14. Jo
FOURTEEN
jo
The car swings into the NASA lot as Frankie and Jo survey the area.
“Up front,” Frankie says, pointing at an area designated for visitors.
“This is crazy,” Jo says from behind her sunglasses, her eyes quickly scanning around just in case Bill is out there. Perhaps he forgot something in his car, or maybe he’s going out to lunch. In either case, she doesn’t want him to see her—not yet, anyway.
“Just park,” Frankie instructs her.
They pull into a spot and Jo turns off the car. “What now?”
“Listen, Jo, you want to see this girl with your own eyes, so now we have to find a way to bump into her accidentally-on-purpose.”
Jo blows out a long breath. She already regrets this and they haven’t even done anything but drive over to the place where their husbands work. But there had been something about the way Bill bounded over to the phone the night that Jeanie Florence called, and something in the tone of his voice as he’d talked on the phone…Jo can’t quite put her finger on it, but it had bothered her. It’s still bothering her. The whole situation has been tickling at the back of her brain, and like any woman, she won’t rest until her curiosity is satisfied.
“You brought him a lunch, and now all you have to do is walk in, ask to see him, and hope that you get invited back to an office where this little minx will be walking around in a miniskirt and high heels.”
Jo looks at her dubiously over the top of her sunglasses. “I hardly think a serious scientist will be strutting around in a short skirt, Frankie.”
Frankie shrugs. “I’m just saying.”
Jo looks at herself in the rearview mirror, fluffing her hair with her fingers. “Do you think I’m being crazy?”
“Yes and no,” Frankie says honestly, watching as two handsome men in suits walk past their car and stride right for the front doors of Cape Kennedy’s main building. “I mean, men are men, which is what makes women act like women. So…I think you have every right to want to see this girl.”
“Will you come with me?”
Frankie shoots her a look. “Jojo, Ed is in Seattle. It would look weird if I showed up here when my husband will clearly not be here.”
Jo nods at this. “You’re right. Okay, I’ve got this.”
“Of course you do,” Frankie says. She unrolls the passenger side window and then lets her arm hang out in the sun. She leans her head back against the seat and closes her eyes. “Go get em, tiger. Show that girl who’s the boss!”
Jo gives a sigh of exasperation and pulls the small picnic basket she’s packed out of the car. She suddenly feels foolish. She’s put on her favorite dress, done her hair and makeup, and packed Bill a special lunch of cold fried chicken, potato salad, and buttermilk biscuits. She’d cooked all morning, and now here she is, standing in the shadow of a rather intimidating building, and hoping that the man who knows her better than anyone else in the world won’t see right through her little scheme.
“Bill Booker, please,” Jo says at the front counter. The woman behind it is so gorgeous she could stop traffic, and Jo’s words nearly catch in her throat.
“Oh,” the secretary says in a breathy voice. “Of course. Let me try to call Lieutenant Colonel Booker’s desk,” she says as she eyes Jo with the tiniest arch of her brow. The woman has dyed blonde hair, red lips, and a thin cardigan wrapped around her narrow shoulders. Her bust is enormous, and Jo forces herself to keep her eyes on the secretary’s face as she dials the phone.
It rings and rings. Jo can hear it. After several seconds, the woman hangs up. “He’s not at his desk. Would you like to leave him a message?”
Jo hadn’t bargained on not being able to track him down. “Oh,” she says, thinking on her feet. “I’m his wife. I brought him a special lunch because it’s our anniversary. It’s a surprise,” she adds, smiling widely for good measure.
“Your anniversary!” The secretary’s smile brightens. She glances around. “Okay, then let’s get you back there,” she says in a whisper.
Jo’s heart leaps in her chest; she’s about to go back into the belly of the building, and she suddenly isn’t sure that she wants to. “Uhhh,” she says, fiddling with the wicker handle of her picnic basket. “Actually, maybe I’ll just save it for dinner. I was hoping it would be an easy drop-off, but I don’t want to bother him.”
“Nonsense!” the secretary says with a huge, friendly smile. “I’ll take you right back.”
But Jo knows Bill: he will sense immediately that she’s up to something, and there’s no way that she wants to alert him to the fact that she’s feeling jealous. It will be much safer just to abort this mission right now and pretend she’d never been driven to doing something as silly as stalking her husband’s place of work.
“No, no,” Jo says, grabbing her basket and giving the woman a hasty, uncertain smile. “Thank you for your time. If you could please not mention that I was here, then I’ll just surprise him with this for dinner.” She walks towards the glass doors that lead to the parking lot, calling back over her shoulder, “Have a good day!”
Frankie sits up abruptly as Jo swings the door open and slides in, shoving the picnic basket at Frankie. “Let’s go.”
“What happened?” Frankie slides off her cat-eye sunglasses and sits up straight. “Did you see her? Is she gorgeous?”
Jo cranks the engine over and backs up quickly. “No, I changed my mind. It seemed too risky.”
This makes Frankie laugh. “Risky? Like you were going to get recruited to go to space if you walked through the doors?”
“No,” Jo says, looking both ways as she pulls onto the long road that leads off the NASA property. “Risky like my husband was going to see my stupid face and me holding a picnic basket and lying to the secretary about it being our anniversary, and he was going to know immediately that I was up to no good.”
“Ohhh,” Frankie says, nodding. “ That kind of risky. Got it.”
They drive in silence all the way to the beach, where Jo parks in a spot that faces the ocean. She turns to Frankie. “How do you feel about fried chicken and biscuits?”
“All I’ve done since Ed left is eat, so what’s one more big meal?” She opens her car door and puts one foot on the ground. “Let’s eat at that picnic table over there, yeah?”
Jo follows her, wicker basket in hand. The table in question is a bit lopsided because of the sand it sits on, but it faces the water. The women sit side-by-side on one bench, and Jo pulls out the feast that she’d made for her husband under dubious pretenses.
“This would have never worked,” she mutters to herself, feeling a laugh bubble up inside of her as she imagines Bill’s face had she tried to hand him a picnic basket. “It was a terrible idea.”
Frankie chuckles. “Yeah,” she agrees. “Terrible, but understandable. Any woman would want to see who was calling her man late in the evening.”
“But remember,” Jo says, holding up one finger, “it wasn’t the call, it was the way he jumped out of his chair.”
“Precisely.” Frankie takes the small container of chicken from Jo and opens it carefully, trying to preserve her red nail polish. “I think it’s always wise to keep tabs on the women who are spending time around your husband. It’s completely normal to want to know who we’re up against.”
At her words, Jo’s shoulders fall a few inches. “I don’t want to think that way, Frankie. I don’t want to look at every woman who comes into Bill’s orbit and wonder what her motives are.” She turns to look at her friend. Frankie lifts her eyebrows. “Do you feel that way about every woman Ed comes into contact with?”
Frankie tilts her head to one side, looking at Jo pityingly. “Not every woman, no. Some are too old or not his type, but honestly, Josephine. You know how women can be—we keep tabs on who might be keeping tabs on our man. It’s just what we do.”
Jo sighs and looks out at the water. “Do you think it’s always been this way?”
“Since the beginning of time,” Frankie says without hesitation. “If there was a hot caveman and he brought home the best buffalo, you better believe that his wife was making angry eyes at the other cavewomen so they knew who was boss.”
This makes Jo laugh. “Cavewomen? Is that all we are?”
Frankie shrugs. “Sure. But with cars and better clothes.”
They finish setting out the spread Jo had made for Bill, and then Frankie goes still for a moment, her hands frozen over the napkin that Jo has placed in front of her.
“You okay?” Jo asks as she pulls the crispy skin from her chicken with her fingertips. She wipes her hands on her cloth napkin.
“Jo.” Frankie is looking at the water. “I need to dance.”
“I know,” Jo says, still picking at her chicken. “That’s why you’re going to open the studio.”
“No, I need to dance first. For me . To get over the fear.”
Jo frowns. “I didn’t know you had stage fright.”
Frankie shakes her head vigorously and Jo turns her entire body towards her friend, putting her chicken on the plate. “It’s not stage fright,” she explains. “It’s the way I left it all. I left out of fear, and I need to reclaim that part of me before I can give it to anyone else.”
Jo wants to understand, but she doesn’t—not entirely. “You mean you need to prove to yourself that you can still dance before you try to convince people that you can teach their kids?”
Frankie’s head bobs back and forth as she considers this. “Yes and no. Sort of. I think I need to prove it to myself. I have a story to tell, and I need to tell it my own way.”
This makes sense to Jo, and is, in fact, part of why she feels the need to write, whether she realizes it or not. Being able to tell your story in your own way is integral to being a human. “That makes sense, Frankie,” she says. “I want to help in any way I can.”
Frankie picks up the buttermilk biscuit that Jo had helpfully already split and covered in butter when she packed the picnic basket at home. “Will you help me find a place to perform? I want to put on a real show.”
Jo watches her with a steady gaze; she sounds serious. “You want to perform…for everyone?”
“Everyone who wants to come. It’s important to me, Jo.”
“Okay,” Jo says, breaking off a bite of her own biscuit. “I’ll help you.”
“Thanks, Jojo. You’re a good friend—better than I deserve, probably.”
A disbelieving laugh comes from deep within Jo. “Frankie. You just came with me to NASA so that I could secretly spy on the woman who called my house one evening, and you didn’t even judge me. You are a good friend. Better than I deserve.”
A big wave crashes onto the shore and the women turn in time to see two surfers emerge from the water with looks of pure joy on their faces. The young men high five one another and turn to point at the water, talking excitedly.
“Good chicken, by the way,” Frankie says, biting into a piece heartily. “Between this and my mom’s cooking, I’m going to need to drop a dress size or two once Ed gets back, otherwise I’ll be wearing muumuus everywhere because nothing else fits.”
“Oh, I doubt that,” Jo says dubiously. She bites into her chicken with a happy smile. “You’ve got dancing to do, and you need your energy, so eat up!”
Jo is at the kitchen table that night after the kids are fast asleep, typewriter set up and a stack of pages filled with words at her elbow.
"Hey, Jojo?" Bill says, poking his head into the kitchen after turning off the television in the front room. "You coming to bed?'
"Not yet," she says. She has a pencil behind one ear, and she's lost in thought.
"Okay." Bill pats the wall with one hand. "Then goodnight. I hope the muse shows up." He gives her a playful half-smile that Jo can't help feeling is a bit patronizing, though in his eyes she sees pride. "Oh," Bill says, turning around and stepping back into the kitchen. I totally forgot to ask you--did you come by NASA today?" His frown is one of puzzlement; surely Jo would have mentioned it if she'd stopped by.
Without thinking, Jo shakes her head. "Nope," she says, plastering what she hopes is a believable smile on her face. "Not me."
Bill looks mostly convinced. "I didn't think so," he says, running a hand over his hair. "The front desk gal said my wife stopped by with a picnic lunch, but she said it was our anniversary, which I know is in April, not January."
Jo widens her grin like the whole thing is a silly misunderstanding. "It is most definitely not our anniversary," she agrees. "Must have been a mistake!"
"That's what I thought." He pats the wall again for good measure. 'Night, Jojo."
Once he's gone, Jo sits in the flood of light that comes from the latticed chandelier hanging over the table. It, like much of her kitchen, is a sunny yellow, and the light is warm against the darkness of the night outside. The kitchen window is open, and she sits in silence, listening to the night sounds in the backyard before putting her fingertips back on the typewriter keys.
Her heart--oh her heart! Jo writes, biting her lower lip as she focuses on the images in her mind . There was no way for Maxine to say the things that needed to be said, so instead she lowered her head and looked up at Winston through her thick eyelashes. He put a hand to her cheek, gazing into her eyes with love.
"Winston," Maxine started, but her words fell away.
"It'll be okay," Winston said. "I promise. As long as you do what I ask of you, I promise that you'll always be taken care of."
Maxine frowned up at him. "You have a plan that I have to follow...after you die?" She was confused; a terminal diagnosis for the man she loved wasn't supposed to come with a to-do list.
Winston smiled at her. His eyes were sad, but she could see how hard he was trying to make things easier for her.
Jo stops and rips the page from her typewriter, balling it into a fist and throwing it across the kitchen. She blows out a fast, hard breath that lifts her loose hair off her forehead. The story has hit a wall, and she knows she'll need to re-write at least part of it if she ever wants it to be compelling enough for anyone to read.
Maxine and Winston are supposed to be a couple who are terribly in love, and when Winston receives a terminal diagnosis, Maxine needs to find a way to keep living after he’s gone. But something about it is ringing false to Jo. Not to mention the fact that she wants Mr. D to appreciate what she's written, not to feel as though she's writing the story of a dying man for a dying man to read. This just won't do.
Jo gets up and paces the kitchen, wandering out into the darkened front room. There, on the coffee table, is a copy of True Romance , a magazine she occasionally picks up at the grocery store. She flips through the issue, skimming a short story about a couple who meets in a park, and another about a man who writes a personal ad to find a woman who loves dogs. At the back of the magazine is a small section calling for submissions. If we choose to publish your true romance-worthy story of three thousand words or less, you will receive credit for your work, as well as a check for ten dollars!
Jo sits on the couch, holding the magazine up so she can read it in the light from the kitchen. Ten dollars? The money seems like a reasonable amount, but the excitement of seeing her words in print makes it even more attractive. In a burst of inspiration, Jo stands and walks back to the kitchen table, folding the magazine open to the submissions page and setting it next to her as she rolls a fresh page of paper into the typewriter.
Jo needs to forget about Maxine and Winston for a moment—or rather, maybe Maxine and Winston are still the same characters they already were, but they simply need a new story. That’s it…a new story! Jo starts typing quickly, her fingers clicking against the keys as the words pour out of her like water from a tea kettle.