It would be a lot easier to get over Malcolm if he weren’t always hanging around. At the end of June, Joanna finally got the keys to her new house. Ted, Laura, and Malcolm all arrived to help her move. As they drove from southeast to northeast Portland in a borrowed pickup, Joanna looked back and saw her jade plant waving in the wind. The huge ceramic pot teetered whenever they turned a corner, dirt sifting out onto her boxes. Soon the whole scaly brown trunk would snap and the top of the plant would take flight, land on the street, get trampled under the wheels of passing cars. Joanna knew it, she had a sixth sense about it—she was experiencing a rare moment of prescience.
Ted was driving, Joanna crammed between Laura and Malcolm. The entire side of her body was touching his. He didn’t seem to mind at all. She would even say he was enjoying it, one arm stretched out the open window, a smile on his face, his other arm slung across the back of the seat.
“Good moving day,” he said. They all murmured in agreement.
The image of the splattered plant was so vivid in her mind that she was surprised to find the plant intact at the end of the short drive. So much for prescience. She fingered one of its leaves, polishing it until it glowed. “Sorry,” she whispered to it. Malcolm carried it into the living room and set it in front of the window. She vowed to be kinder to the plant. It’s a plant, she reminded herself. A plant.
“I’ll pick Mom up at the airport tonight and bring her over to your place first thing tomorrow morning,” Laura said. “Apparently she wants to help you settle in.”
“Great,” Joanna said.
“I can help, too, if you want,” Malcolm said.
“Not necessary,” Joanna said.
“She said she has something important to tell us,” Laura said.
Joanna went pale. “What? Did she say what it was?”
“No, she said she wanted to tell us in person.”
“Wait—tell me exactly what she said.”
“I’m sure it’s nothing.”
“If it was nothing, why would she fly out here to make an announcement?”
“Well, what could it possibly be? Maybe she got a promotion or something.”
“I’ll bet she’s getting married. She’s been with Jeremy for almost a year, right? And remember what she said at your wedding?”
“I really doubt it, Joanna.” Laura laughed. “But good for her—”
“It’s not funny! It’s not really something to joke about. Oh, crazy Tess! Getting married to some underage cowboy!”
“I think he’s in his forties. Anyway, she deserves to find someone.”
Joanna shook her head. “Believe me, this is not going to turn out well.”
The next morning, Laura took Joanna aside after dropping their mother off, reminding her to “act like a grown-up,” which put Joanna in a bad mood from the very beginning.
“Did she tell you what it was?” Joanna had asked her. “Her big announcement?”
“She wants to tell you herself,” Laura said. But all day, Tess didn’t say a word.
“I’m here to help you settle in,” her mom said. “Anything you want—just say the word.”
“The garden. We need to start there.”
“I thought maybe we could go get you some furniture? A table and chairs, maybe?” Joanna’s sole piece of furniture in the front room was her upholstered chair propped in front of the fireplace. A dusty old chandelier dangled down the middle of the ceiling off the kitchen, but there was no table to put underneath it. They stood in the empty living room, their voices echoing.
“You just said you’d help me do whatever I want. I want to plant the garden. Planting season is practically over. It’s June.”
“But there’s nowhere to sit. Don’t you want to get some furniture?”
“Furniture? Furniture?” She tried not to panic. “Mom, I need to get a garden in today.” She took in a deep breath, trying to calm herself. She knew she was acting like a petulant teenager; Tess seemed to inspire this kind of behavior in her.
Half-crazed, Joanna dragged her mother into gardening stores, nurseries, and supermarkets, throwing bags of compost, garden tools, and plant starts into the car. It was past noon before they unloaded everything and stood outside with brand new shovels. Joanna had lent her mother some jeans and a T-shirt, and they both snapped on bright green gardening gloves. The sun beat down on them as they surveyed the plot of land.
“Okay,” Joanna said. “You dig over there. I’ll start here.” The plan was to rip up a layer of grass and weeds, making two 4x10-foot plots for her vegetable garden. The starts sat wilting in the sunlight, cowering from the argument Joanna and Tess had had over them earlier that day. Her mother had suggested saving money by buying packets of seeds instead of shelling out four dollars for established plants, and Joanna had lashed out. “We don’t have time for seeds, Mom! Don’t you understand?”
They lifted their shovels, broke into hard clay. A half hour later, they slumped over the handles, wiped the dust from their faces. At this rate they’d be working until nine o’clock at night before clearing this small patch of land. “Argh!” Joanna cried out. She flung her shovel off to the side and crumpled down on the weed-infested lawn. Her mother stared down at her, breathing heavily through her mouth.
In one of the Little House and the Prairie books, Pa had built a cabin out of his own two hands while the family had lived in a dugout in the side of a hill. When a plague of locusts had descended upon their crops and landed on their food, their skin, their hair, even two-year-old Carrie was too stoic to cry about it. They made pioneering seem so easy.
“You two look exhausted!” Joanna looked up and squinted. Malcolm’s girlfriend was smiling down at them, the sun forming a golden aura around her head.
“Nina wanted to drop by,” Malcolm said, stepping up behind her. He tried to shoot Joanna an apologetic look, but she pretended not to see.
Tess beamed. “Malcolm! It’s great to see you. We’ve worn ourselves out working on the garden.” Everyone looked out at the yard, which looked exactly like it did before, except now it featured two large mounds of dirt. Joanna stayed slumped on the ground, too dispirited to stand up for her unannounced visitors.
“I wanted the grand tour,” Nina explained.
“Okay,” Joanna said carefully.
“I tried calling but no one answered,” Malcolm said. “So we decided to come over.”
Why, Joanna wanted to ask. Why are you always coming over—and now with your girlfriend?
“Why don’t you two stay for a bit?” Joanna heard her mother say. “We could have a barbecue!”
“Oh, I don’t think—” Malcolm said.
“We’d love to!” Nina responded.
“Mom, I don’t have a grill.”
“No problem,” Nina said. “We’ll get pizza. Malcolm and I will go get it. Our treat.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Tess said.
“Mom, we still have to get all the starts in, remember? We were just taking a break….”
“They could come back in a couple hours,” Tess said. “Six o’clock?”
Joanna had to agree that there was nothing preventing this plan from taking shape.
Joanna was feeling better about everything—the plants were in. Now she just had to water them and pray the weather would hold. She’d also taken a hot shower, soaking up the water and steam, digging the dirt out from under her nails. She had spent an embarrassing amount of time deliberating over her outfit. What articles of clothing would most convincingly convey her irritation with Malcolm, while still managing to dazzle him with what he’d tossed aside? She settled on jeans and an olive green T-shirt, an ensemble that managed to say absolutely nothing at all.
“We got you a housewarming present,” Nina said, handing Joanna an aloe vera plant in a blue ceramic pot as she walked through the front door. When Nina smiled, Joanna could see her two front teeth overlapped a bit. Malcolm probably found it adorable.
“Oh, thanks,” Joanna said. She set it on the mantle and stepped back to admire it. “Now my jade tree has a friend.” When she turned around she saw Malcolm observing her, his eyes dark, and the corners of his mouth downturned.
“Friendship is important,” Malcolm said, staring at Joanna. He was standing in the middle of the empty room, holding two pizza boxes. They locked eyes for a split second. Then Joanna broke the connection and looked down. She brushed some imaginary dirt from her pants.
“I’m starving,” Tess said, coming in to the front room from the hallway.
“Well, let’s eat then. Please, have a seat.” Joanna gestured toward the floor.
“Here?” Tess said.
“Nowhere else to go,” Joanna answered. Her mom sat down and Malcolm set the pizzas in front of her. Joanna went back into the kitchen to gather the plates and silverware.
“Thanks for having us over. I just really wanted to see your place.” Nina had followed Joanna into the kitchen.
“Okay,” Joanna responded after a pause. She started pulling glasses out of a cardboard box, freeing them from their newspaper cocoons. She let the newspaper drop to the floor, set the glasses on the counter.
Nina picked a wrapped glass out of the box and followed suit. “I feel like we have so much to talk about. You know?”
“We do?” This sounded ruder than she intended. “I mean, I guess I don’t know much about rocks.”
“Well, I mostly do geotechnical investigations, soil and groundwater sampling, stuff like that,” Nina said.
“Oh. Well, I know even less about … that.”
“I really hope we can hang out more.” Nina unwrapped another glass.
Wow, Joanna wanted to reply. That’s pretty much the opposite of my hope. Instead, she pushed a box of plates between them. She was beginning to intuit Nina’s motives. She was keeping her enemies close, trying to stuff Joanna into that less attractive, quirky “guy’s best friend” mold so that she, Nina, could emerge as the triumphant beautiful girlfriend. Well, Joanna had no intention of playing Eponine to Nina’s Cosette!
When Joanna didn’t respond, Nina continued. “And I really hope you and Mal stay good friends.” Mal? “You know, I can’t even think of the last time I picked up a novel. Probably freshman English? I know you two loved to talk about literature. He told me all about you guys.”
“He did?” Joanna tried to keep her voice neutral. So that’s how Malcolm had described their relationship to Nina: A meeting of the minds. Chaste hours of silent sustained reading. Earnest conversations about Russian Formalism in coffee shops.
“It was just so cute the way you used to send each other secret messages in books.” Nina smiled.
Joanna stared blankly at Nina. “What?”
“You know, when he was in the Peace Corps …”
Nina had the story about the books all wrong. Joanna had sent Malcolm a few old classics she’d had in a graduate school lit class, since he was always short on reading material in Kazakhstan—but she’d forgotten to remove the Post-it notes she had stuck on the pages. Mostly she was just marking important passages, jotting down quotations she might use in a paper. Malcolm had pulled the notes from the pages, chained them together in order, added his own commentary, and mailed them back to her. In this way they had conversations about all the texts she studied in class. These little dialogues added to her enjoyment of the books more than her classes had—not that their musings were especially insightful. About “The Chrysanthemums” she’d written, “The flowers symbolize Elisa’s self-worth,” after which Malcolm had scrawled, “Duh.”
Joanna couldn’t look at Nina. “We’d better bring in the dishes,” she said. “The pizzas are probably getting cold.” She took the stack of plates and brought them into the living room, where Malcolm and her mother seemed to be having some sort of intense discussion about Willamette River run-off. Apparently this was a topic dear to Nina’s heart, because she jumped right in, offering up her opinions on storm drains and bioswales.
Joanna didn’t have any opinions on storm drains and bioswales. She sat down on the floor and took a slice of pizza from the box. After a while, she began to tune them out.
Joanna couldn’t get to sleep that night. It was too hot in the room; the sheets, clammy and lumpy, stuck to her skin. Opening the window didn’t help—only brought in the noise from the street, black clouds of exhaust. She flung the covers off and went into the kitchen. If she couldn’t sleep, she could at least get something done. Under the sickly tint of a single fluorescent light bulb, she freed the remainder of her dishes from their newspaper casings and placed them in the cupboards, sticky with layer after layer of paint. She’d had vague plans of refinishing them before unpacking. Oh well. Too late now.
“Can’t sleep?” her mother said. Tess stood in the doorway wearing a short robe.
“Just unpacking.”
Tess stepped into the kitchen and opened a box and stared into it as if flummoxed by the contents. “I like hanging out with your friends,” she said, lifting out a half-empty box of rigatoni, then setting it back inside.
“They’re not really my friends,” Joanna said.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s complicated.”
“Complicated how?”
“Never mind.”
“Did something happen?”
“Mom, I said, never mind.”
Her mom’s eyes narrowed, then she began to nod slowly as if she’d suddenly had some deep epiphany about the mysteries of life. “I get it,” Tess said. “Believe me, Joanna, I know what you’re going through.”
Now neither of them even pretended to unpack. Joanna’s hands went suddenly cold; they felt detached from the rest of her body. “I doubt that, Mom,” she managed to say.
“I know what it’s like when you can’t get the one you want.”
“That’s not what’s happening.”
Tess nodded. “You want him. It’s obvious.”
“Mom—” Joanna stopped. She didn’t have the energy to deny it.
“I went through it myself, you know. With your dad.”
Joanna had never known—nor had she wanted to know, exactly—why her parents split. They had always seemed so happy together—their dad goggle-eyed at their charming mother, blonde hair swishing as she threw her arms around him and kissed him in the kitchen. Their dad would dip her down to the ground, and Joanna and Laura would squeal and clap. Their father adored their mother back in those days.
Tess went over to the sink and turned on the tap. She filled a mug with water and drank it before turning back to Joanna again. “I left your dad, you know. And then when I tried to get him back, he wouldn’t take me. Worst time of my life. One of them, anyway.”
“Why did you leave if you still loved him?”
“We outgrew each other, I guess.”
As much as she had feared hearing some dramatic secret that would warp her opinion of one—or both—of her parents forever, she also did not want to hear that the marriage was so flimsy, so easily cast aside. “It’s a marriage, not an old coat,” she remarked.
Tess laughed. “You know, it just seems so simple when you fall in love with someone. It always seems like you’re both going in the same direction, you both want the same things. But really you’re just going like this.” Tess held her two index fingers together, then shot them out in opposite directions, until her arms were spread wide. “And there’s no coming back from that. Your father is a very practical man. When we first moved to Reno it was supposed to be for a year, maybe two. Then we were going to sell everything, go on a road trip across the U.S. I had this dream of running a ranch out in Eastern Nevada. We could spend all day riding horses in the mountains, live off the land. We hadn’t figured it all out, but that’s what I was counting on. And the thing was, he was happy where we were. And eventually—what? Fifteen years later? It finally dawned on me that we were never going to do any of the things we used to talk about. I just couldn’t stand that thought—that this was it. This was all there was.”
Joanna was silent. When she was ten and Laura was thirteen, their parents sent them to Colorado to visit their grandparents for two weeks. They returned to two apartments, four toothbrushes, two night-lights, four identical bedspreads on four different beds. Aren’t you girls lucky? Two houses, two families! And oh yes, we’re getting divorced. Sometimes she wondered if she missed the house more than her parents’ marriage. She had loved that place, loved staring out at the shadows the clouds made over the mountains. One morning she’d woken up early to find eleven wild horses roaming right in their yard. She schemed up ways to fence them in, tame them, but by the time her parents and sister got up, they were gone.
Tess now lived in a two-bedroom townhouse, mere miles from the house she’d spent her marriage in. Oh, the townhouse was nice—certainly a big improvement over the apartment where Tess and Joanna had lived together all those years. And the men Tess had dated, one after the other—guys she’d met in the diner or out grocery shopping at all hours of the night, men wearing cowboy hats to disguise their thinning hair—couldn’t have been any more worldly than her father, the high school teacher.
Tess was staring off into the corner of the kitchen.
“Mom—” Joanna hated seeing this childlike, hurt expression on her mother’s beautiful, aging face. “Mom, I thought you were coming up here to tell me something. Me and Laura. She said you had an announcement.” Joanna took in a deep breath and braced herself for bad news. As the day went on and on, through the gardening and the awkward pizza party, Joanna had convinced herself that it was worse than she’d originally imagined. Maybe Tess had cancer, or a rare incurable disease of some kind.
“I didn’t want to tell you over the phone,” Tess said.
“Just tell me.”
Her mother’s chin began to tremble, and Joanna stopped breathing altogether.
“Jeremy and I—”
“Oh no …”
“We broke up.”
Joanna felt herself exhaling in relief. Then she quickly tried to look sympathetic instead of elated by the news. “Oh, Mom. I’m sorry. I know you really liked this one.”
Tess shrugged. “It wasn’t meant to be, I guess.”
“So this was your big news? I mean, you dated him for less than a year. I thought you were dying.”
“Oh, Jo-Jo. Don’t be silly. I came to help you settle in, remember?”
“So you’re handling this okay?”
“Don’t worry about me.”
“I can’t help it.”
“I’ll get through it okay. I always do. Sooner or later.”
“Look, maybe this is a good thing! For both of us. Where would I be today if I were still with Nate? Look at what we’ve done on our own! Think of all the time and energy we put into these guys we could be putting into better things, more interesting things. We don’t need men around—”
“But I like having them around.”
“We should just be done with men. Don’t you think?”
Tess yawned. “If you say so, Jo-Jo.”
Joanna went back to bed. Her eyes stung and her entire body ached from attacking her backyard with that shovel. The air coming in through the window felt cooler now. She pulled the top sheet over herself and closed her eyes. She drifted into a formless dream. No people or images—only tapping, like fingers on a typewriter. The tapping grew louder and louder, forcing her into consciousness. Someone was knocking at the door. She considered staying in bed, but after a minute the tapping became so annoying that she jumped off the bed and walked to the front of the house to peek through the window. She pulled back the dusty, gauzy curtains and flicked on the porch light, revealing Malcolm standing at the door. She opened the door but didn’t let him in. “You’re the only one who invites himself over at all hours of the night.”
“It’s midnight,” Malcolm responded, as if this were a very reasonable hour for an impromptu visit. “Can I come in?”
She went out to join him on the porch, closing the door behind her. The night was still warm, but she shivered. She crossed her arms over herself, aware that she was wearing a sheer—most likely completely see-through—tank top and cotton pajama bottoms.
“What do you want?” she asked, flashing with anger. “Why are you always hanging around?”
“Because I want to see you.” He was leaning against the porch railing, bathed in streetlight. The yellowing light made the shadows under his eyes more pronounced. He turned away and looked out at the street below. A car passed by, its sound whooshing over them, then receding.
She felt the sudden impulse to put a hand on his face, to touch his prickly cheek. Another shiver rushed through her; she kept her arms crossed tightly over her chest.
“Joanna,” he said. “I don’t want you to hate me.”
After a moment, she sighed. “I don’t hate you.”
“Good.”
“All right. Good. Well, thanks for stopping by. Next time, try the phone.” Joanna whirled around, prepared to march back in the house, but Malcolm grabbed her arm and pulled her back.
He stared down at her. She looked into his eyes, then tilted her chin up. His grip tightened around her arm, and he drew her closer. She would let him kiss her; she wanted him to. She wanted him to grab her and kiss her so hard their bodies would go flying, hitting the side of the house with a thwack. She would let this happen, let herself enjoy it, even, biting his lips, sinking her fingers into his skin—and then she would push him away, both hands thumping hard against his chest. Push him so hard he’d go sailing over the porch railing, where he’d land in a bramble of blackberry thorns.
But then he averted his gaze and it was over; the moment fluttered away, nothing more than a piece of dust floating around in her imagination.
“What are you trying to do to me?” She wanted to sound angry, but the words came out soft, deflated.
Malcolm took his hand from her arm and stepped back. He didn’t answer—just kept looking at her, his eyes dark and gloomy. He opened his mouth to say something and then closed it again.
Joanna was horrified to find tears building up behind her eyes. She took in a sharp breath and shook her head. She could only hope she managed to appear annoyed rather than just … sad.
After a moment he turned away from her.
Joanna stood on the porch and watched him walk away. When she turned back toward the house, she noticed for the first time that the exterior paint was coming off in flakes larger than leaves.