My game, this time, not theirs. Their betrayals were many, but they were part of my childhood; they were the past. Now my friends were the grown-ups, the new generation of influence in Port Frederick.
I caught up with one of those younger power brokers—Mary Eberhardt—in the lobby. She tucked an arm through mine and pulled me back a bit so that the two of us were tagging behind Ginger and Marsha.
“Jenny, forgive me, but I just have to say this to you.” Mary spoke so softly I had to lean toward her to hear. “Call me a minister’s wife, but I still have to. Maybe I’m just feeling sympathy for the boy, but I can’t help but think that there’s an angel at work in this situation you’re facing. Now don’t look at me like that! After all these years, I guess I’m an expert on zoning boards and angels! Where there are problems, there are angels hovering about just waiting for us to ask them to help us transform our suffering into blessings. I’m not being religious, I’m telling you the truth as I have experienced it. Even on the city council.” She smiled warmly at me. “And Fm not being trendy either. I’ll have you know I was talking to angels long before they got fashionable.” Her smile widened, and she squeezed my arm tighter. “So maybe you don’t believe in angels, that’s all right, they don’t care. They’re not like Tinkerbell, you know, they don’t depend on your faith in order to exist. A lot of people didn’t believe the earth was round either, but that didn’t make it any flatter. So you just keep an ear open for the flutter of wings, Jenny, that’s all Fm suggesting to you. There’s a richness being offered to you and Geof and the boy. It’s a wonderful opportunity for all of you, I just know it is.”
This was more optimism than even I could take at the moment.
“I think you mean we’re going to be knee-deep in rich and fragrant fertilizer, Mary.”
“You know I don’t mean that at ail.”
I smiled back at her, but I felt annoyed all the same.
“Listen, dear.” She tugged me close enough to sniff the mint in her mouth. I was being lobbied by an expert politician. “A child. Two deaths. A father. And you, now you’re kind of a stepmother.”
“Oh, God, Mary!” I said in not-so-mock dismay.
She laughed and gave my arm another quick, affectionate squeeze before releasing me. “Look for the richness, Jenny. You have a treasure of experience and emotion just waiting for all of you, and that’s where the angels are sitting, right on top of that treasure.”
“Do I have to take it in experience and emotion?” I whined at her. “Can’t I just take it in commodities options instead?” I sighed. “How would you feel, Mary, if a kid walked up to your door one Sunday and announced he was Hardy’s illegitimate son?”
“You forget, I’m a minister’s wife: I believe in virgin births.”
I was still laughing at that as she strutted off to her humble, mayoral, ministerial black sedan with her white purse slung over one shoulder.
Angels! I thought as I walked to my car. Good grief. The kid had looked more like the devil to me.
The Miata smelled worse for sitting in the sun, and there were several fresh black and white spots on my windshield. Thrown into a sudden ill humor by Mary’s exasperating lecture and by my old boss’s infuriating condescension and by the sacrilege to my car, I glared up into the tree branches and snarled at the birds.
“Fly over my house and you’re chicken fingers!”
7
THAT EVENING, GEOF SEEMED TO FIND THE story of my dead mouse far more titillating than I had at the time. He kept pressing me with questions about it.
“Did you look at it, Jenny?”
“Are you kidding?”
We were in the kitchen, it was still very light outside, even at seven o’clock, and I was chopping garlic on the built-in cutting board next to our oven.
“I smelled it,” I told him, “that was enough.”
“Are you sure it wasn’t there earlier, like yesterday?”
“I would have known, Geof, I mean, consider the heat …”
He held a fistful of fettuccine noodles upright above the water boiling in a large pot. He released the pasta and they spread apart in the pot like pickup sticks, distributing themselves evenly for boiling. I used the flat side of a paring knife to slide little bits of garlic into my left hand and I dumped that load in with the mushrooms, tomatoes, black olives, capers, chili peppers, and anchovies that were frying in olive oil and vermouth. I pulled another clove of garlic toward me and began chopping; we operated on the assumption that there is no such thing as too much garlic. Besides, it was helping to finally clear my nose of cooked mouse. Meanwhile, Geof opened the refrigerator in his perpetual search for unlikely leftovers to add to our impromptu pasta repast. Lately, we two noncooks had taken to collaborating a few times a week in the kitchen; I attributed it to the fact that I had more time and energy since I’d quit the foundation, but he said we were just sick of eating out.
Other people probably would have said it was hot in the kitchen that early evening, but we’d grown accustomed to turning off the AC, opening all the windows, turning on the overhead fans, and wearing as few clothes as possible. For me, that meant a halter top and shorts and bare feet and my hair pulled high off my neck, and for him it meant his trusty red swimming trunks, period. I would have gone without a shirt myself, but I was leery of splattering hot oil.
“Can we talk about something besides dead mouse?” I pleaded. “It’s ruining my appetite.”
He was quiet for a moment, watching the pasta boil.
“So what did the girls say about me at lunch?”
“You are not their favorite poster boy this week.”
“Moi?”
It was okay that he called them girls, because I called his friends boys. Postfeminist, that’s what we were, which entitled him to say anything, because I was confident of his sensitivity to the layers of meaning in a single word, its history of hurt. Between us, powerful words like girl could be said humorously, like a rueful joke between old warriors. In the same trusting way, he could even open car doors for me, which I accepted as acts of gallant sweetness and not of dominance, and he could walk next to the curb “to protect me from the horses.” We turned such acts into choreography, with me dancing under his arm and both of us laughing.
He smiled a little as he handed me a jar of Parmesan cheese, then feigned surprise and dismay. “What did I do?”
“You got a girl pregnant. Knocked her up. Left her with a kid. Landed me with the kid years later. That’s how they see it.”
“I thought they were my friends, too.” He picked up a fork and began separating the strands of fettuccine in the pot, and I thought I heard an undercurrent of actual unhappiness in his voice. “How come we’ve suddenly got a gender dividing line here? Did you tell them I didn’t even know she was pregnant?”
“Well, as Sabrina said—”
“Yeah, it would be her.”
”—hadn’t anybody invented rubbers back then?”
He put the fork down, folded his arms across his bare chest, and looked at me. “Okay, so I was a typical teenage boy.”
“And she was a typical easy lay?”
“Oh, boy, I can see where this is going. Don’t you think those were slightly different times back then?”
“Not from what I read in the papers these days, no. Boys are still looking for easy girls and easy girls are still looking for love and they’re still getting pregnant or pelvic inflammatory disease or herpes. No, except for AIDS, I don’t think it’s very different now.”
“Oh, I see how it is! How it always is. All the guy’s fault, right? So your friends think I was irresponsible and they think that now you’re going to have to pay half the price of it, is that what they think? What about her responsibilities? Is it fair just to blame me? If I recall, Judy was extremely there at the time, so wasn’t she also responsible for doing something about birth control? Or for telling me no?”
I made a hissing sound between my teeth.
“Dammit, Jenny, that’s just the trouble with women!”
“Oh, now it’s not just one teenage girl twenty years ago, it’s ‘women’?”
“You don’t want to take responsibility for yourselves.”
I put down the spoon I was using to stir with, and I crossed my arms over my chest and I looked at him. “I beg your pardon?”
“You claim you want independence, but you think all that means is your own condo and your own money and your own car and a job. What you still don’t want or even understand is real autonomy. I’m not talking about you personally, Jenny, so don’t explode at me, all right? I’m speaking of women in general who don’t want to grow up. Deep down, they still want to grab some man who’ll go to work for them, so they can quit and stay home if they want to, so they don’t ever have to be totally responsible for themselves.”
“Been giving this a lot of thought, have you?”
“Yes, why not?”
“Well, tell me this, how did we jump from one teenage girl named Judy Baker Mayer to women not wanting autonomy? Did I miss something in your lecture? It seems to me that we zoomed from the specific to the universal in just under ten seconds from a standing start. So what you’re saying is, you’re pissed because I’m staying home while you keep working—”
“What? I am not saying any—”
“I’d do the same for you, you know.”
“Jenny, I didn’t—”
“Your pasta’s getting overcooked.”
“What? Oh, shit!” He quickly used his fork to lift out a strand of the fettuccine and tested its doneness by throwing the strand up to the ceiling to see if it stuck. If it did, or so the theory went, it wasn’t done yet.
The strand fell onto my left foot.
“Can’t you just taste it?” I complained, bending to pick it up.
We put our dinner together quickly so it wouldn’t get cold, piling our plates high and adding buttered bread and green salads and glasses of wine and water, all without speaking to each other until we sat down and spread our napkins on our laps. The ringing of our portable phone beside my elbow provided a bridge back into conversation for us.
“Mutt or Geof?” inquired the voice of my best friend, the shrink, Marsha Sandy.
“Mutt.” To Geof, I mouthed, “It’s Marsha.” He mouthed back, “Hello.” To her, I said, “We’re eating. Geof says hello. Do you mind if I chew in your ear?”
“Geof wants to chew in my ear?”
I laughed and glanced at him. He cocked an inquisitive eyebrow.
“Jenny,” Marsha said, “I want to tell you what I couldn’t say at lunch about Judy Baker Mayer. Do you want to call me back?”
“No, I can chew and listen at the same time.”
“I always knew you were a bright girl. Judy wasn’t one of my patients, you understand, that’s why I’m free to blab. God, if anybody had told me that being a shrink means you never get to gossip, I might have gone to air traffic control school instead of medical school. Okay, the thing about Judy is that I originally found her telephone answering service through a doctor I know. He said she was always polite to his patients, she was extremely reliable, he liked her service better than any other in town even though she wasn’t a real company, she was just one woman answering the phone.”
“What’d she do about taking night calls?”
“She took them. All of them. She was simply amazing, Jenny. I don’t know when she ever got a decent night’s sleep. In fact, I had the impression that she had terrible insomnia—”
“Sure, phone ringing all the time.”
“Very funny, Jenny. Anyway, I think she watched TV most of the day and half of the night, and I know she sat propped up in a reclining chair with her phone and her notepads beside her. Maybe she slept there or dozed between calls. There wouldn’t usually be many, you know, and some nights there might not be any. I imagine she had a couple of phone lines. She was expensive, but she gave us better service than any of the other services do. She was great, like an old-fashioned central telephone exchange operator, you know? She got to know us and our clients and their problems and our schedules, and that made her a wonderful judge of what was a true emergency and what wasn’t. She knew when to call me at three in the morning and when to let it ride at least until the sun came up.”
“That’s kind of amazing, Marsha. So autonomous of her.”
I made a face at my husband, who had glanced up from his eating when he heard me emphasize the word.
“Yes, I was sorry I had to leave her.”
“Okay, I’ll bite … Why did you?”
“She told the name of one of my patients to one of her other clients.”
“Oh, dear. How’d you find that out?”
“I ran into this guy—her other client, who isn’t a doctor, just a businessman—at a meeting or a cocktail party or something, and he said, ’Hey, I heard ol’ Jimmy Joe has flipped out.’”
“Oh, dear.”
“Yes, I flipped out when I heard that. Not only that, but she also gossiped to him about how poor Jimmy Joe was nearly suicidal one night and how he was going to hang himself from a beam in his parents’ garage and how he called her and said if she didn’t get me on the line, he’d do it with the phone cord.”
“You had to fire her.”
“Damn right I did.”
“And this is to tell me … ?”
“Only what I know about her.”
“I think I’m missing a conclusion here, Marsha.”
“That’s because you really can’t chew and think at the same time. Jenny, the point is that Judy Baker Mayer knew a hell of a lot of sensitive things about a hell of lot of people in Port Frederick. At least once, she gossiped about what she knew. I don’t know if she did it more than once, but common sense suggests she may have. I don’t know if she ever used her knowledge for any purpose besides gossip. I don’t even know if what I’m telling you is important or not.”
“No, no, Marsha, that’s not what you say if you want to be a police informer. You’re supposed to tell me that your information will break this case wide open, and you want your money as soon as it does.”
“I’ll try to remember that next time.”
We bid each other a good evening and hung up.
Naturally, Geof was staring at me by then.
“Your girlfriend was a tattletale.” I related Marsha’s story to him. When I finished talking, he said, “If you don’t want any more pasta, I’ll eat the rest of it.”
“No comment?” I said.
“She wasn’t my girlfriend.” He got up from the table with an empty plate in his hand and returned with a full one. “You’re not jealous, are you?”
“What could be more intimate than making a baby?”
He looked at me, started to say something, stopped, then finally came out and said it: “I’ve tried to tell you that.”
“The voice of experience.”
“Oh, please.”
“Yeah, and when our intimate moment was done, we’d have several billion more moments of raising a child ahead of us. And I’ve tried to tell you that.”
“Call Sabrina,” he said. “Ask about the bologna.”
“The what?”
“Judy’s second husband.” He smiled. “The one who was sandwiched between two slices of Ron.”
He had a knack for tickling my sense of humor just in time.
“I love you, Geoffrey.”
“I know, Jennifer.”
I was smiling as I dialed Sabrina Johnson’s home phone number. When I greeted her voice, she said, “So, tell me, has Geof changed his mind about getting an abortion?”
“It’s a little late for that, Sabrina, like about seventeen years and nine months too late.”
“What’s she saying?” Geof asked.
“Geof wants to know what you asked, Sabrina.”
“Go ahead and tell him.”
He frowned when I did.
“What’d he say?”
; “Never mind. Tell me about Judy’s other husband, Sabrina.”
“You’re no fun. Okay. Dennis Clemmons, that’s his name. I looked up the case files like I told you I would, and that triggered a few memories. I have this fuzzy memory that she was scared of him, I think it was a real strong impression I had at the time. She saw me to find out if she could get Aid to Families with Dependent Children for her son and Social Security for her own disability and unemployment benefits for Clemmons. At first I couldn’t find her because of the different last name. But then, there she was.”
“Why the aid for dependent children? Ron Mayer must have been paying child support, wouldn’t you think?”
“There’s no record of it in my files, Jenny. In fact, what I want to tell you is that she lied like hell to me. Until I read it in the paper last winter, I never knew she’d been married before. She never mentioned a first husband, she never mentioned child support or alimony or a divorce settlement or anything else she might have been getting. We’d have discovered all that, eventually, if she’d stuck around, but she didn’t. She came in a few times for information, and she got as far as filling out some applications, but then she asked me to hold on to them for a while. That’s where they’ve been all this time—in my file cabinet, pending.”
“Ever clean out your files, Slick?”
“In whose free time, Cain?”
“Okay, I know, I’m sorry.”
“The thing is, Judy Clemmons—that’s who she was when I saw her—she let me think the kid belonged to the man she was married to at the time—”
“Dennis Clemmons.”
“Right. She called him Denny.”
“What was his story?”
“Nonunion laborer. Unemployed a lot.”
“Why do you say she was scared of him?”
“Because she was applying for all that welfare behind his back.”
“She said that, Sabrina?”
“I just know I could never get her to get him to cooperate.” She paused, and when she spoke again, I thought I heard a grin in her voice. “Although now that I think about it, I guess I understand why.”
Confession Page 7
