What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez

by Claire Jiménez

What shall I be called when all remains of me is a memory, upon a rock of a deserted isle? —Julia de Burgos, “Poem for my death” (Trans. Vanessa Pérez-Rosario)

The cops had suspected him at first. Dad knew they looked at him like he was a piece of shit, until they called his boss who confirmed that he’d been working overtime, a late shift, the night that Ruthy disappeared. Still, it broke my father’s heart. That somebody could think that about him, and those types of rumors, they don’t ever go away.

Some of these other bitches working at that hospital were straight-up lazy. Didn’t wipe the patients right when they took them to the bathroom or disappeared for twenty minutes when it was time to empty a bedpan. Then they’d turn around and be like: Oh, I didn’t know it was my turn. Bitch, please. Everybody knew it was your turn. Sometimes they got away with it, though. Which is all right because I’ll tell you one thing, you might be able to dupe the boss, but karma is elegant, and God sees everything. And trust and believe he does not forget.

i love the voice, but the writing style is a bit choppy and awkward. all these disjointed sentences in a row decreases the effectiveness of it.

How I felt like I had entered an invisible kingdom of motherhood (whether I liked it or not). Now, I finally understood what it was like to be a mom, a universe I never cared about before. The long nights. The private pain. Jesus, I was such a little badass growing up. And now maybe God was punishing me with 422 days without sleep.

“A white lady. It was so fucking weird, Lou. Spanish people, you know, it’s like we’re very, very emotional. I don’t care if that sounds racist because it’s true. When we lost Ruthy, you could hear all of us wailing at once on top of each other inside the room. A white family, when somebody dies, they all start talking about money. I was running over to the room, and I bumped into one of the woman’s daughters, all business, arguing about who was going to pay for what.” Lou said, “Why you always gotta be so mean to white people for? Leave us alone. You’re just as white as me.” Which for the record I am not…I’m just the lightest skinned in my family.

“Shut up.” “Yeah, you are. Go ahead, go,” he said quickly, waving a hand at me. “Smoke that cigarette and then get your beautiful behind back in bed, before I go call her. But brush your teeth first.” “Shut the fuck up, Lou,” I said as I moved out of the bedroom. But even from the kitchen window, over the sounds of cars splashing through the street, I could still hear him laughing.

it doesn’t seem like their relationship is…great? like i understand being stressed after getting home from work but it doesn’t seem like they’re in a good place..at all

First of all, if you really want to know what happened to Ruthy Ramirez, then you got to understand what happened that day at school. But maybe people don’t really want to know what happened that day. Maybe people don’t really care. Most adults already have their own ideas about the type of girl Ruthy is, that is because everybody’s always running their mouths about her. And people like that, they’re more interested in the type of little girl who one day rides her bike down her suburban block and disappears, only to show up later portrayed by some B actress on Unsolved Mysteries. Or they greedily watch the news, obsessed, as they guess who killed JonBenet Ramsey.

So what? Most people are followers anyway. They don’t know how to form their own opinions but somehow still think that they’re like special. That they are better than me. Inside their head, they think they got it all figured out, about who I am and what happened. Whatever! Who cares? Not me, I promise you. I’ll tell you that much. Let them continue to play themselves. I can tell my own damn story.

this is powerful

Yo le digo, “Mario, I got married once. That was the love of my life. Never again.” I say this not out of hard feelings, or even because it is true, but in order to remind him that we are only friends.

You remember pobrecita Maribella the other day, the little redhead in Proper Parenting, the one whose boyfriend’s been dodging child support for the last two years? That story about how her fifteen-year-old son came home high after “basketball practice” and called her a bitch. Let me ask you something, Dear Lord, what exactly are we supposed to do with children like this? And what do we do when the men disappear and we have to raise them ourselves? You tell me, Dear Lord. Do we beat them? And if so, how hard? How long? And how can we stand the weight of our own hands on our children’s bodies? And what do I say to the young women when the city gets greedy? When it opens its mouth and tries to snatch our children away? “You should have put your kids in time-out.” Ha!

All I want to know though is how am I supposed to sit here warm in bed, raise the remote off the nightstand to click off the TV, then close my eyes and dream? Wake up in the morning. Turn on the coffeepot and the burner. Pry the refrigerator door open to look for the eggs behind last night’s leftover rice and beans. In the bathroom, how do I wash my hair or turn on the faucet to take a bath, slip the MetroCard into the bus, and travel to the church, knowing the whole time that my daughter is missing, that in some other city, some other country, she can be hungry, that someone can be hurting her, can be doing terrible things to her, unspeakable things, that she cannot stop? Am I supposed to forget that this is a possibility, Dear Lord, that this can be happening right now? They tell me I am supposed to smile, but what normal person is ever able to hold a happy thought in their head beside that knowledge? How am I supposed to laugh? Or anything? Anymore.

Better than any political science class you could ever take in college, a place like Mariposa’s really taught you how deeply patriarchy was linked to capitalism. But what good was it, really, to know about a thing, to attach a name to its invisible force, if, regardless, you were gonna constantly be stuck in it?

The hardest part about working at Mariposa’s was just waiting for it to be over. You’d stand there in your heels for what felt like a half hour, then look down at your watch with hope—only to find out it had been a mere eight minutes! You would try to keep your mind occupied by spying on what was happening in the rest of the store because a fight at the register with a customer could turn into thirteen minutes of entertainment.

I hated all of those students, not just Kelsey. Every single one of them with their North Faces and their four-year stints at Exeter, and their daddies who were CEOs, and their mothers who donated to charities to fund scholarships for “at risk” kids like me. When Kelsey learned that I was there on scholarship, she turned to me and said, “Do you know how lucky you are to be here? This is like a really, really good school.”

“Leave her alone, you bully,” Evan answered. “Our poor Nina.” I stood quiet in the car and let them think one fucked-up thing had happened to me instead of another. Months later, I would email Wilkins for a letter of recommendation, and he would answer, Hello Nina, My apologies for the late response. I’m sorry but at this time I cannot recommend you.

ugh what a piece of shit

But then Yesenia said, “There was so many of you girls.” Ruthy spun around and looked at Yesenia, confused. “So many of us?” “I thought, your dad don’t need to touch me,” she explained, “because he’s probably already touching you.” And Ruthy felt surprised and maybe a little bit angry, not only because she felt defensive of her father, but also because she realized in that moment that Yesenia could live with Ruthy being hurt as long as Yesenia wasn’t the one being touched. Things were different after that. No matter how many experiences they had shared, how many years they were best friends, Ruthy suspected there was a part of Yesenia that Ruthy could never understand, a part of Yesenia that could very easily turn cold and sacrifice Ruthy, if pressed, to one of their childhood monsters.

And watching these women brawl made you want to return to those moments to deliver whatever punishment you thought some previous ho from another period in your life still very much deserved. And sometimes it just felt good to watch these women argue, when so much of your day-to-day life consisted of nodding politely or biting your tongue so that you would not be fired, so that you could buy groceries, so that you could pay rent and take care of your family.

And now Ruby looked recognizable, like some of our cousins who’d dropped out of college and couldn’t find jobs. Like my Titi Ivette, who, one day, the police found dead, alone in her apartment, after she had a seizure and nobody was there to help her. Or like a warped magnified version of my own underemployment.

Some chose a girl in their clique, while others purposefully chose women they thought were “too stupid” to understand their clue, which generated a great deal of distrust. In order to win, ultimately, you had to step on the other woman, which reminded me of sophomore year of college and meeting the only other Puerto Rican girl in the Biology Department and the look of hate on her face when I introduced myself.

Ariel, the girl from the Bronx, won that challenge. And at the end of the episode you saw her sitting alone at her vanity, drunk, fingering the five-thousand-dollar strand of pearls around her beautiful neck. Inexplicably crying.

But in one surprising moment, Gem holds out her hand to stop McKayla and says, “No, that’s too much.” That happened sometimes. Glimpses of the girls’ real selves cracked through whatever front they’d built to audition for the show, which made me wonder: Was there an alternate universe where all of these girls were actually friends, co-conspirators, in which the ultimate joke was on us, the viewers sitting on our bored asses at home? Behind the scenes, off camera, did Ruby crack up with Gem and the sorority girl like they were homegirls, laughing about how Catfight fans were going to go crazy watching the next day as Ruby dipped one of her fingers in the ruined foundation and dotted the rancid makeup underneath her eyes?

belonged to the screaming audience. Whose design was it to choreograph such violence between these women, who was really in charge, and why could I not stop watching?

i think some of the most profound observations so far have been about reality tv, and what it tells us about our culture’s values especially when it comes to women

She picks the pencil up and starts again: Once upon a time there was a girl named Ruthy. She had red hair and two sisters, and she liked to run, because she was good at it. Ruthy erases the last part of that sentence and replaces the clause with: very good at it. Then she stares at the words on the page. This time it all sounds boring. Who cares about a Puerto Rican girl from Staten Island on the track team? Who cares about her mother or her sisters or her father?

meta. i like it

Ruthy stares at Yesenia’s name in script, the reality of its loops and how softly she’s drawn the word on the page. What if someone sees Yesenia’s name there, etched inside her binder? What stupid thoughts would they have, if somebody walked by and peeped the word Yesenia written in that big loopy font of Ruthy’s? What if they all thought she was weird? If they all started to laugh?

“She quit,” Savarino said, punching a tag loudly into one of the new midrise lace maternity briefs. And I wondered why they called it quitting when saleswomen left their jobs and how when doctors or teachers or businessmen left, they called it retiring. It was a small thought. So thin and tiny that I’d forgotten it by the time I started fumbling with the computer at the register to clock in.