Jenny and the Jaws of Life

by Jincy Willett

  Last try. Let’s make a deal. You ready? Here it is. You let me live and here’s what I’ll do for you: You let me go on living, forever, in this body, on the earth, which is my kind of place. In other words, you, for your part, refrain from killing me, the Good German, the wormy little coward, and you know what I’ll do for you?

  Nothing. Not a god damn thing.

  You’ve got to admit, it’s a fresh approach.

  Jenny

  When Jenny was twelve she hosted a birthday party for her best friend. She had baked the cake herself and planned to bring it to the table when time came for the big ceremony. She rehearsed the lighting of the candles, the dimming of lamps, the solemn entrance and presentation. But when the moment came, when the cake was fully ablaze in the pantry, she dug in her heels and pushed out her jaw and refused to carry it in. Why on earth not? her mother asked, and Jenny knew there would be a reckoning; but paraffin was dripping onto the butter frosting, so her mother brought in the cake.

  Then everybody sang “Happy Birthday” in the magical light of her cake, and again Jenny, who had had every intention of singing, couldn’t bring herself to do it. This often happened when she sang hymns or recited the Pledge of Allegiance. Instead of really joining in, she did her trick of mouthing the words behind a face that felt, from the inside, pleasant, tolerant, faintly detached. She remarked the apparent ease of most of the others, especially her mother, whose voice was the loudest and most assured. Their good humor amounted to a natural humility before which Jenny felt both contempt and deep shame. She could sense in only a couple of the girls a squirming unease with the occasion. She wondered if they, too, were just pretending to sing. She thought it unlikely that anyone else would have hit on her trick.

  When the door had closed behind the last guest her mother turned on her. “If you could only see your face,” she said, and stretched her mouth into a flat, artificial smile and squinted in a dumb show of fellow feeling, producing the expression Laraine Day and Rhonda Fleming affected to avoid wrinkles around the mouth, only hideously exaggerated and grotesque. “You think everybody is looking at you,” her mother said. “Nobody is looking at you.”

  Jenny knew that what her mother was saying was true, and that her mother’s cruel imitation of her was accurate. She was horrified; and though not angry at her mother—who clearly had been driven to it—she immediately knew no one had the right to be quite this honest. “When you put on that act,” her mother said, making the face again, with tears in her eyes, “you look like you have something the matter with you.”

  “Then it’s a good thing,” Jenny answered back, “that no one is looking.” She was a heavy girl, tenderhearted and prone to sullenness, and too big for punishment.

  “It makes you look feebleminded,” said her grieving mother, who later apologized, and was forgiven. It had been the sort of scene, Jenny thought, that made you sorry for everybody.

  Jenny longed for that grace with which most people submitted to ceremony. That effortless surrender of the spotlight; that mysterious willingness to become part of a mob, and more: to be seen that way, reduced to the obscurity of a class photograph. The worst thing about ceremony was that your next move, the next word out of your mouth, was predictable. Whether singing, dancing, or reading Mother Goose rhymes to a child, she felt fixed, pinned, as though turning, in a dangerously predictable arc, upon a microscope slide; or encased for good within a cheap glass paperweight. Jenny was, she knew, a prideful, self-centered girl, whom no one, not even the ones who loved her, would ever accuse of being a good sport.

  This had to do with her relationship to God, whose existence she had taken for granted before her parents first mentioned him, at that time when she was still the center of the solar system and the sun had not yet muscled her out of the way. Even when she owned it, Jenny’s universe was not particularly hospitable, and the God of her infancy was not her loving friend. Friends don’t watch you in the bathroom or read your mind or kick over the magnificent towers you build with wooden blocks. God did these things to Jenny, not out of wise love, but simply because he had the power to do them. God was very much like Jenny, only bigger.

  God and Jenny had an understanding. He did not always watch Jenny, and she could not know when he was watching and when he wasn’t. The point about God was that he could be watching. He observed her hypothetically and from a great distance, and for reasons she never really wondered about. She assumed she was special in some way.

  When her parents introduced her to the Bible and the church, Jenny believed without question, as most children do. She was a pious little girl and so for many years believed in a being who dandled children on his knee, answered prayers, and loved all sinners equally. She sang solos, gave Children’s Day sermons, asked her Sunday School teachers questions that stumped and embarrassed them, so eager was she to grasp the entire setup and all its implications, for her.

  By the time she was twelve and balked at submitting to her friend’s ceremonial day, the church, in refusing to admit a Negro family or even circulate a Good Neighbor housing pledge, had proved itself worthless, and her Sunday School teacher, who knew he was wrong but “had a family to support,” was revealed, under her merciless grilling in class, as a stupid and frightened man. Inevitably she lost her faith. The church she belonged to was liberal and Protestant; its minister and elders let her go without rancor, with kind wishes for a safe and interesting journey. Much later, when lapsed Roman Catholic and ex-fundamentalist friends told her about their struggles with guilt and community recrimination, she was to remember her own leave-taking as a wide-screen cinematic event, a comic take in which all the believers lined up at a riverbank, dressed like pioneer farmers, shading their plain square faces from the sun; waving to her as she pushed off into a current that, according to their professed belief, was sure to carry her over a roaring falls to annihilation. “Bye-bye, dear!” they cried. “Write when you get the chance!”

  The God of Jenny’s infancy, that cryptic, hypothetical observer, did not evaporate along with her faith. But since he was a given, a constant, the source of her perpetual embarrassment and pride, she thought she was agnostic, and when her mother said, “Nobody is looking at you,” she did not dispute her. Jenny never had paid much attention to other people, so it seemed only sensible and fair, though sad, that she herself moved about in the world unnoticed.

  On the night of the party, Jenny, truly sorry for her arrogance, longing for grace, resolved never again to do her trick, which didn’t work anyway. From that time on she sang Christmas carols, “Happy Birthday to You,” the school fight song, “America the Beautiful,” “Blowing in the Wind,” and all other necessary songs, in full voice; when asked to join in on a chorus or clap hands to a beat, she joined in and clapped hands; she marched down aisles, recited the Girl Scout creed, saluted flags, said grace, wore name tags, repeated solemn oaths, and shook hands with the total stranger to her right. And not once in thirty years did she fail to find such an occasion hateful and freshly humiliating.

  In adolescence Jenny fell down a lot, even for an adolescent. Her frequent tumbles, some of which were spectacular, punctuated and enlivened an otherwise dreary stretch of life, so that later she was grateful for them. They were just about all she could remember of this time. They provided proof that her youth had actually happened.

  She wasn’t exactly clumsy. According to her mother, the problem was inattention. “You walk around in a dream.” Jenny tried even harder not to think about herself, to attend to what her mother called the real world, and with this increased effort the real world receded even further, to moon-size, and she became even less conscious than before of stairsteps and curbstones, of mud puddles and glare ice, of gravity itself. She fell downstairs and upstairs, and tripped on the satiny gymnasium floor; she butted into doorjambs and spilled out of school buses and crowded elevators, and, during those moments when silence really was essential, she brushed against light switches or dislodged large metallic thing
s that landed with a long, sonorous clang; and once, while standing still to receive an award for excellence in conversational French, she just dropped, like a forsaken marionette.

  She wondered sometimes if she were doing some kind of unconscious penance. She got so used to falling that she didn’t much mind; if she fell alone she took no notice of it. When falling in public, though, she embarrassed herself by laughing, often beginning to laugh before she even hit the ground. No one, except her mother, ever laughed with her. Maybe she didn’t look as hilarious to the world as she did in her mind’s eye. She tried not to laugh. It would have been pleasant to hurt herself, to break an ankle and have to be carried, to suffer concussion and lie motionless at the foot of the stairs, pale and alarming, the focus of consternation. But she never achieved more damage than a scraped knee or ripped stocking, and did not see, really, how others managed it.

  For years she thought of herself as someone who fell a lot, only slowly realizing that this was no longer true; that at some point, in college or maybe shortly after, she had stopped. “I was always off balance,” she told her husband. “I flew through the air with the greatest of ease.” She amused him by pointing out infamous accident sites in her old neighborhood. He told her that his adolescence, too, had been humiliating, though in a different way. She thought he missed the point; or could not have guessed that her old disequilibrium seemed in retrospect a kind of enchantment. That, even at the time, it was not really humiliating at all.

  Jenny loved and married the first man to love her and propose marriage, a gray-haired young man, the youngest child and only son in a family of ten. He had grown up in a jungle of fond women. Most of his sisters were pretty, good-humored, friendly girls, and he knew everything there was to know about them. Though he loved them, he resented the loss of sexual mystery. He was sick of women who made sense. He loved Jenny, and married her, because she made no sense to him.

  She seemed to him never to be fully there. She was a ponderous girl, weighed down and distracted by the invisible baggage of her own world. He would occupy her full attention only intermittently, and when he did the blast of unrelated signals she sent confused and delighted him. For instance, she was a wonderfully bad dancer, with good rhythm and coordination and sexy hips and a degree of self-consciousness that was almost morbid. When they danced close and she hid her face in his shoulder she seemed, rather than cuddling, to be abandoning to him the shell of her body; and often, as he put them through their paces, he got from her an absurd sense of danger, as though something terribly important rode on what they did, the pattern they made on the dance floor. She was sullen and sweet in unpredictable turns. In just the way that some people have presence, she had absence.

  They produced a son who, every day of his new life, had to learn by trial and error some new technicality in the natural or moral law. Apparently he did not take this personally. This mystified Jenny. She wondered if men and women differed in this fundamental respect: if women got the Big Picture at a much earlier age. Her husband didn’t know what she meant by “the Big Picture” (it was a phrase she remembered from Driver’s Ed), although the idea amused him. They watched the boy on his new hobbyhorse, galloping faster and faster with increasing grimness on the garish, squeaking toy, discovering a new form of monotony. “I mean,” she said, “that maybe little boys don’t appreciate how powerless they really are. Maybe they’re born into a fool’s paradise.” He said that a fool and his paradise are soon parted. He said, “When you’re a kid, anything is possible. There’s a whole great big world out there.” She gave it up. This had been her point exactly.

  She always spoke to her child in a normal voice, and with her full vocabulary. The ability to croon and talk baby talk had not, as she had hoped it might, emerged along with the baby himself, like the instincts to cradle and nurse. She adored her son but would not play the fool for him. When he got a little older and tried to put her down—climbing or hanging from her body as though it were a piece of furniture, trying with stubborn intrusive fingers to mold her face like a lump of clay—she withdrew from him and showed him her cold displeasure. A few of her friends, glimpsing these occasional displays of power, assumed they were political acts, and approved, or thought they should. Her husband and those friends who knew her better understood, and liked her a little less for it.

  One summer day, when she was almost thirty, she and her husband went to a wedding of close friends, an outdoor wedding in a Japanese garden in the city park, and she was the nearest she would ever come to beautiful, in soft gray silk and ruby-colored sandals. After the wedding she took her plate of little tea sandwiches and her glass of champagne and walked, sipping, in the sunshine, wearing the light proudly, like a sable coat, and sank down in the grass in the deep shade of a ginkgo, on top of an enormous dog turd.

  In the car going home, and for some years to come, she was to describe the event variously as her “formal passage into a world beyond embarrassment” and the moment she first truly understood “the meaning of irony.” “And it really wasn’t all that bad,” she said.

  “You keep saying that,” said her husband, at the wheel, leaning as far away from her as possible, his head halfway out the window.

  “The worst possible thing happened,” and she said, “and it wasn’t that bad!”

  Her husband didn’t agree with either statement, but kept this to himself. That his wife could invest significance in such a nonevent was just the sort of thing that continued to endear her to him. He made a drama of loosening his tie and gulping the outside air, while she laughed and laughed.

  She quickly lost her pretty young looks, which had mostly been a matter of high coloring. She simply faded, at a pace she could follow in annual vacation photographs, and what emerged was her adult face, sharp-featured, intelligent. She took it well. “It’s sad,” she would say, “but interesting, too.” She saw the slow decline of her body as a kind of progress, and took an admittedly absurd pride in it, as though aging were a show-biz turn. She regarded her middle-aged smoker’s hands, rumpled and crepey where the childish dimples used to be, and smiled with deliberate, ironic pleasure.

  She was becoming a better person. She was able to focus on matters outside herself for increasing stretches of time. In the company of friends, with whom she had always been generous with time, hospitality, and gifts, she was now generous with her full attention. She was able to read and think more intensely about difficult, abstract subjects. She could sometimes see, within herself and others, glimmerings of nobility. She thought she might some day become wise. She was very, very happy.

  “The thing about getting older,” she often said, “is that the good stuff gets better, and the bad gets worse. Life becomes terrifically real.” She tried not to show off but could not contain her passion for the adventurous nature of human life. “Anything could happen,” she said, and surrendered, with no loss of pride, to “all the possibilities.” She smiled at how far she had come.

  Her mother died, yelling, in horrible pain, unable or unwilling to recognize her own husband, her own daughter. En route to the cemetery on the interstate highway the right front tire of the hearse blew, and the long cortege joined it in the breakdown lane. Mourners left their cars and milled around, arguing about what to do. “This is terribly dangerous,” a man said. “We’re sitting ducks out here.”

  Her father sobbed without covering his face. She trotted, light-headed, over to the hearse driver. “What happens now?” she asked, and the man said, “Let’s put it this way, lady. The spare isn’t all that easy to get at.”

  Her best friend’s daughter was run over and killed by a school bus, as it pulled gently away from the curbing in a heavy rainstorm. The driver, especially conscientious on that day, had counted the number of disembarking children, had not put the bus in gear until, through sheets of rain, he counted all ten safely across, had counted once more to make sure. Only then, waving, had he started to roll. One of the brightly slickered figures was a mother, a tiny
woman from Laos. The tenth child knelt in front of the bus, adjusting the snap on her new pink boots.

  Her friend called on her at this time, and she had to go. The woman’s grief was ice water into which she plunged daily, with increasing dread; and by the time her friend was sufficiently healed to be left alone Jenny had been cured, for good, of her boosterism for the Possibilities.

  Jenny began to sleep poorly and she could not control her waking imagination. In vivid daydreams, perversely detailed, her son was crushed, and she drove the bus. She lost all control over the fantasies, which ran automatically, in a seamless loop. She quit her job, stopped driving, refused to leave the house, badly frightening her husband and son, who shouted at her and demanded normality. And when the craziness vanished (which it did, suddenly, like a patch of fog on the road) she was different.

  She had accepted the news of her son’s mortality, of the precariousness of his position; she had fought it the way any child fights bitter medicine, and yet when she got it down it wasn’t so bad, and by itself it would have had no lasting effect upon her character besides its vague aftertaste of iron, a permanent but easily accommodated disability. But the news the bus driver brought stuck in her throat. She could not without great inner adjustment accept the fact of the bus driver, though he was as real to her as her own mirror image. His kindly foolish face became a fixture of her landscape, frozen at that moment when the little Laotian woman turned to wonder at two children screaming, crouching, pointing at the anonymous hooded tenth child submitting to the bumper like a penitent. On the comic verge of comprehension the bus driver waved, with that timeless, stylized manner of the perfect foil, and fate whizzed toward him like a custard pie.