Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict by Laurie Viera Rigler Read Free Book Online Page A

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