They do so little. Their connection seems so inconsequential once Jesse is away from it. By the time she gets home again, she often can’t remember what it was they talked about.
“If I knocked out this wall,” Alice is saying, rapping the one dividing the bedroom from the porch, “I’d have a tree house to sleep in.”
“You might get a little spooked out here at night all by yourself. This far out, you’re a ways from your next neighbor.” Jesse prides herself on being an ethical broker, not just selling someone a house, but the right house.
“I won’t be alone,” she says. “A friend’s moving down from Kansas City.”
“Ah,” Jesse says, and pauses so long in her speculation on Alice’s personal life that Alice laughs.
“You’re subtle. I’ll say that for you.”
“You mean how I didn’t swallow my gum? I know. I’m smooth.” Jesse yanks open a stuck door she doesn’t remember and pokes her head into a cedar closet. “You must really like it here,” she says to Alice. “To be sinking all these roots.”
“I think the part I like
is
the roots. I’ve moved ... I think six times in the past ten years or so. One reason or another,” she says, lifting a hand, waving away the bother of further explanation. “Letting things go as I went, lightening my load. Now I’m practically a Berber—just my tent, my pot and my goat. I’d like to stop awhile. Add a cup and a plate. Hang a picture. You have to understand this. I mean, it’s the impulse you’ve followed yourself.”
“Because I’ve stayed here?” Jesse says, then shakes her head. “That’s a complicated business, not a simple one. People like you—”
“Please. Don’t say ‘people like me.’”
“I’m sorry. You, then. You come out from the city and think small means simple when all it really means is complicated in a smaller space. Which sometimes adds to the complication.”
In the middle of saying this, Jesse’s regular thoughts are interrupted by a special bulletin from Wayne. First she thinks it’s just some kind of free association, that when she thinks “complication,” images of Wayne instantly follow. Then she realizes it’s his smell, that there are trace elements of Aramis in the air. Then she catches Alice’s straight-on gaze shifting to something just beyond Jesse’s shoulder. Jesse turns to see what she is looking at.
He is standing breathless in the doorway. He must have seen the Bronco parked outside and thought.... He has already seen his mistake, but it’s too late. Anyone looking at him, looking at Jesse, would know. Alice Avery could be a post, and know.
“My friend Wayne,” Jesse says. No point pretending he’s the meter reader.
He nods. “I was just passing by. Saw your truck. I got a shipment for you. Salt and pepper shakers.” He says this and they listen and no one believes a word. The worst of it is that Jesse can’t even feel fear. Her only emotion at the moment is a terrible sadness that because she has to show Alice the rest of the house, she won’t be able to have this time with Wayne. She has lost one of their finite number of times left together.
That night, Laurel and Claude Owen are by to play Sheepshead. Laurel is Jesse’s oldest friend, which is to say they grew up on the same block and have known each other since before kindergarten, since before everything. Claude is originally from Wisconsin, where they play this great stupid card game—with tens higher than kings, and queens and jacks and all diamonds as trumps, and partnerships that split up and re-form hand by hand—and he has taught them all. They’re hooked on it now, there’s no prying them away from it. They play over here most of the time, so Claude and Laurel can hire a sitter and get away from their kids for a few hours.
Neal has decided to be the picker this hand and is looking over what he got in the blind, figuring out which four cards he will bury for points. This will take forever. He is an impossibly deliberate player.
“I can fold out the sofa bed for you guys,” Jesse says to Claude and Laurel. “In case we don’t get to play this hand until morning.”
“I only play more brilliantly under this kind of pressure,” Neal says. He is a mauerer, meaning he never picks unless he is holding the hand of the century. And now he’s grinning at whatever bonus he got in the blind. Trying to rattle everyone.
“Are you going to Peg’s shower Tuesday?” Laurel says.
Jesse rolls her eyes.
“Oh, come on. It’ll be fun. They’re supposed to have a male stripper come and surprise her.”
“I already got Peggy Palumbo a toaster oven for her first marriage, even though I knew Greg was already sleeping around even before the wedding. Now I’m going to have to shell out for sexy lingerie she can wear on her honeymoon with Rich Coombs, who you just know has long yellow toenails and pee stains on his Jockey shorts. Peg doesn’t have to wear black lace to get him turned on. All she has to do is show up. Actually, she could probably just phone in.”
“Sometimes I’m sorry I couldn’t have been born a woman,” Neal says, not looking up from his hand, “and instead of sports talk and sexual bragging, I could have deep, sensitive conversations with my girlfriends.”
“Yeah,” Claude says. “Bonding conversations.”
It was Laurel who fixed up Jesse and Neal in the first place. He is Laurel’s cousin. Jesse didn’t know him in high school. He grew up in Haney’s Corners, came to New Jerusalem to take on the cave, which his family had started him off with instead of one of their carnivals—hotbeds of trouble.
The three of them, Laurel and Jesse and Neal, went together over to Ted Gates’s Wound Day party. Before he came to work at the Texaco station, Ted had quit high school and signed up with the army and got shipped to Vietnam for about ten minutes, one of which was an extremely bad minute of getting shot in fifteen or so places. To commemorate this tiny piece of stopped time, he would celebrate every year by laying in several pony kegs, pinning his Purple Heart to his T-shirt, and letting anyone who wanted see his scars. “For free.”
Jesse liked Neal straightaway. She was practically sold on him by the time they left the party. They’d spent most of it talking, drinking paper cups of foamy beer, sitting side by side on a rusty swing set left behind by whoever had Ted’s house before him. On the way home, Jesse hugged Laurel and, out of Neal’s earshot, told her he was the nicest thing anyone had ever done for her.
She had never met anyone who was more of a sure thing, sure to stay put in her life now that he’d walked through its door. Now she could unhook her hopes from lost love. Now she didn’t have to go looking for a future.
Laurel was the one who went on to a big future, first to college, where she met Claude. When they graduated, they got married and began moving around a lot so Claude could set up QwikLube franchises. They’ve lived in Flint, Michigan, in Calgary up in Canada, in Belgium, and for a year in Abu Dhabi. Each of their four kids was born in a different place. Now Claude has been transferred to a territory covering the middle southern states, and is working out of New Jerusalem to make Laurel happy. She wanted to come home for a while to be near her mother and sisters. She and Claude have been back less than a year, and don’t really know how long they’ll be staying before he gets sent off somewhere else.
When Jesse thinks about Laurel, it’s mostly as she used to be, in grade school and junior high and high school. When she was so shy about her skinny legs, she tried to get Miss Thorpe, the gym teacher, to let her play basketball in her raincoat. When she brought strange hot lunches to school, mysterious murky soups and stews packed into a widemouthed thermos by her mother, who is a strict vegetarian. Jesse remembers the thick slices of dense, dark bread Laurel would eat silently while everyone else at the table had steam table cheeseburgers and little glass cups of pudding with a rubbery skin on top.
Jesse thinks she probably remembers Laurel’s younger self better than Laurel does. Living her whole life in this one place sometimes makes Jesse feel as though she is holding the heavy scrapbook of her friends’ pasts, while they’re able to move streamlined into unfurnished presents. It’s an extension of the feeling she used to have as a girl standing in the Goudys’ pasture, her Schwinn propped against her hip as she’d watch the long-distance trains shrilling past, on their way from here to there, New Jerusalem being neither.
She missed the one fast chance she had to slip out—when Tom Bellini came first to Mexico City scouting the U.S. women’s team, then down to Missouri later that summer, trying to persuade Jesse to endorse a signature racing suit for his sportswear company. He had a mock-up with him, designed like a tennis sweater, only with the colors reversed—navy with a V-neck bordered in white and maroon. He wanted her to sign her name, to be replicated on thousands of these suits, and then go on a ten-city promotion tour with him. She couldn’t tell if, along with this offer, he was flirting with her.
But by then she was wanting to cut free from swimming, which seemed to have taken so much from her and given so little back, really. Plus she had just started up with Neal, who stood solid and unblinking in front of her, holding her hand lest she drift back up into the ozone, offering her the alternative of himself.
The night is so hot, it really doesn’t seem like any relief from the day. Neal has offered to set up the card table down in the cave, where it is always cool no matter what, but Claude is with Willie on this one. The caverns creep him out. And so the four of them are sitting around the dining room table between two roaring box fans, drinking beer out of sweating bottles and Cokes poured over lots of ice, and eating Cheetos, which Claude says is the official snack food of Sheepshead. They’ve got the oldies station on the radio in the living room. Little Eva is singing, “So come on, come on,
do ...
the Loco-Motion with me.”
“I like imagining this scene,” Claude says as long as they’re waiting forever for Neal to get his plan of attack together. “There’s this party. Middle-aged folks, but still rockers. Like us. And there’s this black woman there and she’s just one of the bunch, there with her husband. They have kids. She works for the phone company. She’s nobody, like everybody. And then this song comes on and she smiles and she says, ‘That’s me. I was Little Eva.’”
Jesse doesn’t say anything. No one else draws the analogy between one-hit rock stars and one-race swimmers, members of the same sorority of failed expectation.
She looks off into the living room, where Willie is doing a sulky dance by himself. He has been in there, muttering and brooding around the floor for most of an hour. He knows, because Claude stupidly told him once, that there is a five-handed version of Sheepshead that could include him.
Jesse is hugely uncomfortable. This just started lately. She can’t find a sitting position that doesn’t ache somewhere. She has terrible gas. She feels as though she is carrying three squabbling toddlers instead of the one tiny girl Dr. Ruben assures her is the sole occupant of her uterus.
Neal takes the first four tricks of the hand, which does not bode well for their chances against him. Trumps are falling like dead leaves. He’s whistling “We’re in the Money,” curling a frizzy lock of beard around his index finger, and looking heavenward. He almost never takes a hand. Either he’s too timid to be picker, or he has some failure of nerve along the way and trips on his game plan. Jesse doesn’t care that his winning the hand will put her score in the hole. It’s still fun watching him take tricks with various flourishes.
The phone rings into the last two of these tricks.
“I’ve got a big nothing, so just lay them down for me any old way,” she says, handing her cards to Laurel as she creaks up off the chair, as though being hoisted by an invisible winch. The closest extension is the wall phone in the kitchen. She picks up, and before she can even say hello, he’s saying, “I love you. I’m crazy with it. I had to call. Don’t be mad. Just say you’re sorry I have the wrong number.”
Jesse’s a beat late.
“Say it.”
“I think you have the wrong number.”
She walks slowly back to the table. She should be furious. Instead she’s thrilled.
“They wanted somebody else,” she tells the others.
They.
Afraid to give him so much as a gender.
Sunday afternoon, she leaves the gift shop in the hands of Linda Mazur—an almost impossibly responsible and good-natured high school girl who is working for them this summer—while Jesse takes William swimming. She hasn’t stopped, as she told Alice Avery, only taken swimming away from sidelong glances, stopwatch eyes, which is what she gets if she shows up at either of the pools she trained in here—the high school or the country club. Now she goes only with Willie, out to the old Tyler quarry. It’s so far from town and so enfolded in trees that it has been forgotten by one generation of rope swingers and inner tube floaters and so, lost to a new one. For the several years they’ve been coming here, she and Willie have had the quarry to themselves.
Usually he loafs inside his tube while Jesse does languid laps. Today they are both just flattened with relief to be submerged away from the heat. Willie idles in his tire while Jesse floats on a plastic blow-up raft, her hair drifting out behind her, her belly a small island. After a while, he paddles over.
“Will the baby come out soon?” He touches her stomach lightly.
“September. It’ll be cooler by then.”
“A girl baby.”
“Yes. Olivia. You’ll like her.”
“Maybe.” He can be pretty cagey sometimes.
“Oh, Cowboy,” she says. He bats her away with a hand in the air. He pretends to hate (but really loves, she’s sure) this old, teasing name that goes back to when the family had fantasies about what he’d be when he grew up. Back before it became absolutely clear that he wouldn’t.
She visors her eyes with her hand and watches him drift away from her. He’s splayed out across his inner tube, his calves and arms submerged, his head thrown back over the rubber, the crown grazing the water. His hair is red like Jesse’s, although fine and straight instead of coarse and wavy, and there’s much less of it now. She knows he frets about this; she has caught him combing this way and that in front of the bathroom mirror. Darlene at Supercuts sold him some styling mousse, which puffs it up like a little souffle on top. He thinks this is an improvement.