Mary Jane by Jessica Blau (debian ebook reader TXT) 📗

cradle. My stomach churned. I was still worriedabout bringing the correct sweets to Dr. Cone and Jimmy.

“Can I have a Popsicle?” Izzy asked.

“Just a half. Don’t want to spoil your dinner.”

Izzy ripped open a Popsicle box and sat on the floor, removing Popsicles one by one. I could tell she was looking for theright color. The Popsicles had started to melt during our walk, so the colors were printing through the wrapper.

“Purple.” Izzy handed me a purple Popsicle. I placed the gully between the two sticks against the edge of the kitchen table and then slapped the top one with the heel of my palm. The Popsicle broke into two perfect halves. I ripped off the paper, gave one half to Izzy, and stuck the other in my mouth. I held it between my lips, melting, as I unloaded the sugary treats onto the kitchen table.

Next, I opened the freezer door and looked inside. A warty, hoary frost covered all the contents, like the Abominable Snowmanhad vomited in there. Few things could be identified past a shape: rectangle, edgy blob, carton. “How about we clean out thefreezer today?”

“Okay!”

I took out a few boxes of unknowns and placed them on the dirty dishes in the sink to make room for the Popsicles. Then Ishoved in all the boxes of Popsicles but one, which I placed in the bottom of an empty Eddie’s bag. On top of the PopsiclesI put two boxes of Zonkers, and then two of each of the other candies.

“I’ll be right back.” I headed out the screen door as Izzy flipped over to her stomach and continued sucking her Popsicle.I was nervous about getting the sweets order right. But, I realized, far less nervous than when I’d run into my mother atEddie’s.

I paused in the middle of the lawn, looked up toward the sun, and shut my eyes for just a few seconds. My heart wasn’t evenbeating hard. In fact, I felt wonderful.

4

I learned two things that first week that Sheba and Jimmy stayed in the Cone house. The first was that addicts ate a lot ofsugar to replace the drugs and alcohol they’d been taking. The second was that being married to an addict seemed harder thanbeing an addict.

Most mornings I arrived to find Sheba and Izzy waiting for me in the kitchen. Sheba didn’t like to cook and both she and Izzythought I made the best breakfasts. I started making a daily trip to Eddie’s with Izzy, where we’d stock up on ingredientsfor a good breakfast the next day: eggs, flour, sugar, baking soda, bacon, real maple syrup, butter, and loads of fresh fruitand berries. Also, I’d pick up more sugary treats, particularly Screaming Yellow Zonkers, which Jimmy had declared essentialto his recovery.

Sheba talked a lot when there were adults in the room. She gossiped about other celebrities, and once complained at length about a particular director who wanted her to take off her top for a horseback riding scene in which “there was no logical reason this character would ride without a top on!” More frequently, she talked about how hard it had been living with Jimmy the past year. There was the Oscars party where he “nodded off” at the table and his head fell on his plate; the intimate dinner party at a famous producer’s house where he disappeared into the bathroom for two hours and then stumbled out and fell asleep on the couch, his head falling into the lap of the sixteen-year-old daughter of the producer; and numerous flights on airplanes—private and public—where he vomited all over the bathroom, peed in his pants, and/or had to be carried off once they’d landed. I wondered how she had stayed with him through all that. And then my sex-addict brain wondered if it had to do with attraction and if she was a sex addict like me, and just couldn’t pull herself away from his body. Jimmy was muscly and lean. And he had a smell to him that made me want to stick my face into his chest. It was almost an animal smell, but sweeter, softer.

Sometimes Sheba relayed stories of addicted Jimmy right in front of Jimmy. When that happened, Jimmy just shrugged, apologized,and more than once looked at Dr. Cone and said, “I need you, Doc.”

When it was just me, Izzy, and Sheba, Sheba became quiet and curious and asked questions about us. It was like Izzy and Iwere foreigners from another country. Sheba had been a celebrity since she was five years old, so, really, we were foreignto her, people from the country of non-stars.

The Monday of Sheba and Jimmy’s second week, Sheba sat with Izzy at the banquette, coloring. I was at the stove making “birds in a nest” as my mother had taught me. Once I had flipped the pancakes, I would cut out a center hole (with a drinking glass, as the Cones didn’t have the circular cookie cutter my mother and I used at home), into which I cracked open and fried an egg. The key to making it work was putting lots of butter in the pan and cooking at a super-high heat so that the egg would cook before the pancake burned. Also, I covered the bird in a nest with salt. When you added butter and syrup, it was the perfect salty-to-sweet ratio.

“Who colored this bloody penis?” Sheba asked.

My face burned. Izzy leaned over the coloring book, looked at the penis, and said, “Mary Jane.”

“Do you hate penises?” Sheba asked me.

“Uh . . .” I felt breathless. “Well, no. I don’t think so. I’ve never seen one.”

“I’ve seen lots.” Izzy focused on coloring the parrots from the nature coloring book.

“You have?” I slid the three birds in a nest onto three different plates. The syrup and butter were already on the table,as were three place settings and batik napkins I’d found when Izzy and I had cleaned out and organized the pantry.

“Yeah, I see my dad’s penis ALL THE TIME!”