The Evolution of Jane (19 page)

Jeremy asked me, not for the first time, to tell him about my family's feud.

"I told you," I said. "It's a secret."

"Have I ever told you a secret?" he said.

"No."

He looked at me in an indulgent, meaningful way. "You see?" he said. "You can trust me."

"Of all places," Mrs. Tommaso was saying. "The famous,
world-famous,
Galapagos Islands. Those poor, dear little birds."

I went out to the deck and stood looking over the rail after dinner, hoping Jack would come out, too. But it was Martha who came and stood beside me. She pointed out some unfamiliar constellations. Perhaps she, too, was waiting for someone. For Jack.

"Jack's great," I said.

"Motivated, certainly."

"He lives on my block. He's my neighbor."

"Really? You do get around, Jane."

We stood quietly for a minute. The air was cool and refreshing and oddly soft.

"Now, girls, what's this I hear about a feud?" Jeremy said, appearing suddenly.

"
You're
the gossip columnist," Martha said.

"So I am," Jeremy said with a sigh. He returned to the main cabin.

The wooden deck was smooth and worn. I stared at it awhile, instead of at the stars.

"That poor old feud," I said. "Remember how we used to try to come up with gothic explanations when of course it was all about money?"

"Mmm. Money. It always is."

"And stupid little slights."

"Yes," Martha said. She laughed.

"Sheets!"

"Sheets." She laughed again. "And of course the engagement," she said.

The deck was silent except for the din of the engine, which was a kind of silence itself. Engagement? I hadn't expected Martha to know anything new. It seemed a little ungracious of her.

"Which engagement?" I said. I hoped by phrasing it that way, "Which?" instead of "What?" that I would seem less ignorant, as if I had so many scandalous engagements to choose from.

"Our parents," she said.

Perhaps I stared at her with my mouth open. At any rate, she poked me.

"You didn't know?" she said. "Aunt Anna told me. My father and your mother."

"Were engaged?"

She nodded. "To each other," she added gently, patting my hand.

"So we're idiot sisters? As well as cousins?"

"Your mother broke it off."

Well, I should hope so, I thought.

This new information was bizarre, intriguing, and repellent. Perhaps my father and her mother had been engaged also. Why not? Let the good times roll. I was about to ask Martha how she knew about the broken engagement when Jack came out.

Not now, you fool, I thought. Anyway, which one of us did you come out here to meet?

I had nothing to say to him. I mean, what could I have said? Hey, Jack! Martha just told me that her father and my mother were engaged!

And then he could have replied, Hey, Jane! My father is safely tucked away in a cigar box.

Martha's father had been engaged to my mother. I lay in my little bunk that night, furious that Martha had discovered this fluttering dirty laundry, from my own aunt, who I introduced her to, on her deathbed yet. Martha had come to Barlow, had appropriated my woods by learning all the names of all the trees, and then had appropriated my aunt. As usual I had been kept in the dark. My own mother had not seen fit to enlighten me. I didn't like it that Martha had known something about me that I myself had not known. It wasn't really about me, it was about my mother, but the genetic link was there. And why hadn't Martha told me? What could I have done to have so poisoned her against me? I felt with more certainty than ever the enormity of the deed, whatever it was, however inadvertent. I tried, yet
again,
to remember what that could have been. Was I sure I had not stolen a boyfriend? Yes, I was sure. That was what I was hoping to do now, perhaps, but I never had in high school. Had some stray scrap of gossip about her, that could have come only from me, reached her ears? But I never gossiped about her, only to her. Perhaps it was the engagement itself that had disenchanted her. She had found out, and then could not bear the sight of me. But I had nothing to do with it. It was before my time. And why, for that matter,
had
my mother broken off the engagement to Martha's father?

"I thought money made the world go round," I said to Gloria.

She grunted in a noncommittal way.

"I thought the feud was about wills."

"Ah! Your family feud!"

"Or incest," I said. "Or at least adultery."

"Yes?" she said. "And?"

"It was about a broken engagement."

Engagements are ridiculous. Animals don't get engaged. They court. The word
engagement
went around and around in my head. We didn't get engaged in college. We hung out or hooked up or moved in together. I wondered what Martha's college years had been like. Or even high school. And then I began to think about high school, that weird island separated from the rest of civilization.

"Okay, Gloria," I said. "Let's look at high school in Darwinian terms for a moment. An isolated geographical area. Once connected to the mainland, but now cut off. You see what I'm getting at? An island. A rugged terrain, few resources. Well, actually, the school had a swimming pool, but I don't mean that. I mean the real food and water of the adolescent, I mean attention and popularity and rebellion and achievement. There's a struggle, right? Every organism for itself. Gradually, over four years, a nanosecond in geological time, but an eternity in teenage time, the organisms appear with slight variations—pants a little baggier, hair a little shorter. Natural selection, high school division, sees this deviation as helpful. It promotes the organism's success in its environment, and so this deviation is encouraged and passed on from grade to grade, and soon more and more exaggerated versions of it spring up—"

"We had to wear uniforms in high school."

"So did we, but you know what I mean."

"I teach high school," Gloria said. "I generally try to view those years as a time of youthful enthusiasm."

"That's what my mother used to say. She's a teacher, too."

"Well, there you are." Gloria smiled at me. "They do outgrow all that, you know."

I tried to think of something I had outgrown since high school, something I could attribute to simple youthful enthusiasm, and it was true that almost all of high school seemed best attributed to youthful enthusiasm. I thought particularly of a teacher I'd had an affair with, a small, potbellied, balding teacher. I didn't really like him. I wasn't attracted to him. It was just a fun, or at least a funnish, thing to do, like driving all night to Boston, then turning around and coming home without getting out of the car. Maybe that was what my mother's engagement to Martha's father had been like. But I had not carried on an extended bitter feud with my English teacher. I couldn't even remember his name.

I lay in bed across from Gloria. She had propped up her pillow by folding a large orange life preserver beneath it. The beam of the bedside light, wan and narrow, groped toward her open book.

I said, "It's condescending to say everyone outgrows everything."

"Yes, you're right. Let me emend my statement: everyone dies. Darwinian enough for you, honey?"

Everybody dies. I had even seen someone die. I had seen the man drown in the swimming pool. Martha and I sat on the side of a grassy hill in our twin bikinis and watched a man drown without even realizing it. I had thought about that day many times. I often wondered if Martha remembered it, too. But she never spoke of it, and the one time I tried to bring it up, a few years later, she told me I was morbid.

"I saw someone die," I said to Gloria. "Martha and I did. It didn't seem real."

I used to reconstruct that day. I would try to determine the exact moment the swimming man became a drowning man. I wrote a story about it for English class when I was in high school. It was the October after the fire. Martha and her family had moved back to New York. In the story, I described Martha's stubby fingers, how they had fascinated me, how they had blotted out the existence of death.

And once again, I remembered that moment when I saw myself as others must have seen me, when I was stunned.

I sent the story to Martha. I had not spoken to her in a couple of weeks. I would not speak to her again for ten years, until I saw her with her sign at the airport on the island of Baltra.

I sent Martha that three-page story typed on my mother's typewriter because it was partly about her, because it was something we'd done, or seen, together, because I thought it would interest her. But perhaps it had not interested her. She probably thought it was morbid. Or just not very good.

I sat on my bunk, and the force of my own embarrassment was sickening. All was revealed—the sin I had committed, the stupid, pipsqueak sin that had extinguished a friendship. I had sent Martha a story about the man drowning at the Barlow Country Club, a story about her fingers, a story about her. She had read the story and never forgiven me.

Maybe she had not liked being observed. Maybe she thought I was poaching, co-opting her life. The story of the drowned man and the stubby fingers had disgusted Martha, angered her. Martha thought I had betrayed her, betrayed a confidence. Or she was simply insulted because I noticed, and remembered, and reported on her short fat fingers.

Martha's fingers were still a little stubby.

But, really, Martha, I thought, it wasn't just your story. It was mine too.

That whole night and the next morning, I argued mentally with Martha:

It was just a story. Couldn't she tell the difference between a
character in a story and a real person?
It was all true. I didn't make anything up, so how could she
object to my describing what really happened?

It was a sign of loyalty that I had written about something
that happened to us so long ago, and a sign of loyalty that I
had sent it to her to see.
It had absolutely nothing to do with her. It was just an Eng-
lish assignment. Why make such a federal case out of it?

I sent it to her, so obviously I had nothing to hide.
Why should I have told her anything, anyway? She never
told me about our parents' being engaged.

I continued this dialogue the next morning. I walked in my thinking circles thinking about Martha and my mother and her father and her dwarf fingers. And then there she was before me, sitting on a deck chair with a notebook open on her lap. I sat down on the chair next to her.

"Today we'll see daisies that have evolved into trees," she said. She closed the notebook. I tried not to stare at her stumpy fingers. She pulled a guidebook from under the chair. She pointed to a picture of a spiky bush crowned by stunted daisies.

Your fingers aren't that bad, I thought. Why are you so sensitive about them?

"See?" she was saying. "Daisy trees. A forest of them. They won't be in bloom, though."

"Are you sure about the engagement?"

"Aunt Anna told me in the hospital, right before she died. She wouldn't tell me why they split up, though."

"I wonder why she didn't tell me."

"I don't know why she
did
tell me. She was probably having nicotine withdrawal. And she really did give me those pearls, after all. She was amazing, your aunt Anna."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

Martha looked up from her book. She was chewing gum. She shrugged.

"I don't know. I never saw you. I just did tell you."

And then at last we boarded the
pangas
for the island of Floreana.

"
Don't
leave Grandpa here," Dot said when Martha and Gloria began chatting about the Ritters, the Wittmers, the baroness, and the corpses.

Jack put his arm around Dot and kissed her head, just the way my mother used to kiss mine. Martha looked at them curiously, and I thought, first, that Martha did not know about the deceased William Cornwall coming on the trip, and, second, that William Cornwall really had come on the trip. Grandpa was a stowaway in an urn. Take nothing but pictures. Leave nothing but Grandpa.

"They ought to be ashamed of themselves," Mrs. Tommaso said.

"Who?" I said. Did she mean the Cornwalls? Would she tell Martha, who might then be obligated to confiscate Mr. Cornwall?

"The human race."

"Oh, them," Gloria said.

Craig and Cindy were holding hands, and I wondered if they had been inspired and touched by the story of the Ritters. Perhaps every couple, when they get married and decide to have children, think they are somehow starting a new line. A new line. Like dresses with shorter skirts for the spring. Pantsuits this fall, sleeker, more feminine, in the new synthetics! Lineage
is
a little like fashion. A closet full of DNA. Natural selection has to go out unexpectedly tonight! The weather is terrible, a goddamn flood. She'll ruin her shoes! What will she wear? Paws? Claws? No, no, those fabulous sunflower-yellow web feet!

We spent the morning at a beach that was made of green sand. Martha told us about the olivine crystals in the volcanic tuff. She held out a handful of the dark, sparkling sand, and I looked at it through the wrong end of my binoculars. I could see the dainty crystals, smooth and egg-shaped, resting on Martha's outstretched palm.

Darwin sailed to the Galapagos to find the answer to the mystery of mysteries. I had sailed to the Galapagos, I had come all this way, and what had I found?

One: Martha hated me because of something in that English story. That explanation seemed more and more plausible, if only because of the timing involved. I sent it to her. I never heard from her again. Q.E.D.

Two: My mother was once engaged to her own cousin. He probably wanted to go sailing with her, so she had to break up with him. A splitting event. Then she met my father. He said, "I don't sail. I row. But only in college." And she had fallen gratefully into his arms. Their passion flourished, landlocked. I felt, I had always felt, that my parents belonged together in some very profound way. I wondered if that belief in their fitness for each other made my marriage to Michael more precarious. My parents seemed destined for each other. I had never felt destined for Michael. I did not feel destined, period. But then, if all of creation was the fallout from various happy accidents, perhaps I didn't have to be destined, only opportunistic. I tried to think of Jack as my new niche.