When We First Met

by Norma Fox Mazer

  “No,” Jenny’s mother said, the color mounting and mounting in her face. She wrenched her arm free. “You still have your daughter. My daughter is gone.” She ran out of the store.

  “Come back,” Nell Montana cried. “Come back!”

  The man at the sewing machine looked up. “You called?”

  Nell Montana walked past him into the back room and Jenny, heartsick, gathered up the packages and went after her mother.

  In the car, going home, her mother wept. “What does she want of me? What should I have done?”

  Driving, Jenny reached out, touched her mother’s knee. “Mom …” But she didn’t know what to say. She herself was overwhelmed by confusion. Who was right? Who was wrong?

  Her mother pressed her face to the window. “I couldn’t forgive her. I can’t. In my heart, I don’t forgive her.”

  Chapter 24

  LOCAL WOMAN HOSPITALIZED OVERDOSE SLEEPING PILLS

  Nell Montana, 38, of 45 East Street, late last night was taken to Community Hospital after, police say, her son, Robin Montana, 18, of the same address, found her unconscious in her bed. An empty bottle of prescription sleeping medication was allegedly found next to her. Her condition was described by hospital authorities as guarded. Her son denied that it was a suicide attempt. “Mom had trouble sleeping some nights,” he said. “Maybe she woke up and forgot she’d already taken her sleeping pills.”

  The woman at the semicircular desk in the hospital lobby flipped cards. People hurried past carrying suitcases and pots of flowers. The rows of red plastic chairs were filled with other people reading, smoking, talking. It was like a hotel lobby, Jenny thought. Phone booths, a gift shop, a newspaper and candy stand, a florist shop, and all the “guests” bustling around. Only the occasional white-uniformed figure and a certain antiseptic smell testified openly to its true function.

  “Four-fifteen,” the receptionist said. “Elevator to your right.”

  On the fourth floor the nurses’ station was empty. Following the numbers painted on the walls, Jenny found 415 and entered. Two beds, one empty. Nell Montana asleep in the bed next to the window. A breeze blew in, stirring the gaily patterned blue-and-ivory curtains. Jenny looked down at the woman’s white, white face. There were thin plastic tubes in her nose and a tube taped to the back of her hand leading to a glass jar of clear solution.

  Only yesterday Nell Montana had worn an embroidered Indian blouse and there had been silver in her ears. Now she lay helpless. Punished at last, even if by her own hand? Were things finally even? Gail dead, Nell Montana almost dead.

  Looking down at the woman who had killed her sister, Jenny tasted unexpected iron in her mouth. You blundered, Mrs. Montana. Almost isn’t good enough. What good is an almost death? An eye for an eye, remember? A death for a death.

  She gripped the bed railing. So inside her there lived the same raw emotions that were so near the surface with her mother! Anger and the urge to hurt and give pain in return for pain. Nell Montana stirred, and a trickle of saliva slipped down the side of her mouth. The wave of atavistic feeling drained from Jenny, and she thought of Rob. His mother had done this, not just to herself, but to him, too.

  Then pity overwhelmed her. Pity for Rob, pity for the white, frail figure in the bed. She drew in a deep breath, dizzy with the rush of conflicting emotions. She bent close to the sleeping woman, studying her. A sigh escaped her. No, I don’t hate you, Mrs. Montana. I don’t want you dead. You did something awful, but you’re Rob’s mother. How can I hate you? Even if you were somebody else—you’re not the sort of person I’d hate. You killed my sister, though! I don’t think I can ever forget that. Should I? No, Mom’s right—there are some things you shouldn’t forget. Still … if you wanted my forgiveness, not my mother’s, I’d—I’d give it to you.

  Walking back to the elevator, down the corridor, she saw Rob coming toward her. She had half-expected this, half-feared it, but she was still unprepared. He saw her, seemed to hesitate, then nodded.

  “I read about your mother in the paper,” she said.

  “They put it in?”

  “This morning. It said you found her.”

  “Yes, when I came home from work.”

  “I didn’t know you were working.”

  “Slayton’s Garage,” he said, “over on Tompkins Avenue.”

  “Oh. When did she—your mother—how long was she unconscious?” All the time aware, so aware of his nearness.

  “They figure I found her about an hour after. I wasn’t even going to come right home,” he said explosively. “When I think—there was a movie I wanted to see—but I felt greasy, wanted a shower. If I hadn’t—”

  “But you did,” Jenny said. “You did find her in time, Rob.” She wanted desperately to touch him, his hair, his face. “There was nobody at the nurses’ station, so I just went ahead into her room. I hope that’s okay? She was sleeping the whole time.” She hesitated, wondering if she should tell him about their mothers’ meeting in the shoe shop. “Is she going to be all right?”

  He nodded.

  “I’m glad. When she wakes up, will you tell her I was here?”

  “I’ll do that, Jenny.”

  A bell rang. A knot of people waited in front of the white elevator doors. “You must have—didn’t you go to school today?” he said.

  “I left after first period.” Was he remembering another day when they had skipped school together? The elevator doors slid open.

  “It was good of you to come,” he said formally.

  “Please let me know if I can do anything,” she said, equally formally. Then the doors closed.

  Later, at home, she found the morning newspaper where it had been piled on the back porch and tore out the article about Rob’s mother. She folded it and put it in her desk drawer. Then she took Gail’s picture and kissed it. “Oh, Gail,” she said, wondering if there was ever to be an ending to what had been started that afternoon more than two years ago, when she and Gail had had one of their silly spats.

  Chapter 25

  “Your car!” someone said behind Jenny as she unlocked the Dart in the school parking lot.

  “Right,” she said, turning. It was Rob, a green baseball cap tipped up on his mass of curls.

  “Your father finally finished working on it.”

  “I know, isn’t it amazing? It’s terrifically peppy; you can just zoom around other cars.” She dropped her books in the front seat. It was a hot, windless day. The smell of tar rose from the parking lot. So they were talking again, she thought, shading her eyes from the sun. She had wondered if those moments in the hospital were to be repeated, or if that break in the ice had been a one-time thing.

  He looked at her, then away. He didn’t seem as tired as the other day in the hospital. In fact, he looked wonderful wearing a tight blue tee shirt.

  “How long have you had the car?”

  “A little over a week,” she said, thinking of all the small daily things they didn’t know about each other anymore. “How’s your mother? I called the hospital yesterday, and they said she was fine, but you know how that is—just a switchboard. Whoever answered sounded totally out of it.”

  “No, she’s—well, not fine,” he said, “but much better. She’s coming home today.”

  “So soon? That’s wonderful. When I saw her, I thought—” Jenny broke off, didn’t want to say that Nell Montana had looked on the far side of life. “She was so white—”

  “I know, I thought she’d have to be in longer, too.” The sun beat down, turning his head into a halo. On his arm the little golden hairs caught the light.

  “She told me she saw your mother,” he said.

  Jenny blinked. “Pardon?”

  “My mother said she met your mother in the mall. Did you know?”

  Jenny hesitated, then said, “I was there.”

  “I didn’t know that. You heard them talking? What did they say? What happened?”

  “Didn’t she tell you?” On the playing fie
ld beyond the parking lot the girls’ softball team was doing push-ups. “And a one and a two,” the coach yelled. “Come on, Kim, and a five and a …”

  “Just that she met your mother and that it upset her.”

  Jenny bit her lip. A door slammed, someone shouted for Randi, and a car packed with kids backed out next to them, the horn blowing all the way to the street. “I’m not sure if I should tell you.” She slid into the car and looked out the window at him. “I don’t mean that the way it sounds. Just—”

  He came around the other side and got in the car next to her. “Did what they talked about have anything to do with what my mom did? With taking the pills?”

  “How would I know, Rob?” she said.

  “You know what she does every night, Jenny? In case she can’t sleep she takes two of those little white pills and puts them on her night table, and then she closes the bottle and puts that on her bureau. So if she wakes up in the middle of the night and those two pills are gone, she knows she’s taken them, and won’t take any more by mistake. Does that sound like a person who would take an accidental overdose?”

  Jenny pressed her hands to her eyes. After a moment she said, “Look, I went into The Sole Survivor to leave my sneakers, and then my mother came in, and your mother said to her, ‘I’m Nell Montana,’ and they talked—no, that’s not right. They didn’t talk so much as your mother told my mother about herself and that she wanted her to forgive her for—you know, for Gail. And my mother—”

  “Your mother what? Your mother wouldn’t?”

  “Rob, she was terribly upset.”

  “What kind of person is she?” he said. “I’m really curious. Does she know what she did to my mother? I thought when I met her she was a kind person, even though—”

  “She didn’t do anything to your mother, Rob. That’s really unfair. Your mother did it to herself. You just said so.”

  “It seems to me she had a little help. And not from her friends.”

  “You don’t know,” she exclaimed. “You don’t know at all. My mother cried. She cried when she left your mother.”

  “I’m terribly impressed.”

  “I never knew you could be so nasty,” she said quietly.

  “You didn’t stick around long enough to learn much of anything about me.”

  They glared at each other. He took a pack of cigarettes out of his pants and punched in the cigarette lighter. “I didn’t know you smoked,” she said coldly.

  “Now you do.” She didn’t tell him the cigarette lighter didn’t work.

  She had always been afraid they would fight over their parents, that the grief and anger of their parents would come between them. Well, now it had, but it didn’t signify, didn’t matter, because in truth nothing could come between them anymore. They were no longer a unit, a pair. They were split, they were apart, they were separate. And nothing touched, not their heads, not their hearts.

  “You should have told me about their meeting,” he said accusingly. “Where the devil is that lighter?” He punched it again. “Under the circumstances, considering what my mother did, you should have told me, Jenny!”

  “What difference would it have made? It was done when I saw you.”

  “You’re always so cool and right, aren’t you? So correct, so principled. You and your mother—between you, do you have even one heart? Or do you both have stones sitting in there?” He jabbed his finger at her.

  “Get out of my car. Just get out. Get out, get out.”

  “I’m going!” He pushed open the door and leaped out.

  “There she is, Pennoyer herself.” Ferd smiled slyly. Jenny had met him, Rhoda, and Nick on the way to school. She wondered how much Ferd knew about her and Rob.

  “Jenny will come, too,” Rhoda said. “Won’t you, Jen?”

  “Another party?” she asked. Nick gave her a warm look from under long-lashed eyelids.

  “We’re all going to the festival at the Greek Orthodox Church. Nick’s sister is going to be one of the dancers, and Nick might even play his mandolin if we twist his arm hard enough.”

  Nick sidestepped around Ferd so that he was next to Jenny. “My musical talents are strictly private.”

  “Oh, come on, Nick,” Rhoda said, “you’re good. And I want you to play.”

  “And what Rhoda wants, Rhoda gets,” Nick said amiably.

  “Why not?” Rhoda said.

  “Will you come?” he asked Jenny as they approached the school.

  “When is it going to be?” Rob was sitting on the stone wall, a girl next to him. Suzi? No, another girl.

  “This coming weekend, a two-day deal. We’re all going Saturday afternoon; that’ll be the best time.”

  Rob glanced over, his face stiff. “I’d love to come,” Jenny said. “Principled,” Rob had said accusingly. “You and your principles.” Okay, Rob, you think I have too many principles? Well, you don’t know everything about me, either. She smiled up at Nick, the smile stretched, became brilliant, glowing, inviting. Are you watching, Rob? Are you looking?

  Chapter 26

  The house was quiet, everyone asleep. Only Jenny sat up studying in her room. Exams were coming. She was accepted into college, so she didn’t “need” the marks, but it was important to her pride to do well. She glanced at the clock. Ten-thirty. She might be finished in another hour.

  A knock at her door. “Jenny? Jenny, it’s me.” Mimi looked in. Her face was flushed, her glasses sat low on her nose, and there was a paper carnation stuck behind her ear. “Come on out, I have something to tell you! Frankie and I have something to tell you!” Mimi’s ordinarily quiet voice was almost rowdy.

  “What is it?”

  “No, come on!” Mimi beckoned, then grabbed Jenny’s hands and pulled her into the living room where, in a moment, her parents appeared with Frankie shepherding them. Her father was in pajamas, her mother tying the belt of her robe. “What is it, what’s the matter?” Amelia said. “Shh, you’ll wake up Ethel.”

  “I’m awake,” Ethel said from the door of her room. Yawning, she came to lean against Jenny’s leg.

  “Everybody, sit down,” Frankie said. In the center of the room, he and Mimi held hands. “Mimi and I are engaged!”

  “Yup!” Mimi shot out her left hand to display a ring on the third finger. She walked around, showing each of them the gold ring with intertwined hearts. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

  Amelia hugged her, then Jenny kissed her and hugged her, a long back-rubbing hug. “I’m so glad,” she said. “I’m so glad for Frankie.”

  “Hey, be glad for me, too,” Mimi said, hugging back, “I love the goof.”

  “So she caught you, son,” Frank said as he shook Frankie’s hand.

  “No, I caught her!” he said, and Mimi laughed. “And I’m never letting her go,” Frankie added, putting his arm through hers.

  “This calls for a drink,” Jenny’s father said. They moved into the dining room where Frank took a bottle of Johnnie Walker and shot glasses from the bottom of the china closet.

  “What about me and Jenny?” Ethel asked as her father passed the liquor around.

  “Too young to drink, toots.”

  “Jenny’s not so young.”

  “Not eighteen yet.”

  “Oh, Frank,” Jenny’s mother said. “An occasion like this—”

  “No, in this house nobody drinks till they’re eighteen. Go get a glass of milk, Ethel, and you can toast, too.”

  “I want a shot toast,” Ethel insisted. Everyone laughed. The child’s face darkened with humiliation.

  “Wait a sec, I have an idea,” Jenny said. In the kitchen she poured chocolate milk into two shot glasses and brought them back. “Ethel, we’ll just pretend this is dark scotch. Who cares? I don’t.”

  “Okay—to the happiness of Frankie and Mimi,” her father said, and they all clinked glasses.

  “To us,” Frankie said exuberantly.

  They drank. “Oh, my, good stuff,” Jenny’s mother gasped. “When di
d you decide?” she asked Mimi.

  “We’ve been talking about it for a week—”

  “More,” Frankie said.

  “And tonight we just made up our minds and went out and got the ring.”

  “How in the world did you do that so fast?”

  “I had it all picked out,” Frankie said.

  “We’re going to the Poconos for our honeymoon,” Mimi said.

  “Are you getting married right away?” Jenny asked.

  Mimi smiled sheepishly. “Uh, not really—not for at least a year, but we made all our plans anyway.”

  “I wanted to get married right away,” Frankie said.

  “The Poconos—that’s where we went for our honeymoon, Frank. Remember?” Jenny’s mother had a soft smile on her face. “We’re always saying we’re going to go back and we never have been back yet. And it’s not even that far away.”

  “Maybe this summer.”

  “Oh, no, we always say that.”

  “This time I mean it. I want to take you on a vacation. You need a vacation. Maybe Jenny will watch Ethel, and you and I—”

  “Jenny is going to be working.”

  “Well, she can take a few days off and watch Ethel, and you and I will go away, just the two of us.”

  “Oh, do it,” Mimi said. “You should do it!”

  “You haven’t heard the other news,” Frankie said. “I’m moving to Buffalo.”

  “Buffalo,” his father repeated. “What’s in Buffalo?”

  “Mimi is going to school there next fall.”

  “Your job—”

  “I’m not quitting, Dad. I’ll put in for a transfer, wait for an opening, then move.”

  “That’s right, that’s the way to do it,” Frank said, giving Mimi an approving look, as if she were responsible for anything Frankie did that made any kind of good sense.

  Sipping the last drop of her chocolate milk, Jenny thought that all their lives were going on—her father’s, her mother’s, Frankie’s—continuing, expanding, while her life … No, it hadn’t stopped, but something terrible had happened. It was as if she had been running along a green path, and then, although the path was still there, she had left it. Veered abruptly off, chosen instead to move slowly, painfully, through thickets of stinging brambles. She had left that green path, she had given up Rob for them, for her family. And they had been glad, yes, but all the same, had it made any real difference to them? Had it changed any of their lives? Giving up Rob, she had drastically altered—worsened—her own life, while making barely a ripple in theirs.