Mary Jane

by Jessica Anya Blau

“What are you doing here?” I ignored my mother’s question, and Izzy didn’t answer either. She must have intuited that my mother’s words were a statement of disapproval disguised as a question.

  “Your father called from work and said his stomach was upset. I need to change the dinner menu tonight.”

  “Oh, poor Dad.”

  “Why are you in aprons?” Mom’s head tocked to the side. I could almost hear her thoughts. She didn’t like dillydallying and obviously didn’t approve of what appeared to be dangerous game-playing in the grocery store.

  Quickly, I blurted out, “Mrs. Cone asked me to buy some for them and I thought it would be fun to wear them while we shopped.”

  “Are you doing the grocery shopping for Mrs. Cone?” Now she actually showed her disapproval on her furrowed brow. To my mother, shopping for one’s home was serious business.

  “We need Popsicles,” Izzy said. Her voice wasn’t as jumpy and high as usual.

  “I thought we’d start with the aprons, you know. To make the shopping more exciting.”

  “Hm.” My mother nodded, examining me. “I suggest you don’t wear them until you pay for them.”

  “But it’s so much fun for Izzy.” I held my mother’s gaze and smiled.

  “I’d think twice about that if I were you.” Mom turned her head toward Izzy, balancing on the end of the cart. “And you need to be safe, too.”

  “Okay. Yeah, maybe we’ll hang out here a few minutes, just for fun.” I finally glanced at Izzy, who was now staring at me. She seemed confused but also appeared to know that she shouldn’t say anything.

  “See you tonight, dear.” My mother turned abruptly and walked to the closest checkout counter. She didn’t look back at us. I could feel my heart like a drum in my chest and knew it wouldn’t stop until my mother was entirely out of the store.

  “Your mom is scary,” Izzy actually whispered.

  “Really?” It never occured to me that she looked or seemed scary to anyone but me. Her voice was always in a steady, calm middle tone. She was tidy. Clean. Not many wrinkles. Her hair was blonder than mine. If she colored it, she didn’t let me know.

  “Does she spank you?”

  “No, not often.” She’d whacked me across the head many times. But she’d never pulled me over her knee. My father had never spanked me either, but he did have a big fist that balled up in silence when he was angry. Usually his anger was directed toward the newspaper, or the news. He disliked many politicians, and he particularly hated the heads of most foreign countries.

  When my mother finally walked out of the store, my body relaxed, my blood felt like warm milk. I turned the cart and Izzy and I went down the nearest aisle.

  “Uh-oh.” Izzy looked up at me, her mouth held in an O from the word oh. “I don’t remember my number for the ratio.”

  “I do.”

  “You remember my number?”

  “Yes. Well. No.” It was one thing to lie to my mother; it was another to lie to Izzy. “We’ll start from this end and we’ll count all over again. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  I returned the aprons before we checked out. Izzy had counted fifty customers and I had counted twenty-six employees.

  “So our ratio is twenty-six to fifty,” I said.

  “And the ratio of me and you to the witch is two to one.”

  “Yes. And the ratio of me and you to my mom is two to one.”

  “Because we’re on the same team?”

  “Yeah.” I tugged one of Izzy’s braids. “We’re on the same team.”

  I held a brown paper bag in each arm and Izzy held one with two hands in front of her. Nothing was too heavy, but we had bought a lot: five boxes of Popsicles, six bags of M&M’s, five boxes of Screaming Yellow Zonkers popcorn, five Chunky bars, five Baby Ruth bars, three rolls of candy buttons, six candy necklaces (one for each person in the household), and handfuls of Laffy Taffy and Bazooka bubble gum. I hoped that I had bought neither too much nor too little. Dr. Cone’s instructions had been so vague that failure seemed highly likely. When my mother sent me to Eddie’s to get something for her, the instructions were specific: one shaker of Old Bay Seasoning in the small rectangular shaker, not in the larger cylinder; one white onion the size of your father’s fist, no brown spots; and three carrots, each the length from your wrist bone to the tip of your middle finger. All Dr. Cone had said was “some sugary sweets.”

  Once we had passed my cross street, we cut back over to Woodlawn. The blond woman was out gardening again. As we approached, she sat up on her knees, pushed her hair out of her face with the back of her gloved hand, and said hello.

  “We got lots of sweets!” Izzy said, and we both paused.

  I put down my bags and Izzy put down hers as well. The woman stood and walked to the edge of her lawn so she was standing right beside us.

  “What did you get?” She peered at the bags.

  Izzy pointed. “Popsicles and candy and popcorn and bubble gum and . . . what else?”

  “Holy moly! Lucky you!” The woman smiled at Izzy. “Are you the summer nanny?” she asked me.

  “Yes. For Dr. and Mrs. Cone.”

  “I’m Izzy.” Izzy pulled out a box of Screaming Yellow Zonkers. “Can we have this?”

  “Sure.” I took the box from her and opened it, then handed it back.

  Izzy stuck her little hand into the box and pulled out a fistful of shellacked popcorn with peanuts frozen in the gaps like insects in amber. “Want some?” she asked the woman.

  “Sure.” The woman removed her gloves and stuck her hand in the box. “What’s your name?” she asked me.

  “Mary Jane Dillard.”

  “Oh, you’re Betsy and Gerald’s daughter.” She plucked a piece of popcorn from her palm and stuck it in her mouth. “I met your mom at the Elkridge Club. My husband and I are thinking of joining.”

  “Do you know my mom and dad?” Izzy asked.

  “Mmm . . . what are your parents’ names again? I’m new here, so I’m just getting to know people.”

  “Mommy and Daddy!” Bits of popcorn flew from Izzy’s mouth as she spoke.

  “Well, I’ll have to walk over and introduce myself.”

  “Dr. and Mrs. Cone are very busy this summer,” I said quickly.

  “My dad is Richard.” Izzy handed the box back to the woman, who took another handful and then passed the box to me. “And my mom is Bonnie.”

  “I’m Mrs. Jones. But there are three Mrs. Joneses in this neighborhood, so you can call me Beanie.”

  “Beanie?!” Izzy laughed.

  “That’s what my parents called me when I was little. I was so skinny, I looked like a string bean. And then it stuck and now everyone calls me Beanie.”

  “Does Mr. Beanie call you Beanie?” Izzy asked.

  “Mr. Jones calls me Beanie. Yes.”

  “Do your kids call you Beanie?”

  “Mr. Jones and I haven’t been blessed with children yet.” Beanie Jones smiled. When my mother’s friend, Mrs. Funkhauser, talked about not having kids, she seemed sad, but this wasn’t a sad smile. Beanie Jones turned her head toward the house and then I could hear it too: through the wide-open front door, the phone was ringing. “Oh, I have to get that! You girls have fun.” She ran toward the phone.

  “Should we leave her the rest of the box?” Izzy asked.

  “Yeah.” I folded down the wax paper and closed the box, then set it on the cobblestone walkway.

  “What if a dog eats it first?”

  “Run it up to the porch.”

  Izzy picked up the box, ran up to the wide blue-floored porch, and placed the box on a little glass table that stood between two cushioned wrought-iron chairs.

  When Izzy and I walked in the house, the Cone phone was ringing. No one seemed to be answering, so I rushed into the kitchen, put the bags down on the table, and looked for the phone. I found it between a stack of phone books and a Hills Bros. Coffee can that held pencils, pens, and a dirty wooden ruler.

&n
bsp; “Cone residence, this is Mary Jane.”

  “Mary Jane! You’re back.” It was Dr. Cone.

  “Yeah, we got lots of sweets.”

  “Great. Can you bring some out to my office?”

  “Okay. Popsicles and—”

  “You pick an assortment. Just lots of sweets.”

  “Okay.”

  Dr. Cone hung up and I looked at the phone for a second before setting it in the cradle. My stomach churned. I was still worried about bringing the correct sweets to Dr. Cone and Jimmy.

  “Can I have a Popsicle?” Izzy asked.

  “Just a half. Don’t want to spoil your dinner.”

  Izzy ripped open a Popsicle box and sat on the floor, removing Popsicles one by one. I could tell she was looking for the right color. The Popsicles had started to melt during our walk, so the colors were printing through the wrapper.

  “Purple.” Izzy handed me a purple Popsicle. I placed the gully between the two sticks against the edge of the kitchen table and then slapped the top one with the heel of my palm. The Popsicle broke into two perfect halves. I ripped off the paper, gave one half to Izzy, and stuck the other in my mouth. I held it between my lips, melting, as I unloaded the sugary treats onto the kitchen table.

  Next, I opened the freezer door and looked inside. A warty, hoary frost covered all the contents, like the Abominable Snowman had vomited in there. Few things could be identified past a shape: rectangle, edgy blob, carton. “How about we clean out the freezer today?”

  “Okay!”

  I took out a few boxes of unknowns and placed them on the dirty dishes in the sink to make room for the Popsicles. Then I shoved in all the boxes of Popsicles but one, which I placed in the bottom of an empty Eddie’s bag. On top of the Popsicles I put two boxes of Zonkers, and then two of each of the other candies.

  “I’ll be right back.” I headed out the screen door as Izzy flipped over to her stomach and continued sucking her Popsicle. I was nervous about getting the sweets order right. But, I realized, far less nervous than when I’d run into my mother at Eddie’s.

  I paused in the middle of the lawn, looked up toward the sun, and shut my eyes for just a few seconds. My heart wasn’t even beating hard. In fact, I felt wonderful.

  4

  I learned two things that first week that Sheba and Jimmy stayed in the Cone house. The first was that addicts ate a lot of sugar to replace the drugs and alcohol they’d been taking. The second was that being married to an addict seemed harder than being an addict.

  Most mornings I arrived to find Sheba and Izzy waiting for me in the kitchen. Sheba didn’t like to cook and both she and Izzy thought I made the best breakfasts. I started making a daily trip to Eddie’s with Izzy, where we’d stock up on ingredients for a good breakfast the next day: eggs, flour, sugar, baking soda, bacon, real maple syrup, butter, and loads of fresh fruit and berries. Also, I’d pick up more sugary treats, particularly Screaming Yellow Zonkers, which Jimmy had declared essential to his recovery.

  Sheba talked a lot when there were adults in the room. She gossiped about other celebrities, and once complained at length about a particular director who wanted her to take off her top for a horseback riding scene in which “there was no logical reason this character would ride without a top on!” More frequently, she talked about how hard it had been living with Jimmy the past year. There was the Oscars party where he “nodded off” at the table and his head fell on his plate; the intimate dinner party at a famous producer’s house where he disappeared into the bathroom for two hours and then stumbled out and fell asleep on the couch, his head falling into the lap of the sixteen-year-old daughter of the producer; and numerous flights on airplanes—private and public—where he vomited all over the bathroom, peed in his pants, and/or had to be carried off once they’d landed. I wondered how she had stayed with him through all that. And then my sex-addict brain wondered if it had to do with attraction and if she was a sex addict like me, and just couldn’t pull herself away from his body. Jimmy was muscly and lean. And he had a smell to him that made me want to stick my face into his chest. It was almost an animal smell, but sweeter, softer.

  Sometimes Sheba relayed stories of addicted Jimmy right in front of Jimmy. When that happened, Jimmy just shrugged, apologized, and more than once looked at Dr. Cone and said, “I need you, Doc.”

  When it was just me, Izzy, and Sheba, Sheba became quiet and curious and asked questions about us. It was like Izzy and I were foreigners from another country. Sheba had been a celebrity since she was five years old, so, really, we were foreign to her, people from the country of non-stars.

  The Monday of Sheba and Jimmy’s second week, Sheba sat with Izzy at the banquette, coloring. I was at the stove making “birds in a nest” as my mother had taught me. Once I had flipped the pancakes, I would cut out a center hole (with a drinking glass, as the Cones didn’t have the circular cookie cutter my mother and I used at home), into which I cracked open and fried an egg. The key to making it work was putting lots of butter in the pan and cooking at a super-high heat so that the egg would cook before the pancake burned. Also, I covered the bird in a nest with salt. When you added butter and syrup, it was the perfect salty-to-sweet ratio.

  “Who colored this bloody penis?” Sheba asked.

  My face burned. Izzy leaned over the coloring book, looked at the penis, and said, “Mary Jane.”

  “Do you hate penises?” Sheba asked me.

  “Uh . . .” I felt breathless. “Well, no. I don’t think so. I’ve never seen one.”

  “I’ve seen lots.” Izzy focused on coloring the parrots from the nature coloring book.

  “You have?” I slid the three birds in a nest onto three different plates. The syrup and butter were already on the table, as were three place settings and batik napkins I’d found when Izzy and I had cleaned out and organized the pantry.

  “Yeah, I see my dad’s penis ALL THE TIME!” Izzy kept coloring. I knew enough about the Cones now to know that Izzy likely saw Dr. Cone’s penis as he walked out of the shower or downstairs to the laundry room to find clean clothes. No one in this house closed doors, except Izzy, who needed to keep the witch out of her bedroom. I had almost seen Dr. Cone’s penis once as he walked past his open bedroom door toward his bathroom when I was in the hall. I turned my head quickly, but I could barely speak for the next half hour, as I was fairly certain Dr. Cone had seen me, and I worried he thought I had deliberately been looking toward their room because I was, maybe, a sex addict.

  Sheba laughed. “I never saw my dad’s penis, but I used to see my brothers’ penises all the time. Boys are ridiculous. Every single one of them thinks that every person in the world wants to see his penis.”

  Of course I knew her brothers from their TV show. Sheba’s brothers were wholesomely clean-looking with giant white teeth and hair that was so thick, you could lose a thimble in there. How odd to think of them with their penises out.

  I carried the three plates, waitress style, to the banquette and slid in next to Izzy.

  “Does Jimmy want every person in the world to see his penis?” Izzy asked. She leaned closer to the parrot picture. Her face was three inches from it as she pressed hard with a purple crayon.

  “Jimmy doesn’t even have time to think about that, because as soon as he walks into a room, women—” Sheba looked down at Izzy. She must have realized she was talking to a five-year-old kid, because she sat up straight and pulled her mouth tight.

  I wondered what women did when Jimmy walked into a room. Did they ask to see his penis?

  I stood and went to the fridge. Changing the placement of my body might change the subject. I opened the door and looked inside for inspiration. “Anyone want orange juice?” Izzy and I had been buying freshly squeezed juice at Eddie’s. The charge of pulpy taste had shocked me when I’d first tried it, and now I couldn’t imagine drinking anything else.

  “Me.” Sheba raised her hand.

  “Me.” Izzy raised her hand too. They bo
th still stared at the coloring books.

  “I guess since you don’t have brothers,” Sheba said as I handed her a glass of juice, “you never had to deal with boys the way I did.”

  “No.” I scooted in next to Sheba on the banquette. “But I’d always thought it would be fun to have siblings.” In my fantasy, my brothers and sisters and I would sing together, like Sheba had with her brothers on TV.

  “Me and Mary Jane are snuglets,” Izzy said.

  “Singlets.”

  “That the word for it?” Sheba dug into the bird in a nest.

  “Well, it’s what the mother of my best friends, they’re twins, calls me.”

  “Her best friends are at sleepaway camp.” Izzy liked hearing about the Kellogg twins and what the three of us did when we hung out (they played piano, I sang; we had chess tournaments with the three of us and their mother; we walked around on stilts; we sewed halter tops, which my mother wouldn’t allow me to wear; and we rode our bikes to the Roland Park library, or Eddie’s, and mostly just looked at things).

  “Do your parents dote on you?” Sheba asked. “Since you’re the only one around.”

  “Hmm. No.” Was what my mother did called doting? “My dad doesn’t seem to notice me; he rarely talks to me. And my mother likes me to help her with things. You know, cooking and stuff.” In my mind, my family was like all the other families in the neighborhood, except the Cones, of course.

  “So your dad ignores you? That’s awful! How could anyone ignore you, Mary Jane? You have so much charm.” Sheba kept coloring, as if she hadn’t said anything unusual. But everything she’d just said felt startling and unusual. It had never occured to me that there was something awful about my father ignoring me. I’d thought that was just how fathers were. And the idea that I had charm was equally startling. Other than my teachers praising my work, I’d received very few compliments in my life.

  “Uh . . .” I couldn’t find words to respond. Fireworks were exploding in my brain.

  “Do you like going to church?” Sheba asked, relieving me from further thought on my possible charm and my possibly awful father.