Practical Jean (18 page)

But that was the last time, as far as she could remember, that she had really wanted Milt. And she didn't think she would tell him that, in spite of what he'd confessed to her (that was nice of her, she thought). Instead she focused on his plans.

“I thought you'd be upset,” said Milt. “I didn't expect you to be so . . .”

“Practical?” said Jean.

“I was thinking ‘hard.'”

Jean nodded. “Of course you were.”

From the street came a particularly complicated crash, a sound built of sequential stages—bang, smack, clatter, smack, thud—following in rapid succession, and Jean looked with a certain detachment out the window. Two of the Craiglee boy's friends were down on the pavement and one was clutching his shin. It seemed they had come together in some unfortunate way; one of them, or both, had made a mistake. A friend was to blame, and a friend was hurt. But after a minute the boy with the injured shin rolled over onto his knees, got up, and carried on with his play. And everyone was still friends. Maybe that sort of easy recovery from disaster had to do with childhood, Jean thought. Or maybe that was how boys were different. As she imagined the equivalent happening to two women—a collision real or metaphoric—she knew that no matter what smiles were flashed in the immediate aftermath, some sort of bitterness would linger.

Jean wanted to get out of the house but couldn't bear to be alone, so she called Natalie and arranged to come and stay with her for a little while. Upstairs in the bedroom she packed a proper suitcase. Her lipstick was lying on the top of the dresser and she swept it up in her hand, glancing only briefly at the wedding picture of her and Milt set in a folding silver picture frame. Milt hovered in the doorway the whole time, his mood a mix of misery and resentment, like a child who'd admitted to stealing candy from the corner store and now watched as all his favorite toys were taken away from him as punishment. Nothing for him to do but accept the consequences of his actions. Jean couldn't help but feel a little sympathy for him; she knew that she was tougher, emotionally, than he was. She had been through more. His own parents were still alive, summering in the Gatineau Hills of Quebec, wintering in one of the Carolinas. To him the concept of loss was still a theoretical one. Soon, perhaps within the hour, he would find out how it really felt.

When she had filled her suitcase until it was almost too heavy to lift, she lowered it down the stairs one step at a time, resisting the urge to just let it go, let it tumble head over tail and land with a crash at the bottom as a kind of parting metaphor for their lives together that Milt might appreciate.

At the foot of the stairs Jean glanced around. “Well, I guess that's everything for now.” She was conscious of holding her breath, and keeping her face very still, giving Milt nothing to read. He was standing stiff near the banister post with his arms straight at his sides and his head hung low. She put a hand on his shoulder, leaned in, and laid a light kiss on his cheek, then thumbed away the lipstick mark. He hardly reacted to that and she knew he was lost in thought; after all these years she knew him quite well, and what affected him. Regret was headed his way, she was sure of it.

Out in the heat and humidity, Jean dragged her Sears suitcase along on its plastic-and-rubber wheels, west on Edgeworth, back down Conmore, bearing the indignity of leaving a man you'd been married to for decades and having to do it slowly, with no great flourish, just a ponderous, heat-soaked trudge. After Conmore she plotted her course to Natalie's grooming shop via the streets with the most shade trees, even if it took her slightly out of her way. For that reason she ended up walking along Mercer Avenue where the Holy Trinity Presbyterian Church still loomed on the north side. She remembered the Saturday night when Milt had parked his clunker of a Ford Torino in the gravel lot and he and Jean had necked for the first time, from eleven until one in the morning with the crickets singing around them. The Torino was metallic blue with a blue vinyl roof, and in every way utterly disgraceful. Jean shuddered to think of it. The fabric seat inserts were tearing away, it had rust pits on the runner panels, and some sort of engine leak meant that it burned oil terribly and left a cornucopia horn of black smoke behind them wherever they went.

The Torino had been Milt's first car. Then had come an old yellow Pinto, an older, seaweed-green Chevy Vega, a scrap-heap Audi that he was so proud of until the clutch and the radiator went in the space of two weeks, then a white Volkswagen Rabbit that ran forever but with a heater that never, ever worked, and the Hyundai. Milt had never had any luck with cars, thought Jean. He made terrible choices. She was long past the church, slowing with her suitcase under the shade of a red-leaf maple, when she stopped and sighed over the choices Milt had made. Alone on the street, she closed her eyes and bowed her head for the terrible, idiotic choices.

Chapter 13

M
r. Binderman was right, thought Cheryl. It was all going down.

In the western half of the vineyard, she stood between rows of Riesling that reached almost head-high and breathed in the sharp, green fragrance of dusty grapes still three months shy of harvest. It was noon, and so her mind was clearish. There was some fog, but much of that came from the fungicide carried on the breeze from the eastern acres where Mr. Binderman, with a tank strapped on his back and a wand in his hand, was spraying the Cabernet Franc, having sacrificed his day off to the greater need.

She asked herself a question: What was she good at? And the answer was she was good at making a decision. Taking all the available facts and acting on them. It was her one thing, and it had served her in school and in the claims department where she had worked, and it had helped her seize her opportunity with Tam. So with her feet set in the sandy grass between the rows and the sun high above her, with nothing in her stomach clamoring to come out and no urgent need to lie down, she looked out over the small bench of land toward Owasco Lake, a pool of Curaçao in the distance, and took stock of her life.

A meaningless career, discarded.
Puh!

No children, no attempts, after her great loss (equipped with a “weak cervix,” so she'd been told).

No friends left. None.

Two squandered husbands. The first, a dentist named Harold Shiner, whose image Cheryl could visualize now only in the most approximate sense, a vague impression made hazier by time, like a chalk drawing trampled by many feet. (She remembered most vividly the way he tucked in his shirts: incrementally with his jabbing thumbs, the way her mother had pinched pie crusts, which was an image so greatly irritating it almost seemed unfair to Harold to recall it.) The second, Tam Yoon, whose face as wide as a melon, whose deep-dimpled cheeks and short-lived cheer haunted Cheryl's every unfoggy moment.

A crummy little winery on the tiniest Finger Lake, which, because it was shallow and couldn't moderate the local climate like the other Fingers, was a really stupid lake on which to set a winery.

A collection, left by Tam, of antique corkscrews, including an eighteenth-century Florentine one with a handle carved from a boar's tusk. (By leaving her the winery and the corkscrews, it was almost as if he'd given her the gun, and the bullets, and left the rest up to her.)

A single, remaining employee—dear, old, prissy-lipped, Austrian-not-German Mr. Binderman—whose reason for staying was hazy to Cheryl, like so many things were hazy, but seemed to hinge on a quaint, Old World sense of honor.

A warehouse with hundreds of cases of bottled wine.

Two two-thousand-gallon stainless-steel tanks filled with fermenting juice.

A dented, four-seater Chevy truck she was not allowed to drive.

A three-bedroom house, empty of all life with the exception of . . .

A cockatiel with a death wish.

Cheryl was able to tally all this, the fruits of her existence, and see what she was: a woman descending the far slope of her days, not strolling downward gracefully at her leisure, not marching down with purpose, but stumbling, rolling, careering down like a barrel bounced off the back of a truck. She had nothing behind her but disaster, and nothing in front of her but a glass.

She had no reason to be.

Chapter 14

A
friend you could count on—that was like a bit of found treasure. A blessing. Something you could never take for granted. Jean knew that and gave thanks. What would she ever do, she wondered, without Natalie Skilbeck?

When Jean had called to ask if she could stay over, Natalie had said, “Of course,” without any hesitation. She had also said, “Don't expect me to clean up,” which was just so
her
. It was one of Natalie's most wonderful and reliable qualities that she never hid whatever furry thought was scampering through her mind. In fact, it was the thing that had made the biggest impression on Jean at their first meeting twenty-three years before.

It has to be said, that first impression had not been a happy one. Jean had thought that Milkweed, her Bichon Frise, was looking scraggly and decided to try the new grooming shop, Skilbeck Pet Stylings, that had just opened around the corner from her studio. When Jean went in for her appointment, Natalie was there with her blazing dark eyes and her blood-dipped lipstick behind a little wooden gate that separated the grooming area from the front counter, shaving down the hind end of a gray standard poodle. Jean picked up Milkweed so that Natalie could see her, and Natalie took one look and announced, over the barking of several caged animals, “That dog is fat!”

“Excuse me?”

“Fat!” repeated Natalie. “What are you feeding it?” She waved her shears dismissively. “Never mind, whatever it is, you'd better reduce it by half, or cut out the bacon treats, otherwise that dog's gonna be dead in about two years.”

Jean thought this was an outrageous way for the owner of a new business to behave. She briefly considered the possibility that Natalie was just a hired hand, and that she should immediately report her rudeness to the owner. But when she asked Natalie's name and discovered she was the very Skilbeck advertised on the painted sign out front, Jean confronted her head on. Told her that Milkweed was not fat, just scraggly. Suggested a pet groomer should be able to tell the difference. Further, explained that she, Jean Horemarsh, was the daughter of a highly regarded local veterinarian, and if there was even a chance Milkweed was gaining weight, her mother would certainly have said something to her about it.

“Or not,” Natalie said.

“What does that mean?”

The barking from the cages was incessant. “Shaddup!” Natalie yelled. She put down the shears, clapped her h
ands to knock off the poodle hair, and came closer. “Most vets I know are money-grubbing dickwads, and that includes the women. I'm not getting into your relationship with your mother, that's your business.” She picked up the bottle of cola that was sitting on a nearby shelf, took a quick swig, and made a satisfied smacking sound. “Let's just say that your mom's one of the good vets, okay? Of which there are maybe . . .” She held up five fingers, then pulled down two. “If she's seen Milkweed here recently, and she hasn't hit the fatty alarm bell, she either doesn't care, or she's got some other reason.”

Something about that assessment rang true enough for Jean that she thought she wouldn't, just then, storm out of Skilbeck Pet Stylings never to return. She allowed Natalie to shave Milkweed down to a nub, and then to show her where the dog's hips were supposed to be but, Jean had to admit, weren't.

The next day, Jean went to the house on Blanchard Avenue, thinking on the way over about all those times her mother had fawned over her brothers' pets; how she had whisked Bogart, Andrew Jr.'s hideous bulldog, into the office for X-rays at the first sign of a wobbly hind leg, and how she'd given Welland a special spray to take care of his yellow Lab's scabby ear. When her mother opened the door, Jean showed her Milkweed's missing hips and demanded to know why Marjorie hadn't warned her that her pup was grossly overweight. At first, Marjorie's face darkened as if she were offended by the question, or by Jean's effrontery in asking it. Then she simply shrugged a shrug that seemed to Jean an echo of so many similar gestures through the years, a shrug that distilled a lifetime's indifference. And she said, “If you weren't so focused on your leaves, my dear, you might notice a thing or two.”

From that point on, Jean had looked to Natalie as her truth-teller, the one who would tell her when a color or a cut was wrong for her, or would give her honest opinion about a new ceramic. Even if the opinion was a trifle blunt, and even if Jean disagreed, she knew that Natalie wasn't hiding anything. And at Kotemee Business Association meetings, she loved the way Natalie stood up to people like Tina Dooley, who seemed to think she had the only ideas worth listening to on a plethora of subjects. Tina, for instance, liked to issue memos to all association members in advance of important meetings, laying out what she saw as the vital issues—Main Street Christmas decorations, the placement of garbage receptacles, a man who shouted too loudly and seemed disturbed. Natalie called these memos “Dooley's Doodles” and “Dooley's Dispatches from the Front” and occasionally used phrases even less charitable, not only in private but at the meetings themselves. Invariably she said something to Tina that had Jean spitting into a coffee napkin.

When Jean arrived at the door of the shop, having slogged through the heat with her suitcase, Natalie seemed to know immediately that she was in a dismal state. She made Jean comfortable (as comfortable as it was possible to be surrounded by half a dozen caged cats and barking dogs) and went for two teas and some Dilman's cupcakes. Then for the next couple of hours she entertained Jean with a running commentary on the animals she was grooming.

A hissy white Himalayan cat was a Taliban operative who wanted to stone her to death. “A mullah mullet, that's what you're getting, Mister,” Natalie said. When the cat bared its teeth, she scoffed. “Oh, big talk. Show me the rock you can throw that's gonna hurt me.”

A taffy-colored Goldendoodle mistakenly thought he was there for a sex-change operation. “Your owner says your name is Marvin,” Natalie told him. “But you'd prefer Mavis, wouldn't you?” The dog licked her chin. “I know, Marv, but you're still going home with your willie.”

A sad-eyed Gordon Setter was Bing Crosby reincarnated. “Sing!” cried Natalie. She took hold of one of the dog's long ears. “Damn it, Bing, I know you're in there. Sing for us!” And as she clipped the setter's tail she sang, “Mele Kalikimaka is the thing to say / On a bright Hawaiian Christmas Day” in a jaunty, Bing-like croon.

Once her customers had retrieved their pets, Natalie locked up the shop and drove Jean to her little ivy-covered cottage-style house on Andover Lane. Natalie seemed to make a point of not asking Jean any questions about what had happened with Milt, for which Jean was thankful because she wasn't really in the mood to hear blunt assessments of her marriage or her husband. There were times when blunt was precisely the wrong note for a given circumstance, like vinegar in a cream sauce, and this was one of them. She thought Natalie's unusual tact probably had to do with the fact that she had been divorced by her own husband, Sandeep Jaffir, some six years before. Sandeep was handsome and broad-shouldered, and quite a lovely man, employed to travel the world seeking out sources for the manufacture of alternative medicines. He'd become not-lovely the day he called from Jakarta and informed Natalie that he had met someone else and would not ever be coming home. Natalie closed the doors of Skilbeck Pet Stylings for a month, and a more despondent, inert woman the world has seldom seen. Everyone who knew and loved Natalie was relieved the day she came to a meeting of the KBA and told Tina Dooley to shove her latest Dispatch up her ass.

After Natalie showed Jean where she would be sleeping—the small loveseat in the living room pulled out into a bed—she went to work making a delectable dinner of baked salmon and fingerling potatoes with a big green salad. While the salmon was in the oven she opened a bottle of South African Chenin Blanc. But when she went to pour her a glass, Jean, who was seated on a stool at the kitchen island, held up a hand and shook her head.

Natalie raised an eyebrow. “That's not like you.”

“Well, I was out with Adele last night and I'm still . . .” Jean made a fluttery gesture near her tummy.

“Oh, I see. Carousing in the big city.”

“We were going to see a play and then we just . . . didn't.”

Natalie began pouring herself a healthy glass of wine, which Jean was glad to see because she had never agreed with the habit some women had of tailoring their own drinking to match whichever relative or friend happened to be over. It put so much pressure on the guest, especially if you knew someone liked a glass of wine and then just because you weren't feeling up to it, suddenly they weren't either. Count on Natalie, thought Jean, to toss such silly “niceties” out the window where they belonged.

“So, how is Queen Adele?”

For Jean, the small glass salt shaker on the marble counter became an object of immediate interest. She picked it up, studied it, and gave it a waggle before setting it down. The edge of the counter required a rub with her thumb. “You know,” she said, “you haven't really asked me about what happened with Milt. Aren't you curious?”

“Uh, let me guess.” Natalie made a show of formulating a theory, pursing her lips and looking off. Suddenly she appeared struck by inspiration. “Milt's been having an affair with Louise.”

For a moment Jean was silent. “I don't understand,” she said. “Does that not come as a shock to you?”

Natalie tucked the wine bottle inside the door of the fridge and seemed, in Jean's view, to take quite a while coming up with an answer to that question. “Well, I know they had that thing once before. You told me about that.”

“Yes,” said Jean, waiting for more.

“So, just that.” Natalie opened a cupboard and pulled out two white china plates. “Also, I saw them having lunch a couple of times while you were at your mom's.”

“Lunch,” said Jean. “Lunch . . . where was this?”

“That Chinese place I go for takeout sometimes, on Sterling.”

“And you never
told
me?”

“Well, I thought everybody was friends now.”

Everybody was
not
friends now, thought Jean. Everybody was anything
but
friends. She reached for Natalie's glass of wine and took a nice big gulp, and she didn't care that Natalie had to pour herself another glass. Oh, the salmon was going to taste just wonderful now that she knew it was being cooked and served by someone who knew her husband had been cheating on her and had said nothing about it. Yes, that was a nice bit of seasoning, wasn't it? Some truth-teller, thought Jean. Some blunt talker. Some friend.

The stove was making ticking noises from the heat, and Natalie was looking mightily chagrined standing over by the far counter. As well she should, Jean thought. She wondered now whether she would have to rethink her whole plan regarding Natalie, because it seemed that she could no longer trust her, and why should an untrustworthy friend be the recipient of her gift? Natalie took a long German knife out of a drawer, and a white plastic cutting board from below, and Jean watched her begin slicing tomatoes and a big pale onion for the salad. As she followed the blade's motion she thought about all the times she had been shocked or offended by the things Natalie had said but then, with determined and deliberate fairness, had reminded herself that such was the price to pay for frank and honest assessments when you really needed them. You couldn't have things both ways, Jean had insisted to herself, you couldn't have delicacy and truth, or delightfulness and truth. Because truth did not come bundled with anything but brutality. Cold, ugly brutality—and truth. That was the package, and if you wanted one, you had to buy them both. Unless somebody in the back of the shop decided to slip in some
lying by omission
and some
what she doesn't know won't hurt her
.

Jean took another big sip of the South African Chenin Blanc, which was clean and crisp and not butterscotchy like so many hot-country wines. She watched Natalie slicing the onion paper-thin, the way she liked it. It was a Walla Walla Sweet onion, which you could only get from the little “fine foods” shop on Main, which catered mostly to the tourists, and Jean considered the possibility that after her forlorn call from the house, Natalie had gone to the shop thinking,
I'll get a Walla Walla Sweet onion and make Jean a nice salad to make her feel better
. She decided against asking Natalie about it, because that might make it appear as though she regarded her statements of fact as truth and had already forgotten what a terribly dishonest friend she'd been. It seemed right to let Natalie stew in that unflattering self-awareness a while longer.

She sniffed at her glass. About Natalie, Jean was now of two minds, and she realized it was possible to have good and not-so-good thoughts about the same person or thing all at once. Like South Africa. It had been a bad place, and it was still very troubled, but it made nice wine. Perhaps a nasty country like North Korea also made nice wine, or some pleasant drink made with rice. To be fair to North Korea you really had to factor that in.

Not that you had to completely forgive them.

“This is nice wine,” said Jean, without saying anything more.

“It's from South Africa,” said Natalie, sounding very hopeful.

“Mm-hmm,” said Jean.

Louise, on the other hand, would get no due consideration. Her betrayal was too clear, her transgression too great . . . worse even than Milt's. It seemed odd not to condemn your own husband for cheating on you, but it was simply true that Jean was far more hurt by Louise's duplicity. Perhaps it was because her friendship with Louise had felt so full of potential. It had begun in fire, in the searing, hostile heat of that first attempt at an affair with Milt. Pain and recovery had connected her to Louise like the scar tissue that formed between burned fingers and toes. With that kind of start there'd been no telling what shared pleasures the two of them might one day discover. Jean had felt they were approaching that time in their friendship when they would begin, not just to tell each other things, but to confide in each other. To let their insecurities show. To be in each other's company the women they truly were, not just the women they wanted to be or the women they allowed the world to see. And now all that was gone. The scar tissue was severed. They could never be friends.