Viewers, however, are not allowed to similarly manage their discomfort in the face of such grief. Rather, we are moved from the quiet of the viewing room to the out-of-sight-area in which Ruth’s unruliness continues. Responding to her son David’s concern about whether she is OK, Ruth wails at both her sons that she is “not fine!” She erupts, “I am a whore! I was unfaithful to your father. For years. . . . I met a man at church once when your father didn’t come with me. And he invited me for coffee. Said he liked my hair. He’s a hairdresser.” Ruth’s hair is in fact a site at which her negotiation of decorum and unruliness is regularly represented; the bun marks her as an old maid of sorts, but she sometimes takes it down to reveal long, flowing red tresses. That her affair took place with a hairdresser seems all too apt, as he certainly must have helped her “let her hair down.” A stunned David responds to Ruth’s confession: “Have you even begun to fathom the impropriety of this?” At this point in the series, none of us had begun to fathom the impropriety of Ruth’s behavior, but the constellation of contexts that provide the frame for her confession—the church, marital (in)fidelity, prescribed codes of conduct—combine to produce Ruth’s body as a carnivalesque text with a grotesque performance at its heart. The very amusing conclusion to this scene comes when Nate responds, “Fuck impropriety,” to which Ruth shouts, “We don’t say that word!” Although it does seem likely that Ruth is referring to the word “fuck,” it is equally possible that she means “impropriety.”
David’s discomfort with impropriety comes as no surprise. His formal dress code and demeanor signals that he constructs a sense of his self around official discourse, and that this operates as the means through which he manages complex responses to life experiences. His refusal to relinquish formal codes comes into direct conflict with Ruth’s impropriety through her repeated attempts at engaging her closeted son in conversation about his sexuality. The awkwardness of the scenes in which Ruth struggles to connect emotionally with her son illuminates the depth of David’s shame as well as the ways in which official, proper discourse works to enclose and isolate. Ruth’s unruliness operates as a means of breaching this. Whereas the boundary between work and home collapse for the male characters as the Fisher brothers take on the responsibility for running the funeral business, Ruth seeks employment outside the home for the first time. This is a cautious move in that her chosen world of work is in the familiar florist shop that supplies the Fisher Funeral Home. Nonetheless, her developing skill in arranging flowers signifies the gradual flowering of her own sense of individuality and sexuality that is at once deeply tied to the home and business, yet separate from it. So, although the kitchen remains a locus of self-definition (we rarely see her bedroom), the external world to which she moves represents a shift beyond the domestic. As Ruth reconfigures her sense of herself, she renegotiates her relationships with her children, breaching personal boundaries in the process. In this way, Ruth’s stunting resembles the work of feminists to dismantle the public/private divide that governs what is sayable or doable and where. Decorum has created distance between her and her family members, and she now hopes to close that gap. In “The Invisible Woman” (episode 18), she corners her adult children on the stairs and indecorously demands more intimacy from them, but her children are not as receptive as she might like.
Another example of this interplay between the grotesque body and the classical body comes in “A Private Life” (episode 12), which begins with the homophobic killing of a young gay man. While the hideously bruised and battered remains are reconstructed for viewing prior to the funeral, the ghost of the young man appears, in all its unreconstructed horror, to haunt and taunt David, goading him into confronting his own attitudes about his homosexuality, of which he is deeply ashamed. Despite Ruth’s repeated (if slightly oblique) attempts to broach the subject with her son, a yawning gulf exists between them as they talk across the kitchen table; he is unable to breach the boundary that marks proper (official) behavior. Instead of this home space, it is the flower shop—where Ruth is employed—that provides a site in which her unruly, risky behavior as mother to a self-loathing sexual subject emerges as a “deviation from the norm.” Here, she makes a bid to open an intimate conversation with Robbie, her gay male colleague, about his experience of coming out to his parents. This is a conversation he has refused her in the past. Ruth says, “Alright. You want to hear the most horrible moment from my intimate past?” Despite Robbie’s firm “No,” Ruth proceeds to disclose the fact that during her 30-year marriage she never had sex with anyone other than her husband—until she started having sex with her hairdresser.
Ruth: “And the first time my hairdresser friend and I had [pause] intercourse, he asked me to pleasure myself so he would know, you know, how I did that. And I couldn’t. Because I had never pleasured myself in my life. I was 52 years old. And I had to learn how to—”
Robbie: “masturbate”
Ruth: “—from a hairdresser.”
Her tone suggests that she is aware of the near comedic ridiculousness of this past repression, and that she is no longer willing to keep hands or words to herself.
