“There isn’t a nose or mouth on that wooden model either,” Ruth said, “but you encouraged us to draw in faces.”
Again Ray squeezed my hand.
“That’s enough, young lady,” Mr. Peterford said. “It is the attitude of repose in this particular drawing that clearly made it something the Nelson boy would xerox.”
“Is that my fault?”
“Without the drawing there would be no problem.”
“So it’s my fault?”
“I invite you to realize the position this puts the school in and to assist us by drawing what Miss Ryan instructs the class to draw without making unnecessary additions.”
“Leonardo da Vinci drew cadavers,” Ruth said softly.
“Understood?”
“Yes,” said Ruth.
The stage doors opened and shut, and a moment later Ray and I could hear Ruth Connors crying. Ray mouthed the word go, and I moved to the end of the scaffold, dangling my foot over the side to find a hold.
That week Ray would kiss me by my locker. It didn’t happen up on the scaffold when he’d wanted it to. Our only kiss was like an accident – a beautiful gasoline rainbow.
I climbed down off the scaffold with my back to her. She didn’t move or hide, just looked at me when I turned around. She was sitting on a wooden crate near the back of the stage. A pair of old curtains hung to her left. She watched me walk toward her but didn’t wipe her eyes.
“Susie Salmon,” she said, just to confirm it. The possibility of my cutting first period and hiding backstage in the auditorium was, until that day, as remote as the smartest girl in our class being bawled out by the discipline officer.
I stood in front of her, hat in hand.
“That’s a stupid hat,” she said.
I lifted the jingle-bell cap and looked at it. “I know. My mom made it.”
“So you heard?”
“Can I see?”
Ruth unfolded the much-handled xerox and I stared.
Using a blue ballpoint pen, Brian Nelson had made an obscene hole where her legs were crossed. I recoiled and she watched me. I could see something flicker in her eyes, a private wondering, and then she leaned over and brought out a black leather sketchbook from her knapsack.
Inside, it was beautiful. Drawings of women mostly, but of animals and men too. I’d never seen anything like it before. Each page was covered in her drawings. I realized how subversive Ruth was then, not because she drew pictures of nude women that got misused by her peers, but because she was more talented than her teachers. She was the quietest kind of rebel. Helpless, really.
“You’re really good, Ruth,” I said.
“Thank you,” she said, and I kept looking through the pages of her book and drinking it in. I was both frightened and excited by what existed underneath the black line of the navel in those drawings – what my mother called the “baby-making machinery.”
I told Lindsey I’d never have one, and when I was ten I’d spent the better part of six months telling any adult who would listen that I intended on getting my tubes tied. I didn’t know what this meant, exactly, but I knew it was drastic, required surgery, and it made my father laugh out loud.
Ruth went from weird to special for me then. The drawings were so good that in that moment I forgot the rules of school, all the bells and whistles, which as kids we were supposed to respond to.
After the cornfield was roped off, searched, then abandoned, Ruth went walking there. She would wrap a large wool shawl of her grandmother’s around her under the ratty old peacoat of her father’s. Soon she noted that teachers in subjects besides gym didn’t report her if she cut. They were happy not to have her there: her intelligence made her a problem. It demanded attention and rushed their lesson plans forward.
And she began to take rides from her father in the mornings to avoid the bus. He left very early and brought his red metal, sloped-top lunchbox, which he had allowed her to pretend was a barn for her Barbies when she was little, and in which he now tucked bourbon. Before he let her out in the empty parking lot, he would stop his truck but keep the heater running.
“Going to be okay today?” he always asked.
Ruth nodded.
