The older she got, the more Martin’s task as a father seemed to be learning to differentiate all the Rubys in his memory from the present one. When he’d heard her on the phone after midnight, he wanted to ask her to quiet down, but couldn’t think of a way to make the request without sounding as though he were treating her like a past Ruby, which Debra had told him they must avoid. “The goal is that she doesn’t revert because of moving back here,” Debra said one evening after they’d hurriedly made love, worried that Ruby would come home early from a dinner with Caroline. “It feels like we’re the ones reverting,” Martin said, as Debra buttoned her blouse with the rushed movements of an adolescent mindful of her curfew.
“We’re not reverting, we’re accommodating.” Debra kissed him hard on the mouth. “Now put on your shirt, old man.”
Debra had long served as peacemaker between Martin and Ruby. It wasn’t supposed to be that way, to Martin’s understanding. If anything, the mother and the daughter were supposed to fight, while the father played hero, showing up for dinner with an air of bewhiskered mystery, of important business too difficult to explain. But when Ruby was growing up, Debra had often been out of the apartment, working all day at the public library’s Riverside branch and then taking night classes—first for her undergraduate degree, next for her master’s degree in library science. Martin was the one who worked from home, or at least from the apartments and hallways and boiler rooms adjacent to home. Ruby saw him hauling other people’s garbage, saw his fingernail beds turn black, saw him placate the worst of the whiniest tenants with a fake goofy smile on his face, like their submissive dog. Because Martin was responsible for making sure she got back safely from school, for making sure she did her homework, for yelling at her when she didn’t return home when she said she would, he’d had to deal with more rebellion from Ruby than Debra ever had. Martin always assumed that their relationship would improve once Ruby moved out of the apartment. Once she had successfully launched herself into her life, she would turn into a new Ruby yet again, a new daughter filled with nothing but appreciation for him.
Only now she was back, and things were just like before. They sniped at each other, they argued. Debra was still doing her best to improve their relationship. When Martin had asked Ruby if she thought her degree excused her from having to wash her dishes, Debra pointed out that Ruby had cleaned the bathroom the day before. When Ruby called Martin’s interest in bird-watching a prelude to a midlife crisis, Debra replied that if Ruby had a job like Martin’s, she’d need to stare at some nonhuman creatures for a few hours, too. When Martin told Ruby she needed to cast a wider net for her job interviews and not just trust that the Museum of Natural History would work out, Debra told Martin that Ruby knew what she was doing, and couldn’t they have some faith in their own kid? When Ruby stayed up late talking on the phone, Debra told Martin to wear his noise-canceling headphones to bed, because what else were the damn things good for.
But today Debra was going out of town, to Albany, to a conference for librarians where she would speak on a panel titled “Community Engagement and the Library: Mindful Outreach and In-Reach.” Martin had gotten excited when he’d heard the title—maybe Debra was coming around on meditation. But no, she said she hadn’t come up with the buzzwordy title, and anyway, “mindful outreach” in this context just meant not being racist or sexist or assuming incarcerated populations shouldn’t have access to information.
Martin had first met Debra at a library downtown when she worked there as a clerk and he’d been studying for his pesticide-applicator certificate. One day he’d glanced around for a wall clock and his gaze went to the checkout desk, to Debra’s face, which was clocklike, too pale and too wide. She was not beautiful. Still, something in Martin jolted. Before he left the library that evening, he asked her out for coffee. A few years after they’d had Ruby and managed to save some money, Debra began to take night classes to earn her college degree, but only so she could do more meaningful work at the library. She didn’t want to just sit at a desk. She wanted to help people who truly needed the library’s resources. It was the only way she felt like she was in the moment.
Maybe she had no patience for meditation, but Debra was mindful in her own way, and fearless in her own way, too. Now she worked as a correctional services librarian for the New York Public Library. She supervised the volunteers who answered reference questions from incarcerated populations, half of them seemingly idle musing (“How does eBay work?” “When did people first start to dance?” “Please tell me about clouds and what are they made of?”), half of them serious and sometimes time-consuming to answer (“How do I get a job when I leave here?” “How much are homes outside of New York City?”). She also helped manage satellite libraries on Rikers Island, going into the jails once or twice a week, setting up tables in the gym, checking books out by hand. But lately the work—the endless cycles of prisoners, of tragic stories, of angry guards—had begun to burn her out. “Do you feel that way, Martin?” she asked once. “You’ve been a super even longer than I’ve been a prison librarian.”
“Yeah,” Martin said. “I’m pretty burned out, too.”
But he knew in a certain light he was lying to Debra. Some different kind of exhaustion was in his bones. It wasn’t from pouring himself into his work like Debra did. It was from keeping himself so held back with the tenants every day, nodding exactly as he was supposed to nod, or keeping his face blank in a way that suggested only the most polite non-anger.
Ruby sighed loudly. “I don’t think this is working, Dad,” she said. “I keep going on anxiety spirals about my interview.”
Martin frowns with concern, Lily voice-overed, like a good dad not in the least aggravated or hurt by his daughter’s failure to appreciate the shining promise of the present moment, and why should he care if his meditation idea was a bust, he is not bound by the false narratives of his own ego, which is just a product of the consumerist society in which he lives!
“Bad energy today, that’s all.” Martin stood, trying to relax his jaw. “We should try meditating again tomorrow, okay?”
“I don’t know. I think I might actually feel more anxious now.”
But Martin is a man of many plots, he knows soon the sun will be rising faster than one-two-three, which means the pigeons outside are up and cheeping for food, Martin’s a walking, talking self-help book of ways to cope with one’s own estrangement from labor due to the manner by which consumerism consistently compromises our species-essence, which—
“Shh,” Martin said. “Jeez. A goddamn monologue.”
“Huh?” said Ruby.
He shook his head, tried out a smile. “I got another idea. Grab some bread, okay? There’s a few rolls on top of the fridge.”
“Are you taking me to feed those pigeons in the courtyard?”