I mopped the floor and sang along at the chorus. When the song ended, Izzy took a deep, shoulder-rising breath and then started all over again. She sang the song once more as I poured out the water and refilled the bucket for the second mop. Everyone walked barefoot in this house—double-mopping was essential.
We were singing Jimmy’s song, I was harmonizing with Izzy’s gravelly chorus, when Jimmy came into the kitchen. He wore his cutoff shorts and no shirt or shoes. I tried to look away from the Woody Woodpecker tattoo on his thigh, but then found myself staring at the leather-and-feather necklace nestled into the fur on his chest. I moved my head up higher to Jimmy’s electric stare.
Jimmy was a tattooed drug addict who had used heroin just yesterday, and maybe destroyed this kitchen. Still, all the great things about him—including his handsomeness and charisma—remained as powerful as always. It was easy to see why Sheba loved him so much.
“Oh Jesus Christ, Mary Jane.” Jimmy turned his head away from me and stared at the floor. Then the sink. Then at Izzy on the table. And finally back at me and then to the mop in my hand. His eyes were more sad than electric now. Even his bleached hair looked sad; it hung, as if windblown, over his eyes.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Christ almighty, Mary Jane. Izzy. Ah fuck!” Jimmy slapped his hand into his head.
Izzy stared at him, her big eyes moving from me to Jimmy and back to me. I put the mop in the bucket and leaned the handle against the counter. I didn’t know what to do. Or to say. All this: the drugs, the breaking-things fight, and now the clear remorse were brand-new to me.
“Oh, Mary Jane.” Jimmy was crying now. Real crying, tears tumbling down his cheeks. He stepped into the kitchen and pulled me into him and sobbed with his face buried into the top of my head. I’d never seen a man cry in my life. Not even in a movie.
Jimmy’s shoulders shook and he made actual noises. He was trying to talk, but the crying kept pumping out of him. Izzy hopped off the table and ran to us. She put one arm around me and one around Jimmy and buried her head between our thighs.
“I’m so sorry,” Jimmy sobbed.
“It’s okay, Jimmy, it’s okay. We’re not mad!” Izzy said.
I tried to speak, but it felt like there was a rolled ball of Wonder Bread stuck in my throat.
“You shouldn’t have had to see this.” Jimmy’s words stuttered out through his tears.
“JIMMY! We’re not mad! We love you. We’re not angry.” Izzy spoke for the two of us. I still couldn’t get out a word.
Jimmy started crying harder and then tears were rolling down my face too. I tried not to make a sound, but I could feel little hiccups coming out of me.
“It’s okay. It’s okay.” Izzy rubbed our legs with her tiny hands.
“It’s fine, I swear,” I finally said.
Jimmy pulled his head from mine, and held my face in his hands. “Oh Jesus, now I made you cry too.”
“I’m fine.” I sniffed. “I don’t know why I’m crying.” I laughed a little.
Jimmy stared at me, shaking his head; he wasn’t crying now. Izzy rubbed our legs and studied our faces. I was sniffing and laughing and still crying too.
“I’m just so sorry. I really lost control.”
“JIMMY, WE’RE NOT MAD AT YOU!” Izzy shouted. “Eat Laughing Cow with me, and Mary Jane will feed you milk too.”
Jimmy looked down at Izzy and laughed. And then I really laughed. He picked up Izzy, kissed her cheeks, and carried her to the table. “Let me finish the mopping,” he said to me.
“I’m almost done. I swear it’s fine.” I quickly grabbed the mop and went over the last corners while Jimmy and Izzy sat at the banquette and ate Laughing Cow. What had happened last night seemed so horrible. But after that cry, and then the laugh, I felt ridiculously happy.
“Do you want Mary Jane to hold the carton? She holds it good.”
“Oh, little Izzy, carton is the only way we ever did it in West Virginia. I’m a pro.” Jimmy picked up the milk carton and chugged. Then he held the carton to Izzy’s mouth, at just the right angle so it wouldn’t spill down her chin.
I emptied the bucket in the sink and took off my gloves, and then I scooted onto the bench next to Izzy. I picked up the carton of milk, held it to my mouth, and chugged and chugged and chugged.
“Look how good Mary Jane is!” Izzy pointed at my face. I nodded and kept chugging. I felt like I was breaking the law. And it made me smile.
Over the next hour, everyone drifted into the kitchen. Sheba said since I had cleaned the kitchen, I wasn’t allowed to cook for anyone that day. Izzy wondered how’d we eat if I didn’t cook, which made Dr. Cone say, “Don’t you remember how we ate before Mary Jane joined the family?” The words joined the family pulsated in my head. In my heart. Sheba got up and made omelets with onions, cheddar cheese, and green peppers. I knew I’d be copying that recipe soon. Everything was served on pink paper plates that were left over from Izzy’s birthday party last May.
There was some discussion about the broken dishes. Dr. Cone brought up Buddhism and detachment and the idea that they were just things and had no spiritual value. I wondered if he still counted as Jewish since he really seemed to believe in Buddha more than God. Mrs. Cone said she hated all those dishes anyway, as they had been given to her by her mother and symbolized her mother’s need to impose her value system on Mrs. Cone. I tuned out of the conversation for a while as I thought over those ideas. It had never before occurred to me that sometimes dishes weren’t just dishes, that things could represent ideas in more powerful ways than the ideas themselves.
When I tuned back in, Sheba was insisting that she pay to replace all the dishes. She asked Mrs. Cone where she should buy the new ones.
“Oh.” Mrs. Cone shrugged. “It’s not something I’ve ever done. I don’t get into that kind of stuff.”
Dr. Cone said, “I’d be happy if we used paper plates for the rest of our years. Or ate off newspaper to create less waste.”
“Mary Jane,” Sheba said. “Where does your mother buy things like dishes?”
“I think most people in Roland Park go to Smyth,” I said.
“Of course!” Mrs. Cone nodded. “I feel like a hippie-alien every time I walk into that place. But yes, we can find dishes there.”
Jimmy said, “When I was growing up, all of our glasses were from the gas station.”
Gas stations still offered free glasses when you filled up, but my mother and father never accepted them, no matter how much I begged. I’d given up wanting them.
“I have gas station glasses with Bugs Bunny on them!” Izzy said, and then her face changed as she remembered that all the glasses were now broken.
“I’m so sorry,” Jimmy said. He looked pained.
“No one needs gas station glasses,” Dr. Cone said.
“JIMMY!” Izzy shouted. “I’M NOT MAD!”
Everyone laughed and then Jimmy said, “So, uh, I’ll clean the living room.”
Dr. Cone said, “Yes. I think . . . Well, I think it will make you feel better.”
Izzy said, “Mary Jane and me were gonna do the alphabet with the books.”
“We were going to alphabetize the bookshelves,” I clarified.
Mrs. Cone shook her head and smiled. “Mary Jane, I don’t know what to make of you!”
Sheba leaned over and wrapped her arm around me. “You sort of remind me of myself.”
“Really?” Sheba was so glamorous. And I couldn’t have described what made any human sexy, but I knew that Sheba was exactly that. Sexy. I wasn’t, as far as I could tell, glamorous or sexy in any way. Though maybe I was a sex addict. Would that make me sexy?
“Yeah. Your desire for order. Clarity,” Sheba said. “The need to wrangle chaos into something that can be managed.”
“What’s chaos?” Izzy asked.
“The books on the living room floor,” Dr. Cone said.
“The kitchen when we went to bed last night,” Mrs. Cone sai
d.
“The shit swirling in my brain,” Jimmy said.
After breakfast, Izzy, Jimmy, and I went into the living room. I brought a spiral notebook and a red crayon. I was going to write out the alphabet for Izzy, so she could see the order without having to sing through the song.
“The letter A comes first.” I wrote a giant red A on the first page of the notebook.
Izzy dropped down to the ground like a marionnette who had just had her strings cut. “How do you say A in French?” Izzy asked. In our nightly reading of the book Madeline, I sometimes replaced English words with French ones (like all the girls at Roland Park Country School, I’d been studying French since kindergarten) and this thrilled Izzy.
I pushed some books aside and kneeled on the floor. “Ah, like the doctor put a tongue depressor in your mouth and said, Say ah.”
“Ah,” Izzy said.
“I’ve got an idea.” Jimmy nudged away a few hardcovers with the side of his bare foot and then sat on the ground beside me. “For each letter, we take turns coming up with a song that starts with that letter. And if you can’t think of a song, you get a point. The person who has the most points loses.”
“A, B, C, D,” Izzy sang. “I won.”
“Not yet,” Jimmy said. “Wait till we start working. When we played this as kids, we couldn’t begin until the car was moving.”
“Did your mom and grandma play too?” I asked.
“Yeah. Granny only sang church songs. She just loved when it was her turn on the letter J.”
I worried Jimmy would see me as out of touch like his granny. The only songs I knew were from church, Camp Fire Girls, the twins’ house, or the Broadway soundtracks in my house. Of course, I knew some of Jimmy’s songs now that Izzy and I had played his records so many times. But I figured he wouldn’t want to hear me sing Running Water songs in this game.
“Okay. Let’s start NOW!” Izzy held a book above her head like a trophy.
“Hold on!” I raised my hand like I was in school. Jimmy winked and pointed at me.
“Mary Jane?”
“Before we put the books on the shelves, we need to put them in alphabetical piles on the floor. All the A authors, all the Bs, etc. Then we’ll alphabetize each pile. After that, we’ll shelve them.”
Izzy lowered the book and held it before her face. She squinted as she examined the cover “S. Right?” It was by Saul Bellow.
“That book’s great,” Jimmy said. “But Augie March is even better.”
“S was a good try,” I said. “But you have to look at the first letter of the last name. I put my pointer finger on the last name.
“B?”
“Excellent! Now put all the B books”—I wrote a giant B on a piece of paper, then stood and cleared a spot on the far wall—“here.” I laid the B down on the ground.
Izzy stepped over the books and placed Henderson the Rain King in front of the paper with the B, and then she started singing “A, B, Cs” again to get Jimmy’s game going. Jimmy sang along, poking through books and making a separate pile of his favorites that he said I should try to read. I promised I would, but didn’t look through any of them just then as I was busy writing out the alphabet and finding space for the lettered papers around the room.
When it was Jimmy’s turn, he sang “Bye Bye Blackbird.” I harmonized and Izzy just bopped her head as she didn’t know the words.
I paused nervously at my turn. Then I remembered “Chantilly Lace,” a song from the ’50s that I knew from an album the twins had. If Jimmy could sing “Bye Bye Blackbird,” then “Chantilly Lace” wasn’t so bad. Izzy didn’t know this one either, but she continued to bounce her head to the beat. Jimmy sang with me, in a cartoony, low voice, just like the Big Bopper—the guy who sings it on the album.
We were at songs that started with the letter R when Mrs. Cone and Sheba came into the living room.
“I want to help,” Sheba said.
“Look at the last name,” Izzy said. “When you find the last name, you read the letter, okay? And then you look for the EXACT same letter on the paper and you put the book there. We’re alphabetting. Get it?”
“I think so,” Sheba said.
“Me too.” Mrs. Cone rubbed Izzy’s head and then started picking through the books.
Jimmy explained the song game and Sheba immediately said “Rhinestone Cowboy.”
“Ah, c’mon! No Glen,” Jimmy said.
“He was before your time, baby. You know I don’t love him anymore.” Sheba was staring Jimmy down. They both looked very serious. Had Sheba been a couple with Glen Campbell and did Jimmy hate him because of that? I was scared for a second that they were going to fight again, but soon enough, Jimmy smiled and crossed the room so he was standing right in front of Sheba. And then they locked their faces together, like they had noses made of magnets, and they kissed, deep and wet.
I turned my head and looked away. Izzy didn’t seem to notice. Mrs. Cone watched them with a yearning but slightly anxious look in her eyes. I wondered if she wanted to be Sheba kissing Jimmy. Or maybe she wanted Dr. Cone to kiss her that way. Kissing like that seemed so advanced. Maybe one day I’d just stand lip to lip with someone. For starters.
The longer the kissing went on, the more my face burned. Finally Izzy broke the silence by singing “Rhinestone Cowboy.” I knew the words too, because the twins’ mother owned all of Glen Campbell’s records. When we got to the chorus, Sheba and Jimmy finally stopped kissing and joined in. Mrs. Cone was singing too, but her mind seemed elsewhere. Her face went from the books to Jimmy to the books to Sheba.
We were on the letter V when I had to sing again.
“Uh . . . uh . . .” All I could think of was “My Victory” from church. This pained me so much that I considered taking the point and passing my turn.
“No church songs!” Izzy said, as if she could see into my head.
“Oh! Wait. What about ‘Kumala Vista’? We’ll go by the last word in the title, like the last names on books. V for Vista.” I was so relieved to not sing a church song that I didn’t mind singing a Camp Fire Girls song.
Everyone stopped what they were doing and looked at me. I kneeled on the ground and slapped my knees twice and then my hands together to get the beat. In my head it sounded like cha-cha, pop, cha-cha, pop. . . .
Izzy kneeled and clapped along. And then Jimmy, Sheba, and Mrs. Cone did too.
“Well, shit, Mary Jane, give us the words, will ya?” Jimmy said, smiling.
“You have to repeat after me,” I said. “And follow my hand motions, too.”
“Oh, I love this,” Sheba said. “Is this from that one time you went to sleepaway camp?”
“It’s from Camp Fire Girls. Ready? Repeat after me: FLEA!”
“FLEA!” they all repeated.
“FLEA FLY!”
“Flea fly!”
“FLEA FLY FLOW!”
“Flea fly flow!”
“Kumala!”
“Kumala!”
“Vista!”
“Vista!”
“Kumala, kumala, kumala vista!” I sang in the melody.
“Kumala, kumala, kumala vista!”
“Oh, no, no, no not sevista!”
“Oh, no, no, no not sevista!”
When we got to the end, where you pretend to scratch your body all over, Dr. Cone came into the living room. He sat on the couch and watched us as if we were monkeys in a zoo, his head tilted.
Everyone laughed when the song ended. It was Izzy’s turn to pick the next song and she said, “I want to do ‘Kumala Vista’ again.” And so we did.
Mrs. Cone, Sheba, and Jimmy all wore wigs that night to go out to dinner at Morgan Millard, the only restaurant in Roland Park. Jimmy put on one of Dr. Cone’s suits. It was blue and had wide lapels and bell-bottom pants. He didn’t wear a tie, but he did wear a starched button-down, with the top three buttons open.
“What do you think?” Jimmy asked me as we walked to the car. “Anyone gonna recognize
me?”
“No.” But I did think people would look at him. His wig was black and straight, with bangs across the front. And he was wearing leather sandals. I’d never in my life seen anyone wear leather sandals with a suit.
Mrs. Cone and Sheba were wearing the Swedish sister wigs again. Dr. Cone looked just like himself with his fuzzy, irregular sideburns eating up half his face. I put Izzy in a flouncy pink dress and white patent leather shoes. Just for fun. And Sheba gave me one of her dresses to wear. Also just for fun. It was red with a pattern of black spiderwebs all over it. The dress wasn’t cut low, but the straps were thinner than my bra straps, so it felt like I was being a bit risqué. Sheba was so much taller than I was, the dress probably fell to her upper thigh. On me, it modestly hit my knee.
Dr. and Mrs. Cone got in the front seat, and the rest of us got in the back. Sheba sat by one door, Jimmy sat by the other. Izzy and I squished in the middle. Everyone was talking at once, happily, excitedly. We had finished the bookshelves. Jimmy had recommitted himself to sobriety. And we were going out to a restaurant so no one would have to make dinner or clean up after it.
The car was warm and dark; streetlights cast moving shadows over us like ghosts dancing across our laps. Sheba leaned in close and whispered in my ear, “I think you should just take off the bra.”
“I’ve never done that,” I whispered, even lower. I really didn’t want Dr. Cone or Jimmy to know what we were discussing.
“The dress will look better. Here. Lean forward.”
I leaned forward and Sheba reached down the back of the dress and unhooked my bra. I quickly slipped my arms out of the straps and then pulled the bra out from the neckline. I was definitely being risqué now, though no one seemed to notice. Jimmy and Izzy were singing “Kumala Vista” again, and Dr. and Mrs. Cone were talking about what to do if they ran into someone they knew.
Sheba grabbed the bra and shoved it into her shiny pink handbag. I bit my lip and tried not to laugh. It felt funny to be braless in public: loose and airy. For a second I imagined my nipples having mouths, breathing in oxygen for the first time. I giggled. Sheba did too.
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