She could feel the bed beneath her body, could sense her own room around her, but she did not open her eyes. I must know, she thought. I must know.
Tap-tap on the door.
“Wake up, Ruth, honey, or you’ll be late to school.” Again tap-tap. “Ruth?”
“That’s not my name.”
She whispered the words in someone else’s voice. Then she opened her eyes. She looked down at her hand and flexed her fingers. They were cramped and there were small indented crescents on her palm made by her nails as she gripped the thing in her dream.
The following Saturday was her birthday.
Her father and his wife gave her a red dress. It was an expensive dress, shirred and flounced. There were puff sleeves and small shiny buttons.
Her father had always given her books and games before. She turned to him, but she could not find him behind the smile his new wife had given him.
“Thank you very much,” she said, feeling the dress cold and slick under her hands.
There was a lamb roast for dinner and a large frosted cake, and later they went to the theater to see a magician and a hypnotist.
Ruth wore the red dress and sat next to her father’s wife. She suffered the small soft hands touching her now and then and the little voice whispering, “Isn’t he marvelous?” each time the magician performed a trick.
She chirps, Ruth thought. She chirps like a silly bird.
There was an intermission and Ruth was given ginger ale to drink. She stood quietly in her new red dress, sipping from a paper cup and saying yes, she was having a wonderful time, and yes, the magician was marvelous.
She disliked magicians almost as much as she did clowns. Her father had known that once, but he did not seem to remember. She looked at him, wanting to ask, “Where are you, Daddy?” — but, of course, she did not. She was much too polite.
After the intermission the hypnotist appeared on stage. He did not look the way Ruth thought a hypnotist should look — lean and satanic with sleek hair and perhaps a painted beard. He had almost no hair at all and his body reminded Ruth of a stuffed bear.
He introduced a woman whose name was Christine, but under hypnosis she called herself Zela and spoke of life in an ancient middle-eastern kingdom. The hypnotist explained that this was not unusual. Certain individuals, under hypnosis, or perhaps in sleep, re-lived earlier incarnations.
Christine-Zela left the stage and then the hypnotist called for volunteers from the audience.
One man was told that he was swimming the English Channel and the audience roared at his exaggerated strokes in the air. Another man was told he was George Washington.
“You are now going to chop down the cherry tree,” the hypnotist said. “Here is your hatchet,” and he placed an invisible object in the man’s hand.
The man tightened his fist and began to swing at the air, chopping furiously. The audience laughed, a swell of sound that hurt Ruth’s ears.
The man’s face was getting red and he was breathing hard.
The soft little hand clutched Ruth’s arm. “Isn’t that funny? Isn’t it?”
Ruth watched the man’s arm go up and down, up and down. The laughter grew and the lights were burning Ruth’s eyes. She squinted to see and now something was flashing in the man’s hand. Up and down, up and down.
She began to climb the stairs. The hot light shifted around her. Now she stood in the doorway of the bedroom. Outside, there was sun and bright sky. And in the room a dumpy old woman. No. The light shifted again. It was a man. Not in the bedroom. Somewhere else. She lifted her arm. Again and then again. The red mist fell around her and the room dissolved.
“Ruth,” someone said.
“That’s not my name.”
There was a laugh and she opened her eyes. Her father and his wife were leaning over her, their faces too close. The purple curtains were pulled across the stage and the people were leaving.
Ruth rubbed her eyes. “I must have fallen asleep.”
Her father’s wife chirruped. “Poor baby! We’ve kept her up too late. She doesn’t even know who she is!”
Her father grinned and patted Ruth’s hand. “She used to say that all the time when she was little. We’d say ‘Ruth, do this,’ or ‘Ruth, do that,’ and she’d say, ‘That’s not my name.’ ”
His wife put her little hand against Ruth’s cheek.
“I know who she is. She’s our little girl.”
Ruth, suffocating in the new red dress, shivered under the hand on her flesh.
On the ride home Ruth sat in the back seat. This was her place now, but she did not mind. Being there put her farther away from the chatter of her father’s wife. She was terribly afraid that some day they might ask her to sit between them.
She kept her face turned to the window. Stars glittered icily in the late-night sky and the houses and lawns were dusted with snow.
Once, when the chirping stopped for a moment, Ruth asked her father a question.
“Did I tell you what my name was when I said I wasn’t Ruth?”
“No.” There was a grin in her father’s voice. “I always thought it might be Cleopatra.”
Laughter trilled from his wife’s mouth.
Don’t, Ruth thought. But the sound went on, spiraling deep into her mind, touching forgotten pain.
Before she went to bed, Ruth was given a cup of hot chocolate. She sat in the living room, alone with her father. He poked at the ashes in the fireplace and yawned now and then. His wife had already gone into their bedroom. “To undo my face,” she said. Perhaps even now she was smearing her skin with the gooey pink cream she favored.
“I must have been a funny little thing,” Ruth said to her father.
“Um?” He covered another yawn with his hand.
Ruth sipped from the cup. The chocolate was too sweet. She thought of the soft hands that poured the milk and stirred the sugar and cocoa. She put the cup down, feeling a little sick.
“I said I must have been a funny thing when I was little. Do you remember when I thought I had a sister?”
Her father turned to her and smiled. “I sure do. You toddled around the house calling her.”
“Did she have a name?”
“I don’t think so. You just called for ‘sister’.”
Ruth picked up the cup and held it to her lips, but she didn’t drink. She could taste the name on her tongue. The name of her sister. But even as she searched for it, it drifted away.
She looked up at her father. “Do we look at the pictures now?”
Each year, on her birthday, she and her father looked at the family album and he told her about the woman in the pictures — the slim smiling woman who had been her mother and had died too soon.
Her father’s eyes slid to the doorway and then back to Ruth. “It’s late,” he said. “We’ll do it tomorrow.”
When he kissed her good night, Ruth thought, I’ll hurry to sleep. She could feel the dream just behind her eyes, waiting.
Deep in the night she woke, listening.
Sleet rustled against the windows.
Rain, she thought. We need it. It’s been so hot.
She got out of bed and went to the window. She did not see the frozen darkness. She saw instead a sun-soaked yard. A picket fence. Houses close by.
No. No rain. She sighed and lifted invisible hair from her hot neck.
She straightened her bed and left the room.
The house with its patchwork of rooms was very quiet. Sun pressed against the windows. The air was clotted with heat.
She went into the kitchen, wrinkling her nose at the smell. Mutton broth. How could they, on such a morning?
She went to the back door, holding aside a skirt that did not exist. She opened the door and looked out into the dark. She saw the barn. And the pear tree. The yard washed in sunlight.