Mrs. Everything (27 page)

The air had turned humid, and the campus was quiet as they walked to Shelley’s car. Shelley handed Jo the keys, and Jo drove, delighting in the warmth of the day, Shelley’s presence beside her, and the anticipation of their trip and all the days they’d have to spend together. Forty-five minutes later, they were crunching up the gravel driveway. “Are you sure nobody’s here?” Jo asked, as Shelley said, “Don’t be such a scaredy-cat,” and Jo followed her through the house, out back to the pool, where Shelley turned, lifting her arms, causing the hem of her pink cotton minidress to ride up high on her thighs. “Unzip me.” Underneath the dress, Shelley had nothing on but a pair of lace-trimmed panties. She kicked them off, gave Jo a grin over her shoulder, and dove into the water, with the clean form of a girl who’d spent her summers at sleepaway camp, where swimming lessons were taught twice a day. Jo pulled off her own shirt and shorts, leaving her bra and underwear on before jumping in the water and scooping Shelley in her arms. Shelley closed her eyes, humming happily as Jo held her, bouncing her a little, walking from one side of the pool to the other.

“This is perfect,” Shelley said, without opening her eyes. “I want a house with a pool.”

“We’ll have to figure out how to get one,” Jo replied . . . and did she imagine it, or did Shelley’s body stiffen, ever so slightly, in her arms? Before she could decide, Shelley wriggled free, slipping away and swimming underwater toward the deep end with her
long, dark hair trailing behind her. Jo swam after her, grabbing her ankles, pulling her, wriggling and laughing, into her arms, covering her wet skin with kisses, thinking that she’d never been so happy.

After a little while, Shelley got bored in the water, so Jo swam laps while Shelley lay in the sun, wrapped in a towel, leafing through
Vogue
with her wet hair gathered into a braid. After half an hour, Jo came to sit with her. She took Shelley in her arms, letting Shelley’s head rest on her shoulder.

“It’s so beautiful here.” Jo had decided to confine her remarks to the present, and the obvious—the sunshine, the green grass, the water.
Can’t you just enjoy things?
Shelley had asked, like a refrain, all through the spring, when Jo would press her about the future, demanding certainty, demanding answers.
Can’t you just be happy being with me now?

“I wonder if my mom was ever happy.” Shelley’s voice was low and musing.

“You don’t think she ever loved your dad?”

Shelley shook her head. “I think, for her, it was more like taking a job than falling in love. If you’ve been bred to marry a rich man and have his babies and basically be decoration, and you have no skills and no idea how to support yourself, how many options do you really have?” She reached down for her cigarettes and her lighter, which were always within grabbing distance. “I think Gloria can barely stand my father, but she knows that she wouldn’t be able to live without him.”

“What do you mean?” Jo asked.

“I mean if you took everything away from my mother, and told her she had to support herself, cook her own meals and pay her own bills and balance her own checkbook and wash her own lingerie, I guarantee you she’d be dead in two weeks. She could never live without help. Without . . .” Shelley gestured toward the house. “. . . all of this.”

Jo was thinking about Sarah, who had been brisk and competent even before her husband’s death. She didn’t think Sarah liked
her much, but she and Bethie had both gone to college, the way her father had always wanted, and Sarah’s hard work had made that possible.

“And what about you?” Jo swallowed hard, and made herself ask, “What do you want?” Jo knew that she could dream of a life abroad, or in the Village, in New York City, but could Shelley live like that? Or would she want a life like her mother’s, with a big house, a new car every year, live-in help, and a regular mah-jongg game? Shelley would have to decide for both of them. Shelley would pick a city, New York or Washington or Los Angeles or anywhere in between, and Jo would follow, finding a teaching job and a graduate school.

Whither thou goest, I will go, too.
Jo reached for Shelley’s hand, which rested limply in hers. Shelley’s dark-brown hair curled against her pale, faintly freckled skin, and her long lashes lay against her cheeks.

“We need more towels,” Shelley mumbled, without opening her eyes. It was and was not an answer to Jo’s question . . . and it was as much as she could hope for, Jo thought.

“I’ll go get them.” Jo pulled her shirt and shorts on over her wet underwear and bra. Barefoot, she walked through the kitchen to the house’s echoing tiled entryway, up the grand, carved staircase, with the stairs covered in soft blue carpet and washed with light filtered through stained-glass windows, into Shelley’s bedroom. There was a linen closet in the bathroom, stacked with fluffy white bath towels and hand towels and washcloths, all with the
REF
monogram that Jo had first seen on Shelley’s car. She piled towels in her arms and then, thinking that Shelley might want a fresh shirt or a sundress to pull on once she was dry, she opened Shelley’s closet. The racks were full of blouses and dresses, arranged by color, from light to dark. Those everyday clothes had been pushed aside to make room in the center for a single garment: a long white satin dress, swathed in a zippered bag of clear plastic that read
Bridal Fashions by Marcile
in fancy gold script.

No
, Jo thought. Her mind was whirling, spinning in a search
for explanations.
It’s someone else’s. One of Dolores’s daughters. It’s Gloria’s old wedding dress. They’re storing it here to keep it safe.
But as she let herself look at the dress, really seeing it, the truth hit her, hard and undeniable. It wasn’t just a wedding gown; it was Shelley’s wedding gown, the heavy silk cut to flatter Shelley’s petite frame. The neckline would show off her shoulders and the delicate architecture of her neck, the bodice would emphasize her tiny waist. It was Shelley’s style, with no frills or ornamentation, not a single seed pearl or sequin or scrap of lace. Just yards of lustrous satin, cream-colored, with the faintest undertones of pink.

Jo stood in front of the closet as pieces clicked together in her mind: the times Shelley had disappeared, the excuses she’d had at the ready, stories about parties, or her parents, or a pair of shoes she needed to retrieve (
You’ve got shoes here
, Jo had said that night, and Shelley had rolled her eyes at her fashion-backward girlfriend and said,
Not the right ones
). Last Friday, her mother had needed her to drive her to a synagogue Sisterhood meeting. The Wednesday before that, there were forms that the family accountant had asked her to sign, and she’d been gone all afternoon. Jo remembered how she’d come to the apartment and found Shelley moody and quiet, smoking on her window seat with her legs pulled up to her chest, and how Shelley’s kisses had an almost frantic quality, how she’d grabbed on to Jo like she’d had something to prove.

A rage stronger than anything she’d ever felt suffused her, flushing her face, curling her hands into fists, making her feel like her skin was going to split. Before she knew what she was doing, Jo grabbed the dress, gathering it into her arms and holding it against her as she ran down the stairs.

By the time she got to the pool, Shelley was sitting up, squinting at her, one hand shading her eyes. When she saw what Jo was holding, she cringed, as if Jo had struck her. For a moment, Jo just glared. In a voice that sounded raspy, she asked, “When’s the happy day?”

“January,” Shelley whispered, with her eyes cast down. “New Year’s Day.”

“And who’s the lucky guy?”

“Dennis Ziskin.” Shelley’s voice was barely audible. Jo remembered the name, the boy Shelley had called her boyfriend when they’d first met, the one who she said was overseas, studying in London.

“Of course. Good old Denny. Good for him.” Jo’s voice was high and sounded brittle. She sounded, she thought, like her mother. “When were you going to tell me? On our way to the airport? On the plane?”

“I thought . . .” Shelley wrapped her wet towel around her shoulders, gripping the edges tightly. “I thought we could have our trip. I wanted to see the world with you, like we planned. I thought I could have that.”

“And then you thought you’d come home and get married?”

“I wanted to tell you.” Shelley sounded like she was crying, but Jo couldn’t bring herself to look. “I hated lying. I tried, a hundred times.”

“So what was the problem? Why didn’t you just say it?” Jo asked. “Why couldn’t you tell me the truth?”

“I didn’t want to hurt you. I didn’t want to lose you. I wanted to have . . . what we have . . . for as long as I could.” Shelley’s hands were twisting in her lap, and her expression was anguished.

“Why not forever?” Jo asked. “Why do you have to get married? Why can’t we be with each other?”

Shelley’s voice was flat. “You know it can’t be that way.”

“Why not?” Jo asked. She was trembling with anger, and with fear, and with the growing certainty that this was the end, the final hours she would spend with the girl she loved. She felt like her world was splitting open, sending everything spinning and flying away. How could she go through her days, brushing her teeth and putting on clothes and talking to other people, now that this had happened? How could she survive this kind of pain?

“Because that’s not how the world works.” Shelley’s voice
cracked as she said, “I love you, Jo, you know I do, but I’m not brave like you are. I couldn’t live with people staring at me and whispering about me and not wanting their kids around me.”

“It doesn’t have to be like that. You know it doesn’t. We talked about this.” Jo heard her voice cracking. “We could go . . .”

“Go where?” Shelley demanded, sitting up straight, tossing her braid over her shoulder. Her neck and chest were flushed, her hands were fisted on the towel’s hem. “Tell me. Tell me where could we go where two women could live together and people would be okay with it.”

“New York,” said Jo. “Or San Francisco. There’re places, Shell, you know there are!”

Shelley was shaking her head. “My parents would disown me. I wouldn’t be able to explain it to them, or my grandparents. My brothers . . .” Shelley let the towel slide down her shoulders as she buried her face in her hands. “I’m sorry,” she cried, in a terrible, broken voice. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” She lifted her hands and looked at Jo, her face miserable, her eyes filled with tears. “I want to be with you, more than anything. I love you, Jo, I do. I thought I could be brave. But I can’t.”

“But you promised.” Jo’s voice was a little kid’s whisper, a little girl who’d been told she could trick-or-treat until eight o’clock and whose mother had changed the curfew and pulled her inside at seven-thirty. She hated herself for sounding like such a baby. She hated herself for believing that Shelley ever intended to make a life with her.

“I know.” Shelley bent her head, not arguing. “You probably hate me. You should hate me. I’m awful.”

Jo stared at her, stunned and numb. Her beautiful Shelley, with her damp hair and flushed cheeks and silvery gray eyes full of tears . . . and then, without planning it, without considering her action, or its consequences, she gathered the heavy satin dress in her arms and heaved it, as hard as she could, into the water.

*  *  *

The next day, the first day of her post-Shelley life, Jo collected her belongings from Shelley’s apartment and left her key on the kitchen table. She walked from her dorm room to the Army-Navy store on Dearborn, where she bought a rucksack with a metal frame, a heavy cotton sleeping bag, a tent, and a length of mosquito netting. She bought a canteen, iodine tablets to purify the drinking water, a flashlight with spare batteries, a toothbrush with a built-in plastic case, and a travel-sized tube of Crest. She packed khaki shorts and wool socks, bras and underwear and a pair of jeans and loose, short-sleeved men’s cotton button-down shirts. On the appointed day in August, Sarah drove her to the airport, and she flew, for the first time in her life, first from Detroit to New York City, and from New York City to London. She’d wondered if the seat beside her on the airplane, the seat where Shelley was supposed to have been, would be empty, but another girl sat down beside her, a girl with blue eyes and freckled cheeks who was going to be a senior at Macalester College and who mentioned her boyfriend four times in five minutes. Jo nodded politely and turned away, closing her eyes. When they landed in London, Jo joined a group of students, some from Michigan, some from Ohio, and some from Madison, Wisconsin. They piled onto double-decker buses and toured London. Jo saw Buckingham Palace and the Changing of the Guard, and spent a yawning, sandy-eyed hour at the Victoria and Albert Museum, looking at carved wooden tigers and jeweled tiaras, and ate fish and chips, wrapped in newspaper, sprinkled with malt vinegar, and drank pints of ale with lemon squeezed onto the foam. By six in the morning she’d boarded her bus.

Jo slept and woke and slept and woke again, trying to read from her copy of James Michener’s
The Source
as the bus bounced along for almost two days, stopping for kids to board or disembark, making its way east to Istanbul. When they finally arrived, the boys hurried off to buy hash. Jo joined a group of girls who, she’d discovered, had also made reservations at the guesthouse in Sultanahmet that she’d chosen for herself and Shelley. The air was dusty, the streets full with people, many of them young and white,
like Jo, others darker-skinned, the men bearded, the women in veils. Jo pulled her collar up over her face, rubbing at her gritty eyes, staring at her map until she and her new friends figured out which way to walk.

The girls’ names were Katherine and Melinda and Gina. Katherine was tall and blond and busty, with flushed cheeks and a high-pitched voice, and Melinda had heavy glasses and a quiet, self-contained manner, and Gina was petite, with short black hair and a quick smile.
Stay away
, Jo told herself as they sat in a teahouse for a meal of fiery lentils and rice. In the guesthouse’s communal bathroom, Jo took a long, hot shower, listening as Katherine, who was dressed in a bathrobe and leaning against the sink, read from a guidebook about the squat toilets.