Brad Watson - Miss Jane

“Do you know about the dances?” he said.

“What dances?”

“The ones at the community center. Damascus.”

“Oh. Right. Grace told me.” They were at a loss for a brief while, like social animals, after a greeting, gone into other distractions.

Then he said, “Are you happy with it?” Kind of soft-voiced, like he didn’t know how she’d respond.

“With what?” she said, her own voice quieter, too.

He hesitated, then shrugged again, glanced back at the corn, said, “Everything, I guess. Your life.”

She didn’t know what to say. She’d never put a word to the sadness she could sometimes feel, especially in the last couple of years, that would linger at the edge of her thoughts like the invisible ghost of someone she thought she recognized but didn’t know who it was, some kind of familiar she couldn’t quite grasp.

SHE COULD TELL he liked her. She would see him, in the store, or passing with his family on the road near their house, and other times like the first time they talked, when she would bring a little bite to eat and think of it secretly as their picnic. In her mind their encounters were episodes in a casual courtship. Yet it occurred to her that he probably didn’t think of them that way at all. And she was embarrassed and felt foolish, and worried that he may have told others — boys, if not girls — about his occasional odd visits with the mysterious girl Jane Chisolm.

She didn’t want him to think that way about her.

And so, during the autumn she turned sixteen, she began going to the community dances. Elijah Key had told her about them and, slowly, a desire to take part had grown stronger in her until it became a resolve to do so. She was tired of being alone. She realized that, aside from her occasional, innocent encounters with Elijah Key, she’d been bored for some time. Maybe the encounters weren’t so innocent, if she looked forward to them so much. And sometimes planned them, truth be told. Well, she always did. She would not eat or drink anything on the morning of a day she thought she might run into him. So she could linger with him for a while without worry.

She had been a spritely young girl, slim and a bit lank-haired but with a sweet face and good humor, but by now had grown taller and begun to take on a gaunt, dark-eyed beauty, and moved with a kind of natural grace, as a leaf will fall gracefully from a tree in barely a breeze.

When she made up her mind to attend the dances, her parents were surprised, but she seemed to want it so much they gave reluctant permission. “It’s only going to be a heartbreak one day,” her mother said.

“It’s just dances.”

“What about when you get older than the others and have to stop going or look foolish?” her mother said. “And I don’t know how you’re going to manage it, anyway, you know.”

“It’s just working against the loneliness,” her father said, “like any child living on a farm.” His wife said nothing and returned to her work.

She and her father stood there on the porch, silent, looking out at nothing. He seemed slack-jawed, not so much silent as mute. His eyes empty.

“Are you all right, Papa?”

He took his hat off and ran a hand through his hair, made a grimace, put the hat back on.

“Nothing to worry about, daughter,” he said. “You go on to those dances, try to have yourself a good time. Of course, I’ll be keeping an eye on you, if you don’t mind.”

He went on down the steps, as if there were really nothing more to say. Or nothing more he knew how to. She watched him disappear into the shadows of the work shed, head down, maybe mumbling to himself.

For an entire two days before the evening of a dance, she fasted. First thing on the first morning, she dosed herself with castor oil followed by a little buttermilk, just to have something on her stomach, and stayed in the privy until she felt herself emptied out. She spent the entire next day beneath a tree in the middle of the pecan grove, or beside the fishing pond, or lying in the middle of her favorite little clearing in the woods. She would take along a piece of bread and maybe bacon, but scattered the bread for the birds, tossed the bacon to the fish or along a trail for some fox or stray dog to surprise upon.

Not thinking. Just being, or simply being, Jane. As when she was younger. On the first day she would allow herself to sip a little water from time to time.

At some point in the second day there would be an almost hallucinatory clarity in her vision, in the presence of things around her, in the sounds, of birds and farm work and dogs barking, the sounds of the livestock, and of people talking.

Even the breezes gently rustling leaves in the trees made a sound that seemed to fill her mind in an intoxicating way, as if the very tips of the leaves were tickling her awareness, a temptation of the senses that she allowed to wash through her, to flush her with calm anticipation.

This had not just a little to do with her strange, alluring grace in those days.

She walked about in such a dreamy, distracted state that her mother let her know that she’d checked her laudanum bottle to make sure the girl had not got into it.

The afternoon before her first dance her mother said to her, “You can’t get too friendly with these boys, Jane.”

Jane said nothing, just listening, oddly calm in a way her mother seemed to find unsettling.

So she went on, “Do you understand? You’ve long known it.”

When Jane only smiled, her mother stood up in mild exasperation to walk away. As she did she said, “You have to be careful. It might not only be you that gets hurt.”

“Dr. Thompson said he believes they’ll be able to fix me one day. I could have a regular life with a man someday.” Though he hadn’t said exactly that.

Her mother stopped and looked at her long and silently.

“Believing is a matter of faith,” she said. “Not certainty.”

Jane had never seen the look in her eyes she saw then. She almost looked empty. And for the first time Jane could remember, she saw her mother as a woman whom life had made not just hard but also exhausted and plain. Older-looking than her years.

Then, as if she could read the unspoken words in Jane’s eyes, her mother’s expression darkened again. Her own eyes glistened, about to shed tears.

“What would you know about ‘life with a man’? And what of your little experience in this world would make you think it such a fine thing?”

Jane watched her go out the back door, feeling more sad for her than abashed at being upbraided. Her mother’s words weren’t able to dispel the deeply calm pleasure she felt in these new days, this new self.

She did not wear a diaper to the dance, only a little padding as if for possible light menstruation, so there were no bulky undergarments to interrupt her slim figure or graceful movements, and she’d made herself a light, more slim-fitting dress and wore a pair of shoes her father had bought for her in town after drawing an outline figure of her foot on a sheet of school paper to show the shoe salesman there. They were hardly more than slippers with a low heel.

She attended two dances before any of the boys got up the courage or got past their bashful curiosity to ask her to dance, but that was good, since it allowed her to study their movements so she could mimic them later. And then, finally, Elijah Key did ask her. She had seen him standing against the wall in the shadows of dim light from the Japanese lanterns the organizers had hung in the hall. He wasn’t wearing his glasses and probably had no idea she was there. A little later she saw him again, spectacles on, looking at her. Maybe someone had mentioned her. Seeing her seemed to surprise him into something like shyness. Then, when she let her attention wander that second night, wander as it tended to do in her state of mind, she looked up and there he was, standing in front of her and holding out his hand. After he danced with her, some of the other boys also began asking her onto the floor. She felt something then she’d never felt before. The pleasure of flirtation, though she didn’t even know the word. The boys liked her, and she liked them. But if any one of them seemed about to like her too much, she had her way of withdrawing just enough. Like a scrap of paper the wind keeps breezing just out of reach. Her oddly calm, distracted state seemed to fascinate them into stupid muteness, and when she would fix her gaze upon her partner that boy looked dumbstruck, as if thinking he might be falling in love. But she was so obviously democratic in the dispensation of her new, strange charm that none of them was moved to any sort of foolish words.