Page 11 of The Space Between

“We have all these brilliant women on staff now,” Kathryn explains, waving Rebecca into the room.

“Career women!” Kathryn’s mom says, standing up. “Here, darling, come sit next to Jeanie.” She gives her seat to a stunned Rebecca, who sinks down to the couch cushion with the alertness of prey amongst a herd of predators.

“What’s going on here?” Rebecca asks Jeanie from the side of her mouth as she shields it with the edge of her martini glass. “It’s like I walked into the room and suddenly there was a spotlight on me.”

Jeanie sighs. “There is. Apparently we’re the first women they’ve ever met who chose to go to college instead of jumping onto the conveyer belt and waiting for a man to pluck us off, marry us, and give us babies.”

Around them, the conversation has moved on to diapers, strollers, sleepless nights, and what Kathryn can expect from her husband in terms of help (short version: not much). Jeanie sips her disgustingly sweet drink and listens, wondering whether these are the highlights of motherhood, or the biggest gripes.

“Think you’ll ever jump on this bandwagon?” Jeanie asks Rebecca, turning to her. “Leave NASA to keep house and spend afternoons at the park with kids?”

Rebecca glances down at the hand in her lap and then raises it slowly, showing Jeanie the sparkling diamond on her ring finger. “I just got engaged a few weeks ago,” she admitssheepishly. “We’re having a winter wedding, and I’ll keep working until I get pregnant.”

Jeanie is stunned. She looks at the ring and then back at Rebecca’s face. The girl had gone to Stanford, for heaven’s sake! She’d devoted years to elbowing her way up the ranks and to earning the respect of her male peers at a top-notch university before landing the kind of job that most people dream of! And now she has a ring on her finger and a plan to leave it all behind for—for what? Jeanie looks around at the other women. For diapers and strollers and sleepless nights and no help from her husband?

Jeanie smiles widely at Rebecca and reaches for the hand with the ring, holding it so that she can turn it from side to side in the light and appreciate the glimmer. “It’s gorgeous,” Jeanie says, and she means it. “And congratulations. I hope he knows how lucky he is.”

They spend the afternoon playing games (Jeanie wins the one where you cut a piece of string that you think is the length of the pregnant woman’s stomach and then everyone takes turns wrapping their string around the giggling mother-to-be’s belly as they measure to see how close they got). She eats two cupcakes, one pink and one blue, and then watches as Kathryn opens piles of gifts that include cute little clothing items, handy things for the nursery, and a collection of bottles and blankets.

By the time Jeanie gets back to her apartment she’s exhausted. Her cat, Miranda, is waiting on the back of a chair with a view of the front door, and she meows impertinently at her mistress, as if to say, “And where haveyoubeen?”

“I’m home, I’m home,” Jeanie assures her, setting her purse on the counter and reaching for a can of cat food to put out for Miranda.

Vicki, her roommate, is noticeably absent—there is a stillness in the air as Jeanie moves through the quiet apartment, turning on the radio as she goes.

She didn’t mind living alone, and, in fact, had sometimes enjoyed the peace and quiet of having her own space after spending the day pretending to be an extrovert at work, but having another person around is sometimes nice, too. And Vicki is…interesting. She’s forty-five and divorced, with a grown son who lives in New Orleans and attends Tulane. Vicki and Jeanie’s aunt Penny, her mom’s younger sister, were friends back in Chicago, so when Vicki wanted to make the move to the Sunshine State, Penny asked her niece whether she might be interested in a roommate, andvoila, now Jeanie is living with a woman who walks around the apartment in her underwear, hangs out at bars looking for younger men, and polishes her toes at the kitchen table.

Jeanie sets Miranda's dish on the little rubber mat she keeps on the kitchen floor, then slides her feet out of her shoes. It's Saturday afternoon, and she has nothing planned for the rest of the weekend. There's a mimeographed sheet stuck to her fridge with a magnet that lists all the activities on offer at the Sunny Tides Condominium Resort, and Jeanie skims it, landing on the block of the calendar for that weekend.

She glances at her watch: at two o'clock there's a canasta game in the Tidal Wave Meeting Room in the main building, and at four o'clock there's a cocktail hour by the pool. Jeanie blows out a long breath and stretches her bare toes against the cool tile. She isn't sure about playing canasta or drinking martinis with the mostly retired crowd at Sunny Tides, but in the absence of anything else to do with her afternoon, she considers it.

"Hi, hi!" comes Vicki's cheerful greeting as her key twists in the lock. "You home, princess?"

Jeanie smiles at this. Though she pretends to be neutral on the nickname, she actually kind of loves living with someone who acts as a bit of a maternal presence. A slightly tipsy, mouth-like-a-sailor, questionable advice-giving maternal presence--but still.

"Hi, Vicki," Jeanie calls back. She meets her roommate in the front room, which Miranda has already vacated in favor of her food in the kitchen. "How are you?"

Vicki drops the sandals she's been carrying by the straps, and it's then that Jeanie notices her beaded and spangled party dress and the remnants of makeup from the night before. Vicki flops on the couch; her legs are bare, and she tosses her evening bag onto the cushion next to her.

"Oh, doll," Vicki says with wonder. "I met the mostdivineman last night. Wow. He's a former fighter pilot who lives on a boat. Fancy that, right? I mean--can you imagine? Traveling the world by sea...showing up in whichever port you please, having a good time, and then setting sail again." Vicki reaches for her purse and unclasps it, pulling out a pack of cigarettes and a gold-plated lighter. "What a night that was," she says in a scratchy voice as she flicks the lighter and holds it to the end of the cigarette that dangles between her lips.

Jeanie stands and carries a heavy blue glass ashtray over to the coffee table, setting it in front of Vicki.

"Thanks, princess. Now how about you? Any wild dates or anything?"

Jeanie sits down again. She's still wearing the white dress she'd worn to the baby shower. "Nope. Nothing like that. I went to a baby shower this morning, and I was considering going to the canasta game at the clubhouse meeting room.”

Vicki exhales and makes a face like she's been jabbed with a hot poker. "Why? I mean, come on." She waves a hand through the air, indicating Jeanie's general self. "Looking like that, whyin the hell would you spend your Saturday afternoon hanging out in a clubhouse with a bunch of people who are just about to knock on God's front door?"

Jeanie coughs lightly and waves a hand; it's been well established that she prefers Vicki to smoke outside their apartment, but in spite of her pleas and reminders, Vicki continues to lounge around on the furniture, smoking one Pall Mall menthol after another.

“It sounded fun,” Jeanie says defensively. “I mean, kind of.”

Vicki stands up on her bare feet and her beaded dress swishes around her noisily. “Nonsense. Let me shower and drink a cup of coffee, and then we’ll go out and do somethingreallyfun.”

Jeanie looks up at her from the chair she’s sitting in, watching as Vicki smokes her cigarette and stretches her long, lean arms to the sky. Vicki has a kind of confidence that Jeanie isn’t sure she’ll ever have, and she isn’t even sure how to get it. For most of her life so far, she’s felt like the little girl whose father went to war and never came home, and now that she’s in her late twenties, it’s time to stop standing at the metaphorical screen door, watching and waiting. It’s time to realize that all the studying, all the job success, and all the achieving that she does will never bring her father home, and it will never be enough to fill her life.

It’s time to open up the door and walk out and join everyone else. To mingle in the fray of people; to say yes to life. Sitting home alone and protecting her heart doesn’t mean it will never get broken again, it will just mean that she never gets to put it to good use.

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