Plain Jayne

by Brea Brown

  It probably helps that Caroline’s movie-star beautiful, too. I don’t add that to the commentary, though. It will only prompt Paulette to assure me of my own attractiveness, and the last thing I want is for her to think I’m comparing myself to Caroline, for any reason. Plus, I don’t have any illusions about my looks. You can dress up my first name any way you’d like, but I’m still as plain as any regular old Jane, “y” notwithstanding.

  Of the three of us sisters, Shannon was the prettiest. Everyone said it. It went this way: I was (I suppose, am) the smart one; Shannon was the pretty one; and Nicole was the funny one. I don’t think it’s allowable to be more than one thing. So “smart” it is. Not pretty. Not funny. Just smart. And not necessarily in the sense of “intelligent.” I’d say it’s more of a creative smart than anything. Not that I’m complaining. It’s served me well. Until today, that is. Today, I’m cursing it, because it’s landed me in this predicament.

  Not for the first time, I’m wondering why I couldn’t get the standard, kind, grandfatherly—or better yet, grandmotherly—editor, who patiently marks run-on sentences and other minor grammatical misdemeanors and maybe offers some mild suggestions for improvement here and there regarding diction or syntax. No, I had to get peppery, volatile Lucas Edwards, with his demands for major revisions, his gorgeous house on Marblehead, and his train wreck of a personal life. Eff me.

  If it weren’t for the magical gazebo in his backyard, I’d be running away from this place as fast as I could.

  All conversation seems to have ceased in the adjoining dining room, but I’m not going back out there. Their strained silences are surely as bad for digestion as their snarky comments. I’m fine with eating in here, like one of “the help.”

  I’m swallowing the last bite from my plate when Lucas comes through the swinging door with his hands full of dirty dishes and cutlery.

  Paulette glances at him and clucks the admonishment, “I would have gotten those, Luke. How many times have I told you?”

  He sets the plates next to the sink and shrugs. “Why? I have legs and hands and arms, and I wanted to see if Jayne had told you how rude and inappropriate Caroline and I were being at the dinner table.”

  I can’t help but smile at his acknowledgment, but before I can reply to his indirect apology, Paulette says with a nervous glance at the dining room door, “Oh, I already knew it. Jayne didn’t have to tell me anything. You and Caroline are like two children.”

  “She went up to bed, so you don’t have to worry about her hearing you.” He leans against the counter and comes close to whining when he says, “Why won’t she go away, Paulette? Why does she insist on making my life miserable?”

  Suddenly it occurs to me that he didn’t see me sitting over here in the corner when he came in. I want to leave the room or at least signal my presence, but another part of me wants to hear Paulette’s take on it. I have to say, as much as I hate that I’m in the middle of this soap opera, I can’t help but be interested in what led up to all this.

  She nudges him gently away from the dishwasher so she can open it and put the dirty dishes into it. While she bends over to load the appliance, she replies, “It’s not my place to say.”

  “I’m asking you, though. I’m giving you a place,” he insists.

  Sighing, she says, “If you truly want my opinion…”

  “I do!”

  “She’s always gotten her way. Why should this be any different? She wants this house back, apparently.”

  He runs his hand through his hair. “But what does she want more: the house or her parents’ approval? It used to be no contest. But the threat of divorcing her—usually the ultimate trump card—seems to be having no effect on her at all this time!”

  Paulette simply shrugs. “I don’t know what you want me to say, Luke. Other than… maybe it’s time you stop threatening her and do it.”

  That statement makes him slouch and stare into space. “This whole pregnancy nonsense is an interesting complication, though,” he mutters. “What if she’s not lying this time…?”

  Now Paulette peeks over at me. Lucas follows her eye line. His entire demeanor changes. Gone is the lost little boy look, the helpless, unfocused stare, and the slack face. His eyebrows ram together, and he draws to his full height.

  “Jayne. I… didn’t realize you were in here. I thought, maybe, you’d gone out to the gazebo.”

  I nod to my plate. “Thought I’d finish eating first. Unless you think I should forgo eating to finish my manuscript as quickly as possible.” I’m half-joking. Which means I’m half-not.

  He looks confused. “What?” His expression changes to one of impatience and exasperation. “Of course not. That makes no sense at all. I invited you to dine with Caroline and me.”

  “Yeah. Well… that wasn’t the most relaxing dinner conversation, as you already know.” I take my plate and glass to Paulette. After she receives them from me, I move to the other side of the large kitchen, lean up against the counter, cross my bare legs at the ankle, and stuff my hands in my hoodie pockets.

  “I apologize for that. And I started it, so I have no excuse.”

  “You don’t have to make excuses to me. But from now on, if it’s all the same to you, I’ll eat in here. Alone.”

  His closed-off expression gives no clue as to what he’s feeling when he concedes, “Fine. Whatever you like.”

  I scrunch my shoulders up close to my ears. “Not that I’ll be here much longer.”

  Before I can explain, he jumps on my statement. “Oh? Are you almost finished?”

  “No,” I relate regretfully. “But I can’t stay here with… all this… going on. It’s uncomfortable and distracting and… none of my business.”

  He curses under his breath, his face resembling how it looked when he was talking to Paulette before he realized I was in the room. “Please, Jayne. Give me a couple of days. If I can’t get her to leave, then by all means, I’ll help you find somewhere else to stay… and work.”

  “You don’t have to—”

  “I want to!”

  From anyone else, it would sound generous. From him, it sounds angry.

  I pull my head back at his gruff tone and say, “Whoa. Tone down the intensity, alright?”

  Finished with her kitchen cleanup, Paulette quietly slips from the room, leaving us alone.

  When she’s gone, he begins, “I’m sorry, but—”

  I interrupt, “What’s your deal, anyway? Why is it so important to you that I stay here to work on my manuscript? It makes no sense. I’m one more complication in this cluttered …situation.” I hate how Gus’s overuse of that word makes me hesitant to use it, even when it’s the best option for vaguely describing something you can’t otherwise name, like this.

  Lucas misinterprets that hesitation as diplomacy. “I know it’s ugly here. I know she’s a hideous distraction. But…” He nods toward me “Look at you. This place obviously suits you. Or did, before she ruined it.”

  His reference to my appearance makes me self-conscious. I stand straighter and tuck my hair behind my left ear.

  “Stop!” he startles me by barking. When I freeze, he explains, “See? You’re already tensing up and reverting to that awkward, insecure person who walked into my office and walked back out with a severe case of writer’s block. That can’t happen.”

  Before thinking about it, I reply, “Well, no offense, but you and your wife don’t foster a sense of carefree…ness.”

  “‘Carefreeness?’ Oh, boy. This is bad already.”

  “I’m not writing; I’m speaking! You can’t judge me based on un-edited… words… I’m saying off-the-cuff.”

  “But when the words don’t flow in your speech, that means they’re not flowing in your head, and if they’re not flowing in your head, they’re not going to flow from your fingers to the screen to the paper, and… Oh, shit. Why does she have to ruin everything?! Everything!” He paces the kitchen, muttering things of which I only hear snatches, l
ike “…ants in her bed…” and “…bad smell…”

  “I’m writing fine,” I insist.

  “You were!” he counters, ceasing his pacing. “You were writing fine.”

  “Am!”

  He shakes his head and wags his finger in the air. “No. I can tell a definite difference between the stuff you produced this morning and afternoon and what you tried to write before dinner, after Caroline arrived and interrupted your flow.”

  My blood drains into my feet. “What? What do you mean, you can tell? I haven’t shown you anything.”

  His eyes widen momentarily but return to their bored shape so quickly that I almost wonder if I imagined it. Casually, he says with a wave of his hand, “Oh, I took a peek when I finished my walk, and you had already come inside to get ready for dinner.”

  “You what?!”

  “It’s not a big deal. You wrote a lot today. And most of it was good. But like I said…”

  “You had no right!”

  “I’m your editor.”

  “But it’s not ready to be edited. It’s rough. Rough rough.” I feel more exposed than if I were standing naked in front of him. Well, maybe not that exposed…

  While I’m contemplating that horror, he stubbornly ignores my outrage and offers, “The cemetery scene is excellent… to a point. Your descriptions of the physical surroundings are so vivid that I can see the place. It’s a horrible place, even on a bright, sunny day, like in the book.” He looks down at the floor, as if he can read the manuscript there. Gesturing at his shoes, he continues, “And I’m there. I’m feeling the hot summer sun. I’m hearing the grass crunching under my feet. I’m hearing the cicadas offering up their unholy high-pitched drone in unison.” Now he looks up at me, his face blank. “And then… nothing. I’m yanked from the scene by the flat prose that follows. Prose that should be so heavy with emotion that I can almost feel it weighing down my shoulders. I should feel burdened with what this character is thinking and feeling. Yet… I feel nothing. That’s what you wrote—or tried to write—when I left you to take my walk. I can tell. The shift is obvious.”

  “Maybe you’re the problem, then,” I snap, not appreciating his criticism or his invasion of my privacy, even if I was the fool who left her laptop plugged in and out in the open for anyone to see. I don’t even have my manuscript password protected.

  As if reading my mind, he says, “You might want to think about password protecting that document, you know. As glad as I was to see that you hadn’t done so, it’s not very smart to leave yourself open to plagiarism like that.”

  “Nobody even knows who I am,” I argue listlessly.

  “And they never will unless you learn to write with feeling when it counts. That scene in the graveyard… that’s your money scene. You ever read anything by Blake Redmond-Womack?” Without waiting for me to answer (because I’m not going to admit it), he says, “Of course, you have. Everyone has. Or at least seen the movies based on his books. Anyway, that’s the sort of passage that Womack pumps out before he’s even had his morning shit, because he knows women who read chick lit love a good cry.”

  “I don’t write chick lit.”

  “Whatever. You know what I mean.”

  I walk to the back door and stare at the reflection of the setting sun in the surface of the sea. “I know what you’re implying, and let me clue you in on something. I didn’t write this book to manipulate people’s emotions and give them an outlet for the ‘good cry’ they need when it’s that time of the month and they’re curled up on the couch with their heating pad and a book. I wrote it—I’m writing it—for me.” I stop, knowing I’m getting dangerously close to saying too much. “It makes me feel something. And if it doesn’t elicit the same response in someone else—you, for example—that’s not my problem. I can’t make people feel what I felt—er, I mean, what I feel when I write it.”

  “Then you’re, at best, a diarist. And you have no business with a publishing contract, because, if what you say is true, then what’s the point in publishing your book? If your goal is to make yourself feel something, and you’ve accomplished that, why do you need to publish it for the world to see? And if you can’t make other people feel what you’re feeling, then you’re a sucky writer.”

  I whirl around to face him. “Excuse me?”

  “You heard me.”

  “Screw you.”

  He laughs. “Nah. You heard Caroline earlier; that’s highly overrated.”

  I ignore his attempt to get me off track. “No, I’m serious. I’ve poured my heart and soul for the past five years into this book, and everyone else who’s read it has deemed it brilliant. You’re the only one who wants to change it or has a problem with it. So, I think you’re the problem. And it’s not my fault you don’t know how to feel.”

  “I’m the reader. The real reader, not one of your friends or your agent or your mom.”

  His reference to my mother makes me physically flinch.

  I wish so much that my mom could read my book. And my dad. And my sisters. I wish this were all a product of my very active imagination. I wish I were spewing theoretical feelings and thoughts into the manuscript. And if sometimes those feelings don’t come across as strongly as I’m feeling them, it’s only because I’m restraining myself so that I don’t cross the line into sentimentality, which I’m sure Luke-Ass would also criticize. I can’t win with him, so he can go screw himself. There. That way, nobody but himself has to be punished with his reportedly-abysmal bedroom techniques.

  Without another word, I yank the door open and speed-walk across the lawn toward the brightly-lit gazebo. At the last second, though, I veer away from it and head for the beach.

  *****

  I wonder if my mom ever saw the ocean. I wonder if she ever sat and watched the waves, like I’ve done for the past two hours. By the time she was my age, she already had three children, and she was a full-time employee of the family business, farming. It was one of those livelihoods that didn’t allow for vacations. We never went on vacation as a family, that’s for sure. For the most part, we stayed at the farm. Three hundred sixty-five days of the same routine.

  But sometimes Mom would take the three of us girls somewhere for the weekend. Or Dad would go away for a weekend, usually hunting with old buddies from high school. I think my parents went somewhere as a couple once, but I was too young to care about the logistics, so I don’t remember how they swung that. I doubt that Mom saw the ocean once she was married to Dad. If I remember correctly, their trip together was to a landlocked city not too far from home (in case they needed to get back quickly). Probably Chicago. Or maybe Cincinnati.

  Neither place strikes me as romantic, but what do I know about that? Bupkiss. College flings can teach you a lot about sex, but they’re not particularly romantic. At least the ones I had weren’t. If I were a romance novelist (or a writer of chick lit, as Lucas keeps suggesting), that would be a professional liability. No, the only professional liability I possess is the inability to make people feel. Or one person in particular.

  I’ve tried as hard as I can not to think about that person since I stormed away from him. I walked for a while, but the breeze off the ocean was getting chilly, and the water was surprisingly cold on my feet, so I turned around and walked on the cool, packed sand back to the Edwardses’ private beach. Now I sit on the other side of a dune obscuring the house from my view (and me from the house’s view), my knees drawn to my chest, my hoodie pulled over my knees, as I stare at the water.

  The sand next to me shifts, and Lucas appears over the gentle rise. He’s carrying a blanket and stops short when he sees me. Due to the darkness that only the moon is nervy enough to try to penetrate, I can’t see the expression on his face, but his curt, “Oh, there you are,” gives me a decent idea of what he’s feeling.

  I lean sideways and look up at him. Nodding to the blanket, I say, “I’ve heard of separate bedrooms, but this is pretty extreme.”

  “What?” he snaps. Then
he tones down his annoyance when he realizes I’m joking. “Oh. This is for you, not me.” He unceremoniously drops the blanket in a bunch onto my shoulders and sits next to me. “It gets cold down here by the water. Paulette suggested I bring you this, since you’ve been gone so long. I was expecting to have to traipse up and down the beach, looking for you.”

  I unfurl and arrange the blanket more securely around me. “No traipsing necessary. See, I’m not so high-maintenance, after all. I’m sure Tom Ridgeworthy is a much bigger diva.”

  He stares out at the water and says cryptically, “You’re definitely nothing like Tom Ridgeworthy.”

  Under the warmth of the quilt, I uncurl myself and sit cross-legged, allowing my hoodie to return to its original shape. “Thanks… I think.” I choose to take it as a compliment, anyway, since Tom Ridgeworthy, dressed in his bomber jacket and aviator sunglasses, as if he’s a real-life action hero, looks like a douche on his book jackets. “And thanks for the blanket.”

  “Like I said, Paulette was worried about you. Not that she’ll admit it. And I think she was off to bed when I was on my way down here.”

  “Okay…”

  He sifts sand through his hands, watching it fall into tiny mounds next to his legs. “I regret what I said earlier to you.”

  This statement that sounds somewhat like an apology gets my attention. “Oh? Which part?”

  His focus remains on the sand. “You’re not a sucky writer. I didn’t say you were, anyway. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized it sounded like I did. I only meant… if you can’t make readers feel what you’re feeling, then you’re a sucky writer. But I know you can.” Finally, he looks over at me and seems surprised that I’ve been staring at him the whole time. “I know you can,” he repeats.

  I look away. “Hmm,” is all I say.

  “What does that mean?”

  After thinking about it for a while, I answer, “It means, ‘hmm.’” I smile over at him. “I appreciate your vote of confidence, but—no offense—I already know that.”