The Kindest Lie(11)
So when Ronald stopped her on the street after a game and asked her name, she was surprised by her body’s unconscious response to the attention. Inevitably, she tried to think of something coy that Natasha might say. Instead, her brain went to mush and the only comeback she could think of was, of all things, biblical.
“Jezebel,” she teased.
He laughed and came back hard. “All right now. Got to watch out for y’all church girls. I know everybody on their knees ain’t praying.”
She blushed at how brazen he was and looked down at her hands, the nails unpolished and bit to the quick. Hastily, she shoved her hands into her pockets.
He stepped closer. “Look, I know you’re a good girl. I’m not trying to take advantage. I see you around school. I don’t say anything to you, but I see you and I know you’re about something.”
I see you. When Ronald said that, it was like turning the key in the ignition of a new car, hearing the engine rev for the first time. She wished she had something to lean on to steady herself. Mama and Eli had been too consumed with their own problems to really see her. They moved through the same rooms, but they didn’t get her the way Ronald did.
I see you. She couldn’t get that out of her head because everyone saw him, not her. As a star athlete, a football legend, he didn’t get patted down at parties or followed in stores like Eli did.
Still, this boy was dangerous. Not in the clutch-your-purse kind of way that some white people considered Black boys dangerous. Not because of anything criminal or even borderline criminal. The threat Ronald posed wasn’t to her body. It was to that deep part of herself she was still trying to get to know. Back then, she existed as this little knot of unripe fruit.
For months, they met in the most clandestine spots—the thirty-yard line of the football field after the stadium lights went out, the aisles of the GoLo gas station, and sometimes his cousin’s apartment. Why they met in secret she didn’t know. And she never asked why he wouldn’t kiss her, but she assumed this was the natural dance of men and women. Everything about their relationship felt like walking on the edge of a cliff, one she wanted to plunge over again and again.
“We fit together like a puzzle. R and R, baby,” Ronald said. He made it sound like poetry, with the rhythm and soul of spoken word, and she said little because his eloquence said it all, overwhelming and consuming her in a deluge of new emotions. She imagined their alliterative names on wedding invitations someday, Ruth and Ronald embossed in the timeless elegance of calligraphy.
They blasted their boom boxes and finished each other’s sentences and hip-hop lyrics. This was the nineties and music provided the anthem to their lives. If Ruth had to name one song that embodied their love story, though, it would’ve been the Fugees’ “Killing Me Softly.”
With Mama taking on extra hours cleaning at the hotel and Eli putting in long shifts at the plant, her family unit barely existed anymore. On most days, she found herself alone.
The first night she joined Ronald down in the basement of the house he shared with his mother, she took in the sparse furnishings. A ratty brown leather couch with one seat cushion that had turned black and slick where Ronald usually sat. In a corner of the dimly lit room, a floor lamp with a dull bulb. She watched him move with ease across the room to the hi-fi, where he nimbly tuned the FM channels until he settled on one with the DJ whispering in a low, raspy voice. Almost intoxicating. And then a slow jam played.
A wave of nerves overcame Ruth and something inside her like an alarm screamed that she shouldn’t be there. She’d never done more than kiss a boy, but there she was alone with one in a dark basement. Still, she convinced herself she was being silly, too uptight as usual. This was Ronald from school, not a stranger. Be cool, she told herself.
He’d poured glasses of grapefruit juice for both of them. When he passed her the bottle of vodka to mix with it, she froze. It smelled like nail polish remover. Other than sneaking a sip of her grandfather’s beer when she was eight, which had made her gag, Ruth had never tried alcohol. Ronald must have sensed her discomfort.
“Breathe in, then just sip on it. Nice and slow,” he told her. He was sitting close to her on the couch. Too close, their knees bumping. A jolt of excitement intensified by fear ran through her.
She put the drink to her lips as he had instructed. It reminded her of one of those nasty-tasting medicines Mama had forced her to drink as a kid. The vodka burned the roof of her mouth and then her throat and stomach, too.
Still, something about the delicious danger of drinking, and doing it with Ronald, ignited her whole body.
The next time she found herself in Ronald’s basement, she came prepared, knowing what could happen, but also not knowing, either. His mother had worked late that night as a nurse aide at the hospital, filling in for someone else. When Ronald called her to come over, it was already late, but she hurriedly changed into her pretty lace thong that Natasha had convinced her to buy on one of their trips to the mall. Not the granny panties Mama bought for her, five in a pack. She dabbed perfumed body oil on her belly button and the insides of her thighs. All those little details she had picked up from tales of Natasha’s exploits that Ruth had stored in her mind. Finally, it was her turn.
The low ceiling and the close walls made Ronald’s football player body seem unusually large and awkward. He excited her. He terrified her, too. Wordlessly, he fumbled with the hook of her bra and she turned her head, avoiding his eyes, suddenly shy, maybe even a little remorseful. Yet if she tried hard enough, she could be a girl who didn’t care about bad reputations and grandmothers’ expectations. She could just be.