Miss Jane

Essentially Normal

Despite Jane’s isolation, she began to be interested in boys. It was a slow, gradual accretion, this new awareness. Of boys as boys, that is, strange creatures, like another species retaining the general physical qualities of her own but with hidden secrets, secret differences. Significant perhaps in some way to her in particular. She saw them when they passed by in buckboard wagons on the road sometimes, or at the occasional sermon she deigned to attend, and sometimes they would come with their fathers to shop at the store. She wondered, feeling foolish as she did, if they had heard that she often tended the store and had come along so as to see her. She had begun to notice them in a different way. Almost in the way a forest animal or bird, at rest and hidden safely away, may take notice of a new animal walking through its woods, walking upright, carrying with it some strong, exotic scent.

She did have a sense that she herself must be some kind of mysterious creature. People must gossip, for her mother gossiped about other people at times. Grace never had, of course. Grace had despised most of them to the point of disinterest, as far as Jane could tell. Jane could imagine coming upon some boy, somewhere, alone, maybe like in the clearing where she’d seen Grace meet and do it with the Barnett boy. They would both stop in their tracks, surprised. He would come closer to her. But then unlike the dumb Barnett boy he would be like Lon Temple with Lacey, tender, and would ask if he could touch her, but in innocent ways, on the cheek or her arm or hand.

This was all soon accompanied by a kind of discomfort, a swelling or tightness in her lower belly, like things being squeezed up in there, and when she mentioned it, her mother stopped what she was doing and looked at her with eyebrows raised, and it seemed to Jane that she was looking at her in a way she hadn’t before. When a few days later she noticed what looked like blood in her diaper, she was frightened. Her mother said she needn’t worry, but seemed not to know how to talk to her about it and looked worried enough about it herself.

Soon followed a visit by Dr. Thompson, who sat her down and asked her some questions, examined her bloody diaper, and probed at her belly with his long, knuckly fingers.

“Well,” he said, “you are becoming a woman, after all.”

“What do you mean, ‘after all’? Besides, I’m only fourteen years old.”

“Comes to lots of girls even younger, and some closer to your age. A few even later, though rarely. Depends on the individual. Anyway,” he said, and sat to look her in the eye, “it is a good thing. In your case, see, even though we believed you wouldn’t have trouble with it, we couldn’t be entirely sure. Reasonably sure but not absolutely.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“I was concerned about the possibility of a blockage. Of the blood not being able to come out.”

“That doesn’t sound good.”

“It could have been a serious problem. But now I don’t believe we have to worry about that anymore.” He pulled his pocket watch from his vest pocket, checked it, then settled himself in his seat, looked squarely at her again, and explained to her as best he could about menstruation. Though he didn’t talk beyond the bodily mechanics of it.

“And it happens for the rest of your life?” she said.

“No, at some point in a woman’s life, later on, it stops. And then she can no longer have children. It’s a natural thing because then she’s too old to have children without endangering her life or the child’s.”

She sat looking back at him, wondering whether to tell her secret. His kind, familiar, and calm gray eyes then set it free, and she said, “I know how people make babies.”

“Well, I did give you that pamphlet drawing, but of course there’s more to it than that.”

“I know that, too.”

He said nothing, his own bushy eyebrows gone up.

“I have to wonder how you know it.”

She told him, after making him promise he wouldn’t tell, about Grace and the Barnett boy. She didn’t tell him just then about Lon and Lacey Temple.

“I see,” he said.

“How come Grace didn’t have a baby, then, from that?”

“It does not always result in a child. Sometimes it just doesn’t take.”

“I know it won’t ever happen to me.”

Again he was gazing at her in that way he had of making her feel she could trust him with just about anything. Then he sat back and cleared his throat, and looked down at his hands as if to see that he held something curious there.

“Well. I believe that you have everything you’re supposed to have, inside. But whether or not you will ever have children—” He stopped and just looked at her for a long moment, which made her scalp prickle. “I guess I should speak plainly. It would be hard for a man to deal with the way you’re different. And even though you have everything inside of you that you need, I don’t know that the act of intercourse — that is what happened between your sister and that boy — would actually be possible, or at least not in a way that would result in your conceiving a child. Or if you did, I’m not sure you’d be able to carry it through gestation — the time it takes to grow inside you before coming out into the world.”

“I know that, too.”

“Do you, Janie?”

She didn’t answer, thinking. It was coming on late afternoon, and for a moment it was like she was in a dream she sometimes had, where it’s the gloaming coming on and the trees are a beautifully darkened green and the sounds in their shadowed crowns begin to rise like some kind of otherworldly singing inside of herself.

Yet outside the window now the trees were nearly bare in their early December secret trembling.

He put a hand on her shoulder.

“You’re essentially a normal child, Jane, as I’ve said. Complicated, but essentially normal.” He looked at her. “I’ll bring you something more to read about all this, what we’ve talked about. With more pictures. It’ll help you understand.”

He told her not to lose hope. That one day there would be a way to fix her. He just couldn’t say when.

“I believe it,” he said. “Maybe it’s wrong for me to say so, because I can’t say when. But I believe there will one day be a way.”

“I don’t deserve it,” she said. Then she couldn’t speak.

“Don’t say that. Here, now.” He gave her a clean handkerchief. “Why would you say a thing like that?”

She told him about spying on Lon and Lacey Temple and how she was afraid she had somehow tainted their union by doing it, and how Lacey had wept, as if she knew they had been tainted.

Dr. Thompson sat quietly, waiting her out. When her eyes cleared, he was gazing at her, a look a bit sad but simply calm, too.

“How could you not be curious?” he said then. “Natural curiosity. There was no harm in it. Not for you, anyway. For a grown-up, yes. But you are a special person. Just as the way you are denies you some things, it also gives you license that others may not have. In my opinion you live on a higher moral ground. I mean to say you are a good person. You were not being bad, doing that. You were trying to learn about things. And about yourself.”

“But how come they never had children, then? They’d been married long enough.”

After a pause, the doctor said, “Have you ever wondered why Lett and I never had children? We were certainly married long enough.”

She looked at him, not knowing what to say. Why had she never wondered about that?

“I am not able to have a child, Janie,” he said. “We tried. We did what you do, as you said, to make babies. But to use the phrase I used about Grace, it ‘did not take.’ And it’s because I am infertile. Like one of your pecan trees that won’t produce pecans sometimes. Or an ornamental fruit tree, a pear or peach, looks like any other pear or peach tree but no pears or peaches.” He smiled. “I hope that doesn’t embarrass you. But know this: You had nothing to do with those two young folks not having a baby. And like as not young Lacey knew why they couldn’t get pregnant. It had nothing to do with you, but with one of them. And that’s why she was crying, hon. Not because of some spell. Life is not fair in that way or any other way. We are who and what we are. It’s just what it is.”

FOR SOME TIME after that she was lost in a kind of distraction, focused on this most strange business of menstruation. The idea that she was becoming a woman in that way, but in another way could never be. She noticed others. The peculiarity of their different shapes. For the first time since she’d been weaned of nursing, she thought again about breasts. The doctor had said that hers would begin to change. There was a lumpish thickness beneath her nipples, hardly noticeable in the mirror but evident to the touch. It occurred to her that, compared to her mother, her sister was quite buxom. She remembered the Barnett boy placing his hands there, which she had thought odd, but Grace had moaned in a way that sounded like pleasure, and lain down and made him hurry up and do what he was going to do.

The next summer she looked for and found another of the infamous stinkhorn mushrooms. The cap on this one was black and did indeed stink. She broke it off at the base and looked until she found a mushroom that looked vaguely, very vaguely, like the drawings Dr. Thompson had shown her of the female parts. She looked around to make sure no one had followed her, then carefully pressed the stinkhorn into the other mushroom, pushed it inside there as far as it would go, and then sat for a while, pondering. Moved it back and forth a little bit, then felt silly. Before she left the spot, she tossed the stinkhorn into some bushes where no one would see it.

Somehow all of this made her feel more alone in the world than she had up to that point. Her dog Top had gotten old, and in her distractions she’d hardly noticed it happening. But then she did, and he was obviously old. Gray-bearded, creaky. She couldn’t understand it.

“Dog ages a lot faster than a man,” her father said. “You knew that.”

“I guess I forgot,” she said.

And it wasn’t much longer before Top went away. She called to him for an hour that afternoon, all around the place and down into the woods, but he didn’t come. Nor the next morning. Her father said dogs sometimes did that, just went off to die.

“Papa. You didn’t take him off, like you did with Hound, did you?”

He looked astonished.

“Lord, no, girl. He was your dog, not mine. I wouldn’t have done that.” He looked perturbed, bothered by the question, like it was an accusation. “Unless you’d asked me to,” he added.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to say I thought you’d done that.”

She waited several days, hoping Top had just gone off on some kind of odd dog journey and would come back around. But he didn’t. Spring arrived in its first stealth, then its open leafing and blooming. She felt something change inside her, felt her old companion’s absence like a weight in her heart. She mourned him.

DURING ONE OF his periodic examinations that summer, Dr. Thompson palpated her abdomen. “Any discomfort there?” he said. No. “There?” No. Then, after pausing his hands a moment, he began palpating a little lower down. “Any discomfort here, Jane?” She said nothing, then placed her hand over the doctor’s and said, “Wait.” The doctor gently took his hand from beneath hers and stood back, removed the stethoscope tips from his ears and hung them around his neck, and looked at her for a long moment before nodding to himself and gathering his bag to leave.

“It would do you no harm should you decide to examine yourself, in privacy, of course,” he said as he was walking toward the doorway. “No harm in becoming more familiar with your own body as you grow on.” And then, without turning around, he took his leave.

After that, sometimes, during her walks in the woods, she would lie back on a bed of fallen leaves (after checking for poison ivy growing among them) and palpate herself in that place until the strange and pleasant sensation returned and a shivering rush of blood ran through her entire body and it was as if she blacked out for a long moment, and when she came to, the world was almost a surprise there all around her, and she lay tingling and warm in a way that she never had before she had this thing she could do to herself.

She didn’t do it very often. The fear that her father or mother or even a stranger might come upon her while she was blacked out like that was too alarming. It would be too embarrassing to ever recover from. And she couldn’t help but feel it must be shameful despite the doctor’s words, because it felt too good, and down there, and the lingering pleasure was always interrupted by the fear of discovery that brought her back to her senses and hurrying back to the house.

IN A LETTER to Ellis Adams in Baltimore, the doctor described the examination and again reminded him to keep his ears open and to let him know if there were any new developments that might be used to help Miss Jane Chisolm, developments that would change the current prognosis. To let him know if anyone figured out a way to work with or around the problems posed by her particular condition.

It would seem the strangest thing to me, he wrote, to have everything a normal person is supposed to have in that regard yet know it is trapped inside my own skin and all but inaccessible to anyone or even anything beyond my own blood, other bodily fluids, the microscopic eyes we might imagine to exist in the very cells that make up what and who we are.