“Time to go,” Ruth reminded him. She was completely unprepared for him to hit her. With left-handers, there’s always something you don’t see coming.
Scott hit her only once, but it was a solid shot. One second he was holding his left ear with his left hand; then he was out of the bed, facing her. He caught Ruth on her right cheekbone with a straight left that she never saw. As she lay on the rug, approximately where she’d seen Hannah’s open suitcase, Ruth realized that Hannah had been right again: Ruth’s alleged instincts for detecting a man’s capacity for violence against women, even on the very first date, were not the instincts she’d thought she had. Hannah had told her she’d just been lucky. (“You just haven’t had that date,” Hannah had warned her.) Now she had.
Ruth let the room stop spinning before she tried to move. Again she thought she was bleeding, but it was only the jelly that Scott had got on his left hand when he’d touched his left ear.
She lay in a fetal position, her knees pulled up to her chest. The skin over her right cheekbone felt stretched too tightly, and she sensed an unnatural warmth on her face. When she blinked her eyes, she saw stars, but when she held her eyes open, the stars disappeared after a few seconds.
She was locked in a closet again. Not since childhood had she been this afraid. She couldn’t see Scott Saunders, but she called to him. “I’ll get you your clothes,” she told him. “They’re still in the dryer.”
“I know where the dryer is,” he said sullenly. As if she were not part of her body, she saw him step over the spot where she lay on the rug. She heard the stairs creak as he went down them.
When she got up, she was momentarily dizzy; the feeling that she might throw up lasted longer. She carried the sick-to-her-stomach feeling downstairs, where she walked directly through the dining room to the darkened terrace. The cool night air instantly revived her. Indian Summer is over, she thought, dipping the toes of one foot in the pool; the silky-smooth water was warmer than the air.
Later she would go in the pool, but right now she didn’t want to be naked. She found her old squash clothes on the deck near the outdoor shower; they were damp with cold sweat and dew—the T-shirt made her shiver. She didn’t bother with her underpants, her bra, or her socks. Just the T-shirt, her shorts, and her shoes would suffice. She stretched her sore right shoulder. Her shoulder would suffice, too.
Scott Saunders’s squash racquet was leaning—handle up, racquet head down—against the outdoor shower stall. It was too heavy a racquet for her, and the grip was too big for her hand. But it wasn’t as if she intended to play a whole match with it. It’ll be fine, Ruth thought, going back inside the house.
She found Scott in the laundry room. He’d not bothered to put on his jock. He’d pulled on his shorts and stuck the jock in his right front pocket; he’d put his socks in the left front pocket. He’d put on his shoes, but he’d left them unlaced. He was pulling his T-shirt over his head when Ruth caught him with a low backhand that crumpled his right knee. Scott managed to pop his head through the head hole in his T-shirt, maybe a half-second before Ruth struck him full in the face with a rising forehand. He covered his face with his hands, but Ruth had turned the racquet head sideways. She slashed at his elbows—one backhand, one forehand, both elbows. His arms were numb; he couldn’t raise his arms to protect his face. He was already bleeding over one eyebrow. She took two overhead shots, at both his collarbones—snapping several strings on the racquet face with the first blow, and completely separating the racquet head from the handle with the second.
The handle was still a pretty effective weapon. She kept slashing at him, hitting him wherever he exposed himself. He tried to crawl out of the laundry room on all fours, but his right knee wouldn’t support his weight and his left collarbone was broken. Therefore, Scott couldn’t crawl. All the time she was hitting him, Ruth repeated the scores of their squash games—a fairly humiliating litany: “Fifteen–eight, fifteen–six, fifteen–nine, fifteen–five, fifteen– one !”
When Sco
tt lay in a collapsed position of lopsided prayer, with his hands hiding his face, Ruth stopped hitting him. Although she didn’t help him, she let him get to his feet. His damaged right knee gave him a jolting limp, which doubtless caused him considerable pain in his broken left collarbone. The cut over his eyebrow was a real bleeder. At a safe distance, Ruth followed Scott to his car. She still held his racquet handle; it felt about the right weight for her, now that the racquet head was gone.
She had a passing concern for Scott’s right knee, but only if it might affect his driving. Then she saw that he drove a car with automatic transmission; he could operate the accelerator and the brake with his left foot, if he had to. It depressed her that she had almost as much contempt for a man who drove a car with automatic transmission as she did for a man who hit women.
God, look at me—I’m my father’s child! Ruth thought.
After Scott had gone, Ruth found the head of his racquet in the laundry room; she threw it in the trash, together with what was left of the racquet handle. Then she started a load of laundry—just her squash gear and some underwear, and the towels that she and Scott had used. She mainly wanted to hear the washing machine; the sound of it running was reassuring to her. The empty house was too quiet.
Next she drank nearly a quart of water, and—naked again—carried a clean towel and two ice packs out to the pool. She took a long, hot shower in the outdoor stall, soaping herself twice and washing her hair twice, too, and then she sat on the bottom step in the shallow end. She put one ice pack on her right shoulder and held the other ice pack against her face, covering her cheekbone and right eye. Ruth had avoided looking in a mirror, but she could tell that her cheekbone and her eye were swollen; her right eye wouldn’t open wider than a slit. In the morning, the eye would be completely closed.
After the hot shower, the pool felt cold at first, but the water was silky-smooth and much warmer than the night air. It was a clear night; there must have been a million stars. Ruth hoped it would be as clear the next night, when she had to fly to Europe. But she was too tired to think more about her trip than that; she let the ice numb her.
She was sitting so still that a small frog swam right up to her; she cupped it in her hand. She reached out and let the frog go on the deck, where it hopped away. Eventually, the chlorine would have killed it. Then Ruth rubbed her hand under the water until the sensation of the frog’s slipperiness was gone; the slime had reminded her of her too-recent experiences with the lubricating jelly.
When she heard the washing machine stop, she got out of the pool and transferred her wet laundry to the dryer. She went to bed in her own room, and lay in her clean sheets, listening to the comfortingly familiar tap or click of something spinning around and around in the dryer.
But later, when she had to get out of bed to go to the bathroom, it hurt her to pee, and she thought about the unfamiliar place—far inside her—where Scott Saunders had poked her. It also hurt there. The latter pain was not sharp. It was an ache, like the onset of her cramps— only it wasn’t time for her cramps, and it wasn’t a place where she’d ever felt pain before.
In the morning, she called Allan before he left for the office.
“Would you love me any less if I gave up squash?” Ruth asked him. “I don’t think I’ve got many more games in me—that is, not after I beat my father.”
“Of course I wouldn’t love you any less,” Allan told her.
“You’re too good for me,” she warned him.
“I told you I loved you,” he said.
God, he really must love me! Ruth thought. But all she said was: “I’ll call you again, from the airport.”
Ruth had examined the fingerprint bruises on her breasts; there were fingerprint and thumbprint bruises on her hips and buttocks, too, but Ruth couldn’t see all of them because she could see only out of her left eye. She still refused to look at her face in a mirror. She knew without looking that she should continue to put ice on her right eye, which she did. Her right shoulder was stiff and sore, but she was tired of icing her shoulder. Besides, she had things to do. She’d just finished packing when her father came home.
“My God, Ruthie—who hit you?”
“It’s just a squash injury,” she lied.