The World According To Garp (2 page)

When the soldier in the movie theater first started changing seats—when he made his first move on her—Jenny Fields felt that the Valentine treatment would be just the thing for him. But she didn’t have an irrigator with her; it was much too large for her purse. It also required the considerable cooperation of the patient. What she
did
have with her was a scalpel; she carried it with her all the time. She had not stolen it from surgery, either; it was a castaway scalpel with a deep nick taken out of the point (it had probably been dropped on the floor, or in a sink)—it was no good for fine work, but it was not for fine work that Jenny wanted it.

At first it had slashed up the little silk pockets of her purse. Then she found part of an old thermometer container that slipped over the head of the scalpel, capping it like a fountain pen. It was this cap she removed when the soldier moved into the seat beside her and stretched his arm along the armrest they were (absurdly) meant to share. His long hand dangled off the end of the armrest; it twitched like the flank of a horse shuddering flies away. Jenny kept her hand on the scalpel inside her purse; with her other hand, she held the purse tightly in her white lap. She was imagining that her nurse’s uniform shone like a holy shield, and for some perverse reason this vermin beside her had been attracted by her light.

“My mother,” Garp wrote, “went through her life on the lookout for purse-snatchers and snatch-snatchers.”

In the theater, it was not her purse that the soldier wanted. He touched her knee. Jenny spoke up fairly clearly. “Get your stinking hand off me,” she said. Several people turned around.

“Oh, come on,” the soldier moaned, and his hand shot quickly under her uniform; he found her thighs locked tightly together—he found his whole arm, from his shoulder to his wrist, suddenly sliced open like a soft melon. Jenny had cut cleanly through his insignia and his shirt, cleanly through his skin and muscles, baring his bones at the joint of his elbow. (“If I’d wanted to kill him,” she told the police, later, “I’d have slit his wrist. I’m a nurse. I know how people bleed.”)

The soldier screamed. On his feet and falling back, he swiped at Jenny’s head with his uncut arm, boxing her ear so sharply that her head sang. She pawed at him with the scalpel, removing a piece of his upper lip the approximate shape and thinness of a thumbnail. (“I was
not
trying to slash his throat,” she told the police, later. “I was trying to cut his nose off but I missed.”)

Crying, on all fours, the soldier groped his way to the theater aisle and headed toward the safety of the light in the lobby. Someone else in the theater was whimpering, in fright.

Jenny wiped her scalpel on the movie seat, returned it to her purse, and covered the blade with the thermometer cap. Then she went to the lobby, where keen wailings could be heard and the manager was calling through the lobby doors over the dark audience, “Is there a doctor here? Please! Is someone a doctor?”

Someone
was
a nurse, and she went to lend what assistance she could. When the soldier saw her, he fainted; it was not really from loss of blood. Jenny knew how facial wounds bled; they were deceptive. The deeper gash on his arm was of course in need of immediate attention, but the soldier was not bleeding to death. No one but Jenny seemed to know that—there was so much blood, and so much of it was on her white nurse’s uniform. They quickly realized she had done it. The theater lackeys would not let her touch the fainted soldier, and someone took her purse from her. The mad nurse! The crazed slasher! Jenny Fields was calm. She thought it was only a matter of waiting for the true authorities to comprehend the situation. But the police were not very nice to her, either.

“You been dating this guy long?” the first one asked her, en route to the precinct station.

And another one asked her, later, “But how did you know he was going to
attack
you? He says he was just trying to introduce himself.”

“That’s a real mean little weapon, honey,” a third told her. “You shouldn’t carry something like that around with you. That’s asking for trouble.”

So Jenny waited for her brothers to clear things up. They were law-school men from Cambridge, across the river. One was a law student, the other one taught in the law school.

“Both,” Garp wrote, “were of the opinion that the
practice
of law was vulgar, but the
study
of it was sublime.”

They were not so comforting when they came.

“Break your mother’s heart,” said one.

“If you’d only stayed at Wellesley,” said the other.

“A girl alone has to protect herself,” Jenny said. “What could be more proper?”

But one of her brothers asked her if she could prove that she had not had previous relations with the man.

“Confidentially,” whispered the other one, “have you been dating this guy long?”

Finally, things were cleared up when the police discovered that the soldier was from New York, where he had a wife and child. He had taken a leave in Boston and, more than anything else, he feared the story would get back to his wife. Everyone seemed to agree that
would
be awful—for everyone—so Jenny was released without charges. When she made a fuss that the police had not given her back her scalpel, one of her brothers said, “For God’s sake, Jennifer, you can steal another one, can’t you?”

“I didn’t
steal
it,” Jenny said.

“You should have some friends,” a brother told her. “At Wellesley,” they repeated.

“Thank you for coming when I called you,” Jenny said.

“What’s a family for?” one said.

“Blood runs thick,” said the other. Then he paled, embarrassed at the association—her uniform was so besmirched.

“I’m a good girl,” Jenny told them.

“Jennifer,” said the older one, and her life’s earliest model—for wisdom, for all that was right. He was rather solemn. He said, “It’s best not to get involved with married men.”

“We won’t tell Mother,” the other one said.

“And certainly not Father!” said the first. In an awkward attempt at some natural warmth, he winked at her—a gesture that contorted his face and for a moment convinced Jenny that her life’s earliest model had developed a facial tic.

Beside the brothers was a mailbox with a poster of Uncle Sam. A tiny soldier, all in brown, was climbing down from Uncle Sam’s big hands. The soldier was going to land on a map of Europe. The words under the poster said:
SUPPORT
OUR
BOYS! Jenny’s oldest brother looked at Jenny looking at the poster.

“And don’t get involved with soldiers,” he added, though in a very few months he would be a soldier himself. He would be one of the soldiers who wouldn’t come home from the war. He would break his mother’s heart, an act he once spoke of with distaste.

Jenny’s only other brother would be killed in a sailboat accident long after the war was over. He would be drowned several miles offshore from the Fields’ family estate at Dog’s Head Harbor. Of his grieving wife, Jenny’s mother would say, “She’s still young and attractive, and the children aren’t obnoxious. At least not yet. After a decent time, I’m sure she’ll be able to find someone else.” It was to Jenny that her brother’s widow eventually spoke, almost a year after the drowning. She asked Jenny if she thought a “decent time” had passed and she could begin whatever had to be begun “to find someone else.” She was anxious about offending Jenny’s mother. She wondered if Jenny thought it would be all right to emerge from mourning.

“If you don’t
feel
like mourning, what are you mourning for?” Jenny asked her. In her autobiography, Jenny wrote: “That poor woman needed to be told what to
feel
.”

“That was the stupidest woman my mother said she ever met,” Garp wrote. “And she had gone to Wellesley.”

But Jenny Fields, when she said good-night to her brothers at her small rooming house near Boston Mercy, was too confused to be properly outraged. She was also sore—her ear, where the soldier had cuffed her, hurt her; and there was a deep muscle cramp between her shoulder blades, which made it hard for her to sleep. She thought she must have wrenched something in there when the theater lackeys had grabbed her in the lobby and pulled her arms behind her back. She remembered that hot-water bottles were supposed to be good for sore muscles and she got out of bed and went to her closet and opened one of her mother’s gift packages.

It was not a hot-water bottle. That had been her mother’s euphemism for something her mother couldn’t bring herself to discuss. In the package was a douche bag. Jenny’s mother knew what they were for, and so did Jenny. She had helped many patients at the hospital use them, though at the hospital they were not much used to prevent pregnancies after love-making; they were used for general feminine hygiene, and in venereal cases. To Jenny Fields a douche bag was a gentler, more commodious version of the Valentine irrigator.

Jenny opened all her mother’s packages. In each one was a douche bag. “Please
use
it, dear!” her mother had begged her. Jenny knew that her mother, though she meant well, assumed that Jenny’s sexual activity was considerable and irresponsible. No doubt, as her mother would put it, “since Wellesley.” Since Wellesley, Jenny’s mother thought that Jenny was fornicating (as she would also put it) “to beat the band.”

Jenny Fields crawled back to bed with the douche bag filled with hot water and snuggled between her shoulder blades; she hoped the clamps that kept the water from running down the hose would not allow a leak, but to be sure she held the hose in her hands, a little like a rubber rosary, and she dropped the nozzle with the tiny holes into her empty water glass. All night long Jenny lay listening to the douche bag leak.

In this dirty-minded world, she thought, you are either somebody’s wife or somebody’s whore—or fast on your way to becoming one or the other. If you don’t fit either category, then everyone tries to make you think there is something wrong with you. But, she thought, there is nothing wrong with me.

That was the beginning, of course, of the book that many years later would make Jenny Fields famous. However crudely put, her autobiography was said to bridge the usual gap between literary merit and popularity, although Garp claimed that his mother’s work had “the same literary merit as the Sears, Roebuck catalog.”

But what made Jenny Fields vulgar? Not her legal brothers, not the man in the movie theater who stained her uniform. Not her mother’s douche bags, though these were responsible for Jenny’s eventual eviction. Her landlady (a fretful woman who for obscure reasons of her own suspected that every woman was on the verge of an explosion of lasciviousness) discovered that there were nine douche bags in Jenny’s tiny room and bath. A matter of guilt by association: in the mind of the troubled landlady, such a sign indicated a fear of contamination beyond even the landlady’s fear. Or worse, this profusion of douche bags represented an actual and awesome
need
for douching, the conceivable reasons for which penetrated the worst of the landlady’s dreams.

Whatever she made of the twelve pairs of nursing shoes cannot even be hinted. Jenny thought the matter so absurd—and found her own feelings toward her parents’ provisions so ambiguous—that she hardly protested. She moved.

But this did not make her vulgar. Since her brothers, her parents, and her landlady assumed a life of lewdness for her—regardless of her own, private example Jenny decided that all manifestations of her innocence were futile and appeared defensive. She took a small apartment, which prompted a new assault of packaged douche bags from her mother and a stack of nursing shoes from her father. It struck her that they were thinking: If she is to be a whore, let her at least be clean and well shod.

In part, the war kept Jenny from dwelling on how badly her family misread her—and kept her from any bitterness and self-pity, too; Jenny was not a “dweller.” She was a good nurse, and she was increasingly busy. Many nurses were joining up, but Jenny had no desire for a change of uniform, or for travel; she was a solitary girl and she didn’t want to have to meet a lot of new people. Also, she found the system of
rank
irritating enough at Boston Mercy; in an army field hospital, she assumed, it could only be worse.

First of all, she would have missed the babies. That was really why she stayed, when so many were leaving. She was at her best as a nurse, she felt, to mothers and their babies—and there were suddenly so many babies whose fathers were away, or dead or missing; Jenny wanted most of all to encourage these mothers. In fact, she envied them. It was, to her, the ideal situation: a mother alone with a new baby, the husband blown out of the sky over France. A young woman with her own child, with a life ahead of them—just the two of them. A baby with no strings attached, thought Jenny Fields. An almost virgin birth. At least, no
future
peter treatment would be necessary.

These women, of course, were not always as happy with their lot as Jenny thought she would have been. They were grieving, many of them, or abandoned (many others); they resented their children, some of them; they wanted a husband and a father for their babies (many others). But Jenny Fields was their encourager—she spoke up for solitude, she told them how lucky they were.

“Don’t you believe you’re a good woman?” she’d ask them. Most of them thought they were.

“And isn’t your baby beautiful?” Most of them thought their babies were.

“And the father? What was he like?” A bum, many thought. A swine, a lout, a liar—a no-good run-out fuck-around of a man! But he’s
dead
! sobbed a few.

“Then you’re better off, aren’t you?” Jenny asked.

Some of them came around to seeing it her way, but Jenny’s reputation at the hospital suffered for her crusade. The hospital policy toward unwed mothers was not generally so encouraging.

“Old Virgin Mary Jenny,” the other nurses said. “Doesn’t want a baby the easy way. Why not ask God for one?”

In her autobiography, Jenny wrote: “I wanted a job and I wanted to live alone. That made me
A Sexual Suspect
. Then I wanted a baby, but I didn’t want to have to share my body or my life to have one. That made me
A Sexual Suspect
, too.”