Mrs. Everything (49 page)

“Glamorous yet approachable,” Nonie said.

Jo rolled her eyes. “If I end up with a hundred copies of Jumpin’ for Jo sitting in my garage, I’m going to make you do burpees every day for a month.”

“That’s your prerogative,” Nonie replied. “But you know what? I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

*  *  *

At the PTA sale, Jo set up her wares at a folding table in the high school cafeteria, underneath a poster that Kim had made, a blow-up of the video’s cover featuring Jo’s star jump. Beside her, Nonie was selling slices of pineapple upside-down cake. “It’s my Meemaw’s recipe,” she’d tell customers, even though Jo knew that the recipe actually came from the back of the Dole can. When the shoppers came flooding into the gym, Jo readied herself for cold stares and hard questions; women asking about her qualifications, or what, exactly, made her think that she was selling anything worth buying. But the questions never came. Forty-five minutes later, Jo was sold out again. “See?” said Nonie, looking smug. “Told you so.”

Over the weekend, Jo visited the library, learning everything she could about the billion-dollar fitness-video market, which, by all accounts, was large, lucrative, and still expanding—fueled by women her age, stay-at-home mothers looking to shape up. On Monday, she went down to the basement with a tape to show to her husband.

Years ago, Dave had turned their basement into a home office. Not, Jo suspected, because he had work to do at home, but because claiming a home office let him write off a portion of the mortgage and the utilities. That was Dave, Jo thought: if there was a way to save money, he’d find it. “What can I do for you, my dear?” he asked. Jo pulled up a chair.

“I have a business proposition,” she began, and offered him a tape. Dave watched the tape the whole way through. He inspected the packaging. He listened to Jo patiently, at one point even grabbing a legal pad and taking notes as she walked him through the genesis of the workout routine, how she’d made that first tape (leaving out the part about boosting the equipment from the high school), and how Nonie’s sisters-in-law had asked for copies. She talked about how she’d sold videos to the women who took her class, and more to strangers, at the PTA sale. “I know that you’d know more about this than I do, but I wonder if maybe this could be something,” Jo said.

Dave set down his pen and notebook and leaned back in his chair, lacing his hands over the belly he’d developed in recent years as he contemplated the ceiling. Finally he shook his head. “Won’t work.”

Jo felt a rush of disappointment that was tinged with relief. She was sorry that she wouldn’t make a fortune selling exercise tapes, but she was glad that she wouldn’t be out there, exposed, embarrassing herself and her kids, the subject of a thousand dyke jokes that she might never hear but would be able to sense nonetheless.

Dave’s voice was sympathetic. “The problem, as I see it, is that you’re not an aspirational figure. Don’t get me wrong,” he said, raising his hands, as if Jo had tried to argue with him. “You look great. But great for a neighborhood lady. Great for the mom next door. But women don’t buy these tapes because they want to look like the mom next door. They buy them because they want to look like Suzanne Somers.”

“That’s what I thought,” Jo said. “Nonie just kept telling me . . .” Her voice trailed off.

Dave waved his hand negligently, a king granting a favor to a peasant. “Sell ’em at bake sales, or to the ladies who come to your classes. Make yourself some pin money.” Jo nodded and walked backward, out of his office and up the stairs, the way she remembered seeing her father walking in shul, after he’d been called
to the bimah, returning to his seat backward so as not to turn his back, and his backside, on the word of God.
Pin money
, she thought, and smiled at her own folly, and started in on the dinner dishes.

The next morning, she told Nonie the news. Her friend was predictably furious. “Dave’s full of it,” she told Jo, urging her to ignore him, to think bigger. “Why not take out an ad in the
Hartford Courant
? Or call the local newspeople and ask them to let you do a segment on Sunday mornings?” she’d asked. Jo never did. She was content. She liked teaching her classes, being out on the fitness trail underneath the canopy of leaves, accompanied by the murmur of a foursome or the crack of a driver on a ball. Jo kept a box of tapes in her car. She sold them to her students and at the synagogue’s fund-raiser. The money was useful, for Kim’s college application fees, and when Lila, who somehow had both an over- and an underbite, required another year of orthodontia.
It’s enough
, Jo told herself. It has to be enough. They had made their way out of bankruptcy, and they had enough to pay the bills. It was true that Jo had never gotten to live with the love of her life . . . but how many woman who loved women ever did? Maybe the ones with more courage could, the women who lived in big cities, or communes, but Jo no longer had that kind of nerve, or that kind of time. Her father had been dead before he’d turned forty-six; her mother had died at seventy-one. Soon she and Dave would be empty nesters, then retirees, and their girls would inherit the earth and have the kind of big life that Jo had once dreamed about. Maybe she’d never written a novel, maybe she and Dave would never move to one of the grand houses in Avondale Woods, or put in a pool, like the Pressmans, but at some point, Jo hoped, they’d at least have money to redo the kitchen. That would be enough.

That was what she was thinking about on a Friday night when Dave summoned her down to his office, saying they needed to talk. Missy was out with her soccer teammates; Kim was out with Derek Rudolph, the boy she’d been dating since
Homecoming. Lila, as ever, was glued to the TV, watching
Full House
. Jo descended the basement stairs, mentally making her case for replacing the kitchen appliances or, at the very least, the garish green-and-silver wallpaper, which screamed 1970s. Maybe they’d do it in stages, she thought, as she settled herself in a chair. Wallpaper first, and they could take out the wall that separated the TV room from the kitchen, and . . . “Jo.” Dave was looking at her, leaning forward, still in the suit he’d worn home that afternoon. His expression was grave.
He’s sick
, was her first thought and, to her great shame, she felt a surge of relief. She’d be rid of him; she’d be single. And maybe she wasn’t a young woman, but she wasn’t old, either. There was plenty of life ahead, years that she could make use of, and . . . “I’m so sorry,” Dave was saying. His face was red, and he appeared to be crying. Jo realized that she’d missed something important. “Sorry for what?” she asked, and tried to look appropriately solemn. Dave was staring at his desk, as if he could barely look at her. Jo felt the atmosphere change, the way it did in advance of a storm. She’d clenched her fists, bracing for whatever was coming, when he looked up and said, “You know things haven’t been good between us for a while.”

Jo didn’t answer. Her hands and face felt cold.
Things have been fine
, she thought. What did I miss? Dave’s shoulders heaved, and he gave a single bark of a sob, then said, “Jo, I want a divorce.”

Jo’s lips were numb, her hands icy, head swirling with a tangled skein of emotions—shock and fear and anger and, yes, relief. Underneath it all, relief. Dave wouldn’t be dead, but he would be gone. She would be free. For a few blissful seconds, Jo let herself enjoy that relief before she thought to ask the obvious question. “Is there someone else?” Dave gave a single, shamefaced nod.

“Who is she?” Jo made herself ask, and Dave had the grace to at least look ashamed when he said, “It’s Nonie Scotto.”

PART

  five

1993

Bethie

T
here she is,” Bethie said, pointing as a tall, skinny girl with a mop of tangled black hair emerged from the Jetway. Her niece was in that awkward place that Bethie remembered from her own adolescence, where you were done being a girl but you weren’t quite a teenager, and where it felt like half of your body parts had declared for Team Adolescence and the other half hadn’t caught up. Lila’s narrow shoulders were bowed beneath the straps of her backpack, and the duffel bag she had was so heavy that it made her lean to the left. Every few steps she’d have to correct her course, or risk banging into the wall.

Four years ago, Bethie had bitten her lip, hard, to keep from saying
I told you so
, when her sister had called to tell her that Dave was leaving, and she’d had to bite it again to keep from gasping when Jo told her who Dave was leaving with. “What can I do?” Bethie had asked. She’d offered to lend Jo money, to buy Dave out of the house so that Jo and the girls could stay there, but Jo was adamant about doing things on her own.

“Besides, I can’t stay. Nonie lives down the street, and Dave’s moving in with her.”

“Oh, God.”

Jo’s voice wobbled as she said, “I just want a fresh start, somewhere else. In Avondale, though. I’ll stay here, at least until Lila finishes school.”

So Jo and her girls had moved into a condo. Kim, then Missy, had finished high school and started college. Every year, Bethie had invited her sister and her nieces to come for a week or a month or even the whole summer, and for three years running, Jo had turned her down until finally she’d agreed to send Lila.

“I should warn you, she’s pretty miserable,” Jo said.

“We’ll be fine.” Bethie asked when school ended, bought a ticket in Lila’s name, and lined up a summer’s worth of activities for her niece. “We’ll take care of her,” she’d told Jo. Jo had just sighed.

Bethie knew that Lila had always been a challenge. She figured that any unpleasant behavior on Lila’s part was surely a result of her father’s abandonment, of Dave Braverman ditching her mom for that evil minx of a Nonie Scotto. “I never trusted him,” Bethie had railed to Harold the night she’d gotten the news. She’d been pacing through their living room, making a circuit from the gas fireplace at one end to the newly installed French doors at the other, with her manicured nails digging into the meat of her palms. “And you know what else? I sent that bitch a jam sampler for Christmas!” Harold, in his deep, sonorous voice, had told her, “Let it go, hon.” He’d grabbed her, midpace, squeezing her shoulders until she could laugh at herself.

“I’m glad it’s Lila,” she’d told Harold as they’d waited at the gate. Of all her nieces, she felt the most connected to Jo’s youngest, who seemed to be struggling more than her sisters. Kim and Missy had sailed through school, both of them distinguishing themselves in academics and extracurriculars, while Lila was floundering, and did not seem to have evinced any special skill or talent. Nor had Bethie failed to notice the
timing of Lila’s birth. Jo must have gotten pregnant right after their big fight. Which meant, Bethie supposed, that she was at least a little bit responsible for Lila’s existence, the same way she was at least a little bit responsible for Jo’s marriage and life in the suburbs.

There was also the way Bethie had found herself thinking about her own childlessness more frequently, as she had slipped from her thirties into her forties. Early on, she and Harold had talked about adoption, or about becoming foster parents, but between her business and his work, plus the charities to which they both gave not just money but time, they were busy and, it seemed, neither one of them wanted children enough to make an aggressive case for them. Bethie was also not certain how eager an adoption agency would be to place a child with a biracial couple. So she contented herself with her extended family. With six siblings, Harold had more than twenty nieces and nephews, ranging from toddlers to young adults, in addition to Kim and Missy and Lila. Bethie loved her work, she loved her husband, she loved her nieces when she got to spend time with them . . . and, she could admit, she also loved it when her guests went home, and it was just her and her husband again.

She wondered if that made her—to use her mother’s old word—
unnatural
. Every time she talked to a reporter—and, lucky for her, Blue Hill Farm had done well enough that she’d been interviewed half a dozen times in the previous few years, four times for print outlets and twice on TV—the subject would come up.
Do you and your husband have any children?
The
why not
was never spoken, but it was absolutely implied. Bethie always gave the same answer, one that she’d arrived at over time and had fine-tuned with a media coach.
My husband and I were friends in high school, but when we reconnected, my biological clock had just about wound down. I’m lucky to have three beautiful nieces who spend part of the summer with me, and I’m a mentor with Big Brothers/Big Sisters.

“I wonder what would happen if I said, ‘I just never really
wanted kids’?” she’d said during their first media-training session, and both Rose of Sharon, who, by the 1980s, had shortened her name to just Sharon, and the media coach, whose name was Beverly Husner, said, “Don’t say that!”

“Why not?” Bethie and Sharon had rented a conference room in the Doubletree Hotel for the afternoon, in preparation for their interview on CNN, which was doing a piece on “The New Entrepreneurs.” Beverly had brought her own camera, and her own lights, and had borrowed a television set from the hotel. For two hours, she’d played the reporter, peppering Bethie and Sharon with questions, recording their answers, then playing the tapes back to show them where they’d said
um
or
uh, I mean
or
you know
or
like
, or where they could have brought their answers back to Blue Hill Farm, which they’d been instructed to mention, by name, as often as they could. “I mean, seriously,” Bethie continued. “Would it be the end of the world if I just said I never wanted kids?”