Chapter 9 Great Opportunity
Blossom Valley, 1994
Jackie had a wedding coming up in less than a week. Yeah, too bad it wasn’t her own, wasn’t it, she asked herself, not for the first time. Jackie herself was 31 years old and very single, having recently broken up with her boyfriend of three years. The man she had certainly once pictured herself marrying. Though now, he was just the final reason she had left New York. For how long, who knows. At least for this past spring, a time she had dedicated to reconnecting with the folks, recharging herself, and refilling her depleted bank account. (Despite earning more than she once would have thought possible in the city, she had also managed to spend it all and then some. Thank God for the ease of subletting her apartment.)
These past months had been a funny, busy time, more so of both than she could have imagined in the worst of her emotional gyrations back in February. She’d had a decent stream of editing jobs that she could take care of from afar, and the season was soon to culminate in a matched set of momentous events: her mother’s move from the family home to an adult only condo, and her father’s wedding.
The former, nearly everything was organized, sorted, donated away or packed. Mom was looking forward to the change, and as much doing Jackie and the rest of the family a favor by keeping the house available for them for another couple weeks. During the wedding weekend, when everybody would be gathered.
As for the wedding, time would soon tell. It was to be a small and quiet event, at the request of both her dad and Amelia Emerson. Jackie shook her head. It had taken awhile at first to wrap her mind around this pairing. Dad, after his long string of too young, too loud, too demanding girlfriends, none lasting more than a year at most, acting more like a school boy with the widow of her high school friend. Karen’s mother Amelia, whom she had always liked, who had always treated her with both affection and respect, but whom she never thought of as a potential stepmother.
Amelia was so different from her own mom, not a person she could have imagined with Dad. And yet, as she spent time around them, she saw that it kind of worked. Even Mom basically approved (although she would be hightailing it out of town before they got back from their honeymoon). Turns out that Dad, despite his sometimes frenzied attempts to modernize himself through clothes and music, in his heart longed for the sort of stability he had last known sometime in the late 1950s. Quiet homemade dinners, a friendly partner who challenged him intellectually but supported him emotionally. As for Amelia – she was genuinely nice. She loved Dad, and enjoyed spending time with the rest of the family. It was easy to recognize the real thing, Jackie thought, after having been merely put up with on numerous occasions with other ladies in Dad’s life.
Despite everybody’s best efforts, though, the event was mushrooming. Hard to help, of course, and Jackie took no blame. Just the two extended families added up to two dozen people right there. Even winnowing down to their closest friends meant a bunch more. Everybody loved Amelia! Dad, never mind being semi-retired, had his own set of colleagues not to be slighted, and neighborhood guys and golfing pals.
The original setting, the diminutive yard at Dad’s place, proved too small. Jackie had overruled their objections and contracted with the country club. It’s not like it was a big or exclusive place, after all. They had the facilities and a caterer on site, and Dad certainly could afford it. (Even if JJ stayed in college for a sixth or seventh year, which seemed likely the way he kept dropping classes, she thought, but didn’t say out loud.)
Dad and Amelia went along with it – what could they do, they were so glad to have the whole thing organized. And Jackie had let them nix a lot of other ideas. There would only be flowers picked from a friend’s garden, no flower girl, no open bar, a DJ playing old standards but no band.
Neither bride, groom, nor attendants would even wear traditional wedding clothes, just regular formal wear. Jackie thought she herself might be the only one who had bothered to shop for a new outfit. She had done so in the city before she left, charging a near maxed out card with the excited sense of one last foray toward the edge of the financial precipice before her responsible self took over and she retreated to live rent free with Mom and replenish her funds.
For sure, the siblings would be ill attired. Joy made it clear she was compromising her lesbian feminist principles to even show up at all, much less in a skirt or heels. And JJ would probably put on whatever got laid out for him in the morning, much as he had as a child. But he was a 20 year old college kid; they’d be lucky to see him in a pair of pants without gaping holes or bong water stains.
Amelia’s adult children would be okay at least. Unlike Jackie’s stoned and aimless baby bro, Karen and her brothers were responsible adults. They guys were an accountant and a teacher, she thought, and Karen had proceeded in a refreshingly normal path into the graphic design career she’d been mulling over since the tenth grade. Her old friend was married too, and had a baby girl. It was only the utter exhaustion that had been clear in Karen’s voice each time they had spoken recently, hammering out logistics, that kept Jackie from being insanely jealous.
A part of her couldn’t help herself even so. Jackie had always been competitive, and it was hard to help comparing herself to a girl she’d known since the week she moved to Blossom Valley and not coming up short. Karen, she knew, had been actively recruited to her college, and then had a choice of jobs after she graduated. She had been promoted and picked to help open up a new branch in California. Whereas Jackie had done okay in college – she had. But that didn’t change the fact that she barely made it there in the first place. It had taken months, years even, before she could be sure that no one found out what she had done to get in, would call her out as a fraud, as not quite good enough to make it on her own.
None of that mattered now, she told herself. No one knew, no one had to know. She might not have had the clean career path, but she did okay. Thanks to one particular editing job – and yes, for a friend of her ex’s, but networking is how it’s done – she had landed a whole series of tech related writing and editing jobs. Maybe not the dream she had always had (and frankly, being an Oscar winning actress slash Olympic figure skater really weren’t in the books for many women, were they).
But she had found a thing she could do well, and she got paid for it. Paid pretty well, when compared to the kind of genius work it took to actually create the software, she thought. And it was nicely transportable – those companies up on 128 didn’t care if she was producing the jobs from New York City or podunk PA, as long as she met her deadlines.
Which was not to say she could stay here. No way no how. It had worked as a temporary thing only. Her subletter would be out at the end of the month, and she had a mental list half a page long just of restaurants she had in mind for meals. There were friends to catch up with, exhibits that had opened, and she missed just the freedom of walking down the crowded streets anonymously.
In the back of her mind, though, in a darker space, Jackie thought resentfully that no one was really missing her that much. Certainly not her ex, who would be easy to avoid once she was back. She’d had good long phone calls with a couple friends. Though she felt a bit that she was losing them too – one close friend had recently had her first baby, and another moved in with her boyfriend out in the burbs. Anyone who thought her single life was like the TV show Friends would be sadly let down by the reality.
Jackie stood, resolute, shaking the demons out of her head and ready to busy herself. Working on the wedding bought her good will from Dad plus served as a huge distraction from the disorder of the rest of her life. She could hear clattering from the kitchen. Amelia, who had basically moved in (although nobody in their generation would admit such a thing), had dinner started although it was not even six. Dad liked an early dinner these days, and Amelia liked to please him.
Could it really all be so simple, Jackie thought, going into the k
itchen to see if there was anything else left to do for the wedding before she drove back to Mom’s. No relationship of hers had such easy give and take. Of course, until recently she and her boyfriend had full time jobs and active social lives – nobody with all afternoon to prepare a nice meal.
JJ was slumped on a chair in the corner, long legs extending practically across the room. Amelia wove gracefully around them, setting out food from the fridge and looking utterly at home here, more so than Dad ever did in his kitchen. Seeing Jackie, she stopped and wiped her hands on a pretty dishtowel. “Well, I think we’re about set, don’t you?” she asked. “Karen and Bill are flying in tomorrow with the baby. I can’t wait for all of you to see her, she’s cute as a button!”
“Yeah, it’ll be great,” Jackie said, trying to sound more genuine than she felt.
“You two are welcome to stay for dinner,” Amelia said. “It’s just pasta, but I’m making plenty.”
JJ looked momentarily alarmed. He had been waking up around noon since he got home to Mom’s place – he probably had no idea it was anywhere close to anyone’s dinner time.
“Thanks, but our mom is expecting us. I think she’s trying to use up all the food in the house.”
Amelia laughed sympathetically, and murmured about the challenges of moving households. But JJ continued to slump, looking more put upon at the memory of the weird, slapdash meals they had been having. His face was almost a pout, a comic expression, Jackie thought, on her now tall and lanky brother. She doubted he really understood that Mom’s move and Dad’s marriage meant that now this would be the place he spent the rest of his college breaks, however many more years that lasted.
Amelia talked some more about her granddaughter, Karen’s baby. Jackie took one more look at her master checklist for the wedding before she felt ready to leave. Dad wandered in and out of the room a couple times, self important with his own set of tasks, readying the house for the guests, trying to baby proof the place. JJ stayed put, plunked down in the middle of the kitchen, still looking somewhat annoyed.
He helped Dad move around some furniture earlier, his nominal reason for being on hand. Since then, no one had paid him any attention, Jackie realized. She had been deep in her lists and preparations, Dad and Amelia busy with their own planning, talking mostly about her children rather than him. The boy just wasn’t used to not being the center of attention. Jackie promised herself she would pay more attention to him.
“Let’s go, JJ,” she said to him. “I want to shower and change before dinner.”
She purposely took the longer, more scenic route, back out to Blossom Valley. Careful not to sound demanding or motherish, she queried about his classes. She knew to give him long pauses, let him work out just how much he wanted to share with her. Sometimes that was just grunts, next to nothing, other time he would really open up.
At the end of last semester, he had been quite taken with his philosophy professor, freely quoting from him as well as from various texts. Unfortunately a different teacher had turned him off, apparently, to the whole subject matter.
“Lectures are so boring,” he complained after she pressed him about it. “They give us all this reading then just stand there and talk about it.”
“Well, that’s what they do,” she said, remembering not a few dull lectures she had gone through to get her degree. “I mean, it’s not all fun in college, right?”
JJ had never been a good student – not because he couldn’t do the work but because he couldn’t sit still. These days, they would probably have him on medication, she thought. Glancing away from the rolling road, she could see half his face. His expression now looked hurt, though it wasn’t clear whether from recalling his classes or from Jackie’s lack of sympathy about it.
“You’ve always been too smart for normal classes,” Jackie continued. “Which was fine when it was a small group and there was a teacher who could, you know, cater to your needs. But at a big school, you may have to be more proactive.”
JJ muttered something incoherent, his head turned away toward the rural landscape. A few small houses dotted the view as they came toward town.
“I’ve met some pretty bright guys through my work,” Jackie continued. “They’re not what you’d call super social, and they’re definitely not businessman types. But they’re designing these new computer programs, and it’s pretty lucrative. You could think about some sort of computer classes, something like that.”
After a moment’s silence, during which she wondered if he’d heard her at all, JJ said, “The whole thing seems like kind of a waste of time. And I’d have to take all this other shit to get my major requirements. I could be there for, like, years.”
“You’ve got to stay in school, JJ,” she exclaimed. “At least to get your degree – it doesn’t even matter what it’s in, but it’s important.”
He shrugged. Jackie was glad, she realized, that he didn’t ask her why. She’d be hard pressed to articulate the reasons at this point, she thought, feeling cynical and old.
They rode in companionable silence the rest of the way. These past weeks, she had gotten so used to driving these roads she barely had to think about it. Such a change from the city though, always having to drive, using this precise set of streets to get home. The town so small, even JJ commented about that every time he returned from school, and he hardly noticed his surroundings.