Janie's Lover (a preamble)

She can still remember the hot afternoon at summer camp.  She was on the lower bunk, and the spider, a furry number with long black legs, was  lazily sprawling its way down the wall toward her pillow.  It was a big spider - size of a baby’s palm, and thick that way, too - fat and ugly in ways that Janie can still remember.

But that’s not why Janie remembers. She remembers because another kid, on the bunk across the way, the one that was attached to Melissa Longfield’s, noticed the spider.  It was the other kid who screamed and said, “Oh. my. god. look,  Melissa.”

Melissa looked. She swung her soft, tan camper-legs  over the side of her bunk and landed like pine a needle hits a leaf.  She pushed aside Janie’s sleeping bag and winked.

Janie titled her head. The barrista was talking wife and latte and how nice.

“Yes,” Janie said. 

She thinks Michael is going to leave her. She is terrified of this - of his ease in the world, of his humor, the way it draws people in, his awkward gait, and the way women comment on it- as if they think he is thrown off balance by an over-weight pendulum.  She could correct them but she’s never actually believed that women care about size. They care, she thinks, about rigidity. Something closer to a good grade.

Michael does walk crooked - lists almost,  and there’s something about him that women think they can fix. Janie is not a fixer. Janie is not a completer.  Janie is a walker.  And she wonders whether she really thinks that he will leave her for another woman or she will.

She doesn’t know why she didn’t correct the barrista when he thought she said “wife” - that her “wife” wanted a latte.  She doesn’t even remember what she was trying to say - only that he slipped so easily into believing she was someone who had something else entirely that for a few moments, she languished in thoughts of a life without a pendulum and allowed herself to remember something about a spider and a girl.