Practical Jean (19 page)

Lifting her glass, Jean said, “The person I'm most upset with is Louise.” As a hint at possible future forgiveness, it was all Natalie was getting; she would have to make do.

“Of course you are,” said Natalie, gathering all the chopped salad ingredients into a glass bowl. “What a total bitch.”

Natalie's words could be such a splash of ice water. But the more Jean thought about it, the more she examined Louise's actions, the more they seemed to fit. Imagine someone pretending to be her friend while sharing a bed, or a room, or . . . whatever they were sharing, with her friend's husband. Imagine betraying her friend while that friend was distracted by the unbearable burdens of family. Imagine doing that to a friend while that friend's
mother lay dying
. What a total, what an absolute
bitch
.

“I'm so angry with her, Natalie.” Jean's voice trembled. Maybe it was the wine, or a sudden realization of what it all meant, the loss of her husband, the loss of her friend . . . she felt a surge of emotions, a welter of primitive, conflicting feelings, pouring into her. It was like she was a lake, a vast reservoir, and from every direction rivers of instinct and energy and heat were emptying into her, filling her up.

“Why shouldn't you be angry?” said Natalie.

“I'm just furious.”

“You have a right to be furious.” Natalie took up a spatula and half turned as if she were going to check the salmon in the oven. But then she seemed to reconsider, set down the spatula, and focused all of her attention on Jean.

“But maybe it's my fault.”

“It's not your fault,” said Natalie.

“It feels like it could be.”

“It's absolutely not your fault. It's hers.”

“It's hers.” Jean took a shaky sip of wine. “I have been wronged.”

“You've been very wronged.”

“Louise was deceitful.”

“You bet she was.”

“She was
evil
.”

“That's a strong word but, okay.”

Jean clenched the fist that gripped the wine. “It makes me want to do something.”

“Of course it does.”

“I want to tell her what I think.”

“You've got to let it out.”

“I have a right to be heard.”

“You have every right,” Natalie said.

“I think I'm going to call her.”

“Let's have dinner first.”

“I'm going to call her
right now
!”

Jean reached into her purse for her phone at the same time Natalie swung around, turned off the oven, and yanked open the door. Jean's hands were trembling so that she found it hard to punch in Louise's number, but she managed it one shaky digit at a time as Natalie donned oven mitts, reached in, and brought out the salmon, the juices sizzling in the baking pan. Jean waited through the first ring, a second, and then a third, while Natalie used the spatula to transfer a salmon fillet and a portion of fingerling potatoes to each plate. And finally, as Natalie lifted the plates and began to carry them from the cramped kitchen toward the dining area, Louise's answering machine voice came on the line, asking Jean to leave a message, the message of her
anger
.

“Louise . . .” began Jean. “It's Jean. Your former friend. I wish you were there right now so I could tell you how angry and betrayed I feel.” She looked toward Natalie for encouragement. Natalie was bringing the plates back to the kitchen. “Do you know what I've come to believe about my friends? I love them, and I would do anything for them. Anything. And because you are no longer my friend, that doesn't apply to you anymore.” Jean looked at Natalie by the oven. Natalie gave a tight nod and Jean nodded back. “Do you know what that means, Louise Draper? It means you should be very afraid. Because you know what's going to happen? You're going to grow
old
.” Natalie was narrowing her eyes in that way she did when she was puzzled by something. Jean knew her friend so well. She thought maybe Louise would be puzzled too, so she went on. “That's right, you're going to grow old, and tired. Your feet are going to swell, and your breasts are going to wither up until they're like two little empty hot water bottles. And your back and neck are going to ache as your vertebrae crumble, and your joints are going to bite you like sharks under your skin.” She was rolling now, she felt unleashed. Natalie was squinting at her as if she were confused, or maybe she was thinking about something else entirely, something to do with work. Dogs. It didn't matter! Jean felt herself flowing, she shone like sunlight, she held The Truth in her hands—the brutal, ugly Truth—and she was delivering it to Louise.

“I know all this, Louise. I'm not making it up. I've seen it, I've
seen
it, and it's going to happen to you. Because I'm not going to save you. You said that you wanted a Last Poem, and I was going to give you one, but I'm not now. I'm not going to make it nice for you, Louise. I'm not going to do anything to help you. And so you're going to get old, and your organs are going to betray you, just like you betrayed me. They're going to turn their backs on you. They're going to go on strike. And when they get tired of that, Louise, your organs are going to mutiny! Your own precious liver, your stomach, your intestines, every wet, wiggly thing inside you that you need to survive is going to turn on you.” Jean wasn't thinking of Louise anymore, she was thinking of her mother. She was looking into Marjorie's pain-dimmed eyes. Here was Natalie handing her a clean dishcloth and Jean didn't know why until she looked down at wet spots on her thighs and touched her cheek and realized her face was streaming with tears. “They're going to break out the swords, Louise. The muskets and the spears! Your organs are coming for you, Louise! They're coming for you! They're coming for you! And I'm not going to do
anything
!”

Sobbing, Jean snapped her phone shut and buried her face in the towel Natalie had given her. She wept into the towel until the fury, the hurt, the whole wide lake of emotions drained away. It took a long time. And when she was done, she inhaled deeply and looked up at Natalie, who was backed against the oven. The expression on her face looked like concern to Jean.

“Natalie,” she said, “don't worry about what I said to Louise, all right? It doesn't necessarily apply to you.” She folded the towel in her lap and noticed the plates set on the oven. “Your salmon is getting cold, and I'm so hungry. Let's eat!”

After dinner, Jean insisted on doing the dishes so that Natalie could relax, since she had already done so much. And later they watched some television, which seemed to be all that Natalie was up to. Jean felt euphoric after her message to Louise, and her mind swirled with images, faces, ideas, so that she hardly even knew what was happening on the screen. She thought of work—two or three exciting new ceramics possibilities that weren't yet fully formed—but mostly she thought of the people she loved, or had loved. Something about denying Louise her help, in a way that was final and absolute, underlined for Jean the importance of what she was doing for her true friends. It defined the boundaries of her actions and her reasons for them. It created within her a sense of right and wrong, of exclusion and belonging. She suddenly had a clear and thrilling insight into the roots of politics and religion, of how whole movements began. There were believers and non-believers. There were people who were meant to be held close, and others who deserved to be pushed away. Before, what she had been doing for her friends had felt right. Now, and this seemed glorious to Jean, it felt righteous.

And where did Natalie fit? Was she going to get a Last Poem? Jean wasn't altogether sure anymore—trust being such a precious, delicate thing, so easily broken and so hard to repair. But that didn't mean she wasn't concerned for Natalie when eleven o'clock came and Natalie announced that she was tired and ready for bed. Jean wondered out loud whether she was coming down with something, because her mood and energy had changed so quickly around dinner, and sometimes when people were getting ill that's how it happened. But Natalie said no, she felt all right. Just tired. As she ascended the stairs to her cute attic bedroom she said she hoped Jean would be comfortable on the pull-out loveseat, and Jean assured her that she would be. Even if she wasn't sure Natalie deserved her great gift, the last thing Jean wanted her to do was worry.

Chapter 15

J
ean lay awake on Natalie's hideously uncomfortable loveseat. There had been times during her marriage when Milt's snoring had kept her from sleeping, and Natalie's fold-out bed, with its dense-as-soapsuds mattress, was like the torture of Milt's snoring made physical.

As she lay with her eyes open in the darkness, her mind drifted to Cheryl Nunley. She pictured Cheryl's face—the miserable one in Welland's printout—and imagined the first words they would say to each other, after all the hugging and tears.

Cheryl would want to know what Jean had been doing all her life. And Jean would insist that no, the first thing she needed to do was apologize. She needed to say what a bad friend she had been. How she had abandoned Cheryl for the worst, most immature reasons. She would say this even as Cheryl shook her head, telling her it was all forgotten, all in the past.
No!
Jean would say.
Yes!
Cheryl would insist. And Jean would repeat the words as often as she needed to, as loudly as required, that she
was deeply sorry and hoped Cheryl could forgive her. And there would be more tears, and maybe some justified anger from Cheryl, sprung loose after all those years. And once all that had passed, Cheryl
would
forgive her.

Because she was like that, as far as Jean could remember.

And maybe that's all Cheryl would need to start feeling less miserable. Knowing she had a friend who had gone to all that trouble to find her and ask for absolution. That would perk someone up, wouldn't it? And then Jean could tell Cheryl that she was going to make it up to her, and that it would be a surprise and not something to worry about.
Don't even think about it,
Jean would say, when Cheryl tried to object.
Just know that I am here for you, and it's going to be all right now.
And Cheryl would smile a little. She would relax. And if the mood was just right, Jean might even tell Cheryl,
Guess what? Ash Birdy married Ruth Donoghue, and she ballooned right up!
They could chuckle about that together; they could bond a little over stupid Ash Birdy. And wouldn't that be a lovely irony?

With all that out of the way, the two of them would get down to the joyful business of sharing their histories, reliving all those missed moments, good and bad, and all the decisions that had shaped their lives. Cheryl would want to know if Jean had had any children, and Jean would tell her no. She would say that it was a choice she had made years ago, not to bring something so helpless into the world, something so dependent on her. That every so often, when she had a yearning she couldn't otherwise explain, she would wonder if she had made the right choice. But that she no longer had any regrets.

And you, Cheryl?
Jean would ask immediately.
Did you have children?
It would be safe to ask then, because the subject would have been broached. She tried to picture Cheryl's face brightening as she began to answer. Because that would mean good news.

Just before she was finally able to fall asleep, Jean spent a moment or two thinking of the more distant future, the one that came after seeing Cheryl. How life would unfold for her, without Milt, and without her friends.

The picture there wasn't nearly as clear. And she thought she wouldn't dwell on it. Not right now.

Chapter 16

W
hen Jean raised herself on an elbow and peered out Natalie's front window, she saw what she'd feared in the sky: an endless mass of vellum-gray clouds, the kind that came like drums and flutes before the marching storm. She worried not for her own sake but for Welland's. Today was the annual Police-Fire-Library Picnic in Corkin Park, and every year, for months before the date, he worked so hard on his part: arranging entertainment, such as it was, helping to round up sponsors for the picnic baskets and the petting zoo and the pony rides, setting up his lonely little booth in the Activity Zone. Jean went to the picnic every year, just to show her support, even though she didn't much care for what went on there. Mothers let their children run around with hands and mouths sticky from ice cream until it seemed half the picnic grounds were caked to them. Teenagers leered at each other or snuck off into the scrub brush. The dunk tank water quickly became so dingy she feared for the health of any town official or local radio “personality” who had to sit on the wobbly wooden seat. The Wheel of Fortune was all right; she'd won twenty-two dollars one year. But then she'd lost it all on the silly carny games. Why the balloon shoot and the basketball toss and the pickle pitch and all the rest were run by the husbands of librarians was something Jean could never fathom. But they did seem to enjoy barking at people.

It was almost eight o'clock before Natalie came downstairs, and when she did she was wrapped in a blue housecoat that, to Jean's eye, seemed at odds with her mood. The fabric of the housecoat had a fuzzy nap and was edged with a shiny satin ribbon. On the chest, over the heart, was a yellow Tweetie Bird. The housecoat, in other words, was entirely lighthearted. Natalie, however, appeared to be quite the opposite.
Pensive
was the word, and if she'd been asked about this, and if she chose to be honest, Jean would have said she was a little annoyed. If you were going to invite someone to be a guest in your house when their marriage was ending, the least you could do was be in a good mood around them. The least you could do was smile and offer breakfast and ask how they slept. Natalie didn't do any of these things. It was probably just as well, because then Jean would have had to decide whether to mention what a terrible bed her loveseat made. But, of course, she
wouldn't
have mentioned it. You simply didn't complain when your friend was offering her hospitality, however faulty. What you did was show a similar generosity of spirit. But Natalie didn't ask, and so Jean wasn't able to express her generosity in that way. Her friend just spooned coffee grounds silently into the machine in her tiny kitchen. She obviously had something on her mind.

“Is everything all right, Natalie?”

“Hmmm?”

“You're very quiet this morning.” Jean perched on a seat at the kitchen island. “You were quiet last night, as well. And we both know that's not like you.”

“I was just thinking about what you said on the phone to Louise. I've kind of been thinking about it for hours.”

“Oh, that seems a shame,” said Jean. She looked down and adjusted the way her pajamas draped over her breasts. “I hardly remember what I said.”

“It was all about growing old.”

“Well, I guess I was upset,” said Jean. “I don't know why you would lose sleep over it.”

“It kind of bummed me out.”

Natalie had stopped spooning coffee, and Jean could see the apprehension in her face. Apprehension had an unfortunate effect on Natalie; she lost all the vivacity in her dark eyes, and of course her sense of humor. She was obviously a woman who struggled with things that were uncertain, like the future. Under the circumstances, Jean thought it best to say something cheering.

“Oh, Natalie,” she said, “I really don't think you need to worry about getting old just yet.”

“Why not?” Natalie dropped the coffee spoon and folded her fuzzy blue arms. “I'm an overweight, middle-aged, single woman. I'm exactly the person who
should
be worried about growing old. And frankly—” she looked at Jean “—so are you.”

What were the chances, Jean wondered, of Natalie ever
not
saying the blunt thing if she had a choice? If it was between bluntness and graciousness—or even something complimentary!—bluntness cut down all other options like a knight in the Crusades.

But never mind. Natalie was clearly anxious, and Jean realized how she could be generous with her this morning: she could put aside her own feelings and do her best to distract Natalie from her niggling fears.

Corkin Park, roughly triangular and set against the lake, was named after Oswald J. Corkin, one of Kotemee's original favorite sons. He had enlisted in the Anglo-Egyptian Nile Expeditionary Force in 1896 and fought in the Sudanese War under Lord Kitchener at Dunqulah and Omdurman. It was at Omdurman, on the western bank of the Nile—where in five hours Kitchener's men killed eleven thousand of the enemy and sustained only forty-eight losses and not quite four hundred wounded—that Corkin's name had become enshrined in lore. He'd got his toe shot off, the second on the left foot. But as the bullets flew he'd managed to find the piece of toe. He later brought it home in a handkerchief.

Just before ten in the morning, under a cloud-socked sky the color of wasps' nests, Jean and Natalie arrived at the Police-Fire-Library Picnic banner and saw Oswald Corkin's namesake filling up with Kotemeeans. From the waterfront that defined the diagonal northeastern edge, to the southern line of scrub brush that acted as a buffer between the park and the old Pleasant Lane Cemetery (where nine-toed Oswald J. Corkin lay at rest), to the baseball diamond next to Howell Road, which eventually became Highway 18, along the western side, Jean could see as many as three hundred picnickers, a legion of sticky, feral children and their irresponsible parents, a multitude of leering, slouching, snack-devouring teenagers, and some older people who seemed to be hurrying through the questionable pleasures of pickle-pitching and picnic-basket bidding in advance of the coming storm. She was pleased about the turnout, for Welland's sake, but she was sad, too. With no sun to sparkle the water, the lake in the distance looked cold, and the dunk tank had about it a miserable, condemned air. In the petting zoo, the borrowed farm animals hunkered down in their stalls. In the baseball outfield, the Ferris wheel the Fire Department had rented stood blackly forbidding against the sky's unremitting gray. And no one was making use of the Fire-hose Cool-off Zone.

Natalie was standing off to Jean's left when a sudden burst of loud, crackling noise attracted her attention. “Is that thunder?” she said.

“No,” said Jean. “It's just Welland's band plugging their speakers into the generator.”

There was no missing the hopeful note in Natalie's question. In fact it had taken a fair bit of convincing by Jean to get her to come to this picnic at all. Natalie, in typical fashion, had said it was the sort of thing that made her wish for a crampy period: “It'd give me something better to do with my time.” But Jean was shameless and insisted that this was the only thing that would keep her mind off Milt, and that she really wanted company. So Natalie had sighed herself into some Levi's and a pair of sneakers and come along.

The revelation she had provoked that morning, that Natalie was anxious about growing old, had burrowed away like an earthworm in Jean's mind all through the bagels and blueberry cream cheese Natalie had served for breakfast. She thought about all the years she had known Natalie, and how her friend had always presented a combative, ironic, foul-mouthed front. She wondered now, for the first time, if perhaps that public Natalie wasn't the true one, but simply a protective shell. All the snippy comments and brutal truths and epic rolls of the eye—maybe these were Natalie's way of hiding the fact that, inside, she was really quite fragile. How heartbreaking, thought Jean, if that were true.

Ever more it seemed as if the people she loved and thought she knew had been visible to her only through veils, like a play watched from behind a screen you didn't even know was there. What a disappointment to see the screen rise just before the story's end and discover . . . oh! . . . how things really looked. Perhaps it was true that you never really knew anyone until it was too late. Or maybe really knowing someone wasn't possible. Maybe all you had were theories, and one theory lasted until it was replaced by another. The way she had assumed Natalie was always honest until she'd learned it was only sometimes. Or the way she'd had one theory about her mother and her mother's opinion of her, which had informed her whole life until her mother's last breath, only to go to the funeral and have Welland tell her something quite different.

“Mom told me something about you, Jeanie,” Welland had said. “When she first got sick.”

They were sitting beside each other in the front pew of the church, before Andrew Jr. and his brood arrived.

“About me?” Jean had replied.

“She thought you were a strong woman. Stronger than her even. She said you never took the easy way. ‘Impressive,' Mom said. She probably never told you that.”

“No,” Jean had said, staring into Millicent Keeping's hydrangeas by the altar. “She never told me.”

“It's true, though. I'm not making it up.”

“I didn't think you were.”

Once those words had been spoken, Welland sat a bit awkwardly beside Jean, as if he wasn't sure what more was expected in the moment. He was likely confused, because he must have thought what he'd said was a good thing, not that it wasn't. And he'd probably expected Jean to react more happily, not realizing how hard it is to react happily to something that rearranges your whole emotional framework in one big swoop and you have to sit with it dumbly because the person you wish you could talk to about it is lying dead in a box.

Luckily for Welland and Jean, Andrew Jr. pressed in just then with his family and there wasn't any room for thinking.

Welland coming to mind gave Jean a reason to look around the park, and after a short wander through the Activity Zone with Natalie in tow she found him, Constable Welland Horemarsh, sitting on a stool in his Kotemee Police Department booth. He was accompanied by Billy Walker, his foam child, placed on a box with his legs out straight in front of him, and a thousand traffic safety pamphlets arrayed along a folding table in stacks of varying height, like a ruined brick wall. Welland made sure he and Billy were sitting off to the side, so as not to block the large black-and-yellow sign cut in the inverted triangle of a Yield symbol that announced, “Billy Walker says: Play Safe around Cars!” Jean had always wondered if that sign wasn't sending a mixed message, but she'd never had the heart to mention that to Welland.

In front of the booth, two boys whom Jean judged to be about nine or ten were grabbing pamphlets from the stacks and swatting each other with them, and each grab of a pamphlet sent two more fluttering to the ground. Another boy about the same age was lunging across the folding table in an effort to grab Billy Walker's foam foot. Welland was doing his best to shoo all three of them away while maintaining his “friendly cop” manner. He had his stiff smile on and kept leaning over and waving at them as though they were yellow jackets hovering around a bowl of fruit. It was having no effect.

“Boys,” Jean said, striding over to the booth. “Boys! Where are your parents?”

The boys continued to swat and lunge. “Jean!” called Natalie, coming up behind. “Did you hear? There are girls showing off their underpants over by the Ferris wheel.”

“Underpants?” said Jean.

“Pink ones!” said Natalie.

With a shout, the boys tore off.

A sheepish look passed over Welland's face. “I can't be associated with that,” he said. “But thank you.”

For a few years it had been Jean's hope that Welland and Natalie might see something in one another, but it had never happened. Welland had probably been too nice for Natalie's taste, or Natalie too sharp-edged for his. Now, of course, given the gaps in Natalie's honesty, it was just as well.

“Natalie let me sleep at her place last night,” said Jean, “while I recovered from Milt leaving me for another woman.”

“Milt left you?” Welland, bless his heart, appeared both shocked and terribly concerned. It looked rather handsome, that concern, against his dark-blue policeman's uniform. Jean hoped Natalie wouldn't notice.

“He's having an affair with Louise Draper,” she said. “So that's as good as left me.”

“Your friend Louise?”

“My former friend.”

“Holy cow.” There was something odd about the way Welland was looking at her, Jean thought. He appeared caught, somehow. Torn between one thing and another.

“Welland?” was all she said.

“Well,” her brother pointed vaguely south, “I thought I saw Milt a little while ago, over by the pickle pitch.”

“No.” Jean shook her head. “That doesn't sound like Milt.” The pickle pitch involved trying to toss dill pickles into the mouths of large pickle jars. You got three pickles for a dollar, and to win a prize you had to get one whole pickle into a jar; half a pickle cut in two by the jar's glass rim, or any amputated piece of one, didn't count. Milt had no hand-eye coordination at all, and vinegar made his nose itchy.

“And,” Welland adjusted the back of his cap, “um . . .”

At that moment an enormous boom sounded across the park, followed by an ear-ripping electronic crackle and a piercing wail of amplified feedback. Not far from Jean a terrified toddler clutched her mother's knees, her lower lip trembling.

“I think it's time for the entertainment,” said Natalie.

On a flatbed trailer set up on Corkin Park's southern edge, against a backdrop of scrub brush, three bedraggled and sleepy-looking young men took up positions with their instruments and stared with apparently limitless fascination at their own feet. Closer to the front of the stage a skeletal girl with lank, dirty-blond hair, wearing purple tights and a jean jacket covered in what appeared to be beer labels, grabbed the microphone stand in front of her with a sudden, jealous vehemence.