Jenny and the Jaws of Life Page 8
I thought that it all had to do with power, my father’s over me. It would come to me, when he was arguing or asking about my job, that he could at any time make me sing a corny old song with him, or rap the back of my skull with his knuckles. This was false. Not merely unlikely, but false. But I couldn’t see that, and I only half believe it even today. My father let go twenty-five years ago. I will hang on until the day I die.
Here I am, then, at nineteen, back home for Christmas vacation. It’s after midnight. I’m at the apartment of my first lover, Rudy, a downy-bearded counterculture twerp of twenty-two. Rudy is insignificant to me; he is something I have to do. I am damp from his shower, and still wet from him, and a little stoned. I stand in his dark, grubby kitchen, alone, watching out the window for my father.
Here comes that big old Ford, maroon and black vinyl. I remember now, nosing through the fat flakes of an early blizzard like a faithful hound, and my father at the wheel. I float downstairs, across the snow, and the door swings open by its agreeable self. The dashboard is cheery with little red and green lights. We proceed in second gear, in silence, and there is nothing out there but blinding white snowflakes dancing in our headlights.
My father, too, has been out. Apparently he goes out a lot, and stays late. It does not occur to me, it does not occur to me, to wonder why. Lately he just asks me, when we’re alone at the breakfast table, or in the TV room, if I’m going to Young Lochinvar’s tonight, and would I like a ride home? and I say, Sure. What do I think he is doing out late at night, rolling home at one or two in the morning? Do I imagine he is working? drinking? moonlighting?
I think nothing, nothing at all. I am nineteen years old. My father is always picking me up someplace.
I’ll never know who she was, or if there was more than one, or how much my mother knew, or how much it hurt her. The whole affair is opaque to me. How I admire them for that! They seem happy now. Sometimes I watch them, especially my mother, for some sign of moral advantage, or lifelong atonement. Whatever happened, it was grownup, front-seat business.
But now. Does he know how ignorant, how self-involved I am? He knows what I’ve been doing, though we pretend otherwise. Does he imagine, with me, his first daughter, an unspoken complicity, a companionship in sin? Does he therefore assume that at last we will be easy with each other?
On this night, the night of first snowfall, at Christmastime, in 1967, my father clears his throat in the dark. I’m sorry, he says.
What for? Suddenly so wary.
For whatever it was that I did, he says. Something went wrong a long time ago, he says, when you were little. In the Mesozoic. Your mother and I—
We’re coming to a boulevard, but the brakes don’t respond, and he calmly turns the wheel hard right and nuzzles us into a soft snowbank. We’re stuck. Laughing like a kid, he puts the car in park and gets out. Take the wheel, honey, he says. You’ve got to rock it.
I am so glad for this reprieve that I welcome any responsibility, even this one, and there is my father bright in the headlights, blind and strong, and we hit a good rhythm right off, as though I am a real driver, and we have done this many times. I am competent. I live, for these few minutes, in the present time, gratefully. Like a woman of forty, I put away history and worry for the pleasure of now. So this is one of the few perfect memories I will have of my young life. I will always be able to regain the sense of the car beneath me, rolling forward, straining back toward freedom, and the toasting breath of the heater, the smell of wet wool, and my father, still young, still lean, in white light.
Then we’re free, and I move over for him. He stands outside his open door, knocking snow off himself. Thick crusts loosen from his coat and avalanche down in tall chunks. He is still laughing when he gets in. He says, Let’s try that again, shall we? and we’re in gear and heading home.
He is so happy this night, so easily delighted, and I can see that part of what delights him is our recent brush with calamity, the absurd almost-accident. To my mother, death and injury are only bad, near-misses only lucky. My mother never takes the longer view where we are concerned. But though he, too, would be destroyed if harm came to his children, still he has me in perspective, on this night. We are equals now. I am on my own in an unfair and unsafe place, and expected to see the loony side of it. And I do; because I am my father’s daughter.
And so, with anything possible, and as though the past fifteen minutes never happened, he says, Your mother and I were your age, you know, when we got married. When you were born she wasn’t even old enough to vote. Think about it, he says, inviting me to wonder, along with him, at what babies they had been, to have babies themselves. We wanted you to be the perfect child. Your mother says we were too hard on you.
No, I say. Don’t be silly. Wow, it’s really coming down now. Dad, do we have snow tires?
All I know is, I screwed up somewhere back then. Because when you were a real little kid, I couldn’t do anything wrong in your eyes. Do you believe that? And then, all of a sudden it seemed, I couldn’t please you to save my life. I don’t know. I’d tell you if I knew. But I just want to say, that whatever it was—
Knock it off, Dad. I don’t know either, and I don’t care. That’s just history, Dad.
Exactly, he says. I can hear the smile in my father’s voice. That’s exactly what I was about to say. It’s all in the past. I can’t change it. I would if I could, honey. He takes my hand from my lap and squeezes it hard, with fierce love, his eyes straight ahead on the slippery road. He has the right to do this. He relaxes his grip, allowing me to choose. You know I love you more than anything.
I know he does. And I take my hand away.
I had understood how to hurt him since before I could read and write. He took it, my best shot, with grace, and said no more on the drive home. In a while he was humming softly, for his own benefit, a tune from the forties, when he and my mother were children in love
I never took less pleasure in my cruelty than on that night. This was my bleak duty, as it was my father’s to entreat forgiveness. It hurt me, as they say, more than it did him. In my grief, with my hand still warm, I thought that some day at least the mystery would clear and we would make peace with each other. We are at peace now, but the mystery survives, with my father’s innocence, not guilt, at its foolish heart. If he had truly needed forgiveness we would be fighting still, to the death. And not mine. He was hopelessly overmatched, as fathers of women ought to be. (This is a very old story, the one about daughters and fathers. It ends in marriage, and the promise of renewal. So it must be a comedy.)
My father hummed “Moonglow” and ferried us both through snow and ice toward Home, whether either of us wanted to go there or not; Home being where it always ends. He was a born driver, my father. Not a good driver, maybe, but born to it. Born to take me home safely, and then die, disappear, take up hobbies. How humble he was that night, and happy in his work! He turned off the boulevard into the neighborhood, where streets became inevitable, and their invariant sequence had an inane Mother Goose rhythm, and had long ago become the Family Poem. He turned,
Left on Seneca
Right on McIntosh
Straight past Mapleview
Left at the light
On past Alcott,
Wildflower, Hillary,
Left at the willow tree,
Home for the night, said my father.
And in a better world than this one, stopped at the willow tree, backed from the driveway, took us to the boulevard, headed us west. We drove due west through a thickening storm, and then past the place it began, and angled south toward the place where winter itself began, and past that, at last, into the outlaw territory. We stopped where we wanted to, and when, and never spoke. We drove at night through endless desert, where there were no landmarks, and all perspectives were alike, and the air was so brutally pure that we cast shadows in starlight alone. And sometimes we sang together. And sometimes I drove, and my father slept, safely, in my care.
At the age of three she creates, for the first time, a better world than this one.
That is, this is the first time for her.
Maybe she was four. Certainly no younger than three. You have to be able to talk first. People need words to say. Words also help to anchor things so that they don’t disappear on you, or shift shape. You can’t have a gorilla one minute, and then a pirate king, and then your father, home from work. You can’t make up a world that way.
“Better” world may not be quite right. “Alternative” is more accurate.
But “better” is better.
At the age of three she is the harried mother of bad girls. Their names—Darla, Giggy, Ellemer—are useful mainly for listing, like the days of the week. Her daughters are beautiful and bad. They will not eat their soft-boiled eggs. They take dangerous risks and tell lies and break things with bold malice. They are defiant, nasty, and rude. She does not know what she did to deserve such children.
She really doesn’t know. She is getting tired of them and often, even though they have names, they disappear for long stretches of time.
She tells them: Wait till your father comes home.
She does not know who their father is.
She loves them only when their father is home and they are tucked in bed and she sits by them in the dark and sings them to sleep, while their father fills the doorway behind her. She can’t see him, but he fills the doorway She sings, in her true voice,
Lover, when you’re near me
When you’re near me honey honey
Softly little baby
Little girl.
Then (age eight, maybe, or nine; the ages don’t matter, except to the child; the ages don’t matter to the woman) three men lie in the sand at her feet. They are trussed like chickens and they buck furiously and curse her through neckerchief gags. A cowboy in white rides toward her out of the sagebrush, kicking up a straight line of dust under the wide blue sky “Whoa, Nellie Whoa, girl.” He jumps down from the still rearing horse. “What in tarnation—! I heard gunshots clear across the mesa!”
“Bandits,” she says, and nudges one of them with her boot. “This one’s got a flesh wound.”
“Where’s your family?”
“They killed my mommy and daddy,” she says, trying not to cry. “I’m an orphan now.”
“What’s your name, little girl?”
“I’m not a little girl My name is Claire Rose Stella Dagmar Elizabeth.”
“That’s a beautiful name.” He takes off his big white hat. “Give me the gun, little girl.”
“Why should I?”
“Hand it over here right now, young lady.” She turns and starts to run; she is going to do something dangerous. He grabs her around the waist and carries her kicking to his horse. “You’re coming with me!” She rides in front of him on the saddle. “I’m your daddy now,” he says, “and don’t you forget it!”
Sometimes he finds her in the Comanche Indian camp, bargains for her with Cochise, scrubs the buffalo grease off her face and body with harsh soap. They sit around the campfire with other cowboys and cattle drivers, and he plays the guitar, or someone else plays and she sits on his lap and they sing duets. “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” “The Rose of San Antone.” He is usually angry with her, because she is so brave and disobedient, and sometimes he spanks her, and she says she’s sorry, but she never really is. They have many adventures. Each time in the end she saves his life, often by rescuing him from a lynch mob.
Her name is Felicia Elizabeth Jamison and she has long fine jet black hair and a beautiful figure. She is much too young to run her own ranch, but she commands fifty surly, trail-hardened cowboys with her iron will and ingenuity. Also she associates with known outlaws, and the townspeople of Virginia City disapprove of her and try to throw her into jail. She works part time in the Golden Slipper Saloon and wears a low-cut silver dress with black and white petticoats showing underneath. She sings and dances on top of the long mahogany bar and all the men go wild.
A family of brothers, four or five, who own the biggest and most prosperous ranch in the valley, befriend her and warn her about the murderous outlaws, and try to stop her from dancing in the saloon. They do not know this—that she does everything for a dark purpose: to avenge the death of her father. Also she has to run the ranch and work at the Golden Slipper so that she can become independently wealthy, because her family is gone, and she doesn’t want to need anyone ever again. She has been too badly hurt. Her heart is stone.
She escapes from jail! Her cattle stampede! The dam breaks! Alone she turns the herd away from the flood, runs them hard just ahead of the thundering wall of water until at last it recedes. Exhausted she faints but does not fall. The ranch hands receive her in awed silence, lift her gently from the horse and carry her inside. She has earned their undying respect. At some point the outlaws learn that she is the daughter of the man they killed. They confront her after midnight in a bleak forest clearing and torture her. Though afraid she does not cry out, but works steadily on her bonds until she frees one hand, grabs a knife from the belt of one of them, and slashes them all to death, shrieking Murderer! Murderer!
Streaked with her own blood and the blood of the men she has killed, half crazy and in shock but fiercely determined, she staggers through the woods (owls hoot, coyotes yowl) and collapses on the brothers’ doorstep. Inside is warm and firelit, gleaming with polished oak, and on the walls hang the hides of great animals. The brothers carry her to a massive bed and the oldest brother gently removes her dress, ignoring her mumbled protests, and treats her wounds. They make her stay with them. They all love her, especially the oldest one; she loves him, too, though she constantly opposes him and refuses to give up her own ranch or quit dancing in the saloon. Sometimes he happens on her bathing in a stream and hides her clothes. Once they plan to get married, but for some reason it doesn’t work out. When she isn’t fighting with the brothers she takes care of them and fights alongside them.
The part where she regains consciousness after her ordeal in the woods is always the same. She lies propped up painfully on her elbows. (“Don’t move, lie still and rest.” “I must. Don’t you understand?”) The brothers gather around her, some sitting on the ample bed; she speaks in a strained, weary monotone, her eyes lifeless.
Her story never varies: that her family came West on a wagon train; that something happened to her mother; that one day her father was standing on a footbridge spanning high cliffs and she was walking toward him; that she heard gunfire and saw her father slump, sag against the single rope railing; that she ran and ran as he lost his balance and his feet left the bridge floor, that she caught his hand in both of hers and held his full weight, suspended over air, as her shoulder muscles tore and her arms came out of their sockets; that she would have held on forever but he slipped from her, somehow, and fell away, his white face upturned, imploring, calling her name, and she watched until he was a pinpoint against the gray rocks below and finally disappeared. She cries, true tears, and cannot be consoled.
Her name is Anne. Her last name doesn’t matter, since she is in the wrong century, and even her kind of name is obsolete. She is, in a sense, the oldest living human being. Just before the car in which she was riding crashed and burned she was, through some kind of error, teleported into the future. Scientists on a distant planet, descendants of her contemporaries, confine her in a hospital. She is their laboratory subject. They are keenly interested in her because she illustrates the extent to which man has improved himself through planned evolution. Physically she is plainly inferior: though beautiful, her features are irregular (eyes a little too close together, face a shade too narrow; there is a small star-shaped mole on her left breast). Though young and healthy, her body is much smaller than the average, and significantly weaker. She has less than half the normal life expectancy and is not cancer-immune. What really excite the scientists, though, are her primitive mental and emotional
characteristics.
Her mind is brilliant but undisciplined, her intelligence unspecialized, diffuse. She is prone to emotional disorders, especially depression. She is apparently, illogically, disgusted with herself and her new world. Hotshot academicians report their findings at intergalactic anthropoidologists’ conventions, in bright white seminar rooms the size of football fields. They lecture using holographs (taken without her knowledge or consent), which show her pacing the contours of her sterile room, upsetting food trays, refusing to cooperate. They refer to three-dimensional graphs and X-rays. “Note particularly the disparate cerebral hemispheres; the right lobe shows marked something something something, possibly indicating an ancient, tenuous connection between something and something…irrational behavior patterns…not adaptable to productive life in present state…,” and so forth.
The decision is made to modify her, to conform her to their standards, through a series of painless, mind-altering operations. But first they force her to view scenes that they have recorded in her own century, in a last-ditch attempt to shock her out of her depression. She sees her own funeral (everybody thought she was in the car), the mourners sobbing, unaware that here she is, still alive, a prisoner. She sees her mother’s grave. She sees her father: querulous, senile, incontinent, indifferently tended by strangers.
This practically drives her insane with grief.
She escapes, stows away on a spaceship, a great big thing, labyrinthine. The captain discovers her and locks her up until they reach the next way station. (They are on a long-range exploratory mission.) She drinks heavily and does not eat or sleep.