Mrs. Everything

by Jennifer Weiner

  She continued teaching her classes on the fitness trail. She wanted to quit, because every step along the path, every sit-up and leg-lift, reminded her of Nonie and of Nonie’s betrayal, but the truth was that she needed the money. So she went, sometimes dragging Lila along. At fourteen, Lila was small for her age, all knees and elbows and beaky nose, with the same dark eyes and emphatic eyebrows as her father. Her dark-brown hair was tangled, her expression was guarded and suspicious, and her mouth seemed to be stuck in a permanent scowl. Lila was angry at her mother. She was angry about having to leave Apple Blossom Court and her only good friend, Amy Seligson; angry about having to switch schools, angry that her sisters had gotten to live with their father for all of their lives while she only got to see him every other weekend. On the door of her bedroom in the condo was a hand-drawn sign that read GET OUT. The wall next to her bed was covered with pictures of their old house, their old street, and her old school, and all of her old class pictures.

  Jo tried to help. She mustered energy she didn’t have and went to talk to Lila’s teachers, telling them about the divorce, and the move, and how Lila’s father had moved on with Jo’s former best friend. She found Lila a therapist, a bosomy woman named Ellen Leong, who had an office full of toys and who told her, “Lila is working through her feelings of abandonment and disappointment,” and charged Jo eighty dollars a session, which insurance didn’t cover and which Dave refused to pay. (“She’s fine!” he said. “She’s just being a kid!”) She took Lila on trips to see Broadway shows in New York City, where Lila claimed to be bored, or hiking in the Berkshires, where Lila said that she was bored and bug-bitten, and after saving her pennies, on a spring break mother-daughter jaunt to Florida, where Lila got so badly sunburned after a few hours on the beach that the bulk of their stay was spent in the hotel room, with Lila in a bathtub full of lukewarm water and baking soda, and they only got to spend a single afternoon at Disney World.

  Finally, after months of dealing with Lila’s sulks and silences, she’d heard Lila laughing at one of the ladies in her fitness class, and she’d snapped. “What is wrong with you?” Jo asked Lila as they drove home from the fitness trail. It was April, crisp and windy, as they drove past the road that would have led them to Apple Blossom Court, Lila turned, and stared, and heaved a noisy sigh.

  “I hate getting up early,” said Lila. “Why can’t you just let me sleep?”

  “I can’t leave you home by yourself.”

  “So just leave me in the car.”

  “Not safe. And don’t change the subject. You were mean. How do you think Mrs. Futterman feels when you laugh at her?”

  Appealing to Lila’s empathy did no good. Jo wasn’t even sure the girl had any. “If she doesn’t want people to laugh at her, why doesn’t she lose some weight?” Lila asked. She stuck out her bottom lip and exhaled hard enough to lift her bangs briefly off her forehead.

  “It isn’t that easy,” Jo said. Lila muttered that it didn’t look like Mrs. Futterman was trying very hard, and Jo said, her voice sharp, “If you can’t be kind, how about you just be quiet?” She hated the harshness of her own voice, hated the way she had somehow started not just to look but even to sound exactly like her own mother. Had she been that impatient with Kim or Melissa? Had she spoken to them that way?

  “And if your bed isn’t made, no TV tonight,” she said as they pulled into the Briarcliff parking lot. TV was on the schedule every night. Lila said that cards and board games were boring. She claimed she hated to read. She would roll her eyes if Jo suggested anything else—doing a craft project, learning to knit, running errands or baking cookies together.

  “Hey,” said Lila, shading her eyes. “Who’s that?”

  Jo looked and saw Missy waiting at the front door, with her backpack by her feet. Her heart sped up. When she’d talked to Missy on Sunday night, she had been fine, and busy, full of talk about her classes, and a boy she’d met, and some drama between her roommates. Now here she was.

  Jo hurried out of the car, leaving the door open and the keys in the ignition and Lila still unbuckling her seat belt. Missy offered a limp wave and attempted a smile. “Hey. Um. I need to tell you something.”

  She’s pregnant, Jo thought as her mouth went dry. She got fired. She’s on drugs, and I’m going to have to pay for rehab. “Um. So I went to the video store last night . . .” Jo saw Missy’s throat move as she swallowed. “Maybe we should go to Blockbuster and I can show you.”

  * * *

  The video was in the center of the “New Arrivals.” The woman on the box had feathered blond hair and a brilliant, pearly grin, but among the lineup of fit, tanned, long-legged, hard-bodied instructors, she stood out, with her rounded thighs and hips and warm smile. Instead of the high-cut leotard and ubiquitous leg warmers, she wore a plain white T-shirt and a pair of blue leggings. Get Fit with Nonie! read the words written in gold above her head. Jo heard herself starting to laugh. She picked up the box, laughing louder and louder. Can’t get worse, she thought. Well, I guess it can.

  Missy said, “Mom?” and Jo just kept laughing, a shrill, witchy cackle, clutching her own shoulders, rocking on her heels with tears streaming down her cheeks until a clerk in a Blockbuster T-shirt came over and said, “Ma’am, are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” Jo gasped, wiping her eyes. “I’m fine.” She flipped the box over and saw Nonie, her old friend, smiling as she stood, not in a meticulously lit exercise studio, but in what looked like someone’s living room. Behind her were six women of varying shapes and sizes, some in leotards, others in shorts and tank tops, one in sweatpants and a T-shirt. “Finally, a fitness video for the rest of us!” read the copy on the back of the box. “Follow along at your own pace as Nonie takes you through a series of simple moves that use your own body weight to build strength and aerobic fitness! Nonie’s assistants will demonstrate modifications for all fitness levels so that any BODY can do this workout! It’s EASY! It’s FUN! It’s FITNESS FOR EVERYONE!” Jo had to search, and squint, before she found her husband’s fingerprints, but they were there, in the small print at the bottom of the box: A Dave Braverman production.

  “Oh, Mom,” said Missy, and put her arm around Jo’s shoulders, and even Lila, instead of muttering something mean about how it was Jo’s fault, gave her mom’s arm a small pat. Jo couldn’t stop laughing. She laughed and laughed until tears poured down her face, aware that people were staring, aware that she was making a scene. The clerk came back and said, “Ma’am, I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” and Missy had said, “We’re going, okay? We’re going right now,” and with her arm still wrapped around Jo’s shoulders she steered her mother out into the parking lot.

  * * *

  “Wow. I’m really sorry,” said Mary Ellen Weems, the lawyer who’d handled Jo’s divorce. “But I’m not a copyright expert.” Mary Ellen got Jo the name of a man in New York City. When Jo finally got him on the phone, the man had her explain the situation, slowly, then go back and explain it again. By her third time through the story, Jo was starting to suspect that the man charged by fifteen-minute increments, and that he was stretching out their conversation to hit the half-hour mark. Finally, he asked if she’d trademarked “Jumpin’ with Jo.” “The name? The concept? The jump that you do at the end? Any of the moves?”

  “The moves are just basic things. Squats and jumping jacks. Anyone can do them. That’s the point!”

  “Which may be a problem,” said the attorney. Jo tried to picture him, imagining a plump, middle-aged man in a three-piece suit, a man who’d never done a squat or a star jump in his life. “If your husband claims that these are exercises that any kid who’s ever taken a gym class learned, you’re going to have a problem proving that he stole proprietary material from you.”

  Jo closed her eyes. “Sir,” she said. “I know you can’t see it. But I made a tape called Jumpin’ with Jo that starts off with me saying ‘Anyone can do these moves’ and ends with me doing a star jump and, in betwe
en, includes exactly the same routine that Nonie is doing. A routine that she learned by taking a class that I teach. With the same modifications for women who are older, or who have bad knees. It’s my routine, sir.” Tears had squeezed out of the corners of her eyes and were dripping down her cheeks. She didn’t think she’d ever been so angry in her life, at least not since Bethie had told her that she’d been raped.

  The man quoted Jo the price of his retainer. She stifled a gasp and said, “I’ll get back to you,” and hung up the phone and held it, breathing deeply, before squeezing her eyes shut and punching in the Atlanta area code. She hated asking her sister for help, but she had nowhere else to turn.

  “Oh, God,” Bethie said then, after Jo had gotten the whole story out. “That motherfucker. That bastard. Tell me what you need.”

  “I need a loan.” The words felt like dead worms in Jo’s mouth.

  “I don’t know why you didn’t ask me to finance the business,” Bethie said, and Jo murmured that yes, in retrospect, that would have been a very good idea indeed. She hadn’t gone to Bethie because she hadn’t wanted Bethie to confirm that it was a bad idea or, worse, to have her sister lie and say that it was a great idea, and invest, and lose her money, just to show that she believed in her sister, that she thought that Jo was as smart and as savvy as she herself was, when, clearly, Jo was not. Bethie was the winner, the family success story, the one who’d turned peaches and sugar and hand-labeled Mason jars into a fortune. Jo was the loser, the punch line, the one who’d had her one big idea stolen by her unfaithful ex-husband and her former best friend. Can’t get worse. What a dummy.

  “But never mind. Let’s not look back. Do you like the lawyer you talked to?” Bethie asked.

  Jo gripped the phone hard, wrapping the cord tightly around her index finger. “He was fine. Expensive, though.”

  “Let me help.” Bethie’s voice was firm, and kind, and full of a righteous rage that left Jo weak with gratitude.

  “Okay,” she whispered.

  “I don’t get it,” Lila drawled from the couch, once Jo had hung up. Lila had taken advantage of her mother’s inattention and helped herself to a pint of Ben & Jerry’s. Her mouth was lined in chocolate-brown, and Jo saw a chocolate chunk melting on the couch’s blue upholstery. She’d told Lila, over and over, to please not take food out of the kitchen, but Lila didn’t listen. “If it was really your idea, why didn’t you register it or something?”

  “I never imagined that your father would try to steal it.” Jo knew she wasn’t supposed to bad-mouth Dave in front of the kids. That was Divorced Parenting 101. No matter what your ex did or how enraged it made you, you weren’t allowed to complain about the man who was, after all, the father of your children. But Jo couldn’t stop herself.

  “Dad’s smart,” Lila said, shrugging. “If you were smart, you would have figured out how to turn it into something by yourself.” She unfolded her skinny legs from the couch and sauntered into the kitchen, and it was all Jo could do not to yank the phone out of the wall and hurl it at her youngest daughter’s head.

  * * *

  The New York City lawyer, whose name was Robert Rhodes, subpoenaed both Dave and Nonie. Rhodes got to depose Dave Braverman. When Dave had tried to argue that he and Jo had come up with the concept together, Rhodes delivered a blistering cross-examination. He’d asked Dave exactly which moves he’d thought of, how many times he’d taught or even attended one of Jo’s classes, and if he knew how a burpee was performed, or how to modify the move for someone with bad knees, or where one parked to access the fitness trail where the class had originated. Dave had mumbled through his answers, seeming to flinch from the video camera. When his deposition ended, his lawyer had huddled with hers, and by the end of the day, Dave offered Jo a lump-sum settlement. Jo suspected that the money wasn’t even close to how much he’d already earned from his first-ever successful entrepreneurial endeavor. But it would be enough. She’d be able to pay off the loans she’d taken out for Kim and Missy. She’d be able to move out of the sad, thin-walled condo and back into a real house, and put enough away so that Lila could attend whatever college would be lucky enough to get her.

  When the check finally arrived, Jo bought a three-bedroom house, new construction, a ranch-style home set on a quarter-acre lot, with a screened-in back porch, a lush green lawn in front, and, out back, the swimming pool that she’d always wanted, complete with an in-ground hot tub.

  “Take a trip,” Bethie had told her when Jo called to say that they’d settled. Bethie had waved off all of Jo’s attempts to pay back the money Bethie had lent her for the lawyer. “I owe you more than I could ever repay. Send Lila down here again. Just go see the world. You’ve waited long enough.” Jo packed a bag and drove Lila to Atlanta. She spent the night at the house in Buckhead where Bethie and Harold lived, endured Lila’s murderous glances across the breakfast table, and said, “See you in August!” As soon as Lila was out of sight, Jo exhaled, feeling a lightness in her chest, a sense of hope for the first time, her shoulders drop down from her ears, where they’d been permanently hunched.

  In the driveway, she sat in the driver’s seat, her hands resting on the old station wagon’s steering wheel. Missy was in New York, where she would spend her summer interning at a literary magazine. Kim was in Philadelphia, finishing her second year of law school. Jo was forty-nine years old, a woman of a certain age, with money in the bank. She didn’t have to rush home to try to scramble up some summer-school classes, or teach on the fitness trail. She could buy herself a ticket anywhere in the world. Or, she thought, as the first real smile she’d smiled in what felt like years moved across her face, she could buy two.

  At a Sunoco station, she gassed up the car, and at the register, asked the clerk if they had a map of the United States. “You’re in luck,” said the guy behind the counter as he slid a folded map across the counter. “Just got the one left.” Jo thanked him, paid, and climbed back behind the wheel. She cranked up the air-conditioning and turned up the radio and, as the opening chords of “Jump” by Van Halen thundered from the speakers, Jo Kaufman turned her car west. She couldn’t remember where, or when, she’d found out that Shelley Finkelbein had moved to Colorado, but she knew that that was where her old flame was living.

  Maybe she’s with someone, Jo thought, as she made her way across the country. Maybe she’s gotten married again. She imagined dozens of scenarios, each one more painful and humiliating than the last, but she kept going, driving to Colorado in all-day, seventy-mile-an-hour gulps, driving from dawn until midnight, collapsing into bed at roadside motels, telling herself, All she can say is no.

  * * *

  There were no Finkelbeins in the phone book, but there was an R. Ziskin in the Denver phone book, with an address on Willow Court. Jo drove down her street, parked the car, and walked up the driveway of a neat little bungalow with pots of bright-red geraniums by the door.

  Jo knocked. The door swung open, and there was Shelley, as if she’d been standing there waiting for Jo’s arrival. Her skin was still creamy, faintly freckled, although lined around the eyes and lips. Her hair was short, still dark and glossy, curling in wisps around her cheeks. She wore jeans, acid-washed and fashionably high-waisted, and a billowy bright-green button-down blouse tucked into them. A heavy silver and turquoise necklace hung around her slender neck. Her feet were bare, and her nails were painted red, and Jo saw a silver ring on one toe, but no rings on her fingers. Jo drank her in, her scent, the shape of her body. Shelley’s small, capable hands, her luminous eyes, her quick, inquisitive glance and the tilt of her head.

  “Shelley?” Jo cleared her throat. She’d barely spoken in the long three days of her drive. Her voice sounded rusty. She was aware of how she must look, rumpled and road-weary, her hair sticking up in spikes and her hands and face sticky with sweat and dust. A scrap of a poem moved through her head: Come live with me and be my love.

  “Jo.” Shelley’s cheeks flushed, faintly, and she opened h
er arms. She still smelled like flowers and cigarettes, and she still felt just right in Jo’s arms. “I never stopped hoping,” she said.

  PART

    six

  2006

  Jo

  Come on,” Shelley called. “If we don’t go now, we’re going to hit traffic.” Shelley was dressed for Thanksgiving dinner at Kim’s house in black cotton leggings and a midnight-blue velvet tunic, with her short silvery hair brushed up into spikes. She wore black patent-leather clogs, “my dress-up clogs,” as she called them, the ones Jo suspected had been chosen because they’d aggravate Kim’s mother-in-law. Once, Shelley had owned a collection of high-heeled shoes that would have rivaled any boutique’s. Now she had arthritis and flats.

  Jo slipped silver teardrop earrings through the holes in her ears that had gotten longer as the years had passed, and gave herself a quick check in the mirror, making sure her gray wool pants weren’t wrinkled and that her black cashmere wrap didn’t have cat fur on its sleeves. As Shelley put her coat on, Jo pulled her contribution to the Thanksgiving meal out of the refrigerator and gave it a shake, watching with satisfaction as the shimmery surface of the cherry-flavored Jell-O gave an obliging wiggle.

  “It’s going to be okay,” Shelley told her as they walked down the driveway. It sounded, Jo thought, as if Shelley was trying to convince herself as much as Jo, but she made herself nod and say, “I know everything’s going to be fine.”