Mary Jane by Jessica Anya Blau

“MARY JANE!” Izzy threw her arms around me and clasped on like a little vine. “I missed you so much!”

I looked behind me at my mother. She was smiling. It was hard not to smile at Izzy Cone’s exuberance, her curls, her unbridled affection. I leaned down and kissed the top of Izzy’s head. Her loamy smell was so familiar, so close to my heart.

At the sound of footsteps, my mother and I both looked up the narrow staircase, made narrower by the stacks of books and laundry lined up on one side. Mrs. Cone trotted down, barefoot as usual. She was in jeans and a soft orange sweater that showed nothing of her nipples. Her red hair was darker than it had been at the end of the summer, and her lips were waxy and bright with lipstick. “You’re here!” she said. Mrs. Cone hugged me, and then she stuck out her hand and grasped my mother’s hand more than shook it.

“We have to hurry!” Izzy said.

“Let’s go!” Mrs. Cone said. “Izzy and I made cookies. The radio’s on already.”

The house was narrow with windows only in the front and back. We walked past the living room into the eat-in kitchen that looked out to the tiny backyard. On the center of the round oak table was a plate of chocolate chip cookies, the edges blackened and burned.

“Do you want coffee?” Mrs. Cone asked my mother. “I started to make a pot this morning, then got distracted and never finished.” She laughed and my mother laughed too. I think Mom had grown used to Mrs. Cone by now. We’d been coming every week since Jimmy’s album was released. My father never asked where we went on Sundays after church. As far as I knew, he was content sitting alone in the kitchen, eating the lunch my mother had left out for him.

“Let me help,” my mom said, and she and Mrs. Cone went to the counter and quietly talked while Izzy took my hand and led me to a seat.

A silver transistor radio with a long antenna sat on the table. It looked exactly like the one I had purchased at RadioShack with my summer earnings. The volume was on low, but I could hear Labelle singing “Lady Marmalade.”It was one of my favorite songs and I’d recently bought the 45. Izzy turned up the volume and climbed into my lap when Labelle started singing in French. “Voulez-vouscoucher avec moi?” Izzy sang, and I laughed and hugged her and kissed her some more.

“Do you girls want milk?!” Mrs. Cone shouted as if we were down a hall although we were only a few feet away.

“Yes!” Izzy said.

“Sure,” I said.

“I think you’re right about the witch,” Izzy said. We’d been discussing her every time we saw each other. And last Friday, when I’d babysat Izzy at the Roland Park house where Dr. Cone now lived alone, we searched for the witch using flashlights I’d found in the mudroom.

“She definitely moved out, right?”

“YES!” Izzy pumped a tiny fist. “And I haven’t seen her here, either.”

“Nope. I told you, witches don’t like row houses. She’ll never show up here.”

“But, Mary Jane—” Izzy turned and leaned into me; her face grew dark and serious.

“Yeah?”

Izzy whispered. “I found makarino cherries in the fridge.”

I whispered back. “Your mom put them there.”

“She did?” Izzy still whispered.

“Yes. She did.” I’d run into Mrs. Cone at Eddie’s last week. We’d been standing right at the maraschino cherry jars and I confessed to having told Izzy about the witch who had stocked the fridge with maraschino cherries. She had laughed, picked up a jar, and then put it in her cart.

“So there really is NO WITCH here!” Izzy grabbed a black-bottom cookie and bit into it.

My mother and Mrs. Cone brought two glasses of milk and two suede-colored coffees to the table. They were chatting like any two mothers might. It was nothing like the conversations Mrs. Cone used to have with Sheba, but it didn’t sound fake, either.

“Divorce is never easy,” my mother said. As far as I knew, she didn’t have any friends who were divorcées.

“No, but Richard makes it easier than most. It was such a strange summer, you know. Truly amazing and beautiful in so many ways. But it made me see things about myself. Ways that I’d compromised who I really was and what I really wanted.”

“You had wanted to marry a rock star,” I said quietly. Then I jerked my head down toward Izzy in my lap. Thankfully, she was tuned out, focused entirely on the cookie that was breaking into rock-hard shards in her hands.

“You remember! Yeah. I did.” Mrs. Cone’s face looked more freckly in the sunlight pouring in through the window. I could see the younger version of her: fat-cheeked, strawberry-haired, dreaming of tattooed lead singers and a life entirely unlike her own mother’s.

“How much more do we have to wait?” Izzy turned in my lap to face me. She had chocolate goo on her teeth.

My mother lifted her wrist and looked at her watch. “Six minutes.”

“Six minutes.” Izzy shoved the last crescent-moon wedge of cookie into her mouth.

“I’ve gotta tell you,” Mrs. Cone said to my mother, as if the interruption from Izzy hadn’t happened, “how relieved and liberated I feel just being me. Not a doctor’s wife. Not a Roland Park housewife. Just me!”

“Being a wife is a lot more work than husbands ever give us credit for!” my mother said.

“How much longer now?” Izzy asked.

My mother looked at her watch again. “Five minutes.”

“WAIT!” Izzy shouted. “I want to tape-record it.” She tumbled out of my lap and ran from the room. I could hear her feet clunking up the stairs.

“Oh, Mary Jane!” Mrs. Cone said, “I was talking to Richard this morning and he wanted me to tell you that that key hook you talked him into buying is working wonderfully. He only misplaced his keys once this week.”

“That’s so great!” I had seen the ceramic placque with hooks on it at Gundy’s Gifts around the corner from Eddie’s. When I told Dr. Cone about it, he had nodded in a resigned sort of way, but then he drove over there and bought it.

“IS DADDY COMING TODAY?” Izzy shouted from upstairs. As far as I knew, Dr. and Mrs. Cone saw each other several times a week. And every time I was at one house, the other called. I didn’t know anyone whose parents had divorced, but still I’d never imagined it was like this. Instead of a drawn-out tug-of-war between two people who wanted to destroy each other, the Cones’ divorce appeared to be a gentle rearrangement of housing and time.

“NO!” Mrs. Cone hollered toward the stairway. Then she looked at me and my mother and said, “You know, Richard still gets jealous over Jimmy. Can you believe that? He needs to understand that I wasn’t the only person who fell in love with him. That man casts a spell on everyone who meets him.”

“I love him, but I wasn’t in love with him,” I said.

My mother laughed nervously. “Oh, let’s hope not!”

Mrs. Cone laughed, not nervously. “No, Mary Jane was the most sane person in the house. She was the adult while the rest of us were throwing temper tantrums, playing dress-up, fooling around. You know.” Mrs. Cone shrugged.

My mother took a giant gulp of creamy coffee. Then she said, “Mary Jane is always so reasonable.”

Izzy skipped into the room holding a black plastic tape recorder. She clunked it on the table so hard, the cookies shifted on the plate.

“You push here and here and it records.” Izzy pushed. “We’re recording now, see?”

“Almost time.” My mother glanced at her watch again. She was pursing her lips as if she were holding in her excitement.

Izzy turned up the volume on the radio. We waited through the end of “Rhinestone Cowboy” and then Casey Kasem came on, speaking in his nasally, snappy voice. “A stunning achievement for thirty-three-year-old West Virginian Jimmy Bendinger—”

“JIMMY!” Izzy whisper-screamed. She sat on the seat beside me. Mrs. Cone was across from me, and my mother was on my other side.

Casey Kasem continued, “Bendinger dropped out of high school and moved to New York City, where he lived in a warehouse in the Meatpacking District with Stan Fry and JJ Apodoca. Fry and Apodoca had moved to New York from Newport, Rhode Island, where they surfed together and attended the prestigious St. George’s School. Fry had just finished his studies at Columbia University, where he’d majored in economics. Apodoca had also been admitted to Columbia, but failed to attend even the first day. The three of them wrote songs while Fry and Apodoca waited tables. Bendinger, a self-described introvert, tried to wait tables but found talking to customers too much of a strain. Instead he wrote more songs, and eventually sold several of his solo efforts to Bonnie Louise, the Suarez Brothers, and Josh LaLange. With money coming in from the songs, these boys bought themselves new instruments: Bendinger an electric guitar, Fry new keyboards, and Apodoca an electric bass guitar. The only problem was, they needed a drummer. When they brought in Stan Fuller, Fry’s former roommate at Columbia, Running Water was born. It wasn’t long before the hits started coming. Most previous Running Water songs are credited to Bendinger, Fry, and Apodoca. On this new album, Fuller is gone, replaced by Finn Martel of Philadelphia, the former drummer of Kratom Runs. Six of the twelve new songs are credited solely to Bendinger, who might be finding inspiration from his glamorous wife, the starlet of a single name, Sheba. Though the title track of this album was clearly written under the influence of a different girl, a muse, someone whose many great talents and Baltimore roots are hailed in the song. Her identity remains a mystery, however, as Bendinger is as private as he is talented.”

Izzy, Mrs. Cone, and my mother all looked at me, grinning expectantly. I was smiling so hard that the edges of my mouth shook.

A drumroll played. Izzy opened her smiling mouth wider; her eyes were enormous. She reached out and took my hand. I looked to my mother, stuck out my hand, and she took it. Mrs. Cone put out both of her hands and completed the circle so we were all connected.

“Moving up from the number two spot, here is the most popular song in the land, written and produced by Jimmy Bendinger. At number one, Running Water’s ‘Mary Jane.’”

The drums clicked. The guitar and keyboards joined in. I was biting my bottom lip. My mother squeezed my hand.

“Mary Jane!” Jimmy sang. And the four of us sang along.