It came as almost a relief when Melinda’s husband told her that he wanted the operation. At first, all she could think of was the thing itself — as pink and ugly and tender as a face crumpled from crying — and how she would never have to see it again. She thought not of what would replace it but only of its absence, a blank space, missingness, like the infinite and mysterious black hole space she had seen on “NOVA.”
Melinda resolved her features into a look of utter surprise as Jonas, coached in his words no doubt by that Richmond therapist, carefully unspooled his case like the most ordinary and obvious yarn.
“So what you’re saying,” Melinda repeated, slowly, not looking at her husband. They were sitting in bed on a Sunday morning. Yellow sunlight streamed onto the unread newspaper. “What you’re saying is you’ve never felt right … down there.”
Jonas explained, patiently, that it was not about down there — it was less about that than about his whole body not feeling right. Could Melinda imagine what it would feel like to have never felt like a girl? Like a woman? If every time she put on her cheerleading uniform she felt more like putting on football pads, cleats, a helmet?
“No,” Melinda said flatly. She could not. She had coached state championship cheerleading teams eight of the last fifteen years, hot-rolled her hair every morning of her life past age thirteen, carried twenty-odd shades of eye shadow in her purse. But she had been thinking lately that if anything ever happened to Jonas she would never seek another man’s company, less out of loyalty to Jonas than out of mere tiredness.
He was already taking the hormones, he told her. Already he could feel changes in his body, a softening of something, coarse hair turning fine as silk.
“Tell me about how you felt, in that moment.” Melinda had agreed to see Jonas’s therapist in private sessions, to help ease the transition. Seeing a therapist made her feel sort of stupid, but she agreed with Jonas that it was good to know what she was in for.
Melinda shrugged, afraid to say too much, of sounding country or simple. She was also afraid she might start crying for no reason, though she felt fine. That happened sometimes at the gynecologist’s. The therapist had long brown hair pulled into a low and glossy ponytail, white-white teeth. Under other circumstances, Melinda might have felt jealous that her husband was spending so much alone time with such a smart and attractive woman.
“Jonas says you are taking it quite well. That you are unbelievably supportive, in fact.”
Melinda smiled.
“Did you feel that this was somehow inevitable?”
Melinda thought for a minute, then said, “No. I mean, I have always known that Jonas was sort of different. The quiet type. My first husband was loud.” She looked up, waiting for the therapist to say something, but she was only waiting, expectant, so Melinda continued.
“I think partly I took it so well because I’d just come home from my sister’s. Her husband bosses her so much. Get-me-a-beer. Where’s-my-pants. Et cetera.”
She said, in a quieter voice, “And my last husband. My daughter’s daddy. He drank. And he cheated.”
“But Jonas has been a faithful husband for ten years,” the therapist said. “Is that not right?”
“No, it is.”
“Then there is no reason to believe …”
“Well, it isn’t that, not really. It’s more the other thing. I’m tired of being bossed by men. And I’m used to taking things as they come.”
The therapist nodded with a concerned and gentle frown, but Melinda thought she did not understand. She did not look like she had ever been bossed by men.
Before Melinda left — on the hour to the minute, she noticed — the therapist asked her in a delicate way if she had questions, of any kind, about the process. The procedures. Melinda shook her head vehemently. She did have questions, primarily about what would be expected in the bedroom, and about down there, but she was too shy to ask them. She could not help thinking, as she left, that if the therapist had been truly good and smart, as Jonas said, she would have known that and made her ask them anyway.
* * *
Telling Jessica, her daughter, was the hardest part. For one thing, Jonas had been the primary daddy that Jessica had known, past age ten, and Melinda thought that this was probably the hardest news you could hear about a father. It didn’t seem right, Melinda said, for Jonas to tell her. She would do it herself, just as she had talked to Jessie about her period and boys and sex. This fell into that category, she felt. Jonas had done the normal dad things — he’d taught her to drive, had chaperoned dances at the high school. Had told Jessie’s dates to have her home by eleven, then twelve as she got older. He had even walked her down the aisle, which was possibly the proudest moment in Melinda’s life. It had been Jessie’s choice to give him that honor, and Melinda had been the one to choose Jonas.
Melinda did not want to tell anyone else first, and she could not imagine not keeping such an important piece of news a secret. When it was not competition season, she spent half her mornings on the telephone, and the person she talked to most was Jessica. She called her when she found a funny piece of news in the local paper, and when she was feeling down, and when she had heard gossip about the neighbors. She’d told her when Jonas had irritable bowel syndrome and had to sit on that funny, doughnut-shaped pillow for a month. Jessie was the first to know anything Melinda knew.
Later, Melinda would wish she had told Jessie in a more properly formal way than how she did it, over the phone, spooning sliced peaches onto a pan of chicken. It just came out:
“Jonas is getting an operation to become a woman. A sex change.”
She had hoped that telling Jessie would finally give her someone to talk to about it, someone to be concerned about her, but what she heard from the other end of the line was Jessie’s phone clattering to the floor.
It took several calls before she would answer again, and by then she was crying, and she was the one who had to be consoled.
“But what will people think, Mama?”
Melinda shrugged, licking peach syrup from her fingers. “This county has had to get used to a lot of things,” she said. There was the Arab-looking country store owner who’d married the sixteen-year-old and set her up working the counter. Countless teen pregnancies, a few of them from Melinda’s own cheering squads. An accounting scandal with the county supervisors. A professor who moved here from Richmond and flew a rainbow flag. Her best friend had her ski boat sunk by a jealous ex-husband. The way Melinda saw it, this was a small and superficial change, no more unnatural than the fertility pills Jessica had been taking for six months, the half-dozen fertilized eggs she’d had implanted in her womb. “He still loves me, honey. Just the same as he did.”
“But Kevin’s congregation,” Jessie wailed. “They will not get used to this. Oh, it’s easy for Jonas — he’s retired — but some people still have to work in this town.”
Melinda did not mention that she still worked, and that high school cheerleaders were not known to be the most open-minded bunch. Jessica had married the county’s most popular Baptist church’s self-righteous and smirking youth minister. Neither Melinda nor Jonas liked him much, though Jonas wouldn’t say so, but it had been clear all along that Jessica was smitten. Melinda wanted to explain something about that, how when you loved someone it didn’t matter what other people thought, but on reflection she realized that wasn’t it, exactly. There was something more complicated that she herself barely understood, and expecting a twenty-two-year-old to understand was probably pointless. It was more like, you come into this world alone, and you go out alone, but it wasn’t exactly that either.
“Well, I wish you wouldn’t take it so hard,” Melinda said. “But I understand why you are. It was a shock to me too.”
She could hear Jessie sniffling. Hopefully, she asked, “Do you want me to come over?”
“No,” Jessie said in a calmer voice. “The doctor says I should not get upset. He says stress is the enemy of conception.”
“All right, sweetie.” Melinda felt her own tears starting, tipped her head back. You mustn’t cry, she told herself. Think of your grandchildren.
“He says I should isolate myself from my stress factors,” Jessica said ominously. Melinda could not help wondering how such a smart girl could have married a man who put vanity plates on his truck.
REV KEV, they said.
Part Two
A sex change is not an overnight thing, Melinda learned. First there are months of hormone therapy, coaxing the body into its new self through small and incremental changes, small surgeries leading up to the big one. Before you even have one surgery there is a period of dress-up, drag they called it, so you get used to the feeling. Of being different. Of being looked at.
The first time Jonas went out in drag they took the doctor’s sensible advice and made it an out-of-town and not overly formal or overly long appearance, shopping for pillow shams at the Ashland Walmart and dinner at the Ashland Ponderosa. Melinda bought Jonas a smart new mint-green pantsuit — none of her clothes would fit him — helped him style the ash-blond wig he’d bought, and powdered his face and eyelids and even gave him a touch of blush and lip gloss. She was careful not to overdo it.
When she was finished he looked, rather as she expected, like an older, mannish woman. She realized, rubbing a bit of thick gloss away from his bottom lip, that she had probably never touched him there, not with her fingertips, never touched his soft and crepey eyelids, or the high sharp ridge of his cheekbones.
“Am I beautiful yet?” he asked, his voice still manly, husky. He laughed, as if to dismiss the notion.
“You’ll do,” she said.
“You do the talking, okay?” he asked in a whisper voice, on their way out. Melinda nodded. She even drove.
Melinda did not think she’d had so much fun in years. First, shopping at Walmart, Jonas meek beside her in the brightly lit aisles. With a new and keen interest, he watched her finger the fabrics, place flowered pattern next to solid rug or curtain material, and did not once check his watch. He wasn’t wearing a watch; his watch was a man’s. No one seemed to notice his large, still-hairy hands, or his Adam’s apple; Melinda told her sister later that was because women from Caroline County were so damn ugly.
At dinner, he ate slowly, carefully, cutting his steak and bringing it right to his mouth in the continental style. Melinda was put in mind of a delicate, long-lost aunt come to visit, or a sister you didn’t have to compete with in looks. She smiled at him across the table, but they didn’t speak. They spent an entire hour and fifteen minutes at the Ponderosa, lingering over black coffee for Jonas and an ice-cream sundae for Melinda. Normally, Jonas would raise his finger for the check before she’d taken her last bite. To save time, he always said.
Time for what? She used to wonder. At a table across from them, new parents took turns feeding their baby. She thought of Jessica and Kevin, said a little, useless prayer for a grandchild. She was sure it was prayed for plenty.
Later, in the car, she asked him what he wanted to be called. Joanie?
“Joan, I think,” he said. He put his hand over hers, which rested on the gearshift, and patted it. Even his palm felt softer to Melinda. “You can call me Jonas still, Melinda. I don’t have to always—”
She gave him her sweet-martyr look. “Like I told your therapist, I am used to taking things as they come.” When in bed he reached for her, she kissed him chastely, then turned over.
“But clearly, you would prefer he stay a man,” her sister Pauline said over the telephone.
“Well,” said Melinda. “It’s not up to me.”
“But secretly.”
“I want Jonas to be happy.” Melinda had come out with Jonas’s news to just about everyone who mattered, and she had never in her life been told so many times how “amazing” and “strong” she was. She’d even told her cheering squad, carefully explaining that it didn’t mean Jonas was gay.
Melinda explained to Pauline that Jonas — Joan — was like a new person. He was willing to go out more, and he laughed and smiled more than he ever had. He spent less time alone. He cooked, though not well. He wanted to learn new things. Could she imagine a man who did things with you not because he had to but because he wanted to?
“It sounds like what you’re saying,” Pauline said snippily, “is that we should hope all our husbands get a sex change.”
Melinda tried again: Did she remember what it was like to raise a child when it was very young? How you could teach them one thing, like how to use a flour sifter, and it kept them entertained for hours? How every day they learned something new, and just learning it delighted them?
It was sort of, a little bit, like that.
“Well, I still don’t think I’d want Roland getting his thing chopped off.”
Vulgar, Melinda thought. Her sister was so vulgar.
* * *
“The thing that is still on my mind,” Melinda began, a little too quick and businesslike, it felt, “is that my daughter is not speaking to us, exactly.”
The therapist nodded, leaned back in her chair. “That’s normal, under the circumstances.”
“Well, it does not feel normal to me,” Melinda said. She had dressed up more for this visit, thinking a more powerful presence would exact better advice from this woman.
She had what she called high hair, the kind of hair that she required her girls to wear for competition. It looked good on the field. It made people remember you.
“I talk to my daughter every day,” Melinda said proudly.
“Every day,” the therapist repeated. “That is quite a schedule.”
Melinda did not expect this woman to understand or come from a place where daughters were their mothers’ best friends, boys their fathers’. She did not want to talk about why that might be a problem, in the therapist’s eyes.
“How does Jonas feel about your daughter’s rejection?”
“He is shy about it,” Melinda said. She explained how it wasn’t Jonas, exactly, who had told her, how Jonas really didn’t like to talk about it to anyone. She told the therapist about Kevin, and how she didn’t think Jonas had ever really cared for him, though of course they wished Jessica well. “I think he wants to just be a woman, a new person, and that’s that. Sometimes I think—”
Melinda looked at the clock, noticed she had seven minutes left.
“—Sometimes I think maybe he is practicing, with us.”
The therapist shook her head, not comprehending. Feeling her eyes begin to sting, Melinda decided quickly to ration the rest of her time to Jessica. “My daughter used to have this amazing memory. Not for things like history and formulas, for math or school — she was honor roll and all, but that wasn’t the amazing part. It was for little details. Like, if you were remembering so-and-so’s wedding, she could tell you exactly what you wore, what everybody wore. It was this talent she had.
“So now, she’s married to this reverend, and she wears sweatpants to the grocery store and goes out without her hair done and lies on her side all day and gives herself injections in the butt. And she won’t talk to me for more than a second now when I call. Says she has to go in this short way.
“I accepted all of that,” she said, her voice breaking. “I accepted it because she was happy.”
The therapist nodded but said nothing. Melinda wanted to say that she was happy now, too, but the words did not come.
Melinda had pictured therapy, before Jonas started going, as a place where you could go and get your embarrassing questions answered. You could say, for example, why did my father drink and whore around, or, why did my uncle abuse me? And the therapist would have an answer. You could say, what does life mean? And he would know what you needed to hear. If you told him your worst and weirdest dreams, he would tell you what they meant. Make you feel better, normal. Why else would it cost so much?
Driving home, air-conditioning cooling her bare arms and blowing back her high hair, Melinda knew what she wished she had asked: How old do you have to be to understand how love works?
Jonas began therapy after suffering a panic attack at work, more than a year before. He had been a trucker, hauling lumber to Chesapeake Paper Co., and one day he pulled over and decided he was having a heart attack. He knelt in the weeds on Route 30 and clutched his chest until the feeling passed, then drove himself and his whole rig to the hospital. When the test results came up clear, the specialist at Tidewater Memorial had referred him to therapy.
And that was that. Melinda wondered if Jonas would have ever made this decision without the therapist leading him there. Another woman, she thought, might be angry with the therapist, angry with Jonas for having a fake heart attack when he was supposed to be working and for taking an early retirement and having something as inconvenient as the mind of a woman inside the body of a man. Surely she would be angry.
Maybe, Melinda thought, turning onto her favorite back road shortcut, they should have a get-together. Not at their house but someone else’s. So that Jessie and Kevin could see how they were accepted by other, normal, reasonably Christian people. It would be sort of like a debutante’s coming out, with Jonas in his modest, schoolmarmish drag so that Kevin and Jessie could see that it wasn’t about blue eye shadow and fishnets and six-inch heels. So they could see that it wasn’t about sex.
Melinda sped up on the straightaway, where she always tried to get the car up to sixty. There was a dip in the road. If you were going fast enough, you lost your stomach in the most pleasant way.
Part Three
Jonas’s voice was steadily growing softer and higher. He spoke in a half-whisper and had become almost neat in his habits, folding his clothes and wiping crumbs from the countertops. It was almost like he knew that he was too big to be a woman and was trying somehow to contain himself, to leave less of his bigness and coarseness behind. Melinda found that she bossed him more, telling him what their plans were for the weekend, what movie she’d like to see. He acquiesced, generally. Doing the laundry, she noticed that even his sweat had a sweeter smell, more feminine. He was plucking his eyebrows now, and using a depilatory on his arms and legs and face. Melinda bought him a special astringent to shrink his pores, and a cold cream that cost twenty dollars a jar.
It had been nearly a month since she’d told Jessica, and she still had not talked to either of them for more than a minute. She’ll come around, Jonas said. Just wait.
But aren’t you sad? Melinda asked. Don’t you miss her?
Of course I do. You can’t make people talk to you.
Meanwhile Jonas had joined a support group in Richmond, and Melinda was tired of waiting. The group met two nights a week next to a tattoo parlor on the Southside, and Jonas would be gone, on those Tuesdays and Thursdays, from four in the afternoon until nine or ten at night. “Sometimes we get a beer afterwards,” he explained.
On the Southside? Melinda asked. She had a big picture of that. There was a separate support group for partners, Jonas said, but Melinda told him she needed to think about next year’s routines, at least for now.
So she stood outside in the backyard in her shorts and T-shirt and did jumps and kicks, listened to her boom box as the sun sank lower and lower behind the water tower. She played old favorites from C & C Music Factory and Janet Jackson and Salt-N-Pepa, jotted notes down on a pad. Doodled her own name in big curvy letters.
When the grass grew too high, making her legs itch, she mowed it. At first she was annoyed that Jonas had neglected the task, but she found that she liked the challenge of starting the motor, liked the feel of pushing and pulling a great weight, of cutting.
And the more she thought about it, the more she liked the term partner. It sounded more democratic, more freeing, than wife.
* * *
They planned the party for a Friday at Pauline’s house. It would be like a tea, with tablecloths spread on the picnic table and ladylike finger sandwiches and jelly jars full of zinnias, and hats and calf-grazing dresses. Melinda worried that Roland might make a scene — he was fine with Jonas, Pauline reported, okay with it at least, but he tended to drink too much at family gatherings, and Kevin and Jessie were teetotaling Baptists. Please, said Melinda. Limit him.
I will try, Pauline said.
It was a delicate balancing act because without Budweiser, Roland was surly. And Jessica made only a halfhearted commitment to show up, but she could not promise that Kevin would make it.
“Please, honey,” Melinda said. “It would mean so much to Jonas.”
Jessica had sighed. She was not the type to make snippy remarks — Is that what you’re calling him still? — but only to judge, silently, to judge and judge. “Okay, Mama, we’ll see.”
Melinda felt sure, despite her sister’s skepticism, that her daughter and son-in-law would come. One time on a radio show she’d heard that a positive attitude and a belief in luck in fact produced positive results. People who felt sure that good things would happen, the argument went, subconsciously made those good things happen. She’d called in for transcripts and had them copied for all the girls on her squad.
When she shared the story with Jessica, around the time of her baby troubles, Jessica had said that maybe it was only that positive people felt more positive because they were better at things to begin with, hence “luckier” and more likely to be successful.
Well, maybe, Melinda allowed. It was hard to argue with that girl.
* * *
On a Thursday night, with nothing but reruns on television, Melinda got out her boxes of wedding photos — first Jessica’s, then her own — and sat down on the bed with them.
Jessica had worn one of those modern, strapless dresses for her church wedding, and she had been tan and beautiful, with a blond updo that showed off her long, graceful neck. The photos taken inside the church were dark — Kevin’s church had narrow, dark stained glass windows in blood colors, burgundy and red and navy and ochre — but you could feel happiness coming off Jessica like its own kind of light.
Melinda was shocked by how much she had changed; three years later, a dropout from nursing school, she had put on twenty pounds at least, and she was doughy-pale and tired-looking, waiting for the radiance of motherhood. When Melinda chided her, gently, for missing out on her education and her career, Jessica had said that being a reverend’s wife was its own kind of job. She felt called, she said, to tend the flock.
Melinda had had two weddings — first to Charles, Jessica’s father, and then, of course, to Jonas. She felt a little embarrassed now that she had worn white, poufy dresses to both weddings, and chagrined that she looked better in the first one.
Picking up a loose photograph from the box — for these, rather than the album-pasted ones, were always the ones that drew her — she traced her finger lightly over Jonas’s smiling, posed features. Jessica was there in her pink junior-bridesmaid dress, hugging herself to Melinda’s white, corseted side. She looked happy, distracted, a little scared. She barely knew Jonas at that point, was just becoming interested in her own little circle of friends and small dramas. She had been in Melinda’s first wedding, too, as a fetus, and from then on Melinda had always thought of Jessica’s presence in all important parts of her life as inevitable and sure.
What was Jonas thinking? Melinda wondered, looking closer at his face. Was he feeling uncomfortable in his too-formal tuxedo? In his role as husband?
And what was he talking about, now, over beers or church-basement punch and cookies? Was he talking about her? About sex?
Melinda then did what she always did when she looked at wedding pictures. She rooted to the back of her closet and pulled out her wedding dress: big, white, iridescently beaded. She slipped the plastic over the hanger, laid the dress smooth and shining over the bedspread.
She pulled her T-shirt over her head, stepped out of her shorts. Then, considering her unflattering brief panties and yellowed jog bra, she took those off too, and stood before the oval, full-length mirror, tilting it back for a better angle before looking.
You are not so bad, she thought.
She was tan all over, thanks to tan-through bikinis and a membership to the tanning salon in Central Garage. She had long legs, and good, sturdy muscles there from cheering jumps and a squat routine she performed every night. Her breasts sagged, but not too much. She was only fat in the stomach and upper arms, but maybe, she thought, mowing the lawn would help that. She had begun to feel a tightness in her abdomen afterward and a soreness in her arms.
Still naked, Melinda washed her hands in the bathroom, then picked up the dress as if it were something holy. She unzipped it down the back — there was a row of pearls there to disguise the zipper — then held her breath and stepped in. The tulle rustled pleasantly against her legs, the nipped waist squeezed pleasantly over her thighs, the modest puffed sleeves felt familiar and right on her shoulders, the sweetheart neckline framed her cleavage like always. Reaching back to zip up, she found the zipper stuck halfway. She sucked in but could get it no higher than a third of the way up her back.
She turned around and examined the back of her dress in the mirror. A roll of tan fat swelled above the white fabric. The seams pulled against the zipper; she could see the white threads straining.
Melinda sucked and pulled, adjusted and shifted, for almost half an hour, inching the zipper upward. By the time she had the dress on all the way, she was sweating and weeping, and she found that she could not unzip herself.
Sobbing now, pressing tissue after tissue to her eyes so as not to stain her dress, she lay on the bed until she was calm. She let Jonas find her that way, hungry, breathing shallowly, and ashamed.
“Sweetie,” he said, dropping his purse. “What happened?”
But Melinda would not answer, only rolled over so he could carefully and laboriously unzip her. It took as long as it had taken her to get into the dress, and Melinda thought that no regular man could have been as gentle. She was reminded of pre-meet dressings, watching her girls groom each other with practiced, nervous hands, or the tender way they consoled one another after each rare defeat.
When finally she was free, they marveled at the map of pink indentations the dress’s seams had pressed into her body. For a little while, she let Jonas trace them, with just his fingertip running over her stomach, up her sides, along her breasts. When he went to kiss her there, his mouth parted, pink tongue out, she sat up and said she wanted some French fries.
“I probably could have gotten out myself,” she said later, in the car, eating straight from the Wendy’s bag.
“I know you could, honey.”
Part Four
It took until six o’clock, when the guests had started leaving, for Melinda to admit to herself that Jessica was not coming to the party.
“I really thought she would come, Sissy,” she said to Pauline.
Pauline put down the garbage bag she was using to collect trash from around her yard, came over, and put an arm around Melinda’s waist. Even though she lived an hour away, in Tidewater, she’d come to state cheering championships every year since Melinda had started coaching. She always said she booked her catering clients around it before they even held the regional meets, so sure was she of Melinda’s success.
“She’ll come around.”
“It was a lovely party, though,” Melinda said. “She missed something real nice.”
“She did,” Pauline said lightly. “We’ll have another one.”
It had been nice, Melinda thought. Pauline’s kids had come with their kids, who did not seem fazed by Jonas. Roland had kept a respectful distance. Neighbors brought wine and beer and snacks, and almost everyone at the party had chatted politely if briefly with Jonas, who had picked out his own sand-colored silk suit from Hecht’s and stood shyly on the sidelines. For the occasion, Melinda had given him a gold-and-pearl bracelet to wear that he had once given her. It just fit over his bony man’s wrist.
“You know, I think hardly anyone called Jonas Joan,” Melinda said. “And he was too shy to tell them. I wonder if some people even thought about the strangeness of a woman — someone supposed to be a woman — going by the name Jonas.
“I forget myself,” she continued. “To me he will always be Jonas, I guess.”
Together, they watched him wander around the backyard with a cup of lemonade in his hand. He was too tall to really pass as a woman, but mostly people did not ask, or even stare for very long. Once someone had even asked if he was Melinda’s mother.
Ha, she had said. This old broad’s my partner.
It grew easier, she found, every time.
“When do the surgeries start?” Pauline asked.
“Soon,” Melinda said. She had sliced herself another piece of cake, almost all icing. “Before the holidays.”
“You know,” Pauline said, “if I were a hell-bent Baptist minister, I think I’d try and stop somebody from going through with it.
“I mean, if you are tending to your sheep, or whatever,” Pauline went on, “if you think it’s so sinful and all, you’d try to keep them from damning themselves. Isn’t that a minister’s job?”
“Kevin—,” Melinda began, then stopped. She had been drinking wine and didn’t want to say too much. “Well, Kevin probably doesn’t want to be seen with us. We’re not really members of his congregation anyway.”
“What an ass,” Pauline said. “Sorry.”
Melinda shook her head. “It’s okay. Jonas says that he’s not sure he’ll get the full package, so to speak. Maybe that will make some kind of difference.”
“Maybe just boobs,” Pauline said thoughtfully. “Tell him to definitely get boobs.”
Melinda laughed a big, cheerleader’s laugh. “Why?”
“To give you something to play with, that’s why, silly.”
Melinda told her to shut her mouth, and Pauline goaded her into showing her the new routines she was trying, and that was how they spent the rest of the evening.
* * *
On the way home, they listened to Melinda’s cheerleading mix. Jonas drove because Melinda had had too much to drink, and she looked out the window as the darkening pine woods thickened into deciduous forest and the land grew hilly and pastured.
“Why do you think Kevin hasn’t tried to stop you?” she asked quietly. She was thinking of interventions she had seen on television dramas. “Or even Jessie. Why haven’t they come over?”
Jonas was quiet for a while. Melinda thought he must be searching for an answer.
“He has, I guess.”
Melinda sat up, sobered, and asked what he meant. She turned down the volume all the way, looked at Jonas.
“He sends these…notes, I guess you could say,” Jonas said. Most of his makeup had melted off, and he looked like a strangely hairless man in a woman’s suit. Melinda felt a little sorry for him. “Bible notes.”
“Bible notes?”
“They’re passages, I guess, from the Bible.”
“Do they say anything else? Letters from him? Or Jessie? Prayers?”
Jonas shook his head sadly.
“Well, what are the passages? What do they say?” Melinda felt herself growing hysterical, her face heated and red.
“I don’t remember,” Jonas said. “I tear them up.”
* * *
If this were a movie, Melinda thought, at least the type of movie they show on cable television during the day, she and Jonas would get all dressed up in their Sunday best — hats and all — and go to Kevin’s church. They would stand nervously in the back while he gave an inspired-sounding, fiery sermon, maybe something about loving thy neighbor or honoring thy mother and father, and there would be no room for them to sit. People would turn and stare, and finally Jessica would notice, would think about it a while, would stand up, teary-eyed, and lead them to their rightful place at the front of the church, and Kevin would extend his reverent hand to them, or something, and all would be forgotten. And then Jessica would get pregnant. And then the two devoted grannies would play with the child on a sunlit lawn.
Except as they passed the redbrick church — Jonas stubbornly refused the shortcut — Melinda and Jonas both noticed three plywood cutouts of stock cars lined up out front like a hideous modern manger, with Jesus’s car in the pole position.
Melinda thought next year she would strongly encourage her girls to go to the Methodist church.
Part Five
The following Saturday, they had tickets to the Faberge egg exhibit at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Melinda had gotten the tickets a long time ago, before Joan was even in the picture. She had planned to go to the exhibit with Jessica, in fact, even though Jessica told her that those eggs were vain and false, the product of a corrupt society.
But will you go? Melinda had asked, impatiently.
Yes, I’ll go, Jessica had said, acquiescing.
It was a Big Event, for Richmond, and Melinda felt just a little bit guilty, standing in the long, hot line that snaked out of the museum and halfway down Grove Avenue, that she had not called Jessica to be sure she wanted to give up her ticket. All of Richmond’s oldest old ladies, their daughters, granddaughters, deaf husbands, and nurses were there, the old ladies in their best scarves and suits and brooches and orthopedic shoes.
Jonas stood nervously beside her in his sand suit, one hand clutching the purse at his side. Melinda was wearing jaunty black capris, a silk tunic, and high hair.
“I wish Jessica could have come,” she said. She looked again at their tickets. They still had thirty minutes before their admission slot. “Want me to go get us a brochure to look at?”
“Sure,” Jonas whispered. He was still funny about talking in public, though Melinda told him his voice sounded natural.
At the front of the line, she saw an old friend from her old, old job, processing medical bills in Mechanicsville. “Melinda!” the woman cried. “It’s Rhea!”
“Oh my goodness,” Melinda said, clutching the programs to her chest. “Hello.”
“You are looking better than ever,” Rhea said, making a show of checking her out. “I read about you in the paper sometimes. You must be so proud.”
“Thank you,” Melinda said. “The girls do all the work. This your daughter?”
“Oh no, this is Emily, my granddaughter. You flatter me.” She nudged the girl forward, and the girl mumbled hello. “Your daughter’s here too?”
“Oh, no,” Melinda said. “She couldn’t come.”
“How is she?”
“She’s fine, fine,” Melinda said brightly. “Married to a minister! Trying to start a family!”
Something in her voice, or the way she was standing, must have sounded sad to Rhea. “Come up and stand with us! Come cut the line!”
“Thank you, Rhea,” Melinda said. “But I am here with a friend.”
* * *
Inside the exhibit, everything was dark and cool, to preserve the eggs. Pinpoint lights illuminated their glass cases, and all around the ladies stood, quiet and rapt, transported, Melinda thought, to the world of miniatures that had been their childhoods, a world of finely made dollhouse furniture, hand-sewn doll clothes, tea sets painted with the tiniest of brushes.
Look, someone would whisper. Look at that.
Hush, the other would say back, but not unkindly.
Melinda thought it was the quietest art exhibit she had ever been to. She held Jonas’s hand so as not to lose him in the dark and the hush.
She was surprised at the variety. Some of the eggs were pale, Easter-colored, while others were lacquered in rich and royal blues and yellows and black. Some were tiny, like a baby’s fist, and some were as big as a state championship trophy. Many of them, in fact, looked like trophies, and Melinda set her mind on deciding which one she would want, if she could have any of them.
She let go of Jonas’s hand and began to wander. Her favorites, she decided, were not the giant serpent-and-clock eggs, on their grand pedestals, but the smaller surprise eggs. The surprise eggs were the ones with things inside them: a toy elephant or peasants dancing, or a rose. She wished they could demonstrate the workings of the eggs and toys somehow. The descriptive placards promised that everything still worked. She was sure it was a sight to see.
Almost by gravity, it seemed, she was pulled to a glass case at the rear of one of the narrow galleries, where a half-dozen ladies, including Jonas, stood gape-mouthed. Inside was an egg made of etched crystal and gold, opened at a bottom hinge to reveal the surprise inside: a mechanical peacock perched on an ornate, golden tree. She could not help but think how Jessica would have loved the exhibit in spite of herself.
“Made for the dowager empress Marie Fedorovna,” a querulous voice read slowly. “It says the engineer hired by Eugene Faberge worked on the peacock alone for three years.”
“Isn’t that something,” and, “My,” people whispered as they filed past.
Melinda and Jonas stood the longest, not touching or talking, just looking. What Melinda liked best, she decided, was the idea of the surprise inside the egg, something special and hidden and fine, something to make you catch your breath.
