Mrs. Everything (22 page)

“Sure. And no, no middle name.”

“So are you a Josephine?” Shelley was using a smaller pair of tongs to retrieve a maraschino cherry from a jar. “A Joan? A Joanne?”

“Josette.” Jo’s throat felt thick. Shelley handed her a glass and raised her own.

“Rochelle and Josette,” Shelley said. “Well. Shall we toast to nicknames?”

“To nicknames,” Jo repeated. She felt like she’d walked into an old black-and-white movie, where an elegant couple sipped drinks and tossed witticisms at each other. Her first taste of the Manhattan was closer to a gulp than a sip. She could taste the sweetness of the cherry and feel the burn of the liquor tracing a fiery line down her chest, glowing in her belly like a lit bulb.

“I’m going to get out of these wet things,” Shelley announced. She eyed Jo up and down and said, “I’ll bet I’ve got some pajamas that’ll fit you.”

Shelley had taken her shoes off by the door. Jo watched as she padded, barefoot, toward the back of the apartment. By the time she reappeared in a soft pink robe, with a set of flannel pajamas in her hand, Jo had finished almost half of her drink, and her head was starting to spin. Shelley’s toenails were the same pink as her robe. The pajamas were size small, still with tags attached.

Shelley noticed her noticing and winked. “I’m not actually a pajama gal.” She raised her arms, and the robe lifted, revealing the slim ivory curves of her calves. She was standing so close that Jo could see her pupils, the dark ring around her pale-gray iris, so close that Jo could feel Shelley’s exhalations against her own skin.

Do not do this
, Jo told herself. Shelley has a boyfriend. She doesn’t like you that way. You could get in trouble. You could get expelled. People will talk. But she could feel all of those sensible thoughts floating away like smoke rings, erased by the alcohol and by Shelley’s proximity. She was certain that Shelley had nothing on underneath that soft pink robe, and that she wanted Jo to know it.

“You know what I think?” Shelley’s expression was teasing, and when she leaned close Jo could smell perfume, Camay soap, and maraschino cherry. “I think you like me.”

Jo’s head spun with desire and confusion. “You’ve got a boyfriend,” she said.

Shelley stood on her tiptoes, wrapped her arms around Jo’s shoulders, and kissed her, very lightly, on the mouth. “I’ll tell you
a secret,” she whispered, so close that Jo could feel the puff of Shelley’s breath as she formed each word against her own lips. “I like boys. I like girls, too. A lot of times . . .” She dropped her voice to a beguiling whisper. “I like girls better.” She tilted her head up, looking at Jo with those dizzying gray eyes. “So what’s your story, Stretch?”

“I like girls, too,” Jo whispered, all in a rush. It was the truth, as true as it had been the day she’d made the same confession to Lynnette, and she’d been so lonely for so long; without a girlfriend, without even female friends, because Jo didn’t want to do anything that would cause the girls in her dorm or her classes to become suspicious. She’d kept to herself her entire time in Ann Arbor, and instead of being free, away from her mother’s scrutiny and suspicion, she’d just been lonely.

“Well, then.” Shelley cupped the base of Jo’s head in her hand, stroking gently. “And do you like me?” Shelley stood on her tiptoes and brushed Jo’s lips with her own. They kissed, softly at first, then more deeply. Shelley’s lips parted, and Jo brushed the tip of her tongue against Shelley’s, hearing the other girl sigh, feeling her sway against her.

“This way,” Shelley whispered, taking Jo’s hand, and Jo let herself be tugged along, down a shadowy hallway, hearing Shelley humming sweetly as she fell backward onto the bed, pulling Jo down with her.

Bethie

S
ummer school?” Sarah asked, as she sat at the kitchen table in her yellow rayon housecoat. The month’s bills were piled in front of her, and her checkbook and calculator were at her side. The table was covered, as usual, in an oilcloth, this one with red roses on a green background. A wooden spice rack, with the same half-dozen bottles of oregano and sage and thyme, parsley and basil and fossilized-looking bay leaves that had been there for as long as Bethie could remember, hung on the wall by the sink, beneath the calendar that came free from the National Bank of Detroit. A clock with black numbers on a white face ticked next to the window, which was covered in the curtains that Sarah had sewn when they’d moved to Alhambra Street. Once a cheery yellow-and-white check, the curtains had faded to the same dingy yellow as Sarah’s housedress.

“Summer school,” Bethie confirmed. Insofar as it was going to be summer and she was, technically, going to be at school, she didn’t feel like it was a complete lie.

“What classes will you be taking?” Sarah asked. Her squint
and her skeptical expression suggested that she wasn’t as convinced as Bethie wanted her to be, but Bethie was ready for her.

“A course in modern music appreciation, and a humanities requirement.” It was, Bethie thought, a neat way of describing her summer plans, which included hanging out with her friends and, eventually, traveling in Connie’s van to the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island. She would hear, and appreciate, modern music. She would see humanity. And in between, she would work. She’d snagged a job on campus, cataloging books at the University of Michigan law library. “And Jo will be there to keep an eye on me.”

“At least until she leaves,” Sarah said. Soon, Jo would be flying to London with her best friend, Shelley Finkelbein. From London, the girls would take a bus to Turkey and start out on the Overland Route, trekking into India and Nepal. Sarah had refused to let Jo travel to Washington for the Freedom March. (“It won’t be safe,” Sarah had sniffed, “and if you think I’m in a position to help you buy your schoolbooks because you decided not to work all summer, you can think again.”) Jo had never forgiven Sarah for keeping her from being there on that momentous day. She’d spent her senior year begging and pleading and finally announcing that she was over twenty-one, technically an adult, and that she could get a passport and go wherever she wanted to go, with or without Sarah’s permission. Sarah did not approve of Shelley Finkelbein, or of Jo’s planned trip—“Why would you want to spend your money to go to countries where the people are so poor that they’d do anything to come over here?” she’d asked. But Jo had pestered and persisted and even cried, and eventually Sarah had grudgingly given her permission, announcing that at least India was better than going to organize down South and getting herself arrested, or even killed.

“And these classes are . . .” Sarah peered at Bethie and groped for the terminology. “Requirements for your major?”

“Part of the core curriculum,” Bethie said, knowing her mother might not even know what a curriculum was, or how the word
“core” might apply to it. She felt bad about lying to Sarah, who had dropped out of school after tenth grade in the midst of the Depression. But if Bethie’s choices were a summer in Ann Arbor, having adventures with her friends, or three months in Detroit, sleeping in her girlhood bedroom, having dinner every night with her mother in this sad, dark kitchen, and selling ties or silverware all day long at Hudson’s, Bethie would lie, and probably also cheat and steal to make sure she got to leave.

“Where will you stay?”

“I rented a room in an off-campus apartment in a house where some of my friends already live.” Bethie waited for her mother to start probing—
which friends? Off-campus where? How will you be paying for this?
But all Sarah did was sigh.

“I should be used to it by now.” Sarah’s mouth folded itself into a tight-lipped frown as she used a silver letter opener to slit the throat of the envelope holding the gas bill. “Jo stopped coming home for the summers, and now you won’t, either.”

“It’s easier to find jobs in Ann Arbor,” Bethie said.

“Hudson’s is always hiring,” Sarah replied. Bethie could see strands of gray in her mother’s dark-brown hair as Sarah bent over the checkbook at the table that still had four chairs around it. Her mom reminded her of a rubber band that had been snapped so many times until all of its resilience was used up, and it just hung there, stretched out and useless and limp. Those fights with Jo had been the animating force of Sarah’s life. The back-and-forth of the battle had given her a reason to get up in the mornings. Anger and frustration and hope that she could turn Jo into someone else had powered her through her days, and had probably given her plenty of sleepless nights. Now that Jo was gone, and her husband was dead, and Bethie, too, was leaving, what did Sarah have to keep her going?

Bethie felt her heart give a sudden, painful twist. She had people. She had Devon, and Flip and Marjorie and Connie, and the rest of her friends. She had boys to dance with, boys to flirt with, boys who would loan her their copies of
Last Exit to
Brooklyn
, and
Howl
by Allen Ginsberg. Jo had Shelley, and their crowd of activists, Doug Brodesseur and Marian Leight and Valerie Moore, a stunning girl with high cheekbones and glossy dark skin whose Afro made her almost six feet tall and who, it was whispered, was a member of Detroit’s Black Panthers. Who did Sarah have? Bethie looked at the four chairs around the kitchen table, the scuff marks on the walls. There was a bare spot in the red linoleum in front of the sink, and it was probably the exact size of the space Sarah’s feet occupied when she stood there, washing dishes. The radio in its plastic case stood on the counter, probably still tuned to WKMH, the “Keener Thirteen-er,” the station her dad listened to when they’d broadcast the Tigers games. Bethie wondered if anyone besides her mom, herself, her sister had been inside the house since that fateful Thanksgiving when she and Jo had insisted on having guests. Her mother had never been a great one for making friends.
My family is all I need
, she would say, along with
We keep ourselves to ourselves
. Her companions had been her own sisters, Ellen and Iris. In the summer, all three sisters would come to the cabin on Lake Erie; Ellen with her husband, Max, whom nobody liked, and their sons, Jerry and Alan, and Iris, the glamorous unmarried sister, who wore red lipstick and smoked mentholated cigarettes. Iris would bring Bethie and Jo candy wax lips, and Ellen would take a rowboat all the way out to the middle of the lake, telling everyone that she was going fishing, when they all knew that she was trying to get away from baby Jerry’s crying and her husband’s requests for sandwiches and bottles of beer.

Eventually, Ellen and Max had moved to St. Louis when Max got some job there, and Iris died of breast cancer, two years after Ken. Bethie had heard her mother talk about “the girls” at work, but she’d only ever heard them described as a single, nameless mass, not as individuals. Sometimes Sarah met the girls for drinks, and once or twice a year, they’d go out to dinner, but Bethie was almost positive that Sarah had never invited any of the girls to her house.

“I’ll come home whenever I can,” Bethie promised, feeling sad and sorry, because that, too, was a lie. The next morning, Sarah dropped her at the bus station on her way in to work. By ten o’clock, Bethie was back in Ann Arbor. By noon, she was naked, in Devon Brady’s bed, with her head resting on his chest. “How’d it go with your mother, little Alice?” Devon asked, reaching across her for the pipe he’d packed before she’d arrived. He lit it, inhaled deeply, and pressed his lips against hers, blowing smoke into her mouth.

“Summer school,” said Bethie, when she could breathe again. She didn’t want to tell Dev how small and worn her mother had looked in the kitchen, and how even the air had felt old and stale. “I told her I was going to do summer school.”

Dev slipped his warm hands underneath her bare bottom, pulling her up closer. “Adult education.”

Dev was only six years older than she was, but he seemed more worldly than other boys Bethie had known. He called himself a student, but he was really a businessman, with a lucrative industry selling a product that was popular, albeit illegal. She thought of Dev as the Candyman, with an endless supply of treats. There was pot, of course, which he acquired by the garbage-bagful and sold by the joint or by the lid or by the ounce. There were mushrooms, dried-up and wrinkled, some of them looking disturbingly like body parts, amputated ears or lips gone gray and shriveled. There was Dev’s famous and much-sought-after acid, guaranteed to provide the smoothest high, the most vivid trips, and the gentlest come-down, and there were assorted pills of varying sizes and colors, in glass bottles, lined up in Devon’s dresser drawers. Once, Bethie had asked Dev if he was worried about having all that stuff in his place. He’d given her his slow, sly smile, the one that made her feel like she was made of melting ice cream, and said, “I’ve got prescriptions. Or at least, someone does.”

Most of the boys’ dorm rooms and apartments Bethie had visited ranged from disorganized to sloppy to so filthy they felt hazardous to her health. Dev’s garden apartment, on the lower
floor of a Victorian on Church Street, was scrupulously clean. His hardwood floors were immaculate, swept in the morning and at night. In the living room, one wall was covered with bookshelves made of raw lengths of lumber and cinder blocks, and the shelves were full of books of philosophy and poetry and political history, biographies of generals and presidents, martyrs and saints. Above the bricked-over fireplace he’d hung a poster of a red-and-white woodcut image of a woman with a serene expression and flowers in her hair and the words
MAKE ART NOT WAR
. A couch was draped in Indian-print fabric. In the bedroom was a brass bed covered in a patchwork quilt, with squares of corduroy and velvet, striped and patterned cotton. Dev’s grandmother had sewn it for him. “This was my jacket, when I was a little boy,” he’d told Bethie, pointing to a square of denim. “This was my mother’s favorite dress,” he’d said, leading her hand first to a square of red polka-dotted cotton, then sliding it beneath the quilt.

“This is my favorite,” Bethie whispered, touching his penis, stroking it the way he’d taught her. With his clothes off, Devon was wiry, his chest and arms muscled, with a patch of surprisingly soft dark hair over his chest. His toes were almost as long as fingers, and he would sometimes amuse Bethie by picking up a pen and writing her name with his foot.