Jane: A Murder (Soft Skull ShortLit)

by Maggie Nelson

  I long for peace and inner satisfaction.

  I seem only happy when I’m eating or reading.

  LIES

  One day walking home from third grade I became increasingly convinced that the driver of each passing car was slowing down beside me, about to ask me to get in. I began walking faster and faster; by the time I reached home, I was running and in tears. Upon seeing my mother, I immediately felt embarrassed that I was so frightened, so I told her that a man had tried to convince me to get in his car.

  The rest of the episode is a blur-I remember my mother taking me back to school and demanding that I tell my story to my teacher, a short, tan wisp of a woman, Mrs. Swing. They pressed me to describe the man; I don’t remember what I said. When there was talk of calling the police to file a report, I broke down, humiliated, and told them I was lying.

  (OCTOBER 21, 1960)

  Sandy commented a while back that I had brought my upsets in 8th grade upon myself.

  Of course I had!!! But what she can’t see is why!!

  I wanted to be noticed.

  I wanted attention!

  I wanted to know my own mind.

  GHOSTS

  The house on Palm was haunted. Emily had ghosts, she named them and talked to them and insisted no one else could see them. They were male ghosts, like Bloop, who lived in the closet on the stairwell, and there were spirits that infested objects, like George, the pool-cleaning device which floated in the water and chased Emily when she swam, its long plastic tentacles trailing to the bottom.

  My ghosts were cowboys who lived in the unused saloon, vampires who chased me up the stairs, and my murdered sister Hillary in the basement. I also remember a bathroom off the stairs of the saloon piled seven feet high with dirt. If you could climb the pile, you were privy to a ceiling entrance to a network of tunnels that connected not only to the big house, but also across time.

  Emily retained her ghosts for years. After our father died it became more acute-even as a teenager she dragged around stuffed animals, T-shirts, pillowcases, anything that smelled like the people she loved. Any object could become host to the scent of the dead or the invisible.

  I also saved a few things. The most precious was a gray cable-knit sweater of my father’s that I kept balled up in a drawer next to my bed, having decided that it carried the most potent scent. One day my mother found it and washed it, saying that it was filthy, that it wouldn’t smell like him forever. But she was wrong. It would have.

  (APRIL 15, 1960)

  I reread all my other notations and regret all I’ve said about my parents,

  for I love and need them. I’m full of so many moods! Why, I wonder?

  Perhaps I must blow off steam in the process of becoming a woman.

  Who knows? Not I.

  Someday perhaps I shall.

  SPITFIRE

  While growing up, Emily and I tried not to ask questions about Jane; we didn’t want to make our mother cry. But if Jane ever came up in conversation, we tried to coax her into telling us what she was like.

  She was a spitfire, my mother always said. She obeyed foryears, then started to talk back.

  I went down to my room and looked it up in my thesaurus.

  “Spitfire: Big, tough woman; Amazon; giantess.”

  JANE-EMILY

  Often I wondered what it would be like if Emily and I could go visit Jane, this eclectic aunt we never had. Would she be a free spirit, without children, who would take us to museums? A Communist in a black turtleneck who would let us smoke? Or, more likely, an impassioned, overworked civil rights lawyer, living in New York?

  I became jealous that Emily’s middle name was Jane-I felt it connected them unfairly. Plus at the library Emily had found a young-adult /horror novel called Jane-Emily, about a young woman named Jane who goes to visit her grandmother and becomes possessed by the ghost of Emily, her aunt who died in the house years before. “The gothic meeting of two worlds-the living and the dead!” the back cover promised.

  I was too afraid to read Jane-Emily, but I liked to look at its jacket.

  Jane’s face hovered beside Emily’s, the latter looming out of a

  large crystal ball.

  WHITE LIVER

  We lived on a beautiful mountain

  but for two years it was wrecked

  by the Trailside Killer. Next came

  the Night Stalker, to terrify white folks

  in one of America’s richest suburbs.

  At school they gave out a flier

  about him, told us to bring it home

  to our parents. But our parents

  were never home. Instead

  my best friend and I stayed up late

  drafting fake security alarm signs

  to tape to all the prominent windows.

  When I was twelve, the big movie was

  The Jagged Edge, and I stayed up countless nights

  replaying the first scene in my head:

  a masked intruder breaks into a home

  on the California coast, slices off the breasts

  of a woman asleep in bed

  and writes BITCH on the wall

  with her blood. It was a good thriller,

  that’s all. Now you can find me

  away from the money, down

  by the fire, my white liver

  on a stick, the fear

  roasting out.

  (1966)

  Fears and doubts don’t disappear

  just because it’s your birthday-

  Are you certain the direction you’re taking

  is the best for you-will make you happiest-

  You’re too damn status quo oriented anyway-

  where’s the spirit?

  You who have been so wary

  have much to offer. Try it-strike out-please-

  The whole person you are

  needs only empathy

  to make you a mind-

  and a woman—

  THE BEAUTIFUL MOUNTAIN

  I walk to a house set into the steep hillside, a stone staircase

  leading down to it.

  There’s a man in the house; I want him to see me.

  I am wearing a nightgown, pink and blue.

  I look attractive in a childlike way.

  The man will know who I am.

  He says he will drive me home.

  Then I realize, I have come to tell him I love him.

  He reaches down to kiss me, but suddenly I’m stung

  by a bee, a loud buzzing sound throughout my head.

  I fall backwards on the dense foliage, next to

  a big, moist, orange flower. An orange gardenia,

  I think, losing consciousness.

  I never knew such a beautiful thing existed.

  THE BURN

  As a child I had so much energy I’d lie awake and feel my organs smolder. To fall asleep I counted the pea-green polka dots on my wallpaper; there were thousands of them. First I was “hyperactive,” then “a spaz,” then “an accident waiting to happen.” I broke bone after bone, became most comfortable in a cast. My elbow first, at age two, then fingers, toes, a foot, a wrist.

  Was Jane waiting to happen? In my imagination, she was the most driven person I knew. A woman who did what she wanted. A woman who wanted.

  But it was my father who burned before me like a little maniac. It was he who shot up from nothing and nowhere and became a top lawyer. He made partner. It was what he’d always wanted. The only one in his family to find the money. He whipped around the beautiful mountain in a little orange Fiat convertible. He laughed often, played the guitar late into the night, traveled around the world, threw big dance parties, suffered keenly when my mother left him, later dated scores of women, adored his children, had his eye on working in Washington, DC, then had a fatal heart attack one night in his sleep. At his funeral, nearly everyone used the phrase “burned brightly.”

  On my first day back at school after his death, one of my friends took me aside
to tell me that she had seen my father jogging in our neighborhood a few weeks earlier. I remember thinking be looked really, really red, she told me gravely. Like he was about to burst.

  (1966)

  This whole world has problems-and I?

  How am I going to stand this place?

  What else is there?

  Too much in the wrong order?

  And what do you feed upon?

  SISTERS

  For quite some time, I felt I was my sister. That was before I just wanted to be her. We liked to tell people we were twins. I spoke so quickly as a child, my speech distorted by my lisp and my speed, I had to spend hours in after-school speech therapy, watching close-up videos of my mouth’s defective workings, or playing board games in which you couldn’t advance until you said Sally Sells Seashells by the Seashore slowly and impeccably. Emily didn’t see the problem-she could always understand me; often she was the only person who could translate me. Later, when she became too shutdown to order in restaurants or talk to sales clerks, I was proud to be her conduit to the outside world.

  Thus it was quite a surprise when she left me. First, she left for boarding school. Then, expelled, she left for reform school. Then she ran away. Every day she was missing, my mother said she was going to throw herself off the Golden Gate Bridge. I tried to stay very quiet, very still.

  After they tracked her down with the help of a private investigator, Emily spent time in juvenile hall. Then they sent her away again, but this time they hired someone to pick her up and take her away forcibly—child-lock doors in the car, etc. It was early in the morning, and neither Emily nor I understood what was happening. She tried to hide in my bed, she held onto my feet. For a moment I thought time might stop, and we could live together forever under my sheets.

  PRETTY GIRL

  Pretty girl beside

  a blue pool.

  Drugged-out, she

  slips into

  the water

  like paper.

  Shall I follow her?

  Down we go, past

  the white

  ladder, past

  the black numbers,

  their paint flaked

  by chlorine.

  Down, down,

  down

  to the drain.

  She will die here;

  she means to.

  Later, her

  swollen body

  lies in my tub. I can’t

  make myself

  get her out.

  I call my lover

  for help, but

  when I try

  to explain,

  no words,

  no breath

  comes out.

  (1966)

  Cigarettes-one after another-why?

  REPEATEDLY

  Repeatedly I dream that a woman

  has been dismembered, her body parts strewn

  around a huge mansion and glistening

  like pieces of a pomegranate.

  I can’t remember if my boyfriend did it

  or if I helped him do it; either way,

  I feel it is my duty to help him escape.

  But he is always too fucked-up on drugs-

  glazed, then comatose, out of his body.

  Eventually I alone manage to get all her parts

  into a wooden chest, though in doing so

  I make a bloody mess.

  (1966)

  Careless dribble-again

  Strange, lying in bed

  unable to sleep

  That’s all familiar

  but the thoughts inside me

  are not

  Questions, over and over

  home too long, back too soon

  alone, really alone

  What are you like when you’re alone

  ugly, heavy, disreputable

  unsure, awake, useless

  This room is hideous

  HIDEOUS

  Unable to sleep, surrounded by

  her words. Afraid, truly afraid

  to tell you about my brain

  chattering with cruelties-

  When did she know

  she was in danger;

  the terrible little gun

  flat against her head;

  which shot first,

  the front or the back?

  The fear,

  her fear

  but I cannot imagine that.

  Why keep trying?

  I can hear you say. Well

  I can’t help it. I just do. Then

  to stop the thoughts, I imagine

  two quick, dull shots

  that come as a sort of relief. Don’t you know,

  I recognize this

  as hell.

  I try to use of the tricks

  I’ve learned to get through this—

  Meditate on a wrathful deity.

  Watch it melt into light.

  And so I do, and find

  that not even Kali

  with her mouth full of blood

  nor Thor with his hammer

  can take me away from here, where

  your breath spouts out of you

  and I listen.

  GETTING SERIOUS

  I dream he comes via parachute

  and lands in a flickering canal.

  I’m on the phone with my mother.

  He’s here, I tell her. I’ve got to go now.

  He climbs toward the shore, dragging

  the tissue of his chute behind him.

  I get a knife, a long one,

  and as he approaches me

  I stab him. He droops a little,

  then bounces back to life.

  It won’t be so easy, he says.

  We take a moment to discuss it.

  Are you some kind of Rasputin?

  No, he says, you just have to get

  more serious about it.

  More specific.

  So I stab him again, then again,

  once in each kidney, two clean

  deep thrusts in his back.

  He’s dead now, truly,

  and my knife bears a pale red glaze.

  He knew what he’d come for,

  and I knew what I had to do. So

  it wasn’t really a nightmare,

  and in my next dream I flew

  over some gorgeous silk dunes.

  (1966)

  There’s plenty of time-why should I worry?

  You shouldn’t, but that’s no rationalization

  for your need to contact people-to know

  them—and share yourself and vice versa

  And it certainly doesn’t cure-altho it helps-

  the feeling of loss when people you like are cut-off—

  or cut themselves off-from you. But the optimism