The Glass Jar

Clara Crenshaw has been waiting for her mother to pick her up at the school bus stop for hours. The horizon swallowed the sun long ago, and a full moon's faint outline is visible in the twilight sky. Her mother’s lateness terrifies her. Something has happened, something bad, probably, knowing her mother. Clara tried to tell Aunt Mona that her mother frightens her, that she didn’t want her mother picking her up on the last day of seventh grade, but Aunt Mona insisted Pearl Crenshaw is fine now. “They wouldn’t release Pearl if she wasn’t better, right? They ain’t gonna release somebody who’s sick. She’ll be different. And besides, she won’t hurt you. She’s your mother”.

Pearl has been hospitalized since Christmas, but Clara doesn’t know the particulars. “Your mother is sick,” Aunt Mona explained to her. “It don’t matter what kind of sickness it is. She’s just…sick”. Clara wonders if her mother has cancer or something called emphysema. Aunt Mona talks on the phone with her friends all the time about family members who have to suck on oxygen just to stay alive. Clara assumes her mother is no different than the other sickly adults in the family. She imagines Pearl with tubes in her nose, pulling an oxygen tank on wheels, coughing violently, and yelling things that nobody understands.

Nothing, not even monster movies or that jerk Noah threatening to throw her in the back seat of his car and take her for a ride, frightens her as much as Pearl does. Clara has nightmares about the day Pearl got sick. All that screaming, all that blood. Some of Pearl’s blood got splattered on her school books. Later, Clara tried to wipe the blood off the book covers with dish soap and water, but the blood spots darkened and looked worse. Before the emergency squad arrived, Clara watched Aunt Mona throw the carving knife that Pearl cut herself with into the greenish-black pond behind the house. She said it would sink into the muddy pond, and nobody would ever find it. She instructed Clara not to mention Pearl’s “hissy fit” again and to forget about it. “Just pretend it never happened and go on with your life,” Aunt Mona said. “That’s how you handle emergencies. Once they’re over, forget about them”.

The moon illuminates the bus stop like a dying spotlight. Clara is so scared that she considers taking her chances and walking home in the dark past the town’s cemetery and Crazy Joe’s house. She could outrun crippled Crazy Joe as long as she didn’t let him get close enough to grab her in his big, beefy hands. But Pearl finally arrives. The car screeches to a stop just inches from her feet. Clara peers cautiously through the passenger door window. Her heart beats so hard and fast that her whole body is tingling, going numb.

When the window starts disappearing into the car door, Clara quickly drops her chin against her chest. She is too frightened to watch the window roll all the way down. She knows her mother’s face is behind the window, the face of the person who splattered blood all over her schoolbooks and threatened to kill everybody with a carving knife that Aunt Mona uses to slice hunks of freshly butchered meat.

“Hi, Clara! I missed you! Hop in and let’s talk”.

Pearl speaks rapidly in a loud, raspy, monotone. Clara gets into the car without looking at her mother. She finds a piece of trash on the floor in front of the seat to fix her gaze on—a crumpled brown bag? The car reeks of something foul, decayed. The odor reminds her of the rancid smell of dead skunks lying bloated and belly up on the side of the road. Clara turns her face towards the open window, gulping fresh air. She feels like vomiting and screaming at the same time. She wishes she could leave her body and fly a million miles away to the moon, where it is quiet and cool and detached from everything she knows.

“Well, look at me, honey!” Let me see those pretty blue eyes”.

When Pearl speaks, Clara then realizes it is her mother’s breath that smells so bad. Clara gasps at what she sees. Pearl must have cut off her hair, eyelashes, and eyebrows. White lipstick conceals her lips, a bloodless color that matches her pale skin. The absence of eyelashes and eyebrows makes Pearl’s dark eyes appear large and lifeless. Clara stares at Pearl and sees the face of a cheap, lipless, wigless rubber doll, the kind of cheap doll brothers steal from their younger sisters so they can fling the doll off train tracks into creeks below and laugh. Pearl turns on the car’s interior light and smiles at Clara. Chipped, yellow teeth appear behind the wide smile that cracks open the lower half of Pearl’s face. “I’m back!” Pearl says, embracing Clara in a tight hug. “Aren’t you glad to see me? Do you hate me now because I’ve been gone for so long? Why didn’t you visit me? What’s wrong with you? Why are you breathing so fast”?

Clara whispers, “What—what did you do to your face?”

  Pearl pretends she didn’t hear Clara. “Oh, look, it’s starting to rain!” she says. “I love rain. I always wanted to dance in the rain when I was in Juniper Hills, but they wouldn’t allow it. Nope. Can’t dance in the rain, they said, you might get wet!”

Pearl flips on the windshield wipers at high speed and laughs. Her white lips glow in the dark like a neon advertisement for some chic perfume. Rain spatters against the windshield as lightning flashes erratically above them. Pearl lights a cigarette and inhales deeply. Clara is reminded of how Pearl would spend hours walking in circles around the yard and smoking cigarettes before her “hissy fit.” Sometimes, Clara would look out her bedroom window in the middle of the night and see her mother still walking, still smoking, propelled by a furious agitation that is meaningless to everyone except Pearl.

 “Do you know what the difference is between normal crazy people and crazy crazy people?” Pearl asks, making a right turn onto dead-end Sheep Road. Clara silently counts to herself—one, two, three, four. She believes by the time she reaches the number 50, she will be close enough to Aunt Mona’s house to jump from the car and run.

Pearl continues talking. “Us crazy crazy people know things. We’ve been abducted by UFOs, seen ghosts, spoken to God, and communicated with time travelers. We know we are being followed all the time, that certain people want to hurt you, that the normal crazy people are scared of you because you have the power to turn them inside out. Aunt Mona is a normal crazy person. And she’s scared of me. She was scared of me when we were kids. I always told her the truth, and she didn’t want to hear it. I told everybody the truth and they said I needed ‘help’. Help? What’s that? Getting locked up in a room for 10 hours a day, talking to doctors who couldn’t give a shit about you, shoving pills down your throat that make you feel like a goddamn zombie or something? What kind of life is that?”

“Told Aunt Mona the truth about what”? Clara asks.

Pearl sighs noisily. “I used to tell her stuff like how we are nothing but goddamn bugs trapped in a huge glass jar, walking around like lost dummies trying to find a way out even though we know there’s no way out. We got nothing else to do and nowhere else to go, so we just keep walking around in this glass jar until we die. That’s why I didn’t marry your father when I got pregnant with you. I’ll be damned if I was gonna end up like Mona or Grandma Neva, married to some dumbass who would tell me what I can and cannot do all the time. So, I had a nervous breakdown, so what? I didn’t hurt anybody but myself, right? In fact, I felt pretty good after I slept for a whole damn day at that hospital. I felt…peaceful.”

“You said you wanted to hurt all of us,” Clara says. “I thought you were going to kill all of us.”

Pearl doesn’t speak until she pulls into the driveway of Aunt Mona’s house. She turns the car off and looks at Clara with her rubber doll face. “Listen, haven’t you ever felt like you don’t want to be controlled anymore? Haven’t you wondered why everything is the way it is? Don’t you ever want to just scream at people to leave you the fuck alone?”

Time passes, and days of raging thunderstorms surrender to fragile clouds that drift like breeze-blown dandelion seeds in the pale blue sky. Clara watches her mother pacing the yard after midnight, smoking cigarettes, driven by that mysterious force that gives the universe its ability to create and annihilate galaxies. Three months later, on the first day of 11^th grade, Noah forces her into his car. He’s parked at the back of the school, and no one is around to help her. He pushes her into the back seat and is about to drive off when Clara sees a tire iron lying under the passenger’s seat on the floor. She grabs the tire iron, swings it back as far as possible, and hits Noah squarely on the side of his head.

“Leave me the fuck alone!”

Later that night, Clara realizes that she is no longer frightened of her mother and decides to join Pearl in the yard. She walks back and forth with Pearl, smoking cigarettes her mother lights for her, and silently contemplates the possibility of escaping the glass jar.