Letters to Jenny Read online

  THE WHISTLE STORY IS BASED UPON A DEVELOPMENT IN JENNY’S THERAPY PROGRAM. JENNY HAD GOTTEN A WHISTLE, AND WAS ABLE TO BLOW IT. THIS WAS A SIGNIFICANT ACCOMPLISHMENT, CONSIDERING THE GENERAL PARALYSIS OF HER FACE. SO I MADE A STORY ABOUT IT, POKING FUN AT HOSPITALS IN GENERAL. BUT I HAVE TO SAY THAT CUMBERLAND HOSPITAL IS A MUCH NICER PLACE THAN THE ORDINARY HOSPITAL, BEING RATHER LIKE A RESORT IN APPEARANCE AND ATTITUDE, AND THIS STORY HAS NO RELATION TO REALITY THERE.

  THESE LETTERS CONTAIN SEVERAL MENTIONS OF COMPUTERS IN CONJUNCTION WITH JENNY’S MOTHER. SHE EARNS HER LIVING BY PROGRAMMING COMPUTERS, THUS IS RIPE FOR TEASING. THERE WILL BE MORE OF IT. IT SEEMS THAT JENNY LAUGHS WHEN HER MOTHER GETS TEASED, AND HER MOTHER LOVES TO HAVE JENNY LAUGH, SO SHE ENJOYS GETTING TEASED. THIS IS A POSITIVE ATTITUDE.

  May 1989

  * * *

  A right big toe uses a right useful computer to right difficult communications. 24-X = 12+X. One person gives a story to another, who may or may not have missed something. A realization of hair loss incurs a moment of sadness. And a happy reunion takes place.

  * * *

  Mayhem 5, 1989

  Dear Jenny,

  I figured out what happened to the last letter: this word processor puts a “ruler” at the top of the file, setting the margins and things. When I set up a new file, for the Jenny letter, it put on its default ruler (yes, your mother will explain that in more detail than you care to hear; just ask her. She’s eager to start in, if you just give her the teensiest bit of encouragement) at the top. Then I used my “letter” macro to put my letter format on, forgetting the default format, which was now off the screen. So when I printed, it took the first ruler, which was the wrong one, and ignored the second. Then when I reset the paper, I put it in wrong. Growl!

  I have things to tell you from the fun to the awful, and not enough time to tell it all, because I’m in a Jenny chapter of Isle of View now, with Jenny Elf and Che Centaur and Sammy Cat captives in the bottommost bowels of Goblin Mountain, and I want to get back and find out how they fare. Jenny is about to meet Gwendolyn Goblin—Um, I’d better check with you on this. She’s lame; I always knew that. That’s why the goblins wanted a horselike steed for her, so she could ride around instead of walking, and be princessly, or more properly chieftainessly because goblins have chiefs not kings, despite her handicap. But why foalnap a centaur foal, instead of a mere regular horse or something? Because, I now realize, there is more than lameness wrong with Gwenny. She doesn’t see well. If she rode a centaur, the centaur could see things and tell her, so that she would always know with whom she was dealing and what was going on, and never make embarrassing mistakes. But you see, this notion stems from your story about the blind princess, so it’s not wholly mine. Your mother told me she would ask you if it’s okay to tell that story here, and if you agree, Jenny Elf will tell it. But to have Gwenny Goblin with poor sight too—well, that fits so well that I think I’ll do it, unless you scream blankety murder or blow the whistle on me. No, no, don’t blow that whistle! The last time you did that—well, never mind.

  Back to business: suppose I cut out the nice parts and cover the nasty parts instead, and—what? The other way around? Brother, you’re fussy today! No, leave that whistle alone; I’ll start with the nice.

  Remember last time when I told you about the wrens in the bicycle bag? How they didn’t come back? That was Thursday I found the nest being started. Well, Sunday morning when I returned with the bike, using a new bike bag, a wren flew out of the other one. So I went inside and opened the bathroom window right next to it, quietly, and watched. Sure enough, Carroll and Lina Wren (down here we have Carolina wrens, with reddish undersides) flew in immediately, perched on the bike and looked all around to make sure I was gone. They had returned to the nest! My daughter Penny happened to drive up from St. Pete that day—the nice thing about daughters is that they visit even after they grow up and move away—and I told her about it, and she said I hadn’t looked closely enough. Her beady daughter eyes had spied an egg in that nest! A couple of days later there were two eggs there, and now there are three. So we have a family started here, and how glad I am that I took the trouble to set up that bike bag, though I thought they weren’t using it. I’ll report on developments as they occur. As I have said, wrens are good to have around the house; they are bold little birds who clean out the bugs that are trying to sneak into the house.

  Now an ugly item. Ask your mother whether she should read it, as I happen to know she’s already sneaked a peek at it. She’ll skip it if you ask her to. This is from the news, and you may have picked it up already. A group of teenage boys in New York City went “wilding”—that’s a new term—and ran through Central Park at night beating up anyone they could find. They found nine or ten people. One of them was a lady jogger. They hit her in the face with a brick and raped her and hurt her so badly that they left her for dead. Several hours later when help came she had lost three quarters of her blood. They put her right into Cute Care and managed to save her life. That was last month. Now she has come out of her coma and is able to squeeze someone’s hand on command and move her eyes, and she evidently understands what is said to her, but they don’t know yet whether she will ever recover completely. Her life will never be the same, regardless, I thought of you when I read about this, because though the circumstances of your injury were different, your situation is similar. I think you can understand how that woman is feeling. She is recovering faster than you, because (I think) she was hurt more in the body than the head, while you got bashed worse in the head. But none of it is any fun. I don’t expect you to feel any better because someone else got hurt, but if you are the kind who prays, you might pray for her. You know what she needs.

  Back to a nice item. Your mother sent me two of your pictures—no, don’t glare at her, she means well, honest she does, you just have to make allowance for mothers—of princesses—no, not the originals, she made copies, you don’t think she’d risk the originals, do you? So stifle that glare—uh, where were we? Somewhere in that sentence I got lost! Also your story about the blind princess. So now you get my critique. Stop that! Come back from under that sheet! You’re disturbing the Bed Monster! I told you this was a nice item, I think. Your spelling is like mine, which means you are a creative person. The only one in my family who could match my bad spelling was my dyslexic daughter Penny. Oh, I can spell now, of course; I learned it when I was an English teacher, and had to abandon my creativity. Sigh. I don’t know whether I’ll ever recover. But your pictures—what do you mean, what makes me think I’m an art critic? I took art classes for six years and once thought to be an artist, so there! Why didn’t I become an artist? Let’s change the subject. What? Look, we really don’t need to go into that. Oh, all right: I realized that I was not good enough to make it as a commercial artist. Now are you satisfied? I feel your pictures are marvelously mature, considering your age, and expressive. Maybe you’ll be able to do what I could not, and be an artist. But it’s something else that brought me to this paragraph. One of your pictures is of a woman with her baby, and she is crying. I’m not sure what the story is there, but I don’t think that’s the blind princess, unless maybe there’s a chapter I missed. But what I notice is her hair. It flows out and forms a kind of cape behind her, framing her upper body, I love that. I remember when—but no need to go into that.

  Oops, you say you want to go into that? Sigh. All right. When I was eleven years old, I knew a girl who was twelve. No, I’m not making this up. She was everything desirable in a woman, as I saw her, I loved her. No, no one took it seriously, and certainly she didn’t; what would this fine young woman want with a boy of eleven? But my mental picture of her remains to this day, and I think I still love her, over forty years later, in my way. I know it by the hair. Her hair was the length of that of the woman in your picture, and though it did not flare out like that—she wore it in two long braids, mostly—I like to think that maybe it could have, had she wanted it to. To this day the first th
ing I notice about a woman is her hair. Have you seen pictures of the singer Crystal Gayle? Right—she’s my favorite singer. Because of that hair. Oh, she sings well, very well, but I really didn’t notice her singing until I saw her hair. So when I see your picture, and that hair, oh Jenny, it touches me. Perhaps by no special coincidence, I have a lady goblin in Isle of View named Godiva, who has hair like that. And of course in a prior Xanth novel I had Rapunzel. Nada Naga, in Heaven Cent, has hair like that too, and younger Prince Dolph loves her. Now you know why.

  And an in-between item. I understand they have to give you nerve blocks, because you get pain, I have half a notion how that is. Some years back, when I was doing more strenuous exercises than I do now, my right arm started hurting, especially when I moved it, and it got to the point where it was getting hard for me even to type on the computer keyboard. So I saw the doctor, and it turned out to be tenonitis, or inflammation of the nerve. Not a life—threatening ailment, and it doesn’t sound like much, but if I moved my arm suddenly I could just about faint from the surge of pain. It was a job sleeping at night, because when I rolled over, the pain jerked me awake. Medicine didn’t help. Finally the doctor gave me a shot of Novocain in the nerve. That wasn’t a nerve block, and it didn’t make the pain go away, but it did reverse its course, so that in the following months I was able, slowly, to reach farther before the pain started. About the time my right arm got better, it started in the left arm. This time medicine helped, but it still reversed grudgingly. All told, it was about two and a half years from start to finish, and it wiped out all my arm exercises. I had done as many as fifty chins on my study beam, and a lot of Japanese pushups, and I had muscles on my arms. All gone now. Running is the only exercise I maintained. But in the course of this, I learned that pain was not necessarily bad. I found that when I knew exactly what caused it, and how to avoid it, and could control it by reaching only as far as I cared to tolerate the level of pain, I could get along with it. I get the feeling that you suffer pain, and you don’t want to make a scene about it and get everyone all up in a heaval, so you just tolerate it. Sometimes the pain is better than the shot in the nerve. Okay.

  Your mother got tired of waiting for me to forward the “Curtis” comic strip, so had them run it in your local paper. Okay, I’ll just enclose the ones I had already cut out, plus a cartoon about the unpleasantness of having a shot in a nerve or wherever. Tell her that Adept #6, Unicorn Point, is already out, in hardcover; if she makes the library ignore the bad reviews and stock it, she can read it. And I didn’t mean to make trouble for you with that Mary and Ann problem; I can give you the formula to solve it, if—you say not to bother? Well, it’s no trouble, really. Uh, okay, I’ll drop it.

  Mayhem 12, 1989

  Dear Jenny,

  Remember when I said I didn’t think your picture illustrated the flower story? Ouch! Five lashes with a wet noodle. When I got into it to adapt it I saw my mistake: I was thinking of Lily, not her mother, and the picture was of her mother. Anyway, I did the scene, and have printed it out for you. But don’t go straight to it; let me explain the background first.

  Che Centaur, the winged foal, is. captive in Goblin Mountain. Jenny and Sammy go with him, voluntarily, because Jenny feels the foal needs company. They meet Gwendolyn Goblin, the daughter of Godiva Goblin, who turns out to be a rather nice twelve year old girl. The reason Godiva wanted a centaur companion for her was to help her get about and to see things, because she is a bit lame and so nearsighted that everything farther than a foot or two away is a blur. Jenny’s problem was solved by her spectacles, but Gwenny’s problem can’t be solved that way, so she really does need help. She has a chance to be the first female chief of the goblins—a chiefess—who can make the goblins behave much better, but if any of them learn about her sight problem, they will kill her and put in a male instead, and things will be as brutish as they have always been with goblins. So Godiva really does have good reason for what she has done: only a centaur can work so well with Gwenny that the goblins will be fooled, and she can rule. That’s part of the larger problem in this novel: Jenny and Che have agreed not to tell, because if they do, Gwenny will die, and she really doesn’t deserve that. But can Che agree to be prisoner of the goblins for the rest of his life? So he hasn’t made up his mind.

  Jenny and Che and Gwenny get into a Tsoda fight, squirting bottles of the water of Lake Tsoda Popka at each other (we happen to live on Lake Tsala Apopka, here in Florida: another of those odd coincidences) and get drenched; it’s great fun. Godiva doesn’t quite approve of this, for some reason, but of course mothers don’t have to have reasons for their objection to fun. So the kids clean up (Che has to face away and close his eyes so as not to see any Panties) and Jenny tells a story instead. She has to adapt it to Xanth terms, which is tricky, and it doesn’t work perfectly, but the essence comes through. That’s the excerpt I printed out for you. At the end, their shared dream is shaken apart when the mountain trembles: Cheiron Centaur is commencing the siege, by having rocs drop stones. The battle has begun. Okay, now at last you can go to that scene. This is my first draft, so maybe there are typos, and I may change things later. If you see something that is fouled up, let me know and I’ll fix it before sending the novel to the publisher. I’ll also show a copy to the Elfquest folk.

  Um, it occurs to me that you may feel that Gwenny is a name too close to Jenny. Well, I pondered this, but it just does seem the best way to simplify Gwendolyn. One letter of a word can make a big difference; I don’t confuse you with my daughter Penny, for example. Penny is 21 now, in college, with a job, but she’s still my little girl. So I think the name’s all right.

  On to other business. I’m enclosing a Sunday Curtis comic you may have missed, and a cartoon about the space shuttle launch; if you look at it twice you’ll see what’s funny. And two clippings about girls you may like: one saved her friend’s mother’s life, and the other sued her boyfriend when he stood her up for a prom. These are your type of girl, right? Plus an envelope with Polish stamps— oh, these’ll never fit in the little envelope I typed! Well too bad, I’ll type a bigger one. What do you care about Polish stamps? Well, they have pretty pictures of horses, penguins and dragonflies. The letter was sent to my old address, but managed to reach me anyway.

  I understand you are using a computer now, to help communicate. I’m glad of that. Maybe they’ll set you up with a paintbrush program, so you can paint pictures on the screen. We have Microsoft Paintbrush, which uses a mouse; you can paint good pictures with it, if you have the patience, and save them or print them out. If they haven’t gotten something like that for you yet, blink your eyes and wiggle your toe until they do; I suspect you could have a lot of fun with the screen and that mouse control, and maybe turn out some great pictures.

  I also understand you are back in Elven Armor again, and casts on your arms. You put a good face on it, but I know that isn’t much fun. I’d tell you to look on the positive side, but I know it’s a pain, so might as well say so. One of the periodic debates I get into with those who believe in God is why God allows awful things to happen to folk who don’t deserve it. Don’t tell me you were a bad girl so you were punished by being almost killed. But of course I explain it all in my Incarnations series: Satan is doing it. Early next year the final novel, And Eternity, will tackle the matter of God and resolve it. You’ll probably like that one, when you get old enough to sneak it past the Adult Conspiracy censors. Anyway, I understand also that you are getting a blazing fast red wheelchair, and that the nurses in the halls will be set spinning when you zoom by too fast to see. “What was that?” one will ask, “A bird? A plane?” and another will reply: “No, that’s Spinning Jenny!” You know I joke about the doctors and nurses, and how they can get piled up ten deep, but I’ve actually had some experience with the real work that they do. I collaborated with a doctor on a book about kidney disease, dialysis and kidney transplants, and I interviewed doctors, nurses, and patients and learned a lot. The doct
or changed his mind after I found a publisher for the book, and I had to drop the project, which I think was too bad; it was a good book. But by that avenue I got to know pretty well folk who were being saved from dying by the doctors and nurses, and what it took to keep them alive. If you want to know a lot about kidney dialysis, I can tell you, but not in this paragraph. I have also had some absolutely infuriating encounters with callous or incompetent doctors and nurses. So I have seen both sides. Just so you know that when I tease a person or a profession, that does not necessarily reflect my underlying opinion. Each profession seems to have its good examples and its bad ones, and this is true for writers as well as doctors and nurses.

  Oh, I almost forgot: yes, the wrens are doing nicely.

  The eggs are still there, and all seems well. Our magnolia trees continue to bloom. I see them when I ride the bicycle out to fetch the paper in the morning—it’s a mile and a half round trip—and the bunnies along the drive. Also when I do my exercise run, which covers most of our tree farm. We have pretty big blue passion flowers now, too. And yes, I saw a dragonfly exactly like the one in the corner of the envelope, green and blue; it was probably the one who posed for that picture.

  So have a harpy day, Jenny, and don’t forget to ask about that paintbrush program. You don’t have to wait to get all the way better, to draw again; you can do it now, if they have the setup.

  Mayhem 19, 1989

  Dear Jenny,

  Yesterday I finished the novel proper, and this morning I finished the Author’s Note for Isle of View, I’m sending a printout, which your mother may or may not read to you, as she sees fit. No, don’t blink your eyes angrily at her; she has reason. Let me explain.