11. Jo
ELEVEN
jo
The dishes are drying on the rack and the children are playing a card game in the living room while Bill reads the newspaper. Jo has pulled the classified section from her husband's paper and put it on the counter by the phone, and she unfolds it now, scanning through the list of items people have felt are worthy of a classified ad: a bicycle for sale; two dining room chairs someone is willing to trade for a coffee table; babysitting services on offer; a family who wants to sell kittens for ten dollars apiece.
Jo is leaning on the counter with her elbows, skimming the list with a pen in hand just in case she comes across what she's looking for. She kicks off her shoes and stretches her toes as she flips the page, but the ringing of the phone interrupts her.
"Booker residence," Jo says, putting the receiver to her ear with her eyes still on the newspaper.
"Oh, hi," a voice says tentatively. "Mrs. Booker?"
Jo stands up straight, her ear cocked to the light inflection in the female voice at the other end of the line. "Yes. May I help you?"
There is a small pause and then: "Hello. This is Jeanette Florence. I work at NASA with Bill, and I was wondering if I might speak with him for just a moment? I'm terribly sorry to call him at home in the evening, but this is important."
Jo is caught off guard. "Of course. Yes, let me get him. One moment please." She sets the receiver on the counter and folds up her section of the newspaper, taking it with her as she walks into the living room where Bill is sitting in a chair, one ankle resting on the opposite knee as he reads the front page.
"Bill?" she says, cocking her head just slightly as she looks at him. He's handsome, even after all these years, and Jo assesses him the way another woman might; she looks at his silky hair, his lean physique, at the way his forehead creases as he reads intensely. He looks up at her. "There's a Jeanette Florence on the telephone for you."
Bill folds the paper and stands up more quickly than she might have expected him to. In fact, Jo thought maybe he'd frown for a moment, puzzling over why a woman coworker would be calling him at home during the after dinner hours. But instead, he gets to his feet, sets his newspaper on the chair, and walks directly to the kitchen.
"Hello?" Bill's voice rumbles deeply. "Yes, it's no problem."
Jo pauses in the living room, one ear on the tone of her husband's voice, and the other on her three children, who are sitting cross-legged on the shag carpet. Nancy holds her cards in her hand all fanned-out as she appraises them. "No," Nancy says, "I don't have any sevens. Go fish."
Stepping around the kids, Jo takes her classified section back to the master bedroom and turns on the lamp on her nightstand. She perches on the edge of the bed and reads the rest of the ads. Nothing.
"Hey, Jojo," Bill says, coming into the bedroom as he unfastens his wristwatch. He clears his throat. "Sorry about that. Quick call from a coworker of mine. She's heard from Ed Maxwell, and things are going great in Seattle. It's three hours earlier on the west coast, so he's just wrapping up his work day and he needed some facts and figures from us."
Jo is still sitting on the side of the bed, facing the window that looks out onto their backyard and the pool. She turns her head to him. "It's no problem, Bill. Really." She pauses, setting the newspaper and pen on her nightstand. She wants to ask about Jeanette Florence, but instead she crosses one leg over the other and puts her hands in her lap. "Bill?" she says. "I was looking for a used typewriter in the classifieds. I think I'd like to write a book."
"You do?" Bill turns to look at his wife as he slips his feet out of the slippers he wears when he gets home from work. His face grows serious when he realizes that she's not joking. "About what?"
Jo shrugs lightly. "I think possibly a romance novel--something for women. I don't know."
Bill sits next to her as they both gaze out the bedroom window into the darkness. The light beneath the water of the pool turns it turquoise and illuminates a palm tree. "What brought this on?"
Jo thinks about this. "Well," she says, "I've always loved the stories that my grandmother made up for me when I was a girl, and I think I have a pretty good imagination, I just didn't ever think about using it this way." Bill is nodding as she speaks. "And then Frankie has been thinking about renting a small studio space downtown--you know where the butcher and the sandwich shop are?"
"I do," Bill says, nodding.
"Anyway, I went with her to look at the space, and I think she's really going to do it. She could teach dance lessons there--I could even sign the girls up for classes."
"Sure," Bill says evenly. "That sounds good." He clasps his hands together as his elbows rest on his knees. He sounds almost uncharacteristically thoughtful, when Jo is more accustomed to him offering an opinion on things--particularly things that have to do with the children. "So her doing something with her time has made you think about doing something else with yours?" he prompts.
Jo can see immediately where he's going with this. "I know I already have the hospital, and the kids do keep me busy," she assures him, "but this would be a really good creative outlet. I'd at least like to get a typewriter and give it a shot. If it makes you feel better, I can promise to work on it exclusively while the kids are at school."
Bill is watching her evenly. "Jojo, I trust you to manage everything," he says. "True, I initially had some misgivings about the hospital taking you away from the kids, but that was also in the summertime. They're in school now, and I've seen how good it is for you to be doing something outside the house. And if you think writing love stories in your spare time is going to bring you some sort of happiness, Jojo, then I support that."
Jo nods; she hadn't realized that she'd feel so relieved after telling Bill what she wants to do. She exhales slowly. "So you don't think it's dumb?"
"Well, I may not be the target audience for romance novels, but I don't think books are dumb, no. I only have one caveat, though."
"What's that?"
"If you model one of the dashingly handsome men after me, you have to promise to include the fact that he's a legendary lover, and a world-class romantic."
Jo laughs as Bill leans in quickly, nuzzling his face into her neck and growling. Her laugh quickly turns into a yelp as they fall backwards onto the bed, tussling playfully.
"Bill!" Jo says, catching her breath as his whiskers tickle the soft skin of her neck. "The kids!"
But the bedroom door is closed and the children are still happily playing Go Fish in the front room, so she lets her legendary lover kiss her behind the ear and along the collarbone for just a little bit longer.
"So Bill is on board?" Frankie asks the next evening as they walk around the outer perimeter of their neighborhood. All of the Christmas lights are gone now, and the evenings are cool and pleasant, with clear skies and bright stars. Frankie is smoking a cigarette with gusto, and blowing smoke rings into the air with relish. "He doesn't mind if you turn into Hemingway and start collecting cats?"
"I don't think he's ready to be married to an alcoholic writer--or for us to have cats crawling around the house--but he was supportive, yeah." Jo was thrilled with the way he'd gotten on board with her idea to write, but there's been something else nagging at her all day. "Hey," she says, trying to sound off-handed. "Weird thing happened. Right before I told Bill I wanted to track down a typewriter and start working on the Great American Novel, he got a call from some gal who said she worked with him at NASA--someone who needed to get in touch late in the evening because Ed had called in from the west coast looking for info or something."
Frankie is taking another long drag on her cigarette. She exhales with a dark look on her face. "Who was it?"
"Jeanette Florence," Jo says as she puts her hands into the pockets of her loose slacks. She's wearing her Keds and a cardigan over her shoulders so that she doesn't get chilly. "She sounded young."
"Huh." Frankie looks pensive. "Well. Ed is working hard in Seattle, so maybe he just needed some data to give to the team there?" she offers, flicking her gaze sideways at Jo as they walk.
"Maybe." Jo chews on the inside of her cheek. It had bothered her a little that the woman had called them at home, but not because she was interrupting their family time so much as the fact that Bill had jumped out of his chair and nearly knocked over anything in his way to get to the phone. Okay, not literally , but it had felt that way. "I'm not sure. I guess it could have been something urgent." Jo waves her own words away. "Anyhow. It was almost like he didn't make an issue with me wanting to write a book because he felt...guilty? I'm not sure if that's what I mean, but yeah--kind of guilty."
Frankie hands Jo her half-smoked cigarette so that she can take a drag of it. "You need to relax," Frankie says. "Seriously. I told you all about these young girls who work with our guys, and we just need to accept it."
Jo takes a deep breath, holds it, releases. "You're right. I mean, soon enough women will be on totally equal footing with men. There'll be as many of us working as doctors, professors, and airline pilots as there are men, right?"
"Sure, Jo. I hope so." Frankie doesn't sound convinced. "But don't you think it's funny how many men are threatened by women in the workplace? And how many husbands really don't even want their wives to work outside of the home? Why do you think that is?"
Jo keeps the cigarette for herself. She shrugs one shoulder. "I don't know. Maybe they don't want to scrub toilets and make meatloaf, so they need us to do it?"
"I don't know many men who want to scrub toilets," Frankie says wryly. "Most can't even aim for it, much less put on a pair of rubber gloves and attack it with a brush."
The women laugh. "True enough. But as for men being threatened by women in their workplace...I bet it's because we're too good at organizing, we can do multiple things at once, and we know how to manage all kinds of personalities with a smile on our faces."
Frankie is nodding sagely. "You are so right, Jo. We make them look bad!" She cackles with obvious pleasure. "They're afraid we'll swoop in and take over!"
Jo is looking at the horizon with a moony smile. "Just wait until a woman is president," she says. "I bet there won't be any wars, every country will get along because she'll be fair and diplomatic--"
"And everyone in America will get a bologna and cheese sandwich in their lunch pails and a bedtime story at night," Frankie adds.
They walk in silence for a minute as they picture a woman in the Oval Office, and Jo passes what's left of the cigarette back to Frankie. "We need to quit that habit," she says, making a face at the smoke that trails up from Frankie's hand.
"Again!" they say in unison, nudging one another with their elbows as they laugh.
"But not until Enzo and Allegra leave," Frankie says as they round the bend and dip back onto the street that leads to the one they live on. "It's given me a good excuse to hang out on my back patio and to go for walks with you, because my mother hates cigarette smoke."
"What about your dad's cigars?" Jo asks.
"Eh," Frankie says, turning both palms to the sky. "One of the many millions of little things you overlook in a marriage that's lasted a million years."
"I guess we all have things we overlook," Jo says.
"I guess we all do," Frankie agrees.