Riddance. Shelley Jackson
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.
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