by Kelly Fordon
After dinner was served, my father slapped his hands on the table and looked at Janice and me as if we’d won the lottery.
“We are going to have so much fun this summer!” he said, then he rang the little bell in front of his placemat.
Gert came back through the kitchen door.
“Do we have any hot bread, Gert?” he rubbed his thumb and middle finger together as if he could almost feel the bread materializing.
My mother gave him a look. “You know what the doctor said, Ron.”
“Hot bread, Gert?” My father repeated.
Gert went back into the kitchen.
“So Janice, how was your first day in the nation’s capital?” my father asked.
Janice shrugged a shoulder. “Good, I guess.”
“What did you do?” My father turned to me as if he were expecting me to say that I had led a parade.
“Not much,” I said. If Janice wasn’t going to talk, I didn’t see why I had to.
“Well,” my mother said. “Let’s talk about what we’re going to do from now on.”
Gert came back through the door with a round sterling silver dinner roll holder and set it down in front of my father. He took off the cover. Inside, there were four Pepperidge Farm dinner rolls, piping hot. My mother gave Gert what Gert referred to as “the ice eyes.”
“I knew you’d come through for me, Gert,” my father said.
He popped one in his mouth and sat chewing while my mother, Janice, and I stared at him. “I have a plan,” he said when he’d swallowed it. “On Friday I’d like to take you guys to the Air and Space Museum. Would you like that?”
Janice shrugged.
“That sounds great,” I said to save Janice from my mother’s glare.
“You are so lucky!” my father announced. “You are going to be one of the first visitors! It just opened last week!”
“Good for you, Janice!” my mother exclaimed.
Janice stared at her.
“Can you pass the peas?” my father asked me.
“Janice, when I was your age, I lived on John Street about three blocks from you. I’m sure your father has shown you the house?” My mother waited, but Janice didn’t look up or respond.
“The only excitement there is the library and the church, am I right?” my mother asked. “Well, you are in for a good time now! And when you get back, you’ll have so many stories to tell your friends about your time in the big city.”
“Can’t wait,” Janice mumbled into her peas.
My mother had made a terrible mealtime arrangement with Gert. Every night, she made the dinner and Gert did the dishes. My father and I had suggested Gert make dinners instead, but my mother wouldn’t allow it because Gert fried her food, sometimes even using butter, and this reminded my mother of Grandma Jean. Gert had told me that she would have preferred to cook so that she could head upstairs and rest her weary bones instead of waiting for us to finish. I still wonder if she ever said that directly to my mother. It is unfortunately quite probable that my mother never gave Gert’s weary bones a single thought.
One time, Gert had told me about a dreadful trip down South she’d taken in the late ’60s with her former employers. They were headed for Florida, and they’d stopped at a diner in Georgia for lunch, but the owners of the diner wouldn’t let Gert in.
“I knew they weren’t going to let me in that place,” she said, with a shrug. “I don’t know what they were thinking.”
I thought she was going to say something more, but she just stopped speaking and picked up the laundry basket.
“If I had been there,” I said, “I would have hit the owner of that diner over the head with a bat.”
“Oh, that wasn’t the part that bothered me,” Gert said. “It was the fact that my employers went in anyway. I had to wait for them in the car, and then afterward they never even acknowledged it. They even had the nerve to bring me back a sandwich.”
That night at dinner, I looked over at Janice pushing her food around and wondered what she thought of my mother’s plain boiled chicken, brownish peas, and the small red potatoes with a sprinkle of dill. I should have informed her that our golden retriever, Jackson, would be waiting by my feet for dinner. To avoid starvation, I had taken to stealing Pop-Tarts from Safeway and stockpiling my classmates’ lunchtime desserts—Ho Hos, Twinkies, and Oreos—in a pillow I kept in the back of my walk-in closet. Kids who were allowed sweets seemed to be able to take them or leave them.
On Friday morning, my mother dropped Janice and me off at the Air and Space Museum, where my father was waiting out front. He had walked over from his office to meet us.
“Janice, you are in for an extraordinary experience,” he said, clapping Janice on the back. “President Ford just cut the ribbon yesterday! When you go back home you can tell your friends that you were one of the first people to see this new installation!”
“Cool,” Janice said, wincing from the clap.
I could not have been more thrilled. I had a secret ambition to be an astronaut myself, though I had told no one. The notion of a girl astronaut was ludicrous, and I knew it, but it was hard to keep my cool as we wandered through the hangar-like museum. If Janice hadn’t been there, I would have matched my father’s enthusiasm and then some.
“Look!” my father said. “The Wright Flyer!”
The 1903 Wright Flyer, the world’s first airplane, looked like it might crash right into us based on the angle it had been suspended from the cables above our heads, and we stood for a long time underneath it, taking it in.
After that, we peered inside John Glenn’s Mercury capsule, Friendship 7, and the Apollo 11 Command Module, Columbia, that had carried humans back to Earth from our first journey to the Moon. My father and I could barely contain ourselves, but Janice seemed to be dragging herself along like a sack of sand.
“Charles Lindbergh’s plane!” My father shouted at one point, waving us over to the Spirit of St. Louis.
“Geez,” Janice muttered. “You’d think Charles Lindbergh was still in it.”
The next morning Janice said, “Does your mother serve that same breakfast every single day?” She meant the bran cereal, side of bananas, and milk.
“Yes,” I said.
“I’m starving,” Janice said. “I can’t eat that again. I have some money with me. Can we walk to the store?”
We got dressed, pretended to eat our gross breakfasts, and then set out for the Safeway and Pop-Tarts. It was a beautiful summer morning, already steaming hot, the heat of the pavement pressing through our flip-flops.
“Why does your mother get dressed up every day like she’s going to work?” Janice asked.
My mother always looked ready for a photo shoot. “She likes to be ready for anything,” I said, which was the best explanation I could come up with.
“It’s so far from normal,” Janice said.
“What about your dad?” I figured that if my mother was such a showboat, her cousin might be, too.
“Are you kidding?” Janice said. “He’s like Night of the Living Dead.”
I had no idea what she meant by that, so I said nothing for a minute. “I think my mother just wants to do her best,” I said. “If you try hard, you can do anything.”
Janice clicked her teeth; a slightly different sounding click than Gert’s, though conveying an equal measure of irritation. “That’s a good one,” she said.
Just before we turned the corner to Safeway, we ran into Cassie, who was coming back from the library. She had a tennis bag looped over her shoulder and wore an all-white tennis skirt and a matching top, as if she were already a Wimbledon champion and not a skinny kid hitting by herself against the library wall. Cassie’s father was stationed in Africa somewhere doing who knew what (she claimed he was a spy), and her mother spent most of her time slinking around their backyard garden yanking things out of the ground, so Cassie was on her own most of the time just like me.
“Hey, what’s up?” Cassie asked
when she reached us. I could tell by the look on her face that she was surprised I had landed a new friend. I had no friends in my class, mostly because I said all the mean things I wanted to say to my mother to other people instead, people who had no power over me. These things slid out of my mouth without warning like slugs. Things like: “Do you really think that looks good on you?” or “You know I don’t think you were meant to be a singer.” Afterward, when the person looked at me horrified or hurt or a little bit of both, I always felt like the worst person in the world, but I didn’t let that stop me. My guess is that Cassie was friends with me out of convenience and because I respected the fact that she was older and had never insulted her.
Cassie gave Janice another once-over, probably also surprised I had landed a friend who was so showy. Janice was wearing a bright blue miniskirt, a white T-shirt, and matching blue sandals. She had put her black hair up into a high ponytail like a cheerleader.
“This is my cousin, Janice,” I said.
Cassie informed us that she had just hit 1,227 forehands against the backboard.
Janice laughed, her first in two days.
Cassie set her racquet bag down and balanced it between her feet. “You think I’m kidding?”
“Why would anyone even want to do that?” Janice asked.
“Where are you from?” Cassie asked.
“Michigan,” Janice said.
“Why would you want to come here in July when it’s like 150 degrees?”
“My dad wanted to get rid of me,” Janice said.
The way she said it startled me. I had not asked Janice why she was at our house out of fear that it might upset her, but also because it was very clear that she wanted as little to do with me as possible. Every time we were alone, she kept the conversation to the absolute minimum, preferring to nap or read the stack of Teen Beat magazines she’d brought with her. She was not, in short, very companionable.
“Why?” Cassie asked Janice.
“My mom left.”
“Where?” Cassie asked.
“Who knows?” Janice said. “She just took off.”
Cassie looked over at me. I looked down at Janice’s bright pink toenails and her blue sandals. Those are nothing special, I thought. Those are just drugstore flip-flops.
“That’s terrible,” Cassie said. “I mean that totally sucks.”
“Tell me about it,” Janice said. She put a hand up to her fringed black bangs and flipped them back out of her eyes.
“She didn’t tell you where she was going?” I asked.
“Why would she tell me?” Janice replied. “She was probably afraid I’d tell him.”
No one said anything. I had the urge to peel off into the woods, snake my way under the fence, and spend the rest of the afternoon alone in the fort. Maybe I would just camp out in the fort for the rest of the summer or for however long Janice was staying. No one had told me how long that would be.
“So what’s there to do around here?” Janice asked Cassie.
“Not much.” Cassie shrugged. “I’m in training, or I’d say we could sneak some of my mom’s cigarettes and head out to the fort.”
“You’ve never done that,” I said.
“Not with you,” Cassie said.
“Can you get me some?” Janice said. “I’m not in training.”
“Sure thing,” Janice turned to me. “Meet me in the fort in ten minutes.”
Back we went under the fence. I led the way to the fort. This time Janice went right in without a peep. I laid out the tarp and she sat down. She looked me over.
“I bet you’ve never smoked,” she said.
I shrugged.
“Well, it’s easy. What you want to do is breathe in really deep, then breathe back out, and that’s it. It makes you feel light-headed at first. I do it all the time. Maybe your friend will give us some extras. We can sneak off into the woods when your parents are asleep.”
“My mother will catch us,” I said.
“No, she won’t,” Janice said. “She smokes. She won’t be able to smell it.”
I had spent the better part of my life coughing and asking various grown-ups to roll down the window or move their cigarettes away, so it was astonishing to me that Janice even wanted to attempt it.
A couple of minutes later, Cassie returned. She had a brand-new pack of Kent’s and a lighter.
“Won’t your mother notice they’re missing?” I said.
“She buys them by the carton,” Cassie said. “Plus, she smokes a pack a day herself.”
Cassie handed the pack to Janice, and Janice held it upside down and started slapping it against her other hand the way my father did.
“Do you have to do that?” I asked.
“Packs the tobacco,” Cassie said.
I looked at her in wonder. All the afternoons we’d spent in the fort, and I’d never seen this side of her.
Cassie handed the pack to Janice and Janice ripped the cellophane from the top of the pack and shook one out into her hand. She lit it and inhaled deeply without coughing. She bent her neck back and blew the smoke out above us. It swirled out through the branches of the honeysuckle bush.
“You know what you’re doing,” I said.
“My mom smoked,” Janice said. “My dad didn’t use to, but he does now.”
“Do you have any brothers and sisters?” Cassie asked.
Janice handed the pack back to Cassie and Cassie shook one out and lit it. She inhaled and didn’t cough either.
“No,” Janice said.
“That’s good.” Cassie said.
“Why do you say that?” Janice asked.
Cassie shrugged. “Mostly they suck.”
Cassie’s brother Ian was nine and a pain in the butt. One time he had emptied a whole bag of plastic spiders into her bed while she was sleeping and that wasn’t even the half of it.
“I might like it actually,” Janice said. “It’s just going to be me and my dad now. A real laugh riot.”
Cassie handed me the pack and I shook one out. I didn’t really want to light it, but I felt like this was not the time to interrupt the conversation. I wanted to hear more about Janice’s life.
“So, do you mind talking about it?” Cassie asked.
I lit my cigarette and took a small puff. It tasted like I had licked the asphalt, and I felt a rush of water in my mouth.
Janice shook her head. “She used to sleep all the time anyway, so when she left, it wasn’t that surprising. One day I just went in after her nap to ask her a question and she was gone.” She stopped and took a drag of her cigarette.
“Whoa,” Cassie said after it was clear Janice wasn’t going to elaborate.
“So, I called my dad,” Janice finally added after taking another drag.
“And you had to wait there?” I said. “All by yourself? When did this happen?” I crushed my cigarette out in the dirt hoping no one would notice.
“I went outside and waited on the front steps.” Janice took another drag, inhaling deeply. “I was nine.”
“That is crazy,” Cassie said.
“She was crazy,” Janice said.
After a moment, I said, “Was she always crazy?”
“No, I don’t think so,” Cassie said. “She used to work for my dad, so she couldn’t have been then.”
“My mom was a model for a little while,” I said. I didn’t add, before she was a secretary.
“That’s not work,” Cassie said.
“Yes it is,” I said.
“You know it’s funny . . . your mom is like the opposite of my mom,” Janice said. “But in a weird way, she’s kind of the same.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, shocked.
Just then we heard a noise. Cassie got up and stuck her head out of the opening. “Construction workers. They’ve got these long orange sticks, and they’re coming this way.” She threw her cigarette down on the ground and then stepped on it. “Let’s get out of here.”
I followed her out of
the fort, and we ran toward the fence. I was just about to crawl through the hole when I noticed Janice wasn’t behind us. Cassie had continued to the street, so I ran back toward the fort, thinking about what Janice had said about my mother. If my mother reminded Janice of her own mother, was my mother going to leave? It seemed unlikely, and yet there was something I couldn’t quite pin down that troubled me. It was many years before I realized my mother’s perfect veneer was just like the chocolate dip on an ice cream cone. Who knew what was happening underneath?
When I reached the fort, I knelt and stuck my head through the opening. I was about to say, “Hey, come on,” when I saw Janice. She was sitting cross-legged on the tarp. She had either ashed into her hand, or the cherry of her cigarette had fallen off and she had caught it. Either way, she was sitting there staring at the burning ember in her hand as if she couldn’t feel a thing.
That night at dinner my mother held her hands out for grace, and when Janice bowed her head, my mother said, “While you are staying in this house, Janice, you will say grace and hold hands.”
Janice held out her hand, and when my mother saw the angry oozing welt, she got up from her chair so quickly it overturned and hit the buffet with a loud bang. Gert opened the kitchen door and asked if everything was OK.
“No, no, no!” my mother said, shaking her head briskly. “Come with me this minute, Janice.”
While they were in the bathroom, I told my father and Gert what had happened.
“That poor girl,” Gert made the clicking noise. “At least she won’t be alone with her pain now. You are helping her through it.”
“Yes, we are,” my father said. “You’re so right.”
After Gert had gone back into the kitchen, my father picked up his fork and stabbed a piece of asparagus. “So what did you two do today?” he asked.
My mother treated Janice’s wound with Bacitracin and bandaged it, and that night after we went to bed, she called Janice’s father. The next day, we took Janice to the airport.
“That girl needs more help than we can give her,” my mother said after Janice disappeared down the gateway to the plane. Then she smiled at me, with teeth.
