The Christmas Pic

22. Jo

CHAPTER 22

JO

I almost have to laugh at the Book of Job-ian twist of fate that we have to beg Wynnie Tatum to get a spot at the festival. But hysterical laughter is a slippery slope into crying while laughing, a phenomenon my mother has coined a ‘goo-goo-eye’. And yes, the one thing worse than laugh-crying is learning at an embarrassingly late age that ‘goo-goo-eye’ is not a word anyone uses outside your immediate family.

Right this second, the source of many a late-night high school goo-goo-eye is walking up to me, arms open wide, enveloping me in the nostalgic eau de Wynnie –two parts fruit-filled expensive perfume, one part Black and Milds smoked secretly in cars and alleyways.

She takes a step back and holds out a hand to Ava. “It’s a real honor to have you here, ma’am.”

I can viscerally feel how unpleasant Ava finds being called ‘ma’am’ by an admittedly stunning woman who is the same age as her.

Ava gives Wynnie a quick handshake. “Thanks for agreeing to meet us so last-minute.”

Wynnie waves her hand as she goes to sit behind her desk. “ Oh, it’s not a problem. Soon as you said it was for Chrissy, I was ready to grease some wheels over here.”

She winks at me. I see Ava subtly twist her mouth in annoyance. Huh . I’m realizing I have a bit of a home field advantage. Even though I don’t love having to hobnob with my high school heartbreak, if I play this correctly I could stick it to Ava a little bit by laying it on thick with Wynnie right in front of her. Remember when I said I was gunning for an Oscar?

I lean over Wynnie’s desk, letting my forearm flex right at eye level. Ava tries to hide her discomfort. “That’s incredibly kind, Wynn, thank you.”

Little pinpricks of blush appear on Wynnie’s face. For all her beauty-queen pageantry, she’s incredibly easy to fluster. I guess it helps that very few people are aware of her truth, so she’s rarely the recipient of same-sex flirtation.

“Now, Jo,” she begins to scold, “You understand better than anyone how early folks here start preparations for CFF.”

“I do, I do.” I strum my fingers on the corner of the desk. Her eyes catch on my hand and her breath hitches in her throat. Ava shoots me an annoyed glare. Good .

I carry on with my plea. “Wynn, is there any chance you could get the council to make an exception? The truck is an institution, and we’re trying to save it on an incredibly tight timeline. I think the community will want to rally around us; we just have to give them an opportunity.”

“I don’t disagree, Jojo. I want to help, really, I do.” Wynnie leans back in her desk chair. “Let me see if we could rearrange a few booths to make space for the truck. I’ll make some calls.” She flashes her pearly whites. “How’s that?”

I think I’ve lost the reins of the flirtation I ignited. What is going on? “That’s, um, that’s amazing. Thank you.”

Ava steps forward. “Yes, thank you.”

Wynnie all but ignores her, instead rising out of her chair and placing her acrylic-nailed hand atop my strumming one to quiet the motion. “It’s nice to see you around. Maybe we could run into each other again sometime?”

She pointedly glances to her left hand and I notice with surprise that she’s no longer sporting a wedding ring.

Okay, I get it now. My plot has backfired, but I’m too proud to admit defeat here in front of Ava, so I feign interest in Wynnie’s suggestion even though the idea of going back to her rollercoaster of love-bombing and rejection makes me ill.

“Oh, Wynn, that’s…wow.” I’m not sure if I can get the rest out, but I invoke my patron saint Meryl Streep and push onward. “I’d love to hang.”

Barf.

Wynnie looks smug. “I’ll be in touch, ladies.”

Ava gives Wynnie the slightest acknowledgement before striding out of the office ahead of me. I wave, disgusted with myself, and follow her out the door.

As soon as we settle back into the rental car, Ava stares out the front window like her life depends on it, avoiding all eye contact with me.

“That was a wild success,” I remark as she pulls out of the parking lot.

Ava turns back toward me, eyes flashing. “You got over your alleged heartbreak pretty fast once Wynnie started batting those synthetic lash extensions at you.”

Okay, she’s struck a nerve now.

“For your information, my heartbreak wasn’t alleged, it was horrific. It actually fucked me up for a long time, probably to this day.”

Ava shakes her head. “I’m just making an observation about what I witnessed.”

“You’re jealous that an attractive woman was flirting with me and that I flirted back. ”

She raises her eyebrows. “Is that what you want me to be? Jealous?”

“I saw you looking her over with green eyes. Don’t pretend you’re in a completely altruistic moral outrage over me flirting with my ex.”

Ava scoffs. “Then don’t pretend you didn’t want to provoke me into this exact confrontation by flirting with your ex in front of me!”

“At least this provoked you into an authentic emotion.”

“I’m a human. All of my emotions are authentic.”

I hear the anguish in her voice and I pause to recenter. “I’m sorry. I understand you have real feelings. It’s just… you may as well have shown up at Emma’s with the Secret Service, you were so guarded.” I clear my throat. “It threw me, seeing you act like the last place we’d seen each other wasn’t… in my bed.”

She’s quiet, eyes on the road. “I understand. I thought it would be easier not to talk about any of it, to forge ahead like nothing happened.” She glances at her mirror and turns down a side street.

She puts the rental car in park. I get the sense we’re not pulling over to passionately make out and, in fact, have a sinking feeling it’s gonna be quite the opposite.

“Jo,” she says, turning to face me. “I have a big life. I can’t be an individual when I’m a figure, a symbol, to so many. Paps snap me buying Diet Pepsi for lunch and Coca-Cola stock plummets. I don’t have the bandwidth, or the allowance in the life I’ve chosen, to explore something like this. Much less right now, when so much is at stake for the company.”

I smile weakly. “It’s one of the more logically sound letdowns I’ve been subjected to,” I acknowledge. “I want this truck to be revived, and it makes sense to not let our energies get… entangled.” I’m lying through my teeth and I hope she can’t tell. And if she can tell, I hope she lets me get away with it .

Ava nods. “But, um, maybe we don’t have to fight each other so hard? Like, we could be friends?”

It’s such an overused line during a breakup but I can tell from her tentative expression that she’s asking sincerely. And because I am a masochist, and also someone who will do anything a hot woman asks of me, I say yes and promptly invite her over for naan pizza and a movie.

No, I have never learned a lesson in my life.

We sit on my couch, a cushion nonchalantly placed between us for safety.

“Have you seen Happiest Season?” I ask her.

“You think I would go out of my way to watch a Christmas movie?”

“This isn’t any old Christmas movie,” I tell her. “It’s the lesbian Christmas movie, directed by none other than Clea DuVall.”

I can sense her hesitation. I didn’t even think about the content of the film potentially stoking our fire further. I simply wanted to give her another taste of the Harmony Springs holiday rotation.

Okay, maybe I wanted to torture her a little. Who can resist falling in love with Aubrey Plaza after watching that movie?

She attempts to remain calm and casual. “Yeah, let’s do it.”

I scroll to Hulu and hit play.

We’re halfway through the film and Ava’s all snuggled up in my favorite quilt when Wynnie calls. I hop off the couch to answer outside and give Ava room to swoon.

“Who’s the best?!” Wynnie squeals through the phone. “It’s me. I’m the best. I got you into the fest with a total banger of a spot, right between Stocking Stuffers and Hole Foods Donuts. ”

“Wynnie, that’s great. Thank you so much.”

“You got it, Jojo.” I can hear her red-painted lips smiling through the phone. “Let’s do drinks?”

“Uh, yeah, yeah you got it,” I feign. I’m not trying to burn our bridge in this synchronous moment.

“Perf,” she says. “I’ll text you.”

I hang up and head back inside, finding Ava fast asleep on the couch. I cover her with another blanket and turn off several lamps around the room. I pause by the oak console, my eyes catching on the bottled ship.

It came in a kit my Uncle Gene gifted me when I turned twelve. My dad, ever the handyman, sat with me in his workshop in the garage, and for hours, we traded off glue-dotting and tweezer duties until the only thing left to add were the sails. The white linen triangles were nowhere to be found. My dad went into the house and found an old flannel work shirt, and he helped me cut out funky plaid sails instead.

As I painstakingly attached them to the masts, my dad explained Plutarch’s thought experiment about the ship of Theseus, a hero from Greek mythology. Theseus’ ship was preserved by the Athenians, who gradually replaced its components as they wore down and decayed. Eventually, every part of the ship that was original had been replaced, to which Plutarch asked: was this the same vessel, or a brand new one?

At first, I was insistent that the ship was the same ship it had always been, it had simply evolved. My dad, whose greatest source of joy was a philosophical debate, lobbed a new paradox at me: what if someone else, while the Athenians were updating Theseus’ ship with new parts, had been salvaging the old parts and rebuilding the original ship? If you compared those two ships, which one was truly the ship of Theseus?

His eyes crinkled as I sat over our bottled creation, stumped and frustrated. “It’s a doozy, huh?”

But I wasn’t willing to give up on having a good answer. In my mind, something either was or it wasn’t . There had to be a solution.

Over the next few weeks, I was obsessed with thinking about the two ships. I sat in math and drew sailboats in the margins of my notebooks. In the evenings, at our dinner table, my dad would tease me. “Have you solved the centuries-old thought experiment yet, Jojo?”

But at twelve years old, centuries seem somehow negligible. Why shouldn’t I be the one to crack the code, expose the truth? The hubris of youth propelled me.

It was in health class when I had my epiphany. Ms. Ball was presenting a lecture on puberty of all things, and I ran home to report the newfound conclusion to my father.

Bursting through the garage door, I announced, “They’re all his ships!”

He raised his head curiously. “How’s that?”

"Ms. Ball was talking about how we change as we grow, but we're still the same person," I explained, trying to catch my breath. "And I realized, it's like the ship! The version Theseus first sailed, the one the Athenians rebuilt, and even the one made from the old parts–they're all still the ship of Theseus. It’s about the idea, the identity of it, not just the wood and nails."

He chuckled, wiping sawdust from his hands. "That’s quite a connection, Jojo. You might be onto something. The identity, huh?"

"Yeah," I nodded vigorously. "Like Ms. Ball said, we change in so many ways, but deep down, we hold on to who we are.”

He got up from his bench and kissed me on the head. “You’re a thinker, Jojo. As long as you keep your mind and your heart connected, you can figure anything out, clever girl.” I never saw my dad more proud of me than at that moment.

I wonder what he would think of me right now. I wonder what he’d think about the maddeningly complex woman–my new friend –snoozing on my couch. My mind and my heart are currently talking through cup-and-string phones, which is to say, communication is not at its smoothest.

I sit back down on the far side of the couch and let the movie play out. When my eyelids grow heavy, I let an honest thought slip through my mind-heart hotline: at least we get to fall asleep beside each other one more time.