It was my sister Pam’s idea for us to find the building that was the basis for the ooky-spooky mansion in The Haunting of Hill House, and it was my sister Pam’s idea for us to go traipsing (Yes. I said traipsing; my bitterness has made me 50 years old) around the woods at the edge of Bennington’s campus. Basically, for the rest of my life, or at least until I actually get this ass to graduate school, I will be reminding my sister Pam that all this was her idea.
If you want to skip to the end, here it is: I fell, tore my ACL, and am having surgery in a week. While my would-be classmates are lining up at the registration table or whatever, I’ll be in bed in yoga pants, leg elevated on a pillow, brain mushy on pain killers.
Here’s the scene: Last week, Pam and I were traipsing around the Bennington College woods. Pam started zigzagging up and down the big hill, working out the timing of something she read online about that missing Bennington girl. (Pam watches too much daytime Lifetime network, which tends toward “Unsolved Mysteries” and “Cold Case” shit. I can’t wait until her kids are in school and she can go back to work and use her intellect for something a little more socially acceptable. Love you, sister.)
I’ve been working on a woods scene in my novel (I pasted the the beginning of it below), and I was doing this kind of embarrassing thing that I hope to God other writers do: closing my eyes and working to memorize the smells of the woods and the sounds of the leaves and the cool peeliness of the bark on the tree trunks (but please, don’t envision me doing that).
I was spinning around a bit to give myself the same sense of disorientation my character feels in the scene, and I wasn’t really keeping track of where Pam was. I’m not sure how long we carried on that way (probably looking like crazy people to anyone who would’ve observed us), but it was quiet for a long time. Then Pam let out this shout that was kind of a bark, and the sound came from up behind my left shoulder, which was not at all where I thought she was, and I turned around at the same time that I started opening my eyes and I felt something pop in my knee and for a second I saw that ghost of Elsie Testa standing there in the woods in her red dress, I swear to god.
By the time I had processed any of this I was on the ground. Pam was still finishing her shout and had turned toward me to ask Did you s— and then she started walking toward me really slowly, saying What’s going on with you? I think at that point I was already sobbing but the sound hadn’t reached my throat yet. I could feel the way my whole face had puckered into itself, though, and the heat spreading out from my knee. If you’ve ever been bitten by a shark and then immediately had someone piss all over the open wound — I imagine that would feel approximately as bad as I felt in that moment. Give or take the massive bleeding hole in your body, obviously.
Pam had to go get the car and pull it up as close as she could so I was sitting there by myself for about twenty minutes. What I thought I’d seen was just a red paint mark on one of the tree trunks. Despite my metaphorical shark bite, I was trying to get a photo of the tree at the right angle to make it look like what I’d seen, the swinging hem of a red dress, but there are a lot of limitations to cellphone cameras. Specifically that cellphone cameras are never paranoid or delusional.
Pam had been shouting about the same mark on the tree, actually. She was so stuck in this Paula Welden mystery that she saw the mark and thought it was a red coat hanging on a tree limb. She’s not sure whether she actually thought it was Paula’s coat, hanging there seventy years later, or if she thought Eurydice Messas had planted it in the woods as part of another “investigation.” Pam has been calling it Paula’s revenge, because she said I was making fun of the whole thing the night before, and because she really thinks that she is hilarious sometimes.
The downside to any low-residency MFA program, I’ve come to learn, is that the residency (particularly the first one) is so important that you can’t miss it, or even half of it, and still be enrolled for the term. So now I’m looking at a January 2015 matriculation, which is so incredibly far away…
Thus concludes Jeannie Alexander’s tale of ghosts and woe. Stay tuned next week for disempowerment at the hands of the medical profession, better living through pain-killers, and a repentant sister who’d better show up just about every day with movies and a bucket of KFC. I plan to be a pain in the ass.
* * *
excerpt from Redress, novel in progress
When I pulled up the drive, it was nearly three AM. The house was dark. Insects and air particles somersaulted in the headlight beams as I squinted at movement along the edge of the woods beyond the backyard. An obscured figure was moving quickly—a person, all shades of black and green until she moved through the furthest reaches of my headlight beam and became Elsie, full hem of that red dress swinging around her knees.
I wrenched at my seatbelt and ran from the car, pounding out exhales as I sprinted across the uneven grass toward her. I tried to shout her name but it was a wheeze. As I neared the tree line, the figure was barely discernible amidst the spindly tree trunks. My feet slipped and skidded on the deep carpet of pine needles as I knocked elbows and shoulders into peeling bark. Over the thunder of my own panting I could just barely hear her footfalls up ahead, quickening as I tried to close the distance between us.
We were headed in the direction of Buck’s Creek, where the ground would be slick and soft after the past week’s rainfall, and where Elsie and Janelle used to build mud castles and come home streaked green-brown, driving Molly nuts.
It was those green-brown streaks that my cruel imagination had been picturing on Elsie’s body since she disappeared, streaks on her knees and her cheek as someone pressed her down into that mud. I’d tasted the cold gravel, felt the pressure of someone’s shin on the small of my back, the ache of my long hair held back, the scratchiness of the fabric of my mother’s red dress, the burn of the seams as it chafed against my neck.
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