Jane: A Murder (Soft Skull ShortLit) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Praise

  Dear

  THE LIGHT OF THE MIND - (Four Dreams)

  FIGMENT

  A PHILOSOPHY OF COMPOSITION

  TWO WRONGS

  THE FIRE

  SLIPPAGE

  FIRST PHOTOS

  SPIRIT

  HOW THE JOURNEY WAS

  TWO LETTERS FROM SWEDISH ANCESTORS, MUSKEGON, MICHIGAN (1910)

  THE BOX

  (OCTOBER 21, 1960)

  GUSHING

  (MARCH 7, 1960)

  THE DIARY OF A YOUNG GIRL

  BARB AND JANE, PART I

  JANUARY 20, 1960)

  SLOGANS

  MOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS

  (APRIL 15, 1960)

  (FEBRUARY 21, 1961)

  UOFM

  (1966)

  BARB AND JANE, PART II

  A NOTE ABOUT THE BOYFRIEND

  OF HER BLOOD

  PHIL

  FIRST LETTER FROM PHIL

  THE BOX

  SECOND LETTER FROM PHIL

  FRANCE

  LETTER FROM FRANCE, 1967

  REFRAIN

  THE LAW

  PHIL’S PHOTOS

  ORDER OF EVENTS

  LAW QUADRANGLE, SECTION C, SECOND FLOOR

  THE PLAN

  THE RIDE BOARD

  THE GIFT

  POSITION

  DIGNITY

  AFTERNOON EDITION

  SKIN

  SHOCK

  (1966)

  OPEN CASKET

  THEFUNERAL

  ORDER OF EVENTS

  CRANK CALLS

  SOME QUESTIONS

  THE GAP

  THEFUNERAL

  THE ARGUMENT

  SOME QUESTIONS

  TWO BULLETS

  AT DENTON CEMETERY

  THE CALL

  SERIALS

  TALLY

  (FEBRUARY 11, 1961)

  ONE LINE OF REASONING

  REASONING, CONTINUED

  REVELATION

  (1966)

  DEMOGRAPHICS

  NEVER WALK ALONE-NOT EVEN IN THE DAYTIME

  A CASE THAT TURNS OUT TO BE UNRELATED for Margaret Phillips

  (APRIL 15, 1960)

  GOD’S COUNTRY

  LEFORGE ROAD

  ASIDE

  STAKEOUT

  HEADLINES

  ONE MISTAKE

  COLLINS’S STATEMENT

  JOHN COLLINS

  FILTHY

  CONVERSATION

  CONVERSATION

  MAIL ORDER

  CONVERSATION

  (1960)

  TWO ECLIPSES

  TWO ECLIPSES

  MY MOTHER STILL DREAMS

  BARRICADES

  EMILY

  STACEY AND TRACEY

  LIES

  LIES

  (OCTOBER 21, 1960)

  GHOSTS

  (APRIL 15, 1960)

  SPITFIRE

  JANE-EMILY

  WHITE LIVER

  THE BEAUTIFUL MOUNTAIN

  THE BURN

  SISTERS

  PRETTY GIRL

  REPEATEDLY

  HIDEOUS

  GETTING SERIOUS

  THE SCRIPT

  THE ORACLE

  A SIMPLY STATED STORY

  THE LIBRARIAN

  A TRIP BACK

  IN THE MOVIE VERSION

  RESTLAWN CEMETERY

  LEFORGE ROAD, REVISITED

  A SIMPLY STATED STORY

  KOAN

  (OCTOBER 28, 1961)

  A PHILOSOPHY OF COMPOSITION (REPRISE)

  DENTON CEMETERY

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgements

  Jane: A Murder

  ISBN: 1-932360-71-9

  © 2005 Maggie Nelson

  Book design by Shanna Compton

  Cover design by David Janik

  Cover photograph: Jane, 1961. Family collection.

  Printed in Canada

  Published by Soft Skull Press

  www.softskull.com

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  www.pgw.com 800.788.3123

  Cataloging-in-Publication information for this

  book is available from the Library of Congress

  Some of the writing that appears here is Jane’s own, either from her childhood diary dated 1960-1961 or a loose sheaf of journal pages from her college years. The later fragments are mostly undated; here I place them around 1966, but that date is by no means a certainty. I have taken the liberty of altering the appearance of Jane’s writing on the page and correcting spelling and grammar when necessary. Also, although this is a “true story, ” I make no claim for the factual accuracy of its representations of events or individuals.

  For my mother, who took the journey, and my sister, Emily Jane, who has been there all along.

  We walk on air, Watson.

  There is only the moon, embalmed in phosphorous.

  There is only a crow in a tree. Make notes.

  -Sylvia Plath, “The Detective” October 1, 1962

  Dear

  I understand many people write for therapy—one’s own.

  So this epistle, addressed to no one,

  is therapy for me. What have I got to say-

  oh a lot of crazy impressions about nothing

  I imagine

  THE LIGHT OF THE MIND

  (Four Dreams)

  She had been shot once in the front and once in the back of the head. She wandered, trying to find someone to remove the slugs from her skull. She was not dead yet, but she feared she was dying. The holes in her head were perfectly round and bloodless, with burnt-flared edges, two eclipses. The passage of air through the holes felt peculiar, just dimly painful, like chewing hot or cold food on a cavity, the sensation of space where it had once been dense and full.

  Sunlight shot around the circumference of each black rind, so that a long shaft of pale light cast out from the center of her forehead, and another shaft streamed behind her.

  Is this the light of the mind? Is this the light of my mind?

  So I was a genius after all! The thought made her smile, but then she wondered, Why had the light always been invisible? I must have been squandering it, I must have felt only its vaguest rotations. Now what can I do with it? If I could find a lampshade, someone could read by it. I might illuminate entire rooms, entire dungeons, I shine so bright.

  But in fact she was losing the light; it leaked everywhere, unstoppable.

  She wakes up. Opens her eyes and sees peonies standing absolutely still. The window frames a solid blue mist; it is 5:30 A.M.

  She sleeps next to a mirror, sits up and looks into it.

  There is one slightly enlarged freckle which she cannot remember having seen before, smack in the middle of her forehead. She watches it, puts a finger to it.

  Pale white skin covered with freckles, what’s one more? But the dream! What’s one more.

  The air is unbearably wet with mist, and suddenly she thinks she can see the freckle growing-just as the flowers are surely growing; but slowly, slowly.

  The freckle is turning purple, a miniature contusion. Then darker purple still, as the flowers begin to grow heavy with their petals. The leaves flop over the edge and begin to dangle to the floor as the spot begins to blacken.

  Ever so slowly, the spot becomes a hole.

  She wakes up. The mist has dispersed. There is no freckle, no hole. The flowers, however, have opened, and they have turned to face the window.

  Soon she will want something-a cup of coffee. She sets off into the day. The sky comes down in
big vertical blue slabs the sun streaks through like bleach.

  The flammable suitcase she was carrying without knowing the danger she was in. Just walking down the street in the middle of a spring day. Unseasonably warm. She is singing, “I Wish I Were a Kid Again.” She doesn’t care what people think. She knows she is Cleopatra. She knows her guts are spears.

  But soon the fog begins to roll in again, in fingers. For a while the sun illuminates it from the inside, makes it warm. Then slowly the sun moves to the outside, hangs on its edges.

  Soon a bakery appears that she has never seen before. There are places like that, places that exist only once, or with only one entrance. Perhaps she has seen this bakery before, in a dream, or in a book still vivid from childhood, the one where a fox bakes éclairs and paces behind the counter.

  There is no one else inside. The chairs and tables are strung together with black thread and wire, as if made by birds. She sits down and begins a letter to no one.

  FIGMENT

  When I tell my grandfather

  I am writing about Jane, he says,

  What will it be, a figment

  of your imagination?

  We are eating awful little pizzas

  and my mother is into

  the boxed wine. I don’t know

  what to say. I wish

  I could show him: between

  figling (a little fig)

  and figure lies

  figment, from fingere, meaning

  to form. As used in 1592:

  The excellencie, dilicatnes, and perfection of this figment cannot be

  suffi[ci]entlie expressed.

  But he doesn’t want to see.

  Besides, that meaning

  is obsolete. By 1639:

  It is a sin to lie, even in God’s cause, and to defend his justice

  with false tales and figments.

  And by 1875:

  We must not conceive that this logical figment

  ever had a real existence.

  I invent her, then, as a woman emerging from the sea. A tall man meets her on the black sand. You’ve come back, he says. Can barely see her in the sea-light. They make love there, and become horses. As night grows black they become weeds.

  She asks him quietly in the dark to tell her about the mother of everything and he did not know of whom she was speaking. She asked the volcano and the volcano belched great streams of wet ash. She lay her head down with fatigue and found her head on a pillow of ink. Upon waking she stretched her arms around the globe and found her fingers weren’t even close to touching.

  A PHILOSOPHY OF COMPOSITION

  “‘Of all melancholy topics, what, according to the universal understanding of mankind, is the most melancholy?’ Death-was the obvious reply. ‘And when,’ I said, ‘is this most melancholy of topics most poetical?’ From what I have already explained at some length, the answer, here also, is obvious—‘When it most closely allies itself to Beauty: the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.’”

  -Edgar Allan Poe

  (1966)

  Hah! Good luck.

  Too bad Franny’s mother

  wasn’t right—too bad

  I don’t just need

  a warm bowl of soup

  and a long sleep.

  It’s cold in here.

  TWO WRONGS

  They say elephants can recognize the bones of a dead loved one when they stumble upon them in the wild. They will stop and wander around the huge decaying bones, swinging their trunks, braying in despair.

  The voice-over on TV might say, The elephants know that these are the bones of Dolly. They are mourning the loss of Dolly. But Dolly is our name, not theirs.

  It feels different to mourn something without naming its name. A fetus, a snake you call Snake, a woman with no Social Security number and the commonest of names.

  She was born in Muskegon, Michigan, on February 23, 1946, and she died on March 20, 1969, sometime between midnight and two A.M.

  I was born four years later, almost to the day.

  Her grave has no epitaph, only a name.

  I found her in the wild; her name was Jane, plain Jane.

  THE FIRE

  According to family lore, there was a great bonfire in which all of Jane’s possessions perished. Her journals, her clothes, her scrap-books, her books, her typewriter, her school papers, her love letters. Her parents supposedly set this fire a few days after she was killed, when they went to Ann Arbor to clear out her things. The way my mother remembers the story, they set the fire outside her room at the Law Quad.

  The Law Quad is a grassy, public area, traversed by several cement paths and surrounded by ivy-covered Gothic buildings, one of which is the main law library. Upon returning to the spot, my mother agrees that the idea of my grandparents, two very private people, setting a large bonfire there and feeding Jane’s belongings to the flames seems unlikely.

  But questions remain. Where was the story from, and where did the belongings go?

  SLIPPAGE

  One day rummaging through

  the “utility room,” I find

  a few loose pages of a journal

  I assume is my own: pages

  and pages of self-doubt;

  a relentlessly plaintive tone;

  and a wanting, a raw wanting

  not yet hidden in my

  poems. But I don’t have

  a beautiful, hard-leaning

  script, nor was I alive

  in 1966. The journal is

  Jane’s, from when she was

  twenty years old. After

  making sure no one’s at home,

  I sneak into my mother’s office

  and Xerox all of it, then carefully place

  the original back where it belongs.

  (1966)

  You know, for a world that demands direction, I certainly have

  none.

  Will I be a teacher? Will I go to France?

  Really I don’t know how smart I am-

  and that above all else keeps me working and working hard.

  I’m not sure I’ve a good mind.

  I’m not sure I reason well.

  I know I can be as confused as anybody else.

  I don’t know how I’ll do in advanced courses—

  I don’t know how I’ll do on the next econ hourly.

  I don’t know if I could be a great debater.

  And there are a million other things I don’t know about my

  intellectual capacities.

  Let’s leave emotional ones alone tonite-they’re in worse shape.

  I want so much-to be versatile, charming, warm, deep, intelligent, accomplishing something, loving,