The Jane Austen Book Club (9 page)

Precious little in
Mansfield Park
supported the possibility of fundamental reform. “Character is set early.” Prudie wrote this on a notecard, followed it with examples: Henry Crawford, the rake, improves temporarily, but can't sustain it. Aunt Norris and cousin Maria are, throughout the book, as steadfast in their meanness and their sin as Fanny and cousin Edmund are in their propriety. Only cousin Tom, after a brush with death and at the very, very end of the book, manages to amend.

It was enough to give Prudie hope. Perhaps she was not as horrible as she feared. Perhaps she was not beyond forgiveness, even from Jane.

But at the very moment she thought this, her fingers, slipping up and down her pen, put her in mind of something decidedly, unforgivably un-Austenish. She looked up and found that Trey Norton had swung about, was watching her. This was no surprise. Trey was as sensitive to any lewd thought as a dowser to water. He smiled at her, and it was such a smile as no boy should give his high school teacher. (Or no high school teacher should attribute such things to the mere act of baring one's teeth. My bad, Jane.
Pardonnez-moi.
)

“Do you need something, Trey?” Prudie asked. She dropped the pen, wiped her hands on her skirt.

“You know what I need,” he answered. Paused a deliberate moment. Held his work up.

She rose to go see, but the bell rang.
“Allez-vous en!”
Prudie said playfully, and Trey was the first on his feet, the first out the door. The other students gathered their papers, their binders, their books. Went off to sleep in someone else's class.

“This chapel was fitted up as you see it, in James the Second's time.”
(
MANSFIELD PARK
)

Prudie had a free period, and she walked through the quad to the library, where there was air-conditioning as well as two computer stations with Internet access. She wiped the sweat from her face and neck with her hand, wiped her hand on her hem, and looked at her e-mail. Kapow to the offers to consolidate her debts, enlarge her penis, enchant her with X-rated barnyard action, provide craft tips, recipes, jokes, missing persons, cheap pharmaceuticals. Kapow to anything with a suspicious attachment; there were six more of these. Deleting all this took only a minute, but it was a minute she begrudged, because who'd asked for any of it? Who had the time? And tomorrow every bit of it would be back. She had
la mer à boire.

Cameron Watson settled into the terminal next to her. Cameron was a slope-backed, beak-nosed kid who looked about eleven but was really seventeen. He'd been in Prudie's class two years before and was also a neighbor from three houses over. His mother and Prudie were members of the same investment group. Once this investment group had seen some heady returns. Once fiber-optics companies and large-cap tech stocks had hung like grapes from a vine. Now everything was a shambles of despair and recrimination. These days Prudie saw little of Cameron's mother.

Cameron had told Prudie that he had a friend in France. They e-mailed, so he wanted to learn the language, but he'd shown no aptitude, although his excellent homework made Prudie suspect the French friend did it for him. Clearly bright as a bee, Cameron had that peculiar mix of competence and cluelessness that marks the suburban computer geek. Prudie went to him with all her computer problems and did her best, in return, to genuinely like him.

“I'm afraid to send anything from home just now,” she told
him, “because I've been getting e-mails that seem to've come from people in my address book but didn't. There are attachments, but I haven't downloaded them. Or read them.”

“Doesn't matter. You've been infected.” He wasn't looking at her, leaning into his own screen. Mouse clicking. “Self-replicating. Tricky. The work of a thirteen-year-old kid in Hong Kong. I could come clean it up for you faster than I could tell you how.”

“That would be so great,” Prudie said.

“If you had DSL I could do it from home. Don't you hate being so—geographical? You should get DSL.”

“You live
three
houses from me,” Prudie said. “And I spent so much money last time out.” (Cameron had advised her on every purchase. He knew her setup better than she did.) “Just two years ago. Dean won't see the need. Do you think I could get a substantial upgrade without buying a whole new computer?”

“Don't
go
there,” Cameron said, apparently not to Prudie but to the screen. Although it might have been to Prudie. Cameron liked Dean a ton and would hear no criticism about him.

Three more students walked in, ostensibly on a research assignment. They punched up the catalogue, wrote things in their notebooks, conferred with the librarian. One of these students was Trey Norton. There was a second boy, whom Prudie didn't know. One girl, Sallie Wong. Sallie had long polished hair and tiny glasses. Good ear for languages, lovely accent. She was wearing a blue tank top with straps that crossed in the back, and her shoulders gleamed with sweat and that lotion with glitter all the girls were using. No bra.

When they went into the stacks, they went in three different directions. Trey and Sallie met up immediately somewhere in poetry. Through the glass window of the computer station, Prudie had a clear view down four of the aisles. She watched
Trey take Sallie's hair in his hands. He whispered something. They ducked into the next aisle just before the other boy, a heavy young man with an earnest, baffled expression, appeared. He was obviously looking for them. They were obviously ditching him. He tried the next aisle. They doubled back.

Cameron had been talking this whole time, talking with passion, although still scrolling down his own screen. Multitasking. “You need bandwidth,” he was saying. “Your upgrade now, it's not about processors and storage anymore. You need to
situate
yourself on the Web. That desktop paradigm—that's over. That's beached. Stop thinking that way. I can get you some killer freeware.”

Trey and Sallie had surfaced in the magazines. She was laughing. He slid his hand under one strap of her top, opened his fingers over her shoulder. They heard the other boy coming, Sallie laughing harder, and Trey pulled her down another aisle and out of Prudie's sight.

“Like a free long-distance line,” Cameron was saying. “Streaming live real-time video, IRC. You'll be able to fold your computer like a handkerchief. You'll be living inside it. You'll be global.” Somehow they'd morphed into
The Matrix.
Prudie hadn't been paying attention and might not have known when it happened even if she had been. The air-conditioning was starting to chill her. Nothing a brisk walk to her classroom wouldn't cure.

Trey and Sallie reappeared in the magazines. He backed her into
National Geographic
and they kissed.

“Your computer's not a noun anymore,” Cameron said. “Your computer's a f-fricking
verb.
”

The heavy young man came into the computer station. If he had turned around he'd have seen Sallie Wong's lips closing over Trey Norton's tongue. He didn't turn around. “You're not supposed to be in here,” he told Cameron accusingly. “We're all supposed to be working together.”

“I'll be there in a minute.” Cameron sounded neither apologetic nor concerned. “Find the others.”

“I can't.” The boy took a seat. “I'm not going to do anything by myself.”

Sallie was holding on to the back of Trey's neck, arching slightly. The air-conditioning was no longer a problem for Prudie. She forced herself to stop watching, swung back to Cameron.

“I'm not going to do the whole assignment by myself and then put all your names on it,” the boy said, “if that's what you think.”

Cameron continued to type. He could spot a hoax in seconds, but he had no sense of humor. He thought the graphics for Doom were totally awesome—his fingers twitched spasmodically when he talked about them—but he'd fainted dead away when
Blood on the Highway
was shown in driver's ed. Although this was a fatal step for his high school rep, it consoled Prudie when she heard about it. This was not a boy who would open fire in the hallway anytime soon. This was a boy who still knew the difference between what was real and what wasn't.

For an instant, like an ambush, a picture came into Prudie's mind. In this picture she was backed into
National Geographic
, kissing Cameron Watson. She deleted the image instantly (good God!), kept an expressionless face, concentrated on whatever the hell Cameron was saying. Which was—

“What if they changed the paradigm and no one came?” Cameron did something strange with his hands, thumbs touching at the tips, fingers curled above.

“What's that?” Prudie asked him.

“A smiley face. Emoticon. So you'll know I'm joking.”

He wouldn't look at her, but if he had, she wouldn't have been able to look back. How lucky his generation was, making all these friends they'd never actually meet. In cyberspace, no one gets pantsed.

“If any one faculty of our nature may be called
more
wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. . . . The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient—at others, so bewildered and so weak—and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond controul!”
(
MANSFIELD PARK
)

Prudie liked the beginning of
Mansfield Park
most especially. This was the part about Fanny Price's mother and aunts, the three beautiful sisters, and how they all married. It bore some resemblance to the story of the Three Little Pigs. One sister had married a wealthy man. One had married a respectable man with a modest income. One, Fanny's mother, had married a man of straw. Her poverty became so pronounced that Fanny Price was sent all alone to live with the wealthy aunt and uncle. Everything changed then into “Cinderella” and the real story began. Someone else had talked about fairy tales last time. Was it Grigg? Prudie had read a million fairy tales as a child. And reread them. Her favorite was “The Twelve Swans.”

One thing she'd noticed early—parents and adventures did not mix. She herself had no father, only a picture in the hallway of a young man in uniform. He'd died, she'd been told, on some secret mission in Cambodia when she was nine months old. Prudie had no reason to believe this and, in spite of its obvious appeals, didn't. Her mother was the problem; no matter what Prudie did, she showed no inclination to give Prudie away.

Prudie's mother was sweet, affectionate, tolerant, and cheerful. She was also strangely tired. All the time. She claimed to work in an office, and it was this work, she said, that so wore her out that even lying on the couch watching television was sometimes too taxing. She spent the weekends napping.

It made Prudie suspicious. It was true that her mother left the house after breakfast and didn't come back until dinnertime, it
was true that Prudie had gone to visit her at her office building (though never unannounced) and there she would always be, but she was never actually working when Prudie did visit. Usually she was talking on the telephone. Her mother should try a day at day care! “I'm too tired” cut no mustard there.

On Prudie's fourth birthday her mother was unable to rouse herself to the demands of a party at which many of the guests would presumably be four years old. For several days she told Prudie that the birthday was coming up—the day after tomorrow, or maybe the day after after—until she finally gave Prudie a present (not wrapped) of a
Sesame Street
record and apologized for its being late. Prudie's birthday, she now admitted, lay somewhere vaguely behind them.

Prudie threw the record and herself onto the floor. She had all the advantages of justice on her side, as well as four-year-old tenacity. Her mother had only twenty-three-year-old cunning. The whole thing should have been happily resolved in less than an hour.

So it was with considerable confidence that Prudie lay on the rug, drumming her toes, thudding her fists, and she could hardly hear what her mother was saying over her own wailing. But the bits she caught when she paused for breath were so outrageous as to silence her completely. Yes, Prudie's birthday was over, her mother was now contending. But, of course, there'd been a party. Prudie's mother described this party. Balloons, cupcakes with pink frosting and sprinkles, a piñata shaped like a strawberry. Prudie had worn her unicorn shirt and blown out all the candles. She was such a good hostess, such a wonderful, uncommon child, that she'd opened all the presents and then insisted the guests take them back, even though one had been the stuffed squirrel that sucked its thumb, which she'd seen in the toy section at Discoveries and been whining after ever since. None of the other
parents could believe how unselfish she was. Prudie's mother had never been so proud.

Prudie looked up through a screen of wet and knotted hair. “Who were the guests?” she asked.

“No one you know,” Prudie's mother said, not missing a beat.

And her mother refused to back down. On the contrary, over the next few days, she embellished. Scarcely a meal went by (a favorite dinner was bagels with butter, which left only a single knife to be washed afterward) without a vivid description of a treasure hunt, pirate hats as party favors, pizza just the way four-year-olds like it, with nothing on it but cheese and not a lot of that. She even produced an opened package of napkins from the back of the cupboard, with ladybugs on them. “Left over,” her mother said.