The Cliffs

by J. Courtney Sullivan

The house was creepy. Jane had the strongest urge to go there and explore. She was drawn to deserted places. Those patches of the world where you could feel the life that had been lived there and was no more.

But to her, trespassing in such places didn’t feel like a crime. It felt like honoring whatever came before.

There was a historical plaque beside the door, printed with the name of the original owner, dating the house to 1846.

When she had finally saved enough money to travel through France and Spain, Jane went by herself, and felt lucky not to have to worry about what anyone else wanted to do or see.

Jane had become an expert at shaping the small traumas of her past into amusing anecdotes.

That’s how unbroken Allison was, Jane thought. She believed that if a man was good enough, his love could fix what was broken in Jane, could transform her into something other than the emotional delinquent she had always been.

Jane didn’t know how to explain to her friend that there was within her an almost violent ambivalence. When she was with David, she wanted to lean fully into him and a life together. But part of her resisted all of it in the extreme. When they were apart, her thoughts spun out. She felt certain it couldn’t work. That she wasn’t made for that and would eventually have to let him go. Jane was always, privately, trying to discern which part of her was right. She never said a word about these thoughts to David for fear that they might hurt his feelings, when truly, they were not about him.

All of this felt predetermined. They were joking, and yet they weren’t. They barely knew each other but could see into their future together. It seemed like everyone could. Even so, part of her said it was too soon for them to be talking this way. She needed to be careful. A fear tugged at Jane’s pocket, whispering that she had only wandered temporarily into somebody else’s lovely life.

Further proof of what she had sensed in the weeks since they moved in: that despite her efforts, a house as old as this one could never be conquered. Every flicker of the lights, every leaky faucet, felt like a fresh reminder that she had been foolish to assume otherwise.

She had read somewhere that mothers mourned past versions of their children. It was impossible to know if it was the last time you would ever change a diaper, or rock your baby to sleep or carry him from one room to the next, until you were on the other side of it. Sometimes the child who greeted you in the morning was somebody altogether different from the one you kissed good night.

When the renovation was done, she felt immensely proud of herself. Most of the work of her life was invisible—she made the doctor’s appointments and gave Benjamin his nightly bath and remembered to send flowers on her mother-in-law’s birthday. Tasks no one took any notice of if you did them properly. Only if you didn’t. But now she had made manifest something concrete, something special.

For much of her life, Jane had been intimately familiar, even comfortable, with loneliness. But after ten years of David’s companionship, she had lost her sea legs. David had been her armor out in the world. A certain degree of protection came from being his. Even when he wasn’t with her, Jane never felt alone.

Jane was known and accepted by him in a way she didn’t think she ever would be by any other man.

Here, success was measured by one’s house and one’s children. Jane’s accomplishments didn’t translate.

A common refrain throughout her adulthood was that it was tedious, the way strangers at cocktail parties asked what you did for work. Now she wished anyone would ask her that. Instead, trying to place her, they asked whether she had kids, and when she said no, they excused themselves as if this was the result of a curse that might be catching.

Only fifty percent of female lobsters are capable of producing eggs, her voice cheery, upbeat. We mark those ones and throw them back. They’re too valuable to eat. The female lobsters that aren’t capable of reproducing are the ones that end up on your dinner plate. They serve no other purpose. How did the passengers react to that? She didn’t remember now. Filtered through the lens of a childless, recently separated thirty-nine-year-old woman, it felt aggressive. Mean. It was a wonder no one had ever told her to go fuck herself.

He’s good, especially now that he’s rid of me, the terrible wife who got blackout drunk at a work event and made out with an assistant in front of her boss, who happens to be David’s best friend. Yes, that’s right, I managed to ruin my marriage and my job in one fell swoop.

Since her mother died, she had felt almost disembodied. She kept up with her work, until she didn’t. And now with what needed to be done at her mother’s place. But that was all she seemed to have the energy for. Jane was a brain floating through space, subsisting on caffeine and sugar, pushing down the more complicated emotions that lived inside of her, to be considered at a later date.

She didn’t know how it happened that when her life fell apart, she decided to come here. To the town she thought of as home, sort of, but not in a way that conjured memories of warmth and love and comfort. In crisis, Jane had acted on instinct. That was all she could figure out.

It seemed to her that whenever New Englanders attempted to honor the legacy of Indigenous people, the story was told in past tense. The sign in front of her now went a step further than mere acknowledgment. Rightly so, it made an accusation of theft. But what did it mean to acknowledge that this land had been stolen, when no one had any intention of giving it back?

Jane didn’t know the protocol. Was she supposed to tip? Was a psychic medium who made house calls like a food delivery person, a gig worker who relied on the generosity of strangers to get by? Or was she more like a master plumber, who came to your home to perform a vocation and would therefore be insulted by a gratuity?

She had lost count of the number of people who, hearing what she did for work, claimed that their grandmother was a pioneer in the field of law or pie-baking or landscape architecture, and should be considered. Everyone thought their own story worthy of preservation.

She wondered if Clementine was really psychic, or if she just had a strong sense of human nature. Maybe they were the same thing in the end.

“Jane, sorry, but D wants to come through again. The young girl. She’s desperate for you to get a message to her mother. She says it could be her only chance.” “Who is her mother?” Jane said. “I have no idea. But D is saying she needs you to tell her that it wasn’t her fault. Tell her she’s at peace in the water. She’s not at Lake Grove anymore.”

When her mother died, things between them went from unresolved to unresolvable. For months, Jane walked around so full of anger about this. She woke drenched in sweat from dreams in which she screamed in her mother’s face to come back; they weren’t finished.

Sometimes Jane allowed him to, grateful for his embrace. Other times, she felt smothered. She went and slept in the armchair in the living room. She wasn’t good at being comforted by someone else. For most of her life, she had done that for herself. She knew she was safe with him, but could never quite manage to flip the switch on the instinct that told her David would harm her if she wasn’t careful. Her mercuriality wore them both down. It was exhausting. Jane knew this.

As an adult, when Jane observed friends’ kids complaining about having to go to bed or turn off the television or brush their teeth, she wanted to squeeze their cheeks and tell them how lucky they were that someone cared enough to make them do such things.

It occurred to her then that there were a few things her mother was a lot better at than she was, including having fun for the sake of it. Enjoying herself.

Once a day a hospice nurse arrived to check in and take her pulse. These visits only ever lasted five minutes, but they were the thing that kept Jane and Holly sane, reminding them that a world still existed out there, that contrary to how it felt, they were not murdering their mother. This gruesome process was what it meant to die peacefully at home in your own bed, surrounded by family, as the obituaries so often read.

“This isn’t about your mother. This is about you, Jane. Something you did,” Clementine said. “You have to face that. It’s going to pull you under if you don’t.”

“Having children has made me more open-minded to the notion of the full spectrum of life, including the before and after.” “What does that mean?” Chris said. “It means once you meet your kids, it’s hard to imagine their existence as some random act of biology,” Allison said. “As individuals, they seem destined for you. Don’t you think?”

She wanted a child too. But everything Jane loved and longed for terrified her. She hated this about herself.

Diaries were among the most frequently donated materials at the Schlesinger. This was a question asked by so many donors. Were they honoring a legacy or violating a loved one’s private thoughts when they handed a diary over? What was the point of leaving such things behind if you didn’t intend for anyone to read them? That’s what Jane told those people when they asked. Privately she believed that in many cases, whoever wrote the diary had probably not expected to die before she could decide what to do with it; had kicked that particular can down the road until it was too late.

True, she herself had started many a journal with the best of intentions only to stop writing after an entry or two. But this felt personal. Like her mother saying once more, this time from the great beyond, that Jane would never really know her.

She said it was one of the few times ever that Grandma didn’t get on her case, because Grandma had her own thing with a married guy once. Well, you know about that.” “What?” “Mom said Grandma told you. And something about you sort of rubbing it in Mom’s face that you knew.” “I have no idea what you are talking about.” “Grandma was crazy in love with him,” Holly said. “Mom was a kid at the time. She said Grandma would bring this married guy around and sometimes she would make Mom go to his house and sit there while they were in the other room. A couple times Grandma didn’t even come home and Mom was here all by herself, terrified. She had just lost her father and been moved to a place where she didn’t know anyone.” “That didn’t happen,” Jane said, indignant.

“I’m just telling you what Mom told me. She said Grandma came home one night completely hysterical, ranting on about what a bad person she was. Mom was pretty sure something awful happened with the married guy, but Grandma never said what. Mom was only like ten or eleven. It was super traumatizing, as you can imagine. After that, Grandma never mentioned the married guy again. To the point where if Mom mentioned him, Grandma would pretend she didn’t know who Mom was talking about.” “Because Mom made the whole thing up,” Jane said. When Jane was a kid, her mother sometimes said, “My mother was no picnic to live with when I was growing up. You think she’s a saint. You have no idea.”

Did the living matter as much to the dead as the dead did to the living?

Sometimes the tragedies of a person’s life didn’t happen neatly, single file, one at a time, but all at once, so that it was impossible to know how you felt about any part of the whole.

She liked talking to Abe. He was someone she had never disappointed. He still saw her as the high school version of herself. A good girl.

History could only ever be as meaningful as those alive were willing to make it.

Jane was not exactly surprised by these reactions, but she still found them depressing. At the hotel bar that night, she railed on to David about how most people were, when you got right down to it, pretty terrible. They got more worked up about last week’s episode of The Bachelor than they did about living in a country built by slaves and founded by slaveholders.

Essentially, if a man didn’t like what his wife had to say, he was legally encouraged to waterboard her.

“We’re friends,” like it was a ludicrous question. Which it wasn’t. There were fifty-five years between them. They looked at art together, and went to the movies. Caitlin invited Marilyn to join them for Thanksgiving. Friendsgiving, they called it. The apartment was full of young people, flirting and laughing and bouncing fat babies on their hips. She was older than anyone else there by half a century. Caitlin didn’t seem to find this odd, so Marilyn decided she wouldn’t either. She had a ball.

Caitlin had so many anxieties, such uncertainty about the future. That was one aspect of youth Marilyn didn’t miss. She had no fear anymore. The worst had already happened and she had survived.

Marilyn said she didn’t believe in the concept as others defined it, but that she had lived five distinct lives in the span of her one lifetime. This was something she had often thought, but never uttered out loud until then. The definition of a lifetime, as she saw it, was when the people most important to you wouldn’t recognize the ones who previously filled their roles.

Marilyn knew lots of women artists who tried to inject their work with masculinity, whatever that meant. There was an old story about Hans Hofmann praising something Lee Krasner had made as “so good you would not know that it was done by a woman.” And Krasner was hardly ever mentioned without the detail about being Jackson Pollock’s wife. Even though she taught him. Women carried knowledge of that sort of thing around, whether they wanted to admit it or not. It changed the way many of them worked.

People who saw her work sometimes mistook her as being primarily interested in the domestic object, but that wasn’t right. She was interested in plastic and glass not for their own sake, but as a conduit to the light.

Painting still life was a form of contemplation. She could not paint the human form because she didn’t want to be in a room with another human while she painted. She didn’t want to have to think about another person’s needs.

She thought often that what she missed most about her youth was not the loss of her beauty or her figure, like women usually said. She had never been all that pretty to begin with. What she missed was the capacity for love. That intense love, which she and Herbert felt for one another in the beginning, and for music and art. You couldn’t ever love that way when you were older. Listening to the old songs or thinking hard on when she first met her husband, she could conjure up memories of how it felt. But remembering was not the same as feeling it.

Marilyn was ecstatic to learn that mother love was every bit as intense as the love she had known before, but more beautiful. Steadying. Love that didn’t unsettle her, but instead made her comfortable in her skin, and in the world.