Every Last One Read Free

anything else of moment. Tears hover.
    Ruby is trying to find a dress for the prom. This has become her life’s work, along with a short story that I have not been permitted to read but which apparently may be the lead story in this year’s literary magazine. Ruby will edit the literary magazine next year. She is also president of a club that concerns itself with what they call the enslavement of the people of Tibet, and a member of the council that meets with the principal once a week to tell him whatis going on at school. “Oh, you’re Ruby Latham’s mother,” people sometimes say to me when I introduce myself. She is not what I envied in high school, the popular girl. She is something I’m not even sure existed then, the sure-footed girl. She gives the impression of being completely herself, and only a part of that impression is false.
    “No way,” I hear her groan from inside the dressing room, and yet another dress is thrown over the bar that holds the curtain. The bar looks as though it’s a shower bar, too. Molly’s husband, who is a builder, built her shop, but on the cheap, she always complains. “Anything that didn’t make it into another job, I got,” Molly says, but with that mock irritation that means it’s not a big deal.
    “Can I see?” I say.
    “There’s no point,” Ruby replies.
    Two weeks ago, Ruby went to look for a prom dress at the vintage store in the next town. The doodles on her desk suggested that she had hopes of finding one of those dresses my mother wore for important occasions when she herself was young: a snug bodice, a belted waist, a long full skirt. When I was a child, there was a trunk in the basement with my father’s name stenciled on it, but instead of old suits and books inside there were dresses of my mother’s that we wore to play princess. My mother didn’t care. She was usually upstairs at the kitchen table, drinking tea, correcting papers, looking up toward the yellowish fluorescent fixture, then down to scribble comments in the margins. “Oh, Mary Beth, I have no idea where those dresses got to,” my mother had said when I called her in Florida the other day to ask about them.
    Nancy told me with a faint air of superiority that Sarah bought the second dress she tried on. And Rachel said sadly last week that she’d ordered a dress from a catalog and didn’t really like it much. But Ruby is incapable of being either casual or resigned. I can see her feet beneath the curtain edge, the nails painted blue, the tinybaby toe curled in like a comma, just as it was when she was born. I was doing copyediting at home then, in the apartment in Chicago that we rented while Glen was finishing his ophthalmology training. I knew no one, did nothing but read textbook manuscripts and make careful marks in pencil, hieroglyphics of error. My left hand worked the ledge of my belly, back and forth, feeling toes beneath my skin, like pebbles under a layer of loose sand. You don’t feel so silly, so stupid, so sad, talking to yourself if there’s someone inside you that you can pretend you’re talking to instead.
    When Ruby came back from the shopping trip to the vintage store two weeks ago, her hands were empty and the big tapestry bag slung across her body looked flat and sad. The sound Ruby’s feet make on the stairs is the window of her soul. “She’s pissed,” Alex had said, sitting at the kitchen table. “Language,” I said mildly. “Pissed isn’t a curse,” he said. “It’s vulgar,” I replied, taking chicken out to defrost.
    My back is aching as Ruby tries on two more dresses. She will never find anything at Molly’s Closet. They’re pretty dresses, but they’re ordinary, made of ordinary fabrics. Ruby loves panne velvet, moiré taffeta. She appears in a beautiful cream-colored satiny dress. I’m pleased to realize that it is one I took off the rack.
    “Imagine this if I took off the sleeves and made the neck square. And maybe, I don’t know, added