The Smart One

by JENNIFER CLOSE

  “But don’t you want to marry me? I want to marry you,” Max said. He shut his laptop and turned to face her. “Will you marry me?”

  She said yes, although she felt unsure. It seemed mean to say no. It was a horrible story, really. That was her engagement, Max saying, “We’re going to be together anyway,” and her saying yes, because that seemed the polite thing to do.

  Later in the week, Max came home and threw his bag on the floor. “I got something for you,” he said. He pulled a small box out of his backpack and opened it for her. In it was a ring with a large round diamond on it. Cleo looked up at him and tilted her head.

  “It’s fake,” he said. “Sorry, I should have said that right away.” He took it out of the box and held it out to her. “I just thought you should have something now, until I can get you something real.”

  “Oh,” Cleo said. “Thanks.”

  “Should I kneel?” Max didn’t wait for her to answer, before getting down on one knee. It felt like they were playacting and Cleo wanted it to be over soon. She took the ring and put it on her finger.

  Cleo felt funny wearing the ring, like she was pretending to be something she wasn’t. She turned the ring around often, so that the fake diamond faced the other way. She was embarrassed whenever one of her professors noticed it.

  When Cleo told her mom that they were getting married, Elizabeth was silent.

  “What?” Cleo asked.

  “Oh, Cleo,” her mother said. “What do you think is going to happen? That you’ll get married and live together, all happy playing house? Come on, Cleo. You’re smarter than this.”

  Cleo wanted to tell her mom that clearly she wasn’t smarter than this. If she was smarter, wouldn’t she be in a different situation? It reminded her of the time she got a B in calculus senior year, and Elizabeth had been angry, had shaken her head. “No B’s,” she’d said. “You’re smart enough to get an A.”

  That never made sense to Cleo. If she was smart enough to get an A, wouldn’t she have gotten one in the first place? She often wondered if she was even smart at all, or if Elizabeth just expected her to be, so she had to live up to it. Of course, the next semester she had brought home an A in calculus. Elizabeth had just nodded. “I told you,” she said.

  She wore the ring for Max, since it seemed to make him happy. After a while, her fingers got bloated and she had to take it off. She was scared it was going to get stuck on there, that her fat little sausage finger would lose circulation and have to be amputated.

  A little while later, Max came home with an identical ring—except this one was bigger. She wore it until that, too, got too tight, and she placed it on her dresser. She was ringless until Max replaced it again. Sometimes she took all three rings and lined them up next to each other. She never asked Max where he got them. They were probably from Walmart but she didn’t want to know.

  WHEN SENIOR WEEK CAME, Cleo was relieved. At least when it was over, people would stop talking about it all the time. Max kept insisting that he should skip it. “I don’t even want to go to Hilton Head,” he said. “I hate it there.” Because he was nice enough to lie, she told him he had to go. It didn’t go unnoticed that he was acting in a way that very few college boys would. She saw the way his friends looked at her, like she’d ruined his life, like he didn’t have as much to do with this situation as she did. And so, because of this, she kept saying, “You have to go.”

  Max finally agreed, but tried to get her to come with. Cleo was firm on this. There was no way in hell she was going to Senior Week with a huge pregnant stomach to be the only sober person in a sea of Bucknell students. She’d rather be trapped in a cave with Mary and Laura for seven days straight than go through that.

  “Then I’m not going the whole time,” Max said. “Just for a few days.”

  Cleo figured that was better than nothing.

  With Max gone, the apartment was so quiet. Even when she walked outside, the town felt empty, since all the seniors were gone. Before he left, Max went to the grocery store and bought Cleo enough food that she would have survived a war. She stood in the doorway of the kitchen and watched him unload frozen pizzas, boxes of cereal, macaroni and cheese, and soup. It made her start to cry, watching him pile up all this junk food for her, and she had to turn and go into the bathroom so she wouldn’t bawl in front of him. These hormones really were a bitch.

  Secretly, Cleo had been sort of looking forward to her time alone in the apartment. She realized that it would be the last time ever that she’d really be all by herself. After graduation, they’d be at the Coffeys’ and then there’d be a baby. And while that was hard to imagine, hard to think that it was really going to happen, she knew enough to be grateful for this time.

  She watched marathons of old TV shows, and stayed up well into the night, then slept past noon and ate huge bowls of cereal. She read stupid books and ate ramen. And after two days, she felt like she was going out of her mind. She’d started to have nightmares about the baby, where she forgot it someplace and left it behind. In one, she was buying shoes and Weezy came up to her and screamed at her for leaving her baby in her purse. Cleo was confused as to how the baby had gotten there in the first place, and tried to say so, but couldn’t get the words right. She woke up sweating.

  She had wanted time alone, but now she wanted Max. She felt desperate for him. She wanted someone else to be there when she woke up to tell her that the baby wasn’t even there yet and to assure her that she didn’t (and wouldn’t) leave it in a purse. She couldn’t help but imagine Max at the beach, drinking and talking to girls. Every night, she thought, Please, God, don’t let him make out with anyone. Please, God, don’t let him decide to leave me.

  When Max came home, Cleo almost knocked him over. She sat with her legs on his lap while he told her about the week and who got really drunk, who hooked up, who threw up all over the floor. Cleo laughed at these stories, so happy to have him home. They talked into the night, and Cleo kept her leg linked around his in bed. She wanted to make sure that he was really there. What had she been thinking, taking him for granted? Was she out of her mind? This might not be what she had imagined, and this certainly wasn’t perfect, and maybe she was wearing a ten-dollar ring from Walmart, but Max was still the best thing she had in her whole life at the moment, and she couldn’t forget that.

  GRADUATION WAS LONG AND HOT, but the upside was that in her robe, Cleo looked like she was just chunky and not necessarily pregnant. The downside was that both of their families were there, and they were all together for the first time ever.

  Weezy and Elizabeth had been in touch and even met up for lunch a few months back. It was a strange thing to imagine, these two women getting together. Cleo waited for her mom to call and ridicule Weezy, to make fun of her coddling ways, how she talked about her children like they were all still toddlers. But she never did. She actually seemed to enjoy her. It was amazing how much an accidental pregnancy could bind you together against your children.

  Weezy made the two of them pose in front of trees and buildings, with their caps on, then with their caps off, holding their diplomas, and just standing. She tried to make the two of them throw their caps in the air, which was when Max put his foot down. Then she made Cleo pose with Elizabeth, and then they took pictures of the whole Coffey family. “I’ll get you copies,” Weezy told Elizabeth. Elizabeth just nodded. Cleo was pretty sure she didn’t even have a camera with her.

  After the ceremony, Cleo and Elizabeth ran into Monica and her family. Cleo and Monica hugged, and then Monica’s mom and dad each hugged her. Elizabeth looked at Monica with a fond but distant smile, like she was sure she’d seen her somewhere before, but couldn’t say where. When they went to say good-bye, Monica’s mom hugged Cleo again, and whispered in her ear, “We’re all thinking of you,” which made Cleo feel strange, and weirdly like Monica had told on her. She pulled away and said the only thing she could think of, which was, “Thanks.”

  They all went out to an Italia
n dinner at a restaurant where Weezy had made reservations months earlier. Every restaurant was booked, of course, and unless you remembered way ahead of time, you were out of luck. Cleo wondered what they would have done if they weren’t with the Coffeys. Elizabeth probably would have just driven back to New York.

  They all said good-bye outside the restaurant. Cleo and Max had to go pack up their apartment, and everyone else was driving back that night. It felt weird packing up the apartment with Max. “I don’t feel like we graduated,” she said. “I don’t feel like anything’s over.”

  WEEZY MADE THEM UNPACK THEIR BAGS on the driveway. “Who knows what you’re bringing back from that place?” she kept saying. Cleo wasn’t sure if she thought they had bedbugs or that mice were hiding in their clothes, but she was offended. She managed to convince Weezy to let them bring the stuffed chair from their apartment down to the basement, after Weezy inspected it and sprayed it with some sort of foam that she then vacuumed off of it.

  Cleo wondered what the neighbors must have thought, looking out to see Weezy in cropped workout pants and an old hockey T-shirt of Max’s, sweating as she pulled the vacuum around, the orange extension cord trailing out of the house, while Cleo just stood there and watched, her hands resting on her stomach, which was as big as a beach ball.

  After they moved everything in, Max sat on the edge of the bed and Cleo stood by the dresser. They were exhausted and sweaty. The room felt tiny, like it could barely hold the two of them.

  “Well, here we are,” Max said.

  “Here we are,” Cleo said.

  MAX STARTED LOOKING FOR A JOB the very next day, which was annoying. There was no point in her even applying anywhere, since no one was going to hire a girl that was almost eight months pregnant. Cleo looked at his résumé and wanted to tell him that she should be the one getting a job, that she’d be able to get a better one than he could. It was always understood between them that she was the smarter one, and now she wanted it acknowledged. She had to bite her lip to keep from saying something out loud. Instead, she sat and watched Max send out his résumé, feeling like a big blob of nothing.

  THEN MAX GOT A JOB DOING AD SALES for a small business magazine, and Cleo spent her days sleeping late, wandering around the house, reading, sleeping, and waiting for Max to come home. Then when he did, she listened to him talk about his job. She wanted to hear everything about his coworkers. Who brought tuna for lunch every day and who napped in their cubicle? She herself had nothing to share, except for the day that she took Ruby for a walk and the poor thing got diarrhea. Max was so tired every night. “I can’t believe this is what a job feels like,” he said. Most nights, he fell asleep while they were still watching TV in bed.

  The days got even more boring. Weezy tried to help, which some days Cleo appreciated and some days it made her want to scrape her teeth with her fingernails. “Shall we go look at some strollers?” Weezy would say. Or, “Why don’t we go get you some new tops?” That last comment made Cleo cry a little, since she was sure that Weezy was telling her that her shirts were too tight.

  One day, even Weezy seemed at a loss, and the two of them sat upstairs on the couch, reading. Weezy had given Cleo an old copy of The Thorn Birds that she’d found on a bookshelf in the basement. The book was wrinkled, like it had gotten wet and the pages had dried all wavy, but Weezy promised she’d enjoy it. “It’s so dramatic, full of love affairs with a priest, and—oh, I don’t want to ruin it. You’ll love it, I promise.”

  And so, even if love affairs with a priest didn’t really sound like a huge selling point for Cleo, she was reading the book, which actually seemed a little bit trashy to be on Weezy’s bookshelf but did hold her attention, which wasn’t easy these days.

  “You know what we should do?” Weezy asked her. “We should go get some yarn and start knitting blankets for the baby.”

  “I don’t know how to knit,” Cleo told her.

  “You don’t know how to knit?” Weezy sounded appalled, as though Cleo had just told her she didn’t know how to tie her shoes. Really, what did Weezy think, that girls still took Home Ec classes? In what world was it that strange not to know how to knit? Cleo thought all of this, but just shook her head in response to Weezy’s question.

  “Well, then, I can teach you. It will be wonderful.”

  Cleo was so bored that she agreed. She even hoped it really would be wonderful. Here she was, getting excited over yarn and books with philandering priests. She didn’t even recognize herself.

  She and Weezy went to the yarn store, to stock up on needles for Cleo and get some easy patterns and fun yarn. The place was called At Knit’s End and was tucked in an old house off of a busy road. A few of the women greeted Weezy when she walked in.

  “Hello,” Weezy said. “Ladies, we have a first-timer! This is my daughter-in-law, Cleo.” The women didn’t seem all that excited, and Cleo stood frozen, shocked to hear herself be called Weezy’s daughter-in-law. She wasn’t yet, but she didn’t correct her. She guessed that’s what she would be soon.

  “Since we don’t know what the baby will be,” Weezy was saying, “we’ll have to get some neutral colors. Yellows, greens, and I guess even light blue would work. We’ll get you some yarn to practice on. And let’s see …” She thumbed through a stack of books. “Here. This looks like an easy pattern. Just knitting with increasing and a yarn over. Or you could do this one, it’s a basket weave. Just knitting and purling. What do you think?”

  Cleo hadn’t understood one word that Weezy had just said, but she pointed to the simpler pattern, and Weezy nodded. She chose a light yellow yarn, which was super-soft and pretty. Weezy had found a complicated pattern, with sheep dancing across it, and she was picking up ball after ball of yarn and throwing it into the basket.

  When the ladies rang them up, Cleo was surprised by the total. How did yarn cost this much? Cleo tried to offer to pay, but Weezy patted her hand away. “This was my idea and it’s my treat. It will be fun for me to get knitting again, and now I have a good excuse.”

  The cashier, who was a large sour-looking woman, put their purchases into a bag and handed it to them without smiling.

  “ ’Bye, ladies,” Weezy called. Some of them grunted in response. When they got out to the parking lot, Weezy lowered her voice. “Knitters are not friendly. I don’t know what it is, you’d think they would be, but I’ve learned over the years that most of them act like they have a needle up their behind.” Cleo laughed and then Weezy laughed a little bit too.

  It turned out that Cleo loved knitting. Well, that wasn’t exactly true. She loved the feeling of concentrating, the magic of turning the yarn over the needles and coming out with a perfect little stitch. When Weezy taught her to do a yarn over for the first time, she gasped. “Oh, look at that!” and Weezy looked pleased. It was magical, sort of.

  She could knit for hours, sit with the TV on or music in the background and let her fingers go. She didn’t enjoy the actual process; it sort of made her fingers ache, and sometimes it was so boring that she felt like her skin was going to split. But she liked the goal, and she loved checking off the boxes as she was done with each row, marking her stitches with the little stitch counters. She was determined.

  At night, she’d sit up in bed and knit. Max thought she was becoming obsessed. “Maybe I’m nesting,” she told him.

  “Maybe that’s it,” he said. He pulled her down for a kiss and then put his face on her stomach and kissed that. “Good night, baby.”

  She and Weezy took to knitting every night after dinner. They had different programs that they liked to watch, and Weezy could always help her if she knotted a stitch or did something wrong. She sometimes hoped that Claire or Martha would join them, but they seemed to have their own thing going on. Will always went up to his office to work, and Max was so tired with his new schedule that he went to bed early.

  Weezy’s blanket was really complicated. Sometimes she would explain it to Cleo, the stitches she was doing, and Cleo wo
uld watch, fascinated. It took Weezy more than an hour to do a row, and almost every row required something different. When she was done, she would knit the sheep over the blanket. “It’s not as hard as it seems,” she said. But Cleo could tell she was pleased at the attention.

  Cleo finished her first blanket, and as Weezy taught her how to do the final stitch and tie it off, they both cheered. Cleo felt exhilarated. She couldn’t believe that she’d made this thing. “I love it,” she said over and over. She put it next to her and rubbed it on her face.

  “We’ll wash it in Dreft and it will be all clean and ready for the baby. It’s really beautiful. You are a natural.”

  They got Cleo more yarn and she started on the basket-weave blanket. This one she did in a light blue that was almost aqua. It was really more of a girl color, but you could use it for both. Plus, Cleo felt like she was having a girl, but she hadn’t told anyone in case she was wrong. She didn’t want to sound like an idiot.

  “A baby can never have too many blankets,” Weezy said. “And you can always give them as gifts. It’s such a wonderful thing to receive.”

  Sometimes Weezy had a glass of wine while she knitted, although one night, after she’d had a few, she ended up messing up the blanket so much that she had to take out two entire rows. “This is why you don’t drink and knit,” she told Cleo. They laughed, and Cleo wished that she could knit and drink, but it wasn’t an option.

  It was funny, those nights, how peaceful it was to sit together, the TV chattering in the background showing some silly sitcom or fashion reality show. She and Weezy could talk about the people on the TV, who their favorites were, or they could talk about their knitting. But most of the time they were silent, both pairs of hands working away, fingers moving in rhythm, and Cleo felt a certain sense of happiness, to be making something for the baby, to be sitting quietly with Weezy and creating something for this little person.

  Ruby liked to sit on the couch next to Cleo while she knitted, sometimes resting her body on the completed part of the blanket, like she was testing it out. At first Cleo hadn’t really liked Ruby all that much. The dog had goopy eyes and some strange-feeling lumps on her back. But after seeing how much Max adored her, and after being at the house long enough to get used to her, and the sort of foul smell that she carried with her, Cleo grew fond of her.