Riddance. Shelley Jackson

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СКАЧАТЬ something complicated, in complete sentences. Turn out one hand (while the other still strangles in my skirt). The idea may be to convince myself that I am already speaking and then, as it were, chime in with myself. It does not work. I just keep on saying nothing, the nothing that is my name.

      The girls are giggling. The back door opening. With a little shriek they flee.

      “Sybil, come inside,” says my father.

      You may imagine me nine or ten years old, chubby, with horrible hair, the stiff, tubular bodice of a pus-yellow organdy dress riding up under my arms where damp circles were spreading, and silk stockings subsiding into the heels of my pigskin boots. I stuttered so violently that I wet my chin, when I spoke at all. This factor combined with my family’s high social standing to deprive me of the fellowship of other children, and it did not endear me to my parents either. My father was personally offended by it, as if I were a walking if not always talking rebuke to his ambitions. He had hoped and indeed expected to engender a perfect boy-child to step into his shoes one day. That he did not, he blamed on my mother’s unpedigreed uterus and general weakness of character. I remember her sorrowful acquiescence.

      Nor were my surroundings such as would compensate in beauty and interest for the shortcomings in my society. Cheesehill was and is a dreary little town. It is located on the rather marshy, thicketed banks of a small, flat, shallow, sluggish river that swells improbably, every ten years or so, into an implacable brown behemoth, sweeping houses off their foundations all down Common Place Road, a town whose architectural history is wiped out at regular intervals, so that it then boasted no very old, no very distinguished buildings except one (now there are none), the piano factory inherited by my father as the last of his line (my insufficient self excepted), built by his great-uncle on bedrock and furthermore on a little rise that may have been the hill for which the town was named (where the cheese comes in I have no notion), though it was scarcely elevated enough to earn the name.

      Perhaps they had agreed to call it a hill to promote themselves in their own esteem, to which that hill or rather the factory that stood on it was central, being the only business concern of any significance in the entire area, and employing most of the locals, so you can imagine how they felt when it burned down, and again when I declined to use the insurance money, which was considerable, to rebuild, but instead (after an interval of some years) sank it into the purchase and rehabilitation of the derelict buildings of the Cheesehill Home for Wayward Girls, which, contrary to local tradition, had been built above the flood plain and far enough out in the countryside (among bona fide hills, in fact) that in theory its tenants could not infect with waywardness the good girls of Cheesehill proper, or lure with waywardness the good boys, though this did not stop said boys from making pilgrimages out to the fascinating property in hopes of espying some sample of waywardness, which is how my parents met, an event that I can only regard as unfortunate in the extreme, my mother spending her entire subsequent existence in failing to make amends to my father for the very waywardness that had initially drawn him to her, since what was alluring in a sweetheart he deplored in a wife, such that she was by the time I knew her a subdued creature, colorless, except for the bruises.

      Cheesehill center is also colorless (see by what contrived means I yank myself out of the lachrymose, as out of the Slow River in spate!)—literally, in its builders’ unimaginative preference for white clapboard, but also figuratively: still, today, depressed by the loss of its main employer, its main street empty of foot traffic, its small library nearly bare of books, its public house kept in business by a handful of sots who stare dully at the occasional strangers who make the mistake of entering it in hopes of enjoying a sample of quaint country cheer, only its firehouse boasting a gleaming modern engine and a recent coat of paint, though I would call that, not the paint but the engine, a case of closing the barn door after the, after what, I forget, after the cows come home, the chickens hatch.

      I believe that there is something about Cheesehill that does not altogether disgust me, but I can’t remember what it is.

      Oh, yes, the snails. Cheesehill has a lot of them. They are some of its liveliest inhabitants, rioting in the kitchen gardens all night, then sleeping it off the next day, buttoned up in their shells, halfway up a clapboard wall. Snails are not universally admired, I know, but I do like a sleek young snail stretching out his shining neck, optimistic eyestalks playing nimbly over the possibilities, and dragging a silver ribbon behind him. My father, mindful of his tomatoes and his salad greens, for he fancied himself a gentleman farmer and often wrote off for seeds of new hybrids that promised to combine exceptional flavor and hardiness, did his best to slaughter the Cheesehill snails. Unlike my rabbits and my mother, the snails—as a race, if not individually—came back, full of enthusiasm and heirloom lettuces.

      Here at the Vocational School we do not poison the snails that frequent our kitchen garden, nor dunk them in soapy water. The children peel them gently off the cabbages and set them free on the edge of our land. That the spot I have chosen is only a short distance from the vegetable patch of our nearest neighbor is not my concern, though I have recommended that the children wait until dark to give the captives their liberty, to avoid misunderstandings.

      I mentioned floods. You might think that, being the wealthiest family in town (the only wealthy family in town), we would have had the means and the desire to build above the high-water mark, but although our house was bolted to its foundations, a measure rarely taken in fatalistic Cheesehill, my father deemed it a point of pride to flaunt our eminence in the very center—such as it was—of town, so we too suffered the rising waters. My father refused to evacuate, choosing to repose his faith in his precautions, and I well remember staring out the upstairs window, while my mother wept quietly on the bed, at a satin-sleek expanse of brown that would have appeared almost stationary were it not for the branches, planks, dead chickens, and other debris that whipped by at a startling clip, occasionally clobbering the keel of our vessel (as I pictured it) with a force that I felt in my bones. How exciting it was to sit at the top of the stairs—for I was not much afraid, feeling dismally and correctly (in this instance) that my father would not let anything really interesting happen to us—and see the dirty water swirling around the banister a few feet below me, carrying, still upright, its lips just above water, a cheap enameled vase that my father had not considered worth rescuing, though my mother was fond of it, and bumping it against the rails, whereupon it tipped, filled with water, and sank. I found it later, buried in the mud, and squirreled it away.

      The bolts held that time and another time and once more still and then failed, but that was after my parents were dead and I a young headmistress occupied with my school, whose outbuildings had been menaced by the selfsame flood. Still, I went to look at the sundered house. It had slid sideways off its foundations and was striking on its former lawn a defiantly jaunty pose, one side stove in and the other thrust out like a hip. I could see a muddy settee through a gap in the wall and, disposed upon it, what appeared to be the head of a moose, not a drowned moose but a moose that had been shot for its spread of horns, decapitated, and affixed, the head I mean, to a plaque, and the plaque to a wall, but had made its escape and was now resting from its exertions.

      I have often wondered whether dead animals, too, have their ghosts. I would gladly give that moose a pulpit. But I suspect that merely dying would not suffice to teach a mute to speak, so that if animals do visit our throats it is only in the odd sad-sounding yap or bellow.

      When I first heard about the waywardness, I pictured a flounced patchwork skirt, such as I believed Gypsies to wear, and began to watch my mother for signs that she was preparing for a trip, since I supposed that to be wayward was to be on the way somewhere, as by repute the tribe of Romany generally were. I saw this skirt so clearly that I dug through her chest of drawers and the old brass-bound Jenny Lind trunk in the attic in confident expectation of finding it and was disappointed to unfold nothing that was not white, peach, pink, beige, or blue.

      Whether because I was looking for it, or because there really was something forever yondering in her, my mother always seemed to me on the verge of departure. СКАЧАТЬ