With her fiftieth birthday approaching, Ruth came to discover that change, a concept once conceived as a course of action to be plotted and planned like a European vacation, was in fact less like a journey and more like a malady, one that exhibited new symptoms daily: foggy brain, flagging vitality, persistent irritability, hot flashes. And those were only the physical manifestations. After decades of personal abnegation and domestic administration, Ruth’s search for self-coherence was nosing toward a crisis. With Maddie already looking at colleges, with the last of the Lego bins and Lincoln Logs and stuffed animals already stowed in the attic, the fully empty nest once envisioned as respite from servitude was suddenly a prospect Ruth dreaded. My God, the house would be so empty. What would she do with herself?
These pressing questions had flooded in on Ruth, wave after wave of uncertainty battering the hull of her identity until she woke up at forty-nine feeling shipwrecked, marooned with a mutinous body on an island where nobody could reach her. She knew better than to solicit her husband’s aid, for he would most likely chalk it up to hormones, and he would only be half-right. Her children would tell her to get over it. And how could she expect childless, unmarried Bess Delory to understand? Ultimately, it would be a stranger who threw Ruth a life preserver.
Ruth was shopping at Town & Country one weekday afternoon, listlessly combing the produce department for the customary provisions (spinach, apples, squash, russet potatoes), when she encountered a striking young woman, perhaps Anne’s age or slightly older, slim and athletic with dark cropped hair, hefting in her tattooed arms what appeared to be a giant, psoriatic melon the likes of which Ruth had never seen. In truth, it had been the young woman herself as much as the mystery fruit that had aroused Ruth’s curiosity: the vaguely Polynesian tattoos snaking up her arms, the short, lustrous hair that still managed to look feminine, the remarkable ease with which she seemed to carry her beauty. By Bainbridge Island standards, she was exotic.
“Pardon me,” said Ruth, approaching her tentatively. “But…may I ask, what exactly is that you’re holding?”
“It’s jackfruit,” said the young woman.
“Ah,” said Ruth. “It looks tropical.”
The woman’s smile was contagious, and Ruth found herself smiling.
“It is,” said the young woman.
“So, like a pineapple, then?”
“You’d think so,” she said. “But it’s actually more like a giant fig.”
“What do you do with it?” said Ruth. “I mean, if you don’t mind my asking. Am I being nosy? It’s just that I’ve never even heard of it.”
“Not at all,” she said. “The jackfruit is unappreciated in North America. They love it in Thailand.”
Ruth felt so ordinary next to this lithe young woman. Here she was in her frumpy jeans, the same hairstyle she’d worn for fifteen years, with her yellow squash and russet potatoes; what could possibly be less exotic?
“When they’re unripe like this, I use them as a meat substitute,” she said.
“Oh?” said Ruth.
“I’m a vegetarian,” she explained.
No wonder she was so skinny.
“I’m Tiana, by the way,” she said, extending a firm handshake.
“Ruth,” said Ruth.
“You look familiar,” she said. “Have I seen you at the Streamliner?”
“I’ve never been,” said Ruth.
“Never? Well, we need to change that,” said Tiana.
And thus, an unlikely friendship began with an invite for coffee at the Streamliner Diner. What exactly Tiana saw in Ruth that she would extend such an invitation, Ruth could not say. A maternal appeal? Or maybe she just saw in Ruth a middle-aged woman in need of a friend.
“Your eyes are so pretty,” Tiana told her that first rendezvous at the diner, a compliment that had Ruth blushing to the roots of her hair. “You don’t look like a Ruth,” she said.
“Oh?” said Ruth. “What do I look like?”
Tiana studied her face intently until Ruth could feel herself blushing again. “Maybe a Rita. Like Rita Hayworth.”
“Really?” said Ruth.
“Or an Ava. Like Ava Gardner.”
What a thrill it was to be seen as a Rita or an Ava, to be equated with a star of the silver screen. Not since her college days had Ruth dared to imagine herself as anything more than ordinary. And here, this young woman saw in Ruth something more—more than a middle-aged woman in jeans and a sweatshirt.
Ruth immediately found herself drawn to Tiana’s self-assurance and awed by the breadth of the younger woman’s experience. Tiana had traveled all over the world, from Central America to Southeast Asia to France and beyond. She’d surfed in New Zealand, worked on a coffee plantation in Costa Rica, cooked for sixty men in a remote fishing village in northern Alaska. She spoke Spanish, Portuguese, and bits of French and Isan. She knew wine, and poetry, and tai chi; she was fluent in food, and coffee, and music. How she’d crammed it all into thirty-two years, Ruth could hardly imagine. How she was still single was even harder to fathom. But she was refreshingly unconcerned by this lack of attachment. Indeed, Tiana spoke very little of men. Maybe that was the secret to her brimming life, remaining unencumbered, an existence Ruth could hardly conceive of after four children and thirty years of marriage.
As for the Streamliner, it made good on its promise that “nothing could be finer than eating at the Diner.” The diner was a far cry from the greasy spoon its name seemed to suggest. The coffee was robust, the muffins nothing like the store-bought bran confections Ruth had grown accustomed to, and the omelets so much more than the standard ham and cheese. The Streamliner possessed a style all its own, one that infused rustic European cuisine with a culinary ethos Abe would have characterized as “granola.” Ruth told herself halfheartedly that Abe wouldn’t appreciate the diner, but the truth was that she wanted the diner to be her place, not theirs. These were not Abe’s people; they didn’t buy life insurance. These were Ruth’s people. They wrote poetry, blew glass, maybe played mandolins. Their sophistication was practically Parisian next to most of the island’s denizens. The thought of Abe at the counter opining about interest rates was incongruous. For Ruth, the Streamliner Diner was nothing less than a revelation; more than a restaurant, it was an institution, vibrant and joyfully noisy, humming with that energy Ruth had gravitated toward in her university days, but something more, too, a warmth, and the promise of familiarity.
Over the course of three or four coffee dates, Tiana introduced Ruth to the entire staff of the diner, women every last one of them but for the teenage dishwashers, who were boys with spiky hair and T-shirts emblazoned with band names and slogans that likely would have offended Abe’s sensibilities: Dayglo Abortions, Circle Jerks, and the most egregious of all, Rock Against Reagan. The diner women were a dizzyingly diverse cast of characters: Barb, and Kiki, and Jewel; Gabby, and Judith, and Heidi; Toni, Alexandra, Leigh Anne, Greta, Lindsey, and Mary Beth. While these women shared a common notion of community, they were anything but uniform in their ideologies. Judith was a Buddhist, while Alexandra was a self-described Taoist, and Jewel subscribed to a deity called Ramtha. Heidi was a devout atheist. Mary Beth believed in extraterrestrials. Toni practiced numerology and read palms. Likewise, their lives were self-styled: Greta lived in a converted school bus. Kiki lived in a yurt. Lindsey drove a vintage Mercedes.
Within a matter of weeks, Ruth was welcomed into the diner fold, and overnight, the Streamliner became her second home, the place she lingered half the day while Abe was at the office and Maddie was at school, those hours formerly spent administering to her domestic obligations, folding laundry, Windexing mirrors she was afraid to look into, watering flower beds nobody appreciated. This time was now passed at the diner counter, talking to the girls as they worked, or whoever happened to sit next to her, whether it was Steve, the mural painter and garden sculptor; Misha, the cellist and actor; Rene, the wreath maker and masseuse; or Maya, the voice artist and sometimes belly dancer. They all accepted Ruth as what she wished to be: a poetess and a farmer. And though in most cases she was old enough to be their mother, they treated her as an equal. Not that there weren’t older patrons in their midst, resident characters, white-bearded fishermen, and carpenters, men who enjoyed lively conversation and the company of those Streamliner women, whose brand of rugged individualism they heartily subscribed to themselves.
When Ruth wasn’t at the diner, she was filling notebooks again, verses and vignettes, whole poems. And for the first time in her life, she was sharing them. Not with Abe, of course, but with Tiana, and Judith, and Heidi, and Alexandra, after hours at the diner, or early mornings at Pegasus Coffee, where they sometimes gathered before work. To Ruth, this community of creative souls represented an antidote to the times. Their built-in support system, their self-reliance, their autonomy, their unique customs, all of it embodied the ideal of the collective that the baby boomers had tried so desperately to achieve. And it seemed that some of them—those she met at the diner, those who weren’t peddling plastics or selling insurance, those who were renting, not owning, those who were either childless or whose children wore their hair past their shoulders and ran with the wolves—had finally achieved it in their thirties.
After two months of Ruth loitering at the diner, Judith offered her a job.
“You know your way around a kitchen. If you’re gonna be here all day, why not get paid? You’ll free up space at the counter.”
The thought of working at the diner had not once occurred to Ruth in her endless hours drinking coffee at the counter, discussing everything from goat farming to the novels of Robertson Davies. Ruth didn’t need the money, any more than the diner needed another body in the kitchen. The proposition seemed less about employment and more about fully belonging to the Streamliner.
That evening at the dinner table, Ruth announced her intention to enter the workforce for the first time.
“Aren’t you kind of old to be getting a job, Mom?” said Maddie.
“Good for you,” said Abe. “How’d you come by it? You applied, or…?”
“One of the owners offered it to me,” said Ruth.
“Great,” said Abe. “Can’t beat that. You know, I’ve been meaning to eat there, but I’m not really a breakfast guy beyond coffee and toast. While you’re at it, find out who insures the place.”
Ruth and Abe had survived Leonard, and Karen’s death, and so far, five years of Ronald Reagan, and while there was no denying that their marriage had grown distant and utilitarian, Abe had once again proven himself a supportive spouse. Whatever distance between them Ruth may have begrudged, she forgave him because of his tolerance.
The diner saved Ruth from what had begun to feel like a life by default. The diner empowered her; it reconnected her to a larger world of ideas and people and experience. To survive the utter chaos of the morning rush at the Streamliner was one thing, but to laugh through it was something else altogether; to feel like you were a part of something vital and thriving embodied a thrill and a sense of accomplishment that the slow, grinding slog of parenthood had never quite achieved with any regularity. Too often, nobody had ever been there beside Ruth to appreciate it when she cooked breakfast for six, cleaned the dishes, packed the lunches, and sent everybody on their way. Lacking anyone with whom she might share the accomplishments, she had stopped acknowledging these pleasures herself.
Nothing beat the solidarity of those late Sunday afternoons closing the Streamliner after a harrowing day, as she and the girls, once the dust had settled, prepared the restaurant for the week ahead, bantering and complaining and laughing as they prepped, and ordered, and restocked, listening to A Prairie Home Companion on public radio. Occasionally, Ruth and Tiana and Heidi would steal out back of the restaurant to smoke a joint by the dumpster. Marijuana was something Ruth had partaken of only twice in her life, once with Fred and Mandy in the back of Fred’s car at Magnuson Park beach, and once with Anne and Royce Holiday out by the pond, where they had gleefully insisted upon her compliance. Ruth had not particularly enjoyed the experience on either occasion. But smoking with Tiana and Heidi felt like a rite of passage.
Many changes were afoot. Ruth’s wardrobe was completely transformed within a matter of months. Gone were the frumpy jeans and the matronly hair, gone the shapeless gardening boots. In their place Ruth wore a sassy bob with a high nape, bold patterned blouses with low necklines paired with flowing, breathing skirts and leather Birkenstocks. Though Ruth worried these wholesale changes might look like a midlife crisis to her husband and the fellow congregants at Seabold Methodist Church, Bess Delory was there to support her as always.
“Nonsense! You look more like you than ever! My goodness, you look twenty years younger with your hair off your face. And that blouse—gorgeous! Are those camellias?”
But not everyone in Ruth’s life was so accepting of her remade appearance, especially her fifteen-year-old daughter.
“Ugh, Mom, it’s embarrassing. What are you wearing?” Maddie complained. “You’re supposed to be a mom. You look like a bag lady.”
Abe met this metamorphosis with curiosity and mild amusement, teasing Ruth affectionately about her granola stylings, but Ruth could feel the force of his renewed attention, even when her back was turned, and that, too, was empowering.
For all the fresh influences in her life, none were more far-reaching than Tiana, to whom Ruth owed her new lease on life. Two months into Ruth’s tenure at the diner, Tiana had already displaced Bess Delory as Ruth’s primary companion. When not convening at the diner, Ruth and Tiana took afternoon walks around Gazzam Lake, or Battle Point Park, or out in the mudflats at Manitou Beach at low tide, barelegged to their knees as they squelched through tidelands. Since they had entire lifetimes to share, these early stages of their friendship might be described as breathless. Their investigations ranged widely, from art to philosophy to politics. In the arenas of politics and religion, Ruth found Tiana refreshingly unencumbered by affiliations, her theological inclinations tending toward those Eastern and new age philosophies that best suited her. Politically, she landed somewhere far to the left of any party platform, her political philosophies, like her religious convictions, a mishmash of ideologies best summed up as agrarian communistic gynocentrism. Abe would’ve had a field day with Tiana had Ruth ever allowed such a summit to occur, but like her diner life as a whole, Ruth cultivated and maintained her friendship with Tiana outside of Abe’s purview.
Abe apparently entertained no misgivings regarding Ruth’s extracurricular activities. He seemed genuinely pleased that Ruth was living her best bohemian-granola life, if not relieved to be excluded from the proceedings. While Ruth clung firmly to her Methodist and Democratic roots, she was endlessly fascinated by Tiana’s maverick philosophies and outlandish notions, pseudoscientific propositions such as “morphic resonance,” “antediluvian civilization,” and “the science of magic.” It was not the ideas themselves that intoxicated Ruth, rather Tiana’s ravenous curiosity and contagious enthusiasm for them.
But more than intellectual, Ruth’s attraction to Tiana was compelled by something else, a sort of kinetic energy produced whenever the two of them were in proximity. Tiana’s effortless, almost androgynous beauty was like a gravitational force. The graze of Tiana’s shoulder aroused a certain flutter in her chest; the touch of Tiana’s fingers stood Ruth’s arm hairs on end. These were new feelings for Ruth. That they were mutual seemed undeniable, though still difficult for Ruth to account for, no matter how many times Tiana complimented her eyes, or her well-preserved figure, or her mental acuity, or her command of language. Such was Tiana’s charm that she might have attached herself to anybody she wanted. Why she’d chosen Ruth in the produce section of T&C remained a mystery.
For all that Tiana and the diner family had done to help Ruth survive the hormonal chaos of menopause, for all the comfort, and encouragement, and occupation they offered, there was no correcting the chemical disequilibrium that visited Ruth daily, those moments of inexplicable agitation, incongruous tears, or incomprehensible grief. Add to this the seismic shifts in Ruth’s identity, all the newness, all the adjusting and recalibrating, and her grand climacteric was bound to reach a crescendo.
It occurred on a rare Sunday when Ruth had skipped church, during a particularly harried brunch rush at the diner: checks flying; orders stacking up; sourdough smoldering in the toaster; potatoes smoking on the grill; the overwhelming cacophony of the diner—the scrape of forks on ceramic, the clinking of glass, the discord of thirty simultaneous conversations—beating on Ruth’s eardrums, even as the demands came flying at her from every direction (How’s that Mediterranean scramble? Table two is missing a BLTA. Where’s my combo? This was supposed to be a deluxe); the impatience of Lindsey at the waitress station; the impossible wall of heat rising off the grill sopping Ruth’s face with perspiration, blurring her vision. On top of it all, that particular Sunday would have been Karen’s twenty-eighth birthday.
When Lindsey, arms akimbo at the register, demanded her combo for the third time, something in Ruth snapped. Dropping her spatula on the grill with a clang, she tore off her apron, dropped it in a heap, and fled the cramped kitchen. She hurried past the register, nearly upending Lindsey as she rounded the corner, quickening her pace down the narrow aisle past gawking diners, nearly clipping Kiki, arms full of plates, on her way past. Once Ruth hit the open air and pushed past the horde waiting on the sidewalk to be seated, she rounded the corner, passing the line of diners gaping through the window this time, before she arrived at the dumpster in back, where she broke down.
It was only a matter of seconds before Tiana joined Ruth there.
“Oh, sweetie,” Ruth said.
Tiana wrapped Ruth in an embrace and held her firmly but tenderly as Ruth’s body slackened in her arms. But as Ruth felt the pressure of Tiana’s chest, almost boyish, pressed against her own, her heartbeat palpable, along with the soft stirring of her breath in Ruth’s ear, a single sensation overrode the rest, an arousal, not purely sexual, though acutely sensual. Perhaps Tiana felt the quickening of Ruth’s heartbeat as she squeezed her harder. When she finally relinquished her grip, she held Ruth at arm’s length and smiled sympathetically.
“Hey, you,” she said, and that was all.
The next instant, Ruth felt her mouth upon Tiana’s, a kiss unlike any Ruth had ever known, a far cry from the gruffness of Abe, whose dry lips arrived at hers like a formality. This exchange with Tiana was ardent to the point of desperation and must have lasted five seconds before they finally separated. When Ruth looked up, her heart galloping in her chest, she nearly swooned from the shock of what she saw next, or rather whom.
There, parked in the rear lot of Town & Country in the station wagon, looking out the driver’s-side window directly at them, was Abe.
“What is it?” said Tiana as the blood drained from Ruth’s face.
“My husband,” said Ruth.
Minutes later, Ruth was in the passenger seat beside him in total silence, both of them staring straight ahead out the windshield at the line of green dumpsters behind T&C.
“I’ve been meaning to come in for weeks,” he said, as if he owed her some explanation for his presence there. “Today was the day.”
A deafening silence settled back into the car as they continued to avoid eye contact. It lasted a minute, maybe even two, Ruth all but paralyzed in her befuddlement.
“Well,” he said finally. “Are you gonna say something? What was that?”
Ruth did not answer; she couldn’t, for she could not account for something she didn’t understand herself.
“Don’t you think she’s a little young for you?” he said.
“It’s not like that,” said Ruth. “Whatever that might have looked like, it wasn’t.”
“It looked like my wife kissing another woman.”
“It was, but not like that.”
“Like what, then? That was no peck on the cheek.”
“I don’t know what it was,” said Ruth. “I was distraught, I was thinking of Karen, I screwed up an order, Lindsey was yelling at me, I ran out. Tiana followed me out. She talked me off the ledge, and then…it just…happened.”
“And that was the first time?”
“It was,” said Ruth. “The first and the last.”
“Mm,” said Abe.
It was clear as he gazed out the window that he was deeply troubled. God, the confusion he must have been feeling, the poor man. Surely, he must have had a million questions that he couldn’t bring himself to ask: Are you a lesbian? Do you love me? Do you hate me? Why is this happening?
Ruth should have told him it had absolutely nothing to do with him. While that much seemed obvious, it might have been a comfort to tell him so. But Ruth couldn’t bring herself to speak. So they continued to sit in silence for a minute until it began spitting rain on the windshield.
“Aren’t you supposed to be in there working?” he said at last.
“Yes,” she said.
“Well, then…”