Jenny and the Jaws of Life

by Jincy Willett

  Mr. Lazenbee caught sight of her during a long pull from his bottle. She was quite close to him by then. He swallowed wrong and sat up in the throes of a choking cough; he capped the bottle and stuck it partway under the mattress. He was not happy to see her. “You lost, girly?” he said. Marsha shook her head. He squinted at her, his old mouth hanging open so long that she was going to tease him about catching flies. He got an idea. “She send you?” he asked.

  Marsha hesitated. He could mean either Miss Milliken or the principal, Mrs. Schwab. “Yes,” she said. “She wants you to fix this place up.” She pulled the orange afghan Aunt Reba had made out of the garden club bag and put it on the bed beside him. She unpacked the cracked teacups and jelly glasses and the two Nancy Drews, and her framed picture of the harlequin. “She says you don’t have to live like this.”

  “She’s nuts,” said Mr. Lazenbee. He spoke in a series of progressively indignant afterthoughts. “I don’t live here. She say that? You tell her, I got a home, just like everybody else. Tell the fat cow to stick it.”

  “Do you really live somewhere else?” This was unimaginable to Marsha. “Where do you live?” she asked, trying to catch him out.

  “None of your beeswax.” Marsha giggled at a grown man saying such a thing. Mr. Lazenbee narrowed his rheumy eyes and studied her. “She didn’t send you,” he said.

  Marsha reached into the canvas bag. “Want some peanuts?” she asked.

  “I’ll give you peanuts, girly. You get out of here now.” Mr. Lazenbee lay back down on the bed, and, when she didn’t move, raised his head and scowled at her. “Beat it, I said. Rotten kids.” Marsha stood the harlequin picture on the table top, propped against the cement wall. “You’re going to get in trouble, girly,” said Mr. Lazenbee. He smiled in a nasty way. “I’ll tell ’em you were down here. You’ll catch it good. Stuckup little piggy.” He looked at her everywhere, her chest and bottom, everywhere but her face, and showed her his long brown teeth. Marsha’s skin felt toasted. She turned her back to him, barely breathing, and unbuttoned her turquoise blouse, and shrugged it to the floor, and swiveled to face him in her embroidered cotton slip. “Jesus God,” said Mr. Lazenbee.

  Mr. Lazenbee scuttled backwards on the bed and off onto the floor, moving with impressive speed considering how many tries it took him to get to his feet. “What are you doing?” he screamed, and then lowered his voice to a terrified whisper. “Jesus God, kid, don’t do that.” Marsha stepped out of her woolen skirt. “What do you want?” he cried.

  Marsha started fussing with the afghan, unfolding and smoothing it onto the mattress. Mr. Lazenbee’s reaction, and the intensity of it, had stunned her into blank confusion. She had taken his cooperation for granted. Not once had she put words into his mouth. This had been stupid of her; but even if she had given him credit for a will of his own, she would never have had him ask, “What do you want?” “You’re the one who wants,” she said, under her breath, terribly embarrassed. She looked at him, held out her arms away from her body, hopelessly toward him, showing him her self, whatever there was to see and want. “You’re the one,” she said.

  “Oh no I ain’t!” He sidled to the door, then edged away from it toward the center of the room beneath the light bulb. He did this again and again, moaning with fright. “Never gonna believe me,” he said, and then he looked at her with pure loathing and called her a dirty name. But it was not “sociopath.”

  “I can come every Friday,” Marsha said, “and Wednesdays for a little while.”

  “Jesus God,” said Mr. Lazenbee.

  “It’ll be just us,” Marsha said, using as few words as she could, but there had been too many words already, and everything was ruined.

  He made a dash for the heavy door, yanked it open. Once on the other side of it, holding it against his body like a shield, he looked at her for the last time, as it shut out his ugly, knotted face. “Rotten kid!” he screamed, and left her down there, alone.

  “So,” her father said. He was slumped, gray and exhausted, in his leather swivel chair in the study, regarding her across his desk. Her mother had just left. “Here we are again. Right, Marsha? The whole adult world, dancing attendance on you.” He sighed through grimly pursed lips, steadily, with low force, as though inflating a black balloon, and doodled on a lined pad. Doodling gave him something to look at besides Marsha. “It seems to me,” he said, “that you’re getting better at this all the time. You’ve got your mother crying now. You’ve got the principal of your school stuttering, like…” He shrugged angrily, smacking his pen down on the pad.

  “Porky Pig,” Marsha said.

  “Don’t you wise off at me!” His eyes widened, to take her in, she thought, and her heart began to race. But then she slipped right out of focus. There was some mechanism in his eyes that adjusted itself, and soon he was not angry at her, but at someone in back of her, visible through her. “I’ll tell you a little something, Marsha,” he said. “You think things are funny that aren’t funny at all. Just because you laugh at something, don’t expect other people to laugh with you. You’re not funny.”

  “I know.”

  “No, you don’t know.”

  Marsha was thinking about Vulture Man, and how she never had understood why the girls laughed, when to her it was just an accurate description; and about the red heart she had drawn on the sidewalk, with her corny joke inside, which wasn’t funny. “Yes, I do know,” she said.

  “No, you don’t!”

  Marsha made her face flat and smooth.

  “You do not know, Marsha! But you are going to learn. And I am not going to give up.” He closed his eyes and leaned back.

  Marsha leaned back too.

  “Worst of all,” he said, “you’ve taken a poor old man with half a mind to begin with, and frightened the hell out of him. He quit his job, did you know that? Does that mean anything to you, Marsha? Do you even know what a job is? You do? Wonderful. Let’s hear it.”

  Marsha was trying to keep her face pale and her lips from curling. There was no reason to laugh. Her father slipping in and out of control was the sort of thing that should have been funny, but wasn’t anymore, really. She tried to picture something serious and sad, which should have been easy, and up popped Mr. Lazenbee, which was horrible. None of your beeswax. She snorted, pink and piggy.

  Her father did controlled breathing. When he spoke, his voice was calm. “It’s not working, Marsha. I’m not going to lose my temper with you again, ever. Do you believe me?”

  Marsha nodded. He never lied to her. He didn’t believe in it. Judy had lied to her. Judy had been in this study, with her father. Judy Sing-Song, who talked down to children, and her father, who didn’t, because he didn’t believe in it. Marsha watched her father get up and walk to the window, and stand there for a long time, looking out.

  “Your mother is worried,” he said, “and I am too, about exactly why you did what you did, and what you thought you wanted from the old man. We know, of course, that it was a cry for help, and I want you to understand that we heard you.”

  That was the saddest part, Marsha thought. They heard everything.

  “We take it very seriously indeed. I’ve set up an appointment for you with Glassman, for Monday.” He glanced at her. “You may have heard us speak of him.”

  Marsha nodded. She’d heard them speak of him many times, in the next room over, or in the hall when she was in bed at night, their voices loud enough for her to hear. If she keeps this up we’ll have to send her to Glassman. She was finally going to meet the Glass Man.

  “The point is, I can’t help you with this. I’m your father. We’re too close. Whatever you were doing down there, it was bound to have something to do with me. I’m the last person on earth who can help you with it. It’s just not my proper job, Marsha. You can work it out with Glassman.

  “What we are going to work on, you and I,” he said, turning back to the window, “is our old nemesis. Our old, old friend.”

  “Empat
hy,” said Marsha.

  “Empathy,” he said, “and respect for other minds, and you will, Marsha, believe me, you will learn to accept that other people are just like you. They have their own feelings and needs, just as you do. You are only one of many.”

  “And I am not the center of the universe,” Marsha said.

  “You don’t bother me in the least, Marsha. You are going to learn that human beings are not dolls to be manipulated according to your whim. That not even a stupid person appreciates having his intelligence insulted, his integrity violated. That everyone is special, individual, unique, just like you. That people are not machines for you to wind up and point in any direction you want. You thought you could make that Lazenbee character do God knows what, you think you can make your mother and me run around like chickens….”

  Marsha watched her father as he talked on and on about what she thought and wanted and felt, as he always had, as though her head were made of glass and crammed with tiny lettered blocks constantly rearranging themselves for him to read. When she was little she had believed that this was true. But that was silly. He was just guessing. He didn’t know anything.

  As he talked he took his left hand out of his pocket and placed it flat against the window frame. He was wearing a light blue sweater over a shirt of darker blue, and the colors belonged together, the cuff and the rolled sleeve of the sweater, and his arm was bent just so at the elbow, and long and thin, but strong. This was the arm that had held her still, so grudgingly, so he could punish her, and it seemed to Marsha now that there was magic in it. Which was silly, because it was attached to her father, and people were not machines, to be taken apart and put together every which way. But the longing came back to her again, the longing to forgive, which was silly too, but so awfully strong that she had to look away, and even then, not looking, she couldn’t bear it.

  “You’re crying now,” he said, “because you feel sorry for yourself.”

  Marsha shook her ugly head no, and no.

  “Yes,” he said, coming near to stand over her, “and some day, not tomorrow, but some day you will learn to cry for other people.”

  She reached out blind with both hands and grabbed the arm. He let her do this. She pressed her face against it.

  “But it’s good that you’re crying now,” he said, with pity in his voice, measured, like milk in a glass cup.

  She said, “Please don’t say any more,” but she didn’t have the breath to make it plain.

  “It’s a good start,” he said. “Go with your feelings now. This is how it begins.”

  Beyond sense and reason, Marsha was afraid he was right, and she tried again to make him just be still, but he wouldn’t stop saying I know, I know, I know.

  Résumé

  Here is the kind of person I am. You and I could be close friends for ten years, and then someone else could come along, and I would know the person for, say, one month, and he would say something derogatory about you, like you’re a pompous jerk or a backstabber, and I’d say, Gee, I don’t know, but I guess I can see what you mean. I have no moral fiber. And I’d still go on being best friends with you. But if I were with this other person I’d pretend to agree that you were a jerk.

  Or I could be at a party, or waiting in line at the post office, and a total stranger standing next to me could say something totally out of line, like Niggers are the scum of the earth, and I’d just pretend not to hear him, or if I couldn’t do that I’d say Excuse me in this superior voice and walk away. Only I wouldn’t just stalk off and stand someplace else. I’d really act like I was looking for the bathroom, or I was late for a dentist appointment. I’d make a big deal out of checking my watch and keep craning my neck looking for the next bus.

  In fact, sometimes when I’m talking to a black person, and it doesn’t matter if it’s somebody I know or some guy painting my house, we’ll have a normal conversation, only all the time I’m thinking, Hey, here I am talking to a black person; or when the conversation is over I’ll think, That was a pleasant conversation. It’s like a nervous twitch. But I guess I don’t think that’s as bad as the other stuff, about being a coward.

  I’ve done a couple of things that looked brave. I saved someone’s life once. I grabbed a little kid’s arm just as he was about to run out from between two parked cars. I’m pretty sure the bus was close enough and going fast enough so that the kid definitely would have been hurt. Although I could obviously be kidding myself about this. But (a) no one saw me do it, except the kid, who wasn’t too impressed, because kids expect you to save them; and (b) all the time I was moving toward the kid, reaching out for his arm, I was seeing in my mind what my life would be like if I didn’t do it, or if I didn’t do it right: I would be the guy who didn’t save the kid. So really I was brave because I was a coward. The other time I was in church, almost twenty years ago, and the pastor, this real moss-back, was ranting about draft dodgers, but I didn’t care because I had to go to the bathroom. Finally I stood up and walked down the middle aisle; and, as you probably know, half the congregation filed out behind me. Just before I got to the men’s room one of the deacons caught up with me and started patting me on the back, and soon I was surrounded by well-wishers. Of course I had to put off going to the bathroom so that people wouldn’t make the connection. I was quite a local hero.

  I don’t cheat on my income tax, but then my father never did, and that counts for a lot. You learn certain habits when you’re young. Just because you have good habits, that doesn’t make you a good person. Although, for what it’s worth, I’d never cheat on a résumé.

  I still vote Democrat.

  I cheated on my wife once. I tried to weasel out of doing it, but then it turned out to be the best sex I ever had. I never did it again, but it wasn’t a penance, oh no. I was doing myself a favor.

  The only reason I didn’t half-blind Billy Flanagan is that his mother called him just then and he turned his head and the arrow grazed the bridge of his nose, nicking it with the green feather on the way by. Lots of times I drive drunk, or half-drunk, which is worse. I could have killed a small army by now. I could have filled a hospital with quadriplegics. But I never killed anybody, oh no, and I never robbed, and I never told an important lie.

  I even cried once on someone else’s account. I saw Nixon’s pets, those POWs, getting off that plane in Washington, or wherever the hell it was, those sad bastards, and this one guy says, with tears running down his face, “God bless the President! God bless the Commander in Chief!” I burst out sobbing in my own living room, in front of the wife and son. I was just getting over the flu, admittedly, but I really did have a moment there.

  Still. The fact is, I could easily have been a Good German.

  Now at this point I could do two things. I could say, But look, I’m not a Good German. But that shouldn’t cut any ice with you. It doesn’t even impress me. Here’s the other, more interesting, way I could go: I know I’m Good German material. That is, I may not amount to much, but I don’t kid myself. So I should get points, etc.

  But I’m not going to go that way. Not because you wouldn’t fall for it, because, frankly, you’re not too predictable. Meaning no disrespect, of course, but every once in a while you don’t make perfect sense to me. For instance, every hour of every day of my life. Example: the wildebeest. The wildebeest population is kept down by every year wiping out most of them with crocodiles, thirst, starving to death, fire, drowning the babies, and finally this parasite that makes the weakest ones turn around and around until they drop, and then, still breathing, they get torn apart by hyenas. That one goes right by me, I have to admit. I’m sure there’s a good reason for it, though. It would have to be a good reason, wouldn’t it? Frankly, I can’t wait to find out what the reason is.

  But I’m not going to go that way because it isn’t anything special to know you’re Good German material. Even the real Good Germans knew what they were. Surprised? Do you think you can have a wormy soul and not know it? Just how stupid
do you think we are?

  What do you think it’s like, living with a wormy soul? What would you know about it, you son of a bitch?

  Well, enough about me. Let’s talk about you. What are you going to do about me?

  It’s pretty obvious what you’ve got planned for my wife, you’ve tipped your hand there, and I must say it’s pretty, well, extreme (I was going to say diabolical!), considering what a nice woman she is, even though, of course, she’s a Good German too, though not as Good as me. I’m just guessing, but I’ll bet it’s going to be something fast for me, like heart or a brain hemorrhage, because I’ve seen how you like to mix it up.

  Sometimes, I know, you like to go the other way, for variety, to stump the experts, like: car crash, car crash, dormitory fire, convenience store stickup, and last, but not least, for the remaining survivor, the Tragic Accident While Cleaning the Gun. But the odds are against this, so I’m betting it’s the other thing.

  Here’s an idea, though: Don’t do it. Let me live forever.

  Now don’t just say no. Think about it first. Ask yourself this: Why not? I’ll wait. Take your time.

  Now I’m betting you came up with an answer, and it satisfied you just fine. So what is it? You shouldn’t mind letting me in on it; I mean, even if I don’t get it, which I probably wouldn’t, it’s got to be so deep, so wise, that it would just blow me away. I mean, it’s not as if I wouldn’t be impressed. It’s not as if you’d be risking any loss of face. You could only gain. Whatever the reason is, it’s got to be so great, so colossal, that there’s no chance at all that I would, say, laugh and laugh and point at you and laugh even harder and run around telling all my friends, my Good German friends, what a dangerous incompetent idiot you are. So what’s stopping you?