“Who were you playing?” her father asked.
“Mostly myself,” she told him.
“Ruthie, Ruthie . . .” her father said. He looked tired. He didn’t look seventy-seven, but Ruth decided that he looked like someone in his sixties. She loved the smooth backs of his small, square hands. Ruth found herself staring at the backs of his hands, because she couldn’t look him in the eye—not with her swollen-shut right eye, anyway. “Ruthie, I’m sorry,” her father began. “About Hannah . . .”
“I don’t want to hear about it, Daddy,” Ruth told him. “You can’t keep your pecker in your pants, as they say—it’s the same old story.”
“But Hannah, Ruthie . . .” her father tried to say.
“I don’t even want to hear her name,” Ruth told him.
“Okay, Ruthie.”
She couldn’t stand to see how sheepish he was; she already knew he loved her more than he loved anyone else. Worse, Ruth knew that she loved him, too; she loved him more than she loved Allan, and certainly more than she loved Hannah. There was nobody Ruth Cole loved or hated as much as she loved and hated her father, but all she said to him was: “Get your racquet.”
“Can you see out of that eye?” her father asked her.
“I can see out of the other one,” Ruth told him.
Ruth Gives Her Father a Driving Lesson
It still hurt her to pee, but Ruth tried not to think about it. She quickly got into her squash clothes; she wanted to be in the court, warming up the ball, before her father was ready to play. She also wanted to erase the blue smudge of chalk that marked the dead spot on the front wall. Ruth didn’t need the chalk mark to know where the dead spot was.
The ball was already warm, and very lively, when Ruth felt that almost imperceptible shudder in the floor—her father was climbing up the ladder in the barn. She sprinted once to the front wall, then turned and sprinted to the back—all before she heard her father tap his racquet twice and open the squash-court door. Ruth felt only a twinge of pain in that unfamiliar place where Scott Saunders had poked her the wrong way. If she didn’t have to run too hard, she would be okay.
That she couldn’t see out of her right eye was a bigger problem. There were going to be moments when she wouldn’t be able to see where her father was. Ted didn’t crash around the court; he moved as little as he had to, but when he moved, he glided. If you couldn’t see him, you didn’t know where he was.
Ruth knew it was crucial to win the first game. Ted was toughest in the middle of a match. If I’m lucky, Ruth thought, it will take him a game to locate the dead spot. When they were still warming up, she caught her father squinting at the front wall of the court, looking for that missing smudge of blue.
She took the first game 18–16, but by then her father had pinpointed the dead spot and Ruth was picking the ball up late on his hard serve— especially when she received his serve in the left-hand court. With no vision in her right eye, she practically had to turn to face him when he served. Ruth lost the next two games, 12–15 and 16–18, but—although he was leading 2–1 in games—it was her father who needed the water bottle after their third game.
Ruth won the fourth game 15–9. Her father hit the tin in losing the last point; it was the first time that either of them had hit the tin. They were tied 2–2 in games. She’d been tied with her father before—she’d always lost. Many times, just before the fifth game, her father would tell her: “I think you’re going to beat me, Ruthie.” Then he would beat her. This time he didn’t say anything. Ruth drank a little water and took a long look at him with her one good eye.
“I think I’m going to beat you, Daddy,” she told him. She won the fifth game 15–4. Once again, her father hit the tin in losing the last point. The telltale sound of the tin would ring in her ears for the next four or five years.
“Good job, Ruthie,” Ted said. He had to leave the court to get the water bottle. Ruth had to be fast; she was able to pat him on the ass with her racquet as he was going out the door. What she wanted to do was give him a hug, but he wouldn’t even look her in her one good eye. What an odd man he is! she thought. Then she remembered the oddness of Eddie O’Hare trying to flush his change down the toilet. Maybe all men were odd.
She’d always thought it strange that her father found it so natural to be naked in front of her. From the moment that her breasts began to develop, and they had developed most noticeably, Ruth had not felt comfortable being naked in front of him. Yet showering together in the outdoor shower, and swimming naked together in the pool . . . well, weren’t these activities merely family rituals? In the warm weather, anyway, they seemed to be the expected rituals, inseparable from playing squash.
But, upon his defeat, her father looked old and tired; Ruth couldn’t bear the thought of seeing him naked. Nor did she want him to see the fingerprint bruises on her breasts, and the thumbprint and fingerprint bruises on her hips and buttocks. Her father might have believed that her black eye was a squash injury, but he knew more than enough about sex to know that she couldn’t have got her other bruises playing squash. She thought she would spare him those other bruises.
Of course he didn’t know he was being spared. When Ruth told him that she wanted a hot bath instead of a shower and a swim, her father felt he’d been rebuffed.
“Ruthie, how are we ever going to put the Hannah episode behind us if we don’t talk about it?”
“We’ll talk about Hannah later, Daddy. Maybe after I’m back from Europe.”
For twenty years, she’d been trying to
beat her father at squash. Now that she’d finally defeated him, Ruth found herself weeping in the bathtub. She wished she could feel even the slightest elation at her moment of victory; instead Ruth wept because her father had reduced her best friend to an “episode.” Or was it Hannah who’d reduced their friendship to something less than a fling with her father?
Oh, don’t pick it apart—just get over it! Ruth told herself. So they had both betrayed her—so what?
When she got out of her bath, she made herself look in the mirror. Her right eye was a horror—a great way to begin a book tour ! The eye was puffy and closed, the cheekbone swollen, but the discoloration of the skin was the most striking aspect of her injury. For an area roughly the size of a fist, her skin was a dark reddish-purple—like a sunset before a storm, the vivid colors tinged with black. It was such a lurid bruise, it was half comical. She would wear the bruise for the duration of her ten-day tour in Germany; the swelling would go down and the bruise would finally fade to a sallow yellow color, but the injury might still be discernible on her face the following week in Amsterdam, too.
She intentionally hadn’t packed her squash clothes, not even her shoes. She’d purposely left her racquets in the barn. It was a good time to give up squash. Her German and Dutch publishers had arranged matches for her; they would have to cancel them. She had an obvious (even a visible) excuse. She could tell them her cheekbone was broken, and that she’d been advised by a doctor to let it heal. (Scott Saunders might very well have broken her cheekbone.)
Her black eye didn’t look like a squash injury; if she’d been hit that hard by her opponent’s racquet, she would have had a cut—and stitches— in addition to the bruise. The story should be that she was struck by her opponent’s elbow . In order for that to happen, Ruth would have had to have been standing too close to her opponent—crowding him from behind. In such a circumstance, Ruth’s imaginary opponent would have to have been a left-hander—in order to hit her in her right eye. (To tell a believable story, the novelist knew, you just have to get the details right.)