The Cliffs

by J. Courtney Sullivan

Jane entered the room. She gestured toward the open office door with enthusiasm, and Jane wondered if she took some sadistic pleasure in hearing teenagers receive their comeuppance through the flimsy wall. Across from the principal sat Jane’s English and social studies teachers. All three of them were grinning too. They had summoned her, they said, with excellent news. Jane was one of twenty-five honors students in the state of Maine selected to be part of a summer program at Bates College. Very prestigious, they said. An incredible opportunity. It would set her apart on her applications next year.

That day or the next, they said, her mother would receive a letter with more details. But they couldn’t wait to tell Jane in person.

Instead, she went home and waited for her mother to bring it up. Five days passed without a word on the subject. Jane sifted through the already-opened mail on the kitchen counter when she got home from school each afternoon, but found no trace of the letter.

When Jane couldn’t wait any longer, she asked her mother flat out if she had gotten the letter. “Yeah,” her mother said, all casual. “I don’t know, Jane. It sounds expensive. It sounds like a scam.” Jane explained that the program was free, the books and everything, even transportation. “Nothing’s ever really free,” her mother said. “They’re using you.” “For what?” Jane said, indignant. “You’d still have to have a summer job,” her mother said. “You can’t skip out on that.” “When have I ever skipped out on anything?” Jane said.

But they always acted happy to see Jane. They asked her about herself, especially Allison’s mom, Betty, who seemed proud of Jane in a way her own mother was not. In the three years they had known one another, Jane had eaten more dinners at Allison’s house than she had at her own.

Jane’s mother always claimed to be overwhelmed, though by what, Jane had no idea. She seemed unable to deal with the details of life that other adults just handled. Whenever anyone asked what her mother did for work, Jane lied. She would say her mom was a bookkeeper, which she had been once, years ago, a time before memory.

Her actual job, if you could call it that, was going to yard sales and reselling what she bought later for slightly more than she had paid. She shopped on Saturdays and Sundays. On Mondays, she brought her finds to various local consignment stores and individuals and tried to make a profit. The rest of her hours at home were spent talking on the cordless phone to whichever guy she happened to be dating, while drinking a beer, and circling addresses and times for upcoming yard sales in the newspaper.

All the worst stuff, the stuff she couldn’t sell, remained in their kitchen and living room, cluttering every available bit of space.

On the front lawn, blue plastic tarps covered three-legged coffee tables and bicycles with no chains and God only knew what else.

The professor, a sixtyish woman with bobbed hair, wrote on the board during the first class meeting: Most Lives Will Be Lost to Time. She spoke the names of women from as far back as the sixteenth century who wrote down their life stories when no one thought it appropriate for women to write at all. By doing so, they endured. Jane’s brain lit up at the idea. She devoured the poems of Lucy Cavendish and the detailed diaries of Anne Clifford.

As she approached the classroom, Jane overheard the professor talking to someone. “This one girl, Jane, she’s smarter and more curious than most of my sophomores and juniors,” the professor said. “I’m really impressed by all the kids in the program. I’m glad I signed on to do it. The whole thing is about giving some early college exposure to high-achieving, at-risk kids, so that hopefully they’ll be the first in their families to finish college. Break the cycle, you know.”

She wanted to challenge the statement, to tell her she was wrong, to demand to know in exactly what way she qualified as at-risk. But she knew. She had a single mother with a drinking problem and no money. An older sister who had landed on the evening news for getting wasted and stealing a boat with a group of guys, an incident Holly swore she did not remember when she woke up in a jail cell the next morning.

Now she realized the opposite was true. The family she came from defined her and always would. She didn’t read on the bus that afternoon, just stared out the window. The worst part of it hit her then: her mother knew why Jane had been chosen. That was why she hadn’t mentioned the letter. Jane felt guilty for putting her mother in the position of having her failings pointed out to her like that. And furious at her mother for being such a failure in the first place. She went home and cried in the shower until the water ran cold.

As Jane mentioned the monument to the passengers now, a woman in the front row nudged her husband and pointed in the other direction, up toward the cliffs. “That one gives me the creeps,” she said.

Jane’s eyes anticipated what she was used to seeing across from the island—a spot where two giant pine trees stood, right where the land jutted out into the sea, with overgrown hedges running along the cliffs on either side. One of the trees had fallen in the storm. She could see its roots reaching up toward the sky like long, grasping fingers. It had left a gap, through which Jane glimpsed a house, pale purple, very old, with turrets and elaborate trim painted green in some spots and blue in others. One upstairs shutter dangled precariously.

A white curtain billowed out from within. The woman was right. 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.

Jane considered herself law-abiding in the extreme. She would never shoplift or run a red light. She had never had a sip of beer. But to her, trespassing in such places didn’t feel like a crime. It felt like honoring whatever came before.

There was no way the purple house was occupied. She found it after forty minutes of searching. She had missed the turnoff at first. A rusty mailbox at the corner of Shore Road was the only indication that there was a house there at all. Jane followed a long dirt path beneath a canopy of trees that blocked out the daylight, until she emerged onto a large plot of land, right on the cliff, overlooking the ocean.

The lawn had been allowed to turn wild. The rhododendrons in front of the house covered everything, up to the second-story windows. Jane had the wonderful childlike sensation that at any moment, someone might pop out from behind a tree. A fear that electrified her, even as she knew there was no real danger.

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

In a grove of pine trees to the side of the house, at the far edge of the property, she discovered a small cemetery, just a handful of graves, old and crumbling.

She ran her hands over the universe of roots. She thought there was something sacred and sad about such a tree falling. Imagine what this tree had seen in its lifetime.

In the weeks that followed, she read every title on the syllabus that way, sitting in the grass at the purple house until it was time for work. She never went back to Bates.

“I can’t believe you’ve been coming here alone,” Allison said. “There is some kind of weird energy here, don’t you feel it?” Jane didn’t. She felt at peace there in a way she hadn’t since her grandmother was alive. Watched over, somehow.

Maybe it didn’t feel weird to her because the alternative was her own house—loud and cramped and unpredictable. The absolute opposite of this place. The size of Jane’s house forced her into an unwanted sense of intimacy with her mother and sister.

Holly mentioned the house at home later that night, and their mother snapped, “Do not ever let me catch you going out there again, do you hear me?” She made a face like Jane had gone specifically to hurt her. “Why not?” Holly said. “Just don’t.” Jane didn’t believe she had a reason. That was just how her mother was. She could manage to find fault with anything Jane did.

More often, Jane went by herself. She went to read in peace, to escape whatever drama was unfolding at home, to watch the ocean. She knew of course that the place did not belong to her, but felt all the same that it did.

Jane went to Wesleyan in Connecticut for undergrad, where her eyes were opened to the realities of inherited wealth;

After college, she got her master’s and PhD at Yale. She worked as an assistant at Emily Dickinson’s homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts, and later, as a junior archivist at the special collections at Wellesley College. At twenty-eight, she landed her dream job, at the Schlesinger Library at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute in Cambridge.

She preferred to live in a tiny studio, rather than have roommates. She went out to eat alone all the time, sitting at the bar, bringing a book, even on a Saturday night.

The pain of losing her mother was in large part about potential. All the conversations they had never gotten around to having and now would never have. The pain of losing David was material. With him, Jane had had something close to perfect.

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.

Jane remembered stepping inside the house for the first time after her grandmother died. How wrong it felt to be there among her belongings without her. By the time she left for college, Jane had lived in that house longer than anyplace else. Her mother remained there for the rest of her life. It was the first and only home she ever owned.

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.

Jane missed David. The way he took care of her. The way he understood her strange impulses, most of the time. She wanted to call him. To tell him all the crazy details of her day. Maybe even about the pregnancy test, how sad it made her when it turned out to be negative. It had been weeks since they stopped talking on a daily basis. That had been her choice. But she was finding it particularly agonizing tonight. Nothing ever felt quite real until she shared it with David. She wanted to see him, to smell him, to hold his hand.

That night was far from her first blackout. But it was the first that made her fully aware that she was capable of doing things she wouldn’t recall the next day, that could fundamentally change how the person she loved most saw her. She didn’t remember the events that had severed their marriage. How could that be? Where was she, Jane, in that moment?

Did the living matter as much to the dead as the dead did to the living? Jane had tried, at some desperate point with David, to blame what happened on grief. Grief for her mother that she wasn’t even sure she felt. She felt it now in some new, unbearable way. Tangled up with her regret over him. 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.

Jane clicked back to her email inbox. Genevieve’s message was still at the top. Great to meet you today! She believed Allison about Genevieve. Jane knew the type. They had patrons like that at the archives, entitled rich women who felt they were superior to everyone else, and needed to be indulged.

Jane replied with a quick note saying she was happy to take on the project. To her surprise, Genevieve wrote back immediately, asking if Jane might be able to complete the work in two weeks’ time, at which point she could come to the house to show her whatever she’d found.

She longed to sit beside her grandmother on the sofa, head on her shoulder, as her grandmother stroked her hair, and told her what to do. Clementine had told Jane to go out in the backyard and the voices would come.

The Providence’s entire crew was lost on what should have been the final day of a three-year voyage. Entering the tidal passage from the ocean to its hometown shipyard, the Providence met with stormy seas and went down less than an hour before it was meant to reach the harbor. The community was devastated. The sailors’ loved ones saw the whole thing happen from the shore, but were powerless to help.

The man on the phone was kind, and happy to help. He emailed her pictures of paintings of the wreck from the museum’s collection, and a letter Samuel Littleton wrote to his wife on his last, fateful journey. She had had a child while he was away, a son he was eager to meet. He wrote that he could not bear to be apart from Hannah any longer. He had arranged for her and the children to come with him on his next voyage, a three-year journey to Indonesia that was never to be.

Jane searched for contact information for the house’s most recent owners, the people who sold it to Genevieve. She figured maybe they knew something of its history. Marilyn and Herbert Martinson had divorced almost fifty years ago. He had since died. She still lived in Philadelphia. Jane looked her up online and learned that Marilyn had been a painter of some renown in the sixties, though she hadn’t done anything since.

Marilyn would now be eighty-eight years old. She had a landline listed in the white pages online. Jane called her twice, leaving a message both times.

Jane didn’t say that Genevieve wasn’t really her friend. That Genevieve was paying her. That she was doing this to distract herself from the fact of having crashed her life. 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.

There were people who wanted history honored, preserved. And there were people, far more of them it seemed to Jane, who didn’t see the point. History could only ever be as meaningful as those alive were willing to make it.

The detail that got the biggest response was the revelation that in Andrew Jackson’s day, many people washed their hair only once a year. All assembled, young and old, exclaimed in horror at that.

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.

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.

What was the reason for the gap of forty years between the prolific period in her thirties and the next time she picked up a paintbrush, at seventy-three? Marilyn gave a vague answer. She was still, as they said about people her age, sharp. Though lately, her memory felt like a canvas that had once been stretched taut but had come loose from its frame. There were holes in places.