The Time of Her Life

by Robb Forman Dew

  Most of the time Jane was practicing, Claudia was lingering in the vicinity. She stood in Jane’s doorway or came into her room or sat on her bed. She began to think that the garishly orange-stained rented violin had a thin, whiny sound compared to the full tones of the Hungarian violin that Alice had played for her. She watched Jane work and work at a single phrase of music and could scarcely keep her mind off that other violin in its buttery-colored worn leather case that she had hidden away in her closet. She became more and more pleased with herself for thinking of making this gift to Jane, and she became increasingly anxious to see the pleasure it would be to her daughter to discover the surprise.

  Jane had stopped going to school altogether on the fourteenth, which was the Monday following that Christmas decorating party. As soon as she had stepped aboard the school bus the day immediately after the night of the party and her friends greeted her, she had begun to feel peculiar. Her muscles became heavy and inert, and mild cramps and nausea set in. And, also, on that Thursday and then again on Friday Jane found that sometimes she had nothing to say. Friday, in language arts, when Mrs. Hollis had asked her a question, she had not been able to answer. She had not intended to refuse to answer, but her face had suddenly gone numb and tingly. When she had begun to speak, her lips would not work; she could only mumble. It was a strange sound she made, and her classmates were kind. They had laughed tentatively, thinking that she meant to make a joke, that she was mocking someone, but Mrs. Hollis had looked at her carefully and gone on to ask the same question of another student. She spoke to Jane after class, as the other students were leaving, but Jane still had not been able to reply. She stood next to Mrs. Hollis completely in the power of that peculiar paralysis. Finally Mrs. Hollis had said to Jane not to worry about anything. “I know it must be hard for you with your parents separated. I’m sure it will all work out.”

  But what Jane was finding so wearisome was the effort of clarifying the images that drifted in and out of her own memory. Every night she lay in bed remembering how her father had planned the round window over her bed just for her, and with irrepressible enthusiasm, because he and she shared an interest in astronomy.

  These December nights she could lie in bed and look straight up into the winter sky and name the constellations within her view. It would come into her mind over and over again how pleased her father had been, the year before last, on the day his new Celestron telescope had arrived. He had unpacked it in the living room and examined each piece with a deep delight that was not like his usual restless excitement; his enjoyment had been almost reverential. “Claudia, I don’t see why we don’t make an occasion out of this,” he had said. “Listen, I’ll take the barbecue pit down the hill, and we can cook out after I set up the telescope. It won’t be too cold with the charcoal going.” He had called this out to Claudia, who was somewhere else in the house, but she wasn’t much interested in any of it. In fact, it was Jane who had sat on in the living room, watching her father, although Claudia did pass through. She had come into the room to say this or that to Avery, although she was strangely jumpy and irritated, and she never stayed in the room long enough to inspect the new telescope.

  When Jane and her father had gathered everything together and were ready to set out for the meadow, Claudia had followed them as far as the back door. “Avery, do you really think it’s such a good idea to do this now? Janie has school in the morning.” And she had that expression on her face that indicated faint irritation, faint disdain.

  But when Jane and Avery had found the best place in the lower part of the open meadow, Avery had been engrossed in the process of aligning the tripod and telescope exactly right, so that they headed precisely due north. Whenever Jane pictured him there, in the long grass, so angular and intense and lonely-looking, she was filled with puzzling remorse, as if there had been something she had not done for him. She always tried to replace that picture with any other picture at all, but she never could, and she grieved for her tall, handsome, lanky father working so hopefully with his telescope.

  He had adjusted the scope so Jane could look through it. He helped her find the Orion Nebula, which Jane thought was such a beautiful, hazy shape as opposed to the sharp definition of the stars. She found the giant stars, Betelgeuse and Rigel, and identified them by herself, which had pleased her father as much as she thought she had ever pleased him. While she was still following his directions and gazing at the rings of Saturn, Claudia had drifted down the hill, following the path, and waded through the tall grass toward them, carrying a tray of drinks and a plate of tomato sandwiches. It was cold, and she had put on her long black woolen cape with the hood drawn up so her pale face cut through the dark like some ghostly, celestial phenomenon, itself, in the surrounding night.

  What Jane could not forget as she lay in bed at night was the odd twist of regret that had shaped her father’s mouth just for one moment, as though he were a child caught out in something shameful, when he first saw Claudia come toward him from the house. But the three of them had sat down to eat the sandwiches, and finally her mother had urged them inside. “It’s past nine, Janie, and you can play with this again tomorrow night.” She had got to her feet and waved away Avery’s suggestion that she look through the telescope, too. “It’s really awfully cold out here. It’s much colder than I thought.”

  These were the things Jane thought about at night, but in the morning she had to train all her senses on her peers: who to sit with at lunch, what couples had broken up, and who was now going together. It was work; it was hard work, and Jane found, all at once, that she had simply run dry of energy.

  That Thursday and Friday at school, if her friends spoke to her, she turned away because she could not make her mouth work, and oddly enough, this made her angry at them. She began to hold them in contempt. She sat in class feeling like some foreign creature, completely dissimilar to the students around her. She quietly began to regard those other children and thought that they were grotesque. In social studies on Friday she found herself studying the hand of the student who sat in front of her, which was splayed out over his desk, and she could not make sense of it. She could not name it, but she gazed on in fascination at the pale, cylindrical, sausage-shaped digits attached to the fleshy, hairless palm. She became so dizzy as she stared ahead of her that she put her head down on her desk since she thought that otherwise she would fall out of her chair. Mr. Alberti had noticed that she seemed ill, and he excused her from the room.

  So Jane stopped going to school, although she continued to get up in the morning and get dressed and go down to the kitchen to have breakfast before returning to her room to read for a while. Her mother had only been curious that first morning, and Jane simply said she didn’t feel good. But even that first Monday Claudia was only vaguely inquisitive; after that she seemed to accept Jane’s presence as a given.

  Jane spent a great deal of the time working on her music, on the Mozart Miss Jessup had just given her and on the two Bach pieces for the Christmas concert. She knew she was making unusual progress, and she knew that Miss Jessup would be very surprised when she played her solo at the concert because she was also skipping her music lessons. She called her father, who always took her to music, and told him she was sick. When he stopped by the house for one thing or another, Jane took care to stay in her room and stay in bed. Lately she had developed a great reluctance to be away from her mother; she didn’t want to leave the house if Claudia was in it. She knew that Claudia wouldn’t think of the lessons unless she was reminded of them.

  The nights were a trouble to Jane, but these were lovely, lovely days, these days at home. Her mother was her only companion, and she was the most enchanting person Jane could imagine. Not competent, like Maggie, but quick and magical and young. Jane could bask in her mother’s risky enthusiasms that previously she had only observed; she hadn’t dared take part. Now that Avery wasn’t home it was mostly a pleasure to Jane that her mother lacked caution, and the two of them talked abo
ut all sorts of things: the adventures of her mother’s life; the foibles of her mother’s friends.

  One afternoon when Jane was practicing, Claudia wandered into her room and sat cross-legged on the bed with her head cushioned against the wall by the pillow of her frothy hair. Claudia listened idly and was looking up out of the window in the ceiling when all at once some private thought amused her and she came away from the wall, leaning toward Jane with her elbows on her knees.

  “What?” asked Jane, continuing to hold the violin beneath her chin but dropping her bow hand.

  Her mother’s face was pleased and relaxed in a lazy smile. “I was thinking about the Tunbridges. Maggie called, you know. She’s very anxious that you come to Diana’s birthday party on the nineteenth. She says even if you don’t feel great, she thinks it would be good for you.” The two of them looked at each other; in the past few days they had become conspirators without ever admitting it or carefully thinking it out. “You’re over there a lot,” Claudia went on. “Don’t you think that Maggie is a strange person? I mean, for all her good qualities… sometimes she’s so rigid, I think. Of course, that’s why she and Celeste are at loggerheads all the time.” Her voice dwindled off with this thought, and Jane sat absolutely still in case her mother might notice her and not continue. Jane could scarcely believe that in Maggie’s life there had ever been a bit of trouble. Jane knew that Maggie would not allow it. And Claudia did go on, gently talking and plucking at the bright printed flowers on the Marimekko spread with her fingers.

  “Maggie’s so definite about everything. It’s kind of endearing. Well, I always think it’s touching. It drives your father crazy, of course.” And whether she knew it or not, she glanced over at Jane with the exact expression that came over Avery’s face when he was exasperated. Then, just as quickly, her face became her own again, pleasantly reminiscent. “Do you know what I mean? Things are this way”—and she moved one hand in a chopping motion and held it stiffly suspended—“or they are that way.” She made the same motion with her other hand, and she sat like that for a second to illustrate Maggie’s nature before she turned her hands palms up and let them fall to her sides, smiling at Jane blandly as though the two of them had agreed upon something. But then she tilted her chin down and glanced at Jane as if she were doubtful and were having second thoughts. She was musing as she spoke. “Maggie said something so odd to me once after she had been out to Seattle to see her mother when her mother was dying. It was a horrible situation, of course. Her mother had cancer, and she had been misdiagnosed at first. Oh, well, it was sad and horrible… but Maggie was over here one afternoon, and she was just incensed.” Claudia paused to think if that was right. “No, she was indignant! She said, ‘You’d think that if they can make a missile that can hit a target halfway around the world, they could cure this disease!’ “ Claudia lifted her full face to Jane with her eyebrows stretched into an arc of amused wonder. “That’s how she sees things,” she said with a shade of amazement in her voice. “She believes everything is related somehow. And she really does believe that anything can be solved if people will apply themselves.”

  Claudia shook her head just a fraction to indicate her resignation in the face of other people’s peculiar notions. Jane was watching her carefully, though. She had put her violin down so she could study her mother, because she herself would have thought along the same lines that Maggie did. When she saw her mother’s remarkable, mobile face indicate the folly of that restricted point of view, Jane’s own mind flew wide-open to all sorts of possibilities, and she fell in love, entirely, with her own mother. She had been caught between her two parents for such a long time that this retarded sensation was all the stronger for coming over her so late in her life. She didn’t even have a frame of reference for this fit of joy that had overtaken her; she just sat in the room, watching her mother and feeling weightless and without any responsibility. She was in the throes of devotion, and she sat in the sunlight, elated.

  “But that’s not the thing you were thinking of that made you laugh, was it?” she asked her mother, who seemed surprised and took a moment to backtrack in her thoughts.

  “Oh, no. No.” And she laughed again. “Well, after Celeste and Mark were born, you know, Maggie went back to teaching, and she did a lot more writing. Reviewing and articles. Anyway, they really didn’t want any more children, and, my God! Maggie checked out every possible birth control device.” She looked at Jane and smiled. “You know how absolutely thorough Maggie is. At every dinner party we would end up talking about the pill versus IUDs. What she wanted was for Vince to get a vasectomy, but then she would go on and on about how Vince was sure that if he had a vasectomy, he would get fat. Poor Vince. Vince would look so detached when she launched into all this that your father said he was afraid that some night Vince would come loose from his moorings and just float away out the window. You know, though”—and her face closed down for a moment in a hooded expression of contemplation—“Maggie just doesn’t have that sort of radar… it’s not a question of bad taste, really. I mean, no one was offended. Mostly we were just bored with the whole subject. But Maggie’s so odd sometimes. Don’t you think it has something to do with a lack of charm?” She glanced at Jane to confirm that notion. She wanted to be sure that Jane shared that idea, and she subsided against the wall again to think about it herself.

  “Is that the story?” Jane asked because she didn’t understand it. The point wasn’t clear to her, but she was delighted to be entrusted with information that no one but her mother would ever have given her.

  “Oh, no,” Claudia said, and gathered herself back into the moment. “Maggie was horrified when she got pregnant! She wouldn’t even believe it for the first four months. She went to two doctors, in fact. She really didn’t want that baby, and she was outraged when it finally sank in. She was so mad that she and Vince filed suit against the company that made the condoms!” And Claudia laughed with no malice at all, only a kind of helpless delight. “After all that research they were using condoms! And they sued for the amount they calculated it would take to raise the child and educate it. Oh, God… we spent hours… your father, well, you can see that it’s exactly the sort of thing he can’t possibly leave alone. Maggie and Vince figured in the cost of the university. Oh, you know, your father just can’t ever resist baiting Maggie. Avery threw himself into it totally. He rushed around phoning all over the place. ‘Why not Harvard?’ he would say. ‘Have you thought about Reed or Oberlin?’ “ This still surprised Claudia and amused her whenever she thought of it, and she was almost giggling. “Do you know that when they were first married, Maggie sued a frozen food company because she’d found a fly in one of her TV dinners?” Claudia laughed indulgently again, although she had never laughed when faced with Maggie’s fury on these matters. It astounded Claudia that anyone as intelligent as Maggie would expect perfection in the world.

  Jane looked on at her mother, pleased but dum-founded. She was trying to grasp whatever it was her mother meant to signify by all this. “Did they win?” Jane asked.

  Claudia looked up at her and waved her hand to dismiss the whole topic. “Oh, they got a case of frozen dinners, or something. I’m not sure what finally happened.”

  “No, I mean about Diana. Did they get money for Diana?”

  Claudia was quite still and silent for a moment. Jane could see that her mother was wary and somehow taken aback. “Well, it wasn’t really Diana. I mean, it was an abstract thing, then. Maggie didn’t want another child! But Vince and Maggie dote on Diana. They just panicked at the time. They love Diana.”

  Jane didn’t say anything at all. She would have to think this over in her own time. It was an unexpected weak spot in her best friend’s enviable life.

  In the evenings Jane and her mother cooked exotic meals together as an adventure, and Claudia came in to watch Magnum and Malt Houston and Jane’s favorite, Remington Steele, on TV and then persuaded Jane to stay up and watch the reruns of Hawaii Five-O, wh
ich, she argued, was much more professionally produced than any of her daughter’s favorites.

  “And, Jane, you can tell when you’re watching that show that Jack Lord really does believe that he’s the head of a police force! Oh, it’s great! I hope they show the one where he’s running around in a rain forest wearing a sort of safari outfit and a planter’s hat. He can do it. I mean, he can carry it off with a straight face. I bet his camera crew hated him. Well, just wait! Wait till you see what I mean!”

  They sat up late at night in front of the color set, and Claudia played a game that was much more entertaining to Jane than watching the show. More often than not, Claudia could anticipate the lines and say them with the characters on Hawaii Five-O. Jane and her mother would sit on the couch with their feet tucked up under them and a bowl of popcorn between them, and Claudia would follow the show and stiffen her torso and cock her head precisely at the moment Jack Lord did the same thing on the screen. She would say with him, “Okay, what’ve we got, Chin?” A few moments later she would swivel straight-backed toward Jane and synchronize her lines with the TV once more. “Patch me through to the governor’s office, Danno!” And her face would take on the same ludicrous expression of absolute conviction with which Jack Lord played Steve McGarrett. At the end of the show she would watch very carefully and turn her head in perfect imitation of the hero’s resigned disdain. “Book ‘em, Danno!” she would say as justice inevitably prevailed.