11. Jo
ELEVEN
jo
The sun has vanished behind the trees but the stars aren’t out yet when Jo meets Frankie at the end of the driveway. Instead of shorts, Frankie is wearing a long, loose caftan with bright orange and blue swirls. The tip of her cigarette glows as she inhales. She reaches up to push a stray piece of hair behind her ear; the rest of it is loosely clipped into a messy chignon. Frankie looks like she’s been lounging around all afternoon, reading Mary McCarthy’s The Group on the couch and drinking gin and tonics as she works her way through a pack of cigarettes.
Jo frowns at her. “You okay, Frankie?” she asks, stopping at the edge of the driveway as Frankie smokes but does not move.
Frankie tilts her head to one side. “Yeah,” she says in an off-handed way, waving her cigarette around. “My monthly visitor showed up today. I’m just low on energy. How about you? You look like you’ve got a bee in your bonnet, and you sounded that way on the phone. Did Bill come home hot under the collar about that new woman engineer?”
Jo grabs Frankie by the elbow and starts dragging her down the block. “No,” she says, puzzled. “What new woman? I thought only men worked at NASA. Except for the secretaries, of course.”
Frankie tugs her arm from Jo’s grasp and slows their pace, putting her cigarette to her lips again as she shrugs. “Beats me. Ed was just ranting over dinner about how this young girl is an engineer and how she got the floor today to introduce herself like she was some grown man with decades of experience. He thinks it’s strange that Arvin North let her have so much control. Maybe she’s his niece or something.”
Jo stops walking. “Frankie,” she says. “Maybe she’s just a brilliant scientist. Maybe she has every bit as much right to be there as our husbands do. Maybe she’s going to be a top-notch engineer.”
Frankie exhales a stream of smoke as they pick back up their slow walking pace. “Or maybe she’ll go into space with one of our husbands, closed up in a tiny rocket ship where they have to share oxygen and a bed.”
Jo shakes her head. “I don’t know. I don’t think there’ll be a woman in the space program anytime soon, and if there ever is, I’m sure they’ll get their own beds.”
Frankie looks unperturbed by the entire discussion. “I think there will be a woman on the moon.”
They amble in silence for a minute or two as the sky fades from blue to lavender to plum, with a line of creamy golden orange hovering along the horizon. If there’s one thing Jo can say for sure about Florida, it’s that the sunsets here are top of the line.
“Can I tell you a secret?” Jo reaches for Frankie’s cigarette, which Frankie gives her.
“Josephine Booker has secrets?” Frankie says with a smirk. “Wait, is this like your mom’s secret apple pie recipe or something? Because I cook strictly out of the Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book, and I only do that just barely.” She takes her cigarette back.
Jo shakes her head, watching Frankie’s face. She truly feels as though they’ve become friends over the past couple of months, and while they’ve spent more time on the phone, taking their evening walks, and hanging out in each other’s kitchens than they have with any of the other women in their group, there’s still a lot they don’t know about each other. “No,” Jo says, “it’s a real secret. Although if I gave you any of my mother’s best recipes, she’d tan my hide.”
“Those Minnesota broads and their secret recipes.” Frankie watches Jo with interest to see where she’s going with this.
“Anyway,” Jo says on a sigh. “I need you to promise me you won’t tell anyone—not even Ed—what I’m about to tell you.”
Frankie stops walking and leans against a Cadillac that’s parked at the curb in front of a darkened house. She pulls a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of her caftan and lights a new one, passing it to Jo. Then she lights another for herself. “I promise,” Frankie says. She keeps leaning against the car, with her eyes trained on Jo.
“Okay.” Jo paces back and forth, smoking like a chimney. She’s never told anyone about this—not even Sally and Genevieve, who have always been her closest friends. “Before Bill and I were married…he had another wife.”
Frankie waits. “And what? Did he kill her or something?” She snorts at her own joke.
“No, he locked her up in a mental facility.”
Frankie’s laughter dies instantly. “Jo. What the hell?”
Jo scuffs her tennis shoe along the pavement, kicking the tire of the Cadillac gently with her toe. “Her name was Margaret— is Margaret,” she corrects herself. “And they were high school sweethearts. They got married really young, and Margaret was always a little…” Jo lowers her voice to a whisper, as if the palm trees might overhear the discussion and spread it around the neighborhood. “She was always a little crazy .”
“Aren’t we all, honey.” Frankie is smoking like her life depends on it as she watches Jo intently.
“So Bill and her parents put her in this home, and eventually he asked for a divorce. When we met, I was twenty and he was twenty-three, and we got engaged and married as soon as we could.”
“And did Margaret agree to the divorce or is she, like…totally medicated and out of it?” Frankie looks awed.
Jo shrugs. “I’m not sure. I’ve never met her. She’s in Arizona, which is where they grew up. Bill was stationed in Minneapolis at the Air Force base when I met him, and we lived there for our entire marriage until we came here. He doesn’t talk about Margaret much. Actually, he doesn’t talk about her at all, and I usually don’t even think about the fact that he was married to someone before me.”
Frankie gives a low whistle. She pushes away from the Cadillac when the front door of the house swings open and a man stands there, watching them.
“Evening,” Jo says to the man with a wave and a half smile. She grabs onto Frankie again and starts walking, dragging Frankie with her once more.
“So why are you telling me this now? Did something happen? Did you guys fight about Margaret?”
“He got a letter from Desert Sage today—that’s where Margaret lives—and they want more money. Apparently, she’s become a danger and she needs a higher level of supervision.”
“Jeez Louise, Jo.” Frankie is totally animated now; she seems to have snapped out of the lazy funk she’d been in earlier. “I really didn’t think you had anything juicy like this in your past.”
Jo sits down on a curb and lets her head drop dejectedly. “I wouldn’t say it’s in my past, exactly—this is more Bill’s secret, and therefore I probably shouldn’t have told it, but it’s definitely seeping into my life today, and now I can’t stop thinking about this poor woman. She’s probably locked up somewhere in Arizona in a room with no bedsheets, possibly scared and certainly confused.” Jo looks up at Frankie, who is standing over her and looking at Jo with concern. “What if she asks for him? What if she doesn’t remember that they’re divorced? I’ve basically got someone else’s husband, Frankie. I stole someone’s husband.”
Frankie sighs and sits on the curb next to Jo. “Honey, he’s yours now. After a dozen years and three kids, he’s definitely yours.”
“I feel that way most of the time,” Jo says. “I would say ninety-nine percent of the time I don’t even remember that Bill was married to someone else before me, but then it comes crashing back, and I just have visions of him…with another woman. You know,” she looks at Frankie pleadingly. “ With another woman.”
Frankie’s eyebrows shoot up. “Oh. Right. Okay.” She taps her cigarette pack against her hand. “I think I’m gonna need another smoke for this conversation.”
“It’s just…can you imagine, Frankie?” Jo drops her voice. “Picturing your husband with someone else—knowing he’s been with another woman?” She gives an involuntary shudder. “I know a lot of men are more experienced than their wives, but I guess there was a part of me that always thought that whoever I married would be having their first time on our wedding night as well.”
Frankie chokes on her smoke. “Oh, Jo,” she splutters. She’s laugh-coughing as she bends forward at the waist, putting her forehead against her knees while they sit there together. “Wait—was your wedding night your first time? Actually?”
Jo blinks at Frankie. “Of course.” Realization dawns over Jo. “Wasn’t it yours?”
Frankie stares back at her, looking like she’s waiting for the punchline. “No, darling. No, no, no .”
Jo flushes in the twilight. Her cigarette is long gone, so she has nothing to do with her hands, and instead wraps her arms around her shins. “It’s just how I was raised, I guess.” She averts her gaze. “I’m not judging you or anything.”
“I’m not judging you either,” Frankie volleys back, still chuckling as she takes a drag on her fresh cigarette.
The women sit in silence, their shoulders nearly touching. Two boys about Jimmy’s age ride by on bikes with playing cards stuck in the spokes of their wheels. The click-click sound of their bikes fades off into the distance as the boys turn a corner together.
Jo is lost in thought; Frankie smokes and looks off into the distance. The notion that she and her new friend are from different worlds is not a new one to Jo, but she realizes as she sits there that Frankie has had a whole wild life in New York City, while Jo has essentially just gone from her parents’ house to her husband’s house, and spent the intervening years raising kids. Meanwhile, Frankie has done interesting things, cavorting with actors and dancers, drinking in smoky bars, and—obviously—having sex with men she never married. While Frankie was dancing on Broadway, Jo was taking secretarial courses at Miss Smith’s Typing School and then working at the front counter of the dentist’s office. It had not occurred to her to let her prom date get past second base, nor did she even once consider taking things further with Bill before the wedding, though she understood that there was a whole school of thought surrounding the testing of sexual chemistry between two people before making a lifetime commitment. But the very idea of that had seemed completely foreign to her as a twenty-year-old—the kind of thing that other girls did, but that Jo never would.
“You know,” Frankie says, finally breaking the silence between them. “It might be nice to never know anything different than being with Ed. But I also think I learned some important things about myself before I met him.”
“Like what?” Jo turns her head and looks at Frankie, who smiles knowingly and taps the ash of her cigarette onto the pavement.
“Oh, like what pleases me. I knew some men who were, shall we say, not very interested in the satisfaction of the women they were with, and I discovered that I did not like that. I prefer a lover who takes his time. Someone who cares about me and about how I feel in bed.”
Jo is about to say something, but the reality of her unworldliness is almost palpable to her. Instead of speaking, she just nods.
“I appreciate a man who appreciates me is all I’m saying,” Frankie goes on. “And let me tell you, Josephine Booker, not all men appreciate women. Some are quite cruel. So if you have a man who loves you and kisses you and treats you like a whole person, then you are way ahead of the game.”
Bill has never treated her any other way than what Frankie is describing, so again, Jo says nothing. The two boys on bikes circle the block once more, passing by Jo and Frankie without looking at them. It’s after dark and Jo wouldn’t like Jimmy out here on his bike at this time of night, but these aren’t her children, so she lets it go.
“Anyhow,” Frankie says, bumping Jo with her shoulder. “This is a bigger talk than either of us bargained for, but I still liked it. Most days I don’t get to talk about anything real with anyone. I remember, in New York, I had three roommates, and sometimes we’d split a cheap bottle of wine and talk late into the night. Sometimes it got real like this, and I always fell asleep thinking how great it was to have girlfriends. I mean, men are nice and all, but women really get each other, you know?”
Jo nods. “I do know. I had some great friends in Minnesota, and I miss them.” She thinks of the girls she’d grown up with; they’d been there for one another through the births of all their children, they’d shared secrets about nursing babies, about talking to their husbands, about fighting with siblings. But in all the years she’d been friends with Sally and Genevieve, they’d never peeled back the most intimate layers of their lives and talked like this , which makes Jo wonder whether they’d ever really known each other at all.
“Call them,” Frankie says. “Or send a letter. Don’t lose your old friends, but don’t discount your new ones. In each stage of life, we need people who understand where we are. And right now, you and I are in the same place.”
This makes perfect sense to Jo and she locks eyes with Frankie. “You are so right. This is a new and different stage. None of my old friends would understand this at all, but you do. You’re here, and you get it.”
Frankie shrugs and goes back to smoking in the dark. In the distance, a woman’s voice shouts for Daniel and Paul, and Jo guesses that these are the boys on the bikes, because they do not ride by again.
“We both have husbands who want to travel into the unknown. They have a dangerous passion, and we’re on the world’s stage watching them try to achieve their dreams. I get all of that—all five of us wives are in that same boat together. But beyond that, our lives are different, and that’s okay.”
“Yeah,” Jo says, nodding slowly. “That is okay.” She slings an arm around Frankie’s shoulders and touches her head against her friend’s for a moment. “I appreciate you.”
“I appreciate you too, Joey-girl.”
“So, how much is it? The increase?” Jo is back from her walk with Frankie, the kids are all in bed asleep (save for Nancy, who is most likely reading a mystery book under her blankets with a flashlight, something Jo pretends to ignore in the summertime when no one has to get up early for school), and Bill is flossing his teeth next to her in the master bathroom.
“I need to call tomorrow,” Bill says. “You saw the same letter I did—there were no concrete details.” He tugs his dental floss through his molars and leans in closer to the mirror to look at his teeth.
Jo smears cold cream over her entire face as she stands there in a pair of pink satin tap shorts and a matching tank top. They are both facing the mirror, and when they make eye contact with one another, it’s through their reflections. “How much does it cost each month right now?” Jo is careful not to phrase it like How much is it costing us , because she knows that Bill earns the money and that Margaret is solely his responsibility, but certainly there is the feeling that the money comes out of their family budget.
Bill is running the floss between his lower front teeth when he glances at Jo in the mirror. “About thirteen hundred dollars.”
Jo stops smearing the cream on her face and turns her whole body to face Bill. “Thirteen hundred dollars ?”
Bill spits into the sink and reaches for his toothbrush. “I’m in charge of the funds her parents left her when they died, so between that and her welfare payment for being disabled, I only send a check for about five hundred dollars a month out of our account.”
Jo is still breathless. “Five hundred dollars. A month .” She feels as if her chest is heaving. “That’s…so much money, Bill.”
“Well, it’s about to be more.” He squeezes toothpaste onto his brush and runs it under the tap. “Right now she’s overseen by nurses and they bring her meals to her room. A higher level of care will entail full-time oversight. I’ll know more after I call Desert Sage tomorrow, Jo. There’s no point worrying about it now.”
Jo reaches for a washcloth and runs it under the warm water, looking into her own eyes in the mirror. She’s been blithely volunteering and making dinner and taking her children to the library while her husband spends a good portion of his paycheck to support a woman in another state who will never again be able to support herself. A woman of thirty-five. A woman who might live another forty or fifty years. This thought actually does make Jo’s heart palpitate. God forbid anything should happen to Bill; if he died, would she be responsible for Margaret’s care? And if not her, then who?
Bill comes up behind her then, having brushed and rinsed and wiped his face on a hand towel. He puts his hands on her bare shoulders and leans down, pressing his lips to the warm crook of Jo’s neck and kissing her there. She shrugs her shoulder to push him away—not because she dislikes his kisses, but because it tickles.
“I don’t want you to worry about this, Jo. This is my problem, not yours.”
“Bill,” Jo says incredulously, wiping away the cold cream with her washcloth. “How can you say that? Anything that affects our family is definitely our problem. We’re a team.” She swallows hard and Bill remains where he is, hands on her shoulders. “Do you think I should get a job? I mean, one that pays? I could look for something that starts when the kids go back to school. Maybe the school needs a secretary—I could do that. Something to help out financially.”
Bill’s hands fall from her shoulders and he takes a step back. “Jo,” he says, his face serious. “No. Margaret’s care is not for you to worry about. I appreciate your concern, but I don’t want you to even consider that option. Aside from the fact that the kids are young, how would that look? I’m working for NASA, making plenty of money, and my wife takes a job answering telephones?” He shakes his head. “How would we even explain that to the kids?”
Jo scrubs at her face roughly with the washcloth. “They should know the truth anyway. Do you think it’s reasonable for them to never know that their father was married to someone before their mother?”
Bill’s jaw drops. He is aghast. “Jo. There is no reason for them to know that. It is not relevant, it does not apply to their lives, and frankly, I don’t think it’s any of their business.” Without another word, Bill turns and walks out of the bathroom.
Jo tosses her washcloth into the laundry basket, flips off the bathroom light, and trails after him. “How can you say that?” She throws back the covers of their bed and climbs in next to her husband. “Our lives—who we are—is what makes them who they are.”
Bill shakes his head firmly. “Wrong.” He flops back onto his pillow angrily. “ Their choices make them who they are.”
Jo reaches for the hand cream on her nightstand and begins to rub it into her hands and elbows with vigor. “I disagree, Bill. I think they watch and learn from us. I think knowing who their parents are will help them become fully-formed people.”
Bill huffs and reaches for the switch on his bedside lamp, clicking it off abruptly. “This discussion is over for now,” he says, turning his back to Jo.
She sets the lotion on her nightstand and turns out her own light with resignation. Jo’s frustration has given way to sadness as she lays there in the dark yet again, trying to fall asleep with an unresolved issue wedged in between her and Bill there in their bed. Since moving to Florida, they’ve spent more time at odds than they have in all the years of their marriage combined, and all Jo wants is for it to end.
Jo wants her husband back, and she wants to squelch the thought that he still belongs to someone else—some phantom woman who lives in Arizona—before the idea takes up residence in her heart.