Chapter Eleven
St. Louis, Missouri
1980
Two years before the divorce, Benny made his second friend in St. Louis, a new boy at school.
“That’s great, sport!” Dad said from behind his newspaper at the breakfast table. Ruth knew when Dad was taking a sip of his coffee because one hand would disappear from the edge of the paper and the barrier would begin to droop. She’d hear the cup go back into its saucer, and then her dad would whip the paper upright again.
Breakfast was Ruth’s favorite meal of the day, least likely to be overcooked, most likely to be inoffensive. Ruth was able to make and butter her own toast, and she was allowed to salt and pepper her own eggs until they tasted the way she liked them.
“Hurry and eat so I can do your hair before the bus comes,” Mama said.
Ruth was nine, and her mother had stopped putting her hair in braids every single day, but she still insisted that Ruth wear it up, despite the fact that Jennifer, Jenny, and Kathy all wore their hair down and flowy, with pretty little barrettes on the sides.
“Well, they can have pretty little barrettes and they can have lice,” Mama said. “Meanwhile, my daughter will be clean.”
“That’s right, pumpkin,” Dad said, lowering the newspaper long enough to wink at Ruth. “Gotta wear it up.”
Ruth interpreted the wink to mean that her father didn’t actually care how she wore her hair, but he was eager to find innocuous opportunities to agree with Mama.
“Anyway, I was wondering if I could go ride bikes with him after school,” Benny said.
“Ride bikes with who?” Dad lowered the paper again.
“With the new kid. Eddie.”
Dad frowned, as if this were the first time he was hearing of Eddie.
“The boy I was just telling you about? Who just moved here?”
“Oh right.” Dad definitely did not remember. “Sure thing.”
Mama was standing at the sink rinsing the frying pan, but Ruth could see her disagreement before she even turned around. Her arms stopped moving in the soapy water. Her shoulders were still. She took in a deep breath and shook her head before she turned, drying her hands on her apron.
“More information, please,” she said to Benny, coming to stand beside him at the table. One hand on the back of Dad’s chair, the other perched on her hip.
Benny had already finished his scrambled eggs and was shoveling his second bowl of Life Cereal into his mouth because, as Ruth had observed, eleven-year-old boys almost never stopped eating. He swallowed before he answered.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, if you’re going to go out with this boy I don’t know, I need more information!” Mama said.
“What kind of information?”
“Last name, where does he live, where are you going, what time will you be home?”
“Oh.” Benny looked crestfallen. “I don’t know. I don’t know him that well yet. I can find out. But then.”
Dad folded his paper and set it on the edge of the table.
Ruth watched Benny try to work through a solution in his head, where he could get his mother the information she wanted but still go bike riding today, this afternoon, directly after school. This was 1980. Logistics were complicated and friends were in short supply. Benny couldn’t afford to miss an opportunity with his Huffy.
“Rafaela, it’s fine,” Dad said, snapping his last slice of bacon in half with one bite. “It’ll be good for him.”
Benny grinned up at Mama, his face a plea.
“And it will be good for me to have more information so I don’t have to worry. I’m not asking for much.” Mama turned to Benny. “Why don’t you stop by here for a snack after school so I can meet him? Then you can go out and ride your bikes.”
Benny tried to hide a cringe, but Ruth caught it. Their mother and father both missed it because they were preoccupied attempting to conceal their mutual irritation instead of looking at Benny. Ruth took another bite of her toast and waited to see what would happen next. Although she sometimes felt bad about her parents’ fights, they were also a reliable source of domestic intrigue, and she could feel this one building right in front of her.
“Just stay between the school and the park, and don’t go farther north than Midway Avenue,” Dad said, rolling his paper into a little tube. “Right, Rafaela? That way you’ll know where they are.”
“Peter.” Mama’s voice was full of reproach. “I don’t even know this child.”
“Ah, they’re just boys,” Dad said, standing up and draining the last of his coffee. “They’re all the same. Right, sport?”
Ruth looked at Benny, who was too smart to agree with their father at a moment like this. Benny lifted his spoon and worked a heap of Life Cereal into his mouth instead, before saying something completely unintelligible. Dad used the rolled-up paper to pat Benny and Ruth on the head, once each. Then he leaned in to kiss their mother, who stiffened. If her mother had leaned in even an inch, even a centimeter, Ruth might have felt some hope for them. Or if Mama had leaned back, even, away from Dad. Mightn’t that have been an indication of some feeling? It was her very stillness, the fact that Mama didn’t even bother to move away from him, that was the most damning thing of all. Like she took leave of her body just long enough to endure Dad’s kiss. Ruth watched Dad grab his keys and his briefcase from their spot by the back door. She could almost see her mother’s spirit alight and return after he was gone.
Ruth and her friends were on the swings behind the school that afternoon when her brother and the new kid came by in a cloud of bike dust. Benny flicked out his kickstand and left his bike upright at the edge of the playground, but the other boy stayed astride his mount for an extra minute or two doing tricks. He popped a wheelie, spun his handlebars around and around. Then he did a reverse wheelie and some bunny hops on his front tire. Ruth could feel her friends watching him.
“Hey, dweeb,” Benny said to Ruth.
“Hey, loser,” she responded.
Jenny was on the swing next to her, stretching and pumping her legs to increase her momentum. Ruth was twisting in circles, making her swing chains into a tight coil, stretching her toes down as far as they’d reach so the chain could reach maximum corkscrew above her. She stopped with one toe extended beneath so she could watch the new kid do his tricks. When he was done showing off, he dropped his bike in the dirt and followed Benny to the monkey bars. Jenny waited until he was looking before she jumped, arcing her body high into the air, the abandoned swing loose behind her, her blond hair winging out like a cape, arms and legs windmilling through the sky. Ruth leaned back and watched her fly, held her breath on the hard thump of the landing. But Jenny landed perfectly, two feet and one hand in the mulch before she moved seamlessly from crouch to handstand. Jenny dropped to her feet and then brushed the mulch from her hands, pretending not to notice the boys watching her. She stuck her hands in the back pockets of her Jordache jeans.
“?Mira, Evel Knievel!” the new boy said.
Ruth couldn’t be entirely sure. She thought that was what he said, and there was a small wiggle of feeling that came with the sound of it, something she couldn’t quite name. She leaned back until her body was parallel with the ground before removing the lock of her toe from the mulch. She arched her back while the swing spun her like a top. She loved the dizziness of it. She kept her eyes open and watched the upside-down world spin past.
The boys were talking quietly, but she couldn’t hear them because Kathy and Jennifer were doing their handclaps super loud. So Ruth waited for her swing to come to a stop and then she hopped off. She ambled dizzily over to the monkey bars, where Jenny was already hanging by her knees on one end. The new boy and her brother were standing on top, balancing on the two outside bars, and when Ruth started across, the boys pretended they were going to step on her fingers. She squealed, but raced across until she bumped into Jenny on the other side. She turned and raced back, Jenny giving her a push from the hips as she went. When she reached the far side, she climbed up the ladder to the top and leaned against the rail where her brother was still standing with his new friend.
“What’s your name?” she asked the boy.
He turned to look at her. “Eddie,” he said.
She gleaned nothing from this exchange. She leaned out, making her body into an acute angle: feet, bottom, hands.
“You just moved here?” she asked.
“Yes.”
There. There was something in that syllable. An almost j where a y should be. Actually, a whole yes where a yeah should be. She knew she hadn’t imagined it.
“Where’d you come from?” she asked.
He looked at Benny for a translation, and Benny obliged.
“?De dónde vienes?”
He looked back at Ruth. “De Puerto Rico,” he said.
“Oh.”
She slid her eyes back to Jenny, still hanging from her knees with her blond hair draping down like a yellow curtain, long enough that it almost swept the mulch beneath her. It was impossible to read Jenny’s upside-down facial expression. Eddie moved his body so he was sitting on the top of the monkey bars, and then he dropped down. Her brother followed. Ruth did another lap across and back, and then she watched while the boys got back on their bikes and took off.
The girls met up on the merry-go-round to discuss the new boy. It was Kathy’s turn to push, but she was taking her time, sitting on the edge and lazily pushing with one foot.
“That was cool what he could do with his bike,” Jennifer said.
“My brother can do way more than that,” Kathy said. “He can do jumps and spin around in the air.”
“What was his name?” Jenny asked.
“Eddie,” Ruth said.
“Yeah,” Jenny said. “That’s right.”
“Seems nice,” Jennifer said.
Kathy shrugged. “I dunno. Did you see how rusty his bike was? And his sneakers were totally busted. Who starts a new school with raggedy sneakers?”
Ruth wished she had looked more carefully at the sneakers, but she also couldn’t intuit what their condition had to do with anything.
“Well, I think he’s cute,” Jenny said.
“Ew, gross!” Kathy said, trying to suppress some twist of feeling from displaying itself across her mouth. Jennifer and Jenny weren’t looking, but Ruth examined Kathy’s face, and there was no hiding the pink that climbed up her cheeks. Kathy saw Ruth notice.
“Anyway,” Kathy said, jumping off the edge of the merry-go-round to begin pushing. “I think he’s, like, foreign or something.” She put an ugly slant on the word so they all understood the unspoken modifiers attached, and eyeballed Ruth when she said it.
Ruth froze. That small feeling she’d experienced as only a tingle now expanded within her. All in a rush, it spread to every part of her body, and it was made of many different pieces. It was both pride and shame, anger and joy, loss and leverage, alienation and belonging. It was nausea, and it was calcified by a tangential feeling that gathered up all the others and displaced them. This largest feeling was much easier to identify: fear.
Ruth wanted to say something. To agree with Kathy, to make some declaration that would illustrate her recognition that Eddie was indeed foreign . But the sentiment stuck in her mouth. Because Benny. Because the comfort of Eddie’s speech, familiar but distant, like awakening in the morning and feeling the remnants of a dream just at the edge of your mind, where you can feel its presence, a vague sense of it, and a prolonged precipice where it may return if you don’t try too hard, if you don’t lift your head from the pillow and sit up. The trick is in a stillness of mind. You can’t want it too much, can’t look too directly, can’t beckon it. With patience and breath, the details may return in sharp relief. The access point may be a single element, a door kicked open, and the sudden unspooling of the whole thing at once. ?Coquí! Or just as often, poof! The door is sealed shut. All is irretrievable, gone.
Ruth held herself very still on the metal deck of the merry-go-round. The sun ducked behind a shelf of clouds, and she zipped her red hoodie all the way up to her chin.
Ruth went home early, told her friends she didn’t feel well.
Dad was still at work, and Mama was playing solitaire at the kitchen table, a mug of coffee at her elbow. Ruth dropped her bag by the kitchen door.
“Hang it up,” Mama said without looking up from her card game.
Ruth lifted the backpack onto her seat at the table instead, unzipped it, and pulled out her homework folder and pencil case. Then she went and hung the bag on its hook beside the back door.
“How was your day?” Mama asked.
“Good,” Ruth said.
“You’re home early.” Now she looked up, and Ruth stood close to her mother, leaned against her, and kissed her face. Mama pulled her chair back a few inches so Ruth could squeeze onto her lap.
“I didn’t feel well,” she said, picking up Mama’s ten of spades, and placing it on top of its jack.
“Oh?” Mama wrapped a cool hand across Ruth’s forehead, checking for fever.
Mama leaned into her back then, folded her arms around Ruth’s waist, and kissed the nape of her neck. Ruth felt herself loosen in her mother’s arms. She felt that new mantle of confusion rolling away. She tipped her head back onto her mama’s shoulder.
“Okay, mi amor?”
Mi amor . Only when they were alone was Ruth still mi amor. The tears came hot and fast, and Ruth didn’t understand them, didn’t know their source exactly, even though it was clear they had arrived with Eddie. She didn’t really think that boy was to blame.
“Oh.” Mama held her tighter, and rocked them both lightly in the kitchen seat. “Shh, shh. It’s okay,” her mother hummed. “What happened? Did something happen?”
Ruth took a deep breath and sat up. She wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her red hoodie. “No, nothing happened. Not really. I don’t know. I just don’t feel good.”
Mama turned Ruth on her lap so she could investigate her face for the truth. A few seconds passed before her mother determined that Ruth was telling the truth, as best she could.
“Okay,” Mama said, pushing her off her lap and standing up from her card game. “Sit.”
Ruth pulled out her own chair and sat behind her homework folder while Mama got up and pulled a Snoopy glass out of the cabinet, filled it with Hawaiian Punch. She set it down in front of Ruth and then sat back down beside her. She picked up her eight of diamonds run and moved it onto the nine.
“You have much homework tonight?”
“Just math,” Ruth said.
She did the first problem and then pulled her sharpener out of her pencil case. “I met Benny’s new friend,” she said. Totally casually, while she stuck the point of her already-sharp pencil into the little black gadget and began to turn.
“Oh?” Her mother matched her nonchalance. “Was he nice?”
Ruth shrugged. “I guess.”
A delicate curl of wood peeled from her pencil and landed on her workbook. She did two more math problems. They were learning long division, and Ruth didn’t care for the numbers, but she liked drawing the little garage with its roof and door.
“He’s from Puerto Rico,” Ruth said quietly.
“Oh.” Mama held the draw deck in her left hand, her fingernails painted the faintest pink. The inside of a seashell. The soft glow of a cloud during a sun-shower. The color of their little house in Santurce, their first house. Home.
“Where is he from, in Puerto Rico?”
Ruth shrugged again. “I don’t know.” She traced a little squiggle in the margin of her math workbook.
Mama drew three more cards from the top of her pile. Ruth could feel the next question brewing, and she knew it was the big one. No way to disguise it, despite the quiet hush of her mother’s voice.
“Is he white?”
There it was.
Another shrug. “I guess.” Ever since that day in the country club, Ruth had lost her ability to distinguish who was considered white. She also didn’t understand why it mattered, but there was no question that it mattered. It mattered in Puerto Rico and it mattered even more here. “Like us, you know? Like, in between.”
Her mother nodded. Relief in her posture. And the swamp of Ruth’s bad feelings returned with a rush. Deep down she knew that Benny had withheld this information on purpose, that there was some reason he hadn’t told his parents or sister that the new kid hadn’t just moved here, but that he’d moved here from Puerto Rico. Ruth didn’t understand what Kathy saw when she looked at Eddie or why, or what her brother was hiding from Mama or why, but when it came to matters of loyalty, Benny was no match for Mama. They weren’t even in the same universe. So in that way, it didn’t really feel like betrayal.
“He doesn’t really speak English, though,” Ruth reported.
Mama took a deep breath. “Oh dear,” she said.
Dinner that night was intense, and not only because Mama made tuna noodle casserole (an abomination in four ingredients: a can of unseasoned tuna, a can of condensed soup, a scrum of wet noodles, and a sad population of flaccid Velveeta). Even Dad had a hard time getting it down, but Benny finished his plate and went for seconds. It was unthinkable.
Mama swirled the long noodles onto her fork, but didn’t lift it to her mouth. “Did you have fun with your new friend today?” she asked Benny.
“Yeah.” Benny nodded. There was a glob of Velveeta on the side of his plate that looked for all the world like something he’d just liberated from his sinuses.
Ruth still felt queasy from earlier.
“Not hungry, sweet pea?” Dad asked.
Ruth shook her head.
“She’s not feeling well,” Mama said, reaching over to tuck an escaped curl behind Ruth’s ear. Mama stroked her cheek, and Ruth felt pleased that her wellness was the one topic substantial enough to move Mama to deliver a spoken sentence directly to her father, rather than into the void around him.
“What’s the matter, pumpkin?” Dad asked.
“I don’t know. Just a tummy ache.”
Dad looked down at his plate and nodded in solidarity. “Just try a couple bites,” he said, then turned his attention to Benny as a way of offering her a reprieve, she thought.
Ruth picked up her fork, but without conviction.
“So what did you and your new friend get up to?” Dad asked.
“We just rode around,” Benny said. “We stopped at the playground but then we went over to the tennis courts on Wooster Place, and nobody was playing, so we rode bikes over there.”
“What, on the tennis courts?”
“Yeah, because Eddie has a BMX bike and he does all these tricks and stuff. He can do a wheelie with no hands. And he can keep it going, like, forever, without even moving really. He just pushes the pedals back and forth and the bike barely moves and he just stays up like that.”
“Wow,” Dad said. “Can he teach you any of that stuff?”
“Yeah, well, some of them you need a trick bike for,” Benny said. “But he showed me how to do a regular wheelie.”
“That is great,” Dad said. “Can you show me after dinner?”
“Yeah.” Benny grinned. “He can do a kind of handstand on his handlebars, too, but I don’t think I can do that one.” It was the most Ruth ever remembered Benny talking at dinner.
“I don’t even think I could do a handstand on the carpet,” Dad said. “Never mind on a bike!”
“Yeah, it was so cool. And then after we left the tennis courts we went to 7–Eleven and he bought a Slurpee.” Benny paused long enough to register Mama’s disapproval. “Don’t worry, Mama, I didn’t have one because I didn’t want to spoil my dinner. I didn’t have any money, anyway. Look, look at my tongue.” He stuck out his tongue for their mother’s inspection because everyone knew you couldn’t sneak a Slurpee.
“Your father said not to go north of Midway.”
“Oh.”
“Don’t be such a stickler, Rafaela,” Dad said. “The 7–Eleven is on Midway.”
“Technically, it’s on Upton Street.” Benny shoved another bite of tuna noodle casserole into his mouth.
“It’s on the corner,” Dad said.
“On the north corner,” Mama said, “and Benny, I do not want you crossing that major intersection on your bike!”
“I didn’t, Mama, we walked them across,” Benny said. “I promise.”
The information wasn’t sufficient to walk Mama back from the glare she had trained on him. Dad took a bite of the tuna noodle casserole, and Ruth watched the experience of it wash over his face. Mama stood up from the table, walked to the counter, opened a drawer. She pulled out a box of Saran Wrap and brought it over to the table where she unrolled a piece and fitted it over the edges of Ruth’s plate. Ruth had never felt more love for her mother than in that moment of deliverance.
“Is your homework all done?” Mama asked.
Ruth nodded.
“Okay, sweetie,” she said. “You’re excused. Why don’t you go lie down on the couch in the den? I’ll bring you an afghan.”
“Thanks, Mama,” Ruth said.
She stood slowly from her chair, stretched, and yawned. She didn’t want to eat, but she also wasn’t ready to be alone. She needed the comfort of her family around her. Ruth stopped by her dad’s chair on the way out and leaned her chin on his shoulder. He kissed her cheek. Mama lifted Ruth’s covered plate from the table and deposited it in the fridge.
“So where is your friend from, in Puerto Rico?” Mama asked, returning to her seat.
“What?” Benny snapped his eyes at Ruth, who straightened up from Dad’s shoulder and turned for the door.
“I hear he’s Puerto Rican.”
“Yeah,” Benny mumbled.
“Oh, that’s great!” Dad’s voice filled the room.
Ruth stood just outside the doorway behind the wall, listening. There was a diagonal line on the carpet where the light from the kitchen was cut from the room. Ruth stood in shadow.
“Funny you didn’t mention that first thing!” Dad said.
Another mumble from Benny.
“Well, we’d like to meet him right away,” Mama said.
“Absolutely,” Dad agreed.
How seldom they agreed on anything, how unusual it was for this confluence of opinions to occur at her family’s dinner table, Ruth realized. She understood, too, that her parents’ reasons for wanting to meet the new boy were likely very different. Dad would be eager to meet a new Puerto Rican family so he could socialize and drink rum and impress them with his Spanish. He’d be hopeful that a friendship might evolve there not only for Benny but also for Mama. But Mama’s reasons would not be social in the least. She’d be interested only in reconnaissance; she’d want to assess this boy and his family. To make sure they were the right kind of Puerto Ricans for Benny to befriend. It didn’t really matter though, because the rare convergence of her parents’ desires meant there would be no escape for Benny regardless. They were going to meet this kid.
“Maybe we should invite the whole family,” Dad said, and Ruth could almost feel Benny’s discomfort radiating through the wall. She pressed her cheek against the wood paneling there. “What do you say, Rafaela? Be fun, right?”
“Yes, I think it’s a wonderful idea.”
Benny had gone quiet, and Ruth could hear only the scraping of forks on plates, and then a moment later, a scraping of chair legs on the tile floor, and a firm but quiet declaration from her father.
“I can’t eat this, Rafaela.”