Brad Watson - Miss Jane

“But what is it?” Jane said. “I’ve never seen one like it.”

“If you see another, you leave it alone,” her mother said, oddly angered.

“What’s it called?”

“It’s called a stinkhorn,” her mother said, “and aptly so.”

When she asked her father about it later, during one of their walks, and asked him why it grew straight up like that when all the others were short and round or flat like fat leaves growing from a tree’s bark, he said some called it the devil’s horn and some called it dead man’s finger. “There’s different shapes of it from just what you found.”

When she next saw Dr. Thompson she asked him about the stinkhorn and her mother’s reaction to it.

“Your mother was upset because she’s a modest woman and it so happens the stinkhorn mushroom resembles a part of the male anatomy or body, the part that is used in reproduction. In making babies.”

“Sure is a big’un,” she said.

The doctor said nothing, but rubbed his mouth for a moment and seemed to grip his jaw, then removed his shaded spectacles and rubbed the lenses on his shirtsleeve.

“Well, in fact,” he said, “there are varieties of the plant that resemble the complementary part of the female anatomy as well, in quite a lurid fashion.”

She didn’t know those words, complementary, lurid.

“Like mine?”

“No,” the doctor said. “Not really.”

“It’s what I’m supposed to look like, then?”

“Not exactly,” the doctor said. “It’s just people using their imagination. For the most part, anyway.”

He told her that he would explain it to her in more detail when she was a little older.

“What’s wrong with now?”

He fiddled in his vest pocket for his pipe and took it out, but only held it out from him and looked at it as if to examine it for flaws. Then he looked sideways at her.

“Soon enough,” he said. “When the time is right.”

She walked off, perturbed, but then came right back.

“I need you to tell me why I’m the way I am, why I’m different, or how I’m different. Why can’t I control myself?” She had learned this discreet term well enough over the years.

He looked at her a long moment, his eyes squinting that tired squint, a mote of some kind in there that was more than a speck of dust, more something in his mind than his eye. Then he nodded, said, “All right, then.”

They sat on the ground and he told her as best he could about what she did not have that most girls and women had. “First, there’s no ‘why.’ It’s just how you’re made. Inside you,” he said, “I believe you have just about everything, if not everything, that any other girl has. But on the outside you don’t have everything they do. Everything is kind of tucked up inside you, hidden away. And one thing you do not have is the little muscle that allows you to control yourself. It’s a squeezing muscle, see. And when you need to go potty, if you have the little muscle, then you can squeeze it and stop it until you get to a privy or bathroom or a good-sized bush to hide behind, you know.”

She nodded, serious. She was trying to form a picture in her mind of her insides, and make that match up somehow with what she’d been able to tell about herself from what she could see on the outside. It was like trying to imagine some very complex mushroom.

“What you have on the inside is just as complex — I mean it is just as much a wonder of a miracle of the human body — as anyone else. But it didn’t get to finish putting itself all together, didn’t get to finish itself up and get everything right, before it was time for you to be born. Or maybe I should say at some point, for some reason, it just stopped making itself into what it was supposed to.” He paused, looked at her looking back at him, her brow bunched down. “That’s about as best I can explain it to you at your age, Janie. I hope that helps a little bit. It’s not anyone’s fault, certainly not yours, and it’s not anything to be ashamed of. It’s just a difference, is all. And the only thing is that it causes you to have to live your life in a special way. To have less freedom to go to school and such as that. But it does not mean that you are not a normal little girl. You’re just a little girl who has to deal with more things than most little girls. And that will make you strong. It already has.”

“Can you fix it?”

“I hope one day someone can. But right now I don’t know. Well, I know they will one day. I just don’t know when. I know they work at figuring these things out all the time.”

Jane nodded, still trying to put together some kind of picture in her mind that made sense. She was coming up with something, although she had no idea if it was a fantastical idea or something close to what the doctor knew.

SHE WOULD HOLD a mirror beneath herself and stare for a long time, studying herself there. She had seen her mother naked, and her sister Grace, too, but not really up close. It was not the kind of thing she could ask to examine , to use the doctor’s word.

But she longed to do just that. If she could only look closely at Grace, and then again at herself, it would satisfy such a curiosity. So she got up her courage one day and asked Grace, bluntly, if she could see her down there.

“I mean take a real good look,” she said. “An examination .”

Grace looked offended, even baffled.

“Find you some girl your own age, if you want to play doctor,” she said before heading off toward the barn and her smokes.

Sometimes she was frightened, in a heightened way, briefly, as if some panic were about to take hold of her, and she would run, just run, until she outran it, or wore it out, and she would find herself way out in the middle of a pasture, with a curious, half-startled cow looking at her, stopped in its cud-chewing, like she was some kind of creature it had never seen before. Then she would notice the other cows, all turned to look at her, their chewing interrupted, some with long pieces of grass hanging from their mouths, their big brown eyes on her as if in wonder about how she’d suddenly appeared in their midst, a tiny creature from some other world. They’d wait to see what she would do. She would think in that moment she could do anything. She would move slowly to pluck a long piece of Johnson grass and chew on the sour end of it, let it hang from her mouth. The cows would take notice. She would stand very still. When she moved again they would startle, as if she had suddenly become human again.

Then, calmed, she would walk in the woods by herself.

She loved most being in the woods, with the diffused light and the quiet there. Such a stillness, with just the pecking of ground birds and forest animals, the flutter of wings, the occasional skittering of squirrels playing up and down a tree. The silent, imperceptible unfurling of spring buds into blossom. She felt comfortable there. As if nothing could be unnatural in that place, within but apart from the world.

There were innumerable little faint trails her father said were game trails. Animal trails. Their faint presence like the lingering ghosts of the animals’ passing. There was a particular little clearing she believed she had discovered, only her, filled with yellow sunlight on clear days, its long grass harboring primroses and wild sunflowers. A meadow she considered to be her very own, her place. The eyes of all the wild, invisible animals watching her. Time was suspended, or did not exist. She could linger there as long as she liked and when she returned from it no time had passed at all since she had stepped into the clearing and then awakened from it. That’s what it was like.

The meadow did not exist if she wasn’t in it.