The Time of Her Life (9 page)

When the music began, Celeste looked over at them. “I know that’s a song you’re not supposed to understand.”

“Oh, we don’t,” Jane said. “We don’t understand a word of it!”

They danced in front of Diana’s long mirror for a while, believing that they looked like the best dancer, the black dancer,
on Solid Gold.

When they were bored with that, they moved on to Maggie’s room where she had set up her easel to catch the north light. She
was working with her pastels, and Jane stood behind her and watched. Diana strayed around the room, trailing her hand across
the dresser to touch the little bottles of perfume, Maggie’s silver brush and comb, a pair of leather gloves left lying out;
she lounged disconsolately against a windowsill, not especially interested in what her mother was doing. Jane would have liked
to have the right to browse through Maggie’s room like that, trifling with all of Maggie’s possessions. It wasn’t possible
for Jane to retain any suspicion of, or disappointment in Maggie when she was in Maggie’s company. From Jane’s point of view
Maggie, more than anyone else she had ever known, had the irresistible allure and completely charismatic quality of unalloyed
competence. Competence under any circumstances. It was what Jane so admired; it was what she herself aspired to.

Maggie had organized the girls to pose for her, so for a little while Diana sat back on Maggie’s chaise longue with her legs
drawn up while Jane sat at its foot, leaning against Diana’s knees for support. Maggie was
working in quick strokes with charcoal, and before she handed the finished sketch over to them, she sprayed it with fixative
and let it dry.

Jane took the sketch and laid it down on the coverlet of Maggie’s bed to study it. She was entranced by her own earnest stare
drawn in with firm lines next to a softer, more hesitant rendering of Diana’s sweeter face.

“Look at this!” she said. “Just look at this! I look more like Maggie than you do.” And it was true, because Jane had both
height for her age and some grace, and she was fair, although not in the same pink and freckled way that Maggie was so blond.
Both Maggie and Jane were tall and thin so that their joints—their knees and elbows—appeared to be marginally broader than
their fragile arms and legs. Maggie was not especially pretty. She had a faintly simian look and a rather alarming smile that
stretched her mouth too far into a grimace that bared her large, straight teeth. But Jane was pleased as she looked at the
sketch. She had always thought that Maggie looked exactly the way Maggie ought to look, and she wasn’t at all sorry to think
that she might look that way, too. It delighted and hugely flattered her that Maggie had wanted to draw her picture.

When the girls finally drifted out of Maggie’s room, just as Jane crossed the threshold into the wide upper hall, she experienced
a momentary ecstasy of inclusion. She had a sudden piercing feeling of familiarity that made her want to open her arms and
receive every nuance of that sensation, which she perceived as something of actual substance that radiated from the walls,
the pictures, the dark wood floors, the people. At the very moment when she stepped out of Maggie’s room, she had a sudden
apprehension of the history of the
house, its present, and its future. As she moved along the hall she did raise her arms a fraction before she remembered not
to, and her aborted gesture was like the flap of wings. For the few seconds Jane was possessed by this phenomenon she was
following Diana down the hallway, self-consciously aware of her own footsteps in her wooden-heeled clogs as they clattered
across the floors of all the Tunbridge forebears and future generations.

By late day Jane and Diana sat in the dining room eating potato chips. They curled onto their chairs with their legs tucked
under them and leaned their elbows on the table. They were delicate with the greasy chips, carefully lifting them to their
mouths with the tips of their fingers and making two bites of the large ones while they looked out at the rain that had begun
to fall. It was an odd rain that didn’t streak down out of running clouds sweeping over the region. This rain was pendulous
and globular drop by drop, falling over the porch with a sound like cooked peas hitting the porch floor with a pulpy splash
outside the shadowy room.

Maggie came in and joined them at the table without interrupting their silence. The rain fell, and Maggie ate a potato chip
and also sat listlessly spellbound by the peculiar downpour. Each drop contained too much; it was an unpleasant sound all
around them, a natural obscenity. Maggie took a handful of chips and moved to the French doors.

“Umm. This looks bad. It’s turning to ice.”

But Maggie went away to start dinner while the girls set the table, and the weather wasn’t important when the whole family
sat down to eat together. At the Tunbridges’
house it seemed to Jane that everyone was the same age, and in her mind there was no sweeter equality. Tonight Vince was irritable,
and Celeste was quiet and sulky with fatigue from having spent the day studying. But these were pale passions, nothing to
conceal. Jane had never seen any member of this family really angry, and she thought that the knowledge of anger was her own
secret shame. By age eleven she had already met in herself the height of any anger she would ever feel again. She hadn’t revealed
it, of course, because she still had only the status of a child, but occasionally she was relieved of it vicariously by one
or the other of her parents if either one of them happened to say to the other exactly what Jane was thinking. What she suspected,
though, was that her fury was a shabby emotion, because it could not be controlled, and everything about this household indicated
that a modicum of restraint was the order of the day.

By the time Jane and Diana went to bed, Jane was sated with fellowship, and she wasn’t sorry to be left alone in the small
flower-papered bedroom that she had chosen as her own for when she slept over. It was known by all the Tunbridges as Jane’s
room. She didn’t mind being separated from Diana, whose own room was down the hall. Maggie said it was barbarous to deny people
privacy while they were sleeping. They had such a big house, she said, that it was ridiculous to crowd people together as
though they were living in dormitories. Sleep was a solitary undertaking, a time to muse and dream alone, said Maggie. And
after spending a day in communion with that family, Jane didn’t think that Maggie’s ideas were at all unusual or precious.
She wouldn’t have known how to think any thoughts like that about
Maggie, and if the two girls had slept in the same room, they would have been far more likely to awaken each other and the
entire family too early on the following Sunday morning.

At eleven o’clock Jane put on her pajamas and brushed her teeth and said good-night to Diana. She got into bed and under the
covers that Maggie had turned down for her sometime during the evening and began to read one of the selection of books that
were always left on the bedside table for her along with a glass of ice water. But she fell asleep within four pages of the
first volume of
The Book of Three
. She had climbed into bed and settled back among her pillows without responsibility of any kind in this vast houseful of
grownups, and that was a powerful soporific.

Jane woke up early, just before dawn, and she woke up alarmed. She lay still for a while, listening for the reason she had
awakened. She was too young to care if she fell asleep again, but she did care to calm herself; she did want to lapse back
into that same soothing state of mind in which she had gone to sleep the night before.

Finally she sat up and pulled the down comforter around her shoulders like a cape and crossed the floor barefooted to the
window to open the curtains. She was just waking up, and her coordination was slumberous in spite of the shock of the cold
floorboards and rarefied air. Overnight all the objects in the room had become just fractionally clearer to the eye, easier
to discern in the crystalline atmosphere, but her attention was too lethargic to take this in. She struggled with the drapes,
trying to fasten the tiebacks with one hand while holding
the quilt around her with the other. At last she dropped the quilt on the floor so she could use both hands, and she settled
the tiebacks around the drapes and hooked them in place with exasperation.

She looked out the window with only a drowsy interest, but when she took in the still dark panorama of the bluff and the river
and the meadow to her right, she moved backward a scant step, and then she moved forward again to peer through the glass in
earnest. She stood perfectly still, staring out for several minutes. She could not organize the scene before her into any
landscape she could recognize.

The river roiled sluggishly wherever it had not crusted over, and the railroad tracks were furzed with ice. In the meadow
nothing moved. The trees did not tremble, and their bright fall leaves hung glazed and heavy from the branches. The meadow
itself, through which she had made her way the day before, was smoothed over with ice, sleek and undulating and foreign. She
made no sympathetic association to any bit of the earth she gazed out upon. What she saw exceeded anything she might have
imagined. The landscape was icebound, desolate, and bruised where it mirrored the barely lightening sky. It slowly came into
her thoughts that her parents would not possibly be able to weather such an extremity of climate, and Jane knew that she ought
to do something, but she didn’t know what would be expected of her.

She got dressed and made her bed and packed her backpack before anyone else in the house had awakened, and she sat on the
edge of the bed, looking out at the mysterious accumulation of ice, and tried not to anticipate anything at all. She was puzzled
the same way
she had been the morning her mother had come in and curled up in Jane’s bed with her after both of them had spent a sleepless
night appeasing, avoiding, and enduring Avery’s violent raging around the house. Her mother had put her head down on the pillow
next to Jane so that her fluffy hair wisped across Jane’s cheek and got into her mouth. On that morning her mother had chatted
in whispers, as though anything at all could possibly awaken Avery, who was sprawled asleep in a living room chair.

“You know,” her mother had said, “I think it’s perfectly understandable that children do the things to their parents that
they do. I was reading about a thirteen-year-old boy who climbed up on top of the refrigerator with one of those huge cast-iron
skillets,” she said. “He knew his father was going to come home drunk, and he waited for hours. Of course, when the man walked
through the door, the boy hit him as hard as he could with that skillet and just killed him.” Claudia had paused to think
about it, and she had turned onto her back and pulled Jane’s blanket up to her chin. “I don’t really think that’s murder,
though, do you? They aren’t even trying him for murder,” she had added thoughtfully. “They’re calling it self-defense. Don’t
you think that’s probably fair?”

Jane hadn’t responded at all to that. She had tried to sort it out and had never succeeded. She was fairly certain that her
mother didn’t want her to bash her father’s brains out with a skillet, but she was just as certain that there was something
that her mother did want her to do to make their lives easier. Yet, as far as Jane could see, she was without any power whatsoever.

This morning, however, as she stared at the ice, she
did understand why, after all those nights when she and her mother had taken long drives out toward St. Louis on the interstate
to be out of Avery’s way, her mother always turned around and came home in the end. When Avery had thought of removing the
distributor cap early in the day so that they couldn’t forsake him, and when her mother had taken the precaution of going
to an auto supply house to buy an extra one in case he should do that again—then Jane had finally asked her mother why they
had to go back.

“I don’t see why we have to go home,” Jane had said. “I mean, why can’t we just go to a hotel like Dad does when he really
gets mad?” She was curled up in the back seat of the car while her mother had stretched her legs out on the front seat. They
had driven around town for a while that night and finally parked on a street near their house while they waited until they
thought Avery had gone to sleep.

“Dad usually stays in a suite at the Oakwood, too, and it’s really nice. We could go there.” Jane adored being with her father
when he was away from her mother and when she visited him in the nice rooms of a motel. Whenever he moved out, he and Claudia
channeled information to each other through Jane, and they set up a pattern so that Avery would meet her twice a week at her
music lesson at Miss Jessup’s, and sometimes Miss Jessup would go back to his motel with him and Jane for dinner. Avery would
order all sorts of things from room service because Jane loved to have her dinner arrive on a trolley underneath a silver
dome that kept it hot. And even Miss Jessup would become lighthearted as they unveiled one surprising dish after another.
They would settle down in the room to watch TV until it was
time for Jane to go meet her mother in the lobby. Her parents didn’t like to see each other during times like those. Avery
had stayed away only two or three weeks at a time, but they had been the nicest times Jane could remember, and she didn’t
see why she and her mother couldn’t try the same ploy.

But when she suggested it, Claudia had shaken her head forward and swung her face toward Jane in a pale orbit over the car
seat, moving her hand in front of her to stave off any other question. Jane had been surprised to see that her mother was
both angry and shocked.

“Don’t be silly, Jane. What in God’s name do you think would happen to your father? Where in the world would we even want
to go? What do you think he would do?”

All Jane had been able to decide then was that her mother must love her father, but at last she understood that that wasn’t
all there was to it. She had never been sure, anyway, that being in love was the right idea to have about her parents. And
this morning Jane knew all at once that she was looking out upon the world the way it was for her parents. It was a place
in which there was no refuge for either one of them except the other. Now she needed to be home, although she thought that
when she did get home, her father would have left them again. She didn’t think he would stay until she could get there, and
she didn’t know how long he would be gone this time.