Ruth Jones, 1955
Copyright © 1999, 2009 Hillary Johnson
All Rights Reserved
Not To Be Reproduced Without Permission from the Author
When I was a little girl living in Minneapolis in what was, by outward appearances, a perfect nuclear family of four, one of my mother’s favorite ways to begin a sentence was, “When I am rich and beautiful and live in New York…” When these events came to pass, she implied, our lives would be better. She never really expected such things to happen; the line was a demonstration of comical grandiosity. Nevertheless, solvency, living in a city of sophisticates instead of a town where the word toast was pronounced with two syllables, were among the most treasured of her fantasies. Her beauty was a given.
By some miracle, twenty years later, her daughter—the me that was some kind of Ruth-Hillary hybrid, my mother’s surrogate in the professional world, if you will—was living in New York and oftentimes well-heeled. Although one of my editors once affectionately noted that I looked like a cross between Jean Arthur and the young Clare Booth Luce, I was hardly one of those raving New York beauties as my mother might have been. I was a smartly attired female with pleasing symmetrical features, no more, no less. My childhood in Minneapolis was not forgotten, but I could draw no solid connection between it and the life I was leading then. Ruth was the only constant: My knowledge of her, my sense of her, was like a light breeze forever blowing in my direction.
In the summer of 1989, when she was sixty, and some seventeen years after my move to New York, Ruth called me one day and reported uncharacteristically that she had felt strangely ill for some time, that she found herself increasingly disenchanted with her husband of twenty-one years. He had become simply a “great toad” in her beautiful house who did nothing but sleep, eat, and watch television. She was loyal enough to note, however, that when she confronted him with her grim appraisal, her husband—unfazed—had responded, “I was a prince until you kissed me.” She told me she felt like spending the night in the Lakeland Motel—a real place but one that for practical purposes existed more in the minds of my mother and stepfather; it was where one or the other threatened to go on the rare occasions when they were mad at each other.
Maybe it was the hint that she might leave her husband, if only temporarily; maybe I was at last on my way to becoming a human being. I spontaneously invited her to come and stay with me for a while. “I will give you a party and introduce you to all my friends,” I heard myself saying. “We will spend our afternoons at the Met, and we will spend our mornings at the Whitney. I will buy you a hundred-dollar haircut from my guy on East Fifty-seventh Street. We’ll have blinis at the Russian Tea Room and tea at the Stanhope. Will you come?” I knew she was startled—after all my years away, this was her first invitation to visit me—and more than intrigued. “Thank you, darling. Let me think about it a day,” she said. By that, she meant, I believe, “You think about it.”
Ruth called me the following day. I could barely hear her. The street outside, Madison Avenue, had collapsed into itself, forming a crater that looked, from my vantage six stories up, like a great toothless grin. Con Edison had been jackhammering around the clock for days. The week before, Ruth had air-expressed me a pair of bright orange ear muffs designed for people who stand on airport tarmacs and direct jet traffic. I carried the phone as far away from the window as I could—eighteen feet—and leaned into my tiny kitchen. Ruth’s voice was measured and sad, as if she was about to say something that would hurt my feelings—and it had always caused her pain to have to hurt me. She would not be coming, she said. She had just received a diagnosis of esophageal cancer. The outline of this tumor had been overlooked by radiologists for quite some time, possibly two or three years. She allowed as how she was dying and could not be saved. She and her husband planned to spend the evening holding hands and crying, she told me. Did I have a friend—anyone—I could stay with that night? she asked. Trying desperately to help me find a way to avoid suffocating in my own stunned despair and terror, she employed a voice she had used when I was very young, the baby-soft voice with the New Orleans lilt, the voice of her own mother: “Darlin’, I don’t believe a girl should be alone when she realizes she’s about to lose her mamma.”
I felt sick; I was thirty-eight. I had nothing but a dented file-cabinet full of magazine clips, a few snapshots of men who had never loved me scattered about the one-bedroom apartment where I had lived entirely alone for twelve years, and now Ruth was dying. A radio station played big-band songs from the 1940s all night; I listened to them as if for the first time and imagined my mother, a beautiful teenager, dancing the lindy, her face a blaze of pleasure. By dawn, I was dizzy and disoriented. I had been crying for hours. It seemed as if my bed, indeed, the world’s surface, was slowly sinking, inch by uneven inch, into a stratum of lava. Perhaps we will all be dead soon, I thought with something approaching hope.
I went back then, to Minnie-No-Place.
