Ironic that Ruth herself had little or no appetite most of the time. Especially these last few days, thanks to the brutal heat and the Great Bath Stench. Who could think of food under such circumstances? If she went away somewhere, would her normal appetites — for food, sex, joy — return, or were those gone for good? Didn’t she owe it to herself to find out?
Apparently not, because instead of putting the car in reverse she laid on the horn until her husband appeared at the back door in his undershorts and barefoot, rubbing his eyes sleepily. Good, she thought. Midafternoon was his time to fall asleep in front of the television, though he always denied doing this, even when she caught him doing it. He had legitimate reasons for napping, she supposed. A successful scavenger — if that wasn’t an oxymoron — had to be up early, so each morning Zack rose even before she did to open the restaurant. By five he was out the door and picking through the crap people set out on the curb on trash day. Tuesdays and Thursdays in Schuyler, where the best stuff was, other days in surrounding communities that still had trash pickup. By afternoon he was ready for a nap. Ruth, who was never not exhausted, didn’t get to nap, though, so she couldn’t help resenting the stolen hour. That he wouldn’t admit to this theft made her more resentful still.
“I hear you, I hear you,” he was saying now, trying to smooth down his unruly hair. What sort of man, at damn near sixty, still had a cowlick in the exact spot where so many other men had given in to tonsured baldness? Was it possible that once upon a time she’d found that disobedient thatch endearing? “You can lay off.”
“Just move the truck,” she told him.
“I am,” he said, limping down the porch steps and onto the rough gravel. Where in this enormous hulk of a man was the skinny boy she married? One hundred and twenty pounds he’d been, soaking wet. At eighteen his mother was still buying his trousers — Ruth should’ve given more careful consideration to what this might mean — in the boys’ department. Now he was three fifty if an ounce. “Filling out his frame,” his mother, herself a very large woman, had called it when he finally turned that genetic corner and started putting on weight. These days he also filled whole doorframes, most of which he had to turn sideways to get through. “What do you think I’m doing?”
“I think you’re walking around outdoors in your undershorts.”
“So what? There’s nobody here but us.”
“Unless Tina was to come walking up the drive?”
“She’s seen me before.”
Ruth massaged her temples. “Just move the truck.”
“I am,” he repeated. “Okay?”
She watched him climb in behind the wheel and then, a moment later, get out again, making a jingling motion with his right hand, which she interpreted as keys, or in this case the lack thereof. Since they lived out of town, where there was almost nobody to steal the truck, he usually just left them dangling in the ignition, but apparently not today. Since his search might take a while, she reluctantly turned her own engine off, got out and followed him inside.
The house where they’d lived their entire married lives had belonged to his parents or, rather, his mother, his father having died when Zack was still a boy. That old bag’s name was also Ruth — Mother Ruth, they called her, to avoid confusion, though she’d quickly dubbed her “Mother Ruthless.” Right from the start the woman made it clear that she held her daughter-in-law-to-be in low regard. The day they were introduced — Zack had brought her to this very house to meet her — Ruth, suffering from a combination of morning sickness and terror, had immediately asked if she might use the bathroom. Even with the door closed, she heard the cruel question: “Did you have to pick the homeliest girl in the whole school to knock up?”
Zack later dismissed the incident as unimportant. “Don’t pay no attention to her,” he scoffed. “She don’t mean nothin’.”
“You might’ve stood up for me.”
He put his arm around her shoulder and drew her close. “Didn’t I say you had a great body? Anyway, she’ll like you better after the baby’s born.” Which showed how little he understood his mother. Give her credit, though, Mother Ruth had at least loved the baby, even though Janey was Ruth’s spitting image. And of course she would have hated whoever Zack had knocked up. Her husband dead, and helpless to navigate the world outside her home, she was determined to keep a tight grip on what she had left, and that was her only son. Through him, and through his devotion to her, she meant to rule what remained of her world, and to this end she did everything in her power to undermine her new daughter-in-law. Among other things, that meant never letting her forget whose house she was living in or that she’d arrived there pregnant and without any domestic skills. Ruth hadn’t learned to cook at home, and Mother Ruthless obviously didn’t like having anyone else in her kitchen. “How’s she supposed to learn if you won’t teach her nothin’,” Zack asked when Ruth begged him to intervene. Eventually, she had grudgingly copied out on notecards the recipes for a few of Zack’s favorite meals. They never turned out right, though. The recipes either left out key ingredients or were unclear about technique or got the proportions wrong, which made Ruth look like a very slow learner indeed. “He likes his mother’s cooking better, don’t you, sweetie,” Mother Ruth cooed after each new failure, and Zack had to admit he did. Only after Ruth finally tumbled to the fact that her culinary efforts were being sabotaged, and compared the notecard recipes with others in cookbooks she’d checked out of the library, did she begin to improve. Before long she was a better cook than Mother Ruth, who was lazy and gravitated to canned and frozen ingredients, even when fresh ones were available. Still, Ruth had known better than to openly challenge her, so the woman remained boss of her kitchen until she finally suffered the stroke that put her in the county nursing home. Not a moment too soon, in Ruth’s view, because the kitchen hadn’t been the only battleground. “You know she’s stepping out on you,” the old woman told her son when some busybody informed her about Ruth and Sully. By then, of course, she and Zack had been married going on twenty years.
“Mind your own business, Ma,” Zack replied, having heard the rumors already.
“I told you she was a tramp from the start,” the old woman continued, as if Ruth had been cheating since day one. On this day, though, she was simply standing in the next room, listening.
“You don’t know nothin’ about it, Ma. You’re just repeating gossip.”
“You know it’s true as well as I do,” his mother said. “You just don’t want to admit it.”
“What I want,” he told her, “is to not hear no more about it from you.”
That was about as close as he ever came to taking Ruth’s side where his mother was concerned. After the stroke he visited her faithfully at the nursing home, usually late Sunday afternoons after his garage sale. With one memorable exception, Ruth refused to accompany him. A Sunday off was rare for her, and she had no intention of spending any part of it with a hateful old woman whose animosity had only deepened every single year. After her stroke, Zack was the only person who could understand her garbled speech, and the one time Ruth went along to visit, Mother Ruth had grabbed him by the wrist to pull his face down next to hers. What she whispered was gibberish to Ruth, though Zack evidently understood, because he removed her hand and said, “How many times I gotta tell you, Ma? I don’t wanna hear it.”