Riddance. Shelley Jackson

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СКАЧАТЬ did not then recognize. Indeed, for a long time I did earnestly try to master my unruly speech, and in sentimental moments the fantasy rose up before me of the loving family life to which I would matriculate once I had solved my little problem: the parlor, of an evening—myself, reading aloud with superior enunciation and eloquent gestures—my parents’ faces bright with candlelight and pride! But increasingly I believed it to be impossible, and knew my father for a brute for punishing me for something I could not help. And a brute could not figure in those fantasies of mine. It had been a long time since I had seen anything like tenderness in even the way he treated my mother; so those dream candles guttered and went out.

      I often loitered near my father’s study as he made his experiments, hopeful that something would go wrong, and once, at least, this paid great dividends. The occasion was the arrival of the Galvano-Faradio Magneto-Electric Machine previously mentioned, which promised to Tune the Entire Organism, Restoring Balance and Harmony to Disordered Nerves, and Sending Vitality Coursing Through the Body. I watched through the door as, moving with deliberation, he unbuttoned his cuffs and collar, took off his shirt and folded it and set it aside, then his undershirt. He had a patch of bear-black hair between naked, womanly breasts. I do not recall that I had ever seen them before. He took hold of one wire and after hesitating a moment fastened the claw-grip at its end to one nipple. He connected the other wire to the other nipple. It comes to me now, as it did not then, that this was a curious site to choose and that perhaps he was engaged in something other than scientific inquiry or medical treatment. I have heard that there are those who take erotic pleasure in pain, their own or others’, but I know nothing of such perversions of sensuality—and little enough, to be candid, of its orthodox course—so shall leave further speculation to those better informed.

      As I edged a little farther into the room, my father took up the pamphlet and consulted it again, holding it in both hands. Then he reached out slowly and switched on the Magneto-Electric Machine. A strange expression came over his face and he jerked about, dropping the pamphlet and batting at the wires, but they did not come loose; finally he seized hold of one wire and with a powerful yank pulled it quite free of the machine, which spat cobalt zips of light and then went dead. He hunched over, breath coming in tearless sobs, then carefully parted the jaws of the dangling wire to detach it from his nipple. The other still connected him to the dead machine. Suddenly he perceived me watching him. He stared at me for a moment, the wire hanging from his hand, then struck at me with it.

      Many things then happened at once. I sprang back, receiving the protruding corner of a credenza in the kidneys. The wire, missing its target, flexed wildly, and its tip caught him in one nostril and scored a line from there down to his lower lip. His sudden movement threw his weight against the wire that was still affixed to his nipple and ripped it free, so that he cursed and clapped both hands to his breast; the first wire, borne thoughtlessly along, flexed again and struck him, though this time with less force, on the forehead. I leaned back against the credenza as if I were quite comfortable there, and made myself laugh, though my side hurt very much. Blood was coming from both his nipple and his lip, and his pale stomach was jumping up and down with his breath.

      “Monster! Banshee!”

      “It is not my fault, Father,” I said. “Perhaps the machine was on an incorrect setting. Why don’t you try it again?”

      “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” He lunged at me and got me by the ear, twisting it as he pulled me against him, until I cried out. “I’ll let go if you can say, ‘Please, Papa, pick me a peck of pickled peppers.’” My face was against his sweating side; he smelled sour.

      I could not say it, as he knew very well.

      Now that he had the best of me he seemed to swell; his stomach broadened, the worm of blood that had started wriggling down it froze as if alarmed. “You would like to curse me, wouldn’t you? But you just can’t find the words!” He laughed loudly, his rage almost forgotten in enjoyment of my shame.

      Let us bring down the curtain on this sorry scene—it can go nowhere good. Suffice it to say that I could never witness his misfortune without ultimately suffering a greater one.

      It is probably not possible to feel completely innocent when one is always being punished, so I supposed myself to be a fairly wicked character, and while I was sometimes sorry for it, I felt myself a hopeless case, and gave in to a life of sin and stuttering. Indeed, my father always punished me a little more than I thought my transgressions were worth, so I felt that I had paid in advance for any crimes I might wish to commit, and would be improvident not to commit them. By, for instance, watching my parents through a crack in their bedroom ceiling that I had widened with a nail file, an often boring vigil enlivened by the certainty that my father would be incensed at the illicit advantage it gave me to possess a knowledge that he did not know I had. Or hiding a lump of ambergris that he had acquired at great expense in the back of a kitchen drawer, where it reposed for many years, imbuing the vicinity with a mysterious fragrance. Or tampering with the wiring of a new gadget. Thus I balanced my books. If after a particularly criminal act I thought I might have overdrawn my account, I got an uneasy feeling, and sometimes even goaded my father to punish me again, on the rare occasions that he lacked reasons of his own to do so. At this I became very adept, playing on my father’s rage as other, happier daughters might on the spinet, rousing and calming it in orderly arpeggios, until I was ready to release it. The feeling of superiority and control that this gave me was worth the pain of a beating to me, and the system worked to my satisfaction until I stupidly succumbed to the temptation to show him that I did not care much about the kind of pain he dealt me. Then he sought other ways to punish me, and found them.

      My first rabbits were not really mine but my father’s, intended for the table. When he slaughtered them I grieved but little, since through all the moments of our acquaintance a spectral gravy boat had bobbed, reminding me of their destination. But these rabbits got more rabbits before they died, and I petitioned my father for the raising of them. His enthusiasm for rabbit-breeding having waned, he agreed.

      Do not care excessively for anything, not even your own self, and you will be invulnerable. So I thought and so I sought to conduct myself. I made a grim game of hiding away my favorites, but when they were discovered, and delivered to our hired man Lucius, who killed and skinned them, I taught myself to watch. In this way I schooled myself in hardness and thought myself a pretty cool customer. But then came Hopsalot, the weapon I put into my father’s hands. He did not look like a weapon, he was fat, furry, and indolent, with floppy ears, but I loved him, though I tried not to show it.

      That I had failed I learned on the occasion of a piece of petty mischief. My father had arranged his collection of dessert spoons in order by their year of issue, one of the rare enterprises that he carried through to completion. I had carefully rearranged them. Not having any very high opinion of his discernment, I imagined that he would never notice—the joke was to be a private one—and pictured him taking out his case and polishing each spoon before putting it back in its slot, his lips bunched up with pleasure, while I savored a different pleasure of my own. But my sabotage was discovered after all, and my father confronted me. Aware of the magnitude of my crime, I stammered so badly that I could not answer him, a circumstance that invariably infuriated him. He rushed out of the house and to the shed—there were the hutches; took up his knife from the shelf (I was clinging to his arm now, and groaning in an uninflected monotone, for I could not discover any words in myself, such was my distress); opened the hutch and took out Hopsalot, who hung in his hand as tame, comfortable, and soft as an old hat.

      “D-d-d—”

      He raised his brows, cocking his head in mock solicitude, and I felt his anger spoil into malice. “Oh, sorry—did you have something to say?” His voice was roguish, kittenish, grotesquely lilting.

      A bulb of pressure rose in my throat, forcing my glottal folds, but only a huff of breath escaped before they closed with an audible click. СКАЧАТЬ