Miss Jane (9 page)

She had never seen their hound or Top doing it. What she didn't realize was the hound was too old, stupid, and lazy, and Top, having been a stray, had been fixed by whoever he had first belonged to, before he was run off or ran away on his on.

Birds fluttered themselves together while on a branch in a tree and then fluttered apart and looked a little bewildered. The birds did not truly understand their compulsions at all. She thought maybe they would actually forget they had done it pretty much just right after doing it.
Birds are the most distracted creatures in the world
, she thought. She could figure that much. Bird brains. The rooster, too, hopped onto the backs of the hens, who seemed to bow down for him and lift their tails, and he clawed and grappled and flapped his wings and pushed himself at them, and you
couldn't really see much because of all their feathers, just the thrashing around. If they let that hen keep her eggs they would have chicks.

She was never able to come upon cats going at it. They were as secretive and mysterious about this as they were about anything else, if not more so. Although a female in heat seemed truly tortured by the condition. She did not want what needed to happen to actually happen but if it didn't happen soon she was going to lose her mind. But somewhere, sometime, it always happened, for the female would disappear and no longer be seen creeping through the yard yowling in a low growly way, shoulders hunched. You might hear them down in the woods, screaming like tiny panthers. And then later there would be kittens.

She spied on Grace and her mother, when she could, after their baths, while they were dressing. If they saw her they stiffened and turned away or shut the door. Then she would take the shaving mirror from the wall over the pump sink out back and, down in the woods, set it on the ground, pull up her skirt, and
examine
herself. She hadn't been able to tell enough about Grace or her mother to see much difference, but she could tell she was different, all the same. Well, she'd long known she was different, but she wanted to know more.

When she asked the doctor to tell her more, at first he looked a little exasperated, then said he would try to show her.

He came back the next day with a book in which there were drawings of the female genitalia. He let her study it. She asked questions about some of the details, and he answered her bluntly. She looked at it for several minutes, the drawing. Then she closed the book and said, “I'll be back in a minute,” and ran off for the shaving mirror, book in hand. Down in the woods, squatting over
the mirror, she looked back and forth between the image there and the drawing in the book. At this point, she was mostly just fascinated by seeing what she was seeing. She didn't feel a shock, or anything bad, just then. She closed the book, returned the mirror to its place, and went back out front where the doctor was waiting. She handed him the book and thanked him.

“Clear enough for now, then?” he said.

“I guess,” Jane said. Then she said, “I want to go to school like everybody else.”

“I know.”

“Help me figure out how to do it.”

“All right. Let me think about it for a couple of days.”

He started to go, then turned back.

“You know, Jane, there will likely be teasing.”

She just looked at him, tears welling up that she blinked back. She nodded.

“I already know that,” she said.

Mrs. Ida Chisolm

Rt. 1, Old Paulding Rd.

Dear Mrs. Chisolm,

As per our conversation regarding daughter Jane's (and your) concerns about managing her incontinence as she begins her public life at the Damascus school, and if you feel the necessity of taking extra measures to insure her mental comfort and avoid accidents, I would recommend that the child refrain from eating and drinking after the evening meal. A little extra time in the privy first thing in the morning. A very light breakfast (absolutely no coffee, as this is not good for children of her age in any case but coffee is a diuretic
and would increase the frequency of urination and possibly bowel movements as well), a very light lunch. She should sip a little water during the day so as to avoid dehydration. She should have a healthy snack when she gets home and partake heartily at supper. Make sure she drinks plenty of water in the afternoons. I would not give her iced nor hot tea.

I'm sure she has told you that I went over all this with her myself. She seemed to understand. Such a wise little girl you have there, as you well know.

She is a healthy child, all things considered, and this regimen should not cause her any more than some initial, mild discomfort, to which I believe she soon will become accustomed.

Yours truly,

Ed Thompson, M.D.

AND SO SHE
willingly took up the routine. At home they had a double privy with a wall in between, so she would go there first thing in the morning and stay, stomach growling, until she felt she was entirely empty. She hardly even noticed the coming and going of others on the other side. No one spoke to her, interrupted her concentration on becoming an empty vessel, her body an empty, hollow chamber of flesh, dry and clean as the inside of a cleaned-out fish. And then she would step back out into the yard, feel the dust on her feet and between her toes, as if she had stepped out onto the surface of the moon, which was sometimes still there pale and wan just above the tops of the trees.

Her dresses were sewn to be loose and hang from her shoulders in a way that would not cinch her waist and accentuate her preventive undergarment. There were no secrets, really, in such a
small world as their little school, but there was a kind of natural discretion. Her mother gave her a vial of inexpensive perfume to dab onto her wrists and her undergarments to disguise—at least for a moment, for a getaway—any smells in case of an unavoidable accident. Even young Jane sensed the sad futility of this gesture, although she would wear a bit of perfume most days for the rest of her life.

Despite the constant faint but cloying scent of this perfume, the smells peculiar to a school classroom fascinated her almost to the point of being mesmerized. Pencil lead, waxy crayons, ­writing-tablet paper and the paper in the schoolbooks, all of them used and handed down from children years and years before, the chalk used on the blackboard, the rising and then fading smells of lunch the students ate from their paper sacks, lunch boxes, or (for some of the poorest) pails covered with a kitchen towel, the boys' hair oil and the girls' bath powder, the dung from the horses and mules that some of the older children would ride to get there and then tether outside the building to a hitching post. All of it combined into a medley of smells that would always mean “school” in her memory.

It was a small school that took the community children all the way from first grade to high school graduation, and there were not many enrolled, so the environment was relatively intimate, like some great, overgrown family, in a way. The children seemed to know and understand one another like siblings, whether lovingly, or with hostility, or with the purposeful ignoring of this one or that.

She established herself in the little world there, and was accepted well enough, easygoing as she was, and thick-skinned by virtue of her family's ways in general and her mother's often harsh
tongue. She could tell that Grace was keeping a distant eye on her but she stayed just that: distant. Early on, she caught some teasing from the other children during recess, saying,
She wears diapers
. The principal and high school teacher, Miss Deen, who had taken it on herself to supervise the younger children's little playground, reprimanded them.

“You should not make fun of anyone for being who she is,” Miss Deen said to them in her calm and level but somber voice. She was a tall and sophisticated woman with a long face and square jaw and glinting sharp green eyes who had grown up in the capital in Jackson, then married a local farmer she'd met at the state agriculture and teachers college.

“You there, Steven,” she said, at which the boy immediately blushed a florid pink. “Should we all laugh at you for your disgusting habit of picking your nose and eating the product thereof? You, Morgan, shall we laugh at you because you secretly like to nibble the lead from your pencil? Do you know that will make you feeble-minded? You, Marjory, should we suggest that you wear diapers because of the time you laughed too hard and wet yourself right there in your seat? You, Bobby Land, because you soiled yourself being afraid to go alone to the privy?”

All fell silent in a pall of embarrassment. A couple of other children had come up and giggled but when Miss Deen turned her hard gaze upon them fell silent again. None was more appalled than Jane. She willed Miss Deen just to be silent and let it go.

“I am sorry to have embarrassed anyone,” Miss Deen said. “But perhaps y'all have learned a lesson about making fun of other people for the ways in which they are not perfect human beings. As we none of us are.”

Jane both loved her and was angry at her for making more of it than had already been made. She'd rather have fended for herself.

She saw Grace, shaking her head, go back into the schoolhouse.

The other children didn't tease her so much after all that, and then after a while not at all. Jane had a dignity about her that the others had come to admire and respect, though some of the other girls did seem to quietly resent her, as if thinking she was a little stuck-up. But that wasn't it. She was in fact in a bit of a fog by midday, usually, the effect of having not eaten or drunk anything since the night before.

But no matter how much the other children seemed to begrudge a respect for her, to feign unawareness of her mysterious need to wear diapers (and who could tell how much they might know or think they knew through rumor?), and no matter how out of it she generally was, she was all too aware of her difference. How
that
was what really communicated to others that sense of strangeness. This was enough in itself to cause a gathering of something like sadness in her mind, a heaviness in her chest. There was no getting away from this awareness, a strange self-consciousness, as long as she was around others. And so it wasn't very long before she began to question whether this business of schooling, of trying to be like everyone else, was actually worth the trouble. The odd mingling of a sense of sadness and embarrassment.

She had even caught Grace looking at her more than once with what seemed, possibly, a genuine sympathy. That was almost harder to take than what she sensed in the others.

And besides, she found it hard to concentrate, being hungry and thirsty all day. And tired of pretending to eat a lunch when she actually only picked at a bit of cornbread or biscuit she carried in a napkin in her pocket like some crumbling talisman, to ward off any overly curious attention. She knew it was safe to eat her lunch—nothing would happen before she got home—but she was too anxious about it all.

On the last day of school before the Christmas holiday, she let Grace walk on ahead without even trying to keep up or asking Grace to slow down. She cut through the woods, around the house, and came out in the pecan grove, the spindly gray branches ugly against the austere sky. A loneliness she didn't even know how to name welled up in her so swiftly that she didn't realize she had tears in her eyes until she felt them cold on her cheeks, and for the first time since she was very small she let them come, blurring her vision, pushing the hurtful feeling from her heart. When it was done she went on to the house. Her mother, standing on the back porch as if watching for her, didn't speak but looked as if she understood everything. And so Jane went to her room to be alone until time for supper. And they left her alone, no doubt knowing.

Ellison Adams, M.D.

Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine

Baltimore, Maryland

Dear Ellis,

I have a regular supply of very decent homemade spirits and the occasional quarter of venison from Chisolm. He feels the need to pay me for my attention to the girl but I persuade him otherwise with the argument of acquiring valuable medical research. She is now seven years old, and seems practically immune to the kinds of infection apparently common in some such cases. Your diagnosis has not faltered at all.

Her disposition is generally bright, if also somewhat prodigiously contemplative. A fairly solitary and independent little sprite. I have driven up, looked around, finally asked, and no one will know
where she is nor seem too concerned about the not knowing. And then she will appear, as if from thin air, behind me, standing there looking up at me and smiling. We talk. It's rare that anything she says prompts me to request a thorough examination.

In any case, I figure we are out of the woods in terms of any potentially dangerous complications. I will keep a close watch when it comes near time for puberty, of course, although—again—if it is indeed what you believe it to be, I shouldn't have to worry about that.

It was a disappointment to her, the attempt to attend our local school. I don't know exactly what happened, and it didn't seem the teasing was excessive. She was melancholy for a while after, but seemed to recover entirely by spring. Still, I cannot help but think that she hides a deep emotional burden inside her little child's chest. I don't see how she could escape it. My god, Ellis, the child pretty much picked up reading in just three months there. Such a waste.

I am considering taking it on myself to bring her up there for a thorough examination by Young, if you could help me arrange it. She is plenty old enough now to undergo surgery, if it were advisable. I know you think my own examinations and communications are probably sufficient to diagnose as you have: that this is not an operable condition, at this point in time, and that most likely even sphincter construction is unlikely. But, if the girl and her family are willing, I would rest easier knowing for sure, after examination by an experienced specialist in the field. If not your people, then at least let one of the urologists in Memphis take a look. It is only a little over 200 miles from here, as opposed to the near 1,000 to you.