Poor Jenny, Bright As A Penny

Chapter 16

It grew harder and harder for Jenny to spend all day with Mama and to listen to her complain, particularly when the summer days were so fine. Mama would not let her alone long enough to write, or to think her own thoughts, and her querulousness dragged at Jenny. Mama seemed to have set a heaviness upon the cottage that robbed it of all joy and ate at Jenny until she too felt hateful. The little cottage that had started out with such a bright spirit was now invaded by bitterness, almost as if a battle were taking place between the spirit of the cottage and Mama.

Jenny would sit at her desk, gazing out the window at their old apartment and letting her mind wander edgily until Mama slept and she could write. Or until Mama summoned her. She could see the curtains behind the balcony hanging crookedly, and once she saw the landlady out there shaking a mop. Then Mama asked crossly for a new magazine and fresh water. Jenny plumped her pillows and straightened the covers, but Mama only glowered.

Jenny wanted to be out of there, she wanted to be out in the sun, she longed to be alone in the park; then she thought of being in the park with Ben.

Daydreaming! she told herself angrily. But she was unwilling to stop.

She had to get out of the house sometimes, though, if only for groceries, and then Bingo had to stay with Mama. He didn’t like it any better than Jenny did—until Willy came to visit.

Jenny returned from the store one day to find Willy reciting dirty limericks to Mama, and all three laughing uproariously. Willy spent the rest of the afternoon telling Mama tall tales and making outrageous remarks to her. Mama looked happy for the first time since the accident. Jenny watched them with delight: Willy’s rude vitality was just what Mama needed.

When Willy left, Jenny went outside with him. “Would you and Bingo stay with Mama for a few hours every day, so I could get a job?”

Willy hesitated.

“I would pay you a little from my wages. Bingo knows how to take care of Mama, he knows everything to do.”

“How much you plan to pay?”

“Twenty-five cents an hour.”

“Thirty-five,” Willy said. “Mr. Frazee needs a girl to replace pregnant Lucy. I’ll fix it up for you.”

“But, I—”

“He pays good and you can take home some of the leftover bread and pies. If you get the job I want ten per cent of your first month’s salary.”

“What?”

“That’s it, baby.”

“I’ll give you ten per cent of the first week, you little robber.” She could have gone directly to Mr. Frazee, but she knew she had better play Willy along.

“O.K.,” Willy said, and grinned.

Willy made the arrangements, and Jenny went to talk to Mr. Frazee. Mrs. Frazee was working in the kitchen, very fat and solid, and Mr. Frazee was in the front of the store. He looked a lot like his wife except he had more color to him, dark, curling hair, blue eyes, and a very red skin as if it were he who had been standing over the ovens.

Jenny would have worked for nothing just to get away from Mama, but the wage was as good as Willy said, and she arranged to go to work the next morning. She could wear a skirt and blouse and a white apron, and her hair must be pinned back, with a net. She would have two days to learn what to do before Lucy left. She hoped she wouldn’t be clumsy and do everything wrong with both those fat solid people watching her.

By the end of the week when she collected her first pay check, Jenny and Mr. Frazee were friends, and he trusted her to do as he told her. The delicatessen had a long, refrigerated display counter where the cold cuts and ham and roast turkey, the potato and macaroni salads, and salami and olives and cheeses were kept, and a smaller case for homemade pies and breads. It smelled wonderful; she could never get enough of the smell. It had five small tables where customers could take their freshly baked doughnuts and coffee rolls, or sandwiches that Jenny made, pour their own coffee, and eat their lunches looking at the shelves of spices and canned hors d’oeuvres, chocolate-covered ants, hot peppers, tea biscuits, herbs, wines, and pickled onions. That made them want to buy, and most people left with one of Mr. Frazee’s white paper bags under their arm.

Jenny peeled potatoes, washed up, wrapped the pies and bread, and made change. In the weeks that followed before school started she learned to make the macaroni and potato salads properly and to slice the hams and cheeses the way Mr. Frazee liked them.

*

I love the delicatessen. Even when I do something wrong, Mr. Frazee is patient, and everything is so clean. And it smells so good. I can have whatever I want for my lunch, and I’m getting better at being nice to the customers too, and holding my temper when I have to, though I never did say anything. But Mr. Frazee says a scowl is just as bad, and of course it is; I don’t like to be scowled at when I go into a store. It’s not very often that a customer is nasty, only sometimes one is in a big hurry, or wanting special things, and that made me agitated at first. Now, I just smile at them and do the best I can.

I do like working, but today some girls came in, dressed really well, and it made me jealous; they were just free and having fun. While I was making their sandwiches I caught myself thinking, like Mama would, I’ll bet they’re rich and can do just as they please all the time. Then all of a sudden Ben was standing in the doorway, and I nearly dropped the pastrami.

He ordered roast beef on white, and I put so much beef on it—I hoped Mr. Frazee didn’t see me. When I took Ben his sandwich he gave me a big smile, and I saw the girls staring. But he didn’t even glance at them, he was smiling at me.

His hair is so red.

She stared out the window into the dusk and watched lights come on in their old apartment and watched a figure move past the curtains. It had been several days since she had seen a light there.

I pay Willy every Saturday and give Bingo and me our allowances, but the rest goes in the bank. How fat our account is getting.

And it’s so nice to get away from Mama. I wonder how long Willy will last. Sometimes when I get home even he looks frazzled. Well, only three more weeks until school starts and Mama will be able to get into a wheelchair and be by herself if all has gone well with the mending of the bone. She goes back for X-rays just before the first day of school.

*

The day Mama was taken back to the hospital for X-rays and to have the tape off her ribs she came home in a vile temper. “Two more weeks in that lousy bed. I can’t take much more of this bilge. I don’t think the old coots know their business. They say the bone hasn’t healed enough. They’d better have me out of this cast when they promise this time if they know what’s good for them.”

She didn’t care that Jenny would be missing school. But Jenny registered and told Mr. Frazee she would work from four to seven; Bingo and Willy could be with Mama then.

When the two weeks ended, Jenny exchanged the hospital bed for a wheel chair. Now, Mama could sleep in a regular bed, with a pillow tied around her leg to keep her from rolling over in the night and damaging the healing fracture. Jenny and Bingo lifted Mama into the chair in the morning before they went to school and lifted her out again at night. At first Jenny worried about leaving her alone, but then she came home from school early one day and saw Mama wheeling herself down the sidewalk from the market with a six-pack of beer in her lap. Jenny watched her manage the low curbs and slip in the back door of the cottage where there were no steps.

Well, what would you expect? Jenny thought wryly. She stood on the corner with a crooked grin on her face, and when she went into the house Mama looked up guiltily and tried to hide her open can of beer under her robe.

“From now on, Mama, you can get the groceries for me too.”

“I can’t carry that much stuff in a wheel chair.”

“You can carry beer, you can carry groceries.”

Twice when she came home, Jenny found Mama with enough beer in her to be grossly sentimental and tearful. Then on Crystal’s birthday Mama got very drunk and on a crying jag. It was frightening now to see her drunk, because she was on crutches; the wheel chair had been returned. Drunk, she could not manage on crutches. Mama sat at the kitchen table and cried for Crystal and blamed everyone—Jenny, the Dermodys, the police department—for her disappearance. Then her thoughts turned morbid, she let herself imagine all manner of tragedies, and she cried hysterically. In her drunkenness she thought she could see some terrible event in the future, and it was all Jenny and Bingo could do to quiet her. It was almost as if, in some late realization, she was determined to punish herself. They were up with her all night, until the last great bout of hysterics left her exhausted and sleeping.

But the next day she had forgotten, and she said, “Crystal must look beautiful in Mexico lying on the beach in the sun.” Then she said, “Crystal knows how to handle the men. Don’t you worry about Crystal.”

“Mama, you come sit down. I want to talk to you.” Jenny almost pushed Mama into a chair. “Do you want to be back in the hospital for another three weeks, then in traction for eight more? Do you?”

Mama looked abashed.

“Then you’re going to have to quit this beering. All you need to do is fall once on that fracture and the bones will separate and you’ll have it all to do over. Or worse.”

Mama looked down at her hands.

“Are you listening to me?”

She nodded.

“You can have some beer when we’re home, I’ll have Georgie get it. But nothing during the day. Not any! Understand?”

“Goddamn it, Jenny, all right!” Mama flung up onto her crutches and hobbled out of the room.

Now that the nights were dark earlier Jenny walked home from work along the best-lighted streets. Sometimes when she saw Ben cruising, he would stop and talk to her. It gave her a funny feeling, confused and excited, to talk to Ben, and she knew she had been daydreaming too much. She got so it was hard to look directly at him, and this made Ben return a puzzled little grin. But he was just as friendly as he had always been, and it made Jenny feel rather special to be talking to a uniformed officer in a patrol car on the street. Then one night when he stopped he said, “There’s been a boy cruising real slow by the house lately in a red M.G., a dark-haired kid. He belong to you?”

Jenny blushed, then grinned back and said, “Maybe.” It must be Tom Riley, she thought. He had a little ’52 M.G. that he said was a collector’s car. She wondered how he knew where she lived. He had never asked.

Even though the thought of Tom Riley was interesting, she still caught herself dreaming about Ben. Daydreaming, she said to herself angrily. But in spite of her preoccupation, stories were beginning to swarm in her head.

One idea stayed so solidly there and reached out to touch her so often that she could not take herself away from it. It had to do with the battle between joy and heaviness that occurred when Mama came home; Jenny began to form a story in which such a battle took place.

She worked on it late at night by a lamp draped with a towel to keep from disturbing Bingo. She imagined a small child who was kept tied to his bed during the daytime. All joy had been killed in him. Then she created the woman who discovered him and took him secretly away; she was a morose woman, as without joy as he, and lonely. The woman tried to kindle some response in the child, some joyfulness. And because the child’s survival depended on it, the woman extended herself beyond what she had ever attempted. Slowly she began to see hints of joy in her own mind. But they were painful to her.

Slowly, gently, Jenny let the story take shape like a growing thing. She revised and rewrote as she went, adding dimension, breathing life into what at first had been but a nebulous idea.

The towel-draped lamp made a pool of warmth beside her. She stared out at the darkened windows of their old apartment, aware with a corner of her mind that she had not seen lights there for some time. Then she saw a light go on in the bedroom. It made a pale golden square behind the balcony railing.

A little while later the balcony doors opened. Now the square of light was deep gold. The balcony was like a stage. A figure stepped onto it.

Her hair was piled on top her head, and the curve of her neck and the curve of her breast were familiar.

Was it Crystal?

Jenny strained against the window, then opened the front door and stood on the porch, staring. Then she was running down the street.