Young Jane Young

by Gabrielle Zevin

  The parrot flew over to Aaron’s nightstand, where he began grooming his feathers. The process was a reasonably quiet one, but it was too late. Embeth was awake. To pretend to sleep was more tiring than to resign herself to the day.

  Embeth got out of bed, and she washed her hair in the shower, and when she got out of the shower, the parrot was perched on the towel rack.

  “I’d love it if you gave me a little personal space,” Embeth said.

  El Meté flew onto her head and pecked her with his pink beak. “Moisturize! Moisturize!”

  SHE WENT TO the kitchen to pour herself some coffee. She was meant to have given up coffee, but what was the point of living without coffee? Living, it seemed to her, was the acquiring of bad habits. Dying, the process of rescinding them. Death was the land without habits. Without coffee.

  El Meté alit on her shoulder. “I don’t want you to come with me today,” Embeth said.

  “El Meté come. El Meté come.”

  “Seriously, I have to go to the doctor, the salon, the dry cleaner, the florist, the seamstress, the jeweler, and I have to speak at that stupid lunch, and there’s the party—”

  “Party! Party!”

  “I don’t even like parties—”

  “Party! Party!”

  “You cannot come to the party,” Embeth said.

  “Party! Party!”

  “You can be incredibly thick, El Meté. And repetitive. And also, you think you’re light but you’re enormously heavy on my shoulder. I think you’re gaining weight. Your claws dig into me now. You’re worse than a bra strap. You’re worse than a Birkin bag. I’m going to need to get a chiropractor.”

  Margarita the part-time housekeeper came into the kitchen, carrying a large box. “Ms. Levin, good morning! Happy anniversary! This was on the steps.” Margarita set the box on the counter.

  Embeth looked at the return address. It was from her most faithful friend, Shipment Fulfillment Center. Embeth got a chef’s knife and opened it. Inside the box, entombed in an infinity of bubble wrap, was a tacky-looking statue. The statue was about the size of a large penis and made from resin and garishly hued like a black-and-white movie that had been colorized. A winged, rosy man wore a pink toga and carried a bronze Star of David, like a shield. He must have been some kind of Jewish angel. Were there Jewish angels? Yes, of course there were. There were angels in the Old Testament, so there must be Jewish angels. Wasn’t everyone in the Old Testament Jewish? She turned the base over. An accompanying certificate of authenticity indicated that this was Mattatron, which sounded like the name of a robot. Who would have sent her such an object? Embeth was not the type of woman to whom anyone would send an angel.

  “Oh, very nice,” Margarita said. Margarita appreciated kitsch. Her look was a bit kitsch, too. She wore her glossy black hair like a burlesque queen. She paraded around the kitchen in shoes with cherries on them, her young breasts pushed up to her chin. Jorge, who was Aaron’s right hand, had taken one look at Margarita and said, “Are you sure you want this in your house?”

  “What do you mean?” Embeth had asked.

  “I mean, she looks like T-R-O-U-B-L-E.”

  “Aaron’s old. I’m old,” Embeth had said. “I’m home more than he is, and it’s sexist not to hire someone because she’s cute. She’s very smart, too. She’s getting an MFA in sculpture.”

  “Trouble,” Jorge had repeated.

  “Would you like it?” Embeth said now to Margarita as she dug through the bubble wrap for a note. She supposed people sent her this kind of crap because they thought the cancer had made her soft.

  “I couldn’t,” Margarita said. “The angel is meant for you.”

  “Or perhaps it was meant for me to give to you,” Embeth suggested.

  “It is bad luck to take another woman’s angel,” Margarita said.

  “If you don’t give him a home, he’s going in the trash,” Embeth said.

  “It is bad luck to throw your angel in the trash.”

  “What isn’t bad luck?” Embeth said. She picked the angel up by the head. “I don’t believe in bad luck.” She opened the trash can and then paused. “Is he recyclable, do you think?”

  “Don’t do that,” Margarita said. “Maybe he’ll grow on you?”

  “He won’t.”

  “Maybe the congressman?”

  “Aaron would loathe this.”

  “Fine,” Margarita said. “Give him to me.” She took the angel and set him by her purse.

  “Are you going to be able to come to the party tonight?” Embeth asked.

  “Yes,” Margarita said. “Of course I am, Ms. Levin. I would not miss it! I sewed my dress myself. It is a red corset on top and a black hoop skirt on the bottom, and I will wear small black lace gloves without fingertips, and my hair up, pulled back tight, and a small veil over my face. It will be so dramatic.”

  “Sounds it,” Embeth said. “You can wear it again to my funeral.”

  “Do not be morbid, Ms. Levin. The dress is very festive.”

  “Margarita, what does meté mean in Spanish?”

  “A child having a tantrum might yell it to get someone to put something down. Meté! Meté!” Margarita said.

  “But what if there’s an el in front of it? El Meté. Does that make a difference?”

  “Ah,” Margarita said. “Then, it means nothing at all.”

  •••

  THE RECEPTIONIST APOLOGIZED. The doctor was running behind schedule. Behind schedule was the schedule, Embeth thought.

  Embeth took out her phone and searched for mentions of Aaron’s congressional race online. She decided she wouldn’t care if he lost. Despite what people said about her—that she was the ambitious one, that without her, he would most certainly be a high school English teacher, not that there’s anything wrong with that—she would almost welcome his defeat.

  “Embeth Levin, is that you?”

  She turned, and it was Allegra. Allegra was so old. She looked like she was in her late forties. Oh God, Embeth thought, she doesn’t look old. She is old. She is in her late forties, because I’m in my late fifties. Allegra had worked with Embeth, back when Embeth had worked for the hospital. They had been so close. People had jokingly referred to them as “work wives.”

  “Allegra, it’s been too long,” Embeth said.

  Allegra kissed her on the cheek. “I hope you’re well.”

  “I was sick last year, but I’m better now,” Embeth said. “I’m only here for a checkup.”

  “Well . . . ,” Allegra said. “Well, you look good.”

  “Don’t lie. I look like shit,” Embeth said.

  “You do look good . . . A little tired maybe. I hate when people say I look tired.”

  “We’re having an anniversary party tonight,” Embeth said. “And after this, I’m going to the salon. I’ve got to figure out something with these useless feathers.”

  “I like your hair. It’s very chic,” Allegra said. “By the way, I know about the party. I mean, I’m coming to it,” Allegra said.

  “Why?” Embeth said without thinking.

  “Well, I was invited,” Allegra said. “I assumed by you?”

  I should goddamn remember a thing like that, Embeth thought. “Of course,” Embeth said. “Of course.” What state of mind must she have been in to invite Allegra?

  “You sound surprised.”

  “I’m not. I’m . . .” The truth was, she couldn’t remember anything lately. Probably chemo brain.

  “Mrs. Levin,” the receptionist called.

  “I was happy to get the invitation,” Allegra said. “Surprised, but happy. But if you don’t want me to come . . . If it was some sort of accident, I mean.”

  “I do want you to come.” Embeth squeezed Allegra’s hand. The hand was cool and soft, and Allegra smelled of frangipani and something spicier and earthier, like sandalwood or pure cocoa powder. “Sometimes, my brain works better when I’m barely thinking.”

  Allegra smiled. “I don’t
know what that means.”

  “I want us to have an impossibly long lunch next week,” Embeth said. “Can we promise to do that?”

  “I wish I’d known you were ill,” Allegra said.

  “I wasn’t any fun to be with,” Embeth said.

  “Still, I would have done something . . .”

  What would she have done? Walked a 5K? Worn a ribbon? Brought chicken soup for Embeth to throw up? Posted a sympathetic tweet? “Why are you wearing cat ears?” Embeth asked. “Am I imagining them, or are you actually wearing cat ears?”

  “Oh!” Allegra laughed coyly, a bit embarrassed, and patted down the hair beneath the black cat ear headband. “It’s my costume. Yesterday was Halloween.”

  “I forgot,” Embeth said.

  “But the party at Emory’s school is this morning. Something to do with testing. I’m in charge of punch. One of the moms sent me a text last night, Don’t put nuts in the punch! Who puts nuts in punch? I’m the oldest mom there, and they think I’m a flake.”

  “Mrs. Levin!” the receptionist repeated.

  “The ears suit you,” Embeth said as she went through the doors into the doctor’s office.

  “How’s Embeth today?” the doctor asked. English was not his first language, and he seemed frightened of pronouns.

  “Embeth has found a new lump,” she said brightly.

  ON THE WAY out of the doctor’s office, Embeth felt stupidly cheerful. The promise of future tests! The promise of another round of chemo! The promise of death! These were not reasons to be cheered, and yet, cheered she was.

  It was certainly not the promise of the evening’s festivities.

  Perhaps it was the relief of revelation. When she’d found the knot in the shower, she had felt like a failure, though she knew that was a trick of her brain, pure foolishness. It was not her fault that her body had continued to grow anomalous clusters of cells. Embeth had been raised to believe that everything was her fault. She was enormously powerful and couldn’t do anything right. Embeth, Creator of Anomalous Clusters. Embeth, Destroyer of Worlds.

  Perhaps her cheerfulness was a result of the day itself. It was a dry, cool morning after what had been a dry, cool October. The late-season hurricanes did not arrive. Her hair, what there was of it, obeyed more than it usually did.

  Perhaps it was seeing Allegra.

  If It wasn’t back, if Embeth had but time, she would have that lunch with Allegra, and then she would have another lunch with Allegra, and at that second lunch, when everyone was more relaxed, they would order two desserts and split them and let their fork tines intertwine and lightly clang against each other and they’d eat those desserts down to the last crumb, and then Embeth would say to the waiter, Yes, actually, I will have an espresso, and Allegra would suggest they take a yoga class together (“It’s hatha, Em; anyone can do it”), and at yoga, one of them would suggest starting a book club, and Embeth would somehow organize her life so that she might see Allegra every, every day until one or both of them were dead.

  Why had Allegra been at Dr. Hui’s office? She should have asked. How self-centered she was. She sometimes forgot that she was not the only person in the world with cancer. Conversely, she often forgot that everyone in the world did not have cancer.

  She had convinced El Meté to wait near the car—one couldn’t bring fowl to the doctor’s. El Meté perched on the hood of her Tesla. His nails clicked happily against the car’s paint job. He flew up and landed on Embeth’s shoulder. “The blouse is silk,” she said. “Be gentle.”

  “Gentle! Gentle!” he said. “Good night! Good night!”

  Embeth got into her car, and her cell phone rang, and she was careful to use the speaker, because the last thing you wanted was cancer of the brain on top of all the other cancers you already had.

  It was Tasha, one of Aaron’s assistants in Miami. Tasha was new. She said they had an emergency at the office. Aaron’s assistants were always given to dramatics, though. The new ones especially. They didn’t have the experience to separate a situation from an emergency, a crisis from a tragedy. A week before an election, what wasn’t an emergency? “Can’t Jorge deal with it?” Embeth said. “I’m pretty booked with the party tonight. Why in God’s name we are having this ridiculous party . . .” Embeth performed an apologetic laugh.

  Tasha said, “Maybe emergency is the wrong word. I’d call it a situation.”

  “Fine,” said Embeth impatiently. “I trust Jorge to deal with all situations.”

  “Fine! Very fine!” said El Meté.

  “Shh!” said Embeth.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Tasha said.

  “No, not you. I was talking to someone else,” Embeth said. “Call Jorge.”

  “Okay. The thing is . . .” Tasha lowered her voice, and Embeth could not hear what she said. She asked her to say it louder. “It’s a girl.”

  “What?”

  “There’s a girl here,” Tasha said. “She says she’s Aaron’s daughter,” she whispered.

  “Daughter! Daughter!” said El Meté.

  “That’s not possible,” Embeth said. “We only have sons.”

  “I’m looking at her. She’s about four feet eleven inches tall and she has braces and curly hair. I’d guess she’s about eleven or twelve—”

  “No, Tasha, I do not need you to describe a girl for me. I know perfectly well what a girl looks like, having been one myself, though you probably find that hard to believe, and I do not dispute that you are looking at a girl! The point is, you are not looking at Aaron’s daughter because my husband and I only have sons,” Embeth said.

  “Sons! Sons!” said El Meté.

  “Would you kindly shut up?” said Embeth.

  “I wasn’t talking,” said Tasha.

  “Not you. Someone else. Call Jorge and tell him that there’s some crazy kid at the office, and he’ll tell you what to do. I don’t have time for crazy people today.”

  “Okay,” said Tasha. “I can do that. But one other thing—”

  “What?”

  “She says her last name is Grossman.”

  How Embeth loathed that name! “Gross,” she said.

  “No, Grossman,” said Tasha.

  “I heard you the first time.” She would have loved to go the whole rest of her life without ever having to hear that name again.

  “The election’s next week,” Tasha continued.

  “Yes, Tasha, I am aware,” Embeth said.

  “I know you’re aware,” Tasha said. “I meant, there are a lot of people in the office and a lot of people coming to the office today. Campaign staff. Media. It might be a good idea to move her to a different location while things sort themselves out. Jorge’s in D.C. with the congressman. I can’t get either of them on the phone. I didn’t want to text it, in case someone saw. There might not be time for me to reach him. I don’t want to cause any trouble.”

  And what if there were trouble? What if Embeth didn’t come? What if Embeth just hung up the phone and went to the salon and continued on with her day as she had planned? What if Embeth didn’t intervene and fix things for Aaron? How irritating that people always assumed that Embeth was the person to call when Aaron had caused a crisis. Weren’t there some wives who were protected from the truth at all costs? Why did no one ever think that Embeth was that kind of wife? The kind of wife who should be left in the dark when it came to her husband’s shortcomings?

  Once, many years ago, Embeth hadn’t intervened, and look how that had worked out.

  “Fine,” Embeth said. “I’ll come get her.”

  “What should I do with her in the meantime?”

  “Stick her in a broom closet! I don’t really care.”

  “Broom! Broom!” said El Meté.

  “Shut it,” Embeth whispered.

  “You want me to shut the door of the broom closet?” Tasha asked.

  “I wasn’t talking to you,” Embeth said.

  “Who are you talking to?” Tasha said. “I’m sorry. It’s no
ne of my business.”

  Indeed, it was not her business. “I’m with El . . . ,” Embeth said. “Friend.”

  “Friend? Friend?” said El Meté.

  “Yes, I’d call us friends,” Embeth said.

  The bird nuzzled the nook of Embeth’s neck and cooed.

  “I don’t even know if we have a broom closet, Mrs. Levin,” said Tasha.

  “Tasha, honestly! In this world, to be overly literal is a profound weakness. It doesn’t have to be a broom closet. Just put her somewhere out of the way until I get there. It could be a basement. It could be the roof. It could be a neglected cubicle. The location of your motherfucking choosing!” Embeth hung up the phone. This girl was hopeless.

  “Hopeless,” said El Meté.

  Before Embeth drove to the office, she looked in her phone for Rachel Grossman’s number. Rachel Grossman, otherwise known as the Worst Neighbor Ever. Yes, this—and who knew what this was? — this should definitely be Rachel Grossman’s problem, not Embeth’s.

  Embeth dialed the number, but the number no longer worked. She started the car.

  AT THE OFFICE, phones rang. Some rings were answered enthusiastically; some rings had been ignored for weeks and would always be ignored. A girl in a dress composed a tweet, and a girl in a cheaper version of the same dress wrote yet another memo—“Re: pros and cons of Snapchat for incumbent political candidates”—concluding that at this stage in the campaign it was too late for the congressman to join. Everyone was being careful about what they put in e-mail or in texts because you never knew who was watching/hacking, and you could mean something to be funny, but nothing was funny without context, nuance, and, oh God, the vagaries of tone. Still, a text was preferable to an e-mail. An e-mail was preferable to a phone call. A phone call was preferable to a sit-down. A sit-down was to be avoided at all costs. But if you had to sit down, drinks were better than lunch was better than dinner. Everyone hated his or her phone and couldn’t imagine functioning without it. A girl in jeans shot a nasty look at the girls in dresses and told a boy in jeans that the girls in dresses didn’t really do anything important. (But everyone knew the girls in dresses ran the show.) A girl in a skirt and a boy in a tracksuit discussed whether Up Ticket would help Down Ticket this year. Someone tossed an old imitation Nerf football with LEVIN 2006 on the side, and someone yelled, “Quiet down, the vote’s on C-SPAN!” and someone else yelled, “No one cares!” and someone else yelled, “I care!” Two boys in blazers took lunch orders, and a girl in a dress said she wouldn’t take coffee orders so don’t even think about asking. A boy in a tie revised his résumé (but everyone was always doing that), and a girl in a dress said, “Can someone please explain to the congressman again that you need to put a period at the beginning of a tweet that starts with an ‘@’?” and then she muttered something about “working with old people.” A different girl in a dress sent an e-mail to someone she knew at CNN: “Out of curiosity, how does one become a surrogate?” A boy in a tie flirted with another boy in a tie, and a boy in khakis stole office supplies and told himself he was stocking his own eventual campaign larder. A girl in a dress cried on the phone to her mother and quietly moaned, “I have to stick it out or I won’t get credit!” And everyone was very important, and very underappreciated, and very underpaid, and in the way of all campaign offices, very, very young.