“We have to hurry!” Izzy said.
“Let’s go!” Mrs. Cone said. “Izzy and I made cookies. The radio’s on already.”
The house was narrow with windows only in the front and back. We walked past the living room into the eat-in kitchen that looked out to the tiny backyard. On the center of the round oak table was a plate of chocolate chip cookies, the edges blackened and burned.
“Do you want coffee?” Mrs. Cone asked my mother. “I started to make a pot this morning, then got distracted and never finished.” She laughed and my mother laughed too. I think Mom had grown used to Mrs. Cone by now. We’d been coming every week since Jimmy’s album was released. My father never asked where we went on Sundays after church. As far as I knew, he was content sitting alone in the kitchen, eating the lunch my mother had left out for him.
“Let me help,” my mom said, and she and Mrs. Cone went to the counter and quietly talked while Izzy took my hand and led me to a seat.
A silver transistor radio with a long antenna sat on the table. It looked exactly like the one I had purchased at RadioShack with my summer earnings. The volume was on low, but I could hear Labelle singing “Lady Marmalade.” It was one of my favorite songs and I’d recently bought the 45. Izzy turned up the volume and climbed into my lap when Labelle started singing in French. “Voulez-vous coucher avec moi?” Izzy sang, and I laughed and hugged her and kissed her some more.
“Do you girls want milk?!” Mrs. Cone shouted as if we were down a hall although we were only a few feet away.
“Yes!” Izzy said.
“Sure,” I said.
“I think you’re right about the witch,” Izzy said. We’d been discussing her every time we saw each other. And last Friday, when I’d babysat Izzy at the Roland Park house where Dr. Cone now lived alone, we searched for the witch using flashlights I’d found in the mudroom.
“She definitely moved out, right?”
“YES!” Izzy pumped a tiny fist. “And I haven’t seen her here, either.”
“Nope. I told you, witches don’t like row houses. She’ll never show up here.”
“But, Mary Jane—” Izzy turned and leaned into me; her face grew dark and serious.
“Yeah?”
Izzy whispered. “I found makarino cherries in the fridge.”
I whispered back. “Your mom put them there.”
“She did?” Izzy still whispered.
“Yes. She did.” I’d run into Mrs. Cone at Eddie’s last week. We’d been standing right at the maraschino cherry jars and I confessed to having told Izzy about the witch who had stocked the fridge with maraschino cherries. She had laughed, picked up a jar, and then put it in her cart.
“So there really is NO WITCH here!” Izzy grabbed a black-bottom cookie and bit into it.
My mother and Mrs. Cone brought two glasses of milk and two suede-colored coffees to the table. They were chatting like any two mothers might. It was nothing like the conversations Mrs. Cone used to have with Sheba, but it didn’t sound fake, either.
“Divorce is never easy,” my mother said. As far as I knew, she didn’t have any friends who were divorcées.
“No, but Richard makes it easier than most. It was such a strange summer, you know. Truly amazing and beautiful in so many ways. But it made me see things about myself. Ways that I’d compromised who I really was and what I really wanted.”
“You had wanted to marry a rock star,” I said quietly. Then I jerked my head down toward Izzy in my lap. Thankfully, she was tuned out, focused entirely on the cookie that was breaking into rock-hard shards in her hands.
“You remember! Yeah. I did.” Mrs. Cone’s face looked more freckly in the sunlight pouring in through the window. I could see the younger version of her: fat-cheeked, strawberry-haired, dreaming of tattooed lead singers and a life entirely unlike her own mother’s.
“How much more do we have to wait?” Izzy turned in my lap to face me. She had chocolate goo on her teeth.
My mother lifted her wrist and looked at her watch. “Six minutes.”
“Six minutes.” Izzy shoved the last crescent-moon wedge of cookie into her mouth.
“I’ve gotta tell you,” Mrs. Cone said to my mother, as if the interruption from Izzy hadn’t happened, “how relieved and liberated I feel just being me. Not a doctor’s wife. Not a Roland Park housewife. Just me!”
“Being a wife is a lot more work than husbands ever give us credit for!” my mother said.
“How much longer now?” Izzy asked.
My mother looked at her watch again. “Five minutes.”
“WAIT!” Izzy shouted. “I want to tape-record it.” She tumbled out of my lap and ran from the room. I could hear her feet clunking up the stairs.
“Oh, Mary Jane!” Mrs. Cone said, “I was talking to Richard this morning and he wanted me to tell you that that key hook you talked him into buying is working wonderfully. He only misplaced his keys once this week.”
“That’s so great!” I had seen the ceramic placque with hooks on it at Gundy’s Gifts around the corner from Eddie’s. When I told Dr. Cone about it, he had nodded in a resigned sort of way, but then he drove over there and bought it.
“IS DADDY COMING TODAY?” Izzy shouted from upstairs. As far as I knew, Dr. and Mrs. Cone saw each other several times a week. And every time I was at one house, the other called. I didn’t know anyone whose parents had divorced, but still I’d never imagined it was like this. Instead of a drawn-out tug-of-war between two people who wanted to destroy each other, the Cones’ divorce appeared to be a gentle rearrangement of housing and time.
“NO!” Mrs. Cone hollered toward the stairway. Then she looked at me and my mother and said, “You know, Richard still gets jealous over Jimmy. Can you believe that? He needs to understand that I wasn’t the only person who fell in love with him. That man casts a spell on everyone who meets him.”
“I love him, but I wasn’t in love with him,” I said.
My mother laughed nervously. “Oh, let’s hope not!”
Mrs. Cone laughed, not nervously. “No, Mary Jane was the most sane person in the house. She was the adult while the rest of us were throwing temper tantrums, playing dress-up, fooling around. You know.” Mrs. Cone shrugged.
My mother took a giant gulp of creamy coffee. Then she said, “Mary Jane is always so reasonable.”
Izzy skipped into the room holding a black plastic tape recorder. She clunked it on the table so hard, the cookies shifted on the plate.
“You push here and here and it records.” Izzy pushed. “We’re recording now, see?”
“Almost time.” My mother glanced at her watch again. She was pursing her lips as if she were holding in her excitement.
Izzy turned up the volume on the radio. We waited through the end of “Rhinestone Cowboy” and then Casey Kasem came on, speaking in his nasally, snappy voice. “A stunning achievement for thirty-three-year-old West Virginian Jimmy Bendinger—”
“JIMMY!” Izzy whisper-screamed. She sat on the seat beside me. Mrs. Cone was across from me, and my mother was on my other side.
Casey Kasem continued, “Bendinger dropped out of high school and moved to New York City, where he lived in a warehouse in the Meatpacking District with Stan Fry and JJ Apodoca. Fry and Apodoca had moved to New York from Newport, Rhode Island, where they surfed together and attended the prestigious St. George’s School. Fry had just finished his studies at Columbia University, where he’d majored in economics. Apodoca had also been admitted to Columbia, but failed to attend even the first day. The three of them wrote songs while Fry and Apodoca waited tables. Bendinger, a self-described introvert, tried to wait tables but found talking to customers too much of a strain. Instead he wrote more songs, and eventually sold several of his solo efforts to Bonnie Louise, the Suarez Brothers, and Josh LaLange. With money coming in from the songs, these boys bought themselves new instruments: Bendinger an electric guitar, Fry new keyboards, and Apodoca an electric bass guitar. The only problem w
as, they needed a drummer. When they brought in Stan Fuller, Fry’s former roommate at Columbia, Running Water was born. It wasn’t long before the hits started coming. Most previous Running Water songs are credited to Bendinger, Fry, and Apodoca. On this new album, Fuller is gone, replaced by Finn Martel of Philadelphia, the former drummer of Kratom Runs. Six of the twelve new songs are credited solely to Bendinger, who might be finding inspiration from his glamorous wife, the starlet of a single name, Sheba. Though the title track of this album was clearly written under the influence of a different girl, a muse, someone whose many great talents and Baltimore roots are hailed in the song. Her identity remains a mystery, however, as Bendinger is as private as he is talented.”
Izzy, Mrs. Cone, and my mother all looked at me, grinning expectantly. I was smiling so hard that the edges of my mouth shook.
A drumroll played. Izzy opened her smiling mouth wider; her eyes were enormous. She reached out and took my hand. I looked to my mother, stuck out my hand, and she took it. Mrs. Cone put out both of her hands and completed the circle so we were all connected.
“Moving up from the number two spot, here is the most popular song in the land, written and produced by Jimmy Bendinger. At number one, Running Water’s ‘Mary Jane.’”
The drums clicked. The guitar and keyboards joined in. I was biting my bottom lip. My mother squeezed my hand.
“Mary Jane!” Jimmy sang. And the four of us sang along.
Acknowledgments
I am so grateful for all the innovative, industrious, and talented people at HarperCollins and Custom House. Special thanks to Liate Stehlik, Jennifer Hart, Eliza Rosenberry, Danielle Finnegan, Rachel Meyers, Elsie Lyons, Paula Szafranski, Kaitlin Severini, Gabriel Barillas, all the hardworking salespeople I have yet to meet, and Molly Gendell.
I have endless love for the following people who offered support, advice, friendship, wisdom, and their faces onscreen during COVID times as I worked on this book: Celia-Kim Allouche; Sally Beaton; Paula Bomer; Fran Brennan; Jane Delury; Larry Doyle; Lindsay, Bruce, and Emily Fleming; Liz Hazen; Lisa Hill; Holly Jones; Matt Klam; Deana Kolencikova; Dylan Landis; Marcia Lerner; Boo Lunt; Jim Magruder; Helen Makohon; Steve, Finn, and Phoebe Martel; Scott Price; the Rende Family; Danny Rosenblatt; Claire Stancer; the Treat-Laguens family; Tracy Walder; Tracy Wallace; Marion Winik; and all the generous people of La Napoule Art Foundation. Also, huge love to my goddaughters, Addie Fleming and Sydney Rende.
And endless love and affection to my hilarious family: Maddie Tavis, Ella Grossbach, Ilan Rountree, Sebastian Rodriguez, Becca Summers, Satchel and Shiloh Summers, Joshua Blau, Alex Suarez, Sonia Blau Siegel, Sheridan Blau, Cheryl Hogue Smith, and Bonnie Blau and her extraordinarily smelly cat, Mookie.
If I could sing, I’d sing to Gail Hochman, the best agent in the business.
If I could write a song, I’d write it about Kate Nintzel, whose genius glows throughout these pages.
About the Author
JESSICA ANYA BLAU is the author of the nationally bestselling novel The Summer of Naked Swim Parties and three other critically acclaimed novels, most recently The Trouble with Lexie. Her novels have been recommended and featured on CNN, NPR, the Today show, and in Vanity Fair, Cosmopolitan, and many other national magazines and newspapers, as well as on Oprah’s summer reading lists.
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.
Also by Jessica Anya Blau
The Trouble with Lexie
The Wonder Bread Summer
Drinking Closer to Home
The Summer of Naked Swim Parties
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
mary jane. Copyright © 2021 by Jessica Anya Blau. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
first edition
Cover design by Elsie Lyons
Cover photographs © Cavan Images/Getty Images; © billnoll/iStock/Getty Images (texture)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Blau, Jessica Anya, author.
Title: Mary Jane : a novel / Jessica Anya Blau.
Description: First Edition. | New York, NY : Custom House, [2021]
Identifiers: LCCN 2020047171 (print) | LCCN 2020047172 (ebook) | ISBN 9780063052291 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780063052307 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780063052314 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PS3602.L397 M37 2021 (print) | LCC PS3602.L397 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020047171
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020047172
Digital Edition MAY 2021 ISBN: 978-0-06-305231-4
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-305229-1
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-31125-3 (international edition)
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