After fantasizing through her high-school years, Joanna earned a scholarship to Temple that allowed her to move out of her family’s house and into the school’s dorms in Philadelphia. After that there was a string of jobs and boyfriends, and her parents’ inevitable divorce. Out of the suburbs and that house, the cloud over Joanna’s head finally began to clear. Her mother would call with reports of yet more ER visits, and though Joanna would sometimes accompany her, she no longer felt responsible for pulling Catherine out of her misery. She lived her own life. She had all but forgotten about the Bates-McAllisters until the day she saw Charles in a bar in Philadelphia, standing across the big, square room, a beer in his hand.
She’d nearly dropped her glass of wine. It was startling that Charles was real, standing a mere twenty feet away. His posture wasn’t as upright as she’d imagined, and his pants were a little high-waisted. He had razor burn on his jaw line, and his leather jacket fit like a poncho. And his voice, which she could hear across the mostly empty room, was wholly different than she had imagined—a bit flat and gravelly, without any accent at all. For some reason, Joanna had always assumed he would sound like John F. Kennedy.
Seeing Charles filled Joanna with bittersweet nostalgia—Oh, there’s that boy whose family I used to be obsessed with! And she could have left it as a sad, funny, odd little moment and gone home, closing that chapter of her life, except Charles walked over to her. He bent over at the bar right next to her, and ordered another beer, even though there were other empty spots at the counter closer to his friends.
So Joanna said something to him. Maybe something about his complicated platinum watch, maybe something about what he was drinking, she couldn’t remember now. Charles said something back, looking her over and smiling. It was surreal, Charles Bates-McAllister smiling at her, like a character from a book coming off the page and asking her to dance. After about a half hour of talking, Joanna dared to take him by the hand, lean over the bar, and kiss him. Charles’s eyes popped in surprise, but then he kissed her back. Charles Bates-McAllister kissed her back. She pulled away and sat back on the stool, grinning, and noticed he was grinning, too. Later that night, when she left with her roommate, Faith, she asked why Joanna had thrown herself at the short guy with the ugly tie and terrible shoes. “He’s an old friend,” was the only way Joanna could explain.
Charles called later that week. After they had been dating for three months, Joanna decided to finally break the news to Catherine that she had a new boyfriend—someone whose name she might recognize. It felt like the biggest moment in her life. After she made her announcement there was a long pause. Catherine stared at her, a nail file in one hand. Finally, she set the file on the table. “Why in God’s name would he be interested in you?” she cried.
Joanna was taken aback. “What?”
“You don’t know how to hang pants on a hanger. You don’t know how to set a table. You always put the knives on the wrong side of the plate.”
Joanna had stood up, walked to the bathroom, and inspected her reflection, looking for . . . well, she wasn’t sure what. A blemish? Some visible ugliness? She looked the same as she always did: her thick dark hair past her shoulders, her gray, almond-shaped eyes bright and alert, and straight teeth from years of treatments from the right orthodontist. For a moment she thought worriedly about Charles’s old girlfriend, Bronwyn, whom he’d told her about by then. The thought of Bronwyn had made Joanna very nervous and cagey, but Charles assured her that Bronwyn didn’t matter and that he wouldn’t bring her up again. But Bronwyn would know how to put knives on the right side of the plate, certainly. She sounded so perfect, the daughter of a brilliant physician and a professor, the girl whose parents gave her every opportunity in the world. In fact, Joanna could easily imagine Bronwyn standing beside Charles in those old, dusty Main Line Times photographs that were still in a box at her mother’s house. Was her mother on to something? Should Charles be with someone like Bronwyn instead?
And then she’d snapped out of it. Who the hell cared about knives and plates? She emerged from the bathroom, her composure regained. “Charles likes me,” she insisted.
“Okay,” her mother said suspiciously, not letting down her guard. Why wasn’t she happy? Wasn’t this what Catherine was attempting to groom her for?
“He does,” Joanna protested. “And I like him, too.” She hated how hard she was trying.
She did like Charles. He was just what she’d imagined he’d be and much more. He took her to great places in the city for dinner. He had season tickets, courtesy of his parents, to the Philadelphia Orchestra. He enjoyed going to plays and museums. When they went shopping, he didn’t sit sullenly on the couches put out for bored husbands and boyfriends, but instead helped Joanna pick out items that fit her best. Whatever she liked, he bought for her. Whenever they went out to dinner, he paid. His apartment in Rittenhouse Square was clean but not generic. He read Civil War biographies and Vanity Fair. He had square ceramic plates and a collection of old Star Wars toys. He saved his old baseball and concert ticket stubs in a leather-bound black book. Once, when he was taking a shower, she’d found a lined notebook full of original poetry. In that same book, she’d found a creased flyer that said, Redemption Is Near. Repent! A man had shoved it at them on their first date; they’d laughed about it in the restaurant, making a jokey second date to attend the prepare-for-the-apocalypse meeting advertised. They’d gone to a bar instead of that meeting and then back to Joanna’s apartment. But Charles had saved that flyer. It meant something to him.
After Joanna found that flyer, she gave herself over to Charles. He became more than just the boy in the magazines she had saved, but someone real. The first time she cried in front of him—recounting an old argument her parents had had that culminated in her dad throwing a plate and her mom sobbing on the kitchen floor—she felt safe and protected. Charles unburdened himself to her, too, telling her about his stilted relationships with his father and brother, recounting memories of being ostracized at summer camps, and sadly wishing he were better with his hands. He had flaws, which she liked. It drew her closer to him, made him more attractive. When he came over she would tear off his clothes. She liked the way he kissed her all over, and she liked the way he stared at her as if she was beautiful and unique. When Charles asked her to marry him at their favorite Italian restaurant in Philadelphia, the one with the homemade pastas and the exuberantly touchy-feely proprietor, Joanna had been rendered speechless. All those pictures she’d saved of Charles’s family, all that wanting. But what made it even sweeter was that where Charles came from didn’t matter anymore. She would have chosen him out of anyone. And she’d thought he’d chosen her out of everyone, too.
Now, though, she wasn’t entirely sure how the choosing had happened.
It was ten in the morning on Wednesday, two days after Joanna and Charles went to Sylvie’s for dessert. There had been no more talk about Scott since then, and although Joanna wanted to bring up what she’d heard Charles and his mother talking about in the kitchen, she didn’t know how. What was this fight Charles had referred to at his high-school graduation? Why hadn’t he ever told her about it, and what did Bronwyn have to do with it? How much did he think about Bronwyn, anyway? Charles had said he hadn’t spoken to Bronwyn in twelve years, but he’d never explained why they’d broken up. Joanna suspected that Charles had not been the one who had cut it off. She couldn’t exactly say why she felt this way—perhaps because the faraway look Charles got on his face when he spoke of her. Or how, when Joanna had made a snippy, jealous comment about Bronwyn one of the first times Charles had mentioned her name, Charles had immediately become defensive, as though Bronwyn were someone to protect, as though he felt unresolved about how they’d left things. Perhaps the strongest case was that Charles hadn’t dated seriously after Bronwyn until Joanna had come along. But she tried not to think about that.
She lay in bed now, staring up at the clean, smoothly plastered ceiling, willing herself to get up. Out the window, she saw the rest of the houses lined up along the streets. Their development was called Centennial. There was a stone sign at its entrance, crowing the name in curly “We the People” font. The streets’ names had something to do with American ideals. There was the cluster named after great American leaders: Washington, Franklin, Hancock; there was Valor Drive, Integrity Circle, and Freedom Court. Joanna and Charles lived on Democracy, just past the dog park and the jogging path and the playground.
It was nothing like Joanna’s old neighborhood in Lionville, with its hodgepodge of houses linked together by a gate at either end; her own house slightly on the bedraggled, lower-class side. Each house in Centennial was big, beautiful, and perfectly maintained in exactly the same way. The only flaw was the line of houses on Spirit, two streets down. They were originally models, but the developers had decided to try to sell them off. Charles had put a down payment on this plot before he and Joanna had seriously begun dating—a fact that he’d announced only after they’d gotten engaged and a fact that had disappointed Joanna a little, knowing that they wouldn’t be choosing a house together. But no matter. By the time the construction on their house had been completed, the market had taken a steep downturn, and the developer hadn’t started any new projects since. All the houses on Spirit were still empty. Quite a few of the “for sale” signs in the yards—low financing! upgrades! reduction!—had fallen over. One was missing entirely. A tree in front of one of the houses had become so overgrown it looked like it was doing damage to the siding. There was a rumor teenagers had broken into one of the homes and were using the closets to grow pot. Maybe it was naive, but Joanna had thought life in the suburbs—suburbs like this—would be untouched by the recession. More than that, Spirit houses seemed so expendable. Without people inside them, they were without identity, mere structures of concrete and siding and faux stone.
She sighed, rolled out of bed, and stumbled for the bathroom, forgetting for the millionth time that it wasn’t in the hall but to the left, part of the master suite. Though they’d lived in this house for two weeks, she still felt lost. She felt a little aimless, too. She’d quit her job in the city two weeks ago, her position at a nonprofit not lucrative enough to justify the commute into the city, and it was the first time in years she’d woken up without somewhere to go, without something concrete to do. There were rooms to paint, she supposed. There were new fixtures to buy for the kitchen, patio furniture to scope out. And there were all the unpacked boxes to attend to, including the ones stacked in the living room containing items from Joanna’s old apartment in Philly.
She walked downstairs and looked warily in the boxes. She hadn’t seen any of the contents in almost a year, since she’d put the stuff into storage when she first moved in with Charles. Only one box had been opened, its flaps gaping free. All of its contents were still packed inside: a stack of old foreign films on VHS, a pair of seventies-style sunglasses she had bought at a thrift shop and worn incessantly one summer, an industrial-size backpack she’d used on a trip to Europe, all funded on a ridiculously tiny amount of money. These items from the past smelled a bit moldy and unclean, instantly conjuring up a long-suppressed memory of a house party she and her roommate had about five years ago that had culminated in a bunch of strangers kissing. The time when she’d used any of it felt like three Joannas ago, and she couldn’t quite remember who that Joanna had been. She also wondered what the Joanna who’d used those items, who’d kissed strangers at a party, would think of the Joanna now in her bright, clean house.