The View from Mount Joy

by Lorna Landvik

  “Welcome, shoppers,” I said, and there was an immediate buzz on the floor.

  After Darva’s death, there hadn’t been any contest giveaways until my customers, after waiting what they thought was a respectful time, politely enquired as to the possibility of their return. Still not having the heart for it, I had turned the job over to Stan, who might have had the heart but not the talent; he was not one to improvise, and he got nervous behind the mike, sometimes blurting out contests inspired by whatever his eyes landed on in the store. Once he announced that if anyone had feminine hygiene products in their cart, they’d win half a case of beans (we were having a hard time moving a new generic brand). Despite the presence of at least twenty female shoppers, no one fessed up.

  “A special contest today for anyone shopping on this beautiful morning in November. Anyone who can sing the song ‘Alfie’ will win”—I thought quickly what Jenny might like—“an arrangement of her choice from our new floral stand. Meet me at Banana Square.”

  “All right,” said Eileen, as I cut through the break room. She was reading Woman’s Day and eating a little packet of crackers. “It’s about time.”

  The store hadn’t been very busy, and there were only seven people standing by the six-foot banana. I was pierced with a flare of disappointment when I didn’t see Jenny—had she left?

  “Hi, Joe,” said a voice, and my heart, which had just returned to its normal pace, stepped on the gas.

  I turned around and pretended to be surprised.

  “Jenny Baldacci!” I said. “Did you come back to Minneapolis to bake another lemon meringue pie?”

  I took a mental picture of the smile she offered.

  “Wow, you’ve got a good memory. Actually I’m just picking up a few things for my mom.”

  “Hey,” said Swanny Swanson, a big barrel-chested guy whose grocery basket contained a couple of bottles of Geritol and a head of iceberg lettuce. “Let’s get this show on the road. I know all the words to ‘Alfie.’”

  “All right,” I said to the small gathering. “Who else?” I raised an eyebrow at Jenny.

  “Don’t look at me,” she said.

  “But you played it in the junior high concert!”

  “It was an instrumental, Joe,” she said. “I didn’t learn the words.”

  “Okay,” I said, turning toward the others. I was disappointed I wouldn’t be giving Jenny a bouquet of flowers. “Just Swanny?”

  No one else took the bait, and so the old Ford plant foreman began to sing “Alfie,” his hands splayed out at his sides. It wasn’t Dionne Warwick, but it wasn’t bad.

  “All right,” I said after he accepted his applause. “Get yourself over to the Floral Cart, Swanny, and pick out your flowers.”

  “You said the winner would pick out an arrangement of her choice,” he said with a hard little chuckle. “Didn’t think a guy would win, huh?”

  “Guess not,” I admitted. He and the other shoppers dispersed, and I was more relieved than I could say to see them go.

  I put my hands in the pockets of my apron so I wouldn’t be tempted to put them around her.

  “So,” I said, suddenly shy. “Jenny Baldacci.”

  “You seem to like to say my name,” she noted.

  A schoolboy blush stained my thirty-five-year-old face.

  “It’s a pretty name. I’m glad you didn’t take your husband’s.” Saying the words your husband, I felt some of my buoyancy deflate, and I smiled extra hard, trying to raise it again.

  “I…I’m not married anymore.”

  If the buoyancy I thought was waning had ballooned any more, I would have been floating around the ceiling light fixtures.

  “You’re not…married anymore?”

  The lovely Jenny Baldacci shook her head. “He decided he needed his ‘freedom.’”

  “What is he, nuts?”

  She smiled at the fervor of my question, but the happiness on her face muted quickly.

  “No…just not in love anymore.”

  “Then for sure he’s nuts.” I picked an apple off the display cart, and after polishing it on my shirt, I gave it to her. “We just got these in from Washington. They’re an especially good crop.”

  “Thanks,” she said, and bit right into it. As she chewed, she nodded, and after she swallowed (me watching her throat move, entranced), she asked, “How’d you know apples are my favorite fruit?”

  I felt like I’d broken the plate with the first ball at a state fair game booth.

  “Because I’m an intuitive sumbitch,” I said, and she laughed. “Also sensitive like you wouldn’t believe. So how long are you here for? When can I take you out for dinner?”

  “I’m here—” The merriment in her eyes pooled into seriousness. “I’m here to stay. At least for a while. I just moved back. I’m at my parents’ house now, but I’ll be moving into my sister’s apartment when my stuff gets here.”

  “That answers one question,” I said.

  “Hey, Joe,” said Mrs. Kirkpatrick, adjusting a hair curler above her ear. “How come those mixed vegetables you’ve got on sale aren’t in aisle seven?”

  “They’re not canned,” I said. “They’re frozen.”

  “That would explain why I couldn’t find them,” muttered Mrs. Kirkpatrick, turning back to her cart.

  “The other question—”

  “About dinner?” asked Jenny. “I’d love to.”

  “Good. How about tomorrow night?”

  “Is this a consolation prize for not knowing the words to ‘Alfie’?”

  “No, it’s the grand prize for looking the prettiest while eating an apple.”

  She took another bite, managing the multidextrous task of chewing and smiling at the same time.

  We went downtown, to the Café di Napoli, an Italian restaurant with a run-down charm. We split a plate of eggplant parmigiana and a bigger plate of spaghetti and meatballs.

  “Once Darva and I skipped school to see a matinee of The Godfather,” I said after we had pushed away our plates. “Then we ate here. It was a very Italian kind of day.”

  Surprising me, Jenny reached across the table and took my hand. “I bet you two had a lot of fun.”

  Surprising myself, I teared up. Jeez, I was going to bawl in front of this woman whom, more than anything, I wanted to impress.

  “Sorry,” I said, opening my eyes wide, as if to air-dry my eyeballs. “Sometimes…” I blinked, the air-dry method not working so well.

  “I know,” said Jenny, and in solidarity, her own eyes welled up. “I still have a hard time with my divorce—even though it’s been more than a year since it was final.”

  “So you…you’ve been living in New York by yourself since then?”

  Jenny nodded and finished the wine in her glass. When I asked her if she wanted to order more, she held her palm toward me and waved it.

  “I’m full.”

  “How about some coffee?”

  “Coffee’d be good.”

  Our waitress, who had treated us as if we were malnourished children, scolding us to eat more and use more butter on our bread, now tried to get us to order dessert.

  “You gotta have something sweet when you’re celebrating,” she said, handing us menus.

  Jenny and I looked at each other and laughed.

  “But we’re not celebrating anything,” I said.

  The waitress smiled, nodding slightly.

  “Oh yes you are.”

  Of course, Jenny said later, she was right; we were celebrating the beginning of us.

  We did allow the waitress to bring us a cannoli to split, but it sat there like a dessert cigar on the plate, untouched as we told more of our stories.

  Jenny had met her husband outside the Eastman School of Music, where she had studied the flute.

  “Is he a musician too?” I asked.

  “Eric?” she asked. “God, no. He’s a stockbroker. He’d come to hear a concert his sister was in. Melanie plays the cello.

  “A
nyway, it was snowing, and I was going to the same concert, and running, because I was late, and the heel of my boot—I was wearing these fancy high-heeled boots, of all the dumb things—gets stuck in the street grate and my foot slides right out of my boot and I go flying in the sleet and snow and fall onto the sidewalk hard enough that I ripped two big holes in the knees of my tights. Anyway, Eric picked me up. Literally. He told me to put my arms around his neck and I did, and he picked me up right there in the street and brought me into the concert hall. Then he ran back out and got my boot.”

  She sighed and smiled, and poked at the cannoli with her fork.

  “And that, as they say, was that. We started dating and after I graduated, I moved to Manhattan to be near him. We got married three years later…and after seven years we got divorced.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, because I could hear in her voice how it still pained her.

  “Don’t be,” she said. “I mean, it’s a shock when the person you love doesn’t love you back the same way, but as more time goes by, I realize he wasn’t so hot. Of course, I thought he was for the longest time; I mean, that’s why you marry someone, right? You wouldn’t marry someone you didn’t think was the most amazing person in the world—” She put down her fork and folded her hands in her lap. “I’m babbling.”

  “No you’re not,” I said, and reached across the table, coaxing her hands off her lap and into mine. “What did you do for work out there?” I asked, sensing that while she had a lot to say about her ex-husband, she didn’t necessarily want to say it now.

  “Oh Joe,” she said, and as she straightened up, she let go of my hands to flick back her thick dark hair. “I got work playing almost right away. Studio work, mostly jazz, although some classical—I played on Ryer Tilden’s first album and then Donita Belmonte’s.”

  “My mom loves Donita Belmonte.”

  “Well, Mrs. A.’s always had excellent musical taste, as I recall. Then I got in this little combo—the Winds in the Willows. I know, kinda corny, but we had so much fun playing together and we got a lot of engagements. But here’s the funny thing—the happier I got in my career, the more Eric seemed to resent it. I know it’s a classic story, but really, who thinks her own husband is going to be jealous of her work, her happiness?” Jenny shook her head. “It was incomprehensible to me. So the more he pouted about me having this gig or that, the more I tried to please him, as if I was the one at fault, you know? Then I was hired to play in the orchestra for the show Susie Loves Harold. There I am, playing eight shows a week on Broadway and doing some work in the daytime with the Winds, and…well, that’s when I think he started his first affair. At least, that’s the first time I found out about an affair he was having. For all I know, it had been going on long before I caught him at it.”

  “Give me his address and I’ll go break his face,” I said, in an okay imitation of Marlon Brando as the Godfather.

  “Oh, you’ve got better things to do,” she said, finally sawing off a chunk of the cannoli with the side of her fork. When she was done, she blotted the powdered sugar on her lips with a napkin and said, “Better things to do with me. That is, if you want to.”

  A squad of cheerleaders somersaulted into my chest, shouting, Score one for the home team!

  Jenny had two sisters and two brothers, and I met them all at Thanksgiving, along with two in-laws, two nieces, and one nephew. Her parents hosted the dinner, a noisy affair with people shouting over one another to be heard, but it was all good-natured, except when a brother who was of one political persuasion began arguing with a sister who was of another.

  Fortunately this argument came just as we were finishing our pumpkin pie and were all ready to leave the table anyway.

  Jenny met my family at one of my mother’s Tuesday night dinners, which was considerably quieter than her family’s but, I hoped, just as entertaining.

  My mother was delighted to host a favorite student—“Really, Jenny, I remember feeling giddy the first time I heard you play”—and even more delighted to see that we were, as she called it, an item.

  Flora was shy, clinging to my arm as if it was a vine and she was Tarzan, but when she heard Jenny was a musician, she whispered in my ear, asking if I thought she should play the piano for her.

  “I bet she’d really like that,” I whispered back, and very solemnly, with the proud, straight-backed posture she inherited from her mother, Flora walked to the piano, pretended to flip back the tails of her tuxedo, sat down, and played “Clouds.” Emboldened by our applause, she proceeded to play “The Circle Song.”

  “Maman loved Joni Mitchell,” she explained, looking over her shoulder.

  Like an old pro, she played enough but not too much, taking a deep bow after “Both Sides Now” and trying modestly to suppress the smile that wanted to pop off her face.

  “That was really lovely,” said Jenny. “Just lovely.”

  “Merci,” said Flora, deciding, I guess, that the wall would remain up.

  “Il n’y a pas de quoi,” answered Jenny, telling her it was no big deal.

  “Vous parlez français?” asked Flora, surprised.

  “Un peu,” said Jenny. “If you went to Ole Bull High at a certain time and you were a girl, you took French, because we had the coolest teacher ever, Mme. Dumont.”

  “That was my mom’s French teacher!” said Flora.

  “I know,” said Jenny with a kind smile. “And you know what teacher you and I have in common?”

  Flora nodded. “Grand-mère.”

  “That’s right: Mrs. A. Although she’s Mrs. R. now.”

  “I told her she could keep her own name,” said Len, “but she was taken by the shimmering beauty of the name Rusk.”

  “Shimmering beauty,” said my mother with a laugh.

  Shimmering beauty, I thought, looking at my date.

  “So where are you living now, Jenny?” asked Linda.

  “For now, with my sister. She lives in a duplex near Lake Hiawatha.”

  “Carole and I lived together when she and Joe moved to Minneapolis,” said my aunt Beth, “until the man with the shimmeringly beautiful name took her away.”

  “We like women who live with their sisters,” said my mother.

  If a poll had been taken among the adults, Jenny’s approval rating would be through the roof. But it was Flora I was most concerned about; I wanted desperately for my daughter to like this new woman in my life.

  Daughter. Saying, even thinking that word was still a surprise, like a handful of Pop Rocks going off in my mouth. It actually had been one of the easiest decisions of my life.

  “I don’t want to be Flora’s guardian,” I said in my lawyer’s office, “I want to be her father.”

  “It’s not like you haven’t been,” said Gary Conroy, my old defense partner from Granite Creek who’d gone to Minneapolis for law school and stayed. He handled all my store—and now that I had more of it—business. “I mean, she’s lived with you since she was a baby.”

  It was true, but I had let the uncrossed boundaries of my relationship with Darva define the geography of my relationship to Flora, too. I was mon Joe, and even if I had changed her diapers; helped her with her homework; played Mousetrap and Operation and Old Maid and a million other games; built enough structures out of LEGO blocks and Lincoln Logs to populate a major metropolis; read Goodnight Moon and all the Curious George, Dr. Seuss, and Winnie the Pooh books a gazillion times; brought her to work and given her little chores (her reward being permission to go wild with the price gun); and brought her to the dentist and doctor—sometimes with Darva and sometimes without—even though I had done everything a dad does, I had never thought of myself as Papa. But now I did. Now I had to.

  Flora had burst into tears when I told her I was completing the paperwork to officially become her father.

  “Flora,” I said, taking the girl on my lap, “I thought you’d like this.”

  “I do!”

  “Then why are you crying, hone
y?”

  “I don’t like paperwork!”

  This struck me as funny, but I didn’t show it on my face, instead busying myself by smoothing her dark curls with my palm. “What do you mean?”

  “Paper is so…papery! What if it gets thrown away? What if it burns up? What if someone rips it up? Then you won’t be my papa and then I won’t have a mom or a dad!”

  “Someone could rip up all the paper in the world—all the licenses, all the certificates, all the documents, all the legal briefs—and I would still be your dad.”

  The sigh Flora exhaled had more air than I thought her lungs capable of holding.

  “I’m glad,” she said, hugging me, and then she asked, “What’s a legal brief?”

  She continued calling me mon Joe, and then, occasionally, shyly, Papa, but to both of us, it sounded unfinished, and she settled on Papa mon Joe, which I thought perfectly described what I was to her, even though it did sound like the name of a Caribbean restaurant.

  On that Tuesday night at my mother’s, I could see Flora was intrigued with Jenny, but when we sat on the couch together, she planted herself as close to me as she could without sitting on my lap. I knew she was calculating how much time this new woman might take away from her, how much affection. But as the months passed, the math that Flora had figured out was all about addition; nothing was taken away from her. In fact, Jenny added to her life, my life, our life, and when we sat together on the couch it was to Jenny’s side Flora was drawn.

  A year after she had come into the store to pick up milk and bread for her mother (“Okay,” she later admitted, “I wasn’t out of milk or bread. I was just hoping to see you”), Jenny and I got married.

  It was the kind of no-hassle, no-fuss affair I can’t recommend highly enough. The bride wore corduroys and a red sweater textured with lint balls. The groom wore blue flannel (a shirt, not a suit) and jeans. For all we knew, we were dressed only for the simple chore of picking Flora up after school, the day before Thanksgiving vacation was about to start.