The World According To Garp Read Free Page B

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