November 15 - What's obvious

“Jess, Jess Milton.”

Jess froze with a canapé halfway to her lips, and half of the smoked Gouda and bacon bits on top fell into the cleavage of her dress. “Oh god,” she groaned, looking around for a server with a napkin. The man who had said her name raised his hand to produce one with a look of triumph, then paused, realizing that to be gentlemanly and solicitous would be to dig his hand in between her breasts. The napkin wobbled in mid-air for a moment, and Jess solved his dilemma by snatching the paper and digging out the cheese and meat herself.

“Ha ha,” laughed Tom Ward, watching a bit too intently as she flecked off the last offending crumbs. “Didn’t mean to surprise you like that.”

Jess felt a little sick as she smiled at him. She had harbored a crush on Tom the entire four years they attended high school together, so she probably should be thrilled that he was interested in her décolletage now (he certainly had never looked when she was fifteen), but at the moment all she could really think about was how clumsy she felt. She was amazed he had even remembered her name, much less anything else about her. “That’s okay, Tom,” she reassured. “You’re well? Where are you working? Do you still live close by? Gosh, you look great!” Too many words all at once, she scolded mentally.

Tom arched an eyebrow. “I’m the president of a hedge fund now. We’re doing quite well for ourselves in fact.” His chest did a good imitation of a blowfish. “I’m surprised you haven’t heard about us recently. A few very important acquisitions. Don’t you read the papers?”

“Oh, of course I do! I mean…” Jess avoided the business section like the plague. “I mean, that’s great. A hedge fund. Remind me what those do again? Gosh, all that financial stuff is such gibberish to me.”

The left corner of Tom’s lips tugged upwards slightly. How she had swooned over that half-smile as a teenager!

“And haven’t you met my wife, Meredith?” He changed the subject.

Jess gave a start, only at that moment noticing that a woman had been standing next to him the whole time. Meredith was short and buxom, with a smile out of a Crest Whitestrips commercial. She extended a slim hand that sported a giant emerald on the second finger. “So pleased,” she drawled with the hint of a southern accent. Jess waffled a moment, the half-eaten canapé in one hand, the dirty napkin in the other, and then inclined her head as a third option. Meredith’s mouth fell open a moment at the rude manners before she caught herself and was all frozen smiles. “Well, nice meeting you dear.” Dear. The woman was easily fifteen years younger! Jess watched Tom steer his wife through the crowd.

She was rendered into one of the pillars in the room for an instant, rooted to the floor, then shook herself off and hurried to the buffet table, where she forcefully hurled canapé and napkin both into a trash can.

Maureen Teasdale and Veronica Watkins were leaning over the class notes brochure – it had arrived in the mail a month before the reunion; Jess had studied it – just down the table from her, obviously reading it for the first time, oohing and aahing with disbelief at the write-ups on each of their classmates, and clucking whenever they read the word Spouse or Children under a person’s name. Jess pretended to be absorbed in ladling out some of the punch.

“Jess Milton, Jess Milton,” Maureen was saying, as if fishing for the name in a dark lake.

“Right, she sat by me in math!” Veronica cried. Jess snorted; they had done no such thing. They were on the cheerleading squad together.

“Right. I remember… I think. Says here that she’s… hmmm…. An artist.” Maureen giggled behind her hand. The giggle still belonged to her eighteen-year-old incarnation, twenty pounds lighter than the version in front of Jess now, and sounded garish coming from this older woman’s mouth. “Sounds like a euphemism for unemployed to me.”

“Watercolors, pastels… some photography,” Veronica read, skimming along with one finger pressed accusingly against the page. “Featured in a show last –” she laughed – “last year at the local elementary school art space.” Both women were doubled over now, holding their punch glasses out to their sides as if for balance.

Maureen wiped a tear from her eye. “It’s obvious she hasn’t done much for herself since graduation, isn’t it?” Jess felt heat rush into her cheeks, the capillaries threatening to pop through the skin. Her hand convulsed around her plastic cup and she hurried away before she upended the ladle over Maureen’s very obviously-dyed brunette hair. Obvious? Maureen had already gone gray; that’s what was obvious.

“Obvious, obvious,” she muttered, pushing past smiling husbands and wives and clusters of ‘friends’ who hadn’t thought to call or write one another in the last twenty years. There was an errant child or two in the crowd, always clutching with concern at a parent’s lower hemline and staring up at the adults with eyes too wide for their small faces, as children’s so often seemed to be.

What did she mean obvious? Just because Jess had chosen a career as an artist and couldn’t boast of husband or children or heck, sex partner – even pet goldfish might have made her feel less lonely – didn’t mean she hadn’t made anything of herself. Okay, so her art sold sporadically, and she still had to call home to her parents every once in a while to meet the rent on time or head off a sudden power outage in the middle of winter, but she enjoyed making her art, and she liked being independent and alone. Maureen’s voice dragged up every damp day in her studio, when she wanted to tear her from her scalp and ‘sell out’ and take the easier path, but always, always some spark of creativity would come along that would stiffen her backbone, remind her that she was on the right path. Lacking piles of cash or children with a fine pedigree didn’t make it obvious things weren’t going well. Some things were obvious, she thought, but this? She tried to make a list of the obvious in her head.

“Let’s see.” She quoted, “Obviously roses are red and violets are blue.” Obvious was sad facts like how gravity made tits sag down over time or how giving birth stretched out the vagina.

Or were none of these things obvious? What if a woman got implants, after all? What if she’d had a c-section? And roses were often pink. Come to think of it, who had ever seen a blue violet? Wasn’t violet a shade of purple? Jess made it through the throng to the door and exhaled with relief as she stepped onto the porch, a good fifteen degrees cooler than it had been inside among the press of bodies. She leaned against the railing, drumming fingers on the chipped paint of the balustrade, and sipped at the punch. The voices drifting out from inside sounded like a very drunken hive of bees.

“Jess. Jess Milton.”

She turned with a jolt, this time only just catching the punch glass before the pink liquid slopped over the rim and onto her dress. She squinted at the man in front of her, trying to smooth out the thin wrinkles on the forehead and add a bit more hair to the front of his scalp.

“Yes?” she asked, at a loss.

“Jess, it’s me. Bradley.”

She looked harder. Make the shoulders less broad, take away the muscle tone to his arms, make him perhaps two inches shorter and perhaps… “My god it is you!” she exclaimed. He laughed self-deprecatingly. “Is it so obvious?” he quipped. Jess turned a shade pink again.

She stared into her punch.

“I hear you’re an artist,” Bradley said after a moment, and she wait pinker, waiting for Maureen’s reaction. “Jess, I just wanted to tell you…” Here it comes, she thought. The ‘get a real job’ or ‘what are you doing with yourself.’ …”that I think that’s so great,” he finished.

“No, it is a real job. I mean, what? You do?” She gaped at him.

“I remember you up in the art wing of the school almost every day after class. God, I look at all those poseurs in there just making money or doing what they’re supposed to do,” (he added air quotes to this last), “but it seems like you’re one of the few who is following her heart. It’s obvious you’re a lot happier than the whole batch of them.” He jerked a thumb towards the drones, who seemed to be rapidly disintegrating into dancing the Macarena.

She tilted her head, about to tell him he had it all wrong, but stopped herself. She barely remembered Bradley, she was ashamed to admit. “Remind me what class we had together in high school?” she said instead.

Bradley lowered his head, swishing the punch in his cup. “Well,” he coughed. “We didn’t, exactly, but I… Oh this will sound silly, but I had such a crush on you, Jess.”

“You… you did?” She tucked back a strand of hair that had come loose.

His eyes went wide. “You mean you really didn’t know? Here all this time I thought it was so obvious!” His eyes narrowed. “What?” he demanded. “What’s so funny?” But Jess couldn’t stop laughing, grabbing onto his forearm for balance as she nearly leaned double with it. After a moment, Bradley started to laugh with her.