By Jill Christman
*Originally published in the Mississippi Review Online (Summer 2006)
Take One
I am five. We live on an island off the coast of Massachusetts, and I want to jump off the roof of our one-story house and into the sand. My mother’s boyfriend, a deep-sea fisherman by the name of Captain Bill with red hair and a boat named after my mother, says no, I may not jump off the roof. From here, the golden sand looks deceptively soft. Like a pillow. Almost springy. I am five and I want to jump.
This is a favorite story from the maritime era of our family history—right up there with the half-roasted turkey flying from the oven on Captain Bill’s boat and sliding around the pitching galley like a greased pig and the lobsters knotted onto the Christmas tree by a nautical Santa. (I claim the lobsters were alive—shimmying crustaceans! salty elves!—but everybody else says boiled. Were they red? I cannot remember. I remember their wiggling claws shaking the branches.)
Like the turkey and the lobsters, the house-jumping story has been told and retold until everybody is sure of the details, the way it all went down. Today, I am not so sure. Sitting around a picnic table thirty years after the fact, I mention to my partially assembled family that there’s a thing called “shareability”—the reason we all know the details of the jumping story is because we’ve been refining the script for years, sharing the story. The story we think we know has more to do with the telling, and retelling, than it does with memory. In other words, ours is a corroborative tale produced with all the witnesses in the same room—except, in this case, I realize I was the only one who was there, the only actual witness, and the story I’m hearing might not be the one I remember. It’s called shareability, I say. For this piece of psychological trivia, I am eyed skeptically over the lips of beer bottles.
Everybody knows the person who makes up stories in this family and it’s sure not them.
I’m the hero in the shared version so I should just let it rest, let it fly, but in my line of work, these things matter, and all I’m saying is we need to look into the gaps here. For example, what am I doing on the roof in the first place? What fool let a five-year-old climb a ladder, scale the warm, black shingles, peer down into the sand and consider jumping? How did I get there? I am five!
But let the picnic table family finish the story. On the roof I am, and I am insisting on jumping down. There is a stand off. Finally, the sea captain boyfriend says Go ahead. This is everyone’s favorite part and everybody but me chimes in like a Greek chorus (after all, as the subject of the story, the little girl with all the chutzpah, somehow my participation would be unseemly).
Go ahead, he said. He never thought she’d actually do it, never, but Jill didn’t hesitate. She marched, she marched, right to the edge of the roof and jumped off. She landed like a sack of potatoes—a sack of potatoes!—in the sand and then, and then, she stood right up, brushed off her pants and said, “There.”
There!
There.
Take Two
Okay, so this is the roof-jumping story I remember and I’m foolish to do so, because in this version I spin myself as a victim instead of a hero, a girl who is desperate instead of tough. In memory, I am older than five. Seven or maybe even eight. Same house, same roof, same sand. My brother and his pack of boys feature here. Let’s say there are four of them all together, all older than me, all utterly antagonistic. There are no adults in this story. The boys have climbed on the roof and pulled the ladder up. I want them to slide the ladder down so I can climb up, too. They refuse. They’re taunting me. I’m the girl, the baby, the worthless, whiny one. Then, my brother lowers the ladder down to me. Alright, he says, come on up. Oh joy! I am part of the pack! I am nearly a boy! I scamper up and hurry to the peak of the roof. I can see the ocean from here!
The boys scuttle down the ladder like cockroaches over the side of a refrigerator, flipping the ladder down into the sand as the last one reaches solid ground. It was a trick. I am stuck. Hours pass. Soon, darkness will fall. The boys come and go, but now the talk turns to sand monsters and other creatures of the beach night. I no longer want to be up. I want to be down. I beg, I plead. They laugh. This is such a good one.
At some point, the boys toss up a garbage bag: large, black, Hefty. They want to know whether the bag will work as a parachute. The bag is my only way down. I can’t remember how long I wait. Finally, I shake out the bag, grip the edges in my fists, slide my toes to the edge of the sloping shingles, and look down. The boys are sitting comfortably in the sand, watching the show in the fading light. I am nervous, but stupidly hopeful that air will fill the bag and break my fall.
I jump.
This story has a moral: A garbage bag does not work as a parachute. Don’t try it.
There is no “there!” here. I land, I hurt, I cry. I tell on the creeps when my mother gets home.
Take Three
No third version exists, although this same black roof has featured in decades of failed dreams in which my featherless arms move in futile wingbeats, and I cannot fly (do I lack confidence?). But there is the thing I know to be true: I did jump off that roof and into the sand. My body remembers what it feels like to hit.
Sand is not as soft as it looks. Sand, when arrived at from a height of at least ten feet—Hefty bag or no—receives its guest with only slightly more benevolence than concrete. Sand is ground rock, after all. When I hit, the air left my lungs like a balloon clapped between two bricks. I felt the blow, the sharp emptying of my lungs and then their refusal to fill again. Chest down, lifting my face from the sand, grit in my eyes, my nose, stuck to my lips, I could not breathe. No matter whose version is true, I hadn’t expected this. I was sure the sand would be soft, or at least softer. I was a child.
Jill Christman is the author of The Heart Folds Early: A Memoir (released March 1, 2026 from the University of Nebraska Press). Christman’s other books include If This Were Fiction: A Love Story in Essays, Darkroom: A Family Exposure, and Borrowed Babies: Apprenticing for Motherhood A 2020 NEA Literature fellow, she teaches at Ball State University and serves as co-editor of River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative (right here!) and Beautiful Things. Visit her at jillchristman.com.
Photo of Jill with her brother, Ian, circa 1979. Photo by Pete Christman.
