Practical Jean (2 page)

Chapter 2

J
ean was so glad to get out of the house. Relieved, simply to be able to venture into the blue-bright day, equipped with a purpose. She stopped the topaz Hyundai in front of 426 Marlborough Street, walked up the path to the wide bungalow owned by Gwen and Phil Thindle, long-time clients of Marjorie's, and dropped a card in the brass mailbox.

Your thoughtfulness was very much appreciated.

It had felt odd, being back in her own home. Unfamiliar, not having the desperate needs of her diminishing mother to consider every moment of every hour. Not having Marjorie's wavery moans filling the hallways and stairwells, or the smell of Pablum and boiled carrots, the only things she would eat in the end, heavying the air like the faint, sweet whiff of decay. It had been peculiar, in particular, having Milt there with her. Watching her.

“Milt,” she'd said. “Please stop watching me.”

“I'm not.”

She'd been sitting at the dining table, with thank-you cards piled in front of her and Milt behind her in the living room, set in his chair by the iron standing lamp. He had a view of her from there and he hadn't had a magazine or book in his lap, so of course he'd been watching her.

“I can feel your eyes on me,” she'd said. “I don't know what could be so interesting.”

“What are you doing?”

Jean wheeled the car around the corner onto Sedmore Avenue and looked for number 157, where Judith Bell lived, an old friend of her mother's who had sent a very ordinary bouquet of gladioli and carnations with only a frilly thatch of plumosa, the most nondescript greenery. It wasn't really Judith's fault, Jean supposed. But what some florists tried to get away with was criminal.

My brothers and I appreciate your kindness.

She'd explained to Milt that she was writing thank-you cards to everyone who'd sent flowers and donations to the funeral. Some of them, for the people who lived out of town, were going to be mailed, and some of them, for the Kotemeeans, she intended to hand-deliver. “People have no idea how much work there is after a funeral,” she'd said. “I'm sure it will remain a mystery to my brothers.”

Milt, behind her, hadn't responded to that. Milt hadn't said anything at all. And it was his
way
of not saying anything at all that had prickled at Jean. She'd been writing,
It was so sweet of you to remember Mother's love of hydrangeas
, in a card to Marjorie's former colleague Millicent Keeping—though her mother had never given a second's thought to hydrangeas, or flowers of any kind, ever, and Jean was only writing it because Millicent was in a nursing home with no hope and it was the least she could do—and she hadn't even been able to reach the end. She'd had to slap down her pen after she'd written
hydr
.

“Milt, what?”

Milt had shifted sideways in his chair. “I was just wondering . . . well . . . when you were going to really let go.”

“Let go of what?”

“I mean show some grief.”

She'd sighed and picked up her pen—
angeas
. “I cried yesterday, didn't I?”
Best of luck in your remaining years
, Jean had finished, signing it the same way she signed her ceramics:
Jean
V. Horemarsh
.

“That was more like the sniffles.”

Jean had sealed Millicent's card in its envelope, risen from the table, and begun to gather her thank-yous. Milt's eyes had followed her as she'd dropped the cards into a green cloth shopping bag.

“You were kind of stone-faced at the funeral.”

“Oh, that is just . . .” She'd stopped to look for her keys.

“You were like that at your father's funeral, too,” Milt had said from his chair. “And right after, you tried to make that fire bush.”

Milt had been referring to the time, six years before, after Drew had died of a heart attack and the funeral had come and gone like a blink, when suddenly Jean had been seized by the idea of making an enormous ceramic Burning Bush. Five feet in diameter, she'd thought, and equipped with some sort of everlasting flame that she had not quite figured out. There was no intention of making a religious statement; Jean was not at all religious. It had just seized her, like so many of her best ideas, that a huge ceramic Burning Bush was exactly the right piece to be working on the minute her father was in the ground. First she would have to make the little leaves. So she'd spent three solid days—that is, three days entirely without sleep and with almost no food—fashioning and firing smooth peltate leaves the size of her thumb. She'd finished about twenty-two hundred of them, which was possibly two or three times as many as she needed, before she lost her will and crashed to a deep sleep on the studio floor. The little leaves were still stored in a box somewhere, set in layers on stiff paper, like green ceramic cornflakes.

“That's not going to happen this time,” Jean had declared to Milt from the front hall. “Nothing like that is going to happen.” Then she'd just shut the door on her husband's watchful silence and got in the car.

The day told her to venture out and breathe, and she obeyed.

Her deliveries took her all over town, and she plotted her course precisely so she wouldn't waste gas doubling back. That was the sort of practical thinking her mother would have appreciated, Jean thought with some pride. And it was easy, too, because she knew the town so well. Other people might have thought of Kotemee as weightless and “quaint,” the sort of place an ambitious person would skip in and out of like something hurled. But that didn't matter to Jean because all of her important memories were lodged in the crevices of the town. At some point in her life, she had walked or driven down nearly every one of Kotemee's wide streets, had been in dozens of its pretty, wood-sided houses. Some of these held more resonances than others, naturally. And with her mother's pain and death still reverberating in her head like a bell, Jean found herself running into those moments from the past more than usual as she drove. A part of her felt as if she had been exiled for years, banished to some strange, cruel atoll, and had just returned to the land that had made her who she was. She felt a need to reacquaint herself.

On Calendar Street, Jean relived the time she was nine years old and had walked home barefoot all the way from Bonner's Shoes. Marjorie had paid for new Converse runners and insisted on leaving the old, filthy pair at the store. But the new runners had precious, Chiclet-white soles and Jean had wanted to carry them for fear of getting them dirty. Hearing that, the saleswoman had held out the old shoes for her to put on. Jean's mother waved them away.

“She's got shoes,” said Marjorie. “It's her choice not to wear them.”

At the end of the woman's arm, the old runners hovered in the air. “She might hurt her feet.”

“Then I guess she'll learn.”

She did learn. Jean learned that she could walk for a half an hour with a box of new shoes in her arms and blisters rising like gumdrops on the balls of her feet, and not cry or stop even once.

On Mott Avenue, Jean slowed past a tiny park with dogwood trees and a stone fountain. When she was six years old that fountain had seemed so huge Jean was sure it had been made by God, because she'd believed in God then. And she'd imagined that when the fountain shot streams of water skyward, those streams were wishes being whooshed to Heaven. She remembered sitting alone on the pebbly edge of the basin, her feet in the cold, green water, and sending wishes on the streams.

On Falling Crescent, Jean passed in front of Dorothy Perks's old house, a simple four-square painted a browny gray now, though it used to be margarine yellow. It was in the basement of that house when Jean was sixteen that a twelfth-grader named Ash Birdy had slid his hand into her underpants, because he'd been watching Craig Veere do it to Dorothy and Ash felt a lot of pressure to keep up with Craig. Jean, on the other hand, didn't feel much pressure to keep up with Dorothy, so Ash was disappointed. Very much so. Dorothy and Jean were still great friends—she had a thank-you card for Dorothy in her bag—but what had happened later with Ash was another of those memories that stuck in a crevice.

As it usually did, thinking about Ash made Jean think of Cheryl Nunley. Sometimes it was the other way around—an image of Cheryl made Jean's mind leap to the boy. Either way, Ash was only a 10 percent part of the memory; Cheryl got the rest.

Hill Street was next. At the top Jean pulled up in front of Louise Draper's house. Louise taught Grade 9 and 10 English at Hern Regional High School, where Milt sometimes substituted. Years before, back in the ancient past of their marriage, Jean had been aware of a snag in the thread of her relationship with Milt, and she'd discovered that he and Louise had had the briefest, barest fling. It was hardly an affair at all, more like a friendship with glimpses of partial nudity, as a movie rating might have put it. But when she went to confront Louise, Jean had found herself far more charmed by the woman than threatened by whatever designs she might have had on Milt. She had an odd, abstracted air and a scattered sort of sincerity, so it took Jean no time at all to forgive Louise, and before long they were good friends.

Jean went up the steps with the card in her hand and was about to plunk it through the mail slot when the door jerked open and Louise burst into view. It was mid-morning on a weekday so that was a surprise, and Jean sort of jumped back. Louise did almost the same jumpy thing when she saw Jean.

“Oh, Jean!” she said. “I saw the car through the window and I thought . . .” She glanced from Jean to the car and bobbed her head down as if to see inside, looked back at Jean, and smiled. “It's great to see you!”

Louise was wearing a white blouse and shapeless tan skirt, which seemed like the sort of outfit she would wear to work. Her long, tarnish-colored hair was combed as usual, high off her head. It was a style quite unconnected to modern fashion. It seemed stuck in a vague Other Time, which fit Louise because her mind often seemed drawn to some misty Other Place. All things considered, knowing Louise as she did, Jean thought it possible that her friend had just forgotten to go to school that day.

“Louise, you look so nice,” said Jean. “Is that a teaching outfit?”

Louise giggled in the rolling, girlish way she had. “It's a P.D. day, Jean.”

That was a relief, and Jean handed Louise the card. The two women chatted for a while, with Louise showing true concern for Jean's feelings regarding her mother's recent death, and Jean not knowing what to say because Louise expected her to be sad and sad was a draggy, wishful emotion—that's how Jean felt whenever she thought of Cheryl—and the way she felt about her mother's death wasn't like that at all. But apart from that, talking to Louise really was refreshing, and Jean decided that Milt's idea of having all her friends over was a good one. She invited Louise then and there to come for a little party on Wednesday night.

Framed by the doorway behind her, Louise looked happy and lost at the same time.

“That's . . .”

“Not tomorrow,” said Jean, “but the next night.”

“Okay, sure!”

The trees and hydro poles cast charcoal cutouts of themselves onto the lawns and sidewalks as Jean made a few more thank-you stops. There was a quick one to the tiny house owned by her good friend Natalie Skilbeck, who was working, so Jean wrote a note on the back of the card about coming over Wednesday.
It'll be fun!
And there was another to the minister who'd performed the funeral service for Marjorie. Jean couldn't quite remember the service because in her mind the entire funeral was such a dark, inaccessible blur, but she thought a thank-you only polite.
We very much appreciate your effort on behalf of our mother.
The minister came to the door in a rumpled plaid shirt and jeans, looking much less formal than Jean expected of a member of the clergy. He was an older man with large, flat glasses, like little windshields on his face, and when he saw Jean he immediately started talking about grief and how important it was. He went on and on about it. Jean listened as politely as she could for a while, and finally started backing away toward the car. By the time she was at the curb the minister was almost shouting at her to be sad. It was all a bit much.

She also delivered a card to Tina Dooley, even though Tina hadn't really earned one.
So nice of you to attend
. Tina, who owned the home accessories store Tina's Textures, was on the committee for the Kotemee Business Association and made a point of knowing the this and that of everyone in the Main Street Business District. By tomorrow she would know who had gotten a card and who hadn't, and Jean just did not need the trouble.

The next minute Jean was approaching Douglas Avenue. Nobody on the thank-you list lived on Douglas; if she had wanted to, Jean could have driven straight by it. Normally she probably would have. But today she found herself making a right turn and stopping the car in the crook of the road, in front of Cheryl Nunley's old house, number 242. After a while, she turned off the engine.

Of all Jean's friends, Cheryl had been the one most like her. Not in her artistic inclinations; Cheryl had scant few of those. But she was a girl who worked for her marks, who dressed neatly, about a year behind the trend, who preferred not to keep people waiting, who tittered rather than laughed out loud, who liked a treat once in a while—something with pastry—and who usually dated boys too shy to ask out the girls they really wanted.

So Jean had always been comfortable around Cheryl. Nothing chafed. Whether it was their opinion of
American Graffiti
(really wonderful) or Richard Dreyfuss (weirdly cute) or Home Ec. teacher Mrs. Woodenshantz (scatterbrained) or girls who smoked (disgusting), she and Cheryl agreed so much they might have been astrological twins. They never treated each other cruelly to gain favor with someone else. They stood together at dances watching Dorothy Perks get the best boys. They were each other's reliable backup plan, in case something more exciting fell through.