Riddance

by Shelley Jackson

  You stammer, I think I recall, on the letter a. A-a-and. A-a-again. A-a-afterlife. I like that about you. A is the beginning of the alphabet and thus you announce in a sense another alphabet, an alphabet of difficulty and even silence. You grew up in New York, I think. Or Paterson? A city bigger than any in which I ever felt at home. You went to work young, washing dishes perhaps, to support your family: your younger sister (so smart, so spirited), your mother (a drunk of easy virtue). Your sister died. Of what? Of consumption, like me? No, cholera, no, influenza, one of the three, galloping through the tenements where you, like so many others, lived. Your mother, equally afflicted, coughing blood and gin vapors, told you to go to the devil, and in a sense you did: You came, after a sojourn at your aunt’s, to me. I am glad you did.

  Are you black? Now I think that you are, that I knew that and forgot it, since your mind seems colorless when I speak into your unobstructed ear, a perfect blank on which I write, though I do not mean to imply that to be colorless is preferable or even possible. None of us is that. One is parchment-hued, another peach or pink, another piebald. Personally I am yellowish. For sheer beauty of hue you have the advantage of me.

  Have you heard from your sister? She is dead, you said, or I said it, or you said it, saying it was me, writing it as if I had said it, persuading me I said it. I am sure she is; I am sure you would not have left her with your mother (if your mother lived), if what I have heard, I mean what I have said of your mother is true. I am sure that when men, loud with drink and lewdness, made free with your mother’s person behind the glowing green sheet that screened the other bed in your single room, you covered your sister’s ears, or sang songs (we do not stutter when we sing), or bundled her up warm and hoisted her out on the fire escape beside you, to count the lighted windows and watch the moon up into the sky.

  I have made your mother’s intercourse an ugly thing, and probably it was, for you. A child does not want to be burdened with her parents’ pleasure, any more than with their pain or grief. But the green-glowing sheet . . .

  I have been told that sexual intercourse is, can be, like death—that the sexual climax is even called a “little death.” During it, I hear, a person becomes like an object, knowing, and glad to know, if for just a few moments, only what things know, as they move against other things and move and lie still and move again. I think I would like to try sexual intercourse. I wonder what you would think if I—but perhaps not with a person. With a tree, or an iron stove. I suppose I might enjoy it with a tinker, in his cart hung with pots and spatulas and buckets of nails, all rocking and clanking and jingling, as if we two were made of nothing but scrap iron and bent spoons bound together with rags. Better if we were. One would not want to start a child. No, no.

  Idle thoughts—the impulse is not strong. Perhaps I satisfy it another way, for it seems to me that stammering is like sex, since when we stammer or stutter the substance of speech becomes present to us as a burr and buzz and scrape in the throat, while its meaning recedes. Time bounces like a tinker’s cart. Consonants rattle and creak. Stuttering, stammering, we rock in place, we thrust with our tongues, we pull strange faces, our cheeks flush, our mouth is misshapen, the throat is a ring tight on the swelling breath, we forget what we mean, we are only saying, saying, saying. So this is sex, and sex is stuttering, the world beating against a threshold, and both are forms of death, joyful death, because we love the world so much we long to lose ourselves in it.

  The world teeters between meaning and matter. We are at the fulcrum—we are the fulcrum. And I am tipping the balance, but I don’t know which way, I don’t know . . .

  The Stenographer’s Story, contd.

  The voice crackles, drops out, returns as pure sound—ice crystals blowing over frozen snow, a handful of sand swirling in a pan. Then there is silence. My fingers striking the keys are as loud as bones snapping.

  For a minute, I let them rest (asdf jkl;), and the silence fills with the green of a glowing sheet.18 It is not in my memory that it glows, but her words. I have never told the story of my childhood. I never will tell it. What is gone tore the hole through which I breathe. We are all built around a riddance: Lungs must empty to fill again. For some here this is doctrine. For me, a fact. Through its ghastly mercy I live.

  In her words, I seem to see my past, but from the outside. My mother, Bitty, me, my blurred and spectral father: tiny figures under a glass dome. I can barely imagine their suffering or, more terrible, their joy. What a gift this diminution is. It is only a malicious ghost who whispers, now, “She has stolen the one thing you had left.” I drown it out with the clatter of these keys, for no one can hold on to the past. What is life but the broom that erases our tracks? Every minute another minute is gone, to be replaced (if at all) by a memory, which is to say a figment, a fiction. Has she stolen my life and given me a counterfeit? No, at most she has stolen one counterfeit and given me another. Or given me a counterfeit where I had just an aching socket.

  So the green glow fades. I will resume my account, which is not concerned with what I was, but with what I have become and am becoming. My destination. (Destiny?)

  I was threading through the crowd that always gathered outside the room where Dr. Peachie was seeing patients when I came face-to-face with Mother Other, shoving her way in the opposite direction. As if she had been burning for the opportunity, she confronted me. “You want to be her successor! You’re angling for it. Ingratiating yourself. I won’t have it!”

  “You want it yourself, then?” said I.

  Dr. Peachie’s door opened and a boy drifted out, his face rapt. There was a collective surge forward and a muted scuffle over the door handle. The door closed again.

  Mother Other blushed hibiscus red. “Well, what if I do? I’d be the obvious choice. Or Dotty, of course,” she conceded grudgingly, meaning Miss Exiguous.

  Ramshead, twirling gracelessly in place, eyes closed, said dreamily: “You’re not a channeler, though, Mother Other.” She stopped and opened her eyes. “I mean—are you? I mean, I’ve never even heard you stutter.”

  Mother Other shifted uncomfortably.

  “You can’t channel the dead!” I discovered.

  “I’ve been her right hand since the beginning. I know everything about running this school. Everything,” she heaved forth. “And I’m one hundred percent faithful. I’d do exactly as she’d do.”

  “But you wouldn’t be her. So how could you be her successor? You’re not even in the running.” I met her small, furious eyes and took a step back. “You’d like to strangle me, wouldn’t you?” I said, and then laughed. “But I’d just come back again. And again, and again, and again!”

  “Don’t listen to her, Mother Other,” said Florence. “It’s ridiculous that anyone’s talking about Grandison at all. Even just among the students there are better candidates. Dixon, McCaughey . . . Wang . . . Even Smithson . . .”

  “What do you mean, ‘even’?” demanded Smithson, who was listening. “But honestly, I don’t know why anyone takes you seriously, Grandison. Nobody has forgotten how you tried to fake it back in Speech One. Your ‘Dutch Surinamian,’ what a joke. I bet you don’t even know where Suriname is. I don’t know why you weren’t thrown out on your bean!”

  “Headmistress probably liked her even more for that,” said Ramshead. Recognizing the likelihood of this, Smithson subsided.

  But though the others believed me a teacher’s pet, I knew better. Possibly, at one point, I had imagined that the Headmistress, relying on me, might come to confide in me, and even care a little for me. Possibly. I do not say that I did. It would not have been like me to expect affection. In any case it did not come to pass. I had worked for the Headmistress for five years without eliciting intimacies. Cold, commanding, unconvivial lady! I was not sure she credited me with any existence outside my function as a recording device. She certainly did not exert herself to draw from me my story. Perhaps another girl, sweet and open and naturally affectionate,
could have snuggled past her guard. But I doubt it. Because my real competition came in the form of quite another sort of child.

  It was Dixon who brought her to my attention. One day, after I had bested her in an exam, she rounded on me: “It’s revolting, how you hang on the Headmistress’s every word. Don’t you see that she’s completely confused? On the one hand, people blab on forever, changing only their form, and everything is language, even dried porridge and, what, sewing machines, and it’s all just so marvelously meeeeaningful. On the other hand, the self doesn’t exist, every person is a missing person, and speech is not communication but a cacophony that humans make in the senseless way that some neurotic animals ceaselessly rearrange their bedding or pluck all the hair out of the base of their tails, communicating nothing except their inexhaustible distress. Well, which is it? Everything is meaningful or nothing is? The whole world speaks in a human voice, or even humans aren’t human?”

  “I think”—I struggled to frame my answer—“I think she’d say that contradicting yourself is good. A way to open a crack in what we mistake for a world. Like stuttering, only on the level of meaning,” I added, getting interested.

  She snorted. “She’d say, she’d say—what do you say?”

  “I don’t exist.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “I don’t know. Yes. In a way.”

  “Well, I exist, and I’m fed up with her mumbo jumbo. All this harping on holes and what goes through them—what do you think that’s really about? She’s fucking ghosts instead of living people. Of course it isn’t satisfying, of course it gives her an empty feeling! But instead of finding herself a fellow or a finger she tells herself she’s on the trail of the Mystery. ‘Deeper, deeper!’”

  “You’re not wrong, exactly,” I said. “Of course it’s desire that’s driving her. But I think you have it backwards: Sex is our substitute for what she’s seeking. We’re all fucking ghosts, but for most of us there’s a body in the way. Our desire can’t be satisfied either, only we blame the other person (who’s not satisfied either) and move on. But we limit our quest to the human. She’s attracted to the universe.”

  “What about Finster?”

  I was silent.

  “I mean, is she in love with her?”

  The idea of the Headmistress in love made us both snort with laughter, which put an end to our argument. But there was something to it, all the same.

  Some months ago, perhaps as much as a year, it had come to my attention that, despite her increasing detachment, the Headmistress took a special interest in one of the younger girls. It was not obvious why. Finster means “dark” in the German tongue, and so the girl Finster was. I do not mean in coloration; my skin is darker than hers. Finster was obscure. One might hesitate to call her a little girl, or even human. She had the overbite, hunched shoulders, and darting movements of a squirrel. Once I glimpsed her sockless foot. It was narrow and bony, the middle toes longer than the big toe, like those of a rodent. Nor did her manners make amends for her appearance. Not too surprising, since she was the get of a shrill, nasty woman who sometimes traipsed all the long way from town to bang on the front door and threaten to take Finster away if she was not paid something for her, and many of us would have told her mother to take her and welcome, for the daughter was no nicer than the dam. But the Headmistress would send Clarence down with a purse or, sometimes, a bottle, and Finster stayed.

  I recall the first or second time I saw her. The Headmistress was crooked over her, tense with effort, attempting to fit her with a branks. Finster, her whole body an expletive, tore the branks from her head (along with not a little of her hair) and struck the Headmistress square in the face with it. Mother Other haled her away; the branks jangled under a settee and stuck there. I flew to the Headmistress, offering my arm, and felt her shocking frailty for a moment as she pulled herself up, breathing hard, a single black pearl of blood hanging in one nostril. There was a high color in her cheeks.

  I expected to see no more of this Finster and was surprised to pass her in the hall a week later, for the Headmistress was not notable for her leniency. Her sensitivity to the dead was only matched by her insensitivity to the living. Indeed, “One must be prised loose a little from the living,” she had taught us, “to go freely among the dead.” But perhaps this was even what drew her to Finster, for though many children are not quite of the living, but spend at least some part of their time in conversation with stones and beetles and the way light shines on a leaf, Finster spent her time no other way, Finster had no friends, had conceivably never had any, her speech impediment was so profound that she scarcely spoke, not to other children, nor even to her mother. And in so abstaining from speech and even, as it appeared, scorning it—for Finster was not aphasic, nor mute: she simply preferred not to speak—Finster had made room enough for the dead in her to rival the Headmistress herself.

  Dear reader, if ever this document has one, I am sure you already understand several things better than either the Headmistress or poor furious Finster did. The Headmistress loved Finster because she was the least lovable of her students, and this is not a paradox. The Headmistress herself was not lovable and never had been, though she believed (and how can we gainsay her, who are even farther from that lost Eden than she was) that her mother had loved her once. Finster, also shorn of a mother—but so am I! comes the cry of pointless protest, but I hold it in—was the Headmistress in miniature, minus the brooch of braided hair (a little singed) and the black bombazine: nasty, suspicious, unattractive, and not particularly clean; and insofar as the Headmistress gave her, Finster, love, so might the Headmistress believe herself lovable—a belief that even those who have transferred all their affections to the dead may wish to hold on occasion. Who can blame them?

  I might have tried to thwart this partiality, had Finster not sought so earnestly to thwart it herself. For Finster took an interest in the Headmistress in turn, but not a warm one. Quite the opposite: she had the liveliest resentment of a person who had snatched her away from a situation that, however unsavory it must seem to an outsider, had suited her very well. That her mother had essentially sold her—and continued at intervals to sell her, in those transactions with Clarence on the lawn of the school—would have given some children pause, but she seemed to consider it unremarkable, and reserved all her blame for the one who, possessing the means, employed them to wrest her from her home. (Having known poverty myself, I would not say she was entirely wrong in that.)

  The interest she took in the Headmistress, therefore, was aimed exclusively at identifying her weak spots and hurling barbs at them. Everyone knew she was the one who stole the rabbit foot the Headmistress kept on her desk. None of us would have dared. She did not fail to perceive the Headmistress’s partiality for her—indeed she seemed to regard it an especial affront—and rebuffed her experimental overtures with scorn, though I do not know whether the Headmistress ever even noticed that, imperious as she was herself, and unused to the give-and-take of equals in affection. (How I talk. As if I were!) However, deprived of any other outlet, this partiality lent a peculiar intensity to the punishments the Headmistress exacted for Finster’s crimes. More than once I came upon her, bent over a twisting, spitting Finster, one hand clamped on her ear, the other employing an oral debrider or other instrument, her whole body tense with focus, and the queerest mixture of wrath, exultation, yearning, and nervous anticipation on her face. Afterward, she was always very fatigued. I think she did not know whether to desire or to dread these encounters.

  They certainly did nothing to discourage Finster’s sorties. If anything, they had the opposite effect. God knows there was no need to manufacture injuries, we had enough of them, and fatalities as well, but Finster was seen banging a door upon her own arm that she might flaunt her bruises, sniffling, before a visiting parent. She slipped notes to trustees, to old Dr. Beede and young Dr. Peachie, to reporters. One day a colossal boom brought us all running to find smo
ke pouring from the refectory, where (we eventually discerned) she had set off a small bomb made with coal dust, cotton wool, a candle end, and an alarm clock. Then she wrote a letter to the Cheesehill Gazette from A Conserned [sic] Citizen complaining of soot particles in the soup. The next week she blew the whistle on a sinister medical conspiracy to inject the students with narcotics, though this did not go over well with the readership—old Dr. Beede was much loved. Undeterred, she followed with a letter alleging that an artificial manure ring had its headquarters in our carriage house and then one about dumping “rapatious” [sic] snails in other people’s gardens under cover of darkness. Seeking scandals to leak with the diligence of a Fleet Street stringer, she canvased the other students—she canvased me—about the Headmistress’s proclivities, past and present. Finally she recruited her mother, or somebody, to pump the older townspeople for stories about the Headmistress’s girlhood. And by God she got them.

  I do not know how the Headmistress had managed it, living in or near the place where it all happened, but until that day no one, including me, had known more than a few blank and unexceptionable facts about her past. We knew her parents were dead; you could hardly miss the Joines plot, the biggest in the cemetery, slung around with chains and stuffed with obelisks, and winged skulls, and limestone lambs, and there anyone might read “Harwood Joines” on a marble monolith and “Beloved Wife” on a limestone block. But the hagiographies that assorted sycophants had tremblingly committed to lavender-scented paper dismissed her parents in a few words, treating them as a sort of trellis to the budding genius, necessary but inconsequential. Now all of the ghastly details came out. All? Well, we thought so at the time.

  Finster did not hurl them in the Headmistress’s face; she had more cunning. Having circulated the facts among the students and faculty (“Is it t-t-t-true, Mr. Lieu, that Headm-m-mistress Joines’s father burned to d-death in a f-f-f-f-f-f . . . ?”) she began insinuating covert references to them into English decompositions, aural reports, etc., in the guise of figures of speech. The effect was disconcerting. One does not expect, while grading a penmanship exercise, to find one’s mind pullulating with fire, strangulation, filicide, patricide, uxoricide, suicide. Though at the Vocational School death was never far away, its attentions were impersonal; we were not accustomed to such ad hominem reapage.