Jane Two

by Sean Patrick Flanery

  Jane’s soundtrack was as constant as mine. As soon as a record ended, she would select another. With her headphones on, I could never tell what song she had selected until she sang a line or two. I would watch her small cupped hand hovering under the brush from her makeshift cinder block pallet that displayed cadmium red, vermillion, lead white in the rainbow spectrum of heavy metals, beside Ball jars of linseed oil and turpentine and other solvents. Jane’s voice rang out “The Sounds of Silence,” and I always wondered why they hadn’t recorded her mellifluous, off-key version. It was my favorite song. Her brush traveled the short distance to the right lower corner of a finished canvas where she signed it: Jane. Her left palm held the globule of green, while her brush just kept dipping into her makeshift cup, before finally traveling back up to the canvas to add the word Two. Jane Two. I looked at my own palm and wondered if the green paint Jane held in her hand would remain in the crevices of her palm to mark Jane’s life line and heart line. And how that hand would feel in mine.

  Jane was my dream. She defied logic, but it was the faulty logic that came from underestimating my abilities. I now know that real dreams require unreasonable actions, like my Grandaddy always said, and that is why I despise my reasonableness with gusto.

  My mom yelled, “Supper!” so I slipped away from the bushes shrouding Jane’s garage, back around the block, up Sandpiper to Bentliff, and inside my house. To exist in Jane’s presence was all I wished for. I hadn’t a clue what I could ever conjure to say to such a unicorn. I walked inside my house for dinner and straight into a fog of the sickening perfume that my sister Lilyth had coated herself with and my mom’s cloud of cigarette smoke at the huge chopping block with little drawers that contained postage stamps and paper.

  Most nights right before bedtime, Dad would time me with my silver stopwatch racing my bike around the block. I’d relinquish its leather thong from around my neck, and I’d set off on my Schwinn Sting-Ray. Often when I was out at the second corner of the block, I’d see Lilyth smoking with Magda on the far corner. Next morning, before school, same thing—Dad timing my laps and Lilyth out smoking. My red scarf just like Speed Racer’s never left my neck and my dad had put an M on the front of one of his old racing helmets with red electrical tape. My Sting-Ray was my Mach 5, and I wanted to break a record every single day.

  My dad would cheer me on like I was in a tight battle for the lead on the last lap of the Monaco Grand Prix. He would yell to me about braking for the corners, and proper apexing to shave tenths. And he always said that the biggest gains were hidden in the most overlooked areas. He always said that my goal was to improve, whatever the size of the improvement. And above all, to never quit, because that’s not what winners do. I’d scream by in cutoffs and bare feet, the hot wind pulling at my hair, hoping to shave a tenth or even a couple hundredths of a second. The speed of my progress was less important than the progress itself, so I had to make sure it was always there. There was no rush—even with Jane, I only had to get a little bit closer to her every day. I just couldn’t quit. And every day, I hoped Jane would see me as I was screaming by on my Sting-Ray.

  I heard my father’s words, but I was far too literal as a child. Maybe it was the things I stuck to that kept Jane at a distance. I wish I had understood at a much earlier age all the wonderful things that my Grandaddy told me. It all seeped down from my Grandaddy. And my Grandaddy contradicted just about every sentence from any parenting handbook ever written. He was the only person in my life to ever contest all those lies. He’d say, “Winners do quit, ya little seedlin’, they quit doing the shit that makes ’em lose,” and, “Winning is everything, and forget what all those other pansies say, because they don’t even know what the goddamn competition is.” He told me, “Progress, and progress alone, gonna point to the winner, and without it, ain’t gonna be no pointing at all.”

  Sports defined my absolutes in life. Sports framed a definite game plan. In sports I relied on no one else; the absolutes were clear. For me, sports were straightforward mathematical equations that, if approached with the right work ethic, could almost always guarantee success. It was easy to outwork people who I knew weren’t working. But Jane was different. With her, it wasn’t just up to me. The uncertainty of love was hard for me to process. I couldn’t intentionally bend physics with Jane. But I could with sports.

  My Grandaddy showed me my first magic trick of life when I was eight years old—a magic trick that I just had to find a way to apply to Jane. I was sprinting down the sideline of the soccer field during a game against Crestview when I chased after a ball that a teammate had passed to me just a little too hard. The ball was racing out-of-bounds, and my body did something instantaneously that no stopwatch, slide rule, or measuring tape could match. My instincts immediately and accurately calculated that the ball would cross the sideline and out-of-bounds a good two seconds before I could reach it. So, I slowed down. I gave up. I’d heard my Grandaddy say many times that “most people think that they’s two possible results for every endeavor, success and failure, but they’s wrong. They’s three, but only one you gotta be scared of.” My Grandaddy taught me to learn from both success and failure, but he always told me that quitting would affect my life far more than anything else.

  At halftime, my Grandaddy walked up to me, and I saw the absolute worst thing that a child can ever see in an elder’s eyes.

  Disappointment.

  Grandaddy told me that he never wanted to see me quit again. He told me to chase every ball out-of-bounds with the true belief that I could keep it in-bounds.

  “Even if you eyes is tellin’ you that you won’t make it, well goddammit, you keep sprinting, ’cause at the very least it will tell all those on the other team that even in the face of certain defeat, you gonna keep going. And they gonna know in they heart that they cain’t defeat that level of determination. And at the very most, you gonna find that that level of determination gonna bend physics, and you eventually gonna catch that ball.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about, but I knew I would sprint for every single ball just to avoid my Grandaddy’s disappointment.

  “Up ta you. You can spend your life checking things off your impossible list, or you can spend it adding things on, but you gonna learn real quick when you find ya self wantin’ somethin’ you ain’t never had. And at that moment, you better get goddamn ready ta do something you ain’t never done.”

  As my Grandaddy spoke, Steve McQueen snuggled up next to me shoring up my courage, and the image of Jane bouncing, defying gravity, kept obscuring the image of that soccer ball. From that day on, I never let anyone see me give up on going after a ball headed out-of-bounds. In game after game, I chased every wild ball with a level of focus and intent that I previously couldn’t match. Then one day, in a game against Westbury, Clatterbuck passed a ball to me. That ball, by my calculations, would go out-of-bounds about three seconds before I could reach it. The conundrum was that I ended up missing it by only a millisecond. It was at this point that I started believing that I could catch these balls.

  Now, I’m the last person alive to believe in any hocus-pokery, but this much I do know: Either those balls started to slow down, or I started to speed up. I don’t know if they coincidentally started finding a certain patch of grass that held them up just long enough, but I started catching the balls after my usually reliable instinctual calculations had deemed it impossible.

  It was on the first day I caught the ball that my internal calculator underwent a correction. It had to recalibrate. Because, of all the criteria that it used to instantly determine success or failure, one crucial thing changed: my belief. You see, up until that first day that I saw my Grandaddy’s disappointment, my body was inputting my lack of belief in the equation. My Grandaddy told me that belief can make a liar of your own eyes. But not to worry, he said, “Your eyes gonna catch up. That goalpost gonna move. What was impossible yesterday, but ’came possible today, gonna seem goddamn normal tomorrow. Then, there go
nna be a new impossibility in ya life that ’ventually gonna fall under the constant bludgeoning of a certain determination. And once them impossibilities start to fall with practiced regularity, then space and time gonna contort all up, and the noise of life gonna be shrunk up into more a manageable volume. This is when physics gon’ bend, and it gon’ bend to your will. You gotta believe. Because getting your hand raised only make you a winner in one aspect of life. What really count is what you do after the goddamn crowd go home. It ain’t ever what you get for puttin’ in all the hard work, it’s what all the hard work gonna make you become. That’s the shit that make you a winner, and you better goddamn believe it, son…it’s everything.”

  * * *

  That boy fell out of a car trunk in his driveway, so I painted a new painting with a lot of blue and listened to ‘Sounds of Silence’ on my headphones. Finished embroidering one dinner napkin to put in my hope chest. Geraniums in cross-stitch. Mom said 11 more and I will have enough for dinner with all my brothers and mom and dad and invite five friends. But I don’t have five. I have my cousin but he’s far. And maybe I have another idea but I won’t say or then it might not come true. Good night.

  * * *

  I came face-to-face with Jane for the first time when a brainstorm told me to confront my claustrophobia by locking myself in the trunk of my father’s car after figuring out how to open it from the inside. I was determined to stay in for ten minutes, and I was halfway through the first five seconds when panic began to set in. My brain was on sabbatical somewhere near the engine compartment, and I couldn’t get the latch—whose mechanism I had committed to memory—to be my friend. I imagined that this was what it must be like to be trapped in The Hole. I hollered and yelled as I flailed around in the sauna the trunk had become, when I heard a car pull into our driveway. I heard my sister saying good-bye to Kevin. I knew the engine on his Firebird. I hollered again and Kevin’s car revved, so I hollered even louder as tires squealed out the driveway. My sister Lilyth yelled something at me as she passed, but I could make out only the words retard and dumbass. Then she drummed on the trunk and kept right on going into the house, but I could’ve identified her without even hearing her voice because the smell of a nauseating new perfume crept inside the trunk to savage me. I had to get out. I thrashed and screamed again in a full panic until the latch finally popped open, at which time I burst out, wringing wet from sweat and gasping for clean air, right into a perfect face-plant on the driveway. My sneaker was caught on the latch, so I remained dangling at a bad angle as my eyes adjusted to the sunshine.

  Why fortune sent Jane walking home by my front sidewalk on this very day haunted me for decades, but she stood there staring at me from no more than ten feet. Still as a bell in the shadow of my giant bean tree by the sidewalk, Jane was everything. It wasn’t until then that I realized that Jane was nothing less than an alien being who had been beamed down for the sole purpose of making a mockery of our female population. Her presence caused me to slip into inarticulateness, and after an inordinately long pause, I searched my vocabulary for a word while we looked at each other and came up with, well, “Hi” with my laces still twisted around the latch.

  Jane looked like she was aware of so much magic that people haven’t yet discovered, like she knew all the secrets. Like she inhabited a secret room walled in velvet, like the little boxes that expensive jewelry comes in. I bet her velvet was purple. She took a moment, then answered back with an equally if not more gusto-filled “Hi,” the only difference being that it was followed—what seemed like three weeks later—with a devastating “Bye.” She took a step backwards and then a step forward, as if to wind up a little extra speed before her shadow followed her out from under my giant bean tree…and Jane was gone.

  * * *

  My mind never left Jane as my mom smoked up a storm next to me while she drove me to school in the Dodge Dart. I hung out the passenger window for air and stared at the houses in various states of disrepair. Most of them had broken-down cars in the driveway and trash. Mom reminded me that my dad wasn’t coming home today until after practice, so he’d pick me up from football. The radio knob was broken, so I asked Mom if the guy at the gas station could fix our car radio.

  “We’ll see, Mickey.”

  “When’s that new school open, Mom?”

  “Couple weeks, maybe before Halloween.” We pulled up to my school. “And, Mickey, in lieu of me driving you to practice today, Miss Flinch’s driving you, so you be sure to tell her thank you for driving. Hear? We won’t see her after today.”

  “Why does Miss Flinch have to go to the new school? She’s so nice.”

  “You’ll have a new homeroom teacher, darlin’ and I’m sure she’ll be just as nice.” But I didn’t want a new one.

  “When can I ride my bike? Everybody else rides their bike.”

  “You’re not everybody else, Sug.” My mom patted me lovingly. “And every day a bike gets stolen from this school. We’ll see.” We stopped in front of the school as kids of all ages filtered in from buses and cars. I hugged my mom good-bye. “Wait, don’t you want to take off that—Sug, your scarf!”

  I heard her, but I was already committed to a dead sprint toward the front door of Missouri City Elementary School, straight to homeroom, minutes late for my first day. And school or not, I liked to wear it for Speed.

  “Okay, Lawrence, you can sit right down, thank you for that poetry,” said Miss Flinch to the fat redhead. “And Emmalyne, you’re next.” Unruffled, Miss Flinch smiled and swept her feathered Farrah Fawcett hair dramatically as she turned to see me enter, out of breath, and gently close the door behind me. I waited at the door for Emmalyne to finish reciting her poem. When Emmalyne was done quoting “The Night Before Christmas” I proceeded to my chair, but my head was immediately jerked to a stop because I had accidentally closed my scarf in the door. About thirty students at folding-top desks gaped back. While my feet had kept going, I was momentarily hanging by my neck. Giggles assailed me. Finally, I was able to right myself. I reached my hands behind my back to open the door and freed my scarf. Breathless, I gently shut the door behind me. I glanced over by the windows and saw the kid with the red crew cut who looked swollen all over. He and his friends had stopped mouthing off and throwing paper airplanes, and just stared. I did my best to hide my embarrassment as I continued on to the last empty chair during a long, uncomfortable silence all the way to the far row by the window.

  “Mickey, you’re next. So Mickey, make us smile, please,” said Miss Flinch.

  No sooner had I sat down and escaped the stares and giggles, I had to stand again and start all over. Awkwardly, I disentangled myself from my desk, slowly stood up, and searched my memory banks. The entire class stared at me, awaiting something…then, I blurted out some words about a loon and a balloon, as if the quicker I went the less mortification I would endure. Everyone stared as if I had just spoken a foreign language.

  “Oh, it’s by T. Rex.” I immediately sat down again, willing the teacher to just move on.

  The room was utterly silent.

  “Who’s T. Rex?” blurted the inflated kid who kept fuzzing his red crew cut with the palm of his hand, over by the windows behind me.

  “Shut up, Firefly,” said Emmalyne.

  “Lawrence, did you mean to raise your hand first, dear?” asked Miss Flinch sweetly. Before I could reply to what struck me as a completely stupid question, a voice came from the back of the class, soft as velvet.

  “Marc Bolan.” And just like that she spoke.

  I turned around slowly to find, way in the back…Jane, her raised hand gracefully descending to her lap. She never even looked up after she spoke. I didn’t want her to catch me staring, but I couldn’t get my eyes to leave her. I wanted to know every detail of her world, and I wanted to start yesterday. Jane was mine—mine alone to translate.

  “Who’s Marc Bolan?” persisted the loud, fat kid with the red brush-top, Firefly. “He’s the singer of a rock group c
alled T. Rex,” Miss Flinch replied. Before Firefly could tell me I was a stupid shit, Miss Flinch interjected. “Lawrence, you might’ve heard ‘Bang a Gong (Get It On)’ on the radio?”

  “That duddn’t count!” pouted Firefly.

  “Of course it counts,” declared Miss Flinch cheerfully, and I sighed in relief. Just at that moment, Jane lifted her eyes and looked right at me with a sliver of a smile. She didn’t scan the room and eventually find me. No, she lifted her head, and her eyes came right to me. “Songs are just poetry put to music. Just because it’s something you hear…” Miss Flinch kept on explaining somewhere off in the far distance.

  It only lasted a moment, and it was gone. Jane sat back there drawing on a sketch pad. She didn’t look up again after that. I wanted to know everything about her, and I would’ve asked if it weren’t for the sudden paralysis that gripped my body when I saw her. I hoped it would go away by the time class ended, and that maybe I could follow her down the hall to some place quiet and ask her…about her. But suddenly, another voice slammed into my head, preceded by the smothering stench of mothballs.

  “Jane?” Wooden paddle in hand, Mr. Totter stood in the doorway, drab as death, smoke from the cigarette he had just quashed right outside the door shooting from his nostrils as he spoke. Practically bellowing, the principal continued, “Jane, we need to get you through registration and into a homeroom for the people transferring to the new school.”

  And then Jane just floated out the door without a sound. She glanced back at something very near my desk just as her eyes crossed the doorframe, taking her from my view. I wanted it to have been me. I’m almost positive that other things happened that day, but I don’t remember any.

  Jane mattered, and I knew she contained a lot of things I needed. That night I sent her a letter. With care, I put it in my favorite mailbox on the corner of Bentliff Street and Sandpiper Drive, where the two intersected before Sandpiper curved around in a ninety-degree dogleg that eventually posed Jane’s house directly behind mine. I looked at that mailbox every day on my way to school because it was tilted, and one of its four legs was bent inward at a weird forty-five-degree angle so it almost looked like it was dancing…or dying. But I’d always chosen dancing. I’d never seen a happier mailbox. And my Grandaddy had always said that happiness is the only magic in the world. That mailbox had to be magic. I patted the happy, federal blue box as I fed it and thought that Jane’s unicorn magic might even mend its leg if it delivered my letter. Even though I deliberately sent it to the wrong address, I hoped for Grace to stand and deliver. I hadn’t a leg to stand on, really, but I reasoned The Dancing Mailbox had three.