You rent an apartment just outside the center of town. It’s one bedroom, five hundred square feet. The walls have recently been painted to exorcise the memory of the prior tenants, and everything still smells of fumes. The apartment feels enormous because you have nothing.
You eat lobster rolls and think about jobs you could do.
You are willing to work hard, but you want something with flexible hours. You have a baby on the way.
Also, you’re sick of bosses. You want to be your own boss, but you don’t have much money to start a business.
You’re in your apartment, weighing your options, and a movie with Jennifer Lopez comes on television. It’s a dumb fairy tale, where she falls in love with the person for whom she’s planning a wedding. You are through with fairy tales. You will never have a workplace romance again. However, you are interested in her business. You try not to consider what it means that you are watching romantic comedies for occupational advice.
What do you really need to be an event planner? What does JLo have?
A desk. A phone number. A business card. A computer.
I could do that, you think.
Events by Jane, you think.
You have made decisions in worse ways before.
In the early aughties, not all businesses have websites, and there’s an enormous advantage for those that do. You have a certain amount of online skills, thanks to your years with the congressman, and you are easily able to build a website.
You wait for the phone to ring.
After a week, it does.
Your first potential client is a woman named Mrs. Morgan. You arrange to meet her at a coffee shop in town.
You put on a black shift dress. You still aren’t showing very much, though your breasts are enormous. Nothing to be done.
Mrs. Morgan is throwing a benefit to expand English as a second language program in area schools.
“Is there a lot of need for that in Maine?” you ask.
“Oh God, yes! Mainly Spanish, but other languages, too,” Mrs. Morgan says. She has a loud voice that she uses to state her many opinions. You have the sense that time is precious with her: she’s just come from something, and she’s on her way to something else. You like her immediately. She reminds you of a WASP version of your grandmother. “That’s why I called you actually. I saw the Spanish literature on your résumé. I thought it would be marvelous to have an event planner who had an appreciation for other languages.
“Also, my regular planner has disappointed me twice. You are allowed to disappoint me once and then I will move on. Do you understand me, Jane?”
“Yes,” you say.
“I see you’re expecting,” Mrs. Morgan says. “Is that going to be a problem?”
“No,” you say. “I’m young”—you acknowledge this is so, and yet you feel so old—”and I want to work. I need to work.”
“Fair enough, young Jane Young,” she says. “And have you planned many events?”
“Well, this is a new career for me. I’m actually transitioning. I thought I was going to work in politics.”
“Politics,” Mrs. Morgan says. “How interesting. What made you change course?”
YOU GIVE BIRTH to a little girl and you call her Ruby. Ruby is a good baby, but she is still a baby. She makes copious amounts of excrement. She requires an endless supply of paper products, an endless supply of everything. She doesn’t cry much, but she rarely sleeps either. You have no friends, no husband, no money to hire a regular nanny, no one to help you. You can’t stop working either. You need the money. So Ruby learns to be quiet, and you learn to keep stress out of your voice when you take work calls. You find a babysitter you like. You order flower arrangements while you give Ruby baths. Ruby’s first word is “canapé.”
You don’t always feel like you love Ruby as much as you should. Where is room for love? All you have is fear and a to-do list. But you take care of her as best as you can, and you think of what your grandmother said: “To take care of something is to love it.” You, who try to regret as little as possible, regret that Ruby will not know her great-grandmother.
You think about calling your mother, but you don’t. This decision is not about your mother. For a long time, for right or for wrong, you were angry at her, but you aren’t any longer. You can forgive your mother, and because you have your own child, you know that she must have forgiven you. You don’t tell your mother to come because you don’t want to have to explain that part of your life to Ruby.
When people ask you, you say Ruby’s dad was killed overseas. They assume he was a soldier, but you never explicitly say that. You drop a few intriguing details and people form a narrative of their own. Poor Jane Young, whose husband was in the Marine Corps! Was he killed in Baghdad? Fallujah? Ah, best not to ask her too many questions. Poor Ruby Young—she never even got to meet her father!
After a while, you have lived in Allison Springs so long that people stop asking you questions. You are an institution.
You are with Ruby nearly every one of her waking moments, and you think no two humans on earth have ever been closer. You know everything about her, and you couldn’t love her more. She appreciates a good pun. She loves quotation marks and peanut butter and words. She is not emotionally guarded, which makes her seem childish. She is not childish. The girls at her school don’t like her, and she doesn’t even care. She won’t change for them, though you know she wishes they would leave her alone. You have murderous thoughts toward those girls. She knows how to find things out and she delights in knowledge. She knows who to call for an ice cream truck in winter. You trust her with everything. She is you, but she is not you. For instance, your life is a lie, and she never lies. When she heard the story of George Washington chopping down the cherry tree, she barely understood it. “Of course he told the truth. The chopping down of a cherry tree would be a very big thing to cover up,” she said.
A day will come when you catch her looking at you in a strange, contemplative way. Her head is cocked. Her expression seems to say, I don’t know you at all.
And it occurs to you that you know your child and you operate under the principle that your watchfulness means there is no subject on which you have greater expertise. Yet there are parts of her that are not accessible to you either.
You love your daughter, but you have fewer choices than you once did. Your choices are dictated by her.
Maybe not fewer choices. Maybe it’s that the answers are more obvious, so you don’t pose the questions. Life unspools more inevitably. You keep turning the pages.
Something you don’t predict is how your job makes you privy to the secrets of everyone in town. You are a confessor, and you know the town’s sins. For instance, a bride whose wedding you planned said she was a murderer. The woman reminded you of a newborn fawn. Very slender, large eyes, a bit shaky on her feet.