The Evolution of Jane (15 page)

The two of us changed into our matching bikinis, made our way out through the thicket of naked legs and buttocks, and we spread out matching red-and-white-striped towels on the grassy hill above the pool. We talked, about what I can't now remember, and gazed at the rectangular brightness of the blue water. We saw a man swimming underwater. He swam there for a long time, white and fishlike. We saw the lifeguard suddenly jump in. We saw the man pulled out of the water, saw him receive mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, saw the ambulance drive up, saw it take him away.

Martha and I sat on the hill looking down at death, and while I was curious and shocked and frightened and, so, talkative, Martha was silent.

Sometimes Martha and I were silent together, in a peaceful, ruminative sort of way, like two cows in a barn, asleep on their feet, our feet. But this silence was not like that. Martha didn't even contradict me when I said that I had kissed my grandmother in her coffin (which I had not). When I laughed, out of nervousness I like to think now, but out of a very real ignorance and insensitivity as well—when I laughed and said the dead man from the pool had done the dead man's float, Martha still did not respond. She didn't join me in laughter, which I hadn't expected, for as soon as I laughed, I knew it was out of place. But she didn't correct me, either.

"He was probably really old," I said. I looked at her. She leaned back on her arms. Martha stared ahead of her at the bloated pale white body as it was lifted onto a stretcher, at the one arm that hung down, at the white sheet that covered the man, the corpse, and she was silent, which was beginning to annoy me. We were twins. Why was she so far away, incomprehensible? I remember touching my bathing suit, my twin bikini, as if it would help. Her hands were splayed out on the grass on either side of her. I noticed that her fingers were short and stubby and childlike, just like mine. I gaped at Martha's chubby, child fingers. Death, and the possibility that I would cease to exist, scared me and intrigued me. But as I stared at Martha's fat little fingers, an intense, disorienting feeling came over me, and death shrank away, unimportant, forgotten. I gaped at Martha's chubby, child fingers, and for a moment I saw myself the way other people must have seen me, and I was stunned.

As Martha's mother drove us home, she told me she was sorry we had seen someone die, that death is sad and hard to understand. Martha was leaning out the window, her face flattened by the wind, and didn't seem to notice her mother one way or the other. But I did. Mrs. Barlow patted my bare leg, and her hand felt cool and reassuring, and I wished she were my mother, a soft, gentle presence who thought death was hard to understand. My mother thought death was just fine, in its place, which she reckoned at eighty-two years of age.

Darwin must have thought about death a great deal, although not in the way Mrs. Barlow did, or even my mother. Once, in South America, Darwin was shown an ancient skull, the fossilized head of some extinct, prehistoric monster of an animal. The owner's children used it for target practice and had knocked out all its teeth with stones. I often envision evolution as a world of niches waiting for some enterprising species to jump in. But sometimes I imagine all those others, the individuals of a species who happen to be born with mutations that are only second-rate. They are, in Darwin's terminology, unsuccessful. Which is to say, they die, and their DNA dies with them. Like the bloated man in the pool.

It was an oddly undramatic, distant pageant, that swimmingpool death. But Martha and I never returned to the country club. We switched back to the beach. Martha continued to examine the plants, reading about them, then passing tidbits of information on to me. Queen Anne's lace was really a wild carrot. You could rub jewelweed on a case of poison ivy. The jack of a jack-in-the-pulpit was female. Skunk cabbage smelled so bad in order to attract flies, just the way some flowers smell sweet in order to attract bees.

Each summer, Martha seemed more and more at home in Barlow. The town, named after her family, began to seem to me to be named after her. During her fourth summer in the Captain Franklin house, when she announced that she and her parents were moving to Barlow year-round, it seemed to me a matter of course. I never for a moment wondered why Martha didn't seem unhappy about leaving the city she had lived in for so many years or whether she would miss her old school or her old friends. I knew that such a misplaced nostalgia was impossible. All those pale city girls? A school with elevators? Of course Martha was thrilled to be starting a new life in the robust town of Barlow.

The reason that Martha's parents, Mr. and Mrs. Not Our Barlows, as my brothers sometimes called them, were moving year-round to Barlow was that they had decided to turn their rescued house into a bed and breakfast. Their intentions became clear in August when the sign went up. My mother was appalled that the zoning laws would allow an inn, but my father said that the way the town was headed, the zoning laws probably required the house to become a B & B. The sign was beautifully painted in an ornate script on a large white board that hung from a post at the end of the driveway. "The Captain Franklin Barlow House Bed and Breakfast." My mother was furious.

"We are surrounded by commercial establishments," she said. "I suppose we are expected to open an antique store now."

"Funeral home," my father said. "Beautiful old houses in small towns should be funeral homes. Everyone knows that."

All that interested me about the bed and breakfast at first was that Martha would be living next door the year round. Martha would go to school with me! But as my parents spoke about it,
I began to wonder why, really, anyone would want to rent the rooms of their house out to strangers. When I actually thought about all those interlopers examining or, worse, ignoring the Barlow altars covered with treasures, I was baffled.

The only explanation I could come up with was that the Not Our Barlows were short of money. I had long known the story of how my father's parents, Grandma and Grandpa Schwartz, had met in a small town in Pennsylvania. My grandfather had inherited money from a stepbrother, a fact I found amazing in itself, because the only people I knew who had stepbrothers had them because their parents had divorced and then remarried. Divorce was common among my friends' parents, and suggested extramarital sex, so it seemed to me thoroughly modern. Remarriage after the death of a first wife never occurred to me, and I thought my grandfather Schwartz very advanced for having a stepbrother, particularly one who died and left him money.

He took the money and left Brooklyn to seek his fortune. He made his way as far west as my grandmother's little Pennsylvania town. There he struck up a conversation with my grandmother's father, who had come from the Lower East Side and now ran the little town's general store. He also happened to rent out rooms. Naturally, the reason he rented out rooms was that the family needed the money, although my grandfather would later joke that they were really trying to snag husbands for their seven daughters. My grandfather married the oldest, got bored with Pennsylvania in a matter of months, and continued on his journey, east this time instead of west, back to Brooklyn with his wife.

I had often heard my grandmother Schwartz say how fortunate it was that her family had been poor and so forced to rent out rooms. That was how she met her beloved husband. Every cloud has a silver lining, she would say. Money isn't everything,
she would say. Just so you had enough! Then she would kiss my cheek in a horrible nibbling way that was unique to her. No one before or since, thank God, has ever duplicated that kiss.

I liked the story, though. I liked the idea of my old grandmother, the soft folds of her arms crushed against me as she hugged me, the skin on her face loose and delicate against my own—I liked the idea of her falling in love with the handsome young man coming in from his travels. I imagined him looking at her among the seven sisters and knowing right away, recognizing his bride. Of course, he wouldn't know about the horrible nibbling kisses until much later. I had never met my grandfather Schwartz. He died before I was born. But I had seen pictures of him, and I was a little in love with him myself. I agreed with my grandmother. How lucky to have been poor and forced to rent out rooms and so be swept away by a handsome stranger.

Thus I thought the Barlows, like my paternal grandmother's family, must have fallen on hard times. And like my grandmother, they didn't seem to mind. One reason they didn't mind was that no one ever came to stay at their bed and breakfast. Except me. There was no handsome stranger who swept into their lives to marry their lovely daughter. There was just the girl from next door. Martha and I were allowed to choose any room we wanted, and we migrated from the one with violets on the wallpaper to the white bedroom with the canopy bed to the one with the fireplace and patchwork-quilt-covered twin beds. My mother, needless to say, was delighted that they had no customers and scornful of my own participation in what she called "the flophouse."

"The flophouse that flopped," she would say.

That sounded sweet to me, like the title of a children's picture book. But my mother's continued animosity upset me. It was so unfair, I told her. Martha hadn't done anything. Even her parents hadn't done anything. Not to my parents. Or to me. "This feud is so stupid."

But all my mother said was, "Don't be silly. That is the nature of a feud."

Mr. Barlow had retired early in order to start the bed and breakfast with his wife, and I got a chance to know him a little better than during those previous summers when I'd only caught glimpses of him on his way to or from the train station. His wife called him Barlow. When I told my mother, she began to call my father Schwartz and he called her Schwartzita, but that lasted only a few days. Mrs. Barlow always called Mr. Barlow Barlow. He was tall and had an awkward elegance, like a shorebird, his long legs moving with an unlikely grace. His accent, which as a child I thought was English, was really an anachronistic boarding school drawl. He clearly loved the sound of his voice, which was, indeed, a pleasant instrument, and he spoke in his lilting, mannered way with great frequency and generosity. He was a kind man, outgoing and charming even to me. I was quite taken with him. He was so different from my gruff, funny father. And the only suggestion that this man and my mother were cousins was their eyes, an icy blue, which were astonishingly alike. My mother, cool and slim and quiet, who moved with a light quick determination, who never seemed to be at the center of what was happening, but seemed always to be above it—could she really be related to this man who would stand chatting with a twelve-year-old about Northeast Harbor?

"The Wallaces have a splendid house just up the road from the Abbots, but they won't spend a bean on it! Do you know them? Rich as Croesus, old Campbell Wallace."

"Why won't he spend a bean, then?"

"I can't imagine. Lovely town, though. That's where I met my wife. Sailing. You don't sail, do you, my dear? No, I wouldn't think so."

"Why not?"

"Well..."

"I wanted to learn to sail. But my mother—"

"Yes. Quite. She never did sail, did she?"

"Did she?"

"Sailing is marvelous. You must take it up, you know. I haven't been in years."

Martha and I discussed this disparity between the two Barlow cousins and felt that probably somewhere along the line there had been a mistake, eyes or no eyes, that one of the two was not really a Barlow at all. Perhaps someone had been adopted.

"Or else he takes after his mother," I said.

But Martha didn't know if he did or not. Her grandmother had died before she was born.

When Martha asked Mr. Barlow what his mother had been like, he said, "Mother was a suffragette," and began to cry.

"Maybe this will end the feud," I said to Martha on our first day of school together, the day we began seventh grade.

"The feud was about love," Martha said. She spoke with great authority, as she always did. "They always are."

"Money," I said anyway. "Daddy said it was business."

Martha shook her head in that pitying way she had. "There's a love child somewhere back there," she said. "I guarantee it."

I asked my mother if there was a love child in the family and she snorted.

"Where did you hear that? How very nineteenth-century."

"Maybe it was
in
the nineteenth century," my brother Andrew said. "A secret love child. Or maybe it's
you,
Jane."

"Stop it, Andrew," my mother said.

"I'm sorry," Andrew said. He gave me an affectionate pat. "I forgot. Jane is
adopted.
"

"
You're
adopted," I said. "You don't look like anyone." Which was not true. He looked just like my mother. And just like me.

"You're both adopted," my mother said.

And for a moment I wished I could be adopted by Mr. and Mrs. Barlow. Then I would be Martha's sister. And go sailing.

Since this was clearly not to be, I consoled myself with the knowledge that at least Martha had moved to Barlow for good, which was how it should be. The town assumed the dimensions of reality itself when I was a child. I was born in Barlow, and I assumed I would live there always. Barlow was so enduring, so loyal, repeating the names of members of my family reverently on street signs. Barlow Highway. Three Captains' Drive. I watched my mother's garden die each fall and return to life each spring, and that's how Barlow seemed to me. Changes occurred, but they didn't really change anything at all. There was a quarry when I was a child, an abandoned quarry, in which we would swim. We weren't allowed to, but it was fabulously deep, and we could dive off the high sides and keep going down into the dark icy water. The quarry later became a neighborhood of fancy houses, back to back and belly to belly, no sign left of the deep, delicious water hole. This development outraged me when it happened, but then I remembered that the quarry itself had not always been a quarry. Before it was dynamited for gravel, the quarry had been a mountain.