She gave vent to these feelings by writing them down in a diary that Auntie Gal had given her for Christmas. She had just finished reading The Diary of Anne Frank in sophomore English class, and like all the other girls, she was imbued with a sense that she too was different, an innocent on a path to tragedy that would make her posthumously admired. The diary would be proof of her existence, that she mattered, and more important, that someone somewhere would one day understand her, even if it was not in her lifetime. There was a tremendous comfort in believing her miseries weren't for naught. In her diary, she could be as truthful as she wanted to be. The truth, of course, had to be supported by facts. So her first entry included a list of the top ten songs on the radio hit list, as well as a note that a boy named Michael Papp had a boner when he was dancing with Wendy. That was what Wendy had said, and at the time Ruth thought boner referred to a puffed-up ego.
She knew her mother was sneaking looks at what she had written, because one day she asked Ruth, "Why you like this song 'Turn, Turn, Turn'? Just 'cause someone else like?" Another time her mother sniffed and said, "Why smell like cigarette?" Ruth had just written about going to Haight-Ashbury with friends and meeting some hippies in the park who offered them a smoke. Ruth took some glee in her mother's thinking it was cigarettes they were smoking and not hashish. After that interrogation, she hid the diary in the bottom of her closet, between her mattresses, behind her dresser. But her mother always managed to find it, at least that was what Ruth figured, on the basis of what she was next forbidden to do: "No more go beach after school." "No more see this Lisa girl." "Why you so boy-crazy?" If she accused her mother of reading her diary, LuLing would become evasive, never admitting that she had done so, while also saying, "A daughter should have no secrets from a mother." Ruth did not want to censor her writing, so she started recording it in a combination of pig Latin, Spanish, and multisyllabic words that she knew her mother would not understand. "Aquatic amusements of the silica paniculate variety," was her reference to the beach at Land's End.
Didn't Mom ever realize, Ruth now mused, how her demands for no secrets drove me to hide even more from her? Yet maybe her mother did sense that. Maybe it made her hide certain truths from Ruth about herself. Things too bad to say. They could not trust each other. That was how dishonesty and betrayal started, not in big lies but in small secrets.
Ruth now remembered the last place where she had hidden her diary. She had forgotten about it all these years. She went to the kitchen, hoisted herself onto the counter with less ease than she had at sixteen. Patting along the top of the cabinet, she soon found it: the heart-patterned diary, some of the hearts coated with pink nail polish to obliterate the names of various boys she had immortalized as crushes of the moment. She climbed down with the dusty relic, leaned against the counter, and rubbed the red-and-gold cover.
She felt her limbs drain, felt unsure of herself, as if the diary contained an unalterable prediction of what would happen the rest of her life. Once again she was sixteen years old. She undid the clasp and read the words on the inside of the jacket, scrawled in two-inch block letters: STOP!!!
PRIVATE!!! IF YOU ARE READING THIS YOU ARE GUILTY OF TRESPASSING!!! YES! I DO MEAN YOU.!
But her mother had read it, had read and committed to heart what Ruth had written on the second-to-last page, the words that nearly killed them both.
The week before Ruth wrote those fateful words, she and LuLing had been escalating in their torment of each other. They were two people caught in a sandstorm, blasted by pain and each blaming the other as the origin of the wind. The day before the fight culminated, Ruth had been smoking in her bedroom, leaning out the window. The door was closed, and as soon as she heard her mother's footsteps coming toward her room, she dropped the cigarette outside, flopped onto her bed, and pretended to read a book. As usual, LuLing opened the door without knocking. And when Ruth looked up with an innocent expression, LuLing shouted, "You smoking!"
"No I wasn't!"
"Still smoking." LuLing pointed toward the window and marched over. The cigarette had landed on the ledge below the window, announcing its whereabouts with a plume of smoke.
"I'm an American," Ruth shouted. "I have a right to privacy, to pursue my own happiness, not yours!"
"No right! All wrong!"
"Leave me alone!"
"Why I have daughter like you? Why I live? Why I don't die long time 'go?" LuLing was huffing and snorting. Ruth thought she looked like a mad dog. "You want I die?"
Ruth was shaking but shrugged as nonchalantly as she could. "I really don't care."
Her mother panted a few more times, then left the room. Ruth got up and slammed the door shut.
Later, over sobs of righteous indignation, she began to write in her diary, knowing full well her mother would read the words: "I hate her! She's the worst mother a person could have. She doesn't love me. She doesn't listen to me. She doesn't understand anything about me. All she does is pick on me, get mad, and make me feel worse."
She knew that what she was writing was risky. It felt like pure evil. And the descending mantle of guilt made her toss it off with even more bravado. What she wrote next was even worse, such terrible words, which later-too late-she had crossed out. Ruth now looked at them, the blacked-out lines, and she knew what they said, what her mother had read:
"You talk about killing yourself, so why don't you ever do it? I wish you would. Just do it, do it, do it! Go ahead, kill yourself! Precious Auntie wants you to, and so do I!"
At the time, she was shocked that she could write such horrible feelings. She was shocked now to remember them. She had cried while writing the words, full of anger, fear, and a strange freedom of finally admitting so openly that she wanted to hurt her mother as much as her mother hurt her. And then she had hidden the diary in the back of her underwear drawer, an easy enough place to look. She had arranged the book just so, spine facing in, a pair of pink-flowered panties on top. That way Ruth would know for sure that her mother had been snooping in there.
The next day, Ruth had dawdled before coming home from school. She walked along the beach. She stopped at a drugstore and looked at makeup. She called Wendy from a phone booth. By the time she returned home, her mother would have read the words. She expected a huge fight, no dinner, just shouting, more threats, more rants about how Ruth wanted her dead so she could live with Auntie Gal. LuLing would wait for Ruth to admit that she wrote those hateful words.
Then Ruth imagined it another way. Her mother reading the words, pounding her chest with one fist to shove her suffering back into the private area of her heart, biting her lips to keep from crying. Later, when Ruth came home, her mother would pretend not to see her. She would fix dinner, sit down, and chew silently. Ruth would not give in and ask if she could have some dinner too. She would eat cereal from the box at every meal, if that's what it took. They would act like this for days, her mother torturing Ruth with her silence, her absolute rejection. Ruth would stay strong by not feeling any pain, until nothing mattered anymore, unless, of course, it went the way it usually did, and Ruth broke down, cried, and said she was sorry.
And then Ruth had no more time to imagine any other versions of what might happen. She was home. She steeled herself. Thinking about it was just as bad as going through with it. Just get it over with, she told herself. She walked up the stairs to the door, and as soon as she opened it, her mother ran to her and said in a voice choked with worry, "Finally you're home!"