Nancy told me with a faint air of superiority that Sarah bought the second dress she tried on. And Rachel said sadly last week that she'd ordered a dress from a catalog and didn't really like it much. But Ruby is incapable of being either casual or resigned. I can see her feet beneath the curtain edge, the nails painted blue, the tiny baby toe curled in like a comma, just as it was when she was born. I was doing copyediting at home then, in the apartment in Chicago that we rented while Glen was finishing his ophthalmology training. I knew no one, did nothing but read textbook manuscripts and make careful marks in pencil, hieroglyphics of error. My left hand worked the ledge of my belly, back and forth, feeling toes beneath my skin, like pebbles under a layer of loose sand. You don't feel so silly, so stupid, so sad, talking to yourself if there's someone inside you that you can pretend you're talking to instead.
When Ruby came back from the shopping trip to the vintage store two weeks ago, her hands were empty and the big tapestry bag slung across her body looked flat and sad. The sound Ruby's feet make on the stairs is the window of her soul. "She's pissed," Alex had said, sitting at the kitchen table. "Language," I said mildly. "Pissed isn't a curse," he said. "It's vulgar," I replied, taking chicken out to defrost.
My back is aching as Ruby tries on two more dresses. She will never find anything at Molly's Closet. They're pretty dresses, but they're ordinary, made of ordinary fabrics. Ruby loves panne velvet, moire taffeta. She appears in a beautiful cream-colored satiny dress. I'm pleased to realize that it is one I took off the rack.
"Imagine this if I took off the sleeves and made the neck square. And maybe, I don't know, added some kind of inserts in the skirt. Maybe lace, so that part of the dress you could see through? Does that make any sense?"
I breathe and try not to make my breathing sound like a sigh. If Ruby hears me sigh she will say, "I told you you didn't have to come." Everything for Ruby is an either/or. I think this may be a keystone of her personality, although it may be her age, too. My mother says I was the same, but she seems to refer to most of motherhood as a martyrdom. Her widowhood, her real martyrdom, we have never really discussed. "It must have been so hard for you when Daddy died," I said one evening when we had been watching the sun go down over the golf course behind the condominium where she and Stan live. She waved her hand, a gesture of dismissal. "That's life," she said. "And everything turned out fine." She waved her hand again, this time at the green on the fourteenth hole, water diamonds arcing from the invisible sprinklers buried belowground. We could hear Stan in the kitchen, doing the dinner dishes. Maybe he was what she thought of when she thought of having a husband, not the man I could only vaguely remember: longish sideburns, a heavy jaw, the smell of citrus cologne, a dry kiss on the crown of my head. For some reason, my father liked to call me Mary Elizabeth Ever After, one of those nonsense names parents make up. I had one for Ruby, too: When she was small I used to call her Ruby Tuesday, and she would frown and say, "That is not my name." I had done the same to my father, hands on hips, brows knit together: That is not my name. Oh, your mother was willful, my mother says to my children sometimes, shaking her head and exchanging glances of complicity. I am so middle-ground these days that it seems impossible to believe, but I suppose that is the progression: the sharp edges of youth ground down by life. A razor becomes a knife becomes a paperweight. It's difficult to believe it will ever happen to my own children, especially my daughter.
"I'm having a hard time seeing it, but maybe that's just me," I say.
Ruby sighs loudly. "I don't know," she says.
"Did you try the blue one?" I ask.
"It's such a magazine dress," Ruby says. When I was a girl, I used to sometimes rip a picture of a dress from a magazine and take it into town to see if anyone had it, or something like it, something like it but cheaper. If Ruby sees a dress, or something like it, in a magazine, this means it is devalued by ordinariness.
The phone rings. It is my oldest friend, Alice, who was my college roommate and now lives in New York City. "What does chicken pox look like?" she says, without greeting or identification.
When we were in college, Alice divided men into three categories: boyfriend material, husband material, and father material. Since we graduated twenty-two years ago, she has met many of the first and almost none of the last two. Her son, Liam, is three now, and was fathered by Donor No. 236: medical student, sandy hair, tall, mathematical, methodical. Because I am a good friend, I've never mentioned that the shorthand description of the nameless Donor No. 236 sounds something like a description of my husband, who Alice called "the straightest guy on earth" until she realized I was serious about him. Sometimes there are people you love because you learned to love them a long time ago, because when you say, "Remember the night we went skinny-dipping in the dean's pool?" she does.
Alice and I had a period of frost when my children were small. When we talked, the sentences were empty--how's work, where did you spend the holidays, how are your parents? "You've lost yourself," she'd finally said. Of course, I had. Now Alice has, too.
"How large an area does the rash cover?" I ask, while Ruby taps one foot insistently and tugs at a long ringlet.
"There's just one blister, but it's very red and angry. And he's been out of sorts all morning."
"Let me call you back. There's never only one chicken pock. He's probably out of sorts because he's three. I'm shopping for a prom dress with your goddaughter."
"Call me back as soon as you're finished," Alice says, and hangs up. "I am not one of those crazy older mothers," she often says. She is one of those crazy older mothers. It's good of me not to say so, especially since she told me I was certifiable when I was just twenty-six and discovered I was expecting Ruby. "He rushed you into it," she'd said of Glen. "He absolutely did not," I replied at the time, and it was true. Ruby was an accidental baby. We had been thunderstruck when I got the news three months after our wedding, as stunned as teenagers who had skipped sex-education classes. I have never been able to decide whether I should tell Ruby this someday, perhaps when she has children of her own. My firstborn, my girl, my happiest accident.
Molly has a dress over her arm and holds it up for Ruby. It is a high-waisted dress in some filmy coral material. Ruby says so sweetly, "I have a problem with that color because of my hair, but thanks so much, Mrs. Martin, it's really pretty." Ruby likes to say that her hair is red, but it's really brown with auburn highlights, a big wavy mass that she pulls at when she's thinking and that makes a hair curtain around her pointed, slightly elfin face. She has outside manners and inside manners, company manners and home manners. Or lack of manners. You can see it in her brothers' faces sometimes, as they think to themselves, Will Ruby offer to take me to the diner for breakfast or scream at me for leaving the shower dripping?
Only with her father is she always the polite and thoughtful Ruby she presents to the world. Last year her favorite word was authentic. She says that Glen is utterly authentic. I suppose that this is true, and may have something to do with why I married him in the first place. Or maybe it was the loneliness, when college was over and Alice had found a place for herself in New York. I remember a weekend when I visited Glen at medical school, and we went to an Italian restaurant and walked back to his apartment through a fine mild rain and made love that night and the next morning and had pancakes and bacon for breakfast. I laughed at the tiny earthquakes the elevated train made every few minutes as it silenced our voices. "I wish every day was like this," I'd said, and Glen said, "Why couldn't it be?" How young we were.
The shopping trip is a failure. Ruby is putting on her own clothes, a long flowered skirt, a tank top, an Argyle sweater. From inside the dressing room, muffled by the sweater she is pulling over her head, I hear her say, "I'm thinking of breaking up with Kiernan."
"What?" I say. Because of the surprise, I have let my voice rise and sharpen.
"Nothing," Ruby says. "Forget I said anything. I knew you'd make a big thing out of it."
&n
bsp; "All I said was 'What?'"
"Never mind," Ruby says. "I don't want to talk about it."
It's hard, almost impossible, to imagine Ruby without Kiernan. It's not just that he has been her boyfriend for more than two years but that they have been playmates since kindergarten. His mother, Deborah, was once my closest friend; Kiernan's family once lived next door to ours. From time to time my husband says, "Does Kiernan ever actually go home?" But he says it in that weary indulgent way that men take note of things they think should bother them but really don't. For his birthday, Kiernan bought Glen a pair of very old spectacles he found at a flea market, and although the rest of us thought it was a peculiar gift--the boys making faces, Ruby saying, "Aren't they great?" in the extravagant fashion of someone trying to make it so--Glen spent a fair amount of time examining the lenses, the construction, the material, and the old glasses wound up on his desk at work.
I should have realized something wasn't right that morning when Kiernan missed breakfast. Last night he and Ruby had gone out to the yard at eleven to watch for some comet that was supposed to sweep across the sky. When we were getting ready for bed, I saw him adjusting the telescope, then going inside to turn off the house lights so the darkness was deeper, the stars brighter. Standing to one side of the curtains, I heard him say something to Ruby, who was lying on one of our old quilts, but she turned away from him. I saw a spark of silver from behind the curtains and turned back to see if the comet was visible, but when I looked down I realized it was the flash of Kiernan's camera, that he was taking pictures of her. "Please, stop," I heard her whine. When I woke in the morning she was in the same position asleep, another quilt over her, but Kiernan was gone.
"He doesn't like to go to sleep," Ruby told me once when I mentioned that Kiernan had been at the house early, before anyone was up. "He says if he stays up all night it's never yesterday." She had been charmed by the idea, I remember. But this morning she'd merely looked exhausted.
She sweeps by me out of the dressing room and toward the door, stopping to smile at Molly. "I just can't make up my mind today, Mrs. Martin," she says sweetly.
"Do you want to go for tea and muffins?" I ask on the street.
"I'm not hungry," she says. "I have to go home and work on my story." My window of opportunity for more information is gone, snapped shut. I will have to wait.
I am in the car alone, picking up Alex from his friend Ben's house. The street is an Impressionist painting: Azaleas and Rhododendrons in Full Flower. These are the shrubs of the suburban neighborhood in which I grew up, but most of our clients have turned their backs on all that. How many women have asked me for English gardens? We are in New England, which is not the same as England at all, but perhaps wishing, and viburnum and hollyhocks, will make it so.
All the twin books say that it is a good thing that Alex has different friends than his brother has. But Alex has more of them, too, many more of them. His friends are other players in the soccer league, boys who plan to join the lacrosse team at the high school next year, friends from the sports camp where he refines his skills each summer. In July Alex will go to a place in Maine where all the boys wear uniform polo shirts and have mixers once a week with the girls who attend camp across the lake. The girls wear polo shirts, too. Theirs are pink, the boys' blue.
Max will go to the camp in Pennsylvania where he has learned to tie-dye, throw a pottery bowl, and play the drums. He is known there as Max the Mute, but not in a mean way, not the way he would be known by that name at the middle school. M & M, some of his camp friends call him. Max has two school friends, Zachary and Ezra, who are just what you would expect: shambling, graceless, brilliant boys who feel as though they've been plunked down on a planet to which they are not native. They come over, go into Max's room, and play computer games, staying on the lime-green side even when Alex is not home. Neither of them is much for eye contact. They are the kind of boys who may well grow up to invent something astonishing, to teach in a prestigious college, to cure cancer. Right now, they have hard lives.
Alex has an easy life. I try not to mother him any less for that. It's odd: Glen and I are conventional people, neither quirky nor creative, although we once had faint pretentions to both. Yet the child who feels the most like the cuckoo in the nest is the one who is most like us, bookended by his always eccentric brother and his confidently distinctive sister.
Ruby is going to a college summer program for promising writers. She leaves as soon as school is over. When she talks about it there is an odd strangulation to her voice, which sounds like excitement but is tinged with fear. "You can stop bragging now," I heard Rachel say, but that's a misreading based on Rachel's own anxieties. Sarah and Ruby are both excellent students; the list of colleges to which they will apply and to which they are likely to be admitted has been implicit since they were both reading in kindergarten while the others were trying to figure out the difference between orange and yellow. Rachel has struggled along behind them, sitting at our kitchen table as Sarah tried to explain quadratic equations and Ruby read John Donne's sonnets aloud. "I wasn't an A student, either, and I'm fine," says Rachel's mother, Sandy. She and Rachel's father divorced when their daughter was a toddler. Seeing college swim coaches at Sarah's meets, paging through the catalogs about writing programs on Ruby's desk, Rachel sees on the horizon the dissolution of the safe circle she has had in lieu of a happy family. She calls my daughter Opal, Garnet, Pearl, sometimes Amethyst. She calls me Mom. Sometimes late at night when I am cooking for Ruby and her friends, Rachel will put her arms around my middle and lay her head on my shoulder. She is one of those big jokey girls with broad shoulders and flushed fair skin who is always hiding a great sadness, as though it were an egg she carried around cupped in her hands, with their chewed nails and cuticles. It's a great weight for Ruby to carry, knowing that Rachel depends so on her affection.
The house where Alex's friend Ben lives is up a winding road from town, down a long drive, sitting in a bowl made between a sharp wooded ridge and a berm covered with creeping chrysanthemum. Ben's mother's name is Olivia, and she is actually English, so it makes perfect sense that she has never asked me to create an English garden around her stone house in Vermont. Her house sits surrounded by several large fir trees, with a hedge of burning bushes around its foundation, and little more. There is a small carriage house at the foot of the lawn, off to one side, wreathed in old privet. The whole thing looks exactly right, as though nature did it. So many of my clients want their yards to look like their living rooms, like carefully groomed and color-coordinated arrangements that are neither to be changed nor used. "They are such boys!" Olivia says emphatically as she opens the door. She is small and very fair, but her voice, with its precise consonants, is carrying. Her blond hair is held off her face with a barrette and she is wearing one of her husband's sweaters, so that, overwhelmed by gray wool, she looks a bit like a child herself.
"Oh, no. What did they do?"
"Nothing. They were perfectly lovely but they are so astonishingly male. Not a word about anything. How is school? Fine. How is your mother? Fine. When does your sister leave? I dunno. Like blood from the bloody stone. Quite another species, don't you agree? Or do you? My sister says her daughter drives her mad with her disapproval. Ruby doesn't seem a bit like that, I must say."
Olivia's house is pretty and unpretentious, with sports equipment in baskets in the corner of the den, the kitchen, and the front hall. Masks, balls, sticks. Her husband, Ted, is as American as she is British, with a big grin and a firm handshake and a long stride. She met him at Oxford when she was an undergraduate and he was a Rhodes scholar, and he still plays soccer with a men's league in town. They have four boys, Ben the eldest, and, unlike my children, Olivia's all seem to be cut from the same cloth. "Someday," she said to me once, "there will be five hulking men in the house, and one small woman." I'm not certain why Olivia and I are not friends. It's just one of those things that happen. "Tea?" she asks, and I say, "I would love t
o, but I have to get home and make dinner." Perhaps that's why we haven't become closer: We are on different schedules. So much of friendship is about being in the right place at the right time. That's how Kiernan's mother, Deborah, and I found each other, both young mothers of young children, both a little overwhelmed, a little lost. Alice is the friend who knew me when I was young and uncertain, Nancy the friend I acquired when I needed someone sure and straightforward and sane to a fault. I'm not sure I have room now for any more friends, even one as nice as Olivia. I'm vaguely sorry about that every time I see her.
Ruby is home working on her prom dress. She is now happy about her prospects. Somehow she had remembered a photograph of my mother in a long dress with a bright swirling psychedelic print. Somehow my mother had unearthed it and sent it up to us. Ruby has removed the cowl collar and created a scooped neckline, has made a sash from some bright pink satin. "An obi sash," she repeats when she describes it. A few days ago, all of this looked like wishful thinking, pieces spread across Ruby's desk and desk chair, her short story momentarily forgotten. Now I am beginning to see what it will look like.
"Your daughter has the oddest taste," my mother says on the phone. "She should go to design school."
My mother told me I should go to nursing school. I assume she had my best interests at heart. "What in the world can you do with an English-literature degree?" she had asked, a high school English teacher always scrabbling to make ends meet. She was so happy that Glen became an ophthalmologist. He had majored in philosophy, then decided to spend the rest of his life peering into other people's eyes. "The windows of the soul," said my mother. "It does make you wonder what we'll talk about at dinner," I'd replied. "What do you think writers talk about at dinner?" my mother asked, before Glen could say anything. "Or artists? Whether they're out of milk. Whether the basement's flooded. Don't delude yourself." Later, Glen said a little sulkily, "You can be an ophthalmologist and still read." He doesn't read. He watches the news and the History Channel. He leans forward to peer at the screen as they show the building of the pyramids, the bombing of Hiroshima, the construction of the railroads. "Come in here and take a look at this," he calls to the children, and as though they have actually flocked to him, hovering behind the wing chair, he points at the screen and provides his own narration: three thousand men, ten tons of dynamite, three decades, thousands of deaths. Somehow it all sounds the same to me no matter what the municipal project or the government initiative or the natural disaster.