Jules comes back into the living room in her old tartan bathrobe, at least two sizes too small at this point, drying her hair. “We going?”
“Going?”
“Yeah.”
“Where?”
“You told me you’d take me back-to-school shopping.”
“When?”
“Like fucking today, Ma.”
“You doing the buying?”
“Ma, come on, don’t fuck with me.”
“I’m not. You notice we don’t have a stove?”
“Who gives a shit? You never cook.”
That gets Mary Pat off the couch with blood in her eyes. “I never fucking cook?”
“Not lately.”
“Because the gas was turned off.”
“Well, whose fault was that?”
“Get a fucking job before I break your head in,” Mary Pat says, “talking to me like that.”
“I have a job.”
“Part-time don’t count, honey. Part-time don’t make the rent.”
“Or keep the stove working, apparently.”
“I will knock you into fucking next week, I swear to Christ.”
Jules raises her fists and dances back and forth in her ridiculous robe like a boxer in the ring. Smiling big.
Mary Pat bursts out laughing in spite of herself. “Put those hands down before your punch your own head, end up talking funny the rest of your life.”
Jules, laughing through her teeth, shoots her the bird with both hands, still doing the ridiculous dance in the ridiculous robe. “Robell’s, then.”
“I got no money.”
Jules stops dancing. Puts the towel back over her head. “You got some. You might not have Boston Gas bill money, but you got Robell’s money.”
“No,” Mary Pat says. “I do not.”
“I’m gonna go to the spearchucker school looking poorer than them?” Her eyes well, and she runs the towel violently over her head to make the tears get no further. “Ma, please?”
Mary Pat imagines her there on day one, this trembly white girl and her big brown eyes.
“I got a few bucks,” Mary Pat manages.
Jules drops into a crouch of gratitude. “Thank you.”
“But you gotta help me knock on a bunch of doors first.”
“Fuckin’ what now?” Jules says.
They start in the Heights. Knock on all the doors that circle the park and the monument. A lot of people aren’t home (or assume she and Jules are Christian Scientists spreading “gospel” so pretend not to be), but plenty are. And few need converting. They provide the outrage, the righteousness, the umbrage. They’ll be there on Friday.
“Bet your ass we will,” an old lady with a walker and smoker’s breath tells them. “Bet your sweet ass.”
The sun’s in descent by the time they finish. Not setting so much as dipping into the brown ribbons of smoke in a constant drift from the power plant at the end of West Broadway. Mary Pat takes Jules to Robell’s and they pick out a notebook, a four-pack of pens, a blue nylon school bag, a pair of jeans with wide flares at the bottom but which run high on the hips. Then Jules, in the groove of it all finally, goes with her mother to Finast, where Mary Pat buys a TV dinner for herself. When she asks what Jules wants for dinner, Jules reminds her she’s going out with Rum. They move through the checkout line with one TV dinner and one National Enquirer, Mary Pat thinking she may as well have Lonely, Aging, and Pudgy plastered to her forehead.
On the walk home, Jules, out of the blue, says, “You ever wonder if there’s some different place?”
Mary Pat says, “What now?”
Jules steps off the curb to avoid a pile of ants swarming what looks like a broken egg. She pivots around a young tree before stepping back up on the sidewalk. “You just, you know, you ever have the feeling that things are supposed to be one way but they’re not? And you don’t know why because you’ve never known, like, anything but what you see? And what you see is, you know” — she waves at Old Colony Avenue — “this?” She looks at her mother and cants a bit on the uneven sidewalk so they won’t collide. “But you know, right?”
“Know what?”
“Know it’s not what you were meant for.” Jules taps the space between her breasts. “In here.”
“Well, sweetie,” her mother says, with no fucking idea what she’s on about, “what were you meant for?”
“I’m not saying it that way.”
“What way?”
“The way you’re saying it.”
“Then how’re you saying it?”
“I’m just trying to say I don’t understand why I don’t feel the way other people seem to feel.”
“About what?”
“About everything. Anything.” Her daughter raises her hands. “Fuck!”
“What?” Mary Pat wants to know. “What?”
Jules waves her hand at the world. “Ma, I just... It’s like... Okay, okay.” She stops and props a foot up on the base of a rusted BPD callbox. Her voice falls to a whisper. “I don’t understand why things are what they are.”
“You mean school? You mean busing?”
“What? No. I mean, yes. Kind of. I mean, I don’t understand where we go.”
Is she talking about Noel? “You mean when we die?”
“Then, yeah. But, you know, when we... forget about it.”
“No, tell me.”
“No.”
“Please.”
Her daughter looks her right in the eyes — an absolute rarity since her first menstrual cycle six years ago — and her gaze is hopeless and yearning in the same breath. For a moment, Mary Pat sees herself in the gaze... but what self? Which Mary Pat? How long since she yearned? How long since she dared believe something so foolish as the idea that someone anywhere has the answers to questions she can’t even put into words?
Jules looks away, bites her lip, a habit of hers when she’s fighting back tears. “I mean, where do we go, Ma? Next week, next year? Like, what’s the fucking,” she sputters, “what’s the — Why are we doing this?”
“Doing what?”
“Walking around, shopping, getting up, going to bed, getting up again? What are we trying to, you know, like, achieve?”
Mary Pat wants to give her daughter one of those shots they give tigers to knock them out. What the fuck is she on about? “Are you PMSing?” she asks.
Jules hucks out a liquid chuckle. “No, Ma. Definitely no.”
“So what?” She takes her daughter’s hands in hers. “Jules, I’m here. What?” She kneads her daughter’s palms with her thumbs the way she always did when she was feverish as a child.
Jules gives her a smile that’s sad and knowing. But knowing of what? She says, “Ma.”
“Yes?”
“I’m okay.”
“You don’t sound it.”
“No, I am.”
“No, you’re not.”
“I’m just...”
“What?”
“Tired,” her daughter says.
“Of what?”
Jules bites the inside of her cheek, an old habit, and looks out at the avenue.
Mary Pat continues kneading her daughter’s palms. “Tired of what?”
Jules looks her in the eyes. “Lies.”
“Is Rum hurting you? Is he fucking lying to you?”
“No, Ma. No.”
“Then who?”
“No one.”
“You just said.”
“I said I was tired.”
“Tired of lies.”
“No, I just said that to shut you up.”