Without Jenny

by Mark Gunther

  “Do you think I don’t know it? I was pretty pissed at both of you, if I recall.”

  “Not at his age. You were a teenager, and we were ready to be divorced. You had a reason.”

  Joy was admiring the way her father had slipped that admission into the conversation when Jake stroked a liner past the third baseman and down the left field line. They jumped up and cheered, applauding him as he waved at them from second base. Two runs scored.

  When they sat down again for the next batter Hiram said, “I remember you having a harder time with your mother.”

  “You would, Daddy.”

  “I wasn’t quite ready for you to grow up.”

  “You fixed that on vodka night.”

  “So I did. It has to be worse for Jake, though, with you and Danny suffering so much.”

  “We’ll be okay.”

  Hiram shrugged and said, “I hope you aspire to more than okay. It’s a terrible thing that she died, but you have a future.”

  Joy tried to forgive him for that. She leaned her head on his shoulder. The familiar smell of him opened a door and behind it were the girls she once was: Cute Joy who wore those dresses while she climbed trees and fought dragons. Proud Joy, so self-reliant, so capable, redecorating her room at the age of eight. Sweet Joy, resilient when her pride was wounded, angry when things were unfair, kind to her friends, loving to her daddy. And then Grown-up Joy brought him Jenny, a different girl, tougher, smarter, more direct, the sweetness of molasses instead of sugar, Pirate Jenny with a harder center, leaving Grandpa empty-lapped because she wanted to sit next to him and figure something out together.

  Jake’s team came in from the field. Jake looked at his grandfather and made a little signal. Hiram signaled back.

  “What was that?” Joy asked.

  “Keep the bat level through the zone,” Hiram said, demonstrating. “You try.”

  She felt jealous; the world of men was beginning to take her little boy away. I have enough to worry about. Soon Jake will be old. How much will he need his mother then? But Hiram was her daddy, and truthfully, she was grateful. He made it so much easier for her, and Jake loved him. She practiced the signal.

  When they were lying in bed that night she told Danny that he had been right, and she wondered why she ever would have chosen shul over parenting.

  “That’s not really what you were doing, is it?” Danny had asked her. He gave her a hug and a kiss. “You were just trying to do anything to make sense of it. And neither of us can say we’re not grateful for the shul and the rabbi.”

  “That’s true, but the effect of it was to take me away from Jake.”

  “True, but I was off-base. You spend a lot of time with him. The effect was to let him spend more time with his grandfather.”

  “It has a different valence now. Why do you go to shul?”

  He rolled onto his side and looked at her. “Being with you at the shul reminds me how hard grief actually is.”

  “And you appreciate that? Sounds like the booby prize.”

  “You know me. If you weren’t struggling I’d probably just be working all the time and end up losing both of you.”

  “That is a very strange way to be charming,” she said, and wrapped herself around him. Joy fell off to sleep feeling more satisfied that she wasn’t that much like her mother after all.

  26.

  ON A DAY just before the end of the school year Jake came home from school and went right upstairs to his room. Thinking it odd that he hadn’t gone to the kitchen first, Joy went upstairs and knocked on his door.

  “Are you all right, Jake?”

  She heard no answer. She opened the door a crack.

  “Don’t forget you have to go to Annie’s today.”

  “Do I have to?”

  “We need to leave in an hour.”

  She closed the door. I hope he works it out. Joy went to her office to work on a newsletter design for a law firm that recently had come to her practice. Her current draft looked boring. She saved the file and opened a new copy of that template. She looked again at the name of the firm and at its logo. Challenging herself to do something different, she altered the frames, tweaked the font, tried a little pixilation, and fiddled with alternate color palettes. After an hour she had to remind herself that it wasn’t her newsletter, it was a fixed-fee contract, and it was time to take Jake to his therapy appointment. She saved the PDF, wrote Newsletter scheme C, final draft in the subject line, and sent it off.

  Danny has certain things right about working. I’m good at it. I do get involved. I want what’s best for my client in spite of what they might think. Referrals keep coming. I might need an assistant. I was foolish to wait so long. Then she had to laugh at herself, still worrying about that although she’d been back for over a year.

  Good. Cut yourself a little slack, said Dead Jenny.

  I like it when you’re nice to me, Joy told her.

  When she knocked on Jake’s door, there was no answer. So she said, “I’m coming in,” and opened the door.

  “Time to go, Jake.”

  He was flat on his back, juggling a single baseball. She knelt next to him and put a hand on his arm. He yanked his arm away.

  Joy was pretty sure touching his arm was something that had been fine last week.

  “Jake, I can’t help you if you won’t tell me what’s wrong.”

  “I just don’t want to go, Mom. Please?”

  “You need to go.”

  “If you love me, don’t make me go today.”

  “It’s because I love you that you need to go.”

  She winced. That was a real Mom thing to say.

  Jake obviously thought so too. He screwed his face into a sneer and said, “Well, I don’t want to go, Moouummm.”

  He bounced his baseball off the floor past her and it banged off the wall.

  “Jake, that’s a hardball! You’ll put a hole in the wall!”

  She barehanded the ball on the bounce and put it on top of the bookcase, out of his reach. He opened his toy cabinet and started dumping things out onto the floor.

  “What are you doing?”

  “It’s my room and I can do what I want to!”

  “No, you can’t. You’re almost nine years old and you share this house with me and your dad and you can’t just throw things all over the place like this. What do you want?”

  He crawled away from her, burrowing into the huge pile of his and Jenny’s stuffed animals in the corner of his room. Joy waited until the burrowing stopped, then tried again.

  “You’ve been liking going. Why not today?”

  Last week Jake had come out of Annie’s office singing.

  “I just don’t want to.”

  “What do you want to do instead?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You can talk to her about this.”

  Jake, in his most nasal and sarcastic tone, said, “Oh Annie, my mom always says she wants to talk but then she stops in the middle so she can do something else and she makes me come talk to you instead.”

  Instead of throwing the ball at his head Joy said, “You have to go, honey. We all have to do things we don’t like to do sometimes. I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings. I make mistakes, too.”

  “I don’t care. I just want to stay home today.” The conviction had drained from his voice.

  “It’ll be okay. Here, put on your shoes.”

  “I’m not going to say anything at all today. I’ll just play one of her stupid games.”

  “That’s just fine, honey.”

  Jake crawled out of the soft pile. She handed him his sneakers. He stuck his feet into the toes and stood up, crushing the backs. He turned his back on her and shuffled out of the room. She heard him going down the stairs. The front door slammed. Her heart rose in her throat. She ran to the window and saw him sitting on the front steps. Joy felt relieved he was angry. Normal kids got mad at their moms. But growing up with a dead sister was not normal. Every year he had to e
xperience his loss all over again in a more mature way.

  Every time I think of Jenny while I’m with Jake he can tell. No wonder he’s mad. Joy had never been angry with Jenny for dying before. What a selfish thing to do, leaving me to clean up the mess.

  When she got in the car with him Joy thanked Jake for going. He said you made me do it, and she said you’re right, but I appreciate it anyway. Fortunately, the Giants were on the East Coast and they could listen to the ballgame for the ten minutes it took to drive to Annie’s office.

  Joy had the fifty-minute hour free while Jake was inside with Annie. She regretted not planning the hour. Other moms cherished their rare private time, but improvisation was still too much for Joy. She wondered if she should go to the little coffeehouse to have a cup of coffee and fiddle around with her phone, or if she should sit in the car and listen to the ballgame so she could give Jake a full report when he came out, but she decided to go into that cute little clothing store on the corner that was expensive but had really nice clothes and buy something for Carly, whose birthday was in a couple of weeks.

  As she put the shopping bag into the back seat she heard a door slam. She turned and saw Jake step out onto Annie’s porch. His body was elongating, she realized, stretching toward the end of boyhood. Soon enough he would be a man, lost to her in the particular way that only her child could be. When she started the car the radio came on. The Giants were ahead. Jake was annoyed that she wasn’t able to report on what happened in the game, so before they drove away she looked it up on her phone.

  27.

  JAKE’S LITTLE LEAGUE team held its autumn practices on an old field pockmarked with a hybrid assortment of grasses, weeds, and brown spots, surrounded by a high chain-link fence. Joy, in purgatory, waited patiently at the gate, watching the last drills.

  “I don’t want you to come in when you get here, Mom,” Jake had said.

  “Jake, I’d like to get to know these people. You spend a lot of time with their kids.”

  “I don’t like it when you come in right at the end,” he said.

  You are still too busy with me, said Dead Jenny.

  It’s not about you, Joy told her. Jake can have his way here. I’ll just keep showing up.

  She watched the last fielding drills and foul-line to foul-line wind sprints. A final whistle and the boys headed for the benches, collecting their fielding gloves and batting gloves and bats and various pieces of discarded clothing and haphazardly stuffing their gear bags. The bleachers creaked and rustled as parents stood. Everyone headed to the gates. Jake put on his backpack and slung the gear bag over his shoulder.

  She watched him, beaming. My son can walk!

  Dead Jenny liked that.

  Joy hadn’t told anyone about Dead Jenny and didn’t think she was going to. Carly would want to be included in the conversation. Lizzie would want to analyze its roots. Rabbi would be encouraging. Danny probably would bring down the men in white coats, even though keeping it a secret made Joy feel as if she were cheating on him. Yet Joy understood that she and Dead Jenny were going someplace, together. She knew she wasn’t crazy, only that she was alone.

  Her conversations with Danny often ended up in the same place.

  “Get out of your head,” he said. “Focus externally. When I start feeling hopeless I just take a breath and look at your picture on my desk and then make the next phone call.”

  “I’m glad my naked body is so soothing,” she said sourly. “Maybe I should become a calendar model.”

  “Hey, I only look at your face. Besides, you told me you liked it.”

  She remembered liking it. Honor my body. Find my sin. Pray for forgiveness.

  Danny had been encouraging her about that, too. “Prayer can’t hurt,” he said. “Judaism is full of stories about miraculous intercessions in the face of overwhelming odds.”

  “True,” she said, “but these stories have lasted thousands of years. Moses and those guys were real heavyweights. You don’t hear about that anonymous Israelite mother from Bumfuck, Canaan, who smote her own child with self-absorbed indifference.”

  “Joy, you are the only person in the entire world who thinks it was even remotely possible that you mothered either of our kids with self-absorbed indifference. Can you pray for deliverance from that?”

  She thought that was kind of a good idea, but when push came to shove it still was easier to get ragged on by Dead Jenny. Well, Yom Kippur was coming up. Maybe then.

  “Should I get a job instead of working for myself? That way I’d always have something external to answer to.”

  “You’d go crazy. I still think hiring someone is the way to go. You can get enough work.”

  “I could,” Joy said, and saw the crone, executive version, smartly dressed in a power suit, heels, and telephone headset, hair and nails perfect, standing with arms crossed at the picture window of the stylish private office upstairs in the JoyDesign high-ceilinged loft, surveying the staff carrels below, making deals and having meetings and solving problems and being as far away from the design process as she was from Jenny. Maybe she’d display a Solomon-like self-possession in the settling of trivial disputes among her employees. Or maybe she’d just yell at everyone every time she missed Jenny, ruling the roost with an iron fist, everyone terrified of her power.

  “I don’t want to be a manager,” Joy said. “I’m a craftswoman.”

  “All the more reason to hire someone,” Danny said. “You can concentrate on design and rainmaking and someone else can do the production.”

  “I’ll think about it, Danny,” she said, so she wrote a job description for an assistant and put it in her to-do folder. She looked up some design competitions and found one that looked good, but wondered if she could sustain engaging with the politics of it, and she was still wondering when the application deadline passed. She reviewed the newsletters she had sent to her clients back when she was avid, but couldn’t quite figure out why what she put in was so damn important. Just a best practice for a small businessperson, a byproduct of pride and ambition.

  Both of which you have, said Dead Jenny.

  No, Joy said, not so much anymore. And don’t do the eye thing, please.

  When Jake reached the gate Joy asked how practice went and reached out to take the gear bag. Jake brushed by her without a word. He opened the rear door, threw his bags inside, got in, and closed the door behind him. She came around and got in on the driver’s side. He stayed on the passenger side.

  “You’re not being very nice, Jake.”

  “You aren’t either. Give me my phone back.”

  “Why did I take it?” Joy had asked him to take out the earbuds when she picked him up to drive to the practice. When he didn’t, she confiscated the phone.

  “Because you want me to talk to you even if I don’t have anything to say.”

  “Two months ago you were mad at me for not talking to you, and now you’re mad at me for talking to you.” She gave him the phone. “Here, Jake.”

  “Thanks for nothing.”

  I don’t think I was ever such a jerk to my mother, Joy said to Dead Jenny. She didn’t like remembering how mean she had been to Rose in those last couple of years before the divorce.

  You’re kidding, right?

  Headline: Woman Strangles Imaginary Doppelgänger.

  Joy adjusted the mirror so she could sneak glances of Jake in the back seat. Driving home she could see that he was typing something, but he kept the earbuds in his pocket. An invitation?

  “Do you have homework tonight?”

  “I always have homework,” Jake said.

  “What do you have to do? Do you need any help?”

  “Dad can help me.”

  See, Joy said to Dead Jenny. What am I supposed to do about that?

  Woe is you, indeed, said Dead Jenny.

  So I’m a stumblebum. There’re worse things.

  At home, Joy told Jake she was going to work in her office, but that she would be happy to help h
im if he needed it. He had to do some online research.

  “Remember,” she reminded him, “no movies or games.”

  “Mom, I’m not stupid. I need to have good grades to play on the traveling team, which is like a ton better than having to stay around here with you all summer.”

  I earned that, Joy said to herself. “I’m sorry I said that. I love you and I trust you. When you’re done maybe we can cook dinner together or something.”

  “Maybe,” he said, and went upstairs.

  Apologizing made Jake angry, but so did being nice. Danny expected her to be infinitely forgiving, even if Jake was a pill or if she was stressed. She thought she deserved some recognition for the transportation-providing and schedule-maintaining and room-straightening and meal-preparing and chore-doing, all of which they both took for granted, but Jake expected it and Danny was so used to it that no extra credit was available.

  Later, Jake came down, said that he was invited for dinner at Bobby’s, and left to walk up the street. Then Danny called and said he was going to stay at the office late and that Becky was going out to grab them all something. Joy called Carly, but there was no answer. She thought of calling Lizzie or Rachel, but she looked at the clock and knew they would be busy with their families. She changed her clothes, took a bike and her headphones out to the back deck, and rode the trainer for an hour. Then she showered and, thinking of Carly, put on her nicest jeans and a pretty sweater and went out to Chestnut Street with her novel and sketchbook, thinking she might get a bite to eat. All the restaurants had couples and families in them, and then she thought she might go to a bar where she would get hit on but could at least talk to someone, but that was too dumb. So she bought some takeout and went home and set the table for one and by the time she was done Danny was home and she was happy to see him. When Jake came home he tried to stay about five feet away from her, but Danny kept all three of them in the same room until Jake went upstairs. Joy was grateful and felt open to her husband, but Danny said he needed to chill for a bit, which turned out to be quite a while, and Joy went to sleep alone.