A Walk with Jane Austen by Lori Smith Read Free Book Online Page A

of smart, orthodox—and in my imagination very good-looking—potential.

Five
Alarms (Fire and Otherwise)
    And now I may dismiss my heroine to the sleepless

couch, which is the true heroine's portion; to a pillow

strewed with thorns and wet with tears. And lucky

may she think herself, if she get another good night's

rest in the course of the next three months.
    — N ORTHANGER A BBEY
    At 11:42 p.m., I still couldn't sleep. My room was Spartan, but not in the quaint old-English-hall way I expected, more in an old-1970s-furniture-and-dirty-orangish-brown-carpet way: institutional cream walls, a dirty blue blanket on a bed that upon close inspection looked like someone had at some point been sick on the middle of the box spring and it was never cleaned.
    I've not slept well for so long that I no longer really know how to fall asleep. My exhausted body doesn't actually get sleepy anymore, perhaps because I've had to fight being tired so much to get through the days that my brains reaction to being worn out is to send adrenaline to stem the tide. So I alternately sink into sleep and jerk awake inwhat feels like panic. But mostly I lie in bed awake, thinking about things, waiting for sleeping pills to kick in.
    The pills themselves are tricky. I don't like how they control me, make me do things I cant do on my own. Tonight I took one, hoping it would be enough to guide me into sleep, but it didn t work; it is a unique kind of torture, being wide-awake, exhausted, and unable to do anything about it.
    Another symptom of whatever I have is that I often wake after several hours of sleep, as though my terribly hard-working Dickensian inner self has decided it is time to make the gruel. (But, oh, just the thought of gruel makes me want to throw up even now.)
    Sometimes when I have trouble sleeping, I imagine there are demons assigned to me, like Screwtape, poking my soul with a big, mean stick as I begin to drift off. They were active this evening, poking away, keeping me desperately awake.
    Not that the things I had to think about were altogether horrible…

    I need a remedial class in dating. Or maybe just in talking to boys.
    Wide-awake, exhausted, and nauseous, I watched the sun just beginning to rise. The fire alarm, which seemed to conspire against me, wouldn't stop going off last night, and I eventually grabbed my white hoodie and climbed down the spiral iron fire escape.
    The lawn was full, and I lurked in the back of the crowd, in pink-and-green-striped cropped-pant pajamas, trying not to wake up all the way. But when I spotted Jack, Paul, and Spencer, I decided waking up wouldn't be so bad and I joined them.
    Jack touched my arm. “Nice stripes,” he said, making me want to curl up with him and be cozy.
    For an hour it was like college. Paul kept getting calls on his cell phone from friends and kept saying, “I'm in England! Do you know what time it is here?” And as a group we decided that Jack should make reparations for something—the Scandinavians and their pillaging, I think—which was all terribly funny to me because by that point, it was around 1:00 a.m., and I'd taken two sleeping pills.
    When they finally let us back in, I was too shy to find Jack and say goodnight. I saw him looking around, maybe for me, and made a subconscious decision to sneak silently back up the stairs.

    There are numerous divergences between Jane and me, of course. One of the most significant is that Jane wrote in some way because she was a great conversationalist, full of wit in a day when wit was prized, a sharp observer of society. I write in many ways from weakness rather than strength—because I am at times a poor conversationalist, because there are things I can't sort out when I'm talking to people and have to put in writing to make anyone else see them.
    When Jane wrote
Emma
,she told her family that she was creating “a heroine whom no one but myself will much like.” 1 I think she was wrong. Fanny Price in
Mansfield