Mrs. Everything (16 page)

“You did a nice job on the table,” Sarah said, giving Jo a rare compliment, as Bethie pulled a tray of rolls out of the oven and used tongs to put them into a napkin-lined wicker basket.

Henry Sheshevsky, still short and heavyset and light on his feet, arrived first. He ushered Bubbe and Zayde into the house, took Bubbe’s coat with a courtly bow, and with great ceremony, handed Sarah two bottles of Lancers wine. “For a special occasion! I’m so glad you’re inviting me to your luffly home!” The Simoneaux came next. Henry helped Barbara and Mrs. Simoneaux with their coats—“Such beauties!” he exclaimed. “I’m surrounded by beauties!,” while Jo put the heralded cheese ball and cut-up carrots and celery and dip on the coffee table, along with a stack of small plates and forks. The Steins came trooping across the street, with each boy carrying a pie and Mrs. Stein wanting to know if she could put the metal bowl and the beaters into the freezer, so they’d be cold when it was time to whip the cream. The house was warm and crowded and noisy, full of overlapping voices and laughter.

Mr. Stein took the boys out back to throw a football around, and Mr. Simoneaux and Andy joined them. Henry Sheshevsky poured Sarah a glass of wine, and when she waved him away, he cajoled her, eventually pressing the glass into her hand. Mrs.
Stein and Mrs. Simoneaux complained about the Krinskys at the end of the block, who didn’t keep their grass cut, and about the Perrinaults, whose new basset hound howled at five in the morning when the milkman came, and Mr. Simoneaux went back down the street to get his new electric carving knife. Jo watched quietly from the kitchen, wishing that her father could have been there. He would have bantered with Henry, and flattered Sarah’s mother, and made Barbara blush by telling her how grown-up she looked, and made sure Jo got the drumstick, and not minded if Jo ate it with her hands.

Finally, Sarah called everyone to the table. When the guests were seated, Sarah stood and said, “Thank you all for coming. I’m so glad to have friends around us today. And I’m grateful to my daughters.” The candlelight smoothed out the lines around her eyes and softened the grooves that descended from her nose to the corners of her lips that had deepened since her husband’s death. In the flickering dimness, with her wineglass in her hand and a tentative expression on her face, her mother looked almost young and almost pretty.

“Mazel tov! Now let’s eat!” said Henry, clapping his hands and bouncing up from his chair to fill the wineglasses. Sarah beckoned Jo and Bethie close, and surprised Jo by taking their hands.

“I know this hasn’t been easy,” she said. “Losing your dad, and having me working.” She looked up. “Bethie, I wish I could come to all of your performances.”

Bethie murmured a demurral.

“And, Jo, I’d like to see more of your games.”

I doubt it
, Jo thought. Sarah would occasionally come to Jo’s tennis matches—
probably because I have to wear a skirt to play
, Jo thought—but had skipped every volleyball and basketball game, even the ones on Mondays and Tuesdays that she theoretically could have attended. Jo suspected her mother hated the sight of her racing up and down the court, or crouching in front of the net; that she hated the knee pads and the mouthguards, the uniforms that left her sweaty limbs bare.
It’s
so rough
, Sarah had said once, shuddering, after enduring the sight of Jo exchanging hand-slaps with her teammates after they’d won a tough match.

“So thank you,” Sarah said. Her eyes seemed to glitter. “Thank you both.”

“You’re welcome,” Jo said, and Bethie added, “There’s nothing you need to thank us for.”

“No. I’m grateful. You did a wonderful job.”

Jo thought of the Jell-O and shuddered, wondering if her mother would notice if she just never brought it to the table.

Mr. Simoneaux and Mr. Stein went to the kitchen to carve the turkey. “Jo, get the cranberry sauce,” said Bethie. Up close, Jo could see a suck mark on the side of her sister’s neck. Sarah passed around the side dishes, the green beans and the rolls, the mashed potatoes and the sweet potatoes that Bethie had baked and run through a ricer with heavy cream, nutmeg, and real butter and a pinch of orange rind before spooning them into a baking dish and decorating the top with an intricate, spiraling pattern made of bits of glazed pecans and miniature marshmallows. That was Bethie, Jo thought. Everything she touched came out perfectly.

Jo helped herself to stuffing, reached for a drumstick, saw her mother’s face, and took a slice of white meat instead.

“Jo,” Sarah said brightly, “don’t forget your Jell-O!”

“The famous Jell-O!” said Henry Sheshevsky as he clapped his hands.

Slowly, Jo got to her feet, sending up a silent prayer to whatever god guarded careless teenage lesbian sex fiends. She carried the Bundt pan to the table and turned it upside down on a clean plate. She tapped it gently. Nothing happened. Feeling everyone’s eyes on her, Jo gave the pan a little shake. Still nothing. Jo raised the pan, shaking harder. There was a horrible slooping sound, and a flood of half-liquefied Jell-O and chunks of fruit poured out of the mold and flooded the plate, pouring onto the white tablecloth, and directly into Mrs. Stein’s lap.

Mrs. Stein shrieked and shoved her chair back, out of the path of the deluge. “Oh, my God, I’m so sorry!” Jo said, as she tried to scoop up as much of the fruit and solid Jell-O as she could, but it was clear that Mrs. Stein’s dress was ruined, and the tablecloth, and maybe the carpeting, too. She bent to shove napkins over the worst of the damage while Bethie ran to the kitchen for seltzer water and baking soda and paper towels. At the head of the table, Jo heard her mother pull in a slow breath and let it hiss out of her nostrils. Jo bent back down, scooping up the fruit, scrubbing at the stains, listening to her mother breathing, postponing the inevitable as long as she could, until finally she straightened up so that Sarah could see her. “I think this is as good as it’s going to get right now.”

Her mother said nothing.

“I can try putting vinegar on the stains . . .” Jo’s voice trailed off. Sarah still did not speak.

“I’m so sorry,” Jo said. “I don’t know what happened!” She felt laughter, like poison gas, bubbling up in her chest—had it been just a few hours ago, at Lynnette’s, where she’d thought things couldn’t get worse?—and she had to bite her lip to keep it inside.

“Not to worry,” said Henry Sheshevsky. He patted Jo’s back. “It’s a little spill, not the end of the world!”

Sarah ignored him and kept her eyes on her daughter. “You have to make a real effort to ruin Jell-O, so maybe I should be impressed that you found a way,” Sarah said. Her voice was calm. “What is wrong with you?”

“I don’t know,” Jo said. She was telling the truth. She didn’t know what was wrong with her, or why she was different, or how to make it right. “I really don’t.”

“Well, whatever it is, you’d better fix it. Because, you have my word, no man is going to want a wife who can’t even manage Jell-O.” She sighed, the weary exhalation of a woman who had burdens too heavy to carry, and who knew she’d never be able to set them down, and lifted her fork to cut a sliver of white meat
from the slice of turkey she’d set on her plate. Jo picked up her own fork and knife. Bethie was still in the bathroom, trying to save Mrs. Stein’s dress. The Stein boys were all eating quietly. At the far end of the table, Bubbe and Zayde had their heads together and were murmuring in Yiddish, and Barbara Simoneaux seemed too shocked to even breathe.

Across the table, Henry Sheshevsky, her father’s old friend, gave Jo a sympathetic look. Jo missed her father so much in that moment, she felt such a deep, sorrowful ache that she wasn’t sure that she’d be able to breathe. Gently, she set down her own silverware and looked at her mother.

“Why don’t you just be honest,” Jo said. “Say you hate me. That’s the truth, right?”

“Hey, so who thinks the Tigers could go all the way this year?” asked Henry Sheshevsky, his voice loud and hearty. Jo kept talking.

“I can’t cook. I won’t do my hair. I hate wearing dresses. I’d rather hit a ball or shoot a basket than prance around a stage and sing. I’m not the daughter of your dreams, but I’m the only one in this family who even misses him.” Jo knew it wasn’t true, knew that Bethie, at least, missed their father, but it was as if some demon had taken possession of her tongue. She couldn’t have stopped talking if she’d wanted to.

“That’s a lie!” Sarah’s voice was high and trembling.

Jo stood up, hands clenched. “I’ll bet you wish I was the one who died. Or maybe both of us. That way, it’d just be you and your perfect little princess.”

Bethie, who was just coming back to the living room, gasped. Jo saw her mother stand up, pulling her hand back. She felt time slowing down as she saw her mother’s lips press together until they’d all but disappeared. As Sarah’s body turned, Jo could have leaned back, or run, or even turned her face away, but she didn’t. She just stood there, frozen and immobile, knowing what was coming and unable to avoid it.

The sound of her mother’s palm on her cheek was like an explosion. It was the first time her mother had struck her in anger
since that awful day they’d fought about Mae.

For a moment, Jo stood, unmoving, feeling the blood rush to her face. She could see the people at the table, but it was like she was looking up at them from the bottom of a lake. Their faces and voices were distorted and seemed very far away.

“You’re a bitch,” she finally said, and she heard Barbara Simoneaux gasp. Bubbe said something short and sharp in Yiddish.

“Here, now!” Henry Sheshevsky roared. “Here, now! That’s enough!”

Sarah raised her chin. “And do you know what you are?” she asked. “You think I don’t know about you?” Sarah had dropped her voice to a whisper, low and dangerous. “You think I don’t know about you and your little girlfriend? You’re unnatural.”

Jo felt like she’d been thrown into a frozen river. Her chest was tight, her mind was whirling. What did her mother know? What had she seen? Had Lynnette’s brothers told their parents, and had the Bobecks called the house and told Sarah? Or was her mother just guessing, stitching together supposition and paranoia, and coming up with the worst? Except, Jo thought, the worst was true. Something was wrong with her. She was broken, she was twisted, she was unnatural, like her mother had said. She would never be fixed or made right.

Jo turned and ran, only this time, instead of going to her bedroom, she went to the front door. The car keys were on the credenza. She grabbed them, jumped behind the wheel of the car, and backed out of the driveway, burning rubber as she stomped on the gas. She hit fifty miles per hour on her way down Evergreen Terrace, and turned onto Route 10. Route 10 would take her to I-75, which would take her to the Windsor Tunnel, down underneath Lake Erie. Her father used to drive through the tunnel with her, having her watch for the dividing line that showed when they’d passed from the United States into Canada. Jo would always hold her breath, imagining that she’d be able to tell, that something would feel different when she was in another country. Of course, nothing ever did.

She drove through the darkness, her foot heavy on the gas and her hands tight on the wheel, all the way to Ambassador Bridge Street. There, she pulled to the side of the road at the last possible instant before the traffic would have swept her through the tunnel. She sat behind the wheel, underneath a streetlamp, with her fisted hands pressed against her eyes. She could drive to Canada, all the way to the northernmost provinces, all the way to the ends of the earth, and the truth would never change. Lynnette would forget her. Her mother would never love her. Her father would still be dead.

Jo opened the car door and stepped out into the darkness. She hadn’t worn her coat, and the wind off the water cut through the fabric of her dress. Cars sped by, cars with happy families inside of them, dads behind the wheel, moms with Saran-wrapped leftovers in their laps, little brothers, stuffed full of whipped cream and pie, in the back seat, next to teenage big sisters who’d close their eyes and dream about boys, the way girls were supposed to.

Jo’s breath caught in her throat. She remembered her father taking her to see the Tigers play, pulling her baseball glove out from under his jacket, like he was performing a magic trick. She remembered his hand on her head, and how he’d call her Sport, and how she’d wanted to run away with him, to go somewhere safe, somewhere better.

“Dad,” she whispered. No voice answered. The wind whipped at her hair and battered her face, freezing her tears, and the cars rushed past in a heedless stream, none of them stopping or even slowing down.

Jo stood until her body ached from the cold, until her face and toes and fingertips were numb. Back in the car, she pressed her cheek against the vinyl of the seat cover, hoping she’d be able to catch the ghost of her father’s scent, the starch of his shirts and bay rum cologne, but all she could smell was Sarah’s hairspray and perfume. She cried until her eyes burned.
I am going to leave here
, she thought. I am going to read, and I am going to write. I am going to find a girl who is brave enough to love me, and I am going to have the kind of life I want, and as God is my witness, I’ll never eat
Jell-O again.

The thought made her laugh a little, and then she was laughing and crying all at once, making weird, hiccupping sounds, with the pain of missing her father as fresh as if he’d died the day before. She cried until there were no tears left, until she was empty and aching, and when the tears were gone, she pulled a wad of paper napkins from the glove compartment, wiped her face, and blew her nose. Finally, because there was no place else to go, she drove back home.

It felt like an entire night had passed since the fight, but in reality, just over an hour had gone by since Sarah had slapped her. The front door was unlocked and the table still set, the candles still lit, the house still full of the smells of Thanksgiving, but all of the guests seemed to have gone home. Sarah was sitting on the living-room couch. She’d taken off her shoes but was still wearing her skirt and her blouse. “Bethie,” she called, “put the pie in the oven, please, and turn the heat on under the gravy.”