40. The Big Scary Unknown

“People don’t want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. Their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messes cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown.” —Chuck Palahniuk

Like an exclamation point punctuating her confusion, the letter from Paula’s mother was in the mailbox when Jen arrived home from dropping Becky and Marie at the airport. She ripped open the envelope as she walked into the house.

“Thanks for taking such good care of the lake house,” the letter read, the scrawled handwriting filling a page of notepad paper that had the words “Deacon-Sanders Educational Publishing Company,” printed across the top. “We’ll be returning for the summer at the beginning of May.”

May, Jen thought. That’s less than three months. It didn’t seem like enough time to make a decision. She read the letter again, silently, leaning against the inside of the front door, her purse at her feet where she had dropped it, her hands growing cold even in her winter gloves.

How do they know I took good care of the house, anyway, she asked herself, surveying the living room in front of her, which was as messy as it had been before she cleaned up for Becky’s visit.

She tidied up the clutter as she walked through the house, carrying a dirty coffee cup, its rim stained with Becky’s tawny lipstick, from the living room to the kitchen, making a little pile of the assorted baby items—a sticky bib, a pacifier—that hadn’t made it back into Becky’s suitcase.

She was going to miss them horribly, she realized, as she placed Marie’s possessions into a kitchen drawer. And more, she felt guilty that she would not be around to help Becky with Olivia, after Becky had helped her with every part of her life, putting Jen’s career and finances and publicity and personal issues before her own for so many years. It was time to return the favor, Jen decided. Wherever she was going to live, it was going to be with Becky.

Becky had sounded serious about wanting to move to Michigan. It sounded like the perfect solution, one requiring almost no decisive action on Jen’s part. But Jen didn’t know if she could stomach the responsibility of having her friend move across the country, to a place where she had no friends or family besides Jen, just to be closer to her. Sure, Becky had liked North Middleton, but she was romanticizing it as a nowhere-place, a clean slate upon which to sketch out a new life, just as Jen herself once had. Would Becky still want to live here once it was no longer a blank, when it was filled in with all the meanings and problems and annoyances of any other town? And what would they do for work— get jobs at the college, or a grocery store? Live off of Jen’s savings forever? With Becky’s cleverness at investing, it just might work, but never working again seemed too decadent for Jen to seriously consider.

And then there was the other solution: Jen could move back to Los Angeles. In a sense, that would be even easier than having Becky move to Michigan. Jen already had a house and a bunch of friends and a career waiting for her in LA. And what did she have in North Middleton? A taekwondo school where she worked out a little, trained a woman she didn’t trust, and learned to play chess. Leaving should be easy.

And it might be; she wasn’t sure yet. Nor was she sure if she would be able to handle the heady rush of Los Angeles after such a long spell of sobriety. She did not think the words “Bradley’s baby”—but an image flashed briefly in her head. That’s what I need to find out today, she thought, picking up her purse and heading right back out the door that she had just entered through fifteen minutes ago.

She hadn’t been back in the drug store since that day long ago when she bought her pregnancy test and stack of celebrity magazines. Her new market had everything she needed—food, medicine, ice packs and ace bandages—plus they didn’t carry magazines at all. It was perfect, usually. But today she went to the drugstore instead, and when she saw the wall of magazines out of the corner of her eye, she headed straight towards them.

She had envisioned herself flipping around to find what she was looking for, but there was no need; it was right there on at least half of the displayed covers. “Bradley trades parties for Pampers,” said one, below a picture of Jen’s ex-husband, a scrubby beard unevenly covering his cheeks, a cherubic blond baby in his arms, smiling up at him. Another showed Bradley looking goofy and cross-eyes, his girlfriend scowling at him as she held the baby out of his reach: “Will parenthood drive them apart?” the caption asked.

There was even one with a tiny picture of Jen under a gigantic one of Bradley and his family: “Jen’s friends say she is crushed: ‘I wanted to have his baby!” cries reclusive star.”

Jen was startled, not by these words but by the photograph that accompanied them. Of course she looked distressed in it, her brow rumpled into a prize-winning grimace that must have funded some photographer’s mortgage payments for a year. But it was an old photo, one from before her divorce, her hair still long and stylishly cut, her cheeks soft and rosy from well-placed makeup.

She knew the face well, and was already quite aware that she was barely recognizable now as that same person. No one turned to stare at her on the streets of North Middleton anymore. She knew that many of the residents were simply accustomed to sharing their town with a former celebrity. But increasingly, she felt convinced that the people she passed did not recognize her at all. When she caught glimpses of reflection during the day, her puffy jacket and practical haircut made her look more like a graduate student than an actress.

But what really surprised her about her image was how old she looked in a photograph that must have been taken at least three years ago. She carried the magazine to the little mirror by the sunglasses stand; and yes, there it was. She had gotten younger. The face of the woman in the photograph was gaunt, skeletal, the skin stretched tensely across the bones like leather tanning in the sun. In the mirror, her current face was dewy with health, her skin seeming to emit light like a maiden in a Renaissance painting. The wrinkles around her eyes had faded into smoothness and her cheeks were full and soft like a teenager’s.

She had planned to buy a few of the magazines, but she didn’t need to. She had come here to find out if she could return to L.A., and she was still not sure, but not for the reason she had anticipated. Bradley, his girlfriend, the baby—Jen would be fine with them. But the rest of it, she was not so sure about.

That evening, mechanically holding pads up for Olivia to kick, Jen felt like she was already gone. She watched the men in the beginner’s class throwing clumsy roundhouse kicks in the air, and realized she didn’t recognize any of them. I used to know the face of everyone at the academy, she thought. Back when Shane was still here. Now an entire generation of new students had arrived, and she hadn’t even noticed.

“You’re doing a good job training Olivia,” said Master Park that night after their second game of chess, as she lifted her bag to go home.

“Thanks,” said Jen, trying to accept the compliment blankly, but she couldn’t: she could feel her eyebrows rise just about a quarter of an inch in surprise. She could not remember Master Park ever having complimented her on anything before, other than her mild humiliation of Nicolai Snail. Certainly he had never said anything positive concerning taekwondo—or anything negative either, she realized. While he could talk endlessly about chess, he had probably said no more than fifty total words to her, in the entire time she had trained at his school, about the sport he purported to be teaching her.

“She’ll be ready to start sparring soon,” said Master Park. “Once she gets a little better, she’ll be a good training partner for you.”

“Great,” said Jen. She stood in the doorway of the back living room, her backpack slung over her shoulder, waiting in case he planned to say more. He was not speaking, but his open gaze suggested that he had left some thought unfinished.

Just as she began to shift her weight to turn around and leave, he spoke again. “I think you’re ready to be an assistant teacher,” he said. “If you want to.”

Jen sucked in a breath between her teeth.

“Don’t give me an answer yet,” he said, raising a hand as though to block her words from reaching him. “I want you to think about it.”

Think about it, Jen repeated to herself as she nodded in silence and left the room. Too many things to think about already, thoughts overflowing like a stack of books or groceries, and just one more would make her drop them all.

The lake house seemed abandoned when Jen got home. Even with the light on, her bedroom looked dark and bleak. She had forgotten how dark it was outside the windows, how dark the entire house was, standing in the shadows of the forest, a mile from the nearest residence or street light.

She decided to sleep in Paula’s old room instead, the one Becky and Marie had been occupying. The sheets in the bed had a lingering baby smell, and Jen imagined that Marie was snuggling next to her as she tried to fall asleep. It was less lonely in this room, but something was wrong with the bed. Jen lay on her left side, moved her arm in front of her and then in back, switched to her right side, turned onto her back. It felt like there was lump, something poking up through the mattress just under her left shoulder blade. The mattress is just uneven, she told herself, trying to ignore the hard spot.

Once twenty minutes had passed on the digital clock, she decided to investigate. She stood up in the dark, lifted the mattress with one hand, and slid the other one over the wooden bed frame. She couldn’t feel anything except the smooth, solid wood. See, nothing there, she said to herself. But just to be sure, she knelt and reached her hand in further, all the way to her shoulder, and hit something hard and flat. When she pulled it out, she could feel the soft, worn pages of a notebook.

She turned on the light and sat down on the bed. It was a red notebook, the kind a student would use in school. She opened it, half expecting to see math equations and English notes, but of course there would be no reason to hide something like that. Instead, she saw pages and pages of short, scribbled paragraphs, each one prefaced with the day and month when it had been written, though not the year.

I shouldn’t read it, Jen thought, closing the notebook and lying back down on the bed which was now uniformly hard and unyielding instead of unevenly so. She held the book against her chest, the light still on, staring at the dark blankness of the window. Then she propped the bed’s two pillows against each other to raise her head up, opened the journal to a page near the beginning, and began to read.

January 8
I’m sick of everybody at my school. I’m sick of everybody in Toledo. Everyone is talking about college all the time. They think it’s going to be so much better at Ohio State. Maybe it will be, for them. Everything will be the same. Everything will be normal. I hate normal! I hate how they don’t know anything about art or music or culture. I hate all their normal plans, how they want to major in business or become a dentist. Please don’t let me get stuck here!

March 22
I am so excited to move to California! Mom didn’t want to let me go without being enrolled in school, but the schools there are too expensive unless you have state residency, so I’m going to work for a year until I get it. By then maybe I’ll have a good job and be doing some cool stuff and I won’t have to go to college at all.

I feel like I can’t wait one more day. Everything is open and creative there, and you can do anything you want. You could be an artist, or be in a band, or be a dancer, or be in a movie. No one expects you to get a boring job or get married and have a boring family. Everyone is cool and no one cares if you’re weird. It will be the perfect place, heaven on earth.

June 4
Been in L.A. three days now. It’s amazing! I’m sharing this apartment in Silverlake, and everyone is so cool and creative. I got a job in a restaurant already, but I think I want to be a singer. I’m going to start going to shows and listening to music, and try to meet some people.

August 16
My band played our first show last night! Well, they’ve played before a lot with their old singer, but this is their first show after she quit and I joined. I think I am falling in love with the guitar player, Tad. We’ve been talking a lot and hanging out after practice, which is really late at night, but nothing has happened between us yet. He writes all the songs and is kind of the manager of the band. He is totally devoted to living an artistic life. He doesn’t even have a day job. He just does small parts in movies and artsy films and he can pay his bills from that. He doesn’t even have to work most days, because one acting job pays enough for him to live on for almost a month. He’s going to help me get started doing that, too, because I am so tired of waitressing, especially since I’ve been working six days a week and then going to band rehearsal every night. He said I’d just need to lose some weight—like maybe fifteen pounds—and then I could totally get enough roles to live on.

November 3
I’m so tired. So so tired. Still waitressing in the day, now five days a week, and on the other ones I go to auditions, and band practice every night or else shows. I got one little part on a commercial where I didn’t say anything but just stood in the background looking excited about this cheese spread. But Tad was right that all the girls are skinnier than me. We’ve been sleeping together, and he’s not exactly my boyfriend, but we spend a lot of time together and he’s been giving me some good advice, like to dye my hair blonde, even though neither of us like blonde hair, but because it’s good for getting roles. I’ve already lost ten pounds, but I’m not quite thin enough. It’s a little hard to lose weight when you work in a restaurant, but what I do is eat my one free meal, which is usually something pretty heavy like pasta, and then don’t eat anything else all day. Luckily no one in the band ever seems to eat anything, so I’m not tempted during practice. Sometimes we do some coke or speed which makes me not want to eat anything even the next day, but I don’t want to get into a habit of that, plus it’s expensive.

January 14
I think we’re going to get signed by this big record label! Tad has been talking with the representative guy, and he came to three of our practices so far. They were talking about making videos, and Tad told the guy that I am going to lose ten more pounds, which made me kind of mad, but the record guy nodded his head like it was a good idea. By Ohio standards, I’d be pretty thin already, but here they want you to have no body fat at all because it looks better in photos or videos. I don’t agree with it and Tad says he doesn’t either, but that it’s just part of working, and the work is what is most important to us.

May 12
In some big hospital. I guess I took too many pills. Something happened during a show, I was on stage and my brain didn’t feel like it was working right and I couldn’t remember the words to the song and then right after the show ended I passed out. I called Tad but he won’t come and see me. He’s really mad that I ruined the show. It’s at least partly his fault because he’s the one who gave me the pills. They were working really well, as long as I kept them balanced. My appetite was really down and I had a lot of energy for work and practice, but if I took too many I would get really anxious and my heart would beat really fast and I’d think I was having a heart attack. Now my head just hurts a lot and I feel so tired, more tired than that time I did two straight weeks of waitressing with no day off and band practice every night. It feels like it takes all my energy just to move my arm. I don’t know how I would ever stand up—right now they have a thing for me to pee into on the bed. I am all along here and everything is horrible, the most horrible place I have ever been.

May 28
Mom came to get me and now I’m with them at the lake house in Michigan. It’s even worse than Toledo here. Worse than the hospital in Los Angeles. This is Hell, and the worst part is that it’s my own fault that I’m here, and I have nobody to blame but myself.

Jen looked up. She hadn’t meant to read this much, just to glance at a few pages. The parts about Los Angeles had drawn her in, though. She remembered the feelings the journal was describing as though she had written it—the excitement of being young in L.A., the endless possibility, the fun of not knowing anybody and starting life anew, friends falling into your life effortlessly, as only happens when you’re twenty.

She remembered these later events in the journal, too. The dieting, the auditions, the fifty girls waiting in the hall, at least fifteen who were prettier than you. The men who claimed to lament the “unrealistic beauty standard,” even as they reminded you that it was a necessary evil. The men who didn’t even bother.

She knew she shouldn’t be reading it, but she couldn’t stop here, in this horrifying spot. She had to keep going until it got better. She hoped it would be soon, or she would have to skip ahead, because she didn’t think she could stand many more entries like the last few.

June 10
I hate Michigan so much. There is absolutely nothing to do here. I’ve been feeling a little better, and I want to go out, but there is no place to listen to music here except this one coffee shop where hippies sing folksongs and all the other hippies get stoned and sing along or dance around like elves. I went a couple of times anyway, but they kept making fun of my bleached hair, which I’m trying to grow out but that makes it worse because you can see the roots so it really looks fake. There are a couple little bars I can get into with my fake ID. One is all old rednecks and the other one is preppy college students.

I hate them all.

July 11
I am going back to LA next week. Mom thinks it’s too soon, but I can’t stand it here any longer. She’ll be going back to Toledo in September, but I don’t think I can wait that long, plus I don’t really want to be there, either. I want to be someplace where I can find out who I am supposed to be, where there are lots of options, where nobody knows me and I can discover whatever my destiny is. I’m nervous. But I don’t know what else to do.

August 4
LA is not so scary as I thought. I met up with some girls from this other band we used to play with. I wanted to see if they’d let me join their band, but they said I had to learn to play an instrument first. It’s their rule: all women, and everyone has to play at least one instrument, but all of them play two or three, and they all take turns singing. They said that women are usually just the singers in a band because men want them to stand in front and look sexy but not actually write any of the music. I think I’m going to learn to play guitar, because their guitar player might be moving away to college.

September 16
I started doing yoga. I didn’t think I’d like it because I thought it was for hippies, but actually I like it a lot. The people in the class are normal and weird and nice, and a few of them are hippies and even they’re nice. Yoga makes me feel really good and strong after I do it, like I can take care of myself and do anything I want.

November 21
I started working at the yoga studio. They needed someone at the front desk, so I’m doing that. I get to go to all their classes for free, plus they pay me a little so I only have to work at the restaurant a few days a week. They have training courses to become a yoga teacher, and I totally want to do it. They said you have to have studied yoga for at least a year, but they said maybe they could make an exception and let me start after six months since I’m taking so many classes, plus I read all the yoga books at work when there’s not a lot to do.

I am still working on learning guitar, and I’m getting a lot better, but I don’t think I’ll be good enough to be in a band for a while. But I am trying to write some songs. I wrote a few I like already. I played them for the girls in the band, and they liked them a lot. They said if I write a few more and practice them really well, I could open up for them sometime, which would be so exciting.

April 8
Everything is going great in L.A., so much better than the first time I moved here. I feel really creative with all the songs I’m learning, and my guitar playing is getting pretty good. I love all the yoga I’m doing, and I think I have found what I want to do as my job. I don’t know why I ever thought I wanted to be an actress.

There’s a girl I like a lot in my yoga teacher training, and she wants to be an actress. I asked her how she can stand going to auditions with all those starving, pretty girls there. She told me that she doesn’t audition for those types of roles. Which is funny, because she could—she’s skinny and naturally blond, except dark blond, and she has freckles, but you can cover those up with makeup, and it would be easy to get her hair highlighted. But she told me that she only applies for roles with descriptions like “smart girl” or “athletic girl” or “quirky girl.” That way, she doesn’t have to be any particular way, or just like everybody else.

She told me, “The most important thing is to always be honest about who you are. Never pretend to be something you’re not. Then you never have to apologize to anyone for not really being what you were pretending to be, because they knew all along, and they had the choice to take you or leave you.”

In North Middleton and Toledo, there were only a few different things you could be: a student, a redneck, a hippy, a suburban middle-American type. In Los Angeles, you can be anything you can imagine. It’s nice, but it’s dangerous, because you can get caught up in pretending to be something, and the act becomes more important than anything else. I guess the trick is to do what that girl said, and always be who you really are, no matter what. The only problem is figuring out who that is, exactly, which part is the act and which part is really you.

Still, I’d pick freedom of choice, even if some of the choices are dangerous, over safe but limited choices any day.

Jen closed the journal. “See,” she said aloud to herself. “Everything turned out okay.” She hugged the book to her chest and rolled onto her side, feeling less lonely with it in the bed next to her. “Everything will turn out okay,” she said.

When she woke up the next morning with the light still on and lines on her face from sleeping with her head on the red notebook, she did not put on her exercise close, make her toast and tea, or begin her morning exercises. Instead she drove straight to the taekwondo academy, where she knew Master Park would be finishing up the seven o’clock before-work class.

She walked in just in time to pass the last few motivated office employees as they hustled out of the school so they could shower and dress for work.

Master Park was sitting behind the front desk, staring down at a student waver-of-liability form.

“Hello,” he said, not looking up at her.

“Hi,” she said. And then, not wanting to lose her nerve, she said, “I’m moving back to Los Angeles.”

Master Park raised his head to meet her gaze. His face was as blank and unmoved as ever, just has Jen had expected. But through his oddly stylish glasses, she could see lines near the corners of his eyes deepen just a little. She had never really thought of him as old, but at this moment, he looked as elderly as her grandfather had in the months between her grandmother’s death and his own.

“I knew you’d say that,” he said.

Chapter 41