What We Do to Stay in a Life

Janny. Everybody called her pretty. And she was. She was every mama's vision of what her boy should bring home when he turned 18, and made the pronouncement, "Mama, Daddy. This is Janny. She is my intended."

Janny turned every head everywhere she went. It wasn't because she was a sultry beauty. Goodness knew, those types of girls were a dime a dozen. Janny turned heads because she radiated. She effervesced. She fluoresced. She was a light, glowing in a way that never overpowered anyone else's light. Janny's spirit and her person were inseparable, interwoven beauty and goodness. They could not be teased apart. The sultry girls wanted to hate her because all the best boys in town wanted a girl like Janny. She was all the boys' first choice, but not a single one of those girls could find it in them to hate on that girl. She was smart and nice, considerate. She would move heaven and earth to help any elderly person with their laundry, the leaves in their yards, the mail. She took time out of her day, every single day, to do the good and selfless deeds that any other self-interested person would shove to the wayside.

She gave and gave, not only to the elderly, but to those young, vulnerable children of the town. She spent time in the library every Saturday morning, volunteering to read to the children. Their parents sent them on Saturday mornings in droves, with the hope that just a kernel of Janny's goodness, beauty, and considerate nature might rub off on their offspring’s beastly little souls. They lapped up every word that came out of her mouth, each syllable a golden droplet of honey.

Janny never even held hands with any of the boys in town. Her sights were set outside of town. She had plans. Everyone in town knew her story, though, and every soul in the town granted her grace, because it cost nothing to give it, so said the old ladies in the beauty shop when they saw Janny walking to school in the mornings.

"That's a girl who has surpassed her roots, don't you think, Sue?" said Cleo, an octogenarian who had always wanted to have the sweet, cornsilk gold hair flowing in waves down Janny's back suddenly sprout from her own scalp in a cascade of youth and sunlight.

"Oh, she certainly has. I do not believe I have seen her daddy in more than five years. She cares for those parents of hers unlike any other human. You know her mama is in the sanitorium up the way dealing with tuberculosis for the past ten years," said Sue.

"I did know that," said Cleo, shaking her head in pity. "You know, my Jimmy went to school with Janny's mama and daddy. They were always headed for trouble, weren't they?"

"I suppose," said Sue. "But they managed to have that beautiful soul of a girl." She kept putting the color into Cleo's hair. "Sweetheart," said Sue with nothing but love for Cleo. "You know white hair doesn't really take color. Do you want a rinse or something? I cannot give you the results you want."

"No rinse, Sue. I just kept thinking that coming to your shop is one of the high points of my month. I believe I would come in weekly just to leave my Robert at home to talk to the wall. At least the wall won't get bored answering the same questions for hours at a time." Cleo sighed. "You know Jimmy's son, Jimmy, Junior. He says Janny keeps her distance from all the kids in school but in a way no one feels put off."

"That girl is going to make something of herself. Just you wait," Sue said.

Janny knew what everyone said. Her nose itched every time someone in the town was talking about her or her idiot parents. She never spoke of them because she had a couple rules: Don't speak ill of the dead; and don't give anyone cause to know more about you than you were willing to share. Where Janny learned these pearls she hadn't a clue.

No one knew the facts of her life. Her daddy was an idiot because in finding himself impotent in life, he took it out on the two souls who could have and would have loved him unconditionally. Her mother was an idiot for confusing teenage lust with love and holding the misapprehension above her own wellbeing and that of her child.

Her mama wasn't in a sanitorium. No, she was in a cage in the basement. She had chewed off her fingers over the nearly ten years she had been put in the cage by Janny's father. Their basement smelled as foul as foul could be, which meant Janny could never have friends over because the odor permeated every cubic inch of that house.

Janny's daddy was a brute. He beat on Janny's mama, and then when Janny's mama was in the cage, he saw Janny blossoming into the most beautiful flower he had ever seen. He set his sights on his daughter, and he knew it was wrong. It was so wrong. He knew it, but he couldn't help himself or his feelings.

Janny took food to her mama, and her mama warned her about her daddy. Janny bloomed while her mama faded, and as she took on the glow of new womanhood, her daddy could not be deterred. Janny's daddy took away the key to the basement and Janny's mama's cage. Janny knew her mama might die down there, but she couldn't turn in her daddy. Once the law came into their house, they would remove Janny, and she might wind up somewhere even worse. Somewhere with boys and their daddies pawing at her and coming to her every night, under the assumption that Janny owed them something for the sanctuary they were providing her. It was the fear of something worse that kept her in the house of horrors with her daddy.

He came into her room at night, every night, to put a kiss on the top of her head. Each night he left her room, leaving that Judas mark on her head, Janny thanked the good lord her daddy left her room. Then one night things changed. Her daddy didn't kiss the top of her head. He bent over her, with his hand at the ready to clamp down on her mouth or her neck, Janny sat upright from her bed with such force, head-butting her daddy across the room. He lay on the floor stunned. Janny saw the trickle of blood coming from his head. But still, he took only a second or two to regain knowledge of what was happening, and in his eye Janny registered that he made a determination. He was going to put her into the cage with her mama. "Janny-Girl," he said, "you do not know what you have unleashed." He left her room silently, followed by slamming her bedroom door and the sound of another door in the house slamming only moments later.

It had been well over a month since Janny had seen her mama and the altercation with her daddy. Even then, her mama was so entirely weak, filthy, and starved by Janny's daddy. Her mama had chosen the wrong boy. They married because they "had" to get married. Then their tiny, white rose of a daughter was born not long after the wedding--which had been held on a Saturday morning, just Janny’s mama and daddy, their parents, and the preacher and his wife in the parsonage across the street from the Greyhound Bus station.

Janny's mama and daddy had had big plans for their lives before they had become a cautionary tale. All the parents in town warned their children they could never become rocket scientists or professional football players or ballerinas if they gave in to the temptations of the flesh. Mothers and fathers said, "Young man (or young lady), succumbing to your urges will destroy every dream for your life you ever had, unless that dream is spending your life sitting on the couch watching re-runs of Sea Hunt, The Lone Ranger, or The Cisco Kid, and holding a baby in your arms while your friends are out having the times of their lives."

Janny knew to her very marrow her mama had died, and she could swear she felt the moment her mama's soul left her body. She heard noises in the basement, sounds of something being kicked around over and over. Janny climbed from her bed, making her way to the kitchen and the basement door. She sat in the dark, scalding, salty tears rolling down her cheeks. She heard her daddy coming up the stairs, ascending lazily and blindly toward the darkened kitchen. Every angry thought, feeling of hurt, hate, betrayal, and vengeance became a physical presence propelling Janny. Her hand rested on the doorknob, and the knob and the entire door became an extension of her. When her daddy reached the top stair, Janny opened the door as he reached for the knob on the other side. In his confusion, he could not make sense of the door coming right at his face with speed and superhuman force. The door's contact with his skull resulted in a very loud crack, and he dropped, then fell with dead weight hitting each stair all the way back to the basement floor, his trajectory punctuated by his head or body hitting the walls bracketing the stairs.

Janny locked the basement door. She wouldn't go down there, at least not for a long time. Maybe not until she turned 18. She would leave this place and make a better life for herself than the one her mama and daddy had made for themselves, which turned out not to be much of a life after all. And maybe Janny would live happily ever after, or maybe she wouldn't, but she would leave, and the people in the town would always wonder what that beautiful, perfect girl, Janny did with her life.