She Poured Out Her Heart (2 page)

Maybe she should start wearing plaid skirts and cashmere sweaters, get her hair done in a country club bob, wear little gold knots in her ears instead of gypsy chandeliers. Clean up her act, literally.

Would that help? All this while she'd carried on like she was some kind of female pirate, as if she was allowed her excesses because she was a creature of tempestuous moods and passions and sensibilities, like an opera diva or an artist. Except she was not an artist. Had never wanted to be or tried to be. She had enthusiasms, but no real talents. Mostly she bought things that were meant to demonstrate her quirky and individualistic tastes. Mostly she had stupid affairs. She was a diva of fucking.

Then, having beat herself up to the point where it no longer mattered how repulsive she was, she hurried to meet up with Jane, because Jane's husband, Eric, had taken the kids out for some enforced daddy time, and it would not do to be there when they got back.

Jane was standing in the open space by the deli. She had taken a step away from her shopping cart and was doing nothing at all, except looking up at the ceiling. Staring, really, with her head back and her mouth falling open. Was there a bird flying around up there? Something trapped?

Bonnie walked up to her, checked out the ceiling, saw nothing there, said, “So what is it, huh?” And Jane jumped out of her skin, like she'd been surprised in some woodland solitude, and for the briefest moment
her face was hard and angry and crazed and she stared at Bonnie like she didn't recognize her, or maybe she did but she hated her and
she knew? Did she? . . .

The next instant she was Jane again, and she said, in her usual voice, “I never noticed how big this place is. Warehouse big. I mean, you know it from walking around, but . . .”

Jane shrugged. She didn't seem especially embarrassed at spacing out and babbling. “It's just a long way down,” she said, as if that was an explanation.

“Don't you mean, a long way up?” Bonnie suggested, deciding to play it wise-guy cool, a sidekick.

“I suppose.” Jane looked at the jars of olives that Bonnie presented. Selected one and put it in the cart. Bonnie left the other jar next to a display of fancy cheeses. Jane pushed the cart forward, then let it go. It wheeled a couple of feet forward on its own, then stopped.

“Hey, Jane?” Still keeping it all in humorous sidekick mode, but a little concerned now. “Earth to Jane.”

Jane roused herself, caught up with the cart, and attached herself to it again. “Sorry. Sorry. I think I have everything. Now I just have to decide what to fix tonight.”

“That's why I don't ever cook,” Bonnie said. “I don't think about meals until I'm hungry.” Relieved that everything was back to Jane-normal. Maybe Jane was taking some kind of new antidepressant? Bonnie knew she had prescriptions, she'd taken a lot of different meds in the past for whatever Jane-depression she suffered from. It was hard for Bonnie to tell what might be wrong because Jane had always seemed pretty much the same to her and had for all these years.

Although there had been that one time, requiring hospitalization, which they were careful not to talk about.

But for now, at least, the little spell of weirdness had passed, and Jane was once again scrabbling around for her grocery list and her checkbook and whatever else she needed. She was always doing that, making sure
she had one thing or another, her wallet, phone, keys, as if the different parts of her got lost in her big mom-style purse.

“There he is again,” Bonnie said. She meant the boy they'd seen before who'd been having the fight with his girlfriend. Or maybe she just thought she was his girlfriend. He was a jerk. And the girl was one of those pitiful types. Sometimes you hated people you didn't even know. Why was it all so important, the endless stupid back and forth that wasn't even love after a while. Or never had been. The boy was in line at one of the self-checkout lanes with a bottle of pop and a bag of some greasy snack food. His face was thick-featured, expressing absolutely nothing. What was inside his head? Car parts, probably.

“It's hard to tell, isn't it,” Jane said, nodding at the boy.

“Tell what?”

“If he's worth it or not.”

Bonnie shrugged but didn't answer, and they moved to the checkout lane and waited their turn. They seemed to have arrived there at one of those cresting times when everybody in the store was jammed together up front. In the next lane, a little girl about five years old was squatting next to a display of tiny bottles, each filled with a different flavor of sugar water, red, green, orange. One by one, she stuck them in her mouth, tried to pry the cap loose, then put them back on the rack.

The child's mother was busy unloading her groceries, as well as managing the baby strapped into a carrier, and an older boy who was pestering his mother about something he wanted and didn't get. Were you supposed to say something? Jane didn't seem to notice, nor anyone else. The child was oblivious, too young to know she was doing anything wrong. Fine, let it go, let everybody catch little kid germs. Why did anyone have so many children anyway? It didn't seem necessary.

Their line moved slowly. Of course they had chosen the wrong one. The mother and children moved toward the door in a straggling group. The woman ahead of them was buying not only groceries but clothes on hangers, and there was a price check that kept everyone waiting. Jane
said, “You know something? Every once in a while, I mean every once in a long long while, I get these flashes where I think, this is going to sound so, anyway, sometimes I think I can see the future. Little corners of it.”

Jane ducked her head, as if she was either self-conscious or proud of saying such a thing.

“Really?” Bonnie said, meaning,
what brought that on?
She had no idea.

Jane began setting groceries on the belt, arranging the frozen items together, then the meat, then dairy, produce, and so on. “Uh huh. Out of nowhere. Very unreliable. But when Robbie broke his arm at school? The day before, I knew it was going to happen. I mean not know know, because of course I would have done something. Kept him home or told him to be careful on the monkey bars. It was just this random thought that popped into my head from nowhere.”

“Wow,” Bonnie said. “That's . . .” She meant to go on, say wasn't that remarkable, and something about the mother-child bond, but the idea of knowing the future filled her with an unreasoning dread, as if the future was a lurking thing waiting to catch you off guard. Why dread, why so fearful? Why not believe in a better tomorrow, a brighter day? What was wrong with her? The best she could manage was, “Well, so what do you see happening, Miss Psychic?”

“Like I said, it's not very reliable. More of a, I don't know, like when you think you see the lights flicker? And you wonder if the power's going out?” Jane put the divider bar at the end of her groceries and smiled an unexpected, impish smile. “Silly! I don't even know what I'm going to make for dinner.”

W
hen Jane was nine years old, she was diagnosed with a heart defect and spent a lot of time in doctors' offices and in hospitals, undergoing tests and treatments, echocardiograms and scans, catheterizations and surgeries. The diagnosis brought her some relief from her bullying father, who believed in vigorous sports as character builders and pathways to success in life. He believed there was no reason Jane couldn't keep up with her two brothers, why she could not take to something, soccer, volleyball, or lacrosse, why she could not be a team player. Why her tennis lessons and swimming lessons and gymnastic lessons always ended in tears and mortification. “You want to give up? Huh? You going to quit every time something doesn't go your way?” Jane passed out and cracked her head on the cement of a swimming pool deck.

The doctors and nurses had long experience and training in dealing with children, unlike many parents, and they tended to her in ways that were both jolly and soothing. Jane felt weak and strange but not really frightened. So many people and voices and lights revolved around her. On this and subsequent visits to the hospitals and clinics, it was as if something rare and important lived within her chest, something worth a great deal of attention and concern. A doctor sat beside her bed and explained the functions of the heart to her, and how they would take
hers apart and put it back together better than new. He used a pink plastic model with all the veins and arteries sticking out in a way that resembled a bug's legs. And Jane knew that her heart did not look like this at all. Her heart was smooth and it had a pretty heart-shape, and it was made of heavy shining glass, like a paperweight, and it beat in its own secret code.

Once she was through with the round of doctors and surgeries and had returned home, her family treated her with caution that edged into a kind of resentment at having to do so. She was special only in the sense that she was deficient. The certainty of being extraordinary faded.

At school she was a dutiful student, quiet and tidy, the kind teachers did not worry about. She had nice hair, her best feature, long and sandy blond. Her face was freckled, her eyebrows sparse and surprised-looking. In the later grades, when boys started up with their smutty talk and harassment, she was most often overlooked. The first two years of high school she had a boyfriend, serious, brainy Allen, who read philosophy and said things like, “What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational.” Or, “No man's knowledge can go beyond his experience.”

He latched on to Jane, it was all his doing, and it flattered Jane to be singled out and chosen. They kissed in basements and outdoors on chilly park benches—they were too young to drive—and Jane let him feel around inside her shirt, although she couldn't say why this was meant to be meaningful for either of them. It made her self-conscious that she didn't have that much to grab on to. She was just grateful that she'd managed to get herself kissed and fondled, since other girls her age had started so much younger and by now were making jokes about blow jobs.

Jane wondered if there was something wrong with her that she didn't get more excited about having sex, the prospect of having sex with Allen. He was her boyfriend and one thing was meant to follow the other. But the only times she felt anything lowdown and agreeably carnal were when she got caught up in a movie or television show and could imagine herself as somebody else, the girl in
Dances with Wolves
, for instance.
Allen was in the habit of carrying breath mints when they were together, crunching them and offering some to her, then, once prepared, taking off his glasses and leaning in, gusts of hot peppermint enveloping her from his open mouth. In
Dances with Wolves
, the white people had turned into Indians, and so they were allowed to jump all over each other and roll around passionately in the grass and dirt.

Allen said, “I feel like we ought to give some thought to the future.”

“Oh?” Jane said, keeping her voice light and neutral. She had no idea what he might say next, but she felt apprehensive. They were watching television in the family room at Jane's house. Her parents had gone to bed, but there was always the possibility that they might descend the stairs, or else one of Jane's brothers might come home. Her brothers regarded Allen with a certain amount of mirth, and it was best not to give them any opportunities. So that this evening, like others, was spent unbuttoning and buttoning, melding themselves together and then pulling apart, their moist skins making a smacking noise. The future? “Yeah?” she ventured.

Allen said, “I've been trying to find a term that would convey the idea of ‘God,' but without the religious context. ‘God' as a comprehensive, unifying principle, ‘God' as unquestioned rightness and authority. Except, secular. Not-God. It isn't as easy as you'd think.”

“What are you talking about?” Jane had started out impressed by Allen's intelligence. Then she got used to it, and now it often annoyed her. “What does that have to do with the future? Future in general or me and you future?”

“Me and you. See, people say, ‘in the eyes of God' meaning, an alternative to state-sanctioned, as in, ‘married in the eyes of God.'” He gave Jane a cunning, sideways look.

“What?”

“But if we don't want to go all religious, we can just say we're married ‘in the eyes of the universe.' I think it's a reasonable alternative.”

“Married? Who said we're married?” It didn't seem like the kind of
thing you had to argue about with somebody. “That's crazy. Anyway, you didn't even ask me!”

“I guess I just figured . . .” Allen began. “I mean, we've been hanging out for more than a year.”

“Hanging out,” Jane repeated. She supposed that was what you called it. She and Allen didn't do a lot of boyfriend-girlfriend activities, besides the kissing stuff. No date things, like football games or parties. They studied together, they watched movies on video, and sometimes they accompanied Allen's grandparents to performances of the symphony, where the grandparents were patrons. These did not feel like dates either, even though Jane dressed up and Allen arrived at her front door with the corsage his grandmother had made him buy. They climbed into the vast backseat of the grandparents' Lincoln and Jane answered the grandparents' questions about what she had been studying in school while Allen, inspired to friskiness, attempted to work his hand or foot across the chilly expanse of upholstered seat that separated them and burrow undetected between her knees.

“I'm not getting married, or pretend married, what a stupid idea. Why do you even want to?”

“So everything would be all settled.” Allen was sulky now. Clearly he had expected her to go along with it. He gave her a peevish look. Maybe he was not as smart as everybody thought.

“You want to, like, do it, but you don't want to have to bother with talking me into it or anything.”

“You're a very conventional person, you know that?”

As always when somebody told her she was one or another thing, Jane kept silent. She never thought of herself as conventional, or whatever other label was placed on her, but other people seemed to view her so much more clearly than she did herself. Allen grabbed her hand and shoved it into his crotch. Jane yelped and pulled away. She thought she had felt his penis squirming around beneath his clothes, ready to break loose, attack.

“You're just afraid nobody else is ever going to come along,” Jane said, meaning it to be scornful and sarcastic, but then she realized she was right.

And for a long time after Allen, nobody else came along for her. She got excellent grades and was admitted to the state university as a general education major in the humanities. She didn't have clear vocational plans; she figured she could find some way to support herself if she had to. Meanwhile, she signed up for classes in art history and political science and American literature, meant to enrich her being with knowledge much as a layer of fertilizer might be spread over a field.

Her roommate was going through sorority rush and spent a lot of time on the phone with other rushees, comparing their prospects. There were good houses and less good ones. Which house had a reputation for being sluts, which had the best parties, or partnered with the hottest fraternities. Which one was for joyless dreary types going for high grade point averages, like Jane over there on her side of the room, writing a paper on Walt Whitman. Most of the time she and the roommate politely ignored each other, but on this night the roommate said, “Do you want to go to a mixer? There's a guy somebody knows who needs a date. You wouldn't have to dress up or anything. Just don't wear your glasses.”

She could have said no. She was so clearly one scant step better than no date at all. But so far Jane's new life at college was turning out to be too much like her old life at home, narrow and unremarkable. She told her roommate sure, she'd go. She fluffed her hair out and put on mascara and presented herself for inspection. Her roommate scrutinized her. “Why don't you wear my red sweater?” she suggested.

She'd been having trouble with her contacts, and without her glasses, the world was an agreeable soft-edged blur. It was November and pleasantly chill. They walked to the party through pools of light from the old-fashioned streetlamps, and underfoot were heaps of red and yellow maple leaves, and around them all the houses and apartments were busy
with people coming and going on their way to their own amusements. And for once she was a part of it.

“So who is this guy, my date?” Jane asked, trying not to think foolish, hopeful thoughts. Her roommate, who was still no more friendly than she ever was, said only that he was this guy from Valpo who was in town for the weekend, a friend of Candy's boyfriend Josh. Jane did not find this helpful information. She didn't know Candy or Josh. She wasn't even sure where, or what, Valpo was. She had to wonder why it was so important for the weekend guest to have an escort, why he couldn't tough it out alone. She walked on in silence. For her paper on Walt Whitman, she had been reading certain titillating lines about a lover who “settled your head athwart my hips” or “plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart.” There was some argument that Whitman was gay, but what did it matter? There had to be other people who felt that kind of thing. It couldn't just be poets.

At the frat house, a DJ was playing a mix of rap songs, boom boom boom and fuckety fuckety fuck. Red Christmas lights were strung along the walls. The noise was terrific. They wandered around in the crowd until the roommate found Candy and Candy's boyfriend, and then Jane was introduced to her date. The roommate vanished, borne away by her overexcited girlfriends. The date's name was Tim. He brought her a red plastic cup of beer, which she drank down fast, though it tasted sour, like something she had already vomited back up.

The music kept playing at terrific volume and it was impossible to hear anything else, so she and Tim mostly grinned at each other. “Where are you from?” she shouted at him, but he just kept saying “Huh? What?” He had buzzed hair, like he might have been in ROTC or a punk band. He was tall, which she liked, and after she drank two more beers she kissed him, standing up against a wall while the music thumped and brayed. He was a better kisser than Allen. He put both his hands on her backside and pulled her up so that she was riding him, a slow grinding
dance, which felt sort of good, in a hopeful way. Other couples around them were also entwined and grappling, and she understood why she, or some other female creature, was necessary, for who could be alone in this paired-off frenzy of mating? It was like the nature program she'd seen on an education channel, a lake full of copulating fish, their tails beating and thrashing the water.

“Want to go upstairs?” Tim asked, and she did, mostly.
I know what I'm doing,
she told herself, although it was not possible to know what was beyond your experience. Should she tell him she was a virgin? Would he be more or less likely to regard her with contempt? Would he change his mind? It would probably be worse to tell him she was a freshman.

Jane tripped and fell against him on the stairs, which set them both to giggling, and gave them an opportunity for another friendly hands-on interlude. At the top of the stairs they felt their way along the walls, Tim trying the doorknobs of different rooms. They were all locked. “Well crud,” he said, perplexed. Finally one door opened. It was dark inside and they bumped against furniture. “Hold on . . .” Tim felt along the door frame and flipped a light switch, then turned it off again. Jane saw flashbulbs behind her eyes. At least they knew where the bed was, more or less. Jane backed into it and sat, her legs sticking straight out, and Tim tripped over them and they fell into the mattress in a tangle and Jane hit her head on a wall but that was all right because her head was not quite attached to the rest of her by now. She reached up and felt his bristly hair, which was softer than she'd imagined, and then his face was up against hers and his big wet tongue was slathering around inside her mouth.

She didn't dislike this, exactly, but she wasn't transported by it either. She wished everything would slow down so she could take her time with each different sensation: hair, tongue, and so on. But she was losing track of the sequence of events, there was a blinking, staticky quality to her understanding, because her pants and underpants were now off, and Tim was tickling her down there in a way meant to be pleasing, she
guessed, but was perhaps too energetic for that, and anyway it was embarrassing, like a doctor's appointment. Her sweater and her bra were still on, which seemed like a mistake: perhaps she should call it to his attention?

“You ready?” His fingers were inside her. At least that made sense. Ready? Excuse me, I don't understand the question. He didn't wait for her to answer, but rolled away from her and put her hand on his penis, which felt like a skin-covered tube with a doorknob on the end. It was so comical! How did men walk around with this branch sticking out of them? She'd only seen pictures before, not the actual item, and it could be argued that she wasn't really seeing this one now, it was too dark in the room.