Page 8 of The Launch

“If only everything were that simple,” Frankie says with finality, pushing herself away from the windowsill. “Ladies, I’m sorry to break up this little party, but Barbara probably needs some peace and quiet anyway. And I need to be on my way.”

Jo follows suit and leaves with Frankie, their heeled shoes clicking as they walk down the shiny, polished hallways. The women’s steps match perfectly as they pass the rooms of tired but happy new mothers recuperating on the maternity ward.

Once they’re out in the hot sun of midday, Frankie pulls a pair of cat-eye sunglasses from her purse and slides them on. This makes her look terribly glamorous, and Jo says so.

“Oh, Jo,” Frankie laughs. “I bought them at Neiman Marcus—they’re nothing special.” She stops and gives Jo an appraising look. “Do you like fashion?”

Jo glances down at her red bandana print blouse, which is tucked into a pleated skirt made of a dark denim fabric. She’d started sewing her own clothes as a teenager, and while she saves time now by shopping off the rack, every so often she still likes to buy a Butterick pattern, lay it on the floor of her living room, and cut into her fabric with the satisfying slice of her sharp pinking shears. She painstakingly pins the fabric and gets everything just so, and then occasionally stays up well into the wee hours of the morning with a pot of coffee, her Singerhumming faithfully as she listens to the radio. It’s one of those small personal pleasures that she indulges in every so often—sleep be damned—because it gives her such joy to be doing something for herself and without any interruption from Bill or the kids.

“I actually do like fashion,” Jo says, blushing as she runs a hand over the blouse she’d made just before leaving Minnesota. “But I don’t think my style is very evolved.”

Frankie is pulling a cigarette from her purse and she turns her head to look at Jo again, though her eyes are shielded by the dark sunglasses. “It doesn’t have to be evolved, Jo—your style just has to beyours.”

Jo thinks about this as they stand beneath a swaying palm tree in the parking lot of the hospital. She looks up at the reflective, glittering windows of the building, noticing the way the fluffy, white clouds are mirrored in the glass.

“I guess so,” Jo says uncertainly. “But where do you getyoursense of style?” It’s probably too hot to be standing around on the pavement, chit-chatting about fashion, but Jo is trying hard to acclimate to the painfully humid weather, so she forces herself to stand there, willing her pores not to sweat.

“My style?” Frankie blows smoke straight up at the sky. “From my mother. She and my father both came here from Italy in 1922. My mother was still a girl then, but her sense of style was already solidified, as was her appetite for life.” Frankie flicks ash onto the gray pavement, crossing one arm over her flat stomach and holding on to the opposite elbow as she stands there, looking elegantly cool in the heat. “They had pasta most days, took naps in the afternoon, smoked like chimneys, and ate dinner no earlier than nine. My parents still drink a bottle of red wine every night. In my entire life, I have never once heard my mother complain about the things other women do: she never says she’s ‘fat,’ she simply says she’s been enjoying life a bit toomuch. And then she drinks a gallon of water with lemon each day until she ‘feels like herself again.’” Frankie shakes her head, tutting as she very clearly imagines this Italian mother of hers.

“Your family sounds so different than mine.”

“How so?”

“Well,” Jo says. “For starters, my parents were born here, and they lived through the Great Depression—both of them on Midwestern farms. Because of that, they’re extremely frugal. My dad can pinch a penny until it screams.”

Frankie chuckles at this. “Until it screams, huh?”

“Oh, absolutely. I wore my mother’s wedding dress when I married Bill, not because I thought it suited me, but because it was free. And when I met him, I was working as a secretary. My dad wanted me to be self-sufficient. He told me and my sisters when we were quite young that there were no guarantees in life—about anything. He said we could marry well, but a stock market crash or some other unforeseen disaster could wipe out our families. My dad thought that having daughters who worked was the best way to insulate us from hardship. ‘If you can work, you can feed yourself—and your children,’ he always said,” Jo says, using a deep, faux man’s voice.

Frankie nods. “That’s true,” she says. “But I’ve already worked and lived on my own, and now I don’t want to work anymore.” She makes a face. “Not because I’m lazy, but because there are so many other things todo,you know?”

Jo does know—of course she knows. A woman can have a wide range of passions and hobbies and pursuits, they just can’t jeopardize her obligations as a wife and mother. “Sure. Of course,” she says.

“I want to learn French,” Frankie says, smoking again as she gazes up at the palm trees overhead. “And I want to bake strudel. I want to take a road trip all the way from Florida to Maine, fromMaine to Alaska, and then down to California. I want to see it all—maybe even Mexico.”

Jo blinks in response. Her dreams have always been much more pedestrian than the ones that Frankie apparently entertains: she wants to sew curtains for the entire house. She’d like to take the kids to Yellowstone before they all grow up and leave to live their own lives. She wants to read a novel a week purely for her own enjoyment. But road tripping around the perimeter of the country? Learning to speak a foreign language? Thoughts like these have never crossed her mind.

“You know what we should do?” Frankie says, dropping her cigarette butt on the pavement and crushing it beneath the toe of her high heeled shoe.

“What’s that?”

“Take a girls’ road trip,” Frankie says. “Once the men are all settled, we should drive up to Atlantic City and have a weekend of debauchery. See Sinatra at the 500 Club.”

Again, Jo simply blinks. Whoisthis woman? She’s completely entranced by Frankie—she can admit that to herself—but she’s also mystified that such a female creature exists in her orbit. Someone who wants to do things simply for the sake of doing them, not to benefit her own family. A woman who thinks it’s perfectly reasonable to just jet away to Atlantic City, of all places, and spend a weekend gazing up at Old Blue Eyes on stage while someone else is back in Stardust Beach holding down the fort.

“That sounds…really fun,” Jo says, giving her best Girl Scout-typeI’m game for anythingsmile. “But I can’t really imagine leaving my children.”

Frankie’s face falls. She pushes her sunglasses up on top of her head and her brown eyes pierce Jo’s. “They’d be fine without you for a weekend,” she says. “I promise.”

It’s on the tip of Jo’s tongue to remind Frankie that, as a woman who has no children, it’s really not fair of her to say so, but she thinks better of it. After all, she knows nothing of Frankie’s personal life or marriage—not yet, anyway—so she bites her tongue.

“You’re so right,” Jo says agreeably. “I’m sure they would be fine.” But she isn’t convinced that they would be, nor is she at all sure that Bill would support her disappearing on a road trip with a bunch of other women, so she just keeps smiling. “It was so good to see you today, Frankie,” she says, turning to find her car in the lot, which is officially baking in the noon sun like a tray of cookies in the oven. “I need to get home and do some afternoon chores, but I’d love to have you over soon for coffee.”

Frankie smiles back, but her eyes are slightly narrowed in consideration. Jo feels scrutinized under her gaze—seen, but not in a good way. Seen, but for who she really is: a dull, staid, boring mom from Minneapolis. Being around Frankie makes her feel as if she doesn’t have a glamorous bone in her entire body, but it also makes her feel like shewantsto be glamorous. Frankie is somehow aspirational for her—almost like the kind of friend a girl has when she’s young; the type who drives a little too fast, starts to smoke a little too young, and always has a really good bad idea up her sleeve.

“Definitely,” Frankie says, watching Jo as she walks over to the family station wagon. Jo unlocks the driver’s side door and lifts a hand in farewell.

Jo backs up with caution, tapping her brakes quickly so as not to nick an old man passing slowly behind her car with a cane, then she puts her car in drive and exits from the lot.

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