If there were people
I'd say "Brother, here is my hand"
Please pull me out
[Memories In A Life] by [Water & Bodies]
Since the time I last saw her, bloated and icteric and slumped in the passenger seat of an ancient Astro van, Ruthie's name and presence had become synonymous with the taste of dread. From the moment when her lashing husband steered the van – which sagged with the weight of our dead father's motorcycle, Ruthie's belongings and my unrealized regret – around the corner, out of my seething sight, I became impervious to any further involvement in schemes to help or hurt her into submission. By that time, any option seemed like a futile crusade. It was a guaranteed heartbreak. Years of being Ruthie's big sister had taught me that.
I never told Daniel anything about my sister, not even her name. My Danish lover only knew of her existence, and that I had cut ties. I never spoke to him of having witnessed, up-close and personal, the indiscriminate catastrophes that personal demons can leave in their wake. Daniel didn't know about my refusal to participate in Ruthie's suffering; only by turning my back on her dying and on her deceptions could I shore up the strength needed to love him – in spite of his demons and the distance between us – believing in his future goodness. Years of loving Ruthie had taught me that, too.
Ruthie consumed life in excess. She was forever seeking more. She was deceptively competitive, with a [hopeless case] of wanderlust. Continually morphing, Ruthie's shadowed personality was so transparent and complex that any expression of genuine self-awareness from her could never be trusted. It was a tragedy that these heartbreaking moments of fleeting-accountability had to exist at all – these moments when her bright eyes like mine, eyes that could [move you] to tears, pooled with a deep understanding of the situation at hand. But soon she was back to the abuse, at her own hand or at the hands of others, back to the sensual seductions and hard trickery.
In our youth, Pops had custody of both me and Ruthie, but it wasn't often that she lived in our house. Ruthie spent her childhood days predominantly on the streets of downtown Portland, trading sex for food, shelter and hard drugs – or in delinquent prison and group homes buried deep in the woods.
When Ruthie was a young girl she would run away, often. Her last full year in public school was the
Like so many [Portland street kids], she spent her days squatting on the brick sections between the columns on the Yamhill Street side of [Pioneer Square], smoking cigarettes and hustling. Her homeless friends were tough and violent, and she kept the fact that she had a home a secret from them. She would sleep in doorways, in hotel rooms, at the end of dank hallways in sleazy apartment buildings, in the basement of someone's house – wherever she slept, it was never truly safe. Perhaps that was part of the attraction to her, the challenge of finding safety where there was none.
A regular place for her was a concrete room accessible via the parking garage under a hotel across the street from [Waterfront Park]. The space was a large rectangle, perhaps 250 square feet total, full of large rolls of damp, molding carpet and retired lobby furniture. The light was minimal, casting a strange, brown haze that did nothing to disguise the coils of human shit in one corner of the room. Ruthie had a small area in the back where she’d stash her things and sleep when she couldn't find someone to take her in for the night.
"I keep a toothbrush here, see?"
It was wrapped in a plastic bag, with toothpaste, a couple of short plastic straws, some tampons, and a small bottle of imitation [Elizabeth Taylor's Passion]. I saw crossword puzzle books and a ballpoint pen. I noticed that she had begun to tattoo a spiderweb on the skin between the thumb and index finger of her left hand with a needle and ink from the pen.
I also had a plastic bag. Inside my bag were royal blue sweatpants with the word "GENERALS" in white letters down the leg. I had just bought them at the [Grant High School] student store before meeting Ruthie downtown to wander the streets with her. I wanted to spend all my money beforehand, so I could be truthful when she inevitably asked if I had any to give.
"Do you want these, Ruthie? To keep you warm at night? You can hide them here."
I looked around the room for a place to stash the bag. The smell and claustrophobia was beginning to overwhelm me.
Ruthie laughed at me.
"Why the fuck would I want to wear those ugly things?" Ruthie shook her head. "No thanks. I'm doing fine on my own. You should worry about those zits of yours."
My mistake was being too obvious in my attempt to help her. It suggested that I might be better than her, when in Ruthie's mind her dismal existence was a better deal than living at home with me and Pops. On the street she could be deviant, be the lustful narcissist of her dreams. She preferred the underbelly of existence and ridiculed my silly high school experience.
But when Ruthie was caught dealing meth, the setting for our conversations changed. They became awkward chats with a forcibly sober Ruthie in a noisy common room with walls adorned with mantras and reminders. My weekends and some of my weeknights were suddenly filled up with resentment as I sat through hour after hour of family therapy. I was required to commit to my part in bringing Ruthie, rehabilitated and fragile, back into my home.
As was true when she lived on the street, Ruthie’s life in juvenile detention was very different from mine. I went to public school and worried about being too tall, having problematic skin, and not having a boyfriend. Ruthie's days were made up of GED classes and frequent 12-step meetings – along with hours of free time for reading true life crime novels and making new friends. She flaunted her enormous breasts, her curves, and her pretty, freckled face. Even though shelter and food were not an issue in lock-up, Ruthie was screwing plenty. Boys and girls. She liked to fuck.
After a three-year stretch full of commutes to [Hillcrest] for uneasy visits and painful family meetings, Ruthie was released, and she moved in with Pops and me. She was 18, with hair a natural dark chocolate again – not coal black, lice-infested, and ratted out, but shiny, curly and shoulder-length. Despite her hard lifestyle, Ruthie's adolescent skin had always been flawless; when she re-entered society as an adult her face was plump and dewy and translucent, thanks to our mother's Dutch skin and her months of detox. She looked like a brand new Ruthie, a smart, beautiful girl with everything she needed to make a life for herself. It went downhill from there.
Having Ruthie in the house, full-time, was difficult from the start. She found a job and a boyfriend almost immediately. She got a car and car insurance. Then came the rum and cokes, the weed, and the cocaine. We began to battle with words and premeditated violations of personal space. We criticized each other mercilessly. It was during this time that I met my son's father, and Ruthie had plenty to say about my audacity to caution her about life when I clearly was in my own abusive relationship. Pops stayed out of the tussle between his girls as much as possible. I stubbornly resisted Ruthie's attempts to manipulate me for reasons that were sometimes beyond my comprehension; perhaps her only reason was to exercise her lure and agility of control.
Our arguments became a pathetic routine. It was always me complaining about Ruthie's manipulations and pranks and her non-existent self-control, and Ruthie bemoaning my interference in her life and my refusal to accept her demons. Also, I was a prude and stuck-up and my life was boring.
"It's not just your life!" I'd hiss. "What you do affects me...and Pops. And mom! We're a family. Don't pull your shit and act like we're over-reacting when some asshole punches you in the face to get out of paying for his blow job."
Ruthie had gotten restless and started inviting strange men at bars to join her in the back seat of her dark brown Buick Skylark, and more than once she had ended up in the emergency room at the end of the trick. It was impossible to hide her swollen eyes and the butterfly bandage on her split lip from her long-time, good-for-her boyfriend, and so he left her. She began dating her Johns, promising them she'd stop having sex for money. But she didn't stop, and there was often violence when they found out.
"I can't change who I am, Shell. I'm doing the best I can."
Ruthie's "best" wasn't good enough. Her efforts, to me, seemed more like folly, like smoke and mirrors, like a con. Who in their right mind would want to return to a life in which a bacterial jungle of carpet and chairs under a waterfront hotel would be an alternative to coming home and sleeping in your own bed behind a locked door? But, once her juvenile delinquent status was revoked, she felt no obligation to stay away from the destruction she craved, the darkness that filled her up. She felt no obligation to sustain the plump-faced, dewy-skinned, healthy girl she’d become for only a brief moment in time. Instead, Ruthie became a barely-functioning drunk, and her life became a series of completely disastrous couplings and bridges spectacularly torched, full of dangerous enthusiasm for pleasure and hard jail time, utter helplessness and sucker-punched cruelty.
During the weeks following my first fateful trip to Denmark, I knew what kind of shape Ruthie was in. She was staying with my mother, where she [lay down] her infected body with its junkie’s disease – having been abandoned, once again, by the most recent of her brutalizing men, her husband Mark. I had also abandoned her, because I could no longer endure her cyclical descents into ruin, smeared with false moments of real hope. Instead I chose to embrace the demons of my lover, offering my experience of specialized empathy to someone else’s darkness.
But that also wasn’t an easy thing to do.
Daniel and I were beginning to argue a lot about communication, about being connected, and about space. I wanted emails; they were leisurely for me. I could write one over the course of several days, and they didn't require an immediate response. Sprinkle them with a text or two and I was sure to be happy. Daniel preferred the full technology experience: video, voice, file sharing. But he never had time for that. He was too busy teaching his students, taking care of his kids, and building the international film career that would someday make it possible for us to be together again.
At work I had stopped telling Lily anything related to Daniel – or to myself. I stopped going over to her house. Lily took my silence in stride, knowing my trust in her had been toppled and that I was enveloped in a slow-boiling panic about Daniel. Everyone who knew me could sense the shift in my attitude since my return. I had slowly become a shaking, starving shell of my former self, far thinner than I had ever been before. Lily watched me from arms-length. She wisely accepted my avoidance and took a light-hearted approach, expressing her concern by sending both me and Daniel a song via email:
Subject line: Dance you two!
[I've Got My Love To Keep Me Warm.mp3]
I developed a system of silent support, letting Daniel take the lead in our communications. He wasn't logging into the instant messenger in the mornings anymore, and he hadn't yet responded to the intense emails which I’d sent (and quickly regretted having sent). When he did check in with me, from the set, from the bus, from bed before falling asleep, I replied in my most supportive, loving voice. Funnily, in a conscientious effort to give Daniel all the space he wanted, I tended to reply with less words than him, as if to say "What you give me is more than enough."
But everything I did seemed to be a misstep. Before going to Denmark, I’d had all the confidence in the world. I believed that my lover's unconditional affection would be more than enough to squelch any nagging problems that stood in the way of our bliss. I could be myself with Daniel. I could let my insecurities seep into him, without fear of him leaving me. But now that was all I could think about. I could feel it happening, feel his tiredness at being pulled in so many directions at once, feel his struggling to accommodate my wish for him to digitally re-create our real-life closeness. I was hard-pressed to believe that Daniel still found me as irresistible as he had in the beginning of our [love long distance] – now that the insurmountable weight of our geographical albatross had been crushing us both for weeks.
To complicate matters, an old character had suddenly reappeared: an obsessive girl from Daniel's past, who I called “Monkey Sex”, had started communicating with Daniel again. He was worried about her, saying that she’d been acting erratically, and she wouldn't fully confide in him about what was going on. We argued via text messages about her manipulations. I wholeheartedly believed that I knew a thing or two about girls like her. My sister was an extreme variation of such a girl.
But in the same way that he’d ignored my earlier concerns about Lily’s precarious situation, Daniel now dismissed my warnings about Monkey's motivations. He even went on to chastise me for needing constant reassurance of his love. I retorted that keeping in touch was critical for our relationship. If we had been together in the same room during that particular argument, I imagine that I'd have thrown things at Daniel's head, or beaten his chest with my fists in frustration.
After a few hours, I calmed down and caught him online.
Me: listen, something you said this morning is not sitting right with me
Daniel: what
Me: is there a connection between monkey's messages to you and you saying I need reassurance?
Daniel: short answer - no
Me: did I do something you suspect set her off?
Daniel: of course not - she's just weird and I thought I'd just share with you.
Me: okay, and I digress...
I need ATTENTION
not reassurance
Daniel: are you ok?
Me: tired with a smathering of coffee jitters
and freshly cut bangs
yes, and relieved to have the movie research done
it was depressing
Daniel: yeah I know - I appreciate it
Me: hell, wasnt saying that to complain
I love picking thru data
about Monkey
Daniel: what about her
Me: about any girl
you can talk to me you know
boys...well, they have a lot to learn about girls like that, all girls really
Here, I took a chance, a [leap of faith]. I was well aware of Daniel's past, and his temptations. If our relationship was expected to survive, I needed to know the truth about his sexual frustrations. We had not had sex since I returned, and my asking for time for this brought more fighting. I missed him, and the smell of him in my skin was turning to an unfamiliar musk that I disliked. And I knew Daniel was playing the “lover” role in at least one of his current acting projects. With scores of women wanting to have him, especially now that his new movie role was thrusting him back into memories of that old life of his, of womanizing, Daniel was struggling. I knew it, because he was my love. And I knew he had some sort of hold over this girl – had charmed, and continued to charm, many girls.
Daniel: like that?
Me: "weird" ones
my point?
Daniel: gimme
Me: I know more than you think I do about the things you don't say
about the way you don't behave anymore.
And the kind of relationship we're having is the kind where I can hear about that stuff,
when you're ready. Just like I have stuff to tell you someday
knowing you won't hit the hills when I tell ya.
Understand?
Daniel: what is it you think you know?
or I don't know you know
Me: Oh jesus
I can read between the lines
Case in point, that text you got on the boat
from your ex-girlfriend's sister
Daniel: yes
Me: I knew, just from the way you were acting
that it was from a girl in your past
and it freaked you out
Daniel: cause she's a bitch and I'll have nothing to do with her - sent me back to unpleasantries and I didn't like that.
About Monkey
Me: yesssssssssssssssssss darling?
Daniel: She's just a kid and I'm worried about her - she turned to me for guidance and comfort, and now perhaps she's moving on - I don't agree that this is just another scheme.
She's not a psychopath and wouldn't do anything to hurt me.
Me: she wants to be your girlfriend doesn't she?
Daniel: she'd hurt herself tho - yes she does and I told her no.
and she respects that
Me: I never thot she'd hurt you
I do think she'd hurt herself to get your attention
Daniel: manipulate me then
she's like that - very abrupt. She also does things she's not thot through
she started counceling on my telling her. She's made progress and then now suddenly there's a backlash.
Listen I'm just ... you know, wondering what all that was about - I'm sure I'll hear from her again - she's driven by impulses. I care about her a lot and have done good for her - even though she likes to see us together at some point - which I have no interest in.
Me: I know you're worried babe
shes just trying to protect her heart by making some space
a good, clear-headed thing to do when faced with unrequieted love
Daniel: I'm sure you partly right, but other things have happened too.
Baby, the kids and I have a x-mas market to go to now.
Me: and I'm off to bed
Daniel: thank you for being mine
Me: I'm yours for as long as you'll have me darling, have merry fun
Daniel: and thanks for the awesome movie research
sleep tight baby
Me: i will, goodnight
Daniel: night
It was another conversation that left me trembling and emancipated at the end. A couple of days later [Daniel responded to my regrettable email with a clandestine warning].
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The Miracle in July is the work of author Michelle Anderson.
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