Blast | June 17, 2022

BLAST, TMR’s online-only prose anthology, features prose too vibrant to be confined between the covers of a print journal. Anna B. Moore’s sentimental narrative “Jenny Dies by Jet Ski” is a delightful exploration at the intersection of memory, soap operas, and life.

Jenny Dies by Jet Ski

By Anna B. Moore

Two years after my mother left, I decided to use my savings for a nine-inch black-and-white Magnavox television. It cost seventy dollars and took up nearly half the space on the desk in my bedroom.

“She saved up her own money for it,” my father said to everyone: his colleagues at the college, his sister over the telephone, my older brother at the dinner table. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Third grade ended; the second custody hearing began. Dad drank bourbon, read The Mill on the Floss in his recliner or met with lawyers; my brother ran through the alleys of Grinnell, the town where we lived, with his friends. Iowa endlessness. An echo of tires on the street, a bark of neighbors’ dogs on their chains in backyards, a squeak in the hinge of the breadbox door.

I discovered the soap opera One Life to Live. I watched it from my bed, images muted by afternoon light and shadow from my windows—images mostly of Karen Woleck (played by Judith Light, her first role before her launch to fame on Who’s The Boss?). Karen was keeping a secret. She met men in hotel rooms and then drove home to wait for her husband Larry to get home from his job as a surgeon at Llanview Hospital. She was in a constant state of withheld tears, her voice quaking as she took illicit calls on their upstairs phone or told Larry she had to run to the store for a steak and instead drove to the Wallingford Hotel to turn a trick. Her hair was blond and combed back over her head like Lynda Carter’s Wonder Woman, held in place by what I thought might be scalp grease. Why didn’t Karen wash her hair? How could Larry be unaware that something was incredibly wrong with his wife? He saw patients at Llanview hospital in his white doctor’s coat, hair swooshed across his forehead like a wing. He came home ready for dinner and then some affection by the fire as Karen trembled or stared over his shoulder into their living room air.

During commercials, I shuffled my cards for a new game of solitaire. It was bright outside and very hot, the air in my room even hotter, my windows all open wide. We did not have air conditioning. It was 1979. Karen was on the witness stand, testifying against the twin brother of her pimp, and goaded by the prosecutor, she lost control and confessed to being a hooker. The whole town watched as she shrieked that she liked it, that she couldn’t help it, that she was so lonely. A feeble breeze blew; a lilac branch scraped against my window screen; a shadow swayed on my grungy, yellow rug. Her screams were the only sounds inside the house. I was transfixed.

*** 

When my mother had lived with us, she sometimes ordered me to play outside, even if it was winter. I never knew what to do, so I stood stunned and alone by our swing set, my arms tight against my body, my fingers cold and stiff inside my mittens. Sun gleamed on all that snow, and I squinted into the white. Our sandbox was crusted with ice. The glare hurt.

In summertime I still felt blank, but there were more options on a Saturday afternoon, when nothing was on TV. I might sit on the wooden swing, the chain warm in my hands, and pump my legs but then lock my knees so I could watch my feet sweep across the cornfield behind our backyard and into the sky. I might climb the weeping willow and wait on a branch, or crawl under the back porch and stare at the barn, or chip paint from the house with my finger and watch a line of ants move across the sidewalk. Time was eternal and relentless. I needed emphasis, benchmarks, beginnings and ends, starts and stops, conflicts and resolutions.

They began on Monday with Ryan’s Hope, but it was the longest half hour ever. It started at 11:30 AM and only prepared me for All My Children. I wondered about their mother. Who was she? I pictured a woman in the sky with a slender face and lots of lipstick, her delicate white hand reaching down to all those unrelated people in Pine Valley. She held them through corporate takeovers, dog attacks, abducted children, heart surgeries, imprisonments in dark wells, near-drownings in distant grottoes. Erica Kane, the show’s heroine (played for decades by Susan Lucci, star of the ABC TV movie French Silk), left me bewildered. She just wasn’t that pretty, with her sloped nose and tiny chin, her movements ungraceful and guarded. At a photo shoot in New York City (the photographers and crew on location), with an actual skyscraper and fountain behind her, Erica posed, her arm a stiff branch over her head, bejeweled evening cape draping from her body like a tablecloth.

The reflection of my bedroom door was bright on the screen of my Magnavox, washing out the starkness of blacks to whites. Passersby stopped at the fountain, whispered and nodded, beamed at Erica’s beauty. I sat on my bed and held my koala bear against my side, fiddled with his black felt claws. A crowd formed, applauding at the way she pretended. Fade to commercial.

***

Ten minutes before noon, ten minutes before one, ten minutes before two, and ten minutes before three, ABC showed a preview. It started with a chorus of “Love . . . in the afternoon,” to violins and harps. A beat and then a clip of usually a couple—a hero who grabbed a heroine or said heroine’s sister or best friend or cousin or mother—and declared his love or lust. These scenes occurred in a variety of settings, each of them spotless and free of clutter or dust or uniqueness. Living rooms lined with matching drapes, hotel hallways with polished end tables, entryways with wall-mounted coat racks. If the couple were outdoors, they made their declarations in parks with lots of brick retaining walls and iron fencing or on benches of boathouses, light shimmering to indicate a reflection of nearby water. They had sex everywhere, especially after a shipwreck or plane crash on an island. They might split a coconut and then kiss and fall to the sand below the view of the camera.

But previews might also cut to veiled widows in mourning, unshaven killers of children, suited businessmen wrongly found guilty of murder. A gun might fire from a dark corner; a body might drop. A tornado might cave a ceiling into a roomful of people, ballroom chandeliers crashing to the floor, women screaming. ABC played the same previews for several days, so after two or three had passed, I waited for a new Love in the Afternoon, watching my clock and counting each commercial as it ended, my hands poised over my solitaire game: One. Two. Three. Four. Then the screen turned to blue, the logo gleamed, the song began, the sun flashed through the circle in the letter b of abc to Jack and Lily or Tom and Erica or Asa and Olympia or Tina and Cord or Robert and Jackie Templeton (the role that skyrocketed Demi Moore to stardom). I flipped three cards from my stockpile. Why did they use the word love for kissing and invisible sex but also for death, crime, and natural disasters? I moved a King to a blank space. The preview ended. I felt in my chest the ache for the show to resume, that painful splinter between fade out and fade in. Not a sound in the house.

***

After the custody hearings ended, my brother and I moved to Iowa City to live with my mother. Ryan’s Hope was canceled and replaced by Loving. I watched it from the new, used bed my mother had bought for me, a single foam mattress atop a maple bed frame and a plywood board. My television sat on the desk that had belonged to my grandmother.

Loving was set in a town called Corinth and focused on Lily, an ill and sickly-looking piano virtuoso with pale skin and fragile limbs and stiff blond hair. She wore only white, mostly dresses layered in ruffles with long sleeves and Victorian necks. Her father Garth forced her to practice piano all the time and rarely let her leave the house to go out with the other kids. But then Jack came along, his chest wide as the sky. He was relentless and adoring, calling up to her like Romeo . . . they fell in love . . . Lily wanted to leave her father but couldn’t; she was too little and white, and for some reason Corinth was always so dark . . . Jack was running through an indoor street . . . and then Lily was gone. They sent her away to become less frail.

My mother had covered the surface of my grandmother’s desk with a pane of glass. It reflected the television itself, its white sides and screen; a tarnished silver cup that had belonged to my father’s mother, where I kept pencils and pens; a lamp whose base was a heavy bottle of Dom Perignon that my parents had shared decades before to celebrate my father’s doctorate.

As I got older, after Loving was canceled, my mother sometimes watched soaps with me on the nineteen-inch color Magnavox in our living room. We sat on the couch, my feet in her lap.

“Do you think she’s beautiful?” I asked about All My Children’s Jenny Gardner (the role that ignited Kim Delaney’s career). Jenny’s lips formed an overbite that gave her face a perfect pout. Beneath her slanted cheekbones, I saw her sadness, her tender desire. I felt it in her eyes when she was a working-class teenaged servant, when she was on the run in New York, when she became a model after Greg broke her heart because he became paralyzed. I was thirteen.

“Almost,” my mother would say. I sipped water from my plastic Iowa Hawkeye cup, the black logo faded. “But there’s something off with her nose.”

“Do you think she’s beautiful?” I asked about One Life to Live’s Tina Lord. Tina had mousy blond hair that feathered several inches out from her head, bulbous lips that looked slightly blistered, and glassy blue eyes. Her life was rich with suitors. She had sex with cowboy Cord Roberts, her true love, in the back of a pickup truck on a bed of hay, a few strands in her hair when they sat up afterward.

“No. I don’t even think she’s pretty.”

“Do you think she’s beautiful?” I asked about General Hospital’s Bobbie Spencer. Her smile was so wide it looked like it hurt her cheeks, and her breasts were enormous. She took a hospital patient’s blood pressure, grinning as she squeezed the inflation bulb.

“Not beautiful. Just pretty.” Didn’t anyone ever say anything about Bobbie’s breasts? How could everyone in Port Charles not notice them?

“Do you think she’s beautiful?” I asked about Erica Kane. Erica’s husband, Travis Montgomery, arrived home from political campaigning and saw her standing by the fireplace, waiting for him.

“No,” said my mother. “But she does have beautiful eyes. She’s very pretty.”

Travis breathed hard through his strangely large nose, removed his jacket, and said, “I have missed you beyond reason.” And then he swooped her up to the bedroom, one arm under her knees, the other around her back. Erica folded her legs into him and clasped her arms around his neck.

The only people who told me I was pretty were older women—mothers of friends, passengers on the Greyhounds I took to see my father on weekends, clerks who sold housewares at Younkers. Boys did not compete for me. Jealous girls did not plot my ruin. I owned no evening gowns. I had no confidence or ambition, only lavish longings. Travis held Erica’s face in his hands. The windows behind the television revealed a ground-level view of our street, our driveway, a square of our front lawn that my mother mowed herself despite our status as renters. They were in bed now, their bodies under gleaming soft sheets. Erica placed her slender palm in the center of his hairy chest. I bit a cuticle.

***

Viki Buchanan was not who I wanted to be—matronly and giving and proper to her core. I envied nothing about her. It was my day off from work. I was twenty-two, pulling bongs on the couch in my apartment, letting the soaps fall, one after the other. One Life to Live was all about Viki—her split personality, her heart transplant, her breast cancer, her unearthed brothers and sisters, her amnesia, her vast wealth and newspaper empire. But I did not want to transplant myself into her body or kiss men like she did, like a nun—self-consciously, with a closed mouth. If I use my tongue, Viki seemed to say, if I exhibit hints of desire—a hard exhalation, a shimmer of saliva—I might gross you out. I did not want her short, feathered hair or her business suits and frumpy turtlenecks or her unsculpted and middle-aged body. She had been middle-aged since I was seven years old, her dress and demeanor as far from sexy as the horizon line from my bedroom window in Iowa—that line I always felt but could never comprehend. No one ever explained it to me until I was in high school and took an art class, where a drawing teacher called it the vanishing point, where lines and planes merge only to disappear.

Pulling bongs to falling soap operas day after day when you are twenty-two or watching them fall without bongs when you are thirty-three, is to waste time, kill time, while away, hold off, sit around; to twiddle the thumbs, watch the clock tick, drag the feet; fritter, putter, dawdle, tarry, delay, dillydally, loiter, lollygag, piddle, trifle, idle, vegetate. It is longing, yearning, mooning, coveting. It holds everything still.

***

Summertime in Grinnell. I was old—about to start junior high. I was honoring the visitations in the custody agreement, but I no longer wanted to because there was nothing to do at my father’s house. My brother was back in Iowa City with my mom. The yellow rug was still on my bedroom floor—a deep yellow fuzz, the color of a chick that was far too dark—and I must have brought my television over from Iowa City because it was there on my desk, the windows behind it, the lilac bush scraping away.

Over the previous year, General Hospital had run the Ice Princess story line and invented Luke and Laura, the first supercouple, the pair who originated the term. Their nemesis, Helena Cassedine, was played in a few episodes by Elizabeth Taylor, whose movies I had never seen. She was my father’s favorite celebrity to complain about—beautiful, he said, but a dreadful actress and getting so fat. But General Hospital had given me so far the most exciting story of my life, one that did not and did not and did not end: Luke and Laura’s love, Robert Scorpio’s English accent, the World Security Bureau (like the FBI), an evil snow machine that the Cassadines were planning to fire at Port Charles from their secret island. Luke, Robert, and Laura were hiding in the giant plastic trees and leaves of the jungle, plotting overthrow. Laura was the wanted, the desired. She always had been, but her gums were large and her lower jaw inflated and her hair defied category, neither blond nor brown nor red. But she was the center of two men. She worked in a bar.

Luke and Laura’s wedding had happened in a November, so I never saw it because I was in school. Shortly afterward, Laura disappeared. But now she was back in Port Charles, following Luke, eavesdropping. I’m still alive! she would fantasize. I’m still alive! I love you and I never stopped! But she kept stalking instead. On a Friday, she hid around a corner or behind a shrub or inside a barrel or beneath a window, listening for a moment to reveal herself; on Monday, a few dockhands would walk past her barrel, or another woman would walk into the diner and throw herself at Luke, and Laura would change her mind. Devastated and confused, she would follow someone else—her mother or brother or father or cousin or former friend.

Time was running out, because Laura was about to leave Port Charles for good and allow Luke to think she was dead forever. But at the last moment, she decided to return to the scene of their wedding—the grounds of a mansion. A vast shady lawn, a giant hedge. She walks the grounds in a blouse and a tight skirt and heels. Luke has decided to return to the grounds at the very same time . . . they keep missing each other . . . around some trees . . . around some pillars . . . Luke stands on the balcony overlooking the sweep of lawn, downing champagne in his grief . . . he is about to leave . . . and then he sees a woman in the distance, walking toward the gazebo . . . he drops his glass, leans forward, cannot speak, spins around, runs through the mansion and onto the grass. . . .

“Laura!” He holds his hands out in front of him like a zombie, reaching for her. I am standing in the corner of my room, my hands on my chest, panting.

She spins around. Sees him. Takes him in, holding her tiny pocketbook in one hand.

“Laura!”

They run and embrace. Laura is silent and Luke is hysterical, weeping with joy. Laura lets herself be held. I weep too—all that love, all that loss. The hot breeze through the windows is stifling. I had been waiting for that scene all week. I smile and cry, smile and cry, the sounds of my sniffles lost in the screams of Luke’s joy, ringing through the walls of the house. He holds her.

Oh, to be there instead of here.

***

For the last two decades, Anna B. Moore has been publishing creative nonfiction, essays, and short fiction in a variety of literary journals and magazines, including American Scholar and Smokelong Quarterly; work is forthcoming in Identity Theory and the Offing. Her first novel will be published by Unsolicited Press in 2024. She lives in Northern California.