“Dworkin is a loony tune.” Ruth pulled one book down from the shelf. “You ever read her?”
I looked down at the book. Intercourse, read its stark cover. Nothing you’d find between He’s Just Not That Into You and Eat Pray Love on Dawn’s bookshelf. I shook my head.
“She makes reality TV look like The Partridge Family,” Ruth said admiringly and handed the book to me. “Here. Keep it. I’ve read it.”
“You haven’t read, like, all of these, have you?”
“Yep.”
“Whoa.”
“Yeah, well. Thirty-four years teaching women’s studies, you crack a book or two. Not that there’s ever any right answer to this stuff.” She shook her head with sort of a bemused smile. “It’s amazing how the more you read, the less you know.”
“I totally get what you mean,” I said instantly. A second later, I realized I actually did. It was the first time I ever felt understood by a grown-up.
I tucked the book in my backpack, feeling a little bit like I’d just found the coolest informal library ever.
Ruth plucked the dime bag from my hand and brushed past me, heading into the kitchen, all Formica and peeling wallpaper. I followed behind. She lifted the lid of a porcelain sugar jar and placed the new plastic bag of weed inside it. She opened a junk drawer, pulled out some rolling papers, and started making a joint. Or a blunt. I’m still unclear on the difference, maybe the latter just isn’t as polite at parties.
“You wanna start this Old Crone Report, then?” Ruth asked through gritted teeth, clenching the joint between them.
I nodded and took out my notebook.
“Okay.” She breathed in, held it, frozen, then exhaled. A plume of smoke rose and twisted in front of us like a belly dancer. “You should know I’m not gonna give you any Tuesdays with Morrie bullshit.”
I wrote that down.
“Life isn’t a beautiful gift to treasure every moment of. It’s shitty and unfair, and I’m not gonna give you any ‘wisdom’ on how to gracefully come to terms with life or death or anything.”
I nodded.
She exhaled, visibly relaxed—her forehead wasn’t tensed up anymore like it had been when I first knocked on her door—and shrugged.
“I could use a hand with the garden. If you want to come by a few days a week and help me out, you can pick my brain about when dinosaurs roamed Earth. How does that sound?”
“Yeah! Great.”
“Good. Starting now. Can you show me how to do an emoji?”
She handed me a cracked iPhone with no case. She’d been texting with someone called “K.,” flirtatiously bordering on straight-up smut.
I showed her how to access the emoji keyboard and handed it back. She vacillated between the wink face and the kiss-blowing face, then looked at me.
“Hello? Make yourself useful.”
“Kiss, I think. Wink emoji is a little bit ‘recently divorced dad.’ Also,” I said, “you spell twerk with an e.”
She revised and hit Send, and I was glad to see the ghost of a smile on her face at my response.
“You want some bourbon?”
“I’m fifteen.”
“What’s your point?”
After one faded flower teacup full of bourbon, I was drunk. Ruth drank triple that and seemed totally fine, considering she was asking me what books I was reading in English class, whereas I was trying to focus my vision while wondering who I could possibly persuade via text to take my make-out virginity.
“What are you reading?”
“The Turn of the Screw.”
“Good one. Classic. Sexual repression, ghosts—what’s your teacher’s name?”
“Mr. Radford.”
“What’s he like?”
“Uh, young.” I thought. “Enthusiastic.”
“You should do him!” She said it with the same tone of wholesome encouragement you’d use to say You should do yoga! or You should visit Lake Placid!
“What?!”
“Don’t look at me like that. Every great writer has ‘turned the screw’ with a professor. Obviously it would be better if his balls hung a little lower, if he was older, more established, but . . .” She shrugged.
“Jesus Christ. Ew. Also, I’m not a—don’t call me that.”
“A what? A writer?”
I nodded.
“Why not?”
“It feels weird.”
“It’s supposed to feel weird. If it didn’t, that would be a problem.”
“Really?”
She nodded. “You want some more bourbon?”
Later that month, I finished my social studies assignment, which was honest to a fault (I got a B-and a Please see me after class, with “please” underlined thrice), but I stuck around to help with the garden, and Ruth and I have been friends ever since.
“You’re really wasting your energy worrying about this,” Ave informs me as she highlights some boring crap in her calc textbook. “Guys are like H&M tops to Ashley. Next week he’ll be in the Goodwill bin, and my parents will yell at her for insisting she’d wear it forever and being so wasteful with their money.”
I shake my head, gritting my teeth as I yank out the stubborn weeds congesting Ruth’s zinnias. “It’s because he’s special and she knows it.”
Ave makes a noise.