Riddance

by Shelley Jackson

  The bolts held that time and another time and once more still and then failed, but that was after my parents were dead and I a young headmistress occupied with my school, whose outbuildings had been menaced by the selfsame flood. Still, I went to look at the sundered house. It had slid sideways off its foundations and was striking on its former lawn a defiantly jaunty pose, one side stove in and the other thrust out like a hip. I could see a muddy settee through a gap in the wall and, disposed upon it, what appeared to be the head of a moose, not a drowned moose but a moose that had been shot for its spread of horns, decapitated, and affixed, the head I mean, to a plaque, and the plaque to a wall, but had made its escape and was now resting from its exertions.

  I have often wondered whether dead animals, too, have their ghosts. I would gladly give that moose a pulpit. But I suspect that merely dying would not suffice to teach a mute to speak, so that if animals do visit our throats it is only in the odd sad-sounding yap or bellow.

  When I first heard about the waywardness, I pictured a flounced patchwork skirt, such as I believed Gypsies to wear, and began to watch my mother for signs that she was preparing for a trip, since I supposed that to be wayward was to be on the way somewhere, as by repute the tribe of Romany generally were. I saw this skirt so clearly that I dug through her chest of drawers and the old brass-bound Jenny Lind trunk in the attic in confident expectation of finding it and was disappointed to unfold nothing that was not white, peach, pink, beige, or blue.

  Whether because I was looking for it, or because there really was something forever yondering in her, my mother always seemed to me on the verge of departure. One morning I awoke to an empty house and the conviction that she had gone at last. I ran all the way down Common Place Road in nightgown and slippers, eyes wide and wet, but turned back when I reached the factory drive, perceiving that she would never have gone that way, and sped back again, in at our front door (standing open), and straight through the house to the back porch, where, on the steps, staring off toward the river, my mother sat. I sank down beside her, she put her arm around me without taking her eyes off the swatch of sliding silk, and I never asked if she had decided to come back to me or never left in the first place.

  When I understood better what waywardness was, I looked for that, too, in my mother but could not find any more evidence of it than I had of the flounced skirt, though my father seemed to detect the taint of it even in the way she kept house or received the mail, while her familiar way with a grocer’s lemons once occasioned weeks of recriminations.

  But I saw with what hopeless hopefulness she adjusted the lay of a doily or straightened her chairs and her skirts when he was due home and, dismayed, thought hers an all too strait and narrow waywardness. Only, sometimes, when my father was out, did she take off her shoes and go out to stand awhile under the trees in her bare feet, very still and expressionless, and I saw that here was the flounced skirt at last, or what remained of it.

  I recall that after what my father deemed to be her indelicate pronunciation of “leg of lamb” at the butcher’s he struck her as I watched through the bedroom door, left ajar. “Marrying you was the ruin of me!” He fell on the floor and began pulling his beard and hitting himself in the face, a thing I was always happy to see. I heard him groan, “Bea, Bea, I wanted it to be different! You’ll forgive me, Bea!”

  I couldn’t help it, I laughed.

  My mother came to the door. Before she closed it she met my eyes and shook her head slightly. One of her cheekbones was higher than the other and something was strange about her eye on that side. At dinner I saw that a glossy cherry-red spot was rising from behind the lower lid, like a second, devilish pupil. I was afraid to see it watching me and kept my own eyes on my plate. I remember the meal as the very hypostasis of dread: a thin brown sauce spreading from under the slab of lamb as if it were leaking, a gray pile of one of father’s healthful grains, and some peas. When my mother came to put me to bed that night I shrank away from her.

  In my fear there was also an element of disgust, for like my father I was revolted by weakness. I was offended by my mother’s apologetic submission to my father, for it seemed obvious to me that she was the superior being, and I indicated my partisanship when I dared, hoping to inspire her to revolt. For instance, understanding that the incident at the butcher’s had enraged my father, though not exactly why, I subsequently made of leg of lamb my chief epithet. How clearly I remember shouting “L-leg of lamb leg of lamb leg of L-L-LAMB!” as the ruler came down on my thighs.

  To this day I do not greatly savor lamb.

  Then, of course, I returned to writhing, sobbing, and patting his feet in wordless entreaty. This may seem chicken-hearted but was in fact a sort of defiance, because he regarded groveling with such disgust, and I wonder now whether the same logic might not excuse my mother’s obsequiousness. “I would have expected more pluck from a whelp of mine,” he would say, and interrupt my “education,” as he called it, to page through a pamphlet on the principles of heredity: criminality, imbecility, and pauperism traced through several generations of tenement dwellers, mollusks, or pea plants; a cat who lost its forepaw in a steel trap, whose grandchild had a limp; and so on.

  It will be perceived that my father was a scientific American, and indeed he was a faithful subscriber to the periodical of that name, as also to Popular Science Monthly, The Telegraphic Journal and Electrical Review, The Medico-Chirurgical Review, The American Journal of Dental Science, Practical Sanitation, The Water-Cure Journal, and the like, with whose aid he proposed to manage his life, his business, my mother, and me. The books on our shelves were scientific and were ordered scientifically. Our house was kept clean by science, or so father supposed, though my mother often crept around with a dustpan and whisk-broom to make up for the deficiencies of our hand-pumped Whirlwind Sweeping Machine. We ate scientific food that we chewed scientifically as Father counted aloud, pausing (but holding the bolus ready for resumed hostilities) when he interrupted his count to tender us scientific descriptions of the activities in his corpus as the wholesome ingredients purged his system of impurities.

  You begin, perhaps, to get a sense of the range of my father’s interests. Some of his other enthusiasms were photography; telegraphy; the mixing of perfumes; the raising of silkworms; modern sanitation; antique dessert spoons; mesmerism; hydropathy; and novel methods of extracting sugar from melons. In some cases his interest did not extend beyond that of a critical onlooker, but he was often inspired to wholesale enterprise by the articles he read, and would write off for the equipment and materials to set him up in a new line of work, for to husband an inherited manufactory did not suit his impatient and choleric temperament. That same temperament rebelled at any sustained effort, however, so very few of these enterprises lasted beyond his initial infatuation. In some cases simply writing out an order satisfied the appetite aroused in him by the article or advertisement in one of his periodicals, and by the time a thousand packets of dung-colored, spiky seeds or a lump of waxy material arrived in a bumped, scuffed, stained, and belabeled carton, he had forgotten why he wanted them and sometimes even what exactly they were.

  More often he lost momentum only after he met the first serious obstacle, by which time half the house was given over to dyestuffs, say, or the grinding of lenses, and then my mother would enter the field to try to recoup at least some of his expenses. Far more practical than he, she became pretty knowledgeable about the various ways available to a lady entrepreneur to unload a very odd range of goods, and sometimes even turned a profit, though to my disgust she did not ever hold back any of the money she made to supplement the small allowance from which she supplied all her own needs and mine, as she might easily have done, but turned it in to my father, submitting meekly to his grumbling, for of course although he thought “peddling” beneath him, he nonetheless believed that if he turned his hand to it, he would do it better than anyone, always asked what he believed to be very canny questions about th
e deals she had struck, and invariably concluded by lamenting her sad want of acumen, when the truth was that without her acumen he would have been emphatically out of pocket and perhaps ruined us with his many nonsensical investments.

  His extravagances were never more flagrant than when he could style them research. For my father planned a great work, whose particulars were yet to be determined. Above all else he admired inventors, knew their names and stories, often spoke, though always in vague terms, of the inventions that he himself would unveil when he was ready, and pored over the official reports of new Patents and Claims with occasional exclamations of annoyance at those who, to hear him tell it, had anticipated ideas for which he had just been on the verge of filing a patent himself. His conversation at dinner was really a monologue on the latest discoveries, many of them of no utility in his line of work, such as a new method for ventilating railroad carriages, or for making artificial ivory out of caoutchouc, ammonia, chloroform, and phosphate of lime; and some quite unwelcome at the dinner table (or so I perceived—for I had a strong stomach myself—from the suddenly rather taxidermic appearance my mother assumed as her jaw froze in mid-bite), such as a new sort of verminous tumor in the stomach of the horse, an improved remedy for fecal stench, or a way to induce sluggish leeches to suck (soak them in beer). He treated us to expositions on the dyeing of ornamental feathers; female labor in Germany; improvements in chandeliers; the preservation of blood from slaughterhouses in the form of a jelly obtained by adding quick or slaked lime; the Inter-Continental Tunnel planned between Tarifa and Tangiers; a new factory proposing to make paper from the cactus plant; a new method for identifying falsification in documents via photographic copies; and an experiment in weighing the rays of light, which showed that the weight of sunlight on the earth was three thousand million tons, “a force that but for gravitation would drive it into space” (Practical Magazine).

  He gave his opinion freely and somewhat wildly on these topics, of which he had no firsthand knowledge whatsoever. Sometimes he became so exercised that he leapt up from his chair and strode around, employing gestures that recalled the elocutionary training of which he was so proud. (He often mentioned that he had won a prize in school for his recitation of Bryant’s “Thanatopsis,” a conversational turn that I dreaded, for it invariably progressed from pleasurable reminiscence to lamentation that such as he should have spawned such as I—i.e., a tongue-tied nincompoop.)

  When he heard of a new gadget, however dubious or impractical, nothing would stop him from placing an order, and when it came in the mail he would drop everything to read any manuals included with it, to assemble it if necessary, to try it out, and then to show it off. Alas, he did not have any friends to show it to, so he would summon his secretary, the foreman of his factory, and the more trusted and responsible of his skilled craftsmen, and they would all troop into the parlor and sit very silently and awkwardly on our most uncomfortable chairs while my mother poured tea and my father stalked around the device, waiting irritably for her to finish. It was plain to me that these visitors felt uncomfortable in our house and considered the occasion an extension of their work duties rather than a social event, but my father grew flushed and merry and loud and exaggeratedly colloquial in his speech as if to make his low company feel at home (though they themselves were invariably restrained and punctilious in their diction) and reminisced about the event afterward as though it had been a great success. Then he would spend several days in composing a long letter to the manufacturers giving his opinion of the device and suggestions for its improvement and often spoke as if the manufacturers waited eagerly for his letters and were very grateful for his insights and as if he had some sort of official role in the creative process and was indeed practically a co-creator. When I was very young I assumed that this was true and it made me think my father a very important fellow, but later I understood that it was all moonshine and pictured the manufacturers laughing over the letters with which he took such pains or simply dropping them into the trash unread.

  I do not remember all the items he purchased. But here are some that I still possess:

  An Automatic Signal Buoy;

  An Arithmometer, or calculating machine;

  A Magneto-Electric Bell Apparatus;

  A Pocket Telegraph, or portable Morse instrument;

  A Scott’s Electric Hair Brush;

  A Galvano-Faradio Magneto-Electric Shock Therapy Machine.

  My father often spoke of our world as rendered limitless by the ever-extending reach of practical science, and this had its effect on me, for I will not allow death to be an end. But while my father’s scientific cast of mind and the ideas and devices that he brought into the house were a great influence on my later work, I hold them to blame for many tribulations. Although my father was a serial enthusiast who could usually be trusted to move on from any given hobby within a few months, my stutter was a continual vexation and a reminder to him of the unfinished project that was my speech, and so from the pages of his science magazines came an endless succession of ways to torture my mouth: the syllabic exercises of M. Colobat, regulated by his muthonome or orthophonic lyre (a sort of metronome); exercises for the lips, the tongue, the breath; tongue-depressing plates, jaw-spreading pads, obstructions of various kinds—cruel descendants of Demosthenes’ pebbles—like the little gold fork of M. Itard, worn “in the concavity of the alveolary arcade of the inferior jawbone,” i.e., under the tongue; leather collars that buckled around my neck and pressed firmly against my larynx; metal plates that strapped to my teeth and projected between my lips; and a sort of whistle that was held against my palate by a sharp point digging into my tongue. It goes without saying that none of these devices fulfilled their promises to “restore the patient’s usefulness to Society by opening the Floodgates to cogent and mellifluous Speech.”

  I was supposed to be grateful for the trouble my father took over me and to let any setbacks inspire me to greater exertions, so my mother was not permitted to comfort me when I wept. “You have done enough harm, Madam!” he would cry, for my father considered my stutter a sign of the weakness in the maternal line, and never ceased blaming himself for the “temporary venereal intoxication” that had resulted in the “unscientific” and “counter-evolutionary” union of a man of his elevated forebears with a “moral imbecile” from a “line of shopkeepers and petty criminals.” He felt it his duty to correct for the evil effects of his ill-advised marriage on his social class, so when the pages of his monthlies offered no new quackery to inflict on me, he exercised his own ingenuity, pouring all his balked ambition as an inventor into designing novel devices for me to try. No doubt he also calculated that if he could cure stuttering where others had (so obviously) failed, he would make his name.

  Never had a mouth been so stretched, cut, prodded, plungered, braced, cantilevered, wedged, winched, pinched—so Scientific Americaned—so Popular Scienced. These periodicals were possessed of wonderfully detailed etchings of docks, and decks, and dykes, where somber, beautiful, flawlessly geometrical machines enjoyed the anonymous attentions of stiff, tidy men with tapering symmetrical limbs. In my father’s fancy and mine, such was or would be my mouth: a site of modern industry, well-regulated and productive, rolling forth (conveyed by belts and pulleys) a serene procession of die-cut, stainless-steel, copper-bottomed sentiments, accompanied by appropriate gestures.

  When my father fitted me with his contraptions—the only time he touched me except to punish me—his fingers were not ungentle, and I could sometimes mistake the optimism shining in his eyes for tenderness. Even now I ask myself, was there not, perhaps, under his dissatisfaction with me, a love that could be glimpsed in those moments alone, as mute and enduring as an endolith?

  Then I answer, No.

  But in those moments during which I sat, given over to his fiddling, my body softened and a strange knowingness went up my spine. “Sit up strai—damn it!” (A spring snapped loose.) “Open, wider, not so wide, cle
nch your teeth, relax, draw back your lips here, no, here, no, you stupid girl, here.” I complied, with something almost like eagerness, and an optimism of my own. This time, surely, it would work. The intensity of our shared wanting would make it work. I felt my coming fluency as a physical pressure at the root of my tongue, begging for release.

  It never came. My father’s contrivances were beset with misadventures: A spring-loaded cheek-stretcher came uncocked and shot out of my mouth to ricochet around the dining room. A gutta-percha bladder shipped its anchor when I inhaled and lodged in my windpipe, nearly asphyxiating me. A tiny dumbbell that I was, under his stern eye, rolling forward and backward on my tongue, was accidentally swallowed, after which for days I had to bring him the chamber pot that received my excrements and stand at attention while he dissected them with little metal rods like chopsticks. (The object never turned up; I suppose it is inside me still, lodged in my blind gut and slowly poisoning me, for it was made of lead.) For these mischances he naturally blamed me. Perhaps in some recess of his conscience he knew better, however, for he abandoned the most disastrous conceptions without retrial. Though not, I should say, without punishing me as “slothful, obstinate, and recidivistic,” bringing down the ruler once per adjective.

  Then he looks at the white-edged marks on my palm and his face contorts. “I have ruined my life, I will never amount to anything.”