“Drugs? No, I never take drugs.”
“You don’t remember me, Ruby?”
“Remember?”
“We’ve met before.”
Ruby shook her head, slowly, unable for the moment to make any connection between the plump and perspiring woman holding the glass of beer, and the composed efficient nurse in the white uniform who ran Gordon’s office and answered the telephone. Even the voices were different.
“What you need,” Hazel said, “is some food and rest.”
“No, thank you.” She stared at the table in front of her, at the half-prepared sandwiches, the buttered bread and the thick slices of meat loaf containing bright blobs of green which might have been peas or green pepper but which looked to Ruby like some phosphorescent decay. She had missed dinner — she hadn’t, in fact, had a square meal for a week now — and the sight of the meat and its strong oniony smell nauseated her. She never wanted to see food again. There was no fight, no resolution, left in her, only the numbness of despair that made her want to lie down in a quiet place and go to sleep for a long time until many things were forgotten. She hadn’t even the energy to get up and leave. She was bound by sheer inertia to a chair at Hazel’s kitchen table, shrouded by the smell of meat loaf and the sweet, fermented memories of the summer with Gordon.
“You’re Gordon’s Hazel,” she said, and a nerve began to twitch in her left cheek, contracting the muscle and pulling up the corner of her mouth. It was as if, minutes before Ruby herself could see any humor in the situation, her face was preparing to smile. But instead of smiling, she threw back her head and laughed, and kept on laughing while Hazel watched her uneasily over the moist, foamy rim of her glass.
“You’re George’s Hazel and you’re Gordon’s Hazel and they both begin with a G!” It was so excruciatingly funny that tears oozed out from between her eyelids and fell down her cheeks almost to the point of her chin. She did not weep like Josephine who had a wealth of tears, fat and silver and smooth like ball bearings. Ruby’s tears came out pinched and meager, little coins squeezed out of shape between a miser’s fingers. Josephine wept from a great reservoir of self-regard and self-pity; Ruby wept from the dry ducts of self-hate.
“You’re punchy.” Hazel took a piece of Kleenex from the window ledge over the sink. “Here. Use this.”
“I don’t want anything from you, I don’t want anything from anybody.”
“All right, but not so loud. George might hear you.”
“I don’t care.” She took the piece of Kleenex and rubbed her face, savagely, as if she had a grudge against her own skin. “He brought me here on purpose. It was a trap. He wants to find out things about me.”
“He wants to help you.”
“I hate him. I hate him and his help.”
“Now listen—”
“He’s a fat creepy old man and when he looks at me I feel like screaming, my skin crawls. I know what he’s thinking. I know what he wants. And it’s not to help me. He wants to help me, what a laugh.”
“Shut up,” Hazel said, but without authority, without even conviction. “He’ll hear you.”
“Let him. I want him to hear. All this time him putting on the big act, poor Ruby, Ruby needs help, there’s something the matter with her. Well, I know who there’s something the matter with and it’s not me. It’s him. Him and his greasy eyes that never let you alone, that you can’t ever get away from because even when he’s not around I feel them looking at me and I get sick in my stomach!”
“You’re imagining things.”
“Am I? That’s what you think. I’ve been around. I know men like him.”
Hazel finished the beer and put the empty glass on the sink. With one part of her mind she felt pity for George and the need to defend him: George has nice eyes, they’re not greasy, they’re luminous — and he always tries to help people, not just you. But from another and deeper part of her mind, words gushed up like water from an underground river: Go on, tell me more. Show me how you hate him. Talk louder and he’ll hear you. Let him find out. Raise your voice, Ruby.
“Shut up,” she said roughly. “You’ve got no right shooting off your mouth about one of my best friends.”
Ruby didn’t answer. She had picked up a crumb of meat from the table and was rolling it between her fingers until it looked like a little brown pill.
“You’ve got no right,” Hazel repeated. “And anyway, what are you doing going out with him if you can’t stand the sight of him?”
“I don’t know.”
“You must have a reason.”
“No. He came to the house and wanted to take me for a drive and I was too tired to argue, that’s all, too tired.” She made another brown pill and placed it carefully beside the first one on the oilcloth table cover. “We drove up Garcia Road.”
“You don’t have to tell me where you—”
“I’ve never been in that part of town before. It’s very pretty, all the trees and flowers, and the houses with such wide windows like the people in them have got nothing to hide. I’d like to live in a place like that with big wide windows and never pull the blinds. I would keep myself very well groomed so that people walking by on the sidewalk would never catch me looking sloppy or anything. I would always have on a pretty dress or one of those quilted satin housecoats, and I’d keep the house very clean and tidy, nothing lying around. People walking by would glance in and wonder who I was and think how lucky, that girl, to have such a beautiful clean house with such shiny furniture.” She paused for breath, sucking the air in through her mouth greedily as if it was not air at all but an ether to prolong the dream. “Blue is my color but a red robe would be nicer. It’s more cheerful, like Christmas. Red always reminds me of Christmas at home.”
But she had stretched the dream too far — there had never been a Christmas at home that she could remember without bitterness — and it snapped like an elastic band and stung her skin and brought moisture to her eyes. Through the moisture she could see Hazel looking blurred and fuzzy as if she had just grown a crop of tiny feathers.
“You should have something to eat,” Hazel said.
“No. No, please, I’m not hungry.”
“A glass of milk, then.”
“No.” She blinked the moisture out of her eyes. “Gordon lives in a house like that, doesn’t he?”
“Like—? Oh. Yes, kind of like that.”
“Did you ever go there?”
“Once.”
“It’s like I said, isn’t it, when you walk by you can look right into the windows?”
“I don’t remember. Maybe you can.”
“I bet she keeps the place very clean. Just judging from what I’ve heard of her, I bet she’s very tidy.”
“I guess she is,” Hazel said. The girl was making her nervous. She wished George would come back and take her away. “I don’t notice those things much.”
“Naturally, being a friend of Gordon’s, I’ve had invitations to dinner and things like that, but I’ve always been too busy to go, so I’ve never even met his wife. I guess you know her pretty well.”
“Well enough.”
“What’s she look like?”
“She’s kind of blonde and pale.”
“Pretty?”
“She has nice teeth. She gets them cleaned every three months. That’s the only time I ever see her, when she comes to the office, except the once I went out to the house to take her the car keys.”
“I thought you might be friendly with her, she might tell you things.”
“No. She isn’t the kind that confides in the office help.”
“You don’t like her much, I can tell that.”
“I don’t think about her.”
“I do,” Ruby said in a whisper. “I think about her a lot.”