Without Jenny

by Mark Gunther

  Her weekly date with Carly was the next night. Joy wore a youngish dress. They were in the Balboa Café, sitting at a small table in the bar, when she told her about it.

  “What do you expect?” Carly said to Joy. “Jake may be nine years old but he’s still a guy.”

  “And you’re the expert?”

  “More than you.”

  That was a good point, Joy conceded. “Who’s gonna get their nails done with me?”

  “I will,” Carly said.

  “I didn’t mean you.”

  “I know what you meant, but your world can’t end with them. Danny isn’t even home that much. Come out with me some night. We can get our nails done first.”

  “Do I have to wear one of those little dresses we used to wear?”

  “You still could, and you’d be very, very popular. Half the guys in this place have been checking you out. I try to be more glamorous now. You’ll be proud to be seen with me.”

  “You always look great. Hope I can keep up.”

  “Joy, you’re a goddess. You can wear anything. Besides, you got out of the game when you hit the jackpot with Danny.”

  “It feels like the booby prize. Maybe promiscuity wouldn’t be so bad for either of us now.”

  “That’s the last thing you need. Things are the same?”

  “Mostly it’s just kind of dull and achy. Up and down. Having a dead child really sucks.”

  Joy took a sip and stared out the window at a young mother wheeling her twins down the sidewalk. “I’ll go out with you, Carly. Just don’t abandon me again.” Joy remembered finding herself in one of those little dresses, alone with three boys behind the closed door of someone’s bedroom. She kept them at bay but felt hunted, and was furious with Carly when she waltzed back in an hour later with the boy she’d been eyeing . . . and Joy’s car keys.

  “You never are going to let me forget that, are you?” Carly said. “It only happened once.”

  “Twice.”

  “No, it was the same night. That only counts as once. And you did get the car.”

  Joy had left then, and Carly’s boy had brought her home in the morning.

  “Why did we think we had to do that?”

  “I liked it, Joy. But I never go home with them on the first night anymore.”

  Joy snorted. They got a second glass of wine. Carly kept pointing out the guys who were checking Joy out.

  “Good clean fun, Joy. Not every guy wants to get into your pants.”

  “Not when they can get into yours, right?”

  Carly spit out her wine, she was laughing so hard, and they kept it up while one-upping each other with many details of a few wild college nights they later almost regretted. At home that night, Joy thought that doing more probably was the right thing to do, but why did everyone have to tell her all the time?

  I wish, she said to Dead Jenny, that for five minutes all of you could just shut the fuck up.

  28.

  ON ROSH HASHANAH Joy lingered with the story of Hannah, a woman who was loved but couldn’t get pregnant. This went on for years. She even got hubby a second, more fecund wife. Eventually, though, her constant, anguished prayer was answered and she bore Samuel, but at a significant cost—she had to give him up to the priesthood at age five. That didn’t seem like such a bargain to Joy, five years and out, but Hannah at least knew the deal at the outset, and she at least got to see him a couple of times a year. I’d make that deal now, Joy thought, instantly.

  Jenny had quickened in her like a magic bean; Joy went off the pill and there she was. Now every month another baby was never born, ticking the time away until the plumbing clogged for good. Maybe I’m actually as desperate as Hannah and don’t know it. I still could have another one. Even if Danny doesn’t want to I can get him to bed and not even tell him I decided. Just let it be a “whoops” in a couple of months.

  Great plan, said Dead Jenny. Whoops.

  When Joy was at the shul she tried to think about forgiveness, but it seemed petty to want relief from a small personal problem like hers when God seemed more inclined to grant miracles like Knocking Down the Walls of Jericho, or reward sustainable activities like Getting Eternally Rich and Fecund Harvests for Hewing to the Covenant.

  God is infinitely forgiving, but I don’t feel forgiven. Jenny can’t forgive me.

  No, Dead Jenny said, dead is dead.

  Can’t you ask her for me?

  Dead Jenny ignored that question. Danny forgives you. Jake forgives you.

  I don’t know how to forgive myself.

  She expected the experience to be singular and cathartic. She’d have some kind of a holy moment and God would immediately and permanently release the nagging guilt that she alone had wrecked their life.

  Maybe for you God is more like a cheerleader than a wizard, said Dead Jenny. No magic for the common mourner.

  Maybe I can get forgiven only after I die. Or after I spend my entire life mindlessly executing on my deliverables.

  That piece of paper is already pretty tattered, Dead Jenny said.

  I want it a lot.

  Stop trying so damned hard, Dead Jenny said.

  I’m afraid to stop trying.

  Maybe forgiveness never really happens at all, but eventually enough time goes by that the slow accrual of other layers of experience buries the grief and the guilt. Living half a life becomes acceptable because a full life is impossible.

  Or maybe forgiveness is already happening in little bits and pieces of chance occurrences, doing something just a little differently each time. Tolerating Danny’s absorption in his work. Tolerating Jake’s anger. Tolerating her own failures. Forgiveness by attrition.

  She had to be more afraid in order to feel her sin. She had to feel her sin to feel forgiven.

  She asked Rabbi about it, when he made some time for her in the incredibly busy week between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

  “Afraid of what?” Rabbi asked.

  “Fate? Death? God? I thought I got inoculated against fear because I now know anything really can happen. I guess I was just dense. I should still be afraid. Maybe that’s why I can’t find forgiveness.”

  “God already forgave you, Joy, but He can’t save you from yourself.”

  “God is a terrifying idea,” she said.

  “You haven’t said much about God in our talks,” Rabbi said.

  “It’s hard to believe in a God who left Jenny out of the Book of Life.”

  “He might have something for you anyway.”

  “I’m still here. That’s enough.”

  “Doesn’t seem to be. What’s missing?”

  “A purpose beyond breathing, maybe?”

  “You already found that when you decided your family needs you.”

  “That was your wording,” Joy said. “I couldn’t refute it.”

  Do you always have to be such a hardnose? Dead Jenny asked.

  I feel like a marshmallow.

  “You abandoned the Other World for it,” Rabbi said.

  “That’s true.” I had thought it abandoned me. Joy suddenly thought that maybe just being alive and having Jake and Danny was its own miracle, in a way, when not too long ago her destiny was to become a lonely crone-witch doctor-medium-permanently-grieving crazy lady.

  “This seems to be your work for Yom Kippur, Joy,” Rabbi said, “figuring out what fear and forgiveness have to do with each other.”

  She said, “I was in charge and she got killed and I can’t get around that.”

  “Maybe that’s not the relevant thing anymore. Start somewhere else.”

  The only work she used to do on Yom Kippur was try not to die of boredom as the day crept glacially by. Now she understood that the holiday itself was a practice, a place to be immersed in rituals of transparency, forgiveness, and submission. The practice of Tshuvah, she thought, the active work of self-examination, an annual ritual of my people, thousands of years of penitence and error and renewed penitence and more error. Mistakes a
re inevitable, even if unforgiven.

  Joy called her mother the morning before Yom Kippur.

  “G’mar chatimah tovah, Joyeleh,” Rose said. May the Book of Life be sealed with your inscription already in it.

  “I hope that happens for all of us,” Joy said.

  “We do what we can, honey. Are you doing okay?” She hadn’t called Joy “honey” in a while.

  Joy liked it. “Well enough. We’re both working and Jake’s doing well in school.” Joy felt Rose waiting, her calm attention warming the telephone’s handset. Hiram had always liked Rose’s attention. Joy suspected he had actually let Rose go because having a wife who followed her own mind as far as Rose had confounded him. Now she was Mrs. Pinchas Gelberman, rebbetzin—wife of the rabbi. Joy only heard her call him “Reb Pinchas” or “the Rebbe,” even in private conversations. He was always studying or teaching, and Rose told Joy she had her own life, so much richer than it ever was in San Francisco, not that she meant anything personal by that. Joy wanted her to feel at least a little bit lonely, so they could commiserate, but Rose said what with being the rebbetzin and all, she had a lot of unofficial duties in their community, plus the Rebbe’s family. He had five children and seventeen grandchildren.

  “I’m sorry I was so mad at you, Mom, when you left.”

  “I hurt you, Joy. I knew that, but it was a long time ago. You have nothing to apologize for. Your tshuvah is done with me.”

  Joy wasn’t sure about that, but she had to accept it. “I’m not doing so well with Jenny.”

  “I don’t know what to say to that, Joy. Almost four years have gone by. I can’t imagine your father lets you get away with that, even if Danny does.”

  Nailed you there, said Dead Jenny.

  “I don’t know, Mom. A lot is good. Rabbi thinks I’m not asking the right question.”

  “He’s a wise man.”

  “I keep trying to do the right thing.”

  “I know that, Joy,” Rose said to her. “May God bless you for it.”

  They said shanah tovah, Happy New Year, and wished each other an easy fast. Joy stared at the phone. Rose hadn’t abandoned her, exactly, she remembered holidays and birthdays, but she had made herself a new life. Emphatically.

  I forgive you, Mom, for leaving me. It felt true. Just like Jake wants of me.

  Joy had thought that she had to forgive Mom for leaving her; but Mom didn’t think so. Rose forgave Joy for doing the leaving, but Joy never thought it had been her doing. Mom is holding me. She loves me. Judaism will hold my grief for longer than I will live. When I’m the one who’s in the Other World.

  Yom Kippur started with a short service in the evening. Rabbi’s sermon was pointed, droll, and warm. Joy felt grateful he was her rabbi. The next morning she checked off all the boxes. She didn’t shower, and when she brushed her teeth she was careful not to swallow any water. She made no coffee in the kitchen. The morning orange remained uncut. She poured Jake’s cereal into a bowl and put the milk carton next to it.

  Danny appeared, unshaven. “Morning. What kind of a holiday starts at the crack of dawn? I thought it was the alarm for work.”

  He got himself a glass of water.

  “Started last night,” she said. “You’re drinking water?”

  “Yes,” he said, “it’s hard enough to go without coffee. Hope I don’t get smited. Smoted?”

  He took a sip. They waited. No smiting occurred.

  “Didn’t you drink water last year?”

  “Yes,” Joy said. “Just trying the next thing.”

  “Whatever,” he said. “You can always be more perfect, I suppose.”

  “Or less fucked up.”

  He shook his head at that one, but hugged her anyway, and she kissed him.

  Jake walked in. “Should I be fasting?” He poured milk into his bowl, then picked up his spoon and took a bite.

  Joy put the milk back in the refrigerator. “Kids aren’t expected to.”

  “We fast to remember our regrets,” Danny said. “You’re too young for them.”

  “No, Dad,” Jake said. “I’m not.”

  “We all have that regret,” Danny said.

  “We can’t change what happened,” Joy said. “Only what we do next. Just like baseball.”

  There was peace in that moment.

  You’re going to run out of things to talk about, Joy said to Dead Jenny.

  That’s the plan, said Dead Jenny.

  Yom Kippur services started early and ran past sundown, five services linked, one after the other, with a short afternoon break. Joy and Danny got there at the beginning of the second service. The tired old building looked a lot grander when its rows were filled with congregants, many in long white kittels, topped with a wide variety of yarmulkes and draped with prayer shawls.

  Repetition is the root of change. Doing the same thing, differently. Maybe something different will happen to me today.

  She stood up and sat down and sang and beat her breast and tried to be an open vessel. The Yizkor service, memorializing all the dead, came and went around noon, and she cried for her loss. Rabbi prostrated himself three times during the service of the Kohen Gadol, and her heart melted toward the ground too. She read the selections and studied the commentaries during the Torah service. She listened to the rabbi and the cantor and the poets. She was tired and hungry and thirsty. After the break they came back for Ne’ilah, the final service: as it’s said, the last chance before the Gates of Heaven closed for another year. She read the sins, again, Al chayt shechatanu lefanecha, beat her chest, again, for thousandth time that day.

  “. . . we have sinned against you through hardening our hearts, We have sinned against you thoughtlessly, We have sinned against you in our innermost thoughts. We have sinned against you through empty confession, through foolishness, by clever cynicism, through stubbornness, by betraying trust, by succumbing to confusion . . .”

  Her skin flushed. A rippling rose against gravity, through her feet, hands, arms, legs, head, heart, that pushed open the door of the selfish time and space she wanted to believe protected her loves from her suffering but was her suffering, the sweet glory of her martyrdom to the Moment When Everything Changed. Millions of children were dead, dead in the Holocaust and dead in pogroms and dead by plague and by accident and in simple ordinary dying.

  I have to let my one dead child fully live in the world of the dead. She is gone. Danny has his life to live. Jake needs to push against me. And I must stand.

  Joy held on to Danny’s shoulder to keep from falling. He looked at her; she saw his question turn to softness as she saw in him the softness she felt in her own face. The final shofar blast turned her inside out, her loss, for once, on the outside, perhaps to be transformed forever. She sang Havdalah with a full heart.

  But the next morning she woke to billowing dust and stabbing sunlight and echoing screams. She’d been waiting for so long for a moment of forgiveness, of light, and it had come and gone outside her control, as chance as Jenny’s death had been.

  How much light did you expect, Joy? asked Dead Jenny. Can I go now?

  Not quite yet. Soon, I hope.

  29.

  ON THE OUTSKIRTS of St. Helena, vineyards surrounded the winery. When Joy drove down the long driveway to the offices she saw the bare architecture of dormant vines and the road stretching into the distance, and for just a moment she remembered cold wind cutting her face and the rhythm of breath and steady effort resonating in her legs. She felt an archaic, elemental yearning to be on the road, alone, away, just her and Dead Jenny, forever.

  Not to be.

  Joy had been excited to win this high profile contract, an identity package for a new winery opening up in Yountville, part of a large beverage group with a big budget. She worked crisply with the client and the branding agency to produce something specific yet enticing that would immediately differentiate this particular winery from all the other ones. The blinds rolled up as she finished her presentation.
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  “So,” she said, “you can see that the basic image is strong by itself, but as I illustrated in the slide show is very adaptable to each of the requirements laid out in the brand statement. If there are any questions I’ll be happy to take them now.”

  The five faces around the table were smiling, nodding. She wondered about each of them, if the young woman from marketing was a mother, if the guy from finance ignored his wife, if that older guy, the winemaker, had lost his parents yet, if the young secretary in the short skirt she kept pulling down even thought about why she dressed that way. They left, but the boss was hanging around, checking his phone. Joy waited for it, and as she was ready to go he caught her arm.

  “I guess there’s no good way to do this,” he said, “but I just want to say how sorry I am for your loss. I have two sons and I can’t imagine how it feels.”

  “You’re imagining it now,” Joy said. “It’s nothing to wish on anyone, but it could happen to anyone.” She let a beat go by. “I appreciate your kindness, and I do look forward to working together. Maybe I can bring my bike next time.”

  “Sure,” he said all in a rush, “I ride, too!”

  Joy, who knew that about him, said, “Oh, you do? We should make a plan.”

  She said nasdrovya to Danny, for the list they had made so long ago. When she got to the car, she called him.

  “I did good, Danny. They really liked it, and I’ve got the account for the foreseeable future, I think. Then the boss gave me his condolences.”

  “It’s about time. You’ve only had about six meetings with the guy.”

  “Four,” she said. “I did just fine, although I wasn’t very gracious. Anyway, he rides, so I started talking about that.”

  Danny chuckled. “Nice feint. We have two things to celebrate tonight!”

  He had called her from his office a couple of weeks before to ask her to go out with him for his birthday. “Another tradition restored,” he told her.

  She knew what he really wanted. More often than not Joy had given herself as Danny’s present, vampy and bare under a range of skimpy dresses and high heels. He would wine and dine her and later in their bed her generous intention often reduced him to grateful tears.