“Marsha has given us the correct answer,” Miss Milliken said. She lifted her glasses and massaged the spot between her eyes with two fingers. She stayed quiet for so long that Marsha began to wonder if she had fallen asleep.
“Now the easiest feelings to identify are physical feelings,” Miss Milliken read. She stopped and looked out at the class, brightening momentarily. “The verb ‘to feel’ can, of course, be transitive as well as intransitive.” She looked down at the booklet again and read, “We get feelings of pleasure or pain when our bodies are touched. What are some examples of touches that make us feel good?” A couple of the boys snickered. Miss Milliken did not even give them a dirty look. Three girls raised their hands, looked around, and put their hands back down again. Miss Milliken sighed. “Hugging and kissing and squeezing and embracing and caressing and fond pats on the head,” she said, her lips in an angry purse. “These are the kinds of touches we all love.”
The class was nervous because Miss Milliken was acting strange and it was impossible to tell what she wanted from them. Marsha understood that Miss Milliken was in her own world now, as her parents often were, but felt terrifically complimented rather than left out. Miss Milliken was letting the class see that she was angry about some adult matter; she was sharing, Marsha thought, without understanding exactly what this meant. Marsha loved the way she said “hugging and kissing and squeezing” in a deliberate monotone, the way she said that “we all love” these things and let her cross voice and face say the exact opposite thing. She thought this was so funny that she could hardly keep from laughing. Marsha liked Miss Milliken very much, even though Miss Milliken did not like her.
Miss Milliken got a more enthusiastic response when she asked for examples of painful touches. The boys were especially inventive and graphic, and Miss Milliken let them run on, trying to outdo one another in violence. She finally stopped it by agreeing with Jason Adams that no one liked to be hit in the face with a hammer.
“Now some touches,” she said, “make us feel ‘funny.’ They give us that ‘funny feeling.’” She regarded the class with weary, sympathetic eyes as the children tried to imagine what this could possibly mean. One said “tickling” and another “when someone pretends to crack an egg on top of your head” (“Yes, Elvira,” Miss Milliken said, “that certainly would feel funny”) and another “when someone trips you and makes you fall down in front of everybody.” The longer it went on the more tolerant of the class and angry at something else Miss Milliken got. It seemed to Marsha that she was putting on a performance just for her. Marsha got very excited; she wanted to clap for Miss Milliken. She started giggling to herself, and then, without meaning to, she laughed out loud. Miss Milliken inclined toward her, gazing at her with neutral curiosity, and waited. Marsha had to say something, and she had to say it through her own convulsive giggling. “Vulture Man,” she said. The class stared at her. Children in the front rows swiveled around in their seats to get a look. Miss Milliken, studying her from a great distance, turned to stone. Marsha was drowning in laughter. She snuffled and snorted like a pig. “Vulture Man gives me that funny feeling,” she said.
Miss Milliken looked at the space where Marsha was. She did not look at Marsha at all; she looked through her, and Marsha felt herself disappear. Miss Milliken turned away from the empty space and regarded the class for a moment. She ripped the booklet into four neat pieces. “This is not my job, children,” she finally said, and then dismissed them for lunch, ten minutes early.
When Marsha got home Aunt Reba was there. Aunt Reba was her father’s older sister, a fat, pale, doting woman with a vacant laugh. She always hugged Marsha, and kissed her with peppermint lips, and squashed Marsha’s face and boneless unresisting body against the jello of her bosom and stomach. She was the only adult who paid close attention to the things that Marsha said; she listened greedily to her opinions and especially to her accounts of the day. She seemed to live through Marsha in some awful intimate way that she was powerless to prevent; Marsha’s adventures, such as they were, were no longer her own once Aunt Reba had extracted them from her. Marsha despised Aunt Reba, and not just because she was a leech who invaded and plundered what little privacy she had. She hated her because Reba was the family member whom she most resembled, and she saw her future self interned within that flabby, freckled body, mocked by those stupid and glittering eyes.
Marsha sat beside Aunt Reba at the dinner table and picked at her mashed potatoes and roast chicken. She usually took third helpings, but the sight of Reba’s plate, piled high with food and gravy-drenched, disgusted her. Aunt Reba warned that she would dwindle down to skin and bone if she ate like that. Marsha’s mother pointedly replied that this would be “highly unlikely.” Aunt Reba tittered, “oh-ho-ho,” this being her standard response to the most innocuous statements. Marsha’s father, who was ashamed of his big fat sister, often privately referred to her as “the global village idiot,” inevitably complaining in the next breath that her IQ was “within normal limits.” Marsha’s father was a child psychologist.
Aunt Reba’s moon face loomed over Marsha. “What did we do in school today?”
Marsha began to shovel mashed potatoes into her mouth. “Answer your Aunt Reba,” her father said.
“I made everybody hate me,” Marsha said.
“Oh-ho-ho,” laughed Aunt Reba.
“Marsha has problems relating to her peer group,” her mother said.
Reba laughed and said she couldn’t imagine such a thing. “She’s smart as a whip,” she said.
“She’s brilliant,” her mother said, “but she socializes poorly.”
“She’s working on it,” her father said. “We’ve discussed the problem with her many times, and she understands what she has to do.”
Reba nudged Marsha with her dimpled elbow. “Maybe we march to a different tune,” she said. Marsha made a fat moon face in her potatoes with the bowl of her spoon and submerged it in milk gravy. “How did you make everybody ‘hate’ you?” Aunt Reba asked. “Oh-ho-ho.”
“She doesn’t have to tell us. We respect her privacy.” Marsha’s father turned and addressed her in a tone that pretended there was no one else in the room. “Are we going to hear from Miss Milliken about it?” he asked.
Marsha thought about Miss Milliken’s cold and final stare at the empty space where she used to be. “I think it’s highly unlikely,” she said.
Miss Milliken introduced the lady as “Mrs. Johnson, our special guest speaker,” then sat down at her desk and folded her hands in front of her, her face a polite, expectant mask. Mrs. Johnson wore blue jeans and a green checkered shirt rolled up to the elbows, and her hair was red and down to her shoulders, like Crystal Van Meter’s. She smiled broadly at each member of the class, and told them to call her “Judy,” and to drag their desks out of their straight rows and into a half circle around her. She stood up and leaned against Miss Milliken’s desk, hugging her elbows against her chest, so that she had poor posture. She was younger than Marsha’s mother, and she didn’t wear makeup.
“Now,” said Judy, when the room was quiet, “everyone has feelings. Good feelings and bad feelings Happy feelings and sad feelings.” Judy did not read from a booklet, but spoke as though the words had just occurred to her and every sentence was new and exciting. The other children seemed willing to pretend that they had not heard this before. When Judy asked for examples of touches that feel good they were much more cooperative than they had been with Miss Milliken, and they pleased Judy by giving her the right answers. (“When who hugs you?” Judy asked. “When your mom hugs you,” said Merilee Spoon in a lisping whisper, and Judy smiled at her.)
Judy had to help them out with “touches that feel funny.” She said that sometimes hugs and kisses don’t make us feel good at all; she asked if they knew what she meant. Merilee Spoon said that one time a man was going to hug her but he got stopped by a policeman. She was less audible than usual, and everyone, especially Judy, leaned toward her to he
ar the story. Miss Milliken came out of her private world and attended to Merilee. She looked alarmed and sad, very different from her usual distant self. Marsha had a sudden dizzying vision of Miss Milliken, with her fragile old-lady bones and sculptured silver hair, a woman made entirely of words and ideas, standing guard over Merilee Spoon, shielding her with her actual body.
Judy nodded gravely all during the story, and when Merilee was done she looked out over the whole class to make sure they had been paying close attention and understood how important it was. Then she told them about bad touching, and about saying “no” and screaming as loud as you can when someone grabs you. “Your body belongs to you,” she told them. “Nobody, not even a grownup, has the right to touch you if you don’t want to be touched.” She told them what to do if anybody said or did something that made them feel “guilty and embarrassed, without knowing why.” She made them all write down a phone number they could call at any time of the day or night.
Marsha wished she could see Judy the way the other children did. If she could just understand why they liked her and believed everything she said she would not have to work so hard just to get through her life. Angry and fatalistic, she raised her hand. “If it’s somebody in your own family,” she said, “you have to let them touch you. They can hug you and pinch you and follow you everywhere and you can’t help it. If you screamed you’d just get in trouble.” Judy was staring closely at her with that special alertness her father often showed, when he listened, not to what she said, but to what she meant. Marsha’s voice rose. “They can fix it so you don’t have any privacy at all. They can crawl all over you like…they can eat you up.” She knew this last bit was melodramatic, but the arresting image of Aunt Reba leaning over her with a knife and a fork seemed a righteous one, and clever, too.
Judy, in the charged silence that followed, never taking her eyes from Marsha, leaned back, inclining her head toward Miss Milliken, who said “Probably nothing, nothing at all” in a calm voice but she, too, regarded Marsha closely and with the beginnings of interest; and the other children were watching her, only a few of them looking derisive or skeptical. “When you talk about being ‘followed everywhere,’” Judy asked with an encouraging smile, “do you mean, within the house?”
“Certainly,” said Marsha. She was trying hard not to enjoy Judy’s concern, but she could not help her heart pounding.
“What rooms in the house?” Judy asked. “Is there a particular room or rooms where he follows you?”
“It’s not a man,” Marsha said, and thought for a despairing moment that here was the eliminating answer, but Judy made her face blank, the way adults tend to do when they get excited, and asked which rooms the woman followed her into.
“Perhaps after class,” Miss Milliken said to Judy in a low voice. “I shouldn’t pursue it here.”
“The bathroom,” Marsha said, watching Judy’s eyes, and saw she had gotten it right. “The basement,” she said.
Marsha was not conscious of doing wrong until she sat in the big leather chair in the principal’s office with just Judy and Miss Milliken and Mrs. Kelly, the nurse. There had been the confusion of Judy’s questioning, and then the bell ringing, and the dismissed class dawdling on their way out, reluctant to leave her. But even before Judy and Mrs. Kelly indirectly made plain the specific nature of “bad touching,” Marsha knew she had deceived them so seriously and so thoroughly that if they ever found her out they would not even bother to hide their disgust. The cool leather against the backs of her thighs, the important hum of the principal’s air-conditioner, three pairs of adult eyes that never left her—this was all wrong. She didn’t belong here. Miss Milliken asked her if she would like some chocolate milk, and Marsha, who never cried, could not answer for the tears that froze in her throat.
Aunt Reba was nasty, but not in a way that anyone cared about. In class Marsha had briefly come to believe that she had been treated as badly as Merilee, that if people knew what her life was really like they would want to shield her, too. But Aunt Reba was only an unpleasantness, as her father often told her, and life was not a carnival, and Marsha was not the center of the universe.
Marsha was a good, defensive liar, cautious and canny, and gave them enough to justify their faith in her. She made them promise not to tell her parents, and even so she was careful to emphasize that Aunt Reba never hurt her and did not frighten her. When Judy said she was going to drive her home, Marsha wondered that the woman could know how very tired she was, how gratefully, and deeply, she could sleep, and she almost liked Judy then, for her kind perception. Miss Milliken stood up to see them off. “My dear,” she said, and Marsha turned and ran, stumbling, from her teacher’s foolish compassion.
There was a scene on Marsha’s front lawn, when she pleaded with Judy not to tell and screamed at her retreating back as she marched up the front steps. Her father, home with the flu, opened the door before Judy got to it and welcomed her in, Marsha running in after her, and there was another, louder scene when he agreed to see Judy alone and tried to shut the study door. Marsha’s mother had to help pry her daughter’s fingers off the inside doorknob. Marsha had never made so much noise. She had the power only to deafen. Her mother tried to pull her upstairs but she kicked her hard in the shins, ran into the coat closet, and shut the door.
When her father opened it she was kneeling in a pile of boots and coats yanked from their hangers, her mother’s fur, her father’s Burberry, and her arms ached from the pressure of stopping up her ears. Judy was gone. Her mother was gone. There was no one but her father and her. He said something she couldn’t hear. She planned to keep her ears plugged forever; she planned never again to explain or listen. He seized her by the wrists and pulled her to her feet, his violence astounding them both. He was pale and sweaty from illness. For a moment he was speechless, and his face showed confusion, even self-doubt, a look so alien that she wondered if he were having some kind of attack. Then, to her amazement, he asked, “Is it true? Is any part of it true?”
“Of course not!” Marsha said. “Don’t you know anything?” She started to laugh, because, really, he was as big a fool as the rest of them, and when she heard him ask, “What am I supposed to do with you?” in a helpless whine, she laughed even harder, and she was still laughing when, after much awkward maneuvering, he tucked her head and shoulders under one arm and began to spank her.
He hit her very hard, but held her lightly in place. She could stop the spanking any time; she could simply straighten up and walk away. The thought made her light-headed even as the blood rushed to her face. Here she was, at the end of a terrible day, and here was her father, and they were doing this curious, intimate thing. She was not angry anymore, or frightened, and the pain was unimportant; she felt, oddly, as if she could forgive him anything. She had such a longing to forgive. But the arm around her waist was gingerly, not gentle. He held her with distaste, and in his grudging dutiful embrace she closed her eyes and turned herself, for good, into an orphan.
After supper she used her bedroom phone to call the hot-line number in her notebook. She told a woman with a pleasant grandmotherly voice that her father had held her still so she couldn’t get away, and then had touched her where he shouldn’t have. She felt guilty and embarrassed, she said, and she didn’t know why.
Marsha stood on the second-floor landing, in robe and pajamas, looking down at her parents as they helped the child abuse couple into their coats. There had been a great deal of talk, and she had answered all their questions with scrupulous honesty. Are you afraid of your father? No. It was just a spanking, nothing more? Yes. Why did you call us, Marsha? I wanted to see what would happen. I think you must be very, very angry with your Dad. That’s not a question. You’re a clever girl, aren’t you? Yes, I am.
“Sorry about this, Dr. Potter,” the man was saying, and the woman said, “We have to check everything out.”
“Of course, of course,” said her parents. Everyone was laughing and talking at once,
and pretending not to be upset. Marsha hated them too much to feel guilty, although she supposed she should. All she wanted was to fall asleep and wake up in a hundred years, some place where no one knew her.
“You know,” said the man as he opened the front door, “I wish they were all this simple.”
“So do I, George,” said her father, shaking his hand. “God, so do I.”
“What a world,” said the man.
Outside two car doors closed, and the car started up and drove off. Her parents stood very close together in the dark front hall. They held hands. They were wary, skittish. If she were to cry “boo” and stick out her tongue they would jump like rabbits. “Psychopath,” her mother said, to him. “Sociopath,” said her scrupulous father.
A week later she slipped down to the boiler room during recess, when she knew he was outside sweeping leaves and picking up litter with a pointed stick. It was warm down there and very dry, not musty-smelling, like her own basement: the pale walls and gray floor were free of obvious dirt, and there was plenty of light from a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. There was furniture, too: a cot with a bare, discolored mattress, a beat-up table that swayed when Marsha pushed against it with one finger, with a long drawer full of mostly empty bottles. It wasn’t as bad as it could have been, though there was an air of expectancy here, as if the room held its breath, and she thought of the robber bridegroom, and the lairs of predatory beasts. But that was silly. She was overexcited, she knew, from lack of sleep, and secret planning.
Next day she came back down after school, carrying her mother’s old canvas tote bag from the garden club, and wearing her nicest blouse and skirt. Mr. Lazenbee didn’t hear her over the throbbing hum of the boiler. He lay on his back drinking liquor out of a bottle; his legs were stretched out straight in front of him, and he lifted only his head to drink, with his shoulders flat against the dirty mattress. Marsha was sure that if she tried this she would spill the liquor all over her chin and neck. If Mr. Lazenbee were buried under sand, with just his head and right arm sticking out, he could still drink his liquor. This seemed extraordinarily innovative for a man as stupid as Mr. Lazenbee.
Jenny and the Jaws of Life Page 16
