Mrs. Everything (52 page)

Bethie shook her head. “She used her money to help me. That was part of it. And I think that after she came home, she lost something. Her momentum. Her courage.” What fairy tale was it, Bethie wondered, where you could fly as long as you thought lovely thoughts, but as soon as you stopped you came crashing back to earth?

“Whatever you want to be, whoever you want to be, your mother is going to love you and support you. I’ve known your mother all my life. I know who she is. She loved me even though I spent ten years just . . .” Bethie raised her hands and shook her head, searching for the right words. “Just wandering around, singing on street corners, stealing from people. Hating myself. She doesn’t care if you have a big life or a small one, Lila. She just wants you to be able to be whoever you want to be, and love whoever you want to love.”

“That’s not true,” Lila said, but her voice was wavering, lacking the all-out conviction that Bethie had heard before.

“She loves you,” Bethie said again, and stood, stretching out her hand, waiting until Lila took it, thinking that if they hurried they could tell Jo that her flight had been delayed and get her home by the end of the day, without her mother knowing that anything had gone wrong.

Jo

I
n the years after her divorce, Jo had a mantra that she’d repeat to herself every morning, every night, and every bad moment in between:
At least it can’t get worse.

She’d gotten both her daughters into college, cosigning their student loans after Dave said he couldn’t. She and Lila lived in a two-bedroom condominium, in a complex full of divorced people, where the walls were as thin as cardboard and the carpet was a sad, flat, industrial gray. Jo had done what she could to make the place cheerful, hanging brightly colored posters on the off-white walls, covering the carpets in her own wool rugs. She took Lila to Girl Scouts, which Lila claimed to hate, to the dance lessons that Lila abandoned after three months, and the piano lessons she quit after just six weeks, ignoring Lila’s scowls and dirty looks, her daughter’s muttered assertions that Dad’s place was nicer, that Dad was more fun, that Nonie was a better cook and Dave was a better parent than she was.

It can’t get worse
, she’d think, even though she was exhausted all the time, aching with longing for her former life with Dave,
who’d been her husband, however imperfectly, and for Nonie, who Jo believed had been her friend. The world felt like a terrible place. Everything hurt. In the morning, she’d wake up with her body aching like she’d run three circuits around the fitness trail in her sleep. She tried not to think about the pain or the disappointment. Dwelling on the past was a luxury she couldn’t afford, along with new shoes, or new tires for the station wagon, or a rug large enough to cover up all of the sad grayish stuff in the condo’s living room. She plodded through her days, putting one foot in front of the other, then did it again and again and again, getting up every morning, fixing breakfast, packing lunch, going to work, coming home, cooking dinner, washing clothes and dishes, grading papers, going to sleep, then waking up and doing it some more. She wouldn’t let herself think about Dave and Nonie, or about Margot in Philadelphia, with the strawberry-blond curls, or about Shelley, who’d come to find her all those years ago.

She continued teaching her classes on the fitness trail. She wanted to quit, because every step along the path, every sit-up and leg-lift, reminded her of Nonie and of Nonie’s betrayal, but the truth was that she needed the money. So she went, sometimes dragging Lila along. At fourteen, Lila was small for her age, all knees and elbows and beaky nose, with the same dark eyes and emphatic eyebrows as her father. Her dark-brown hair was tangled, her expression was guarded and suspicious, and her mouth seemed to be stuck in a permanent scowl. Lila was angry at her mother. She was angry about having to leave Apple Blossom Court and her only good friend, Amy Seligson; angry about having to switch schools, angry that her sisters had gotten to live with their father for all of their lives while she only got to see him every other weekend. On the door of her bedroom in the condo was a hand-drawn sign that read
GET OUT
. The wall next to her bed was covered with pictures of their old house, their old street, and her old school, and all of her old class pictures.

Jo tried to help. She mustered energy she didn’t have and
went to talk to Lila’s teachers, telling them about the divorce, and the move, and how Lila’s father had moved on with Jo’s former best friend. She found Lila a therapist, a bosomy woman named Ellen Leong, who had an office full of toys and who told her, “Lila is working through her feelings of abandonment and disappointment,” and charged Jo eighty dollars a session, which insurance didn’t cover and which Dave refused to pay. (“She’s fine!” he said. “She’s just being a kid!”) She took Lila on trips to see Broadway shows in New York City, where Lila claimed to be bored, or hiking in the Berkshires, where Lila said that she was bored and bug-bitten, and after saving her pennies, on a spring break mother-daughter jaunt to Florida, where Lila got so badly sunburned after a few hours on the beach that the bulk of their stay was spent in the hotel room, with Lila in a bathtub full of lukewarm water and baking soda, and they only got to spend a single afternoon at Disney World.

Finally, after months of dealing with Lila’s sulks and silences, she’d heard Lila laughing at one of the ladies in her fitness class, and she’d snapped. “What is wrong with you?” Jo asked Lila as they drove home from the fitness trail. It was April, crisp and windy, as they drove past the road that would have led them to Apple Blossom Court, Lila turned, and stared, and heaved a noisy sigh.

“I hate getting up early,” said Lila. “Why can’t you just let me sleep?”

“I can’t leave you home by yourself.”

“So just leave me in the car.”

“Not safe. And don’t change the subject. You were mean. How do you think Mrs. Futterman feels when you laugh at her?”

Appealing to Lila’s empathy did no good. Jo wasn’t even sure the girl had any. “If she doesn’t want people to laugh at her, why doesn’t she lose some weight?” Lila asked. She stuck out her bottom lip and exhaled hard enough to lift her bangs briefly off her forehead.

“It isn’t that easy,” Jo said. Lila muttered that it didn’t look like Mrs. Futterman was trying very hard, and Jo said, her voice sharp, “If you can’t be kind, how about you just be quiet?” She hated the harshness of her own voice, hated the way she had somehow started not just to look but even to sound exactly like her own mother. Had she been that impatient with Kim or Melissa? Had she spoken to them that way?

“And if your bed isn’t made, no TV tonight,” she said as they pulled into the Briarcliff parking lot. TV was on the schedule every night. Lila said that cards and board games were boring. She claimed she hated to read. She would roll her eyes if Jo suggested anything else—doing a craft project, learning to knit, running errands or baking cookies together.

“Hey,” said Lila, shading her eyes. “Who’s that?”

Jo looked and saw Missy waiting at the front door, with her backpack by her feet. Her heart sped up. When she’d talked to Missy on Sunday night, she had been fine, and busy, full of talk about her classes, and a boy she’d met, and some drama between her roommates. Now here she was.

Jo hurried out of the car, leaving the door open and the keys in the ignition and Lila still unbuckling her seat belt. Missy offered a limp wave and attempted a smile. “Hey. Um. I need to tell you something.”

She’s pregnant
, Jo thought as her mouth went dry.
She got fired. She’s on drugs, and I’m going to have to pay for rehab.
“Um. So I went to the video store last night . . .” Jo saw Missy’s throat move as she swallowed. “Maybe we should go to Blockbuster and I can show you.”

*  *  *

The video was in the center of the “New Arrivals.” The woman on the box had feathered blond hair and a brilliant, pearly grin, but among the lineup of fit, tanned, long-legged, hard-bodied instructors, she stood out, with her rounded thighs and hips and warm smile. Instead of the high-cut leotard and ubiquitous leg
warmers, she wore a plain white T-shirt and a pair of blue leggings.
Get Fit with Nonie!
read the words written in gold above her head. Jo heard herself starting to laugh. She picked up the box, laughing louder and louder.
Can’t get worse
, she thought.
Well, I guess it can.

Missy said, “Mom?” and Jo just kept laughing, a shrill, witchy cackle, clutching her own shoulders, rocking on her heels with tears streaming down her cheeks until a clerk in a Blockbuster T-shirt came over and said, “Ma’am, are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” Jo gasped, wiping her eyes. “I’m fine.” She flipped the box over and saw Nonie, her old friend, smiling as she stood, not in a meticulously lit exercise studio, but in what looked like someone’s living room. Behind her were six women of varying shapes and sizes, some in leotards, others in shorts and tank tops, one in sweatpants and a T-shirt. “Finally, a fitness video for the rest of us!” read the copy on the back of the box. “Follow along at your own pace as Nonie takes you through a series of simple moves that use your own body weight to build strength and aerobic fitness! Nonie’s assistants will demonstrate modifications for all fitness levels so that any BODY can do this workout! It’s EASY! It’s FUN! It’s FITNESS FOR EVERYONE!” Jo had to search, and squint, before she found her husband’s fingerprints, but they were there, in the small print at the bottom of the box:
A Dave Braverman production.

“Oh, Mom,” said Missy, and put her arm around Jo’s shoulders, and even Lila, instead of muttering something mean about how it was Jo’s fault, gave her mom’s arm a small pat. Jo couldn’t stop laughing. She laughed and laughed until tears poured down her face, aware that people were staring, aware that she was making a scene. The clerk came back and said, “Ma’am, I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” and Missy had said, “We’re going, okay? We’re going right now,” and with her arm still wrapped around Jo’s shoulders she steered her mother out into the parking lot.

*  *  *

“Wow. I’m really sorry,” said Mary Ellen Weems, the lawyer who’d handled Jo’s divorce. “But I’m not a copyright expert.” Mary Ellen got Jo the name of a man in New York City. When Jo finally got him on the phone, the man had her explain the situation, slowly, then go back and explain it again. By her third time through the story, Jo was starting to suspect that the man charged by fifteen-minute increments, and that he was stretching out their conversation to hit the half-hour mark. Finally, he asked if she’d trademarked “Jumpin’ with Jo.” “The name? The concept? The jump that you do at the end? Any of the moves?”

“The moves are just basic things. Squats and jumping jacks. Anyone can do them. That’s the point!”

“Which may be a problem,” said the attorney. Jo tried to picture him, imagining a plump, middle-aged man in a three-piece suit, a man who’d never done a squat or a star jump in his life. “If your husband claims that these are exercises that any kid who’s ever taken a gym class learned, you’re going to have a problem proving that he stole proprietary material from you.”

Jo closed her eyes. “Sir,” she said. “I know you can’t see it. But I made a tape called
Jumpin’ with Jo
that starts off with me saying ‘Anyone can do these moves’ and ends with me doing a star jump and, in between, includes exactly the same routine that Nonie is doing. A routine that she learned by taking a class that I teach. With the same modifications for women who are older, or who have bad knees. It’s my routine, sir.” Tears had squeezed out of the corners of her eyes and were dripping down her cheeks. She didn’t think she’d ever been so angry in her life, at least not since Bethie had told her that she’d been raped.

The man quoted Jo the price of his retainer. She stifled a gasp and said, “I’ll get back to you,” and hung up the phone and held it, breathing deeply, before squeezing her eyes shut and punching in the Atlanta area code. She hated asking her sister for help, but she had nowhere else to turn.

“Oh, God,” Bethie said then, after Jo had gotten the whole
story out. “That motherfucker. That bastard. Tell me what you need.”

“I need a loan.” The words felt like dead worms in Jo’s mouth.

“I don’t know why you didn’t ask me to finance the business,” Bethie said, and Jo murmured that yes, in retrospect, that would have been a very good idea indeed. She hadn’t gone to Bethie because she hadn’t wanted Bethie to confirm that it was a bad idea or, worse, to have her sister lie and say that it was a great idea, and invest, and lose her money, just to show that she believed in her sister, that she thought that Jo was as smart and as savvy as she herself was, when, clearly, Jo was not. Bethie was the winner, the family success story, the one who’d turned peaches and sugar and hand-labeled Mason jars into a fortune. Jo was the loser, the punch line, the one who’d had her one big idea stolen by her unfaithful ex-husband and her former best friend.
Can’t get worse.
What a dummy.

“But never mind. Let’s not look back. Do you like the lawyer you talked to?” Bethie asked.

Jo gripped the phone hard, wrapping the cord tightly around her index finger. “He was fine. Expensive, though.”

“Let me help.” Bethie’s voice was firm, and kind, and full of a righteous rage that left Jo weak with gratitude.

“Okay,” she whispered.

“I don’t get it,” Lila drawled from the couch, once Jo had hung up. Lila had taken advantage of her mother’s inattention and helped herself to a pint of Ben & Jerry’s. Her mouth was lined in chocolate-brown, and Jo saw a chocolate chunk melting on the couch’s blue upholstery. She’d told Lila, over and over, to please not take food out of the kitchen, but Lila didn’t listen. “If it was really your idea, why didn’t you register it or something?”

“I never imagined that your father would try to steal it.” Jo knew she wasn’t supposed to bad-mouth Dave in front of the kids. That was Divorced Parenting 101. No matter what your ex did or how enraged it made you, you weren’t allowed to complain about the man who was, after all, the father of your children. But Jo couldn’t stop herself.