by Nicole Baart
Janice groaned softly and threw her hands up in entreaty. “I am so bad at this. You have to give me one freebie, one chance to erase something dumb that I never should have said in the first place.”
“I have to?”
Her eyes dropped. “I would like you to.”
“Who’s Ben?” I asked again.
Instead of answering me, Janice said, “I knew this wouldn’t be easy, but I didn’t know it would be this hard.”
Much to my consternation, I actually enjoyed her discomfort. How could she bring out such cruelty in me? “It doesn’t have to be this hard.” I sighed. “But we have got to stop pretending. Either you are totally, completely, brutally honest with me, and I’m the same with you, or we might as well waste the night asking each other about our favorite colors.”
“Pink,” Janice offered almost shyly. “You?”
“Yellow, but that’s not the point.”
“Food?”
I narrowed my eyes at her but acquiesced. “Watermelon.”
“A hamburger, medium rare, with everything on it. And extra onions if it’s a red onion. I don’t like Vidalias. Sport?”
“I’m not athletic,” I muttered.
“I used to play volleyball, but that was years ago. I like to watch football.”
We studied each other with nothing more than the table between us. But hovering and invisible above the wavering heat of the lone candle, there were ghosts. Ten years of conversations that should have been, experiences we should have shared, rose and lingered and reminded. Taunted us with what we could have had.
The hint of a smile played at the corners of Janice’s mouth. “Who was your first kiss?” she dared me, breaking into territory that smacked of motherly affection.
Although I didn’t want to play her little game, I was learning things about her that I had only imagined as a child. My mother, a stranger, was taking shape before my very eyes. I cooperated. “A boy named Brandon. You?”
Janice bit her bottom lip. “Your father,” she admitted, and the two words were measured and timid.
I couldn’t go there. I couldn’t talk about Dad with her. Not now, maybe not ever. I clung to the name that had incensed me only moments ago. “Who is Ben?” I demanded.
“Simon’s father.”
And it was released. There was an almost soundless puff, a sniper’s bullet loosed at some well-defined target, and though I waited for the slashing pain, there was none. Instead I felt a rush like relief. We were actually getting somewhere. Yet beneath my subtle relief, disappointment swam just below the surface—she had lied to Simon. “He’s not dead,” I stated dully. “Simon said—”
“I know what Simon said,” Janice interrupted. “I know I shouldn’t have … I shouldn’t have told him that. But what would you have me tell him? How can you explain … that to a little boy?”
I didn’t know what she meant by that, nor did I necessarily want to know. Apparently Ben wasn’t very excited about being a parent. Something he and Janice had in common. What was different this time around? Why did Janice try to be a mother again when she had failed so miserably the first time?
But Simon’s story was his to uncover. I wanted to learn more about mine. Shoving thoughts of my wronged little brother aside, I pressed on. “Did you leave us for Ben?”
Janice laughed. “Absolutely not. I didn’t meet Ben until much, much later.”
“Was he the first?”
It was a bit of an ambiguous question, but Janice knew exactly what I meant. I was being bold, maybe too bold. But she gave me a hard, unreadable look and finally admitted, “No. He was the last.”
I didn’t even want to know how many had come before. Obviously Ben had been different. He had meant something to Janice; he was more than just one of the many names that had paraded in and out of her life. I needed to know if he was still a part of her and how he would affect Simon and, in some mysterious way, us. I pushed forward, though I almost wanted to end the conversation right there and talk about safer, less risky things. But she was answering my questions, and I couldn’t bring myself to stop now. Even if the answers were wild, unexpected things, things that could bite even as I tried to tame them. “Were you married to him?”
“No.”
“Is he an architect like Simon said?”
Janice pursed her lips as if it pained her to admit the truth. “He’s a construction worker.” Watching me carefully, she went on, adding information in a growing pile of words like they were a collection of small gifts that she could extend to me. An extra helping. A little understanding. “He has a thick accent. Ben is a nickname. His real name is Benret or Benmet or something else that I can never remember.”
I nodded, a reporter merely collecting the facts as analytically and impassively as possible. I detached myself from the conversation and plodded on. “Why did you leave him?”
The stranger across from me opened her hands on the table, palms up, as if she had hidden the answer inside. “He left me.” Her voice splintered on those three short words.
I felt no pity for her. “Kind of like you left Dad and me?”
Janice didn’t answer.
The question hung like a threat in the air between us, and at that exact, inopportune moment our food arrived. I wanted to scream. Janice looked shell-shocked, and her hands were still gaping, prostrate and ready to accept the proffered plate as if she had seen our waiter coming from a long way off. But it wasn’t food that she was waiting for. Janice flushed and looked up at the waiter’s starchy white shirt and black tie with a sheepish, down-turned mouth.
“The lamb is exquisite,” he assured her with an indulgent smile.
I watched her snake her hands from the table, folding them in her lap and peering at the waiter through lashes heavy with mascara. There was something changed in her hazel eyes, and all at once I imagined that she was flirting with him. Only moments ago we had been making progress, cutting a path through the impenetrable jungle of our lives and our relationship, and she had switched it off to share coy smiles with a stranger. Our waiter. A man ten years younger than her with what I now considered to be a greasy smile and bad hair.
A steaming plate of paella was set in front of me, and though I had longed for it when I saw it on the menu, the scent of it now turned my stomach. I pushed it slightly away from me and watched as Janice followed the waiter with her eyes and then turned eagerly to her meal. My question, only seconds old, was forgotten. She dug in with her knife and fork without glancing at me again, without acknowledging once what we had just experienced, her disclosure drained of all value and importance.
“Is that why you left?” I finally asked, sickened by her obvious pleasure in the perfectly done lamb.
Janice laid down her utensils and touched a napkin to the corners of her mouth. Still chewing, she surveyed me mildly, taking in my untouched entrée and the angry slant of my eyebrows. A mixture of bland concern and uncertainty washed over her features, softened and indistinct in the candlelight. She swallowed. “Excuse me?”
“Some sort of an addiction?” I prodded. “An unquenchable need for a man in your life? The next best thing? The grass is greener on the other side or something dumb like that?”
She looked genuinely confused, maybe even offended. “What in the world are you talking about?”
But I was fuming. I wasn’t about to play games or hint at what I meant when we had more or less agreed to be honest, brutal if need be. “You were flirting with him,” I accused caustically. “We came here to work on us, to try to find some way to make this ridiculous arrangement work, and you were just making eyes at our waiter.”
“I was being nice!” Janice countered, surprised and sharply defensive.
The heat in her voice evoked old, buried feelings in me. I was reduced in an instant to the child I had been, cowering and perplexed by her coldness but also increasingly unaffected by her disinterest, her distance that often translated into unmistakable resentment. I glared at her,
rolling around a dozen bitter comments in my mind before I finally spat out, “You are unbelievable.”
“Well—,” Janice began, and then cut herself off as quickly as she had started. She took a deep breath, visibly stilling herself and attempting to fight back the defensiveness that prompted her to meet me insult for insult. I wanted her to strike back, but instead she said gently, “I am not going to be like this.”
“Like what?” I tested.
Janice narrowed her eyes at me, and I saw her anger rise, cool and controlled. “Look, I am trying so hard. You have to cut me a little slack, Julia. I know I’m not perfect, I know I’m not good at this, and the whole world knows that I’ve made mistakes, but at least I’m trying.” She was visibly trembling when she added in a whisper, “You’re being impossible.”
Affronted, I opened my mouth to respond but found I had nothing to say. Was she right? Though I had felt vindicated all along, suddenly there was a swelling guilt, a knowledge that we could be so much more and I was preventing any healing that might take place. But didn’t I deserve to hate her?
Janice refused to look at me when she continued, “You know the whole house walks on eggshells around you. You’re moody and difficult, and though you try to direct your anger at me, it spills over onto Simon and Nellie. They feel it. They’re affected by it.”
I rushed to stand up for myself. “That’s not true. Grandma knows how I feel about her, and Simon and I are … we’re friends,” I finished lamely.
“Believe what you want.” As quickly as the words were out of her mouth, Janice caught her head in her hands. She spat out a quiet curse. “Sorry. I’m sorry. It’s just … we’re not supposed to be fighting!” She looked at me desperately. “I’m sorry. I really am. Please don’t fight with me anymore.” Her face was drawn and sad, pale and etched with shadows as if her makeup was slowly peeling away from the aging skin beneath. “Eat your meal,” Janice entreated me. “It looks delicious.”
My appetite had fled, and more than anything I just wanted to go home and strip off the dress that came with such a cost. But at the same time, Janice’s words stung me, and, despairingly, I realized that they rang true. Was I like that? Was I the person she described? It horrified me enough to make me pick up my fork and try a bite of paella. The rice was sand on my tongue. I took a sip of ice water and said to my plate, “You were right about one thing. This is very, very hard.”
“There isn’t a textbook for this sort of thing.”
“I guess I’m glad that there isn’t,” I admitted.
“Truce?” Janice asked.
What could I possibly do? I nodded.
We ate in silence for a few moments, and I put bites of food into my mouth mechanically, chewing minimally and swallowing quickly. My jaw ached with the pain of wanting to cry, but I resolutely held back the tears.
I was startled when Janice offered, “Maybe we should go to counseling together.”
Counseling? I dismissed the thought without even considering it. “We don’t need counseling, Janice; we just need to talk this through.”
“Then let’s talk. I want to work this out. What do you need to know?”
It was a simple question with a complicated answer. “Why did you leave?”
Janice sighed. “You don’t really want to hear it. But I’m going to tell you the truth since that’s what we’ve agreed to do.” She paused, collected herself. Looking me square in the eye, she confessed bleakly, “I should never have married Daniel.”
My father was my hero, my best friend, almost supernaturally perfect and preserved in my memory without the flaws and foibles that were so human when he lived. How could any woman not want to be his wife? How could she be so cold?
Apparently my disgust was obvious, because Janice rushed to explain. “Don’t look so insulted—hear me out. I was young and I was rebelling against my parents. I liked Daniel well enough—he was kind and generous and he loved me, I think—but I know now that I certainly didn’t love him.” She stopped to regard me seriously. “Don’t get me wrong. He was a wonderful, wonderful man. I didn’t deserve him. The fact that I left had nothing to do with him and everything to do with me.” Then Janice shrugged, waved her hands in front of her a little as if the rest of the story was obvious. “And, well, the next thing you know I was pregnant and essentially trapped.”
Trapped.
Janice pressed her fingers to her temples and made a little noise that sounded like surrender. “I know that sounds terrible. I know I should have been happy. I should have settled down and had three more kids, but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. I’m not built that way, Julia. I’m a terrible mother. I failed with you; I’m failing with Simon. …”
“And running away fixes everything,” I said softly.
Her eyebrows shot up in surprise. “No, of course not. Of course not.” She faltered. “It’s just … you were better off without me.”
“I was?” It was something I had wondered many times myself. Life without her had been hard enough. Would it have been even worse with her? It was tempting to accuse her of the things she missed, but I wouldn’t let myself get dragged down that tired old road. Janice had not been a part of my life, and no amount of moaning would change that.
But there was one last thing to ask, one last question that had the potential to bring everything into focus. My head ached; my emotions surged and sputtered like a downed power line. I had energy for no more than this. Throbbing with the strain of the evening, I finally managed, “What do you want from me?”
She studied me for a long moment. At some point she had put her hands on the table, and she slid them forward now, toward me, as if she wanted to touch my fingers with her own.
I withdrew the hand that clutched and crumpled a heavy linen napkin and balled it on my lap.
Something fierce and unanticipated flashed across Janice’s face, and then understanding like a sudden explosion lit up her eyes. She gasped, a small, choked inhalation that ended in a whisper. “You think I don’t love you.”
“What?” I croaked.
“Oh, Julia, you think I don’t love you. I can see it in your face.” Janice was crying a little now, as though she finally got it and whatever it was had been entirely preventable and all her fault. She shed resigned, mournful tears for something—or maybe someone—already long gone. “You have to believe me,” she said. “I have always, always loved you. I know that you might find that hard to understand, but in my own, broken way I have loved you. I still do.”
It was an admission that I hadn’t planned for and wasn’t ready to hear. She loved me? Janice was right: I found that very hard to understand, almost impossible to believe. Leaving was a love language that I would probably never get. If she cared for me at all, why let ten years slip away into oblivion? And why try to make things right after all this time? Hadn’t someone once sung, “If you love me, let me go?” I wanted to say, “Let me go.” But I couldn’t speak.
Instead, Janice answered my question. “What do I want from you, Julia?” She bit her lip, closed her eyes as if it was difficult to admit. “I want … I want—I wanted you to love me, too. Just a bit. Just enough for me to know that that one thing, all those years ago, is not completely unforgivable.”
Somewhere, veiled behind the anger and the regret and the self-righteous indignation, I heard myself say, “I did. I did love you very much.” And then the unexpected: “Maybe I still do.” But the Julia that would say something like that, the Julia that actually felt that way, was very small and very far away.
She was riding the elevator to the thirty-first floor.
Seeds
FOR DAYS I FELT like there were words on the tip of my tongue, things I longed to say that filled my mouth but refused to spill past my lips. Maybe I was still processing, working through the many conflicting emotions Janice had unearthed the night we tried to connect. Maybe I was waiting for the right person to talk to. No one seemed quite ready, quite suited to hear everything I want
ed to say.
Or maybe it was simply a timing thing.
Either way, something had changed between Janice and me. Though anger still gnawed, though it was still difficult for me to look her in the eye, she had said something that I hadn’t planned I wavered between disgust at her obvious and pathetic attempt to win me over and a reeling, floating, wishful feeling of maybe. Maybe Janice really did love me in her own incomprehensible way. Maybe we would be able to come to an understanding. Maybe my life would be more than I ever imagined it could be. Maybe. But then again, I had learned enough to know not to give in to such immature dreams.
We all went to church together on Sunday morning with Simon sandwiched between Janice and me on the hard-backed pew and Grandma tight against my other side, and though we had done so nearly every week since Janice and Simon had arrived, everything felt different. There was an urgency that nagged at the corners of my consciousness, a feeling of determination, of now, now, now. I couldn’t escape the sensation that something was about to happen. It was almost as if a stranger had whispered my name just out of earshot. Julia from an unfamiliar mouth. My ears pricked. My skin tingled. But nothing extraordinary happened. We sat. We sang. The pastor preached. I listened, but there was nothing for me to hear.
When we got home, Janice tried her hand at grilling hamburgers for lunch. Grandma and I made a warm potato salad, letting Simon snitch crispy pieces of bacon as we fried it and leaving a small bowl without onions so that he, too, could enjoy Grandma’s signature side dish. I followed her careful instructions blindly, oblivious to their cheerful conversation as I chopped potatoes and sliced fresh radishes that snapped when the knife slid through them. Each red-rimmed disk was a word I ached to say. But I said nothing.
It was gorgeous outside, the sort of still and softly warm afternoon that makes you want to find a place, any place on God’s green earth, that can boast such loveliness more than one or two days a year. The breeze was from the south and more of a breath than a breeze. It lifted the very edges of each leaf, merely to steal a peek at the veined underbelly, then rested, leaving nothing between the earth and the sun but distance. Birds warbled and sang. And winding along the ditch, the creek that would be nothing more than a trickle by midsummer was a burbling, laughing thing.