He’d come home and shower before he went to his classes, and I’d watch him get dressed and look in the mirror, smooth out his button-down, flatten the cowlick at the back of his head, and nod approvingly before leaving the house again, not looking at me. It hurt just watching him walk out like I wasn’t even there, but when I watched him watch himself in the mirror, he looked more like the boy I’d known in high school than he had in a long time—it made me warm thinking about him sitting in a classroom, diligently taking notes.
At night, I’d stay up until he got back from the community college. I’d get into bed on my side and he’d climb in on his side and we’d fall asleep, our backs to each other. But in the mornings, I’d wake up and my face would be against his chest, our bodies wrapped together. When I woke up, I’d quickly close my eyes again, slow my breathing, pretend I was still asleep—I could feel him do the same thing.
We would only move and fake-yawn once our alarm rang. Every evening, one of us would set our alarm a couple minutes later, neither bringing up why we were doing so.
* * *
—
JENNY SHOWED UP at the grocery store on a Wednesday three weeks after Bakersfield.
I had finished my shift for the night, told Marina we would hang tomorrow—we were friends then, had discovered we both loved watching NBA games, no matter what team was playing—and was about to get in my car when I heard a voice from behind me.
“Hey, Pizza Girl.”
* * *
—
I’D AVOIDED thinking about Jenny. I’d stared mindlessly at fluorescent lights for hours, been taking a different route home from work, I’d shouted at Mom a week ago when she suggested we order pizza for dinner, but as Jenny stood in front of me in that grocery store parking lot, I realized how avoidance was the most attention you could give something.
I fiddled with my car keys. She passed her grocery bag back and forth from one hand to the other.
“Why are you grocery shopping here?”
“I’m not. I called Eddie’s first.” she said. “I asked for you, but the guy working there said you were gone, got a new job. I had to threaten to talk to his manager for him to tell me where your new job was.”
“Why do you have a grocery bag, then?”
“I was just hoping to run into you. I bought chicken nuggets and a jug of milk.”
“The dino-shaped ones?”
“No, just the regular.”
A woman walked up and unlocked the car between us. She only had two bags, but it seemed to take her forever to load them into her trunk. Jenny and I both watched her, and I’m sure she was as grateful as I was for a moment to collect ourselves.
The woman finally got the bags into her trunk, hopped into her car, and pulled away. I turned to Jenny and really looked at her then, straight in her eyes. “Do you even know my name?”
She looked blankly at me.
“You’ve never called me by my real name.”
“I know your name.”
“What is it, then?”
I’d never thought about our age gap until that moment, or maybe I’d never thought about it because I’d never wanted to think about it, had ignored the way she had always looked at me, like I was something semi-recognizable, a small flicker of something she remembered, but had mostly forgotten about, shoved to a dark corner of her memory. “Your name is Jane,” she said.
More fiddling with keys, more bag passing between hands. “I’m pregnant too,” she said.
“Oh.” I looked at her belly, no bump visible yet. “Congratulations.”
“Thanks. Maybe I’ll name it Jane if it’s a girl.”
“My baby is going to be a girl too. Maybe I’ll name it Jenny.”
“That would be weird.”
“So would your daughter being named Jane.”
We both laughed. “Don’t worry,” she said. “We’re probably naming it after Jim’s mother, Margaret.”
“I don’t know what my daughter is going to be named yet.”
In a lot of ways, it felt like we were talking how we’d always talked, as if no time had passed, as if I hadn’t shown up drunk at her place and passed out on her couch with a gun in my hand.
She said, “I have the best story about my new neighbor and her pet iguana,” at the same time as I said, “Why are you here?”
I could tell by the way her shoulders drooped that she had been hoping we’d talk and joke for a few more minutes before she’d say goodbye, take care, like she always did. I half expected her to pull out her wallet and fold twenties into my palm.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve just been feeling guilty, like it was my fault that you were in that position.”
I almost told her that, yes, it was absolutely her fault I was in that position. That if she’d never called in to Eddie’s, never left me alone with Adam, if she’d never kissed me back, if she hadn’t made me feel special, like the things I did and said mattered, I would’ve been okay. But I knew that was a lie and that, even if I’d never picked up the phone and heard her voice on the other end, I would’ve found something else to lose myself in—if you were pushed off a cliff, you’d grab hold of anything resembling safety.
“You don’t owe me anything,” I said. “It’s okay, really. Just tell me about your neighbor and the iguana.”
There was still more I wanted to ask her. What exactly I meant to her, how much of herself did she actually reveal to me, did she still miss me sometimes like I missed her—a missing that had no electricity, no lightning, or thunder, a missing like a hand digging into an empty chip bag searching for crumbs, any last salty bit, a missing more like mourning.
But we just talked about her life in Bakersfield—the classes she’d started taking at the local YMCA, how Adam wasn’t playing baseball any longer, but was interested in painting now, spent hours in their backyard staring at blank canvases before he even reached for his paintbrush, and then he’d stare at the different-colored paints before he made another move, how Jim was coming home earlier than he ever had since they’d been married, he didn’t even wear a tie to work anymore—and the more she talked, the more the desire to ask faded. Her hair had grown a little longer. It didn’t flow freely and lightly down her back like her ponytail did, but it went a couple inches past her chin, and she seemed to stand straighter and looser at the same time, nothing weighing her down. She would never be anything more to me than what she was now. If we saw each other again, it would be by chance, or, if you believed in this kind of a thing, by the large invisible hands that were responsible for pushing and pulling people together.
Billy called me and I answered on the first ring. “Hi.”
“Hey, if you’re still at work, can you get some ground turkey and tater tots? Brussels sprouts too if they’re on sale.”
I looked at Jenny. She smiled back. “No,” I said. “I’ve already left. How about I pick something up tonight and we eat with Mom. I saw a new Chinese-Italian-French fusion place opened up near us, and I don’t know what that means, but I’m interested.”
He didn’t say anything for a moment and I was worried he’d hung up, but then he said, “Yeah, okay. Sounds good.”
I hung up and put my phone back in my pocket. “I’ve got to go.”
“Me too,” Jenny said. “Take care, Jane.”
* * *
—
I’D MOSTLY STOPPED DRINKING.
The second night back from the hospital, I’d been unable to sleep and got up from bed, sure Billy was awake, and gone to Dad’s shed. I pulled all the unopened beers I had from the mini-fridge and opened them, dumped their contents onto the backyard lawn. The next day, I bought a new lock to put on Dad’s shed and drove to a freeway overpass, threw the key to the lock over it.
That would’ve been nice if that was the last time I ever had
a drink. That was the shit that people said in AA meetings, the stories re-created in commercials that encouraged people to live better lives. Not even a week after that, I left the grocery store and parked out in front of a liquor store, begged seven different men and women before a homeless guy in a wheelchair agreed to buy me a six-pack if I rolled him to the McDonald’s across the street and bought him two Big Macs and a large fries. I asked him if he wanted a soda with it and he shook his head, said he heard if you left a tooth in a glass of Coke for twenty-four hours it would dissolve.
I broke the lock off of Dad’s shed that night with a pair of pliers and drank four of those cans, dumped the last two. The next week, the same guy bought me another six-pack and I drank three and dumped the remaining three.
In the twenty-fifth week of my pregnancy, I finished my shift and drove to the liquor store. I could see the homeless guy wheeling around the front of the store, but that time I didn’t get out of my car. I pulled out of the lot and kept driving.
I drove past my street and turned around, almost turned onto Jenny’s old street. I didn’t know where I was going. My daughter had been kicking almost every day. It was mostly just a small kick or two here and there, randomly—when I was brushing my teeth, opening the fridge, locking my car, saying hey to Marina. But that night, as I pulled up to the liquor store, she kicked four times, in quick succession.
I kept driving, and my left hand drifted from the wheel to the top of my belly. My belly had grown significantly, protruding far enough that I’d had to move my driver’s seat back a couple notches. My hand felt comfortable on the crest of it, and as I cruised down the road, no turns being taken, I started talking to my daughter.
“Her name was Jenny Hauser and every Wednesday I put pickles on her pizza.”
Acknowledgments
While this book is fiction, my dad did tell me once that he thought everyone would be happier if he lived alone on an island and even just writing that out now, my heart broke a little. Nobody should be an island and I am blessed every day that I’m not, that I have so many people who helped me become who I am.
This list will be long and it could be even longer. I could probably make a whole novel of just thank-yous.
Thank you to Cara Reilly, Emily Mahon, Sarah Englemann, Terry Zaroff-Evans, Todd Doughty, Tricia Cave, Jillian Briglia, and everyone at Doubleday. Thank you especially to my editor, Lee Boudreaux. You not only helped me shape this book, but you ate messy chicken wings with me and asked all the right questions, cared about the answers, brought light and enthusiasm even when I didn’t have it. None of this would be possible without you—let’s split a bottle of Havana soon.
Much love to Tallboy, an artist that if you don’t know, you should. I’ve been a fan ever since I bought a shirt of yours at Roberta’s. Honored to be the first book cover you designed.
Thank you to my agent, Eric Simonoff. You said my query letter was the worst one you’ve ever read and I’m just grateful you looked past that and still read my book, believed in it. Thank you also to Taylor Rondestvedt, Laura Bonner, Fiona Baird, and all the other believers at WME.
Thank-yous to my professors at Columbia University who gave me a space to grow. Special thank-yous to Elissa Schappell, Sam Lipsyte, Ben Metcalf, James Canon, Binnie Kirhsenbaum, Rivka Galchen, Lara Vapnyar, Anelise Chen, Matt Gallagher, and Darcey Steinke.
To my professors at USC, the people who helped me fall back in love with writing: T. C. Boyle, Marianne Wiggins, Dana Johnson, Molly Bendall, Susan Segal, Chris Freeman, and David St. John.
I believe friendships are the purest relationships in your life, the ones where nothing is asked of you but yourself, and I am so lucky I have so many. There are people I love that are sure to be left off this list (I’m sorry).
Cheers to my Scum Mansion boiz and gurlz: Youssef Biaz, Emily Rawl, Jackson Burgess, David Fulmer, Marta Olson, Skyler Garn, Katie Barreira, Austin Shaw, Nate Fulmer, Austin Smith, Mike Harper, and Jessie Land—you guys made college a beautiful, gorgeous mess.
Another glass raised to my Columbia Writing peeps: Evan Gorzeman and The Mango Deck, Anya Lewis-Meeks, CJ Leede, Kyle Kouri, Brady and Natalie Jackson, Mina Seckin, Michael Hanna, Nifath Chowdhury, SJ Collins, Nick Smatt, Christina Schmidt, Chris Molnar, Etan Nechin, Mina Hamedi, Naomi Falk, Nathan Fetherolf, Claire Carusillo, Jarrod Harrison, Santo Randazzo, Bryan Perley, Isabelle Burden—can’t wait to buy your books off shelves.
Molly Leonard, Cat Barnes, Lucy Sheinbaum, Sami Pastron, Ethan Fuirst, Hailey Noonan, Carlos Rivera, Brenna Gildenberg, Mark Sullivan, Alex Bailey, Lauren Tierney, Dylan Silverstein, Bobby Fitzpatrick, Jake Roberts, Josh Brandis, Alana Duthie—I will always be AVAIL for you all.
To my high school friends who ruin my life every damn time—Mayuri Patel, Nisha Puri, Lauren Gutierrez, Isabel Lee—fuck you all, love you all.
My oldest friends in the world, who knew me when I had a bowl cut and still talked to me. Albert Lim and Carter Beck—the youngest I’ve ever felt was drinking beers in the trunks of our first cars, talking about shit that used to mean something.
To the sports teams I’ve played on, to the wonderful teammates I’ve had and wouldn’t have known if not for sweaty practices and rough games—PVPHS Panthers (shoutout to the basement crew), USC Women’s Club Basketball, USC Hellions (Five Lokos), Columbia Pandemic.
Big, big thank you to my family. On both sides, I have aunts, uncles, and cousins who drive me crazy and love me hard and I hope I drive them crazy back, that they know that I love them even harder.
Thank you and I love yous even bigger than that are reserved for my brother Ryan, someone I wish I could be as brilliant and hilarious as, whose couch I still plan to live on one day. My dad—I’m sorry things haven’t always been good between us, but I’m thankful a lot has been good with us and we still have time to fix the bad. To my mom, whose first name is my middle name—thank you for showing me how important words are, showing me their beauty and their fragility, how you can have all the pretty words and it means nothing if you can’t perform the actions that back them up—you are my hero, a badass woman who made me believe from a young age in the power of women, whose name I’m honored to carry and have printed on the spine of this book.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jean Kyoung Frazier lives in Los Angeles.
Pizza Girl is her debut novel.
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