The World According To Garp Read Free Page A

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