Crossroads (3 page)

There were also pinups thumbtacked to the bulletin board, usually in the form of calendars. They seemed out of place among the tidy desks and carefully drawn plans. As I grew older and the months and years slipped by, the girls in the pictures changed with the times. They grew thinner, their poses less ludicrous, their faces more youthful, as if they attended junior college, until one day a Sierra Club calendar of redwoods appeared and a real woman, myself, Deborah Mills, was working on urban development projects in the drafting room.

Though I never fell in love in my father's office, Zap did one summer when I ran the switchboard—though I'm not really sure he fell in love so much as sealed his fate. He'd really been in love with Jennie Watson for years, and he was like one of those toys you punch and it keeps coming back. I walked into the drafting room one August evening and in the dim twilight saw my brother, clutching at the breasts of my oldest friend. I saw Jennie's spine arched over a drafting table. I saw Zap's hands slide up and down her ribs, and heard him rasp in a deep voice, “Please, please.” I knew what it was then to desire someone desperately and to lose all sense of pride.

That evening I sat in my apartment, staring at the South Bronx project, which was sprawled on the desk along with a small pile of Mark's unpaid bills that had arrived that day in the mail. I stared at the Bronx battleground where Mark and I
had spent Saturdays, envisioning little park benches where there was rubble. The bills were mostly for clothes. Some shirts he'd bought somewhere, shirts I'd never seen. I was trying to figure out if I should pay them or mail him the bills. Or walk over and hand-deliver.

In the end it's details that defeat us. The bills, not my doomed-to-fail urban planner's vision for the Bronx, were what I couldn't handle. It was the same when Mark left. I didn't cry when I found he was gone. I cried four days later, when I found a wet puppy shivering in the rain. I took the dog by its clutch collar and led it to the address on its tag. I rang the bell, and a tall, heavyset woman in black toreador pants stormed down the stairs, shouting at me. “What're you doing? Why did you ring that bell?” When she saw my face distort and saw her shivering hound, she began apologizing and even ran after me a little way as I dashed down the street. In the end, it was the dog and his screaming mistress who made me feel lost and destitute in the world, more than Mark and the note he'd left on the kitchen table.

The phone rang as I sat, immobilized by Mark's unpaid bills.

“Guess who this is?” a woman's voice said.

“It's Jennie.” We'd lost track of one another over the years, after she married Tom, but I'd have known her voice anywhere. A few days before, Jennie Watson had received the directory from our high school reunion committee. My address listing was an old one, the first apartment Mark and I had shared in Manhattan, the one next door to the funeral home, where we'd had to push past mourners in order to get inside. Doom, it seemed, surrounded us. Our phone number had changed twice, but my parents' number was still good, and parents seem to be a kind of constant in the lives of overly transient offspring.

She was crestfallen. It was almost ten years since we'd
talked. “How'd you know it was me? Did your mother tell you?”

“We only spent half our lives together on the phone, remember?”

“Oh, God, do I remember. So, how are you?” I told her that my husband had just left me and I thought I was losing my job, but otherwise I was fine.

“Oh, that sounds great,” she said. She was living on a farm in Thrace, New Jersey. I said I didn't know New Jersey had anything but chemical dumps. She reminded me it was the Garden State and that there were vast farmlands. “We got this one cheap.” I was surprised she said “we.” No one had imagined she and Tom would stay together, but now they had two children. All her sentences had “we” in them. They'd come east long after I had. Tom studied computer science at Columbia while Jennie went to Teachers College for her master's in biology. They'd planned to return to the Midwest after graduate school, but Tom was offered a well-paying job at Bell Labs and Jennie got a job teaching at Princeton Day.

With the insurance money from his father's death, Tom made a down payment on a hundred acres of farmland as an investment. “But now he's addicted. A real farmer. He works four days a week as a farmer. You know Tom.” She laughed. “He always was a workaholic.” I did know Tom and I didn't recall him ever working very hard. “What about you?” she asked.

“Are you ready for this?” She said she was ready, but when I told her Mark was living with Lila Harris, she was aghast. I told her I wasn't sure what I minded more. That they were together or that they had never had the nerve to come and just tell me. The conversation turned somber, so I decided to lighten the mood. “My boss has been planning exotic vacations for me. Yesterday he told me to go to Ireland. He thinks I'm Irish.”

She paused for a second. “So you can visit us for a few days,” she said. “We've got plenty of room. The kids are with my mother for the summer.” She said it in such a way I understood that that was what I'd do.

A
FAKE-WOOD-PANELED
station wagon, with a drooling black dog, its head thrust out the window in the back, pulled up, and Jennie waved. I dropped the candy bar wrapper and peach pit from the food I'd brought with me into a trash can. They were ten minutes late and the bus had been a little early. I'd eaten the candy bar while I waited, then the peach. Waiting made me nervous.

Jennie, rushing toward me, still looked like a fox—that reddish-brown hair, the thin, pointed face, her long nose. She was still five-three and one hundred five pounds, and I felt huge beside her, as if my large bones could crush her frail bones. The opposite of course was true. She was one of the strongest women I'd ever met, and some boys couldn't beat her at arm wrestling. She shook my hand with the firmness of a man's shake. “So how was the trip?”

“It was good.” It was bad. A nuclear disarmament demonstration en route to the United Nations had almost made me miss the bus. Someone who looked like Zap waved a “No Nukes” banner at me and would not let the cab drive on to the
Port Authority. Where had my brother been all these months when I needed him? The bus was hot and I had to sit near the motor. A Mormon woman sat beside me and showed me pictures of her eight children. I tried to envision this woman in a red leisure suit in bed. Then she interrogated me. “You married? Kids?”

Tom laughed as he swept me into his arms. My feet dangled in the air and I clutched his shoulder. He'd put on a little weight and lost some hair around the crown, but mostly he looked the same. He wore a blue T-shirt that said “I've Got Charisma,” and held on to me a little longer than he should have. “You've changed,” he said, scooping up my suitcase and heading toward the station wagon.

“Hey, what's that supposed to mean?” I rushed after him, but Jennie caught me by the arm.

“You know he says stupid things.”

“I know, but you forget.” I'd forgotten a lot, it seemed. I'd forgotten how Jennie was always a little formal when we hadn't seen one another for a while. I'd forgotten she was always a little late with some dumb excuse and that Tom said things without thinking. It had been almost ten years.

“Sorry we were late. Aretha Franklin got out at the last minute. That's the dog. We keep saying we're going to send her to obedience school.” Jennie slipped her arm comfortably now through mine. Tom went on ahead. “God, it's good to see you.”

“You look the same,” I said to her. The first time I saw Jennie she was walking a raccoon on a leash down our street and she handed me the leash. “You walk him,” she said. “He likes strangers.” The raccoon's name was Calcoon; she'd found him sleeping in a garbage can. He'd taken to her immediately and later she told me Calcoon was the first thing she ever loved. I was the second. My brother was the third.

Our friendship, mine and Jennie's, was based on proximity. We walked the same route to school four times a day for years. Later, it would be based on conspiracy. She was my best friend
long before Zap made the mistake of falling in love with her.

We both watched Tom as he walked ahead to put my things in the car. Everyone had been surprised when she married him and some had suspected she had to get married, but that wasn't so. There had been something large and rather stupid about Tom's body when we were teen-agers. Even though he had the first perfect back I ever saw, I felt certain he'd grow flabby with age. The jowly cheeks and soft paunch of a shoe salesman. But instead I could see, as he threw my bags into the back of the wagon, how the opposite had occurred. He'd turned solid, almost to the point of stiffening, and reminded me of a cousin of mine who had a rare disease that was turning her bones into stone.

“The farm's beautiful now, in June,” Jennie said, leading me over to the car. “Except that Aretha Franklin's in heat. That's why we had to bring her with us in the first place. She's Cory's dog. We have no idea why he named her that. He was only five at the time. Cory and Melissa are with Mom for the summer. She likes them to come for a stretch since Dad died.”

“He died?” Jennie's father was a man who always smiled, like Jimmy Carter. It drove everyone crazy. I wonder if he was buried smiling.

“Two years ago. I thought you knew. It was a blessing . . .”

I offered to sit in back but they wouldn't hear of it because the dog sat there, so we all squeezed into the front seat of the station wagon. I sat in the middle, between Tom in the driver's seat and Jennie by the window, my legs pressed against the stick shift. The seat of the car was old vinyl and torn in parts, so that a billowy cotton puffed out of the innards and I felt the springs below me. Jennie made some feeble apology about the old station wagon, saying how the Chevy wouldn't start. “Excuse me,” Tom said as he reached down to put the car in gear and grabbed my knee. I pressed against Jennie.

Tom shifted gears again and this time struck against my leg. “Excuse me,” I said, leaning farther away from him. I
pushed against Jennie, who had her nose to the glass like the dog in the back, and I put my hand on her knee. She took my fingers and gave them a squeeze. “I just can't believe you're here.”

“Me either.” I moved away from Tom.

“How long can you stay?” he asked.

“Oh, I don't know . . . a week.”

“As long as she likes,” Jennie cut in.

“You can stay as long as you like.” Tom said it in such a way I knew he couldn't mean it. He pushed his foot on the pedal.

“Slow down,” Jennie said, her mouth wrinkled into a pout.

A few moments later Tom shouted “We're home!” as we turned down a driveway and all I could see were fields. I wasn't prepared for the fact that they owned all of this. In the distance I saw the barn, the house, the coops.

“Enough room for you?” Jennie said, as we got out of the car and walked across the lawn. The sprinklers were going and it made me think of a game we used to play. All the lawns had sprinklers when we were growing up. Some turned in many directions like dancers, and some had a lot of legs of water reaching out like spiders. There were the sprinklers that jerked around the way the spastic boy in school jerked around. Some went in smooth circles and some rose and fell. Some rose high like clocks and others exploded like fireworks. Some were hidden deep inside the ground and we could only see the water shooting out of the grass, as if from an underground well.

We'd catalogued all the different kinds, and the game was to run through the sprinklers, but each sprinkler was different and required a different approach. Some we'd back into slowly, shivering, our faces wrinkled, and others we'd dash through, and some we tried to crawl under. If we timed it right, we didn't get wet. That was part of the game. Stay dry. And then sometimes we just went in, hand in hand, Jennie and I, and there wasn't anything to do but take it like soldiers.

 

Tom and Jennie thought I needed to meet new people, so the night after I arrived they threw a small cocktail party for me. It was one of those balmy June nights in which the moon carved out a niche for itself in a cloudless sky, and they set up card tables on the patio.

The Petersons, Ted and Roberta, arrived a little ahead of everyone else and were distressed at being early. “Should we leave and come back?” Ted offered. He kept tapping his watch and listening to it to make sure it was running. They wanted to sit on the porch until the others got there at seven-thirty sharp, but Jennie insisted they at least come out on the patio. Roberta wore a blue cotton skirt that was too short and a polyester shirt with bunny rabbits and a pack of Marlboros in her breast pocket. Ted was in shirt sleeves. He kept his hand on his wife's hip.

I followed Jennie into the kitchen to bring out some trays. “I hope this isn't going to be a disaster,” she groaned, thrusting her hands deep into the back pockets, trying to pull her snug jeans off her pelvis a little. The doorbell rang. Ted and Roberta looked visibly relieved. Buzz Weidman and his girlfriend, Janice, lived together near Trenton, which was a big sacrifice for Janice, she told me right away, because she was in urban studies at Rutgers and hated the commute. Buzz, who did marketing for Bell Labs, had a big bald patch in the middle of his head, which he tried to cover up with a strand of frizzy brown hair, combed across the crown; it kept slipping out of place. He had done primal scream therapy, he told me shortly after Tom introduced us, which had taught him to go after what he wanted. Once he screamed for four hours, on and off.

Three more people arrived and one of them from the back was a dead ringer for Mark. He was the same height, with his hair cut straight along the back of his neck. For an instant I thought it was Mark. Everywhere you look, you see the person you love. On subways, in crowded theaters, I'd seen Mark a dozen times since I found the note he left me on the table in our
kitchen. Sometimes I even went up to him, prepared to have it out, only to find myself face to face with a perfect stranger.