Riddance

by Shelley Jackson

  Dear Ms. Brontë (Charlotte),

  I am—but I shall not introduce myself. I expect you know me, as I have known you since I was a little girl. If not, I hope you will forgive my boldness in so writing.

  Today I nearly lost another of my students, a stupendously talented girl whose rejection of the letter G was so absolute that it shaped every aspect of her life. She had appeared on the stoop one day, a dour little personage in breeches and a cap. (Unable to pronounce girl, she had been living as a boy for the last four or five years of her brief existence.) She was from Georgia, we eventually ascertained—poor creature! she could not tell us—and had hopped a series of freight trains to get here. Tell me, pray, how she could do this, when she very nearly could not do anything at all? It took great concentration for her to wake without waking, sleep without sleeping, dream without dreaming—to make, without the progressive tense, any progress at all. She must have picked her way across six states in a series of discrete acts, separated by voids. The present moment was a tribulation to her.

  I calculated that she would thrive in death, if anyone would, and I taught her the way. Cocksure, she tried to cross too soon. She would have made it, just the same, but when she scraped against her tonsils, she hesitated long enough to see that she was dying instead of dead, and so got stuck, halfway down her own throat. (Forgive me, I do not have leisure at present to explain how we get to the land of the dead—but I am forgetting that you already know!) Thankfully, little ’arriet came running, bleating about a “sucking place” and a “mouth with bootlaces” by the washroom sink, and I knew at once what had happened. I rolled up my sleeve, forced my arm down the hole, and towed her out by the tongue.

  ’arriet asked me why I could not ask one of the dead to push her back from the other side. Perhaps some of them—of you—might be capable, but for the most part you are simply no longer concentrated enough to exert much force in any one direction. You are more like descriptions of people than people. I do not mean to say that you are diaphanous—certainly not! Do you perceive how weary I am of that word, of which the ladies of the Harmonial (Hormonal!) Sisterhood are so fond? No—you are solid enough, at least in part. But you are not exactly entities. You are more like situations.

  I am in low spirits. Today a girl I saw right here in Cheesehill, asking a grocer for pa-pa-parsnips, and pointing to pears, and on whom I had set my heart, now that little ’mily has left us, for the part of E, or I should say, not-E, in my Analphabetical Choir, has declined the scholarship I was prepared to offer her, though it mean firing our laundress, and wearing dirty linens for a year, and says she will not come.

  I must have her! Her stammer is beyond anything. Her eyes bulge, her ears turn tomato red, her hands clench, and from her open mouth comes . . . emptiness itself. A humming, fizzing absence, in which I can already hear the distant voices of the dead. I could barely make out the “no” in it, and indeed I thought—hoped—that she wished to say yes but simply (simply!) could not pronounce it, a problem with which I am familiar, and so, while she was still sputtering, I grasped her by the shoulders, told her she might simply nod if she agreed, and asked again, would she come. Whereupon she shook her head so vehemently that her wet bonnet strings—she had been chewing on them—struck me in the face.

  There are lies put about in this town. But I mean to have my way, and my Eve, in the end!

  Adamantly,

  Headmistress,

  SJVSGSHMC

  4. The Final Dispatch, contd.

  It is easy to forget what you are about, in the land of the dead. Then the scenery with its painted birds and thistles is jerked up into the flies, with a rattle whose associations it is better to ignore. The world goes white.

  [Pause, sound of breathing.]

  For the moment, I remember only that I am chasing a child. Apparently I must save her. She is not far ahead, on the next page, or the next but one, I hear the shushing of her feet. The dry air, by which I mean the page, carries sound, by which I mean these words in which I say that sometimes she skips, like the child she is, as I never was. Sometimes she stops, to rest, or to wait for me, or for some other reason, I don’t know why a child stops, I was never a child.

  Setting down one word after another, I make my way to the end of the page, which swings open like a door, as it always does, and shows me nothing, as it always does.

  Or something, why not. A clue to keep me going, a little shoe, say, one lace trailing, looping over itself, like the flourish of an old-fashioned signature, but I don’t believe it. The shoe is plausible; the lace, though, gives the game away. For when I said “the little shoe,” that “little” betraying a sentimentality I am surprised to identify in myself, what took shape was a faded red Mary Jane, a little worn, and yet a Mary Jane does not have laces, nor do we permit play shoes in the school, but only school-issued black leather oxfords, bought at discount, sturdy and unimpeachable, which the students must sign out from Supplies. Those do have laces, and yet the one who is ahead of me, if I know her, keeps her laces tied, as surely as she keeps her wits about her. So it is not her shoe. So it is not a shoe at all. So I made it up.

  [Crackling] Save her!

  As for my wits, never mind.

  Save her!

  Maybe a dropped handkerchief instead, one of many bought in bulk from a Hebrew gentleman from Brooklyn, New York, issued every Sunday, surrendered to Housekeeping every Friday. If your nose runs on Saturday you are out of luck. Today must be Saturday. There is no handkerchief.

  Save her!

  No shoe and no handkerchief. No matter. I may be fortunate. Suppose she dropped a hairbrush, like the witch’s daughter in the story. I could then expect it to spring up into a thicket or a mountain range. I should count my blessings and keep a weather eye out for personal grooming tools.

  Or worse things. A doll made of— Are you receiving?

  I race on. O’er the drifting sand, though it is not sand. It is not snow either, yes yes, that has been established. I race on. But for all my haste I have the impression that I am not moving at all, that I am sitting upright, eyes almost closed, in my heavy wooden chair, which is angled to face the window, though the shutters are closed, my legs planted like Lincoln’s, big hands stiffly crooked over the carved armrests, a small sedate pillow of minutely patterned oilcloth, stuffed to stiffness with horsehair, slowly sliding out from behind my back, and the stern black crepe of my high-necked dress quite, quite still over my chest. The lamp burns low. Light is coming through the cracks in the shutters, blueing the black of my old-fashioned leg-o’-mutton sleeve in soft stripes, so that it looks almost tropical, some jungle animal lying in wait beside me. My mouth is open a crack, but no breath moves through it; under my lids a crescent of eye is drying.

  Or, another thought, that they have boxed me up, couldn’t wait, that the toes of my best kid boots are bent against mahag mahogany (cosmetically softened with silk), my hands folded, probably with the help of a mallet, into a semblance of prayer, my cheeks rouged (one slightly redder than the other) in the conventional transvestism of death, all my instructions ignored . . . my strongbox forced, my will12 removed and burned to ashes . . . [Rapid breathing.]

  In short, I have the impression that I am dead. That I am no longer a necromath, necrographer, necrologist, or necronaut, but only a corpse. That I have not been traveling, for hours, for what I count as hours, in death, but only for a few minutes, though long enough to have begun soiling my undergarments, and probably ruining the dress as well. So I won’t be buried in it, that’s a shame, I liked that dress, it was so ugly that everyone feared me in it, for none but a very powerful lady can resemble an eland in a horse blanket and still command obedience. Well, if I am going to ruin my dress I hope I shall ruin the chair as well, I should not like anyone else to sit in it.

  But what am I saying, have I not taught that the dead and gone don’t go, that I in particular will not depart but will reign on in the person of other, weaker ch
aracters who will yield precedence to me, as is proper? And should they not sit, as I have sat and through them will continue to sit, on my chair? Of course they should. I shall try to hold my waste. But I am forgetting, such feats are beyond me now, if it is true that I am dead. When I aspersed you, dear listener, with the imputation that you were dampening your institutional underpants, I was perhaps projecting onto you a suspicion that was already making itself felt, but had not yet reached my conscious mind: that I myself was dribbling. That the great, the ultimate incontinence had come.

  You, dear listener, are not even taking down these words, since by now you have noticed that I am dead, and have long since pulled the cord that rings the little bell downstairs. Someone has awoken with a snort in a room of suffocating blackness, windowless, such as my lowliest employees occupy, those who must submit to being woken by a little bell in the middle of the night, if it is the middle of the night, I can’t remember. Someone has pulled on his brogues and trudged upstairs, carrying a lamp, has approached the door outlined in light, which he knuckles timidly, no, I am mistaken, boldly, even more boldly than required, since he can place the blame for an interruption on you, listener, and is already looking forward to the punishment you will get for waking him from his sleep on such a stupid errand. Receiving no answer, he has knocked again, harder, and hearing nothing still, has begun to feel the justifiable excitement of finding himself witness to calamity, years of fruitless night-watchmanship rewarded at one stroke, and with unaccustomed confidence he has seized the door handle and walked in. He spots me at once. Stops short. Erect in my chair, I seem to be sleeping. Belatedly meeting your terrified, no, tranquil eye, he pulls his forelock, not literally, I merely conform to literary tradition, and takes a step closer.

  Perhaps it is an odor that now alerts him to my real condition. How relieved he is, while nonetheless a faint, fine tremor besets his whole body. Disavowing it, he strides around the room as he would not dare to do at any other time, even touching, in this his moment of ascendancy, those objects that must seem to him the regalia of my power—my great inkwell, my stuffed crow, my ear trumpet, my lace mitts. Finally, he touches the very symbol of his servitude, his manhood thrilling in his trousers—no, not that, the great bell cord—and, curling his fingers around it, gives it a mighty tug.

  After that, of course, the house rings with voices, all louder than their owners would have dared to pitch them, a day before. As if they wished me to hear, from wherever I was, and know that they still lived and did not fear me any more. Very foolish of them, for they ought to know that I shall return, more terrible than ever.

  But if I am really dead, and only imagine myself a necronaut, then how do I know that I have not been dead for years, for decades? You, and my school, and little Eve Finster might be long gone.

  Or [static] never have existed at all, for if I can invent a world for my shade to run through, surely I can invent a girl to flee me through it, and another girl at a typewriter, to write it all down.

  But now I am frightening myself. In any case I am probably not dead, and all this is just a distraction and a hindrance—a thicket, you might say. (She dropped that hairbrush after all!) Yes, I must get back to—what was it? Winding road, muddy field—then the bird—the thistles—my boots are wet, green burrs cling to my sodden bootlaces, a nice detail, I’m beginning to believe this story, and so back down the bank to the road. Did I say I left the road? I left the road. In more than one sense. I stopped dead, you might say—

  The worms! Would I feel them at their work?

  I think not; I think all feeling would have ended, for me.

  Let’s face it, there is no way to know for sure. I might be dead. You might be dead. We might all be dead, pushers of prams and their passengers, shiners of shoes and those whose shoes are shined, all of us unwitting necronauts, inhabiting through the naïve thaumaturgy of our incessant chatter a world as solid as we can make it. But not quite solid enough. Some knowledge of our real estate leaks through—a whisper, a wisp, a wandering light. We call these lapses “ghosts” . . .

  [Static, sound of breathing.]

  The road!

  The Stenographer’s Story, contd.

  I traipsed dumbly around behind Florence for the rest of the day and observed a great many things that made me wonder, but that was no more than I had expected of a school of spiritualism. That I might eventually have dealings with ghosts was a notion that, insofar as it was real to me at all, was rather delicious. More troublesome were my doubts about my own standing as a student, which my reception thus far had scarce allayed.

  It was not until the evening meal, while partaking, under the coldly curious gaze of the other students, of a thin, greasy soup in which a few white beans swam, that I finally glimpsed the Headmistress, seated at the high table below her portrait (half visible behind her, a student was posted as before, his back to the assembly)—an ark of a woman, stiff in her whalebone, and with the slightly frowning look of a person listening intently to something almost out of hearing. At one point she dropped her knife to smother a cough in her napkin, and it seemed to me that every spoon paused before dipping again into the broth.

  After dinner I was following Florence toward the reading room for an hour of study before evening calisthenics, when Mother Other, overtaking me, dropped a hand on my shoulder. “Do you suppose that my office is a cloakroom or luggage claim repository?”

  I indicated that I did not.

  “Then I cannot comprehend why you have not retrieved your suitcase from it.”

  Despite her surly manner I was uplifted at the prospect of seeing my suitcase again, for though it contained nothing of value I felt that my old self was still in some manner bound to it and I was not sure what would become of me without it. I tripped along so close on her heels that I ran into her when she unexpectedly stopped short. The Headmistress, emerging from her office, had signaled to us to wait.

  “Who is this?” she said, in that low, hoarse, commanding voice I have come to know almost as well as my own.

  “Grandison, miss,” I volunteered, though my heart thudded at my presumption.

  Mother Other glared. “It’s ‘Grandison,’” she said, with her manner inserting quotation marks around my name, as if it were false or foolish. “The new girl.”

  “Can she type?” The Headmistress spoke carefully, as if considering each word for a moment before pressing it into place. Of course, the Headmistress was herself a stutterer. I was obscurely gratified.

  Mother Other took a breath, but I got out my “Yes, ma’am,” before she had time to speak; I was sure she would assume that one of my age and complexion would not have acquired such training.

  “Then come with me, girl. Winnifred, you will excuse us.”

  I could not type. Nonetheless, I went.

  The Headmistress glided into her office ahead of me with the ponderous dignity of an old-fashioned clipper ship. Her stiff skirts creaked and rustled, bellied out as if by a strong sea wind. From this description, over which I have labored, you will see, first: that I am acquiring a passably literary style, and second: that the headmistress affected an old-fashioned mode, viz. a large bustle, whalebone undergarments, and voluminous skirts. These latter were rocked by movements that seemed to have little to do with the body underneath. For a moment I fancied that there was a whole second person under her skirts, moving independently. Then I dismissed this fancy as not just silly but superfluous. At a school that dealt routinely with ghosts there was simply no room for imaginary wonders.

  The office of the Headmistress was a somber wood-paneled room with high, shuttered windows. On one wall, above a pneumatic tube and what I identified as the door of a large dumbwaiter, hung a pair of brownish oil paintings that appeared on sidelong inspection to be the matched portraits of a gentleman and lady rabbit in antiquated human attire. A stuffed gray parrot, rather dusty, stood a little atilt on an imposing mantelpiece under which was fitted an iron stove, wi
th a battered coal hod and poker tucked in beside it. On either side of the mantel were numerous built-in shelves and drawers, neatly labeled. Among these, tiers of pigeonholes, perhaps originally intended for filing documents, now housed many small, knobbly, yellowish, translucent objects—anatomical models, I supposed. But the dominant feature of the room was a great old desk, occupied by a blotter; an inkstand; several pens; a dingy little article that, after stooping insensibly for a closer look (sharply: “Do not touch that!”) I determined to be a rabbit’s foot worn nearly bald; one mechanical device that I recognized; and another, rather larger, that I did not. The former was this typewriter.

  (Let me take a moment to say how I love it, my typewriter, for so I privately regard it. I love the gold “Underwood” glowing on the glossy black frame that incidentally, with its beetling forehead, a little resembles the chassis of the car that brought me here. I love the round keys rising smoothly to my fingertips. The oiled hammers tapping down these words, my words, in neat uninterrupted rows.)

  The Headmistress gestured at the latter, which possessed a copper coil, a series of nested paper cones, some glass vessels, and a great big burnished brass trumpet—an earlier vintage of the machine I still use. “This is the device that receives my dispatches from the land of the dead.”

  I nodded calmly. It is one of my great skills to appear tranquil while my vital organs are in turmoil. I developed it in the cruel halls of the Academy for Disadvantaged Girls in Brooklyn, New York, where for a time I was schooled, and honed it to an edge in my aunt’s house, and it has saved me, if not from distress, then at least from giving others the satisfaction of knowing they have distressed me.

  “Perhaps one day we will devise a way to record dispatches automatically, but for now we rely on the human ear. We employ students to monitor the trumpet and take dictation when required. Unfortunately, Emily Culp . . . We have recently lost a stenographer. Are you capable of long periods of sustained attention?”