Morning Pages: No One Should Eat Death for Breakfast
“Jane Doe Goes Rogue” Character Study
From Jane Doe Goes Rogue
If the morning was a cold one at the Doe residence, Gabriel Faure’s Requiem in D Minor was playing. An unorthodox choice among their strict set both because it was a requiem—no one should eat death for breakfast—and because it was beautiful. High-and-mighty vines grew wild and ample in woodsy Michigan. Bach, Mozart, or any one of the denser composers were preferred: good for the blood, stirring the marrows. Anything hefty and warding was the best choice. French composers like Faure, were too romantic and whimsical for daytime. Even their requiems were best left for the bedroom.
Perhaps in this one small way, there was a hint of something to come. Mr. Doe revealing his ever-so-slight deviance from the convention in this musical rebellion. Rebellion they were taught, was the kind of thing that crept up and choked out the white-washed brick houses in the township of Parish. Vines were prohibited by the Homeowners Association for fear of causing ruin. Façades cracked slowly, almost undetectably, until it was all at once.
Faure’s Requiem was entrancing, rapturous even, and this unnerved Jane some mornings. The younger two swayed a little too much, swept up. Their eyes closing halfway, their heads tilting and lingering sideways. Lulled inside some snug hammock held in the mouth of that mythical stork, flying them away from her nest instead of dropping them at her feet.
The Paradiso movement was as close to heaven as she wanted any of them to be. And even though Mr. Doe balked at the idea in mixed company. If pressed, he admitted what everyone knew—Jane was the vicious angel at the gates of their heaven. She was the unsqueamish one battling grubby demons that thrashed against their threshold. She was the one with the bounty on her head, growing in number because of all our heads.
It was not just any Tuesday, it was blintz Tuesday. Five eager Doe girls scooted their way around the banquette extra early, crinkling up their noses at the smell of sizzling butter. Looking like dapple-furred spring rabbits with their perky multi-color hair frizzed about their freckle-pocked faces. Our stray teen brother straggled behind earnestly, flopping back his shaggy hair, pinning them all in with his imposing overnight growth. A gangly man-child instructing us to get our elbows off the table—watch out, here it comes!
Jane spun ‘round, floating toward the table with an amusing elegance, presenting a plate of rolled-up goodies from high overhead. Dad’s eyes never lifted off his papers; we tried not to brandish teeth or salivate over the powdered sugar. Everyone waited for grace. We were always waiting. Waiting for catechisms, waiting for his stomach to growl by some miracle. A candle to light and snuff, so we could eat small bite by mannered small bite using knives awkwardly. Straight faced, wishing we could wolf it with our bare hands.
Smiling wasn’t for breakfast or for Tuesdays. It was for the over-shiny wedding picture on the mantle and times when father was out of the house. Possibly even for later that very day. They could all see the signs. That plaything in mother’s eyes. The mania enhanced all the more as she licked the last of the homemade raspberry jam from the berries the girls’ hands were still stained with, and for extra grandeur, arched her back making show of her extra-extruding bellybutton. Almost the end of another pregnancy. Despite her load, she was in a young, feral mood. The goddess of our secret moments alone together. The countdown was on though none of us would dare count aloud. Her eyes showed it most, they were euphorically purple this morning, darting about the kitchen like searchlights as she pretended to prep their schoolwork. Her hair was erratically curly, a bulging bun giving way, dark and matted near her temples from the sweat of the night.
As soon as dad bolted upright, his chair screeching against the orange and cream Formica floors, we stood straight up and bowed, kissing his hand one-by-one. When the door shut, we crept toward the bay window and smushed our faces against the beveled glass panes, watching kaleidoscopes of him back ever so slowly out of the driveway. When he was safely out of sight around the bend, Mother exchanged Faure for You Make my Dreams by Daryl Hall and John Oates. Eighties music was her favorite and it had become ours. All optimism and head-wagging beat. We danced, we flailed, we slipped around in socks clearing the table without breaking more than two or three dishes. Then set off for math lesson—the wiles of the supermarket.
How she could fit anything inside her stomach, I will never know. But this morning she was on bender for brie and extra-whipped Philadelphia cream cheese. Didn’t cravings ever end? Not for mother with this pregnancy. It was a boy. She hadn’t had one since Jack—fifteen years ago and counting. One thing we knew besides the name we swore we wouldn’t tell, was this infant was made of triple-cream impulsivity. Mom couldn’t wait to devour the cheeses, so she didn’t. Cream was the the fuel to keep the party going as we made parade down the aisles. As the oldest daughter, I carried the coupons. Mother said everyone was so distracted with their phones these days they left out clipping coupons. The best deals she said, were still in print.
She had known a thing or two about print, she would often tell us. Dad may be a digital advertising guru wielding algorithms but she was a budding journalist once, wielding words in black and white. The kind that smudged so much you could use the ink on Ash Wednesday to mark your own forehead and skip church.
She wasn’t a full-fledged journalist, more a researcher and co-contributor on a story or two. She had really wanted to be a war correspondent but you had to start somewhere. She’d even managed to go to Croatia for a month, tagging along with a cameraman and hunky anchor on the few dimes she’d made waitressing Martha’s Vineyard the summer before, living on a boat.
In Croatia, she mostly carried the supplies—glass jars and olive oil and the wine corks, the pens, paper, water. Vouchsafed the matches in the double fabric slit in her bra to keep them dry. For when they needed some light. Something as wondrous as light could be made from simple things, she always said. Something small penetrates the darkness just enough. Just enough was all you needed in the dark anyway. Just enough kept you safe in war and life. Meant you could see your shoes step, but no one could see you.
On assignment, she belted with British accent for whatever unknown affected reason. We ate too many sardines, and an occasional wild berry by light of those glass jars she lugged. Watching the show of artillery in the distance most nights, dreaming of their uncharted futures. Until the night the boys got a craving and decided to ferret for more berries. Just as she could hear the clammer of their victory, a misstep, and boom! They were gone. In pieces. Mom went home alone. Blood in her ears. Fangs in her smile.
It was this desire, she said. To be near conflict. To tell people about what blood and guts and buried bombs were really like, that had made her want to be our mother. Motherhood was a land of high conflict and hyper-vigilance. Surrounded by assailants. Some obvious, some hard to detect. All dangerous and wanting one thing: her brood. One day she would write something about it. Today, we played a game among the grocery aisles. Keep away the demons. The littlest ones, shielded by Jack, made ultimate havoc. After a tower of cans fell, we got a scolding from the manager and paid our due. Game over.
Sometimes after our games, mom got that stare I imagined she had on the plane back from Croatia. Jack reminded her of the friends she lost there, she told us. They were too good for this world, purgatory beings from the get-go. In limbo, holding signs to passersby— this way up. Risking their own lives so others may be warned: this is what happens if you go too far.
Jack was in real school so he could play football. He wanted to go out with his team like a real teenage boy. The compromise for letting him go to school at all, was that he had to take one day a week off to help at home. Dad wanted him to get a scholarship. Mom wanted to keep him with her forever. Jack wanted friends. This was not the Parish school; they didn’t have a football team. Not a scholarship-getting one anyway. This was Public High and Jack was suddenly surrounded by alluring temptations: girls. And boys who’d been able to access all kinds of tools for how to get these girls attention: phones. The plan was dinner in town, walkable. And then hanging in someone’s basement with maybe a few girls, or pickle ball if the freeze thawed. Dad said no. Mom argued, he needs this for his scholarship. Making friends is team building. Dad said go to the basement, it’s free. Mom said here’s some cash from the stash she kept next to her father’s semi-valuable watch in case they were overtaken by Qanon, Muslims, or aliens.
Jack took the money, went to the dinner and found a girl eyeing him. He liked the eyeing. She looked like his mother in a way with her wild, wanting glare, batting at him like a lapping ocean, and that jittery playful streak. She was smart, too. Asking him about TS Eliot’s Four Quartets, regaling him with high-minded opinions on the dictator in Syria. She, too, had to go to Parish Church, here or there. Chirping her words at Jack like a love song. She’d seen him, in fact, carrying the Bible up the aisle. Stoic and manly. And well, she loved inhaling incense and staring at the altar avoiding the eyes of Jesus as he bled on the desires waging within her. To kiss him or not kiss him. That’s right, she’d been watching him all along, just like Jesus.
If love can happen at fifteen in fifteen minutes, it was happening to Jack. But his parents would never have allowed this to be anything more than a subterranean crush. At least dad wouldn’t. Jack could not come up to the surface with love. But the gal was beginning to feel like she wasn’t worthy of an introduction. Like a lady of the night, the way he hid her from them, though they had barely held hands. She bought him a phone; they needed to stay connected. They sneaked about as much as possible mostly during the off-campus lunch hour. And then she did it. She ended it. She broke his heart in pieces. Pieces he couldn’t find they were so small, impossible to meld back together no matter how much he tried. This irreparable pain he suffered alone without airs. A penance of secrecy.
Mother played You Make My Dreams in keeping with Tuesday mornings, a snowstorm blowing through, dad gone early. Mom was extra frisky. But the singing and the mayhem were torturous—salt melting Jack’s patience, salt to the roads of his bombed-out heart that could never keep anything as delicate as snow on its rugged passes. It was arid and ventless place now, subterranean alright. Tight as a coffin.
The children danced; Jack writhed without detection except maybe the way his hair was more moppish, and his hands fidgeted in these odd turns, knuckles popping between twirls. Jack wasn’t one to resist the girls. Mother, usually hawk-eyed, reveled in the sight, noticing Jack’s fidgets only in hindsight. Caught up in the music’s force, she took a naive and reckless leap off the couch and her water broke. This was it; the children would have to do as midwives. Blessedly, it would go fast.
The boy came forth with one hard, long push. We fought over it, but as the strongest girl I won the craft scissors over from the four-year old, and clumsily cut the umbilical cord. It took longer than I imagined. By the time I looked up, Jack was fussing over and hogging the baby. When dad got home after riding shotgun in a snowplow, mother was pale and nearly speechless. The nearest doctor was a wizened dentist. The next nearest didn’t get there until the nightfall the following day. By then, mom was beady with sweat, pupils-dilated, clutching the bedsheets frothing at the mouth.
It’s not worth going into now but mother did say, once she could talk a week later, she had seen “beyond the veil.” It was nothing like Croatia. This was a war that went on forever. Without perch to watch distant fireworks by faint light chomping sardines with new friends. The only food there was gravel in the mouth and endless famine. Scorched feet and fetid smell of things dying but never dead. The only beauty was horror. Until a swordish light pierced and she fell at its feet. A victory won by someone else, temporary and with strict orders. Things to accomplish and correct. Let’s just say with the birth of Gabriel, mom was born again, and dad didn’t like it. Now instead of being only wild on Tuesdays, she was wild all the time. Unleashing some new invincibility and hyper-focus that called all of us to new kind of attention. Just in time though. We needed something superhuman to get us through what happened next.
It’s important to note that no one believed mother’s tales a wit except for Willa the four-year old. She also believed if push came to shove, we could all climb Jack’s beanstalk to God. By that she meant the one Jack told her existed when she’d heard too many thunderbolts and he needed to sleep.
Mother was a spinner of impossible to corroborate stories. The Croatian newspeople, if they were ever real, were now dead. Dad tended to roll his eyes and give a dubious shrug when anything was said having to do with times before their marriage. Nothing before him existed, she was born when she took his name. As for the near-death experience, her “going through” could have been chalked up to the daze of just that: near death. All the microbes of sepsis making their fiery spread slowly, then all at once. I looked a few times, no fangs present.
But it may also be helpful to note that in the absence of fact, sometimes neuroses play a part in sussing out truth. And mother did have an uncanny nervousness around wild berries. The way we ventured too far into the woods or how she pumiced our hands in vain to get the stains off even though no one had died by rotten berries or landmines in Michiganian history. Not yet anyway, unless you were talking about the device Jack was hiding. The one that lured him into foreign wilds by venal gypsies all from the the palm of his hand. Broken hearts are more easily led astray. But mothers aren’t so easily fooled. Beware the ones who leave everything to stop at nothing. That’s what happened to Jane. Jane Doe went rogue. She left her kids at home with her balking, flummoxed husband and traveled across sea and land to find the culprits. She did this to protect your kids, too. Jane found them, she did. And brought back this message. They weren’t out there. They’re right behind your head.