Write, Jane, Write!

December
by Jane Fellows

It was cold that day. We were down on the basketball court behind the church, Lanny, Jay and I, shooting hoops. My knuckles were red from gripping the ball and my breath formed clouds in the crisp, dry air.

“I’ve gotta go, you guys,” I said. Night was falling and it would soon be time for supper.

At our house, supper was at six and you’d better be there. Mother cooked for nine of us, and she didn’t tolerate latecomers. Just two weeks earlier I’d got a whipping for failing to remember this. It didn’t matter that I was too old for whippings. I’d gone somewhere without telling her and hadn’t come home till after supper. She’d taken me to the bedroom and had me grab my ankles. Then she thwacked my bottom with a belt I could scarcely feel through the coarse padding of my jeans. She went on thwacking, however ineffectually. Finally I took pity on her and pretended to cry. She stopped. I don’t think her heart was really in it.

The last shot I heaved from the backcourt bounced off the rim and was quickly captured by Lanny, my erstwhile nemesis. I didn’t care; I was ahead in total points. There weren’t a lot of things boys could best me at yet, though the time was coming when this would change. Soon their muscle strength would exceed my own and I would have only my grit to rely on. That and my superior intelligence.

I left exhilarated. The feeling of “Ha!” in my chest made me skip all the way home along the soft dirt shoulder. I felt good about so many things -- the icy chill that made my skin prickle and my lungs burn; the ecstasies of running around a basketball court with my friends all afternoon, thoughtless of care. We wouldn’t have homework till we got to high school, and that was still two years away.

When I got to the house, I ran up the walk between the junipers, opened the front door, and was instantly plunged into the discrete universe of home -- its too-warm air, its shadowy rooms, the dinner smells coming from the kitchen.

Standing before the bookcase was a tall, piney-smelling Christmas tree with bright colored lights blinking in rotation. “When did we get the tree?” I called.

“Come wash Greta’s hands,” said Mom. Greta stood in the kitchen doorway holding her paws in the air like the disgusting contaminants they were.

“When did we get the tree?” I asked again, once I’d got to the kitchen. Greta rested her head against the pocket of my jeans, her hands still pointed carefully toward God. Mom was stirring mashed potatoes.

“Your dad trucked it in this afternoon,” she said. “We could have used your help.”

“I was down by the church, playing basketball."

“I didn’t know that,” said Mother, lifting an eyebrow to remind me of my recent run-in with the belt. She raised her chin in the direction of Greta’s mitts.

“Come on, Greta,” I said and led her to the washroom basin. “Your cheeks are red,” said Greta, and tried to touch one. “Not with those pinkies, Miss,” said I. Lifting her onto a stool, I held her hands under the warm rushing water, then lathered them up. It felt good once my knuckles stopped stinging.

We dried our hands and sat down to supper with the rest of the brood. The brood did not include my parents, obviously. My father took his supper on a tray in the tv room. Mother waited till the table had emptied each night, then sat down to enjoy her meal in peace.

“Why don’t you get a start on those dishes,” said Mom. My brothers, who by nature of their sex were exempt from household chores, were already cozied up in front of the television.

“I did them last night,” I said.

“The girls have tests to study for,” said Mom.

The girls were my older sisters. The first children born to my parents, they’d cornered the market on parental affection and enjoyed preferential treatment ever since. They were the only ones who got new clothes. Bets even got a professional haircut once.

In the kitchen I filled one sink with suds, the other with rinse water. I scraped the plates off with a knife and took the scraps out behind the garage to give to the animals. It was dark now and the moon was hanging low over the creek bed, the air biting at my limbs. The cats gathered ‘round the plate while I sat in one of the tall swings we shared with our neighbors and scanned the coal-black sky, its stars strewn like Christmas lights across the vastness of heaven.

I pushed off on the swing and started pumping. The moon was so low, I wanted keenly to touch it. I pitched myself forward as far as I could, then threw myself back, again and again, rising in the cold night air for the sheer reckless pleasure of it. Just as I was very nearly high enough to press my toes into the soft, waxen moon, I heard my mother’s voice call out to me from the kitchen door.

“Evie!” she hollered. “This water’s getting cold!”

This Site . . .

This site is under new year's reconstruction. You know Jane, she always did like to rearrange the furniture. Once she even burned down a house, then started over fresh.

The Little Pine Table that Could

Jane slunk through the flea market like a fugitive trying to evade detection. She didn’t want anyone she knew to recognize her and ask what she was doing there. She was a very bad liar and would be forced to blurt out something truthful about wanting to be a writer and needing a special table to do it, both of which sounded ludicrous. Hadn’t Harriet Beecher Stowe sat in a kitchen surrounded by children and produced a story that sparked a war? Jane imagined a stentorian voice ringing out from the heavens: I knew Harriet Beecher Stowe, and you, Jane Fellows, are no Harriet Beecher Stowe. But then, Jane already knew that. Hence the slinking.

Jane hadn’t told anyone, not even Scott, that she was creating a writing room. She didn’t want the pressure. What if she didn’t produce anything worth reading? What if she didn’t produce anything, period? The only writing she’d done prior to this had involved sitting on a bed with a steno pad propped against her knees blathering about her life. Oh, and there was that weekend after college when she’d sat up all night with coffee and cigarettes writing a very bad play. Very bad. Could one really learn to write by writing a lot of things badly? Was it like practicing your golf swing?

And then she chanced upon it: a slender pine table with a wide, shallow drawer. It was the absolute perfect size, as though it had been expressly made for her and her untoward purposes. Jane had a weakness for pine. There was something so modest and unassuming about it. A soft wood, pine wore its history like scars upon its face, unable to conceal a single mark. It lacked the grand pretensions of cherry or walnut or the fine, weighty grain of mahogany. This table was a bit beat up, with odd nicks and scratches swirling like signatures beneath a patina of wax, which only endeared it to her more.

Transporting it up the hill in the bed of her station wagon, Jane listened with satisfaction to the creaks and moans it emitted, as though it had not just a face, but a voice, and stories of its own to tell. After lugging it up the concrete steps and then down into the spare room, she set it beneath a window that overlooked a twisted oak and a hillside sheeted with poppies, perfect for gazing. Jane suspected she’d be doing a lot of gazing.

Tiny Kumquats

Jane brushed her teeth in the usual absent way. Her mind, always scanning for lapses, chided her for not having flossed the night before. I’ll floss tonight, she vowed, though she probably wouldn’t. She’ll be too tired. Lately, no matter how much sleep she gets, she feels as if she hasn’t been to bed. The bags under her eyes threatened to burst their skins like overripe fruits. If they had zippers, she could store things in them. Walnuts, perhaps, or tiny kumquats.

In the next room Jack whistled as he dressed for school. Though she hadn’t quite articulated it to herself, Jane found his happiness grating. Nothing had happened yet to make him happy; the day hadn’t even begun. Then guilt, because what kind of mother begrudges her child his unearned joy? For breakfast she would make him scrambled eggs, sausages, and those crunchy buttermilk pancakes he loved. Not that she would ever give her children cold cereal on a school morning. That’s something else only a Bad Mother would do. It was enough she wasn’t flossing on a regular basis. She didn’t want to bend the rules too far.

There were times Jane hardly recognized her life, so different was it from the one she had daydreamed. Though the envy of some with her elegant home, her beautiful children, her handsome and accomplished husband, something was absent at the core of her existence, something she couldn’t quite put her finger on. This is what she pondered those mornings when she idled in her bed gazing out at the Chinese elm, reluctant to get up and press the start button on a day that was sure to be a Kinko’s copy of the day before.

What had become of the life she'd intended to live? In school she'd been president of this and chairman of that, elected to elite societies and selected for honors, exhibiting the sort of innate leadership that eldest children often possess. But that Jane had disappeared. She worked just as hard as she ever had, but she received no recognition or even appreciation for it. Today’s Jane prayed she wouldn't be asked to bring cupcakes to the Kindergarten Open House, terrified lest she be given one more thing to do than she had already given herself.

Jane pulled up her stretchy pants with its elastic waistband and slipped into her comfy shoes. She took a last breath and headed for the kitchen. If Scott wasn't speaking to her, she was going to ignore him.

Jane Enters Stage Left

Our heroine enters stage left and right away you have her pegged, you Smarty Pants. You note her sensible shoes; the massive shoulder bag that holds everything she might ever possibly need or once did need but has never needed again; her hair in its outworn bob. She could use some reinventing. Yet she’s not a caricature of conservatism either, not one of those women you see at the supermarket with their hair looped around their heads like spun sugar. You could get your fingers into Jane’s hair, and you might like to, just so you could mess it up.

If she's a wee bit anal, it’s only because she wants so earnestly to get it right. That’s what we love about Jane -- the way she takes it all so seriously. The way she respects the rules and obeys them without question. How hard she tries.

Some of you know her well. Some of you don’t know her at all. Some of you are her, but we won’t go into that. This much we'll say in her defense: she means well, and she would never think of giving up, albeit a certain fatigue has begun to set in.

Jane doesn’t bound out of bed anymore, have you noticed? She lies on her side and stares at the branching elm till the need to pee impels her to her feet. She lingers on the toilet long after she’s done, just staring, staring at nothing, gathering strength perhaps, or perhaps avoiding what comes next. The day.

Scott is up; she can smell the coffee. He’s probably halfway through the crossword by now.