Remembering Jemimah

Pendlewood was the kind of place that seemed to exist for the sole purpose of comparison, rendering the general impression of everywhere else hopelessly inferior. Surrounded by its timeless air of haughty confidence, the bucolic landscape zipping by in a dazzling blur behind the glass of the car window, I felt all the pride I'd once taken in being the sole member of my family to escape the rural countryside and make my living in the city shrink and dissipate as if sucked away by a vacuum. It was as if someone had constructed the place with a vision of creating a welcoming little village - charming red-brick manors and rolling pastures lush with vegetation and resplendent green hillsides overlooking prairies of wheat and grain - but failed in that pursuit and instead developed an exclusive settlement of cold, detached majesty that seemed disparagingly unattainable and far out of the common person’s league.

It was because of these ingrained qualities that crossing into the city lines didn’t bring me the sensation of fond nostalgia that I’d anticipated would come rushing in as the domes of the cotton mills and the tips of rooster-shaped weather vanes popped into view. Instead, I was struck by the impression of self-subordination that I recalled so well from my time living among the elitist residents of the town. My every memory here has been tainted with constant reminders of my social ranking; I only remember sitting at our little oak dining table licking cherry pie filling off my fingers because my mother had to prove her worth among the arrogant housewives of Pendlewood during our first month living there; I can only reminisce about the leaf piles I’d run and jump in because my father had worked so hard to rake them from our lawn into neat piles to match the spotless front yards every other man displayed so proudly to so they could vaunt their work at community meetings. In short, every daily action had some social implications attached to it - even among the children, no actions were taken in the innocent context of simple desire, but always with the goal of advancing further and securing a position in the upper echelons of the rural world in which we were confined.

No one, then, had ever considered leaving. The ultimate goal in life was not to rise to eminence on the platform offered up by the world, but to rise to the top of the tiers right there at home. Those that did leave were dismissed as unable to accept the challenge of living among the distinguished Pendlewood residentry and called off as lazy and unmotivated. It was the act of staying that was regarded as bold and brave and daring, and these were the traits that garnered popularity, so naturally everyone stayed. 

Then little Jemimah Sherlie drowned in the crystal blue waters of Poloma Duck Pond, and though the town eventually healed and forgot, everything began to change for me. Our little bubble of utopian paradise had finally been popped. The townspeople had never before experienced grief, had never before been exposed to the unpredictable and gripping nature of true tragedy. Life had always been taken for granted as merely a set amount of time to climb as far up on the social ladder as humanly possible - if you climbed fast enough in the preordained time you had, you could certainly reach the summit. The problem for me, however, was that I didn’t know what to expect once I reached that final destination. If I’m being completely honest, I don’t think anyone really knew what they were climbing up towards - I think we simply kept climbing because we revelled in the illusion of moving forward in a certain direction. For the first time now, I was recognizing that life could actually be taken away prematurely and so there had to be more to it than satisfying the social hierarchy.

The funeral procession, held in the center of town in front of St. Mary’s Episcopal Church (the only place of worship in our strictly Catholic little settlement), was a mess of women in feathery black dresses far too ostentatious for the somber ordeal and men who’d seemed to put more thought into the type of wine they gifted the parents than the death itself. It seemed that even this jarring shock of reality had not been enough to shake the town out of its supremacy-oriented way of life. It frustrated me, to say the least, that the locals continued to walk around in their perpetual daze of pretension. A funeral, in their eyes, was just another public gathering, an opportunity to assert their own paramountcy to the rest of the community, all their competitors that had to be outdone. Having been just a girl at the time and a good friend of the late Jemimah, I was both confused and sickened by the apparent nonchalance with which the ladies gossiped at the casket and the men threw the latest stock trade statistics into conversation at every opportunity they could get to show off their financial literacy.  

Rather than gathering around them in a show of community support, the town of Pendlewood distanced themselves from the Sherlie family. Maybe they thought that if they got far enough away they might be able to forget about the incident altogether. Maybe they saw the tragedy as a stain on the picture-perfect front they put up to boast to the outside world. Whatever the case, leaders rushed to restore everything back to its state of static normalcy as soon as possible, and one of the ways this was achieved was through making the Sherlies social pariahs.

Why my parents shipped me off to an urban boarding school in nearby Boston, I could not say with positivity. Perhaps my lamentation at the death of my friend had become damaging to their reputation; I had heard on various occasions the women in their knitting circles whispering that I had become overcome with an unshakeable depression. It’s possible that they no longer wanted to be the guardians of the “shattered child” any longer. I like to believe there were kinder intentions at work, however - that my mother and father recognized my frustration and inability to properly mourn while surrounded by a community doing everything they could to make my friend disappear from their memory. It would be nice to think that they had wanted me to reach a place of healing at a time when every second in that perfect neighborhood felt like an alcohol wipe on an open wound.

My driver took a sharp turn onto Edgewood St., and I saw that the barn that served as the town hall had a fresh coat of blaring red across its wooden slats, outlined by neat lines of clean white finishing. The sight of that building looking somehow younger than it had decades ago elicited in me an uneasy feeling of nausea. I swallowed down bile as the doors opened silently on freshly-oiled hinges, the absence of the squeaking sound that should have come naturally with age shrieking in my ears, and five ladies in gaudy colored petticoats came flocking out giggling. By the time the cab passed by Poloma Park and the pond that had haunted my dreams for years now, my stomach had fully devoted itself to its self-proclaimed cause of revolt. I barely grabbed the barf bag from the glove compartment in time to catch my lunch. 

The man at the wheel looked at me from beneath twin bushy eyebrows, now knitted together in a look of concern and disgust. “You good there, kid?” he asked in that thick Boston accent that had also begun to creep into my speech after spending the past few years studying in the city. “You’re turning whiter than those cows we passed a couple miles back.”

I was aware that by now a sickly pale color had probably flushed the life out of my face. Rolling down the window to suck in a huge gasp of air, the scent of lavender and cow manure dancing on the breeze in a dizzying aromatic concoction, I managed to squeeze out a strangled “Fine” before doubling over and retching into the bag again. Embarrassment was replaced by immediate regret - just inhaling the fresh open air of the rural utopia made me queasy. My lungs were much better acclimated to the smoke and fumes of the industrial complex located directly across from Harvard campus.

Either he didn’t notice my struggle to speak without a gag reflex kicking in or he was well aware but simply needed some entertainment as we neared the end of the long drive, because he asked, “You been by this part of Massachusetts before? I heard the money in this place is huge. It may not look like much, but those farmhouses are loaded. And look at all that land. Ha! Now, you don’t see that kinda space in Boston, let me tell ya!”  

Another cascading bout of retching. I swallowed. “I’ve been. Just coming and going, passing through.” Why I lied, I cannot explain. Most people would be honored to announce their humble Pendlewood origins, steeped in its justifiably supercilious glory as it was. I felt no such pride in my hometown. It dawned on me then that just as my former community had done everything in its power to distance itself from the grief-stricken Sherlie family following the loss of their daughter, I had taken the same extremes to flee from them and everything they stood for.

The cabbie parked outside a wide brownish-red farmhouse, potted petunias blooming in the windowsill hangers. From my position in the car, I could just see through the wire mesh of the open screen door and into the kitchen. My mother was pulling two fresh-baked pies out of the oven. I already knew they were cherry - that was her favorite, and after that first year she’d won the local pastry competition with them, she never seemed to want to try any other flavor. After all, why try anything new when what is familiar gives a guarantee of success? The lawn was as clean-trimmed as ever, spotless save for two massive piles of leaves raked neatly under the sagging apple tree on the far side of the yard, my dad’s yardwork prowess on display for all to see. 

I lumbered out of the taxi on legs that had gone rubbery from sitting still so long, wincing at each step as they were met with the familiar squelch of morning dew-coated grass underfoot. Time had not seemed to work the same magic it had on the rest of the world here in Pendlewood. Indeed, nothing had changed.