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

with candy orange wedges. There was something explosively wonderful about tasting salty, grainy meat stufffollowed by chewy, gelatinous sugar stuff.

For dinner, I had a list of ingredients copied from one of my mother’s index cards. Tonight was going to be the most complicatedmeal yet. Chicken breasts roasted in orange sauce. My mother went over it with me in the morning, giving me tips on how toknow when the chicken was properly cooked, and how to spoon the sauce over every few minutes to keep the breasts moist. Themore she told me, the more nervous I got. Mom must have seen this on my face, because she stopped her instructions and said,“Mary Jane, now is not the time to lose confidence. There is an ill mother in that house and a hardworking doctor who needsto be fed.” She had stared at me until I nodded, and then she gave me even more directions.

“How many breasts do you think Jimmy will eat?” I asked Izzy. We were standing at the butcher counter. The butcher, whoselong rectangular head reminded me of a cow’s, waited patiently.

“Seven?” Izzy said.

“You think Jimmy alone would eat seven?”

“Jimmy a football player?” the butcher asked.

“Just a man.”

“Two,” the butcher said. “Prepare two breasts for each man, one for each woman, and maybe a half for half-pint there.” He winked at Izzy.

“Okay, seven breasts.” I figured Izzy and I would split one if the men really did have two each. And I wasn’t sure Sheba reallywould eat a whole breast anyway. I noticed that she sat down and ate at every meal, just like everyone else, but she lefthalf of everything on her plate. It didn’t matter what it was, or how much she claimed to love it; only half went in her mouth.Usually, when everyone appeared to be finished, Jimmy—though once it was Dr. Cone—would reach over and take her uneaten portion.

Mrs. Cone had noticed how Sheba ate as well. The past couple of dinners, she had tried to leave half of her meal on her plate.But with little success, as just as someone—Dr. Cone, usually—made a play for her food, she would come back to it with a fewquick stabs. And last night, when we were clearing the table, I found Mrs. Cone in the kitchen, using her hands to shove downthe half piece of lasagna that she had left on her plate. I’d never really thought about food, or how much to eat or not toeat, until these meals with the Cones. In my own house, you ate everything you took. If you weren’t going to eat a whole chickenbreast, then you sure as heck didn’t put a whole chicken breast on your plate.

In addition to eating, or trying to eat, like Sheba, Mrs. Cone had been dressing like Sheba too. They were about the same height, but Sheba was more of a curvy line while Mrs. Cone wasn’t a line at all. Her hips jutted out, her breasts jutted out, and lately they all had been jutting with greater enthusiasm as she wore tight pants, jumpsuits, and clingy maxi dresses. They were clothes that demanded you look at her, something that was virtually impossible when Sheba was nearby. Sheba sparkled. My eyes trailed her from room to room, as if she were a rocket sailing across a night sky. Mrs. Cone, in her snazzy outfits, was the contrail from that rocket, her breasts, behind, and flaming red hair streaking by in Sheba’s wake.

Sheba and Mrs. Cone came home a few minutes before the chicken was ready. They both oohed and aahed over the way the housesmelled and I could see that this made Izzy proud. I prayed the chicken would taste as good as it smelled.

Sheba helped Izzy set the table while Mrs. Cone stood in the kitchen with me as I finished preparing the rice and the stringbeans I had steaming on the stovetop. She leaned over to see exactly what I was doing when I spooned sauce over the chicken,and when I sliced off a hunk of butter and melted it into the beans.

“How do you know how to do this?” The long locks of Mrs. Cone’s blond wig fell over her shoulder. She pushed them back withthe side of her dangling hand, the same way Sheba pushed her long hair out of her face. It was a gesture I had tried to copymany times when I watched Sheba push her hair away during the opening monologue of her variety show. In person, she didn’tdo it as often as I’d seen her do it on the show. I wondered if it was a nervous habit.

“I help my mother with dinner every night.” I wanted to ask how she didn’t know how to do this, but I felt that it might be rude.

“I’ve never cooked,” Mrs. Cone said.

“Your mother didn’t teach you?” I spooned the rice into a serving bowl, then melted a pat of butter on top and garnished itwith parsley.

“Oh, she tried, but I just wasn’t interested. I was boy crazy, and I loved rock and roll. There wasn’t time to care about things like cooking.” She laughed. “Nothing’s changed!”

I blushed. It was odd to think of Mrs. Cone as boy crazy. She was married! “But you ended up with a doctor, not a rock star.”

“Richard was in a band in college—he was at Johns Hopkins and I was at Goucher. When he started medical school, he quit theband and I quit school to marry him.”

“Were you disappointed that he didn’t stay in the band?”

“Not as much as my parents.” Mrs. Cone pulled a string bean from the pan and bit off half.

“They wanted you to marry a rock star?”

“No, but they didn’t want me to marry Richard. Medical school or not.” She shrugged.

“Why not?” I needed to take out the chicken, but this news seemed important and I didn’t want to turn away.

“Because he’s a Jew!” Mrs. Cone laughed.

I tried to laugh with her, but I didn’t understand why that was funny.