interesting, given that he hadn’t seemed to have read any of the plays as we were studying them. But he did have a nice little library, right there within reaching distance of the couch. Vonnegut. Plato. Emily Brontë. Ginsberg and Burroughs. Plath. The bindings for the hard-backs cracked upon opening, the pages inside pristine. There were four books by Toni Morrison, a slim volume of Cliffs Notes tucked inside The Bluest Eye. Looking down at the other end of the shelf, I saw Jane Eyre. I had read it for freshman lit, which had been taught by a graduate student with flaming red hair and wire-rimmed glasses who told us on the first day that the freshman reading list had been put together by the English Department, and that the books were not what she would have chosen to have us read at all, and that she was at least going to frame them for us in alternately Marxist, feminist, and post-colonial perspectives. She had frightened me on that first day, but I had come to like her as a teacher, though she and I reached a temporary impasse when the class started reading Jane Eyre. I adored the book. Jane was a great heroine, I thought, with all her spirit and courage, and I believed the love story that unfolded between her and Rochester. The graduate student, however, firmly believed that Jane Eyre wasn’t a love story at all; she presented us with a published article that argued that at the end of the book, when Jane is the young wife to the old, blind Rochester, she is no more than his Seeing Eye dog, an underling hired to maintain the colonial, patriarchal status quo. I didn’t believe it for a second, and I was so indignant that I risked my English grade—my one dependable A for that semester—to argue on Jane’s behalf in my midterm paper. I wrote that Jane was not his Seeing Eye dog, but his equal companion. Society may have cast them as master and servant, but in their minds, they were equals, because he loved her, and she loved him—there was ample evidence for this in the text.
The graduate student was fairer than I’d expected. She returned our papers a month later, and on mine, across the top, was written:
You are brainwashed by your culture. And you are wrong. But you are a good writer. A-
That night on Jimmy’s couch, I reread almost all of Jane Eyre, reconsidering the Seeing Eye dog argument. I didn’t mean to read so long. I just kept turning pages. There was the solace of focusing on someone with real worries: Jane, with her confined life in another century, lived in a far more dismal world than mine; her choices were fewer and far starker. And there was also the familiar pleasure of a good story, the slow revelations of someone’s nature and troubles and thoughts; a word-created world to fall into.
I woke the next morning stretched out on the couch, Jane Eyre fallen to the floor. Sunlight streamed in through the living room’s sheer curtains. In the dorm, mornings were loud. There was always a door opening, a door closing, someone laughing in the hallway, a stereo blasting, or an alarm clock going off in an empty room. But the town house was peaceful. I was happy when I wandered into the kitchen, even with the suds-stained counters and mud-tracked floors, but then I saw the little digital clock by the oven. It was almost eleven. Jimmy and Haylie would be home by four.
I circled frantically, picking up cans and cups. My bare feet stuck to the kitchen floor. I tried to prioritize my tasks. There was the dirt on the carpet where the plant had fallen. The blood on the curtain. Haylie’s clothes, the boas, the shoes. The faint but distinct odor of cigarettes in the living room. The plastic bag of aluminum cans which Gretchen really should have taken with her, which I did not know what to do with, as I had no car, and no way to leave before Jimmy and Haylie returned.
Once again, I was stranded.
I tried calling Gretchen. No answer. My mother had called again, and left a message. I listened as I dug cigarette butts out of an aloe vera plant by the sink.
“If this is the only way I can communicate with you, I at least want you to know two things. One, you are not the only person in