The Supplicant
I saw Ruth for the first time in math class. She sat in front of me, and I spent an entire class watching her absently braid and re-braid her long, cornsilk hair. Later, I found myself beseeching God over my lunch tray.
I had transferred to St. Mary’s School for Girls a month into my sophomore year of high school because my parents had decided that they wanted me to be friends with a different sort of girl than I had been friends with at my public school. My best friend and I had not had the right sort of friendship. A St. Mary’s girl, they said, wouldn’t cross the same lines.
It wasn’t in that math class that Ruth and I became friends. We were assigned to work on an English project together and made a poster about Romeo and Juliet. She spent an entire class period writing the title of the play in big, neat, bubble letters on the top of the poster as I helpfully detailed, in a comedy-club manner, everything that Shakespeare had done wrong. I incredulously mocked the melodrama, age gap, and the notion that anyone could fall in love so quickly. Ruth laughed like I was Steve Martin. We had spent so much time on the lettering (her, writing; me, monologuing) that the rest of the poster had to be scribbled out at the last minute. We got a C+, if I recall, but she asked me to come over to her house that weekend.
I don’t remember anything about the first time, or the second, or the third, but I was soon being hugged by her mom every time I came over and asked by her dad how my last softball game went. I was being invited to stay for dinner and had inside jokes with her older brother.
My parents loved her. When she came over to my house for the first time, she wore a gold cross on a delicate gold chain around her neck that she would unconsciously fiddle with from time to time (I had never seen the necklace before). She told them about her confirmation classes and bashfully agreed to pray over dinner, which immediately erased the semi-permanent creases in their brows. Ruth winked at me whenever they weren’t looking. After she left, my parents told me that she was exactly the kind of girl they had hoped I would become friends with at St. Mary’s.
When I went to her house, Ruth would take my hand the minute I had my shoes off and pull me upstairs to her bedroom, where we would flop unceremoniously onto her bed. If I were going over to her house after school, I would spend hours thinking of things she might find funny and how I would say them. Then I would perform, like a player at the Globe, and she would laugh until tears came out of her eyes, which was when I knew I had prepared a particularly good set.
We would talk too, mostly about boys. Ruth liked this boy named Nick from the boys’ school, and everyone knew that he liked her back. They hung out a lot in that high school way: not together but not not together, tentatively holding hands in movie theaters, maintaining the pointless charade, when they were teased, that they were just good friends and had no idea why people thought otherwise. She didn’t waste the charade on me. She told me about his eyes and his hair and that she thought he was working up to ask her to be his girlfriend. She told me about the time he had kissed her at the joint homecoming hosted in the shared gym at the girls’ school and how his face had gone red, which she thought was cute.
One time, she asked me who I liked, and I chose Nick’s friend Liam. This made Ruth squeal with excitement, and she decided that us becoming their girlfriends was a foregone conclusion. She proclaimed that we would go to their games together (they were on the volleyball team) and when they won, they would come running over to us and kiss us triumphantly on the lips, and we, of course, would love it, but would pretend to be grossed out by how sweaty they were. They would laugh at us for being so squeamish (that’s just how girls are, they would say), then kiss us again before running back to celebrate with their team.
Ruth animated her fantasy with an urgent sense of excitement, and in that moment, I couldn’t remember having ever wanted something so badly. So, as girls do, we giggled and giggled and squealed and squealed, and she emphatically put her hand on my thigh, which gave my laugh a bit of a hysterical edge.
Two weeks after Ruth and Nick started dating, Ruth told me I should come to a party at Nick’s house, implying not-so-subtly that Liam had told her he wanted me there. I came over to her house before, and she squawked indignantly when she realized that I didn’t intend to wear any makeup. She pulled me onto her bedroom floor and cupped my chin with her hand as she carefully dabbed red lipstick from her mom’s makeup bag onto my bottom lip with her middle finger, then told me to rub my lips together, miming the action with her own reddened lips. She laughed when I tried to do as she said, then grabbed the back of my neck and pressed her mouth to mine because I couldn’t be trusted to do it properly, she said. She laughed at my surprise. Ruth actually laughed like people did in cartoons and movies, with her head thrown mirthfully back and her hands clutching her stomach as though her sides had split and she was trying to keep her organs from spilling out. I tried to imitate her laugh and tentatively touched my fingers to my mouth, which had begun to burn.
There weren’t many people at Nick’s house, and in fact, I was the only person there who had been invited by someone other than Nick. When we got there, he nodded to me and casually slung his arm across Ruth’s shoulders. Ruth unsubtly gestured with a tilt of her head at Liam, who had been watching us since we came in. I shrugged vaguely. She smiled and winked as Nick led her away, presumably to some dark, unpeopled corner.
I don’t remember the chain of events that led to Liam’s hot mouth clumsily covering mine or his damp palms fumbling with the hem of the shirt that Ruth had lent me as we sat, completely alone, on a stained couch in Nick’s basement, but I find them irrelevant anyway. I had spent so many hours in Ruth’s bedroom, sprawled on her soft, carpeted floor or shoulder-to-shoulder with her in her twin bed, listening to her try and interpret Nick’s actions and text messages like they were lines on an ancient, archaic scroll: inscrutable, enigmatic, ambiguous. But I ended up being kissed and touched by a boy for the same unambiguous reasons that Juliet and Eve and Helen had: merely for having skin and hair and warm blood.
Still, he kissed me with an unfeigned earnestness that made me pity him, and when he pulled away, he wasn’t Romeo or Adam or Paris. He was just a boy with wide, uncertain eyes and a smear of red lipstick on his chin who had been told that the thing to do at a party was kiss a girl.
He tentatively, almost reluctantly, reached for me again, but I pulled away this time. “You don’t have to.”
His nod seemed more like an involuntary twitch, and he fell back, looking almost relieved, into the cushions of the couch.
We were silent for a moment. “Was that your first kiss?” he asked after a while, his voice a little raspy.
“No.” With my fingernail, I picked at the seam of the couch cushion under me.
“Oh. It was mine.” He looked down.
We were silent again. He was still looking away from me, but I studied his profile. Without thinking, I wet my thumb and started wiping at the lipstick on his chin. He looked confused, but let me do it. Even after it was gone, the residue left his skin pink.
Liam gave me a little smile. We stayed side-by-side on the couch until it was time to leave.
I slept at Ruth’s house that night. She demanded details and bit her lip with excitement when I told her that Liam had kissed me. She asked me if I liked it, and I told her that I had. She buried her head in her pillow to stifle her giggles when I asked where she and Nick had gone off to, and she told me, between peals of incredulous laughter, how he had folded her shirt and jeans after taking them off, how he had made strange faces when she touched him (she reenacted these for me), how he had held her afterward like she was something unbelievably precious. At this, she blushed wildly and smiled in an unrestrained, thoughtlessly happy way.
I lay awake all night trying desperately not to feel the arm that Ruth had carelessly thrown across my stomach. My own arm lay flat on the bed next to me, as if glued or bolted. It was like lying next to a live wire. Her gentle snores sounded electric.
My parents suggested that I bring her to my church’s fall camp that year. The camp was on a lake and populated with a handful of mismatched buildings that seemed like they had been strewn about in a haphazard game of marbles. Ruth was, as she always was, instantly charmed, remarking on how blue the lake was and how delightfully unlike a church the quaint little chapel seemed (it looked closer to a barn than a house of worship, with its hard-packed dirt floor and the fact that it had been, apparently, hastily constructed from half-rotted wood. But the planks that made up the roof had long since separated, so on sunny days, rays of sun were remarkably filtered through the slats in a way that immediately recalled divinity, which I always thought made it an uncommonly appropriate place for services to be held).
When I had asked her, she’d looked at me in the way that I’d become used to being looked at whenever I brought up anything related to church or God: With the usual wary, apprehensive grimace that seemed to be anticipating judgment. Her family was religious too, but to her, faith was like a coat that could be shed when it got too warm, or a costume that could be donned for the right occasion, then put back into the closet to be forgotten for a while, or so it seemed to me.
Mine clung to me, but it was beginning to lose its tack. Every time I saw Ruth, the fires seemed to burn a bit brighter, and I couldn’t decide which was more terrifying: that the kingdom of God didn’t exist, or that it did, and I would be denied entry.
A road ran through the camp, and on one side was a hill, and on the other, the lake. Our cabin was one of the only ones next to the lake, which made us feel deliciously separate. The cabin had a long hallway running down the center of it, off of which were individual bedrooms that had two or three bunk beds each. There was one outlier at the end of the hall that curiously had only a full bed, which Ruth quickly claimed for the two of us, telling the other girls that we were used to it. I smiled with great effort and prepared myself for a few more sleepless nights.
I could immediately tell that Ruth liked our counselor. I knew Olivia from church, and was proud to be able to present her to Ruth as an acceptable specimen from my world. She was pretty and bright and played soccer at the prestigious liberal arts college she attended, and her presence seemed like sufficient confirmation to Ruth that the weekend would be free of the usual horrors of religion, like crucifixes and brimstone. To my relief, she relaxed perceptibly after the introduction.
There were services in the chapel twice a day, which Ruth clearly thought was excessive. She complained in loud whispers all the way through the first morning service, and finally lay her head dramatically on my shoulder and pretended to fall asleep, disturbing the escaped pieces of hair from my ponytail with her uneven breaths. It was the typical purity sermon: A few times throughout, the pastor would say something that would cause her breath to hitch or would make her squirm a little against my shoulder like a fussy child.
Afterward, we were free to do whatever we wanted. I knew a lot of the other kids there and was friends with a few of them, but Ruth pulled me away to the lake, saying that she wanted to go swimming.
Despite the heat of the day, we were miraculously the only ones there. We could hear the distant shouts of those playing volleyball or foursquare on the courts by the cabins, but the hill across the road may as well have been another world.
I was sitting on the dock, leaning back on the palms of my hands, feet dipping languidly in and out of the water. Ruth was floating on her back, her face utterly serene, her golden hair forming a halo around her head, which made her look like a saint in effigy, or perhaps Ophelia. Both of these images disturbed me, and I tried to put them out of my mind.
After a while, she swam over to where I sat, then folded her arms up on the dock and rested her head on them. Her hair was darkened with water and her skin was beaded intricately with glassy droplets. Sometimes, I thought half-hysterically, she didn’t seem real.
She stared at me pensively for a few minutes before I said, “What, Weirdo?” with a smile I hoped was casual.
She smacked my thigh with the back of her hand, then said with a consciously defiant look, “I’m not sorry about what happened with Nick.”
Despite my best efforts, I couldn’t forget what she had told me the night of the party. I knew that she was talking about whatever the two of them had done when they disappeared to Nick’s bedroom. I fought against the image of his hands on her, and fought even harder against wondering what it was like.
Slightly stricken, I made sure she saw me roll my eyes. “Okay, nobody’s asking you to be sorry.” We were both seasoned Catholic school girls, so we both knew that this wasn’t strictly true, but she seemed to allow herself to be reassured by my words, and the grave expression fell from her face as she laughed, throwing her glistening head back in that careless way of hers.
“I swear to God I saw that pastor look me dead in the eyes like, six times.” She pushed off from the dock and started treading water in front of me, her long, pale legs suspended easily beneath the surface.
I scoffed. “I don’t know what you could’ve possibly seen with your eyes closed for the whole sermon.” I knew that she hadn’t actually been asleep, but I played along anyway, reading the lines that she wanted me to read.
She splashed water onto my lap in a show of righteous indignation. “I’m just naturally very intuitive. I could feel his eyes.” It was an effort to hold back the rueful laugh that had risen suddenly in my throat.
“You want to know what I think?” I said, now singularly focused on my thighs. I feverishly noted the beginnings of a sunburn.
“More than anything,” she replied with a sweet smile as she swam back over to me, wrapping her hands beseechingly around the tops of my thighs and forcing me to look at her again. I fought to remember what I had been about to say.
“You tend to believe that people think about you way more than they actually do,” I said after a moment, feeling a little smug at how bitingly insightful I thought I sounded. I had noticed that she always seemed to assume that people were concerned with what she was doing. It often seemed, in fact, that she wanted them to be.
Ruth wasn’t offended like most people might have been. She never was. She only smiled bigger and said, “I bet you think about me.” Any ounce of smugness I had felt a moment ago vanished, and my ears began to feel hot. Resting her chin on my knees, Ruth gave me a look full of mischief and terrible significance. “I swear that you can feel someone’s eyes on you,” she said, then laughed heartily like she had made a great joke. I couldn’t look at her. Sometimes it felt like she knew everything.
Because Ruth had braided her hair after we’d left the lake, it was still wet during the evening service and it dripped periodically onto the cracked wooden pew.
I don’t remember what the service was about, but I remember that the expression on Ruth’s face kept oscillating between hysterical amusement and carefully disguised shame. I could always tell when Ruth was trying to hide something like this, because she covered it with this strange, dry smile. Still, she giggled her way through most of the service and even buried her face in my shoulder a few times to muffle her laughter. I had a wet spot on my shirt by the time it was over. After our conversation on the dock, I felt alarmingly naked. I couldn’t seem to find anything to say to her, and I didn’t even jokingly reprimand her for her rudeness like I might have done otherwise. Ruth didn’t seem to notice my silence.
After the band (whose performance Ruth loved to mock, particularly the boyishly warbly voice of the lead singer) had finished their final song, Olivia took us and our cabin-mates to do “group time” under the canopy of a large pine tree. The sun had been down for hours, and everyone’s faces were eerily illuminated by her lantern. We were supposed to discuss the sermon, but the allotted time tended to devolve into group confessions, with Olivia playing her part of the solemn but nonjudgmental priest. Ruth liked Olivia, and I could tell that even she was somewhat taken with her hieratic airs. Something about the dark and the hour and the reassuringly ordinary sight of Olivia’s chipped pink nail polish and beatific expression on her face led girls to tearfully confess to lies they had told, people they had hurt, and things they had done with their boyfriends. Ruth didn’t participate, but she watched the proceedings closely, and once even leaned in as if to say something before quickly withdrawing.
Olivia woke us up the next morning before the sun rose and ushered us outside to a firepit. Campers from the surrounding lakeside cabins stood around awkwardly, some leaning against each other like trees, others determinedly rubbing the sleep from their eyes. Ruth made to grab my arm to pull herself into my side, but I gently shook her off. She tilted her head at me, clearly confused, but I just shrugged at her.
The counselors did this every year. They woke us up in the middle of the night and had us all hold hands around the fire while one of them artlessly strummed the chords to some hymn on an acoustic guitar. With all of us singing and swaying and illuminated fiercely in the firelight (Olivia looked particularly otherworldly, her eyes closed and her lips moving rapidly as if she had become the earthly mouthpiece of some unseen, divine entity), it felt as though we were performing some pagan ritual. Ruth was holding my hand. The hymn was one we often sang before class in school, and I saw out of the corner of my eye that Ruth’s lips formed the words as she swayed with the group, apparently somewhat caught up in the ritual’s strange, hypnotic power.
“What the actual hell was that, Paige?” she asked once we were back inside. I sat on the bed, and she flopped down next to me and let out an exaggerated yawn. “I mean, that was some cult shit,” she said, but her eyes were still a little glazed over. She hoisted herself up onto her elbows and looked over at me, finally seeming to note my silence. “Also, you’ve been weird all day. You basically tried to shove me into the fire when I touched your arm outside.”
I shot her what I hoped was a scathing look. “No I didn’t.”
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure you did.” She reached over and pushed me down into the bed so that we were about eye level. She kept her hand on my sternum.
“Why are you always doing this?” I said abruptly, still turning our conversation at the lake over and over in my mind. I put my hand over hers to show her what I meant. Sometimes, it felt like she knew exactly what she was doing when she touched me in her proprietary way. I often felt that I was a toy being batted between the paws of a cat, but there were moments when I allowed myself to think that it wasn’t a game or an act. Sometimes, I allowed myself to think that we wanted the same thing.
The part of me that spoke was going rogue, as if it was acting without the permission of the whole. Even as the words left my lips, I felt as though I was committing a violation. In that moment, we were Adam and Eve, suddenly and shamefully aware of our nakedness. At some point, we had silently agreed to pile all the unspoken things on top of ourselves until, apparently, one of us started to fracture under the weight.
Ruth looked stricken. She pulled her hand from my sternum and turned onto her side without another word. She spent the night facing away from me and I spent the night bitterly regretting my moment of insanity.
Ruth wasn’t there when I woke up, only a divot in the mattress where she had slept. I found her sitting at a table in the dining hall, deep in conversation with Olivia. I went up to them, and Ruth greeted me cheerfully, going on about how tired she was and how much she missed Nick and how the pancakes they were serving up weren’t half bad, actually, as long as you put enough syrup on them. I nodded absently, suddenly feeling as though I could cry.
It was a beautiful day, and rays of sun reached into the old chapel like great, heavenly fingers. Ruth maneuvered Olivia to sit between us. She talked animatedly to both Olivia and I until the service started, even making a show of cajoling me into doing my impression of our math teacher for Olivia, but there was an almost aloof politeness to her tone when she addressed me that made it clear that something had come to an end.
Ruth didn’t laugh at all during the sermon. The pastor spoke about David and Bathsheba, about willfully taking what it is unwholesome to covet, and called for all those who were burdened with sin to come forward and receive prayer from the present counselors. Ruth rose immediately with the drove, many of whom were beginning to shake with sobs, and kneeled before the pulpit. With distant horror I realized Ruth was crying, and her form became, for a moment, indistinguishable from the undulating mass of sinners at the front of the room. Olivia went to her, her face limned with divine ecstasy, and laid her hand beneficently on her brow. The image reminded me of an old statue of Mary that stood inconveniently in the math wing of our school. The statue’s head was wreathed in a stony halo, and her hand was laid on the repentant brow of a faceless, kneeling supplicant. Last spring, someone painted Mary’s toenails a bright, matchbox car red, and the nuns had been all in an uproar. Ruth didn’t have to tell me that she had done it; every time someone brought it up or the nuns tried to intimidate us into confessing, her eyes glimmered with illicit pride.
But now, she was the perfect supplicant, just as imagined by the sculptor. I try not to remember her as she was in that moment, head bowed, eyes all red, form being covetously grasped by the godly sunbeams that had infiltrated the chapel, but no matter how many years pass, I can’t seem to erase it from my mind.
When we returned home, Ruth took up with Nick as if nothing had changed, and I found that I had spent all my time at St. Mary’s so utterly wrapped up in her that I hadn’t made any other friends. Instead of whispering to Ruth during my classes, I began to look around and realize that I didn’t know many of my classmates’ names. It was like a spell had been broken and my ball gown had finally turned back into rags.
I made new friends at school. They were the kind of girls my parents didn’t think would be a problem at St. Mary’s.
I still saw Ruth in class. She never took off the gold cross necklace now, and I wondered if it had become permanently fused to her skin. She didn’t talk to me anymore, but sometimes I would turn around in class and catch her staring at me. It was the kind of stare that’s so intense, it’s almost embarrassing to witness. Our eyes would meet for a single, agonizing moment before she would look away, as if to hide her reddening face.
Julia Gartley studies English literature at SUNY Geneseo. She enjoys solitude and dislikes olives.