Where Somebody Waits

Where Somebody Waits is a 2013 novel written by Margaret Kaufman of California and published by Paul Dry Books of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The novel consists of a series of interrelated stories, some of which were previously published in the journals Ascent, Marlboro Review, Missouri Review, Staples, and Kenyon Review. Before this novel, Kaufman had published five books of poetry, 

The stories are set in an unspecified rural Arkansas community located in northeastern Arkansas. As the narrator of one story describes it: “This small town in Arkansas which we visited each summer had no Downtown. There was Uptown, Colored Town, and the rest of the town, which stopped someplace near the cemetery at the edge of town. Everything beyond that was called country or downriver.” Given that, at one point, characters go to the county seat of Wynne (Cross County), the implied setting could be Parkin (Cross County), which had a documented Jewish community, perhaps best known through the novel Summer of My German Soldier by Bette Greene. 

The book opens during the World War II years with the meeting of Ruby Daniels, a nineteen-year-old woman who works as a manicurist, and Nathan “Bubba” Davidson, a local merchant in his thirties, “too old to be drafted off to war with the younger men she sometimes wrote letters to.” Ruby’s sister, Martha Nell, works for the Red Cross in Little Rock (Pulaski County), and Ruby once went with her to deliver packages to German prisoners of war at “Fort Robinson” (Camp Joseph T. Robinson). Ruby is surprised to learn that Bubba is Jewish and admits that, on Sunday mornings, she usually goes fishing instead of to church.  

That Sunday, they go fishing and fall in love, and the next story finds them married, having rushed off to a justice of the peace in Wynne. However, after a year of marriage, Ruby has not become pregnant, likely due to a case of mumps Bubba had as a child. John Clay Ferris, a former boyfriend, comes home from the war, upset to find her married, and Ruby allows him to take advantage of her. She ends up pregnant, but, after confiding to her doctor, has an abortion, saying, “I have a good life with Bubba. It will have to be enough.” 

Most stories in the book offer vignettes into Ruby’s life through the years, sometimes told from a first-person perspective by family members or other people in the narrative, such as John Clay Ferris, with whom Ruby carries on an extended affair until she is thirty-five. Ruby and Bubba sell the store, and Bubba dies of a sudden heart attack while the two are visiting her nephew Frank, who has AIDS, in California, on their way to Hawaii. John Clay repeatedly proposes to Ruby after her husband’s death, but she has no desire to be married again. Frank dies, and so does John Clay, and Ruby eventually makes a quilt from clothing left behind by these three dead men in her life. The last story finds Ruby at age eighty, telling her nieces, “Only reason I’m still alive, darlin’, God and the devil are fighting over who gets me. Doesn’t either of ’em really want me, too much trouble….Whoever loses gets me.”  

For additional information:
Kaufman, Margaret. Where Somebody Waits. Philadelphia, PA: Paul Dry Books, Inc., 2013. 

Staff of the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas