The Gradual Disappearance of Jane Ashland

by Nicolai Houm

  ‘On the way up, I met a hospital clown in the lift,’ Greg told her.

  ‘You did what?’ she said in a voice still muffled by sleep.

  ‘The hospital clown. I was chatting with him in the lift.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why not?’

  Then Greg grew quiet. She settled back into the bed and closed her eyes.

  ‘Seems he wondered when we’d have time to see him,’ he added.

  ‘Are we to see him?’ she mumbled.

  ‘Oh, yes. He was emphasizing how important it is to lay the foundations of a humorous mindset at an early stage.’

  ‘Gosh!’

  ‘Yup,’ Greg said and breathed in, as he always did in the middle of explaining something. ‘I think the idea is rather like the skin-on-skin programme at St. Mary’s but more focused on the newborn’s social skills.’

  She sat up in bed and rubbed her eyes.

  ‘Well, maybe tomorrow, unless you have to…’

  Then she discovered that Greg was beside himself with suppressed laughter and reached out across the bedside table to smack him.

  Her bed was in the so-called family room, but Greg wasn’t allowed to stay the night. There were no set visiting hours, but late at night a change in atmosphere somehow communicated to the visitors that the mothers would soon be due for a period of whispering peace. She wanted Greg to stay all the time and he didn’t want to leave them. He held Julie close to his chest. His hair was still almost shoulder-length – that, and his tattoos, signified his last stand against becoming a grown-up and a career journalist – and as he bent his head over Julie to inhale her scent, father and daughter disappeared behind the dark curtain of his hair.

  ‘Cruelty to children is impossible to understand,’ Greg said in a low voice.

  There was enough space in his hand for Julie’s foot. Julie’s toenails fascinated her parents perhaps more than any other part of her. They were so tiny it seemed out of order not to believe in God.

  ‘I used to regard images of suffering children as a hackneyed media device. Now, I’m glad I’m writing about culture rather than working on the news desk,’ Greg said. ‘I start crying now every time I see suffering children on TV.’

  ‘Do you, truly?’

  ‘Last time was yesterday,’ Greg said and swallowed.

  He hesitated before starting to speak again. ‘Imagine, my father beat me up.’

  Greg still sounded as if it had happened recently. He had told her about his boyhood while they were still in New York. Mainly, the punishments had amounted to little more than slaps on the behind. Once, when Jeff went outside in a blizzard wearing only his pyjamas and Greg locked him out, a wire clothes hanger had been used.

  ‘How come it’s possible?’ Greg demanded in a choked voice. ‘What I mean is… the entire system of parental rule. Kids were hangers-on. Parasites, with restricted rights. We didn’t have any say. Ran our childish world according to our own system. And it mustn’t clash at any time with the much more important adult world.’

  ‘True,’ she said.

  ‘Of course, it was still worse to be a child in the fifties when our parents were growing up. Not to speak of the childhoods our grandparents had to put up with!’

  The blanket slipped from Greg’s arm. Jane wrapped it round Julie again.

  ‘For instance, historians believe that Adolf Hitler was economical with the truth in Mein Kampf when he describes his father’s brutality. It was probably much worse. You wouldn’t credit it but this was the time when an Austrian expert pedagogue recommended hitting babies hard, for no reason – except to toughen them up!’

  ‘Greg, why are we talking about Hitler?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  She pulled Greg close and kissed him. She felt that they both had softer, warmer lips than before. But then Greg backed away and continued stubbornly. ‘No, I do know. The answer is: because I want us to do it differently. To be another kind of parent.’

  And so they were. Jane and Greg felt that they belonged to the first generation of parents who regarded their children as complete human beings, held them in correspondingly high regard and thought so hard about their role that they were in a state of constant confusion. But the light never faded; it was like a flame that lit up days and nights. They had changed. Still, Jane was wrong to believe that the outside world would have changed, too. It caused just as many problems as ever and now there was a new source: Julie.

  During Julie’s childhood, Jane found herself going through compulsive rituals when no one was watching. There was a special time just before she fell asleep next to Greg. She saw things in her mind: steep stairways, a butcher’s knife near the edge of the kitchen counter, the rusty bracket on a swing in the park. Such images forced her to reach out with her hand in the darkness to knock on the bedside table. In case Greg hadn’t gone to sleep, the movement had to be disguised as fumbling for something on the table but must also be completed to fit the proverb: the knocking finger must touch wood. This often meant that the hand pretending to look for, say, the mobile charger, had to move a box of tissues or a magazine to get at the actual table top.

  She pondered the borderline between superstition and compulsion. The ancient human need that led people to convince themselves that there was a system where none existed. The lengths to which people would go to make believe they could control the universe. She also wondered about how many others went in for behaviours like hers. Perhaps men and women everywhere in the USA were lying awake in bed at night, knocking on bedside tables, quickly switching the light on and off (if they were alone), clapping or snapping with their fingers under the covers, or hitting their hip bone rhythmically while saying: don’t let it happen, don’t let it happen, don’t let it happen. All this, to save the one they loved.

  As time went by, Jane became aware that her daughter could enrage her so much that she said and did things she would later regret bitterly. As it happened, these things were often said or done just when Julie was about to be left with her babysitter, or when Jane was going away for several days, which meant that she remained in a state of anguished self-reproach until she could once more hug her daughter tight and have the chance to make it up to her. On her way home from literary events and book readings, she would jump into taxis, zigzag across the airport to avoid business travellers and overweight tourists from the Midwest, drive all the way home in the left-hand lane on the highway, taking the corner of Spooner Street and Regent Street on screaming tyres – only to be told by Greg that Julie had just fallen asleep.

  Julie was eleven when Jane realized that one of her rather slim novels was receiving unexpectedly enthusiastic attention. Greg called it a great breakthrough, but that was of course an exaggeration. The Age of Plenitude was in every way as demanding as her earlier books and as focused on language. Even so, it sold more copies than all her previous titles put together. Her editor said that was because it was so fucking excellent. Jane thought, although she kept it strictly to herself, that the cover had done the trick: it showed a woman on a beach just before the trend that placed woman-on-a-beach images in a special category of successful cover designs. She celebrated Greg’s fortieth birthday, luckily more than a year before her own, by buying him an eighteen-foot fishing boat, a trailer and all available accessories for sport fishing. She joined him on trips a couple of times because she wanted to experience his happiness at being on board next to a cooler stocked with bottles of beer and an echo sounder display of flickering pixels, which might or might not be fish. Greg’s most faithful companion on fishing trips was none other than Tom Belotti, Jane’s admirer when they were at school. Tom had also moved to Madison and eventually become an especially good friend to both of them. He had married a Russian nurse with nearly transparent teeth, who could look about seventeen one moment and fifty-five the next. You were asked to believe a backstory about Vladlena (what joy, just to say her name…) that involved a wild party at the Russian embassy and a love that conquere
d every barrier of language and culture placed in its way. This story was about as credible as young Tom’s tale about the white shark that lived in the filter system of the public swimming pool in Brookfield and was let out for exercise a couple of times a year. Tom had spotted Vladlena for the first time in an online catalogue of Russian women wanting to marry. But they seemed happy together.

  The unexpected success of Jane’s latest book spurred her on. She wanted to work harder, write more and faster, speed up her publication rate, say yes to invitations, and generally carry on doing whatever was needed to make a name for herself because there seemed to be a genuine interest in what she was writing – she no longer felt that to be a writer meant holing up in some dark cubbyhole and making stuff up. On the days she didn’t teach at the university or attend some event out of town, she typed away on a new novel. She could hear when Julie came through the door after school, but more and more often just called out a greeting from her upstairs study; the front door seemed to open in the middle of the most important sentence so far. During the frenetic hours before Greg came home, her conscience was always on its way to Julie. She had been an only child herself and knew just what the tense quietness downstairs meant.

  One Thursday at the beginning of May, Jane felt she needed to meet Julie after school and spend a few hours with her before she had to go to the weekly hour of piano playing with Mrs Gurzky (this was a Greg project). Jane’s longing had an urgency she hadn’t felt since Julie was very young. She must save what she had written and hurry out. Later, this appeared to be a portent, a sign so unmistakable that, in her capacity as creative writing instructor, she would have called it foreshadowing.

  Probably, her longing had sprung from three recent events. For one thing, a few days earlier, Julie had preferred to be driven to a friend’s house rather than going with her mother to buy a new swimsuit, a choice Jane saw as confirmation of her daughter’s growing independence. Secondly, Jane was off to the Newberry seminar in Chicago the following day, and had to spend several days without seeing Julie. Thirdly, she had drunk so much coffee throughout the morning that her brain seemed to lay exposed and trembling, like a dish of jelly on a picnic table.

  In the handout on ‘Safe Delivery and Collection’, parents were told to park behind the tall fence around the yard on the western side of the school. However, Julie would come out through the main entrance on the opposite side of the building. Jane squeezed the car up against the kerb on Chadbourne Avenue, along with other parents who either felt like irresponsible slobs or actually were. While she waited in the car for the clock to show 2.37pm, the eccentric end point of the school day at Randell Elementary, she was cross with herself for not collecting Julie more often. It was always Greg who played with her and Jane who helped with dull homework; Greg who joined in ball games and Jane who cooked complicated Mediterranean food with a glass of Chablis in her hand. She couldn’t understand why she hadn’t taken pleasure in things like sitting on the floor with Julie and fussing with the nylon hair, bristling with static electricity, of a small, plastic pony.

  When Julie and her friends came out of school, Jane was brimming with coffee-induced expectation. She had rolled down the car window but managed to hold back from shouting. This was how Julie looked when she didn’t know her mother was watching her: whispering and whooping, dancing about in tight jeans, knock-kneed when she giggled. Jane recalled this moment of childhood: the taste of eraser in her mouth, multicoloured nylon bags dangling from thin shoulders, the way one had to swing one’s hair out of the way of the straps, the yelling and squeaking of sneakers on a stone floor becoming a mass of sound that built behind her, higher and higher until she was ejected through the door and the sound turned into rustling in the treetops.

  They drove along Lake Monona. Julie was in the back. No one seems to know exactly when a child is old enough to sit in front. The grass was green along the water’s edge but the bleakness of winter lingered in the lake and the sky above. Julie was deep into one of her long tales about an episode from her school day, something Amy had said to Joe just at the moment Joe was tipping forwards and back on his chair so that the teacher was just… and he just, and then she just… Jane watched in the mirror as the eagerness to tell bubbled in the corners of Julie’s mouth, nodded and agreed when it seemed appropriate, but was aware that, in her head, she was inside the scene she had been working on before leaving her study.

  ‘Mom?’

  Jane often reflected on how she would like to have about three hours to surface after being immersed in her fictions, something like the pressure equalization that divers need.

  ‘Mom?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘I thought it might be a good idea to go look for that swimsuit.’

  ‘OK. But Dad and I have already been looking online.’

  She switched the blinker on with excessive force as she changed lanes.

  ‘So, what’s the upshot? Do you need a swimsuit or don’t you?’

  Julie didn’t answer for a while, then: ‘I don’t.’

  ‘Terrific!’

  The rush of coffee had squeezed the blood out of her fingers.

  Julie sat gazing at the water. Her lips were moving slowly.

  ‘Are you tired?’ Jane asked carefully. It actually meant I am tired, just so you know.

  And Julie knew. She shook her head.

  Jane took it further and said in a fluting voice, ‘Well then, we’ll have time for a little stroll in the botanic garden, won’t we?’

  ‘Why?’ Julie had earned the right to a little resistance.

  ‘It’s so lovely at this time of year.’

  Julie turned to look out through the window.

  ‘Can we phone Dad?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Jane tried to reach behind her back to hand over her cell and almost dislocated her shoulder. The pain felt so up-to-date somehow.

  ‘Julie! Come on, take it.’

  ‘Oh.’

  When Greg answered, he seemed to be inside a cardboard box together with the entire editorial staff.

  ‘Dad, you’re on loudspeaker.’

  ‘Hiya, is that you?’

  ‘We’re in the car.’

  ‘Wait, let me…’

  A drawn-out, scraping noise, then silence at last.

  ‘There. Welcome to the copier room. What are you up to?’

  ‘We’re going to the botanical garden,’ Julie said. ‘It’s so lovely at this time of year.’

  Thanks, Julie, Jane thought.

  ‘Jane? Are you there?’

  ‘I’m driving the car.’

  ‘Do you know what Clive said?’ Greg asked rhetorically.

  They were driving through a tunnel. Jane and Julie stretched their necks like alert animals.

  ‘He said from now on, there will be fewer feature articles. They’re no longer prioritized. Just as I thought,’ Greg continued.

  ‘What did you say to that?’

  ‘That I don’t give a shit because I have a boat that’s perfect for perch fishing. With a rotating chair on deck.’

  ‘Julie is here too, in case you had forgotten.’

  ‘Says you?’

  Compared to Greg, she had always been poor at controlling her speech in their daughter’s presence. She might make rude comments about strangers within Julie’s hearing. Why don’t you just jog off? You look like it’d do you good. She had asked herself if, by sharing her bad as well good sides, she was trying to get closer to Julie as she grew older. Best of luck! You’ll need it, with that hairstyle. Would she become the kind of mother who hung out with her daughter in the mall, both in matching pink hoodies?

  There was just one other car in the parking lot in front of the grounded spaceship that was the Bolz Conservatory. Between the pillars at the main door, an older man stood, pointing at a sign that blocked the entrance to the greenhouses. He seemed deeply disappointed.

  Jane rolled the window down.


  ‘Closed for emergency repairs,’ quoted the man. He spoke so loudly she had to retreat from the window.

  She thanked him, drove on and shouted to Julie in an old man’s cracked voice, ‘Under repair! Closed!’

  There, she had done it again.

  She suggested that they go for a walk in the open garden and the arboretum instead. Once more, Julie asked: why? And got the answer: why not? Julie climbed out of the car slowly and walked a few paces behind Jane across the parking lot. Jane felt that her day of sitting at her desk had left her bursting with pent-up energy. Walking along the gravelled track leading to the Perennial Garden, they found themselves inside the dust stirred up by a noisy ride-on lawnmower. The gardens were either bleakly black or flowering desperately.

  They arrived at the grassy slope where outdoor concerts were held during the summer. An empty Coke can was lying on the lawn and she could see that Julie was tempted to give it a kick. Impulsively, Jane ran to beat her to it. Julie stopped in her tracks, gave off a subdued howl and started running. Jane had already reached the can and sent it across the grass in a fine arc. As they ran side by side to catch up with it, Jane managed to bump her hip into Julie’s side to gain ground but Julie came back with a mean leg-hook that tripped Jane up. Lying on the ground, she got hold of a sneaker that had come off and threw it after Julie, who avoided a direct hit with one graceful sideways move, picked the shoe up and threw it among the pillars at the far end. Jane had to hobble along, shouting in annoyance. In front of her, Julie, very pleased with herself, was dribbling with the can. When Jane had got close enough, she took aim at Julie’s thin ankles and lunged.

  They both rolled about on the grass, trying to reach the can. Jane’s foot was closest but Julie lay on top of her and pushed her elbow into Jane’s thigh.