Mrs. Everything (45 page)

“I want to be with you,” she said, not caring that it was forward or unladylike. “I want us to be together.”

For a long, awful moment, Harold didn’t answer. In that time, Bethie imagined life without him. No more Saturday nights reminiscing about drag races on Woodward Avenue, or Coach Krantz, or the Thanksgiving Day parade. No more phone calls at nine o’clock just to see how she was doing; no more bouquets that she’d stick in empty Mason jars and smile every time she saw. No more daydreaming about how it would feel to have Harold naked against her; how it would feel to touch the glossy skin of his back and shoulders and the dense curls on his head, to see if he smelled just as spicy up close.

“It won’t be easy,” he said. She could feel his deep voice rumbling right through her.

“I know,” she said.

“You don’t,” said Harold. He sounded glum, but he hadn’t let go of her hand. “Maybe you think you know, but you don’t. You
can’t.” He looked around at the people sitting by the fire, some black, some white, and said, speaking slowly, “You think we come from the same place. We don’t. My Detroit, my family, my history, it’s all different.” His chest rose and fell as he sighed. “Maybe it’s okay here, for us to be together. But this isn’t the world.”

“I can be brave,” she told him. When he didn’t answer, she squeezed his hand and pulled him to his feet. “Want to see my old room?” she asked, remembering what he’d told her at that party long ago.
A closed mouth doesn’t get fed.
Bethie led him into the house, up the stairs, and into the attic, where she’d stayed when she’d first washed up in Atlanta, broken and lost and hating herself.

Harold looked around. There were three single beds in iron frames, a blue-and-white rag rug on the floor and, on a table pushed underneath a window, a record player and a stack of albums. He knelt, flipped through them, pulled one out, and settled it onto the turntable. “Some enchanted evening,” Bethie heard Frank Sinatra singing from
South Pacific
. “You may see a stranger, / You may see a stranger, across a crowded room.” Tears stung her eyes. Harold turned to her, opening his arms, and Bethie stepped into his embrace, settling her cheek against his shoulder, which felt as solid as she’d hoped. She pulled him close, until he was leaning against her, letting him know, without words, that she could be strong, that she could support him, that she could be what he needed, just as he was what she needed.

PART

  four

1987

Jo

N
ana, Nana!” Lila shouted, racing out of the car and into Sarah’s arms. Jo braced herself for scoldings, for her mother’s pursed lips and pointed fingers, but as her teenagers emerged from the station wagon, stretching and yawning, she saw that Sarah was actually giving Lila a hug.

Kindred spirits
, Jo thought, and immediately felt guilty for comparing her youngest daughter to her intolerant, censorious mother . . . but, if she was being honest, she had to admit that the two of them had a surprising affinity.
The Wicked Witch of the West has found her apprentice
, was how Dave put it, and Jo would flush with frustration, not knowing which one of them she was supposed to defend.

“I made rugelach,” Sarah announced, leading Lila into the little brick house on Alhambra Street. In 1985, after twenty-five years at Hudson’s, Sarah had taken a retirement package, but had refused to move, even though, by then, Bethie could have bought her a house in Bloomfield Hills if she’d wanted one.
Why should I move?
Sarah had asked.
Why do I need all those empty rooms
to clean?
She gardened and played bridge and had a regular mah-jongg game, and although she had no real friends, as far as Bethie could tell, she had a range of acquaintances. She’d joined the synagogue’s Community of Care and delivered meals to new mothers twice a week. “I get to hold the babies. That’s the best part,” she’d say. For a while, she’d look meaningfully at Bethie’s midriff when she talked about the babies. Bethie suspected that, at some point, Harold must have taken her aside and explained that no additional grandchildren would be forthcoming. Either that, or the passage of time had done the trick, because right around Bethie’s fortieth birthday, the comments had stopped.

For this visit, to celebrate Sarah’s seventieth birthday, the plan was for the girls to stay with Sarah, all three of them in the bedroom that had once belonged to Bethie and Jo, and Jo was already prepared for Missy and Kim to beg to be allowed to stay with the adults at the hotel instead.
It’s so dark there
, Missy said. It was true that the maple tree had grown to a towering height, and that its leaves kept most of the house in the shade, but that wasn’t what Missy meant. Over the years Jo and Bethie (mostly Bethie) had paid for improvements to the property—a new roof in ’82, new carpeting the year after that, and all new kitchen appliances the year after that. The driveway had been repaved, the landscaping redone, but for all that, the house still felt unchanged. The new kitchen floor was tile, not linoleum, but somehow there was already a worn spot in front of the sink, and Jo suspected that her mother purchased the lowest-wattage light bulbs on the market to save money, which kept the place dim.

“Come on in, everyone,” Sarah said as Bethie and Harold arrived. While Jo and Dave had made the trip from Connecticut by car, her sister and brother-in-law had flown from Atlanta and rented a four-door sedan at the airport. “There’s tea and cookies.”

“Who is she?” Bethie whispered to Jo. “And what has she done with our mother?”

Jo smiled back, but it was a brief smile. Things were still tense between her and her sister, and had been for years. The
blowout at Blue Hill Farm had been part of it. The card Bethie had sent after Lila’s birth, fulsomely congratulating Jo on her commitment to her family, had felt like another slap. In the years since her post-blizzard trip to Atlanta, she’d spent time with Bethie at Thanksgivings and Passover Seders, in Connecticut or in Michigan, or over the last few years, at the beautiful home that Bethie and Harold had purchased in a neighborhood called Buckhead, where, Jo suspected, there weren’t many Jews, even fewer blacks, and maybe no interracial couples at all. The summer visits to Georgia continued, with the rafting trips and the campfires behind Blue Hill Farm, where Bethie would take them to pick raspberries and spend the day. Jo had overheard the two older girls reminiscing, telling Lila how it had been when Bethie had lived on the farm. “It was like a great big slumber party that never ended,” Kim had said. “All the kids slept in the attic, and you could stay up and talk all night.”

“But the hamburgers weren’t real hamburgers,” Missy had added with a frown. “They were made of black bean mush.”

As soon as Lila began nursery school, Jo started dropping the girls off with Aunt Bethie. She’d kiss them goodbye, give Bethie a list of what foods Lila was currently eating (it was easier to list those than to list the foods Lila wouldn’t eat), turn the car around, and drive back home. She would tell herself that a child-free house was as good as a vacation, but all it did was emphasize how little she and Dave had to say to each other. The girls were what bound them and what gave them fodder for conversation. Had they saved enough for Missy’s braces? Did Kim really need to buy a new dress to attend the prom at a different school, or could she just wear the dress she’d worn to her own school dance? Was it worth making an appointment with a psychologist, or would Lila figure out how to control her temper on her own?

Jo would always plan on using the free time to write, to finally begin the novel she’d always imagined writing, or even just a short story, or a poem, but it seemed she had no stories left, other than the ones about local residents that she wrote for the
Avondale Almanac
(her most recent opus had featured an area
man who’d amassed the largest collection of
He-Man
action figures in all of New England). She’d sit in front of the Olivetti that Shelley had given her all those years ago.
Once upon a time
, she would type . . . and then her fingers would stop, and she’d sit, staring at that line, unable to think of what came next. “Write the stories you told us when we were little,” Kim would say. “Those were great!”

But Jo knew her stories weren’t special, or what anyone wanted. Parents were the ones who bought children’s books, and parents wanted sweet stories with beautiful princesses, brave princes, and happy endings, or trees that gave and gave until they were just stumps. They did not want stories like the ones Jo had told Kim and Missy, where the prince was a lazy bungler who kept falling off his horse, and the princess ended up saving both of them, then riding off into the sky for parts unknown with the dragon whose company she preferred to the prince’s. And Lila had hated stories, and bedtime in general. She’d kick and scream at naptime and at night, wailing, “Not tired. NOT TIRED!” until she’d finally collapse, facedown in her crib, and when Jo had tried to pull Lila into her lap for a story during the daytime, Lila would indulge her mother for a page or two, then squirm away, looking for something to break. Jo was in her forties, officially middle-aged, and it was time to accept the truth. She was a reasonably good substitute teacher, and her stories for the
Almanac
were acceptable, but she would never be a writer. In fact, the only thing she felt like writing were the bits of doggerel that popped into her head and hung around like stubborn colds, when she was grading history tests or peeling more carrots that wouldn’t get eaten.
A girl named Jo once had a life / But that’s gone now; she’s only wife.

It might have been easier to endure if Bethie’s success hadn’t been so spectacular. In a few years’ time, her sister had gone from making jam in the kitchen of Blue Hill Farm and selling it at farmers’ markets to selling it at a little shop to supplying what seemed like half of the restaurants and hotels in the South. Jo
wondered about the toll that might exact on her sister’s marriage, but Harold seemed perfectly fine with things. It probably helped that he, too, had started his own business, a security consulting firm. At first, he ran it as a part-time venture, in addition to his work at the bank, but eventually he had more business than he could handle, and he left his job to run the firm, which now employed almost a hundred men and women, many of them veterans.

Bethie and Harold glowed, with success and contentedness, and with, Jo thought, a little meanly, the kind of well-rested good looks you could have only when you were childless. She’d asked her sister about it once, and Bethie had given a firm headshake, hinting that there was some kind of war-related health issue, some reason that they’d chosen not to have children. Jo hadn’t pushed for details. Nor had she told Dave, who probably would have started making mean jokes about precisely what had been shot off Harold in the war. Dave himself had been a full-time student during the draft. Jo suspected that he’d taken a leisurely path to his bachelor’s degree in order to stretch out his student deferment. He hadn’t done anything close to illegal. Still, Jo was aware that this was one more arena in which her sister had bested her. Bethie’s husband was not only successful, and a good provider, he had served his country, had been wounded in combat. As for her husband, he’d once been briefly hospitalized after breaking three bones in his foot when a ten-pound weight had fallen from a shelf.

Jo sighed. Her sister looked at her with a quizzical expression. Bethie had changed her hair again. The Glenn Close in
Fatal Attraction
perm was gone, replaced by a long, layered Diane Keaton in
Baby Boom
bob. Maybe they were just busy, Jo thought. She knew the story of Blue Hill Farm by heart, the myth that her sister had burnished in all of those newspaper profiles, how she and her partners had gone from making jam in small batches in the Blue Hill Farm kitchen to selling it at farmers’ markets, and how one restaurant owner had asked them to make jam for his customers, then two restaurants, then three, then hotels. By 1981, Blue Hill Farm had a dozen wholesale customers, and they’d
shifted their base of operations to a commercial kitchen in Loring Heights. The next year, they’d won an award for outstanding product line in the nation at the Specialty Food Show in New York City, and sent out their first catalog. Jo had paged through the glossy photographs and ecstatic descriptions and wondered if Bethie had missed her, and who she’d found to write about the various jams and dressings. The orders Bethie had written had surpassed every expectation, and two chain grocery stores had started to carry their wares. Bethie and her partners had hired a CFO, a bright young woman with a Wharton degree, and broken ground on construction of a building that would house a much bigger commercial kitchen, in addition to a shop, a restaurant, and a cooking school. On that afternoon, in 1987, Blue Hill Farm was producing around forty thousand jars of preserves daily, in addition to the new product lines rolled out twice a year. The farm itself no longer existed as a commune and had been completely remodeled, the peeling paint scraped off, the floorboards patched, the windows replaced, and a few new bathrooms added, along with modern plumbing. It was a shop/inn/tourist destination, and Bethie was the Blue Hill Farm co-CEO. She looked the part, too, with her hair cut and styled and highlighted, her peasant blouses and bell-bottoms swapped for shoulder pads and sharp Jil Sanders suits. Jo knew that Bethie still fretted about her weight, with her anxiety usually cresting right around the times she knew she’d be seeing her mother, but Jo thought that Bethie still looked good, healthy.