It’s a Sunday and Allison doesn’t have to work, so she takes Little Jeff to the movies. It’s where she and Jeff went on their first date, one of the few places where she can be reasonably sure she won’t have to talk for at least two hours. They watch a comedy that Allison swears she’s seen before, even though the ticket price assures her it’s a new release. During the beginning of the movie, Little Jeff sits beside her, his eyes fixed on the screen and his hand making a perpetual motion from the popcorn bucket to his mouth and back again. He chomps loudly, irritating her, but before she can say anything he finishes eating, then reaches over and holds her hand, his small fingers cool and comfortable and reassuring in hers.
After the movie, Allison drives them to the chain restaurant closest to the theater. This is where she and Jeff went after their first movie together. She sits across from Little Jeff without saying anything, both of them smiling a bit too much while she tries not to embarrass herself by making a mess of her food. By the time Allison gets home, she’s sure this has been the best day she’s had in months. All weirdness aside, she’s happy, and that’s something.
In the apartment, Little Jeff strips to his underwear and climbs into bed, a development Allison isn’t comfortable with. She doesn’t know what to say, so she goes to sleep on the couch. She thinks again about her first date with Jeff, how she wanted to sleep with him but didn’t want him to think badly about her. She wonders what Jeff thought that night. She wonders what Little Jeff is thinking right now.
The next day at work, Allison is supposed to be proofreading the newest edition of a calculus textbook, but there’s no way she can concentrate. What she does instead is search the internet: Doppelganger. Clone. Homunculus. She follows the links from one site to the next, trying to find a description that at least approximates the person in her living room.
What she finds is nothing very useful.
She opens a new document and types CHARACTERISTICS OF LITTLE JEFF then makes a list: Smoker. Doesn’t like health food. Chews with his mouth open. Watches too much television. Doesn’t put his clothes in the hamper.
It doesn’t take her long to recognize the pattern, to see that what Little Jeff is made of is all that she made her first Jeff quit or change or give up. She’s lost her boyfriend and gained all the things she hated about him, and yet she wishes she could be home instead of at work. She thinks about calling Jeff but she knows she’ll sound crazy, so she calls her apartment instead.
Little Jeff answers on the third ring but doesn’t speak. Allison says, I just called to make sure you’re okay.
Allison doesn’t know what to say next, what she expected to happen. She holds the phone to her ear a little longer, listening to Little Jeff breathe, and then she says goodbye and hangs up the phone. She decides that on the way home she’ll pick up a bucket of fried chicken and some mashed potatoes. Once upon a time, it was Jeff’s favorite food.
Allison once again gets used to dirty clothes on the floor, socks under the coffee table, skid-marked underwear kicked beside the tub. After a week, she’s used to the fact that even though she works all day she’s still going to have to do the dishes when she comes home. Ditto for cooking dinner, for doing laundry, for making sure the rent gets paid on time.
The next cable bill that comes, she’s furious at the seven dollars and ninety-nine cents she’s been billed for a porno. She charges into the living room with the bill clenched in her hand, but then she remembers how she freaked out when Jeff did the same thing, thinking he wouldn’t get caught, and how her yelling didn’t do either of them any good.
During this same time period, she comes to understand that it’s not only the bad habits Jeff quit that make up Little Jeff. There are also qualities that Allison forgot she even missed, because they’ve been gone so long or because they disappeared from her and Jeff’s relationship without announcing their departure. She notices the long absence of these traits only when they reemerge: Little Jeff writes poems on the backs of take out receipts and on yellow sticky notes, just like Jeff used to do. She finds them in odd places, as if Little Jeff doesn’t understand that it might be more romantic to put them on her side of the bed or on her nightstand. She finds a haiku—freezer door left open / letting out the stark cold air / I am apology—taped to a box of her tampons, then free verse tucked into the toes of her galoshes. The poems aren’t good exactly, but she takes them from their hiding places and puts them in the scrapbook where she kept Jeff’s poems, then, unsure if she should treat them as two separate authors, she removes them and starts a new collection. These new poems are written by someone who is like Jeff but is not him, unless she counts the leavings of a body as part of a person. Unless she counts the dead skin cells ground into her carpet or the sweat soaked permanently into the mattress, the one lone hair stuck in the drain of their shower because she is too lazy to dislodge it. She could count these things as Jeff but doesn’t, and if these things are not Jeff, then neither is this other person.
The first time she has sex with Little Jeff is the best sex she’s had in a year. What Little Jeff knows about her is what Jeff used to know, back when he cared more about her happiness than his own. Afterward, with Little Jeff curled against her longer body, she recognizes this is unfair, but she thinks it again anyway. She has always wondered why her friends are constantly falling into bed with their ex-boyfriends and now she understands. It is good to be known, to have your likes and dislikes already clear before the act even begins.
Three months after Jeff moves out, Allison is still learning to take the good with the bad, to put up with the boogers stuck to her furniture if it means she gets poems tucked in her purse. She hates that Little Jeff smokes so much, but she doesn’t ask him to quit. She doesn’t ask him to change anything, at first because she doesn’t want to drive him away and then later because she is afraid of what will happen to whatever he quits.
Whatever she and Little Jeff have, it may end one day, and then what? What if another, smaller version comes to live with her?
This time, she’ll let her man do whatever he wants, be whoever he needs to be, and she’ll decide whether to stay or go based on who he is, not who she wants him to be.
Together, they go to other places that Jeff and Allison went when they were new. They go to an art museum that Allison has wanted to see forever, and they go to a movie that Little Jeff picks out of the paper, some remake of an eighties cartoon that Allison never watched and still doesn’t like. They go to the botanical gardens, a place people only go when they start dating or when they get married or when they are a thousand years old. Allison is glad that Little Jeff has so much facial hair or else she would have to worry that people would think she was letting her kid smoke. As it is, they hold hands and kiss and she learns to stop caring what other people think they see. She has often made choices because someone else told her she should, because she read about a new diet in a magazine or because her friends were all doing the same. Little Jeff is everything she took from Jeff by doing this, and it’s enough for her to see she doesn’t want to be that way ever again.
One day, Allison comes home from work with an armload of groceries, thrilled at the truly decadent meal she’s making for the two of them for dinner. Nowhere in her bags is any organic fruit or wheatgrass or any labels with the words high-fiber on them. Instead, she’s cooking footlong coney dogs, with chili out of a can and onions out of a plastic bag. She’s frying French fries and making root beer floats. She knows eating this is going to make her sick, but she also knows it’s going to make Little Jeff happy.