Mary Ruth

Mary Ruth looked as if she could be 102 years-old, with brittle salt-and-pepper hair resting on her broad, yet feeble, shoulders. When she was upright she nearly reached six feet tall, and that was discounting the intricately decorated ladies hat she wore atop her head. An infinite amount of wrinkles pinched her skin, and yet, something about her was youthful. Her face was so perfectly structured that through thinly squinted eyes, you could almost see back into her younger days, when she was no doubt a stunningly beautiful woman. As I stared, I wondered in what decade she had been my age. As she gazed back at me, I swore her eyes revealed that she was imagining the same thing—viewing her younger self through my eyes—the young girl that she would always identify with.

In the day and a half I had been at the hospital, I had managed to eat alone at every meal. Well, I managed to sit alone, as I can’t say that I did much eating. The same shyness that consumed me on the first day of junior high school found me in the lunchroom on the 8th floor of Lennox Hill, as I kept my eyes down on my “food.” But when Mary Ruth entered the cafeteria on this day, there were no more empty tables, and mine was the only one lacking conversation. Out of the corner of my eye I saw her making her way over to my table, moving slowly, her strides no longer as confident or stable as they once were. Instinct told me to keep my eyes down—that if I didn’t make eye contact, she would feel uncomfortable and choose another table. Manners told me to meet her gaze, to smile and welcome her, insist that she join me. The internal battle lasted only a few seconds, as I’ve never been good at being impolite.

I reached for my water glass, lifting it to take a sip, allowing for my eyes to smoothly transition to hers without abruptly acknowledging her presence. I swallowed, pressing two fingertips to my lips signifying that I wanted to speak, but was delayed for just a moment. I set my glass down and smiled. Finding no words, I tilted my head toward the empty chair and nodded.
“You don’t mind if an old bitty like me joins you for lunch?” She crooned. She hesitated over the chair, clearly waiting to set down her tray.

“Not at all,” my better half replied. “Please, have a seat.” A huge grin overtook her wrinkles, and I felt instantly rewarded to have put it there. Her shaky arms lowered her lunch tray to the table, and her shaky body followed suit until she was seated across from me, the grin still prominent. Social Skills 101 replayed through my head and I was instantly “on.” While lifting my fork and picking at the blue Jello mold on my plate, I introduced myself. “My name is Lauren. I just got here yesterday.” She smiled and nodded as she uncovered her tray (when I first arrived, the plastic dome covers on the food trays enthused me—until I realized they didn’t protect anything worth excitement). When she didn’t speak, I hesitated. Maybe I had been wrong about her desire to engage in conversation. Maybe she was hoping to find an empty table herself, and I had been the next best option—a quiet girl at a table who clearly wanted to have nothing to do with anyone else. For a moment I thought about reverting to my introversion and ignoring her. But she had interrupted me, and I was on autopilot. I couldn’t stop myself if I tried. “What is your name?” I continued to play with the Jello, feigning disinterest.

She kept her eyes down on her food, but smiled. She glanced up to meet my eyes and cleared her throat. “My name is Mary Ruth, dear.” Her eyes were back on her plate but the smile was still there.

“Mary Ruth,” I repeated. Mary Ruth. What a perfect name for the oldest woman in the world. I imagined a faded black and white photo, slightly sepia due to antiquity, curled at the edges, a small baby girl in a lace gown and a day cap, Baby Mary Ruth sprawled in delicate cursive on the back.

She shook her head in instant denial. “My girlfriends call me Ruth.” Her voice was excited, and I took it as an invitation. I nodded, while conjuring images of her and her girlfriends sipping tea around a bridge table, serving finger sandwiches on silver trays, discussing their adult children’s pastimes and laughing delicately at one another’s jokes.

“Ruth, then,” I corrected. We both grinned. And my smile faded as I realized I had nothing else. I had a million questions I wanted to ask. Why are you here, Ruth? How long have you been here? Who visits you? How old are you? Will I be here until I’m your age? None of them seemed appropriate, and my manners won again. I defaulted to a social trick I learned at an early age. When lacking anything deeper, use superficial cues to drive the conversation. “Your hat is beautiful, Ruth.” And it was. The hat not only looked out of this decade, but out of the last century. The wide circular rim and the round bucket were a pretty pale green. A purple ribbon wrapped around the crease where the rim and the bucket met, tying into a bow in the back. A small bouquet of brightly colored dried flowers was tucked into the ribbon on the right side.

At the hat’s mention, Mary Ruth looked upwards and touched her fingers slightly to the rim, as if to remind herself that it was still there. “Thank you!” she exclaimed, appearing thoroughly complimented. Her fingers fell slowly to her face. As she touched her cheek, her smile faded to a pained grin. I looked behind a cloudy cover into her blue-gray eyes, which took us both to another world. I felt her sorrow as nostalgia emanated from her gaze. Her hand still on her cheek, she turned slowly toward me and looked as if she might cry. She pursed her lips and shook her head as if to push down whatever negative thoughts were surfacing. She let her hand fall to the table and met it with her other. “You know,” she began, “my father was a milliner!”

My blank look must have given my ignorance away. Either because she expected a reaction as enthused as her statement had been, or because she suddenly realized the age gap. She laughed a healthy laugh and reached for my hand. She gently pressed her cold fingers to the top of my hand and leaned across the table. “You have no idea what a milliner is, do you?”

I didn’t. My first thought was milliner—like mill, as in some sort of construction or farm. But that truly would have lost me, because I could find no connection between mills and hats, at least one derived by a sane train of thought. “Umm,” I hesitated, not wanting to appear stupid, but doing just that. “No, I don’t,” I admitted.

She clapped her hands once as if she had just stumbled upon some great joy and was delighted to find it. “Well,” she started, “a milliner is a hat maker! A hatter, if you will.” An image of the boy who played the Mad Hatter in my fifth grade production of Alice in Wonderland flashed in my mind’s eye. My automatic look of understanding must have pleased her, because she continued emphatically. “My father was a creative man. His hands were so gentle, so precise. The millinery, his shop, was on the first floor of our house. We were lucky enough to live in town.” She was staring into space, living in her memories. I listened, eagerly growing interested. “Did you ever watch the Little House on the Prairie?”

Did I ever! “I was obsessed with that show! I used to want to be Laura Ingalls Wilder.” I felt warm.

“Our town looked like Walnut Grove, and everyone knew our family. My father’s hats were coveted by all the lady folk. He also tailored men’s suits and fixed dresses for the women. He was very good.” It was clear that Ruth loved her father, missed him terribly.

I asked what I thought was a safe, simple question. “Where did you live, Ruth?”

She refocused her eyes to shoot me a strange look. A sly grin overtook her face. “Don’t be silly!” she exclaimed. She laughed and replayed the funny joke over in her head.

Okay, Ruth…I chuckled in my head. I suppose speaking with someone who had probably seen both world wars and was currently in a psychiatric ward warranted its fair share of crazy. “Oh I’m sorry,” I apologized, though I wasn’t sure for what.

She nodded in acceptance. Her eyes closed. She continued. “Daddy seemed to favor me to my brothers, who were always causing trouble in school and getting in his way in the shop. Before Grace died, he used to take us with him to the shop and let us help to pick out the ribbons, feathers, and beads for the hats.”

I wanted to ask who Grace was, but I didn’t. To satisfy my curiosity I decided to believe it was her older sister. Mary Ruth and Mary Grace, perhaps.

“Then when Grace died, I wasn’t allowed in the shop for more than a year. At the time it made me angry. Everything changed. Everyone was sad. Mother didn’t let me help with the house chores because she said I was too wild.” She laughed at herself again. “She meant that I loved to play in the dirt with the boys. When Sam let me, I’d wear his overalls out in the yard. Not too many girls could get away with that then.” Ruth placed both her hands on her hat and straightened it out. With the hat she looked like a proper lady, but I could see the tom-boyish spirit behind her eyes. I just then noticed the hospital gown she was wearing. She couldn’t have been here longer than a day, two at most. They were supposed to give you your clothes back after your first visit with the doctor. It took persistence on my part to convince an orderly to open my locker and retrieve my things for me, just that morning. She looked vulnerable and even frailer in her smock. I empathized. I wondered how she was able to keep her hat, imagining some supernatural bonding.

“When I was about twelve years old, Daddy took me on as his apprentice. Every day after school, he would give me lessons in weaving, sewing, and gluing. When I had advanced, he let me design, finding in me a talent for sketching.”

I debated whether to speak. She was swept up in her story, and I was fascinated. But now she sat, her voice paused, her thoughts in this past world. I bit my lip and returned my gaze to my mostly uneaten plate of food. I decided to go for it.

“Ruth, did you make the hat you are wearing now?” I forced my eyes to meet hers, wondering if she would think me silly again.

She didn’t come back from her other world, a brightness in her eyes focused in the invisible distance. “No, Dear,” she responded softly. “I haven’t made a hat since 1922. That’s the year Daddy died.” She was quiet.

I shivered, and then replayed her story in my head. 1922, her father died. She was twelve when he taught her to make hats. The latest she could have been born was...1910, which would make her at least…98 years old! I watched her in disbelief. Could she really be that old? Sure her face was weathered and experienced, her body frail, her voice ancient and cracked…but she was young. She was with it. She could walk, slowly, but surely. She could converse, reminisce, only the slightest of quirks revealing themselves. Then again…maybe the entire thing was made up? Maybe she had created a world surrounded by her favorite hat, where she could live behind her eyelids with her loved ones and be happy in her old age. I had, in fact, no idea why she was sitting across from my on the 8th floor of Lennox Hill. I had snapped. Maybe she had too—not from a sane person into a crazy one—but from a real person into a fictional one. My thoughts got away from me. Mary Ruth watched my face.

“I didn’t have many girlfriends when I was younger,” she said. This was an unexpected turn.
“Why not?” I encouraged her to explain.

“Well,” she laughed embarrassedly, as if she hadn’t meant to reveal this truth to me. “I suppose they didn’t like me very much. I was odd.”

I could see that. She was odd. Not in a frightening way, though. I considered telling her about my girlfriends. I was lucky in that department. Even though I hadn’t spoken to most of them in months, they were my sisters. They would enjoy hearing about Mary Ruth.

“Lauren,” she began. I got Goosebumps when she spoke my name. I knew I had introduced myself, but she seemed so disinterested at the time that I assumed she hadn’t committed it to memory.

“Yes?”

“You remind me of my girlfriends.” Okay. Back to crazy. Didn’t she just say she didn’t have many girlfriends?

“In what way?” I asked.

“You’re so young. You’re quiet, but I can tell you are thinking.” I was now a little frightened. “I didn’t have girlfriends when I was younger, but as I got older, younger girls flocked to me. I never had children of my own, but I always had a group of women, some twenty years behind me. We’d talk and laugh and discuss life. They made me feel young.” She clasped her hands and stared down. She looked again like she might cry. In that moment, she reminded me of the way my grandmother looked, tears in her eyes, right before hugging me goodbye. Sadness encroached on our small table.

“It’s nice that you have such good friends, Ruth. I don’t know where I would be without my friends. Life isn’t much without them.” I smiled, assuming my words would be helpful.

Her melancholy didn’t lift. “So many of them are gone. And Janice won’t talk to me.” I was confused again. Gone as in, dead? Twenty years younger, and deceased? I suppose that would still put them around 80, if Ruth’s story had suggested her actual age. My grandmother was only 78 when she passed. I could see the physical pain writhing through her body now. I began to feel very uncomfortable. I was enjoying the nice story—a peek into an ancient world, a time I’d never know. But I was barely capable of holding it together myself, hence my presence. I didn’t know if I’d be able to watch the world’s oldest woman lose it because she missed her friends.

Just then, the same orderly who helped me retrieve my clothes approached our table. A few feet from our table an empty rocking chair swung gently, and I gathered that he had just been sitting there. He touched Mary Ruth’s arm lightly, and she looked up. “Mary Ruth.” He spoke her name smoothly. She looked up abruptly, as if waking up from a dream. “It’s time for your visit with Dr. Newman.”

Mary Ruth clapped her hands together once again. “Oh, lovely! Always so punctual.” She stood almost effortlessly, and reached for her tray. The orderly picked it up with one hand, and placed the other on her back, ready to lead her away. Mary Ruth smiled at me, and turned away. The orderly looked back at me and winked.

I sat slightly stunned at the table for several minutes. I wondered how long the orderly had been listening to our conversation, and what he expected to hear. Had he heard it? What would have happened if he hadn’t walked over to retrieve her? I smiled to myself, relieved that I could be on my own once again, only now with something other than my own broken spirit to consume my thoughts. Mary Ruth! I gathered my tray and hurried off to my room, before anyone could recruit me for the after lunch social activities.