2 kids, boy & girl.
Kids are two years apart.
Caesarean both times.
My Charlie. Jackie’s Patrick.
Catholic Church.
Camelot – Fav musical.
Fathers absent since we were seven. (Jackie’s due to divorce, mine to death.)
One full sibling, a sister (like Jacko too).
Birthdays – 10 months apart, same year.
Same patent leather purse. Almost.
Me – Homecoming Queen ’46. Jackie – Debutante of the Year ’47.
Profile. Same chin. Forehead. (well, everyone says so!)
Hair style. Left parting.
Hair texture. Different colour, but same depth of colour, the same thickness.
On the front page of the Sacramento Bee, Jackie Kennedy was wearing a hair clip which was exactly like the one Billie was wearing right this very instant. Clipped to the right side of her head, holding her hair off her forehead.
Same hair clip!
Sixteen similarities. Uncanny, that’s what it was. So not surprising, really, that they were both married to charismatic powerful men. Jacko and John. And wasn’t John sometimes called Jack? Mr MacAlister and President Kennedy. Mrs J. MacAlister and the First Lady. Billie and Jackie!
Okay, so their backgrounds were not similar. And their income. And the Kennedys, it had to be said, were a well-established American dynasty, whereas the MacAlister dynasty was still being created. But the affinity was there, and Billie knew, just knew, that if she and Jackie were to ever meet, they would be instant friends. She felt closer to her than she did to her own sister. Louise, well, of course Billie loved her…but let’s face it, Louise lacked class. Not only did she not aspire to it, she made fun of it.
In the two years since the Kennedys moved into the White House, Billie’s personal style had changed from timidly garish to confidently muted. Corduroy featured a lot now, and 100% cotton had become something to look for on labels. Cotton madras was her new interest, as well as seersucker for hot weather. And if she ever had any more babies (and here, Billie stopped and sighed), she’d name them Caroline and John. And it was a fine time to be Catholic! To sit in a pew every Sunday with healthy children and a handsome successful husband. Weren’t lots of people on their block the same – solid Catholic families with names like Gilotti and O’Reilly and Cincotta. Okay, MacAlister wasn’t exactly Catholic sounding, but everyone knew Scotland and Ireland were practically the same island. And anyway, her maiden name was Molinelli – very Catholic. The bottom line was, if she wasn’t in the life she was, she would be insanely jealous of herself. Goodness me, she thought giddily, I would hate myself.
A photograph of John Kennedy on his sailboat had been pinned to the kitchen bulletin board for six months. She’d cut it out of Life magazine and Jacko had teased her. Said she had a crush on the president. But now he wanted to get a sailboat too. Not a motorboat, they were tacky. A wooden sailboat, to take his children out on. And Billie would go too, with her Brownie box camera, and take lots of photographs of them all, with the wind filling the sails and their sunburnt freckled faces all beautiful with smiles. God bless families. God bless Catholic families. God bless Catholic families in America.
The MG Jacko drove when Sam was a baby was gone. They had one car again, a green four-year-old Hillman which Jacko used to commute to his new job as sub-editor at the Bee. Oh! Another similarity.
John Kennedy and Jacko – both wear white collars to work.
But unlike John, Jacko’s job involved quite a lot of typing on his Remington, and phoning. And unlike Jackie, Billie did not have servants to clean her house and provide clean clothes for her family. Actually, she didn’t even have a washing machine or a dryer. Ah, the price of living beyond one’s means. But didn’t they own the sweetest little white house on Cherry Blossom Way at the centre of the coveted Land Park neighbourhood?
White houses
But life behind the facade was hot dogs for dinner, home-sewn dresses and a drawer full of Blue Chip stamps all carefully pasted in books. The Blue Chip Catalogue was her most frequently read book. Their vacations were either trips to her mother’s in Redding, or camping. Camping! Arriving with tired children, everyone cranky from the hot drive and from packing up, and then having to put up the tent and unpack before you did anything else. All that scrabbling around in dirt, picking insects out of food, hearing mosquitoes like jet planes inside the tent.
It suddenly occurred to her that marriage was a bit like their tent. When Jacko brought it home, it had nestled neatly in a shiny clean bag. After the first use, they couldn’t fit the tent back in, no matter how hard they tried. It would not go! And by the fourth use, they’d lost seven pegs, the zip stuck sometimes, and there was a little mould growing in the corner where they’d all slept in a familial heap. Nope! No matter how closely they read the instructions, that darn tent was never true to its promise. And she’d never be able to squeeze the days of her marriage back into that neat orderly way she’d imagined them.
Acceptance of imperfect marriage.
Billie slipped the list into the Blue Chip stamp drawer. Jacko never looked in there.
Twice a week, while the kids were at school, Billie filled a suitcase with dirty clothes and headed to Sunny Suds Laundromat. They’d only lived in this neighbourhood six months; routines like this made it seem much longer. The suitcase was awkward and heavy. She switched hands now and then, so each leg had bruises. Today was hot. Hotter than Piggleston, where they’d been living this time last year. The two apartments they’d briefly rented before buying this house had been much less convenient for the laundromat. It had been a forty-five-minute hike from the first one. She’d hated that apartment. Snot-green stucco, with their apartment on the fifth floor. No elevator and no air conditioning, just a ceiling fan that made an irritating whine. All their boxes had still been in storage, and for months they’d lived out of the suitcases they’d driven down with. Like camping.
Most of those mornings Jacko would shower, while she ironed the shirt she’d washed the night before in the bath. Then she’d serve up eggs and bacon for them all. He’d kiss her goodbye, ruffle the kids’ heads, and go off to his air-conditioned adult world, briefcase swinging to beat the band. He never complained, and she always complained. The kids kept asking for the toys which were still in storage, she had no friends, and Jacko was often out.
The lease had been short – it was more a boarding house really – and they’d moved to a better apartment for a few months, and now they were in their own house, 1910 Cherry Blossom Way. All the boxes had been unpacked and friends had been made. Well, Jacko had some friends at the office, and they’d been to three cocktail parties, at which she’d been able to finally wear that empire waist dress with the poppies, spitting image of the dress Jackie wore to her nephew’s christening. Robert and Ethel’s eighth child. The Robert Kennedys were classy too, but Ethel couldn’t hold a candle to Jackie. It was Billie’s feeling that Ethel was holding Robert back from the political success of his brother. Her eyes were…too small, and she’d let her figure go. She had the look of, not exactly trailer trash, but definitely housing tract. Not that there was anything innately bad about housing tracts. In fact, Billie and Jacko were living in one right now. But at least it was an old one, and the houses had long ceased to be clones of each other. In fact, Billie had fallen in love with 1910 Cherry Blossom Way because it was different from the other houses on the street. For one thing, it had a huge sycamore tree in the front yard, and the attic had been converted into a tiny bedroom with a multi-paned window peeking out to the sycamore branches. There were lemon and orange trees in the small backyard, with grey squirrels continually leaping from branch to house roof to branch. Yes, it had cost too much, barely enough for groceries after the mortgage, but it was worth every penny, every sacrifice.
She was nearly at Sunny Suds, and her arm couldn’t wait to let go of the suitcase. She passed Vic’s Ice-Cream Parlour, and out drifted that song. She paused here, putting down the suitcase. Suddenly, no other songs were on the radio. ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand!’ Just kids, the Beatles. Cute, though, she had to admit. Jackie had admitted to liking them too, just recently. Paul McCartney was twenty-one years old, over a dozen years younger than Billie. This made her feel old. She sighed. The sky was a flat white, too polluted and windless to be blue. She thought the sky looked unwashed. A rush of vanilla-scented cold air hit her from the open door of Vic’s Ice-Cream Parlour. She was accustomed to constantly telling herself: No, not yet. She walked on, her mouth tasting the Jamaican almond fudge she loved, and she didn’t miss a beat, the sweat staining her pretty pink blouse. So self-sacrificing! So mature! So thin and classy! Well, wouldn’t Jackie do the exactly the same? She’d suffered so much, had Jackie, but did you ever hear her moaning about her lost babies? All the miscarriages, the stillborn daughter, the son who died at three days old? Not a word. Always the bright smile, the controlled serenity. Jackie knew how to endure, how to not let life get you down. Darn it, there was no two ways about it: Jackie Kennedy had style.
Since Charlie, Billie had struggled with style.
At first she’d howled like a demented thing, even in public places. When the crying became more controlled, she stopped having sex. She felt crazy. One day she put all the photographs of Charlie, all his newborn sleepers, the teething toys and teddies still brand new, away in a box. Then she took them out again, talked about him too much with strangers, upset Elisabeth and Sam with her afternoons on the sofa and a box of Kleenex. She never drank, which was a good thing, but Jack still said she was embarrassing herself. And embarrassing him. So she put Charlie’s things away again, aside from a brown teddy bear and three framed photos, which she did not display in the living room. They were on her bedside table. Charlie at one day old, asleep; she could smell his newborn skin just looking at that picture. Another from the park, when he was just two weeks old, sleeping in that new buggy she’d coveted. And one a week later, just before the terrible night: Charlie naked in the bath. This one was her favourite, because she was in it too. She could see her own arm cradling his back, and her hand scooping water over his belly. She loved the way his skinny legs and arms seemed to keep moving, even in the photograph. She never got tired of looking at the photographs, but she rationed herself. Her guilty treat. She avoided times when Jacko was home – he didn’t like to talk about Charlie anymore.
‘It’s not that I don’t miss him,’ he explained to her one evening when he’d been drinking. ‘It’s just that talking about him doesn’t help. If it doesn’t help, what is the point? It’s…it’s uneconomical.’
He was right. It was an inefficient use of time, to talk about Charlie, to think about him, to picture him. And yet. It had been just over two years now. He’d only been a month old when it happened, but the nine months of pregnancy made her feel she’d known him longer than a month. Some days just after she woke, the family felt like a family of five, a completely different shape in her mind than a family of four. Five was asymmetrical but rounder, four was equal but angular and sharp pointed. Then she remembered, and it was like her family reversed, sucked in on itself, and going backwards had never felt right to her. It never felt the same. It turned out that once someone took up space, the space didn’t disappear just because they were gone.
Jackie would understand this. She probably never bothered her husband with her moods. With her nostalgia, and this awful feeling of…permanent wrongness. No, no. She’d continue getting her hair done, her nails painted, her leg hair removed. She’d be ever-ready in bed, pliable, melting, a proper lover. Billie could remember behaving this way, but she couldn’t summon the actual feeling. Jackie would be hiding all her sorrows, but Billie imagined that somewhere in the White House, perhaps in some small closet or cubbyhole, she had built a little shrine to her lost babies. Photographs, unworn baby shoes, a birth certificate. She imagined Jackie slipping away from some state dinner or cocktail party, maybe slipping out of her post-coital bed, to take solace alone with her mementoes. To just sit with them, and somehow inhale proof that once she’d had other children. She adored her Caroline and John-John of course, but when alone she might sometimes whisper the names of the others.
Weird, how occasionally thinking that Charlie was still alive when she first woke, made her so happy she hardly minded the shocking dip straight afterwards. So secretly, sometimes in the afternoon in the empty house, she’d begun pretending that he was just in the other room, having a nap or playing with his Matchbox cars. He’d be just over two now. Maybe he’d be looking at a picture book, pretending to read, trying to copy his siblings. On one level she always understood it was a game, but, oh, the second’s worth of joy it brought her anyway. And to think he began life as an accident! The night Kennedy won, they’d drunk expensive wine, made love, and she’d fallen asleep before douching. How could such random carelessness lead to someone so sweet, so specific – the surprise of Charlie had made him more precious somehow than the two planned children. He so nearly wasn’t. With that amount of luck, it seemed illogical that he didn’t get to have his full life as well.
Some days she got irritated, thinking of the way she’d taken him for granted, almost from his first day. The older children and Jacko had still absorbed her; her own appearance had still absorbed her. For long periods when he napped, she’d focused on other things. That dress she was sewing for Elisabeth. Helping Sam with his arithmetic. She revisited memories, just daily routines like changing Charlie’s diaper, or tilting his head back in her hands to rinse the shampoo out, or putting him in his crib and covering him with that yellow blanket. This time she infused the occasion with the proper enthusiasm. As if appreciation could be effective, retrospectively.
Sunny Suds was steamy and smelled of Tide. The powdery, chemical sensation burned the back of her throat as she loaded up the three machines. Whites, coloureds, delicates. As usual, she briefly remembered days when she did one load of wash a week. Sometimes not even that. Hard to believe that had been her, suiting herself every minute of every day. That lavender silk lingerie she’d been so proud of and hand-washed. The fine lace on the trim of each piece. Nowadays, all her underwear was greyish cotton. But then Jackie probably didn’t place much importance on fancy underwear either. In fact, it seemed vain now. Serviceable good quality underwear, that was classy, wasn’t it? 100% cotton. Breathable. Something a little trashy, a little desperate, a little unwholesome, about sexy lingerie. Anyway, her Jacko certainly didn’t need encouragement. Mores the pity, she often felt.
