“That stuff’s gross.”
“I know,” I said. “But it’s the only cereal Jess eats.”
“All I want is for her to like me,” Penny said. I imagined that sentence circling her brain for these past months, round and round, gathering speed, ready to explode and shatter glass.
“I know,” I said, and accidentally added, “Me too,” which apparently Penny interpreted as me saying that I also wanted Jess to like her, because she leaned in and gave me sort of a hug, and a sort of murmur that might have been thanks. Which I suppose I did also mean, sort of, maybe. But mostly, I meant what I always meant when I thought about Jess: that I wanted Jess to like me. Which—maybe surprisingly—I never viewed as being in opposition to what I was doing with Tommy in the library. I suppose I imagined I was saving her from him, giving him the outlet and helping her; she thought blow jobs were disgusting, he had told me, and yet he wanted them, so I provided them. It made sense. That’s what I told myself.
Or I suppose I imagined that the splinters of my life could remain separate because they always had. Seeing what happened to Jess’s father had shaken me, but I knew that if I were him, confronted with the abrupt reality of Penny, I would have found a way, something all his money could handle or maybe another person to take her in, or, really, I would have taken care of it from the very, very beginning and that pregnancy test coming up positive. I knew, now, that he wasn’t as tough as I was. Probably no one was as tough as I was. What I had done, been willing to do: that was how much I wanted to be here, had to be here. There I was, sitting on Jess’s bed, reveling in my tiny bit of superiority, knowing I would never let myself get caught.
Penny was talking: “. . . going to get a print and have it framed. And then I’m going to—” and there was the click of a key in the back door and I said, “Crap,” and jumped from the bed and grabbed Penny’s wrist and said, “Shh...” and Penny snatched something off the pile of papers on the bed as I scooped them up, and Penny whispered, “Top desk drawer.” I jammed the handful in there, hoping the back door was its usual sticky, stubborn self, and I half dragged, half pushed Penny into my bedroom and saw that thing still in her hand and plucked it away from her, thinking it was the used tissue, but it was a white envelope, folded in half, and I knew exactly what that was; I had been there when Jess had pulled off the ring and dropped it into the envelope, and I wanted to shake Penny so her teeth rattled like maracas, but all I said was “Jesus Christ, what are you doing with this?” and shoved the envelope into my underwear, at my hip, until I could sneak it back into Jess’s room, and I closed my bedroom door just as the back door opened and there was Jess, startled to see me.
“What are you doing up?” she asked. Black mascara striped the skin under her eyes, which was puffy and pink.
“Couldn’t sleep,” I said.
“Join the club,” she said. “My shitty father. I don’t want to talk about it. Ever. He’s a shit. All men are shits.”
My blanket and pillow were on the couch, and if she saw, she’d ask why I was sleeping out there. I stood in the hallway and leaned, hoping to block the easy view through the cutout between the two rooms.
“I came for my stuff,” she said. “I’m staying with my mom for a few days. She’s a mess.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’m sorry. Is there anything...?”
“If my dad calls...” She looked around suddenly, as if she were a dog catching an interesting scent. The room reeked of Lauren. I couldn’t remember if we had put away the cassettes. The flipped-over photo of Tommy. Handprints on the glass.
“If your dad calls?”
“Tell him to go to hell,” she said. “Tell him to find somewhere else for that girl to stay. Tell him that girl can go to hell, too.”
“Her mother died,” I said. “Don’t you maybe think—”
“Yeah, and I hope her mother’s in hell right now, too.” Jess spoke loudly, as if aware that someone else might be listening, needing to make her message heard. She stood with her arms folded, dissatisfied, but after a moment, she swirled into her bedroom, and I tiptoed into the living room and tucked the sheet up under the blanket so at least she might believe a story about me falling asleep watching TV or something under a blanket. Then I sat at the kitchen table, too nervous to do anything else, but it felt awkward and weird to just sit, so I poured out Special K into a bowl and started eating it with my fingers—I preferred it that way; back in Iowa we ate tons of dry cereal since lots of times there wasn’t milk—and listened to the bangs and scrapes of Jess pulling open drawers and sliding hangers in her closet. I willed Penny to shut up, not trusting at all that she would.
The envelope was tickling my skin, so I took it out of my underwear and opened it. There was the ring, the big, beautiful, expensive ring. I slid it on my ring finger. What if I showed up at the library wearing this ring? What would Tommy say, it glinting as I unzipped his jeans, the feel of the metal as I took his cock in my hand? The diamond felt heavy. Hard to imagine how much money it had cost. Jess hadn’t told me, and I had known not to ask directly. To some ways of thinking, it could just as easily be mine.
Suddenly Jess shrieked, “Who was in here? Where’s the ring? Where’s the goddamn ring?” and my stomach knotted and a bad taste rose up along my tongue. The silence that followed was so heavy that I couldn’t know if what I heard was real or not when Penny shouted, “I was only looking.” Jess’s scream was like nothing I had heard before, like something being slaughtered. And just like that, Penny was real.
Jess accused me of betraying her. There was more. That I should mind my own fucking business, and maybe I looked shocked because she shouted, “That’s right, I’ll say ‘fucking’ any fucking time I want.” There was more. And more. And more. It all happened in maybe ten minutes, maybe less. I told myself not to remember the words, that words weren’t actually important. Maybe I said, “I’m just trying to help a little girl whose mother died.” Maybe she said, “Help your own sister, why don’t you?” Maybe I remember it all.
I know that I closed my eyes, and I saw that painting I had touched in the museum: The Bedroom by Vincent van Gogh, a picture of a bed with a red spread and two chairs and pictures hanging on the blue walls, the bright paint thick like frosting, streaks and rows dancing across the canvas, so much paint, colors I had never experienced before. There was a semi-open window in this bedroom, which is where my eyes had jumped immediately, and looking long enough, as I did, it was clear the air outside the window smelled like something indescribable and beautiful, and there was a bird chirping madly, and that someone could lie for hours across that red bedspread and time would slow, then stop, then disappear. However crazy it was—and it was crazy, because it was only a painting, the exact same painting a dozen people behind me were staring at right then—I thought that if I could be there, inside that cozy little room for even just a minute, everything in my life would be perfect. I guess that was why I touched it, and also that was why buying a postcard or a cheap poster afterward couldn’t possibly ever be enough.
GIVE THE LADY WHAT SHE WANTS
(winter, sophomore year)
In an ideal world, Jess’s mom said she would see Jess at least once a week. In an ideal world, Jess said she would see her mom at most once a month. They didn’t say these things to each other, but to me, separately. I didn’t ask, they volunteered, each using the words “in an ideal world.” This happened on the same day, when Jess’s mom met us at the big Marshall Field’s department store downtown for shopping and lunch. It was early February, and Jess hadn’t told her parents about dating Tommy, so she warned me to keep quiet. But she wanted a new dress for Valentine’s Day that would knock his socks off. “Or better yet, his pants,” she said.
I was invited last minute, because Linda dropped out, claiming shopping was bourgeois, an opiate for the masses like TV and sports. “She’s stopped washing her hair,” Jess’s mom reported, “and now it’s baking soda instead of Crest like a normal person. She says s
he’s not going to college, she’s moving to Vermont to make yogurt out of goat milk, or maybe it was spin yarn out of goat hair. Who can keep up?”
We were at lunch in the Walnut Room on the seventh floor, where we’d gone straight off because Jess’s mother said she needed coffee, but she ordered a glass of white wine. Jess and I had Tab. Jess ordered a chef’s salad with oil and vinegar dressing, and her mother started out talking about salad but switched to chicken pot pie. They told me I had to try the Marshall Field’s special sandwich so I did. I was hoping toothpicks with those frilly cellophane tips came jabbed into it, which wasn’t very sophisticated, but they reminded me of Grace. She loved them, and maybe I was thinking about her, her face through the window twisting into sadness as I boarded the Greyhound after Christmas break, and how on purpose I plunked into an aisle seat.
“Who cares?” Jess said, about her sister. “Let her hang out with stinky goat lovers. Probably be good for her to move away.”
“No one’s moving to Vermont,” Jess’s mother said. “That’s too far.”
We were seated at a round table for four, smack in the middle of the room, which reminded me of a historic mansion, with stately ribbed pillars and a dizzyingly high ceiling. Jess said there was a forty-five-foot Christmas tree every year where the marble fountain was, which I hadn’t believed until now that I was scrunched here, feeling tiny. The walls were heavy oak paneling, and the tablecloths were crisply white, with cloth napkins, and soaking up any clatter was thick red carpet with twining flowery shapes. We sat in plush-bottomed chairs with wooden arms where the varnish was still shiny and unchipped. Everything felt like it cost a lot of money. I sat opposite the empty chair, imagining Linda there instead of the pile of coats, our eyes latching, both of us thinking, Bourgeois, at the same time; or imagining Linda here instead of me, Linda glaring quietly as Jess picked at her salad and Jess’s mom peeled off and ate the top crust of her chicken pot pie, leaving the rest, Linda hissing that there were starving kids in some African country no one had ever heard of. Linda watching Jess’s mom order a second glass of white wine, explaining the first one tasted off (though she drank it anyway); Linda not nodding yes when the waitress asked if she liked the special sandwich and its ladles of Thousand Island dressing, not shaking her head no to dessert because Jess did. And then lunch was over, and it was time to shop, and a knot twisted my stomach.
Jess’s mother spent a lot of her time shopping, which I didn’t understand could be a thing people spent time doing in real life. I thought it was something women did in TV shows and movies because showing what women did in real life would be boring. I had been shopping with her two or three times with Jess. She liked getting a couple of salesgals (that’s what she called them) to roam the racks, scooping up dresses in different sizes and colors, parading them to the dressing room, where she tried on everything in a bustling rush, swishing behind curtains, then marching out to pose on the platform in front of the three-way mirror. That was what she loved most about shopping, it seemed, stepping onto that platform and staring into the mirror, examining every angle, every side, twisting her torso to admire and castigate. As much as she loved that, she loved even more when Jess was up there. “Turn around, lovey,” she’d say, “those pants look loose; how many fingers can you squeeze in the waistband?” She was always jumping up to tug some part of the garment lower or higher or to the side, demanding that Jess bend forward to see if the V-neck “gave the world a free show” and telling Jess to raise her arms or hunch her shoulders forward. “Your butt looks too big,” she would say, or “Your boobs are too small for that sweater,” or “Your neck isn’t long enough.” She knew the Marshall Field’s tailors by name and snuck them an envelope of tip money; “Every gal’s best friend is her tailor,” she’d announce to anyone listening, “you want that perfect fit.” She didn’t rummage the sale racks like I did and wouldn’t buy anything just because it was marked down 80 percent; “It’s no bargain at any price if it doesn’t fit.” She’d say that about a hundred times, tacking on, “Good fit is everything.” And her favorite was: “To feel good, you’ve got to look good.” The shopping trip ended at the makeup counter, where she’d finagle free makeovers that weren’t free, because afterward she’d buy a bagful of creams and eye shadows and powders.
The thing was this was all annoying. Annoying to watch. Annoying to think about. All this fussiness and bossiness and so much money spent. Good fit wasn’t everything. My guess was that Linda didn’t like it either, not if in her ideal world, she was making goat milk yogurt. But Jess didn’t seem to mind. It was the only time she wanted to see her mother, when shopping was involved. Sometimes she’d get off the phone and groan, “My mother wants to go to a movie with me on Sunday afternoon... can you imagine? The horror, the horror.”
“It’s so horrible to sit next to her in a dark theater?” I asked once. “Or is eating popcorn the horrible part?”
“Haha. The movie part’s fine, but it’s the ‘let’s talk about the movie,’ the ‘let’s grab a bite.’” Jess made fluttering, chatty mouths with both hands. “Blah, blah, blah. All that work, finding the right things to say to her. At least with shopping, I end up with new clothes.”
Today we were looking for a dress for Jess’s mom to wear to someone’s daughter’s wedding at the country club, someone Jess’s mom called “new” in a pinched voice, which I interpreted to mean the dress had to be show-offy. At lunch she announced that Jess and Linda were invited to the wedding, and Jess said, “No way, that’s during finals,” and her mom rolled her eyes and said, “Fine. Help me pick out something for Linda then,” and she eyed me and said, “You’re her size, aren’t you?” and I said, “I guess so,” because she had decided I was.
So we followed a trail of escalators to the floor with the fancy dresses, and Jess’s mom got us one of the dressing areas in its own alcove and corralled a herd of salesgals, sending them on their mission of finding a tasteful cocktail dress for her—“maybe Calvin Klein or Calvin Klein–like, or Halston or Halston-like; think simple, clean lines with a little pizzazz,” and a thousand more adjectives—and something for me playing the role of Linda, maybe in lavender or light blue; “She won’t wear pink,” Jess warned, so her mom added, “No pink. Nothing little girly, but not too grown-up either... she’s still my darling little baby!”
Bobbie—the primary saleswoman working with us, a bouncy blond lady with lots of mascara who jerked her head in one hard nod to punctuate everyone else’s sentences—said, “Periwinkle is great for you,” and I said, “It doesn’t matter because the dress is actually for her daughter who can’t be here today. I’m just filling in since we’re the same size,” and Bobbie did her series of nods as if this all made sense, and Jess’s mom said to me, “Maybe you need a nice dress for yourself? For a fraternity formal?” and Jess said, “Stop it, Mom. She can buy a dress or not,” and Bobbie flashed an exaggerated wink and said, “We’ll pick some things, just to see. Who doesn’t want to admire herself in a pretty dress?” and Jess explained that what she needed was the slinkiest floor-length black dress they had, “one that shows off boob and leg, so high slits and a low, super-plungey neck,” and her mom sighed and she and Bobbie exchanged looks under waggling eyebrows, with Jess’s mom signaling an embarrassed apology, and Bobbie sending back sympathy about girls today and the complexities of daughters. “We have some great new looks for spring, so let’s start there,” Bobbie said, her voice as bright as a flashlight beam, and she hustled off, waving one hand at a couple of younger girls, roping them in.
“What’s Dad doing today?” Jess asked.
“Something about taking in his car,” Jess’s mom said. “I don’t know. That car’s in the shop more than it isn’t. He’s getting to be quite the regular down there. He sends his love.”
“No, he doesn’t,” Jess said.
“He most certainly does!”
“I just mean that, yeah, he loves me,” Jess said. “But he didn’t specifically say to you,
‘Send Jess my love.’ He never says things like that, so why do you pretend he does?”
“He says things like that all the time,” Jess’s mom insisted. “Honestly, Jessica.”
“Okay, sure,” Jess said. “Then you tell him I send my love right back.” She flashed me a mocking imitation of Bobbie’s exaggerated wink right as Bobbie walked back with three black dresses. Her face flushed, but otherwise she pretended not to notice, of course, and smiled hugely as she passed the hangers to Jess. “Hop right in that dressing room, dear,” she said, and Jess ducked into a little room cordoned off with heavy, Walnut Room–ish drapery. Jess’s mom and I sat side by side on a tufted bench near the big three-panel mirror. I felt like a member of an audience.
“I want to see those dresses on,” Jess’s mom called. “I don’t want you looking trashy.”
“Oh my god,” Jess said.
I smiled at Jess’s mom because I didn’t know what to say. Jess never looked trashy, but also she wouldn’t want to ever look like anyone’s darling little baby either. Jess’s mom checked her watch, which was slim and gold with tiny diamonds at twelve, three, six, and nine. Linda was right; shopping was bourgeois, though I had never heard anyone say that who had enough money to get clerks running around. I wondered what Linda was doing instead. That seemed safe to ask, but when I did, Jess’s mom said, “Probably rolling out of bed. I swear, she’d sleep all day if we let her. Maybe she should, since she’s a growing girl, but her father is always at her to set an alarm clock and show some responsibility. Early bird gets the worm and all that.”
“Who wants a worm anyway?” Jess called out. There was the sound of rustling, a zipper.
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