When Jenna arrived on the ward, Jared was sitting with the three cops, all of them eating Light and Fit yogurt and hard-boiled eggs. She breezed in, already recovered, it seemed, but for the bruise around her neck and her pajamas. She picked up her bacon and eggs in Styrofoam from under the hot yellow lights and waved to the men, then went and sat at the front of the room as if she knew the unspoken rules.
“Too bad she’s a fatty,” said Jack, elbowing Jared. The cops had no complaints about anything and none of the other patients knew why they were in there, but their stubborn refusal to be miserable was disharmonious with the thick, melancholic air.
Jenna’s first day in group Jared noticed she had a cobra tattooed on her ankle. It was the only thing about her that was explicitly rebellious and, perhaps for this reason, it managed to crawl inside his crowded brain. She was “on pajamas,” an AWOL and suicide risk, her naked ankle exposed—cleanly, sweetly shaved—with the body of the cobra snaking its way up from her socked foot to somewhere he couldn’t see. Afterward she drank cocoa and he sat at the opposite end of the couch while they watched “Conan.” They didn’t speak, but they didn’t have to. Jared knew that life with Jenna would deprive him of the confidence and status men secured from the companionship of a skinny woman, but something about her soothed him. She seemed so normal and almost giddy, but the scar told a different story, one he could immediately understand. And Jared, who suffered nearly without relief from the moment he opened his eyes in the morning until the next morning when he opened his eyes, felt this commonality might finally make him able to love.
“Dude,” said Christopher, the youngest cop, “that chick is fat.” He was an ex-marine, married nine years by age 30, volunteered at 28 charities and worked out not seven but fourteen times a week, never missed Sunday mass with his wife and six kids.
Jenna had learned this about him, as well as the fact that he thought all TV cops except for Sippowitz were “friggin’ Disney cartoons,” on her third day when she had made the mistake of sitting opposite him at lunch in the cafeteria.
“Oh, and he has a pet rat,” she added between sit-ups in the exercise room. Jared was amazed, not only that she had amassed so much information in so short a time, but that she had chosen to remember it. He had been on the ward for nearly two months and had learned almost nothing about anyone—including Jenna.
When Jenna told her mother she intended to marry Jared, her mother looked up as if God were involved in the conversation. “Now she abandons her impossible standards,” she said. “Do you really want to spend the rest of your life explaining that you met your husband at McClean? Or having to lie?”
Jenna shrugged. “I wouldn’t have to lie. That’s you—you would have to lie. Anyhow, we’re going to have one of those Elvis weddings. Doesn’t that sound like a blast?”
“Weddings aren’t supposed to be fun, Jenna. Weddings help you acquire things you need. Toasters. Blenders. Dishes. The way charities hold benefits for starving children.”
Jenna stared out the grill that covered the window. She had made up her mind the same day she woke from her coma that from now on her life would be happy—even if her whole family was miserable: her mother, father, grandparents hapless gamblers watching the chips scooped away again and again but still returning to the table as if this time they might not lose all. Then losing all. Sitting quietly with Jared in the big TV room or having sex against the washing machine in the middle of the night were obstinate refusals of the only life she’d seen. They whispered of hope for the future.
“What will you do after you’re married?” asked Jenna’s mother, shaking her foot as though responding to repeated administered shocks.
“Have a baby?” Jenna shrugged.
