Episode 11: He Who Stays Put
Jenny and Seth and Jerry Garcia
Jenny wasn’t always the free-spirited postmistress of Looser Island.
Though sometimes that’s how it seemed. As if she’d always been there, as if she’d been washed ashore, an orphaned mermaid or selkie, or a statue carved from the island’s basalt and breathed into life by a god who loved whimsy above all.
As if she belonged.
Reminder that you can find the Cast of Characters on this Substack and also on The Dogs of Looser Island website here.
Also special thanks to Gini Chin, once again, for the photo.
And now back to Episode 11 . . .
Seth means many things. One of them is this: “He who stays put.”
In her first twenty-two years on this earth, Jenny drifted from place to place. Her mother, whatever-spirit-there-may-or-may-not-be-rest-her-soul, was a self-proclaimed hippie who didn’t want to be tied down. After her mother passed away, her father moved frequently in an attempt to find some place that would fulfill his longing for space to breathe, he later told Jenny, but also where he would feel he was meeting the minimum requirements of fatherhood.
Jenny emancipated herself at the age of seventeen and then continued as her parents had begun. She couldn’t tell if she was peripatetic by nature (on her mother’s side) or just by habit (on her father’s side), but either way she couldn’t seem to settle, until she found herself on Looser Island, pregnant, alone, but somehow, finally, home.
So she named her baby Seth.
Jenny wasn’t entirely sure of her unborn child’s paternity, having inherited her mother’s lackadaisical attitude toward social norms, including monogamy. And truth be told, she never tried to find out. She’d gone to visit a friend on Looser Island, contracted the stomach flu (she thought), called in sick from her job as receptionist for a dental clinic in Tacoma, and then realized she was pregnant. She considered an abortion, recognizing that she was barely more than a toddler herself, emotionally-speaking, but ultimately rejected that option.
Years later, she would say the sea told her not to go back to the mainland, and the wind counseled her to stay on the island and make a life for herself and her baby.
Jens Jensen scoffed, audibly, when she said that, but Alessandra understood.
(Jenny and Alessandra had become friends by the time Alessandra headed off to college, in spite of the fact that Alessandra was so much younger than Jenny, only two years older than Seth.
“I don’t want to get too woo-woo on you,” Jenny said, the first time the subject came up, “but the sun and the wind and the water, there’s a language there. If you shut down the logical part of your brain, the part that wants precise definitions and fixed meanings, you can hear what they’re saying.”
Alessandra laughed, and then visibly tried to turn it into a cough, to avoid hurting Jenny’s feelings, but Jenny heard the laugh under the cough, and smiled.
“I know, it sounds dumb.”
“No it doesn’t,” Alessandra said quickly. “I mean yes, it sounds crazy, but not to anyone who’s ever really looked at the water or listened to the wind. They would know what you meant. I know what you meant.”)
At the very least, it was Jenny’s truth. The fractured light on dimpled water, the heady scent of cedar trees after the slow embrace of the sun yields to night, the mad, mad Northern lights dancing as if tomorrow was already here . . . . In Jenny’s mind, these seemingly inanimate residents of the world had voices, and the voices said stay, so she stayed, and trusted that it would all work out.
Sometimes believing something can make it so. Not always, but occasionally. Jenny believed the Salish Sea and the North Wind when they told her to stay, so she stayed, and it all worked out, more or less.
After she’d exhausted her welcome at her friend’s house, she rented a tiny A-frame cabin in the woods, across from Jens Jensen’s sprawling sheep farm. She got a job as a part-time clerk at the Looser Island Post Office, and though she would not be eligible for maternity leave until she’d been on the job for a year, the post office manager said she’d make sure Jenny got a couple of weeks of paid leave when the time came.
Not long after remaking herself as a Looser Islander, Jenny’s car broke down, irreparably, so she picked up a decrepit Schwinn at a garage sale for five dollars, charmed by the bits of coral-colored paint still clinging here and there to the frame, and began commuting by bike.
At seven months’ pregnant she felt more than a little like a whale on two wheels. Notwithstanding the ubiquitous jokes about fish and bicycles (“A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle”), the bike was a fine substitute for a car, she felt.
And then she gave birth to a beautiful but smallish baby boy, and gave him the name that means Staying Put.
Jenny took the promised two weeks off, and went back to work.
It truly never occurred to her to look for childcare, and she likely couldn’t have afforded it even if the idea had occurred to her. Seth seemed a part of her as integral as an arm or a leg or an eye.
Monday through Friday, Jenny strapped Seth onto her chest (and later her back), and pedaled to work or anywhere else she needed to be, until someone gave her a kiddie trailer to attach to the bike. It was lovely when the sun flittered through the trees like dancing gems, and miserable when the rain came slashing down like a knife. When it snowed, Jenny and Seth stayed home.
Almost no one objected to Seth’s presence at the post office. If a customer came in when she was nursing Seth or changing his diaper, she just told the customer to wait. If it was Jens Jensen, coming in to copy the minutes for the Presbyterian Elders’ meeting, his mouth would screw itself into a kind of wordless snarl, but he wouldn’t say anything. If it was Celia Prewitt, she’d offer parenting tips while she waited, like the time she suggested painting Seth’s thumb with Tabasco sauce if he was still sucking it when he went to school. (Which was silly, Jenny thought, since he was just a baby at the time, and anyway if he wanted to suck his thumb right into adulthood, well, that would be his choice.)
When Seth got old enough to be mobile, a used playpen and some toys appeared in the post office lobby, as if by magic. Jenny set them up behind the counter, and everyone who came in would wave at Seth and talk to him and try to get him to smile.
Bringing Seth to work was easy, because he was a quiet, gentle, malleable child. With Seth, the Terrible Twos just weren’t. Jenny truly didn’t realize that was unique. He wasn’t in daycare, and she didn’t have any Mommy-n-Me playgroups or other children with whom to compare Seth. She didn’t see other children having meltdowns and doing the amazing Jell-O-child routine as their attempts to conquer the universe failed. She herself was an only child, and she’d never been the kind of teenager who was asked to babysit.
And because of the aforementioned lack of comparators, Jenny didn’t notice that as he got older Seth wasn’t picking up on letters and numbers like other children who were preparing to enter kindergarten, or realize that it was odd that he spoke very little, usually in sentences of one or two words.
It may seem impossible to believe, in hindsight, but Jenny had no idea Seth was different.
For one thing, she’d never had any reason to take Seth to the island health clinic.
Not when Seth was born—Ella had been in the post office when the contractions started, and she’d called the local doula, and together they’d driven Jenny back to her cabin, and helped with the delivery. Neither Doc Johnson nor any other doctor attended the birth.
Not during the first five years of his life—Seth was an amazingly healthy and strong child, with nary an ear infection.
Also, having been raised by itinerant hippies, Jenny wasn’t aware parents were supposed to bring their babies to the doctor regularly for well-baby visits and vaccinations.
(A couple of times when Doc Johnson came in and was making googly-eyes at Seth, he looked like he was about to say something, but then he just paid for the stamps or picked up his package and left. Probably he assumed Jenny took Seth to a doctor on the mainland.)
As a result, Jenny was content and more than content, until the second day of kindergarten, when Seth’s teacher called Jenny at work and gently asked why she failed to let the school know her son was developmentally delayed.
The next day, Jenny sat in the empty classroom, waiting for the teacher and the principal and the school nurse to meet with her, watching Seth play with blocks.
He wasn’t playing the way most five-year-old children play with blocks. He picked up a blue block, stared at it intently for several minutes, hugged it to his chest, kissed it noisily, and set it down again. A few seconds later, he started again with another block. Sometimes, he picked up the block he’d set down earlier. He seemed to like blue best, though a few yellow blocks were also showered with affection.
Jenny sat in the tiny chair designed for kindergarten students (luckily, she was a very petite woman), nervously rearranging the sage green tiered skirt that flowed over the edges of the chair and pooled on either side, and repeatedly pushing her hair—currently dyed a fiery red—over first one ear and then the other. She wondered briefly whether she should have removed her nose ring (Jenny was ahead of the curve on that particular fashion trend), or covered up the tattoos that cascaded down each arm (ditto). But then she decided to hell with that, these conservative, stick-up-their-butts school-types could take their preconceived notions and shove them where the sun don’t shine.
Except they weren’t stick-up-their-butts.
Jonna Thatcher, Seth’s teacher, was a large Black woman with a soft voice. She was wearing a long necklace with brightly painted ceramic fruits, and when she entered the room, Seth looked up, and opened his mouth wide in delight. He got up, and went to her, and she crouched down and enfolded him in a warm embrace, and he didn’t let go when she did, just stayed leaning against her chest and patting the ceramic fruits.
Marion Gregg, the principal, was an older woman (white, Jenny told herself self-consciously, having noted that Jonna was Black), and she was wearing a navy blue suit, and she did shake hands with Jenny as if commencing a corporate meeting, but then she sat right down on the carpet and patted the spot next to her invitingly, to encourage Seth to join her. Seth walked over and plopped himself heavily in her lap, and she said, “Oof,” and then patted his arm and smiled.
And the school nurse was a man with a pony tail, which instantly made him all right in Jenny’s estimation. (His name was Jacob, and he had a rotating assignment at various schools, but Jenny didn’t know that at the time, as he neglected to introduce himself in the meeting. A couple of years later they had a brief but very satisfying fling, and then he moved to Wisconsin.)
Marion probed the situation delicately, and Jenny shared the history: home birth with a doula, no doctor visits, no playgroups. Marion asked about the paperwork Jenny had filled out, listing dates of vaccinations and other pertinent information that didn’t jibe with her story. “Oh I just made that shit up,” Jenny said, laughing easily, and the other three adults smiled, almost involuntarily.
The-man-who-would-later-turn-out-to-be-Jacob explained his observations and professional opinion about Seth, and suggested a full medical examination by a doctor, preferably one who worked with special needs children, and Jenny nodded as if she was taking it all in, but only one word really stuck with her: “special.” Seth was special. Every Saturday Night Live skit and crude schoolyard taunt about special people and short buses echoed in her mind while the three nice, kind, helpful people talked and asked questions, and a metal ball of thought slammed erratically in her brain as if her head was a possessed pinball machine: specialspecialspecial.
“Does he get to stay in school?” she finally blurted, interrupting what she was sure was a very important comment by Jonna.
There was silence for a while, as the three of them looked to each other for an answer. Finally, the principal spoke. “There are better facilities on the mainland,” she said. “All schools are required to support IEPs—Individualized Educational Programs,” she explained, seeing Jenny’s look of bewilderment. “Some have more capacity than we do to help special needs students. But if you want him to stay here, and he wants to be in school here, he can stay.”
Jenny wasn’t stupid. She heard the ifs in that statement. She knew there were more ifs implied. But for now, it was enough.
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