Shane and Carmen: The Novelization Ch. 13

"I know," Shane said. "It's just ..."

"I know. I'll miss you guys, too. But it seems to be the only way. I've been, like, coming apart at the seams for a couple months now, maybe more, I dunno. But ... I understand now that I've been having a mental breakdown, and I need some time and some help putting myself back together. And as much as I really don't want to go back home, I'm going to have to do it."

"Sure, Jen, okay, anything you need. We understand," Carmen said. "What is it you need from us?"

Jenny glanced at Dr. Stenowski, who responded. "When Jenny flies back to Chicago, we'd all feel more comfortable if someone went with her. Jenny's mom is unable to fly out here and get her, and Jenny would just as soon not have her step-father come, whether he wants to or not, which apparently he's not exactly, um, enthusiastic about—"

"We don't get along," Jenny said, referring to her stepfather. "I've told you guys a little bit about Warren, and what a pain-in-the-ass he is."

"Yes. Well, at any rate, what Jenny and I wanted to ask you was if there was any possibility one or the other of you would be willing to escort her to Chicago?"

"What he's saying is they won't let me loose without a responsible adult to make sure I don't slit my wrists," Jenny said, making a joke of it.

Shane and Carmen looked at each other for a split second, then turned back to Jenny and Dr. Stenowski.

"Absolutely," Shane said again. "I'm there!"

"Road trip!" Carmen said,"Whoo-hoo!"

"You don't both have to go," Dr. Stenowski tried to put in, but Jenny jumped up and ran to the couch and hugged them both.

"Oh, I love you guys so much!"

"You couldn't keep us from not going," Shane said, struggling for air amid Jenny's strangle hold on both of them.

***

When they got to the airport, Carmen dropped off Shane and Jenny and their three suitcases at the departures area and went to park the car in long-term parking. "I'll see you guys inside in a few minutes," she said, as Shane and Jenny handed over their luggage to a porter.

They went inside the terminal and found an unoccupied bench as they waited for Carmen.

"Shane?" Jenny asked quietly.

"Yes, sweetheart?"

"I'm scared."

"I know. But it'll be all right." Shane put her arm around her and pulled her in.

"I'm not scared because of me or what's going to happen when we get to Skokie. But I'm scared I'll never see you and Carmen and all the guys again. Alice and Tina and Bette. Dana. Kit. Little Angelica. She's so sweet."

"Sure you will," Shane said, although she had no reason to believe it.

Jenny sniffled and Shane rocked her gently.

"Shane?"

"Yes?"

"Remember the other night, when we were talking about all the bad stuff that happened to us when we were kids? There's something I never told you. I never told anybody out here."

"What's that, Jen?"

"When ... when I was ten, I was raped." She felt Shane stiffen. It was a minute before she resumed rocking Jenny.

"I'm so sorry, Jen," she said. She turned her head and kissed Jenny's hair. "I'm so sorry."

"There were four boys, in the woods, out behind my house. There was this rinky-dink traveling circus and carnival midway thing in a vacant lot on the other side of the woods. It wasn't really much of a forest or anything, really just a large patch of trees, like an unofficial park. There were trails, and all the kids walked through it all the time. All the houses on our street backed onto it, and nobody ever thought it was dangerous or anything. Down a few houses there were some Hasidic Jews, and they had built a sukkah, that's a kind of a Jewish gazebo or shelter they build for the Sukkoth holiday, on the edge of it, and lots of nights they were out there in the sukkah dancing and praying, like they do."

"Uh huh," Shane said. She remembered all of Jenny's drawings about demonic circus clowns, and the horrific imagery in some of Jenny's short stories. The parts about terror and degradation and humiliation. About torture, about pain. About isolation and helplessness and invasion.

"It was a Friday night, Shabbas, near the end of September. We had gotten back from synagogue, and I wanted to go to the circus with my friends, but I wasn't allowed because we had to go to synagogue because it was Shabbas and because of the holiday. But when we got back I snuck out to go to the circus where I was supposed to meet my friends. I was walking through the woods when these four boys jumped me. It ... it ..."

"Ssssssh, you don't have to tell me if it hurts too much."

"Okay. One reason it hurts is that it was kind of all my fault. I disobeyed my parents."

"Jen, when something like that happens, it's never your fault, even if you did something you shouldn't have that somehow led to it. Believe me, I'm an expert on this particular question."

"How so?"

"I never told you something. I was raped, too, when I was nineteen. Two guys kidnapped me. Well, three guys. It started out two and then they called this other asshole."

Jenny sniffled. "I sorta knew that. That's why I wanted to tell you what happened to me."

"How did you know?"

"I put it together, from a couple things Alice said. She didn't say too much, she just hinted about it. She knew you back then, apparently, and there was something about some man who saved you or rescued you in some way, and then he died, and there was a funeral, which is when Alice first met you. That's all I really knew, except that something really bad had happened to you. And like me, you never talk about it, so I never brought it up before. But sometimes when there's conversation about something, and the word 'rape' comes up you get this funny look on your face, in your eyes, and I knew it meant something to you that was personal, not, you know, academic or whatever."

"Yeah, that's about it, I guess," Shane said.

"See, what I wanted to say is ... I have this friendship with you, you're my best friend, but it's always been more than that. You're like my big sister, too, but even more. You were the first person who really befriended me, and all through all that shit that happened with Tim and Marina and all, you were never judgmental. You always accepted me just the way I am, warts and all. It's like you and I ... we have this special bond, because of what happened to us. We're both ... a little broken ... I guess is the way to put it. Only I'm a little more broken than you. Or maybe you were this broken, too, once, when you were nineteen."

Shane rocked her and kissed her hair again. "Yeah, I was," she said. "I was pretty fucked up."

"But you got better."

"Yeah, I guess so."

"And you had help."

"Yes. A lot of it. I didn't realize quite how much at the time, but I realize it now."

"I never got help," Jenny said. "Nobody did anything, back then. Nobody helped me."

"This time it's different. We're gonna get you taken care of, okay? This time it's gonna be better. It'll be hard, but you'll get through it. And this time you got all of us, to help. Me and Carm, Tina, Bette, Kit. Alice and Dana and Helena."

"Except I'll be in Illinois and you all will be out here."

"We'll write, e-mail you. We'll come see you, come visit you and make sure everything's going okay, all right? That's a promise. And whenever you get out of the hospital or whatever, you can come back out here. We'll be your motivation to come back. I'll always have a place for you, okay? You'll always have a place to stay with me, no matter what, okay?"

"Okay."

"Okay," Shane affirmed. "You and me, kid. It'll always be you and me."

"Good. That's good," Jenny nodded. "I hope everything works out with you and Carmen. She really loves you. She always loved you, right from the first. Everybody knew it, except you and her. You two were the only ones didn't know."

"Guess we were pretty dumb, then, huh?" Shane said, laughing.

Jenny started to laugh, too. "Yeah, pretty dumb. Pretty dumb. God, she's so beautiful, though."

"Yes, she is."

"Sometimes she takes my breath away. And she's so fun. And God, can she fuck. She taught me so many things. You have to promise me, you have to swear, that you'll take care of her and keep her, make her happy. Don't fuck it up with her. I mean it, Shane."

"Okay," Shane said.

"I mean it. Say it. Say 'I promise. I promise not to be an asshole and fuck it up with Carmen."

Shane laughed. "Okay, I promise."

"Say the rest of it."

"Oh, Christ. Okay. I promise not to be an asshole and fuck it up with Carmen. Happy now?"

"Very. Thank you."

"You're very welcome."

"Are you going to keep the house? You need a new roommate."

"I've been thinking about what to do. I haven't decided. I'm so going to miss you."

"You need to ask Carmen to move in with you."

"You think so?"

"Fuck, Shane!" Jenny said. "Yes! Jesus. Didn't we just have this talk two seconds ago? Didn't you just promise --"

"Yeah, yeah. I was just ... you know, I have to think things out."

Jenny shook her head in exasperation. "Shane. Ask her."

"But ..."

"Shane, just do it. That's all I've got to say. Just fucking ask her."

"Okay."

They didn't say anything more until Carmen came into the terminal and found them, and they all went to check in at the ticket counter. They both grinned at her, and Carmen knew something had been said. She thought about asking what's going on, but something told her to just let it go.

***

Jenny's mother, Sandy Ziskin, met them at O'Hare. She was waiting for them patiently on the outside of the security zone at the end of the concourse. Carmen's first impression of her was of a woman who, though still attractive -- had once been very good-looking but who was now ... Carmen searched for the words ... worn down. Careworn, maybe. He dark hair was streaked with gray and was pulled back in a careless ponytail. She wore comfortable clothes that looked like they were headed to or just come from the second-hand store, and she had a sweater draped over her shoulders. Shane could see that Jenny had acquired her mother's looks, but she, too, thought there was just something about Sandy that she couldn't quite explain. At some deeper level Shane couldn't put her finger on, she felt sorry for Sandy, somehow.

When Jenny saw her they hurried together and hugged, while Carmen and Shane stood to the side, smiling and getting out of the way of the general stream of passengers. Curiously, Jenny and her mother never exchanged a single word until they finally broke apart and Jenny said, "Mom, these are my friends Shane McCutcheon and Carmen Morales. Shane's my housemate, I've told you about her. And Carmen is my friend, too. These are my two best friends."

Sandy shook both their hands and seemed friendly enough, if a bit ... distant. Perhaps she felt embarrassed because of the circumstances of Jenny committing herself to a mental hospital, Carmen thought. But somehow Carmen and Shane both knew right from the first moment that Jenny and her mother had one of those relationships where neither one spoke much to the other. Carmen even wondered to herself for a moment whether they even liked each other, or merely tolerated each other. Carmen understood mothers and mother love very well, and Shane, having had almost no experience with one, and none in the past 18 years, understood it hardly at all. But each in her own way, and coming from opposite ends of the spectrum, recognized that this was not a very good, warm relationship.

They walked slowly to the baggage claim area, and waited mostly in silence for the bags to arrive. Jenny had stayed in the hospital in the psych unit until Shane and Carmen had come to pick her up this morning. In the meantime they had gathered together all of Jenny's luggage plus two suitcases of their own, and packed into them as much of Jenny's possessions as they could, because no one knew how long Jenny would be gone, or indeed if she was ever coming back. The plan was they would drop off all the luggage at Jenny's mom's house in Skokie, unwind and freshen up a bit and wait until Jenny's stepfather, Warren, got home from work. Then they would all go out to dinner somewhere, and then take Jenny to the sanitarium, where she had to check in by 8 p.m. Carmen and Shane would spend the night staying in Jenny's old room at the Ziskins, and then fly back to LA in the morning.

Dinner didn't improve anyone's mood. They went to a Bonefish Grill on Skokie Boulevard at Gross Point Road, which turned out to be not far from the psychiatric hospital Jenny was going to. Warren Ziskin was a tall, graying man and even more distant than his wife had been. His relationship to Jenny was entirely formal, and neither Shane nor Carmen could detect any trace of affection between them; at best, they seemed to tolerate each other, with Jenny's mother caught between them. It was Sandy who tried her best to make the meal seem as tolerable as possible under the circumstances.

"So, as I understand it, Shane, you're a hairdresser for lot of movie studios, and you do movie stars, is that right? And Carmen, you work backstage, Jenny says. That's so exciting! You guys must see celebrities and movie actors all the time!"

Carmen and Shane looked at each other quickly to see whose job it was to respond first. Carmen knew it would take Shane three minutes to frame an answer, so she jumped in. More than anyone at the table she felt sympathy for Sandy and her predicament, and wanted to help Sandy make the evening as pleasant as possible under the circumstances.

"Yes, I'm a production assistant," she said, "and I also do a lot of DJing on nights and weekends. I do get to see some celebrities from time to time, but mostly with the kind of work I do I mostly deal with producers and directors and set designers and stuff, the sound techs and the lighting people and all -- all those backstage craft people whose names you see in the credits. And a lot of what I do has to do with talk shows and the Sunday political talking heads shows, like Arianna Huffington, and so on. With the actual actors and stuff, mainly I just say, 'Here's your latte, Governor Schwartzenegger,' or 'Two minutes, Senator Boxer.' But I can put in a 10-hour day and never run into a single celebrity. I've worked jobs for a week on a set before a single famous person ever showed up to film a shot. It's a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff. Shane, at least, gets to actually work on celebrities' hair styles, and talk to them."

"That must be fascinating, Shane!"

"Well, it sounds a lot more glamorous than it is. Even when it's somebody famous, it's just some woman in a housecoat who's in a grumpy mood. She comes in, sits down in the chair, and somebody else comes in and tells me what kind of hairdo she's supposed to have. So I do her hair while she sits and reads a magazine, or goes to sleep, or yaks on the phone. You know, it's not like Natalie Portman and I sit there and have long conversations or anything. And, anyway, I'm sure Carmen will agree with me, half the people we deal with are crazies and maniacs."

"You've heard of Veronica Bloom? The bigshot movie producer? Shane worked for Veronica for a couple weeks. Total, complete, raving lunatic," Carmen said. Shane grinned and rolled her eyes. "And Jenny was working with a big star for a little while. Jenny, did you tell your folks about that?"

"Jenny! You never said! Who were you working for?"

"Oh, mom, it was nothing, it didn't work out. I was taking a writing class, and my teacher got me this audition to be a ghostwriter for Bull Connor."

"Bull Connor? The cowboy? Oh, my god! Really? That's terrific!"

"Yeah, but it didn't work out. I met him, and all, and we had a couple meetings, but it wasn't a good fit. And I don't want to spend my life ghostwriting some bullshit about some phony head case actor."

"He's a head case?" Warren asked, coming out of his silence. "How so?"

The very last thing Jenny wanted to do was discuss Bull Connor's sexuality and his not coming out of the closet, much less her being fired for being a lesbian. "Oh, you know, the usual Hollywood stuff. Massive ego, full of himself. Hitting on all the women. I mean, who needs that?"

The food came and they ate for a while in silence.

"Do you hear from Tim?" Sandy asked, knowing she was on thin ice.

Shane and Carmen studiously ate their dinners. They had no idea how much Jenny had told her folks. They seemed to know about Tim Haspel, and they seemed to know Jenny had broken up with him. They didn't know if Jenny had told them she'd been married to him, briefly, and was waiting for the final divorce papers to come through. Did they know Jenny was a lesbian? Did they know about the affair with Marina? Did they know Shane and Carmen were also lesbians? Did they know Carmen had been Jenny's lover?

Carmen wondered if Jenny's folks had some idea about them all being lesbians, and perhaps that accounted for the great discomfort Sandy and Warren seemed to have. Maybe it was simply the mental health thing, the stigma that attaches to having someone close to having to go into a psychiatric hospital. Presumably they knew the precipitating event had been Jenny's cutting episode. They'd talked with Dr. Stenoski, surely. Did they know that in the larger picture Jenny was suffering a nervous breakdown?

As she ate, Carmen began developing a fantasy of looking Warren Ziskin right in the eye as he ate his calamari and telling him, by the way, for the past few months I've been munching your step-daughter's carpet, but now I'm doing the other one here, the boy/girl one. In her head she started making a list: All the Things We Can't Talk About Around the Dinner Table.

Jenny's mental health Politics Religion Current events Jenny's failed marriage Jennie's friendships with and membership in a pod of West Hollywood lesbians Jenny's writing Jenny's childhood Jenny's sexual orientation Jenny's brief stint earning her rent money by stripping in a biker titty bar Shane's family/childhood/relationships Carmen's relationship with Shane

"No, mom, I haven't heard from Tim in a while," Jenny said.

Carmen had a brainstorm.

"Mr. and Mrs. Ziskin, do you guys follow professional tennis? Because there's one celebrity Jenny and Shane and I all know pretty well you may have heard of. It's Dana Fairbanks, the tennis player? She hangs out with this whole bunch of friends. She's ranked number, I think, what? -- thirteenth? -- in the world--" She turned to Shane.

"Number 11, last I saw about two weeks ago," Shane said.

"Right. Number eleven. She's been coming up fast, and we all think she's going right to the top soon," Carmen said.

"Really? Jen, you never mentioned her," Sandy said.

Jenny shrugged. "Well, I guess in a way we don't think of her as a celebrity, exactly, she's just one of our friends."

Warren spooned coleslaw into his mouth. "Never heard of her," he said. "But then, I don't follow tennis."

"Warren's a football fan," Jenny told Shane and Carmen.

"Cool," Carmen said. Of the three, Carmen knew the most about football by far -- she knew the name of the Chicago team was the Bears, she knew who Mike Ditka was, and Gayle Sayers because she was a movie buff and loved "Brian's Song" with James Caan. And to herself she thought they'd finally stumbled across something Warren and Shane probably had in common: Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders they'd both like to fuck.

"You follow football?" Warren asked.

Shane shook their head no. Carmen nodded her head yes, but Warren missed it.

"Baseball?"

No.

"Hockey?"

No.

"NASCAR?"

"What's NASCAR?" Shane asked Carmen.

"Cars, auto racing," Warren said.

"Oh, right, right," Shane said, trying hard to be helpful. "No, we don't follow auto racing much."

"What are you interested in?" Warren asked, trying but failing to keep an attitude out of his voice.