Riddance. Shelley Jackson
they sent it to me! The Headmistress had perceived that the book would be the better 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 dragging 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,