Practical Jean (5 page)

Chapter 5

I
n her studio-shop at the end of Kotemee's Main Street, under a hanging tungsten light pulled low, Jean worked on
Kudzu Attack!
It was to be one of the biggest ceramics she'd ever finished, perhaps four feet tall, on a three-foot-square base. She'd been inspired to create it after watching a TV documentary about the invasive and virulent growth of the kudzu vine in the southeastern United States. Kudzu could grow up to a foot a day, Jean had learned, and was amazingly versatile: you could eat it, make tea from it, make baskets or fences from it, bale it like hay and feed it to cattle, or watch as it choked the life out of an entire precious forest. But what Jean loved about kudzu more than anything was its leaf. It was completely unremarkable. There was nothing jagged or menacing about it. Grouped in threes, with gentle, rounded lobes, it seemed the friendliest, most innocent leaf in the world. But when you knew what it could do, you looked at it differently. To Jean, the kudzu leaf looked like a stingray slicing through the water. While she was at her mother's, Jean had thought often about
Kudzu Attack!
She imagined a tall, swarming wave of kudzu leaves and vines curling over a small, crouching, innocent miniature oak, majestic and tragic and serene all at once, like the hand of Doom.

Just now she was working on the leaves. She pinched off cherry-sized pieces of porcelain clay and wedged them with the heel of her hand to press out the air, then worked and shaped them between her thumbs and fingers until each piece was three inches wide and paper thin. Then she selected a trim knife from her wall of tools and cut each leaf precisely, made ribs with threads of clay rubbed between her palms and laid them in, then etched in the veins with a pin tool. Each leaf took her seven or eight minutes and she figured she'd need about a hundred and sixty in all. After that she'd work on a hundred feet of vine. She had to keep the leaves under plastic so they wouldn't dry out entirely, so they'd get leathery but not crisp. And when she was ready she'd build it all without wire—she hated wire because it seemed like cheating. She thought if nature could construct something without wire, then she could as well, even if it took her five, or ten, or fifty tries.

Jean knew that once she had finally completed
Kudzu Attack!
she would never be able to sell it. The piece would sit in her showroom, on its own dedicated table, for as long as she owned the shop. Probably for as long as she was alive. People would come in and admire it, or gawk at it, or snicker. But nobody would be able to imagine it as a thing in their home. So it would be with Jean until she died. And then someone would try to move it, and it would crumble to pieces.

But it didn't matter.

Growing up, Jean had learned never to tell her family about her plans for projects. She'd made the mistake a couple of times, letting out a hint of her idea, like a wisp of smoke, and whoever she had told would scoff and say it was impossible, and not only impossible but pointless. They'd blow the smoke away from in front of her eyes and the idea, or Jean's will to realize it, would vaporize. And so she never spoke of her ideas in anything but generalities—something big, something new, something exciting—until she had accomplished whatever she'd imagined. Then they could laugh all they wanted. That was the singular sort of practicality that Jean had always embraced.

And with that experience, she knew she could never tell anyone about the other idea that was beginning to form in her mind, the “new understanding” she had hinted at to Welland in his office. It was still just a strange, exhilarating swirl of smoke, and until it was solid and real she could never say a word. People just would not understand.

The bell above the shop's front door jingled and Jean looked up to see Natalie Skilbeck floating in like a bit of dandelion fluff on a breeze.

“Hey there, hon,” said Natalie. She held up a little brown paper bag. “I brought you a cupcake.”

“Oh, gosh. Aren't you sweet!”

Natalie closed the door and stepped wide around a blue-glazed piece set on the floor that Jean called
Night Stalker
—a flaring sheaf of wormwood plants with reaching herbaceous fingers that tended to catch on nylons and skirts and tear a nice big hole. She dropped the paper bag on Jean's work table. “Chocolate,” she said. “I hope you approve. They just put out a fresh batch at Dilman's and I said, hey, I'll bet Jean needs a treat.”

“You are a mind reader.” Jean dug into the bag. “I was starting to get woozy.”

“That's what I'm here for,” said Natalie. “One of these days I'm going to buy their Butter-Pistachio No-Conscience Torte. I just have to get up the nerve.”

Natalie owned a dog grooming shop over on Kanter Street, which came perpendicular to Main, and she'd been good friends with Jean for twenty-three years, ever since Jean had taken Milkweed, the Bichon Frise she'd once owned, for a trim. Of her Kotemee friends, Natalie was probably the one Jean trusted the most, because of the shared experience of being Business Association members, because Natalie unfailingly said what was on her mind, and, to some small degree, because Natalie was a smidge over her ideal weight, just like Jean.

Natalie looked at the sleeve of her mauve knit top and
tsk
-ed. “Collies,” she said with disgust and brushed at the hairs with sharp chopping motions of her hand. It was with a similar sort of gesture, Jean imagined, that Natalie had divorced her husband, Sandeep. “So how's my girl doing?”

“I'm doing just fine!” said Jean, and she bit into the cupcake. “Mmm, oh, this is delectable.” She caught a crumb as it tumbled from her mouth. “Really, I thought I was going to faint.”

“Hon, you can't let your blood sugar get so low. I swear that's why so many women slam their cars into telephone poles.”

Jean paused. “I didn't know it was so many.”

“Oh, it's a lot.”

“Well, I just get so focused when I'm working.”

“You're really going to town here,” Natalie said, surveying the table. “What's it going to be?”

“Oh, you know. Just one of my silly contraptions.”

Natalie pursed her red lips until they looked like a smushed raspberry and gave her a disapproving look. “Jean, don't talk like that. You're always so disparaging of your own talents. I wish I had half your skill with sharp objects. I know a couple of Pekinese bitches who could use a nice, quick behavior modification.” She made an elegant stab-rip motion as she said it.

Jean shielded her eyes with a chocolatey hand and felt herself blush. She had long ago stopped feeling odd about the fact that she blushed more around Natalie than she normally did. In some way she had accepted that Natalie's role in their friendship was to be mildly shocking, and hers was to be mildly shocked. It was almost an arrangement, a negotiation that suited them both. “The way you talk sometimes, Natalie,” said Jean, “I feel like I'm in one of those gangster rap videos.”

“Bitches is a technical term, Jean. I didn't say they were ho's. Although it would be completely and entirely fitting.”

Jean leaned away from the table and knocked the crumbs from her hands. “So, did you read my message? Can you come tonight? It's just casual, for drinks.”

“Of course.” Natalie touched the corner of her mouth to indicate a smudge of chocolate on Jean's, and Jean attended to it with one of the stiff paper towels she always kept near a bucket of water when she was working. “It's understandable you might want some company after everything. Did I tell you I thought the funeral was lovely? Although the minister was a bit wordy, I thought, a bit God-ish.”

“It's not that I need company,” said Jean. “It's just that seeing so many of my friends at the church, I thought, gee, we haven't all been together in one place for so long.” Talking about the funeral brought to mind what Milt had said, about being stone-faced. Looking back, she realized she probably hadn't been at her best; a little numb, maybe. A bit hollow. Natalie was kind not to mention it.

“Did you want me to bring anything? Apple pie? More cupcakes? I'll march right back up to Dilman's. I mean, the smallest excuse will do.”

“Actually,” said Jean, “Adele mentioned she might bring some treats from a place she knows in the city. She says their butter tarts are the work of the Devil.”

Natalie breathed in deep and slow in a way that suggested she was displeased or annoyed, and Jean knew what was on her mind even before she said, “Adele Farbridge?”

“Yes, you remember her.”

Natalie hummed a small note of assent and nodded, looking off at the half dozen pieces in Jean's
Bleeding Heart
series set on display shelves along the wall. “I know she's an old friend of yours and everything, and you invite who you want. I just find her a bit condescending, that's all. She's got this whole city attitude, like we're hicks living in a quaint little tourist town and she's Miss Queen of the Urban Realm. Like if she wanted to, she could fuck her choice of our husbands without a word of protest. Except she couldn't be bothered.”

“You are terrible.”

“Well, doesn't she act like that? The way she drops names and gossip as if she's got everybody you read about in the morning paper on speed-dial.”

Jean shook her head and waved her hands. “I don't see it and I don't want to hear it. You're my friend and she's my friend and everybody should just get along, and if you loved me at all you would.”

“Hon,” Natalie batted her lashes and pouted, “what says ‘love' like a chocolate cupcake?”

“I think you two don't like each other because—”

“She said she doesn't like me?”

Jean hesitated, and then lied. “No, no. But there's obviously an atmosphere around you two, and if anything it's because you're too much the same.” Natalie made a scoffing sound that Jean thought it best to ignore. “Anyway, Louise will be there and you like Louise.”

“Yes, Louise is fine. A little . . . no, she's fine.”

“Maybe Dorothy Perks, too. If she can find somebody to take care of Roy.”

The bell above the door chimed and Jean and Natalie watched as two elderly women made their way into Jean's shop. They looked to Jean to be in their late seventies at least, wearing their day-trip attire—smart khakis and blouses, with sunglasses on chains around their necks and little cotton hats on their white heads—and when they saw they weren't alone they trilled, “Hello,” and Jean said, “Come on in!” They advanced tentatively on their comfortable shoes, keeping their hands and purses close to their sides, the way they might have while walking through a crowd of grasping slum children in Mumbai. But Jean knew that they were only being careful; they respected the fragility of the things around them, they understood it, because they themselves were just as delicate, their lives were filled with fragility—Ceramics “R” Us—and they were going to take their time.

“Just have a look around,” said Jean. “Let me know if you have any questions.”

“Thank you,” said the lady in the sea-green top, speaking for her companion in yellow.

Jean made sure to smile, but watching these women, she felt a profound unease. The force of the feeling surprised her, and held her. She couldn't shake the idea that these women considered themselves the lucky ones—existing without debilitating pain, unlike so many their age—and yet even they were surely living diminished lives. Jean had only to look at them to know their limbs were stiff and sore, their eyes were weak, their skin had gone papery and lax, the internal systems of their bodies were no longer reliable. They were faint remainders of what they once had been, mere impressions left in the sand, and the things in the past that had made them feel vital and alive were now beyond their reach. Every day for them was another accounting of all that had been lost, and as they walked about in their clean cottons, the threat of imminent disease and distress followed them like a black hound on a leash, and they could never be rid of it. They would argue, if anyone said this to them. “Oh no,” they might protest. “We're quite capable and content.” But Jean knew what she knew. The signs of change, the incremental deficiencies, were already showing up in her own body; there was no doubt where things were headed. So she was distressed for these women, as they ventured toward the wall of display shelves. She felt worse for them than for her mother. The truth of it was, Jean thought, her mother was the lucky one now.

And then the woman in yellow picked up a piece that Jean called simply
Rosemary
—her realization of the spindly herb: a foot and a half tall, spiky with tiny blade-like leaves, and so realistic it almost wavered in the breeze. Before Jean could warn her, the woman tipped the piece over looking for a price on the bottom, and it snapped off at the stem and smashed to dust on the floor.

“Oh, no!” gasped the woman, a hand to her mouth.

“What an old twat,” Natalie whispered.

At the house that night, before the women arrived, Milt busied himself in the kitchen, cubing cheese, uncanning olives and smoked almonds, dishing out tortilla chips, and mixing up a big batch of Mojitos. He was wearing his favorite blue shirt with tiny black checks, Jean noted. And over that he wore his charcoal-gray sweater vest, which he liked because he thought it made him look “trimmer.” The fact that it was a fall-winter accessory didn't seem to register.

“You're going to be hot in that vest,” Jean warned him. “You should just take it off.”

“I won't be hot,” said Milt. “I'll be drinking Mojitos.”

He had a buoyancy about him that contrasted his side-combed hair and buttoned sleeves, and Jean realized that having endured three months of forced abstinence from any female presence in the house, he was now about to go on a bender.