lickhaven

[This is the first chapter of the novel about Jenny that I’ve been working on in bits and pieces for the last couple years. It’s just to give you a hint. If you it doesn’t interest you you, you can clean out the cat’s litter box or make that phone call you’ve been putting off.]

Morning

The sun invades Jenny McGiver’s bed, its stain flowing across the sheets. Waking never feels good. Dreams are no better, but they finish. The living day starts and goes on relentlessly, bringing the creepy-crawlies, the heebie-jeebies, the slow, malingering gnaw of time. 

Fighting the mold inside, she rolls out of bed and snarls at the pitilessly shining orb. Useless bravado. She shambles around the room, searching for items not too wrinkled or encrusted with yesterday.

Is Jenny depressed? It’s chic to be depressed. People simper knowingly, there-there you and ask what you’re “taking.” Jenny would like to answer, “graft,” “umbrage,” “liberties.” Instead she says, simply, “Nothing.” The knowing simper turns to incredulity. Does she also wash her underwear in a mountain stream and beat it with rocks ? Does she plant asparagus by the phases of the moon?

Jenny can be likable, even engaging, if most often in a distant way. The etched bone structure of her face and almost corpse-white skin are enlivened by an electric undercurrent that turns men’s heads, though some feel spooked by their own attraction. Thin and tight-muscled, she could be an ad for exercise or for something exotic but unsettling. Aware of her unsettling beauty, she can glory in it or slap it aside.

She makes uneven attempts to eat nutritiously. She is not deliciously fond of vegetables but can accept them with suitable camouflage. She bolts down large quantities of proteins but gains no weight because her metabolism churns with aggressive vigor.

On the crowded street, kicking through the accusing June sunlight, she greets the traffic, human and auto, with snarl and sneer. Bloody fucking fools in their bloody fucking cars. Jenny cannot afford a car. Would she own one if she could? Something used and prone to confounding breakdown – a possibility. A ’60s VW bug, if any remain, or Hitler’s armored car, up for auction now and then (no one in their right mind can afford it; fortunately for the auction houses, those who can afford this super-bauble are not in their right minds).

People crossing the street dodge the vehicular hodge-podge, more or less successfully. There – a pedestrian nudged by a passenger-side bumper end. The driver does not notice. The pedestrian stares with impersonal anger, then continues on.

“Fuck,” says Jenny, encapsulating the scene, the driver, the not-sufficiently-injured party. Fuck and fuck again.

Moments later, she stands behind the counter of French’s Stationery on Chestnut Street in Center City Philadelphia. She smiles abstract radiance as she rings up envelopes, felt-tip pens and greeting cards mucilaginous with sentiment.

She is, to all external measures, an excellent employee: observent, organized, rapid at giving change. She can dash her hand into the register to snatch a complicated combination of coins in a single haul. This negligible ability provides a fleeting pride, as a housewife might hold up a perfectly ironed shirt.

Yet an undercutting nastiness enjoys sneaking out. “Customers…” She rolls the word across her tongue. “Cuss. Tumors.” Most of them look slightly lost as they pick up a card, open it, read it – actually read it – put it back, frown, pick another. A few giggle through the humor offerings, usually young women, usually in pairs. The men never know what they want. They might be choosing a chimp’s underwear or a toilet cleaner.

Jenny sidles up to an almost elderly woman thumbing anniversary cards.

“Did you hear about the man who jumped in front of the subway train?”

“Oh goodness, no. I didn’t.”

“Neither did I – isn’t that a coincidence?”

“I don’t – what are you talking about?”

“Imaginary animals with very long tails. Do you see them? Out of the corners of your eyes?”

The woman holds the card before her, a talisman to ward off craziness. Jenny lays a hand lightly on her arm. “It’s nothing to worry about. Lots of people don’t and still they survive – nearly all of them.” She backs slowly away.

Long fingers grip Jenny’s shoulder and she spins around, part stunned, part enraged.

It’s Pamela, her boss. Jenny and Pam work well together. Most of the time. Pam gives her leeway, because when Jenny isn’t a volcano on the edge of eruption, she’a the ideal salesperson of cardboard sentiment. Pam likes her, as do most customers and many passing acquaintances.

But Pam sets limits.

“Goddammit, you can’t chase customers out of the store. This is a business.”

None of my business. “I was giving her advice.”

“What, ‘Go screw yourself’?”

Jenny leans against the counter in a seductive ’40s pose. “Really, dahling, you should use a more distinctive perfume.”

“Come off it.”

Jenny straightens. “I’m off.”

“You know about the sale next week.”

“From the Aisle of Man to the Islets of Langerhans, everything 20% off. Except for the small print.”

“I never know what the hell you’re talking about. Here. These are the forms to fill out.”

The skewed type has been copied from copies of copies of other copies. It could be in Arabic or cuneiform.

“I can’t read it.”

“The ones with the little squiggles, see, are numbers. The rest is sales items.”

“Why do we work with crap like this? This is the 21st century, if barely. Hasn’t anybody seen a computer, or a printer?”

Pam’s eyes turn to hard marbles. “Do you want to work here?”

“No.”

Pam’s eyes sog. “I don’t friggin get you. When you do it, you’re the best I’ve ever had. Then you dive down a manhole, into the shit. What do you get out of it? Doesn’t look like it makes you happy.”

Jenny winces inside but doesn’t let it show. When reality strikes, either throw spitballs or go silent.

As she’s wending her forlorn way back to French’s after a flavorless lunch, the woman in front of her takes a inexplicable stumble and slams to the sidewalk. Her right leg twists and snaps, adding a joint where none had been. Her scream cuts the air, gouging the buildings. 

Overcoming a wave of revulsion, Jenny drops to one knee beside the stricken woman and touches her arm, her shoulder, her forehead. “You’ll be all right, really you will,” she says without knowledge or effect on the woman.

A man with a power tie streaks in and waves his hands. “Don’t move her! Don’t move her!” 

Jenny looks up, perplexed. Why would she think of moving the stricken woman?

“Don’t move her! Leave her there!” The man’s palpable hysteria passes through the circled onlookers and ricochets off the storefronts, fighting for space with the woman’s wails. He and Jenny stand outside the henge of need, along the periphery of observation. Jenny touches the woman’s cheek, her arm again. 

A policeman slides through the crowd and squats beside her. “What happened?”

Jenny points at the woman’s leg. “She just fell.”

You think so? asks the accident, unasked, so many things to watch, so much to unfold across the universe, why should this happen right now, right before your face?

Jenny makes a strangled sound, flips her head side to side, a confused-dog wiggle – what the hell is this? – but hell doesn’t answer. 

The policeman returns to his patrol car and calls for an emergency wagon, then takes up station near the woman without looking at her. The man with the power tie speaks in staccato bursts into the officer’s ear, his hands fluttering, darting, clenching. The officer nods a few times, grunts once. The woman has passed out. Jenny asks the cop if there is anything she can do. The officer shrugs and tells her the emergency crew is on its way.

All’s well (really?), so back to selling predigested emotions spewed onto rectangles.

At the late afternoon laundromat on 22nd St. her hand dives into her backpack, solid with books, picking volumes at random. She reads Buddhist dharma during the wash cycle, Bertrand Russell’s arch pronouncements on logic through the rinse, a chapter or two of Anthony Trollope along with the hum of the drier, all while listening on her iPod to The Residents, San Francisco’s most cultly anonymous band, or Tom Waits, or Renaissance dances, or Tuvan throat singers. Unceremoniously combined, the music, the words, the abstruse ponderings make delicious sense. 

But nothing, read or heard, contains a hint of mathematics. No.

Rachel will likely visit after dinner. She spends two or three evenings a week at Jenny’s. Rachel is Jenny’s counterweight, the friend she thought she would never have. Theirs is the relationship binary stars might experience if they turned sentient: close and embracing, with an easy trading of essential matter.

Rachel shines a rich cocoa-brown, exuding sensuality as a tapped maple exudes sap. Roughly half American slave descendent, a fourth Southern cracker and another fourth Haitian, she draws men like flies. She creates no conflict in their minds like Jenny does. They simply want.

Jenny eats her dinner, a grilled cheese sandwich – crumbly cheddar that melted non-uniformly and tumbles from the slightly burned bread as she bites. She crams a  romaine lettuce leaf into her mouth, chews rapidly and swallows without enjoyment, then back to the cheese for its fleeting pleasure. Jenny is an indifferent cook at best, at worst a culinary blunderbuss.

After washing the single dish and the black iron frying pan (which, she knows, should only be wiped clear with a paper towel), she turns to the shelf of books she has begun reading over the last months. She counts 21 volumes embellished with bookmarks. Tonight, nothing on the “begun” shelf appeals to her. Is the laundromat her truer intellectual home?

The doorbell rings. The apartment has no intercom, so Jenny ratchets down the stairs to answer. Rachel stands in the vestibule, swinging her arms, humming to an internal tune.

“Oooouuu,” Rachel moans around the smoothness of a chocolate truffle. “I spose now you’re gonna tell me ’bout the decline of Western civilization.”

“Why bother? You know all my rants by heart.”

“Do I ever.”

Jenny pours Rachel a glass of red jug wine, inexpensive, not unpleasant, properly alcoholic. Jenny takes her first glass now; she will take multiple glasses later.

“So this accident?” Rachel scooches down into the charmingly lumpy armchair, treating it like a hammock.

“Just wham, she’s on the sidewalk, bone sticking out, a compound fracture. The day before, a piece of a … gargoyle falls off the building across the street and hits a guy on the head.”

“Heavy.”

“He bled like a pig.” Jenny licks at the remaining taste of cheese on her lips. “That kind of shit just happens.”

Rachel waves her hand to entice the philosophic round. “And that’s because…”

“There are too many people, too much tension, too little time to think or react, we’re pressed together like rats in a cage, with tail-biting –”

“Whoa, lady. You sound like you’re biting your own tail. Ease off. In the Middle Ages we would’ve had the Black Death. Lot less people die these days than once did. I mean, we all die in the end, but we don’t most of us because of shit flowing down the middle of the street.”

“Open sewers.” A Jenny smile peeks out. “I know your rants too.”

Rachel’s laugh sloshes the wine in her glass. “Gotta get me some new ones. Oh dear, oh dear, so what’re we gonna talk about tonight that’s new and exciting and doesn’t have to do with death or the mad sad state of the world?”

Jenny tops off her glass, ignoring the internal simper for restraint. “What’s happening at work?”

“Same old same old. Ummm, there was a case today, sorta like what you were saying. Guy walking down 57th Street and a tree limb falls on his head. OK, a civil suit. But he says it’s deliberate, that this neighbor he’s feuding with rigged it to drop on him. So, turns out when they look, the limb was sawed two-thirds through. OK, so it’s a criminal case – except, how can you make a limb fall just when you want it to? And the other guy, of course, says he never touched the tree, must of been some kids. But the guy got hit’s bringing charges.”

As the DA’s office top-drawer paralegal, Rachel conducts interviews, collects facts. She’s in closer touch with more cases than the assistant DAs, her nominal and certificated superiors. Every legal excrescence in the city drifts across her desk or into her ears. She has developed the ability of seeing the futility of trying to untangle all these skeins of sordidness, while keeping the meshed particulars from exploding her head.

“How do you put up with it?” 

“You don’t expect justice and you don’t get justice, so it’s got a kind of balance to it – you don’t got what you don’t waste your time lookin for.”

“You go on about the evil ol’ world the same as I do.”

“Now, girl, I never said it was evil. I just said it was awful, both ways: Horrible but leaves you chock full of awe if you’re payin attention. Downright  righteous awe.”

“Awe, shit.”

Rachel almost snorts wine onto the faded throw rug.

“You got any cranberry juice?” she asks

“No. What? – you never drink anything like that.”

“Wanna try it. Sposed to be good for the digestion.”

“You could digest the iron curtain.”

“Feels like I did.”

Jenny points to the empty truffle container. “So why did you eat the whole box?”

“Because they’re good.”