The Evolution of Jane (9 page)

"We don't know that side of the family," my mother said, cold and ridiculous, but quite serious, I could see. Then she told me stories of her childhood in Cuba, which she often did when she wanted to change the subject.

"When I was a girl," she said, "we would go to the market to buy a chicken, and it was not the supermarket, you know, but a big outdoor market. My mother would pick out a chicken, a live chicken, and the chicken man would swing it around and wring its neck. We'd take it home in a bag."

I wondered what they did with the chicken's feet, not to mention the head. But I knew enough not to ask, for my mother would have answered.

"Sometimes we'd find an egg still inside the chicken," she said thoughtfully. "With a transparent shell."

After Martha started coming to my house and my mother did not poison her or, more important, embarrass me, Martha took me to her house and introduced me to her pretty mother. From then on, I preferred to play at Martha's house with her mother and the hundreds of objects her parents collected. Mrs. Barlow was an absurdly vibrant, forward-looking woman, always in motion, like a train decked out in crisp chinos and a pink Lacoste shirt. One of her accomplishments was decorative painting. Mrs. Barlow liked to paint flowers on things, and so, as she hurtled through her life, she painted countless flowers on countless things. The Captain Franklin Barlow House was lined with trays and pots she had decorated. Ladder-back chairs. The stairway. The borders between the ceiling and the wall. Even the edges of the shelves in the linen closet. Mrs. Barlow's flowers bloomed everywhere. I suspected that the real reason my Barlow cousins had bought the house was not to rescue it at all, but to give Mrs. Barlow something else on which to paint her flowers.

In addition, Mr. Barlow needed more room for his collections. Mrs. Barlow decorated, but Mr. Barlow collected. He was a tall, slender man with an accent from a thirties movie, an accent connected not to geography but to class, and not even to any particular class, but to a recognition and celebration of the divisions of class. Mr. Barlow actually said "tomahto." He collected Early American tools. He collected model sailboats. He collected tennis trophies, other people's tennis trophies from previous decades.

We did not have collections in my house. At least not any that we kept very long. My brother Fred had gathered up leaves and put them in a book and labeled them, but I drew on them when I was a baby, and they had to be thrown away. I had a shell collection, or told Martha that I did. The truth was, I had brought a few shells up from the beach and left them in the driveway and forgotten about them until asserting their existence two months later to Martha. My mother thought collecting was a bad habit, like coming into the house without wiping your shoes. She didn't collect. She accreted. Our house was full, just uncatalogued.

But Martha's house was different. Within weeks it went from a haphazard group of nineteenth-century rooms, each more in need of repair than the last, to one extensive, miraculous corridor of exhibitions. Every shelf, every table, embraced an aesthetically pleasing drift of objects, all related in some essential way, yet individual enough to suggest ornamental depth and range. There were medicine bottles of cobalt blue and amber and sea-glass green. Little pots that once contained balm or powder, each with an elaborate flourish of a label. One room was lined with paintings of vegetables, another with prints of birds of prey. I would sit on the floor before these shrines, awed, but also suddenly avid. The sheer numbers of things made me want to join in, to add more. I loved the 27 Barlows' house. My brothers always called Martha's house that, as if there were twenty-seven of them over there, and I thought it a fitting name, suggesting variety and amplitude in an exalted platonic sense.

Martha, though, preferred to play at my house. I didn't encourage her. There was nothing in it for me, and I was always a little afraid my mother would forget she was being so tolerant and suddenly turn on Martha. But when we did go to my house, Martha's favorite place to play was my father's study. This was a small room downstairs that was crowded and shabby with papers and books, and only two things stood out in that room: the view and the roll-top desk. From the window, which had no curtain or shade, you could see the verdant crabgrass lawn, the corner of my mother's glorious garden, its lilacs and roses cascading like waves from its trellises and, beyond that, the real waves rolling in from the sea, which itself seemed to have rolled in from the wide sky above. All of this splendor and light and color and constant change from morning to afternoon to night, from summer to fall, from rain to pale wisps of cloud beneath the sun, all of it was framed by the little yellowed room with its big oak desk. The desk had rows and rows of small square drawers that seemed absurdly deep when you pulled them out, like long wooden tubes of papers and paper clips and pencil stubs. Martha and I liked to switch them, exchanging one for another. Then we would wait for my father to come in and work, and if he actually did arrive before we got bored and moved on to something else, so much the better. We would crouch behind the door or in the closet and watch him settle into his chair in that overly elaborate way adults did, then begin to work on papers taken from the mixed-up drawers. He never seemed to mind. In fact, he never seemed to notice, which tells you something about my father's organizational skills. I didn't understand exactly what his work was, only that it involved not-for-profit organizations, the not-for-profit part amply explaining, in my mind, why Martha's family was rich and mine was not.

Most of the time my father worked at an office in the city, but on the weekends he often went to his study and scribbled at his oak desk with the rows of mixed-up drawers. Martha was fascinated by his complacency before such disarray and disorder.

"He just keeps going," she said.

And indeed my father would pull out a drawer, any drawer, examine the contents, and continue with his work, his pen scratching no more quickly, no less surely, no differently from before.

"He just sort of knows where everything is," I said.

"No, no," Martha said. Her voice was impatient. "No. He just uses what he finds."

Martha was very taken with my father, though she was dismayed that I had seen him naked. She had never seen either of her parents naked, or even in their underwear.

"They're just parents," I said. And I was pleased to note that she looked at me with new regard.

My father was always very friendly to Martha, and my mother, though she would never have considered going next door herself and never acknowledged the existence of the 27 Barlows, never snarled at Martha or berated her with stories of her branch of the family's sordid past. I think she even liked her, which was just as well because not only wouldn't I stir without Martha, I also began to dress like her.

I wore a uniform to school—white shirt, blue knee socks, brown shoes, a light blue skirt in summer, a navy flannel skirt in winter. I know some people don't like uniforms, but for me they have always been both soothing and challenging. The uniform relieved me of any responsibility regarding clothing, and yet it allowed me to introduce small variations, thereby signaling some cultural message or other to my fellow uniform wearers.

The evolutionary advantage is pretty clear when birds prance around in their gaudy courtship feathers or insects hide in their dreary splotched camouflage. But what could it mean to the history of the human race that I wore Docksides instead of regular shoes? That friendship pins dangled from the zipper of my coat? That I was able to convince my mother to let me wear nail polish? Nothing, except perhaps to testify to the willfulness of a little girl, surely a great advantage somewhere along the evolutionary line. But at the Charlotte Posey Country Day School, these nuances were important and immediately interpreted. There was a lovely simplicity to the whole arrangement, like a Japanese brushstroke.

At home, I tried to preserve the aesthetic purity of uniform clothing. For that summer, the summer I met Martha, I had adopted as my summer uniform one particular pair of cutoff blue jeans, red high-top sneakers, and my old school shirts. After the first week of vacation, when my mother tried unsuccessfully to tempt me with hideous shorts and sleeveless blouse combinations, no one bothered me about what I wore.

Then Martha came. She offered me what I now understand to be a sort of glorious uniform of the soul, new and intricate and ever-changing, which I could put on each morning without thinking or choosing, which I could wear all day and even at night and revel in the pleasure of the fabric against my skin, the swirl of the skirts, the elegant shape.

Unfortunately, Martha, couturier to my inner self, also wore real clothes. And they were of the kind I had always sedulously avoided. Martha wore frills, outfits, tops and bottoms that matched. There were ribbons dangling from her barrettes. It was everything I hated, her style of dress. And yet I admired her so much I began to relent even on this important matter. This is not to say I gave in right away. We fought endlessly about clothes.

"That's a clown bathing suit," I said, referring to the ruffles on her backside.

Martha just looked at me in contempt, the contempt of someone older and more experienced. "Don't you think it's time you got yourself a new bathing suit, though?" she said.

"No." I approved of the way she had turned my taunt aside and somehow put me on the defensive. All the same, I liked my bathing suit. I had just gotten it the year before, and though I had grown considerably and the red one-piece pulled at my crotch and the straps dug into my shoulders, I considered it my new bathing suit, my grown-up bathing suit, my recognition of propriety, for it was not that long before that I had insisted on wearing my brothers' old trunks.

"I'm getting a bikini," Martha said. "You get one, too. We'll be twins."

Twins!

"There's nothing to hold the top," my mother said when I told her I wanted a bikini. "It's vulgar, a bikini on a child." But she gave in, and I liked the bikini, which was much more like my brothers' comfortable bathing suits than the pilled, stretched-out, and now utterly cast-off one-piece. In the interest of being twins, I then isolated a few select outfits of Martha's that I liked and forced my mother to purchase them for me. One was a sailor suit—blue knit shorts, a white knit shirt with a navy sailor color, and, the
pièce de resistance,
a white beret with a blue band and a red pom-pom. The sailor suit became my new favorite and eventually my new uniform. Martha and I swaggered through the summer like soldiers with gleaming boots and clanging silvery swords. Each time I looked at her, and then at myself, I felt a surge of nationalistic pride. My mother said no self-respecting sailor would be seen in such a suit, but I pointed out that I was not a sailor, I was a little girl.

After that first August of our blooming friendship, Martha went back to New York to her school and I went back to my school, where I forgot about her utterly. She receded from my thoughts to make room for a girl named Celeste, who had nostrils that looked like tiny black round coins. Celeste had never been of much interest to me before, and I don't know what happened in third grade, but she came to my house almost every afternoon. Our house had three old maple trees in front, and when they dropped their leaves the ground was deep in color. We made piles, mountains of cold, wet leaves in which we rolled and jumped. In that cool leafy time, Martha was far away, as far away as summer.

My mother took me to school each morning because she taught there. I'm sure that's why I went to the Posey School to begin with. My mother taught Spanish, and she liked the small private girls' school because it reminded her of her school in Cuba, which she said was "innocent, pleasant, and second-rate." My father suggested that as the school's motto: "
Innocenta, placita, et secunda.
"

On the drive there, we would sit beside each other in the car and talk. I would have preferred to look silently at the gray seashore as we drove by, alone in my morning stupor, and she probably would have preferred it, too, but we didn't have that many opportunities to talk to each other alone, and so she would put her hand out on the seat between us and I would put mine on top, and we would talk. She liked to tell me about her garden, especially in the dead of winter when she had no garden.

"But I really do have one," she reassured me. "You just can't see it."

I knew that a lot went on that I couldn't see. And I did find comforting the idea of a garden slumbering patiently beneath the snow, roses buried beneath the drifts. I thought of the roses as living fossils, waiting to be dug up and displayed in the spring. There were plenty of other things buried in Barlow, too, buried even beneath the sea. My mother liked to tell me stories of the ships that had gone down on the reef we could see from my bedroom window. On stormy nights, the rocks were invisible, just as they had been for the ships that she described running across them. I suppose I should have been scared on those nights, but I wasn't. To begin with, I didn't really believe my mother. But even when I thought one of her stories might be true—the tilted masts and jagged tears in the hull, the sailors pulling on ropes stiff with ice, the Barlow residents in their surf boats risking their lives to rescue the crew, then risking their lives to ransack the sinking ships—it all seemed so grand, like something from the Bible. My mother told me Bible stories, too, like my grandmother, and Greek myths, and I neither knew nor cared which god was from which book, which from Cuba, which from Barlow.

Although my mother was much taken with her marine ancestry, she did not herself ever set foot on a boat. She was surprised when, influenced by Celeste, I wanted to take sailing lessons. My father did not sail either. It was not a sport popular in Brooklyn, he explained, although he did row at Harvard.

"Even Kafka rowed," he said, almost apologetically. I assumed Kafka was one of his roommates.

The winter passed. While I practiced bow knots at bedtime, my mother read seed catalogues to me, which I loved. I thought of my mother and her flowers in one breath, so to speak, as if she were herself a flower, albeit a thorny one. Once Celeste asked me why my mother taught. Instead of saying that we needed the money, that my mother was extremely independent, that she would have been bored to death at home, that any chance to speak Spanish eased her homesickness for Cuba—instead of these reasons, which never even occurred to me, I just said that she couldn't garden in the winter and needed another hobby, which was perhaps the real reason. I don't know. We never discussed it. No one else's mother worked, but it was a given that mine did. I liked her for it, but in those days I liked her for almost everything.