by Delia Ephron
The back is pink and puffy. I look closely. A splinter.
16
Jenna’s mom throws out her arms. What choice do I have? “Guess who’s here,” she shouts after squeezing me. “Frannie. It’s Frannie.”
Jenna’s face appears upstairs, over the banister. Alice, their housekeeper, rushes out of the kitchen. Another hug. I dread them. I should hang a NO HUGS sign around my neck. “Mambo, look who’s here.” Jenna’s mom nudges the dog, who’s napping. Mambo flaps his tail once as if he’s swatting a fly.
I take the stairs two at a time, drag Jenna into her room, and shut the door. “I have to talk to you.”
“I can’t believe you’re here,” Jenna says, “because I was just thinking that I have to talk to you. The most unbelievable thing has happened.”
“Same here.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
In case you’re wondering why we’re acting as if I haven’t ignored her for three whole months, you know what? It didn’t matter.
“What happened, Frannie?”
I can’t quite come out with it. Ever since Barbie One pointed out the splinter, I’ve been obsessed, Get to Jenna, you’ve got to get to Jenna, but now here I am and she’s waiting…. “You first,” I say.
Jenna assumes first position. In ballet, it’s a way of standing so your heels are together and your toes point out. That’s what she does when she’s excited. Most kids jump up and down. Jenna snaps into first position, her back straight as a ruler, long neck extended. She goes still. She practically quivers with stillness. When Dad and I were at the beach on Cape Cod, we saw, at the water’s edge, a graceful little bird with long legs as skinny as string. “A sandpiper,” Dad said. Perhaps if you were close, you could see its feathers ruffle, but through the binoculars from our perch at the top of a dune, the little bird looking out to sea appeared unmoving, elegant, taut with expectation. “That bird reminds me of Jenna,” said Dad, and I knew exactly what he meant.
“James is a chef.” Jenna’s voice goes all hush-hush when she’s in first position, as if everything she says is so earth-shattering it can’t be spoken in a normal tone.
“A chef? In a restaurant?”
“No, not in a restaurant, at home.”
“You mean he cooks? He’s a cook?”
“Oh, Frannie, don’t do that.”
I don’t ask because I know. “Sorry.”
“He means a lot to me.”
“Okay, so Dr. Dental Floss is a chef.”
“Frannie!”
“Sorry. Go on. I’m sorry, Jenna.”
“His parents were out and he made me spaghetti with sausage and cabbage, which sounds disgusting but it is so excellent. You should see him. He chops like he’s on Iron Chef. He loves Iron Chef.”
“Is that what you wanted to tell me?”
“Almost. He asked me to cut the price tag off his apron. He gave me poultry shears to do it.”
“What are poultry shears?”
“Big scissors. He has every piece of kitchen equipment you could ever need. Three whisks, even a tiny one like for a doll. He uses it for salad dressing.”
I try to imagine Waldo loping around the kitchen, juggling pots and pans, wearing oven mitts. I like the idea of him in oven mitts.
“Are you listening?”
Jenna’s sensitive to when my brain spins into orbit. “I’m listening, go on.”
“The tag was in front—it’s this white chef ’s apron with a bib—and I could smell him and he smelled of onions because he’d just been chopping them, and he said, ‘Taste this.’ He stuck out his tongue and we licked tongues.”
“So you and James are together?”
Jenna props her leg on the dresser and arches her body over it. She’s unpredictable. Just when you think she’s going to sigh and moan, she decides to give her muscles a stretch. “Remember the Satin Ultra lip gloss we got? It comes right off.”
“You mean from kissing.”
“From kissing,” she says, proud to have that knowledge. “From anything. It doesn’t last at all, it’s kind of a rip-off, but the good thing is that it keeps your lips moist. What a surprise. What an awesome incredible surprise.”
“Most lip gloss comes off pretty easily.”
“Not the lip gloss. James. When we licked, and then later when he sprinkled basil on the pasta and lit candles, I kept thinking, ‘Is this my life? I can’t believe this is my life.’ Remember when we thought we’d never get breasts, and then we did? And then I thought I’ll never have truly romantic experiences, and now I’m having them. Isn’t this unbelievable? What happened to you?”
I can’t answer right away because she’s reminded me of all the things we fantasized at a million sleepovers. Things are happening to her that she wished for, and the thing that happened to me is at the very top of my not-wished-for list, or would be if I’d ever made one. Once Jenna and I moped for weeks because Sukie claimed she was having wild sex with a football player at Hudson High while we were still practicing puckers in the mirror. Will I ever get bummed out about something silly again, or am I permanently bummed out about something colossal? I want to have no perspective about what matters and what doesn’t. I want to lose my marbles over basil. Instead I’m dying to point out how dumb it all is, big deal, he sprinkles basil. So what, he’s got an itty-bitty whisk. I want her to feel awful. I want everyone to feel awful, because I do. It’s wretched but true.
I can stick Jenna with a giant dose of perspective.
Or I can tell her this bizarre thing.
Scold or tell. Insult or confide.
Tell, tell, tell.
I flop on the bed. Jenna climbs on too, only she sits up cross-legged while I lie like a limp trout. After all, I’m fairly wiped out—not sleeping, the job, massive agitation from the latest turn of events. I begin at the beginning, finding Dad’s present. It’s exciting to tell her and a total relief. I linger over details: the exquisitely carved box, the intricate Celtic knots contrasting with the simple stark lettering of FRANCES ANNE 1000. I confess that I embroider, inventing some thumping heartbeats and sweaty palms before I eased off the top. I also exaggerate the danger of being discovered, my mom’s nosiness—claiming I barely sneaked the box by her while she endured the pennywhistle music. Jenna makes a hideous face as she always does at even a mention of that crazy bird music.
“How strange is it that Dad finished my present early? That is—was…” I stop. “How unlike him.”
“Imagine carving a thousand-piece puzzle by hand.”
Just like that, Jenna solves the mystery of the 1000. One thousand means one thousand pieces. To her it’s obvious, and I knew she’d nailed it. The explanation fits like a puzzle piece when it’s the right match.
“One thousand.” Jenna shakes her head. “How long did it take him? Do you think your dad spent over a year? Maybe two? Wow.”
My eyes water up; man the floodgates. That is the tenderest notion—Dad toiling away for maybe two years to make me a birthday present. I tell Jenna about the photo, how the puzzle must be a scene from a town in Ireland where my grandparents were born. “Oh, oh, oh, I almost forgot. I took the photo to the Xerox place to make an enlargement and it didn’t work. The colors ran, although that’s scientifically impossible; still the photo looked all streaked and blurry, as if they had. The photo couldn’t be copied.”
“You’re giving me goose bumps, Frannie. Feel my arm.” Sure enough, she has prickles up and down it. “James has a whole notebook filled with recipes he Xeroxed.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“It doesn’t. Sorry.”
I’m not sure I want to confide in Jenna after all. “Are you planning to tell James all about this?”
“No.”
“Do you swear?”
“I swear.”
“No matter what he does with his tongue?”
That makes us both laugh. “Say it. Say, ‘I swear, no matter what he does with his tongue or i
f he says my eyes are beautiful black beans and my breath smells of eggplant.’”
Jenna has a fit of giggles, even snorts a few times, before she can swear. Then I confide the strangest part: the dream. I show her my hand. “If I have a splinter, then maybe it wasn’t a dream. Maybe I was there.”
It’s spookily silent at that instant. Outside, no whoosh of cars down the block or shudder of leaves in the wind. Jenna touches my splinter lightly with her finger. We both gaze at the sliver of wood, the only evidence of my preposterous claim.
“Tell me about the dream again,” Jenna says finally.
I run through it once more. The room with the cardboard suitcase under the bed, the sign on the door. “It must be a hotel room, right?” Seeing nothing out the window but white.
“Fog?” asks Jenna.
“I guess. When I put my hand out the window, it was like my hand evaporated. I couldn’t see it. I could sense it, I knew it was there, but it was invisible.”
“Invisible,” Jenna echoes.
“If it was fog, it was the world’s thickest. Also, you know what, now that I’m thinking about it—”
“What?”
“Fog is wet, isn’t it?”
“Wet?”
“You can kind of feel fog. It’s moist and cool, but this white stuff, it didn’t feel like that.”
“What did it feel like?”
“I guess not really anything. Anyway, when I pulled my hand back inside, I scraped it on the window frame. I felt it, Jenna. I remember noticing that the wood on the frame was shredding.”
Jenna taps her teeth with her thumbnail, a thing she does when she’s thinking.
“Impossible, right? I’m crazy. Demented.” I roll off the bed.
She nods.
“I can’t have fallen into a jigsaw puzzle. It’s only a dream, one of those exceptionally real ones where you wake up and are completely shocked to find that you were, in fact, actually dreaming.” I open the desk drawer where Jenna sometimes stashes protein bars. There’s nothing but a half-shriveled carrot. “This is gross.”
Jenna drops it into the wastebasket. “White out the window, no world at all—that’s a dream thing for sure. Is there someplace else you could have gotten a splinter?”
I have to admit it. “I could have gotten it at Camp Winnasaki, in the barn.”
I hold out my hand, and we both study it as if it were a science exhibit. Is there a clue in the little splinter and the pink irritated skin around it? “Shouldn’t we remove it?” Jenna asks.
“It’s my only proof.”
“You might get an infection.”
“I’ll risk it.”
“Let’s go.”
“Where?”
“Frannie, you’ve got to show me the puzzle.”
17
Jenna gets the same enthusiastic greeting at my place that I got at hers. My mom screeches and practically does backflips. Mel is summoned. They are so happy and relieved to see Jenna that it bugs me. Like this is proof that I’m over Dad’s death or something. A good side effect: Mom is exceptionally pliant, letting us eat dinner privately in my room, delivering the chicken and rice on paper plates with plastic knives and forks for both of us. I’m sure Jenna thinks, given the paper and plastic, that Mom is doing an indoor-picnic thing, when she’s actually doing a don’t-let-Jenna-know-Frannie-is-crazy thing.
“Mom, what town did Dad’s mom and dad come from?”
“Albany.”
“No, I mean in Ireland. Before they came here.”
“Oh. I’m not sure. Blarney, Blaney, Blantry. Something with a B. Why? Did you find something in his stuff?”
“What would I find?”
“I don’t know. Why did you ask?”
“There’s this guy at camp, Simon, who’s always talking about Ireland.”
“Who’s Simon?” asks my mom.
“No one.”
I have no idea why I blame Ireland on Simon. I don’t even know why I brought him up. “Great chicken, Mom.”
“Thank you.”
As soon as she leaves, I explain all about Simon, how he’s revolting and irrelevant, and then I slide the treasures out from under the bed.
Jenna views the carved box from every angle, caresses the wood, admires the chiseling of my name. “Frances Anne,” she whispers. “So elegant. Your dad was amazing.”
Jenna’s not a rusher. She takes her time. That’s probably why she’s good at applying eye makeup. Bizarre, isn’t it? Being awfully skilled and patient at drawing lines around the eyes wouldn’t seem to indicate that a person would also be a great appreciator, but nevertheless, at least with Jenna, those two great gifts go together. When I lift the top off the box, she combs through the puzzle pieces, oohing and aahing over the intricate cutting and painting.
“You know what this is, Frannie?” she says.
“What?”
“An act of love.”
An act of love. Fact, not opinion. My chest tightens. I have to flop onto the floor, on my back, and go into ceiling mode. You know how hair dryers have settings—high, low, and off? Well, I’m beginning to think that I have settings—awake, sleep, and ceiling. Jenna is too busy comparing the snapshot to the work I’ve completed on the puzzle to notice that I’m zoning out.
“Is this the window? The upstairs one?” she asks.
“Yes,” I agree without actually checking to see what’s she’s referring to. Lying here is calming, although…while I’m familiar with some wrinkles in my bedroom ceiling, the result of multiple repaintings before we even moved in, now I detect spidery cracks. “A friend of Mom’s, this woman Rachel, was going to the bathroom when the ceiling fell on her.”
Apparently Jenna is preoccupied with the puzzle, because she responds, “Show me exactly what happened.”
“I don’t really remember. I was looking at the puzzle and then I was in it.”
She waves the snapshot over my face. “Try it again.”
I lean close to the puzzle, close enough to lick it. I stay there, immobile.
“Stare.”
“I am.”
“Hard. Until your head gets dizzy. Remember how we used to stand in front of the mirror until our eyes crossed and our faces got fuzzy? Try that.”
I try it. It feels stupid. This whole idea is stupid. I fell asleep while I was working a jigsaw puzzle and had a dream. That’s all.
Jenna knows it’s stupid too. Neither of us needs to say it.
I slide the puzzle back under the bed.
“How very cool.” Jenna pulls the board out and shoves it back—out and in, out and in. “Did you make this?”
“I ripped the back off mom’s ugly old bookcase and stripped the casters off a chair.”
“James is pretty handy too,” says Jenna.
I let her carry on about a card he made for her. He cut out a magazine picture of a chef wearing a professional outfit complete with tall hat and glued a photo of his face over the chef ’s face. Then he found a picture of a roast chicken and pasted on Jenna’s photo, the one from the yearbook, so it looked like the chicken had her head. He glued chef and chicken to a construction-paper heart, signed it “James à la mode,” and tucked it in her biology book, along with a sprig of rosemary. It was pretty dumb (an under-statement), and made no logical sense (à la mode means with ice cream, so what does that have to do with a chicken and a sprig of rosemary?), but Jenna lights up when she describes it. She couldn’t look happier if she won the lottery or heard that she never has to go to gym again. Her idiotic card has nothing to do with my puzzle board. How can a person compare a scissor-and-glue job to carpentry? But hey, Jenna is my very best friend, the best and the greatest. It’s sweet that she can’t stop grinning when she talks about James. Love is blind. I don’t think I realized the utter truth of that until I heard Jenna rhapsodize about having her head on a chicken.
18
A partial list of contributions to the poison collage.
dishwashing detergent
/>
toothpaste
mouthwash
hair spray
one red apple
mothballs
AA batteries
nail polish remover
Gregor, a boy in the older group who contributes the apple, has a wishing face—hopeful, longing, sweet. Every time I look at him, I wonder what he wants to hear. “It began with the apple,” he says.
“Are you referring to Eve, in the Bible?”
“No. Snow White.”
“Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of us all?” I cackle, and they all laugh except Lark, who points out that we can’t put the apple in the collage because it will rot.
“Rotting is good,” I tell her. “Poisons pollute the world; the apple will pollute the collage. We’ll be making a statement. Let’s have one bite out of the apple.” I hand it to Gregor.
He turns it few times, and then, satisfied with the location, crunches. He doesn’t chew and swallow but removes the bite whole from his mouth. “Use the bite, too,” he says.
“What a great idea. You have the makings of a true artist.” I don’t know why I’m moved to proclaim that, but he beams a whole mouthful of braces.
Lark contributes the hair spray and a speech she’s composed on the computer. The title is “Aerosol.” “In conclusion,” she writes, “aerosol is known to contain chlorofluorocarbons that break down the ozone and cause global warming. The ice caps will melt and we will all drown.”
The warnings on the nail polish remover are numerous. Naturally, Don’t swallow. That’s the route to disaster with all these products. In this case I suppose swallowing can occur if you get polish remover confused with cough medicine. Let’s say you forget to turn the light on in the bathroom in the middle of the night, which is when my coughing fits usually take place. (Middle of the night is an especially hazardous time. Once, during a sleep-over, I opened Jenna’s medicine cabinet and took out a tube of diaper rash ointment meant for her baby brother, squeezed it on my toothbrush, and began brushing.) If that happens—if, in some mixed-up moment, you swallow polish remover—call Poison Control and drink a lot of water. Also, according to the label, you might go up in flames if you smoke and remove polish at the same time.
