Mrs. Everything Read online

  “Take me with you?” Shelley looked up at Jo. Her eyes had sooty rings of mascara underneath them, and Jo found herself, in spite of everything, noticing how sweet she smelled, and that Shelley’s cheeks were faintly freckled.

  “Sure,” Jo said. “Sure.”

  * * *

  “Attention!” Doug Brodesseur had a high, nasal voice, pale skin pitted with acne scars and curly black hair, and was all of five feet, three inches tall. Doug was hosting the first meeting of the executive committee of the University of Michigan’s chapter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee that had been convened since Kennedy’s assassination. Instead of the usual dozen students, almost a hundred kids had crowded into the living room of his off-campus apartment to listen.

  Shelley had called Jo on the dormitory’s phone that morning, and had met her out on the Diag, in front of the Undergraduate Library, affectionately called the UGLI, dressed in a burnt-orange corduroy skirt and a white wool turtleneck sweater. A brown leather belt cinched her waist, and her knee-high brown suede boots matched the shade of her belt exactly. In her right hand was a cigarette; on her face was her typically amused look. “Howdy, Stretch,” she’d said, as Jo approached, and Jo had smiled.

  “My dad used to call me ‘Sport.’ ” Up close, Shelley’s breath smelled like mint and tobacco. Jo wished she’d gotten dressed up, that she’d chosen something more flattering than jeans and a loose white shirt with blue stripes. Jo and Shelley had walked together to the house that Doug shared with three other guys, an off-campus residence that was easily the filthiest place Jo had ever visited. Dirty footprints and clumps of cat hair dotted the carpet, which had probably been cream-colored at one point and was currently the gray of sidewalks after the rain. Dozens of empty beer cans and pop bottles, some half-full, with cigarette butts floating in the liquid, stood on or near the coffee table. A stack of pizza boxes and newspapers teetered in one corner. A fly buzzed around the box at the top of the pile, and one of the walls looked like someone had punched a hole through it and patched up the damage with . . . Jo squinted to confirm that it was, indeed, crumpled-up pages of the Daily and duct tape.

  Most of the meeting’s attendees were white boys. Jo recognized some of them from previous pickets or actions or meetings. Some of them were sitting on the cream-and-orange plaid couch. Others sat on folding chairs that had been set up around the edge of the room, with their feet planted on the floor and legs spread wide. Jo and Shelley found places toward the back of the living room, by the door. “In case we need to make a quick getaway,” Jo said. She watched Shelley smile and lean against the wall, and pull away as soon as her shoulder touched the knotty pine paneling. Jo knew, from experience, that the walls were sticky; that everything in the house seemed to have been lightly coated in spilled pop.

  “Okay!” called Doug. “Now, more than ever, it’s important for us to stay the course and not back down. We need to show the rest of the country, the rest of the world, that they can kill our president . . .” He gulped, and his voice, which had been trembling, got steadier. “. . . but they can’t shake our commitment to civil rights, or slow the wheel of progress. No matter what.” This prompted murmurs of assent, nods, and a smattering of applause. “We’re going to talk about the action we’ve got planned for this coming Saturday at Woolworth.

  “Now, last week we only had about seventy-five people show up.” His voice became louder and more aggrieved. “There are twenty-four thousand people on this campus. What does it say that only seventy-five of them can be bothered to stand up for racial equality?”

  “That you aren’t very good at your job?” Jo heard someone mutter.

  “I want every person in this room who’s planning to be there Saturday to commit to bringing at least two new people with them!” said Doug. “And I need someone to volunteer to type up the flyers!” His eyes, small and close-set underneath his high forehead, moved over the room, finally arriving at a woman in a corduroy jumper, who sat perched on the couch in a manner suggesting she was trying to keep as much of her body away from the fabric as possible. “Marian, how about you?”

  Marian nodded.

  “Moving on,” said Doug. “We need to talk about the bigger picture. Summer’s going to be here before you know it. The Freedom Rider Coordinating Committee is asking for new riders,” he continued. “The rides begin in Washington, D.C., and end in New Orleans.”

  “Or jail,” someone muttered.

  “Many universities have had students participate,” Doug continued. “It would be great if the U of M could have a representative on one of the buses.”

  A dark-haired white fellow with heavy stubble and dark-rimmed glasses raised his hand to ask if arrests showed up on your academic records. “Is going to jail going to keep me out of medical school?” he asked. The crowd offered competing, contradictory answers about how an arrest for civil rights activism might affect one’s future.

  Jo stood close enough to feel the warmth of Shelley’s body, listening as the boys discussed the putative consequences of riding a bus and registering voters while their less fortunate, poor, and Negro counterparts were being beaten by cops or set upon by dogs or shipped off to die in Vietnam. She and Shelley and the other girls who had come stood quietly until, finally, Doug deigned to acknowledge them with a smile that displayed his overbite.

  “Hey, you know what? If a few of you gals want to get dinner started, there’s spaghetti and sauce in the kitchen.”

  * * *

  “So that’s the movement.”

  “I can’t believe that,” Shelley said, with a disgusted roll of her eyes. She and Jo had left the meeting and were walking through campus in the twilight, moving fast, with the empty paths providing fresh air and space to complain. “I can’t believe he expected us to make copies and make them dinner!” A few steps more, and Shelley said, “I can’t believe we did!”

  Jo made a noncommittal noise. She’d washed her hands, but she could still smell jarred tomatoes and oregano underneath her nails.

  “Are you planning on being a politician?” Shelley asked.

  “Who, me?”

  “Yes, you,” Shelley said, and playfully bumped Jo’s hip with her own. Jo felt herself smiling. “You’re all commanding and committed.”

  “That’s the only time I’ve ever spoken up in a meeting. I care about the world, but I don’t want to go into politics.”

  “So what, then?” asked Shelley. “I can tell you’re a gal with a plan. What’s your major?”

  “English,” said Jo. Her face, her whole body, was flushing with pleasure at being the subject of Shelley’s regard. She couldn’t remember the last time someone had complimented her, or been interested in her future. “I’m going to get a teaching degree, so I’ll be able to support myself. But what I really want is to be a writer.”

  “Books?” Shelley asked, as if Jo had expressed a perfectly reasonable wish, like wanting a burger for lunch. “Or journalism? Do you want to write for newspapers or magazines?”

  “I want to write books,” said Jo, and wondered how long it had been since she’d given voice to that dream. She’d told Lynnette, but had Lynnette believed her? “Maybe for children. When my sister and I were little, I used to make up stories for her.” Jo looked down at Shelley, gathering her courage. “Hey. Do you want to come to my dorm room and listen to some records?” She could feel her heart beating, body thrumming with an excitement that she couldn’t ascribe to simply making a new friend. “Or, if you’ve got homework to do . . .”

  “Music,” Shelley said, and smiled up at Jo. “Music sounds good.”

  * * *

  The cinder-block walls in Jo’s dorm room were the pinkish-tan of a Band-Aid, and there was barely space for a twin bed, a dresser, and a desk with bookshelves above it. As she opened the door Jo was overwhelmingly aware of how small the space was; how close to Shelley she would be.

  “Welcome,” she said, as Shelley sashayed her way inside. A Michigan pennant
, a calendar, and a red, white, and blue Kennedy poster with the slogan LEADERSHIP FOR THE ’60S hung on the wall. Jo sat on the bed before deciding it was too suggestive, so she got up and strolled casually across the room to take a seat at her desk.

  “Dorms,” Shelley murmured, looking around. With her lipsticked pout and her cheeks still pink from the walk, Shelley looked delicious. “I haven’t been in one in forever.” Shelley knelt gracefully and flipped through Jo’s albums, stacked in a plastic crate, as Jo cringed, holding her breath, hoping that her taste in music was up to Shelley’s standards, only exhaling when Shelley selected a 45 of “Be My Baby.” She showed it to Jo, eyebrows raised. “Okay?”

  Jo nodded. Shelley slipped the record out of its paper sleeve and lifted the phonograph’s needle. When the song began, she took a seat on Jo’s bed, toeing off her boots and letting them fall to the floor. She looked up at Jo from underneath the dark fringe of her lashes. “Okay if I smoke?”

  Jo nodded and found the metal peanut-butter lid that she used as an ashtray, on the rare occasion when she had guests. Shelley pulled her cigarettes and her gold lighter from her skirt pocket and went through the ritual of shaking a cigarette loose, tapping it and lighting it. Jo’s mouth felt dry as she watched.

  “I’m glad we went tonight. In spite of the b.s.,” Shelley said. She blew smoke rings toward the ceiling, a group of three that descended in size as they went: large, medium, small. Jo wondered how much practice it took to become that proficient a smoker.

  “So how about you?” Jo asked.

  Shelley laughed a musical laugh. “Oh, Lord, please don’t ask what I want to be when I grow up. It changes every week. Every day. I might just stay in college forever. Just never make up my mind.” She looked at Jo, and again Jo flushed, thrilled and disconcerted by Shelley’s attention. “So how’d you get involved in civil rights stuff?”

  “Well, Kennedy,” Jo said.

  “Of course,” Shelley answered, her eyes still fixed on Jo. “Only you’ve been at it awhile.”

  “Since high school,” Jo replied. “We had a cleaning lady when I was a girl. Her name was Mae, and her daughter, Frieda, was my friend. My mom didn’t like that we were close, so she fired Mae.” Jo could still remember how she’d felt, coming home to find a stranger in the kitchen, the all-news station on the radio, realizing that her mother had banished Mae and Frieda, and that Jo wouldn’t see them again.

  “So that’s what got you started?” Shelley drew on her cigarette, watching Jo.

  Jo nodded. “I think people should be able to be who they want to be. Be friends with who they want to be friends with. Live where they want to live. How about you?” she asked Shelley. “When was your big epiphany?”

  Shelley looked up at the ceiling, exposing the slim column of her throat. “We have help, too. A woman named Dolores, who lives in and cooks and cleans, and basically raised me and my brothers, and a man named Davis, who drives my father and does yardwork. My parents aren’t cruel to them. They pay them well. It’s more that they treat them like they’re pets.”

  Jo winced, recognizing the truth of what Shelley had said; the way her mother and other women she’d known could be polite, kind, even generous to the women who washed their dishes and cooked their meals and rocked their children to sleep, without ever treating them as entirely human. Shelley got to her feet, looking moody as she stared out the window. “I remember when I was twelve, there was a huge snowstorm. Davis had shoveled the front walk, but not the back. Dolores’s daughter Trish was helping that day—my mother had a bridge party, or a tea for the Hadassah ladies, or something—and when it was time for Trish to go, she went out the back. I remember standing in the kitchen, watching her wading through the snow that came up to her hips and asking my mom why she couldn’t use the front door, and my mother telling me that it wouldn’t look right.” Shelley’s voice was bitter. She blew twin plumes of smoke from her nostrils, before bending over the record player and starting the song again. “The party wasn’t for another hour, so it wasn’t as if there was anyone there to see. The neighbors, maybe. It made me sick.”

  “You’d think the Jews got here and forgot all about the ghettos and the pogroms,” Jo said.

  Shelley rolled her eyes. “My mother’s family’s been here since the 1870s. They’re basically the Pilgrims of the Jews. My mother grew up rich, and now she’s even richer. Which I guess she thinks gives her license to behave like she was raised on a plantation.” Shelley straightened her shoulders and stubbed out her cigarette. “So, I’ll come to this picket. Maybe I’ll get my picture in the paper. God, my parents would die.” She seemed pleased at this thought, smiling as she went back to the bed and pulled her knees to her chest.

  “You don’t get along with your folks?” Jo asked.

  Shelley shook her head decisively. “Leo’s fine, but he’s never home. Davis drives him to work at six in the morning and brings him home at eight at night. He’s extremely busy making a fortune, so he’s not around enough for me to really despise, and Gloria . . .” Shelley curved her fingers, wrapping them around an imaginary glass that she raised to her lips.

  “Oh,” said Jo. Lynnie’s father had been a martini drinker. Mrs. Bobeck would mix up a pitcher of gin and vermouth, and meet him at the door with his first drink, which he’d swallow almost before he’d set his briefcase down. But she hadn’t known anyone with a real drinking problem.

  Shelley tilted her head, flashing Jo her pretty gray eyes. “And how about you?”

  “You mean, do I make my cleaning lady walk through the snow?” Jo wrapped her hand around her own imaginary wineglass. Shelley picked up Jo’s pillow and heaved it at Jo’s head. Laughing, Jo caught it and said, “Okay. My mom and I don’t get along. I’ve got a kid sister who’s a freshman. My father died when I was sixteen.”

  Jo waited for the exclamations of sympathy that typically followed the dead-dad reveal, but Shelley simply said, “Tell me what happened.”

  Jo explained, giving Shelley more of the story than she usually shared. “He wasn’t sick, and he hadn’t been in any pain. But it happened so fast that I never got to say goodbye to him.”

  Shelley nodded. Instead of telling Jo that she was sorry, or worse, that she understood, she knelt down to inspect Jo’s books before returning to her spot on Jo’s bed, and patted the space beside her. “Come sit with me,” she said. When Jo hesitated, she said, “Come on, Stretch. I won’t bite.”

  Jo stood up, still holding her pillow, and crossed the room, a journey that seemed to last at least a week. It was dark outside, the Diag loud with students’ voices, shouts and laughter, and the Ronettes were singing “Baby, I Love You,” and Jo could hear the bedsprings creak when she sat down next to Shelley, who leaned against her, settling her head on Jo’s shoulder as if that was a perfectly normal thing to do. Jo could smell Shelley’s shampoo and hairspray, tobacco and toothpaste and Shelley’s flowery perfume. Jo could barely breathe. She wondered if she dared to move her arm, to drape it over Shelley’s shoulders and pull her close. But what if she’d misread things? What if Shelley screamed, or shoved her away, or called her sick or perverted? Jo was seventy-five percent sure that Shelley wanted Jo’s arm around her, but in that remaining twenty-five percent lay the possibility for embarrassment and expulsion and a lot of trouble with her mother.

  And so, instead of pulling the other girl close, like she wanted, like she thought Shelley wanted, Jo gave Shelley’s shoulder a quick squeeze and got to her feet. Shelley blinked up at her, looking startled. “I should study,” Jo said. “I’ve got a ten-page paper for my lit seminar, and two problem sets for economics.”

  Shelley pushed herself lightly off the bed and crossed the room on her small, stockinged feet. “Want a ride to the picket?” she asked. Jo’s mind was telling her to stay away, not to risk it, that Shelley Finkelbein probably just wanted a comrade in arms and a friend, but her traitorous mouth, denied the kisses it craved, opened up and said the word, “Sure.”

/>   “Cool beans.” Shelley bent over for her boots. “I bet I can get my boyfriend to come, too.”

  In that instant, with that word, Jo felt as wounded as if Shelley had pulled a stiletto out of her suede boot and plunged it into Jo’s heart. Of course Shelley had a boyfriend. What had she expected? Jo’s face felt frozen, her lips were numb, as she made herself ask, “Who’s your boyfriend? Anyone I know?”

  “Denny Ziskin. He’s a great guy. He graduated last year—he’s over in London, he’s a Fulbright Scholar—but he’s home for the holidays.” Shelley explained the strange English term system as Jo stood and listened, feeling as stupid as she’d ever felt in her life. “See you tomorrow, Stretch!” Shelley said, with a wink that made Jo’s heart leap. Then she was gone.

  * * *

  Saturday dawned gray and drizzly, but the rain had tapered off to a fine, freezing mist by the time Shelley parked her car, the legendary Karmann Ghia, with a monogrammed nameplate that read REF by the driver’s door handle.

  “No boyfriend?” Jo had asked when Shelley showed up alone. Shelley answered with a headshake and an enigmatic smile. She and Jo had put their posters in the trunk, and Jo carried them both as they made their way to a group of about fifty people, most of them white, a few of them Negroes, who were walking in a slow circle in front of the store’s front door. “Two, four, six, eight, Woolworth’s needs to integrate!” Doug Brodesseur called through a megaphone. Shelley pressed her lips together, like she was trying not to smile. “Maybe I’ll just watch for a bit,” she said, and so Jo stood by her, at the edge of the sidewalk. Jo’s sign read EQUALITY NOW. Shelley’s read LIBERTY AND JUSTICE FOR ALL.

  “Do these ever get, you know, violent?” Shelley asked as an older white woman in a raincoat, with a plastic bonnet tied under her chin, gave an angry sniff and pushed through the picketers on her way to the revolving door.

  “The only blood I ever saw was when Kathy Coslaw tripped and cut her knee,” Jo replied. A black woman holding a little girl’s hand bent her head and slipped through the picket line next. Shelley’s gaze followed her into the store. “Now what was that about?” she asked.