Riddance. Shelley Jackson

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      Readings

      My Childhood

      The following document, ostensibly by Sybil Joines, has been much discussed in the critical literature. It was sent to me as a .pdf file by a representative of the school, rather late in my researches, when I had already begun compiling this book. I subsequently offered it up to the larger community, with my own commentary and modest fanfare. It made a great stir, of course, as contributing a new and more intimate perspective on the early life of the Headmistress, and my reputation as a scholar was such that few questioned its provenance, but after its swift elevation to canonical status, questions began to arise about certain subtle anachronisms in the text, and it was finally condemned as a forgery by several major scholars in concert, in a rather hurtful public demonstration on the occasion of my presentation with an honorary degree from the University of Göttingen.

      Flushed, still holding my parchment scroll with its little tassel (which had somehow got caught in my reading glasses), and somewhat the worse for champagne, I was forced to hastily defend the document’s authenticity and, implicitly, my scholarly integrity, while at the same time aware of a highly unpleasant sensation in the pit of my stomach, not entirely attributable to Schnitzel mit Spaetzle, as I awoke to inchoate but long-standing doubts of my own.

      Finally, a Dutch research team took the obvious step of asking to see the handwritten original—as I should have done at the start—and resolved the debate at a stroke, for they found that it was written with a ballpoint pen. (As we know, Laszlo Biro did not file his patent until June 1938, well after Joines’s death.) I quickly issued a handsome retraction, making no reference to hurt feelings. Yet questions remained. If I had been the victim of a hoax, what on earth was its objective? Was the SJVS less enthusiastic about my project than it seemed? If so, why had they gone to such lengths to appear accommodating? Why was the fraud so cunning in one respect (whoever wrote it knew his SJVSeana) and so careless in another (how difficult would it have been to procure an inkwell and quill)? Finally, should we not accept as plausible

      hypotheses, if not facts, the explanations the counterfeit supplied for the many hitherto inexplicable references in the legitimate texts? I found myself unable to “roll back” the changes in my understanding of the Headmistress’s story; the fiction had folded in the facts and made them its own.

      I took these issues to the community at large, and after much consternation and internal debate we penned a collective e-mail to the Vocational School that was a masterpiece of tactful circumspection, requesting more information on the provenance of the contested document, and offering the dubious “out” that they had themselves been victims of a trickster among their own ranks. The response was quick and disconcerting in its honesty.

      Of course the document was modern! It had been completed just days before they sent it to me! The Headmistress had perceived that the book would be the better for an autobiographical overview and had undertaken to provide one. The new headmistress? Well, yes! And also no. It was meaningless to speak of new and old in this context; the new headmistress was the old headmistress. Only insofar as the ghost of Sybil Joines spoke through her was she the headmistress at all.

      That this not only discredited the document in question but cast retrospective doubt on all the supposedly historical materials they had been supplying me with, I could not make them see. Concerns of plagiarism they brushed aside with an emoticon. How pointless to insist on verifiable authorship when “We are NONE of us in possession of ourselves,” when “We are ALL mere mouthpieces for the dead.” (Emphasis theirs.) Indeed, insofar as my extremely “STUPID” persistence betrayed a skepticism that the dead can speak, I risked souring our relationship and thus losing this priceless connection to the fount of all SJVSeana.

      I backed off.

      I have since decided that as a document of the contemporary Vocational School, this text is just as revealing as if it were exactly what it purports to be, and I would no longer contemplate omitting it from any serious study of the legacy. I leave it to the reader, however, to decide whether it reveals more about this headmistress, that one, or we scholars. —Ed.

      I had a fierce, unthinking certainty that I was exceptional. Once a bone had struck the road beside me and bounced up almost as far as my head, having fallen from, as it appeared, a great height. I turned around and around but saw only an old horse grazing on the far side of a field. The bone was therefore a sign. Not from God, not from anyone, just a sign: that I was special, that uncommon things were going to happen to me. Once, too, a hummingbird intent upon a trumpet flower had trustingly curled its claws around my finger—until then I had not been quite sure that hummingbirds had feet—while I inhaled with my eyes the pulsing iridescent neck, the finely thatched crown, the liquid eye. Even after it tensed and flew away I continued to feel its warm, bony grip, like an invisible ring, as if I were betrothed to the extraordinary now. I felt not wonder, but vindication. This was what I expected life to contain. This, and an unending series of similar marvels, like brightly colored glass beads on a string.

      “Excuse me, what was your name again?” Susannah says, as Mary coughs behind her plump and freckled hand. Susannah is my next-door neighbor (it is over the fence that dissociates our lush lawn from her seedy one that we conduct this interview). Her father works in my father’s factory. So does Mary’s. She knows my name.

      My breath turns to glass in my throat. I gag; again; again. At the front of my mouth, my tongue (with a pressure slightly, maddeningly off-center) seems to be trying to stub itself out against my teeth.

      “Sssssssss . . .” I say, if you call that saying.

      Susannah tilts her shining head, and I burn. Not just for the barbaric sound I am making—a spiccato sizzle—but for the hair stuck to my cheek, the stinging spot where my frock chafes, my index finger, twisting my skirt into a garrote. For my whole, objectionable person. It is as if I have been precipitated out of fumes and intimations only now, when the thick, wet, rubbery fact of tongue and lip makes itself felt.

      The shock disacquaints me with myself. I feel no loyalty toward that wretch, only alarm and aversion. I would like to signal to my prosecutors, watching my evidentiary mouth with forensic curiosity, that I am on their side, against me. But to do that I would need to speak.

      “Sssssssssss . . .”

      I lean forward, lean back, tilt my head one way and then the СКАЧАТЬ