Now Jane wiped her chopping board clean and donned a pair of rubber gloves to chop raw taro root. It had been a long time since she’d done much more than microwave a TV dinner or heat a bowl of soup.
As Jane worked her chef’s knife up and down, she realized how much she’d missed cooking. The pleasures of kitchen tasks. Pungent flavors. Now she was ready for it all again, especially Thai food, a longtime favorite, with its balance of hot, sour, sweet, bitter, and salt. The cuisine held many surprises for the Western palate, such as the way sugar added to a hot and sour sauce mellowed and married the other ingredients.
Jane thought families were like that too. People combined with the sweetness of love became an entity even better than its individual parts. The Magnificent Millmans were, for sure: Max, her beloved husband, and their precious girls, Frannie and Hope. When she was ten, Frannie had composed a family song.
Max, Jane, Frannie, and Hope
You don’t like us, you’re a dope
We rock, we roll, we boogie too
Just about nothing we can’t do
Magnificent Millmans,
One in a jillions
Boop-boop-e-doop. Boop-boop-e-do.
At that memory, a wave of anguish lapped up and over Jane’s shoulders, threatening to knock her to her knees. All grief was terrible, but this past year had been so much harder than anything she’d ever imagined. Her mother’s death had been devastating, but this…
At first Jane thought she simply couldn’t bear it, that surely she would die, that a heart could not continue to beat under the weight of so much pain. Then, one day, she realized that she’d gone an entire hour without despair. Then two. And so it went, but even yet, fifteen months since Before, there were moments like this. Then the tide of anguish would recede; Jane would continue.
And so, Jane finished chopping the raw taro and slid it with the knife’s edge into a small bowl of Chinese scarlet, then washed her rubber gloves under the tap. She lined up all the bowls on her kitchen counter: a half-dozen cups of tapioca, three small blue bowls for the other condiments, the scarlet for the raw taro.
Jane was ready for her guest. She settled onto a stool at her kitchen counter. She could hardly wait.
*
Looking back, Jane thought, it all began that May afternoon, fifteen months earlier, a Saturday, when Natalie stopped by for coffee. Though it was hard to know. Human relationships are so complex, the ribbons of events so intertwined, others’ hearts and minds so unknown (even if those hearts once beat beneath your own) that it’s difficult to point your finger and say, There, then, that’s the place and time my life began to unravel.
But it would do, that coffee.
Natalie, who had long lived across the street and a couple of doors down, had knocked at Jane’s back door.
“Come on in!” Jane said. “I was just thinking about you.”
“You’re sure I’m not interrupting?” Natalie gave a nod to the food spread across the kitchen counter: garlic, green onion, cilantro, lemongrass, and a small bonfire of Thai chillies, tiny prik kee noo.
“No, no, I’ve got plenty of time. Nobody’s coming till seven. Did I tell you I was taking a Thai cooking class?”
“Really? I love Thai food. Especially the hot stuff.” Natalie plopped on a stool at Jane’s counter where Max usually sat. A pair of the reading glasses he bought by the score marked his spot as clearly as a place card. Natalie picked up a bit of chilli along with a sprig of cilantro.
“Watch it!” Jane warned. The tiny peppers were incendiary.
But Natalie had already popped the pepper in her mouth, and a look of bliss transfigured her round face. “Yum. You know I’ve always been crazy for hot.” Then, casually, she asked, “So, who’s your company?”
“Max’s brother, Ed, and his wife, Jean. The guys have some family business to sort out.” Jane heard herself explaining more than she needed to. She felt guilty about not seeing Natalie more often. It had been a while since they’d had her over for dinner.
Not that Jane didn’t like Natalie. Her intelligence and quick wit had always amused Jane, though her tongue had grown rather sharper since her divorce. But Natalie was a friend, a buddy, a neighbor she could count on, and Jane’s elder daughter, Frannie, and Natalie’s daughter, Megan, who was away at college now, had been off-and-on-again chums since they were tots.
Jane knew it was difficult for Natalie, being all alone now—particularly in this neighborhood. Their tree-bowered street in the Rockridge section of Oakland, just south of the Berkeley line, was like a throwback to the fifties. Every old house was large and well kept, every yard was neat, and everyone was married, with children—and very caught up with their families.
Of course, after the divorce Natalie could have sold her house and moved across the bay to San Francisco. But she hadn’t wanted to move in Megan’s senior year, and, anyway, she did most of her work from home.
Natalie wrote a column, five days a week, for a San Francisco newspaper, about anything and everything that struck her fancy. Pretty glamorous, thought Jane, who’d been a do-gooder all her life, starting with her rabble-rousing days at UC Berkeley. She’d become a welfare caseworker, and now she was the chief administrator of Oakland’s child care services. An admirable profession, perhaps, but hardly as jazzy as Natalie’s.
Natalie nibbled another bit of hot, then reached for a plate of brownies Jane had made for her ever-hungry teenagers. “May I?”
“Help yourself. There’s plenty.”
Natalie laughed. “Gotta keep up my weight.”
Natalie was a wonderful-looking woman, with an impish face and dark curly hair marked with a blaze of white, but she had put on more than a little poundage since Jack’s desertion. She was forever nibbling, taking a bite of this or that. More than once Jane had heard Natalie’s justification: “You know what Catherine Deneuve said. At a certain age, a woman can have her face or she can have her figure, but not both.”
Jane wondered about that. At forty-six, she was only a year younger than Natalie, but so far had refused to give up the good fight against middle-age spread. She liked working out and visited her gym regularly. On the other hand, she did have more wrinkles than Natalie. Maybe there was something to keeping those cheeks plumped.
Also, Jane told herself, Natalie’s job kept her young. Researching her column gave her entree to all kinds of worlds.
Jane said, “I loved that series you wrote last week on bumper stickers. It was so funny. Imagine using your turn signals. It’s just amazing how you can take one little thing like that and spin it and spin it. I don’t know how you do that.”
“Yep, that’s me.” Natalie broke a second brownie in half. “Natalie, the Queen of Trivia.”
“No, no, I think it’s wonderful, what you do.”
Natalie shrugged. “I guess. You wouldn’t believe how hard it is sometimes to come up with something to write about.”
“I’m sure. But look at how you get to follow your fancy. You have such freedom.”
Natalie frowned. “You know, Jane, sometimes there’s such a thing as too much freedom. Since Jack left and Megan’s off at school, my life has no structure. I feel like I have to invent it all over again every day. You know, make it up? Things just aren’t automatic like they used to be.”
No, Jane thought, they wouldn’t be. One of the things she’d loved about being part of a couple from the very beginning was the framework a relationship gave to life. Having a partner meant you had a schedule, endless things to do, and then with the kids, too many things.
“I know it must be hard,” Jane said, thinking, not for the first time, how gifted Natalie was at laying on guilt. “On the other hand, you can take classes, travel, do whatever you want.” Jane was thinking that if she were in Natalie’s shoes, she’d be off on that tour of Thailand her cooking teacher, Kasma, was leading.
Natalie didn’t seem to hear her. “I’ve been thinking maybe I ought to sell the house and move into the city
after all. Of course, Megan doesn’t want me to, but then, how often is she going to be home? Aren’t you lucky, you and Max, that you’ll have Hope for another year, after Frannie’s gone?”
“Yes, we are. Max and I are very lucky.” Jane had had difficulty conceiving, and after taking fertility drugs had feared quintuplets, but instead, her daughters had been born, blam-blam, twelve months apart. Healthy, beautiful, and smart. “Very lucky.”
“Now, of course,” Natalie said, “I wish I’d had more, a houseful of kids. Maybe Jack would have felt guiltier. Maybe he wouldn’t have felt the need to run off and marry a child.” Natalie’s mouth twisted with bitterness.
It was that, Jane thought, later, that last comment which made her reach into her bag of conversational topics and come up with Frannie. She was feeling sorry for Natalie, and at the same time, guilty about her own happiness, so she offered up Frannie as proof that her life wasn’t perfect.
It hadn’t felt like sacrifice at the time. Jane had wanted to discuss her concern about the business with Frannie with someone, but not Max, not right then. He was so preoccupied with the way things had been going with his practice, medicine being what it was these days, that Jane didn’t want to bother him. And though Natalie had her quirks, she had always been a good sounding board. Wasn’t that what women friends were best at: listening to one another puzzling and repuzzling life’s everyday vicissitudes? Listening and offering sympathy? And advice, if asked?
Do you think I should get my hair cut?
What should I do if he’s seeing her again?
Should I tell her she’s really being a bitch, or let it go?
What would women do without their friends? Without girl talk, that safety zone they share with women they trust?
So Jane leapt in. “Double your kids isn’t always double your pleasure, Natalie. To tell you the truth, I’ve been plenty worried about Frannie lately.”
“Frannie? You’re kidding.”
Natalie’s skepticism was understandable. After all, blithe, blonde Frannie was a star. She’d be graduating at the top of her class in a couple of weeks. She was a state champion distance runner. And she’d won admission to Yale with a partial scholarship, which had amazed even Jane.
Hope was also a great student, though she was having a rockier passage through adolescence than her older sister. As Max joked, “My younger daughter doesn’t speak Adult, though her French is flawless and her Italian’s not bad.”
“I found something in Frannie’s room,” Jane blurted, and then, the moment the words left her lips, she wished she could take them back. It was as if she could see a newspaper headline in banner type, blaring out the news that should have been kept in the bosom of the family. But now it was too late. There they were, her words, cast into the wind.
Natalie’s gaze was bright, avid, like a bird’s. “What kind of thing? Are you talking about drugs?”
“No, no.” Jane shook her head emphatically. Though she’d wondered that herself. Of course, she’d imagined a million possibilities, tried out all sorts of scenarios in the past few days. “I feel awful,” she said, not exactly answering Natalie’s question, not answering it at all, really, “as if I were snooping.”
Jane hadn’t been snooping, not the first time anyway. Nor the second, really. Okay, the second more than the first, her suspicions having been piqued, but the first time was perfectly innocent. Jane had been looking for a favorite silver pin, an art deco design with a chubby angel atop it. The pin wasn’t valuable, not in monetary terms, but her dear friend Cecilia had given it to her, a parting gift before she and her husband had been transferred back to Cleveland. Frannie had a habit of borrowing her things without asking. Jane had spoken to her about it more than once.
“Sure, sure, Mom,” Frannie had said. “But if you’re not using something at the time, why can’t I?”
“Because it’s not yours. Because it’s mine.”
“Well, God, I guess.”
But Frannie had never really understood, and in a way, Jane was proud of Frannie’s lack of concern about material possessions. Frannie and her friends had always shared their belongings and frequently wore one another’s clothes. “It’s very Berkeley,” Max had teased Jane. “You raised her to share and share alike, but you forgot to tell her you didn’t mean your stuff.”
Not the stuff I care about, Jane had told herself, as she’d stepped into Frannie’s room to search for the pin. I just don’t want her to lose something I treasure.
Jane had never been great at absorbing loss, and the disproportionate despair she was feeling at the time over misplacing even the smallest item—a paring knife, a sock—she could lay at the recent death of her mother, Frances. Since that, the loss of one thing was the loss of all. She’d wept over a straw hat left behind at a picnic.
Jane knew that there were those (a different breed of cat) who blithely cut their losses and moved on. She’d recently read a magazine piece in which movie mogul Barry Diller talked about his defeat in the battle for control of Paramount. “They won. We lost. Next.” Unthinkable. After her mom, Jane didn’t want to let go of another single thing in her life. She knew, intellectually, that she was trying to hold back death, and that was impossible. But the knowing didn’t make things any better. She wanted her loved ones, Max and the girls and their dog, Bingo, to live forever. She wanted everything—her keys, her gloves, her jewelry, her memory, her life—to stay just where it belonged.
Jane looked up. Natalie was still waiting for an answer. What had she found in Frannie’s room when she was looking for her pin?
“So, anyway, I fought my way through the girl debris to search the top of her dresser, but the pin wasn’t there. Sometimes Frannie actually puts things in her jewelry box in the top drawer, so I took a quick peek in there.” Going through her daughter’s bureau. It was such a cliché. And such a no-no.
“I used to do it all the time when Megan was still home,” Natalie said, matter-of-factly, tapping another pepper onto her tongue. “I mean, you have to know what your kids are up to. It’s not like they’re going to tell you anything.”
Jane was shocked. “No, no, I don’t do that. Never. Just, this one time, and…”
Natalie shrugged. “So, what was it? Birth control? Frannie’s seventeen, Jane. You ought to be glad that she’s careful.”
Jane shook her head emphatically. She didn’t want to even skirt a discussion of Frannie’s sex life or lack of it with Natalie. Or with anyone, for that matter. “I didn’t find anything in her dresser. I just took the peek in her jewelry box. Then I thought, Maybe she’s left the pin on a blouse or a jacket. So I opened her closet.”
“Jesus. She didn’t have a boy stashed in there, did she?”
Jane had to laugh, and the laughter felt good. The hand of anxiety that had been clutching her gut released its grip and she could breathe more freely. “No, no boy.” She laughed again at the idea of the imaginary boy’s frightened face, his goofy grin as he tried to explain. But then her mind’s eye fastened on the memory of what she’d seen hanging there, and her stomach tightened once more. “It was a skirt.”
“A skirt?”
“A brand-new skirt. Short. Black. With the sales tag. A hundred and sixty dollars.”
“Wow! So, what’d you think?”
Jane shrugged. “I didn’t know what to think. It wasn’t something that Frannie would have bought. Certainly not without consulting me, not at that price. She doesn’t have that kind of money. Her Saturday job at the card store pays peanuts.”
“So, did you ask her?”
“Not right away. I guess I was hoping that she’d bring it up.”
“Because you didn’t want her to know you’d gone in her things?”
Jane nodded. That was it, precisely. She’d felt guilty. Plus she simply hadn’t known how to broach the subject.
“How long did you wait?”
“A couple of days.”
“And then?”
Jane was abo
ut to answer when they heard, “Hi, Mom. Hi, Natalie.” It was Hope, her dark curls a tangle, her voluptuous sixteen-year-old body camouflaged by a baggy polo shirt and torn jeans. Hope opened the refrigerator and stuck her head inside.
“Hi, honey!” Jane said brightly. “What’s up?”
Hope only shrugged. She obviously felt that she’d already said enough. Then it took her a while to figure out what she wanted for a snack, and next Max called from his Saturday run to the hardware store. He needed Jane’s input on choosing a color of paint for his office. Jane had to scoot.
*
The very next afternoon, Natalie called. “I made this killer apple tart from a recipe I found in a magazine at the doctor’s office. If you don’t come over and help me, I’m going to eat the whole thing myself.”
Jane didn’t really have the time, but she still felt bad about not having included Natalie in their dinner the night before. They really had had a wonderful visit with Ed and Jean.
And the tart was delicious. “Fabulous,” said Jane.
“Thanks.” Then Natalie leaned across the table. “So, did Frannie tell you about the skirt?”
It was then that Jane realized that it wasn’t her company Natalie was hungry for. Nor was fear of her own gluttony her motivation. It was Natalie’s curiosity that needed to be satisfied. But Jane didn’t mind. Not really. Now that she’d unburdened half the story, she figured she might as well finish the tale and gain her friend’s input.
“No,” she said, “Frannie never did mention it. I waited until I couldn’t stand it anymore, and then I finally said something.” Jane shook her head, remembering. “It was bad.”
“Frannie stole the skirt?”
“No, no. She said she had no idea where it came from. That it had simply appeared in her closet.”
“What!”
“That was my response. Then, too, Frannie was upset because I’d gone into her things. And even more upset that I hadn’t broached the subject right away. ‘You didn’t say anything because you thought I stole it, right, Mom?’”
Natalie said, “But didn’t she think it was possible that you’d bought her the skirt? That it was a surprise? That she ought to have thanked you?”
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