Mrs. Everything

by Jennifer Weiner

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Fuck!” Nonie stage-whispered. “Run!”

  Jo raced down the hall after her friend. The yoo-hooing lady had been joined by a man who was yelling, “Stop, thief!” Jo and Nonie pushed through the doors and ran down the east staircase, with the race-walkers yelling at them to stop. “Come on,” Nonie said, her voice urgent as she grabbed Jo’s arm. They raced down the stairs, with Nonie whispering, “Come on, come on, I’m not getting arrested in the dumbest crime of the century.”

  “Stop . . . making . . . me . . . laugh,” Jo wheezed as she ran. They made it through the cafeteria, Nonie carrying the equipment, until finally they were out the door, into the parking lot, and leaning against the cafeteria’s Dumpsters, laughing until they couldn’t breathe.

  “We did it!” Nonie said, pressing her hand to her chest. “Shit, I think my heart stopped in there. Does fear burn calories?”

  “Probably,” Jo said.

  “Excellent.” Nonie unlocked her car. “And off we go!”

  Because Jo didn’t want to implicate her daughter in a crime, she’d asked Missy to meet them at the fitness trail. “That’s what you’re wearing?” Missy asked as Jo and Nonie climbed out of the car. Jo looked down at her black T-shirt and gray terry cloth shorts. “Why? What’s wrong?” “Nothing. It’s just that the fitness ladies all wear, like, you know.” Missy gestured toward Nonie. “Warm-up suits and leotards and stuff. Leg warmers. Stuff like that.”

  “I am not a fitness lady,” Jo said, her voice emphatic. “And spandex doesn’t have pockets. Where do you put your car keys?”

  “Bra,” Nonie said merrily. “God’s pocket.”

  The three of them walked to the first station on the trail, which had a pull-up bar and a patch of soft, sloping grass for push-ups. “Okay. Stand there.” Missy got Jo in position, peered through the camera, nodded, and said, “Three . . . two . . . one,” and pointed at her mother. Jo looked at the camera. She felt oddly nervous, her mouth dry and chest fluttery, even though no one but Nonie would ever see the tape. She forced herself to smile. “Hi, Nonie. It’s me, your old pal Jo, leaving you with no excuse to fall off the fitness wagon. Today, we’re going to start with three sets of four different exercises, starting with your very favorite, walking lunges.” By the third exercise, Jo had forgotten all about Missy. “Keep your shoulders over your wrists,” she said as her daughter circled her with the camera during the planks. “Don’t let your knees get past your toes,” she counseled during the squats, and “Remember to keep your core tight” for the one-legged toe touches. “And that’s it!” she said when she’d gone through a round of each exercise. “Do the entire circuit three times, and you’re done. I’d like to thank my cameraperson, Melissa Braverman, who is also my producer and director. Nonie, I’ll see you back on the fitness trail.”

  “And . . . cut! Hey, that was good,” Melissa said with an enthusiasm she usually reserved for her soccer teammates.

  “Really good,” said Nonie. “You know what? You should sell tapes.”

  Jo was only half listening, already thinking about how she’d get the equipment back, and whether she’d taken out something to thaw for dinner.

  “What?”

  “You should sell these,” Nonie repeated. “Your fitness tapes. Like Jane Fonda.”

  Jo shook her head. “I’m not Jane Fonda. Or Suzanne Somers. I don’t even own a pair of leg warmers, remember?”

  “There’re famous people who make fitness tapes,” Missy said. “But aren’t there also regular people who got famous because they did fitness tapes? We can go to Blockbuster tonight and check out the competition.”

  “Do it,” said Nonie, waving as she got into her car.

  “Do you really think it could work?” Jo asked as she and her daughter got into their car.

  Missy’s dark-brown ponytail brushed her shoulder as she turned her head and slowly backed out of the parking space. “Dad’s always saying, you just need one thing—a product, or a business, or a service, or a big idea—and you just keep looking until you find it. What if this is your one thing?” Jo’s heart twisted as she listened to Missy parroting her father’s advice, hearing the love and admiration in Missy’s voice. She hoped the girls had absorbed Dave’s ambition and not what she had come to see, over the years, as his allergy to hard work, his willingness to take shortcuts or tell lies in search of the big score.

  “We can take a look,” Jo said.

  Melissa gave her a smile, a warmer, less toothy version of her father’s glittering grin. “We’ll get you some leg warmers, and you’ll be all set.” She pushed a button on the car’s tape player, and the music of Duran Duran filled the car. “And a title. You need a good title.” Jo had thought of that already. On Monday morning, she affixed a piece of masking tape to the video cassette’s side and, using one of Lila’s markers (left uncapped and discarded on the kitchen table), she wrote JUMPING FOR JO. “I like it,” said Melissa. At Missy’s insistence, Jo had watched Jane Fonda’s Lean Routine and something called Buns of Steel. Alone in the family room, Jo had seen the shiny leggings and high-cut leotards, the headbands and the matching leg warmers, the heavy makeup and the sprayed and feathered hair. Everyone in the videos smiled, all the time, even in the midst of the most grueling series of glute bridges and walking lunges, and no one ever seemed to sweat. The videos were part workout instruction, part performance, and while Jo knew that she could handle the first part, the second part was beyond her.

  But a part of her wanted to try. Maybe Bethie’s success was a once-in-a-lifetime miracle, something that wouldn’t happen again in the same decade, much less in the same family, but that didn’t mean that there weren’t a few crumbs left over for Jo.

  Nonie came back from Nantucket in a brand-new track suit (lemon yellow and neon green), glowing and exultant. “I did that tape every morning, and guess what else? My sisters-in-law both want copies!” She paused. “Is it sisters-in-law or sister-in laws? I never know. Anyway, they love you.” Nonie was beaming. “I think you should sell ’em.”

  “Told you,” Missy called from the kitchen. Jo asked, “You really think that people would pay?”

  “I know they would.” Nonie adjusted her braided green-and-yellow headband. “You know what my sisters-in-law said? They liked that you were a real person. You weren’t some fakey-fake actress with breast implants. You’re just a regular gal.”

  Just a regular gal, Jo thought, and smiled, thinking, If you only knew. That night, Missy drove her to the Video Barn, where a sullen, pimply teenage boy ran off twenty copies for a dollar apiece. At the end of the Friday fitness trail class, Jo stood on top of one of the tree stumps they used for step-ups and hops and, with her cheeks burning, she announced that she had videos for sale, for five dollars apiece. “In case anyone’s going on vacation, or just wants to be able to do the workout at home.” She finished her pitch and braced herself for shuffling feet, averted eyes, and embarrassed silence. Ruthann Bremmer spoke up first. “Ooh, I want one.” Connie McSorley, of poison-ivy fame, said, “Me, too,” and Julie Carden bought one for herself and one for her sister in Massachusetts. In ten minutes’ time, Jo had a hundred dollars in her pocket and no tapes left in the box.

  “Go back to the Video Barn and have them run off a hundred copies,” Nonie instructed. “And tell pizza-face you want a bulk discount this time.”

  “Oh, Nonie,” said Jo.

  “Do it.” For all her Southern charm, Nonie could be ruthless when it suited her. “I’m going to send copies to my sisters-in-law, and you’re going to sell at least another twenty at class. And there’s the PTA sale in September.” Jo tried to imagine selling tapes of herself to strangers. She’d barely been able to watch the tape, worried about how unfeminine, how mannish she’d looked, in shorts and a T-shirt, performing high-knee raises and jumping jacks. Unnatural, she heard her mother say, and she thought of all the jokes she’d ever heard about female gym teachers.

  “I
don’t know.”

  Nonie was glaring at her, eyes narrowed. “I don’t get it. What’s the problem? Shoot, if I was as skinny as you, I’d have done that video naked!”

  “You look great,” Jo said. Nonie had gotten some sun on Nantucket. Her face and arms and chest, normally pale pink, had acquired a golden glow. She’d lost a little of her jiggle, but she was still deliciously plump, her thighs and upper arms rounded and firm and covered in the finest dusting of golden hair. Juicy, Jo sometimes thought. Like a ripe peach, where the juice would fill your mouth when you took a bite.

  “Come on,” Nonie said. “What have you got to lose?”

  “My self-esteem? My dignity? However much I spend to get the tapes made?” Nonie was relentless. She drove Jo to the Video Barn, demanded to speak to the pimply teenager’s manager, and negotiated the rate she wanted. She made Jo pose for pictures, doing the star jump over and over, propelling herself into the air with her arms and legs spread wide. “Smile!” Nonie called, until finally, Jo did, and when her friend showed her the shot, Jo had to admit that she looked okay. At least, not awful.

  “Glamorous yet approachable,” Nonie said.

  Jo rolled her eyes. “If I end up with a hundred copies of Jumpin’ for Jo sitting in my garage, I’m going to make you do burpees every day for a month.”

  “That’s your prerogative,” Nonie replied. “But you know what? I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

  * * *

  At the PTA sale, Jo set up her wares at a folding table in the high school cafeteria, underneath a poster that Kim had made, a blow-up of the video’s cover featuring Jo’s star jump. Beside her, Nonie was selling slices of pineapple upside-down cake. “It’s my Meemaw’s recipe,” she’d tell customers, even though Jo knew that the recipe actually came from the back of the Dole can. When the shoppers came flooding into the gym, Jo readied herself for cold stares and hard questions; women asking about her qualifications, or what, exactly, made her think that she was selling anything worth buying. But the questions never came. Forty-five minutes later, Jo was sold out again. “See?” said Nonie, looking smug. “Told you so.”

  Over the weekend, Jo visited the library, learning everything she could about the billion-dollar fitness-video market, which, by all accounts, was large, lucrative, and still expanding—fueled by women her age, stay-at-home mothers looking to shape up. On Monday, she went down to the basement with a tape to show to her husband.

  Years ago, Dave had turned their basement into a home office. Not, Jo suspected, because he had work to do at home, but because claiming a home office let him write off a portion of the mortgage and the utilities. That was Dave, Jo thought: if there was a way to save money, he’d find it. “What can I do for you, my dear?” he asked. Jo pulled up a chair.

  “I have a business proposition,” she began, and offered him a tape. Dave watched the tape the whole way through. He inspected the packaging. He listened to Jo patiently, at one point even grabbing a legal pad and taking notes as she walked him through the genesis of the workout routine, how she’d made that first tape (leaving out the part about boosting the equipment from the high school), and how Nonie’s sisters-in-law had asked for copies. She talked about how she’d sold videos to the women who took her class, and more to strangers, at the PTA sale. “I know that you’d know more about this than I do, but I wonder if maybe this could be something,” Jo said.

  Dave set down his pen and notebook and leaned back in his chair, lacing his hands over the belly he’d developed in recent years as he contemplated the ceiling. Finally he shook his head. “Won’t work.”

  Jo felt a rush of disappointment that was tinged with relief. She was sorry that she wouldn’t make a fortune selling exercise tapes, but she was glad that she wouldn’t be out there, exposed, embarrassing herself and her kids, the subject of a thousand dyke jokes that she might never hear but would be able to sense nonetheless.

  Dave’s voice was sympathetic. “The problem, as I see it, is that you’re not an aspirational figure. Don’t get me wrong,” he said, raising his hands, as if Jo had tried to argue with him. “You look great. But great for a neighborhood lady. Great for the mom next door. But women don’t buy these tapes because they want to look like the mom next door. They buy them because they want to look like Suzanne Somers.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Jo said. “Nonie just kept telling me . . .” Her voice trailed off.

  Dave waved his hand negligently, a king granting a favor to a peasant. “Sell ’em at bake sales, or to the ladies who come to your classes. Make yourself some pin money.” Jo nodded and walked backward, out of his office and up the stairs, the way she remembered seeing her father walking in shul, after he’d been called to the bimah, returning to his seat backward so as not to turn his back, and his backside, on the word of God. Pin money, she thought, and smiled at her own folly, and started in on the dinner dishes.

  The next morning, she told Nonie the news. Her friend was predictably furious. “Dave’s full of it,” she told Jo, urging her to ignore him, to think bigger. “Why not take out an ad in the Hartford Courant? Or call the local newspeople and ask them to let you do a segment on Sunday mornings?” she’d asked. Jo never did. She was content. She liked teaching her classes, being out on the fitness trail underneath the canopy of leaves, accompanied by the murmur of a foursome or the crack of a driver on a ball. Jo kept a box of tapes in her car. She sold them to her students and at the synagogue’s fund-raiser. The money was useful, for Kim’s college application fees, and when Lila, who somehow had both an over- and an underbite, required another year of orthodontia. It’s enough, Jo told herself. It has to be enough. They had made their way out of bankruptcy, and they had enough to pay the bills. It was true that Jo had never gotten to live with the love of her life . . . but how many woman who loved women ever did? Maybe the ones with more courage could, the women who lived in big cities, or communes, but Jo no longer had that kind of nerve, or that kind of time. Her father had been dead before he’d turned forty-six; her mother had died at seventy-one. Soon she and Dave would be empty nesters, then retirees, and their girls would inherit the earth and have the kind of big life that Jo had once dreamed about. Maybe she’d never written a novel, maybe she and Dave would never move to one of the grand houses in Avondale Woods, or put in a pool, like the Pressmans, but at some point, Jo hoped, they’d at least have money to redo the kitchen. That would be enough.

  That was what she was thinking about on a Friday night when Dave summoned her down to his office, saying they needed to talk. Missy was out with her soccer teammates; Kim was out with Derek Rudolph, the boy she’d been dating since Homecoming. Lila, as ever, was glued to the TV, watching Full House. Jo descended the basement stairs, mentally making her case for replacing the kitchen appliances or, at the very least, the garish green-and-silver wallpaper, which screamed 1970s. Maybe they’d do it in stages, she thought, as she settled herself in a chair. Wallpaper first, and they could take out the wall that separated the TV room from the kitchen, and . . . “Jo.” Dave was looking at her, leaning forward, still in the suit he’d worn home that afternoon. His expression was grave. He’s sick, was her first thought and, to her great shame, she felt a surge of relief. She’d be rid of him; she’d be single. And maybe she wasn’t a young woman, but she wasn’t old, either. There was plenty of life ahead, years that she could make use of, and . . . “I’m so sorry,” Dave was saying. His face was red, and he appeared to be crying. Jo realized that she’d missed something important. “Sorry for what?” she asked, and tried to look appropriately solemn. Dave was staring at his desk, as if he could barely look at her. Jo felt the atmosphere change, the way it did in advance of a storm. She’d clenched her fists, bracing for whatever was coming, when he looked up and said, “You know things haven’t been good between us for a while.”

  Jo didn’t answer. Her hands and face felt cold. Things have been fine, she thought. What did I miss? Dave’s shoulders heaved, and he g
ave a single bark of a sob, then said, “Jo, I want a divorce.”

  Jo’s lips were numb, her hands icy, head swirling with a tangled skein of emotions—shock and fear and anger and, yes, relief. Underneath it all, relief. Dave wouldn’t be dead, but he would be gone. She would be free. For a few blissful seconds, Jo let herself enjoy that relief before she thought to ask the obvious question. “Is there someone else?” Dave gave a single, shamefaced nod.

  “Who is she?” Jo made herself ask, and Dave had the grace to at least look ashamed when he said, “It’s Nonie Scotto.”

  PART

    five

  1993

  Bethie

  There she is,” Bethie said, pointing as a tall, skinny girl with a mop of tangled black hair emerged from the Jetway. Her niece was in that awkward place that Bethie remembered from her own adolescence, where you were done being a girl but you weren’t quite a teenager, and where it felt like half of your body parts had declared for Team Adolescence and the other half hadn’t caught up. Lila’s narrow shoulders were bowed beneath the straps of her backpack, and the duffel bag she had was so heavy that it made her lean to the left. Every few steps she’d have to correct her course, or risk banging into the wall.

  Four years ago, Bethie had bitten her lip, hard, to keep from saying I told you so, when her sister had called to tell her that Dave was leaving, and she’d had to bite it again to keep from gasping when Jo told her who Dave was leaving with. “What can I do?” Bethie had asked. She’d offered to lend Jo money, to buy Dave out of the house so that Jo and the girls could stay there, but Jo was adamant about doing things on her own.

  “Besides, I can’t stay. Nonie lives down the street, and Dave’s moving in with her.”

  “Oh, God.”

  Jo’s voice wobbled as she said, “I just want a fresh start, somewhere else. In Avondale, though. I’ll stay here, at least until Lila finishes school.”