Before You Knew My Name, Jacqueline Bublitz [best book club books for discussion txt] 📗

for six months, it seemed everyone spoke to her in exclamations. There was something about what she was doing—quitting her day job, giving away most of her furniture and clothes, compacting her life into two metallic blue suitcases—that seemed to inspire people, her news triggering faraway looks and hushed confessions everywhere she went. I always wanted to … I wish I could have … Maybe one day I’ll …

For a while there, Ruby was privy to a whole world of secret desires, shared without invite by both strangers and friends. Now, vodka at her lips, the room rocking slightly, she finds it odd to think of all these people living ahead of her, somewhere in the tomorrow of Melbourne. From her new time zone, she will perpetually live behind them, chasing hours long ticked over in Australia, even though people back home assume she is the one out in front. Taking a self-appointed sabbatical to live in New York City, just because she can. She might as well have told people she was heading to the moon.

‘Am I brave or just crazy?’ she asks the vodka bottle and the room and her hazy reflection, none of which offer a satisfactory answer before she capsizes into sleep.

And now it’s 2 a.m. this next, first morning in New York, and she’s wide awake. The bed sheets are soaked through with sweat, and when Ruby stands up to go to the bathroom, she feels like she is pitching forward, as if her body wants to be somewhere else. Somewhere else. When she is already as somewhere else as she’s ever been. Here in this city of—what is it now? Eight million? Nine? No matter, given she knows exactly two people out of that number, a couple of former colleagues who have made it clear they would love to catch up, Sometime soon, Ruby. When you’ve settled in.

Well, she thinks. Here I am! All settled in. And not feeling very brave at all.

What would those friends and strangers back in Melbourne think of this admission?

Returning from the bathroom, still unsteady, Ruby sits down on the edge of her bed just as a siren starts up outside her window. It is a familiar sound in the dark, yet somehow different to the ambulance calls she is used to hearing back home. More melancholy, perhaps. Or—she moves to the window now, peers down onto the empty street—this New York siren seems resigned, somehow. Weary from overuse, as if the worst tragedies have already happened. It is another delirium-induced musing, this prescription of poetry to an ordinary thing, but something else, too. The beginnings of a new kind of loneliness, where Ruby will soon find herself talking to objects as if they are people, holding conversations with her hairbrush, and her vodka bottles, and the pillows on her bed, just to say anything at all. In these first, early hours, it is as if Ruby senses this impending isolation, the days ahead where she will barely speak to anyone unless she’s reciting her breakfast order or saying thank you to strangers for holding the door.

Turning from the window this first lonely morning, closing the blinds against the piles of black rubbish bags and jungle-gym scaffolds and scattering of parked cars on the street below, Ruby concedes that sleep is no longer an option. Instead, she carefully unpacks her suitcases, hangs up her dresses and jackets, lays out her shoes. When this task is done, empty suitcases stored by the door, she compiles a list of things that might make this room, with its clean linen and private bathroom, feel more like home. A glass for her vodka. A candle. Dishes for the microwave in the corner, and a vase for fresh flowers. Little anchors, trinkets to remind her that she lives here now.

Here. Ten thousand miles from Melbourne.

Ten thousand miles from him.

We both had to leave, you see. And maybe Ruby is right with this next thought, pushing through the vodka and jetlag and grey light of early morning:

Maybe the people who appear brave are merely doing the thing they have to do. It’s not a matter of courage, then, to pack up and leave a life. Just a lack of any other option, and the sudden realisation you probably don’t have anything left to lose.

I may be sleeping soundly this next, first morning, as she makes her lists and thinks her delirious thoughts. But make no mistake. Though we came from very different places, Ruby Jones and I might as well be the same person when it comes to how we landed here in New York City.

THREE

LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT MY FIRST SEVEN DAYS.

It’s like I’m living inside one of those Sunday afternoon, old movie musicals you don’t mean to keep watching, but it’s all so bright, so joyous, you can’t look away. Even when it rains, which it does a lot, there are no grey skies here, not to me. Sometimes, when I am wandering through Midtown, I stop in the middle of the street, just for a second, to look at the Chrysler Building, glittering skyward from her perch on Lexington Avenue. I think she is beautiful, the way an old-time beauty queen is beautiful, all silver sparkles and sash and crown. I always wave to her, subtly, though I don’t think anyone notices, and then I get going across the street, so I don’t get run over by a cross-town bus or a honking yellow cab.

I know about cross-town now. I know about uptown and downtown, and the way Broadway rambles around like a river. I know about boroughs and blocks, and I know which side of the pavement to stick to. I’m not even afraid of those cellar doors anymore, the ones that lead down to basements filled with flowers and fruits and every other imaginable thing. It’s as if the girl who arrived a week ago has lived a year in this city, that’s how much