You Are One of Them (8 page)

It takes nearly ten hours—without traffic—to get to Woods Hole and four hours into the drive we were still creeping up the New Jersey Turnpike. Mrs. Jones worked on her needlepoint while Mr. Jones gripped the wheel. Jenny was never satisfied with the temperature. “Max high!” she cried when she wanted her mother to turn up the air conditioner, and when the icy blast became too much to bear, she whined, “It’s
cold.
” She also assumed an insufferable worldly pose. “You haven’t tasted tea until you’ve had it from a samovar,” she said. “There’s no traffic in the USSR,” she sighed later. “There are also no backyard swimming pools,” said her dad. I tried not to laugh.

“Time for a pit stop,” said Mr. Jones when he jerked the car into a rest area. Inside at McDonald’s he ordered a nine-piece Chicken McNuggets for Jenny and me to split. “But it’s not fair. One of us gets only four,” said Jenny. She was especially concerned about fairness since falling under the Soviets’ spell.

“Cut one in half,” said her mother. So we used a flimsy plastic knife to divide one McNugget and then sat across from each other and hardly spoke as we ate.

“What’s wrong with you?” she asked me.

“Nothing,” I said.
Everything,
I thought.

Many of the details of the rest of the week are fuzzy. I know that we went to the lighthouse at Gay Head and ate lobster rolls at sunset in Menemsha. There were a few days with Mrs. Jones on the beach. Mr. Jones didn’t like sand, so he whiled away his hours elsewhere. Jenny was recognized only once that week: in a store, the clerk grabbed my arm and said, “Is that the girl who went to meet the Russians?” I nodded. The woman asked for Jenny’s autograph and then gave her a free hermit crab. “Something to remember the Vineyard,” she said. The crab’s shell had been painted an iridescent blue and it glowed as he clawed up and down the mesh walls of his small cage.

I still have a picture of us ferrying to the island: Mr. Jones snapped it as the boat neared the harbor at Oak Bluffs. We had scrambled up to the bow for a better view, and Jenny was pointing at the docks. The photograph has yellowed with age, so the sky is no longer the evening pink I remember. It was the start of our vacation, and we weren’t yet sick of each other. By the end of the week, though, I couldn’t wait to get home. Being with someone else’s family can make you feel like a hostage, to their diet and schedule, their idea of etiquette, their variations on board-game rules. I was tired of straitjacketing my emotions.

One afternoon when Mr. and Mrs. Jones were playing tennis, Jenny said she had something to show me. I followed her into her parents’ room. She lifted up the mattress and pulled out a copy of
Playboy.
On the cover a naked woman posed in a pile of jelly beans, with jewels of candy strategically placed over her nipples and between her legs. “It makes me think of Ronald Reagan,” said Jenny.

“Why?”

“Because he likes jelly beans,” she said. “Duh.” This was true. At Christmastime the White House sent commemorative jars of Jelly Bellies to friends and donors. More than a few of our classmates’ parents had received them.

“Look,” said Jenny as she opened the magazine. “The centerfold.”

I knelt beside her on the rug and looked at the woman. Her pout was at odds with the bubbly handwriting on her questionnaire. I don’t remember her name, but I know that she dotted her
i
’s with hearts. Her skin was golden and waxy, like a piece of fruit. She was wearing lacy white kneesocks and nothing else. “Her boobs are huge,” said Jenny.

I had never seen
Playboy
before. The generic shame it produced made me queasy. “Whose magazine is this?”

“My dad’s,” said Jenny. “He always hides them from my mom.”

I didn’t want to know this about Mr. Jones. “It’s gross,” I said. But it was also exciting, in the way that only secrets can be. “We should put it back.”

So Jenny returned it to its spot under the mattress. And I almost asked her what
she
was hiding in her room at home, but we heard the car pulling in to the driveway and ran out to the porch to greet her parents.

On the last night, I couldn’t sleep and overheard Mr. and Mrs. Jones fighting from their bedroom next door. I could hear the trilling, eager voice of Mrs. Jones, though her words were muffled. Then Mr. Jones barked, “Goddamn it, Linda, I’m tired of hearing about what you want. Want, want, want. Jesus. Do you have any idea how much moving to Washington has cost us?”

In some ways it was a relief to realize that Jenny’s parents didn’t always get along—it made my own family seem less screwed up—but it was also disturbing. It was like seeing a famous actress without makeup.

•   •   •

T
HE NEXT MORNING
we rushed to pack up the car because Mr. Jones was worried we’d miss our ferry. The front doors were open so that he could stand on the running board to reach the roof. While her father strapped our bags onto the rack, Jenny lingered beside the open door, studying her reflection in the side mirror. “I think I have some new freckles,” she said. “Just from this week.” She did have new freckles. Four on her forehead, three on her nose. She also had a narrow stripe of sunburn down one leg, where the sunscreen had missed a spot.

“Come on, girls, get in the goddamn car,” Mr. Jones snapped. It was the first time I’d witnessed his temper, and the flare-up scared me. His jaw locked, and he pushed his glasses up on his forehead to reveal an unforgiving squint. It was a glimpse of a man I didn’t know. My nerves were still wobbly as I buckled myself into my seat.

We made the boat back to the mainland, but somewhere in the middle of Connecticut my suitcase fell off the roof. We heard the thump, and by the time Mr. Jones yanked the car to the shoulder, the contents of the bag had already scattered across the highway. My days-of-the-week underpants made a rumpled calendar in the far lane until a tractor-trailer ran them over.

“Ed,” Mrs. Jones scolded, “you didn’t tie them down tight enough.”

“Get off my fucking back.”

“You said the F-word, Daddy,” said Jenny.

“And I’ll fucking say it again,” he said. Jenny, chastised, slid down in her seat.

Mr. Jones set up emergency flares, and as passing cars slowed to rubberneck, he darted out into the lanes to retrieve a handful of items.

“Oh, honey, I don’t think anything survived,” Mrs. Jones said sadly, as if I’d lost family members instead of articles of clothing. I could feel tears trembling on my lashes; I didn’t care about the clothes, but I was tired of being the one to whom the bad things happened. No one else’s suitcase fell off the roof. It wasn’t fair.

We left the shredded garments on the pavement. The suitcase itself—it was black-and-white houndstooth and belonged to my mother—had come to rest near the guardrail. It survived the fall without damage but was smeared with axle grease. Mr. Jones secured the empty bag on the roof with extra bungee cords. For the rest of the long ride home, the only sound I remember is the unsettling tickle of the hermit crab moving around his cage.

Back in Washington that evening, Jenny decided that the crab deserved freedom. She released him from his cage and let him crawl around on the kitchen floor. “Just for a few minutes,” she promised her mom. But hermit crabs move fast: we soon lost sight of him. Before we could figure out where he’d scampered off to, we heard Mr. Jones shout, “Goddammit.” Jenny and I rushed to the front hall and found a cracked shell, a violent smear. The crab had met his end under Mr. Jones’s shoe.

“My crab!” Jenny wailed. I realize now that it was the worst thing that had ever happened to her.

“Daddy didn’t mean to,” said Mrs. Jones.

“There’s a moral here,” said Mr. Jones.

But I can’t remember what the moral was.

•   •   •

J
ENNY AND
I
BEGAN
to drift away from each other that fall. She continued to smile benevolently at me in the halls, even after she fell in with Kim’s crowd—her newfound celebrity made her an asset to the clique—and if she sensed any hostility or awkwardness from me, I’m sure it was attributed to envy. I still spent some afternoons at her house, but while I was there, she was usually on the phone. She had inspired a cult of personality. She twisted the telephone cord around her finger like a lock of hair. “We need to get another line,” her mom said. “What if it’s urgent and someone has to get through?”

Jenny and I used to joke that we needed a direct hotline to each other’s house, like the red phone between Washington and Moscow. But now she was busy talking to other people. By second semester it was Kim who was going to the Joneses’ house after school; from my bedroom I watched her saunter up the twenty-one steps to their front porch. Was Jenny telling Kim all the things I’d said about her? “I just don’t think she’s that smart,” I’d said once. And “She’s so fake.” I’d confided in Jenny about so many things, and now I worried that my information was no longer safe. Were they laughing at me or, worse, feeling sorry for me?
Kim just likes you because you’re famous,
I wanted to say.
You’re just another cool brand.

Jenny quit swimming and joined Kim’s soccer team. “Isn’t it boring going back and forth alone in a pool?” Kim said. “At least in soccer you get to talk to people on the field. It’s a
team
sport.”

In the cafeteria Kim led Jenny around like a trophy. And on the days when Jenny was out of school, she took charge of informing all the teachers of her whereabouts. At the start of every class, she raised her hand to announce her famous friend’s schedule: “I just wanted to let you know that Jenny is in L.A. until Friday. I talked to her last night.”

Social dynamics often shift in sixth grade. We weren’t the only friends who grew apart that year. But I wasn’t just losing a friend; I felt as if my whole life was unmoored. That fall my father called to tell me that Phillipa was pregnant. My half sibling was expected in January. “We hope you’ll meet the baby,” he said, but I knew that wasn’t likely. I’d never even met Phillipa. At school I learned to catch the sorrow in my throat and then stick my head into my locker and let the tears slide down my cheeks without making any vibration at all.

I didn’t tell my mother about finding my letter in Jenny’s room. Of course she noticed that Jenny hadn’t been around in a while, but she ascribed the absence to Jenny’s relentless publicity schedule, and I didn’t disabuse her of that notion. I needed an ally, but I wasn’t sure my mother could be one. She was so fixated on disarmament that everything about Jenny’s fame—and the attention it brought to the cause—thrilled her.

Jenny became a touchstone for nuclear anxiety. When
The Day After
premiered on ABC that November, various newspapers asked for her comment. “Are you going to watch the movie?” they asked. A stupid question, since we were
all
going to watch the movie. Our teachers had instructed us to watch it, with our parents. For most kids the depiction of mutually assured destruction was traumatizing, but for me the film just confirmed everything my mother had told me. Once launched, ICBMs could not be recalled. It would take just thirty minutes for those missiles to reach us. Enough time to retaliate, but not much else.

We were all doomed.

•   •   •

I
WAS IN SEVENTH GRADE
when the head of the middle school pulled me out of class to give me the news. It was January 1985. Jenny and I had hardly spoken in a year.

“There’s been an accident,” she said. She touched my shoulder, then thought better of it and extracted her hand. She wore a beige cardigan, the antiseptic color of a dentist’s office. We were in the library; there was a blur of red encyclopedias behind her. My stomach growled. It was almost time for lunch. “An accident?” I said.

“Your friend Jennifer’s plane.”

I was allowed to leave school early that day. At home I found my mother in her bathroom. She was stretched out in the empty claw-foot tub, fully dressed, as if indulging in a good soak. She didn’t even look at me as I entered the room.

“Now do you see why I hate flying?” she said.

“Plane crashes don’t happen very often,” I said, resorting to my father’s old tactic, which had been to respond to her irrational fears with statistics. It never worked. I closed the toilet lid and sat down. I inventoried the expired bottles of sunscreen and painkillers on the bathroom counter. There was a graveyard of old lipstick tubes next to the sink. I was surrounded by rot and decay. My tears came fast and furious. Suddenly I was crying so hard I could hardly breathe.

“Come here,” my mother said.

I knelt on the floor beside the tub. She cuffed my wrists and pulled me in like a convict. “I love you so much it hurts,” she said.

“I know,” I said.

She pressed her forehead to mine, and we were locked together like two magnets, the grief pulsing between us. I finally stopped crying. “It’s our job to make the world a safer place,” she said, and then released my wrists as if they were balloons that might lift into the sky.

•   •   •

T
HERE WERE MANY NIGHTS
before her death when I’d wished for Jenny’s comeuppance. We studied ancient Greek myths, and when we got to Narcissus, I remember deciding that Jenny was a narcissist. All that attention had gone to her head. Her ego was out of control. She deserved to be exposed as the mean, spoiled brat she had become. I imagined humiliating scenarios: a glimpse of her underwear on national TV; her diary, where she described her secret crushes on the boys at the school across the Cathedral Close, leaked to the press. In the winter of 1984, I wanted to pelt her with snowballs.
Cold War!
I imagined yelling, with the assertiveness I possessed only in my head. I hated her for being so lucky. I hated her for having a father, for having a mother who baked, for being named Jennifer Jones. People loved her because she was easy to love, I thought, and I prayed for a time when my complexity wouldn’t scare people away.

But I also longed for détente. I would have given anything for someone to broker a treaty between us. I missed my friend.

The last time Jenny and I had a real conversation was a few weeks after my half brother was born. Phillipa sent a birth announcement:
“Sebastian Andrew Zuckerman, January 23, 1984, 7 lbs., 6 oz.”