雙語·摸彩：雪莉·杰克遜短篇小說選 跟我來 4

Come Along with Me 4

I have a real feeling for shapes; I like things square, and my room was finely square. Even though I couldn't cook there I thought I could be happy. I wanted the barest rock bottom of a room I could have, I wanted nothing but a place to sleep and a place to sit and a place to put my things; any decorating done to my environment is me.

One reason is, the first time it happened was in a square room, my own room when I was about twelve. Before then, most of it was just whisperings and little half-thoughts, the way a child almost notices something, almost remembers, but this time it was real and I was not dreaming; I know when I'm dreaming. I sat up in bed in the middle of the night, and heard my own voice saying “What? What?” and then I heard another voice, not coming out of my own head—I know what comes out of my own head—saying “Find Rosalind Bleeker. Tell her Sid says hello.” Three times I heard that crazy voice say “Tell her Sid says hello.”

I knew Rosalind Bleeker—in all the years since I've never forgotten her name—and because she was four or five years older and in high school I had a little trouble finding her the next day, but I caught her when she was walking home. I remember I had trouble getting her attention; I was just a little kid, and she was popular and pretty and always laughing. She was wearing a white blouse and a blue skirt and a charm bracelet. Her hair was curly. She was carrying her biology textbook and a blue-covered notebook. Her shoes were white. Her eyes were blue. She wore a little lipstick. I pulled at her sleeve and said “Rosalind, hey, Rosalind,” not very loud because she was a high-school girl. She turned around and looked down at me and frowned, because I was a kid and she was a high-school girl and here I was pulling at her sleeve. “Listen, Rosalind,” I said, “l(fā)isten. I'm supposed to tell you Sid says to say hello.” “What?” she said. “Sid says to say hello,” I said, and then ran, because I had nothing more to say and I felt silly. I heard later she went home and hanged herself. I don't know.

Anyway, that was the first time. After that there were lots more, some more real than others. There was the time I said to my mother, “Grandma just picked up the phone to call you,” and she said, “That's nice,” just as the phone rang. She looked at me funny; they always did after a while.

“I dabble in the supernatural,” I told Mrs. Faun; she thought I was making some kind of a joke.

I quit when I married Hughie; you'd have to.

I remember another time when I sat by the window and my mother, who ought to have known better by then, said to me, “Why are you always brooding, staring out the window, never doing anything?”

“I'm watching the peacocks walking on the lawn,” I said.

“But you ought to be out playing with the other children; why do you suppose we moved here to a nice neighborhood, so you could always sit looking out the window instead of playing with the other kids? Haven't you got any friends? Doesn't anyone like you?”

“I'm watching the peacocks,” I tried to tell her. “They're walking on the lawn and I'm watching them.”

“You ought to be out with your friends. What are peacocks doing on our lawn, ruining the grass?” and she came over to look out the window; as I say, she ought to have known better.

Sometimes I knew and sometimes I didn't; there would be times when I lay on my stomach on the floor watching creatures playing under the dining-room table, and I knew then of course that my mother wasn't going to see them and was maybe going to put her foot through one when she came by to say why did they move to a nice neighborhood and I wouldn't go out and make friends. Sometimes my good square room would be so full I just lay in bed and laughed. Sometimes weeks would go by and I would be reading some specially interesting book, or painting, or following people every day after school, and nothing would come at all; sometimes they followed me; once an old man followed me, but he turned out to be real. I could see what the cat saw.

When I was about sixteen I began to get self-conscious about all of it; it wasn't that I minded them coming around asking and following me everywhere I went; most sixteen-year-old girls like to be followed, but by then I knew no one else was going to see them and sometimes I felt like a fool; you don't go around staring at empty air all the time, not when you're sixteen years old you don't, not without people beginning to notice. “Do you need glasses?” my mother used to ask me, or “Can't you for heaven's sake stop gawking at nothing and shut your mouth and comb your hair and get out with the other kids?” Then sometimes for weeks at a time I would think that they had gone away, maybe for good, and I'd start taking care of my hair and putting polish on my nails and hanging around the soda shop or going to a football game, and then first thing I knew I'd be talking to someone and a face would come between us and a mouth would open saying some crazy thing, and I'd be watching and listening and whomever I had been talking to would wait for a few minutes and then get edgy and walk away while I was still listening to some other voice. After a while I just stopped talking to anybody.

That's not a good way for a girl to grow up. It's easy to say that if I knew then what I know now I could have handled it better; how can anyone handle things if her head is full of voices and her world is full of things no one else can see? I'm not complaining.

I sat in my pleasant square room at Mrs. Faun's house and thought about it all. Ever since I can remember, I thought as quietly as I could, I have been seeing and hearing things no one else could see and hear. By now I can control the nuisance to some extent. It disappeared entirely when I married Hughie; I have reason to believe now that it is coming back. I sat in Mrs. Faun's house and thought what good did it do to sell the house and find a new name; they don't care what your name is when they come around asking.

At first I tried to point them out to people; I was even foolish enough at first to think other people just hadn't noticed; “Look at that,” I would say, “l(fā)ook, right over there, it's a funny man.” It didn't take long for my mother to put a stop to that; “There isn't any funny man anywhere,” she would say, and jerk on my arm, “what kind of a sewer do you have for a mind?” Once I tried to tell a neighbor about it; it was quite accidental, because I rarely told anyone anything. He was sitting on his front porch one evening in summer and I had been lying on the grass on our lawn, watching small lights go and come among the grass blades, and listening to a kind of singing—sometimes, especially in summer, it was a kind of pleasant world I lived in—and he heard me laughing. He asked me to come and sit on his front porch and he gave me a glass of lemonade, and when he asked me what I had been doing I went ahead and told him. I told him about seeing and hearing, and he listened, which is more than anyone else ever did. “You're clairvoyant,” he told me, and I always remembered that; he probably knew less than nothing about it, but he listened and said I was clairvoyant; later he told my mother I ought to be taken to some special clinic and examined, and for about three days she decided I was pregnant. I never talked to him again; I wanted to, once in a while, but he never spoke to me after that.

I knew a lot about people, a lot that they never knew I knew, but I never seemed to have much sense, probably because one thing I never really knew was whether what I was doing was real or not.

The house, I later found out, was almost all square. It had three floors and a basement, and neat trim porches on three sides; whoever built that house had either very little imagination or a mind much like mine, because everything was neatly cornered and as near as possible the same size; that is, one door matched the next almost perfectly and where there were doors they were as often as possible right in the middle of the wall, with an equal space on either side of them. The windows were perfectly correct.

When I asked Mrs. Faun later she told me that there were five people renting rooms in the house; I thought it was wrong that they should be an odd number, but since I was the fifth I could hardly protest, and in any case she had only six rooms to rent. On the top floor were a Mr. Brand who was a bookkeeper, and a Mr. Cabot who was, Mrs. Faun believed, in merchandising. On the second floor were old Mrs. Flanner, who kept a bookshop, Mr. Campbell, who was in transit, and me. Mrs. Faun kept the ground floor for herself. “I always wanted it that way,” she told me, “I always used to dream of the time when I could live on the ground floor; I had it planned for years. I always thought the dining room would work out better as a bedroom, and I hated the idea of going upstairs every night and leaving it behind. It's more comfortable, it's more convenient, and it's perfectly safe.”

“Safe?”

“In case of fire. I can get out.”

I may say that in all the time I was in that house I never met Mr. Campbell, who was in transit.

We were a gay crew, I soon discovered. Here I was, with one suitcase and a fur stole and a pocketbook with plenty of money, but old Mrs. Flanner had had her same room for nine years and she had a television set, all her own furniture, including a Chinese lacquer table, purple drapes on the windows, and a silver tea service. Brand and Cabot on the top floor took cocktails in one another's room every day at six. Mrs. Faun was apt to invite anyone at random to Sunday dinner; she was almost as good a cook as I am. Brand played the cello, and Mrs. Flanner used to sing at one time before her voice cracked. Mrs. Flanner also played the dirtiest game of bridge that Mrs. Faun had ever seen. Brand had a small mustache, Cabot collected Coalport china, Mrs. Faun disliked garlic and consequently never made a decent salad dressing until the day she died; Brand fell over the bottom step of the staircase every night regularly, coming home at five-thirty. He was neither drunk nor clumsy, he never fell over anything else that anyone ever knew of, he never dropped anything or spilled anything, but every night at five-thirty Mr. Brand tripped over the bottom step of the staircase. You could set your clock by Brand falling over the bottom step of the staircase, Mrs. Faun used to say, if it was important to you to set your clock at five-thirty. Brand and Cabot and Flanner and I usually took most of our meals at a little restaurant around the corner, but every Friday night Brand went to his mother's and every Saturday night Cabot took out a girl; he had been taking her out for four years now, Mrs. Faun said, but thought marriage was too confining. I liked Mrs. Faun. I had almost nothing to do, so I got to helping with the housework and we'd knock off and sit around the kitchen drinking coffee and eating cookies; Mrs. Faun baked every second morning, before anyone was up, and one thing I did like about living in that house was waking up to the smell of cookies baking.

My room, as I say, was absolutely, perfectly square; I measured it. I admire a house with a good square room, and when I unpacked I knew I was going to stay. First I unpacked my picture, my painting; it had been painted with Hughie's paints but I painted it myself. “Keep it around if you like,” Hughie said, “you're proud of it, all right. Don't think I hate all painting styles but my own.” So my own painting went on the wall, although Mrs. Faun said that it would cost to repair the hole. Cabot liked my painting, and Brand. Mrs. Flanner poked it with her finger and said it took her back. Mrs. Faun said it would cost to repair the hole.

“What do you do, Mrs. Motorman?” Brand asked me.

“A little shoplifting, sometimes,” I told him. “Some meddling.”

“What brought you to our city?”

“Curiosity,” I told him.

Brand and Cabot asked me up for cocktails, and Mrs. Faun asked me for Sunday dinner, and Mrs. Flanner asked me if I played bridge and I said no. I walked to the end of Smith Street and around in the little park, under the trees. One day I went back to the streetcar and got on and went into the center of the city, where I went into the first large store and looked at blouses.

“If you don't have this blouse in a size forty-four,” I told the salesgirl, “I'll just run across the street and look.” I didn't go across the street, actually; I spoke to a lady in a drugstore where I stopped to have a sandwich and a milk shake. “They're all chemicals now,” she said to me. “You can't even buy pure vanilla. All chemicals.”

“In a drugstore you'd expect chemicals.”

“Everywhere. You think you're drinking chocolate in that milk shake? Nothing but chemicals.”

“I didn't actually come into the city for a milk shake, though; I came to buy a blouse.”

“Well, they're chemical. Clothes, food, drink, plants growing in nothing but water, laboratories overcrowded, it's a bad world.”

“Bourbon—”

“It's all this mad race into space,” she said, and went away.

When I got onto the streetcar to go back, it said SMITH STREET in big letters on the front; “Does this streetcar go to Smith Street?” I asked the motorman, and he looked at me for a minute and then he said very quietly, “Yes, ma'am, it surely does.”

“Thank you,” I said. “How is your wife's asthma?”

“I am not married,” he said, “thank God.”