Brad Watson - Miss Jane

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.