Jenny and the Jaws of Life

by Jincy Willett

  For Edward T. Kornhauser

  Contents

  Foreword by David Sedaris

  Julie in the Funhouse

  The Haunting of the Linguards

  Melinda Falling

  My Father, at the Wheel

  Father of Invention

  Anticipatory Grief

  The Best of Betty

  Under the Bed

  Justine Laughs at Death

  Mr. Lazenbee

  Résumé

  Jenny

  The Jaws of Life

  Preview

  About the Author

  Foreword

  Like most of the books that have made a profound impression on me, I first discovered Jenny and the Jaws of Life in the New Fiction section of the Chicago Public Library. I was a voracious reader then, a student shoplifting for a voice, and there was nothing I felt I couldn’t learn from. Had Pol Pot released a chapbook I doubtlessly would have taken it home, violating the margins with check marks and little notations reading “That is so true!” The publisher’s name or author’s pedigree made no difference whatsoever. If it had gone through a printing press or even a Xerox machine I added it to my stack and read it without discrimination.

  We were told in the 1980s that this was a golden age of American short fiction, that stories were “in,” much like caterpillar eyebrows and, for a brief period, lesbianism. It seemed to me that a golden age was best defined in retrospect, that, when marketed as trend, a thing was doomed to suffer accordingly. What’s in today is, by its very nature, out tomorrow—scorned, the object of embarrassment and ridicule. It made sense with shoulder pads, but how could you dismiss an entire medium? What could replace the pleasures of a short story, and to what purpose? It’s like replacing oral sex or chicken. I mean, why even try?

  If the age was golden what made it so was the giddy wealth of material. Publishers were much more willing to take a chance, and each trip to the library yielded someone new. The great Tobias Wolff, Jean Thompson, strange Joy Williams; I’d read a collection, examine the blurbs on the back of the book, and seek out those authors as well, following a trail that would often lead me full circle. There were stories in magazines, anthologies devoted to every imaginable theme or pathology, and obscure reviews and quarterlies; a seemingly endless supply of stuff.

  There are great story writers now but I doubt. I’ll ever read the same way I did in the 1980s. My brain is not the democracy it once was, and I’ve developed an attachment to traditional punctuation. The carte blanche reverence is gone as well, an unfortunate side effect of wish fulfillment. I now know what it’s like to see your own book on the library shelf, to watch as a stranger frowns at your author photograph, hedges a bit, and then dumps you in the romance or self-help section. Authors are no longer omnipotent gods and goddesses, but the people you share a bathroom with at Yaddo, the people who follow a fantastic joke or after-dinner story with the words, “I’m already using it.”

  While the business of writing holds no particular excitement, the act of writing continues to mystify me, especially when practiced by such people as Jincy Willett. Of the umpteen story collections published over the last twenty years, hers is one of the dozen that continues to gnaw at me. Who is this person, and why don’t more people know about her?

  I’d hoped that Jenny and the Jaws of Life might be followed, immediately, by another collection, but for whatever reason, that was not the case. As it is I’ve had to satisfy myself with regular rereadings, hardly a disappointment as each time I come away with something new. What I loved first was her humor, which is black rather than jokey and displays an unfailing, perfect sense of timing. “This is a very old story, the one about daughters and fathers. It ends in marriage and the promise of renewal. So it must be a comedy” (“My Father at the Wheel”). “Her mother and her father’s sister had each had out-of-body experiences, her sister was always talking about Velikovsky, and both her grandmothers had met Jesus Christ” (“The Haunting of the Lingards”).

  It’s the sort of book that leads to late-night phone calls. “I know you’re busy sleeping or whatever, but wait, I just want to read you this one passage—.” The one then leading to another, and another. For me that first passage was always from “The Best of Betty.” Written in the form of increasingly hostile letters, it documents the breakdown and eventual rebirth of a bitter, smart-mouthed advice columnist. (It’s a bit long for inclusion in an introduction, but please bear with me. These paragraphs alone are reason enough to buy the book.)

  Dear Betty:

  You hear from so many unfortunates with serious problems that I feel a bit ashamed to take up your time this way. I am an attractive woman of 59; my thighs are perfectly smooth, my waist unthickened, I still have both my breasts and all my teeth; in fact I am two dress sizes smaller than I was at eighteen. My three grown daughters are intelligent, healthy, and independent. My husband and I are as much in love as when we were first married, despite the depth of our familiarity and the, by now, considerable conflation of our tastes, political beliefs, preferences in music and art, and, of course, memories. He still interests and pleasures me; miraculously our sex life remains joyous, inventive, and mutually fulfilling. I continue to adore the challenge and variety of my career as an ethnic dance therapist. We have never had to worry about money. Our country home is lovely, and very old, and solidly set down in a place of incomparable, ever shifting beauty; our many friends, old and new, are delightful people, amusing and wise, and every one of them honorable and a source of strength to us.

  And yet, with all of this and more, I am frequently very sad, and cannot rid myself of a growing, formless, yet very real sense of devastating loss, no less hideous for its utter irrationality. Forgive me, but does this make any sense to you?

  Niobe

  Dear Niobe:

  Certainly. You’re lying about the sex.

  I learned, over time, that it was better to simply lend people the book and let them read the letters for themselves. The story suffers from a vocal recitation as it is, in part, about writing, that particular type of writing that hopes to be published in the newspaper. Read out loud the story is simply incredibly funny. Read on the page it is sad and hopeful, the humor even bleaker, and more complex.

  Read “Justine Laughs at Death,” or the short, masterful “Résumé,” and you might peg Jincy Willett as a satirist, but her stories are slipperier than that, jumping off the board at the very moment you try to pin them down. Yes, they’re often funny, but there’s something else at work here. Read “Julie in the Funhouse.” Read “Mr. Lazenbee.”

  Like all the best storywriters, Jincy Willett excels in the moment, that split second when everything changes, and there’s a discomfort to this. We like to think we’ll recognize such moments in our own lives, but when the time comes we almost always get it wrong. Our eyes peeled for the Big Event, we point out the usual suspects—the death of a parent, the car spinning out of control—not realizing that the damage was done weeks or maybe years earlier, over dinner or while washing our hair, the moment cunning in its very resemblance to everyday life. “There’s the violation,” says the narrator in “Under the Bed.” “There’s the damage. There’s the tragedy.”

  I once accepted a teaching job, knowing full well that I’d be very bad at it. Like any petty dictator, what attracted me was the power. Friends insist that you watch their favorite movie or read a particular book, but you don’t really have to do anything. It’s not like they’ll stop talking to you. A teacher says, “You have to read this story,” and your evening is pretty much shot, at least that’s what I hoped. I thought of my students as younger, better-looking versions of myself, and imagined the pleasure they would doubtlessly
experience while reading my favorite books. But of course it doesn’t work that way.

  Assignments were skimmed in the cafeteria, lost on the subway, stolen, eaten by bees. Then there was the lip. “I won’t read stories threatening violence against women.” “Why aren’t the characters younger?” “Who are you to tell us what to read?”

  “I am the teacher,” I said, but already they were looking through me.

  By the time I had a little authority, Jenny and the Jaws of Life was out of print. Now, fifteen years after its release, the book is back, and I can once again go about the business of pushing it. There’s a singular joy in discovering something for yourself, a personal satisfaction that is numbed and cheapened by salesmanship. In spite of the pleasure I’m bound to diminish, I am prepared to wear a sandwich board for this book. I can’t help myself. It’s just too good. (That is so true!)

  —David Sedaris

  Julie in the Funhouse

  After I moved to Illinois, my sister and I wrote to each other once a year, if that, and neither of us liked to talk long-distance. We were happier apart. I could never see Julie, or hear her voice, without becoming at some point, then or later, aware of our drab and banal defeat. I had married an ungenerous woman; Julie, a big good-looking fool. I had started out to be a surgeon and ended up a druggist; and Julie, who had too much beauty and arrogance and wit for any single ambition, never even left home. She had planned to be a world rover—an artist, if she had the talent; an adventuress, if she didn’t—and in the end she never, literally never, lived anywhere but in the house where we were born.

  No matter what we talked about, all we ever really said was, Here we are. This is how we turned out. And she never offered us the comfort of a shrug, the summing up and laying to rest of a sigh. She never accepted it, or even complained, which would have been at least a kind of acceptance. Seeing her always produced a delayed disturbance in me, an obscure panic.

  “She depresses you,” observed my wife, who thought Julie cold and critical, and chose to believe that I, not she, was jealous of Julie’s money, her “business acumen.” This was absurd, but so was the truth: Julie always made me feel that time had not quite run out for us, that I only had to do some simple, obvious thing and everything would be all right. I didn’t know if the feeling came from Julie or from me, or which of us I was supposed to save, and from what. The future, vague and sad, did not frighten me half as much as knowing that it was not carved in stone.

  She didn’t dote on her children, it’s true. They’ll make hay out of that. She was a competent mother, when I still knew her, and she often scolded me for not having kids myself, but she let Samson do the doting, the clowning. Samson was the one who made faces and talked baby talk. “He’s so good at it,” she said.

  She treated him with an affectionate contempt that suited him well. Their marriage, begun in heat like my own, had become an antiseptic partnership, amiable, frictionless, curiously graceful. She regarded all her losses squarely, with unforced humor and a perverse delight, as if at some ragtag parade of shabby miracles. She took none of it personally, not even the early loss of her beauty. “I am going to be,” she once observed, “one of those barrel-chested women with stick legs.” She made it sound like a caprice.

  The last time I saw her we sat in her kitchen, our old kitchen, and her children played outside in the summer grass, and Samson puttered in the basement with his electronic kits, or ham radio, or whatever it was that year. Julie said, “Here’s another one for the scrapbook. There was, until recently, an Australian crocodile hunter by the name of Basil Hubbard. Leguminous by name and, as it turned out, by nature as well. His widow—this was in Collier’s—claims that all his life he was ‘obsessed’ by the fear that a big croc was going to ‘get him.’” Julie grinned. “You’re way ahead of me. Well, that’s the beauty of this story.

  “One day, while hunting, he sat down on a riverbank to eat his lunch and take a nap, which proved to be his last. Basil may have cursed his destiny, but he certainly didn’t fight it. I picture him as a sort of cross between Hamlet and Mortimer Snerd. Anyway, in a couple of days they found his boots…with his feet inside, natch.”

  Julie had been collecting these stories since she was twelve. To qualify, the story had to be “All Too True,” the title of her scrapbook. “They caught the croc, a behemoth with no tail, and Basil the Squash inside. Here’s the wonderful part: this crocodile had been stalking him for months.” She hunched over the table and walked two fingers around the sugar bowl and pepper shaker in a figure eight. “They found the tracks of the Squash, some of them pretty old, leading up at last to his final resting place…and right behind him, all the way, the unmistakable trail of You-Know-Who. Hah!”

  “Captain Hook,” I said. I couldn’t laugh.

  “Don’t you love it!”

  Well, no, I didn’t. I didn’t always have the stomach for the All Too True.

  But I remember it now, and the red afternoon light on the kitchen table, and her children’s voices outside the window. I remember it all, in amazing detail, as my night plane whines toward Pennsylvania, and I am tempted, for one sickening minute, to give it significance. To make sense of the way my sister died.

  And sure, how “wonderful,” if she had been pregnant then, with the one who killed her. If, while she told about the crocodile, the Demon Baby had kicked out and bumped the table and given us a scare, so that later I could remember and add it to the list of things that make sense now, when you think about them, you know? But all the children she would ever have were playing outside in the yard.

  Too bad for the storytellers. Too bad for the sense makers, the apologists, that nothing, then or ever, nothing was inevitable. It’s just too bad.

  I learned about my sister’s death from a radio news report. My cashier, like the one before her, and the one before that, tunes in eight hours a day to our local all-news and information station. I hate what radio has become, and most of all these talk stations, with their constant hysterical updates. Why do we have to know these things? What are we supposed to do about them?

  A kidnapped ambassador is heard on tape begging for his life. Forty thousand Soviet troops are put on battle alert. A fifth-grade class in Des Moines adopts an ailing zoo hippo. Record turnip unearthed in Greensboro. Bizarre double murder in Pennsylvania; children sleep through shotgun slaying of their parents. In Clarion, Pennsylvania. My home town.

  I was filling Mrs. Holley’s Librium prescription. Mrs. Holley is a pretty woman in her thirties, chubby like a doll. Mrs. Holley has had it. She comes in here with her full-length fox and orders refills of diet pills and tranquilizers and roams the aisles loading a wire basket with bath beads, tampons, bags of licorice and candy corn, boxes of Dots and nonpareils; tortoiseshell barrettes, panatelas, coloring books, Harlequins, and the New York Times. She spreads the evidence of her domestic life before me on the counter with a demure and wicked lopsided grin, and lets her coat fall open, flashing her pink flannel bathrobe. Mrs. Holley’s grocer doesn’t know what I know. Even her liquor dealer doesn’t know her this well.

  I love Mrs. Holley and would take her home with me, and punish her, and comfort her, if I were not myself so tired and old and incompetent. I was thinking of this, of poor timing and lost opportunity, of sad clues and hopeless mysteries, while Mrs. Holley, clowning sweetly, waved the empty Librium container in my face like a lacy handkerchief, telling me as always to “Fill her up,” and smiling her smile, when the news came over the radio that Julie was dead.

  When she heard about Julie, my wife drove all the way from Urbana, and let herself into my apartment with a key I forgot she had. She was there when I got home. Coffee was brewing and my old suitcase was open on the bed and half-packed. She had already booked my flight to Pittsburgh. When I walked in she just hugged me; and her ruined hair, clipped and brittle and bottle-red, held a trace of its old clean perfume. For a while she sat beside me on the couch and massaged the muscles of my neck and shoulders w
hile I leaned forward, elbows on knees, and my hands, long and white like my father’s, dangled pointing at the floor. When my eyes filled it was not for Julie, not yet, but for my wife and our failure and the astonishing fact of her kindness at this time.

  But then she said, “I don’t know why, but I’m not surprised. She was a bitter woman. You refused to see it.” And I said, “You’re not surprised that my sister was murdered? You’re not surprised?” She said she had called the Petersons, old neighbors in Clarion, and gotten “the inside story” from them. As she related the details her voice revealed, despite itself—for my wife is not a bad person, no worse than I—a mean excitement, and she drew out her tale for maximum shock effect, saving until last the horrendous and apparently well-founded suspicions of the police. As I listened, at the dead center of my horror and disbelief I felt ashamed of her and sorry for the silly woman she had become. She ran with me once, right beside me, matching stride for stride, down a clean white stretch of the Atlantic coast in early morning; and her hair was long and gold.

  According to the papers, Samson Willoughby died on his feet, in the doorway to his wife’s room, shot twice in his chest with his own shotgun. They say Julie died in bed. “As she slept.” She was shot just once, point-blank, in the back of the head.

  The three children, ages twelve to sixteen, said they heard no shots, but woke up in the morning to find the living room in disarray, their father’s safe open and ransacked, the clock overturned and broken at some early morning hour. They found their parents, and the daughter, Samantha, four years old when I saw her last, called the police.