Poor Jenny, Bright As A Penny

Chapter 4

For breakfast Jenny made fried bread with syrup and opened a can of peaches. Lud had a good appetite in the morning. He scuttled it down, his share and more. Mama ate daintily, a bit of dry toast, some black coffee. Crystal, pale and wan, wanted nothing. She turned so white once that Jenny thought she was going to be sick. Jenny walked her to the door and they stood on the wet stoop in the cold fresh air. The rain was only a sprinkle now and the sun was coming. “Jenny, did you put me to bed last night? Did you put me in the shower?”

“Yes. You were screaming, you were afraid. You said something was crawling.” Jenny shuddered. Then she put her arm around Crystal.

“I can’t remember it,” Crystal said. She turned to face Jenny; her eyes were frightened. “I can’t remember it.” Then her eyes went flat and she looked away.

When they were on the road, Crystal sat hunched against the side of the car, her forehead pressed against the glass and her eyes closed. As Jenny watched her, the sun caught at her cheek and lashes. Outside, the sunlight made the wet bushes sparkle. The earth and trees, darkened by the soaking, were incredibly rich in color. Jenny pulled the newspaper packing out of her broken window and stared out. She could smell the wet earth and the grass. In a field of stubble one apple tree stood alone, naked and twisted.

The children had never seen a large city. The idea frightened Bingo, thinking of schools—big schools. But Jenny was eager. She watched the green hills on their left, and studied the houses on them with interest. They were large houses with gardens and they commanded a view of the city. A river ran through its center. But the main street was lined with topless bars and nude movies.

Lud said, “You can get anything in this town.”

Jenny wondered what, exactly.

Crystal brightened and ogled the college boys as they passed through the downtown campus.

They drove beside a narrow city park where the bare trees held twisted branches against the silver sky. Tall buildings lined the park and suddenly Bingo was alert. Some of the buildings were handsome slabs of brick and wood and smoke-colored glass; others were of ancient styles, carved and deeply shadowed under porticos, with stained glass windows that bled color as the sun touched them. Bingo pressed forward, studying them. The air was diamond-clear and the buildings seemed larger and sharper than life. Black shadows angled across rough stone walls. The thrusting carved towers might have been shaped by giant hands, as Bingo made his models. But these were infinitely more finished, infinitely more beautiful. He leaned over Jenny, pushing against the broken glass to see, then he rolled Crystal’s window down and leaned out.

“It’s cold!” Crystal snapped.

But Bingo, locked in his own world, hardly heard her.

Maybe Lud knew this city, or maybe it was instinct, but he headed unerringly for the cheap apartment houses. He chose a neighborhood where lumberyards, delicatessens, and warehouses were jumbled among the dilapidated residences. The first apartment for rent sign they saw was on a boxlike brick building blackened with soot. “One place’s good as another,” Lud said. Fire escapes covered the front, and the windows were blind with dirt. They could hear tugs hooting from the river.

The apartment they were shown had bile-green walls and a lumpy pink couch across one corner of the living room. The colorless rug was worn to threads in pathways between the inner doors. The limp lace curtains had holes in them, and the rooms smelled of cabbage.

But it was a corner apartment with a view of the river in one direction and the green hills in the other, and off the smaller of the two bedrooms was a balcony. Bingo went out onto it. From four floors up he could see the tops of warehouses and freight cars, and beyond them the river with ocean-going ships on it. Behind an ancient little church with a white steeple rose the elevated freeway; half-finished, it stopped in mid-air. A car going along it at high speed could drop suddenly to the street below, where it would roll and bounce, smashing other cars.

Jenny scraped caked food out of the kitchen drawers and from between the maroon tiles of the walls, then scrubbed the kitchen with Lysol. The filth made her retch. Mama helped for a while, but soon she was standing at the open front door talking to the landlady, a pale wisp of a woman with ragged hair and skin the color of thin milk. She wore no stockings, and above her carpet slippers her legs were knobby and blue-veined. She had a whining voice. Jenny listened to her with care. She talked about the tenants, then began asking Mama questions. But Mama was adept at hedging questions.

The landlady whined, “Does your man work around close?”

“I did want to ask about that: how is the bus service downtown from here?”

“It’s right on the corner, every fifteen minutes. Are you new in town?”

“I’m not too familiar with this part of town. Is it safe for the children on the streets after dark, or should I have them in?”

“There are some strange characters. Though I keep them out of my apartments.”

“I know what you mean,” Mama said. “It’s hard, running an apartment house, ain’t it?”

“Oh, you have no idea, honey. Take that man in 3D, all that grease up the walls, and why in the world would anyone keep his sofa turned up on end like that? It ain’t normal. At least he don’t have no women around. But if he don’t have women, what does he do?”

Jenny grinned and thought, I might hate moving, and I might hate the dirt, but I sure do get an education. Mama is good at fencing questions. She just asks one right back. If that old bat out there gossiped less and scrubbed more, she might have nicer tenants. Doesn’t say much for us, though, does it? For two cents I’d tell her what I think of her pigsty.

But she knew she wouldn’t. Mama couldn’t afford to be on bad terms with the landlady. Jenny set herself to dreaming of a little house, a clean cottage painted white inside and out, with a private bedroom of her own. With a garden all around it, and sunshine. By the time she had it furnished, with pictures on the walls and flowers on a red lacquer table before a bay window, she had scrubbed the real kitchen clean and put the boxes of cereal and crackers and the few cans and jars into the cupboards. Then she washed all the dishes, those that belonged to the landlady and those they had brought with them.

She found Bingo kneeling beside the red trunk at the foot of his cot. His drawings were scattered across the floor and he was studying them critically.

Crystal’s voice wafted up from the yard and Jenny peered over the balcony rail. Two boys with a guitar, Jenny thought. She sure doesn’t waste any time. I wonder if I could operate like that if I wanted to. I guess I’m too skinny. She looked in the mirror, wound her hair on top of her head like Crystal’s and puffed out her chest. But it wasn’t the same. She grinned at herself and stuck out her tongue. Maybe in a few years. Maybe I’m a slow starter.

At dusk the two boys, Clayhill and Sammy, came into the apartment with Crystal, draped themselves across the pink couch, and looked bored. They made the room uneasy, as if they had been there first and the Middles were intruders. Then they went away again, taking Crystal. Clayhill jingled his car keys impatiently as he went out the door.

Mama smiled indulgently after them and Lud said, “Little creeps ain’t even out of diapers.”

Jenny said, “I want to talk to you, Mama.”

“If it’s Crystal and those boys, forget it. You can’t stand for Crystal to have any fun.”

“Crystal was stoned last night,” Jenny said tersely. She watched Mama to see what effect that would have.

“Crystal can handle her beer,” Mama said.

“It wasn’t beer. It was grass. Or something else.”

“You’re imagining things.”

“No, I’m not.” You never could tell Mama anything. She believed what she wanted to believe. “It’s not like when you were young, Mama. Kids drop pills like eating candy.”

“That’s mostly your imagination. You scare too easy. If I have anything to worry about it’s you with all your bookishness. You read too much, then you imagine things.”

“I don’t hide my head from the facts. You won’t be able to either if something happens to Crystal.”

“Crystal can handle herself.” Mama lurched up and slung her coat over her shoulders. “Poor Jenny, bright as a penny,” she sang sarcastically. “Come on, Lud, we’re going to look this town over.”

Jenny picked up Mama’s purse, took out some bills, and handed it to her. Mama glared, but she didn’t say anything. Jenny and Mama had had this out long ago. Jenny got the grocery money, or she told Mama’s caseworker.

“If it’s grass now, Mama, it’ll be something worse later. Maybe something she can’t get off of.” Jenny turned on her heel and went into the kitchen.

The feeling of helplessness that surged over her made tears come. There was no one else to do anything about Crystal, there was no one else who cared. She wanted Papa, she wanted someone strong that they could lean on. She wanted Mama to care.

In the night, sirens woke Bingo and he heard men yelling at each other somewhere. Then when he slept again he dreamed of Turnock. He could feel Turnock’s armor and smell the scent of ginger as they flew above thrusting towers and steeples. Turnock’s wings shone and a bellowing call echoed between the buildings, a call that seemed sometimes to be Turnock’s voice.

*

In the morning, white fog pushed at the balcony doors. Jenny and Bingo stood on the balcony enchanted, wrapped in the magic of the fog. Above them it was thin and wispy, but beneath the balcony it lapped at their feet like a white sea. The city they had seen yesterday was gone, only rooftops remained like jagged islands. The hollow cries of the foghorns could have been the cries of great animals lost in the heavy white mists. When Jenny went to dig her notebook from under her bed and sit there on the cold floor, writing, they had not exchanged a word.

Bingo sat in the kitchen with icy feet eating Post Toasties and thinking.

That day Jenny made a sign for the apartment house bulletin board, offering to baby-sit, run errands, and do odd jobs. The money would go into the red trunk for when Jenny was eighteen, and they could be on their own. The bulletin board was by the landlady’s door, next to a pay phone. A sweaty old man was shouting into the phone and waving his fist. Behind him, through an open door, she could see a junk room filled with trash cans, a black fire hose, and some piles of rubbish. The hall smelled of fish and cheap perfume. The old man yelled, “Tell her she ain’t got no right, tell her to mind her own business.” Then he shouted, “I ain’t got no more dimes, operator,” and turned to Jenny as if he might ask for one. Jenny left.

Upstairs, Mama and Lud were fighting. But they were sober so they made up soon enough and went to drink beer with the woman on the second floor. Crystal stood pressed against the front window, looking down at the street. She had Mama’s radio on loud. Then Sammy and Clayhill walked in the front door without knocking. Sammy wore a grin like a hyena’s. Crystal got some beer out of the refrigerator and they all went out. It was starting to snow.

Jenny made sandwiches and put cocoa in a Thermos. Then she and Bingo walked up into the hills. It was snowing hard. They found a park and had a picnic sitting on a log in a white field where there were no footprints but their own.

They went sliding on their seats down a hill of snow until they were soaked and frozen.

When dusk came, they stood on the sidewalks and looked into the lighted houses. It was a lonely thing to do, peering in at families who sat before their fires with cats and dogs asleep by the hearths, books crowding shelves, good smells of dinners cooking, sounds of children laughing, someone playing a piano. They tried to guess what the dinners were, and that made them ravenous. Jenny said, “Someday we’ll have a house like that, when I can go to work. Each our own room, with a view of the river and the city. And a fireplace.” She flashed him a look. “Ours.”

“Would we have room for Mama?”

“If she’d stay with us. But it will be our house. We’ll earn the money to buy it and no one can take it from us.”

“And a room for Crystal?”

“As long as she wants it. Crystal won’t want to live with us when she’s grown, though.”

“I wonder what it’s like to be grown. I’m not sure I want to be.”

“I think it’s like we are now, only with more added. And nothing taken away. At least that’s how it ought to be.”

“How, exactly?”

“Lud always acts like what we do is stupid, my notebooks and your buildings.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, what did he ever do that was so great? What did he ever do that he really cared about? He and Mama have forgotten what’s important. Like something they must have had when they were young is gone. Now they’re bitter and don’t care about anything.

“Just because there’s ugliness in the world, they think it’s stupid to see anything else.

“Or if people want the world to be beautiful they pretend the ugliness isn’t there. They can’t stand to see ugliness. Grownups want everything one way.”

They paused before a house where the fire in the study had been left to burn by itself. They could imagine that they were standing before the burning logs; they could almost feel the warmth on their toes. Jenny shoved her cold hands deep into her pockets. “I think when you grow up you should be so wise you can see good and bad for exactly what they are.”

“What about people who don’t want to see?”

“They go to hell,” Jenny said. She pelted away down the snowy street toward home. They raced home laughing, slipping, scattering snow about them in the cold darkness.

Later in bed Jenny lay thinking about the houses on the hill and the people who lived in them. Those rooms, lit by firelight, seemed little worlds of incredible happiness, where husbands and wives sat talking with quiet pleasure. What were they talking about, what secret and simple things? Mama and Lud never talked together like that. Had Mama and Papa talked that way? She could not remember.

And yet that was the way it should be. All the things inside your head should be part of the telling to each other. Should be a part of the loving.

She leaned over the side of the bed and reached for her notebook, then switched on the bedside light. Bingo growled and turned over.

But when she tried to write what she thought it must be like to be married and have someone love you, she couldn’t. I don’t know truly, she thought. I can only guess.