“Nah, that’s OK,” said Heffie. “I’ll do them some other time.” She slid open the glass door to the refrigerated deli case and grabbed a lone cheese curd, the squiggly shape and bright marigold color of it like a piece from a children’s game. She popped it into her mouth. “You ever been surfing?” she asked Jane.
“Surfing?” Jane repeated incredulously. She would never figure out how Heffie came up with the questions she did.
“Yeah. Surfing. You know — some people have done it. The fiberglass board that you stand on in the water and then a wave comes along?” Heffie’s face was a snowy moon of things never done.
Jane looked away. “Once a couple of summers ago I went water-skiing on a lake,” she said. “In Oregon.” Her lover, the daredevil toymaker, had liked to do things like that. “Khem on, Jane,” he had said to her. “You only live at once.” Which seemed to her all the more reason to be careful, to take it easy, to have an ordinary life. She didn’t like to do things where the trick was to not die.
“Water-skiing, poohf,” said Heffie. “That’s nothing like surfing. There’s not the waves, the risk.” Jane looked up from her clipboard and watched as Heffie waddled away, the tops of her feet swelling out over the straps of her shoes like dough. Heffie walked over to the Swiss nut rolls, put a fist down lightly on top, and gazed off.
“CARE TO TRY some of our horseradish cheddar today?” Jane smiled and held out the tray. She had placed little teaspoonfuls of spread on some sickly-looking rice crackers, and now she held them out to people like a caterer with the hors d’oeuvres at a fancy party. Horses’ douvers, her mother used to call them, and for years Jane had had her own idea about what a douver was. “Care to try a free sample of our horseradish cheddar spread, on special today?” At least it wasn’t spraying perfume at people. Last month she had met the girl who did that next door at Marshall Field’s. The girl, who was from Florida originally, said to her, “Sometimes you aim for the eyes. It’s not always an accident.” Malls, Jane knew, were full of salesgirls with stories. Broken hearts, boyfriends in jail. Once last week two ten-year-old girls, one pudgy, one thin, had come up to Jane, selling chocolate bars. They looked at her as if she were just a taller version of themselves, someone they might turn into when they grew up. “Will you buy a chocolate bar?” they asked her, staring at her samples. Jane offered them a cracker with a big clump of spread, but they politely declined.
“Well, what kind of chocolate bars are you selling?”
“Almond or crisp.” The pudgy girl, wearing a purple sweatshirt and lavender corduroys, clutched a worn-out paper bag to her chest.
“Is this for the Girl Scouts?” asked Jane.
The girls looked at each other. “No, it’s for my brother,” said the pudgy one. Her friend slapped her on the arm.
“It’s for your brother’s team,” the friend hissed.
“Yeah,” said the girl, and Jane bought a crispy bar and talked them into a sample after all. Which they took with a slight grimace. “D’you got a husband that drives a truck?” asked the one in purple.
“Yeah,” said the other. “Do you?” And when Jane shook her head, they frowned and went away.
A man in a blue sweater like one her father used to wear stopped and gently plucked a cracker from her tray. “How much?” he asked, and she was about to say, “A million dollars,” when she heard someone down the mall corridor call her name.
“Jane Konwicki! How are you?” A woman about Jane’s age, wearing a bright-red fall suit, strode up to her and kissed her on the cheek. The man in the blue sweater like her father’s slipped away. Jane looked at the woman in the red suit and for a minute didn’t know who she was. But the woman’s animated features all stopped for a moment and fell into place, and Jane realized it was Bridey, a friend from over fifteen years ago, who used to sit next to her in high school chorus. It was curious how people, when they stood still and you just looked, never really changed that much. No matter how the fashions swirled about a girl, the adult she became, with different fashions swirling about her, still contained the same girl. All of Bridey’s ages — the child, the old woman — were there on her face. It was like an open bird feeder where every year of her, the past and the future, had come to feed.
“Bridey, you look great. What have you been up to?” It seemed a ridiculous question to ask of someone you hadn’t seen since high school, but there it was.
“Well, last year I fell madly in love,” Bridey said with great pride. This clearly was on the top of her list, and her voice suggested it was a long list. “And we got married, and we moved back to town after roughing it on the South Side of Chicago since forever. It’s great to be back here, I can tell you.” Bridey helped herself to a cheddar sample and then another one. The cheese in her mouth stuck between her front teeth in a pasty, yellowish mortar, and when she swallowed and smiled back at Jane, well, again, there it was, like something unfortunate but necessary.
“You seem so … happy,” said Jane. Heffie was shuffling around noisily in the shop behind her.
“Oh, I am. I keep running into people from school, and it’s just so much fun. In fact, Jane, you should come with me this evening. You know what I’m going to do?”
“What?” Jane glanced back over her shoulder and saw Heffie testing the spreads in the deli case with her finger. She would stick her finger in deep and then lick it slowly like an ice cream.
“Oh,” said Bridey in a hushed and worried tone. “Is that a customer or an employee?”
“Employee,” said Jane.
“At any rate, I’m going to try out for Community Chorus,” continued Bridey. “It’s part of my new program. I’m learning German—”
“Learning German?” Jane interrupted.
“—taking a cooking class, and I’m going to get back into choral singing.”
“You were always a good singer,” said Jane. Bridey had often gotten solos.
“Ach! My voice has gone to pot, but I don’t care. Why don’t you come with me? We could audition together. The auditions aren’t supposed to be that hard.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Jane, though the thought of singing again in a chorus suddenly excited her. That huge sound flying out over an audience, like a migration of birds, like a million balloons! But the idea of an audition was terrifying. What if she didn’t get in? How could she ever open her mouth again to sing, even all by herself at home? How would her own voice not mortify her on the way to work in the morning, when she listened to the radio. Everything would be ruined. Songs would stick in her throat like moths. She would listen to nothing but news, and when she got to work she would be quiet and sad.
“Listen,” said Bridey, “I’m terrible. Truly.”
“No, you’re not. Let me hear you sing something,” said Jane.
Bridey looked at her quizzically, took another horseradish cheddar sample, and chewed. “What do you mean? God, these are good.”
“I mean just something little. I want to know what you mean by terrible. Cuz I’m terrible. Here. I’ll get you started. Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream …”
“Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,” continued Bridey rather plainly. Jane wondered whether she was holding back. “Life is but a dream.” Bridey looked at Jane a little unhappily. “See, I told you I was bad.”
“You’re much better than I am,” said Jane.
“Where are you living now?” Bridey pulled at the red jacket of her suit and looked around the mall.