Ruby
Trying to make the best of a bad idea—to go Christmas shopping—Margo and I were taking a break in the food court. The place was mobbed. My trolley was filled, and over half of the gifts were for Reggie. She’d given me a list this year, no more money in a card. I assumed her coveted items were things her dad had said no to. The seat next to Margo held her packages for Bobby, Jon, and Jon’s fiancée. She’d brought re-usable bags, of course.
We’d set our trays on the nearest nearly-clean Formica table and sat across from one another. Margo rubbed anti-bacterial gel on her hands, wiped everything down with one napkin, spread another out for a place mat, and set her little boat of chicken nuggets on it. She pulled her own straw in its own little case from her purse, poked it into the drink and took a sip.
I’d already started eating, a dry-as-the-Sahara chicken sandwich made barely edible with three packets of mayo. “Thank the gods you’ve come to your senses, woman, and bless Bobby’s beating heart for helping you see what a mistake it would be to leave that man. Thirty years you’ve invested in that marriage—”
“You think I don’t know that?” She peeled open her container of honey mustard dipping sauce. “Thinking about being lied to for thirty years was what was making me feel like—”
“Tell me. Did he ever ‘lie’ to you about money—tell you he had it when he didn’t? Hide it? Gamble it away? Spend it foolishly?”
“No. Of course not.”
“Did he compliment your cooking and eat up even when it was rubbish? Because, Margo—”
“Shut up. Of course he did, but—”
“Was he there when the kids needed a responsible parent to change a nappy or clean up vomit, while you, with your fucked-up sense of smell, couldn’t get within ten feet—”
“Yes, Ruby. I’m sensing a theme here.”
“And how about when they were into mischief. Was he fair and reasonable with the discipline?”
“Okay, yes. I’ve never denied that he wasn’t a good dad.”
“Technically, that makes him a good partner, too.”
“Yes but—”
“And when you were upset? Confused? Needed a shoulder to cry on? Needed someone to listen to you?”
“You know he’s good at all those things. What does that prove?”
“Okay, I could go on and on about Ron’s virtues, and you would answer me the same way. D’you know how many women have what you have? The one thing he was dishonest with you about was something he couldn’t help. Because telling you would’ve hurt you. In my mind that makes him a flawed human with good intentions, not a wanker who needs to be tossed to the curb—”
“So, great. Ron is a peach, and everyone knows it.”
“And you. You need to let go. You can always divorce the man next year if you want, or if he cocks up again, can’t you?”
We ate in silence for a bit, and I wondered if I’d gone too far. I was often worrying about that, face it.
“Speaking of letting go,” Margo said, “can I approach a delicate subject without getting my head bit off?”
“It’s Christmas. I’m not gonna—” Some nutter was eyeing the packages in my trolley. “Hey! You. Sod off. That’s not yours. What are you, daft?”
Margo was laughing. “I thought it was Christmas.” She’d finished her nuggets and was wiping her hands with a wet wipe she’d brought with her. She handed me one. The woman thought of everything.
“Yeah, well that wanker needs to keep to himself. Those trainers cost a bomb. What were you goin’ on about before?”
“Letting go.”
“Yeah, that. What about it?”
“Ruby, you need to forgive yourself. You know that, don’t you?”
“Oh, so we’re getting serious, are we? Okay, to answer your question, yes. Ever since we got back from Kiawah, I’ve been talkin’ to a therapist. We’re doing ‘grief work’ I’ll have you know. It’s painful as shit.”
“How many times—”
“Four. I see her twice a week. She thinks my little visit to Joe might’ve been one way I was trying to deal with my past—forgive myself, if you will—that it had little to do with Joe. Makes sense.”
“So you like her?” Margo with her hopeful smile.
“No. I hate her guts, but I think it’s helping.”
She touched the corners of her mouth with a napkin. “What’s her take on your decision about Alan?”
“She doesn’t have much to say about that, except that she wants me to keep ‘working on myself’ before I make a move as serious as marriage.”
“Sounds like wise advice.”
“Not sure how Alan’s gonna feel about it.”
“What’s his hurry?”
“Margo, you do know we’ve been ‘dating’ for, umm, five years, now, right?”
“Exactly. That’s why I want to know what his hurry is. So what if you go on dating—for a few more years, as a matter of fact. It’s not like you’re planning a family.”
“And your point?”
“Well, it has occurred to me that he might be rushing things for a less obvious reason. He might need your income to count on before he decides to move and start up his business here. And if you’re married—”
“That’s harsh.” I looked around at all the stressed-out consumers. Frowning and trying to get their ankle-biters to behave. Nobody looked like they were enjoying themselves. This holiday brought out the worst in people. Then I met Margo’s gaze. She was concerned for me.
And now, so was I. “Bloody hell, what if you’re right, Margo? I never asked him if he had his finances in order.”
“And what is it you do for a living? Something about the shoemaker’s kids never having shoes?”
“Piss off, woman.”
She blew me a raspberry then started gathering up the rubbish, shaking her head and muttering her disapproval at the Styrofoam containers, cleaning off and saving the plastic cutlery and straws and tucking them in her bag. Next she’d be hoovering the floor. The food court was thinning out, and we both had a couple more stops to make.
Margo said, “I’m about done. How about you?”
“I am, love. Quite.”
Zan
“I’ve decided to tell Trevor I was raped,” I told my therapist when I called for an appointment. “My friend Olivia thinks I need to do it.” She got me in right away.
“I’m glad to see you,” Mindy said, as she gave me a hug. I have to admit, she looked pleased. “It’s been over a year.” She was flipping through her little pad. “I felt like we had more work to do.”
Could any amount of ‘work’ fix me? Fix childhood sex abuse, fix the trauma of my parents being killed leaving me at twenty in charge of a ten-year-old sister with brain damage? Then all those unhealthy years of promiscuity. Cutting myself. Nothing in there to be proud of, for sure. An affair with a married man—a bit of a pervert himself, if I’m honest—who I later married. Can you fix all that?
One thing nobody knew, including Mindy, was that I’d had a baby. A girl. Never saw her. Gave her up in a private adoption. Had to promise never to contact the adoptive parents. No problem there. I got paid handsomely and spent the next twenty-five years thinking but not thinking about her. I couldn’t imagine ever wanting to talk about that—to anyone.
When I had started going to Mindy two years ago, it was to talk about the rape. The court recommended it. There was only so much to say about it—at least that I was willing to say, but lots more stuff came up. Maybe that’s how therapy works, but after some time, I’d pretty much exhausted confessions about my family tragedies and sister guilt. One thing good came of that: Mindy had suggested I try to do something fun with Zoe, something I would enjoy, too, when I saw her. To make it feel less like an obligation. And it had helped, I had to admit. Zoe and I both liked craft fairs. Who knew? Admittedly, she liked the homemade baked goods and fudge more than the unique jewelry or art, but it was win-win.
Then I just drifted away from seeing Mindy. Maybe I thought I was cured. Hah. Maybe I was afraid I’d tell her about the baby. Maybe I was just afraid. But, Olivia was right, I needed backup once I gave into the idea of telling Trevor about the attack. Mindy suggested I could use the session to ‘elicit his support in a safe space.’ Then she asked about how we met and what the early days of our marriage were like. “So I’ll have some context.” One of her favorite words.
“I met him at a fitness center,” I told her, “I was working out. I don’t know what he was doing, aside from looking at me. He asked me to go to coffee and told he was married to a woman who’d ‘let herself go,’ his words. He was … charming, I guess. Made me laugh, anyway, and he persevered through all my reservations. He was relentless. Marriage was a deal breaker for me. I’d had enough sleeping around. If he wanted me, he’d have to marry me. How I had enough chutzpah to bring that off I’ll never know, but it worked.”
“And were you glad?”
“At first, sure. I’d known he traveled for his work, and it sounded glamorous. In fact, he actually lived in fancy hotels all over the freaking world. And now, so did I.”
“Sounds exciting. Was it?”
“No. I guess I’m not much of a traveler. Kept feeling out of place. Especially in countries where I didn’t speak the language. I got tired of shopping—can you imagine—and having lunch by myself. Once I saw that most of the hotels had fitness centers, nice ones, I felt at home, even when it was in another language. Fitness equipment is the same everywhere.”
“So you were more content to travel with your husband?”
“Not really. One time when we were in the states, I missed America. So, there we were in D. C., I wanted to stay.”
“How did you settle in Maryland?”
“This is going to sound nuts.” I smiled, and she nodded. Nuts had to be the standard in her office. “I overheard someone say that the woman’s lacrosse team in College Park had won something like a dozen national championships. Why that cockamamie reason, I’ll never know, but I wanted to live here. Besides, it wasn’t far from my sister’s residence. I’d begun to feel guilty about going so long without seeing her, even though she hadn’t known who I was for years. Called me ‘mommy’.”
“And Trevor wanted to settle down?”
“No. Not at all. Vagabond life suited him—and paid him well.”
“So, how did you—”
“I used my best sales tactics and persuaded him that we needed a nice place to come back to—a home base with a plan toward retirement and near where there were lots of important people—people he might want to know.”
“And that appealed to him?”
“Apparently. Before I knew it, he had found a gray stone and glass mansion he liked. So he bought it.”
“Did you like it?”
“Not so much, but I liked the lake it sat on, and I felt safe living alone there. Ironic, huh?”
“So he left?”
I nodded. “I stayed to get it furnished so we could move in. Funny thing is, he didn’t make a huge fuss about me not travelling with him. Either my moodiness weighed him down, or, more like it, he might’ve enjoyed the freedom—freedom to fuck around, anyway.”
“And do you think he did that, does that?”
“I did, and I do.”
“And how—”
“Are you seriously going to ask me how I feel about that?”
“I was.”
“I’d be surprised if he didn’t. Fuck around, that is. He’s pretty much a sex addict as far as I can tell.” I’d already told her about Trevor’s … desires.
“That doesn’t tell me how it makes you feel.”
“I don’t think I minded as much as I should’ve. Could be I wanted a break. So, relieved?”
“Well, that’s a feeling,” she said.
“I have them sometimes. Anyway, I found a little gym in town, spent enough time there to learn that I was a better trainer than the trainers were. So, I decided Trevor needed to buy it. Post-coital suggestions often worked well with him. And he was the one who proposed we make it my business. Probably had no faith it would be a good investment, and he didn’t want a loss in his portfolio. Or he wanted to gloat.”
“But he was wrong about that wasn’t he?” She closed her little pad. My signal to wrap it up.
“He was. With some remodeling, a good marketing plan, and competent staff, I turned it into a success. It made me proud—what I was able to do with that place. That’s a feeling, too, right?”
“It is.”
One thing about therapy, at least for me, is that I’m always left with shit to think about. And, when I opened Fit&Fab Forever, I had wanted—still wanted, who was I kidding—to avoid showing my age. Extreme fitness was one way. Plastic surgery was another. I didn’t admit it to Mindy because she’d want to explore that, but lately I was less motivated to work so hard. Ironically, I looked younger than I was, but I didn’t care much anymore. Trevor did though.
I didn’t need groceries, except pet food, so I stopped at the feed and grain store and accomplished that. A heavily muscled man offered to put the bags in my trunk. He got a little too close. I could smell his aftershave. “Can’t have a pretty lady like you hauling heavy bags around, can we?” He said it with a smile. I had a flashback to the last time something like that had happened to me and felt a moment of panic.
The cashier seemed to intuit my discomfort, and sent him on an errand. “Bill, we got this. Carl needs some help at the loading dock.” I didn’t know her name, but she knew me because I was a regular customer. “Let me help you,” she said, and we took the bags to the car. “He means well,” she said, “but he came on a little too strong, I think. Do you want me to tell the manager?” I just shook my head dumbly, got in the car and left.
“When you try so hard to look good,” I said aloud in the car, “what do you expect?” And then I remembered Trevor would be home in two days. Home with his appetite. Funny, Margo being all upset about Ron being gay. I wished Trevor was gay. I wished he didn’t come back from wherever he’d been last wanting to get laid two or three times a day, wanting to check me out naked. Make sure I was properly waxed. Smooth as a baby. “Let me look at you,” he’d say. “Turn around.” Pinching my waist to see if there was an ounce of fat there to pinch. Smacking me on the behind. “That’s my girl,” he’d say. Made me sick, but I smiled. His girl.
~~~
Trevor brought me a beautiful gold bracelet with diamonds set in a yin-yang disc. Couldn’t wait for me to open the blue velvet box. It clearly cost a lot of money. “Helping to keep you balanced,” he had said. Was I unbalanced? It was something to consider. In the two days he’d been home he hadn’t seemed to notice anything different about me. Maybe there wasn’t anything different about me, but I felt like there was.
Much of the Christian-centered world paused at this time of year, which meant for the next few days, my husband’s phone calls to business associates went unanswered. Bored, he went out and bought an artificial, fiber optic, pre-lit Christmas tree and got it set up. He got out the box of ornaments and set it near the tree, but I couldn’t muster up the energy or enthusiasm to decorate. The next day he did it, never saying a word. Honestly, I think he preferred it that way. He was the one with the precise placement theory. I could see how proud he was for the way it looked, and I told him it was the best arrangement I’d ever seen. Seemed to make him happy.
All that made me happy, ever, were those three ridiculous dogs. Didn’t have to do a thing to deserve it, but they were always glad to see me. I believed there was nothing I could do to make them not love me, and it was fairly obvious that humans had tougher standards. “What do you think will happen when you tell Trevor about your attack?” Mindy had asked. I wasn’t sure what Trevor would do, to tell the truth. I did know he didn’t have any Great Pyrenees DNA, therefore loyalty and unconditional love were probably out of the equation. But I had gotten to the point where I was willing to let the chips fall where they fell.
Mindy had suggested, naively, I thought, that I might be ‘depriving Trevor of an opportunity to be supportive of me’ with what she had labeled my trauma—the latest one, anyway. I knew better, I did. The odds were not in my favor that Trevor would want an opportunity to put himself out. But I was tired of the suspense. If it was going to come out, it had to be there. I had scheduled a couple’s counseling appointment for December twenty-fourth, her last day in the office for a week, and all I had to do was get him there with a flimsy explanation. “Try your ‘shifting moods due to menopause’,” Mindy recommended.
“Why will he care?” I asked.
“To prepare him for it, help him to recognize the symptoms. Cope with them. He’s organized. Won’t he want to formulate some effective responses to your hormonal outbursts?” She wasn’t a dummy, Mindy wasn’t.
We kept our appointment. I must have over-sold it because Trevor insisted. I think he was looking forward to impressing her with how reasonable he could be. Maybe he was curious about her. Whatever his reason, he had no clue what was in store for him. When he found out, it wasn’t pretty. My gut won.
We had plans to go to dinner after, but that didn’t happen. Neither of us had an appetite. The only question he had for me as we drove home was, “Why did you let the guy get into the house?” I don’t think we slept much that night and stayed about as far apart as you can get. He had lost all interest in sex, in spite of his usual insatiable appetite. It was as if I’d grown horns.
In the morning, we exchanged gifts with all the joy of a wake. I made breakfast, eggs Benedict, his favorite, and we ate in the sunroom. We endured a tension-filled Christmas afternoon by going to a movie. It was fascinating to me how many people went to movies on that day. And they weren’t all Jews. I smiled at that thought—Trevor didn’t even know I was Jewish. What did he know about me anyway? Besides the thing he couldn’t handle.
Someone else had stuck his dick inside me.
Was it really rape? What if I’d asked for it? What if I liked it? I knew he was asking himself those questions. He was repulsed by me. It was reflected in his expression, which I saw mostly from the side view, his clenched jaw, because he avoided even looking at me. He moved his flight up to an early one the next morning and left in the pre-dawn hours. Car service to the rescue. And he was gone.
December 26th, I stayed in bed and cried, even though I wasn’t sure why. Sixteen years. I had no idea what marriage was supposed to be about, but I was pretty sure mine never hit the mark. He could be sweet, and certainly generous, especially in public or in front of his business associates, but his largess was based on whether it made him look good. Whenever we were out with people, he made it a point to show them the latest piece of jewelry he bought for me. I would stand like a manikin while he posed me. I knew he wanted wives of his associates to envy me. If only they knew.
What I looked like mattered to him. He had always gotten me onto the scales as soon as he got home to see if I had gained even a pound, and if so, he admonished me to fast for a few days. “You can’t afford carbs, Zan, not as you get older.” My happiness never came up. But, was that fair? I’d never told him what made me happy, since the only thing that pleased me was my goofy dogs. As if on cue, Aramis lifted his head, yawned, thumped his tail and laid his huge head down with a sigh. See? I thought. He made me smile.
So, it was me and the Three Musketeers. If Trevor never came back, what would we do? I was torn between hoping he was gone forever and being terrified of it. Was I sad? I couldn’t tell. Hell of a thing, not to even know what you feel. I thought about Mindy asking me how something made me feel, and then I saw that I had a text message from her: Call me. After all, she had witnessed Trevor’s reaction. It was anything but supportive.
That evening, ignoring her text, I went looking through the medicine cabinet, knowing Trevor had some Ambien. He had forgotten to take his new prescription with him. I took one. With a good night’s sleep I’d be able to make sense of what had happened. The dogs were allowed back in the bedroom and were ecstatic. We all slept, but I woke up crying a few hours later. Another of my famous nightmares. This time, as was often the case, I was a little girl. There was a young woman holding my hand as we leaped into the dark from a ledge. I got up, peed, went back to bed, and slept without dreaming.
I wandered around the next morning fuzzy-headed. The weather was miserable, so no hope of going for a run with the dogs. Even they went out and did their business fast. It occurred to me that I hadn’t checked the mailbox in several days. No doubt Trevor had forgotten about it, so I put on my boots and walked out to the road. There was a bunch of Christmas cards from Trevor’s clients. Black Friday sales flyers.
There was one fat letter. Addressed to me. Beautiful script writing. Oddly, it looked a lot like mine used to. I stood and stared at the intricate handwriting. Return address Arizona. I didn’t know anyone in Arizona. I barely felt the freezing rain penetrating my pajama top. A dog barked, so I looked back at the house. All three of them were watching me through the front door’s side panels. I went in and threw away all the mail except the letter. Then I toasted myself a bagel, sat on the bar stool at the kitchen center island, and read the letter.
Pat Ponders Life 