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 Fi
elds 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."
And that was what made her vulgar, too. (And that was where she got her famous title: A Sexual Suspect, the autobiography of Jenny Fields.)
Jenny Fields discovered that you got more respect from shocking other people than you got from trying to live your own life with a little privacy. Jenny told the other nurses that she would one day find a man to make her pregnant--just that, and nothing more. She did not entertain the possibility that the man would need to try more than once, she told them. They, of course, couldn't wait to tell everyone they knew. It was not long before Jenny had several proposals. She had to make a sudden decision: she could retreat, ashamed that her secret was out; or she could be brazen.
A young medical student told her he would volunteer on the condition that he could have at least six chances over a three-day weekend. Jenny told him that he obviously lacked confidence; she wanted a child who would be more secure than that.
An anesthesiologist told her he would even pay for the baby's education--through college--but Jenny told him that his eyes were too close together and his teeth were poorly formed; she would not saddle her would-be child with such handicaps.
One of the other nurses' boyfriends treated her most cruelly; he frightened her in the hospital cafeteria by handing her a milk glass nearly full of a cloudy, viscous substance.
"Sperm," he said, nodding at the glass. "All that's one shot--I don't mess around. If one chance is all anyone gets, I'm your man." Jenny held up the horrid glass and inspected it coolly. God knows what was actually in the glass. The nurse's boyfriend said, "That's just an indication of what kind of stuff I've got. Lots of seeds," he added, grinning. Jenny dumped the contents of the glass into a potted plant.
"I want a baby," she said. "I don't want to start a sperm farm."
Jenny knew this was going to be hard. She learned to take a ribbing, and she learned to respond in kind.
So they decided Jenny Fields was crude, that she was going too far. A joke was a joke, but Jenny seemed too determined about it. Either she was sticking to her guns, just to be stubborn--or worse, she really meant it. Her hospital colleagues couldn't make her laugh, and they couldn't get her to bed. As Garp wrote of his mother's dilemma: "Her colleagues detected that she felt herself to be superior to them. Nobody's colleagues appreciate this."
So they initiated a get-tough policy with Jenny Fields. It was a staff decision--"for her own good," of course. They decided to get Jenny away from the babies and the mothers. She's got babies on her brain, they said. No more obstetrics for Jenny Fields. Keep her away from the incubators--she's got too soft a heart, or a head.