A/N: Based on a tumblr prompt: What would be Jess' reaction to hearing about the Donna Reed Night? It's taken me far too long to post this; but here it is at last! Enjoy ;)
P.S. Bonus points if you can spot my favorite moment in this fic.
Jess returned from the kitchen with mugs of hot cider, settling in next to where Rory sat cross legged by her mother's coffee table. Rory had her hand over her eyes. "What'd I miss?"
"Oh nothing, nothing... After I bring you home nice and officially engaged, NOW they have to start 'the great boyfriend debate.' Can I please hide somewhere?"
Jess scrunched his eyebrows in amused discomfort. "If I'm voted off, do I have to take the ring back and go?" he leaned in and whispered in mock worry.
"Oh no. You're stuck here on this island, and nobody is taking this ring away from me," Rory murmured adamantly, holding a protective hand over the precious circlet.
Jess nodded, taking in the madness.
"I can't believe that you won't admit that you loved Dean!" Sookie was slack jawed, staring at her best friend who was perfecting the art of denial. "It was the whole young love , let me carry your books and build you a car...guh! You loved it!"
Lorelai rolled her eyes while reaching for her mug of Irish coffee. "Did I love the fact that he mowed my lawn and changed my water bottle? - Yeah, of course I did. And he was good for smashing bugs and opening pickle jars. All that stuff was great."
Sookie dropped her a deadpan look.
"His Donna Reed fixation, on the other hand, was not so charming."
"Donna Reed fixation?" Sookie scrunched up her nose.
Simultaneously, Rory piped in. "He did NOT have a Donna Reed fixation!"
"Oh that was the Esquivel night, right?" Lane chimed in eagerly.
"Okay, t h i s I've gotta hear." Jess shifted, leaning forward, sensing a worthwhile anecdote.
"Oh, you really don't," Rory groaned, but it was too late.
"Oh! He's never seen them, he's never seeeeeeeeeen theeeeeeemmm!" Lorelai manically sang, setting her coffee down on the mantle with a gleeful look and diving for a particular cabinet, causing Rory to spring fumbling to her feet, knocking her elbow into the coffee table and almost knocking Jess' cider out of his hands in the process.
"No! No, no, no-not the Christmas card ammo stack! Mom...mom! Don't you realize you're wasting perfectly good blackmail material here? You could even do a Throwback Thursday kind of birthday card thing! Christmas is coming up! You could continue to hold this over my head for YEARS! You-" All the while she was trying to reach for the stack of pictures Lorelai was rifling through; but Lorelai managed to rifle and dodge at the same time, which took some acrobatic skill, and put on a highly entertaining show for the gathered company.
"Ooh! Is it the one where-?" Sookie interrupted.
"Shoosh, you!" Rory tossed over her shoulder with crinkles between her eyebrows, and Sookie 'shooshed.'
Lorelai continued to shuffle through the pictures, and to laugh triumphantly at her daughter's failed attempts to snatch them from her. "Ha-haah! Just be grateful I'm not one of those sadistic mothers who pulls out all the naked baby butt pictures to show your fiancé."
"You kept naked baby butt pictures framed and on display for most of my childhood-you don't deserve much gratitude!"
"Please tell your mother not to show me any baby butt pictures," Jess called from his place on the floor. "That would be the epitome of creepiness."
"She's not looking for baby butt pictures!"
"Well then, what i s she looking for?"
"Something infinitely more embarrassing."
"Well in t h a t case, by all means, keep looking. Something infinitely more embarrassing should be worth the price of admission," he joked.
Rory shook her head without turning around. "I hate you!"
"No, you don't."
Lorelai grinned, still flipping through the very large stack. "I LOVE that you do that. You are SO my child!"
"But that would make Luke Rory," Jess responded, without missing a beat.
"Okay kids, this is where it gets complicated," Lorelai smirked back, tilting her eyebrows at Jess and nearly losing the pictures to Rory for the sake of comedic timing.
Lane frowned. "I thought the orange dress pictures would be in the Dean box."
The pictures went fluttering as Lorelai sprang forward. "Genius! Mwah!" she kissed Lane on the forehead mid-dash, and Rory shot a look at the more Korean of her two best friends.
"Sorry."
"You are NOT pulling out the boyfriend boxes! That is private property! CONTRABAND! OFF LIMITS! I can't beLIEVE you!" Rory shouted down the hallway, and then back again as Lorelai lugged a large cardboard box back to the coffee table. "I should sue you for breach of parenthood!"
"It's not healthy to start a marriage off with secrets!" Lorelai grunted, shifting the weight onto the table while Jess moved out of the way.
"That had better be a joke. Please tell me you are joking and not being the greatest hypocrite of all time!"
Lorelai's mouth formed a perfect "O". "Blasphemy! My life is an open book! Luke knows all!"
Rory nodded sarcastically, rolling her eyes. "Oh, sure he does!"
Jess leaned around the box to look at Rory. "Let me know if there's seriously anything you don't want me to see."
Rory sighed and shrugged. "It's embarrassing, not earth shattering."
"Okay," he verified, nodding minutely and biting his lower lip before shifting to a better vantage point.
Diving into the box, Lane squealed. "Oh my word-it's the cornstarch!"
Jess lifted a quizzical eyebrow.
"The cornstarch you stole from Doose's-that's so romantic!" she beamed, holding it up, and causing the quizzical look on Jess' face to turn to wide-eyed bemusement.
"It is not romantic! And it's not like I stole it on purpose."
"Ohh...it's the recipe for the rocky road cookies!" Sookie put a hand to her heart. "Remember when you tried to make them and ended up with chocolate briquettes? You were so adorable!"
Rory ducked her head. "A little less gushing, please. This is extremely surreal and more than vaguely disturbing."
"Aw, honey. You know we only torture you because we love you." Lorelai put a hand on Rory's arm, and Rory gave her a sighing look through downcast eyelashes.
Jess certainly wasn't gushing, but waited a moment before asking, "Metamorphosis?" holding out the volume.
"It's a Czechoslovakian football," Lane nodded, as if this was the most reasonable explanation known to humankind.
"Of course it is." Jess flipped open the cover and half read the inscription by instinct before consciously respecting Rory's privacy and flipping it shut.
The three females who were not Rory continued to squeal, and sigh, and gush, and discuss in their own pidgin-like memory shorthand, every last item in the box. Colonel Clucker, the blue 'fancy dress,' a handful of books and CDs that seemed nothing like Dean Forester and yet must have had some connection to him in order to have ended up in this box...a picture of Dean and Rory with him in a tux and her in that vaguely bridal white tulle Jess still remembered her wearing one night at the diner under an incongruously attractive denim jacket - probably the same night the picture had been taken, come to think about it...a receipt in the name of one Martin Forester, charged for 50 cents for a 'meatbl.' In the end, though, Lorelai sat dejected on the couch between Jess, who was standing, and Rory who sat in a defeated sprawl upon the laminate flooring.
"It's not in there!" she moped, sticking her lower lip out .
"Thank god!" said Rory with a groan.
"What is it you're looking for?" Jess asked with his eyebrows screwed together.
"It cannot be deSCRIbed," Lorelai huffed sullenly, and Jess shook his head, eyes closing with a near-laugh.
Rory muttered under her breath, "Not that it'll stop you from trying..."
"It was a series of pictures...of Rory trying to block the camera, and then glaring at the camera with one hand on her hip, and she is wearing this," Lorelai gestured, demonstrating the shape, "orange, checkered hoopskirted dress, with a frilly white apron-"
"The apron was n o t frilly."
" -and a pearl necklace, a headband, and these waaaaaaayy-oranger-than-carrots high heels."
"They were more persimmon colored, really."
"And what was all of this for?" Jess' face was scrunched more in bizarreness reaction than amusement.
"It was for Deeeeaan..." Lorelai stretched the name out, blinking quicker for the moment she held it.
"Well, that much we've established, but...?"
Lorelai held up a 'halt' hand, as if to say: 'but wait - there's more!' "It was for Dean and his Donna Reed fetish."
Rory rose up with an indignant roar. "Oh my G O D! First it was an 'obsession,' and now it's a 'FETISH'?!" She glared down at her mother with angry eyebrows and hands on her hips.
"See! There's the expression I was trying to describe!" Lorelai clapped her hands together.
"I think she actually said 'fixation'," Lane interjected.
"Not helping!" Rory whirled on Lane again.
"Sorry. I'm sorry..." Lane backed down with a shake of the head, eyes lowered.
"Tell him about the dinner you cooked!" Sookie chimed in her hands clasped together rapturously.
"Also not helping!"
Jess held up a hand, unclear who he was asking. "I'm sorry, but... Donna Reed?"
Lorelai waved a regal hand at the question, "Executive producer, director, and star of the 'Donna Reed Show.' Incomparable 50's icon who-"
"I knooow who Donna Reed is!" Jess deadpanned.
"Well, Dean didn't!" Lorelai said in her own defense.
"Do I even loook like a Dean? And how did he both not know who she was AND have some kind of a fetish for-"
Rory grimaced, interrupting. "Could we PLEASE stop using that word?"
"Sorry," Jess flicked in her direction without losing his train of conversation with Lorelai, "but how?"
"Maaaayyyybe Dean Moriarty..." Lorelai replied.
"What?"
"You mean like in 'Sherlock'?" Sookie asked, scrunching up her nose, and Rory shook her head in reply to Sookie without taking her eyes off her mother and Jess.
"You asked if you looked like a Dean!" Lorelai explained in a tone that said that should have been obvious.
Jess rolled his eyes. "Could we please stick to the- You know what? Never mind. She doesn't want me to know; you're not making sense..." He pursed his lips and shrugged.
"I am so making sense!" Lorelai gave him a sour look.
"I am not letting this degenerate into an 'are too' 'am not' squabble. This is ridi-"
Rory's arms dropped. "HOW did a night like this turn into an argument?!"
"WHAT IS GOING ON IN HERE?" Luke stumbled in from the cold with a monkey wrench in his hand, finding that the living room and its occupants looked to be in far greater need of repair than the alternator Jackson had talked him and Zach into helping to replace.
After a few seconds of stunned silence throughout the room, Jess waved his hand across the general melee. "Lorelai thought it was a good idea to summon Rory's ghosts of boyfriends past..."
Luke's eyes pierced, and his head tipped as he pivoted on one heel to look at his wife.
Lorelai's jaw was unhinged, gaping at her potential son-in-law. "I summoned...!? I did not start th- You weren't even in the ROOM when this debate started! I was on YOUR side!"
This elicited th of weird looks.
Rory huffed out a frustrated breath and planted herself in front of Jess' wild expression.
"Mom and I pointed out that 'The Donna Reed Show,' while being classic and beloved, was also deeply dull, overtly sexist, and kind of messed up on several different levels. Whereas, Dean thought it was homey, and nice, and idealistic..."
"Why am I not surprised?"
Rory leaned forward, leading the narrative with her shoulders. "I was trying to make a point."
"By dressing up like a pumpkin patch, and turning culinary, and doing something involving space age bachelor pad music?"
"Yes."
Jess nodded slowly with a contemplating and almost tongue-in-cheek frown. "And you don't think that's at all disturbingly playing into exactly the messed up idealized role he seemed to have you in, in his head?"
Rory grimaced uncomfortably, voice quiet and eyes wandering the far wall. "Noo..." She shook her head foggily. "I mean, maybe it did have that result in some way, but that's definitely not what I was going for."
Lorelai let out a scoffing noise. "Well he certainly wasn't satisfied with Donna Reed when he finally got her..."
Rory stabbed her finger through the imaginary speech bubble coming from her mother's mouth. " D o not start!"
Jess had raised a fist quickly to his lips to squelch a low whistle at Lorelai's scathing remark.
"Who wants to talk about Logan?" Sookie blurted out in a squeak, only to find death glares on all sides. "Or how to make baguettes with just the right crunch? ...or toenail polish?-toenail-polish-is-good!"