Without Jenny

by Mark Gunther

  Sometime during Shloshim, Danny had told her he had dreamed of Jenny as a young adult, happy and smiling. Joy had tried to draw that Jenny, a portrait in charcoal and pencil, long black hair falling below her shoulders and off the bottom of the page. Joy found the drawing on the shelf of her drafting table and tried to imagine the privilege of knowing this young woman. Then she looked again and frowned. The eyes never were right.

  Danny called to her from the kitchen. “Were you moving boxes?” He came into the room. “Nice legs. You didn’t get on the bike.”

  “Never got around to it.”

  “What have you been doing?”

  “Wandering around. Did some swearing.”

  “Well, it’s not like having her room together made it any easier.”

  “No.”

  She felt his hands on her shoulders. She lifted up the drawing to show him.

  “That’s good, Joy,” he said. “We could go back upstairs, if you want.”

  She felt his hands slide slightly down toward her breasts. His fingers ran between her ribs, lightly massaging. She like his touch, but the drawing had the bulk of her attention. She stopped his hands. Danny kissed the top of her head and sat in her office chair while she perched on the stool looking out the window.

  “When you told me your dream I thought she had come back. Then I had my vision about the Other World. I thought that if I could draw her it might be a talisman or something that she could find more easily when she wanted to come visit us. I hated it because I couldn’t get the eyes right. But now she doesn’t have any eyes. Should I draw her without eyes?”

  “No,” he said. “Eyes, please.”

  She closed the drawing pad and slid it back under the desk.

  “I thought if you dreamed her alive maybe it could be true. I did that in her room. I kept waiting for her to talk back to me.”

  He was very still and said softly, “Yeah. Sometimes I get lost too.”

  They went back to the kitchen. Joy got a dust rag and returned to her office, grateful, today, for her husband. She wiped Jake’s dinosaur off the wall. The world tightened, forcing her attention ahead toward a foggy, featureless future. The Other World crumbled forever, its warriors dead and buried, it mysteries unsolved. In brief equilibrium she floated, untethered, a moment of perfected wisdom, of submission rather than glory. She was surrounded. Jake’s kind sweetness and bewildered sadness; Danny’s duty, his loyalty; her dad, her bike, her business, the persistence of the world. Committed to the Common World, functional but floating until maybe, when she was many years out, the capacity to believe in what she was feeling might be restored.

  She opened a new page in her sketchbook. She wrote at the top: Losing Jenny is irredeemable. But I remain alive.

  Then she made a list.

  1. Be Jake’s mom.

  2. Work.

  3. Ride the bike a lot. Do yoga.

  4. Keep house (with help).

  5. See Dad once a week.

  6. Help Danny. Somehow.

  She put the pen down and studied the page. After a while it still seemed good enough, so she took a piece of art paper and her calligraphic pen, cleanly copied the list (except for the somehow), cut the page neatly from the sketchbook, and taped it to the wall above her monitor. She heard Jake padding down the stairs, and, temporarily satisfied, went into the kitchen to execute on her first deliverable.

  20.

  ON JAKE’S SEVENTH birthday, ten months almost to the day after she lost his sister, Joy invited Danny, Carly, and the three local grandparents to mark the day. No one, Jake included, wanted a party, even though Carly did do some tricks. He got just a few presents. Rose sent a beautifully illustrated young adult history book called The Jews Come to America! Hiram got him a baseball bat. With subdued fanfare Danny lifted the top of the cake plate to reveal the year-old poppy-seed cake from the bottom of the freezer, the last one Jenny had made. Elaine compensated for the freezer burn with a decent lemon-vanilla icing that she layered on thick. It was a Bundt cake, so Danny couldn’t write a message on it, but they had seven candles, plus one to grow on, and chocolate chip ice cream.

  Joy thought it macabre to use that cake, but Danny pointed out it was the last thing that Jenny could give her brother. Until he uses the funds from the settlement, she thought, which really is macabre. When it was time to sing, Joy called Lizzie on the speakerphone as she had promised, and Lizzie and Amanda and all their family joined in a rousing “Happy Birthday.”

  Jake’s birthday was on a school day. He didn’t want a party in his classroom like usual because Jenny had come down to his classroom when it was his birthday in kindergarten and first grade and now she couldn’t. Usually, the mom brought cupcakes and the kids sang happy birthday after lunch. Joy said no to the teacher twice. That refusal percolated upward, and the head of school called Joy to tell her bringing birthday cupcakes would be good normalizing behavior for her son.

  “Except he doesn’t want it,” she said. “We didn’t do one at home and he doesn’t want a party at the school either.”

  “But Joy, he’ll be the only kid without one. If it’s too much, I’m sure one of the other mothers will bake the cupcakes for you.”

  Are you really that stupid? Joy wanted to say, but instead she said, “That’s very thoughtful, but it’s not the point. Nothing is normal. Our first party is not going to be at school. Okay?”

  And the head asked if Joy was really sure and Joy said yes and then she said goodbye nicely before she slammed the receiver down on the flash button.

  Maybe I should keep Jake out that day, in case they can’t control themselves.

  Joy avoided school events as much as possible. When she had to go to one she actively followed a spontaneously developed practice that minimized the inauthentic contact so characteristic of such gatherings. Park a few blocks away. Wear neat but nondescript clothing. Style-less. Baggy. Show up at the last possible minute. Keep her hair loose, partially covering her face. Take a seat in the back, go to the bathroom right when it was over, dawdle, then drift through the crowded hallways, sliding off the conversations already begun, until she could get to Jake. And vamoose.

  But today was Forward!, the day kids and parents got the educational and fundraising plans for the year. Joy walked Jake inside to his classroom. She bent down to kiss him but he was already gone, backpack hung on the hook neatly labeled with his alphabetically ordered name. He didn’t look back. The teacher, who had taught Jenny, looked up at Joy and flashed one of those deeply empathetic teacher smiles, full of care, hope, and regret all at once. Joy gave a halfhearted wave and turned away from her son.

  She made her way to the auditorium, slipping in the back door and leaning against the wall, alone. School leaders were pitching the annual fundraiser. From where she stood at the rear of the auditorium she could feel the rustling in the room, the men making sure their wallets were still in their pockets as their women whispered to them about doing their part.

  Would have been me up there, before. Busy Little Beaver.

  The pitching over, parents and kids traded locations. She watched the sixth grade parents, Jenny’s class, going up the stairs to the science classroom and wished that she was walking up the stairs with them. No one looked for Joy, the exile, stranded in the desert like Hagar. In Jake’s classroom she tried to lose herself against the wall, but the teacher would have none of that, pushing a nametag on her. “Joy, Jake’s Mom,” it said. The tag had little heart stickers on it.

  The teacher briskly organized them into pairs to do one of the introduction to algebra exercises the kids would be doing this year. Joy was paired with the father of a new student. He seemed nice.

  “So, how many children do you have?”

  He didn’t know who she was. She had six more years in the school with him. “Jake is here. We lost our daughter last November.”

  “Oh, you are the Rosenberg family. They told us about you when we got admitted to this class. What a terrible thing. I
’m so sorry for your loss.”

  “Thank you,” Joy said. She wondered what the school told incoming parents. Walk softly around those Rosenbergs? Give little Jake a pass when he does something weird? I should ask them. What right do they have to tell people what to think about my family?

  “I hope somebody pays,” he said.

  “I’m paying,” Joy snapped. She fixed her gaze on this hapless and unwitting man, letting the witch take over. Fear spread across his face. Beads of sweat formed at his hairline. She held his gaze just long enough to drive her despair into him, then, just before his head exploded, she hooded her eyes, looked away, and became a socialized woman once again. From the top of her mountain, she smiled, and making the generous gesture of king to subject, asked him, “Do you have other children here?”

  She immediately forgot his answer.

  He avoided her at the next classroom event.

  21.

  CONVENTIONAL WISDOM WIDELY promulgated in grief books promised some relief after a year, as the mourner lives for the second time those specific days that already included her bereavement.

  Joy wondered who the hell they were talking about.

  Most days she was able to cook dinner. Danny would pick up something she’d ordered if she couldn’t. They found Jake a therapist, not because he seemed abnormally sad or withdrawn, but more prophylactically, as if a problem was expected and they had better make some room for it to arrive. Elaine thought an outlet outside the family system might provide greater access to wellness, and Joy saw no reason why that might not be true. But Jake seemed okay. He was reading a lot at night. Joy thought maybe she was not as afraid of losing him, but on too many nights too much of her got in his way and Danny would tuck him in.

  After Jake’s bedtime, Danny would work in the office/guest room/library. Some nights Joy would go downstairs and work too, far from him, but other nights she’d sit with him in the room that used to be Jenny’s, drawing in her sketchbook or reading novels that all too often surprised her with a dead child in the plot. Then she would find herself in some kind of suspended animation, seeing the pages through the dust of the minimart doorway. Sometimes ten pages would go by and she’d have to backtrack to find out what had happened. Danny thought she maybe should read non-fiction, but Joy didn’t see how it mattered. Jenny still was dead.

  Joy generally went to bed first. If she still was awake when Danny came in, most nights a whispered kindness ended their evening. Rarely, he would come to bed with an insistence she would always allow. She thought if she could keep her body close enough to him, her spirit might eventually come around too. But if his need wasn’t urgent, hers never was, and then they would go to wherever it was they went now that they couldn’t go to where they once went anymore.

  Yoga at Rachel’s studio was lasting. Joy appreciated having a new friend who accepted that remaining alive wasn’t actually her doing. Days she didn’t feel safe on the road—she owed that much to Jake—or wanted to avoid the eyes of men, Joy rode the trainer on her back porch, headphones blasting Velvet Underground or Talking Heads.

  The first morning she had returned to work the habit of years reasserted itself. She sent her boys off. She washed the breakfast dishes. She went upstairs, showered, and got dressed for the office. At nine, she sat at her desk. She opened her accounting program and generated an email list of all her past clients. She cut and pasted email addresses from the few inquiries that had come in during the past six months. She loaded her letter template. Her logo was multicolored and flowerish. Joyful.

  When she started the business, she had agonized for weeks if she should call it Joy Design, JoyDesign or Joydesign! The decision had seemed dreadfully important, and she had thought that the wrong choice would consign her to the bush leagues forever.

  The ridiculous things I worried about, she thought, not unkindly. It didn’t matter at all.

  The email read, “Dear Friends and Clients: Thank you so much for all your thoughtful kindness and concern over these past six months. I’m writing to let you know that I have now reopened my office and am available to work with you again for all your design and production needs. As always, you can reach me by phone or email at the contacts below.”

  She stared at the text for a while. I should be nicer. She added, “I hope everyone is doing well and looking forward to a happy summer. Warmly,” and pasted her signature at the bottom. She touched the return key and the message whooshed away into the ether. Then she modified the letter and sent it to all the ad agency account managers she knew, and finally she modified that one and did a little more individual customization to send to friends and colleagues who had the kind of connections to be able to refer her for work. Then she placed some phone calls to her most faithful clients and agency people. She had two conversations and left twelve voice mails. That all took about two hours. She reviewed her website portfolio, but she had nothing to update it with. With no other work do, she went upstairs, changed out of her work clothes, and got on the bike.

  She was surprised and gratified that only a week later she had four jobs. Her old clients seemed genuinely happy to have her back.

  Joy had told Carly she didn’t know why. “They probably pity me.”

  “People are glad to do something for you, Joy,” Carly agreed, “but actually you’re damn good: fast, smart, competent, creative, attentive, and easy to work with. Just like before.”

  “I suppose,” Joy said, because it seemed to be a good way to think about it, now that she had no pride anymore.

  When she felt in control of things she kept it simple. Stay in her office, ride her bike, feed her boys, try to be present for the people who loved her. That’s what she wanted.

  Her girlfriends double-teamed her. Carly never asked how she was feeling, just about Jake and how work was going and how things were with Danny, and her own work and man troubles, and when all else failed would just kiss her and walk with her companionably, arm-in-arm. Lizzie, on the other hand, made it her mission to inhabit as much of Joy’s interior as she could, asking a million questions. Joy felt both loved and exhausted when she got off those calls.

  Hiram came for Shabbat dinner nearly every week, and surprised Joy by joining in the blessings. He told her that despite having lost Rose to religion (not that there weren’t other reasons, of course), he could respect the tradition. “My mom actively didn’t want me to learn Hebrew,” Hiram said. “My generation needed to be Americans. Not Christians, but like Christians, kind of. Assimilated. Not that I missed having a Jewish life or anything. How can you miss what you don’t know?”

  Joy liked her ordered Shabbats. The quiet, the shul, the peaceful walks with Danny in the afternoons while Hiram still had Jake off to wherever they had gone in the morning. Sometimes she would sit on a park bench with her husband, he with a novel or magazine, she with her sketchbook and pencils, and she would draw landscapes with empty places in them.

  Danny didn’t like those drawings. “They’re weird, those empty spaces.”

  “They fit,” Joy said. “They’re a part of the drawing.”

  “I hope the world won’t always look like that to you,” Danny told her. “I thought work would fill those empty places.”

  “Not for me.”

  “Yeah. I’m too busy to stop for them, even if they are there.”

  “I know,” she said. “That’s your thing. I feel like I hardly see you.”

  “It isn’t so different than before, is it?”

  “I guess not,” she said. “I just feel more alone.”

  “I’m still in your bed every night.”

  “I go to sleep alone a lot,” she said. “You stay up too late.”

  “You get up too early.” He snapped that one off, but then lowered his tone. “Joy, honey, we talked about this when we bought the business. Dead child or not, I can’t back off now. A few more years until it’s big enough to sell. Then I can do lawyering and consulting and we can go do the things you made me write on the wall
of our apartment.”

  The plan was perfect, and she followed it—grad school, magazine jobs, athletics, friends, and Danny was there, at home, when she wanted him.

  “Jenny dying wasn’t part of the plan.”

  “No.” His voice shook.

  “Maybe I need you more now.”

  “Look, you’re working. You’re riding. I’m working. Jake’s in school. We’re managing.”

  There’s that word again. Like routine can make this life graceful.

  “Coping, you mean.”

  “So call it that. Does it matter?”

  She wanted to touch something, but her hands bounded off of each other, opposite poles of a magnet. “So everything just goes back to the way it was? Like she never existed? Maybe her life didn’t mean anything at all.”

  Danny looked exasperated. “Of course it did. We don’t lose that because she’s dead.”

  “How do you know that? Her being alive has just made Jake’s life harder.”

  Danny’s face stiffened. “Did you really just say that?”

  The dust billowed. Joy paced. “Her death is having more consequences than her life. Was she born just to die? Just for us? Just to have a perfect childhood?” Joy could not stop. “Never becoming an adult, never dealing with ambiguity, never seeing my failings, never seeing her period, boys, college, never knowing her children.”

  “It was an accident, Joy. Stop this!” Danny was almost yelling. “Her being dead is what’s hard. She wasn’t born just so she could screw over her brother.”

  Standing in the minimart doorway she reached out for him, but he went into the bathroom and closed the door.