Riddance. Shelley Jackson

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ on me. The feeling of separate, separate gave way to one of interest and affinity. Here was a stutterer as afflicted as myself! She appeared no great shakes and I began again to feel that I might fit in and even distinguish myself in this place.

      Then she opened her mouth, and said in a man’s voice, bewildered and peremptory, and without any hint of a stammer, “Who are you? You’re no child of mine.”

      I jerked back. The girl reeled away, veered into the bushes, and, shaking out a flock of sparrows, forced herself through.

      Shaken, I heaved up my suitcase and mounted the steps to the door, which to my relief was still open; I did not think I could bear to offend it with my fist. I managed to maneuver myself and my suitcase through without touching its plated edge or the cold tongue it stuck out at me.

      Before me, a great staircase surged up to a landing and turned out of sight. The treads were scuffed almost white except near the walls, where they were black with polish in which just a few golden scratches flared like comets. There was no sign of Miss Exiguous, but a few steps from the bottom lounged a skinny ginger-haired white boy of about fourteen, lashing himself in the mouth with a thin peeled stick. His lips were cut and bleeding. The stick was red where it struck.

      Seeing me, he stopped this occupation and cocked his head impatiently.

      “Mmmmm . . . uh-hmmm . . .” A fine sweat broke out all over me. I could feel my sleeves sticking to my damp skin. “Mmmm . . . Uh-hmmm—mmm . . .”

      I had squeezed my eyes shut. Now I opened them, only to see that the boy was taking no interest in my difficulties, but had begun striking himself again with his stick in a bored manner. I took a careful breath and started over. “Mmm-may I ask where I am supposed to present myself?” I said.

      “I—” He stopped, eyelids fluttering. Then with an upward jerk of his chin, “Wouldn’t,” said the boy, and went on hurting himself.

      “Wouldn’t what?” Consternation at this incivility vied with elation. I had known I was going to be among stutterers like myself, but I had not understood what it would feel like to excite neither curiosity, nor pity, nor mirth. I was ordinary. How glorious!

      “A-a-a-ask. Or present myself. If I wa-was you. She don’t want to see you. If she wanted to see you she would a-already have seen you. And called you to her office. A-a-a-and given you a uniform, and maybe other privileges too” (this in a highly ironical tone), “privileges the rest of us can only dr-r-r-r-eam of, because there’s no telling what honors she might bestow on you if she wa-wants to see you, and without your having time to ask ‘Wh—’”—he stopped, stuck out his chin, closed his eyes, struck himself in the mouth, went on—“‘where should I present myself?’ as if you had any say in the matter. No sir, if you haven’t seen her already you’d better just leave.”

      “But I’ve only just come!”

      “That’s good, it means you haven’t ha-ad time to offend her yet. Go away quick.” He slid his whip between his lips, tasting it.

      I was silent, confounded. I hoped I should not cry. I imagined knocking on Aunt Margaret’s door, suitcase in hand—the words “all a mistake,” her look of dismay—and knew that I would sooner throw myself under the wheels of the train than go back. The thought had a steadying influence, and now my letter of admission swam up in my mind: the envelope with the typed address, the single long half-white, half-dark hair windingly affixed to the adhesive, the brief missive on tissue-thin paper, the enclosed train ticket. And Miss Exiguous on the train platform, holding up a placard with a hole through it in place of words, and pronouncing my name. No, it was not possible that I had misunderstood.

      So it was something else. Well, it would not be the first time I was made unwelcome on account of the color of my skin. I was readying a pert reply when the boy jumped up and hurried away down the narrow hall that, skirting the stairs, led back into the depths of the building. I heard a door close.

      A moment later a pair of feet descended the stairs into view. They were encased in solid black orthopedic shoes and made with each step the sound—doom, doom, doom—of something too heavy to carry being set down only just in time to keep from dropping it. I shrank back a little; even once the adult person to whom the legs belonged turned the corner onto the landing and showed herself in increments, I thought she had for a moment the appearance of legs that had only accidentally and somewhat gruesomely acquired a torso and head, especially because she was wearing a long sort of stiff smock or robe under which one could imagine that her legs went up all the way to her shoulders. There was even something footlike about her red face with its big dry creased heel of a chin.

      “You must come at once! I don’t know why you are hanging around down here!” she said to me, then turned around and—doom, doom, doom—shrank to legs again.

      My suitcase banging on a riser, as I hurried after her, caused one of the locks to pop open, so I stopped to fasten it, and when I attained the second floor the woman was nowhere in sight. But neither could I hear her tread on the stairs above me, so I exited the stairwell for a wide hallway, lined with closed doors, and dimly lit by a window at the far end.

      It was full of children in school uniform, some perhaps as young as six, some (to my eyes) practically adult. I saw among them, to my relief, several Blacks as well as Orientals and others whose race I could not guess at sight. Most of the children were standing in line outside one or another of the doors, these lines crossing and plaiting without merging. But the impression of order this might have given was greatly offset by other sights: A girl spread-eagled on the floor while a bigger girl, whose uniform had been fitted in back with what looked like a sort of sail, giving her no small resemblance to a Dimetrodon, attempted to fit the tapered end of an eight-foot-long, wobbling cardboard cone into her mouth . . . Another seemingly talking to a small rhombic rubber eraser, periodically holding it up to her ear to receive its reply . . . Three boys, one of them mixed race like me, trying to insert their whole hands into one another’s mouths. A door banged open and a youth ran out, black paper streamers flying from his mouth, jerked open the opposite door, and slammed it shut behind him. I had stopped dead to take in these portents and now, without meaning to, I giggled. Nobody paid the least attention to me. Again I thought, I am a ghost—no one can see or hear me. It was an oddly comfortable notion.

      I flinched at a whirring and the impression of sudden movement near my face: A sparrow had found its way in. Against the round window at the end it bumped and fluttered horribly before hurling itself back down the hall again. Then one of the doors beside me opened and the line began shuffling inside. I watched, balancing my suitcase on the tops of my feet. Inside I could see part of a blackboard, benches, anatomical diagrams suspended from a dado. The last child went in; then a white man with tight black curls and a purplish red face, wearing a sort of smock, buttoned at the neck and loose below, looked out, saw me—this was a shock (but spiritualists do see ghosts, I thought, if anyone does)—clicked his tongue irritably, and said, “What are you doing standing out there like a lump? Take your place at once,” seized me by the elbow, and dragged me into the room.

      He took up a position at the front of the room, raising his ruler. His smock was buttoned so tightly around his neck that it appeared to have driven all the blood to his head. I had the fancy that droplets would at any moment start from his pores. When he brought down the ruler on his scarred wooden desk, it was with such violence that it rebounded and struck him in the cheek. He clapped his hand to his face with a look of fury and rubbed the spot, where a welt was already rising, as the class clattered to their feet again—I had not left mine—and began what must have been a recitation, though they spoke so quickly that I was unable to make out a word. It seemed possible that they were stammering, but if so, they were stammering in perfect unison and with—if such a thing were even possible—great fluency. It СКАЧАТЬ