The Evolution of Jane (3 page)

I listened almost impassively as Pablo, a very young Ecuadorian with curly black hair and the only crew member who spoke English, gave us our room assignments, and my roommate fears were confirmed.

She waved at me.

I waved back.

Around us rose a confused competitive murmur. Our room was one of only two on an upper deck. Other passengers looked suspiciously at me and the roommate. A silent question rippled through the group: Would our room be better than theirs? Or worse?

It was better. It had windows and a door that opened out onto the deck. The cabins below were prettier, bigger berths, with walls of varnished wood. But they smelled of fuel, and their little portholes were useless. You couldn't open them for air because they were nailed shut, and they were far too cloudy to let in the sunlight. In my cabin, though my knees bumped my roommate's if we both sat on the bunks at the same time, the fresh chill of the air blew through, from door to bright, open window. I was grateful for that breeze, for although we had not yet begun to move, the slight swaying of the boat was already making me a little seasick.

"Just like Charles Darwin himself," said my new roommate, with a reassuring pat on the back.

Our cabin was not much bigger than a train compartment. Pablo ducked his curly head in the open door to tell us we must each take only one shower a day, or two short showers. Martha had the other cabin on the upper deck. I saw her walk by as Pablo added that we should not flush toilet paper down the toilet, but deposit it in the wastebasket, which he would empty frequently. He spoke in a beautiful, lilting English, which I barely listened to, so intent was I on Martha, incongruous, unexpected, out of place, a fossil, my seashell in the Andes.

My roommate introduced herself as "Gloria Steinham, no relation." I guessed she was about my mother's age, and I suspected that even in that cramped space, her knees would seldom have a chance to bump mine, so infrequently did she sit still long enough to get in the way. She told me she was a science teacher, which perhaps I should have guessed, as she seemed to be wearing around her neck all the specimens she would need for an entire unit on shells, seedpods, or canine teeth. Then she announced that she was never seasick, and that she did not snore.

"Which is a blessing," she said.

"My mother's a teacher, too."

"She should have come with you!"

I tried to picture my mother on the
Huxley.

"Well, if she could be captain, maybe," I said.

E
ACH MORNING,
my mother could be heard saying the same thing: "Chaos." She would murmur it in her soft voice as she mulched her garden or buttoned her coat or stared out the window at a cloudless sky. "Chaos." For years I thought "chaos" was an exclamation of some sort, an expression of abstracted joy, not unlike "wow," for my mother smiled as she said it and shook her head, as if in wonder.

When I think back, her mild observations of chaos were not so much complaints as welcomes, greetings, like a sailor breathing in the salt air. Even her hair looked windblown in anticipation. I used to imagine my mother as a sea captain, like her sea-captain grandfather, Frederick Barlow.

My middle name, as I've said, is Barlow. Jane Barlow Schwartz. My mother did try to use Barlow as my first name, but my father, in this matter at least, prevailed, and I reverted, at age two weeks, to Jane. Of the many ways in which it was unfortunate that my great-aunt Anna, herself a Barlow, chose just that moment to enter senility, the one that affected me exclusively was her conviction, until her death, that my name was Barlow Schwartz, which she repeatedly criticized as silly, undignified, and, worse, unladylike.

"Well," my mother would say to a distressed Aunt Anna, "her name is Jane, but if you insist on calling her Barlow, we could always change it."

"Barlow? Barlow, indeed!" Aunt Anna would say. "Why, you must call me Aunt Anna, of course!"

Sometimes Aunt Anna would introduce herself by saying, "How do you do? I am the skeleton in the family closet." We're the sort of family that has skeletons rather than ghosts, and I'm grateful for that. Ghosts are personal and intrusive, memories that haunt the living. We have neither the imagination nor the patience for ghosts in my family.

Skeletons, on the other hand, are the real thing. Skeletons hold everything together. Skeletons hold the past. They hold information. That's why Darwin collected skeletons. On one of his many inland excursions from the
Beagle,
Darwin visited a place in Patagonia called Port Desire. One of his traveling companions shot an emu, which is some kind of big flightless bird like an ostrich. It was smaller than the other emus he'd seen, so Darwin thought it was an immature member of that species, a young rhea. Only after the little ostrich was cooked and eaten did he realize it was probably a specimen of a smaller, less common species, which he had heard about but had never seen, though he had been searching for one for months. He scraped the bones from the plates, gathered up the remaining bits of feathers and skin and,
voilà!
Ostrich stew transformed into
Rhea darwinii,
a new species stuffed and on exhibit at the Zoological Society.

Skeletons don't come and go like ghosts, even after they've been served for dinner. You can study them, measure them, read the past in them. They're as faithful as dogs. I have tried to examine my friendship with Martha, my former best friend, in this manner. If only I could scrape her off my plate and pick at the bones of our friendship and glue back the feathers.

There's one old shard that I'm particularly attached to—an event that occurred when Martha went on a trip with her parents. She asked me to water the plants she was growing for a science project. I remember the plush emptiness of her house as something thrilling, secret. I walked up the stairs to Martha's room and stood on the threshold looking in with an almost guilty excitement. It was just Martha's room, a canopy bed, a prism hanging by the window, a poster of Madonna. I watered the plants. Then I left Martha a note saying I had been there. I drew a heart and signed it. I felt suddenly self-conscious about the heart. I put a question mark beside it. And I left.

Martha asked me about it when she got home.

"It looks sort of mean," she said. "A heart with a question mark."

"It wasn't meant to be mean," I said.

"Oh. Okay." And that was it. Martha crumpled the note, threw it away, and it was only later, when we stopped being friends, that I thought of the question mark and the heart again. Why did I draw a heart? Because I loved Martha? Why did I write a question mark? Because I was embarrassed about having such strong feelings for Martha? Why did Martha even mention such a stupid, unimportant note? Because it really said so much? Were Martha's feelings hurt? Why would her feelings be hurt by an offhand note? Did my explanation soothe her feelings? Did she, years later, think of that note? Did she think, "Jane is peculiar, both excessive and stingy in her affection. Who needs a friend like that?" Is there anything more petty, more exalted, than a friendship between two girls? How did mine go wrong?

Martha took up almost as much of my energy when we stopped being friends as she did before we stopped being friends. I want you to understand that there were long stretches of my life during which I did not think about Martha Barlow. There were many such stretches, days and weeks and months. I fought with my parents, fell in love with boys, studied for exams, and went to Europe. I graduated from college, got an apartment, got a job, got married, got divorced. My life was full of joy and annoyances, just like the next person's. I didn't sift through Martha's trash in the middle of the night. I was not insane. I was just haunted.

I was haunted by her absence. Did I say, just a moment ago, that my family did not have ghosts? That we had skeletons instead? Skeletons in our closets? Well, I was haunted by Martha, and if that makes her a ghost, so be it. I stand corrected.

Martha first appeared in Barlow when she was eight and I was seven and a half. She and her parents were going to spend the summer in the house to the west of ours. There was another house to the east. Ever since I can remember, and before that, too, those neighboring houses were a source of mortification for my mother. All three houses were identical, three white houses balanced on the cliffs above the sea. They had been built by my great-great-grandfather for his three children, triplets named Frederick (my great-grandfather), Franklin (Martha's great-grandfather), and Francis (he never married, seeming to prefer sailors to women). The three brothers were ships' captains who prospered and caused their New England village to prosper to such an extent that the town fathers rechristened it "Barlow" after its own favorite sons.

By the time my parents got married and moved into the house with my grandmother, the Captain Francis Barlow house to the west had become a clubhouse bordered by a golf course and tennis courts. A gray wooden staircase scaled the cliff from beach to house, and club members in bathing suits traipsed up and down from June till September. We were far enough away not to be disturbed by noise, and gradually my mother came to accept the Barlow Country Club, almost as if she herself had established it, like a Rockefeller letting the commoners walk his Pocantico pastures. But the Captain Franklin Barlow house was a different story.

Just half a mile down the road, beyond the meadow and the stand of trees that bordered our property and signaled the beginning of theirs, stood a house that mirrored ours in every way, and yet no one would have had the slightest difficulty distinguishing between them. For the shutters, which sagged and gapped and faded into their dotage at our house, hung straight and bright on theirs. At our house we believed in crabgrass the way others believe in the stars—crabgrass was less than a religion, but it held meaning. And that meaning was: Look how green and lush a weed can be, look at the pretty yellow dandelions. And all without watering! The lawn spread out from their house in manicured opulence. This house was Martha's. Visiting Martha, I would walk through the field and beneath the trees until I reached that carpet of grass. Then I would ascend the stairs to the large porch, continue across the polished floor, through the open door, where I would stand for a moment, alone and awed by the wallpapers, by the splendor and order and spotless peace, and I would sigh happily, and I would say, "Chaos."

Until the summer I met Martha, the house had looked almost as disreputable as ours. Her parents, who lived in New York City, had rented it out for years and years. I loved the two men who were the last in a long line of tenants. Pan and Sven. They were ballet dancers. They drove a red sports car and were waiting for a check from Sven's father, a famous novelist who lived in Mexico. Pan colored in his bald pate with some kind of brown pencil, and he made this shiny pretend hair come to a point in front, like a cartoon devil. Pan and Sven fascinated me, and I begged to take ballet lessons from them instead of from Madame de Fornier. Unfortunately, they were arrested before I started. They were con men. There was no check, no famous novelist father in Mexico or anywhere else, no roles in the Paris ballet. Just charm and a leased red sports car and a painted point of hair. How I missed them when the police came and took them off in handcuffs. Even then they both looked suave and insouciant, words I learned from them. Sven waved, lifting the policeman's hand with his as he did so. Pan winked and his chiffon scarf blew behind him in the breeze.

"I will miss them, too," my mother said, kissing me on the head. "Though, really, they pruned that lilac to within an inch of its life."

The house stood empty for a while, then I noticed some activity, cars driving into the driveway, people opening and closing the front door. My mother pretended nothing was happening. But something was happening. First, the workmen came. They replaced the old roof with shingles of golden wood. The house, like the others, was large and square, built in 1860. I watched the workmen that summer without wondering who might be moving in. Maybe I thought the workmen were moving in. Probably the next step just never occurred to me. The activity itself was enough. To see the mirror of my own house transformed—first gutted, then put back together like a new breed of Humpty Dumpty—was riveting. I sat at the edge of the trees on the trunk in a weeping willow that had taken a convenient horizontal twist and watched in open-mouthed abstraction.

It wasn't that I was alone before Martha came. I had my two brothers who, though they were so much older than I was, tried to make contact every once in a while, like those people who beam radio messages into outer space, just in case. And there were my parents, of course. My great-aunt Anna did not yet live with us, but even so, there were enough of us so that it never occurred to me I was lonely. It was only when I saw Martha, a little girl, a person who resembled me in height and weight and the pitch of her voice, galloping like a horse across her lawn the way I galloped across mine—it was only then, months after the workmen had come and transformed the house, as the family drove up in a blue station wagon and a little girl my age jumped out and galloped, that I realized I needed a friend.

Martha saw me that day as I sat and watched from the weeping willow tree. She smiled, slowed her imaginary horse to a walk, began to approach me, then suddenly was whisked off by the unruly steed.

"Whoa!" she cried. "Whoaaaa!"

I was tempted to run out and join her. I recognized her invitation. But I just sat and waited in my tree, dumb and agog, until she got bored racing all over her new lawn and ran over as if she had no horse at all, and said, "Look! I have braces!"

She did indeed sport an impressive set of shiny braces, which made me instantly jealous. But as she was a newcomer, almost a guest, I asserted my native superiority and personal liberality by being gracious.

"And a new house," I said.

"No. It's really old."

Martha and I then entered our first of many arguments, pedantic but passionate exchanges, and our friendship began.