What money he left Ruth was modest (the bulk of it went to his son, a stand-offish man not much younger than she was): enough to support a woman who does not drive and who shops the canned goods stacked in the supermarket’s Wall of Value. Prairie Rose had already left home and embarked on a series of disastrous relationships with men she would in the end denounce as helpless. Helpless! In her segues between boyfriends, she often moved back into the walk-in closet off the living room in Ruth’s apartment, where she slept on a futon mattress.
She was a strapping girl who could run for miles along the inlet without breaking a sweat, and she kept her weight bench on the sagging front porch of the old house whose upstairs Ruth occupied. Even when Prairie Rose was not living in the closet, sometimes Ruth would wake in the night to the loud clink of the barbell being set down in its keeper.
So when Prairie Rose said, Ma, you’re turning into a lump, Ruth knew this was not just an appraisal of her body but also of her life, for the truth was that ever since Mr. Lindquist died — okay, since even before Mr. Lindquist died — she’d really never (as they say) “done much.” She’d raised a daughter, for a while she’d worked part-time at the library shelving books: wasn’t that enough? But the answer was no, at least not according to Prairie Rose. Just one class, just one hour each day, Prairie Rose doesn’t understand how anyone can be overwhelmed by this.
Ruth tries to explain how first there are the preparations to attend, the purchase of exercise clothes and the daily packing of one’s duffel bag, then the getting dressed, the breakfast, the bus ride, the transfer, the other bus ride, the class and the shower and the reversal of bus rides until finally the getting home and fixing lunch.
After this, she is tired enough to indulge herself in a little nap, then maybe in the afternoon she ventures out to the library or walks down to the inlet, before returning home to fix dinner for herself and (often) Prairie Rose, for whom she buys vegetables and assembles them into a meal whose creation and cleaning up will fill her evening. Prairie Rose doesn’t understand how her mother could be satisfied with so little; Ruth doesn’t understand how a person’s life could accommodate much more.
And then there is not just the exercising itself but also the mandatory socializing that comes with it. When they lie down for leg lifts, the women clump in groups to rehash the events of the twenty-four hours since they last lay down together. They know the routine so well they have no need to look at Marco or hear what he’s saying, nothing to impede the speed and fluency of their chatter. And Ruth panicked when she first realized that signing on with the exercise group obligated her to participate: at first the women were satisfied simply to instruct her in technique, winching up her leg like a dog’s for the exercise that Marco called “The Fire Hydrant.”
But when the women turned onto their backs for pelvic tilts, a headband-wearer in a nearby clump called out, “So what’s your story, hon? You a widow?” Ruth wiggled her head in a manner that she hoped could be read as either yes or no.
“Kids?” the woman persisted, but this time Ruth could not even muster the hint of a shrug as she lay flat on her back.
Then she heard the woman whisper to the pelvic-tilter next to her, “I think she’s deaf.”
Within the hour this rumor had worked its way from clump to clump, and from then on the women no longer tried to speak to her but merely torqued her body into position whenever they were of the opinion that she was not correctly emulating Marco. Ruth didn’t see the need to disabuse anyone about her deafness; she didn’t want even one drop of whatever power was left in her creaky body to be dissipated by jawing. Being deaf streamlined her commerce with the other women to its bare essentials. Being the deaf woman set her free.
And when Ruth walked out of the Y that first day and boarded the bus for home, she was surprised to find Marco behind the wheel, wearing a blue city jacket and driver’s cap in addition to his sweatpants. He seemed to avoid her gaze deliberately, which made her wonder if the code of conduct for exercise instructors was anything like that of therapists: you did not acknowledge your clients outside the session, giving them the courtesy of not giving them away. But later Marco caught her gaze in the rearview mirror, and when they stopped for a traffic light he took his hands from the wheel and began making peculiar gestures. This bewildered Ruth until she realized that Marco was speaking to her in sign language. In response to which she tried to nod inscrutably, as if she understood what was being said.
WHEN PRAIRIE ROSE was a child, she took Mr. Lindquist in stride, but as she grew up that stride became a typically teenagerly sulk in pursuit of what Prairie Rose came to refer to as the Truth. Finally, Ruth made the mistake of admitting that, as far as Prairie Rose’s biological father was concerned, there were several possibilities.
“So what you’re telling me is you were easy,” said Prairie Rose, easy being a word whose connotations in this regard she’d just picked up in high school. Ruth remembers exactly: they were sitting in Prairie Rose’s bedroom, in the “regular” house they’d occupied when Mr. Lindquist was alive, the room’s pretty lilac walls only a few months away from being repainted black and covered with posters of heavy metal bands.
“Well, I guess that’s how your grandmother looked at it,” Ruth said.
The upside of the “easy” remark was that it gave her an excuse to stalk self-righteously from the room, as if she had been wounded. And acting wounded saved her from having to explain — how when Prairie Rose was a baby Ruth had stared at her for hours and still not been able to reach a conclusive verdict. By the time Prairie Rose grew out of her baby flesh, Ruth could no longer remember much about the faces of the contenders.
“Look at me, Ma,” Prairie Rose would say from time to time over the years. Then she’d hold Ruth’s face between her palms while Ruth stared back while Prairie Rose squeezed, as if the information were in there somewhere and could be extracted like orange juice.
“Honey, I’m drawing a blank, I’m sorry,” was all that Ruth could say. And Prairie Rose would squeeze her face for a moment longer, hard enough to hurt, hard enough to make sure it hurt, before she’d finally let her mother go.
MORE RECENTLY, when Prairie Rose got on a jag and pestered her about the list of candidates, Ruth said there had been a meat cutter named Bill with a bubble of curly hair and a blond boy named Phil who lived with his mother off Delmar Boulevard in St. Louis, where Ruth had briefly attended nursing school in 1976. Or maybe she had the Phil and Bill mixed up, she wasn’t sure anymore. During the month in question, she’d also traveled with her girlfriends to the Mardi Gras in New Orleans, where she had to admit there had been indiscretions.
“What do you mean, indiscretions?”
“Oh, honey, think about what you did when you were twenty.”
Then Prairie Rose was quiet for a moment, as if she really were thinking. “So it’s the butcher, the baker, or the candlestick-maker,” she finally erupted peevishly. “Or maybe it’s Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda, who just happened to roar into town on their choppers!”
The problem was that Prairie Rose never wanted the kind of information Ruth remembered, particularly the car upholstery, in one case a maroon brocade deeply quilted with silver fixtures — door handle, ashtray, button for the electric window. This was where the boy, whoever he was, suddenly glided his hand under her bra, and in the midst of the squirming she usually did at this juncture, a new thought occurred to her: Why not?