Jack With a Twist bm-2

by Brenda Janowitz

  Everyone’s staring at me and the room begins to spin. Vanessa and my mother rush to my side, a show of support, and I try to fight back the tears that are threatening to explode from my eyes. I turn to my father, whose face has gone completely pale.

  “Daddy, would you please take me home?”

  23

  I wake up the next morning in my old room at my parents’ house. The room I grew up in from the time I was born straight through to high school and college. My toes practically touch the tip of my twin-size bed and I nearly knock over the glass of water my mother left for me the night before on my bedside table as I stretch my arms out.

  “Knock, knock,” my mother says quietly as she opens the door to my bedroom. She’s holding a tray with coffee, a buttered sesame bagel and a bottle of Advil. The perfect South-Shore-of-Long-Island hangover cure. “Can I come in?”

  “Of course,” I say, even though she’s already halfway across my room. “Morning.”

  “I thought you could use some of this stuff,” she says. I sit up in my bed and she sets the tray down next to me and perches herself at the end of the bed by my feet. I’m instantly reminded of all of those sick days when I was growing up and how my mother would prepare a tray with everything I needed to feel better—ginger ale, toast with strawberry preserves, tea with honey—and would then sit on my bed with me until I felt better.

  “Thank you,” I say, picking up the bagel and taking a bite. It’s just the right amount of soft and sweet and the butter melts in my mouth. I wash it down with a greedy sip of coffee and think that this is the best bagel I’ve ever eaten in my life.

  “A buttered bagel always does the trick for me,” my mother says, “and we have to get you back, good as new, before we send you back into the city.”

  “I’m not going back into the city,” I say, with my mouth full of bagel. My mother furrows her brow and regards me. I take a huge gulp of coffee and rearticulate, “I’m not going back into the city.”

  “I heard you the first time,” my mother says, “But I don’t understand. Don’t you want to go back home and make up with Jack?”

  “No,” I say, taking another huge gulp of coffee.

  “Well, you don’t have to go back tonight,” my mother says, laughing. “You can stay out here and take the train to the city in the morning. Then you can go back to your apartment after work.”

  “I’m not going back,” I say, polishing off the first half of the bagel in two bites.

  “What do you mean, you’re not going back?” she says, laughing. “Eventually you have to go back to your apartment. It’s your home. Your home with Jack.”

  “I’m not going back,” I say, looking down at the tray.

  “Brooke, you’re not going to give up your whole life over one fight,” my mother says. “Be reasonable here. Now, I know that you are hungover and not thinking properly, but—”

  “That’s the thing, Mom,” I say, “I am thinking properly now. The problem was that I wasn’t before. But now I am. I was just ignoring all of the things that were wrong, all the things that were bothering me.”

  “Those are silly things,” she says, “none of it was real. What is real is the fact that you and Jack love each other. Once you’re feeling better, you’ll see.”

  “What about how his family has been treating us?” I say.

  “There’s always an adjustment period when the families meet,” she says. “Do you think that my family and your father’s all just magically loved each other at first? No, they didn’t. We had our problems, too. But, you work at it. And look at how close we all are now.”

  “What about the fact that Jack never stood up for us?” I ask.

  My mother gets up from the edge of my bed and walks to my window. She looks out at our backyard, at the huge pine that is in the center of it, and exhales deeply.

  “I don’t know,” my mother says, and doesn’t turn around to face me as she does. “I just don’t know.”

  “Well,” I say, getting up to join my mother at the windowsill, “neither do I.”

  I don’t get back out of bed until six o’clock that evening, when the smell of New Hunan Taste fills the house all the way up to my bedroom.

  “You want an egg roll or a spring roll, BB?” my dad asks me as I pad downstairs, still in my pajamas. My dad is in sweatpants and my mother is in a fancy teal-colored yoga suit that I know for a fact she bought at Saks.

  “Egg roll,” I say as my mother pours me a Diet Coke. “I’ll get the ice.”

  I walk to the freezer and grab a few cubes of ice. As I go back to the table, I’m suddenly very cognizant of the fact that my parents are smiling manically at me, sort of the way you’d imagine that the family of a mental patient would treat that person. Everything’s just fine, honey.

  “I’m fine,” I say, looking at them.

  “We know that,” they say in unison.

  “Boneless spare ribs?” my father asks, reaching across the table to pass them to me. Now, I know that my father is a kosher butcher, but his deepest darkest family secret is that one of his most guilty pleasures in life is the boneless spare ribs at New Hunan Taste. Which is why he normally hoards them all to himself.

  “You’re offering me boneless spare ribs?” I say, my expression blank.

  “You can have anything you want, BB,” my mother says. “Right, Barry?”

  “Anything you want, BB,” my father says, still pushing the boneless spareribs on me. I decide to test him. I take the tin and systematically take out all of the well-done pieces. My father and I both love the well-done pieces, and I watch him as he watches me pick them out. The smile remains plastered on his face and as I look between he and my mother, I realize that they must both be very good poker players.

  “You don’t have to treat me like a mental patient,” I say. Their expressions don’t change at all; in fact, they barely move at all. They are like those animals in the woods who, upon being attacked, try to freeze themselves so that the crazy attack animal leaves them alone.

  “We’re not, honey,” my mother says. “It’s just that you hardly ever come home and we’re so happy to have you, aren’t we Barry?”

  “So happy,” he says, still smiling. “Mu shoo?”

  I take the mu shoo, but make a big show of how happy and decidedly not insane I am as I pour the hoisin sauce onto a pancake. It continues like this for the rest of dinner—we all smile at each other incessantly and use really good table manners and don’t chew with our mouths open at all. The perfect little Stepford family. That is, if the Stepford wives were mah-jongg-playing petite Jewish women.

  Finally, the torture is over and it’s time for fortune cookies.

  “What does yours say, Barry?” my mother asks my father, giggling. They had one of their first dates together over Chinese food, so fortune cookies always make my mom especially giddy.

  “‘A smile is your personal welcome mat,’” my father announces, flashing his pearly whites. “How about you, Mimi?”

  “That one is perfect for you! Mine says: ‘Don’t worry about money,’” she says, squinting, since she needs reading glasses but refuses ever to wear them in front of my father. “‘The best things in life are free.’ Hmm. Obviously these people have never been to Saks. What does yours say, BB?”

  “‘You would make a great lawyer,’” I say, tucking my fortune under my plate, along with my napkin.

  “Really?” my mother says, “maybe there really is something to these fortune cookies!”

  “That’s not what it says,” my father says, eyes burning into me as if he can read my mind. “What does it really say, BB?”

  How is it that my father always knows when I’m lying? Even when I was a little girl, he always just knew.

  Growing up, my mother’s most prized possession in the world was a cameo that belonged to her grandmother. Alabaster white and a shade of delicate pink set in gold, it was the most beautiful thing my thirteen-year-old eyes had ever seen. I desperately wante
d to wear it to my junior high school dance—certain that it would make my crush, Danny, immediately fall in love with me on the spot. My mother flatly refused. I was dumbfounded—how could she say no? Didn’t she know how important this dance was to me? I made an unsuccessful plea to my father. He explained to me that it was the only thing my mother had left of her grandmother and that it had huge sentimental value. It couldn’t be replaced. I told him that it wouldn’t need to be replaced, since I would only be borrowing it for one evening—mere hours, really, if you thought about it—but, he remained unconvinced.

  My first losing oral argument.

  In my heart of hearts, I just knew that if my mother knew how unbelievably important it was for me to wear her cameo, she would have said yes. So firm was my belief that, on the night of the dance, I took it. While she was downstairs in the kitchen, I walked into her room, stealthily as a cat, and went to her jewelry box. A wooden box painted an antique gold, I opened it, slowly, quietly, revealing its insides encased in a rich red velvet, as if it were a buried treasure. I ran my fingers over the soft fabric. My mother, from out of nowhere, appeared behind me and looked over my shoulders, making me jump. I tried not to look guilty.

  “I bet we can find you something special in there,” she said and picked out a pair of pearl earrings for me. “Those will be beautiful,” she said, holding them out for me to try on. “They were a Sweet Sixteen present for me from my Aunt Florence.”

  I smiled and she beamed back at me. As she admired the earrings in my ears, I slowly put my hand behind me, into the jewelry box, and took the cameo.

  I never even made it into the dance that night. My girlfriends and I ran into Danny and his friends on our way in, and decided that we were all way too cool for a junior high school dance. We instead ended up in Danny’s basement, drinking wine coolers. Come to think of it, the majority of my junior high and high school memories took place in that very basement, Danny’s parents never being home. Within minutes of the wine coolers being passed around, games of Spin the Bottle and Seven Minutes in Heaven began. I can barely remember the details of the evening, though—my only memory being that it was the night that Danny asked me to be his girlfriend. I floated home at the end of the night and walked in the front door just before my curfew.

  “Have you seen your mother’s cameo?” my father asked me as I walked in. His eyes burned into me and I could barely meet his eyes.

  “No, why?” I answered, my hand instinctively flying to my chest. The cameo was not there.

  “It’s missing and your mother is really upset,” he said, looking at me calmly. “If it doesn’t turn up, she’ll be devastated.”

  “Guess I should have let you wear it tonight, sweetheart,” my mother said, walking out of the kitchen in her bathrobe. “At least then I’d know where it was.”

  My father’s eyes stayed glued upon me as I ran up the stairs quickly. I flew into my room and checked everything I was wearing, shaking my coat and my sweater out, praying that I’d hear a thump on the carpet. The cameo was nowhere to be found. I could hear my parents talking in their bedroom. My father was trying to calm my mother down, but she was inconsolable. It was the first time I’d ever heard my mother cry.

  I prayed the whole night through. I don’t even remember ever having gone to sleep. I prayed and prayed with every fiber of my being that I would wake up in the morning and I would find the cameo. I told God that if I found the cameo the next morning, I would never lie to my father again.

  The next morning, my prayers were answered—I woke up from the previous day’s horrors as if it were only a bad dream. Danny brought the cameo back, having found it on the floor of the closet in his basement. My mother was thrilled, but my dad wanting to know how the cameo ended up there of all places brought on a whole host of other problems.

  I never lied to my father ever again.

  “What does your fortune really say, BB?” my father asks, eyes still on me.

  “It says: ‘Every exit is an entrance to a new experience.’”

  I look down at the fortune and take a big bite of the cookie. My eyes don’t come up to meet those of my parents. Leave it to this seemingly innocuous fortune cookie to make the whole evening explode into a discussion about Jack and me and how I’m ruining my life by not rushing back to him immediately.

  When I finally do look up, I see my mother and father looking at each other. Then, in an instant, my mother’s up clearing the table and my father’s washing the dishes in the sink.

  “Do you have these under control, honey?” my mother asks my father once she’s done clearing the table. “My show’s coming on.”

  “Yes, Mimi,” my father says, giving my mother a tiny peck on the lips before she flits off. “It’s all under control.”

  “Let me help you with those, Daddy,” I say, joining my father at the sink.

  “I’ve got it,” my father says with a smile. “Why don’t you go and watch TV with Mom?”

  “But I want to,” I say, and he regards me, passing me the yellow plastic gloves.

  “You rinse off and I’ll load the dishwasher,” he says, “deal?”

  “Deal,” I say, and turn the water all the way to as hot as it goes.

  “So, do you want to talk about it?” my father asks, waiting for the first dish to load into the dishwasher. The steam begins to rise up from the sink.

  “There’s really nothing to talk about,” I say, passing him an appetizer plate. “It’s over. It’s done.”

  “Do you really want it to be over, BB? Do you want it to be done?” he says, “I thought that you loved Jack?”

  I scrub at a particularly sticky spot of hoison sauce.

  “I do,” I say, “it’s just that I don’t even know him any more.”

  I pass the dish to my father, only partially clean, and move on to the glasses.

  “I don’t think that that’s really true,” my father says, and as I turn to face him, a glass slips out of my hands and crashes into the sink, breaking into pieces.

  “Oh, my God,” I say, turning back to the sink and picking up the pieces with my rubber gloves.

  “It’s okay, BB,” my father says, his voice low and soft, “it’s okay.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I say, and I begin to cry.

  “You don’t have to be sorry,” my father says, turning me to him so that he can hug me. My face melts into his chest and I begin to cry even harder. He puts his hand on my head and tells me that everything’s going to be okay.

  Minutes later, my father’s put up a pot of tea and we’re seated at the kitchen counter, having left the rest of the dishes piled up in the sink.

  “It’s just that we’ve been friends for years,” I say, still crying as I speak. “But now all of these things are happening that make me question who he really is.”

  “But he wasn’t running around with that Miranda woman you accused him of cheating with,” my father says. The teapot begins to scream and my father goes to pick it up.

  “It’s not just that,” I say as my father pours the boiling-hot water into my mug, “It’s other things, too. Like when we went to Tiffany’s to register, and like how he litigated against me. It’s like I’ve been seeing this whole other Jack. A Jack I don’t know at all. A Jack I don’t want to know.”

  “That reminds me of something,” my father says, setting the teapot back down on the stove. “There was this Twilight Zone episode that I used to love. I think it was called ‘Button, Button.’ A salesman comes to this couple’s home and leaves them with a machine that has a big red button on top. He tells them that if they press the button, they’ll get a million dollars, but, once the button is pressed, someone in the world—someone who they don’t know—will die. The couple argues about it all night. They could really use the money, but the thought of killing someone, even someone they don’t know, is just too much to bear.

  “Finally, they go to bed, but the wife wakes up in the middle of the night and can’t stand it any more. Sh
e presses the button. The next morning, she wakes up to find that her husband has died in his sleep. When the salesman returns to give her the money, the woman is furious. She screams at him: ‘I thought you said that someone we didn’t know would die?’ And the salesman responds: ‘Do you think that you really knew your husband?’”

  “That’s not how it ended!” my mother yells at us as she comes walking into the kitchen. “And why are there still dishes in my sink?”

  “That is how it ended,” my father says, “and we’re just taking a break.”

  “Why do you need a break from cleaning dishes for three people?” she says, walking to the sink and rinsing off the remaining dishes and piling them into the dishwasher. “And anyway, that’s not how the story ended.”

  “How did it end?” I ask. I’m still unsettled by the ending to the story that my father just offered, and am, therefore, willing to take any challenging interpretation of the story.

  “It ended with the guy saying: ‘Now, I will take the box and give it to another couple. A couple who does not know you.’”

  “I think you’re mixing up the short story by Richard Matheson,” my father says. “That’s how the short story ended, but not the Twilight Zone episode.”

  “Well, I think that you’re the one who’s all mixed up,” my mother says, “what the hell kind of story are you telling her anyway? Don’t you ever want her to get married?”

  As my parents bicker in the kitchen where I spent most of my young life, I realize that I want what they have—the kind of relationship that they have. That sort of comfortable, natural relationship where you can bicker and argue and still know that you’d never go to bed mad at each other.

  I had that with Jack. But what kind of a relationship can you have with a man you don’t even know?

  But that’s what I want. That’s the kind of relationship I’ve waited my whole life for. The comfort, the love, the silly flirtatious bickering after over thirty years together. They’ll probably go back to bed tonight and have sex.

  Ew.

  But the relationship. That’s what I want for myself. I thought that that was the kind of relationship I had with Jack, but it turns out that I just didn’t know him at all. My father seems to think that you never really know the person you’re with, but I don’t believe that. More importantly, I don’t want that for myself. I want to know, when I walk down the aisle, every inch and fiber of the man I’m going to marry. I thought I did. But, I just don’t anymore.