Now, with the author himself about to arrive for his first student-teacher conference, he sat down with the excerpt for a third and hopefully final time.
Ruby could hear her mother, all the way upstairs in her bedroom and on the phone. She couldn’t hear the actual words, but she knew when Diandra was on one of her Psychic Hotline calls because the voice went up and got billowy, as if Diandra (or at least her psychic alias, Sister Dee Dee) were floating overhead, looking down at everything in the poor caller’s life and seeing all. When her mother’s voice was mid-range and her tone flat, Ruby could tell that Diandra was working for one of the off-site customer service lines she logged in to. And when it got low and breathy, it was the porn chat line that had been the soundtrack of most of the last couple of years of Ruby’s life.
Ruby was downstairs in the kitchen, retaking an at-home history test by her own special request to her teacher. The test had been on the Civil War up through the postwar reconstruction, and she’d gotten an answer wrong about what a carpetbagger was, and where the word came from. It was only a little thing, but it had been enough to kick her out of her usual spot at the top of the class. Naturally she’d asked for another fifteen questions.
Mr. Brown had tried to tell her the 94 on her original test wasn’t going to hurt her grade, but she refused to let it go.
“Ruby, you missed a question. It’s not the end of the world. Besides, for the rest of your life you’re going to remember what a carpetbagger is. That’s the whole point.”
It wasn’t the whole point. It wasn’t any part of the point. The point was to get an A in the class so she could argue her way out of the so-called Advanced American History junior spring class and take history at the community college instead, because that would help her get out of here and into college—hopefully with a scholarship, hopefully far, far away from this house. Not that she felt the least inclination to explain any of this to Mr. Brown. But she pleaded, and eventually he gave in.
“Okay. But a take-home test. Do it on your own time. Look stuff up.”
“I’ll do it tonight. And I promise, I absolutely will not look stuff up.”
He sighed and sat down to write another fifteen questions, just for her.
She was writing a longer than necessary response about the Ku Klux Klan when her mother came down the stairs and padded into the kitchen, phone wedged between her ear and her shoulder, already reaching for the refrigerator door.
“Honey, she’s close by. Right now. I can feel her.”
There was a pause. Her mother, apparently, was gathering information. Ruby tried to return to the Ku Klux Klan.
“Yes, she misses you, too. She’s watching over you. She wanted me to say something about … what is it, honey?”
Diandra was now standing before the open refrigerator. After a moment, she reached for a can of Diet Dr Pepper.
“A cat? Does a cat mean anything to you?”
Silence. Ruby looked down at her test sheet. She still had nine answers to go, but not with the psychic world filling the little kitchen.
“Yes, she said it was a tabby cat. She used the word ‘tabby.’ How’s the cat doing, honey?”
Ruby sat up straight against the little banquette. She was hungry, but she’d promised herself not to make any dinner until she’d done what she needed to do, and finished proving to him what she needed to prove. It was the tail end of their grocery week, and not a whole lot in the fridge, she’d checked, but there was a frozen pizza, and some green beans.
“Oh, that’s good to know. She’s so happy about that. Now honey, we’re almost at half an hour. Do you have more questions for me? Do you want me to stay on the line with you?”
Now Diandra was walking back to the staircase and Ruby watched her go. The house was so old. It had belonged to her grandparents, and her grandfather’s parents even farther back, and though there’d been changes, wallpaper and paint and a wall-to-wall carpet in the living room that was supposed to be beige, there was still old stenciling on the walls in some of the rooms. Around the inside of the front door, for example: a row of misshapen pineapples. Those pineapples had never made sense to Ruby, at least not until her class had gone on a day trip to some early American museum and she’d seen the exact same thing in one of the buildings there. Apparently, the pineapple symbolized hospitality, which made it about the last thing that belonged on the wall of their home, because Diandra’s entire life was the opposite of hospitality. She couldn’t even remember the last time somebody had stopped by with a misdelivered piece of mail, let alone for a cup of her mother’s terrible coffee.
Ruby returned to her test. The tabletop was sticky from that morning’s breakfast syrup, or maybe the mac and cheese of last night’s dinner, or maybe something her mother had eaten or done at the table while she’d been at school. The two of them never ate at the table together. Ruby declined, as much as was possible, to place her nutritional well-being in the hands of her mother, who evidently maintained her girlish physique—literally girlish: from the back, mother and daughter looked absurdly alike—through an apparent diet of celery sticks and Diet Dr Pepper. Diandra had stopped feeding her daughter around the time Ruby turned nine, which was also around the time Ruby had learned how to open a can of spaghetti for her own damn self.
Ironically, as the two of them grew ever more physically similar they had less and less to say to each other. Not that they’d ever enjoyed what you might call a loving mother-and-daughter relationship; Ruby could remember no bedtime cuddles or pretend tea parties, no indulgent birthdays or tinsel-strewn Christmas mornings, and never anything in the way of maternal advice or unsolicited affection, the kind she sometimes encountered in novels or Disney movies (usually right before the mother died or disappeared). Diandra seemed to skate by with the barest minimum of maternal duties, mainly those related to keeping Ruby alive and vaccinated, sheltered (if you could call this freezing house a source of shelter), and educated (if you could call her unambitious rural school a source of education). She seemed to want it all to be over every bit as fervently as Ruby herself did.
But she couldn’t want it as fervently as Ruby herself did. She couldn’t even come close.
The previous summer Ruby had gone to work for the bakery in town, off the books, of course. And then, that fall, she picked up a Sunday job for a neighbor, watching a couple of the younger kids while the rest of the family went to church. Half of whatever she made went into the house account for food and the occasional repair, but the other half Ruby wedged into an AP Chemistry textbook, which had to be the last place her mother would ever think to look for it. The chemistry had been a necessary slog the year before, a deal she’d made with her advisor to let her move ahead in her school’s bare-bones science track, and it hadn’t been easy to manage alongside her humanities classes at the community college, the independent French project, and of course her two jobs, but it was all part of the plan she had formed around the time she’d opened that first can of spaghetti. That plan was called Get-The-Fuck-Away-From-Here, and she’d never deviated from it for a single second. She was fifteen now and an eleventh grader, having already skipped her kindergarten year. In a couple of months she’d be able to apply to college. A year from now, she’d be gone for good.