The Evolution of Jane (16 page)

I often thought about my family's past when I was growing up. The feud was tantalizing, naturally, but all kinds of stories about the Barlows and the Schwartzes had been recited and joked about and contradicted and denied and asserted and told and retold ever since I could remember. "Puss in Boots" and "Cuba"
and "Grandpa Schwartz and the Seven Sisters" and "Jacob and Esau" and scraps of unintelligible Spanish were the bones and skulls and fossil teeth of my childhood. Gloria was right—cladistics was just my cup of tea.

"Yes," Gloria said. "But cladistics is too limited. Now, I have my own theory about you and Martha. You see, organisms change over time, individual organisms, and some of the features that are useful to them when they are young are not of any use when they are older, and some features are only of use when they mature and must begin to court and find a mate. In an analogous way, there are features that were once of value to a species that are no longer useful, and so these features have grown smaller or changed function or even disappeared. You see?"

She stood up, looming above me, her arms crossed. "That explains Martha, dear. Doesn't it?" she said. "Martha Barlow is a residual organ."

Martha a residual organ? Martha is a thumb, I wanted to say. Something essential, defining, not residual. When the last of Grandma Schwartz's sisters died, Grandma sat in a chair with a bewildered look and said, "Who do I tell things to?" Whenever we children did something cute, she would smile and then tears would come to her eyes. "Who do I tell?" she would say softly. "I don't have my sister to tell."

"You don't like my theory, do you?" Gloria said.

"No."

"Do you have a better theory?"

When we would ask my sixth-grade science teacher a question, she would always answer, "Because God made it that way."

"Because God made it that way," I said. "Martha is not a vestigial organ, and if she is, it's because God made her that way. For our enjoyment. I'm converting from nominalist to natural theologian. You have driven me to it. I want to be a country clergyman. I want to be given a living and grow dahlias. I want to catch butterflies and hold jumble sales. Did they have jumble sales in the nineteenth century? Or is that only in Barbara Pym novels? I think of Martha as a sort of echt friend. You see? The model on which all other friends must be based. And so this entire shipload of strangers has partaken of her essence."

"Oh dear," Gloria said. "You're not a nominalist. You're not even a natural theologian, really. You're a silly old essentialist!"

W
E WERE A CALM
, heterogeneous group, a stagnant pond of little girls, before Martha came splashing in. The urban rhythms of her speech, her nervous city pace, distinguished Martha in our poky school. Not only was she blessed with a profoundly advanced taste in pop music, but Martha also had a boyfriend in New York whom she had kissed. At an age when most people hate to stand out, Martha flaunted her singularity.

She said, "Girls, I'm here to corrupt you."

With determination and energy she led strikes and sit-ins protesting our having to wear pastel dresses to dance around the maypole.

My aunt Anna had moved in with us by this time, when her housekeeper finally died, and she and Martha soon became great admirers of each other.

"Your little friend shares our family appellation," Aunt Anna said after I brought Martha up to her room to meet her one morning.

"Well, she's a Barlow," I said.

"Is she? Perhaps she's related," Aunt Anna said.

"She's my cousin," I said.

"Is she? Perhaps she's some sort of cousin, dear," Aunt Anna said, smiling.

"Your aunt is so great-looking, like a flapper," Martha said later the same day.

"She thinks you might be related. Because of your name."

"I want a strand of pearls like that, long."

"Maybe she'll leave them to you in her will. If she remembers you're related."

It was amusing having Aunt Anna live with us—
she
was amusing. The stairs were difficult for her to maneuver by herself, so I was often called into service. I would stand in front of her, one step below, as she leaned on my shoulders. Step by step, slowly, slowly, we would make our way down the stairway.

"Maybe it would be easier for you if you moved into a room downstairs," I said.

"Oh, no, Barlow, dear," she said, breathless, her hands clutching at my shoulders for support. "I like my independence."

Most of the time, Aunt Anna stayed in her room upstairs dressed in an old silk dress and the long string of pearls, a cigarette hanging from her trembling lips. My mother would bring her breakfast up there. Graziela, a young woman from Cuba who was staying with us to help out with Aunt Anna, would bring her lunch. But every evening, at five sharp, Aunt Anna called me to help her downstairs for cocktails. Five o'clock was cocktail hour, even though she would then have to sit down in front of the TV and wait for an hour and a half until my father came home from work and mixed her a martini with two olives. They would clink glasses, say "
L'chaim,
" and relax together in silence for half an hour or so. My father loved Aunt Anna. Finally, there was someone who understood the importance of a stiff drink and a moment of repose after a long day.

"You're a highly civilized woman, Anna," he would say.

"Nonsense," she would answer. "I'm not the least bit high. Hollow leg, you know." And a long ash would drop from her cigarette to the floor, landing as lightly as an angel.

When she discovered Graziela could drive, Aunt Anna began inviting her out for lunch.

"Come along, Gracie, come along. Hamburgers!"

Sometimes I would bump into them when I stopped at the diner for a doughnut on my way home from school. Aunt Anna had introduced Graziela to the pleasures of tobacco, and I would see the two of them in a booth, hunched over an ashtray and crumpled red packs of Winstons, their smiling, animated faces in a haze of blue smoke and rapid Spanglish.

"Now," Aunt Anna said on one of these occasions. "English lesson! I teach you. Should anyone ever give you any trouble about anything..."

Graziela looked baffled.

"If, well, let's say, you, Graziela"—she pointed to Graziela—"unhappy." She made a sad face. "Bad man bad to Graziela."

Graziela stared intently at her teacher.

"
Anyone
bad to Graziela, Graziela say: 'Son of a bitch.'" Aunt Anna pronounced it very carefully and slowly. "Son of a bitch."

"Ssahn ahf ah beech."

"A regular native, my darling."

Graziela had been a seamstress in Cuba and was saving her money to open her own shop. She was supposed to clean the house and cook dinner for us, but what with the hamburgers and English lessons and the dresses she was sewing for Aunt Anna, my mother, and me, there was little time left for extras.

I came home from school early one day—it was a half day because of teachers' conferences—to find Aunt Anna hanging on bravely to the vacuum cleaner as it dragged her old frail person in violent, loud bursts around the living room.

"What are you doing? You'll kill yourself," I said. I turned the machine off and gently pried Aunt Anna's bent fingers from the handle.

"Extraordinary machine," she said.

Graziela came out and said Aunt Anna wanted "to go hamburger" in a new dress that still needed to be hemmed, and when Graziela had protested that she really did have to vacuum, it was after all her job, Aunt Anna had offered to do it while Graziela finished sewing the desired outfit.

"Graziela! Hamburgers!" Aunt Anna said suddenly, jumping up, teetering for a moment until Graziela ran forward to steady her.

"Now she is forgotten," Graziela said.

"Now she
has
forgotten," I said.

"Nonsense," said Aunt Anna. "Graziela remembers everything, don't you, dear? Extraordinary," she added as they passed the vacuum cleaner and swayed unsteadily out the door.

My mother had great faith in Graziela and often bemoaned the fact that we did not have enough money to get her started in her own business. But Graziela did what she could from her room, which housed an astonishingly diverse expanse of pins, rolls of material, paper patterns, and scraps that piled up like colorful leaves. One of her most devoted customers was Martha. Martha had changed from the days of ruffles and bows that so enraged and fascinated me, and Graziela kept both of us in an abundant supply of clothes. When we tired of preppy blouses and skirts and turned to layers of thrift-shop silk and lingerie, Graziela magically transformed these items into clothing that fit. I loved this constant manufacturing in the room downstairs, though I was studying the Progressive era in school and worried that we might be running a sweatshop.

"Now that's a good idea!" said my father, who was getting a little tired of making us cube steaks every night for dinner because Graziela was too busy sewing and we too busy being fitted. "Clever girl." He patted my head.

Just in case, I suggested to Graziela that she might consider unionizing herself. But the mention of unions reminded her of Castro, and she said, "Son of a bitch," very loudly, slowly, and with a perfect accent. She returned indignantly to her sewing machine.

Her English teacher put down her martini and applauded loudly.

"By George, she's got it," my father said, and went to the kitchen to make us dinner.

For nearly three years, Martha lived next door, Aunt Anna lived upstairs, and Graziela sewed. "Mmm! Pins for dinner!" my father would say, observing the state of the dining room table. "And thread!" My mother drove me to school each day. Martha's mother drove her to school. My mother also applied to the zoning board to have the Not Our Barlows' Bed and Breakfast closed down. She called the Wildlife Federation and reported destruction of natural habitat. She wrote letters to the local newspaper in which she complained of the strain on the sewage system, though the house had a septic tank. The Barlows, in response, wrote letters to the editor emphasizing their contribution to the local economy. My mother, in response to their response, wrote a letter complaining of the traffic brought in by the bed and breakfast. The bed and breakfast, meanwhile, had not had a single guest.

Then, on a beautiful spring day at the end of ninth grade,
when leaves had just begun to show themselves on their dark, wet branches, when the wind blew in from the sea with a new, fresh scent, when the sun shone down as if in eternal benevolence, our house burned down.

Martha and I saw the smoke as we walked home from school. We had just smoked some hashish she'd gotten from one of her old friends in New York. The sweet, sticky smell clung to us in that brisk fresh air, and we moved sluggishly down Barlow Street toward a great, black billowing cloud.

"That's my house," I said.

I ran the rest of the way and got there in time to see Graziela helping Aunt Anna down the porch steps, one by one, slowly, slowly. The dog stood behind my aunt, nudging her gently but deliberately with his black round nose.

"That's my house," I said again. I saw Martha running to her own house. I wondered if she was calling the fire department.

Aunt Anna had a cigarette dangling from her lips.

"That's in extremely poor taste," I said.

"Winston tastes
good,
" she said. "Like a cigarette should!"

I could already hear the sirens as we walked to the edge of the lawn. I tried to think what of value might be burning up in the old white house. I thought of my father's papers in his wonderful old desk. I thought of Graziela's dresses and scraps of dresses. I wondered if the heat would wilt my mother's roses in the garden. I imagined the melted CDs and dripping black vinyl, formerly Grateful Dead albums.

Martha came and stood with us.

"I called the fire department, and I called the headmistress so she could tell your mother."

She looked down at the ground. I realized she was embarrassed, as if she were looking at someone with a deformity.

"At least it wasn't your house," I said. "With all those collections."

Martha looked up with a start, and then I knew that she had been thinking the same thing.

My mother's car roared up the road. She had beaten the fire engines.

"What happened?" she said. It was the obvious question. But I had not been able to bring myself to ask Graziela and Aunt Anna, for the answer also was obvious. My mother looked at Aunt Anna, the cigarette dangling from her lips, the long ash falling to the ground as lightly as an angel. She looked at Graziela, Aunt Anna's protégé, and at her cigarette dangling from her lips. "Oh God, oh God," my mother said. She shook her head. "Are you okay? Are you all okay?" She didn't expect a response. She turned from us to the house.

The firemen were there. They were rushing in and out of the door. They were carrying heavy canvas hoses. They rose gracefully into the blue sky on long ladders.

By the time my father got home, the fire was out. It had started in the living room, probably from an ash smoldering all night in the cushion of Aunt Anna's favorite chair. The fire itself had been put out before it spread through much else of the house, but the smoke and water damage was enormous.

We stood on the edge of the front lawn and looked at our wet, blackened house as the sky darkened around it. Aunt Anna sat with Graziela in my mother's car listening to the radio. She liked Madonna.

"This young woman has spunk," she said, nodding her head in rhythm.

For a moment, I thought of the day, years before, when Martha and I had seen the man in the pool drown.

"You'll have to stay at our house," Martha said suddenly.

My mother turned to her in horror. Then I saw it dawn on her that one of the results of having your house burn up was that you had no place to stay. There were no hotels in Barlow. There was one disreputable motel that had hourly rates, which I wasn't even supposed to know existed. And that was about it. Except for the Captain Franklin Barlow House Bed and Breakfast.

"Do you have any vacancies?" I said, and Martha and I began to laugh uncontrollably. The flophouse that flopped had never had a single customer. Barlow was not a place tourists visited. Mr. and Mrs. Barlow never seemed to mind, though. In fact I think they were relieved. Guests would have disturbed the aesthetic equanimity of their bed and breakfast.