I pushed away the image of her kissing some faceless boy from my mind. “Why wouldn’t you say that, then? Have you ever even lived in North Dakota?”
“I have. Of course I have. I went to college at NDSU and then lived in Bismarck after Adam was born.”
Jenny with water dripping off her skin, her wet fingertips darkening pages of thick books, being kind in grocery store lines—this had to be real. “I just don’t understand why you wouldn’t say that, then. What’s the point of lying? Why go to the meetings at all? Did you ever even have grilled-cheese lake days?”
She looked miserable, stopped eating, and began pulling the top of her sandwich off, tearing it into little pieces.
“Hey,” I said, “I didn’t mean to attack you or make you feel bad.”
“It’s not you.” Jenny grabbed my hands again and this time didn’t let go. I felt warmth and calluses. I wondered how she got them, what actions she’d committed so repeatedly that there was physical proof of them on her palms. “I don’t know why I told everyone I was from North Dakota.
“When I was eighteen, I only applied to colleges in weird, faraway places. I ended up choosing NDSU. My mom and dad thought I did it to make them furious and maybe I did a little, maybe I was tired of being a smiling size-two who never broke curfew and was described by all her teachers as ‘quiet, serious, a dream come true.’ Mostly, I felt small every day and blamed the city, thought maybe if I went somewhere unlike anywhere I knew I could be fixed and new and like I’d always wanted to be.”
“So you went to North Dakota.”
“I went to North Dakota!” She let go of my hands and shoved a couple of torn bread pieces into her mouth. “I was so charmed at first. Los Angeles sounded so exotic to all my classmates, and at parties people were always refilling my glass and asking me endless questions about my opinion on this, that, whatever. The school’s mascot was a bison, a big shaggy, horned creature. There was a statue of one on campus that looked so powerful, its body leaning into motion, front hoof forward. I liked reading by it, especially in the fall. I looked cute in a scarf and beanie.”
“What happened?”
“What do you mean?”
“You said ‘at first.’ ”
She paused, smiled. “You really listen to every word I say.” I knew then that all the moments that followed would be in service to that one. I would be scratching my nose, brushing my hair, double-knotting my sneakers, driving to work, talking to Mom, Billy, Darryl, whatever hungry soul opened the door, standing in the shower scrubbing sweat, grease, whatever got stuck to me through the day off my skin, and I would ask myself—what are all the ways to make Jenny Hauser smile?
“So—what happened?”
Her hands were out of bread to tear. She clasped them together, tightly. “Nothing crazy or dramatic, just what always seemed to happen: I got bored. Everything I loved about North Dakota felt tired by the end of my sophomore year. As I lay in bed every night it felt like an invisible hippo was sitting on my chest, and I couldn’t help but think: I am wasting my life.
“One of the guys I was sleeping with was a city kid like me, but from New York. He talked constantly about the city and would earnestly call it ‘the best place in the world.’ It got me thinking that maybe it wasn’t the city that had been killing me, but the wrong city. So I moved to New York that summer and never went back to school.”
“I’ve always wanted to go to New York,” I said. “My dad lived there for a little and played in a band. I listened to one of their records and they weren’t very good, but I liked the idea of them playing in dark, smoky bars.”
“I wasn’t in New York long. Met a guy and moved to Miami. Then on my own again, headed to Austin, then D.C. when I thought I wanted to be in politics, Portland, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Flagstaff, a brief month in Dublin, then back to New York City, Bismarck, and now here, Los Angeles again.”
So many landscapes to picture her in. Her ponytail riding the subway, pushing through bodies and bodies on crowded sidewalks, surrounded by buildings so high she’d have to tip her head backward to see the tops of them. Her ponytail on a beach, salt and sunshine soaked into it. Among dark suits and conservative ties with the Washington Monument looming behind her. Hiking through forests in a haze of mist. Fruity colorful drinks with chiseled tan men. Casinos. Desert nights. More drinks, more men, but Guinness now, burly, red-faced men. Same skyscrapers, more bodies. Bismarck, a place I still didn’t have a clear picture of. And now Los Angeles, her in front of me, mere feet away—I could reach across the table and grab that ponytail between my fingers if I wanted to.
“Why not just say that, then? That’s all so much more interesting.”
“Listing all those places doesn’t make me feel worldly or fascinating or anything close. I like the idea of me being some doe-eyed Midwestern girl moving to the big city for the first time more than the reality. Because the reality is, I’ve been to so many places and not a single one has saved me. And I need Los Angeles to save me. I need this place to work this time.”
I realized then that for her even to be sitting across from me she would’ve had to find someone to watch Adam. Whether a babysitter, a friend, her faceless husband, she called in favors or pulled out her wallet to go to the meeting in the church she talked so much shit about. I watched her fiddle with the edges of the menu, flip pages back and forth, mumble something about dessert—should we get some?—and thought about how easy it would’ve been for Jenny just to stay home if a small part of her didn’t hope that the meetings weren’t bullshit, that one day she would emerge from the church basement and onto the street, blinking rapidly, her eyes adjusting to the brighter, more beautiful world of a healthy, well-adjusted person, all of it unlocked for her by a circle of women.
I waved the waiter over. “Can we get a bowl of ice cream? We’re going to be here for a while.”
The waiter walked away, Jenny had that smile again, and I hoped she was thinking, yes, Los Angeles would work this time.
* * *
—
JENNY DROPPED ME OFF a couple houses down. The Freemans’ front yard was cleaner, never a bag of garbage on their curb. “See you soon,” she said before she reached across me and opened my door.
I watched her taillights until they turned the corner and let those words swell up inside me and carry me to my front door, up the stairs, and away from Mom’s and Billy’s worried faces and simultaneous sentences—“Where have you been?” “Do you know what time it is?” “We were so scared”—onto my bed, where I flopped, shoes still on. Billy crawled next to me soon after and I only distantly felt myself saying, “I’m sorry, I should’ve called. I lost track of time. It won’t happen again, I swear.” His arms curled around me and even those, in all their muscled solidity, felt barely there.