Jenny and the Jaws of Life

by Jincy Willett

  “All alike.”

  “Justine. Dear Heart. That’s just an expression.”

  “Yes, and one of your favorites, Dear Heart. In fact, it’s not unfair to say it’s a basic tenet of your creed.”

  “So what?”

  “So, you ought to be delighted. You’re vindicated. You are our first initiate. You now know What No Other Man Has Known.”

  “That you’re all alike?”

  “All alike.”

  “In the dark. Yessssss. In the pitch black, alone and helpless, your thin hands beating, fluttering like wings…”

  “And in the big fat light of day. All alike. Interchangeable. Omnipresently coincident.”

  “Omnipresently my buttocks!”

  Justine giggled like a thirteen-year-old.

  “All for one, eh? I’m supposed to believe that whatsoever I do to the least of you my sisters I do to all. Well, get this:——” (Here he said something for which there is no euphemism.)

  “You got it backwards, Bob. What you do to all you do, repeatedly, to one. One with, I must point out, a by now substantial grudge.” Justine sniffed. “Namely, me.”

  “Justine?” Ripley, watching the big bird, the Great Horned Owl, fast asleep, limned in shell-pink light, concentrated mightily, breathed slow and deep. “I’m thinking now of an ordinary pair of pliers, the kind your home handyman buys in any hardware store. Do you wear nail polish, Justine? Are those cuticles shipshape?”

  “I thought you wanted to talk. If you’re just going to horse around—”

  “I am talking, Justine. And I’m thinking about a belt sander….”

  Justine sighed. “Call me when you’re ready to get serious. Any old number will do.”

  “Wait.” How he surprised and hated himself for begging! How she would pay. “Explain yourself. Please. You’re a coven of feminists, you’ve got ahold of a computer and rigged up some kind of network. We’ll start there.”

  “Wrong.” Justine made a rude blatting sound, like the loser’s honk on a game show. “The technology is totally uninteresting, and forget politics. This is personal, Bob. I Am Woman, get it? I take everything personally.”

  “You’re sticking to this ridiculous story, then. You’re all the same person because that’s the way my mind works. Justine, honey, this is the real world. This is Planet Earth. That kind of stuff only works in cheap fiction.”

  “If I were you, Bob, I wouldn’t take that line of reasoning any further.”

  Ripley unaccountably began to sweat. He didn’t take that line of reasoning any further. “So. Revenge, eh? You’re plotting vengeance for my crimes against you.”

  Again, with the game show blat. “No punishment could possibly be, as they say, ‘appropriate in this instance.’ Why, you’d bankrupt the Furies themselves. The Eternal Agony of Prometheus would amount to a slap in the face. I mean, really, how in hell are you going to pay me back?” Involuntarily, tenderly, Ripley massaged the region of his liver. “See, what I have in mind is more like what I said before. Having a few laughs. And, well, keeping in touch. Do you have any idea how lonely I get?”

  “I can fix that, Justine. Tell me where you are.”

  “No, no. Not that. Bob, do you know, this is the first time we’ve ever really talked?”

  He had been admiring the owl for so long, and the light had been so slow in coming, that he had failed to note the arrival of the others. He saw that the maple branches, which he had dimly supposed were laden with some sort of small ovoid fruit (God, he was tired!) were full instead, to flashpoint, with scores of tiny birds. Perhaps as many as a hundred. And scores were perched everywhere below, on the low brick wall, in the arbor vitae. It was a huge winter flock, a city mix of sympathetic foragers—nuthatches, titmice, chickadees. Mostly chickadees. But they weren’t foraging: they were sitting stock-still, a rapt congregation, attending upon the owl. Who slept, oblivious. “What did you mean,” Ripley asked, “when you said you were my worst nightmare?”

  “Just that. Your worst nightmare, Bob. A woman with an inner life.”

  Ripley let out his breath, then laughed with relief. “But that’s what I count on! Your inner life! Your fear, your longing, your wild hope! You haven’t learned much, Justine, if you think this is just about sex. Why, I could get an inflatable doll, I’d buy ’em by the gross, I’d stay right here in my own head and not do anything at all, if sex were all I wanted. What would I need you for, if not your inner life?”

  “Not a doll, Bob. A robot. A synthesizer. Press one key for FEAR and another for TERROR and a third for ABJECT HORROR and so on. A crude and primitive instrument, for your trite, monotonous music.”

  “I terrify you!”

  “True.”

  “I give you endless, exquisite pain!”

  “Sure.”

  “I take your precious life.”

  “You bet.”

  “I fill your mind!”

  Blaaaat.

  The owl opened his round yellow eyes, took in his audience, its size, its nature, showed no fear. Did not, for instance, cringe comically like a surprise party stooge at the moment he switches on the light. Ripley could almost see him suppress the involuntary start, gather his great dignity around him like a purple robe. The animal could not, however, control the reflex behavior of his feathers, any more than Ripley could keep the little hairs on the back of his neck from standing up. Layers of down and feather lifted, fanned, bristled. The owl, unmoving, grew tall and fat. The man, for all his goose bumps, grew not a micron.

  “Do you remember that time in the laundromat?” Justine asked.

  “Which laundromat?” There had been so many laundromats. He tried to remember a woman, any woman, but all he could get were smells, sharp detergent, clean lint, dryer heat. He hated laundromats.

  “The Helpy Selfy in St. Paul.”

  “Got you.” Ripley couldn’t remember her at all. He didn’t even want to remember. He didn’t care. He was desperately tired and he felt vacant, cavernous, with only dread and apathy where his hunger should be. He was depressed. “I feel awful,” he thought, then realized, to his horror, that he had spoken aloud.

  “I was bottle blonde, forties, little potbelly in light blue double-knit stirrup pants. I was monopolizing the drycleaning machines. Remember?”

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  “So, what do you suppose I was thinking about, there, at the end?”

  Something was happening outside, in the trees. No one had moved, but he could hear, through the glass, the sleigh-bell jingle of a hundred cheeping throats. The tiny birds were scolding, en masse, at full throttle. The sound on his side of the glass was unpleasantly insistent, like the cry of an infant, about which, regardless of how you feel about infants, you must do something. Outside it had to be deafening. The owl, with his so-sharp ears and no hands to cover them, swiveled his great head back and forth, scanning, patient, every inch the monarch, back and forth again and again in the same ponderous rhythm, getting nothing new, no purchase, like a monarch-machine, robotic and stupid and dull.

  “I was thinking, believe it or not—” Justine caught her breath, laughed a rueful laugh, “—this is right at the end, remember, just before I died. I was thinking about cigarettes, and how much I wanted the one I dropped when you came up behind me. I could just taste that Lucky. God. But that’s not all, and this is really wacky. I remembered this time when I was a kid, and I was Christmas shopping by myself for the first time, at Woolworth’s, with a ten dollar bill to cover everybody in the family—imagine that, Bob!—and I had two whole dollars left to spend on my Mom, and I wanted to get her the most perfect present, and then I saw it. On top of a glass counter, a painted statue of the Virgin Mary. It was the most gorgeous thing I’d ever laid eyes on.”

  “You lie! You were in mortal agony! If you could think at all, you thought of me! ‘Why is he doing this to me? How have I offended him? What can I possibly offer him to make him spare my life?’”

  “And when I got it home
I looked at it for hours on end—well, minutes, anyway—and it was even more beautiful when I owned it. And every little detail, every eyelash, every fold in the robe was painted in. Of course, machines turn those things out by the pant-load, but I was just a kid. I kept picturing my Mom’s happy face when she unwrapped it from the tissue paper—”

  “WHO CARES?”

  “Well, of course, she wasn’t happy at all. She tried to look thrilled, but even I could see that something was wrong.”

  “WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH ME?”

  “So, she acted thrilled, but the next day she called me into the kitchen and there, at her feet, were the smashed remains, no piece bigger than the nail on my little finger. She said she was washing it and it slipped out of her hands and she was very, very sorry. I told her I’d get her another, but she said, No, no, and her cheeks were bright red and her face was like a mask, like she was hiding something. I don’t want another one, she says, I’ll always remember this one; and in the next room my father snorts like you do when something funny happens in class. So suddenly I get the big picture. It was a bad gift for some reason, she’d broken it on purpose, they were laughing at me. God, I wanted to kill them. I was so embarrassed.” Little swarms of chickadees, still scolding, left their perches and circled the owl. Like participants in some confrontational therapy group they took turns screaming in his face and He, who could have reached out one yellow taloned foot and plucked out a life, pretended he was alone. He looked ridiculous. “The point is,” Justine was saying, “we were Presbyterians.”

  Ripley grabbed a fork from the counter and began to rap on the glass, which cracked prettily, like ice. Again he thought aloud. “What’s going to happen? Why won’t he fight back?”

  “It’s a common natural phenomenon,” Justine said. “It’s called ‘mobbing.’ Most birds do it.”

  “Are they going to peck him to death?” Ripley shuddered. Death in a million tiny bites.

  Justine laughed. “Nah. They’re just having a little fun. See, owls are dangerous only when they’re feeding. The rest of the time, there’s nothing special about them, except they’re huge and hard to camouflage They’re very, very good at what they do. But they’re not terribly bright.”

  “WHO ARE YOU?”

  “This one’s especially stupid because he tried to hide in the city. But even in the deepest, darkest forest they have a hell of a time getting fifteen minutes of uninterrupted sleep.”

  “WHAT DO YOU WANT?”

  “They never dream, you know. And they always feel crummy.”

  Ripley’s fork shattered the window. Deafened and distracted, the owl below ignored noise and raining shards. A chickadee swooped up onto the sill, inches from Ripley’s white knuckles, regarded him with frank, good-humored curiosity, and addressed him in its little buzzy voice. It said: “Dee dee dee dee dee.”

  “But at night,” said Ripley, “at night…they terrorize and maim and kill….”

  “And in the morning they hunt, in vain, for a quiet place to sleep, and just a little respect.”

  The chickadee was quick but Ripley was quicker. He pounded it, with one lightning fist, into a distant memory. Another jaunty bird, identical in every particular, instantly popped onto the sill, like toast from a slapstick toaster. He took in Ripley with one wise black-button eye. He said: “Dee dee dee dee dee.”

  Ripley saw it all then, the infinite assembly line of chickadees, the joyless, dutiful, mechanical pounding of his fist, the stinging jangle of a million midnight telephones. His comic, boring future. “I’ll never stop!” he screamed, whirling in hopeless fury, ripping the cord from the wall. “Do you hear me, Justine?”

  “Everyone hears you, Bob.”

  “And tonight, and tomorrow night, and every night you’ll suffer and cry and beg for an easy death! You’ll bleed and you’ll…I don’t know…bleed…and—”

  “I know, I know,” she said, like comforting a baby, and stifled a little yawn. “Bob? Listen. I’ll call you.” Click

  And he would, too. Never stop. Below, the owl spread its great gray wings and lofted up and out across the courtyard, majestic, pretending no hurry; his little torturers followed him up, darted around his head like bees, chirping with derision. The owl circled the tree deliberately, twice, as though seriously considering going back there, then turned himself north and sailed away, oh so slowly, as though he had all the time in the world and were just acting on a whim. As though he weren’t Grand Marshal in a capering parade of hooting, nose-thumbing hors d’oeuvres. Ripley tried to admire the elaborate pretense, the grandeur of the act. But sentimentality was not one of his faults. The owl, really, looked like the big stupid idiot it was, and they’d ruined everything, and a single bitter tear tracked down the side of his nose and plopped onto the receiver in his hand, which buzzed in its perky, tireless, impossible way, and he was already so very tired.

  Mr. Lazenbee

  Mr. Lazenbee was an old, old man with watery eyes and a shriveled, bashed-in chin, so that his face sloped right back to his neck from the tip of his big purple nose. Viewed from the side, hunched over the green metal wastebasket under Miss Milliken’s desk, shuffling down the corridors behind the huge waxing machine, he looked just like a vulture, with his bald head and his beak and his scrawny old red neck. Marsha was the first to recognize this likeness. Soon after, all the girls called him “Vulture Man,” sometimes in his hearing, behind hands damp with giggling. Astonished to have thought up a popular joke, Marsha took to bragging about it. Miss Milliken, who always stopped talking whenever Mr. Lazenbee came into the room, whose knees could be seen to flinch when he emptied her wastebasket, who never looked directly at Mr. Lazenbee at all but addressed the air in front of him, scolded the whole class one day for calling him “Vulture Man.” “Cleverness,” said Miss Milliken, looking straight at Marsha, “in the service of unkindness is a sin.” She dropped her eyes and frowned, to herself, not at the class. “This is inappropriate behavior, children,” she said, in a tone less sure.

  Marsha walked the O’Brien twins to their house. She skipped ahead of them and drew a big heart on the sidewalk with red chalk. “Miss M. + V. Man” she printed inside the heart. “Don’t,” whined Sheila O’Brien, scuffing out the mark with her toe. “That’s dumb,” said her sister Val.

  Marsha guessed that the heart joke was poor. Even the skinny, rat-faced O’Briens could, without effort, tell the laughable from the lame, a distinction Marsha continued to find elusive. “What if he grabbed her by the leg,” she said, in her excited voice that carried. She doubled over and pretended to vomit. The twins ignored her. “Mr. Lazenbee!” she shrieked, in a silly old-lady voice, and then cackled, “Come wiz me to zee boiler room, girly!”

  “Grow up,” said Val, who had laughed with the whole class the time he called Miss Milliken “girly.” She and Sheila, in fact, were the ones who had first pointed out to Marsha that Mr. Lazenbee always looked at the girls’ chests and their laps when they passed him in the corridor or playground, that he called them all “girly” and laughed in a foolish, nasty way; that he was a dirty old bum. Marsha never even noticed Mr. Lazenbee before that. She thought it was unfair and typical that now they changed the rules so that she was once again a pariah for the exact same reason she had been briefly, and tentatively, included.

  Marsha tried again. “Mr. Lazenbee smells like a brewery,” she said. “He’s utterly repellant.”

  “He’s Borderline Retarded,” said Sheila. She and Val stood on their front porch. They were not going to invite her in.

  “He is not,” Marsha said. The door slammed shut. “You don’t even know what that means,” she yelled after them, then walked away, muttering, “So what if he is.”

  That night at dinner her mother explained that Borderline Retarded meant slow-witted and childlike. “Such people are almost always harmless,” she said. Marsha thought Mr. Lazenbee was more like a cunning, crippled animal than a slow child. Her parents did not make her tell them why she
asked; but, “I trust,” her father said, “that whoever it is, you haven’t been tormenting him or her.”

  Miss Milliken was unusually tense and preoccupied. “Children, put away your quizzes and sit still. We’re going to have a little talk.” She pulled her swivel chair from behind her desk and around in front. She perched there, looking smaller and older than usual, and very uncomfortable. She studied a booklet that she held before her with one hand; the cover read, “Sixth Grade Facilitator: For Your Eyes Only.” The class was wary, for Miss Milliken, a formal and old-fashioned teacher, never left her desk except to write on the board or collect papers. She glanced up at them. “I am sitting like this,” she said drily, “to put you at your ease and encourage a frank and open dialogue.” She looked back down at the booklet and after a long pause began to read in a clipped, expressionless voice.

  “Everyone has feelings,” she read. “Good feelings and bad feelings. Happy feelings and sad feelings. Sometimes we feel sorry, and sometimes we feel guilty. When do we feel guilty?” She paused but did not look up. Crystal Van Meter said we feel guilty when we do something bad. “And when do we feel excited?” Sheila O’Brien said, “When something, like, exciting happens.” “And sometimes,” Miss Milliken said, “we get what we call a ‘funny’ feeling. It is easier to give examples than it is to explain exactly what this means. When do we get a funny feeling?” “When we do something funny,” said Barry Levin. Barry was the class wise guy and Miss Milliken usually dealt with him ruthlessly. Marsha was shocked now to see her lips curl at the edges. “It is hard to fault your answer, Barry,” she said, regarding him mildly, “but it was not the one we were looking for.” Claudine Fortin said, “When we throw up,” and everybody in the class laughed. John Block said he sometimes got a funny feeling in the middle of the night. “We get a funny feeling,” said Marsha, “when we know something is wrong but we can’t explain it.”