Practical Jean (15 page)

“I guess that makes sense,” he said.

“What are you going to do with yourself?” she asked, stepping into her sleeveless emerald rayon dress.

Milt shrugged. “I guess I can do anything I want. Bachelor's night out.”

It was the sort of thing Milt said when he was being pouty, so Jean chose to ignore it. “I wish you could make some friends,” she said, “so that you're not lonely on nights when I'm away.”

“I'm not lonely.”

Jean knew that was just defensiveness talking, because it was a simple fact that men just didn't make strong, lasting friendships the way women did. They had no awareness of themselves as part of a community, of being woven into something greater than themselves. Compared to women, men just floated unconnected through life like helium balloons lost on the wind.

Feeling sad for Milt for being like a balloon, Jean turned around and let him zip up her dress. After that she put on her black-and-gold bolero jacket and checked it all out in the mirror.

“Nice,” said Milt.

It was an ensemble better suited to cooler weather, but Jean was feeling lately that her arms were getting flabby and the jacket hid those well, and the only other theater-appropriate thing she owned that fit her just now was the black jacquard dress she had worn to the funeral, and she thought she would leave that in her closet for a while. As for shoes, she pulled out a pair of black open-toed pumps and a pair of gold sandals and asked Milt for his opinion.

“Black ones,” he said. But she chose the sandals instead, because they looked that little bit snazzier. Milt muttered something about not being needed and wandered away, probably to get himself a snack.

Jean touched up her lipstick in the mirror—a rich cinnamon red that just jumped from her fair skin and perfectly complemented her orangey-blond hair. When she was done she popped the lipstick into her boxy overnight case. The plastic bag from her mother's house was tucked away in a drawer nearby, and she reached for it and took out some disposable gloves and four Fentanyl patches. There was momentum in all of these movements and she carried them out without thinking, but now with the patches in her hand the momentum stopped. The truth of it was that Jean wasn't quite sure what she expected of herself in taking the patches to Adele's. She knew what she
hoped
of herself, and it was in the spirit of this hope that she had brought the patches home from her mother's. But now, in the act of packing, the patches in her hand seemed to suggest something more certain than hope. They traced a route on a map in pen, with a big black
X
at the destination. Since her wave of missing Dorothy, Jean wasn't yet convinced she could go all the way to that
X
.

Milt was oddly distant when she went to kiss him goodbye. He sat on the end of the couch by the living room window, his gray eyes focusing into the distance as if his mind were consumed by something complicated and serious. It might have been a posture for her benefit, Jean considered, or it might have meant that he was quietly condemning himself for something . . . perhaps a lack of friends. It was all right for a husband to quietly condemn himself once in a while; it helped to maintain a certain equilibrium in the house. But Jean thought there was a chance that she'd been too quarrelsome with Milt over the last few days. She dropped her bag and her little black evening purse and sat on the arm of the couch. In both hands she took the heavy cheeks of his face, felt the smooth, shaved skin against her palms, and steered his head toward her the way she might move a roast of beef, looking for the best place to carve.

For a moment he resisted meeting her eyes, like a child, and then she said, “Milt!” and he relented. “I don't want you being sad that I'm going out tonight with Adele,” she said. “I'm sorry if I've been . . .” She stopped and wondered what she had been.

“Kind of mean?” Milt offered.

“Or not as nice as I usually am.” She stared into his eyes, looking for a twinkle. “It's just us going through a transition, getting back to normal. We'll be fine.”

“I dunno . . . you've seemed a bit . . .” Milt hesitated, and Jean joggled his face so that he would complete his thought. “I guess a bit hard or something,” he continued, “since you got back from your mom's.”

“Hard,” she said. She let go of his face.

“Or something.”

Jean tried not to bristle too obviously, because she'd been hoping to leave with both of them in a pleasant frame of mind. But the word grated on her. It seemed to be the view of men that whenever a woman wasn't nurturing, the way a fantasy mother might be, or pliant like a prostitute, she was automatically hard. There was no middle ground for a woman; in the eyes of men she was like a dial with three positions: nurturing, pliant . . . or hard. So if she was determined, she was hard. If she was tired, she was hard. If she failed to suffer fools. If she made snap judgments. If she held others to a high standard. If she was practical . . . then she was hard. This was as good a reason as any why women needed women friends—so there would be someone around to see them as they really were.

Jean cleared her throat, looked down at Milt, and forced herself to smile. “I apologize,” she said.

Milt nodded, and his face softened a little. “I'm sorry too,” he said. “I guess you've had a pretty shitty time with your mom and then Dorothy.” He shook his head. “Dorothy. Wow.”

Jean leaned over and kissed Milt on the forehead. “Don't worry about Dorothy,” she said. “She did all right.”

She boarded the bus ten minutes before it was to leave and found a seat next to a girl of about fifteen, with lanky blond hair, green eye shadow that glistened like algae in a pool, and dark-green polish on her nails.

“I sometimes use a glaze that color,” Jean said to the girl, smiling. “In the ceramics that I do.” But the girl was piping music into her ears and didn't seem to hear, and appeared to have no interest in a middle-aged woman sitting next to her. Jean imagined that the girl's mother, whoever she was, would be hoping for and expecting more pleasant and engaging behavior from her daughter in such a situation. But . . . no. She supposed it was impossible for a parent to know how much of the training and effort devoted to a child really soaked in and presented itself to the world as evidence of proper upbringing, or how much of it glanced off like so much light rain against a windowpane, or how much sat just below the surface of a daughter's consciousness, like mold beneath a tile, waiting for the right conditions to bloom.

The drive to the city went as it usually did, the route graduating from two-lane to six-lane highways, and clear sailing most of the way. All the traffic was coming from the other direction, cars filled with city workers headed home. Jean watched out the window and grieved again at how far the new housing developments stretched. Block after treeless block, houses hammered together without any sense of history or place. None of the people Jean knew lived out here. These people hardly ever came into the center of town. Did they even know where they lived? More and more, Kotemee was becoming a bedroom community, tied irrevocably to the city. To a future that had nothing to do with its past. Soon it would feel pressures it had never felt before, and it would be forced to change in ways no one could ever have imagined. And with change came death—the death of whatever had been, to be replaced by something that was no better or worse, just different. Just unrecognizable.

Beside her the teenaged girl took a green-skinned apple out of a bag, and a paper towel. As the bus hummed along the highway, Jean sat with her hands in her lap. And though she'd had no intention of watching the girl eat, she soon found herself fascinated.

Beside her, the girl took a bite of the apple, and chewed for a while, and then she held up the paper towel like a plate under her chin and spat out the rumpled skin. Again and again the girl took a bite and chewed, carefully ingesting the flesh but eschewing the peel, until after ten or fifteen minutes a mound of green, translucent remains, like the desiccated husks of a dozen praying mantises, sat in the paper towel in her hand. Jean had never seen anything like it. And while a part of her felt a middle-aged urge to explain to this child that she was rejecting the most nutritious part of the apple, another part thought she saw in this girl's actions the way of life itself. How it consumed, scraped clean, all that was sweet and good in a person, until nothing remained but the bitter, chewed-up shell.

So that they would have time to eat before heading to the theater, the plan was for Jean to meet Adele at six o'clock at a new restaurant that she'd raved about over the phone. It seemed that Adele was always raving about something or other—a new restaurant, an artisanal tart bakery, a German Expressionist movie, a Korean plum—and whatever it was was available only in the city, and neither Jean nor anyone she knew had ever driven there to find out whether it or anything was nearly as nice as Adele claimed it was. So Jean was eager to see what the fuss was all about regarding the restaurant called Vedøy, named after the owner, Gudrun Vedøy, who was a Norwegian former model whom Adele had met at an Endicker Trust shareholders meeting.

“She's connected to the Norwegian mafia,” Adele had murmured into the phone. “But you cannot tell that to anyone.”

“I didn't even know there was a Norwegian mafia,” said Jean.

“Oh, there is,” replied Adele, “and they'll carve out your heart and serve it on a Triscuit. But that's the last you'll hear of it from me.”

The bus pulled into the midtown station at half-past five and Jean got off, saying a cheery goodbye to her young seatmate who ignored her completely, which was only as Jean had expected. Being pleasant to a rude teenager was her way of girding herself for the ordeal of venturing into the teeming city, and indeed, once she was out onto the sidewalk she was immediately engulfed in what seemed like the whole of humanity rushing to catch the subway, and she gripped her overnight bag tightly and bent into the oncoming squall of flesh and fashion.

She had to go five blocks north on Sander Street, and then east on Esais Road for three, and at first Jean was torn about whether to take a cab. But walking a block in her gold sandals, in the heat of the day, through crowds of attractive young working women, past all of the mirrored glass buildings whose reflections could not have been less flattering if they had been designed for a carnival funhouse, made the decision for her. She hailed a taxi and asked the driver to turn up the air conditioning as high as it would go.

Taking the cab allowed Jean to get to the restaurant twenty minutes early, so she had a chance to tug open Vedøy's heavy, hammered-steel door and become thoroughly uncomfortable before Adele arrived. Greeting her was a severely cheekboned hostess who stood about six-foot five on her wedgy heels and wore a flowing sage ensemble that wafted against her protruding bones without her having to move, so that she seemed as slender and cool as a river reed and as likely to strike up a conversation, and made Jean, in her dark green rayon dress and her stiff, arm-hiding bolero jacket, feel like a bloated Spanish toad.

The restaurant's interior rose to a height above her and seemed constructed mostly of metal, like a sea-going destroyer, the furnishings and walls accented here and there with a brass stud or a bit of wood, like shards from some pitiful vessel smashed against the ship's hull. With a smile that was merely a straight line stretched, the hostess plucked up two menus and wafted Jean past empty table after empty table toward a far corner banquette and sat her, as if deliberately, so that she was forced to stare at her reflection in a pillar clad with shiny hammered tin. But
reflections
was a more appropriate word because each of the hammered divots shone back at Jean a small, distorted image of her face, so that for what was probably fifteen minutes but seemed like an hour she had dozens of short-browed, wide-cheeked Jean heads gaping and blinking and gradually reddening before her eyes.

And that was why, when Adele arrived in her fabulous cocktail attire and exclaimed, “Darling, don't you look lovely!” Jean finally burst into tears.

Adele flung herself down onto the banquette and wrapped Jean in her arms and listened as Jean explained about trying to look her best and feeling as though the city was pitted against her. And Adele offered the sort of comforting advice that reminded Jean why she'd been so fond of this woman for so long.

“Screw the city!” Adele said. “Let's have some aquavit!”

They ordered two small glasses of ice-cold aquavit from the waitress and then two more, and though Jean had never had it before, and had never been terribly fond of the taste of caraway, she found herself lapping it up. And when it was time to order food Adele said to ignore the menu because she had been told personally by Gudrun Vedøy what to order, and Jean just let it come.

They had little
lutefisk
cubes on tiny mounds of
surkat
. Adele said something to Jean about lye in the fish, that's what made
lutefisk
lutefisk
, and Jean just laughed because that was absurd and the sound of
lutefisk
was funny and what were all these little bugs in the cabbage? Those were caraway seeds, Adele explained, and Jean realized she was already rather drunk. They had
sursild
with pickled onions and
sursild
with pickled beets, all served on crunchy little bread wafers that fell apart when Jean bit into them and tumbled down her chin, which shouldn't have happened but just seemed to anyway. They
sure slid
, giggled Jean. And she kept drinking the aquavit because Adele kept ordering it, which was surprising to Jean because she had never thought of Adele as being much of a drinker. Although she did remember one time when the two of them had been in a college dorm room together. And they'd been drinking something, or smoking something. Maybe it was both! And they'd had a lot of fun until Jean had decided she had to go home, and pretty soon after Adele had left for Cornell.