Riddance

by Shelley Jackson

  It seems incredible, but I am going, really going, I told myself. My stammer, the cause of so much misery, had set me free.

  I was only seven and just come from quarantine to my aunt and uncle’s big Boston house when I first heard the Voice (for so I thought of it). It growled and spat in my throat, and I was beaten with a strop, for my new guardians had no better notion than to try to scare it out of me. The sum of their ambition for me was that I should disappear into the nondescript throng of their own children, of whom there were six seven six or seven. Unfortunately I could not do so. If nothing else, my dark complexion would have set me apart—for though my mother was white Irish like my aunt, my father had been black—although my aunt feigned not to notice it, while pressing upon me, as my only luxuries, whitening creams and parasols. But no one scrupled to editorialize on my stammer. Even little Annabel, still in diapers, knew that to imitate me was to earn shouts of laughter from her older siblings, and smiles even from the adults.

  I can see her now, in receding view: fat feet drumming the parquetry, Hygienic Wood Wool diapers dangling from a single pin.

  (“My hat!”—Miss Exiguous, outraged, as a lurch crushed its cheap feathers against the car ceiling. She unfastened it and, having inspected it for damages, laid it on the seat between us, holding it there with one sinewy little hand.)

  Still, I thought well of myself, though I had little enough reason to do so, and had I suspected that a stammer betokened “exceptional natural aptitude for spirit communications” (as Miss Exiguous would subsequently inform me), I would have prided myself upon it, no matter how my cousins derided me. But I did not, and I fought the Voice. The Voice won. I had periods of fluency, but much of the time I could barely speak at all and was in a pretty pickle when it came to asking directions of a policeman or naming the capital of Lithuania. I did not go hungry—to point and grunt was not beyond me. Still, if what distinguishes us from the beasts is the capacity to speak, as I was often told, I was not quite human.

  At the school there would be others like me, or even worse. It would be interesting to meet the worse. Drooling perhaps. Jerking and hissing like geese.

  At home, I mean at the large Boston house of my aunt and uncle, a picture hung on the wall. It had once decorated a Slavic beehive, I had been told; I do not know how it came into their possession, or why they kept it. It looked barbaric amid their twinkling crystal, fringed lampshades, dark soft-glinting mahogany furniture. In it a crudely rendered, gape-mouthed lady was having her horribly long red tongue drawn out by a naked devil wielding a pair of oversized tongues, I mean tongs. Tongue-tongs: it was as if the near-homophone had itself brought them together—as if language held a barely concealed grudge against its chiefest organ. It, the tongue, was frayed at one end into what I took for roots, in the botanical sense. I had red, I mean read, of a tongue being pulled out “by the roots” and had drawn from this the lesson that a tongue was a sort of vegetable, not of a piece with the body in which it was fixed. My own experience had supported this view: Within my mouth, warmly fuming with self, something foreign had grown. So I had half-believed the picture and even entertained, in drowsy reveries, certain fearful corollaries: that if my tongue was not pulled out like a carrot, it would branch, flower, go to seed. Of course it was not my tongue but my Voice that had taken root in my mouth like a weed. I could not imagine the tongs that could pluck it out. But I thought that the devil wielding them might resemble a man-faced woman in black.

  I slumped, jamming my chin against my chest through the stiff, coarse cloth of a new pinafore, a parting gift from my aunt. A more loving, better-loved child might have been hurt to be thus packed away, but I was glad. Glad! Hateful Aunt Margaret. Hateful cousins. Hateful house. And hateful myself, there. I had been bad, very bad, so bad that remembering, I swallowed hard, frightened and even awed at myself; but I would put wickedness behind me now. I would be so good, no one would ever send me away again.

  The hat crouched on the seat beside me, jet-tipped hatpins glinting like eyes among the feathers. It was watching me, knowing what I was thinking, that it would be so easy to reach over, and with just two fingers . . .

  I took hold of the seat with both hands. The car jerked, staggered, jerked. Miss Exiguous was breathing through her nose in indignant little puffs. We had come to the worst stretch yet; at some point the overflow from a drainage ditch had evidently run a good way down the road, washing away the dirt between the boulders; it would be interesting to see what became of the road if the storm fell upon us here, but I was no longer thinking about it.

  A peculiar tugging and plucking was taking place somewhere in my midriff. There was an almost palpable snap as of stitches parting, and then a slackening and a sliding; my past life was slipping away, like a loose signature from an old book. Already, those tribulations that had seemed so real were disintegrating into dust. Cousins, aunts, salt pork and boiled cabbage, grief and the slow, terrible deadening of grief—had I ever really believed any of it? Willingly, I yielded to a will stronger than my own, and let myself be carried into a new story.

  Readings

  My Childhood

  The following document, ostensibly by Sybil Joines, has been much discussed in the critical literature. It was sent to me as a .pdf file by a representative of the school, rather late in my researches, when I had already begun compiling this book. I subsequently offered it up to the larger community, with my own commentary and modest fanfare. It made a great stir, of course, as contributing a new and more intimate perspective on the early life of the Headmistress, and my reputation as a scholar was such that few questioned its provenance, but after its swift elevation to canonical status, questions began to arise about certain subtle anachronisms in the text, and it was finally condemned as a forgery by several major scholars in concert, in a rather hurtful public demonstration on the occasion of my presentation with an honorary degree from the University of Göttingen.

  Flushed, still holding my parchment scroll with its little tassel (which had somehow got caught in my reading glasses), and somewhat the worse for champagne, I was forced to hastily defend the document’s authenticity and, implicitly, my scholarly integrity, while at the same time aware of a highly unpleasant sensation in the pit of my stomach, not entirely attributable to Schnitzel mit Spaetzle, as I awoke to inchoate but long-standing doubts of my own.

  Finally, a Dutch research team took the obvious step of asking to see the handwritten original—as I should have done at the start—and resolved the debate at a stroke, for they found that it was written with a ballpoint pen. (As we know, Laszlo Biro did not file his patent until June 1938, well after Joines’s death.) I quickly issued a handsome retraction, making no reference to hurt feelings. Yet questions remained. If I had been the victim of a hoax, what on earth was its objective? Was the SJVS less enthusiastic about my project than it seemed? If so, why had they gone to such lengths to appear accommodating? Why was the fraud so cunning in one respect (whoever wrote it knew his SJVSeana) and so careless in another (how difficult would it have been to procure an inkwell and quill)? Finally, should we not accept as plausible

  hypotheses, if not facts, the explanations the counterfeit supplied for the many hitherto inexplicable references in the legitimate texts? I found myself unable to “roll back” the changes in my understanding of the Headmistress’s story; the fiction had folded in the facts and made them its own.

  I took these issues to the community at large, and after much consternation and internal debate we penned a collective e-mail to the Vocational School that was a masterpiece of tactful circumspection, requesting more information on the provenance of the contested document, and offering the dubious “out” that they had themselves been victims of a trickster among their own ranks. The response was quick and disconcerting in its honesty.

  Of course the document was modern! It had been completed just days before they sent it to me! The Headmistress had perceived that the book would be the bett
er for an autobiographical overview and had undertaken to provide one. The new headmistress? Well, yes! And also no. It was meaningless to speak of new and old in this context; the new headmistress was the old headmistress. Only insofar as the ghost of Sybil Joines spoke through her was she the headmistress at all.

  That this not only discredited the document in question but cast retrospective doubt on all the supposedly historical materials they had been supplying me with, I could not make them see. Concerns of plagiarism they brushed aside with an emoticon. How pointless to insist on verifiable authorship when “We are NONE of us in possession of ourselves,” when “We are ALL mere mouthpieces for the dead.” (Emphasis theirs.) Indeed, insofar as my extremely “STUPID” persistence betrayed a skepticism that the dead can speak, I risked souring our relationship and thus losing this priceless connection to the fount of all SJVSeana.

  I backed off.

  I have since decided that as a document of the contemporary Vocational School, this text is just as revealing as if it were exactly what it purports to be, and I would no longer contemplate omitting it from any serious study of the legacy. I leave it to the reader, however, to decide whether it reveals more about this headmistress, that one, or we scholars. —Ed.

  I had a fierce, unthinking certainty that I was exceptional. Once a bone had struck the road beside me and bounced up almost as far as my head, having fallen from, as it appeared, a great height. I turned around and around but saw only an old horse grazing on the far side of a field. The bone was therefore a sign. Not from God, not from anyone, just a sign: that I was special, that uncommon things were going to happen to me. Once, too, a hummingbird intent upon a trumpet flower had trustingly curled its claws around my finger—until then I had not been quite sure that hummingbirds had feet—while I inhaled with my eyes the pulsing iridescent neck, the finely thatched crown, the liquid eye. Even after it tensed and flew away I continued to feel its warm, bony grip, like an invisible ring, as if I were betrothed to the extraordinary now. I felt not wonder, but vindication. This was what I expected life to contain. This, and an unending series of similar marvels, like brightly colored glass beads on a string.

  “Excuse me, what was your name again?” Susannah says, as Mary coughs behind her plump and freckled hand. Susannah is my next-door neighbor (it is over the fence that dissociates our lush lawn from her seedy one that we conduct this interview). Her father works in my father’s factory. So does Mary’s. She knows my name.

  My breath turns to glass in my throat. I gag; again; again. At the front of my mouth, my tongue (with a pressure slightly, maddeningly off-center) seems to be trying to stub itself out against my teeth.

  “Sssssssss . . .” I say, if you call that saying.

  Susannah tilts her shining head, and I burn. Not just for the barbaric sound I am making—a spiccato sizzle—but for the hair stuck to my cheek, the stinging spot where my frock chafes, my index finger, twisting my skirt into a garrote. For my whole, objectionable person. It is as if I have been precipitated out of fumes and intimations only now, when the thick, wet, rubbery fact of tongue and lip makes itself felt.

  The shock disacquaints me with myself. I feel no loyalty toward that wretch, only alarm and aversion. I would like to signal to my prosecutors, watching my evidentiary mouth with forensic curiosity, that I am on their side, against me. But to do that I would need to speak.

  “Sssssssssss . . .”

  I lean forward, lean back, tilt my head one way and then the other, as if I were explaining 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 drag
ging 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.