I emptied the bucket in the sink and took off my gloves, and then I scooted onto the bench next to Izzy. I picked up the carton of milk, held it to my mouth, and chugged and chugged and chugged.
“Look how good Mary Jane is!” Izzy pointed at my face. I nodded and kept chugging. I felt like I was breaking the law. And it made me smile.
Over the next hour, everyone drifted into the kitchen. Sheba said since I had cleaned the kitchen, I wasn’t allowed to cook for anyone that day. Izzy wondered how’d we eat if I didn’t cook, which made Dr. Cone say, “Don’t you remember how we ate before Mary Jane joined the family?” The words joined the family pulsated in my head. In my heart. Sheba got up and made omelets with onions, cheddar cheese, and green peppers. I knew I’d be copying that recipe soon. Everything was served on pink paper plates that were left over from Izzy’s birthday party last May.
There was some discussion about the broken dishes. Dr. Cone brought up Buddhism and detachment and the idea that they were just things and had no spiritual value. I wondered if he still counted as Jewish since he really seemed to believe in Buddha more than God. Mrs. Cone said she hated all those dishes anyway, as they had been given to her by her mother and symbolized her mother’s need to impose her value system on Mrs. Cone. I tuned out of the conversation for a while as I thought over those ideas. It had never before occurred to me that sometimes dishes weren’t just dishes, that things could represent ideas in more powerful ways than the ideas themselves.
When I tuned back in, Sheba was insisting that she pay to replace all the dishes. She asked Mrs. Cone where she should buy the new ones.
“Oh.” Mrs. Cone shrugged. “It’s not something I’ve ever done. I don’t get into that kind of stuff.”
Dr. Cone said, “I’d be happy if we used paper plates for the rest of our years. Or ate off newspaper to create less waste.”
“Mary Jane,” Sheba said. “Where does your mother buy things like dishes?”
“I think most people in Roland Park go to Smyth,” I said.
“Of course!” Mrs. Cone nodded. “I feel like a hippie-alien every time I walk into that place. But yes, we can find dishes there.”
Jimmy said, “When I was growing up, all of our glasses were from the gas station.”
Gas stations still offered free glasses when you filled up, but my mother and father never accepted them, no matter how much I begged. I’d given up wanting them.
“I have gas station glasses with Bugs Bunny on them!” Izzy said, and then her face changed as she remembered that all the glasses were now broken.
“I’m so sorry,” Jimmy said. He looked pained.
“No one needs gas station glasses,” Dr. Cone said.
“JIMMY!” Izzy shouted. “I’M NOT MAD!”
Everyone laughed and then Jimmy said, “So, uh, I’ll clean the living room.”
Dr. Cone said, “Yes. I think . . . Well, I think it will make you feel better.”
Izzy said, “Mary Jane and me were gonna do the alphabet with the books.”
“We were going to alphabetize the bookshelves,” I clarified.
Mrs. Cone shook her head and smiled. “Mary Jane, I don’t know what to make of you!”
Sheba leaned over and wrapped her arm around me. “You sort of remind me of myself.”
“Really?” Sheba was so glamorous. And I couldn’t have described what made any human sexy, but I knew that Sheba was exactly that. Sexy. I wasn’t, as far as I could tell, glamorous or sexy in any way. Though maybe I was a sex addict. Would that make me sexy?
“Yeah. Your desire for order. Clarity,” Sheba said. “The need to wrangle chaos into something that can be managed.”
“What’s chaos?” Izzy asked.
“The books on the living room floor,” Dr. Cone said.
“The kitchen when we went to bed last night,” Mrs. Cone said.
“The shit swirling in my brain,” Jimmy said.
After breakfast, Izzy, Jimmy, and I went into the living room. I brought a spiral notebook and a red crayon. I was going to write out the alphabet for Izzy, so she could see the order without having to sing through the song.
“The letter A comes first.” I wrote a giant red A on the first page of the notebook.
Izzy dropped down to the ground like a marionnette who had just had her strings cut. “How do you say A in French?” Izzy asked. In our nightly reading of the book Madeline, I sometimes replaced English words with French ones （like all the girls at Roland Park Country School, I’d been studying French since kindergarten） and this thrilled Izzy.