9. Jo
NINE
jo
It’s Sunday evening and the kids are in front of the television watching The Ed Sullivan Show while Jo cleans the kitchen and puts away the pots and pans that she’s just washed by hand.
“I’m glad you’re getting something out of volunteering, Jo, but the kids said Frankie took them to the theater to see Cleopatra the other day. Do you really think that’s appropriate?” Bill is leaning against the counter with his arms folded across his chest.
“It’s historical,” Jo says defensively as she bends over to slide a heavy pot into a low cabinet. “And it’s Elizabeth Taylor—she’s a great actress.” When Jo stands up and turns to face Bill, he’s giving her a long, searching look.
“There are scenes in bed, far too much kissing for my taste, and I hear that Elizabeth Taylor brags about her sexual prowess. I really don’t think that’s the kind of thing our young children should be seeing.”
Jo folds the dishtowel she’s been using and hangs it over the handle of the oven before heaving a deep sigh and turning out the light over the kitchen sink. “I bet most of it went right over their heads,” she says in a near whisper. “All I heard about was how glamorous Cleopatra was, and Jimmy loved the Battle of Actium scene. He talked about it all afternoon that day.”
Bill shakes his head. “Look, I know she’s your friend, but I’m just not sure that a thirty-year-old woman with no children who smokes two packs of cigarettes a day is the best babysitter for our children.”
Now Jo has gone beyond mildly defensive to fully annoyed. “Frankie is a wonderful woman, Bill. I would never leave the kids with someone I didn’t trust. They’ve had fun with her the few times she’s watched them, and in case you haven’t noticed, it’s been an amazing experience for me so far at the hospital. Not that you’ve bothered to ask much about how it’s going.”
Jo walks across the kitchen and makes to turn off the light, which would leave Bill standing there in the dark.
“Jo,” he says with a warning in his voice. She stops with her hand on the light switch. “Fine.” Bill relents. “How is it going so far? Have you decided to go back to school and become a nurse yet?”
Jo spins back around on him angrily. She would have accepted his belated, solicited inquiry into her volunteerism, but the sarcastic question tacked on at the end takes it a step too far. “Maybe,” she says with a tight jaw. “Maybe I will go to college and go into medicine. Who knows?”
Bill pushes away from the counter and walks over to Jo, taking her by the elbow. “Me. I know. You’re not the type, Jo. You love being a mom,” he says imploringly, looking down into her eyes. “You’ve never once told me you were unsatisfied with being my wife, or with being a mother to our children, and I don’t think you are now. You’re just…floundering a little.”
“But I’m not .” Jo shakes her head for emphasis. “I’m doing my best to find my footing here.” She drops her voice so that the kids won’t hear her over the sound of Ed Sullivan introducing his next guest. “I didn’t want to move to Florida, Bill. You know that. This place isn’t me. I mean, it’s beautiful, and having a pool is exotic, but I don’t know if I fit in here. I’m mountains, and picnics in the woods, and making my own dresses out of fabric I find on sale. And Florida is bikinis, and beaches, and eating lunch at the Neiman Marcus cafe while shopping for the latest fashions.” Jo pauses, exasperated. She flaps her hands in the air and then lets them fall to her sides helplessly. “I’m a fish out of water here, Bill.”
Bill’s expression softens as he walks over to his wife, putting both hands on her waist. “Jojo, you’re not a fish out of water. You are a wonderful, caring, sweet woman, and everyone who meets you sees that. You’re already making friends here, and accomplishing good things. I’m proud of you.”
Jo’s stubborn attitude melts somewhat as Bill pulls her closer. He lowers his face so that their lips are just inches apart, and Jo relaxes into his arms. “Thank you,” she says, growing inexplicably teary-eyed. “It’s nice to be seen.”
“I do see you. This has been?—”
“Mommy?” Nancy calls from the front room. “Can we watch one more show?”
Bill shakes his head at Jo and whispers, “No, let’s put them to bed and go up on the roof. You want to?”
Jo steps out of his grasp as Nancy pokes her head into the kitchen. “One more show, Mommy? Please?”
“No, sweetheart, not tonight. Dad and I are going to team up and get everyone into bed.”
“Awww!” Jimmy calls out from the front room; the other two are clearly listening to see if there’s any chance of more television. “Come on, Mom!”
Bill clears his throat. “No ifs, ands, or buts about it, amigos,” he says in a gruff voice. “First one into pajamas with their teeth brushed gets to choose which parent tucks them in.”
Jo smiles because Bill will be the one the kids angle to have as the parent who puts them to bed. She also knows he’s done this on purpose, perhaps to give her a break from the bulk of the child-rearing duties for one evening, but also possibly to butter her up so that they don’t turn out the lights and immediately fall asleep with their backs to one another, as they’ve been doing lately. While Bill shepherds and cajoles the children, Jo takes two bottles of beer out of the fridge and slips a bottle opener into the pocket of her skirt.
“I think we’ve done it, boss,” Bill says twenty minutes later, after a whirlwind of giggles, toothpaste, and bedtime stories. “What do you say we make for the stars?”
Jo carries the beers, one in each hand, as she follows Bill out to the pool deck. He pulls a ladder from the side of the house and sets it against the ledge of the roof, then tests it to make sure it’s stable. Bill holds the end of the ladder steady and takes the beers from Jo.
“Up you go, Mrs. Booker,” he says, easily gripping the necks of both beer bottles in one hand as he holds the ladder with the other. He’s got a handsome, impish grin on his face—it’s the same one Jo fell in love with all those years ago, and it charms her still. She can’t help but smile back at him as she mounts the ladder, holding on with both hands and carefully placing each flat-shoed foot on a rung before moving up to the next.
Going up on the roof together at night after the kids are in bed has long been a favorite thing for Jo and Bill, but they have yet to ascend to their roof here in Florida. This one is slightly pitched and has a different tile from their roof in Minnesota, so Jo looks around, trying to find a place to sit comfortably.
“Here,” Bill says, his head appearing above the ladder. He hands her the beers. “Be right back.”
A minute later he returns, handing Jo a heavy quilt. Bill climbs the rest of the way up and spreads the blanket out for them, then takes the beers so that Jo can fish the bottle opener from her skirt pocket. The bottle lids make a satisfying pop as Bill frees them, and they clink their beers together wordlessly, looking up at the clear sky above. It’s mid-July, and the moon is full and bright.
“We came here for this,” Bill says reverently, watching as the lights of the sky twinkle and dance above them. “Look right there.” He points at a spot off in the distance. “That’s the Summer Triangle: Vega, Altair, and Deneb. This little trilogy is only visible on clear summer nights, and if you look really closely, you can see some of the other stars in their constellations. They’re faint, but you’ve got Cygnus the Swan,” Bill says, pointing at one corner of the Summer Triangle. “There’s Aquila the Eagle, and over there is Lyra the Harp.”
As always, Jo is dazzled by her husband’s brilliance, and she wishes that she knew something, anything , as intimately as Bill knows the stars. Instead of speaking, she sips her beer slowly, not wanting to get dizzy while she’s up on the roof.
“Everything might feel vast right now, Jojo, and home might seem far away,” Bill says softly, “but when you look at the scope of the heavens, you realize that we’re not that far from anyone we love.”
Jo turns to look at her husband. His skin is smooth, but the curves of his jaw and cheekbones are sharp. “Do you miss it, too?” she asks, watching him carefully. “Do you miss Minnesota?”
Bill glances at her. “I do. I miss it. That’s where the kids were born, and there’s always comfort in what’s familiar. But I can be at home anywhere, Jo—any place that allows me to be with you, Jim, Nancy, and Kate. That’s all I’ve ever wanted,” he says, shaking his head as he searches her eyes with his. “A family and a home. And you give me that.”
Jo gets a twinge of guilt as he says this; she wants to feel the same, but it’s simply taking longer for her to assimilate. She’s always been a creature of habit, and leaving her parents and siblings and friends behind for this strange paradise has felt like a radical change. She swallows hard before speaking. “I know, Bill,” she finally acquiesces. “Home is where we all are, and this is really a beautiful house. A wonderful community.”
He’s still watching her, looking hopeful as she speaks. “It is,” he agrees.
“The other wives are all great. Well, Judith is proving to be a bit of a mystery,” Jo says, biting her lip as she looks up at the Summer Triangle once again. “Bill,” she says in a serious voice. “Last month, when we were at Carrie’s house, I caught her pouring herself more vodka in the kitchen.”
Bill frowns. “Pouring it…like, secretly?”
“Yes! I went into the kitchen and found her there. I think I startled her.” It’s Jo’s turn to frown. “And then we had a slight disagreement another day when we were at Barbie’s pool with all the kids. Or rather,” Jo says, correcting herself as she fans her skirt out around her knees, “it wasn’t so much a disagreement , as her telling me that our only purpose as women is to—oh, never mind.” Jo waves a hand and wrinkles her nose slightly. “It was just women talking. I don’t want to weigh you down with things that aren’t worth repeating.”
Bill is still watching her, but this time with a puzzled look. “Everything okay between you ladies?”
“Yes, absolutely,” Jo says with a reassuring smile. “And now that I’ve been volunteering at the hospital for three or four weeks, I think I’m really hitting my stride. I won’t say that I’m entirely at home yet, but I know where everything is in Stardust Beach, I have friends to meet up with, and when I go to the hospital, I feel useful and needed. I’m not as unhappy as I was, Bill.” Jo reaches over and puts her hand on her husband’s thigh, squeezing it as she watches his face. “I’m still homesick, and I wish like hell we were back home and camping at Clear Lake right now instead of melting in this humidity, but things are okay. I promise.”
Bill visibly relaxes; the tension has been palpable since they arrived in May, and between his long hours at NASA and the physical distance between them in bed at night, Jo has felt increasingly as if she were living at the beach with a stranger. She closes her eyes and leans in closer, turning her face up to Bill’s for a kiss, which he obliges. Their lips touch tenderly, and Jo feels something stir in her; she puts a hand to his cheek and deepens the kiss as the moonlight falls on their hair and skin.
Bill pulls away first, but not abruptly. Instead, he kisses her closed eyes, her forehead, her nose. “Did I tell you about the solar eclipse yesterday?” he asks with a boyish eagerness that makes Jo laugh as she accepts the kisses he’s planting all over her face.
“It wasn’t top secret, Bill,” she says, amused. “In fact, you took us all out to the yard with those little glasses so we could look at it.”
“No, I mean, did I tell you about the astronomers who chartered a DC-8 so that they could fly along the path of the eclipse up in the Northern Territory of Alaska? They got to see it for forty-four seconds longer than the rest of us knuckleheads here on the ground.” He shakes his head. “I’m so jealous.”
This makes Jo laugh even more. “When did you get to be such a space nut, sweetheart? Were you always like this?”
Bill looks at her incredulously. “Of course. From my first Air Force flight onwards, all I wanted to do was fly higher, faster, farther.” His eyes look slightly glassy while he stares up at the stars, one arm now around Jo’s shoulders as he holds her close. “I’m living my dream, Jojo.”
The laughter inside of her dies down when she sees how serious Bill is. This is his dream. And Jude may not have been entirely right when she said that Jo’s only purpose in life is to be a wife and a mother, but she was at least partly right: it’s Jo’s duty—it was in her vows, for heaven’s sake—to love, honor, and cherish her husband, and that means to fully support him as well. To bolster him, and to help him achieve his dreams. She reaches over and brushes his hair across his forehead. “I love you, William Booker,” she says, leaning closer and kissing him on the lips again. “I love you, and your dreams.”
In response, Bill lays Jo on her back there atop the roof and kisses her slowly, moving down her throat and kissing her on the hollow of her neck. Jo sighs softly as Bill’s nimble fingers work the top buttons of her blouse. She’s tempted to sit up and look around to see if any of their neighbors are outside, but then Bill unzips the side of her skirt and she forgets entirely that they live in a neighborhood.
There, beneath the Summer Triangle on a hot July night, Bill makes Jo forget everything. All she can think of as the passion builds between them is the weight of her husband on her. The feeling of his arms. The solidness of him .
Jo closes her eyes and arches her back as she bathes in the moonlight.