13.
Ruby’s mother worked long, hard hours cleaning hotel rooms, which was despicable work, full of disgusting things. Desirée
wore a little canvas apron that held the tools of her trade—sponges and scrubbers, dustcloths, and tweezers for hair clots—and
as the day went on, the stuff she collected went into the empty pockets, so by nightfall she was a walking treasure chest.
From her earliest days, Ruby remembered, she’d reach for her mother, her calm, tired face so high above her, and Desirée would
kneel—painfully, as the years went on—and show her, one by one, all the items she had collected from the rooms she had cleaned
that day.
A bag of unopened candies (she was not so foolish as to eat any opened food, after all she had seen). A fancy candle, the
wick still white and proud. Look, baby girl. Ever seen one of these? This is an Indian Head nickel. Here, a family left this, and into Ruby’s small, warm palm came her first yo-yo.
Every day started and ended with her mother, the beautiful Desirée, who left their room before dawn wearing her apron, some
of the pockets aching with want, and dropped her with neighbors she never remembered because all she thought about was her
mother, and by nightfall, Desirée brought the world home.
On Desirée’s rare days off, she and Ruby played. Desirée taught her to rub a balloon over her head to make her hair stand up, and she did the same, and then they stood in the middle of the room and pretended that the electricity would take them to the stars.
On other days, they walked to the downtown library. There were entire rooms full of books, and a children’s section with the
kind of rugs kids like: soft and firm, with cheerful bright colors and patterns that make sense. Today, even the rattle of
water in a ceramic sink in a dusty, airless bathroom could bring back memories of those days to Ruby.
They took grocery bags from the Piggly Wiggly, and Desirée let her daughter fill her bag with as many books as she wanted.
In those days, the children’s stories were real stories, full of intrigue, death, and romance: Crazy Weather by Charles McNichols, Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls.
Ruby and Desirée walked home, talking, stopping for a hot dog at a stand, Ruby grimacing as her mother ate hers with mustard
and kraut, and she would stand there, mesmerized, and watch her, her mother’s hair blowing against a sunlit sky, the striped
cart umbrella behind her, the people passing in what felt like bright costumes to her, from straightlaced suits to bell bottoms,
the skid row alcoholics begging for change, the street musicians banging drums on the corners.
“Do you want a bite of mine?” Desirée would tease, and the little girl would shake her head, quick, because she liked her
dog plain, and had already finished it, in three bites.
It never occurred to her that her mother was still a child when Ruby was born, and that by the time she was eight, Desirée
was only twenty-three.
“Do you want to move?” Ruby’s mother kept asking her.
They still lived in Old Town, in a larger but decayed apartment above skid row, and the place had a claw-foot tub that felt massive to little Ruby, and linoleum that peeled in the corners.
Ruby had found pennies in the back of a cupboard, and the closet was bigger than many modern kitchens.
On one shelf, her mother had placed a small blue bottle, and the sun caught it when the rays came in through the lead-glass windows.
Ruby loved it there. She didn’t want to move. This was her poorhouse, and it was better, different, and her mom agreed.
Here they had space, and movement. Desirée had risen through the ranks of hotel cleaners, and now supervised other women like
her. She had a deft hand with other women. She knew to be not their friend but their boss. Other women liked that. The secret
to sisterhood was to know whose side you were on, and friends could be malicious. They sacrificed each other every time a
man caught their eye. If a woman was working to support a husband who spent all his money on drink, well, that was fine. If
she was pretending to be a widow with a fake wedding band washed with silver from the local pawn shop, sure, why not. Desirée
never trafficked in gossip because gossip is the way men have trained women against each other, and she knew it.
In the old warehouse district along the Willamette River, Ruby ran as free as a bird. She played among the breweries polluting
the air with the rich, redolent smell of hops. She made friends with men playing dice and whist outside corner shops. She
learned to weave a cane chair from an old man without legs on her floor of their building. She pried windows open with butter
knives for old ladies. She felt like her legs were loose here. She was free.
“No,” she told her mother, time and again, when she asked if Ruby was interested in the beyond: a circular place where the
kids all looked the same, and wore starched clothes like the Brady Bunch, and did the same things, like attended the same school, and had men with faces like butchers for dads.
Here in Old Town, the kids who lived in the old apartment buildings went to whatever school they could, usually riding the
city bus, and in the summers they earned extra money by taking the rickety berry bus to the fields outside of town, where
farmers paid them a quarter a flat, and she ate berries and felt the fine sun on her face. She could discover the world here,
and the world was wonderful: It was big and actually without danger. Of course, there were creeps and cretins, as her mother
cautioned her: Desirée had told her about the men where she had grown up, always stealing her nose, but Ruby knew about them—and
she knew how to run.
She could run here.