Riddance. Shelley Jackson

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СКАЧАТЬ conviction that she had gone at last. I ran all the way down Common Place Road in nightgown and slippers, eyes wide and wet, but turned back when I reached the factory drive, perceiving that she would never have gone that way, and sped back again, in at our front door (standing open), and straight through the house to the back porch, where, on the steps, staring off toward the river, my mother sat. I sank down beside her, she put her arm around me without taking her eyes off the swatch of sliding silk, and I never asked if she had decided to come back to me or never left in the first place.

      When I understood better what waywardness was, I looked for that, too, in my mother but could not find any more evidence of it than I had of the flounced skirt, though my father seemed to detect the taint of it even in the way she kept house or received the mail, while her familiar way with a grocer’s lemons once occasioned weeks of recriminations.

      But I saw with what hopeless hopefulness she adjusted the lay of a doily or straightened her chairs and her skirts when he was due home and, dismayed, thought hers an all too strait and narrow waywardness. Only, sometimes, when my father was out, did she take off her shoes and go out to stand awhile under the trees in her bare feet, very still and expressionless, and I saw that here was the flounced skirt at last, or what remained of it.

      I recall that after what my father deemed to be her indelicate pronunciation of “leg of lamb” at the butcher’s he struck her as I watched through the bedroom door, left ajar. “Marrying you was the ruin of me!” He fell on the floor and began pulling his beard and hitting himself in the face, a thing I was always happy to see. I heard him groan, “Bea, Bea, I wanted it to be different! You’ll forgive me, Bea!”

      I couldn’t help it, I laughed.

      My mother came to the door. Before she closed it she met my eyes and shook her head slightly. One of her cheekbones was higher than the other and something was strange about her eye on that side. At dinner I saw that a glossy cherry-red spot was rising from behind the lower lid, like a second, devilish pupil. I was afraid to see it watching me and kept my own eyes on my plate. I remember the meal as the very hypostasis of dread: a thin brown sauce spreading from under the slab of lamb as if it were leaking, a gray pile of one of father’s healthful grains, and some peas. When my mother came to put me to bed that night I shrank away from her.

      In my fear there was also an element of disgust, for like my father I was revolted by weakness. I was offended by my mother’s apologetic submission to my father, for it seemed obvious to me that she was the superior being, and I indicated my partisanship when I dared, hoping to inspire her to revolt. For instance, understanding that the incident at the butcher’s had enraged my father, though not exactly why, I subsequently made of leg of lamb my chief epithet. How clearly I remember shouting “L-leg of lamb leg of lamb leg of L-L-LAMB!” as the ruler came down on my thighs.

      To this day I do not greatly savor lamb.

      Then, of course, I returned to writhing, sobbing, and patting his feet in wordless entreaty. This may seem chicken-hearted but was in fact a sort of defiance, because he regarded groveling with such disgust, and I wonder now whether the same logic might not excuse my mother’s obsequiousness. “I would have expected more pluck from a whelp of mine,” he would say, and interrupt my “education,” as he called it, to page through a pamphlet on the principles of heredity: criminality, imbecility, and pauperism traced through several generations of tenement dwellers, mollusks, or pea plants; a cat who lost its forepaw in a steel trap, whose grandchild had a limp; and so on.

      It will be perceived that my father was a scientific American, and indeed he was a faithful subscriber to the periodical of that name, as also to Popular Science Monthly, The Telegraphic Journal and Electrical Review, The Medico-Chirurgical Review, The American Journal of Dental Science, Practical Sanitation, The Water-Cure Journal, and the like, with whose aid he proposed to manage his life, his business, my mother, and me. The books on our shelves were scientific and were ordered scientifically. Our house was kept clean by science, or so father supposed, though my mother often crept around with a dustpan and whisk-broom to make up for the deficiencies of our hand-pumped Whirlwind Sweeping Machine. We ate scientific food that we chewed scientifically as Father counted aloud, pausing (but holding the bolus ready for resumed hostilities) when he interrupted his count to tender us scientific descriptions of the activities in his corpus as the wholesome ingredients purged his system of impurities.

      You begin, perhaps, to get a sense of the range of my father’s interests. Some of his other enthusiasms were photography; telegraphy; the mixing of perfumes; the raising of silkworms; modern sanitation; antique dessert spoons; mesmerism; hydropathy; and novel methods of extracting sugar from melons. In some cases his interest did not extend beyond that of a critical onlooker, but he was often inspired to wholesale enterprise by the articles he read, and would write off for the equipment and materials to set him up in a new line of work, for to husband an inherited manufactory did not suit his impatient and choleric temperament. That same temperament rebelled at any sustained effort, however, so very few of these enterprises lasted beyond his initial infatuation. In some cases simply writing out an order satisfied the appetite aroused in him by the article or advertisement in one of his periodicals, and by the time a thousand packets of dung-colored, spiky seeds or a lump of waxy material arrived in a bumped, scuffed, stained, and belabeled carton, he had forgotten why he wanted them and sometimes even what exactly they were.

      More often he lost momentum only after he met the first serious obstacle, by which time half the house was given over to dyestuffs, say, or the grinding of lenses, and then my mother would enter the field to try to recoup at least some of his expenses. Far more practical than he, she became pretty knowledgeable about the various ways available to a lady entrepreneur to unload a very odd range of goods, and sometimes even turned a profit, though to my disgust she did not ever hold back any of the money she made to supplement the small allowance from which she supplied all her own needs and mine, as she might easily have done, but turned it in to my father, submitting meekly to his grumbling, for of course although he thought “peddling” beneath him, he nonetheless believed that if he turned his hand to it, he would do it better than anyone, always asked what he believed to be very canny questions about the deals she had struck, and invariably concluded by lamenting her sad want of acumen, when the truth was that without her acumen he would have been emphatically out of pocket and perhaps ruined us with his many nonsensical investments.

      His extravagances were never more flagrant than when he could style them research. For my father planned a great work, whose particulars were yet to be determined. Above all else he admired inventors, knew their names and stories, often spoke, though always in vague terms, of the inventions that he himself would unveil when he was ready, and pored over the official reports of new Patents and Claims with occasional exclamations of annoyance at those who, to hear him tell it, had anticipated ideas for which he had just been on the verge of filing a patent himself. His conversation at dinner was really a monologue on the latest discoveries, many of them of no utility in his line of work, such as a new method for ventilating railroad carriages, or for making artificial ivory out of caoutchouc, ammonia, chloroform, and phosphate of lime; and some quite unwelcome at the dinner table (or so I perceived—for I had a strong stomach myself—from the suddenly rather taxidermic appearance my mother assumed as her jaw froze in mid-bite), such as a new sort of verminous tumor in the stomach of the horse, an improved remedy for fecal stench, or a way to induce sluggish leeches to suck (soak them in beer). He treated us to expositions on the dyeing of ornamental feathers; female labor in Germany; improvements in chandeliers; the preservation of blood from slaughterhouses in the form of a jelly obtained by adding quick or slaked lime; the Inter-Continental Tunnel planned between Tarifa and Tangiers; a new factory proposing to make paper from the cactus plant; a new method for identifying falsification in documents via photographic copies; and an experiment in weighing the rays of light, which showed that the weight of sunlight on the earth was three thousand million tons, “a force that but for gravitation would drive it into space” (Practical Magazine).

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