Chapter 20 Christmas with the Fam
Christmas with the Fam
As the weeks passed, I had to get used to Jack’s absences.
He’d leave for a few days, come back with souvenirs, usually food, from wherever he’d been, and soon he’d be gone again.
He seemed happy. He liked having something to do, and he liked meeting his fans and his favorite actors, directors, and producers.
The energy of the film world was a rush for him. That was something he couldn’t hide.
And he was getting better and better known.
Not just in town, but in other cities, other countries, other continents.
He was made for the camera, and the little jokes he cracked in interviews made the whole world fall in love with him.
Sue dedicated herself to getting views for all the videos he posted online; apparently, she’d taken a class in SEO, and she was determined to make his stuff go viral.
As for the rest of us, we were stuck in the twentieth century, waiting for him to show up on television.
It wasn’t the best time for me, though. I was feeling lonely at school without Curtis.
Hanging out with my classmates was dull without him, and as I struggled to get through the material, I started to realize how much he had helped me.
To tell the truth, I was getting mopey. It was Will who pulled me out of it.
He encouraged me to start my own study group, and even if it wasn’t the best thing I’d ever done, it did help, and my grades certainly improved.
After one of our weekly meetings in the library, I saw a flash on my way down the stairs.
I looked around but didn’t see anyone taking pictures, and I forgot the whole thing until the following week, when a major magazine published an article about Jack with my photo in it, describing me as his girlfriend.
I had thought I was angry until Jack called from Argentina, so furious that it took Will, Naya, and me to try to calm him down.
“Stop telling me to chill out!” Jack screamed over speakerphone.
“Who the hell do these people think they are? They can’t just invade my privacy like this!
Some psycho on the internet is going to look at that picture and figure out which school Jen goes to, and then there will be all kind of stalkers following her around. ”
“Jack,” I tried to reassure him, “it’ll be fine. The article’s been out for a while already, and I haven’t noticed anything weird. I don’t even think the photo’s that clear.”
“If a single person bothers you,” Jack said, “that’s it for any contact with the press. I’ll move to Tahiti and they’ll never hear another word out of me.”
I didn’t like that he was angry, but I was glad we could have a normal conversation about something.
He had been weird ever since I’d gone to get Nelle.
Not confrontational, just unable to relax around me.
I had wanted to sit down and talk to him about it, but between one thing and another, it was hard for us to get a moment alone, and I think in a way we were both avoiding it, too.
Naya was now eight months along, and attending classes had started to be too much for her. Will finally managed to convince her to finish off her semester at home, and fortunately, her professors were understanding.
There was just one little problem. Or not so little. Having a pregnant, bored, nervous, stir-crazy Naya in the house was a challenge none of us were ready for.
Sometimes she would cook all day. Other times she’d lie on the sofa immobile.
She might get a wild hair and go on a cleaning frenzy while chewing out Sue and Mike for being messy.
Every day, there was at least one crisis.
We all started entering the house with our guard up in case a shoe or a plate might fly past when we walked in the door.
Will had gotten an internship at a financial company.
The hours were long, and he came home exhausted every night.
And that left me staying up with Naya, watching movies and series and just talking.
Because of her hormones or her nerves, she spent most of the day in bed, then when night came, she was full of energy and wanted company.
One night, while she was playing with her heartbeat monitor, I asked her, “As much as you play with that thing, I’ve got to say it’s weird that you don’t want to know if it’s a boy or a girl.”
I dipped a tortilla chip in some queso—that was one of the things Naya had cravings for, and I wasn’t so rude that I’d let her eat alone!
Naya passed me the headphones so I could hear the heartbeat, too, as she said, “Honestly, I just want it to be healthy. That’s all I keep thinking about.”
“Have you guys talked about names?” I asked.
“Yeah, lots. Will hates them all, though.”
“Tell me some.”
“I really like Gabriella, Michelle, and Kim.”
I took off the headphones and objected, “Not Michelle…”
“It’s not because of you, it’s because of the Beatles song. I can sing it to her when she’s little. It sticks in your head, don’t you know it? Michelle, ma belle, these are words…”
“Please, Naya. I love you, but your singing voice is like nails on a chalkboard.”
“And Gabriella is the girl from High School Musical. And Kim is—”
“Naya, don’t say it—”
“For Kim Kardashian!”
“I swear, I’m trying not to judge you, but try a little harder, please.” I told her. “What’s Will want?”
“He likes Jane. I don’t know why. He just does. I mean, we could go with Michelle Gabriella Kim Jane. That way nobody gets the shaft.”
Nobody but the kid, I thought.
“What if it’s a boy?” I asked.
“It’s a girl,” she replied solemnly.
“How do you know?”
“A mother knows these things!”
It struck me that one of the reasons God invented obstetricians was because mothers didn’t know these things, but she seemed so certain that I didn’t want to contradict her.
Mike and Sue almost never left the apartment anymore.
Sue had finished her degree but hadn’t bothered looking for a job, and with no band and no ambition, Mike just hung around keeping her company.
They spent all day watching movies and TV and eating.
Jack called them bums every chance he got, but it didn’t seem to have any effect.
Sue had money from something or other, so she could afford to loaf around.
Mike didn’t, but he had a gift for squeezing anything he wanted out of his mother.
Mary had come over a few times. Her visits were always unnerving. Mike ignored her, Jack was curt with her, and only Agnes’s occasional presence made those moments tolerable.
I think Jack was disappointed in her. Time kept passing, and the divorce she’d promised never happened. Jack’s father had moved into an apartment on his own, but after the separation, things screeched to a halt, and I think Jack feared they’d backslide, so he wouldn’t let himself get his hopes up.
Nelle had gotten a place of her own. Or rather, she’d found a place and her parents were paying for it.
She wasn’t interested in going to school—she said it wasn’t for her—but she did take all kinds of stupid online classes that allowed her to add lines to her résumé.
She had a LinkedIn page, but no one was getting in touch with her because she had no relevant experience in anything.
She didn’t care, though. She was enjoying her free time.
Things had changed between us. We weren’t close the way we had been when we were girls, but we still met up to talk sometimes. Our discussions were short and trivial, but they were something, and I appreciated them. No matter what, she had been an important part of my life.
I was telling Jack about her one day when he said, out of nowhere, “I get where she’s coming from. School sucks. I’ve honestly been wondering why you don’t quit.”
He was lying on the bed looking at his phone, but this was something he did sometimes, acting distracted when he really wanted to talk about something serious. I was sitting on the ground at the time, mixing paints and looking at a blank canvas.
“Excuse me?” I said. “What are you talking about?”
“I don’t know. You’ve been complaining about school constantly lately. You don’t need a degree for anything. Maybe you should drop out.”
Passing a streak of green paint over the canvas, I said, “Look, I may not be in the most enthusiastic phase right now. But that doesn’t mean I want to quit.”
“You said Nelle was taking online classes. You could do that. Or something else, if you wanted. I just feel like you’re wasting all your time doing two things that aren’t going anywhere.”
Two things: he meant my painting and school.
Jack didn’t understand dedicating yourself to something that didn’t bring an immediate payoff.
He was like Mike in that way: they both thought you had to be having fun all the time.
For me, though, it was different, and as many times as we’d had this discussion, he never would understand.
I liked painting, and I didn’t want to give it up.
And the same went for school. If I started something, I needed to finish it.
Jack didn’t understand how backward my family was, he didn’t know how hard I’d had to fight to get them to even consider college.
That had been an accomplishment on its own, and I wasn’t going to give up now.
Instead of responding, I gave Jack a menacing look that told him we weren’t going through this again. He grunted to show his disagreement, but he didn’t insist. Instead, he asked, “What are you working on there?”
“Something ugly. It’s an abstract painting of you not listening to me when I tell you how I want to live my life.”
I meant it as a joke, but there was a grain of truth to it.
I held up the canvas as Jack was rolling his eyes, and when he was done being sarcastic, he stared at it a moment.
“It’s not bad,” he said. “My mom says a true artist doesn’t imitate reality, they create their own, or some mystic shit like that. ”