3. Jo
THREE
jo
“Oh, isn’t he gorgeous,” Jo says, leaning over the hospital bed to peer at the tiny, pink-faced bundle in Barbara’s arms.
“His name is Huck,” Barbara says.
“Well, isn’t that adorable,” Jo coos, still admiring the newborn.
Frankie is leaning against the windowsill, her strong, tanned arms visible from beneath a fitted Pucci sheath dress that’s a swirl of green, turquoise, black and white. With it, Frankie wears a pair of white wrist-length gloves and matching white heels. Barbara lifts an eyebrow at her shoes.
“It’s only a week until Memorial Day,” Frankie says to Barbara as the new mother stares at her shoes from her hospital bed, face aghast. “I promise the earth won’t tilt on its axis if I wear white shoes a little early.” At this, Frankie pointedly sets a potted frangipani plant with blooms of yellow and pink on the table at the foot of Barbara’s bed. “Congrats on this little pup, by the way.”
“I thought you were having a girl,” Jo says, reaching out gingerly to caress the little swirl of silky hair at the baby’s crown.
Barbara’s smile fades just slightly. “Me too. Well, I’d hoped for one,” she says, looking wistfully at her baby. “But I guess I already know all about little boys, so what’s one more, right?”
Frankie huffs as she slides her manicured hands from her gloves, unsnapping her purse and dropping the gloves inside. “I don’t know about that,” she says. “The world is already lousy with men.”
“Frankie!” Jo says, turning around quickly to shoot daggers with her eyes. She’s still gripping the metal side rail of the bed when two other women enter the room tentatively, arms laden with flowers and presents.
“Hi, girls,” Barbara says. “Come in and meet Huck.”
The new women cluck over the baby as Barbara holds out a hand. “You also have to meet Jo Booker and Frankie Maxwell,” she says, pointing at them in turn. “Jo and Frankie, this is Caroline and Judith.”
“Oh!” Caroline says, holding her arms open and pulling Jo into a warm, familiar embrace that is completely disarming. “I am so sorry we missed the barbecue at your house the other day! Judith’s kids got my kids sick, and then we each had one throwing up that day, so we figured it was better not to come over and take down the entire neighborhood in one fell swoop, you know?”
When she finally lets go, Jo is nearly breathless from surprise at her ebullient greeting. “Well,” she says, trying to collect herself from this dizzying onslaught of friendliness. Jo puts a hand to her chest. “Of course—please, don’t give it another thought. I’m so happy to meet you both now, and I hope the kids are all better.”
“They’re healthy as horses and tearing through our houses like a pack of wild bulls raging through a china shop,” Judith confirms, holding out a hand to shake Jo’s in a more traditional greeting. “Pleasure to meet you both.” She turns to Frankie with a small smile and a quick nod.
Frankie is still leaning artfully against the windowsill, watching the entire scene. “Kids, babies, babies, kids,” she says, waving a hand in the air. “I have none of them. But what I do have is a husband. Have any of your men done their psychological evaluations yet?” Frankie lifts one perfectly drawn brow as she glances at the other women to gauge their responses.
“Jay’s is this afternoon,” Caroline says, looking down at the baby. Her eyes flick up and meet Frankie’s.
“So is Ed’s.” Frankie inspects her manicure; her face is neutral.
“Good,” Caroline says with just a hint of reservation. “Hopefully they’ll get this out of the way and move on. I don’t think any of them look forward to sitting down and having a group of strangers grill them about personal details for two hours, do they?”
“I would think not,” Frankie says.
Jo knows that Bill had done his evaluation first thing that morning, and she’s eager for him to come home so she can hear how it went. But that’s for later—right now there’s a baby in the room, and their husbands’ jobs are rendered momentarily irrelevant. Jo turns back to Barbara. “So, how are you feeling? This is your third time, so it’s old hat by now, I’m sure.”
Barbara sighs. “I wish. I think every time I’m in the throes of labor is about when I remember how painful the whole thing is. But then, the minute they whisk the baby away to clean him, you just forget, don’t you? You forget all the horrible stuff.”
“You’d have to,” Judith interjects, “or no one would do it more than once, and then the entire species would die out.”
The other women laugh appreciatively.
“I remember after finding out about giving birth—I must have been fourteen at the time—I asked my mother, ‘Mom, why would anyone do this in the first place? And once they have, why would they do it again ?’” Jo laughs at this memory as she tells the story. “And she said to me, ‘You do it once for love, and then you do it again for love.’ It was that simple.”
The other women nod, their eyes returning to Barbara, who is the picture of maternal love as she holds little Huck there in her hospital bed, gazing at his tiny nose and his squished-up face.
“If only everything were that simple,” Frankie says with finality, pushing herself away from the windowsill. “Ladies, I’m sorry to break up this little party, but Barbara probably needs some peace and quiet anyway. And I need to be on my way.”
Jo follows suit and leaves with Frankie, their heeled shoes clicking as they walk down the shiny, polished hallways. The women’s steps match perfectly as they pass the rooms of tired but happy new mothers recuperating on the maternity ward.
Once they’re out in the hot sun of midday, Frankie pulls a pair of cat-eye sunglasses from her purse and slides them on. This makes her look terribly glamorous, and Jo says so.
“Oh, Jo,” Frankie laughs. “I bought them at Neiman Marcus—they’re nothing special.” She stops and gives Jo an appraising look. “Do you like fashion?”
Jo glances down at her red bandana print blouse, which is tucked into a pleated skirt made of a dark denim fabric. She’d started sewing her own clothes as a teenager, and while she saves time now by shopping off the rack, every so often she still likes to buy a Butterick pattern, lay it on the floor of her living room, and cut into her fabric with the satisfying slice of her sharp pinking shears. She painstakingly pins the fabric and gets everything just so, and then occasionally stays up well into the wee hours of the morning with a pot of coffee, her Singer humming faithfully as she listens to the radio. It’s one of those small personal pleasures that she indulges in every so often—sleep be damned—because it gives her such joy to be doing something for herself and without any interruption from Bill or the kids.
“I actually do like fashion,” Jo says, blushing as she runs a hand over the blouse she’d made just before leaving Minnesota. “But I don’t think my style is very evolved.”
Frankie is pulling a cigarette from her purse and she turns her head to look at Jo again, though her eyes are shielded by the dark sunglasses. “It doesn’t have to be evolved, Jo—your style just has to be yours .”
Jo thinks about this as they stand beneath a swaying palm tree in the parking lot of the hospital. She looks up at the reflective, glittering windows of the building, noticing the way the fluffy, white clouds are mirrored in the glass.
“I guess so,” Jo says uncertainly. “But where do you get your sense of style?” It’s probably too hot to be standing around on the pavement, chit-chatting about fashion, but Jo is trying hard to acclimate to the painfully humid weather, so she forces herself to stand there, willing her pores not to sweat.
“My style?” Frankie blows smoke straight up at the sky. “From my mother. She and my father both came here from Italy in 1922. My mother was still a girl then, but her sense of style was already solidified, as was her appetite for life.” Frankie flicks ash onto the gray pavement, crossing one arm over her flat stomach and holding on to the opposite elbow as she stands there, looking elegantly cool in the heat. “They had pasta most days, took naps in the afternoon, smoked like chimneys, and ate dinner no earlier than nine. My parents still drink a bottle of red wine every night. In my entire life, I have never once heard my mother complain about the things other women do: she never says she’s ‘fat,’ she simply says she’s been enjoying life a bit too much. And then she drinks a gallon of water with lemon each day until she ‘feels like herself again.’” Frankie shakes her head, tutting as she very clearly imagines this Italian mother of hers.
“Your family sounds so different than mine.”
“How so?”
“Well,” Jo says. “For starters, my parents were born here, and they lived through the Great Depression—both of them on Midwestern farms. Because of that, they’re extremely frugal. My dad can pinch a penny until it screams.”
Frankie chuckles at this. “Until it screams, huh?”
“Oh, absolutely. I wore my mother’s wedding dress when I married Bill, not because I thought it suited me, but because it was free. And when I met him, I was working as a secretary. My dad wanted me to be self-sufficient. He told me and my sisters when we were quite young that there were no guarantees in life—about anything. He said we could marry well, but a stock market crash or some other unforeseen disaster could wipe out our families. My dad thought that having daughters who worked was the best way to insulate us from hardship. ‘If you can work, you can feed yourself—and your children,’ he always said,” Jo says, using a deep, faux man’s voice.
Frankie nods. “That’s true,” she says. “But I’ve already worked and lived on my own, and now I don’t want to work anymore.” She makes a face. “Not because I’m lazy, but because there are so many other things to do, you know?”
Jo does know—of course she knows. A woman can have a wide range of passions and hobbies and pursuits, they just can’t jeopardize her obligations as a wife and mother. “Sure. Of course,” she says.
“I want to learn French,” Frankie says, smoking again as she gazes up at the palm trees overhead. “And I want to bake strudel. I want to take a road trip all the way from Florida to Maine, from Maine to Alaska, and then down to California. I want to see it all—maybe even Mexico.”
Jo blinks in response. Her dreams have always been much more pedestrian than the ones that Frankie apparently entertains: she wants to sew curtains for the entire house. She’d like to take the kids to Yellowstone before they all grow up and leave to live their own lives. She wants to read a novel a week purely for her own enjoyment. But road tripping around the perimeter of the country? Learning to speak a foreign language? Thoughts like these have never crossed her mind.
“You know what we should do?” Frankie says, dropping her cigarette butt on the pavement and crushing it beneath the toe of her high heeled shoe.
“What’s that?”
“Take a girls’ road trip,” Frankie says. “Once the men are all settled, we should drive up to Atlantic City and have a weekend of debauchery. See Sinatra at the 500 Club.”
Again, Jo simply blinks. Who is this woman? She’s completely entranced by Frankie—she can admit that to herself—but she’s also mystified that such a female creature exists in her orbit. Someone who wants to do things simply for the sake of doing them, not to benefit her own family. A woman who thinks it’s perfectly reasonable to just jet away to Atlantic City, of all places, and spend a weekend gazing up at Old Blue Eyes on stage while someone else is back in Stardust Beach holding down the fort.
“That sounds…really fun,” Jo says, giving her best Girl Scout-type I’m game for anything smile. “But I can’t really imagine leaving my children.”
Frankie’s face falls. She pushes her sunglasses up on top of her head and her brown eyes pierce Jo’s. “They’d be fine without you for a weekend,” she says. “I promise.”
It’s on the tip of Jo’s tongue to remind Frankie that, as a woman who has no children, it’s really not fair of her to say so, but she thinks better of it. After all, she knows nothing of Frankie’s personal life or marriage—not yet, anyway—so she bites her tongue.
“You’re so right,” Jo says agreeably. “I’m sure they would be fine.” But she isn’t convinced that they would be, nor is she at all sure that Bill would support her disappearing on a road trip with a bunch of other women, so she just keeps smiling. “It was so good to see you today, Frankie,” she says, turning to find her car in the lot, which is officially baking in the noon sun like a tray of cookies in the oven. “I need to get home and do some afternoon chores, but I’d love to have you over soon for coffee.”
Frankie smiles back, but her eyes are slightly narrowed in consideration. Jo feels scrutinized under her gaze—seen, but not in a good way. Seen, but for who she really is: a dull, staid, boring mom from Minneapolis. Being around Frankie makes her feel as if she doesn’t have a glamorous bone in her entire body, but it also makes her feel like she wants to be glamorous. Frankie is somehow aspirational for her—almost like the kind of friend a girl has when she’s young; the type who drives a little too fast, starts to smoke a little too young, and always has a really good bad idea up her sleeve.
“Definitely,” Frankie says, watching Jo as she walks over to the family station wagon. Jo unlocks the driver’s side door and lifts a hand in farewell.
Jo backs up with caution, tapping her brakes quickly so as not to nick an old man passing slowly behind her car with a cane, then she puts her car in drive and exits from the lot.
In her rearview mirror, she sees Frankie getting into a convertible Corvette—one that looks just like the car that Bill drives. She registers the carefree way that Frankie settles in behind the wheel with the top down so that she can bask in the Florida sun.
It never would have occurred to Jo to ask Bill if she could drive his Corvette. And she knows in her heart that it never would have occurred to him to offer it.
“Mommy, Mommy, Mommy!” Nancy shouts that evening as Jo takes a bubbling tuna casserole from the oven, both hands engulfed in giant, well-worn oven mitts. “Can I get the new Nancy Drew book? It’s called The Moonstone Castle Mystery !”
Jo uses one shoulder to push the long strand of hair out of her eyes as she navigates around her ten-year-old daughter to set the hot casserole dish on a trivet on the kitchen counter.
“Baby, I’m not sure right now,” Jo says distractedly, turning to pull a salad from the refrigerator. She takes the lid off the Tupperware container, revealing a chopped head of iceberg lettuce dotted with shaved radish rounds, light green crescents of celery, and chunks of tomato. “Can you get the salad dressing out of the fridge, Nance? Please? And set it on the table,” Jo says hurriedly, nodding at the table with its bright yellow placemats and clean silverware set out on folded, ironed napkins.
Nancy sighs, but does as her mother asks. “But, Mom. Please? I played Barbies with Kate all afternoon like you wanted.”
Jo can hear the annoyance in her middle child’s voice over having to entertain her younger sister, but Jo had already thanked Nancy for watching Kate so that she could go to the hospital to see Barbara and baby Huck. Jimmy had been home as well, and while Jo prefers not to leave her children alone, she knows that, at ten and eleven, her two oldest kids are plenty responsible enough to watch television for a couple of hours with their little sister, or to make a snack that doesn’t require any cooking. She’d grown up strong and independent and responsible, and she wants that for her children as well.
“Honey, Daddy will be home soon and I want to make sure you’re all washed and ready for—“ Jo is about to say “dinner,” but just then, the door from the garage into the house opens. Bill walks in looking distracted.
“Daddy!” Nancy shouts, flinging herself at her father. She wraps her arms around his waist and hugs him, looking up at him adoringly. “Do you think I can get the new Nancy Drew book since I babysat Kate today?”
“Why did you babysit?” he asks, looking at Jo as he puts an arm around Nancy and pats her shoulder.
“I went to the hospital to check on Barbara and the baby,” Jo says, willing her eyes not to travel to the spot in the front room where Barbara’s water had broken just days earlier. She’d been able to mostly remove the spot, but the reminder of impending childbirth in the middle of her new house is mildly unappetizing as Jo gets dinner on the table.
“How is she?”
“She’s doing just great,” Jo says with a smile. “I got to see the baby—little Huck. He’s adorable.”
“Todd seems pleased to have another boy,” Bill says. He gives Nancy a squeeze and lets her go, moving through the kitchen to set his briefcase on a table in the front room. “Listen, I need a few minutes to myself. Why don’t you all eat without me this evening, and save me a plate for later?”
For the third time that day, Jo finds herself standing there just blinking at someone without knowing quite what to say. “You don't want to eat with us?”
This is a turn of events; Bill is the one who has always been so insistent on the importance of the family dinner. Though they’d never talked about it much, she’d gotten the impression that Margaret, his first wife, had always felt unwell and never wanted to cook or eat together. It takes very little motivation for a second wife to do the kinds of things that a first wife didn’t do—quietly besting the first wife can become a competition, of sorts—and once Jo had gotten that impression about Margaret, she’d made it her mission to have a hot meal on the table each evening, and to have the children washed and ready to eat when Bill walked in the door.
“I’m a little under the weather,” Bill says. Jimmy has come in to the kitchen with his face washed and hair wetted down to hold his cowlick in place. “Hi, buddy,” Bill says to his son.
“You’re sick, Dad?” Jimmy asks, eyes filled with worry. “We can’t play catch tonight?”
Bill puts out a hand like he might muss his son’s hair, but then pulls it back. Jimmy has just reached the age where he isn’t a fan of things like having his hair tousled, or being treated like a baby in any way. As a fellow firstborn son, Bill can understand his son’s need to grow into manhood, and he does his best to act as though eleven is right on the cusp of shaving and driving.
“Listen, bub,” Bill says as he clears his throat. “I just need to lie down for a bit. I’ll see how I feel, okay?”
Without another word, Bill vanishes down the hall and leaves Jo with two of her three children. They’re looking to her for cues, but Bill has never once, in their entire marriage, come home and gone directly to the bedroom for a nap.
“What do we do, Mommy?” Nancy asks.
Jo slides her hands out of the oven mitts and tosses them on the counter, then she slips the apron over her head and hangs it on its hook in the pantry cupboard. She runs her hands over her hair to smooth it down.
“Well,” Jo says, “I guess we eat. Jimmy, please get the milk out of the fridge, and Nancy, go get your sister. Make sure her hands are washed.”
Nancy emits a long, loud sigh, then turns on her heel to walk back to the bedrooms, where Kate is no doubt lost in a land of Barbies or baby dolls. “Fine,” she says, her voice ringing out in the giant openness of the modern house. “But I still think I deserve that new book.”
It’s Jo’s turn to sigh out loud as she drops into her seat at the table, spreading her napkin across her lap. She reaches for the serving spoon to dish up some casserole onto Kate’s plate, and then makes a mental note for the next day while she’s out running errands: Buy more milk; go to fabric store to find new Butterick patterns for summer dresses; stop at the bookstore and look for the new Nancy Drew book.
Another day , she thinks, glopping a spoonful of casserole onto her own plate as the children pull out their chairs and sit down with her, of not learning a foreign language, of not shopping at Neiman Marcus, and of not taking a leisurely nap after lunch. Oh well.