Doodle Meeting
Teddy, in his irresistibly persuasive tone, had suggested quietly that he and Joanna should have a private rendezvous at the Yankee Doodle for lunch. It was the day before the long drive up to Maine for Christmas with Teddy’s grandmother. New Haven had an empty feeling, with the Yale campus deserted until January.
“What’s up?” Joanna said as she swung onto the stool beside him, a few minutes late. She had ducked out of the apartment with a claim that she was going for a walk, and she had felt mildly guilty about her maneuvering to keep Amy from joining her. Joanna had pretended not to hear Amy asking her if she would wait for Amy to get dressed, and then she had hurried out of the building and up the street and across the Jonathan Edwards footpath so that Amy wouldn’t have been likely to catch up to her if she tried. Meg had left the apartment very early, as she had told them she would, in order to put in a few extra hours with Mark Frank’s children in anticipation of her week away. The Franks apparently had no specific Christmas plans, and Meg was worried, she had said at dinner, that the children would just sit around while she was gone. She had bought them a pile of inexpensive card games and puzzles, which she and Amy wrapped economically
in pages from the color comic section of a Sunday New Haven Register someone had abandoned at Starbucks.
They had made their plan at bedtime the night before, and Teddy had already gone out by the time Joanna had woken up. He had probably worked out at the gym or gone for a run before spending some time in the library before lunch. Joanna could see through the steamy window of the Doodle that Teddy was reading a three-day-old Yale Daily News with great concentration, and he finished the article he was reading before he looked up. Joanna had found Teddy unusually preoccupied in recent days, and she was somewhat apprehensive about this mysterious summons.
“The squash team is really circling the drain,” Teddy said. “Blake, this guy I know, he’s really good, but he can’t do it all by himself. Anyway. So. You’re here.” He folded the paper and pushed it aside. “I thought we could talk, just the two of us. I’ve already ordered for you—we’re having five pigs.”
“Four of them are yours,” Joanna warned demurely while simultaneously gazing with delighted greed in the direction of the grill. There they were, in all their bacony splendor, sizzling in a row. She was ravenous, having had no breakfast.
Teddy snorted. “I know about you and pigs-in-a-blanket,” he replied, “and the word on the street is that you can eat two without a blink, and maybe three under certain circumstances.”
“Busted,” Joanna said, looking at Pearl, who winked at her as she wiped the counter and served her the usual Diet Pepsi. Teddy was drinking milk. There was one other customer down at the end of the short counter, a tired-looking black man wearing a Yale maintenance uniform who was drinking coffee and reading a newspaper. His double cheeseburger was the only other order on the grill.
“So?” Joanna prompted. Ordinarily she felt completely comfortable with Teddy, who, she noted with a detached, almost scientific interest, hadn’t shaved in a couple of days. She resisted the
urge to fuzzy the bristles on his chin, where his little underlip chin-beard came and went from one week to the next.
After living in the same apartment for nearly three months, they were accustomed to seeing one another in various states of dishevelment and personal untidiness, and she had grown so used to his presence, whiskers and all, that at times he just felt like family. She had never known a boy so well—Lou didn’t count—and something about knowing Teddy made Joanna feel more at home in herself. She envied him his easy and uncomplicated boy body. Why weren’t they all boys in the first place? she often wondered. It all would have been so much easier.
Sometimes the four of them would watch television all piled on the decrepit old sofa together in what Amy called the puppy pile. But being just the two of them on their own by prior arrangement, out in public, seemed very different from the way it felt when the two of them happened to be alone together in the apartment, and Joanna felt oddly self-conscious.
She was also still preoccupied by an unsettling encounter at Starbucks the afternoon before, near the end of her shift. Joanna had been wiping up spilled coffee grounds around the bar area and restocking the sugar, stirrers, and napkins before signing out. She had started to chat about the endless rain with a woman with short spiky hair and big dangly earrings whom she knew as a regular customer, maybe a lecturer or junior professor, someone who was notable because she spoke with a faint German accent which was almost imperceptible at times. Also, she always had a friendly smile, she always said hello to Joanna, and she tipped generously. (As it turned out, she was then an editor at Yale Press, though she was soon to depart for a better position at Random House in New York, but Joanna wouldn’t learn this until they met again in New York at a time more than a year after the events that have inspired this story.)
The customer made a reference to something involving an umbrella on an episode of Ally McBeal that had been on television the night before, but Joanna was not an Ally McBeal watcher. The conversation shifted quickly to movies, but went nowhere fast when Joanna couldn’t express a preference for The Sixth Sense or American Beauty because she had seen neither.
Joanna had seen no new movies at all in New Haven. Another thing she missed from their New York life! Their whole family had a habit of going to movies together every week or two, after agonizing deliberations, with New Yorker and New York Times reviews in hand, about what they would see.
“Sorry, I just haven’t gone to the movies in ages,” Joanna confessed to her while bagging the rubbish under the counter. “But the reviews of both sound excellent.”
“I’m trying to figure out your taste, that’s all. I was thinking maybe we could get together sometime and go to a movie,” the woman said. “And hey, after all these weeks how silly is this? I know you but we don’t even know each other’s names. I’ve never even seen you out from behind that counter before. I’m Ursula. You’re—?”
“Joanna. Um, sure, maybe, that would be nice, it’s just that between the expense and the time—”
“I’d love to take you,” Ursula said. “No problem. I’m talking about a real date, which you don’t seem to be making any easier. You know, dinner, a movie, whatever. What do you say?”
“Oh.” Joanna suddenly understood. “You’re asking me out.”
“Yes, I am,” Ursula said. “You’re not just cute, you’re incredibly perceptive.”
“Oh,” Joanna said again. There was a roaring in her ears that she knew was her own blood rushing about in her head, rearranging itself, moving from here to there in a blink, everything was being rearranged, everything, everything, constantly moves and changes, every cell is the same and nothing remains the same, that’s what blood does, changing itself constantly, always.
“I’m sorry,” Joanna said, finally. “I don’t think I can do that.”
“Okay, well, no harm in trying,” Ursula said, putting her hand on Joanna’s arm. She had very kind eyes. “I understand, no problem. Really—I’ll get over it. So listen, do you have a partner? A group of us like to meet at this bar over on Orange Street about once a month and play silly games of pool for money, and maybe you—”
“No, no,” Joanna said, taking a step back, shaking her head. “I’m sorry. Just—”
“Okay then, no big deal,” Ursula said a little stiffly, withdrawing her hand. “Don’t get all upset, all right? I thought you were cool, and I apologize if I’ve made a mistake. I didn’t mean to put you on the spot. Not everybody’s comfortable being right out there, and I can respect that. You’re young.”
Joanna nodded.
“Well, sorry again if I made you uncomfortable,” Ursula said.
“No problem,” Joanna had replied, wishing she were anywhere but there. “Hey, my shift is ending and I’m supposed to clean up all the dirty dishes and stuff on the tables every ten minutes, so I better finish up,” she said somewhat apologetically, hoisting the bagged trash.
“Okay then, see you around.”
“Yeah, see you, and, uh, thanks,” Joanna said awkwardly, before escaping to the back, where she had to fill in her shift times on the Operational Excellence Deployment Board.
“We need to talk about some things,” Teddy said.
Oh no. Did he want to move out? This was, of course, inevitable. How would they manage? And she would miss him! But why was he meeting with her instead of Meg to break the news?
“Things?”
“I have a list.” Teddy fumbled in the pocket of his zippered sweatshirt. “Here it is.” He smoothed out a wadded sheet of yellow
lined paper. Joanna peered over his shoulder. He reflexively covered the paper with his hand, and then uncovered it again to let her read the short column of words that were neatly printed in his familiar blocky writing. A list was good. And his letting her read it was good, too. It wasn’t long, only some four lines, the first one of which read monthly thing. Teddy drew the scrap of paper away before she could read the next line.
“Sorry, no offense. But if it’s okay with you, I’d rather tell you what’s on my mind than have you read my notes.”
“Sorry.” She waited apprehensively.
Their pigs were served on two plates, three in front of Teddy and two in front of Joanna.
“Okay.” Teddy drew a deep breath. “I need to say this, and it’s a little embarrassing. I thought I could talk to you about it more easily then either of the others.”
Joanna nodded for him to continue, her mouth full. She hoped she would be flattered that she had been selected for whatever this was about. Probably not.
“See, I know Meg in a different way from the two of you, and she’s my same age and everything. I just didn’t feel comfortable talking to her about this, and I know it’s silly. I don’t want to embarrass Amy, who’s way mature for her age but she’s still young and easily weirded out. So that leaves you. The sturdy one in the middle, I guess.”
“Okay,” Joanna said cautiously.
“It’s a bathroom thing,” Teddy blurted. “It’s not very meal-ish. A sort of personal hygiene issue. I’m sorry, I should just be able to say this.” Teddy was blushing now. He took a drink of his milk and wiped his mouth with his sleeve in his unconscious, little-boy way. Joanna began to relax. This would be manageable.
“Okay, look,” he said at last. “It’s one of those strange things that women living together all start to menstruate at the same time.”
“Tell me about it! I read an article about this about once a year,
it’s some kind of entrainment thing, I think, and I know it’s so, anyway, from experience.”
“I mean, I realize everyone knows about this. I remember the guys on the ferry crew joking about it, when three of them, whose girlfriends shared a house, realized that the girls were all, what did Ben call it? ‘riding the rag,’ at the same time and none of them were getting any that weekend. Not to be gross, but that is how guys talk when there aren’t any girls around. Anyway, I thought I’d be cool with all the, you know, female things that living with you three would involve. But it is a little overwhelming to be the only guy using the bathroom at the time of the month when, you know, the um …” He trailed off this awkward soliloquy and looked at her hopefully.
“God, you mean the whole bathroom wastebasket thing when we’re all flowing at once?”
He nodded, looking chagrined. “It’s no big deal,” he said. “It’s just—”
“No, it’s not something you should have to see,” Joanna said apologetically. “I can speak to Amy and Meg about it. Teddy, you have no idea how worried I was about whatever you wanted to talk about. I’m so relieved that it’s only this. Would it help if we got a better wastebasket?”
“One with a lid would be nice.”
“Oh, Teddy, I am so sorry that you had to make a whole thing out of asking about this! You should have said something.”
“There was never the right moment. I didn’t want you to think I was some kind of fusspot, you know? And every time I thought of it was exactly the wrong time to say anything, trust me. Though I must say it’s been a relief a couple of times when you’re all snapping at everything anyone says or does, and everybody is in everybody else’s way, and then a few days later, there’s the evidence that it was just another huge PMS festival.”
“Are we that bad?”
“Only sometimes. And on the same subject, since I really hope
we won’t be having this conversation again, could you all keep your, um, supplies somewhere where I don’t see them all the time? I’m sorry to have to ask this, I wouldn’t have expected to be so bothered by—”
“And you grew up in a house without sisters, and then your mother—” Joanna stopped.
“And my mother died when I was a little kid. So I never saw a lot of sanitary napkins and Tampax and whatever. It’s okay to say it, Jo-Jo. My mother died when I was seven.”
“Your mother died when you were seven,” Joanna said softly. Her eyes began to brim with hot tears from nowhere. She had become something of a crybaby these days, although easy tears were usually Meg’s specialty. “And then your father two years ago. No wonder you’re so cross with us for rejecting the two living parents we’ve got, Teddy.”
He patted her on the shoulder awkwardly, and she put her hand over his and held it there. It wasn’t really clear who was comforting whom. After a moment, Teddy leaned forward and took a big bite of a hot dog, and Joanna fumbled some paper napkins out of the countertop dispenser so she could wipe her face.
They ate together in thoughtful, comfortable silence for a while.
“Split the last pig?” Teddy offered, seeing Joanna eyeing it there on his plate.
“You bet.” Joanna watched Teddy’s expert bisection. “You know, when we were little, Lou devised the perfect way for us to share anything fairly, like cake. One of us would make the first cut, then one of us would make the second cut, and then the third one would get to choose who got which piece.”
“Did Amy have a set of calipers for these moments?” Teddy asked, laughing fondly. He took up one of the dripping hot dog halves and spread some pickle relish on it. “I can just see it. Amy would be triumphant that she got the piece half a millimeter bigger, and then Meg would be noble about having the smallest piece.” He took a big bite of his hot dog.
“So she could bludgeon us with her nobility, you mean. You really do know us, Teddy,” Joanna agreed, expertly applying a fine stripe of mustard to her hot dog half before rotating it in the bun.
“Why did you turn it?” Teddy asked curiously, his mouth still full.
“It’s a family thing. Really a Lou thing, I guess, from when we were little. If you turn it, the mustard and ketchup are on the inside and that way it doesn’t drip or get all over your face.”
“That’s ingenious. Your father sounds really really clever.”
“I should make you some of his Zepto coffee sometime.”
“Qu’est-ce que c’est Zepto coffee?”
“Coffee made with coffee,” Joanna explained. “You make cof fee, and then you use it to make coffee.”
“Sounds intense.”
“It’s nothing if not cromulent,” she agreed.
“So, anyway, what about you? With the cake? Where were you?”
“Me? I’m the one in the middle. You know that.”
“But you like crusts. I sincerely hope you aren’t scarred from a childhood spent only getting middles and never getting edges,” Teddy said with mock solicitousness.
Joanna was touched that he knew about her and crusts. It was like the way he recognized her insatiability for apples. She ate the cores, too, and had a bad habit of leaving little piles of seeds and an occasional stem here and there in the apartment.
They smiled at each other comfortably. Teddy mopped the last of the relish from his plate with the last bite of hot dog bun. The guy from Yale maintenance paid and left. Joanna looked out onto Elm Street. The moist heat from the grill by the window blurred the reds and greens of the Christmas decorations on the lamp post.
“So.” She drained her soda and gazed down at her empty plate with regret. Two and a half pigs was really disgusting. “Next item on this list of yours.”
Teddy unfolded the list once more and she had a quick glimpse
of the words parking, Amy and school, Meg’s secret life before he folded it up again.
“Coffee?” Pearl asked.
Joanna was torn. She was spoiled by Starbucks (where she had been given a small and most welcome raise the previous week for her conscientiousness and expertise). She had also been drinking really good Kenyan coffee all morning while getting some of her homework out of the way. But it would be offensive to go across the street for better coffee, especially since Pearl would probably watch them. (Pearl had once expressed enormous irritation to a sympathetic Joanna about certain Yale girls who accompanied their cheeseburger-eating football player boyfriends to the Doodle but who brought with them salads and fruit smoothies from Au Bon Pain across the street.) Anyway, it would be wrong to interrupt this moment. They both nodded yes and Pearl brought them two mugs of the Doodle’s weirdly burnt yet diluted-tasting java.
“When water’s boiled too hot, the air bubbles go out of it, they’re probably using robusta beans, and they really need to scrub out that urn,” Joanna whispered. Pearl was talking on the phone and her brother, who manned the grill with the seriousness of a jet pilot, had finished scraping who-knows-what off its surface and had now stepped out onto the sidewalk for a break.
“So. Next item,” Teddy said, calling the meeting back to order. “Nothing else quite so sensitive, I promise.”
“Parking, I see?”
“Yes. Do you realize Meg is paying sixty-five dollars a month to park the Subaru in that crummy garage on Crown Street? I know she missed the Yale permit deadline, but she should apply again. And otherwise I know lots of people who get by with street parking. You just have to know where to go, and you have to move the car on a schedule. But I could help. I just thought you guys ought to consider that. I’ve mentioned it to Meg a few times, but she isn’t very receptive.”
“That might be a great idea, but it’s sort of Meg’s decision, isn’t it? I mean it’s her car and all. And I know she is worried that something could go wrong that would end up costing more money than we’d be saving, if someone breaks in or if it’s towed.”
“Hey, I don’t have a clue how you guys work out all the little details of your financial decisions. I just thought you ought to know about one way you could save some specific dough. Meg seems phobic about it, I don’t know why.”
“Well, the garage is just down the street, and I think Meg likes the convenience and knowing she can just go get the car whenever. Plus there’s the whole Lou parking obsession she might have absorbed osmotically. We hardly use the car, except for big grocery expeditions to Hamden and stuff like that, or her drives out to see Professor Baldwin, so maybe it is a crazy expense. Things were so much simpler when Lou and Janet paid for everything!” Joanna exclaimed in frustration. “It’s not just the parking, it’s everything. We thought we were independent but we had no idea how much our lives really cost, with every little thing. It all adds up. God! We were so spoiled! Are we still spoiled? We are, aren’t we? Are we just big babies? How do you stand us, Teddy?”
“Very easily,” he replied gently. “You know that. So, Lou’s parking obsession?”
“It’s like a family joke but it isn’t a joke at all. Lou is just obsessed with alternate-side-of-the-street parking. He knows all the Jewish holidays, like Shavuot, when alternate-side-of-the-street parking is suspended.”
“Shavuot?”
“It’s in the late spring or early summer. It’s a sort of a harvest pilgrim festival that’s always fifty days after the second night of Passover. There are traditional meals with wheat, wine, pomegranates, dates, olives, figs, you know, stuff like that.”
“Oh, of course,” Teddy said, “I used to see all that Shavuot-y stuff in the Shavuot aisle at the supermarket all the time. And of
course Avery had such great Shavuot recipes. It’s a wonderful family tradition.”
“Oh, shut up, you just like saying the word. Anyway,” Joanna continued, “I had a friend in kindergarten whose mother was one of those leftover hippie Birkenstock Jews who brought the same homemade mandelbrot for every bake sale. They always had a Shavuot party. So I actually do know what it is beyond its implications for parking.”
“Seriously, I’m impressed at your encyclopedic knowledge of an obscure Jewish holiday. I’m also glad Amy’s not here to start perseverating on the word Shavuot,” Teddy said. “Though I might start.”Shavuot. Shavuot.”
“Stop it!” Joanna nudged him hard. “In New York it’s not obscure, it’s a huge big deal because alternate-side-of-the-street parking is suspended. That’s major. Anyway, when it wasn’t Shavuot or some other holiday, which was most of the time, we spent lots of childhood Sunday nights cruising around the West Side with our father looking for a parking place that would be good until Tuesday morning. And one of the worst fights I ever remember Janet and Lou having was over parking, when Lou didn’t want to drive to a funeral in some deep dark part of Brooklyn because he didn’t want to give up a great parking space. The dead person was some old twice-removed aunt of Janet’s whom she hadn’t seen in ages, but she really wanted to go anyway, to see the other relatives or something. We have so few relatives, I guess she wanted to see them even though they were never close. I mean, if not then, when? Anyway, Lou really didn’t want to go because it was some kind of trifecta fabulous parking space that was good for a whole week or something because of holidays and street-cleaning schedules and whatever.”
“Like a seven-letter Scrabble word with a ‘Q’ and a ‘J’ on the triple-score square, I get it. So what happened?”
“Janet took the subway to the funeral and they didn’t speak for three days.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah, pretty intense but not intense, you know? I feel nostalgic for the days when something like that was the worst problem. So anyway. What else have you got on your list?” Joanna peered in the direction of the folded scrap of paper.
“You know what’s on my list. I saw you see it,” Teddy said with a laugh. “Amy and school.” He put down his empty coffee mug and twirled on his stool to face her.
“Look, I am really concerned about her attitude, now that the Scriveners have turned on her. We need to watch her carefully in January, after the vacation. Let’s hope it will all have blown over by then with those little bitches. I think she’s really discouraged and could start to screw up, maybe cut classes or just zone out, which would be a disaster. I just wanted to get that on the record.”
“You’re right,” Joanna said, peering into the glass case across the counter. “Do you think the pie is worthwhile? No, you’re right. Anyway, Amy doesn’t want to talk about it at all, but she was really hurt. Whenever I bring it up, she just says she dreads going back and wishes she could stay home and be homeschooled, God help us. And to think that I used to feel that Amy got the cream of everything. She sure hasn’t got a lot going her way right now.”
“Maybe I can get Avery to talk with her about new strategies for being her own woman while we’re in Long Harbor,” Teddy mused. “The two of them will either love each other or be at each other’s throats after the first day. You’ll see—they’re very alike in some odd ways.”
“And we should be having this conversation with Meg,” Joanna added, “because she needs to pay a little more attention to Amy. She needs to pay a little more attention to a lot of things. I feel as though Meg has been a million miles away in the past couple of weeks. I know she just handed in that big paper she was working on forever, the Anne Frank meets Holden Caulfield thing, but she’s just so disconnected lately, don’t you think?”
“Which brings me to the last item on my list—Meg.” Teddy screwed up his face and closed his eyes for a moment, with a look as though he had suddenly remembered something painful.
“Meg’s secret life,” Joanna prompted. “That’s what your list says. But I have no idea what it means.”
“Something’s going on,” he said.
“Something?” Joanna was apprehensive again, feeling suddenly that this was the real reason for their meeting. A policeman came in and ordered three cheeseburgers to go. Pearl bustled around organizing his food while his cheeseburgers were on the grill. Joanna idly thought she could eat a cheeseburger.
“Yes. I don’t just mean how distracted she seems. I saw her. I saw something,” Teddy said.
“Sometimes we’re all pretty distracted. You’ve been distracted lately,” Joanna pointed out. “So what?”
“No, I saw something,” Teddy repeated.
“What do you mean? You saw what?”
“A couple of days ago I was walking in a nice Yale-free part of New Haven, way over on State Street, because there’s a shoe store over there that has Docs in my weird wide size, except it turned out they didn’t, except in purple, so forget that, and I passed by a bakery café on the corner, and people have told me about this place, Marjolaine, where a baker named Gretel bakes amazing things. So I was going to go in and get this famous plum cake they have, for a treat for us, you know, to celebrate the end of the semester, but then I saw that Meg was there with someone. I saw her at a table in the window. So I didn’t go inside after all and she didn’t see me.”
“Teddy! Stop speaking so cryptically! I can’t stand it! You saw her with someone what?” Joanna gripped his arm urgently.
“Ow! Let me explain! They were being very affectionate. And he was this older guy.”
“Define ‘very affectionate’ and ‘older guy,’ please,” she said impatiently.
“They were holding hands and sitting together, and they were just, I don’t know, looking at each other in a certain way. I can’t say exactly what it was I saw, it was just a quick glimpse and I wasn’t expecting to see Meg in the first place,” Teddy said, rubbing his arm where she had squeezed it. “But there was an intensity. A vibe. And he was really a lot older, like in his fifties.”
“When was this? Do you think it was Mark Frank? It must have been. I don’t know who else it could be.” Joanna didn’t know what to think. “But Meg says he looks a lot younger than he really is. I’ve wondered if she had some kind of crush on him. She’s sort of reticent on the subject, if you think about it, and even though she said we would take turns baby-sitting, she’s never asked Amy or me to do it, not once. What did this guy look like?”
“This was day before yesterday, and I can’t really say what the guy looked like. I guess he could be an academic, I didn’t really get a good look at him, you know? I registered that he was this older guy, kind of big, in a big sweater anyway, and he had a head of gray hair, and big eyebrows, but mostly it was just the whole effect of the two of them together.”
“Wow.” Joanna still didn’t know quite what to think. “This wouldn’t be so strange if she had said she was meeting him for coffee or something, but she never mentioned anything like this, plus, what were they doing all the way over on State Street? It’s not like there’s a good reason for that. I thought they hung out in his office and had their little ultra-literary chats together there. Sometimes Meg comes in to get coffee for the two of them. He always gets a tall latte.”
“So you agree it’s odd,” Teddy said. “Unless they went there for the plum cake. But think about it. It’s a place to meet that’s kind of private and away from campus. What’s that about?”
“Oh dear,” Joanna said, sloshing the last of her coffee around in the chunky white mug with an unconscious rhythmic intensity. She could use some plum cake. “What are we going to do? I don’t think we should let her have this relationship, if that’s what it is.”
“It’s not up to us, actually, and I don’t know that we need to do anything,” Teddy said. “But I wanted to tell you about it, is all. And maybe Amy doesn’t need to hear about this right now.”
“You’re right, she doesn’t. Especially since we don’t even know what it means. Oh shit! Teddy, Teddy, Teddy,” Joanna said with a burst of feeling, “this is so disturbing. But I’m glad you told me about it. I know you’re looking out for us. Thank you. Really.” She put her hand on his arm again, but gently this time, and rubbed the spot she had abused a moment earlier.
Teddy didn’t answer but she could see his eyes fill with feeling as he leaned over and put his cheek on the top of her head and drew her against him, putting an arm around her.
Joanna stiffened and then relaxed. Why didn’t she feel what she secretly believed she ought to feel at a moment like this? She was fond of Teddy, to be sure, but she just didn’t have any sensations of attraction, even though she liked the idea. She loved the idea. She had felt for weeks now that she wanted to want Teddy. But it wasn’t there. What did she want? She thought about Ursula’s assumption at Starbucks the day before. Did everyone know this about her? Was she the last to figure it out? Maybe Ursula was only half-right. Maybe she just didn’t have a sex drive at all. Would she ever feel genuine intensity of physical feeling for another person? Did everyone else in the world? It was hard to imagine.
So many novels and magazine articles made Joanna feel that everyone around her maintained a constant inner struggle against animal urges to rub and touch and press his or her body against someone else’s, that everyone walked around trying to keep in check a profound desire to copulate with members of the opposite sex. Joanna had never kissed a boy and wondered if she ever would.
“Do you think of me as a girl, Teddy?” she blurted. “I mean, I know I’m a girl, one with Tampax and everything, but that’s not what I’m asking. You know what I mean.”
“I think you’re a wonderful person,” Teddy answered, giving
her shoulder a squeeze that made her heart sink. “Not like anyone else I know. Really. But I’m not sure what you’re really asking, how serious you are. Do you think of yourself as a girl?”
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out, if there’s an easier way, you know—” she started, but then she lost her nerve. “It depends on what ‘girl’ means,” she replied, and immediately regretted the words. “Hey, some other time, you know? This is too serious for right now. Never mind. Sorry, I know I started it.”
“But I do mind, actually,” he said, startling them both. He turned and tilted her chin with a finger until he had forced her to meet his gaze. He smiled with the sad superiority of one who knew that his fidelity, like his love, was unalterable. “Oh, Jo, can’t you?”
“Teddy, I wish I could,” she said, with a little shake of her head.
They sat without talking. Pearl refilled their coffee mugs.
“So what do we know about this Mark Frank?” Teddy asked presently.
“Mr. Verb Adjective, as Amy likes to point out? I don’t know. Not much. English, handsome, brilliant, needy kids, dysfunctional wife, smokes despite the rules. Sounds like a recipe for trouble, doesn’t it?”
“It is, of course, none of my business really—”
“Shut up, Teddy! I mean it! Of course we’re your business! But do you think we’re just totally the weirdest people ever, really, the three of us, each of us with our unique neurotic tendencies plus the synergy of us together plus our whole family mess?”
“You know, you keep asking me to define you. I think you’re—unique,” he replied after a moment’s hesitation. “But sometimes I think there’s something that happened in your family that make you all, I don’t know, somehow convinced that you spring from Platonic conceptions of yourselves. Do you know what I mean? Nobody can live up to that. And you expected your parents to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever, which is a Gatsby reference you should recognize, incidentally.”
“What time is it, anyway?” Joanna broke in. “I’ve got to get back, there’s a ton of laundry to do before we can pack. But I was listening, really.” She scrabbled on the counter for the check but Teddy had hold of it and snatched it away.
“Can’t we split it?” Joanna asked.
“How about I pay for this and you do my laundry?”
“Deal.”
Reader’s note: So that’s how you met “Ursula”! I had thought you met in New York. But meanwhile, what was the purpose of this chapter? I know what you’ll say—that it establishes more conflict and sets the story up for the events that follow while illuminating the relationship between these two characters. I know how you rationalize. I’m sure there’s a quote from some famous writer for the occasion, too. Couldn’t you have achieved this without just sitting them down to talk to each other? That’s all they do. You always complain about novels where characters do this at convenient moments. MG
Author’s note: First, you don’t really know what I would say. Second, which proves the first point—ironically enough, given my antipathy toward authorial choices defended on the sole grounds of their connection to actual events or circumstances, the simple response to this query is that it happened this way, that this was the circumstance of the reality from which this moment in the fictional narrative is derived.
Reader’s note: So you don’t like it when someone else writes your lines for you? And remind us again—what makes it fiction? AG
Author’s note: What makes every word on every page fiction is that this is a novel.
Reader’s note: But that’s really crap. You know you’re playing a game here, going back and forth over the line of fiction and real-life incident. Why can’t you just admit it? AG
Reader’s note: Do you really expect our sister to start admitting that at this point? Haven’t you figured out by now that she will play this game,
with as many moves, for as long as it takes, until she thinks everyone agrees with her? MG
Reader’s note: I don’t see how even ordinary people reading this novel can fail to see what she is doing. AG
Reader’s note: The ordinary people who read this novel will be happily entertained by what she has done. You might as well get over any hopes you have of winning people over to our side. MG
Reader’s note: Then why are we writing these reader’s notes? I thought that was the whole point. AG
Reader’s note: We’re writing these notes because we can. MG
Author’s note: You’re writing these notes because you are both angry at me over the publication of this novel and because you have forced me into an absurd agreement. It’s disappointing that you needed to do this. I had thought the three of us had a decent relationship these days, but neither of you has enough respect for my artistic integrity to trust me. Neither of you understands the nature of a novel, what it is made of, where fiction comes from. So you have ganged up on me, which is nothing new, and made me feel like the outsider looking in, like some kind of emotional burglar. And the two of you wonder why I have always felt like the family narrator?