The Cure for Grief by Nellie Hermann

Author:Nellie Hermann
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2008-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Summer 1994

Fifty-two Rubys

Ruby and Michael lay on the metal dock at the shore of the lake, looking up at the sky. Their feet were on the soft ground at the edge of the water, their backs on the metal. They were quiet, looking at the stars and listening to the frogs in the grass somewhere off to their right. Every night, this croaking— uhh, uhh, uhh, uhh —the methodical and disenchanted sound of frogs that were, as the rumor went, fucking. Was that what they were doing? Ruby wasn’t sure she believed it, but she imagined a whole series of them anyway, lined up on the shore, mounted on top of each other, thrusting their froggy organs into each other one by one, on down the line. Uhh, uhh, uhh, uhh, uhh, the groaning was constant and relentless, the tone never altering. The frogs had deep voices and they were deeply bored, Ruby imagined, even as they copulated. Uhh, uhh, uhh; yeah, yeah, yeah.

The frogs added a bit of humor to Ruby and Michael’s vigils at the lake, which had become serious and frequent, almost nightly. One of them would utter a terribly sad or deep statement about life, about their feelings, a statement they’d never uttered before to a single soul, and they would look at each other, and there would be the frogs— uhh, uhh, uhh —to point out how seriously they were taking themselves. One of them, usually Ruby, would be crying, and asking Michael Why, why, why, and then there were the frogs, answering her back: Uhh, uhh, uhh.

Perhaps this was why they went back to the lake every night. It had become their spot of choice, though before they’d landed there they also spent a few nights in the amphitheater, where the camp gathered on Friday nights for Shabbat services, a few nights in the green wooden sukkah on the path by Ruby’s bunk, and one night on the steps of the Chadar Ochel, the dining hall, where they never returned because they had seen a skunk cross in front of them. Now, when Ruby met Michael outside her bunk while the rest of the girls got ready for sleep, there was no discussion about where they would go. They met, their legs moved over the ground, and then they were there.

They were still shy with each other, despite (or perhaps because of) the increasing intimacy of their nights together. During the day they were camper and counselor—Michael was twenty-one, the head of Ruby’s kerem, the name of her age group, the oldest kids in camp, and Ruby was sixteen, just one of the many campers in Michael’s charge. At night, though, they spoke their saddest and most puzzling secrets to the balmy night air. Ruby shared herself with Michael as she never had with anyone, and it became more and more difficult to repress the way she felt about him, to align their relationship with those of her other friends.

The agam—the waterfront: during the

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