Jenny and the Jaws of Life

by Jincy Willett

For in the attempt simultaneously to propose an elaborate toast, something about “citizens of the world,” and to dish out the crepes suzette, she set the monstrous drink ablaze and bowled it over, sending a river of flame the length of the table. The immediate effect was magical. We rose to our feet as one, with the hushed, appreciative cry of witnesses to a pyrotechnics display. But eventually the fire department had to be called, and though the damage was not extensive, the party broke up soon afterward.

  She was disconsolate. For hours she lay face-down on the living room couch, sobbing wildly, angrily brushing off my comforting hand. When she became coherent she called herself “a freak, a freak, a freak,” and threatened to run away to a sideshow. I told her that indeed, she was a freak, in a positive and glorious sense; that she was unique; that she was different, not in degree but in kind, from any other woman I had ever known; and that therefore she was infinitely precious to me. She said I was crazy. How can it be crazy, I asked her, to love someone without reservation, just as she is, and to wish for nothing more? “I don’t know,” she said, “but it is.”

  I had known all along that she was indifferent to my love; that she had married me by accident, and stayed with me through inertia, in keeping with the overall random patterning of her life. Seeing that she was now actively wretched I determined to discover what I could offer her to make her happy. Your freedom, I said, if that’s what you want. She appeared to think it over, and reject it as not worth the bother. “Melinda, we have a great deal of money. Just tell me what you want. Education? A summer house? A horse?” At first I could get nothing out of her but the general wish not to have been born, but finally she entered into the spirit of the thing. “Yes, there must be something I want,” she said, for I had convinced her. And for long minutes she stared into space, her brow furrowed in mighty concentration. “Anything at all,” I prompted from time to time. “Animal, vegetable, or mineral.” At last her face relaxed and she gave me a triumphant little smile. “What is it, Darling?” “I want a baby,” she said.

  As a matter of fact, across the room from where she sat was a brass newspaper rack, and on that particular night the foremost newspaper bore the prominent headline, BABY SURVIVES SUB-ZERO ORDEAL. But her desire to get pregnant, from the moment she expressed it, was, whatever the nature of its origin, fierce and all-consuming. It consumed, first of all, the great pleasure she had always taken in lovemaking, for determined as she was to conceive she did not, in bed, allow her body a moment’s peace, maintaining a deadly vigilance over its every motion. There were no more sea cruises for us, ever again. For six months she could talk of nothing but temperature charts and favorable positions, and with every failure she grew more single-minded. I tried to explain to her that she was going at it all wrong, that she should relax and think about other things. But she would not, or could not, believe me, and so in the end her will consumed itself, and I found her one morning, shortly after her discovery of her sixth and final failure—for I could never persuade her to try again—sitting naked, cross-legged in a square of sunlight, her face unrecognizable in fury, pounding her poor innocent stomach with knotted fists. “Stupid bastard,” she called it. “Stupid idiot sonofabitch.”

  “We can adopt,” I said.

  “That has nothing to do with it,” she said, with a venomous look. “This is the last straw.”

  She proceeded, in spite of all I could do, to punish her body with starvation and grinding, relentless exercise. It was an all-out war, having nothing to do with self-improvement, but in the process, and of course by accident, she became a conventionally pretty woman, beautiful in fact, spare of hip, bony of ankle. She achieved in time the sticklike upper arm of the fashion model: high cheekbones, knife-blade collarbones, and knobby spine emerged as her flesh dwindled and her skin tightened.

  She was adopted by the Rittenhouse Gang—my old crowd—and learned, through the meddling of the chic ladies, how to dress, how to shop, how to be like everybody else. So dispirited was her pummeled, malnourished body that it could not muster so much as a single misstep, and without the blurring effect of her envelope of flesh she seemed more ungainly than ever. Though she was a mere wisp, hers were still the leaden footfalls of a giantess, hers the ponderous gestures of the ungifted auditioner. But in the eyes of her new admirers there was something terribly piquant in the physical contradictions she posed, something almost outré in the spectacle of a slender, petite woman with an elephantine carriage. In fact, the more fashion-obsessed ladies in the circle began, unconsciously I suppose, to imitate her peculiar style, much as idiot women everywhere once affected the Vogue slouch, and after a time only the hopelessly gauche were light on their feet.

  And though she was as closemouthed as before, there was now a faint overlay of bitterness, of world-weariness upon her speech and manner that intrigued the men, especially Rittenhouse, my partner, my old friend, my betrayer. Rittenhouse of the impish grin and silver tongue, the most eligible of society bachelors; who had, like me, refused to settle for anything less than the perfect woman.

  I knew I would lose her. After all, I had won her by working her inertia to my own advantage, through the force of my desire. It was inevitable that the combined influence of so many would pull her away from me. What I could not have foreseen was the active nature of her defection. I never imagined she would fall in love.

  What could he have told her that I had not, a thousand thousand times? What more can a woman wish to hear than that she is singular, peerless, and rare? That you must have her, or die? In my blackest moods I see him snaking his arm around her pitiful waist, preening her with his hooded gaze, whispering: You are so beautifully right for this time, this place; you exemplify, typify, and crystallize; you have that certain something; you look just like that television actress. You know. The one with the hyphenated name.

  She did not have to tell me. I was there when it happened. I was witness; which is only fitting, since from the start I had been no less than her devout, adoring witness, and no more. I forget the place, the date, the occasion. Some awful party, a humid night, tired laughter and tireless conversation, innocent of thought. My wife stood in a clearing at the other end of the room, leaning against a pillar of pink marble. She wore a sheath of olive brown chiffon, cut in the current severe style, and her hair was skinned back into an elaborate, gold-braided knot, and the corner of one ravaged hip pointed accusingly at me. And her eyes were clear and fathomless and gave away nothing, not a trace of desire or disappointment, or memory, or wonder. She was terrible, maddening. An impossible object. My only love. I thought: Oh, my. Then she swiveled her head to face, almost, in my direction, and her mouth widened slowly into a dazzling smile, and into her eyes dawned a light of intelligence and purpose; and she stirred and hurried forward, not to me but to another. The hem of her filmy skirt lapped gently at her ankles as she rushed, with step delicate and sure. She was suddenly, irrevocably, all elegance and heartbreaking grace. And I closed my eyes and turned away; for just this once I could not bear the sight, of Melinda falling.

  My Father, at the Wheel

  I remember my mother everywhere at once, my father at the wheel. I can put my mother behind the wheel, too, and in every room of both our houses, and downtown, and by the sea. But when my father wasn’t driving I must not have looked at him too often, or too closely. He was, and is, a fact of great importance. Only this poor old fact, in human guise, apparently had only a right profile. Like a centaur in relief. My mythical, memory-shy father.

  He drove a big black car with a running board, built before the war. He drove an old pink Nash, and then an old black and white Hudson. He drove a gold ’57 Fairlane, our first new car, which we all loved, and then a gold ’60 Galaxy, our first lemon. My parents said it had “ugly lines.” I remember it as a Fairlane with bloat. He stayed with Ford anyway, but I don’t recall the names after the Galaxy. Now his cars are Japanese. I buy American.

  When I was three and a half and Mary Jane was a newborn baby, I rod
e in back with my panda and played with the fold-up armrest and the ashtrays. The ashtray up front was always full of brown Raleigh filters that you could peel and shred, and clouds of gray smoke issued from both my parents, settling on the baby in my mother’s arms, swirling around me like weather. I loved the smell. I still do. At school my sons are taught to make rude noises when I light up, and to ask me why I don’t love them. At the moment they ask, the answer is obvious. But I never smoke in the car, not even when I’m alone, not even at night.

  The long slippery backseat was for children and dogs. We all liked to stick our heads out the window, and on the open highway, away from the whipping branches of trees, we were allowed to do this, with my mother watching, and our hair and fur skinned straight back, our eyes hooded against the wind. We stuck our arms out too, for the magic of air hard as a board. We threw our sneakers out the window on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. My father stopped the car and spanked me, because it had been my idea.

  And sometimes, when Mary Jane and I were fighting, my father would reach around and knuckle one of us in the back of the head, or grab one of us by the arm and shake, leaving little marks. Once, before Mary Jane was born and I didn’t want to leave my cousin’s birthday party, my father picked me up and threw me into the car, so that I cracked my head against the door handle and stopped screaming. And there were side window vents in the back, which we could open at will, with sharp edges pointing toward our eyes. And there were no seatbelts, harnesses, or regulation infant carseats. When the car stopped short we would slam into the front seat upholstery; we learned not to sit or kneel directly in front of the ashtray, which could cut your lip. Or if I rode in front, and the brakes locked, or we ran into something, my father’s arm, or my mother’s, would shoot out rigid and straight in front of my face, giving me an object softer than steel to hit with my nose, to grab hold of as my body slid beneath the dash.

  How tough we all were! How rubbery and intrepid! Millions of little fat kids in black and white photographs; the last of the black and white children. Twinkles in the eye of World War II. We ate white bread and Spam, creamed salt cod, mashed potatoes, chipped beef on toast. Cream of wheat! And when we weren’t eating white things, we shared smoky air with our shameless parents; and cavernous steel boxes, traveling at lethal speeds, shook our square sturdy bodies like dice. Some of us must have died. We didn’t!

  Here we are on the road to Galena, all the way from our apartment in New Bedford, to visit my father’s people. My father drives, my mother reads the maps. Her hair is still long. She is still beautiful. (When she cuts it short my father will be, for almost a week, bitter and unforgiving, and I will be on his side, but not admit it.) She wears a big blue coat that will look dowdy in the old photographs, and exactly matches the color of her eyes. She is a soft blonde in blue, with hair like Dorothy McGuire’s. Mary Jane and Pluto, the part collie, have the right-rear window. They are hidden completely by a tent she has made out of the car quilt, one corner of it pinned by her rolled-up window, flapping outside in the light rain. She keeps asking me if I can see her, and I keep telling her I can, which is a mean-spirited lie. She is four; all she wants is not to be seen. I am almost eight, and Tom Sawyer is my book of the week. I am breathless in the cave with Tom, Becky, and Injun Joe.

  My mother will point to the red swoop of our first cardinal, and then our first silo, our first herd of cows. Mary Jane always looks. I read. There are cows in Massachusetts. Besides, I am the sort of child for whom nothing is ever really new. My mother tells me I will ruin my eyes, and worse: that the world is going right by me while I read. I’m missing it all, she says, not quite scolding, not quite grieving.

  My father defends me. If she’s reading, he says, she’s very much in the world. Most of the books I read are his, from when he was a boy. He asks me how I’m doing with Tom Sawyer, and what’s my favorite part so far. I close the book. It’s all right, I say. Have I gotten to the cave yet? I tell him I don’t remember. Gee, he says, I don’t see how you could forget that. He is so easy to fool. Sometimes, as now, my mother gives me a cold, appraising glance, a dirty look, but even she can’t see into my head.

  We come to our first bad accident at the Ohio state line. Traffic slows and my mother makes us lie down and close our eyes. She whispers, God. Oh no, John, look. She starts to cry. My father says what he always says: these people are good drivers but they go too fast. Fewer accidents, worse wrecks. Mary Jane and I are flat on our stomachs on the seat, with Pluto running across our backs and legs from window to window, scenting blood. We are each afraid of what we can’t see; but we are not afraid for our own safety. It will be almost fifteen years before it occurs to me that I could die like that. My parents hold that thought between them, in the front seat, where it belongs.

  We drive all night through Indiana. Mary Jane, who can sleep anywhere, sleeps on the floor under the quilt, with her head on the hump. I’m lying in an L with my feet on top of the cooler, my head on the middle armrest. I’ve brought my pillow and blanket from home. But this isn’t a real bed, and after counting to a thousand with my eyes closed I settle back, wide-awake, for an interminable night. We drive in the rain through pitch-black farmland, past outcroppings of illuminated smokestacks, and then the industrial towns of the north. Gary is my father’s idea of pure hell. I will always picture hell, not as a fiery pit, but as an outpost on the night horizon, iron and brick, black smoke and white steam.

  My father sings to stay awake; my mother tries to harmonize, but he can never hold pitch and she ends up giggling. His voice is baritone, smoky, reverberant; even when he sings low it fills the car. He always starts out in tune and sinks, gradually, to a range where one pitch is indistinguishable from the next, at least to the human ear. They are singing “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows.” I can feel his voice through the armrest. If he knew I was awake, he would make me sing with him. My father is a sentimentalist. I am not.

  In the dark, at the wheel, with false dawn to his left, he has the nosy, clever profile of a fox, or so my mother says. I have an idea of what she means, although I can’t see the fox, myself, except in the auburn of his hair. He is skinny and tense, well under six feet tall, light-boned, wiry. Like my husband. Like every important, hurtful lover I will ever have.

  My husband still looks like a fox. My father does not. While he isn’t fat, he’s become solid and boxy. Even his bones seem heavier. You can’t see the thin man inside, not even when you look at his face, which is intelligent still, but no longer inquisitive or particularly alert. He has become the least nervous person I know, and one of the happiest.

  I took the boys out to Arizona last summer to visit their grandparents. My father drove us to a ghost town near Bisbee, showed us ocotillo and mesquite, black hawks and black vultures, a vast lavender copper mine. The boys were in the backseat with geodes, and belt buckles of turquoise and sand-casted silver, and a metal detector from Sears. Up front we talked and laughed like old friends, which is what, somehow, we have become. There was never a moment of awakening, of forgiveness. All of a sudden, that summer, we had a new history.

  He was in good health and he loved the Southwestern life, the dime-novel romance of the desert, the melodrama of killing heat, monsoons, flash floods. We saw a rainbow so tall and far away it barely curved. He talked about some day buying a camper and spending a nomadic year or two in the desert, taking pictures, prospecting, living the outlaw life. Your mother and I are going on the lam, he said. We’ll start out at the territorial prison at Yuma, then out into the desert there, up past the Chocolate Mountains into Joshua Tree A year in the Mojave. Panamint Valley. Furnace Creek. Devil’s Hole!

  I said, What if you run out of gas, in the middle of nowhere? What if you break an axle or something? The sun could kill you.

  Anything could kill me, he said. Something will for sure. He laughed without bravado, and the car rattled at unsafe speed across a narrow wooden bridge spanning nothing but dust, a long, dry riverbed. He was so careless tha
t I wondered if he was really happy after all. He turned and saw my face, and grinned; and for just a moment there was pity in it, and he was not my friend, but my father again. You’ll get there, he said. (You’ll get to where I am now.)

  I spent much of that day standing on an imaginary brake. My mother says he never was a very good driver. If I had complained, he would have slowed down right away. In his new expansive mood he would probably not even have been insulted. Yet it made sense (it still does) to take some risk with my own life, even my children’s lives, rather than reproach my father.

  I didn’t learn to drive until I was thirty-eight. My father couldn’t teach me, though he was dead set on it. I wasn’t interested. He was always yelling at me to concentrate, to get my long, straight hair out of my face so I could see in the rearview mirror. I ran an Esso tank truck off the road. My father backed down.

  In my teens I sat up front, next to him. He was always picking me up someplace. I waited at curbs, in front of office buildings, inside the houses of friends, watching out the front window. His car was always cutting through some obstacle to get to me—fog, rain, dark, traffic—I see it as a kind of animal, a fish, and my father at the wheel, an organic part of it. He was never late, though he often had to wait for me.

  We had our most animated conversations in the car. Here was the ideal setting for talk between us. Here we could not look at each other. We listened and watched the scenery. We talked about politics, morality, social change; always some abstract matter. (My mother and I talked about individual people and what made them tick.) He told good jokes and thought up terrible puns to make me groan.

  These times were special to both of us. Special, that is, in a way that hung between us like a white, swollen cloud; special in a way that frightened, and made me (me, anyway) so sad that I was always turning to face the passenger window, to let sudden, irrational tears evaporate without falling. I did this so often that even now, when my husband drives, I become secretly emotional. Anything can set it off. I must imagine myself invisible there, in the passenger seat.