Riddance. Shelley Jackson
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, clench 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.”
A strange thing for the most important man in Cheesehill to say, but I know what he means. “Don’t cry, Father,” I say kindly, “Someday one of your inventions will work.”
He raises the ruler again.
Sometimes I looked at myself in the maculated mirror above my mother’s dressing table and marveled at my ordinary looks, for my mouth felt bigger, if possible, than the head it was set in, and as violently resistant to socialization as a kraken, strapped to my face in place of a mouth and enjoined to speak.
That there was something of pride in my feelings toward this monstrosity, I did not then recognize. Indeed, for a long time I did earnestly try to master my unruly speech, and in sentimental moments the fantasy rose up before me of the loving family life to which I would matriculate once I had solved my little problem: the parlor, of an evening—myself, reading aloud with superior enunciation and eloquent gestures—my parents’ faces bright with candlelight and pride! But increasingly I believed it to be impossible, and knew my father for a brute for punishing me for something I could not help. And a brute could not figure in those fantasies of mine. It had been a long time since I had seen anything like tenderness in even the way he treated my mother; so those dream candles guttered and went out.
I often loitered near my father’s study as he made his experiments, hopeful that something would go wrong, and once, at least, this paid great dividends. The occasion was the arrival of the Galvano-Faradio Magneto-Electric Machine previously mentioned, which promised to Tune the Entire Organism, Restoring Balance and Harmony to Disordered Nerves, and Sending Vitality Coursing Through the Body. I watched through the door as, moving with deliberation, he unbuttoned his cuffs and collar, took off his shirt and folded it and set it aside, then his undershirt. He had a patch of bear-black hair between naked, womanly breasts. I do not recall that I had ever seen them before. He took hold of one wire and after hesitating a moment fastened the claw-grip at its end to one nipple. He connected the other wire to the other nipple. It comes to me now, as it did not then, that this was a curious site to choose and that perhaps he was engaged in something other than scientific inquiry or medical treatment. I have heard that there are those who take erotic pleasure in pain, their own or others’, but I know nothing of such perversions of sensuality—and little enough, to be candid, of its orthodox course—so shall leave further speculation to those better informed.
As I edged a little farther into the room, my father took up the pamphlet and consulted it again, holding it in both hands. Then he reached out slowly and switched on the Magneto-Electric Machine. A strange expression came over his face and he jerked about, dropping the pamphlet and batting at the wires, but they did not come loose; finally he seized hold of one wire and with a powerful yank pulled it quite free of the machine, which spat cobalt zips of light and then went dead. He hunched over, breath coming in tearless sobs, then carefully parted the jaws of the dangling wire to detach it from his nipple. The other still connected him to the dead machine. Suddenly he perceived me watching him. He stared at me for a moment, the wire hanging from his hand, then struck at me with it.
Many things then happened at once. I sprang back, receiving the protruding corner of a credenza in the kidneys. The wire, missing its target, flexed wildly, and its tip caught him in one nostril and scored a line from there down to his lower lip. His sudden movement threw his weight against the wire that was still affixed to his nipple and ripped it free, so that he cursed and clapped both hands to his breast; the first wire, borne thoughtlessly along, flexed again and struck him, though this time with less force, on the forehead. I leaned back against the credenza as if I were quite comfortable there, and made myself laugh, though my side hurt very much. Blood was coming from both his nipple and his lip, and his pale stomach was jumping up and down with his breath.
“Monster! Banshee!”
“It is not my fault, Father,” I said. “Perhaps the machine was on an incorrect setting. Why don’t you try it again?”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” He lunged at me and got me by the ear, twisting it as he pulled me against him, until I cried out. “I’ll let go if you can say, ‘Please, Papa, pick me a peck of pickled peppers.’” My face was against his sweating side; he smelled sour.
I could not say it, as he knew very well.
Now that he had the best of me he seemed to swell; his stomach broadened, the worm of blood that had started wriggling down it froze as if alarmed. “You would like to curse me, wouldn’t you? But you just can’t find the words!” He laughed loudly, his rage almost forgotten in enjoyment of my shame.
Let us bring down the curtain on this sorry scene—it can go nowhere good. Suffice it to say that I could never witness his misfortune without ultimately suffering a greater one.
It is probably not possible to feel completely innocent when one is always being punished, so I supposed myself to be a fairly wicked character, and while I was sometimes sorry for it, I felt myself a hopeless case, and gave in to a life of sin and stuttering. Indeed, my father always punished me a little more than I thought my transgressions were worth, so I felt that I had paid in advance for any crimes I might wish to commit, and would be improvident not to commit them. By, for instance, watching my parents through a crack in their bedroom ceiling that I had widened with a nail file, an often boring vigil enlivened by the certainty that my father would be incensed at the illicit advantage it gave me to possess a knowledge that he did not know I had. Or hiding a lump of ambergris that he had acquired at great expense in the back of a kitchen drawer, where it reposed for many years, imbuing the vicinity with a mysterious fragrance. Or tampering with the wiring of a new gadget. Thus I balanced my books. If after a particularly criminal act I thought I might have overdrawn my account, I got an uneasy feeling, and sometimes even goaded my father to punish me again, on the rare occasions that he lacked reasons of his own to do so. At this I became very adept, playing on my father’s rage as other, happier daughters might on the spinet, rousing and calming it in orderly arpeggios, until I was ready to release it. The feeling of superiority and control that this gave me was worth the pain of a beating to me, and the system worked to my satisfaction until I stupidly succumbed to the temptation to show him that I did not care