This is an excerpt from a novel I wrote, Joone*.
*Joone is a term of endearment in Farsi, a word comparative to "dear" in English. Usually tagged onto the end of someones name, for example, Susie Joone...
Joone
Susan Saraf
343 N. Village Avenue
Rockville Centre, NY
11570
Susansaraf@gmail.com
917-861-3162
Women Who Stepped Up
Were Measured As Citizens
Of The Nation, Not As Women...
This Was A People’s War,
And Everyone Was In It
-George Oveta Culp Hobby
* * *
He’s away for the weekend and she considers life without him. She puts their baby, the reason they could never regret their relationship, to bed. It’s seven o’clock and so far business as usual. Jonny only comes home before seven if she doesn’t beg and usually after a long day, alone with the baby, she can’t resist. It’s an element of his psyche he claims to be unaware of; a part of him that rebels against doing anything that could even mildly suggest being controlled. His not coming home before seven pisses her off almost daily. She attributes the trench that has formed between her thirty-one-year-old brows, solely to his lack of punctuality. What his friends and family fondly refer to as Persian Time.
She lay their baby boy, Jakey Wakey Come On and Shakey, short for Jacob, in his crib. Savoring the smell of his powdered cheeks she tucks his pacifier into his pink bow lipped mouth then arranges his teddy bears up by his fair chub rolled neck- so he can cuddle with his friends- the friends of an eleven month old. She brushes his forehead with the tips of her manicured fingers, whispering their nighttime ritual in a soothing voice that works for both of them: comforting him while making her feel creative, like what she’s heard it means to be a good mother. Unconsciously (but almost everything she does these days is unconscious) improvising off of a popular children’s book, “Good night trees, good night leaves, good night grasshoppers, good night penguins, good night Nana, good night Papa, good night Sahroya Joone, Bubby Joone…,” she hopes the words will work him to sleep.
Slipping out of the nursery she closes the door behind her. She listens to the house. She listens to her body. She’s listening to hear if she feels the least bit alone. She doesn’t. She will continue to test herself like this throughout the long weekend, but is it valid? Can you discover if you can live without someone when you know they are coming back? Of course she always wondered what her life would be like without this one or that one, but now there were other people to consider, other lives besides the pair of them to be directly effected. One had to be certain it wasn’t a matter of whimsy, a reflection of mood, that there was no bending of the circumstances to fit either.
The heats coming up through the radiators from the basement; they live in an old colonial farmhouse on Long Island bought from the children of the man who built it with his own hands nearly a century ago. It is a much smaller version of the one she grew up in twenty five miles away, before she lived in an apartment alone in New York City.
The sound of steam and the clacking of the pipes feel as warm and comforting as a bowl of mashed potatoes, it smells as good too. Walking down the stairs she holds the metal railing with her left hand; it feels cool. She’s afraid she might snag her palm on a ragged piece of metal on the banister, even though the thought is irrational. The railing is original to the house, smoothed by use for over 9o years. Still, she pulls her hand away. When she reaches the landing and turns into the dining room she checks the thermostat out of habit. She’s always policing Jonny, making sure he doesn’t sneak it up a degree and waste money on heat when he could put on a sweater. It feels good to check the thermostat; she turns it up one degree because she can, because Jonny won’t see her being a hypocrite.
The kitchen is in front of her, looming like an unpaid bill. What should she make for dinner, for herself? Opening the refrigerator door she is stricken by the waft of dill and kebab and how easily she forgot that her in-laws had brought it over just hours before. She is sickened by the smells, more from the idea of being dependent on her in-laws then the actual herbs and spices used to marinate the meats. Instead of seeing the free home cooked and delivered meal as a gift, the idea that as a grown adult, a mother and a wife, her mother in law is asserting her food into their refrigerator, makes her feel suffocated. She decides on a glass of Chardonnay, a baguette slathered in butter, sprinkled with Sea salt and a Vicodin. She brings her party for one into the den and sets it on a nesting table; she sits on the couch resting her feet on another nesting table, the next size down. She can smell the cold air outside coming in from a drafty window like a vicious rumor. She pulls the curtains over the draft. There must be three feet of snow already. She feels decadent and content and indulgent sitting in front of the TV. She turns to the home improvement channel, on it the image of an exceptionally good-and-young looking elderly couple talking about how often he pleases who is meant to be his gorgeous albeit post-menopausal wife. Sarah can’t remember the last time she was pleased, at least by another person.
She looks at the snow falling outside the French doors Jonny installed by himself last spring. She was so proud of him then, they were proud of each other. She herself bragged to anybody who’d listen, calling him by the pet name she created, “Did you see our French doors? Shaz did it all by himself! Saved us a ton and it looks like a real guy did it.” They laughed together whenever she said that, “a real guy”, it sounded backhanded but she didn’t mean it that way. The right word would have been professional Other than that, she was weary of overselling her husband, showing off- a lot of women weren’t so fortunate. They have to pay out for that kind of work and she didn’t like to court jealousy.
She thinks to herself, Jake is sound asleep and I am trapped inside with my wine, bread, butter, salt and TV, waiting for my Vikey Rikey to kick in. This is too good to be true. She checks in to see if she misses her husband yet. Nope. In fact she begins to think they should do this more often, plan two or three trips apart a year, weekends away to collect themselves, remember who they were before they merged (collided?) into one. She turns on the country music channel to stir something up. Someone named Conway Twitty is singing about Linda being on his mind while he’s sleeping next to his wife, whom she gathers is not named Linda. It’s a good song- he’s such a dog! She switches over to the Classic Rock channel, more her speed. Honky Tonk Woman plays, she can remember singing it in a bar in San Francisco ten years ago, maybe Grant and Green was the name of the bar, in a boozy haze of misplaced dreams she stepped up to the microphone and joined the band in song, she thought maybe she’d be discovered, this millenium’s version of a female Jim Morrison, but it turns out all she could do was drink like him. This makes her miss those days, but not Jonny. She tells herself to enjoy the present- the decadent, contented, indulgent, feet up on the nesting table, butter spread on a French baguette sprinkled with sea salt washed down with a glass of chardonnay, baby sleeping peacefully, man finally being away after three years, self-gratifying present.
If only our minds did what we tell them to before our feelings have a vote.
Instead she has a second thought. Drinking her wine, the drug kicking in, she thinks, “This would be even better with a cigarette.” Before she runs the thought through to its inevitable dangerous conclusion, she finds herself with her coat on walking out the front door. She is walking into town to buy a pack of cigarettes. She is walking away from her sleeping infant, who lay sleeping alone, helpless in his crib. She is walking high on alcohol, Vicodin and the idea of freedom.
****
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