Ten

Ruth

There were few pictures around the house of Ruth’s years at Yale, little evidence it ever happened except for Ruth’s diploma. Whenever former classmates emailed old college photos, she cringed at the bowl-shaped mushroom hairstyles and the tracksuits they used to rock in loud colors. Students on campus wore oversized sweaters and slouchy, baggy pants. The only saving grace of late-nineties fashions had been that they helped her hide the leftover pooch she carried in the months after the birth of her baby.

When she got to Yale, no one knew her. The handful of kids from Ganton who did go to college stayed in-state. Her little corner of Indiana tethered Ruth to her past, to the possibility of questions she couldn’t answer, forcing her to lie. But in Connecticut she could be somebody else. Start over. Create a new life.

Freshman year, she roomed with Emily Fontaine, a white girl from Greenwich. Ruth hadn’t spent long periods of time with anyone white except for Lena back home. But Ruth soon realized that she didn’t count. Lena wasn’t like the white people she met at Yale.

Emily was petite, with tousled brown hair that she must have intentionally mussed to give it that careless look. She walked with her toes pointed outward, a sign that she’d studied dance. No one would consider her pretty in the purest sense of the word, but she had enough money to manufacture the illusion of beauty and make it look effortless.

The daughter of an anesthesiologist and a hedge fund manager, Emily came from money, like most of Ruth’s classmates. Two older brothers had followed in her father’s footsteps and worked on Wall Street. Ruth and Emily exchanged these obligatory, polite details when they first met outside their dorm and then had to begin negotiating how to fit each of their belongings into the cramped space of one dorm room.

After showering in the mornings, Emily would return to their room and flip her drenched hair forward and back, spraying water on everything within a two-foot radius.

“It’s so weird. I never see you wash your hair,” Emily said from time to time with practiced indifference that irked Ruth even more than if the girl had come right out and said, I think Black people are dirty.

Ruth could have told her she visited a salon in New Haven once a week for a shampoo and blow dry or roller set. But that would have led to a discussion on why some Black girls washed their hair once every week or, God forbid, two weeks, only serving to reinforce misperceptions. Ruth said nothing and just glared as Emily moved through the room with proprietorship as if it were her room and not theirs.

When Emily’s friends visited, they sat on Ruth’s bed and plied her with questions: Where are you from? What do your parents do? Where do you summer? She’d never heard anyone use summer as a verb. And it wasn’t just the white kids who were elitist. Even the Black kids came off bougie as hell, recounting tales of their summers in the Hamptons and Links cotillions back home. Soon she realized this was how people distinguished themselves, figured out their place in the socioeconomic order of things.

These kids knew nothing about the real world. She wanted to say, I created a life over the summer, thank you very much. She wanted to tell them she had carried another human being inside her body, nourishing and growing it for nine months. Then she pushed it out into the world to live on its own.

She wanted to tell them that Papa had done backbreaking labor in a plant until he couldn’t work anymore. That her grandmother had to button his shirts, feed him toast small bite by small bite, and lift him onto the toilet those last few months. When the bills piled up, Mama had to go back to work again at the Majestic Inn, picking up used condoms and cleaning beer-soaked sheets left behind by guests. Ruth had learned early on not to judge people by how they made their money as long as it was an honest living.

Just survive and make it through these four years. That’s what Ruth told herself to stay sane. She attended the white keg parties and got her buzz on there first. Then she settled in for the night at the Black Greek ones where bodies pressed against each other in the darkness, sweat and weed thickening the air. Whenever Ginuwine’s “Pony” came on, she’d be grinding in a corner with boys she’d seen on the yard or with townies, the local guys who infiltrated the campus’s party scene. But if “Killing Me Softly” played in the DJ’s rotation, she had to leave the party in tears because it reminded her too much of Ronald and what could have been. No one at Yale knew about him or the legacy he’d left in Ruth’s life.

One of those tearful nights she came back to the dorm buzzed and saw Emily emerge from the communal shower naked. Smooth as wax paper, her flat stomach shimmering with fresh dew.

Ruth stared and, without thinking, said, “You are so beautiful.”

Obviously mortified, Emily grabbed a ratty T-shirt from the bathroom counter and frantically slipped it over her head. “Oh my God, you’re weirding me out right now. I’m flattered, but girls aren’t my thing. Nothing personal. Really.”

Ruth blinked, embarrassed she’d been so spontaneous. She didn’t really think Emily was beautiful. Why had she said that? It was just that the girl’s stomach transfixed her. Looking away, Ruth scratched her own midsection through her nightshirt, thinking of what lay underneath, the dimpling of flabby flesh and the stretch marks that itched constantly. Then she glared at her roommate.

“Look, I was just being nice. I don’t get down like that, okay? And if I did, you wouldn’t be my type. So, get over yourself.” Nothing between them flowed smooth after that. They shared meager square footage and breathed the same air, nothing more.