Miss Jane

Sensual Matters

Dear Ellis,

I’ve decided — I suppose the impetus is the girl’s decision not to attend school — to arrange for an examination, if for no other reason than to find out if there is the possibility of sphincter construction or repair, which would at least allow her to be in social situations without embarrassment. There is no reliable urologist around here. I will be speaking with her, and of course with her parents, in the coming days. I understand it is a slim chance of good news. And will make sure they understand that.

It’s not that I think a life with romantic love — full-on or chaste — is necessarily something anyone and everyone should pursue, and in my opinion many I’ve known would’ve been better off following their solitary natures. But it seems wrong not to have the option. Her family trusts me and knows I have consulted with you on this a number of times, but I worry, still. I don’t want to have been mistaken and would very much like to be corroborated by such an examination by a specialist — I hear the men in Memphis are good, among the best.

I wish we could travel to Baltimore, but that’s quite an undertaking for a seven-year-old child, without her parents. It would be good to see you again. It would be a shame not to see one another again before we are old. You should consider a visit down here, in any case. Get out of the city for a while, have a little country vacation. We could go fishing or even quail hunting if I could rustle up someone’s dog. Let’s think on it together, though we are what seems almost a world apart.

Yrs,

Ed

A LITTLE LOST in the here and there, birdsong in the trees of the warm afternoon, invisible but for one silent flicker in its undulating flight from one line of trees to another, the air beginning to take on weight it would carry hard into the summer. When Jane awoke from this and stepped through the screen door of the house, she saw the doctor’s Ford coming around the bend in the drive. She went down off the porch to greet him and they stood there talking for a few minutes before he surprised her by asking if her sister was at home.

She said, “Grace?”

“You have another sister?” He grinned at her.

She went into the house but no sooner had the screen door shut behind her than she saw Grace looking like she’d just tugged on her nice yellow dress, it being a bit askew on her frame, a small brown valise in one hand and a blue umbrella in the other.

“Where’re you going?”

“To town,” Grace said. “I’m done here.”

She brushed past Jane.

“Your friend the doctor’s going to give me a ride.”

She walked out, nodded to the doctor, went around to the passenger side. She plumped herself down in the passenger seat and upended the valise to stand between her knees, the blue umbrella cocked onto her shoulder like a rifle.

The doctor looked at her, raised his eyebrows, then nodded to Jane.

“You want to go live in town now, too?”

“No,” Jane said, before she realized it was a joke.

“I’ll speak to your mother and father before we leave,” the doctor said.

“I don’t have all day,” Grace called from the car seat.

“Be just a minute,” the doctor said.

Jane and the doctor walked out to where her father and mother were weeding the cotton field with hoes. They stopped and came over.

“Ma’am,” the doctor said, touching the brim of his Stetson. “Where am I to drop the girl off?”

“Search me,” her mother said. “Said she’s got herself a job working at a dry cleaner’s. Somebody she knows of somehow.”

“Well, I guess she knows how to get there, then,” the doctor said.

Jane’s mother turned and went back to weeding.

“Well,” her father said. “We knew she was going, and told her to wait till the weekend, I’d take her on in myself, if she was so set on it. I reckon she couldn’t even wait that long to get away.”

He took his hat off and wiped his brow and face with a handkerchief, looked at the gritty sweat that came off onto it, shook it out, folded it back into his shirt pocket. Then he said, “I thank you for taking her. I suppose she’s going to do what she wants, no matter.”

They shook hands, then her father walked back into the cotton rows and set in to chopping weeds again like nothing had happened.

On the way back to the house, Dr. Thompson rested a hand on Jane’s shoulder and said, “Your sister can take care of herself, I have no doubt.”

She looked up at him and thought to make a comment, but recognized something of self-pity and resentment in it, beyond the puzzlement, and buttoned it.

He turned the crank and got into his car. Grace sat in the passenger seat as still and silent as someone with a gun held to her head but who seemed entirely unconcerned about the danger of the situation. He patted his jacket pocket as if to check for something, waved to Jane, then made the turnabout in the drive and headed out.

Grace isn’t even wearing a hat, Jane thought, watching them go. The dust raised in the hot still air by the car’s wheels like the dusting away of Grace herself into what it was said people came from. She had never thought literally of that before. A human being made out of dust from the earth would never hold up, and a human being made from mud would be nothing but a crumbling mold creeping about swamps to keep from drying and whisking away in the wind, like the dust she stood watching drift and settle back onto their driveway, no longer disturbed.

IN MERCURY after dropping the girl off at the dry cleaner’s, he posted his letter, stopped by Hellman’s speakeasy for a beer, then on a whim he’d never indulged before stopped by a popular whorehouse on Ninth Street to have a drink with the men there, thinking he might think on one of the ladies there. He’d been disturbed in that way by Grace’s demeanor and didn’t know what to do about it. He got caught up in a poker game that was interrupted by a fistfight between two young men named Bates and Urquhart and escaped the brawl quick as he could. It put him in a better mood, though, those boys fighting over a girl. He headed back downtown to Schoenhof’s to pick up a sack of oysters fresh from the Gulf, plus a sack of crushed ice, then at a bootlegger’s for a pint of bourbon and a case of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. He put several beers and the oysters into a broad bucket in his car’s trunk, dumped the ice onto them, and headed out.

Driving home, he took a long swallow from the bourbon and relished the new calm in his blood. About halfway there he started thinking about the girl Grace again. The way she’d sat there in his car’s passenger seat, he’d swear to God he could smell her the way a stallion scents a dripping mare, and he’d wished he had a drink right then. And how he was sure he saw her, from the corner of his eye, looking him over with a frank stare like she was sizing him up in a way she never had before. He smoked hell out of his pipe most of the drive, and neither said anything much.

“There’s a canteen of water for you there under your seat,” he said once over the clatter of the motor and wheel noise.

“Thank you.”

“I presume that medicine I gave you worked out all right.”

“Just fine.” Then, “I don’t like you wouldn’t take my money.”

“I don’t like how you got it.”

When he’d dropped her off he offered to carry her valise and she said no, thank you, it didn’t weigh anything.

“Anything in it at all?”

“Just a few personal items,” she said with a half smile that taunted him to say more.

“So you just got the one dress you’re wearing, then.”

“I’m going to be a seamstress,” she said. “When I need a new dress, I’ll make it.”

“Makes sense.”

“So where you headed, then, Dr. Thompson? Going to have some fun?”

“Just a little business.”

“Busy-ness,” she said, smiling.

And with that she closed the car door and walked toward the door of the shop, letting her hips move casually in the yellow summer dress she wore, and when the afternoon light shone through it, good lord, he was right. Nothing at all underneath, and the shadow of her young little bushy hair in the gap between her slim legs below her hips.

Now, driving home, he muttered to himself, “I am nothing but a sad case of horny old low-minded pitifully lonely son-of-a-bitch.”

Out of a low-frequency guilt and the need to somehow expunge it, he went on past his house and back to the Chisolms’, pulled into their yard honking the Klaxon. He got his lanky bulk down from the driver’s seat and wobbled a bit before getting his feet back and checking to see that the tub with ice, beer, and oysters hadn’t bumped out along the way. Everyone came over and crowded around. First the doctor took a brown bottle from the ice, flipped the crimped top of it off with a church key, held it out.

“Taste of cold beer, Chisolm?”

“By god,” Chisolm said. “On ice, is it?” Chisolm hesitated, then took the beer and drew a long swallow, his Adam’s apple bobbing, then held it out in front of him looking at it, blinking like his eyes were smarting in the sunlight. The doctor extracted another bottle from the ice and uncapped it.

“Mrs.?”

Jane’s mother glared at him and set her lips. He shrugged and drank, himself.

“What’re those rocks in the ice for, or did you just put them in there to steady your bottles of beer?”

“No, ma’am, these are oysters, straight from the Gulf of Mexico, come up on the train to Mercury for Schoenhof’s Restaurant.”

“Oysters,” Mrs. Chisolm said, twisting her mouth around the odd word. “What is it?”

The doctor lifted his chin and looked at her. Yes, he was a little tight.

“Let me show you.”

He produced from his belt a small dagger-looking knife and grabbed one of the rocks with his left hand, and went to prying at one end of the rock with the knife in the other, and the oyster parted like a mouth with a sound like a suction cup coming off the sink bottom.

“This is called shucking them,” the doctor said.

“Shucking!” Mrs. Chisolm said. “That’s what you do to an ear of corn.”

“Well, they use the same word for this,” the doctor said.

He handed the top half to Jane’s father and said, “You can use that for an ashtray.” He wiggled the tip of the dagger gently underneath some kind of jelly-looking gray-white blob lying in the bottom half, and next thing you knew he put the lower half up to his mouth and slid the blob out onto his tongue and was chewing the thing, his eyes closed, and then he was swallowing and smiling.

“What in the world?” Jane’s mother said.

“What is it?” Jane said. “You ate it!”

“I did,” the doctor said. “It’s delicious. It’s a mollusk, from the sea. You harvest them from the ocean bottom and keep them on ice so they don’t die and eat them fresh as you can.”

“You mean that thing you just ate was alive?” Jane’s mother said. “My land, that’s horrible.”

“Looks like something that ought to come from inside something,” Jane said.

The doctor cocked an eye at Jane, amused. “I guess that’s kind of what it is, then.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake!” Jane’s mother said.

“As I said, it’s delicious. And perfectly safe, mostly. These are, anyway. I ate several before purchasing this sack. Try one. The Indians down on the Gulf used to practically survive on these things and a few fish.”

“Mostly safe is not near good enough for me,” Jane’s mother said. Then, under her breath, “Indians.”

“I’ll eat one if Papa will,” Jane said.

Her father looked at her, eyebrows raised. Then he nodded at the mound of oysters. “All right, shuck me up one of them.”

“I’ll not witness it,” Mrs. Chisolm said, and went into the house. She stuck her head back out the screen door and called out, “Won’t be on me if you all get sick and die.”

The doctor took an oyster from the pile and shucked it, handing the bottom half to Jane’s father, then did the same and handed one to her.

“Okay,” the doctor said, “just tip it back into your mouth. And chew it, now, don’t just slide it down.”

Her father did as the doctor said. His face became serious as he held the thing in his mouth for a moment.

“Go on, chew.”

He looked sideways at the doctor, then began to chew. His eyebrows went up again, and then he swallowed.

“What, Papa?” Jane said. “What’s it like?”

“I can’t really say,” he said. “You’ll just have to see for yourself.”

She tipped the shell up and slid the oyster into her mouth, held it there a moment looking like she thought it might explode, then she bit into it, and the doctor watched her eyes get big with what he knew was the actual explosion of salty juices bursting onto her tongue and cheeks and the cold strange taste overwhelming her palate. And then it was down.

She stood there very still for a moment, then looked at her father, then the doctor. They were all standing there with big grins on their faces.

“What?” she said.

“Well, how’d you like it?” her father said.

“I do like it,” she said. “But sure does seem like you’d have to eat a whole big bunch of them things to make a meal.”

Her father smiled and the doctor laughed out loud and reached for another and began to shuck it.

“Sure enough,” he said. “But the ocean’s full of them. All over the sandy floor of the big Gulf of Mexico. And every other ocean in the world, far as I know. Let’s have us a bounty.”

But she and her father would have only a couple more each.

“Keep some, then,” the doctor said before he angled himself into his car seat to go. He put several into a small croaker sack and put some ice in with them and set them down onto the ground at their feet. He took a couple out, shucked them, and set them on top of the sack with their tops loosely covering them. “Don’t like them raw, I tell you what, they’re even better battered and fried.”

Her father shook his head.

“I don’t think I could get the wife to touch them,” he said. “Otherwise I might try that.”

“Well, you get a notion to try one that way, just come on over to the house this evening. I might just fry some up myself. Or get Hattie to. Course, they say a raw oyster’ll put the lead in your pencil.”

“What’s that mean?” Jane said.

The doctor grinned, touched his hat, turned his car about in the yard, and trundled off toward the road. Then he stopped, put it in reverse, backed up. Chisolm came over to the window.

“I need to talk to you about something. Not tonight, but in the next day or so,” he said.

“All right.”

“It’s about little Jane,” he said. “I want to have an expert take a look at her. I’ll tell you more when I come back by.” He smiled. “When I’m a bit more sober.”

“Good enough, Doc,” Chisolm said with a grim smile of his own. He backed away from the car and the doctor drove on.

THEY WATCHED HIM go till he was out of sight and they could only hear the car speeding up and its wheels bumping on the rutted road.

“Always something new in the world,” her father said.

Jane grabbed one of the shucked oysters from the top of the sack. The young tenant Lon Temple and his even younger wife, Lacey, leased eighty acres on their place and Jane had been looking for an excuse to try to make friends with Lacey, since she seemed so young for a farm wife.

Ice-cold oyster in her hand, she ran down to show it to her, keeping her hand clapped on top of it, the sticky wet coolness of it against her palm. She knocked on the door of the cabin, then knocked again, and in a minute Lon Temple came to the door and stood there looking at her. She was surprised, thinking he’d be in the field like her father and mother had been. He was a shortish, square kind of man, square face, small eyes, and a small mouth. She’d always thought he looked a little peevish. His young wife Lacey she couldn’t tell much about from spying because she wore a bonnet outside most of the time.

“I wanted to show Lacey something,” Jane said. She lifted her hand, revealing the oyster, and held it toward him.

He just looked at the thing in her hand.

“Lacey can’t come out,” he said. “She’s not feeling well.”

“Oh. Can I help?”

“She don’t need no help but what I can give her. What the hell is that thing there?”

“It’s an oyster. You eat it, raw, like this. Dr. Thompson said it’ll put the lead in your pencil.”

Temple looked angry then.

“What the hell?” he said.

Then he shut the door.

“Mean little son-of-a-whore,” Jane said to herself, echoing words she’d heard her mother mutter about him. She looked at the oyster, and popped it into her mouth, chewing as she climbed down the porch steps. Even then she had to stop for a moment, the sensation of it was so strange.

She went back up to the house and stood there in the yard, then walked in a kind of daze back to the pecan grove, found some leftover nuts in their smooth brown shells, held them in her hands, rolled them between her fingers and thumbs and into her palms, savoring her tongue’s memory of the new strange thing, the taste of it lingering even in her teeth. The light began to fail and fall about her like a weightless, silvery, disintegrating rain. She felt flushed by it down to the very tips of her toes.

All things of this nature, apparently unrelated — torrential storm, the burst of salty liquid from a plump and ice-cold raw oyster, the soft skins of wild mushrooms, the quick and violent death of a chicken, the tight and unopened bud of a flower blossom, a pack of wild scruffy dogs a-trot in a field, the thrum of fishing line against the attack of a bream, and peeling away the delicate frame of its bones from the sweet white meat of its body, a smooth and hard oval nutshell rolled in a palm, the somehow palpable feel of fading light — were in some way sexual for Jane. Not that this was how she would or could have expressed it, especially at that age. She felt it inside herself, though, as deeply and truly as a lover. She fell into the grove’s rough, tall grass and into darkness, some charged current running through her in pleasant palpitations of ecstasy.