Jessica Z

by Shawn Klomparens

  Is it strange that I hope this person, whom I’ve never met and probably never will, is doing okay?

  I finally start to type, and by the afternoon I’ve got the copy done, for the most part. But I’m having trouble coming up with a tagline for these shorts. Even looking at the home pages of every cycling apparel manufacturer on the planet fails to inspire, and I don’t think Mike would appreciate outright plagiarism. I see Katie is online, so I open up a chat window.

  “Women’s cycling shorts,” I type. “Need a tagline. It’s for a trade show. Wow me.”

  “You’re asking me to come up with one?” she types back.

  “Yes. Client wants to hype the woman aspect.”

  “Are they cushy?”

  “I haven’t actually tried them on, but they look like they are the cushiest.”

  “Hold on.” A long pause. “How about, ‘The Spot for the Twat.’ Would that work?”

  This makes me laugh out loud. “You rule, K.”

  “I know. Bye bye.”

  That night Patrick makes me a passable interpretation of pad Thai for dinner up in his apartment. I try to care—really—about the wine he carefully pairs with it, but even my feigned interest in Riesling doesn’t prevent him from wanting to spend the night in his own bed, alone. Back downstairs, I’m tipsy and restless under my covers, so action is once again taken, and action leads to sleep.

  Wednesday is basically a repeat. Limited train service has resumed out to the valley, so Patrick leaves mid-morning, mostly to check in and see how people—the team, as he calls them—are doing, but also to get his little MacBook and phone, which he seems to be going crazy without. He surprises me by stopping in and kissing me before he leaves, a friendly sort of see-you-later kiss, nothing more, but he shakes his finger at me when he sees the look on my face after.

  “Rule’s a rule, Jessica,” he says. And he leaves.

  I sit down and stare at the Cippoletti logo on my desk. Everyone at work has taken to calling it “the ass,” because, well, it’s basically a swooshy yellow and blue line drawing of a woman’s ass. It takes two hours for me to whittle my notes down to a list of eleven possible slogans for this stupid line of bike shorts. “The Spot for the Twat” is not one of them. Nothing on the list seems any good at all, so, in desperation, I open my robe and pull on the shorts, half expecting that, as I do so, a beam of God-sent light will emerge through a crack in the ceiling and shoot right down to illuminate the proper choice on my list.

  There is no beam of light. No flash of inspiration hits my head or the padded space between my legs. And when I see myself, and the shorts, in my mirror, I immediately pull them off and throw them onto my bed.

  It’s another hour before I almost come to a decision. “Her Sport. Her Motion. Cippoletti” is my number one, and “Cippoletti—For the Way She Moves” is number two. Even ranking them seems a little too hopeful; they both suck. But I find comfort in the knowledge that, when we finally meet with the Cippoletti people, they will graciously nod and thoughtfully hold their chins during my presentation before suggesting we go back to the Italian tagline they’ve always had and that no one understood in the first place. So either way, I’m covered.

  I e-mail everything to Mike, cursing myself as soon as I hit the send button because I should have waited another day so he’d think I was still working on it. In any event, the job is done, and with this minor feeling of accomplishment I decide to actually get dressed for the first time in two days. But as soon as I get my jeans and ratty sweater on, I lie down on the couch and fall asleep.

  I’m awakened sometime later by Patrick coming into my apartment and banging things around in a less-than-subtle way. I’m groggy and angry that he woke me up, but all is forgiven when I see that he’s brought me a chicken salad sandwich from Mario’s. This divine creation on light rye bread might be my most beloved culinary treat in all the Bay Area. If I’m ever to be blown up on a bus, or anywhere else for that matter, I hope one of these will have been my last meal.

  Patrick sits next to me on the couch with a sandwich of his own in his hands and a wad of paper towels in his lap. We eat and watch the news on mute, since the pictures say enough and the anchors are a local joke.

  “How was Mountain View?” I ask.

  “They acted as though nothing happened,” he says. “It was all like, ‘project launch date in t-minus three weeks and counting, sir.’”

  The TV is showing footage of the mayor riding, in a smiling display of confidence, on a Muni bus. It looks like the 71 line, but it’s hard to tell. I’m watching him gesture with his hand as he silently talks to someone out of the shot, and then, over his shoulder, a scruffy crackhead peers into the frame. The guy disappears for a moment, maybe shooed away by one of the mayor’s handlers, but then he’s back, giving a wide smile that shows his few remaining teeth. I’m trying not to laugh as I watch. The mayor seems unfazed, though, and keeps talking, even as the crackhead starts a spastic dance behind him. Now I’m really trying to keep myself from laughing, but when I look at Pat I see he’s biting his lip, transfixed, and I start to giggle. This turns into full-bore laughter, and Pat starts to lose it too.

  The cameraman is obviously into it also, and he opens up the shot so we can see more of this dancing freak. Unable to ignore the guy anymore, the mayor turns and claps, feigning delight at his ruined photo op. Now it’s the all-crackhead show, the camera fully devoted to his jerky efforts, and Pat unmutes just in time for us to hear the guy shout: “I love dis bus! I love dis may-YAH! Yahhh!”

  The bizarre spectacle of a dancing homeless man next to our mayor has triggered some sort of necessary release, and I’m laughing so hard that tears are coming down my cheeks and there’s chicken salad spilled on my jeans. Pat stands up and raises his arms and yells, “I love dis bus! I love dis may-YAH!” Then he sits back down and we lean together and laugh, and every time it feels like we are about to stop, another wave of it comes and we lose it again, until finally it dies away for good, and my stomach muscles are sore from laughing so hard. We lean against one another for a long time, and I let out a long, happy breath.

  I needed this. We both did.

  Pat still chooses to spend the night upstairs, though.

  Thursday is spent alone, and the solitude isn’t such a bad thing. Patrick has some meeting in the evening, so I get takeout and mentally prepare myself for the following day’s commute to my office. The bus ride Friday morning is mostly fine; the driver is too cheerful and welcoming and all of the passengers sit and quietly smile at each other. I join in and smile too as I take my seat, not really knowing why I’m doing it. Would a potential suicide bomber be so overcome by this collective effort of happiness that he might decide to abandon his mission? I think it’s just that we’re all so scared we want to pee in our pants. That’s sort of how I feel, at least, so I keep smiling. Whatever it is, I’m happy when I get to my stop, because my cheeks are getting sore.

  It’s actually a great relief to be back at my office. We work primarily with outdoor-oriented companies, just a six-person shop, and I feel a strange comfort in the fact that I have to climb over three kayaks—the same kayaks I was so angry about no one taking care of last week—in our reception area to get to my cubicle.

  “Hello?” Mike calls from the back.

  “Hey, Mike, it’s Jess.”

  “I got the Cippoletti stuff, looks great.”

  “Thanks,” I say.

  “Those tags are both so good, I don’t know how we’re going to decide.”

  Well isn’t that something?

  There’s a dry erase board in the room with the coffeemaker and our mailboxes, and taped to the upper left-hand corner of the board is my very own fifteen minutes of mortifying fame, my picture on the cover of a two-year-old Cooper & Greaves Pacific Northwest Outfitters catalog. It’s become a running competition here for people to try to come up with the funniest caption for the photo, and, thanks to an office filled with creative people, I’ll admit t
hat some of them have been pretty clever. The latest one is not, though; it says: “I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way,” and I can tell by the handwriting it’s been put up by our creepy sales guy, Grant. This disposes me to hate the caption, regardless of what it says, so I wipe it away.

  That I ended up on the cover of a catalog that my mother buys clothes from was a little unexpected. It certainly was not a planned part of my stumbling career arc, anyway. Amy and I had met up to grab lunch one day, and as we waited in line outside the little deli down the street, two guys came up to us, one with a giant camera and the other with a notepad. “We’re scouting for a catalog shoot,” the one with the notepad said. “Can we take your picture?” Amy rolled her eyes, but we did it, standing in the sun on the sidewalk, one shot from the front, one from the side. Notepad guy took our numbers (Amy, being a suspicious type, gave them a fake one) and told us we’d hear in a couple days if they were interested.

  I acted indifferent and laughed along at the office jokes made about budding modeling careers, but I made sure my phone was on me at all times. And when it rang, I was secretly thrilled. They faxed me a photo release to sign and asked where the van should pick me up Saturday morning, and the weekend was basically spent walking around a vineyard having my picture taken in different combinations of conservative tops and shawls. Then they gave me five hundred dollars and dropped me off at home. When none of my pictures showed up in the next catalog, I figured they’d decided not to use any of my shots, and I forgot about it. Until Katie called.

  “Jess!” she screamed. “You’re on it!”

  “On what?”

  “Have you seen the latest Cooper & Greaves?”

  I didn’t even know I had it, there in the stack of catalogs to the side of my important mail. And when I searched through the pile and pulled it out, I gasped.

  “Oh no,” I said. “Oh no, no, no.” There I was on the cover, but I was hardly myself: lips parted, dreamy eyes, with a shawl wrapped around my shoulders and a tendril of hair blowing across my face. All blemishes and ugliness Photo-shopped away.

  “Yes,” Katie said. “You’re the proto-lass, rising from the heather.”

  The cover only increased my already bad enough self-consciousness to severe levels. There are few things more ick-inducing than hearing a drunk frat boy in a bar shout: “Whoa! Dude! Check it out, she’s the…Hey, I used to have your picture up in my room!”

  The Cooper & Greaves people actually called me about a year ago to see if I’d do another shoot for them. Apparently they had gotten quite a bit of feedback on my cover. I declined. I think my sister would be more appropriate, anyway. People say she and I (and our mother, for that matter), look so alike, but it isn’t the case. I’m nothing like them. My mother’s body looks too fragile to have carried two children, and her breasts look too small to have nursed them. Katie got Mom’s slight build and refined face, and we both got her red hair and fair freckled skin. My body, though, the odd one of the three, seems made up of too-broad hips and too-big boobs, blue-veined globes bearing pale bull’s-eye nipples, with a rash of freckles painted down the center of my chest toward my other target, that red-haired exclamation mark that Katie calls “the Zorich pubic flame.”

  I look at the cover taped up on the whiteboard and get a marker and write “proto-lass, rising from the heather” beneath it.

  It’s nice to be back behind my desk. I power on my computer, and find that Patrick has sent me an e-mail with a picture of the snaggle-toothed crackhead on the bus attached.

  “Aw, Jess!” I hear someone saying. “Jess.” It’s Grant, and I reflexively cross my arms over my sweater as he peers into my cubicle.

  “You took down my quote,” he says, pouting.

  “Oh shoot, Grant, I’m sorry. I thought it had been up there for a while.”

  “What does ‘proto-lass” mean?”

  I just smile and shrug, telepathically willing him to leave. And he does, so maybe there’s something to it. Another e-mail from Pat comes in, and this time it’s a little animation someone’s made of the bus guy dancing, moving his hips and raising his arms, looping over and over and over. Apparently he’s become a local phenomenon. A third message arrives a few seconds later, this one blank except for a subject line that says: “CALLING NOW.” Moments after I delete it, my extension rings. It’s Patrick himself, letting me know he’s going out with some people from his office tonight. He asks if I want to meet up with them.

  “Come on,” he says. “We aren’t staying out late. You can go easy.”

  “Going easy” with Patrick usually ends up meaning “just as drunk with twice the remorse,” and the place they’re going is too far away. I’m not really excited about another bus ride to get there, or a staggering walk home, so I pass.

  “You’re sure?” he asks.

  “I’m sure. And what’s up with all the bus guy e-mails?”

  A pause.

  “They’re funny?”

  I say nothing, and can tell that my lack of a response hurts his feelings a little. “I’ll stop sending them,” he says. “You really won’t come?”

  “I’ll see you later,” I say. “Have fun.”

  5

  The message machine is flashing a red number one when I get home, and, what do you know, Dad has called.

  “Jessica,” he says in the slow and oddly formal way that Katie imitates so perfectly, “it is your father. It is Friday afternoon. I will try you Saturday.”

  Whether this means tomorrow or some unknown Saturday in the future is anyone’s guess. Raymond Zorich has spent the past couple years, flush with cash from royalties on his engineering patents, traveling around the country in a battered (and enormous) RV. Katie tells me he’s been rolling with a companion named Wilma for the past couple months. He refuses to pay for a cellular phone, so communications with him have been somewhat sporadic. It’s not like that’s anything new, though.

  Our father left home when I was twelve years old and Katie was four days away from her tenth birthday. They had been fighting for a while, my parents, and when Mom called Katie and me down to the living room and I saw her, standing so severely with her hands on her hips, I had a pretty good idea what the news would be.

  “Your father isn’t coming home tonight,” she said.

  The melodramatic possibilities of my parents’ impending divorce had been almost exciting; the potential attention and social elevation I saw my seventh-grade self receiving in the wake of such a family tragedy seemed almost too good to be true. The realization that it was actually happening, though, was another thing entirely.

  “Is he coming home tomorrow?” I asked, pressing my lips together and clenching my teeth to try to stop the tremor in my chin, as if that would hold off the breakdown I could feel coming on.

  “Your father isn’t coming home tomorrow, or any day after that. Your father isn’t going to be living here anymore.”

  My vision went blurry with tears, and I looked to my right at Katie, the skinny, little-girl Katie who I still see in my dreams sometimes, holding the book she’d been reading when Mom called us down. She turned to me and shrugged, giving an “oh well” look before she went back upstairs to her room. Mom didn’t volunteer anything else, so I followed Katie up the staircase and went to my own room, where I curled up on my bed and cried and cried. If the foundation of my parents’ marriage could be destroyed, I thought, surely everything else would be falling apart soon as well; probably an earthquake that would rip the earth open beneath us and swallow us whole, or maybe a distant volcano in the Cascades would erupt and bury our house in thick ash.

  It was a while before I lifted myself, sniffling and hiccoughing and spent, from the wet spot of tears and snot on my pillow. And when I rose up, there was Katie, sitting on the floor at the foot of my bed, her book propped on her knees.

  “When did you come in here?” I asked.

  “A while ago,” she said, closing the book. “Do you want to move into my room with me?�
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  “Alright,” I said, and we spent the rest of the evening quietly dismantling my black lacquered bed frame with a screwdriver and worn pair of pliers from Dad’s still-resident toolbox. Katie and I slid each piece down the hall to her room, where we reassembled it in a spot hastily vacated by her two enormous and outgrown dollhouses. Mom never suggested that I go back to my own room, and that was where I stayed, every night from that point on, until the day I left for college.

  Remembering this makes me want to call Katie. She doesn’t answer, and I don’t leave a message. She’ll see that I called, and that will be enough.

  I consider the delicious idea of locking the door and taking a hot bath with my own book when the phone rings again. This time it’s Amy, who says she’s going out with her friend Susan to Brenneman’s and do I want to come too? The place is close, it’s a mellow bar, and she swears it’s going to be an early night, so this time I say sure.

  “See you at seven,” she says.

  Danny is crossing the street toward our building as I’m heading out. I wave at him and he waves back, and he puts his other hand on his hip and makes a butt-wiggling pirouette before jumping up to the curb next to me.