainly by the time my father’s ceremony rolled around, I’d be a brand-spanking-new version of myself. Everyone would see that I’d come a long way over the last few years, and maybe they’d stop looking at me like that. Like I was fragile but also frightening.
I started at the knock on the car window. Someone was speaking my name. “Ruth, right? Ruth?”
There was fog on the glass, and I wiped it away to see Tina, waving and smiling and talking, though I couldn’t hear most of what she was saying through the pane. I rolled down the window.