Leading Ladies Anthology [FEATURED STORY]

@ShelleyBurbank - Jennie's Got Some Gum

Jennifer Douglas-Brant twists her auburn hair into a ponytail and secures it with an elastic band.  She bends to double-knot the laces of her running shoes.  Outside the bay window of her large kitchen, a misty rain falls, but inside the kitchen gleams with stainless steel appliances and a set of copper cookware suspended over the granite-topped center island.  It's a warm room, all browns and coppers and greens, but large enough to entertain groups of guests—Alexander's work colleagues, their son's Boy Scout troop, Jennifer's book club. 

Beautiful, everyone tells her, as they size up the room with envious eyes.  Just beautiful. 

It should be beautiful, Jen thinks, straightening her back.  The handmade Spanish tiles alone had cost a fortune, and she'd spent countless hours with a Portland architect making sure it turned out just right. 

And for what?

The thought sneaks up on her.  So many things had turned out differently than she'd expected when she and Alexander and their son, Boston, moved here.  How naïve she'd been three and a half years ago, pouring over catalogs, cutting out pictures from home magazines, fantasizing about her dream home.  She'd grown up in the city, in an apartment in Portland's Back Bay, but she'd always wanted a house.  Now she had one, and it hadn't turned out to be the Nirvana she'd imagined.

She  pushes open the sliding door and steps from the kitchen into the misty coolness of an early spring day.  Overhead, a blue jay screeches and flaps toward the wooded ridge of maple trees rimming the overgrown pasture behind her house.  The last remnants of snow have succumbed to a rainy April.  The pasture is a sodden, beige stretch of uncut grass dotted with a few clumps of pine and alder seedlings, a place where nature has begun to reclaim the land for her own purposes. 

She sniffs, and the earthy smell of mud tinged with the raw, animal scent of manure assaults her nostrils.

 "Ughh," Jennifer mutters, reaching to the waist of her jogging pants and powering up her music player.  "So much for fresh, country air."  She twists her torso back and forth, stretching in preparation for her run and trying to ignore the smell of cow dung that clings to the land like a ghost of some long-dead Holsteins Frederick Johnson pastured here twenty years ago.

If Alexander had been clear that the development he'd planned was to be built on old dairy pasture, she might have objected to leaving Portland, but her desire for four bedrooms, three and a half baths, and designer kitchen had prevented her from asking the right questions.  She'd been blinded by house-lust, infected with Alexander's optimism that the rock-bottom price of the acreage could be transformed into a profitable real-estate deal, and now she finds herself living at the end of a poorly paved town road, unsold house lots on all sides, her only neighbors a group of hostile families that had been entrenched in the small town of Three Lakes, Maine for generations. 

She jogs down the long, paved driveway to the access road and past the undeveloped lots of the subdivision, each one marked with stakes and fluttery orange tape.  Every flag defeats her.  Every stake pierces her heart.  There should be houses here.  And neighbors.  Jennifer picks up her pace.  Nothing has turned out as she expected.

————

 Four summers ago, Alexander drove them all to Three Lakes to look at the Johnson property.  Walking through the field, fragrant with the smell of wildflowers— not dung— Alexander outlined his plans.  The real-estate market was booming, he said.  They could get the land dirt cheap.  None of the relative wanted it.  The words washed over her, background noise.  Twenty house-lots.  Graywater pond.  Huge profits. 

She'd barely listened.  The sky had been a deep, cornflower blue and insects buzzed in the tall grass.  Jennifer imagined Bo catching lightening bugs in a jar or sleeping out in a tent with a friend beneath a wide expanse of starry, night sky.  Something romantic, something sentimental tugged at her heart.  Her child could grow up in the country.  She could have the big house she'd always wanted.  She could learn to knit and to bake bread.  She'd throw parties for their city friends and impress them with handmade place cards and floral centerpieces arranged from flowers she'd cut from her own gardens that very morning.  She'd be the Martha Stewart of York County . . .