Joy School (7 page)

I take off my coat, sit in his chair, slant my legs to the side. This is how you’re supposed to do it, but it’s hard to stay that way. Once when I was doing it, my leg started shaking so I had to quick improvise to the crossed-leg position even though that is how prostitutes sit.

I get up to lean against the wall, my hands clasped in front of me. Then I move my hands behind me, lean against them. That’s better. It looks more natural. Plus older. My skirt is hanging perfectly over my nylons. There is nothing spilled on my sweater. I take out one hand from behind my back, use it to find the clasp on my pearl solitaire necklace, make sure it’s at the very back of my neck. It’s a cultured pearl, real. If you rub it on your teeth you can feel the sand from where it used to live.

I hear the sound of the outside bell, look out the window.
Another car has pulled into the station! I feel so mad at the driver. It is a woman, staring at herself in the rearview mirror like she has forgotten that what she should be doing is watching to make sure she’s ready to pull right up when the person ahead of her is done.

I get out of my pose, go over to look at what’s in the candy machine. I like everything there except the peanut-butter crackers. I pick the order of what I would eat. First place goes to Nestlé’s Crunch. Last place to Tootsie Roll.

So there is a hot-beverage machine in here and a candy machine. If there were a sudden blizzard, you would be fine. Really, you could live here, just hang up some curtains and there you are. There is a bathroom and a telephone. He has a hot plate in the back, I saw it when I changed, with some cans of soup by it. Bean and Bacon, which is my favorite also. You could use a mattress on the floor at night.

I look outside again. Jimmy is turned away from me, leaning over an engine. Say you pointed to anything there and said, “What’s that?” I’m sure he would know. Even if it were something under something else. There are more or less ten years between us. That is nothing, if you really think about it. After I finished high school, nobody would say a word. And it would be a neat thing, like when he was forty-three, I would be thirty-three. “How old are you?” Twenty-seven. “And your husband?” Thirty-seven. Easy.

The pay phone rings, which makes me jump. I lean
out the door. “Jimmy? The phone is ringing!” I could be calling him in to our apartment.

“Could you answer it, please?”

“Me?” I point to myself like a dope, wreck the whole thing.

“Just say ‘Mobil Oil’ and ask them to hold on.”

I pick up the receiver. “Mobil Oil,” I say. “May I help you?” I am so nervous for many reasons.

“… Hello?” a woman’s voice says.

“Mobil Oil,” I say, louder. “Can I help you?”

“Is
Jimmy
there?” she says. I hear a kid yelling in the background. I believe he is saying “Mine” but it is hard to tell since the sound is so long and drawn out. It sounds like someone falling from a cliff.

“Just a minute, please.” I’m not sure what to do with the phone. There is no hall table to lay it on. I let it down gradually, leave it hanging there, and go to the door again. “Hey, Jimmy!” I have to yell, but I do it in as dainty a way as I can. “It’s for you.”

“All right. Tell them just a minute.”

Well, it is the team of us.

“I did.”

“Okay. Be right there.”

I hear noise coming from the phone and I go to stand closer so I can hear. Some entertainment has suddenly arrived.

“What did I tell you?” I hear the woman yelling. “Huh? What did I
tell
you?” There is a silence and then
the kid starts bawling loud. She either hit him or took something away from him. “Damn it!” she says. Her voice is like a rope unraveling.

I move away from the phone. Something has just occurred to me that hits like a sock to the stomach. She could be his wife. There could be pans on their stove, her making his dinner. They could have their wedding album out on the coffee table and look at it often and fondly.

He is coming in now, smiling at me so friendly, and there is no wedding ring on his left hand. And in that moment I decide, I don’t care if he is married. I’m staying. It is every woman for herself.

I
am sitting in my room thinking I have never seen anyone change so fast as Diane has. She is the kind of person who always looked so done and you never saw her doing it. She had things on her dresser: emery boards, bobby pins, Aqua-Net, makeup, perfume, scarves and barrettes to wear in her hair; but you never saw her using anything and she always looked so good. But now! When I first saw her, I didn’t know where to look. In the bad way. Her nails were almost all broken off, and she had not cut them all short, which you are supposed to do if two or more get broken. She had one ring finger long, and on the other hand the thumb; all the rest were broken off short. Her hair was tied back in a low ponytail, not shiny. No makeup except the black rings of eyeliner. I tried to look like I didn’t notice anything, but she knew. It was a hurt in her face, saying, “Yes, I know.” She had gained some weight, too. I wouldn’t say you could call her fat, but she was not the same in that department either. It was not pregnant weight, which according to what I learned you would not see yet anyway; what Diane told me last time we
spoke is she is three months. At three months the morning sickness should be thinking about leaving. But if not, eat soda crackers before you even get up to pee.

Dickie looked absolutely the same. Same clothes, same hairdo, same slow grin. I can’t say that my father was polite to him, but he didn’t kick him out, which is how he used to treat him. There is a bedroom made up for them in the living room out of the sofa. They are out now, buying the groceries we need, for tomorrow. The frank truth is I need some time to get used to how Diane looks, which is why I decided not to go along. My father took them in his car, Dickie is plenty tired of driving. His truck is parked out front. It is the same, too.

I come out into the kitchen, find Ginger hanging up her apron. She is ready to go home for the long weekend. “I wish you could eat Thanksgiving dinner here,” I say.

“Do you?” This makes her happy. It’s a good thing to let people know how much you like them. It’s strange but true that people usually forget to do that, but then when you see how the littlest compliment can make a person sit up lively you say to yourself, oh yeah.

I sit at the kitchen table. “What will you be doing tomorrow?”

“Oh,” she turns around, wipes the sink out with a sponge even though it is already clean. “I’ll be making dinner. Wayne will be coming with his family. His parents and his two sisters.” She is tired already, just talking
about it. Behind the veil of her niceness, you can see the other feelings.

“Well, we’ll save leftovers here for you.”

“Thanks. On Monday, we’ll have turkey sandwiches when you come home from school, how’s that?”

Now I am a little nervous. Dickie eats a lot. The turkey might be plumb gone by Monday. I really meant just that we’d be thinking of her. “Well,” I say. “Or pie, something like that.”

“Right.” She looks at her watch. It’s a cheap silver one, gaps in the links. I wish I could buy her a new one. I know for Christmas I’m getting her a book. A hardback. “I have to go, Katie. Please tell Diane and Dickie that I enjoyed meeting them.”

“I will.”

“And tell your father … Well, just Happy Thanksgiving, I guess.” She looks at me a little too long and I see that she is thinking about him in the romantic way. Which I guess I had known but hadn’t known until now. Facts bump up against me like waves. How she has been fixing herself up more lately. How she leaves at night slowly.

Huh. Him, as a plain man.

Just as Ginger is going out the door, the phone rings. I get an alarmed feeling that it might be Jimmy, although I would also be happy. We had a good time, when I was there. He has a checkers game which we played, I won one, he won one, which of course leaves you with a very satisfied feeling. He said, “Come by
again,” when I left, which was a relief, since that
was
his wife on the phone. They got married right out of high school, is about all he said. He kind of smiled, saying it. But their son is five years old. So figure it out. That man got trapped like a rat.

“Hello?” I say, and I can actually feel my heart beating in my chest.

“Hi! Where have you been?”

Oh. It’s Cynthia.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I forgot to call you back.” She phones a few times a day, and if I don’t answer or call back right away, why call out the FBI.

“It’s okay,” she says. And then there is a loud silence. This is one of those friendships where I’ll have to do all the talking.

“How’s your grandma?” I say.

“She and my mother are going at it right now. Nona got up last night and made three gallons of red sauce.”

“What for?”

Cynthia sighs. “Oh, you know, spaghetti, all that stuff. Calzones. Pizza.”

“No, I mean, are you having a lot of people over?”

“No. Nobody. Nona just loves to cook. It’s her only thing. My god, if
people
are coming over for dinner! Then she makes about two
hundred
gallons. She gets all excited. She rubs her hands together and says, ‘Ah, business, she’s-a pickin’ up!’”

“So what’s wrong if she cooks?” I ask.

“She has bad heart problems. Congestive failure.
Sometimes she’s just not supposed to get up. Her legs are swollen up again like crazy. You should see them. If you poke them with your finger, the mark stays.”

This is not something I would buy a ticket for.

“She got up when everyone was sleeping. I don’t know, three in the morning or something, that’s how she does it. She’s really quiet, I have to say that. She lights a candle, cooks by that.”

“Really?” Now this is something I would like to see. Cynthia’s grandmother, dressed in a robe and slippers, her hair wild and sticking out all over, stirring sauce by the light of a big white candle. Like a good witch. The skins of onions and garlic all over the kitchen counter. She would stir and stir, squint into the pot, sprinkle her spices in. I’ll bet she puts wine in, right from the bottle, I saw an Italian grandmother do that once in a movie. The bottle was in its own basket. Nona only uses her own spices, I remember Cynthia telling me that, that she grows spices in the summer. Plus tomatoes, which she cans. These are skills I don’t know anything about. I don’t think many people know how to can, although seniors in Miss Woods’s class do. I never saw basil growing. If Cynthia and I are still friends in the summer, that is one thing I would like to see: Nona’s garden, with things you can eat just growing for free. You want something? Just go out in the backyard and pick it. She has lettuce coming up from the dirt, raw peas.

“She’s up there
screaming
now,” Cynthia says. “At my mother. Can’t you hear her?”

I listen carefully. “No.”

“I’ll hold the phone out,” Cynthia says. “Listen.”

I listen again. “No,” I say. “I can’t hear.”

Nothing.

“Cynthia?” I say.

Nothing.

Well, look at this.
“Cynthia!”

“What?” she says. “Did you hear?”

“No.” I’m getting tired of this conversation.

“Oh well, you wouldn’t understand it anyway, it’s all Italian.”

“Your mother speaks Italian?”

“Oh yeah. Nona gets her mad enough, she’ll spout Italian all day long.”

Well. A dent in Mrs. O’Connell.

“Can you come over tomorrow?” Cynthia asks.

“It’s Thanksgiving.”

“I know. But before dinner.”

“I don’t think so. My sister’s here and everything.”

“Really? I didn’t know you had a sister. What’s she like?”

The door opens, and I hear Diane’s voice. Then she is in the kitchen putting grocery bags on the counter. She waves at me but there is nothing in it, no life.

“I’ll have to talk to you later,” I say.

“Is she right there?” Cynthia asks, like we have secrets together against Diane.

“No. I just have to go.”

“But can you come over on Friday?”

“I guess,” I say. “All right.”

“I’ll teach you piano.”

A brightening in me. “Okay.”

My father comes in the kitchen, his face shut down. Well, here we are, back to the old days, just like that. I don’t know what it is between the two of them. It is like they are allergic to each other.

“Hey,” I say.

No one answers.

“Need any help carrying things in?”

“We got it all,” Dickie says. He looks like he is ready to blow up with uncomfortableness. I feel sorry for him. I wish I could tell him to go in my room, but that would be taking sides and my father would just get madder. When he is like this, he welcomes more to keep him going.

“I’ll just go get the mail,” I say.

My father starts putting groceries away. I pity the shelves he will slam the cans down onto.

Diane goes into the living room and sits on the sofa. She is holding one hand with the other, rubbing her knuckles. I keep thinking, inside her is that little baby. Held right in her center. Surrounded by magic liquid. Listening for her body to tell it every single thing to do.

Dickie comes in and sits beside her and it’s like he isn’t even there.

“Hey, Dickie,” I say. “Want to get the mail with me?” It’s a country-type mailbox, out at the curb. It has a red flag to put up when you want to tell the mailman
to stop and take something. I don’t know why we have a country mailbox when this is the suburbs, but who knows why they do what they do here? I could show Dickie how it works.

“No thanks, Katie.”

He wants to help Diane, but I can tell him he might as well give up right now.

I go outside and it is such a relief to be out of that house. There is the sky, which has nothing to do with any of this. I’d thought we were going to make pies and it would be a little fun. I’d imagined my father and Dickie wearing aprons too, and it would be cute-funny, like when the men on TV cook and do things all wrong which only makes their wives say, Oh HONEY, and love them more. But no.

Well, there is some mail, but it is all window mail. Bills. But then I see a small envelope, purple. I turn it over, feel so happy at the sight of a letter from Cherylanne. One thing she is still doing in her own way is being there, I have not lost her after all.