Letters to Jenny (11 page)

June 1989

Abdominal muscles see their first use in months; will the elven armor be retired? A new chair is ordered. A new companion is gained. Some old stories are retold. An anniversary occurs. And a birthday occurs, maybe.

Jejune 2, 1989

Dear Jenny
,

Well, it’s a new month. I just finished last month, with a total of exactly 600 letters for the year to date—and this is the fourth letter this month. I—what? The last letter before this one? Oh, you wouldn’t care about that; it was just to some dull old publisher. So let’s—what do you mean, what publisher? Morrow, if you must know. Now let’s get on to—will you stop interrupting me?! Morrow’s a hardcover publisher, a major one. Now, as I was saying—good grief, girl, you’re as bad as your mother! Once you latch on to something irrelevant, you never let go! All right, it was this: last month the editor at Morrow phoned me and asked whether I would start a story for a New York Book Fair story contest later this year, and be the judge of the winning entry. That is, I would write maybe the first thousand words, and then the contestants who picked that up at the Morrow booth at the fair would finish the story, and I’d decide who did the best job. Well, I was in the middle of writing
Isle of View
then, but I said I’d do it when I finished the novel. So now the novel is done, awaiting only your word on how your name should be in the Author’s Note, so I wrote the story. It’s titled “Baby,” and it’s about this newspaper reporter who does a feature on black-market baby adoptions, and discovers that no matter what race or sex the babies are, they are all the same age, weight and length, and look like twins. What could account for this? That’s it—the contestants will finish the story, and I dare say some will have it turn out that the babies are really BEMs in disguise, waiting to take over the world. Oh, you don’t know what a BEM is? It’s a Bug-Eyed Monster, a standard item in cheap science fiction. BEMs are always chasing after femmes, which are—oh, you already know that. So my letter was to go with the story. Now aren’t you sorry you were so curious? You should have taken my word that it was dull.

I’m enclosing a few things: last Sunday’s Curtis comic, an item on saving a baby whale—you know, I just decided to join an organization called Greenpeace, that works to preserve aquatic creatures from extinction. Man does horrendous damage to the water folk, as he does to the air folk and the land folk, and if it doesn’t stop soon, there’ll be nothing much left on earth but man, and then man will set about exterminating himself too. I am disgusted. But I try to help save creatures in various ways, and this is one of them. I’m also joining an organization that fights censorship, because that’s something I hate. But I’m wandering from the subject. I’m also enclosing a picture I don’t like, which made me think of you—stop that, I didn’t say I don’t like you. It’s a picture of about six girls seeing the body of a friend appear in the water, their horror manifest. I thought of your friends when that car hit you, and I think that’s the way they looked. In this case, it was a drunken boat driver who ran over another boat and killed five young folk. Yes, they caught him. Our drunk drivers are just as bad as yours, more’s the pity. There’s also another letter enclosed for someone else; if your mother reads “Dear Andrea,” tell her she’s in the wrong letter, and to get on to this one. While you’re telling her things, tell her to do what I do about saving computer files: to program one key for an instant save, and hit that key compulsively every time she pauses. I do that in addition to having an automatic save feature. I’m ornery about problems; I don’t let the same one happen to me twice.

Your mother tells me about your days, which strike me as not much fun. I suspect you are a lot better patient than I would be. Are you able to read, if the book is in front of your face? I mean, I know you can’t just pick it up and hold it there, or move your head around much, but if it were right, could you read, or do your eyes not focus well enough for the small print? I go crazy when I don’t have my glasses on and then I have to read something; all I can see is the general shape of the words, like blocks lined up in rows. But if I wear the glasses, then I get seasick when I look beyond eighteen inches. So I’m forever putting them on and off, unless I’m wearing my half-glasses that I can peer over. A funny thing happened when the writer Jody Lynn Nye was here. I call Jody the Nymph, because she looks just like a nymph, only she wears clothes. She writes the Xanth Gamebooks, such as
Ghost of a Chance
; I don’t know if you’ve read those. They are where all the puns of Xanth have gone. She and I collaborated on the
Visual Guide to Xanth
, which is to be published this NoRemember. So she was here, last OctOgre, along with her husband and the artist, and we were talking. Every time I looked at her and put my glasses on, she took hers off. When I took mine off, she put hers on. Hers were just like mine, too. It was weird. Finally I figured it out: she needs her glasses for distance, while I need mine for close work. So I put mine on to focus on her at close range, and she took hers off; then when we looked elsewhere, long range, we switched. I guess you keep yours on all the time, so that doesn’t happen. Anyway, I was in the process of inquiring whether you can read, if the book is right. No, I realize that no one is going to stand there and hold the book in front of your face, and turn the pages when you blink; it would be hard to read, because the book would wobble and be at the wrong slant and all. They’d rather just read it aloud to you. But suppose the print were on a computer screen, and you could in effect turn the pages yourself, by pressing a button under your finger on the armrest? So you could sit there or lie there, with the screen just right, and read at your own pace or snooze in the middle without losing your place. Would you be able to read then, without getting a horrible headache? Because if you could, and would like to, they might be able to set it up that way. And if they could set up with an IBM AT-compatible system, which is what I use now, after four years on the DEC Rainbow, then I could send you a disk with
Isle of View
on it, and you could read the whole story of Jenny Elf in context. Because of course she’s only part of the story, and there’s a whole lot else going on, but she is intertwined with it throughout. This novel won’t be published until OctOgre 1990, and I wouldn’t want that disk to get into the wrong hands, but if this enabled you to read the novel yourself, even if it took you six months to get through it—well, first you have to decide whether you’re interested, and then your mother has to find out whether it’s possible.

Meanwhile, since your day isn’t all that nice—by my definition, your day won’t be nice enough until you are running through your yard and meeting the ducks who moved in during your absence—let me tell you about mine. I run through my yard—but my yard is an 87 acre tree farm. So my running route is 2.9 miles, from the house down along the forest path, beside the lake, through all the oak and magnolia and hickory trees, to the pump, where I prime it and pump the old bathtub full for the horses, then start my stopwatch again and run on through the slash pines, the dragonflies racing playfully with me and the blackflies trying to bite me, up to the gate at the north. Then back down through pines and oaks, taking a shortcut I carved for the horses, to the other side of our house, by which time I’m close to half way through my run. Then up the paved drive to the little magnolia tree, where, you know, nitrogen—STOP LAUGHING! THE NURSES ARE STARING AT YOU—and on up to the main entrance, which is about the three-quarter mark of my run. Then around and back down that drive to the house. Today I ran that run in twenty-three minutes and forty-one seconds, which is okay for me. It’s one sweat of a workout, I assure you, especially since the temperature was 90° F. But that’s how I keep healthy. I’m in my fifties, you know. If my first child had lived, I could have had a grandchild your age by now. Have you ever noticed how the old and the young understand each other better than the folk in between do? I saw a cartoon once, showing three people emerging from a movie. The posters said “Great fun for young and old!” The old man and the boy were laughing their heads off, while the ordinary man in the middle was looking blank. So then I came in and took my shower and washed my hair, which is dull business, so I sing in the shower, trusting no one can hear. Those old folk songs I memorized when I was your age. “Nicodemus” and “Danny Boy” and funny sea-songs and love songs and such; I like everything if it’s folk. I don’t know if you know most of the songs I know. If we ever meet, and no one else is around, I’ll sing some for you, but you’ll have to promise no one else can overhear; you know how it is. One of the funny ones goes like this: “My sweetheart’s the mule in the mine; I drive her without any lime; on the bumper I sit, and I chew and I spit, all over my sweetheart’s behind.” One of the serious ones is “The Ohio,” pronounced O-hi-O, about a man who drowns his girlfriend because she refuses to be his bride. A song can be ugly but beautiful, as I guess you know. Then lunch and here to this letter. After this I’ll have to proofread 27 fan letter answers the secretary typed and pack them off. Then, tomorrow, I can return to work on the story I have to do for someone else’s anthology, and finally get to work on my real project,
Tatham Mound
, about the American Indians who encountered Hernando de Soto. No it’s not fantasy, it’s historical and archaeological. If you promise not to tell, I’ll tell you a secret about that. Do you promise? No, I won’t accept a stuck-out tongue as an answer; I demand a firm blink. Okay, the secret is this: I got interested in archaeology because my daughter Cheryl was getting into it, and the local folk discovered an untouched Indian burial mound right here in Citrus County, Florida. That’s a rare thing; there are few if any left, and the culture of these Indians is unknown, because they all disappeared. What happened to them? Maybe this mound had the answer. What was needed was to excavate that mound scientifically, studying the placement of every bone and arrowhead and piece of crockery. But that would cost money, and there wasn’t money. So I gave the University of Florida the money to do it, and my daughter Cheryl worked on it, and now we know much more about those Indians than before, and I will write a novel to bring them to life and show how they perished. It’s a tragedy, all right; they were wiped out by plagues brought by the Spaniards. The evidence was in that mound. I expect this to be the most significant novel of my career, and tomorrow I get to work on it. But I don’t want folk knowing about the money yet, because then everybody would be asking me for money, and I just wanted that mound to get done. Uh, no, it couldn’t be left untouched, once discovered, because poachers would come and destroy it, as has been the case with most of the other mounds of Florida; that’s why so little is known about the local Indians. So it was excavated with respect, and my novel will really make the case for those Indians. I know what their land was like, because I live in it, and I know how the white man treated them. Forget about cowboys and Indians; this is a serious novel.

Sigh; I have rambled on for three pages. Well, you’re a good listener. Let me check your mother’s last letter, which just arrived today. She says you haven’t had a chance to answer about how you want your name in the Author’s Note. Well, let me know, so I can do it right and ship the novel off to New York. There is one more thing you maybe should know: I’ll be dedicating the novel to you, just to “Jenny,” however it is in the Author’s Note. Then folk can wonder who you are, until they find out at the end.

Your mother says they are setting up to rework your house, so that you can buzz around it in your blazing red wheelchair. She says she’s trying to figure out how to fit twice as much computer into half the space, and asks “ten pounds of dung in a five pound bag?” Another term for that description is—oops, there’s the Adult Conspiracy again. Well, I’ll sneak it in in brackets, so no one knows about my violation of the Conspiracy. The term is [blivet]. Don’t throw it around carelessly. Speaking of dirty things: she says that Ray’s car is now called the “Nitrogen Pot.” That must be some car! She also says she doesn’t drive much now. But after your accident—well, I had a car accident, back in the first year I was married. I was looking for an address, and took my eye off the road at the wrong moment, as I hit a reverse-banked turn. I lost control and sailed off a six foot bank at 40 miles per hour. I didn’t know whether I would wake after hitting ground. I remember the car going over and over. But I survived with only a bashed shoulder. I found my head in the back seat; this was before seat belts existed, and you bet I use them always now, as does every member of my family. The car was back on its feet and facing back the way it had corae. So it was a complete rollover and turnabout. I never recovered my confidence in driving, and I do little driving today. I taught both my daughters to drive, as I have a better temperament for that than my wife does, and now I’m satisfied to ride with them or my wife. Once a person has been truly touched by the disaster that an automobile accident can be, he or she does not forget. That may have figured into my attitude when I completed the novel of the young man who was killed by a careless driver, and with you. It’s one reason I don’t like to travel. My daughter Penny had an accident in thick smoke, and now she’s shy of foggy conditions.