Without Jenny

by Mark Gunther

  Sitting alone in the clean and empty kitchen, Joy wondered if the boys had taken Jenny to tap. Danny and Jake would do that Sundays, so Joy could ride her bike. Why wasn’t she on her bike? Then she felt the dust in her eyes and the weight of the pile and the rawness of her throat. The wound was not cauterized.

  She found her boys in the den with Lizzie. Now Danny was reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to Jake, and Lizzie was reading the New York Times.

  Lizzie looked up and threw her arm across the back of the couch. “Sweetie, come in and sit down over here next to me.” Joy thought she could do that.

  Joy curled softly up against Lizzie and pulled the afghan over her legs. Lizzie stroked her hair. She looked at Danny and Jake, reading the book, and loved them. Her heart broke.

  Later on they took a walk.

  Eventually the day passed.

  6.

  IT WAS THE third Shabbat after. Joy and Danny sat alone in the front row. The Hebrew she had given up trying to follow washed over her; it felt reassuringly ancient, a language of rhythm and image, stirring feeling and memory from somewhere deep within. Today’s Torah portion was To’le’dot, beginning with the birth of Jacob and Esau and ending with Jacob’s terrified flight to Haran, where he eventually wed the sisters Leah and Rachel. Joy was surprised at Jacob’s venality, forcing a starving Esau to trade his birthright for a bowl of soup. An indefensible crime of opportunity. But even that wasn’t enough for him. Jacob hid away in Haran for fourteen years and then, despite being welcomed home by his brother, connived with his mother to steal Esau’s blessing at their blind father’s deathbed. Creepy. Power, duty, honor, lies . . . Joy was glad she wasn’t a man. Joy remembered the death of Sarah from the previous week. Such a long life, and at the end of it both generosity and fear. Abraham built her a shrine and she had many descendants. Her Jacob had no competition for his father’s blessing. Joy was the matriarch of an infinite line of forever-unborn women.

  Rabbi smiled at her. Their family was a symbol to him too, she realized, a part of his teaching, a pseudo-Biblical tragedy in his own congregation, to teach compassion and mindfulness through the power of his metaphor. What would his teaching be when wisdom’s currency was modeled by some other happening?

  Are you that capricious, God, that you involve yourself in my family’s affairs like some jealous Olympian? Did you really inscribe this sweet child in the book of not-life? Did Jake earn the punishment of a life without his sister?

  Joy stood as the Torah was carried past, touching with her prayer book, bringing the book to her lips. All of the words, the ideas, the stories, the love, the brutality of God’s victories and punishments—all here in my broken little family. Maybe it’s true our life is only metaphor now, purpose found only in roles cast on us by others.

  Afterward, at the car, she and Danny changed their shoes and rolled up the cuffs of their nice wool pants. They exchanged their sports jackets for quilted Cal Bears warmup jackets and walked through the Presidio down to Baker Beach. The day was cold but sunny, filled with that sparkly, cleansing beach air. They sat on the sand, close together, but not touching. Joy took off her shoes and socks. She buried her feet, seeking absent warmth in the sand; her attention drifted in the still of sun and waves. The teenagers that Jenny never would be played hacky sack in front of them, laughing, most of the boys shirtless, one brave girl in a bikini. Joy wondered why she wasn’t freezing, but she probably was. A large freighter weighted with empty containers sailed west, the world of commerce rushing forward without Joy’s participation. She couldn’t imagine working.

  Joy saw her lifetime unfolding in tiny monochromatic steps, forever backed up against the Moment When Everything Changed. Danny had been busy—a small pile of tiny red stones lay in front of him, sifted from handfuls of sand. She put an arm around her husband, squeezing his shoulder, pulling him from his engineering into her reverie. He rested his hand on her knee. They each watched the water. A sailboarder whipped by in front of them—a brave man far from the safety of the harbor.

  Hagar didn’t want to watch Ishmael die, so she left her boy sitting alone under a sheltering tree. He minded her. Such a good boy. Sarah couldn’t cooperate, so she used her power over Abraham to get what she wanted. And Abraham, clueless, obedient, died a contented death after traumatizing both his sons. Jacob stole his brother’s place. Esau got turned out for being incredulous. Yet they all lived. Trauma resolved with reunification and faith, and there were awesome booby prizes for the losers.

  When it seemed time, Joy and Danny helped each other up. Joy wanted to walk home alone. Danny wanted to stay with her and pick up the car later. “Please, let me,” she said. She was embarrassed, but she said there just wasn’t enough space right now. He shook his head at her, bemused, sad, and probably hurt. She watched him trudge through the sand and disappear; another fraying of the Rosenberg Commons, the shared belief in their communal perfectibility in an otherwise indifferent world. Her suffering was no more bearable because or in spite of his. Still, she smelled the water and tasted the salt air and saw the sand and the beached shoals of rock and abandoned pieces of driftwood, and the constant weight of time’s fingers pressed her down into it all.

  She carried that weight down the beach and up the sand ladder, a spy in the manufactured world, stealthy on the Crissy Field promenade, her burden invisible to the joggers, walkers, bicycles, dogs, strollers, and wheelchairs that surrounded her. Wind and wave and sun and green grass, and the chatter of hundreds of living beings, and suddenly a powerful wind blew up from a giant chasm that opened within, beneath her. It was vast and kneaded with black and gray and dark blue and white clouds with bright silver highlights like Hubble star factories and she wanted it, oh God she wanted it. She saw the path and the people and she saw this other world. She saw them both and they were moving in and out of her and each other and they both were real.

  Sound reverberated upward, deep rhythmic grinding as if huge gears enmeshed, straining to move the massive fossilized casts of all the grief and all the glory felt by all humans from the beginning of time. She saw herself from a distance, dressed in a sturdy green linen riding gown and knee-high boots. Light armor covered her torso; a sword hung at her side. As the clouds boiled high above her she stood at an altar at the bottom of the chasm, invited to stride into a vast, treacherous landscape. The Other World—a world without artifice, where motives were clear, where choices had predictable consequences, where honor was respected. Where the dead may be alive. A sensuous flush of terrified pleasure rippled through her body, from spine through ligament and muscle, to caress the tiniest nerve endings in the tips of fingers and ears and toes . . .

  “On your left, lady!”

  She jumped right. A row of tourists on Segways slipped by her.

  Slowly lengthening shadows of afternoon played across the city. Absurdly, she was excited.

  Maybe that’s where Jenny is.

  7.

  WHEN JOY ANSWERED the front door she expected to see Hiram. Instead, a tempest swept past her.

  “Hello, hello, here’s your dinner for tonight! Where’s the kitchen? Back here? Oh, good!”

  Joy wasn’t quite sure who it was at first. Gail. Her son was in Jake’s class. Joy followed the sound of whistling back to the kitchen, where Gail was taking out pots and pans.

  “Gail. What are you doing?”

  “Don’t you worry, hon, I’ll do it all, no problem!”

  “Can you just leave it here and we’ll tend to it later?”

  “Oh, no, honey. This meal takes some real cooking. Jeffy and Bob will be over later to help us eat it.”

  “Gail, we’re not really having guests these days.”

  “That’s all right! You’ll be the guests!”

  Instead of strangling her, Joy retreated up the stairs. She wanted to keep going up, up to the hidden place in the Other World, the place Jenny might be, the room at the top of the stairs, tantalizingly close—but when she reached the landing th
ere were no more stairs. Jacob’s ladder had not been lowered for her. The only way to go was to turn left, into Jake’s room. Her boys were sitting on his bed reading Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. What would they do when they finished? Read another book, probably.

  “Danny,” she said. “Invaders.”

  “Sacrè bleu! Call the forks and candlesticks!”

  Jake fell on the floor laughing. That was good to see. She looked into Danny’s eyes, pleading, sharing, resolving, handing off the pain. Didn’t work.

  He made to get up. “Do you want me to deal with it?”

  “No,” she said, “I’ll do it. Just needed a recharge.”

  “We love you, Mommy,” Jake said.

  That worked.

  Downstairs, Gail had almost every pot in the kitchen out on the stove.

  “Honey, do you have a Dutch Oven?”

  “Gail, please listen to me. It isn’t time for us to have people in the house. Please just leave the food or take it back. We can’t have you here all afternoon. We’re in no position to host your family.”

  Gail gaped at her askance. “I’m just cooking. You don’t need to be here.”

  “I hardly know you. I can’t have you in my house for four hours. I can’t have anyone in my house for four hours. Please go.”

  Joy watched Gail’s face work through anger and pity to settle on incomprehension.

  Gail said, “I’ve been planning this meal for two days. I bought all this food, but if you don’t want it, fine.”

  She picked up her grocery bags and flounced out, slamming the door behind her.

  Joy dropped onto a stool. Stared out the window. Shook her head. Cried for a bit. Banged her fists on her thighs. Stood. Banged her fists on the counter. Dried her eyes on her shirtsleeves. Went back upstairs.

  Danny looked up at her over Jake’s head. Flipping the double bird felt great. She said, “I practically had to throw her out. Bridges are burned. She took her food.”

  “We have way too many leftovers anyhow,” Danny said.

  No one knows how to cook for three.

  Jake got up and hugged her leg. “Mommy, did Lumière help you, and all the dishes too?”

  Joy laughed and hugged him back. “Oh Jake, you’re my Lumière! Yes, the drawers flew open and everyone jumped out!”

  To Danny she said, “I think she took out every pan in the house.”

  He shrugged and held out his hand to her. “We’ll put them away later.”

  She cuddled up with them while Danny finished reading the book. It really was a great story. Hiram did come around later, just to show up, as he said. They all ate leftovers for dinner. The next day, Joy found food sitting on the doorstep. There wasn’t even a note.

  8.

  DANNY’S MOTHER ELAINE had claimed Thanksgiving for her Tupperware night. The family gathered at Joy and Danny’s this year, instead of going to Elaine and Jerry’s in Calistoga as usual. Joy couldn’t imagine feeling thankful after only three weeks and three days and resisted enforcement of family custom until Danny pointed out that the others had suffered Jenny’s loss too. Being together was important to everyone. “We all somehow have to get used to it,” he said.

  Joy dawdled in her bedroom. Going downstairs she heard Sarah and Jacob’s voices through his closed door. Joy’s proprietary motherly impulse kicked in and she felt her ears enlarging, but she kept walking.

  Jake gets to have his own relationship with his cousin. They both deserve that.

  At the bottom of the stairs she heard the whispered sibilance of the Other World and turned right to find it, away from the familiar voices in the kitchen. She fell onto the couch.

  Are you there, somewhere, Jenny? Are you scared? Did you get scared on the street, right at the end? Did you know you were dying? Do you know you’re dead now?

  She heard Elaine ask for her, and recognized Hiram’s footsteps coming down the hall.

  The clouds subsided. She prepared to rise.

  “There you are,” Hiram said. “I thought you were still upstairs.”

  “No,” Joy said, “I’ve been down here for a while.”

  “Well, come on, then.” He stretched out his hand.

  Hiram came by Joy’s house, usually unannounced, almost every day. When he found her there he always was getting her to do something. One day they washed the car. Weeded the backyard. He helped her organize the basement. The day they washed the windows he wouldn’t let her climb the tall ladder to the second story. He thought they could paint Jenny’s room, he had told Danny, evidently thinking that the male conspiracy to protect women from their own feelings was a stronger bond than marriage. It wasn’t; but when Danny told her, she said that Hiram just wanted to fix it. “You do too,” she told Danny, but Danny said, “Not me. It’s unfixable.”

  Hiram pulled her up off the couch and pushed her toward the dining room. Joy had set the table earlier in the day, and it turned out to be one place short this time. No one said anything. Elaine got herself a chair and a setting. Joy thought that Jenny would be happy to see them all sitting together like this, everybody she loved in one place.

  After eating, Danny stood. Joy loved the improvised eloquence of his Thanksgiving toasts. “I don’t know how to do this without her. I was remembering those twisted cliché jokes she liked.”

  He tried to mimic her voice. “Don’t hatchet your counts before they chicken!”

  “People who live in grass houses shouldn’t stow thrones!” Joey said.

  “If the fu shits, wear it!” Jake said. The table erupted.

  Joy felt her lips curl upward and her face became warm. I’m smiling, she thought. Huh.

  “Remember her picking up my rum and Coke and taking a big swig?” Jerry said.

  Joy remembered. Jenny had spit it out and thrown the glass and it had crashed into a million pieces on the kitchen floor. Joy had gotten mad at her for breaking the glass, but Jenny got mad at her grandpa for fooling her.

  She was right and I was wrong.

  “I thought I was watching my little girl growing up,” Danny said. “Now . . . ”

  Joy saw his eyes recede and his face twitch in the way that it did when something just got to be too much. He wiped at his left eye while blinking his right eye rapidly and looking away at something that seemed to have appeared over the top of Joy’s left shoulder. Joy thought she should try to help him, but she didn’t know what to do.

  Elaine reached out and held her firstborn’s hand. “We’ll never be the same,” she said.

  “Maybe not,” Hiram said, “but we still have what we have.” He raised his glass, and they all drank to Jenny. These people wanted Joy to stay here. She really needed them, each one, if that was going to happen, but it felt equally reasonable to imagine that it may not. She sat on the sidelines of her mystery while the winds of the Other World echoed unendingly in her ear.

  Hiram returned the next morning. They sat in the kitchen with coffee; Joy could hear Danny upstairs with Jake. Joy stared out the window at their brown autumn lawn.

  “That was nice last night, Joy,” Hiram said.

  “I guess.”

  “Well,” he said, “it was. Everyone you love was here.”

  “Not everyone,” she said.

  “No. But you can’t control that.”

  “I should have.”

  “No, you shouldn’t have. You did everything right.”

  “I didn’t. She’s dead.”

  “You didn’t do it, Joy.” He spoke in his all-knowing lawyer voice. Joy wondered if he really was going to be like this, even now, so soon after. But he always was Hiram. Blunt and to the point. What’s good about that was instilled in her one memorable night when she was seventeen. She had a date. She wore a short black skirt over bare legs, black work boots, and a sheer white shirt over a black bra with a black leather vest. Hiram and Rose came home earlier than she had expected. They walked in on her in the living room with a boy, their hands in R-rated places. Her skirt was at her waist, h
er shirt mostly unbuttoned, her bare leg wrapped around the boy. A bottle of vodka was open on the table. Rose got angry at the boy, but Joy screamed at her that she had unbuttoned her own shirt. “Mom, I did it!” Hiram gave his wife’s shoulder a little squeeze as she stormed off to their bedroom. He took the boy’s keys and called his parents. Joy ran up the stairs into her room, ashamed and embarrassed and so, so angry.

  After a time, Hiram came up. He knocked and entered. She was loaded for bear, but he came upstairs with two glasses full of ice and the bottle of vodka. He poured. “Nasdrovya,” he said, and drank. Then he told her a long, adjective-heavy story about how much he loved to drink when he was younger and how he had gotten away with it, pretty much. Nothing bad had ever happened and he believed all the girls had been willing. He said that he didn’t presume to know Joy’s thoughts, but he did know boys can get really stupid and selfish sometimes and mostly he didn’t want her to get so drunk that she would find herself having done something she otherwise may not want to have done. She said with anger, “It’s my choice. You have nothing to say about it.” She wanted him to get mad, too.

  But he didn’t. He pointed to her still-full glass and asked if she was going to drink it. She said no. “Nasdrovya,” he said, downing the glass, “I hope that’s true. That doesn’t excuse the boys, no, and it is your body, yes, but sex is too cool a thing to take casually. You are going to have a lot of it in your life, and it’s easy to screw it up. Be deliberate,” he said. “Don’t get swept away until you’re able to go there and come back. Know what I mean?”

  She actually didn’t know what he meant but something in that moment was just so amazing anyway. She smiled and hugged him and said, “Daddy, I promise you can trust me even if I don’t tell you anything.”

  “Okay, Honey. Fair enough.” And they drank to it. That was the beginning of their adult relationship. Joy loved him. She appreciated him. But he still could be pretty single-minded sometimes.