the Aunt Ruth story

I confess. One of the main reasons I started this blog was to put my stories into the world. I've been holding onto them for a long time and launching them here is downright scary. But, oh what the heck... here goes. I've writen everything from poetry to non-fiction to picture books, but mostly what I have is true stories about the people I grew up with.This is one of those.

Ruth and Me

Aunt Ruth always wore white; white cotton from head to toe. This allowed her to bleach each load of laundry. When she washed dishes, she’d fill the right side of the sink with bleach-water and submerge each item before placing it on the drying rack. Thus, any meal at her house came with a bonus snack of bleach.

Ruth had been the wife of my grandfather Martin’s brother, Ray. Both men died in their late fifties, but Ruth and Memmem (my mom’s mom) stayed as close as sisters, though in most ways they were opposites. Ruth and Ray had owned a cabin in the Canadian wilderness, but when Ray died, she sold it. She had no children to pass it on to, and didn’t want the hassle of ownership. After that, she took to spending her summers with all of us at Memmem’s spacious cabin right next to the one Ruth had sold.

Ruth drove an orange AMC Gremlin. In the spring of seventh grade, I broke my leg in four places, requiring me to wear a cast for four months. The cast made bus riding cumbersome, so I got to ride to Canada with Ruth in her Gremlin that summer while my sisters and cousins all had to go by Greyhound bus with Memmem. Before we were old enough to get jobs, we cousins would spend our summers in Canada with Memmem. Our moms, would drive up for the final week to retrieve us before school started.

I had always liked Ruth and felt privileged to be her companion. The trip took two days. Our family usually drove it in one twelve-hour shift, but Ruth was an exceedingly cautious driver, so our travel time was more like sixteen hours.

          Long trips made me carsick, so I took Dramamine the whole time, which caused me to sleep a lot. Ruth didn’t like this because she wanted me to talk more to keep her company. I hated to disappoint her, but thought it was better to be sleeping than puking.

I had only my hoarded babysitting money to spend, so at each stop I ordered the cheapest thing on the menu: grilled cheese and water. By lunch the second day, Ruth made me get (and pay for) pork chops insisting that that much grilled cheese could not be healthy. She also made me pay half of our hotel bill, but at least I didn’t have to cough up any gas money.

          Ruth enjoyed politics. During my brief periods of consciousness, she tried to engage me in discussing the latest political biographies and exposes she had read. At the time I was only faintly aware that our country was actually run by elected officials. At home, we took no newspapers. We only discussed things like soap operas, whether it was necessary to speak in tongues to have the Holy Spirit, and Carole King at the dinner table. I tried to play along, though, nodding sagely to her observations, throwing in the occasional, “Yeah, I know!” Which, of course, I didn’t.

           Though I slept through most of it, and ended up broke by the end of it, I really enjoyed my trip with Aunt Ruth. She was calm and thoughtful: something I wasn’t used to in a relative. Her car was as neat and sterile as a surgical ward, and she was a conscientious driver. Our drive bonded us. I now felt that I, alone, understood her completely.

Ruth was fairly petite. She was meticulous about everything, especially her pride and joy: her teeth. Ruth had grown up poor, vying with numerous siblings for resources. She’d had no medical or dental care, and her mother had never heard of Mr. Clean. As a result, Ruth had waged a lifelong war on germs and disorder.

Memmem, who’d grown up similarly poor and dentist-free, sported a full set of dentures by the age of thirty. But Ruth had somehow managed to keep all of her original teeth. They were her life. They were famous (at least among the people I knew). They’d thrust her solidly into first place among those jockeying for the “overachiever of the family” crown.  Also, she was way ahead of her time, as this was forty years ago, before white strips were even invented. Back then, Americans viewed their teeth as no big deal, just something to eat with; like Britons do today.

Tooth care consumed a great deal of Ruth’s time. She never needed a hobby because she always had her teeth to keep her busy. Whenever she headed into the bathroom for her twice-daily cleaning procedures, we all knew the place would be off-limits for at least an hour. While most of us were allotted about two square inches to stash our toiletries, Ruth’s dental equipment consumed an entire bathroom shelf. But, despite her shelf-hogging ways, she was generous. She loved nothing better than to recount her scientifically-honed tooth preservation system in minute detail. I think she was trying to inspire my generation. Maybe she was looking for a protégé, but who had that kind of time for teeth?

The first step was to floss down both sides of each tooth. Twice. Next, using a professional-grade dental pick (don’t ask me where she managed to procure such a thing) and magnification mirror, she would scrape along the gum line of each tooth; front and back. Then, she would crank up the Waterpik to blast every gap and surface, passing twice around. Now she was ready for the actual brushing. Each tooth would receive ten circular strokes front, top and back: thirty in all, per tooth. (Now that I think of it, Ruth was always talking about numbers, especially the even ones.) After that, each tooth would be buffed; two strokes on, and polished; four circles off, with Pearl Drops Tooth Polish. The final coup de grace was a two-minute Listerine flush, which needed to settle for at least thirty minutes before any eating or drinking. Voila – that’s how you keep your original teeth.

         You’d have expected Ruth to have ultra-white teeth, but no. They were a bit dingy because of two curious habits which defined her as much as her cleanliness. She chain-smoked unfiltered Camels, and downed cup after cup of coffee strong enough to leave layer of sludge behind. 

          After our car ride, in my mind Ruth and I were practically best friends. I was strangely proud (and a bit jealous, if you want to know the truth) of her political knowledge, and admired her predictable lifestyle. I had neither of these things; never sure when Mom would announce our next move or drag some stranger home to stay with us. From then on, whenever anyone poked fun at Ruth’s germaphobic ways, I was compelled to defend her. Like a few days later when she accidentally stepped in dog crap: a catastrophic event which catapulted her into superhuman strength. She managed to remove the soiled white Ked, holding it in front of her at arms length while hopping on the other foot up a quarter-mile hill to the cabin all without touching her shoeless foot, clad in a white cotton ankle sock, to the dirt path. Not bad for a seventy-year-old.

My cousins laughed hysterically, making light of her panic. I had to admit it was funny, but still. “Lay off, you guys,” I said, sunbathing on the dock she had just hopped past. “She’s soooooo nice. And … I mean, really,  how ‘bout those teeth. Aren’t they something? And, did you see the way she could hop? Not bad for her age.”

           A couple years later, we visited Ruth at her little house in Florida. All of the furniture was shielded in custom-made thick plastic covers. Also, she kept the place rather warm. Not good in the Florida humidity, causing us all to stick like Velcro every time we sat down. All of her dishes and utensils were covered in plastic. We brought paper plates to use, so that any accumulated germs could be thrown away with the plate and she wouldn’t have the stress of bleaching and re-wrapping. This must have saved an entire roll of Saran, at least. The lampshades were all adorned in plastic skirts. Heavy-duty-plastic runners, like you might see in a warehouse, laced the carpet connecting all the major traffic areas. We were advised to keep to the runners, even though our shoes had been removed at the door. Ruth was a woman who certainly did her part to keep the plastic industry going.

In the guest bedroom, the twin beds were covered in beautiful white eyelet bedspreads. They were almost regal looking (if you could overlook the plastic overlay), with a plush gathered skirt trailing elegantly to floor. I complimented Ruth on them, mentioning I’d never had a bedspread, only a comforter.

Actually, I appreciated the cleanliness and order at Ruth’s house. The plastic didn’t bother me. Here, you knew what to expect, and it was calm. It was neat. I sort of wanted to stay there with her forever.

A year or so later, Ruth stopped at our house in Pennsylvania on her way to Canada for the summer. She pulled a big plastic bag from her Gremlin’s hatchback and handed it to me. Inside it was a zippered storage bag containing two freshly dry-cleaned white eyelet bedspreads.

“I know you’ve always liked these,” she said, as I unzipped the case to run my hand over the fabric, “so I thought you might like to have them when I bought new ones.”

“Thanks, Aunt Ruth,” I said, tearing up a little as I bent to give her a hug. A gentle hug; not close enough to transmit any germs.