Poor Jenny, Bright As A Penny

Oh, I want to write. I have been thinking and thinking about stories. But I haven’t written anything. I’m trapped somehow—or I was until I went to Georgie with it. She didn’t say much, but she gave me some books on writing to read. I have been in my room all day reading. It’s sunny out, but I don’t care. Ideas are springing into my head. And the ideas I had are becoming more solid. It’s the truth underneath a story, the strong true idea, the bones of a story, that I have to think about. I have a lot of thinking to do.

*

Jenny began hurrying home after school and locking herself away, reading and thinking. Soon she was behind with her homework, so she set herself to doing that first, grimly determined, dispatching it as fast as she could.

Then she would sit in the window in the long evenings putting stories together in her mind, pulling them apart and putting them together in other ways. She began to make notes, she made hoards of notes, tore some up, filed others away in drawers with paper clips binding them together.

And she sat for hours thinking. What is it I want to say? I know but I can’t put it to words. And how shall I say it? The thing that bothers me more than anything else is that I know so little. Is what I want to say worth anything?

*

I used to think that when I tried to see the things around me truly, I was looking at life. But what I saw was nothing compared to what there is. Even the had things I saw weren’t the worst things. I haven’t seen the depths of that, or the really beautiful things—they’re still waiting for me. There are unimaginable horrors, and there is brightness. I guess I knew this was so, a little bit. But I didn’t see it. The ugliness is there, and awful. But the bright part is brilliant. And huge. As if the whole world has stretched!

*

She thought of the places they had lived, forlorn apartments furnished with the discarded refuse of other’s lives. But then there were the sharp flashes of beauty, rain-smeared windows, sun on an apple tree. A sweetness in Mama sometimes. The quick, beautiful things, shining across the drabness.

When her ideas for stories were winnowed and sorted, this kernel of what she wanted to say was left bare and plain before her: Ugliness, with occasional brilliance. And the most powerful contrast of all is within people. Beauty and ugliness. Love and hate. Kindness and cruelty.

She chose six ideas that seemed to her to deal strongly with the contrasts in life. And with the perverse, ugly things that people did to themselves. Maybe, Jenny thought, I can say something about knowing good and evil and not being afraid to see them, and about people who don’t want to see them.

She chewed on that for a day or two.

Then one day she was ready, an idea had grown solid in form, and she began to write. The story was set in an ugly place and the woman was a sour, unimaginative creature with a weasel-sharp expression and legs the color of skim milk. Jenny showed the woman’s thoughts sharp and twisted, and sometimes yearning terribly. Then Jenny lifted her up, turned her a quarter turn, and handed her a miracle. A shining miracle. She let the woman dwell with it, examine it.

Then she let the woman do what she knew she would do—turn her back on the miracle and not admit to it. Return to her squalor. Just as a captive bird returns to the cage.

When the stories began, they flowed out. Jenny could hardly bear to take herself away to school, she only suffered school, and when she could bear it no longer, she played sick and Georgie wrote a note for her. She stayed home for four days, which ran into the weekend, and two days the following week. She hardly left her room, except to eat.

She would write until she was exhausted, then eat or shower—anything to refresh herself—and return to read back what she had written, rewrite paragraphs, rephrase sentences, sometimes reconstruct many pages, slowly building, breathing life into the flood of passions and fears she had unleashed.

She would work well past midnight and was up before dawn. She worked until finally she was empty. And when her energy was spent she was quite willing to go to school, make up her homework, do ordinary things. But she was pale, and Georgie made her go for long walks to get her out in the air. Sometimes Bingo went with her, but more often she went alone and climbed until she was out of breath, then found a place under a tree where she could look down at the hills and dream.

Once Ben went with her. They sat on a log on the side of a steep bank where they could see a valley yellow with blossoms. He told her about his sisters, Barbara, who was a year younger, and Carol, who had taken care of Ben and Barbara when Georgie worked night shift, and the older boys were away at school.

She studied Ben. She was easier with him now, but still—perhaps it was his training. He did not talk lightly, he had to be drawn out. She was becoming more adept at that, though. “Don’t you get bitter sometimes, with the messes you see people get themselves into? Doesn’t it make you sick of people?”

“You get disgusted with them. But it’s the way people are. You just face facts, you see them without their company manners. And it isn’t all bad, you’re close to something basic, something real in people.