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She backed off the balcony and turned into the room. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed the new photographs on the bedside table.
“God damn it,” she muttered, looking through them.
Caroline had done it again. They were all pictures of Carolines new life. It was as if her sister were trying to exorcise Ruby from the family.
Frowning, she marched back downstairs and went outside. She grabbed their two suitcases from the car and carried them inside, dropping her mothers in front of the closed bedroom door.
Upstairs, she opened the closets louvered doors, then yanked down on the beaded light chain. A bare light bulb in the ceiling came on in the empty closet.
She tossed her suitcase inside. It hit a cardboard box, rattling it.
She knelt onto the dusty shag carpet and pulled the box toward her. In bold, black marker pen, someone had written BEFORE across the top flap.
Ruby opened the box . . . and found herself.
Photographs. Dozens of them. These were the pictures that used to sit on every flat surface in house--tables, mantels, windowsills.
Pictures of two little girls in matching pink dresses . . . of Dean and Eric in Little League uniforms . . . of Dad waving from the stern of the Captain Hook. And one of Nora.
She slowly withdrew that one.
This was the mother shed forgotten, the woman shed grieved for. A tall, thin woman, with auburn hair cut in the layered Farrah Fawcett style, wearing crisp white walking shorts and a celery-green T-shirt. The photograph was old and creased, but even the maplike fissures couldnt dim her mothers smile. In the background was the peaked white tip of the Matterhorn.
Their trip to Disneyland.
In a bittersweet rush, Ruby remembered all of that day; the screams of older kids on scarier rides, the sudden, plunging darkness of Mr. Toads Wild Ride, the rollicking music of Country Bear Jamboree, the sugary residue of cheerios, eaten while you walked, the magic of the Electrical Light Parade. Ruby had watched it from the best seat in the house--on her daddys shoulders.
And she understood what Caroline had done. Caro, who couldnt stand conflict or confrontation . . . Caro, who just wanted everything to be normal.
It had hurt her sister to look back on these years.
Better to simply . . . go on. Start over. Pretend that there had never been happy summers spent on these shores, in these rooms.
Ruby released her breath in a heavy sigh and boxed the photographs back up. Her sister was right. It was too damned hard to see the past in Kodachrome.
God . . . shed already lost her equilibrium in this house, and it had only been a day. Suddenly she was wound tightly, full of nervous energy. She had to get back on track. Remember why she was here.
The magazine article. That would keep her focused.
She unzipped the side pocket of her suitcase and withdrew a yellow legal pad and a blue pen. Then she crawled up onto the dusty bed, drew her knees in . . .
. . . and stared down at all those blue lines.
We want your thoughts, your memories, what kind Of mother you thought she was.
“Okay, Ruby,” she said aloud. “Just start. You can always change the beginning later. ”
It was the first rule of comedy writing; it should work here, too.
She took a deep breath, released it slowly, and wrote the first thing that came to mind.
In the interest of full disclosure, I must tell you (she decided to talk directly to the Cache readers) that I was paid to write this article. Paid handsomely, as they say in the kind of restaurants where a person like me cant afford to order a dinner salad. Enough so that I could trade in my beat-up Volkswagen Bug for a slightly less beat-up Porsche.
I should also tell you that I dislike my mother. 132 No, thats not true. I dislike the snotty salesclerk who works the night shift at my local video store.
I hate my mother.
That seems like a pretty harsh statement, I know. Were taught in childhood not to use the word “hate” because it represents a blight on our own soul, perhaps even a karmic misalignment. But silencing a word doesnt eliminate its meaning.
