The Evolution of Jane (22 page)

I straightened up. A moment of calm. I remembered a poem my grandma Schwartz had taught me:

Holy Moses, king of the Jews,
Pissed in his britches
And shat in his shoes.

I turned my head. I saw Martha. The feud had come to this. I was unfit.

But then Martha handed me a Kleenex. She handed me a plastic bag. She held out a plastic box of some kind of wipes, the kind you use for babies. How prescient. She gave me a handful. She grabbed some more and began mopping at my legs.

I looked down at the mess and thought, Wouldn't it be nice if Mrs. Cornwall had waited or kept a handful of Mr. Cornwall in reserve and could dump her husband right here, where he could do some good, soak up the spill, like sawdust in the butcher shop.

Martha stood with me while I repeated my performance. Martha stood with me while I dabbed at my legs, at my boots. She produced more and more paper products. She squeezed her water bottle at me, washing off some of the worst mess. She wiped me up with the tender indifference of a mother cleaning a baby's bottom. She sealed the Ziploc bag, then another and another. She carried the hat and the camera and the binoculars. She took out the shirt I had in my backpack and tied it around my waist. It occurred to me that I ought to be embarrassed, humiliated, mortified, shamed. I thought for a moment of the nuances of meaning that separated those words, but realized I felt none of them, I felt only gratitude. I must have been wrong about the Barlow family feud. There was no family feud anymore, no genetic legacy of discord, no primogeniture, no Romeo and Juliet.

Most of the others had already gone in the first
panga
when we got back to this island's set of concrete steps with this island's sleeping seal. I thanked God, who did not exist and whose fault this whole thing was, that Jack was among them, and my girlish pride seemed quaint to me, even at the time. I sat down in the
panga
and tried not to think about what I was sitting in. I wondered if I might not have some prevocal memory of being a baby, but I didn't. In that moment of extreme vulnerability, sitting in my own shit, I actually felt almost happy. I had been reduced to a Job-like state of low humiliation and filth, of powerless pathos, and no one minded! I was nothing, less than nothing. All was vanity. And Martha had cleaned me off with the best will in the world.

A great responsibility had been lifted from my shoulders.

"Shame is a kind of narcissism," I said. But perhaps I did not say it out loud. No one would have heard me, anyway, over the roar of the outboard motor.

Ethel and Jeannie were with us, I think. I know Gloria was there, because she took off her own sweatshirt (which, she had informed me that morning, was knit out of fibers from old Coke bottles) and without a word laid it across my knees in a delicate offering. I knew it would be invaluable when I stood up, but I couldn't bear to defile this holy garment, this token of generosity toward me in my moment of need, this symbol of self-sacrifice and spiritual greatness.

Gloria was a goddess. No, Jane, for once, just say, Gloria is a wonderful human being. Human beings can be this wonderful. They don't have to be goddesses. Just look at Martha. Could this really be the same person who had made my life not miserable exactly, but
narrower,
who had left me high and dry, deserted, an island of narcissistic confusion, because of some story written ten years ago? No, probably it could not be the same person. This Martha was very real, her backpack full of soiled wipes in little Ziploc bags. So what, then, was the other Martha? Just an idea in my head? I really didn't know.

I had no idea! How odd. I always had ideas, didn't I, a sandstorm of ideas, of theories and metaphors. No, not a sandstorm. It was more like a disease, like Tourette's syndrome, an uncontrollable barking. I was compulsively metaphorical, a victim of echolalia, repeating every one of the earth's utterances.

When we were in high school, Martha said something to me that I had never understood and until that moment, sitting in shit on a dinghy in the Pacific Ocean, I had never thought of again. But now I remembered it.

She said, "You're so self-centered. But you're not introspective. No offense."

"I am not self-centered. And I think about myself
all the time.
"

Martha had laughed. I asked her what book she had just finished reading and said I was sure she was just thinking about some character in it rather than me because she didn't have an original idea in her head, and she had sighed in a way that made me think I'd won the little argument.

But then she said, "You have a hypothesis about everything but yourself."

I tried to fend off the crew member who wanted to help me untie my bootlaces when we boarded the
Huxley.
I tried not to drip as Martha and Gloria helped me make my way up the little stairway to the cabin. I think I said thank you. I think I said it over and over again. Then, at my cabin door, Martha turned to go.

"I left more than footsteps," I said.

"You know, I make jewelry out of pigeon shit," Gloria said. "You dry the pellets in the microwave, and then polish them in one of those rock tumblers."

"You've altered evolution," Martha said.

"Thank you," Gloria said.

"Not you," Martha said. "
Jane.
You've altered evolution. Now you can rest after your labors."

I showered in my clothes. I threw the quick-dry underwear and the socks in the garbage with the toilet paper. I washed the rest in shampoo, then Woolite. Gloria, who had waited anxiously in the cabin, offered to take the wet shirt and shorts up top and hang them to dry, but I felt suddenly too shy to give her so intimate an assignment. I took them myself and climbed unsteadily up the ladder, hung the dripping clothes on the line, halfheartedly pushed a clothespin in their general direction, and stumbled down again, nearly swooning as I collapsed on my bunk.

Gloria was gone, but she reappeared soon after with a cup of exotic, delicious tea and some dry toast.

"Eduardo the cook thought you might want this," she said.

"What is this wonderful tea?" I said. "It's so soothing. Maybe it's marijuana. Or Ecuadorian rain-forest bark."

"Jane, it's chamomile."

The breeze came in through the windows, rattling the blinds. I drank the tea. I ate one piece of toast. The engines roared. I wondered how Gloria knew the cook's name and I didn't. I wondered at the weird way in which one sometimes doesn't see what's in front of one, in which I did not see what was in front of me, like chamomile. Sometimes. The
Huxley
set off for a new island. I slept.

I woke up now and then, looked around me, sipped cold chamomile tea. I thought about Martha a little. As I rested in a cloud of enervated nausea, I thought of the feud, thought there were worse things than broken engagements, or even broken friendships, for I was overwhelmed again by that one feeling—gratitude. I lay in my bunk, my body limp and weak, and slept through the afternoon field trip, a visit to an island called Santa Fe. When she came back, Gloria said there were huge land iguanas there and cacti as big as trees.

"You can have copies of my pictures," Gloria said, aiming her camera at my sickly face. I blinked at the flash in the darkened room.

"Especially that one," I said.

When she came out of the bathroom after her shower, she stood before me, toothbrush in hand, hair flying in all directions, wearing a T-shirt decorated with a design of small irregular white blobs meant to resemble bird shit, each one labeled with the name of a different species.

"Martha is an ideal guide, isn't she?" Gloria said. "I can see how it must have been a challenge to be friends with her."

I was so grateful to Gloria that every time I looked at her I wanted to reach out and pet her. This wave of good fellowship I felt for her had previously affected me only with regard to cats and dogs. Who's a good Gloria? Who loves her Gloria? Who's the best Gloria in the whole wide world? But I resented her saying anything about Martha. My stomach rested delicately, a neurasthenic inmate just quieted down, a hysteric who could not be disturbed in any manner.

"Martha held my head when I vomited. She gave me wet wipes," I said. "And you gave me your sweatshirt. All of evolution, all of civilization, marched in teleological progression toward that glorious moment."

Gloria pulled off the bird-shit classification T-shirt and put on another with a picture of pathetic baby seals. I looked at Gloria, my savior, my nurse, and veered between wanting to pet her and wanting to club her baby seals.

"Martha has forgiven me," I said. "For whatever it was I said or did, she reached down, like an athlete at the end of his endurance, and found that little something extra. She reached down deep inside and forgave me. I guess."

Gloria felt my head, gave me a motherly kiss, and shook her own head, slightly, ruefully, as if at my sad attempts to flap my poor little residual organ.

"Or did I forgive her? Anyway, the feud is over."

"You better take some more Tylenol," Gloria said. "You're burning up."

Martha walked by, looked in, knocked on the air of the open door.

"Come in," Gloria said. "The patient is all tucked up, ready to weather the stormy weather."

"Are you feeling any better?"

Martha sat on the edge of the bunk, her body pulling the tight covers even tighter. I felt like a mummy. Her hip was jutting into my ribs. It was difficult to breathe.

"There, there," she said.

At least she didn't say, "There, now."

Her eyes glanced around the little cabin.

"Good. Everything is shipshape in here." She looked back at me. "Even you." I was forgiven, absolved, pardoned, exonerated. Go with God, go in peace, go forth and multiply. Her magnanimity flowethed over.

"My story was so harmless," I said. I hadn't meant to say anything. But sometimes even conversation is opportunistic.

"What story?" Martha said.

"I'm sorry I wrote it if it offended you. Well, it obviously did offend you, but I didn't mean anything by it. And how could it offend you? You said much worse things about me. And vice versa. I thought you'd be interested. You're always so interested in everything."

"She's delirious," Gloria said. "Jane! Can you hear me? I am Gloria, your roommate."

"I never even found out what that man's name was. He died right in front of us, he drowned right in front of our eyes and we never even asked who he was," I said.

"Maybe you shouldn't be tucked in quite so tight," Gloria was saying.

"Jane, calm down," Martha said. "No one is dead. No one drowned. Everyone is fine."

"Why didn't you tell me the story made you so angry? Why did it make you angry, anyway? I sent you an innocent English paper, and you never spoke to me again! Why couldn't you just tell me what the problem was?"

Martha looked alarmed now.

"There is no problem," she said in a soothing voice.

"Maybe it wasn't chamomile tea," Gloria said.

"I'm not delirious," I said. I tried to sit up in the tight blankets, but they were held down by Martha sitting close beside me. I struggled inside of them. "I'm not delirious!"

"Jane, Jane, it's okay. No one drowned. It was a lovely snorkel."

I finally loosened the blankets from the other side of the bunk and sat up. "Look," I said. "The man died. The man at the Barlow Country Club. Remember?"

"No," Martha said. "No, I don't. Oh, wait, yeah, vaguely. So what? You knew him?"

"No, I didn't know him. He just died, that's all. And I looked at your fingers and they were stubby and it made me see myself the way other people saw me, which was so unnerving, and then I sent you my English essay and then you never spoke to me again. It doesn't make any sense, Martha!"

Martha handed me a glass of water.

"Why didn't you just tell me you hated the story?"

"I'm sorry," Martha said.

I waited. At last. An explanation.

"I'm sorry, Jane, but I don't remember that drowning man very well, and I don't remember any story at all. Anyway, what's wrong with my fingers? I've always thought I had perfectly reasonable fingers."

She held them out to Gloria, who nodded approvingly.

"You hate my fingers?" Martha said. "How odd."

I awoke to a grinding, gnashing noise. I knew immediately that we had run aground. I lay in my bunk, still nauseated and dizzy, doped and weak, too frightened to move. The boat was not rocking. It actually seemed rather calm. Probably the water rushing in through the gigantic hole in the hull was stabilizing the doomed craft. I wondered how long we had. I felt the cold sweat on my forehead, on my chest, my arms. I wondered if it was fever or fear. My life jacket was on a shelf above me. If only I had the strength to stand up and put it on. Sleepiness battled with adrenaline and terror.

I forced my eyes open. "Gloria, we're, like, sinking."

"Do you think we ran aground? Or hit a reef or something? What a noise! I wonder if we've crossed the equator."

"I don't think it scrapes when you cross the equator. Anyway, we'll drown in either hemisphere."

We lay quietly for a while. I sweated and waited for the captain to make his announcement. Then I realized I had fallen back to sleep and I pulled myself to consciousness, embarrassed that on the verge of death I had taken a nap.

Then I said, "What if we sink?"

"But we seem to be moving," Gloria said.

"So? There's a huge hole in the boat! We'll go down in a whirlpool, like the
Pequod.
Have we crossed the equator or not? I won't even know what direction the whirlpool will swirl in."

There was a knock on the door. This was it. The captain telling us to abandon ship. Would they start to ring the little bell they used to summon us for meals? Where were the lifeboats? The engine still roared behind us.

Now I would die. My whole short life had been lived in a jumble of improperly catalogued perceptions, everything filed carefully in the wrong drawer, and now I would die, I would sink to the bottom of the sea having understood nothing.