Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict (4 page)

Six

I reach the house and consider standing up Mrs. Mansfield rather than join her in the sitting room after my walk, as she hath commanded. But I want a distraction from those dangerous thoughts, any distraction. A little poking around at the various rooms on the ground floor leads me to what is evidently the sitting room. There are a couple of sofas, several chairs, a massive fireplace, and a couple of tables in the sunny room. Mrs. Mansfield is seated at one of the tables, intent on some sewing she’s doing. She looks up and smiles when I walk in, and indicates an embroidery frame on the table.

“Here you are. I knew you would be eager to get back to your work.”

In your dreams, lady. And last time I checked, this is mine. I sit down at the table and pick up the embroidery, amused by the thought that anyone could think I am capable of doing anything that involves a high level of domestic skill. I can’t even hem a skirt.

As I look at the embroidery (pretty, whoever had done it), Mrs. Mansfield says, “What is it, my dear? Are you not interested in your needlework today?”

“Just not in the mood, I guess.”

“Are you unwell again?”

Again? This Jane person must be one of those fainting hypochondriac types, a Mary Musgrove, always loosening her stays and reaching for her smelling salts. Then again, with all this tight stuff around my torso it doesn’t take much imagination to figure out why fainting might not be that farfetched. “I’m hanging in there.”

Mrs. Mansfield’s brows contract. “‘Hanging in there’? You know that is a common way of talking I cannot abide. Have not I warned you about engaging the servants in idle conversation, Jane? Now pick up your needle. You have a bad habit of leaving things unfinished. Accomplished women do not leave work unfinished. And women without accomplishments do not make good marriages, especially women of thirty whose first bloom is a distant memory.”

This woman is more and more resembling my real-life mother. The same put-downs masked as helpful advice, the same warnings about becoming an old maid. Okay, how about I show Miss Bossy-corset just how much I can fuck up that embroidery with my clumsy, home-economics-dropout fingers. So I pick up the needle. And watch in stunned disbelief as my long, tapered fingers (oh so different from the small and somewhat stubby ones of my waking life) fly over and through the cloth, creating lacy flower petals and leaves and delicate little borders. Who is this? What Martha Stewart–like demon of a Stepford wife is possessing me?

I think about stopping, but watching the effortlessness of my alien hands doing their embroidery thing sucks me in. Time stretches out, yet passes quickly. Before I know it, Mrs. Mansfield is telling me it’s time to dress for dinner. I attempt to make sense of all this in the quiet of my bedroom. But what sense is there to be made of anything? It’s a dream, where anything is possible. Even my ability to sew. And like it.

At dinner, a true carnivore fest, I finally meet my “father.” He is a tall, thin, quiet man with strawlike hair in shades of brown and gray and the hollow-cheeked look of an ascetic, though he consumes more food than I can imagine he has room to put it. He’s either a bulimic or blessed with the metabolism of a hummingbird. Clearly he likes me or, more precisely, likes who he thinks I am, as the only words he speaks other than those in response to his wife are when he tells me how happy he is to see me looking so well again and how his joy has inspired his painting the entire day. This is a welcome departure from my real father, a would-be writer who left when I was only nine years old, ostensibly to pursue his art, but who has not, to my knowledge, published so much as a greeting card, let alone ever sent one to his only daughter.

After dinner, Mr. Mansfield retires to his “atelier,” the mention of which causes Mrs. Mansfield to arch her brows and make a sort of snorting noise, and leaves me consigned to sit with her in the drawing room.

I see a newspaper lying on a table. The date: August 12, 1813.

So what does one do for entertainment in 1813 England? Fortunately, conversation is not on the menu. The expected activity is my reading aloud to Mrs. M from the second volume of Pride and Prejudice—a first edition, no less. Hands trembling, I open the precious volume to the title page, which simply says, “by the author of ‘Sense and Sensibility’.” What I wouldn’t give to take this treasure home with me, a real, impossibly new first edition. With my career prospects, however, a dream is about the closest I’ll ever get to holding one of these puppies in my hands.

I open to the place Mrs. M has marked and read to her for hours. It’s the most fun I’ve had since this whole thing began. And now it’s time for bed. Strange, isn’t it, to end a dream in exactly the same manner in which I began it?

That’s it! That’s all I need, this little bit of synchronicity. That’s what will bring me back to reality. I know now that when I close my eyes to go to sleep, I will wake up where I belong, in my very own twenty-first-century bed.

I’m so pleased with that thought that as I kiss Mrs. M on the cheek and say good night, I nearly tell her how much I’ve enjoyed meeting her. But I decide not to. Not that I have problems lying, but I realize there is something truly fun about this playacting I’m doing, and I don’t feel like saying anything to spoil the moment. It’s harder to keep quiet when I say good night to Mr. M, because I really do wish I had more time to get to know him better.

Within half an hour, I’m tucked snugly under the covers of Jane’s luxurious four-poster bed, and my eyes are getting heavy. Odd, I usually can’t go to sleep that quickly when I’m awake. I giggle at the absurdity of such a thought. I command my mind to focus and remember every detail, as I intend to write everything down in my journal as soon as I wake up back in L.A.

Seven

I t’s dark in the room, and my mind is full of the dream.

I can still feel the jagged softness of the grass soothing and slightly tickling my bare feet as I walked through the field. The moon in the nighttime sky was round and full and bathed everything in a silver glow. As I crossed a section of grass that was damp, I wondered whether I would catch a cold. That’s when I realized I wasn’t just barefoot, I was naked.

I crossed my arms over my breasts and crouched down, scanning the landscape for observing eyes, for a place to hide, but I seemed to be all alone. I relaxed my muscles and stood; so what if I was naked? If no one was there to see me, why shouldn’t I enjoy a moonlight stroll without clothes?

Soon I came to a miniature lake, more a swimming hole, really, its calm, mirrored surface reflecting the moon above. The water made me aware of how dry my mouth was, and so I knelt down to take a drink.

And then I caught sight of my reflection.

Looking back at me was the strange woman with the long dark hair and pale skin. The reflection smiled at me, and I felt my own face smiling. But inside my stomach was a chill.

“Don’t be frightened,” the reflection said.

“Don’t be frightened,” I said to the reflection.

That’s all I remember. I lie here in bed, my heart pounding as I wait for the truth to unfold with the first glow of daylight coming through a gap in the curtains. I am not back in my apartment. I am still in the dream.

But wait a minute. I just woke up from a dream. Last time I checked, it’s not possible to have a dream within a dream.

Am I really asleep?

A cold rock of fear settles on my chest. Dear God. I’m not going to wake up. I’m not going to wake up because I’m not asleep. My dream was a message, the reflection in the lake the messenger.

I am here, in the past or in some other reality, living out someone else’s life.

But how could this be? Am I actually inhabiting the body of a real, live person? And if this Jane person is indeed real and alive, then where is she now? If my own body isn’t sleeping and dreaming all of this, then what is it doing right now and where is it? Could it be that I’m living Jane’s life and my own simultaneously? If so, where is Jane? Where is her essence, her spirit, her personality, whatever it is that inhabits a person’s body?

Maybe I’ve gone crazy. Maybe my mother, my real-life mother, is standing over me right now and patting my hand in some mental ward, looking into my vacant eyes while I live out insane fantasies of being an early-nineteenth-century Englishwoman. Was all Mrs. Mansfield’s talk about insane asylums my subconscious mind’s way of breaking the truth to me? But isn’t the catch-22 of being crazy that if you really are crazy, you don’t know you are?

If I’m not crazy, then how do I explain my presence here? Did I walk through some kind of rip in the fabric of space-time? Have I watched too many Star Trek reruns? If this is time travel, then how am I in someone else’s body instead of visiting this time period in my own body? As if time travel would be any sort of explanation anyway.

Could this be a past life? No, a past life would have already happened, and I wouldn’t be bringing my twenty-first-century persona into the mix. I wouldn’t even know about myself in the twenty-first century if I were really having a past life. I’m getting dizzy thinking about this.

Wait. Could it be some sort of parallel reality happening simultaneously with my own? Okay, then why would I be in the body of a nineteenth-century woman but possessing the mind of a twenty-first-century woman?

Have I died and reincarnated? Can people reincarnate into the past? That would be a good trick. Is that what Buddhists mean when they say that linear time is just a mental construct? Are we actually overlapping into different times? Will I return to the twenty-first century to find a Roman gladiator sitting in the next booth at House of Pies or Mrs. Mansfield standing behind me in the checkout line at Target? I’m not even so sure I believe in reincarnation. Why am I even engaging in these speculations? How is any of it going to get me my life back?

Don’t be frightened, said the reflection in the pond. I can’t get the image of that face, her words, out of my head.

I feel like I can’t breathe. I open the window with shaking fingers and will myself not to hyperventilate. My breathing slows, and I feel the sun warm my face. I inhale the tang and sweetness of herbs and grass and flowers, hear the birds chirping in the vividly green trees. I pull up the sleeve of my nightgown, and there is the same healing cut on my arm from the doctor’s knife. All of these sensations are undeniably real.

I’m here. In someone else’s body. In someone else’s life. And here, it appears, I will stay until—or if—I figure out how to get back.

Okay, so how do I get my life back? Willing myself out of here didn’t work. Insisting I’m not who they think I am almost got me committed, not to mention nearly bled dry.

There has to be a way to get my real life back. I just haven’t figured it out yet.

I hear a quick rap at the bedroom door, and then it opens a crack. It’s Barnes, wanting to know if I’m awake. Damn. I really don’t feel like dealing with anyone right now. Then again I’m not sure I can get into my clothes with all their laces and buttons in the back. Not to mention that horrible, stiff corsetlike thing that makes the simplest motion, like sitting down in a chair or bending over to pick something up, an exercise in creative problem-solving. Hasn’t anyone ever thought of ergonomics? Or common sense? It’s as if they purposely designed them for women who have hired help. Of course they did.

It’s good that Barnes is here, that she can help me get dressed, that her very presence will stop me from curling into a fetal position or screaming until they cart me off to an asylum. Because—and I feel the blood drain from my face—being committed would be much worse than a nightmare. It would be a no-exit situation far more horrible to contemplate than life imprisonment in the higher echelons of a society that predates a woman’s right to do more than embroider and keep house. I have to compose myself and get through this day. I have to believe that somehow it will all become clear. And that somehow I’ll find my way back to my real life. I have to believe this. Or else I can’t function. Right now I feel the familiar morning pressure on my bladder. And relieving that pressure is all the reality I can handle at present. That and getting dressed. And playing the role.

W hen I enter the breakfast room, Mrs. Mansfield appraises me, eyes narrowed. “Your complexion has improved, but that color is most unbecoming to it. Have not I told you so at least three times? After you take a turn in the shrubbery, Jane, I want you upstairs and in your new blue gown. We cannot have Mr. Edgeworth seeing you in anything but your best looks, can we?”

“Mr. Edgeworth?”

“You know perfectly well he is expected for dinner today. If you would listen to your mother she would not have to repeat herself.”

Oh God. She is now referring to herself in the third person. This is a particularly annoying habit my real-life mother also has, especially when she imagines herself as being poorly treated by someone, which is actually most of the time.

I break off a piece of a warm roll. I stuff it in my mouth and reach for the jam. It’s apricot. Delicious. And that chocolate smells irresistible.

“I must speak with Cook about the roast,” Mrs. Mansfield says, putting her napkin down. She gets up from the table and walks toward the door, mumbling something about soup and fish sauce and the timing of each course and that she would not have a moment to herself until dinner. “Not that you would know anything about the matter,” she says, addressing me for a parting blow before sweeping out of the dining room, her last words trailing behind. “You are incapable of household management.”

When the door closes behind her I gulp down the rest of my chocolate and wrap another roll in a napkin. This is a perfect time to escape.

Eight

A s I leave the breakfast room, that cute serving guy from yesterday is coming in. We do one of those awkward advance/retreat/advance dances in trying to avoid crashing into each other. He turns bright red and averts his eyes as we make it past each other. This has to be Barnes’s brother. I turn my head to take a last look, only to catch him doing the same. We both turn away. Oh, well. If this is the guy in question, then I’m sure there’s no reason to give him a second thought, not with things on such a junior high school level.

The air outside is sweet, the birds are singing, and the flowers are resplendent, but I will not allow myself to get sidetracked by the scenery. Walking always did clear my head, and even if this isn’t my own head I am determined to clear it well enough to find a way out of this situation.

Maybe the key to getting home lies in figuring out what I’m doing here. Could Jane and I have swapped lives? Could she be living my life right now, walking around in my body and talking in my voice? Talk about culture shock. At least I’m here with some knowledge of history, sparse though it may be. Jane, whoever she is, could not possibly know the future.

I have a flash of some upper-class, nineteenth-century Englishwoman dealing with my twenty-first-century, left-coast life. If she could get past the aesthetic shock of my industrial-carpeted little apartment, which is slightly larger than the Mansfields’ drawing room, complete with wrought-iron security bars on the louvered windows and graffiti on the front gate, the noise alone might give her a breakdown. Between the LAPD helicopters making their nocturnal circles in the sky, the old deaf guy next door with his crowing rooster and blaring Latino talk radio, and the earsplitting conversational tones of my boss, it would be enough for any gently bred Regency girl to question her own sanity, just as I now question mine.

Wait a minute. I don’t want some strange woman living my life. Maybe it isn’t the best life, but it’s mine, and I want it back. I want my crummy little apartment with its paper-thin walls and floors pumping god-awful power rock from the apartment of the hostile Russian downstairs, who will never lower his music no matter how often I ask. I want my lousy job and my loud boss and the unpaid bills that keep me there. I want my friends, all of them. Paula, Anna. Even Wes. Mostly Wes. I want my bottle of Absolut chilling in the freezer. I want my raggedy stuffed dog, the one Daddy gave me on my ninth birthday. I want my music, my movies, my books, and my clothes. I want dresses that I can put on myself. I want to wear pants, jeans, real underwear. I want a toilet that flushes. And I want to walk into a room and hear people call me Courtney.

I think of some stranger inhabiting my body, just as I am inhabiting Jane’s. I can just see this Jane person surveying my belly and criticizing my flabby thighs. Or the cellulite on my ass. It’s not that I’m a bad-looking woman or anything. But I’m not the long, willowy beauty that Jane is.

I can’t believe this. Here I am, stuck in some parallel reality or whatever and all I can do is obsess about whether some strange woman that might be living in my body is dissatisfied with her new home. Anna once told me that obsession is just the mind’s way of avoiding the real issues. Well, what is the real issue here? That I’m a time traveler stuck in a stranger’s life? Who wouldn’t want to avoid such a thing?

Figuring this out is a hopeless business, and my head is starting to throb. I have to calm down. I left my migraine meds in another reality, and I don’t think a bleeding would be quite the same thing.

The sound of a horse nickering alerts me to my surroundings; I am passing a paddock with two horses inside. The brown one has its head to the ground, intently chewing some grass, but the cream-colored one goes right up to the railing as if to greet me, its big gentle eyes framed by long white eyelashes. I stroke the side of its face, and it seems to enjoy the contact. Boy or girl? What do I know about horses?

I wonder if this is the horse that I supposedly had the riding accident with, and I shudder. The horse gently nudges my hand with its velvety muzzle, as if to reassure me. “Don’t mind me,” I say. “You’re a good girl. Or boy.”

A slight teenage girl in a drab brown dress and apron, a cap covering her hair, is walking toward the house with an empty pail. She comes closer, and stops to curtsey slightly before continuing on her way. She ducks her head as she walks by, but I can see enough of her perfectly defined brows and milky complexion to tell how pretty she is. And young—she must be all of sixteen. She should be hanging out with her friends at the mall and looking through college catalogues, not schlepping a pail in a drab brown sack of a dress.

I stroke the horse’s muzzle one last time, then continue on my way, taking a cooling walk through a long avenue of shady trees. Things could be a lot worse. I could be a scullery maid like that poor young girl instead of a wealthy young woman in a mansion. Sure, there’s Mrs. M, but other than subjecting me to dirty medical instruments and threatening to have me committed, she seems relatively harmless.

On the other hand, this all has to end eventually, doesn’t it? I’m sure wherever the real Jane is, she’s just as eager to get back to her own life as I am to mine. So why not just relax in the meantime, experience the sensation of living in another body and another time, Jane Austen’s time, no less, and have faith that real life will return soon enough. What do I have to look forward to on a typical day anyway? Breakfast alone? Marking time at work? Lousy television to fill the evening? Or maybe dinner with Paula, who’s in full energy-vampire mode these days? Sooner or later I’ll return to a sink full of dirty dishes and an empty refrigerator. At least in this world someone else does the shopping and cleaning up.