The Genealogies: Chapter Nine, "Transcripts", Part iii
iii.
{Jessie sits alone at the kitchen table, spooning cereal into her mouth, sipping at coffee, trying to wake up. The light streams into the apartment, the blind slats opened to allow the sun to blast against her in an effort to rouse her. She hates mornings. Even though she wakes up most mornings at 10 or 11, it’s never enough sleep. She sometimes feels she could spend her life sleeping. She’s never more together than when she’s asleep, curled up on the couch so as not to disturb Marcelo when she gets home past midnight from her shift at the hospital. And the days when she sleeps in the bed, like today—oh, those are precious. The bedroom is protected by light-blocking shades; there’s darkness there at noon. She relishes it, waking up just enough to appreciate the fact that it’s nine and still dark, then falling back asleep. But the day won’t be denied; work awaits her in a few hours, and she needs to get ready, shower, shave her legs, throw a few uniforms into the wash so she’ll have something to wear. But first she needs to wake up! She can’t wake up; it’s such a chore. Coffee doesn’t help her; food makes her sleepy again. She never used to be such a somnambulist. But lately, she’s moved about in a fog, becoming forgetful, bumping into things. Nothing motivates her. Her job, which she used to love, leaves her cold. Even the gratitude from patients and families does nothing to elevate her. It’s all a dull grey. Absently, she reaches over and pets Clarke the cat as he jumps up on the table, meowing for attention. At least there’s Clarke.
{The phone rings. Grudgingly, she gets up off the chair and walks to the phone stand. She knows it’s not Marcelo; he never calls her from work. She picks up the phone and answers it.}
Jessie (into the receiver): Hello?
Voice: Hi sugar. It’s me!
Jessie: Mel!
{Mel is Jessie’s sister. Short for Melinda, her and Jessie have had a rocky relationship. If family is the group of people with whom Fate and Genetics have forced you to come to some accommodation, then Melinda fits that definition. There were many times when Jessie wanted to wash her hands of her sister, frustrated with her ill-advised decisions, her lapses, her irresponsibility. Jessie didn’t speak with her for two years after she moved out to California, leaving Mel in her father’s hands. She wanted to get as far away from Indiana as she could, even though she loved her father and sister as much as they loved her. But she couldn’t stand her father’s wife, and Melinda seemed to be slipping into the category of a lost cause. She felt that nothing remained for her except to save herself, starting anew in a place with no history. So one day she went to a seminar where California hospitals were recruiting nurses, and two months later found herself living in L.A. At the time it seemed to be the answer for all her worries.
{Melinda never slid into drugs or alcoholism. Nothing so drastic or traumatic. She did run away from her father’s house at 17, unable to deal with her father’s wife, much like Jessie. She moved down to Louisville, living with her mother for a bit, then striking out on her own, never having graduated high school, living with a string of men in the more questionable sections of town. Miraculously, though, she lucked into finding a decent, hardworking man, Linus, who was immediately taken with her. Within weeks they moved in together; soon after that they married; then she had a daughter. That seemed to straighten her out. She got her G.E.D., then enrolled in a local junior college. She tried to refashion herself into the type of woman Jessie was: self-reliant, professional, successful. Aside from her husband’s and daughter’s approval, she craved Jessie’s acceptance, much as she did when they were children. This is the Melinda that re-established contact with Jessie, breathlessly telling her of all the changes in her life, waiting breathlessly for Jessie’s reaction. Jessie, reserving judgment, had welcomed her back.}
Mel: How are you, sis?
Jessie: Dreading work. You?
Mel: On lunch. I wasn’t hungry, so I thought I’d call my sister and find out how she was. I haven’t talked to you in a week.
Jessie: Yeah, I know. I’m sorry—I’ve been pulling a lot of doubles at work. I haven’t even had time to answer your emails. And I’ve told you what a hog Marc is with the computer once he gets home.
Mel: He really does get off on it being his, doesn’t he?
Jessie: Well, he did buy it. But I was never like him when we were using my computer.
{Jessie shrugs. In this shrug, one should not read world-weariness, although it would be easy for one to do so. One should instead read a resigned acceptance of a loved one’s peculiar character quirks, quirks one acquiesces to in order to maintain peace in the household.}
Mel: You give him too much slack. If my man was to do something like that, shit, you know I’d bust him left to right.
Jessie: I’ve just learned that certain things you accept. He’s not going to change. In fact, he’s gotten worse lately.
Mel: How worse?
Jessie: Moody. Always cranky. Nothing I do is ever good enough for him. He’s always finding fault in the way I dress, what I eat, what I read—or don’t read, I mean. He gets so tiresome.
Mel: And do you tell him off?
Jessie: Sometimes. He just storms off in a huff. Sometimes there’s no talking to him.
Mel: Sounds like he feels guilty about something.
Jessie: Like what? Cheating? Hardly. I don’t know where he’d squeeze it in. Every moment he’s not at work he’s here on the couch, sucking in oxygen.
Mel: Now, I didn’t say anything about cheating. But now that you brought it up, wouldn’t he?
Jessie: I—I don’t think so. I just don’t see how he could do it. He doesn’t hide things well—I’d be able to tell without him having to say anything.
Mel: Sis, all us women would like to think that. “Oh no, my man couldn’t do nothing on me without me telling right off.” But it’s not like that. Not when we love them. We just want to believe what’s best in them, not believe that they could ever do anything so hurtful. I’m pretty sure Linus would never step out on me, but even if he did, I wouldn’t know. And men are smarter than we think they are. If they decide to cheat, they figure out a way to hide it.
Jessie: Then how do you catch them?
Mel: Eventually they catch themselves. They get cocky and fuck up. That’s the good news, if they actually would rather stay with you. The bad news is when they get tired of living with the secret, and they just up and tell you, just to end things, and give you a good kick in the ass to boot.
{Jessie slumps on the couch, much as Marcelo has been wont to do recently. She idly twirls a lock of hair with her finger, listening to her sister. Honestly, it’s nothing she hasn’t thought of before. Marcelo has been behaving rather much like an asshole lately, and she’s wondered if he’s been cheating. But the logistics of it seem to be impossible. And he is such a creature of habit. She doubts he’d give up his comfortable evenings at home for a surreptitious fuck. They barely fuck anymore, which, actually, doesn’t displease her. Lately her sex drive isn’t what it used to be—certainly not what it should be for a woman of her age, hitting the peak of her sexual power. She figures it’s a passing phase, as with him. Although he is getting older; things start to decay with men faster than they do with women.}
Jessie: Well, we can talk all we want, but I really doubt he’s cheating on me. It’s not even that he wouldn’t do it out of fear of getting caught. I just don’t think he’s that kind of person. I think if he found someone he preferred, he’d chuck me and Clarke out and start fresh, a clean break. He’s upright like that.
Mel: If a man can have his cake and eat it too, he will.
Jessie: I never understood that saying. I mean, to eat the cake, you have to have it, don’t you? If you don’t have the cake, what is there to eat? It just seems like nonsense.
Mel: Lord, you’re starting to sound like him. Too smart for your own good.
Jessie: It’s about time some of his smarts started rubbing off on me. Mel, we wasted our youths. Just imagine where we’d be now if we hadn’t fucked around in high school, had actually studied, gone to college, done something with our lives.
Mel: Listen to you. Like your life is awful. You make, what, $30 an hour? I wish I had that much of nothing.
Jessie: It’s not making me happy.
Mel: You’ve got other reasons why you ain’t happy. You’re just letting them bleed into your job.
{Jessie looks around her apartment. Everything is comfortable: well-worn, but not shabby. It has a lived-in look. Prints and pictures adorn the walls, tchotchkes from Marcelo’s trip to Costa Rica with Maria years before he and Jessie met, a couple of small ornamental African masks purchased at a store in Leimert Park. The television is modern, the sound system a symphony of Dolby, a DVD player and a media streamer hooked up to the TV. She has a comfortable life. Marcelo earns decent money, she earns more than decent money—certainly more than a girl with a high school degree and a couple of years of nursing school ever expected to make. And she loves her life in L.A. She misses Mel and her father terribly sometimes, and sometimes it’s hard to make friends; her circle is still small, despite her years in the city. But whenever she flies back into town after visiting family, she presses her face to the airplane window, marveling at the city’s immensity, stretching almost unbroken from ocean to mountain to desert. The less charitable would make an analogy with cancer, or spreading rot. Not her. Los Angeles came and saved her at a time when she was particularly low, feeling alienated at home, just broken up over an engagement, her life tattered. And there was L.A., warm, glowing, so easy, waiting and accepting. And then she met Marcelo.}
Jessie: You don’t know what it’s like, working with sickness every day. I mean most of the time they get better, then leave and go home. But there are patients… Like the old ones, the ones pretty much ready to die. We can’t do anything for them. They’ve got things wrong with them that are just not fixable. Most of the time we end up sending them off to nursing homes—or returning them to the nursing homes they came from. But while they’re at the hospital—God, there’s nothing worse than caring for someone who’s beyond care. It just wears you down. And it’s something like that every day, some little reminder that our bodies are just so fragile and not worth that much.
Mel: It’s not your body you need to be worried about: it’s your soul.
Jessie: Are you preaching to me?
Mel: What was the last time you went to church?
Jessie: Mel, just because I don’t have a church doesn’t mean I don’t believe. I believe. I believe as much as you do. You were the one who was doing all sorts of things Daddy never taught us to do.
Mel: I’ve changed. You know I’ve changed. I just see you worrying about all sorts of stuff and get concerned, is all. And it seems like you’re not worrying about what’s most important.
Jessie: Well, isn’t this just to beat all get out? My sister preaching to me. Not too long ago it woulda been the other way around.
Mel: I just want you to be happy. You’re not doing what makes you happy—and it has nothing to do with work. You’re not being true to yourself.
Jessie: Now you’re sounding like Dr. Phil.
Mel: Nothing wrong with that. He don’t take no shit. Well listen, sugar, I’ve gone way past my break time… I’d better get back before they notice I’m gone. Give my best to Marc and everyone out there. And you take care of yourself.
Jessie: You too.
{Jessie presses the talk button on the handset and ends the call. She tosses the phone onto the couch, slouching further onto it herself. Clarke the cat jumps up, seeing that his mother is done doing whatever unfathomable thing she was doing, and that it’s time for petting. He crawls onto her lap, lying across it, and Jessie reaches and scratches behind his ear. He purrs contentedly, his tail swishing, burrowing deeper into her lap. There’s nothing left for her to do except to get up and ready herself to face the day. She squeezes her eyes shut and opens them wide, trying to get the sleep out of them, trying to see the world differently. Neither works. She sighs, and, rising up off the couch, heads for the bathroom.}