Chapter 2 Janes 1 and 2
THE WOMEN PASS THE LONG days and nights working the past over, studying the mistakes they made, the bad luck that reached in like a hand and turned them away from the lives they should have had.
The summer after she graduated was when the malaise crept in, when everything became blunted, gray.
When the beers didn’t seem to be as cold, the parties as fun, the songs as moving, the sun as hot.
It was as though there were some kind of screen between her and the rest of the world, dimming the thing that made every moment pulse with energy, sparkle with promise and light.
And then the kids she dismissed as losers, nerds, moved away for college.
One of them even went to Yale, and the idea that something so monumental could happen to someone whom she had thought so little of occupied her mind for days.
She felt as though she had made a fatal mistake—all this time she thought she had mastered the order of the world, and it made her sick to wonder if perhaps, maybe, she had not.
She took a job at the cage in the casino, where she counted out chips and cash all day.
The polyester uniform made her sweat. She hated the tuxedo shirt she had to button to her chin, the horrible little paisley bow tie cinched around her neck.
The mildewed smell of old dollar bills always on her hands.
The dim light threw dark circles under her eyes.
Her tan faded by Labor Day. The blonde streaks in her hair from the sun grew back dark, and before she knew it, she was unremarkable.
In December she ran into the boy who had been Homecoming King her year, who had been hanging drywall since they graduated.
She felt such contempt for his ordinariness that for days the thought of him filled her with rage.
But then she realized, he could look at her and feel the same.
She was so disgusted with herself, so bored when she looked out at her future, flat, her days filled with counting other people’s money, nothing to call her own.
She was mortified by how often she got her counts wrong, and how everything started to remind her of work: the sun and the moon nothing but dull coins in the sky.
Meeting men was what made her feel something, her only chance at being admired, at pleasing people again.
And at least they were something she couldn’t predict, the one thing in her life that wasn’t going to be the same.
Even the last one had seemed intriguing, mysterious.
As they drove to the Sunset Motel she noticed the ways his eyes caught on the outline of the ballpark, the banks of lights that had gone dark years ago. What was that about?
That’s where the drugs were meant to help.
Ah, the coke. If #2 could take it back, turn the other way when a dealer first offered her a hit on a shift, would she?
That first zip of energy. The confidence of holding a straw, the comforting script of ritual.
The thump of her heart and the lightness of her body.
The way the nights blurred by in a frenzy of flirtation and vodka and little bumps in the ladies’ room, the surge of energy thrumming through her limbs, the thread of her pulse pulled a little more taut.
She felt proud that she could keep up her figure—proud even when her shift supervisor would come and fit his hands around her waist, the fog of his breath on the back of her neck.
No. Even now. She wouldn’t trade it. Not those nights when everyone seemed to be laughing together.
When she could feel men watching her, wanting her, and she could hold herself just beyond their reach.
She would be more careful, though. She wouldn’t, the night when no one was holding, take the barback up on his offer of speed.
She wouldn’t let the speed slide into pills.
She wouldn’t get so high that she tripped during her shift, crashing on the marble floor with a full tray of drinks.
She knocked her tooth so hard on the rim of a beer mug that it fell out and she felt it slide along the slick pocket of her cheek.
Her mouth filled with the taste of blood, and once she sat up, she spat the tooth into her hand.
She stared at it for a minute, thinking it was strangely pretty, this little piece of her.
She probably had a concussion, along with the sweet buzz of the speed, and it made her thoughts tilt in strange ways, but she had been mesmerized by the bizarre beauty of it, the swirl of blood on her skin, the hard white square at the center of her palm.
The next morning she was fired for being high on the job.
If she could do it again, she wouldn’t pick up a needle after she was canned, wouldn’t feel so relieved that heroin came cheap.
When she got clean, like she did in ’96, ’98, ’03, ’07, she would stay that way.
Leave town, go to school, learn a skill that didn’t involve moving through dark places, handing out drinks, leaning over so men could get a better look at her breasts before deciding how much to tip her.
She pictured herself in an office filled with plants and sunlight, the smell of paper and ink.
But school would cost money. And what to do in the meantime?
She was like everyone else: the grind of daily life, so many bills to pay.
A generation apart, but both of them feel betrayed by the mythology they grew up on: that Jersey girls are the most beautiful, the most carefree, the most fun.
That they were meant for something big, that they had grand destinies to claim, that Atlantic City had enough energy, enough luck, enough money and glitter for everyone.
That they would one day have their own stories to tell their grandchildren—serving a martini to Madonna.
The limo ride with Muhammad Ali. The silk and satin of their uniforms, the hair spray and air kisses and twenty-dollar bills rolled into their bustiers. That’s what he’s taken from them.
They knew death was inevitable. Once they started with the needles, being surprised by death would have been like being surprised when you come to the other end of a piece of string.
But he took their stories and changed the shape of them.
Janes 1 and 2 share their greatest regret: that once they are found here, in the marsh, this will be the only story anyone will ever tell about them.