Practical Jean (11 page)

Jean considered asking him whether he should really be drinking while he was driving, but she abandoned that idea on the grounds that she knew what sort of answer she would get from him, and what sort of look she would get from “Roxanne.” She bent down and had to use all of her strength to pry off the lid because it was so snugly wedged between flanks of vinyl. At a certain point in her struggle down there, among the gum wrappers and fragments of straw, Birdy turned on the car's interior light. Jean thought he was doing it to help her. But when she finally managed to sit up straight with three wet cans in her hands, she realized that Birdy was examining Dorothy's face while he drove. His eyes stared hard at her, his jaw muscles flexing. Dorothy was facing straight ahead, and Jean could feel the tension radiating off her like sonar.

“So how old are you, anyway?” said Birdy.

As far as Jean could tell, Dorothy didn't flinch. “Why don't you guess,” she said, her voice a small, tight version of itself. “Are you as good with ages as you are with names?”

She kept staring straight ahead. In the back seat, Jean held the cold, slippery cans to her chest, hardly breathing.

“I know you're north of forty,” he said. He looked forward and snapped the wheel to avoid something in the road ahead, then went back to staring. “But you're not as old as my mom . . . I guess that's all that matters.” He reached up to the ceiling and flicked off the light.

In the back seat, Jean marveled at the cold calculus of young Jeff Birdy, and she silently cheered for Dorothy. Because Jean was acquainted with Jeff Birdy's rather plus-sized mother, and she was a good four years younger than either of the women in her son's car.

“I got the beers,” she sang, and passed two of them to the front. As she did, she gave Dorothy's shoulder a little squeeze.

They drove with Jeff Birdy in his rumbling Barracuda along two-lane highways and across gravel concessions as the darkness settled around them. If Birdy was “between jobs,” as he explained at one point, he also seemed to be between ideas as to what to do with two mature women willing to be taken wherever he intended to go. It didn't seem to matter to Dorothy, who leaned her head onto Birdy's shoulder and held his arm as if it were a vine keeping her from sinking into quicksand. In the back seat, Jean helped herself to another beer and silently mouthed the words to Birdy's country tunes.

The roadside landscape was turning grape-colored in the darkness when Birdy abruptly hit the brakes, and the gravel beneath the car shotgunned the floor under Jean's feet. Dorothy lifted her head.

“What is it?”

He threw his car into reverse and looked over Jean's shoulder as he began backing up. After about fifty feet he crunched to a stop again and rolled down his window.

“You see that lane?” said Birdy.

Dorothy leaned across him to look out his window as Jean slid over on the back seat and rolled down hers. In the dim starlight, on the side of the road, Jean could see the shape of a huge oak or maple tree on a knoll and, beside that, the beginning of a lane that was not much more than two wheel ruts worn into the dry earth. The lane seemed to lead nowhere but down, toward some place beyond view that was even darker and more remote than the place they already were.

“I'll bet that leads to some kind of water,” said Birdy. He crunched an empty beer can in his fist and whipped it into the far grass for emphasis.

“What kind of water?” said Jean.

“Maybe a creek, maybe a pond. Hard to say.” The car shuddered and grumbled beneath and around them. Jean smelled exhaust coming through the window, or perhaps through unseen holes in the floor. Birdy turned to Dorothy. “Whaddaya say, Roxanne . . . check it out?”

“Sure!”

“I don't know . . .” Jean began to say from the back seat. She wasn't quite sure how she intended to finish that thought. I don't know
if this is safe
. I don't know
if this is wise
. I don't know
what good anyone can expect to come of this but I guess it's not my call!
And it didn't matter because Birdy had already cranked the wheel and now they were bumping down, down the lane, crashing through weeds and grass that beat against the open window frames and filled the car with a swirl of dust and floaty particles that caught in Jean's nostrils. In the front seat, Dorothy held on to the boy's arm with one hand and pushed against the ceiling with the other, while Jean held on to the back of Birdy's seat and dipped her head the way she'd been told to do on airplanes during emergency landings.

They continued down like that for two or three minutes, Birdy swerving expertly to follow the twists in the lane. Jean thinking of Milt comfy in front of the TV with Roy, and of what a good friend she was, really an exemplary friend. And then without warning they were level, and they were stopped. Birdy shut off the engine, and the stereo, so that all they could hear was the cloud of dust settling on the car, and the cicadas in the trees.

“What'd I tell you?”

“Wow,” Dorothy whispered.

Jean raised her head and looked out. Beginning just a few yards away, a black pond stretched out in the moonlight, surrounded by the small, blue silhouettes of scrub trees. Birdy leaned out through his window, staring at the water. “Trout, I'm thinking.” He lifted his cap and gave the top of his head a scratch. Then he turned back into the car. “So, who's swimming?”

For the next while, Jean sat on the fender of the Barracuda, beside a mound of clothing, listening to Dorothy and the Birdy boy splashing and hooting in the water, tormenting the trout, just like a couple of teenagers. When she put her hand back, the sheet metal above the engine felt warm, so she lay down with her head on the air scoop, which rose up in the middle of the hood like a big flat nose with enormous nostrils, and looked up at the stars. They were extravagantly bright, strewn like silvery jacks across the dark floor of the universe. What a pity people who lived in the city couldn't see stars like these, she thought. Adele couldn't see stars like these. She would have to show them to her, some night soon.

Jean had to admit to herself that she felt a little lonely lying there, without a hard young man grabbing at her goosebumpy behind and her cold-cinched breasts. But still she was coming to believe that everything was going to work out tonight, much better than she could have hoped. She knew that Birdy and Dorothy would soon be coming out of the water, and they were probably going to make love. Dorothy would want that, it would help make the evening complete and familiar for her, so Jean cast a silent wish on her behalf. Thinking about that likelihood, and hearing the two swimmers coming closer, Jean sat upright on the fender again and looked around for something to do with herself. There were probably some interesting plants around the edge of that pond, she considered. So she slipped down off the hood and fetched the little keychain flashlight out of her purse. And when Dorothy and Birdy emerged from the pond holding hands, naked and sparkly with water, she announced, “I'm going to go exploring for a little bit. Don't leave without me.” Then she kicked off her pumps and trudged off into the weeds and sludge.

It felt well past midnight when things finally seemed to calm down in the Barracuda, so Jean was surprised when she examined her watch in the starlight and saw that it was only eleven-thirty. Time, she supposed, lost its shape when you were standing in your bare feet at the edge of a boggy pond, wondering if those were penny toads landing on your toes, having no way of knowing because your flashlight batteries ran out long ago, while you were swatting mosquitoes and your friend was being riotously screwed in the unsprung back seat of a muscle car by the son of the boy you once wanted to marry. But that was okay, thought Jean, as long as Dorothy was happy. This was her night.

Young Jeff Birdy had some work to do turning his car around and getting it back up the two-rut lane. At one point he got one of his fat rear wheels lodged in a patch of mud, and so with Dorothy steering, her hair all loose and wild, it was Birdy and Jean pushing together on the rear of the car, as the two-barreled tailpipe pumped exhaust against her shin. But they shoved it free—Jean getting a firm handshake from Birdy for her effort—and the ride back into town went quietly after that.

Jean directed Birdy to where her car was parked on Main, all alone now save for a few pickup trucks in front of the Ol' Town Tavern at the far east end, and she waited with the key ready in the ignition while the boy and Dorothy made their goodbyes. Dorothy had not forgotten how to kiss, that was obvious. Jeff Birdy could count himself lucky for the lesson.

When the two of them were finally alone in Jean's car and Birdy had rumbled off, Dorothy melted with a sigh in her seat. “Oh, God,” she said, with her eyes closed. “I'm a bad woman, Jean Horemarsh.” She chuckled a little wickedly. “It's my fervent hope that I have corrupted that boy for life.”

“I'm so glad for you,” said Jean.

Dorothy opened one of her eyes. “Are you? It wasn't weird for you, considering Ash and everything?”

“You deserved every moment of happiness tonight. I believe that truly.”

Dorothy let out a slow, deep breath. “Thank you,” she whispered. “You're a good friend.”

That was all that Jean had hoped to hear. She believed it to be true. She believed it. And to have Dorothy say so just confirmed for Jean, as she drove to Dorothy's house on the outskirts of town, that she approached with the purest of intentions what was now to come. There wasn't even a question about that, really, but it was comforting to have it reinforced. She was a good friend, just as she had been a good daughter. It was just that as a friend she was better prepared. She had the foresight of experience, which she had not had with her mother. Imagine, she thought, if her mother had been able to enjoy a night like this before she died, a night when the pain was carved right out of her, and the hole was packed full with laughter and bliss. What a blessing that would have been for her, what a blessing now for those who loved her. Jean brought a hand to her face and flicked away tears as she drove.

And the fact that Dorothy had spent her last night doing the thing she had done so often when they were girlfriends back in high school—swimming and screwing—wasn't that funny? It was funny how little people changed. Perhaps that wasn't true of everyone, perhaps it was only true for Dorothy. Maybe screwing herself silly was the only thing that had ever made her happy. If so, that was kind of sad. But what luck that everything had worked out the way it did. Jean thought now that, if she'd believed in God, she would have thought it was His hand guiding events. But no, there was no God, and there was no Afterlife. When people died they were gone. So what mattered was how they lived. And whether they were granted a last moment of beauty, which was rightfully theirs. A Last Poem. Or a last screw . . . Well, whatever the case may be, Dorothy had had hers.

So.

Dorothy was asleep in the seat beside her. Jean drove along the narrow roads leading to Dorothy's house, the occasional street lamp shining down on her friend's untroubled face, almost childlike but for the etchings of age, and the smears of makeup, and the small wound on her lip. It would be lovely to do it as she slept, Jean thought, but that was impossible because there would probably be a mess, and Milt was going to be getting back into the car, and he wouldn't understand. No, he would not. Just thinking about how much Milt would not understand made it all the clearer for Jean that she was right not to tell him about any of this, just as she never told him about her ceramics before they were made. Because until it was done, it was just an idea, and an idea was too easily dissipated. And somebody not understanding, in the panicky way that Milt would not understand, was a sure dissipater.

The closer Jean got to Dorothy's house, the slower she went, because she realized that she hadn't brought any of her tools, and she needed time to figure out what to do. Then she remembered: wasn't there a little fold-up shovel in the trunk? That could work nicely.

As she approached Dorothy's long country driveway Jean shut off the headlights. They were so late she worried that Milt would be checking out the window for them. For fifty yards or so she drove with only the moonlight to guide her. There were no streetlights, no houses in the distance. Then she turned into the lane and shut off the engine. Beside her, Dorothy began to wake up.

“You're home,” said Jean.

Dorothy rubbed her face and looked out. “Why did you stop here?”

“Oh. Well, there's something in your lane, and I wasn't sure I should drive over it.” Jean opened the door to get out and walked toward the back.

“What are you doing?”

“Just getting a shovel from the trunk.”

“Strange,” said Dorothy. “I don't see anything.”

“It's up a ways,” said Jean. She opened the trunk, rummaged around, and finally laid a hand on the shovel as Dorothy got out of the car.

“What time is it?” she said.

“A little after midnight, I think.”

“Oh, God. Roy's going to be so upset.”

“Don't even think about that,” said Jean. She set the trunk closed without slamming it. “Remember, you deserved your fun tonight. You did have fun, didn't you?”

Dorothy sighed. “Jean, it was the most fun I've had in years.”

“I'm so, so glad.”

“So where is this thing in the driveway?”

“It's up ahead. You look for it.”

Dorothy walked slowly forward as Jean struggled to unscrew the shovel's locking collar. She wondered why Milt had never oiled it. What good was a folding shovel if it couldn't be unfolded? “Don't go too far,” she called. Finally it came loose, and as she walked up the lane toward Dorothy she was able to straighten the shovel to its three-foot length and lock it into place.