Mary Jane by Jessica Anya Blau

The first thing I saw was my mother, seated on a chair in the Cones’ living room. Her thick orangey-beige stockings looked Velcroed together at her crossed ankles. Then there was the even more startling sight of my father on the couch. Beside him, Mrs. Cone was wearing an untucked gold silk blouse. Her nipples tented out from the thin fabric. Dr. Cone stood near the fireplace, one hand flat against the mantel. The house was only slightly messier than I had left it, so either Sheba or Izzy had been tidying up in my absence.

Our Starsky and Hutch escape had only lasted about twenty minutes, so my parents couldn’t have been sitting there long. Sheba had worried they would call the police, so we’d returned to the Cones’ with the idea that we’d have a quick snack and then Sheba would walk me home and seduce (her word) my parents into a blanket pardon: the escape, the clothing, the lies. We’d even gone so far as to plan the outfit Sheba would wear: a tidy pink sheath that wasn’t too short or revealing. I knew the dress Sheba was talking about, as I’d seen it in her closet. It was something my mother would never wear, but it was the only piece of clothing Sheba had brought that my mother might not criticize.

Izzy and I were hand in hand. One of us was sweating; I could feel the wetness pooling in our palms. Jimmy and Sheba stood behind us.

No one spoke for a fraction of a second. Then Dr. Cone said, “Mary Jane, we’ve missed you!” He stepped forward and gave me a hug that felt both wonderful and terrifying. I couldn’t look at my father. What could he think of this grown man, this grown Jewish man, touching me?

“Oh, Mary Jane!” Mrs. Cone got up from the couch and kissed me.

“We came back so Mary Jane wouldn’t get in trouble.” Izzy turned to me and put her head in my belly. I picked her up and held her close against me, her head now deep in my neck.

“Gerald Dillard.” My father stood. He walked around the coffee table and shook hands with Jimmy first, and then Sheba. My mother did the same and then sat back down on her chair. I knew my father wouldn’t sit again until Sheba did, and maybe Sheba knew this too, as she went to the couch and sat. Jimmy had claimed the other chair, so the only logical place for my father to plant his body was between Sheba and Mrs. Cone.

“Mary Jane,” Izzy whispered loudly. “I’m hungry.”

“Is it okay if I take Izzy to the kitchen for a quick snack?” I asked. I didn’t know who I was asking—my parents? Dr. and Mrs. Cone?—and I didn’t know where to look, so I stared at a misdirected whorl of shag carpet in front of Jimmy’s chair.

“Oh, that would be wonderful,” Mrs. Cone said. “She hasn’t had lunch; she doesn’t seem to like anything I make for her now!”

Dr. Cone said, “Mrs. Dillard, what an amazing chef you’ve made of your daughter. Each night another superb dinner!”

My mother smiled, so I took that as a yes and escaped to the kitchen with Izzy still monkeyed on me. We scooted into the banquette and Izzy tumbled out of my arms. There was a chill of cool air on my sweat-damp neck.

“Mary Jane,” Izzy whispered. “Are they going to put you in home jail again?” Jimmy had been calling it that in the car. He wanted to know what they fed me in home jail and if I was allowed to go to the bathroom unescorted when in home jail. We had to explain to Izzy what escorted and unescorted meant, and she pointed out that she rarely went to the bathroom unescorted, as she missed everyone when she was in there alone.

“I hope not.” I leaned in and kissed the top of Izzy’s head. Her loamy, sweet smell and the feel of her curls on my face calmed me. “Let’s eat.”

I scooted out from the banquette and went to the fridge. When I opened it, I found, to my relief, that it was still clean, though less stocked than I’d kept it.

“Birds in a nest!”

“Okay.” I pulled out the eggs. “Who made dinner when I was gone?”

“No one.”

“No one?” I got out the mixing bowl and started cracking eggs.

“Hmm, Jimmy made breakfast-dinner one night.”

“Fried bread and bacon?”

“Uh-huh. And we got Little Tavern.”

“Yeah?” I was cracking far more eggs than was necessary for just me and Izzy. Would others come in and eat? Or was I about to be carted off to home jail?

“And I can’t remember the other nights.” Izzy looked up, thinking. “CHINESE! We had Chinese.”

“Good remembering!” I whisked the eggs, then got out the milk. “What else did you do when I wasn’t here?”

While I mixed up the pancake batter and heated the pan, Izzy climbed onto the orange stool and talked through her days and nights without me. Nothing particularly exciting had happened, but still I felt that I had missed things in simply not having been part of the daily routine.

Izzy was salting the birds in a nest when my mother and Mrs. Cone came in.

“Oh, are you making eggs in a nest?” Mrs. Cone clapped her hands together.

“BIRDS in a nest!” Izzy said.

My mother leaned over the pan. “You put too much butter in.”

“This is how Izzy likes it.” I flipped a nest over.

“We love Mary Jane’s meals so much,” Mrs. Cone said.

My mother’s mouth pulled up into a forced smile. “She still has a lot to learn.” I saw her look around at the kitchen, the dishes in the sink, the books on the table, the jade Buddha on the windowsill, the unswept floor.

My father stepped into the kitchen with Dr. Cone. “Okay, Mary Jane. Let’s go now.” His voice was firm and fast.

“Let me just put out the food.” I went to the cupboard and took down four plates. My mother’s head bopped back just an inch as she watched. For her, letting a fourteen-year-old take over a kitchen was like handing over the controls of a flying jet to a random passenger.

I passed the plates to Izzy, who placed them on the table.

Dr. Cone put his hand on my father’s shoulder. “Are you sure you can’t join us for lunch?”

“I have something planned,” my mother said. “It would be such a shame to waste the food.”

I nervously re-salted what Izzy had already salted. My heart ticktocked like a timer.

“Syrup?” Izzy asked.

“Fridge door,” I said.

With the red oven mitt that I kept tucked behind the toaster, I lifted the frying pan and walked it to the table. Everyone watched as I slid a bird in a nest onto each of the plates.

“It’s much easier, dear, if you bring the plates to the pan,” my mother said.

“Mary Jane, aren’t you going to eat with us?” Izzy hugged my legs.

“I’m sorry.” I put the empty pan on the burner and then picked up Izzy and buried my face in her neck. The urge to cry welled up from my chest to my throat like a wave about to crash. But I swallowed it away and held it down.

I kissed Izzy on the cheek and then took her to the banquette and set her in front of a plate. There was no silverware, so I quickly went to the silverware drawer. I held it open for a moment, admiring how clean it was. Just last week, Izzy and I had removed the silverware tray and emptied the cutlery. Both the tray and the drawer that held it were filled with crumbs, jam smears, unidentifiable seeds, and even dead bugs. I wanted to point out how clean the drawer was to my mother. It was something she might appreciate.

“We need to get going, dear.” My mother crossed her arms and stared me down.

Quickly, I pulled out the knives and forks and laid them on the table. I leaned into Izzy’s ear and whispered, “I promise I’ll be back, but it might not be until school starts again.” Izzy looked at me, her eyes huge and wet. I kissed her quickly before I could feel her feelings and double them, and then I followed my parents out of the kichen.

Dr. and Mrs. Cone walked us to the entrance hall. No one spoke until Dr. Cone opened the front door.

“This humidity can kill a golf game,” my father said.

“I’m sure it does,” Dr. Cone said. “I can take it about fifteen degrees hotter than this when there’s no humidity.”

“Do you golf too?” Mrs. Cone asked my mother.

“I prefer tennis.”

“She’s a doubles gal,” my father said. “Singles in this heat will ruin her hairdo.”

My mother smiled and then patted her stiff hair. “Well, thank you so much for having us in.”

“It would be lovely if Mary Jane could come back till the end of summer,” Dr. Cone said.

“What a shame she can’t,” my mom said, and smiled real big and stiff, like she was posing for a picture she didn’t want taken.

I stared toward the steps, hoping to see Jimmy or Sheba bounding down. It seemed impossible that I’d walk out that door and simply never see them again.

“Goodbye now,” my father said, and then I was on the sidewalk once more, between my parents, moving toward our house. I turned my head back several times, hoping that someone from the Cone house, even Dr. Cone himself, might run out and beg me to return. But no one did.

My mother unlocked the front door, and then the three of us stepped into the sterile chill of the air-conditioning. My father immediately went to his chair.

“Set the table for lunch,” my mother said.

I followed her into the kitchen. She took a pot out of the refrigerator and placed it on the stove. “Chicken noodle soup.”

I took down three bowls and placed them on the kitchen table. Then I opened the silverware drawer. I had to admire the shiny, organized cleanliness. The spoons were nested, hugging one another. The knives were lined up like canned sardines. And the forks were stacked atop one another in two neat piles. I looked over at my mother, slowly stirring the soup, her mouth in a downward melt. Before I could think it through, I put my hand into the forks and disrupted the piling. Then I did the same with the knives. The spoons seemed to cling to each other, like sleeping kittens. I flipped half of them upside down, and then removed three.

As if to cover my tracks, I paused by the stove. “That looks great.” When my mother didn’t reply, I asked, “Did you like the Cones? What did you think of Sheba?”

My mother put the stirring spoon on a ceramic holder the shape of a giant spoon and went to the refrigerator. “That entire crew certainly admires you.” She removed from the fridge a bag of Wonder Bread, butter in the glass butter dish, and a stack of individually cellophane-wrapped slices of Kraft cheese.

“Do you want me to make the cheese sandwiches?”

“You use too much butter.” She put everything on the counter and then went to the silverware drawer and pulled it open. My heart dropped down to my stomach like a boot into a pond.

My mother stared at the disarray for a moment. Quickly, she righted all the silverware, pulled out a knife, sliced off a pat of butter, put it in a frying pan, and turned on the flame.

“I’ll try to use less butter next time.” My voice was quiet, hesitant.

“And you definitely oversalt.” Mom laid three pieces of bread in the pan.

“I can be more careful.”

“One should never be careless or haphazard when cooking. Particularly when it comes to butter and salt.” She unwrapped the Kraft slices and laid them on the bread.

“Did you like Izzy? Don’t you think she’s cute?” I felt desperate for my mother to understand the magic of the Cone house.

“How did those people eat before you arrived? They talked about you like you were Gandhi feeding the starving masses.”

Was there anything I could say that would shift my mother’s focus from disparaging the Cones to appreciating them? Or, at the very least, maybe she could appreciate that I was an integral part of the family? “Well . . .” I paused as I tried to answer the question without betraying the family. “Before I started cooking for them, they picked up a lot of prepared food from Eddie’s. And sometimes they ordered Chinese or went to Little Tavern.”

My mother looked at me like I’d told her they ate dog poop off the sidewalk. “That poor, poor child.” She turned back to the sandwiches. “There’s something wrong with that mother.”

I opened the cupboard and took down three plates and put them on the counter near the frying pan. “What do you think is wrong with her?” My curiosity was sincere.

“The way she was dressed. That she doesn’t feed her child.”

“But she loves Izzy so much. I think she just doesn’t want to be a housewife.”

“Use paper napkins and fold them in thirds.” My mother nodded quickly toward the yellow plastic napkin holder that always sat on the kitchen table. “If she didn’t want to be a housewife, then she shouldn’t have had a child. And she definitely shouldn’t have put that child in danger with those people in the house.”

“I was in charge of Izzy.” How could my mother not know that? What did she think I’d been doing all summer? “She was never in danger.”

“You shouldn’t have been in charge. You’re a child. You should have been a helper.” My mother used a spatula to turn the sandwiches over. “I never should have allowed you to take that job.”

“Mom.” I felt strangely choked up. I wanted to tell her that I was pretty sure that I’d done a really great job being in charge of Izzy and taking care of the house, too. And I also wanted to tell her how much I loved cooking for the Cones. How cooking for people you love feels less like a chore and more like a way of saying I love you. And, really, I got that from her, the cooking, the child-rearing, and the housekeeping. My mother had been such a good mother to me in so many ways. She’d taught me so much. And she’d been excellent company. Until she wasn’t.

“Mom,” I said again.

My mother didn’t respond. I pulled out a napkin, folded it in thirds, and put it under the first spoon. Then I folded the second and third napkins. Once they’d been placed, I picked up the soup bowls and took them to the counter near the stove. I was trying to anticipate my mother’s directions before they left her mouth.

“Mom,” I said.

“Spit it out, Mary Jane.” My mother banged the soupspoon on the side of the pot and then placed it in the holder.

“You did a really good job teaching me how to keep house and how to cook. Everyone was amazed by my cooking and I learned all that from you.” I blinked rapidly to keep my eyes from filling with tears.

My mother started ladling soup into bowls, then handed the bowls to me without ever looking up at my face. We were both silent as I walked back and forth, placing the soup bowls on the table, one by one.

“I don’t understand why Sheba’s with that drug addict,” she said at last.

“He’s recovered.”

“The tattoos look so dirty. I wanted to take a Brillo pad and scrub them off.”

The urge to cry vanished and I actually laughed. “It’s weird how quickly you get used to that stuff. I don’t even see them anymore. It’s like Karen Stiltson at school. When she first showed up at Roland Park, she had this lisp, like she said shoe lay-sheshinstead of shoelaces.” I took two plates with grilled cheese back to the table.

“Don’t be mean.”

“No, I’m not being mean. I’m just saying that I noticed that lisp when she first came to school. But by the end of the year I didn’t hear it. My ears just stopped registering it.”

My mother brought the third plate to the table. “I hope you never said anything to her about it.” She was half scolding me, but her tone was lighter. Maybe I was being forgiven.

“No, Mom.” I went to the cupboard, took down three drinking glasses, and placed them on the table. “But it was the same for Jimmy’s tattoos.”

“I wish you didn’t call those people by their first names!”

“Okay. Well, it was the same with the tattoos. I didn’t see them after a while. And I didn’t see Sheba—Mom, she legally dropped her last name; she doesn’t even have one. . . .”

My mother shook her head. She put the frying pan in the sink to be washed after we’d eaten.

“So with Sheba, I forgot she was a big star. She became just a lady. She’s super kind and caring, Mom. She doesn’t hate anyone, not even drug addicts and not pastors or politicians. She loves singing and she loves the church.”

My mother pointed at the table. “Milk for me. You can have orange soda today, if you’d like.” Now I knew forgiveness was coming.

I took the orange soda from the fridge and poured two glasses, one for me and one for my father. Then I got out the milk and filled my mother’s glass. It was so thick, it looked like wet paint. I thought about the day Jimmy, Izzy, and I had drunk milk straight from the carton.

When I returned the milk to the refrigerator, my mother was standing by the stove staring at me. I could see that her bottom lip was quivering.

“Mom,” I said, and now my lip was quivering.

“I just don’t understand why you lied to us.” A tear ran down my mother’s face. My stomach lurched. My body stilled. I wasn’t sure what to do.

“Um . . .” My chest rose and fell as I tried to breathe. “I really wanted to work with the Cones. I loved the job and I knew you wouldn’t let me if—”

“Exactly, Mary Jane. You knew you shouldn’t be in a house like that.”

“No, Mom. I knew you wouldn’t approve of it. But you were wrong. They’re wonderful people. It was the best summer of my life.”

My mother stared at me and I stared back. We both were breathing hard, as if our lungs were twinned bellows. I had never before told her she was wrong about anything. And until this summer, I had never thought she was wrong about anything.

“Go tell your father lunch is ready.” My mother wiped the tear away and re-formed her face into a placid downturn. She sat at the table and I went to fetch my dad.